“Thou Art the Soul of Thy House” (1902) by Silas Weir Mitchell

First published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1902 and then again in Mitchell’s short story collection Little Stories (1903), “Thou Art the Soul of Thy House” is thoroughly of its time and yet wildly contrary to what readers would have expected from a physician-novelist known for historical novels and slice-of-life doctor stories. Of course, for readers today, “Thou Art” won’t seem peculiar. If Silas Weir Mitchell is remembered at all, it’s either for “The Case of George Dedlow” (1866), a Gothic Civil War story about a quadruple amputee with literal phantom limbs, or for developing the rest cure and prescribing it to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who then dramatized its dangers in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892). When he appears in the American literary canon, it’s as a figure of medical horror, an honor he would have hated.According to Mitchell, “Dedlow” was written in jest and shared with a friend, who sent it to another who liked and submitted it—on Mitchell’s behalf—to The Atlantic, where it appeared anonymously. “Dedlow’s” case study form and vivid neurological language led some to think it authentic. This is despite the story culminating with the narrator standing on the ghosts of his amputated legs and immediately becoming drunk because they were preserved in specimen jars. Nevertheless, “the story was received with joy by the spiritualists as a valuable proof” of their beliefs (Autobiography x). So, years later, in bone-dry prose, Mitchell explained the neurology behind phantom limb phenomenon in an article for Lippincott’s Magazine. Never admitting in the article that he wrote “Dedlow,” Mitchell reprimands its author for “taking advantage of the freedom afforded to a writer of fiction” by setting an impossible case alongside an astonishing reality (564). For the next three decades, he policed the boundary between literature and science in his public life, becoming—through largely separate pursuits—America’s foremost neurologist and a nationally recognized author. Though his novels featured physicians and his clinical practice relied on his literary imagination, his fiction never again represented topics beyond the available science (Altschuler 191). By his own choice, he inhabited a world exemplifying the Two Cultures divide between the sciences and the humanities.This changed in 1900 with the publication of The Autobiography of a Quack and the Case of George Dedlow, a volume of Mitchell’s comic stories about American medicine. For the first time, Mitchell was claiming paternity for “Dedlow.” This is also the year he began composing “Thou Art,” a story about a house that seems to have “influential memories” (i.e., the mental imprints of previous occupants) that infect, “as with a moral malaria,” the minds of its inhabitants. Mitchell’s sudden reversal on Gothic medical fiction raises an obvious question: Why now?Though Mitchell never explained the reversal, it was likely a reaction against the growing popularity of psychical research in the 1890s. One of Mitchell’s friends, the Harvard psychologist William James, was deeply involved in this work and invited Mitchell to a séance. Mitchell attended but found it to be a “babble of utter nonsense” (Cervetti 78). The public disagreed. They were hungry for ghosts—a fact authors couldn’t afford to ignore. Henry James, William’s brother, was in the tightest financial situation of his life that decade and partially buoyed himself with a string of ghost stories for magazines. Even The Turn of the Screw (1898), which he dismissed as “a shameless pot-boiler” after the psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers praised its accuracy, bore this imprint for James (300). Whatever that novella’s aesthetic merits or Henry James’s true feelings about it, he clearly begrudged writing a serialized Gothic thriller for readers more interested in séances than art.Motivated by neither belief nor necessity, Mitchell likely wrote “Thou Art” to critique the flood of ghost fictions. Unlike “Dedlow,” the humor is foregrounded and directly attacks spiritualism and psychical research. Take the gloriously faux-biblical epigraph “thou art the soul of thy house” by the vaguely Eastern European “Pavel Sychofsky, M.P.S.” What does this mean? Is it allegorical? Prophetic? Literal? Pavel Psycho-fsky speaks in all rhetorical registers and none, the very image of a spiritualist impresario. Similarly, the character Secton is a pun on Sexton, a traditional term for gravediggers, and his PhD in psychometry references an outmoded spiritualist doctrine from the 1840s. By 1900 psychometry was transparently a pseudoscience, unlike Mitchell’s initial choice for Secton’s degree: psychology. In an early manuscript, Secton has a PhD in psychology, a scientific discipline with prominent psychical apologists like William James. So, too, between the manuscript and first publication, Secton goes from being “a man” with extreme views to “a mystic.” This earlier, scientific Secton resembles James, in the same way the narrator’s rejection of spiritualist “nonsense” recalls Mitchell post-séance. By emphasizing psychical research as a spiritual rather than a scientific enterprise, Mitchell shields Science from his attack on pseudo-sciences.At the same time, “Thou Art” is not wholly comedic. It dedicates substantial space to describing acute mental deterioration and refined this in the 1903 version (reproduced