The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
From Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales

Interesting Links

“Edgar Allan Poe and Mesmeric Possibility” (Allen Porter Mendenhall, The Literary Table)

“‘You Are Getting Very Sleepy’: When Hypnotism Came to America” (Anne E. Bromley, UVA Today)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe
• “An Itinerant House,” Emma Frances Dawson
• “The Spectre Bridegroom,” Washington Irving
• “For the Blood Is the Life,” F. Marion Crawford

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“‘I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead.’ No person present even affected to deny, or attempted to repress, the unutterable, shuddering horror which these few words, thus uttered, were so well calculated to convey. Mr. L——1 (the student) swooned. The nurses immediately left the chamber, and could not be induced to return.” Illustration (cropped) by British artist Byam Shaw (1872–1919) for Selected Tales of Mystery by Edgar Allan Poe (London, 1909).

In 1844 Chauncy Hare Townshend, the author of Facts in Mesmerism—a book Edgar Allan Poe regarded “as one of the most truly profound and philosophical works of the day”—described an experience with mesmeric therapy:

I have watched the effects of mesmeric treatment upon a suffering friend, who was dying of that most fearful disorder—Lumbar Abscess. Unfortunately, through various hindrances, Mesmerism was not resorted to till late in the progress of the disease, so that, of course, that it should effect a cure was out of the question. Mesmerism does not profess to work miracles. It cannot restore a decayed bone to its integrity, or re-create a missing part;—but it can benefit, even where it cannot save. And how much is it to say of a power—that it is remedial even where not curative, and that in cases where it fails to rekindle life it can smooth the passage to the grave, and mitigate the horrors of physical pain! . . .

I have no hesitation in saying, that, under God, the life of my friend R. T. was prolonged, at least, two months by the action of Mesmerism.

During the 1840s mesmerism fascinated Poe, who could turn even the most promising advances of the era into the stuff of nightmares, and it stirred him to write a trio of stories. In 1844 he published “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and “Mesmeric Revelation,” and the following year, inspired in part by the experience of Townshend’s dying friend, he wrote the best known of the three, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”

For the last 180 years, most readers and even many scholars seem to have assumed that mesmerism in Poe’s stories was simply the act of hypnotism. In an analysis of all three stories, Doris V. Falk reminds readers that hypnotism in Poe’s day was considered only one element of what mesmerists called “animal magnetism”: “an autonomous physical force pervading both the animate and inanimate worlds, accounting for the mesmerists’ therapeutic powers at the same time that it attracted iron to magnets [and] kept the stars in their places.” The influence of this pseudoscience on literature was vast; Falk drolly notes that it gave rise to “a popular contemporary genre, the dream vision or prophecy [which] probably constituted the greatest volume of unreadable effusions ever to pollute a literary atmosphere.”

In Poe’s stories, however, mesmerism becomes (as Falk puts it) “an amoral force operating within the mind and body, linking consciousness and ‘physique,’ animating both.” Thus, in Poe’s story “Mesmeric Revelation,” a dying man in a “sleep-waking” state explains that “there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser. . . . The ultimate, or unparticled matter, not only permeates all things but impels all things—and thus is all things within itself. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought,’ is this matter in motion.”

Poe’s fascination seems to have focused on how this “force” or “matter” might operate when the mind straddles the boundary between life and death. In “Mesmeric Revelation,” the man is dead when the mesmerist awakens him from the trance, which leaves open the question of whether he had been talking to the mesmerist from “the region of the shadows.” Or, as another prominent scholar, Paul John Eakin, explains, “Mesmerism seemed to offer a means by which the barrier between the angelic and the mortal realms might be crossed by a living man.”

What Poe apparently had not anticipated when he published “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” was that many readers would believe it was a true story. “I had not the slightest idea that any person should credit it as any thing more than a ‘Magazine-paper,’” he wrote to one of his publishers four years later. Yet Poe was hardly an author who would dampen the kind of publicity generated by the debate over whether the “case” was genuine. After the story appeared in the December 1845 issue of the American Review, under the title “Facts of M. Valdemar's Case,” a New-York Daily Tribune critic contended that it was “a pretty good specimen of Poe's style of giving an air of reality to fictions,” and that any reader who thought the events actually occurred “must have the bump of Faith large, very large indeed.” Without addressing the veracity of Valdemar’s case, Poe coyly responded in the Broadway Journal (the weekly newspaper he owned and edited), “Why cannot a man's death be postponed indefinitely by Mesmerism? Why cannot a man talk after he is dead? Why? — Why? — that is the question; and as soon as the Tribune has answered it to our satisfaction we will talk to it farther.” He then stirred things up some more by reprinting the story in the Broadway Journal with a headnote:

An article of ours, thus entitled, was published in the last number of Mr. Colton's “American Review,” and has given rise to some discussion—especially in regard to the truth or falsity of the statements made. It does not become us, of course, to offer one word on the point at issue. We have been requested to reprint the article, and do so with pleasure. We leave it to speak for itself. We may observe, however, that there are a certain class of people who pride themselves upon Doubt, as a profession.

Soon enough, the story worked its way across the Atlantic. While the London Morning Post reprinted it with an editor’s note suggesting it was “either a fabrication or the work of one little acquainted with consumption,” the Popular Record of Modern Science published the piece with a statement weighing the evidence and concluding “there is no strong point for disbelief. . . . The circumstances are, as the Post says, ‘wonderful,’ but so are all circumstances that come to our knowledge for the first time—and in mesmerism everything is new.”

A few weeks earlier, Poe had published The Raven and Other Poems, with a dedication to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and he sent a copy to her in England along with his recent Tales. She responded with words of thanks and praise, adding:

Then there is a tale of yours which I do not find in this volume, but which is going the round of the newspapers, about mesmerism—throwing us all into “most admired disorder”, or dreadful doubts as to whether “it can be true”, as the children say of ghost stories. The certain thing in the tale in question is the power of the writer, & the faculty he has of making horrible improbabilities seem near & familiar.

In a subsequent letter to her husband, Robert Browning, Elizabeth joked they would need to “decide whether the outrageous compliment to me or the experiment on M. Vandeleur [sic] goes furthest to prove him mad.”

While Poe did little publicly to dampen the debate over the veracity of the story, he usually admitted the truth in personal correspondence. Arch Ramsay, “a believer in Mesmerism” living in Scotland, wrote and asked if Poe would deny, “for the sake of the Science & of truth,” that the story was a “hoax.” Poe responded bluntly, “‘Hoax’ is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar's case. . . . Some few persons believe it—but I do not—and don’t you.”

Notes: The Latin phrase in articulo mortis translates “in the moment of death.” Wallenstein is a trilogy of epic historical dramas by Friedrich Schiller, first performed in 1798–99; they chronicle the fall and assassination of General Albrecht von Wallenstein during the Thirty Years War. Gargantua refers to François Rabelais’s The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, a sixteenth-century pentalogy of satirical novels relating the adventures of two giants. Phthisis is a consumptive disease, usually pulmonary tuberculosis.

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