"Hypochondria and Racial Interiority in Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee"

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Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory,Volume 64, Number 1, Spring 2008, pp. 1-25 (Article)

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Hypochondria and Racial Interiority in Robert Montgomery Bird’s

Sheppard LeeIf I were seriously to propose to Congress to make mankind into sausages, I have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition, and if any believed me to be in earnest, they would think that I proposed something much worse than Congress had ever done.

Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” 1854

In the novels that have become critical touchstones for understanding cross-racial sympathy in the antebellum era—works

such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)—medical constructions of the mind and its diseases play a profoundly important but still overlooked role. Indeed, antebellum authors such as Stowe, Melville, and Poe repeat-edly, and sometimes histrionically, foreground one nervous disorder in particular: hypochondria.1 They do so in order to imagine the stakes and consequences of imagined sympathy across racial boundaries. For although “hypochondria” survives today as a way to characterize those who believe they are ill when they are not, the antebellum disorder it named was much more expansive and suggestive than this. Physicians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century defined hypochondria as a functional disorder of the nervous system that began with a somatic cause, dyspepsia, and had a wide range of psychological symptoms, including melancholy, ennui, imagined illness, and imagined bodily transformations. The protean nature of hypochondria, in which such disparate symptoms as these could be the means of diagnosing the dis-

Arizona Quarterly Volume 64, Number 1, Spring 2008Copyright © 2008 by Arizona Board of Regents

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justine s. murison

2 Justine S. Murison

order, was the reason for its expansive use in antebellum fiction and, as I will show, made it not only an integral aspect of an interiority defined by race in the nineteenth century but one that emerged as a counter-discourse to the particular forms of sympathy most often represented in the sentimental novel.

Recent work by Christopher Castiglia, Peter Coviello, and Sianne Ngai (in distinct but complementary ways) has recast our understand-ing of how antebellum theories of affect and emotion, the vocabulary of sympathy, turned what at first glance seems a physical distinction, race, into an expression of interiority and intimacy.2 The sentimental novel, and its literary cousin the abolitionist novel, has done more than exem-plify this relationship between affect and race; it has taught us how to read representations of interior depth through these emotional terms. Antebellum hypochondria complicates, and potentially reverses, the sentimental process at the center of these novels. Indeed, nineteenth-century medical theories examined how sympathy could be pathologi-cal, as likely to reveal a reduced or debilitated interiority as it is to demonstrate the most morally refined emotions possible in social life. This reduced interiority was most often expressed through the peculiar hypochondriacal symptom of imagined bodily transformation, in which patients believed their bodies were turning into mundane household things such as teapots. In this way, hypochondria provided a psycholog-ical language for how the very materiality of the body can become the launching point for all kinds of pathological flights of fancy, sentimental or otherwise. In doing so, antebellum hypochondria tracks how medical theories of bodily sympathy structured anti-sentimental theories of race through the suggestive pathological correlation of the slave (“the man that was a thing,” to borrow Stowe’s phrase) and the hypochondriac (physicians’ psychological version of the same).

In order to elucidate the importance of hypochondria to both the construction of racial interiority and the forms of the novel that teach us to read for that interiority, I turn to Sheppard Lee; Written by Himself (1836), by author and physician Robert Montgomery Bird. In Sheppard Lee, Bird makes explicit what is only implied in other fictional treat-ments of the hypochondriac, namely the role the symptoms of hypo-chondria played in structuring a racialized sense of self in antebellum America. He does so by continually returning to the legal and psycho-logical line between person and thing. In its provocative twinning of

Hypochondria and Racial Interiority 3

the slave and slave master through the symptoms of hypochondria, Sheppard Lee offers scholars of antebellum literature a theoretical and formal articulation of the politically vexed psychological vocabulary structuring novelistic representations of slavery, insanity, and interior-ity. Bird’s novel also allows us to see what forms of the novel are needed to make this counter-discourse apparent, for Sheppard Lee does not read-ily conform to our expectations of antebellum literature. While its racial politics register Bird’s anti-sentimental outlook on antebellum reform movements, its comic plot, in which the narrator’s spirit reanimates and inhabits a succession of corpses, defies the formal conventions of typical antebellum novels. Although a popular novel in the late 1830s, Sheppard Lee is most often cited today as evidence of Edgar Allan Poe’s pro-slavery sympathies, due almost entirely to Poe’s 1836 review of it for the Southern Literary Messenger in which he critiques Bird’s somewhat clumsy depiction of metempsychosis but praises his representation of “abolition and the exciting effects of incendiary pamphlets and pic-tures, among our slaves in the South” (399).3 Poe’s review has obscured the cultural work on medicine and race Bird develops in Sheppard Lee, for the Virginia scenes of the novel to which Poe refers constitute more than a mere apologia for slavery or scientific racism. Indeed, Bird’s now obscure novel gives form as well as voice to antebellum medical con-structions of the self that are epitomized by hypochondria, construc-tions that ultimately pathologized tropes of sentimental identification so central to abolitionist rhetoric and the antebellum novel.

wrong in the upper story

Physician, novelist, dramatist, professor of medicine, daguerreotyp-ist, and occasional Whig politician, Robert Montgomery Bird is gener-ally remembered today for two literary moments: his publication of the Kentucky frontier novel, Nick of the Woods (1837), and Poe’s review of Sheppard Lee (1836). Bird was born in New Castle, Delaware in 1806 and lived in Delaware and Philadelphia during his youth. He attended Germantown Academy and the Medical School and College of Phar-macy at the University of Pennsylvania, earning his medical degree in 1827. Bird did not practice medicine for long (only a year), but his inter-est in medicine and science survives in his novels, particularly in Shep-pard Lee, Nick of the Woods, and Peter Pilgrim (1838). Bird did return to medicine, briefly, as Professor of the Institutes of Medicine and Materia


