Sleep Fictions: Rest and Its Deprivations in Progressive-Era Literature

We should spend one third of our lives asleep, many of us have long been told. Huber traces this ideal of seven to eight hours of sleep a day to Benjamin Franklin, who proposed it at the dawn of the industrial era, but she emphasizes that current sleep research finds the amount of sleep we should obtain varies from person to person. However much sleep we should be getting, it’s rare to read a book about literary depictions of sleep. This original topic makes Hannah Huber’s Sleep Fictions a revelation and a treat. Drawing on the emerging field of sleep studies, Huber focuses on the political economy of sleep. Her discussion asks such questions as who suffers from insomnia and how that insomnia is treated, and whose sleep is curtailed in favor of the productivity and efficiency that our culture expects of us. The period of study is the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At that time, the “Second Industrial Revolution” made sleep “a popular cultural concern and an impediment to be conquered,” Huber argues (5). Huber traces the idea that people should treat sleep as an inconvenient truth through self-help manuals by industrial titans like Thomas Edison and Frederick Winslow Taylor and medical textbooks by Charles Elam and George Miller Beard, and she compares their findings to twenty-first-century sleep research. With this medical background in mind, the book focuses on how the cultural debates about sleep inform fiction by Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Huber’s interpretations of fiction by these writers are innovative and provocative. The analysis is enriched by two new approaches: the medical humanities and the digital humanities. Graphs and visualizations illustrate the central thesis that sleep was uniquely important to the period and tied up with its class, gender, and race politics.Huber follows up previous studies of sleep by Michael Green (Sleep and the Novel) and Eluned Summers-Bremner (Insomnia: A Cultural History) to argue for sleep as a subject with a material history. Sleep is a universal biological necessity and a currency, in every society, whose parameters are subject to unwritten rules about when, where, with whom, and for how long people should sleep. Equally important has been the question of whose sleep should be protected. The late nineteenth century was a time when arguments about sleep came to a head, Huber convincingly argues, for fromPhysicians studied exhaustion-induced sleep phenomena, including somnambulism and neurasthenia. These physicians anticipated findings about REM sleep and circadian rhythms, but they largely concurred with the industrialists that medical science should work to overpower sleep with a round-the-clock work ethic. The fiction writers that Huber features expressed things differently, however: “Despite a capitalist, elitist disregard for—and limited understanding of—sleep’s essentiality at the turn of the century, Progressive-Era writers depicted death and near-death experiences as an inevitable result of sleep deprivation, thus using their fictions to articulate ignored and previously unexplored truths about the value of sleep” (7).In Wharton’s The House of Mirth, stories by Gilman from her self-published magazine the Forerunner, and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, sleep abnormalities are correlated to social nonconformity. (The Awakening is discussed for only a few paragraphs at the beginning of the introduction, but the reading illustrates larger points.) Edna Pontellier is restless and exhausted when she discovers that she loves another man and only receives restorative rest after her “awakening” when she falls into another woman’s bed and pretends to be Sleeping Beauty. In fact, references to somnambulism and Sleeping Beauties pervade these texts, despite their surface adherence to the genres of realism and naturalism, known for eschewing the mythic. Lily Bart of The House of Mirth also suffers from sleeplessness, being kept up late by her social obligations and prone to insomnia due to her worry about her finances and her aging. Huber’s attention to the wide-ranging implications of sleep terminology in the novel is impressive. Carry Fisher’s famous complaint that Lily “works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic” speaks to Lily’s author’s understanding of the necessity for sleep, even as Lily herself subscribes to her age’s desire to transcend the need for sleep (qtd. on 94). In the near-rape scene with Gus Trenor, his eyes “had the haggard look of the sleep-walker” (qtd. on 99). Sleeplessness increases one’s inclination for risk and the avoidance of undesirable truths, according to sleep research, and Lily’s actions evince her sleep debt. Her psychosomatic fantasies, such as her fear of being chased by the Furies of Eumenides, are symptomatic of sleep deprivation and classified in modern medicine as parasomnia. The focus on the necessity of sleep encourages Huber to weigh in on the controversial topic of the novel’s resolution (Is it accident or suicide?). Huber’s analysis illustrates how Wharton’s novel is deeply invested in the social problem of sleep deprivation and, more generally, the universal experience of embodiment that is so often left out of analyses of fiction.The Chesnutt chapter will likely change the way people read his fiction. Racial stereotypes and pseudoscience coined the term “Colored People’s Time” by 1912, a shorthand to describe how African Americans as a class of laborers resisted the time strictures of their overseers before and after slavery. For the white carpetbaggers John and Annie of the conjure tales, the North Carolina town seems restful and lazy; the resident Black storyteller, Uncle Julius, is a source of tales that are distracting and leisurely. But the tales indicate that enslaved people’s rest was being interrupted continuously by their masters’ demands on their time, and tales like “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare” reveals “the harsh realities of sleep deprivation and the cult of productivity” (90). Sleep deprivation was a key tool in employers’ arsenal, before and after the end of slavery, and unlike Booker T. Washington, who encouraged Black southerners to submit to the industrial clock, Chesnutt argued for the elevation of people’s own bodily needs. Perhaps another chapter on sleep debt for the working classes would have added to the book’s value.Huber’s interpretations of James’s Roderick Hudson and Gilman’s What Diantha Did aptly illustrate that creative work, like agricultural or industrial work, requires restorative rest—yet employees increasingly expected creative work to happen mechanistically. These employees unfortunately include Gilman’s feminist heroine Diantha, who relieves white women of the burdens of cooking nightly dinners but who does so through driving her working-class employees in a regimented way. The book raises important questions for our own day about how the right to restorative rest for workers, including creative workers, should be protected in a twenty-four-seven economy.Huber is an exacting scholar, and her generalizations about medical research in the period and about former readings of the literary texts featured are scrupulously documented. The digital humanities component of the book adds to its clout. Huber uses the Google Ngram search engine (books.google.com/ngrams) to provide evidence for the unique importance of sleep-related terminology to this period. Her graphs show that across a corpus of books, the terms sleep, exhaustion, and insomnia peaked during the period in question. The chapters include text visualizations generated using Voyant Tools (voyant-tools.org) to illustrate the connection between the sleep terms and other themes. For example, she argues that a Voyant-generated image of the words associated with “sleep” in “Mars Jeems’s Nightmare” illustrates that the enslaved characters associate nighttime rest with angst and fear. It was difficult for me to be convinced by this analysis, given that the words associated with “sleep” were often things like “feelin” and “days.” Huber is clear about her methodology and assumptions, but her findings are augmented rather than transformed by her digital tools, raising the question of whether close reading needs to be augmented by such tools.More research into the digital humanities—particularly research like this that combines insightful close reading with visualization tools—remains on the horizon. The book comes with an impressive digital companion (currently housed at https://sleepfictions.org/sleep/scalar/index?path=index) that enables readers to follow along Huber’s analysis or conduct further research of their own. The digital companion offers incredibly detailed annotations of, for example, chapter 3 of The House of Mirth. There is plenty here to encourage readers to spend late nights searching for sleep-related terminology in the fiction. With its meticulousness and its abundance of resources, the book paradoxically works against its own underlying finding that rest remains a primary need in the digital age. The book and digital companion include qualitative and quantitative data worth mulling over for years to come.