https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPf1_f5Dex_0xs4WQb4_xWTtL7zsAg-122Ozx2TzRIE/edit?usp=sharing

  • From the Novel:

“He made a movement with his hand, and, directly as he did so, it happened as on the previous evening, that a metamorphosis took place in the very abysses of my being. I wake from my topour, as he put it, I came out of death, and was alive again. I was far yet from being my own man; I realized that he exercised on me a degree of mesmeric force which I had never dreamed that one creature could exercise on another…”(Marsh 62)

Marsh, richard. “The Beetle”. 1897.
  • Critical Commentary:

“…I consider two oppositions that shape critical discussions of the fin-de-siecle Gothic-horror and terror, and entropy and energy – and I argue that critics’ exploration of the Victorian’s seeming preoccupation with the horrors of entropic decline has obsucred that culture’s persistant anxiety about the terrors of energy”

Jones, Anna. “Conservation of energy, INDIVIDUAL agency, and gothic terror in Richard marsh’s “the beetle”, or, whats scarier than an ancient, evil, shape-shifting bug?”. 2010. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41307851
  • Historical Context:

“Ancient history speaks of the mysterious doings, oracular sayings, prophetic forebodings, and apparently miraculous performances of the Egyptian Priests; of the Delphion oracle among the Greeks, and of the Sybils among the Romans…Mesmer’s theory is as follows “Animal magnetism is a fluid universally diffused: it is…mutual influence between the…bodies, the earthm and animated bodies…”(354)

https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.somnolismpsychei00hadd/?sp=5&r=-0.676,0.404,2.352,1.118,0
  • Visual:

Welcome Catalog .”The rise and fall of a medical mesmerist”. 2018.

https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/WsT4Ex8AAHruGfXv