Medica at Pennsylvania Medical College in 1841; however, the College disbanded in 1843 and Bird returned to writing. Bird first made a name for himself in the literary world through his collaboration with Edwin Forrest, composing heroic parts in classical plays such as The Gladiator (1831) that took advantage of Forrest’s acting style. A subsequent break with Forrest would become Bird’s impetus to turn his attention more fully to novel writing. Bird published a succession of novels, including Calavar (1834), The Infidel; or, The Fall of Mexico (1834), The Hawks of Hawk Hollow (1835), and Nick of the Woods.4

For those readers familiar with Nick of the Woods, a strange combi-nation of conventional sentimentality and aggressively racist frontier politics, the psychological picaresque of Sheppard Lee may come as a surprise. Originally published anonymously by Harper’s in 1836, Shep-pard Lee is, above all else, a darkly comic novel. As Rufus Griswold lauds in The Prose Writers of America (1847), Sheppard Lee “abounds with whim and burlesque, pointed but playful satire, and felicitous sketches of society” (435). Because of its episodic nature and its nar-rative metempsychosis, Sheppard Lee does not yield to easy summary. Bird’s narrator and main character, Sheppard Lee, the lazy son of a New Jersey farmer, squanders much of his inheritance and is cheated out of the rest by a corrupt steward. His sister Prudence and her husband try to help Lee, but to no avail; his brother-in-law, reduced to suggesting that Lee is “wrong in the upper story,” throws out wide hints that Lee has inherited madness from his mother, who died of melancholy (1:20). After a succession of failed attempts to regain his financial solvency that plunge Lee into the marriage market and local politics, he finally rests his hopes on the legend that Captain Kidd’s treasure is buried in the owl-roost of his woods. While trying to dig the treasure up, Lee suffers an acutely painful but ultimately slapstick death involving his mattock. Although Lee finds his body has expired, his spirit survives, and he realizes that if he can find a corpse he can wish his spirit into it via its nostrils. As a disembodied ghost, Lee begins to “possess” other people’s bodies and identities. Throughout the course of the novel, Lee inhabits the following characters up and down the social scale of ante-bellum America: John Hazlewood Higginson, a gouty and henpecked Philadelphia brewer; I. D. Dawkins, a Philadelphia dandy; Abram Skinner, a money-lender and miser; Zachariah Longstraw, a zealously philanthropic Quaker; Tom, a Virginia slave who helps foment a rebel-


lion on his plantation because of Lee’s ability (in Tom’s body) to read an abolitionist pamphlet; Arthur Megrim, a hypochondriacal Virginia slave-owner; and finally, Lee returns to his own body when he discovers it as part of a medical display by a German physician, Feuerteufel. Or so Lee thinks. Bird implies at the end of the novel that Lee has all along been in a strange, maniacal delirium and that Feuerteufel has been his attending doctor. The conclusion of the novel makes clear that Lee, according to his brother-in-law, has never left his sickbed and has been imagining “ridiculous conceits of various transformations” (2:270).

These “ridiculous conceits” structure both the novel as a whole and Bird’s hypochondriacal character Arthur Megrim, the Virginia planter. Bird suggests a psychological interiority for Megrim by drawing on the symptoms of hypochondria, an interiority best introduced through the genealogy of the disease. During the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-turies, hypochondria did not display a clearly defined set of symptoms; rather, it had an expansive, overdetermined pathology, encompassing flatulence, dyspepsia, melancholy, ennui, psychosomatic illness, and imagined bodily transformation.5 Within the medical literature, physi-cians theorized these symptoms as progressing into one another, begin-ning with stomach ailments and often ending with patients’ concerns that their bodies were subject to various illnesses or were turning into inanimate objects. Both G.S. Rousseau and Roy Porter have traced how hypochondria was a disease of the eighteenth-century British upper classes.6 As they point out, the symptoms of hypochondria corre-sponded to and in many ways helped construct a sense of self defined by class: dyspepsia was caused by a rich diet; ennui arose when wealth and urbane society bored its “victims”; imagined illness and bodily transfor-mations were leisurely symptoms for those who could afford the undi-vided attention of a physician.

Although historians of medicine have traditionally looked at hypo-chondria as a disease expressive of class and gender, when placed in the transatlantic context, the symptoms of hypochondria became raced as well. The association of race and hypochondria that we see in antebel-lum fiction first arose out of British physicians’ use of nervous disorders to understand the growth of the British Empire. For those physicians concerned with classifying the medical effects of the West Indian cli-mate on colonial whites, hypochondria was a way to manage fears of the racial and sexual contamination of an ever-widening British Empire.


The tropical climate of the West Indies and South America had long been considered unhealthful for European travelers, a theory still influ-ential in nineteenth-century medical works on mental disorder.7 Physi-cians saw the tropics as a harmful environment, which they explained psychologically through the symptoms of hypochondria. By the early nineteenth century, the figure of the nervous Creole grew to promi-nence in classifications of nervous disorders and tracts on tropical medi-cine such as Benjamin Moseley’s A Treatise on Tropical Diseases (1789), Thomas Trotter’s influential View of the Nervous Temperament (1807), James Johnson’s The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitu-tions (1812), and Sir Andrew Halliday’s The West Indies: The Natural and Physical History of the Windward and Leeward Colonies (1837). In these works physicians dwell on the way hot climates produced nervous, effeminate Creole men and encouraged sexual and mental degeneracy.8

In this way the pathology of hypochondria became increasingly entangled with descriptions of slave systems in the Caribbean and the United States, refashioning what in the eighteenth century was con-sidered a metropolitan British disease into one expressive of racial poli-tics in the Americas. Because plantation slavery connected the United States South with the West Indies, physicians and writers often super-imposed the psychological effects of tropical climates onto the more temperate environments of the southern states. Jennifer Greeson has recently argued that a concept of “‘the South’ emerged as a distinct and cohesive figure defined by its tropicality, plantation commodity produc-tion, and reliance on African slaves—as well as the moral character-istics associated with those terms in Enlightenment discourse” (103). The psychology of the southern hypochondriac, inherited from British physicians’ works on tropical medicine, demonstrates the medical and psychological stakes of what Greeson tracks as the process of making the South the “colonial other” to the newly conceived nation. In response to this process, antebellum physicians, particularly those from southern states, treated the South as a distinctive medical geography that war-ranted study of its own diseases. As medical historian James Breeden notes, “Southern diseases,” including malaria, hookworm, and pella-gra, constructed southerners as lazy (11). The symptoms of hypochon-dria conveniently matched these other “lazy” diseases, perpetuating a regional psychological profile that helped give birth to the literary stock character of the nervous (because indolent) slave owner.


The potent combination of physical and nervous diseases that constructed a “lazy” southern character soon became a standard way to describe the South. Medical journals and treatises abounded in the first half of the nineteenth century with this characterization. In an article titled “On the Medical Character of the United States” for the Phila-delphia Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences, a physician writes of the South that “in hot and moist situations and seasons, the prevailing diseases are malignant, pestilential and deadly; bilious fevers, cholera, colic, dysentery, diseases of the liver and spleen, succeeded by various and protracted forms of debility, by atrophy, consumption, hypochon-dria, palsy, syncope, jaundice, dropsy or obstruction of the viscera occur” (Calhoun 46). In this catalog of debilities, hypochondria represents the psychological state associated with the enervating climate. This view of southern debility extended beyond the medical community. In a letter to the Marquis de Chastellux in 1785, Thomas Jefferson, for instance, claims that the warmth of the southern climate “unnerves and unmans both body and mind” (387). “Unmanned” and “unnerved” by the Vir-ginian climate, southern planters replay the “colonial invalid,” a phrase coined by physician James Johnson, through a dysfunctional nervous system that potentially drained southern men of their masculinity.

This causal relationship, in which the southern environment gives rise to nervous disorder, underwrites a more implicit and structural connection between hypochondria and slavery suggested by the most extreme hypochondriacal symptom, when patients imagine themselves turning into things. According to physicians, patients experiencing this symptom attended to their newly transformed bodies with a hyperbolic, overweening care. Treatments of hypochondria, in turn, attempted to remind patients of their personhood and force them to give up the idea that their bodies were turning into the household objects surrounding them. As Benjamin Rush argues in his Medical Inquiries and Observa-tions upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812), physicians must “conform our remedies as much as possible to [the patient’s] erroneous opinions of the nature of his disease” by treating patients as the objects they imag-ine themselves to be (110). Ezra Stiles Meigs, in his 1822 Dissertation on Hypochondriasis for the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, cautions that derision rarely works to cure the hypochondriac, yet he includes a particular exception to this rule: “It is true that ridicule has in some instances proved beneficial, as in the case of a man who fan-


cied himself a plant, and insisted on being regularly watered;—one of his companions instead of pouring water on him from the spout of a teapot urinated upon him; his resentment was so great that it affected [sic] a complete cure. Such means however, are liable to do more harm than good in most cases” (15). Despite his disclaimer, Meigs relishes the cruel humor of this cure, one found in many medical texts of the era. The “successful” cure treated the hypochondriac as an object only to spark resentment at such treatment, healing through degradation. This type of cure sought to drive a wedge between the patient and his iden-tification with and internalization of the things surrounding him, sug-gesting an anti-sentimental medical solution to improperly conceived associations with the external world.

how a man became a dog

As the hypochondriac imagined himself (and in nineteenth-cen-tury medical theory it is most often “himself ”) turning into a succes-sion of inanimate things, his symptoms mimicked the legal category of the slave, in which a diminished, but not negated, personhood created a strange paradox for antebellum culture. Legally, the slave inhabited a contradiction: that of moveable property and morally responsible person.9 Hypochondria translated this paradox into psychological terms and assigned it almost exclusively to whites, turning them into unwit-ting parodies of slave law. In other words, hypochondriacs imagined that they were turning into the pieces of property that antebellum slave law mandated (but could never absolutely enforce either psychically or physically) slaves should be. At its most ludicrous limit, then, hypo-chondria enacted the psychological tension of slavery: the inability to locate the boundary between person and property. Indeed, to assume that one’s personhood overlapped with the material, non-sentient world—to believe, in other words, that one could subjectively inhabit “thinghood”—was to be either a slave or insane.10

Bird’s depiction of the Virginia planter Arthur Megrim arises out of this medical genealogy of hypochondria and its theoretical contradic-tions. Bird draws on the symptoms of hypochondria, introduced to him no doubt during his time as a medical student at the University of Penn-sylvania, to create Megrim’s character. Because of the complexity of the plot of Sheppard Lee, it may be worthwhile to summarize a little more


closely the Virginia scenes. In this section of the novel, Lee, inhabit-ing the body of Quaker Zachariah Longstraw, has been kidnapped from Philadelphia and carried to the South to be lynched as an abolitionist. When Longstraw escapes from the lynch mob he finds a slave who has fallen from a tree and broken his neck; taking this opportunity, Lee jumps from Longstraw’s body into the body of Tom, the slave. As Tom, Lee is quite contented until he reads to his fellow slaves an abolitionist pamphlet that riles them to revolt. Lee, still in Tom’s body, is hanged for the insurrection but dug up by physicians so that they can perform galvanic experiments on his corpse. Galvanism brings Lee back to life in Tom’s body, and he uses this opportunity to wish himself into the body of Arthur Megrim, a member of the audience attending the exper-iments who dies of fright at seeing Tom’s corpse reanimated.

Seeking to represent the “unmanned” and “unnerved” southern slave owner in Arthur Megrim, Bird depicts Megrim as living under the rule of his sister and doctor. Megrim—whose name itself is a homonym of “migraine,” an illness associated with women in the nineteenth cen-tury—is a feminized southern man, one who only occasionally over-comes his ennui through forays into rich diets and poetic excesses. As Bird very pointedly pathologizes, Lee-as-Megrim becomes a hypochon-driac through this luxurious lifestyle. “I grew gradually worse,” reports Lee of his life as Megrim, “until my melancholy became a confirmed hypochondriasis, and fancies gloomy and dire, wild and strange, seized upon my brain, and conjured up new afflictions” (2:236). Megrim begins his downward spiral into this “confirmed” hypochondria when, “getting up early one morning, I found, to my horror, that I had been, in my sleep, converted into a coffee-pot; a transformation which I thought so much more extraordinary than any other I had ever undergone, that I sent for my sister Ann, and imparted to her the singular secret” (235). When his doctor, Tibbikens, enters and sees Megrim standing “in the middle of the floor, with my left arm akimbo, like a corked handle, and the right stretched out in the manner of a spout” Tibbikens “seized me by the shoulders and marched me towards a great hickory fire that was blazing on the hearth” (235–36). The threat of fire disabuses Megrim of his belief that he is a coffeepot, but it does not bar him from believ-ing in further bodily transformations. He wakes to find himself turned into a succession of inanimate and nonhuman things: a dog, an icicle, a chicken, a loaded cannon, a clock, a hamper of crockery-ware.


To each transformation, Tibbikens responds as the urinating friend does in Meigs’s dissertation, treating Megrim as a thing in order to remind him that he is a person. Many of these cures threaten both loss of dignity and physical pain. When Megrim happens to hear a dog bark-ing, he is “seized with a great rage of a most unaccountable nature, and falling on my hands and feet, I responded to the animal’s cries, and barked in like manner, being quite certain that I was as much of a dog as he” (2:236). Dr. Tibbikens enters with a horse whip and falls to lashing Megrim “without mercy, crying out all the while, ‘Get out, you rascal, get out!’” (237). Tibbikens’s whipping of Megrim as he cowers as a dog reenacts the iconic abolitionist image of the whipping of the slave. Bird’s use of hypochondria in this scene to turn the slave master into the slave anticipates but inverts the more familiar chiasmus in Freder-ick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). Douglass makes the turning point of the Narrative his fight with Covey, in which he claims to show the reader how “a slave was made a man” (107). In this instance, though, the slave owner stoops to the level of household animal and the physician applies the lash.

By “curing” Megrim’s most outlandish hypochondriacal symptoms, Tibbikens reduces his patient to the most somatic one—dyspepsia—a conclusion that foreshadows the ending of the novel. “In this manner I was cured of hypochondriasis,” Lee tells his readers, “for although I felt, ever and anon, a strong propensity to confess myself a joint-stool, a Greek demigod, or some such other fanciful creature, I retained so lively a recollection of the penalties I had already paid for indulging in such vagaries, that I put a curb on my imagination, and resolved for the future to be nothing but plain Mr. Megrim, a gentleman with a disor-dered digestive apparatus” (2:241–42). Bird leans on the verb “confess” to show that Tibbikens’s cure has not uprooted the source of the disease in the mind, only disciplined his patient not to follow these imaginative impulses. Nothing could be less “plain,” though, than Lee’s position inhabiting Megrim’s body. In fact, Megrim’s hypochondriacal imagin-ings playfully break the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Because Lee still asserts that his narrative is true at the end of the novel, Bird makes clear that Lee’s “cure,” like Megrim’s, depends on his ability to con-tain his desire to “confess,” something Lee humorously fails to do if his yearning to tell “the world” his extraordinary story is any indication.


Reading back from Megrim’s hypochondria to Lee’s previous iden-tity, the slave Tom, we can see how similar terms emerge in relation to Tom’s character, but they reverse the trajectory of Megrim’s cure. Bird invests Tom with the same sort of hypochondriacal imaginings as Megrim, but these prove to be in their place and conducive to his hap-piness under slavery. After recovering from his death and reanimation, Lee-as-Tom explains that, upon seeing his owner’s youngest son, he had “an unaccountable longing come over me to take him on my back and go galloping on all-fours over the grass at the door” (2:163). As it turns out, imitating a big dog or horse for the boy’s pleasure becomes Tom’s only task on the plantation. He relates that when he sees the boy, “instead of being moved by the sight of juvenile independence and happiness to think of my own bitter state of servitude, I was filled with a foolish glee; and little Tommy running up to me with shouts of joy, down I dropped on my hands and knees, and taking him on my back, began to trot, and gallop, and rear, and curvet over the lawn” (167). Until Megrim’s bark-ing fit as a dog, this interlude about Tom is almost unremarkable. In retrospect, though, Tom “naturally” feels what makes Megrim insane. As Lee narrates it, his desire to imitate an animal evidences his natural affinity for slavery when inhabiting the identity of Tom; it should come as no surprise, then, that Megrim’s doghood reduces him to the position of a slave. For both Tom and Megrim, turning into a dog is an expres-sion of their psychic position in relationship to property rather than a full collapse into the position of property, an important distinction. By linking the slave to the hypochondriac through the domestic pet, Bird calls attention to the mutable boundaries between thinghood and per-sonhood, material thing and conscious being.

pursuits of happiness

The structural similarity that Bird draws between Megrim’s hypo-chondria and Tom’s slavery is the culmination of a newly emerging racialized medicine, one that explores and pathologizes the blurred psy-chological boundaries between slave and master. Within the Virginia scenes, Bird, in effect, sets up a fictional experiment in which he con-siders which is the worse slavery: a white man in a slave’s body living under the rule of a kind master or the white man in the white body experiencing the luxurious disease of hypochondria. The latter, Bird


implies, is the true enslavement. As his ennui gives way to fantastic transformations, Megrim, as we have seen, imaginatively occupies the position of slave under the therapeutic control of Tibbikens. Yet before his painful cure is effected, Lee proclaims his existence in Megrim’s body to be unbearable. Employing a particularly loaded phrase, Lee explains: “I found myself, young, rich, and independent as I was, bond-slave and victim of a malady to which the woes of age and penury are as the sting of moschetoes [sic] to the teeth of raging tigers” (2:232). Since Lee has already inhabited the body of a real slave, Bird means this locution in a literal way: the most enslaved body Lee occupies is that of the rich, hypochondriacal planter. Lee, in turn, claims to experience the most happiness as a slave: “it may be, however, that there is nothing adverse to happiness in slavery itself, unaccompanied by other evils; and that when the slave is ground by no oppression and by no cruelty, he is not apt to repine or moralize upon his condition, nor to seek for those torments of sentiment which imagination associates with the idea of slavery in the abstract” (172–73). In this passage, Bird develops a psychological distinction between the hypochondriac, apt to “repine or moralize on his condition,” and the slave, who does not “torment” himself with such “sentiments.” Indeed, the penchant for imaginative sentimentality distinguishes the two.

In this way, Bird mounts a comic, incisive, and troubling critique of the relationship between race, mental capacity, and liberty. In no other character does Lee claim to have so wholly lost his own identity than he does with regard to Tom. According to Lee, “I forgot that I once had been a freeman, or, to speak more strictly, I did not remember it, the act of remembering involved an effort of mind which it did not comport with my new habits of laziness and indifference to make” (2:171). Yet no other character in the narrative requires so much analytical work on Lee’s part. Lee’s voice continually interrupts the narrative about his life as Tom in order to investigate racial identity, the politics of abo-litionism, and the absurdities of sentimentality. Moreover, Bird never seamlessly integrates Lee’s narrative voice with Tom’s voice. In fact, Bird includes very little in the way of direct dialogue for Lee-as-Tom. Although the slaves around him speak in dialect, Lee’s narrative voice and Tom’s few moments of dialogue are practically indistinguishable from each other.


Although Bird generally avoids representing directly the voice of Lee-as-Tom, he forefronts Lee’s impulse to explicate. The sections of Sheppard Lee from Tom’s point of view include some of the most detailed encapsulations of medical theories of racial psychology and physiology in antebellum literature. These passages develop a counter-discourse of sentimentality, one that allows Bird ultimately to critique abolition-ist rhetoric. In one of his many analyses of his experience of race, Lee writes:

I could not have been an African had I troubled myself with thoughts of any thing but the present. Perhaps this defect of memory will account for my being satisfied with my new condi-tion. I had no recollection of the sweets of liberty to compare and contrast with the disgusts of servitude. Perhaps my mind was stupefied—sunk beneath the ordinary level of human understanding, and therefore incapable of realizing the evils of my condition. Or, perhaps, after all, considering the cir-cumstances of my lot with reference to those of my mind and nature, such evils did not in reality exist. (2:171–72)

When Lee says that he “could not have been an African” had he brooded on the thoughts of servitude, he shifts the register from “slave” to “African,” in other words, from a legal category to a racial category rooted in a naturalized relationship between cultural and biological ori-gins. Bird’s description of an “African” mind depends upon the supposi-tion that the lot of slavery naturally corresponds to that mind, erasing the evils that would dog a more complex character. In this passage Lee considers and then dismisses the argument set forward by monogenists like Samuel Stanhope Smith in his Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1788) and James Cowles Prichard in Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1813)—that race is a development of social and physical environments—and instead interprets his unusual narrative through emerging theories of polygenism, a discourse that would find its most scientifically influential advocate in Philadelphian Samuel Morton, author of Crania Americana (1839) published three years after Sheppard Lee.

The “American school” of ethnology, which promoted polygenism (the theory that races had separate origins and may constitute separate


species), depended on psychological theory to support its arguments. The psychological grounding of polygenism gained credence, in par-ticular, through phrenological interest in the subject. George Combe, noted Scottish phrenologist, wrote a concluding essay for Samuel Mor-ton’s Crania Americana that melded phrenology with polygenism. In it, Combe argues, “the independence of any tribe or nation, that is to say, its freedom from foreign yoke, is the result of a large development of the organs of self-esteem, firmness, and combativeness or destructiveness, in the majority of the people” (282). According to Combe, the organs of the mind, like self-esteem, determined one’s political freedom or sub-jection. Importantly, Combe reverses the usual phrenological method in this passage: rather than beginning with someone’s head and con-cluding about their character, he begins with the historical and politi-cal situation of nations and races and draws conclusions about their psychological constitution, implicitly blaming African enslavement, for instance, on Africans’ lack of self-esteem.

In anticipating the racial and national aptitude for captivity described by Combe, Bird explores the political question of happiness in Sheppard Lee in a way that reveals the entanglement of race, medi-cine, and sentimental politics. According to Lee, the real surprise of his own narrative is that he is happiest as an irresponsible slave. Crucial to Lee’s interpretation of his life as a slave is this emphasis on happiness. Tom’s contentment to be a slave—and Lee’s contentment to be Tom rather than a free white man—comes to a startling close in the novel through the introduction of abolitionism. In the ensuing build-up to the slave revolt, Bird parodies what he sees as the politically irresponsi-ble discourse of abolitionists. When he shifts to narrating the rebellion, Bird changes the tone of the novel to a gothic style, the generic mode most often employed for slave revolts and a reminder of how recent the events of Nat Turner’s Insurrection still felt by 1836, when Bird published Sheppard Lee.11 Bird draws upon the symptoms of nervous disorders like hypochondria to explain the motivation for the slave insurrection, implying that to turn the comic into the gothic requires a convincing psychic shift.

The slave rebellion in Sheppard Lee begins when Tom reads to his fellow slaves an abolitionist pamphlet that has been smuggled onto the plantation in a shipment of lumber. When the slaves first discover the


pamphlet, they interpret its illustrations, which include a scene depict-ing the whipping of a slave, as humorous. In fact, a slave named “Gov-ernor” imitates the illustration of the whipping: “He rubbed his back, now here, now there, now with the right, now with the left hand; now ducking to the earth, now jumping into the air, as though some lusty overseer were plying him, whip in hand, with all his might” (2:179). In imitating the illustration, Governor performs the role of slave in a similar way that Lee does as Tom. When Lee-as-Tom reads to the others the text of the abolitionist pamphlet, which argues that “the Negro was, in organic and mental structure, the white’s equal, if not his superior” (191), the humor and, crucially, the separation necessary for perform-ing the role recede. By reading the pamphlet, Tom and the other slaves move closer to a hypochondriacal reaction typically ascribed to slave owners. Lee writes that after he read “the fatal book” he became “sour and discontented” (192). His splenetic reaction, which he shares with the other slaves who read the “infectious” pamphlet, makes him unfit for his role as a slave. Just as the symptoms of hypochondria potentially conflate Megrim with his slaves, Tom’s and the other slaves’ introduc-tion to abolitionism infects them with the symptoms of nervous disor-der usually reserved for their masters.

The turning point in this reading scene depends upon Bird’s rep-resentation of abolitionist uses of the Declaration of Independence. When the slaves are not convinced by the initial argument of the pam-phlet that their master bought them—as one objects, “we born him slave”—the following paragraph draws upon an argument of natural rights. Lee relates that “the very next paragraph was opened by the quotation from the Declaration of Independence, that ‘all men were born free and equal,’ which was asserted to be true of all men, negroes as well as others; from which it followed that the master’s claim to the slave born in thraldom was as fraudulent as in the case of one obtained by purchase” (2:187). In this moment, Bird, like prominent southern anti-abolitionists such as William Drayton and George Fitzhugh, paints abolitionism with a French brush. By turning the original statement from the Declaration—“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”—into “all men were born free and equal,” Bird shifts the language from the American Declaration to that of the French Dec-


laration of the Rights of Man. In so doing, Bird implies that a terror-like revolt will follow the spread of abolitionist principles, and these associations draw in Haiti as a site of revolt. The pamphlet, ostensibly addressed to slave owners to encourage them to manumit their slaves, offers “predictions of the retribution that would sooner or later fall upon them, these being borne out by monitory allusions to the servile wars of Rome, Syria, Egypt, Sicily, St. Domingo, &c. &c.” (191). Ending with St. Domingo, the pamphlet reminds readers of a successful slave revolt threateningly close to America’s borders. Yet the effect of the pamphlet is to code slave revolts not as biblical retribution but as senti-mental contagion, a threat to both slaves’ and plantations’ health. After Tom reads the abolitionist pamphlet, he “began to have sentimental notions about liberty and equality, the dignity of man, the nobleness of freedom, and so-forth” (192). The French Enlightenment terms of “liberty,” “equality,” “freedom,” and “dignity of man” are “sentimental notions” in Sheppard Lee because they suggest what the novel proves false—namely, that freedom provides equality, dignity, or happiness. Lee has already declared that he has found happiness in the life of a slave. Bird’s critique, then, begins with the abolitionist emphasis on liberty and equality over happiness of situation and place.

Edgar Allan Poe’s main quibble with Sheppard Lee was that Bird offers “the very doubtful moral that every person should remain con-tented with his own” (402). Poe correctly points out that the moral of the story is contentment with one’s place in society. What supports this moral is an appeal to empiricism implicit in the medical orienta-tion of the narrative. Hypochondria is a disease precisely because it causes the patient to confuse the relationship between person and thing and to identify with those outside of his or her station. Moving in and out of socially prescribed roles signals Lee’s, Megrim’s, and ultimately Tom’s pathology. In Sheppard Lee, Bird therefore anticipates the polyg-enist theories of Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, shaping a narrative in which racially inflected bodies produce psyches.12 The bodies of Tom and the other slaves can be threatened by abolitionism’s introduction of nerves to their happy plantation life, but ultimately they do not suc-ceed in their revolution because their bodies hamper their minds. Lee, while awaiting execution for his role in the revolt, even forgets he can save his own life by jumping out of Tom’s body into another. He is therefore hanged for the slave insurrection and dies. Luckily, several


anatomists—professionalizing physicians—are there to resuscitate him (and the narrative) in order to advance the cause of medical science.

the ridiculous conceits of sentimental culture

Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee offers antebellum scholars a window into how medical and political discourse intersected to con-struct racial interiority in antebellum America. The pivotal symptom Bird employs is the hypochondriacal belief that one’s body is turning into various things. Bird’s coupling of Megrim and Tom through this symptom dramatizes how abolitionist rhetoric echoes the cure of hypo-chondria. Both depend on disabusing someone of the belief that they are property; yet Bird would claim that this cure is potentially dan-gerous when dealing with the minds of slaves. Although it would be tempting to conclude that Bird resolves the racial “anxieties” inherent in this contradiction through the gothic narrative of slave rebellion and the hanging of the insurrectionists, as we can see, the structures of the mind and nervous system that produce nineteenth-century anxiety are actually topics Bird self-consciously pursues in Sheppard Lee. In other words, Sheppard Lee does not betray antebellum anxieties about race and sympathy so much as thematize and represent them. After all, what are Lee’s imagined transformations into all of these people but Megrim’s hypochondria and Tom’s slave identity translated into a larger narrative about identity?

By crafting a narrative that follows Lee’s continual occupation of new bodies and minds, Bird represents the foundational antebellum medical assumption that mental disturbances are often manifesta-tions of somatic processes. In fact, his critique of sentimental politi-cal notions is rooted in this most basic of antebellum conceptions of physiology. In the antebellum medical world, the body and mind were considered mutually constitutive; many of the diseases of the mind, like hypochondria, originally arose in the stomach. As medical historian Charles Rosenberg explains, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century “every part of the body was related inevitably and inextricably with every other. A distracted mind could curdle the stomach, a dys-peptic stomach could agitate the mind” (12). The inextricable nature of body and mind within this theory both materializes the mind and makes internal organs sympathetically tied to mental health. Placed in


the context of antebellum racial politics, this material and sympathetic relationship between body and mind was the basis for racial interiority as well as theories of mental disease.

Bird draws on this materialized psychology in order to construct both the political and medical lessons Lee offers in his narrative. The political moral of the novel, according to Lee’s experiences as different people, is that happiness can best be found in contentment with one’s lot in life, which is made apparent when Lee returns to his body and learns to maintain his much-reduced farm in New Jersey. The medical moral of Sheppard Lee, which comes earlier in the novel, is the founda-tional theory of this political conclusion. After his second transforma-tion, Lee muses: “I do verily believe that much evil and good of man’s nature arises from causes and influences purely physical; that valour and ambition are as often caused by a bad stomach as ill-humour by bad teeth” (1:181). The mind, in other words, is neither triumphant nor transcendent. Both valor and ill-humor can have somatic causes. This speculation leads Lee to claim in an ethnological idiom that “those sages who labour to improve the moral nature of their species, will effect their purpose only when they have physically improved the stock” (181). Lee concludes:

Strong minds may be indeed operated without regard to bodily bias, and rendered independent of it; but ordinary spirits lie in their bodies like water in sponges, diffused through every part, affected by the part’s affections, changed with its changes, and so intimately united with the fleshly matrix, that the mere cut-ting off of a leg, as I believe, will, in some cases, leave the spirit limping for life. (181–82).

Although couched in a humorously deflated claim—in which the amputation of a leg is a “mere” event—Lee here expresses a standard theory of the antebellum body. In Bird’s most telling analogy, the mind is like water in a sponge, located everywhere in the body, affecting and being affected by it. Yet this sympathy is not the same as abolition-ist sentimental identification in which different people are likened to each other through common emotions; this sympathy is, in fact, not sentimental at all. Instead, sympathy, as Bird describes it, is a lounging and slothful exercise of “ordinary spirits,” one that guarantees that the physical markers of race will produce minds with distinct capacities.


Bird’s character construction, then, relies upon maintaining distinc-tions between person and property through the assumption that the internal workings of the racialized body are the primary means of form-ing the mind. The intersection of the medical and fictional in Sheppard Lee therefore illustrates how the mind was never divorced from matter in antebellum America. By bringing this medical point to its most clear articulation in the Virginia scenes, Bird critiques abolitionist senti-ments not so much as politically dangerous but as medically absurd.

Within this conception of the materiality of the mind, we can see more clearly why hypochondria operates as a critique of sentimental culture in Sheppard Lee. Hypochondria can be viewed as an attack of the nerves that disrupts internal bodily sympathies, leaving the hypochon-driac without a sense of a boundary between the psyche and the exter-nal world. Hypochondria emerges in the novel as a disease of excessive and inappropriately directed sentimental identification: Megrim sym-pathetically identifies with things and Tom sympathetically identifies with whites. The structure of the novel takes this point to its utmost limit: Lee’s ability to inhabit corpses with his spirit parodies concep-tions of readerly sympathy in which a reader “possesses” and experiences the emotions of fictional characters. Although Bird seems to explore the potential for sentimental identification in Lee’s bodily possessions, medicine ultimately determines the reader’s understanding of Lee’s tale. Lee has not been jumping into and out of other bodies but rather imag-ining these movements in a feverish delirium influenced by snatches of newspaper articles and overheard conversations. The ephemera of the print culture around Lee produces a nervous identity like that of both Megrim and Tom, in which anxiety operates as a materialized interiority. The conclusion of the novel repeats the medical cure of Megrim in the cure of Lee, narrating how they both learn to suppress (albeit unevenly) their own “ridiculous conceits.” For Tom, though, the hypochondriacal conflation of person with thing is naturalized and its disruption poten-tially threatens the racial hierarchy upon which hypochondria—and the happiness of his Virginia plantation—depends. According to Shep-pard Lee and antebellum medicine more broadly, the healthy and well-ordered self resists the sentimental confusions between person and property inherent in both the legal personhood of the slave and the medical classification of the hypochondriac. By narrating the process by which one learns to constrain one’s sentimental possessions, Robert


Montgomery Bird parodies the sentimental novel in order to reimagine cross-racial identification not as an opportunity for a psychologically rich relationship but as a homeopathic cure for the pathology of senti-mentality.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

notes

1. Antebellum literature abounds with memorable hypochondriacs whose relationship to race and slavery is mediated by their disease. These hypochondriacal characters include, but are certainly not limited to, Ishmael in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Benito Cereno in “Benito Cereno” (1856), Edward Clayton in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred (1856), Roderick Usher in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), the mortal melancholic Clarence Gary in Frank G. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), and even the brief but amusing appearance of the lethargic, West Indian Edwin Percy in E.D.E.N Southworth’s The Hidden Hand (1859). These works were written amidst an intense campaign on the part of the medical community to establish itself as a profession whose sphere of knowledge included mental disease, and part of the effect of this pro-cess of professionalization was the widespread circulation of pathological concepts about the mind. On the profesionalization of American medicine in general, see Duffy; Nelson, National Manhood; Sappol; and Starr. On the professionalization of American psychology in the nineteenth century, see Caplan; Grob; Scull, ed.; and Tomes.

2. For a particularly good articulation of this concept of interiority, see Casti-glia. The important aspect that the work on racial feelings and affect brings to light is that the body is not the final horizon of racial difference; that, in fact, race came to signal both intimacy between people and a quality of inward “depth” or its lack in this period.

3. With the exception of this moment of admiration, Poe’s review is equivocal. He opens the review by calling the novel “an original in American Belles Lettres at least,” and claims that it is a sign America’s literary prospects “look well” (389). Considering Poe’s backhanded compliments here—the appeal to literary national-ism ironically deployed to give credit to Bird’s originality—it shouldn’t be surprising that his objections to the plot center on form and effect. In particular, he objects to Bird’s explanation of “metempsychosis” as a spirit moving through the nostrils of each body and the pat ending that emphasizes social and political contentment. As the vehicle through which Sheppard Lee is remembered today, Poe’s review has been used primarily as evidence of Poe’s pro-slavery sympathies (Nelson, Word 91; Jones 242), and, as importantly, it is read as a manifesto of sorts that explains Poe’s por-trayal of a more “subtle” type of metempsychosis in stories such as “Metzengerstein,” “Ligeia,” and “Morella.” Bird’s other critics were less explicit in their praise of the Virginia section of Sheppard Lee, though they were much more overwhelmingly impressed with the novel itself. See contemporary reviews in periodicals such as


The American Monthly Magazine, The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine, The Family Magazine; or, Monthly Abstract of General Knowledge. Almost universally, these critics hailed Sheppard Lee as a unique and exciting “American production.” At the moment, there is no extensive criticism on Sheppard Lee. Reynolds mentions Poe’s review of Sheppard Lee and summarizes its plot (239–40, 525, 529), and Sollers footnotes it as a novel that poses an interracial self at the moment Lee jumps into the body of Tom the slave (500 n.61). A reading of Bird’s use of the delirium tre-mens in Sheppard Lee appears in Hamilton (318–19).

4. For a more detailed account of Bird’s life, see Dahl.

5. Before the seventeenth century, the symptoms of hypochondria were flatu-lence, dyspepsia, and melancholy, and it was therefore both a somatic and psycho-logical illness. By the seventeenth century the illness began to consolidate into two various, more psychological pathologies: on the one hand, the belief that one’s body was changing into inanimate and nonhuman forms, made popular by the story of the man made of glass in Cervantes’s Don Quixote; on the other, the hypochondriac as la malade imaginaire, popularized by Molière, in which hypochondria is a series of imagined illnesses, a pathology familiar to us today.

6. The majority of scholars studying nervous disorders for the era 1700–1860 focus mainly on Britain and therefore focus on gender and class rather than race. American scholarship picks up on the issue of the nerves in the postbellum era, concentrating on the development of neurasthenia and the rest cure by George Beard and S. Weir Mitchell. The best source for an understanding of the long gene-alogy of hypochondria is Starcevic and Lipsitt, and in particular, Berrios’s essay. See also, Porter; Rousseau, Introduction and “Depression’s Forgotten Genealogy.” All three sources provide important background for understanding the cultural work of and the historical differences between hypochondria, melancholy, and depres-sion. For scholarship on nervous disorders and literature before 1865 in Britain and America, see Ender; Frawley; Logan; and Thrailkill.

7. By the nineteenth century, Anglo-American physicians claimed that the tropical climate of the West Indies could be curative for those suffering from physi-cal ailments such as tuberculosis or the gout. Nervous disorders, though, were the exception to this rule, and they continued to appear as pernicious side effects of the climate throughout this period. For more on the relationship between tropical climate and disease, see Bewell; and Kupperman.

8. Trotter, for instance, offers an almost apocalyptic narrative in which “unmanned” nervous Creoles augur the fall of the British Empire (48). Johnson worries that ennui, an important symptom of hypochondria, leads Creoles in the East and West Indies into sexual relations with slaves and indigenous women (333). Edwards argues that the social and natural climates of the West Indies stymie the early genius of white Creole children. All of these constructions of the nervous Creole depend upon seeing the West Indian planter as the ultimate version of the British aristocrat, one, though, who combined the ennui and luxury of the home-grown aristocrat with the racial anxieties of the West Indies.


9. For an understanding of the construction of the slave’s legal personhood, see Patterson; and Dayan. Particularly illuminating is Dayan’s tracing of the transfer-ence of the terms of attainder—the British punishment for one accused of trea-son—to the word “taint,” which allowed social death to accrue a racial meaning. Hartman also builds her important critique of slavery on the recognition that slaves were often most subjected to power through negotiated moments in which the slave’s humanity was explicitly articulated.

10. I draw these terms, in part, from Kopytoff who explains that the West imag-ines subjectivity as operating in two drastically different spheres: person and thing. The definition of person in the West, according to Kopytoff, is that which cannot be exchanged in the market place; a thing, on the other hand, is an exchangeable commodity. Kopytoff argues instead that personhood and thinghood are actually interrelated processes rather than separable categories, a theory he believes is mani-fested in the slave and, as I would argue, the hypochondriac.

11. Bird’s use of gothic narrative for the slave revolt reinforces Goddu’s argu-ment that the gothic was a particularly apt mode for representing slavery because “the terror of possession, the iconography of entrapment and imprisonment, and the familial transgressions found in the gothic novel were also present in the slave system” (73).

12. Although much of the current scholarly interest in nineteenth-century ethnology has concentrated on Samuel Morton’s craniology, polygenists also spent a great deal of time attempting to delineate the moral and mental characteristics of race to support further the contention that they represented different species. By beginning with the assumption that each race has its own ethnological his-tory, Gliddon and Nott propose that human racial variation extends to “moral” and “psychical” characteristics. They write, “Ethnology demands to know what was the primitive organic structure of each race?—what such race’s moral and psychical character?” (49). For an overview of the American school of ethnology, see Hors-man; Nelson; and Stanton.

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"Hypochondria and Racial Interiority in Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee"

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