below) to explore the phenomenology of possession-like experiences. Compare the syntactic placement of “I felt” in the two print editions: “I felt, as I stood in amazement, looking about me, a slowly gathering renewal of the melancholy” from 1902, and “As I stood in amazement, looking about me, I felt a slowly gathering renewal of the melancholy” from 1903. The earlier “I felt” establishes a subjective report, a consciousness observing their feelings; in contrast, the repositioned “I felt” feels compressed, a subject almost eliminated between two overwhelming emotional states. Melancholy becomes palpable. It clouds, convinces, stands near, and owns the narrator. It’s an alien presence that threatens to annihilate him.For Mitchell, psychiatric realism seems to be fiction’s contribution to understanding phenomena that might be called psychical. A true answer to the question “was it temporary psychosis or psychometric haunting?” exists outside the story in the space of scientific inquiry. Within the text, we should stay with conscious experience and personal beliefs. At a moment with too many ghost stories, “Thou Art” was a fable about an author’s right to represent the extremes of emotional and psychological life, as well as a neurologist’s insistence that ghost stories and case studies should not overstep their disciplinary divide.“Thou Art” was first published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1902 to build interest for Mitchell’s 1903 Little Stories, also published by The Century. Although Mitchell’s novels and poems enjoyed broad popularity and occasional reprinting in his lifetime, this was not the fate of Little Stories, a work largely ignored after its initial publication and then forgotten after Mitchell’s death in 1914—along with most of his literary output. In the century since, there are no known reprintings of the story, leaving only these two published versions and an undated manuscript held in the S. Weir Mitchell collection in the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Viewed chronologically, these three versions (manuscript, magazine, and book) offer a modest genetic insight into the story, as Mitchell gradually refined its attack on pseudo-science and developed its account of possession-like experiences.The Kislak manuscript, which I believe to be from 1900, appears to be a drafting and editing copy. Minor revisions, like “psychology” and “man” being crossed out and replaced with “psychometry” and “mystic,” appear alongside larger cuts and restructuring in the manuscript. By contrast, the two published versions are nearly identical, having only five textual variants between them. Two of these variants are small changes to punctuation. Another small difference is that Little Stories capitalizes the epigraph, whereas the magazine does not. The final two variants are more substantial and revolve around the placement of “I felt.” The first change (discussed above) moves “I felt” from the beginning of a sentence to the middle, compressing it between two overwhelming emotional states. The other variant, occurring a few sentences later, eliminates the first-person subject entirely. “My power to reason was, I felt, affected” becomes “My reason and my will power were affected.” Between these two print versions, the narrator’s “possession” transforms from personal unease to real psychiatric peril. It is a matter of fact that he is altered, not his judgment that he may be so. Consequently, the 1903 version (reproduced here) is Mitchell’s clearest description of the phenomenology of possession-like experiences. So along with the common editorial practice of privileging the author’s last edition as definitive, the text’s genetic history affirms that choice.“Thou Art the Soul of Thy House.” Little Stories, Century Co., 1903, pp. 91–100.My friend Secton is a Ph.D. in psychometry, and believes that all things created by man have souls, and remember, and are what he calls influential. It is sad nonsense. He believes in lucky and unlucky houses, and in shops where the successive owners always fail. He goes further, and says that it is morally dangerous to live in a house where a murderer has long dwelt, or in which a murder has been done. My doctor says there is only one kind of ghost and that it lives unseen of any in houses where certain kinds of diseases have killed men. This idea captures my imagination, through my reason, and does appeal to me. As to the other style of ghost, I entirely disbelieve. My friend is hurt when I say that ghosts must be rare, since there is no mention of them in the last census; nor of rattlesnakes, says Secton, who dislikes trifling with the serious, and does not see the logical value of a jest, nor why I grin at his houses with “influential memories.”That doctor of mine also smiles at Secton’s queer notions, and taps his forehead indicatively. But then, the doctor is a materialist. So extreme a mystic as Secton is more to my taste. I can readily see why, with that kind of a doctor, my wife remains neither well enough to be of use, nor ill enough to be honestly pitied. He says: “Bah! a ghost. I should put a thermometer under his tongue, and soon know where he came from.”One night in June, when my wife was away, Secton called at my house in South Kensington, and began at once on his hobby. I smoked and listened, mildly amused. Secton is very persistent. He suspects me of having a little leaven of love of the mystical, which is true of most reflective men.He said at last: “I have often tested my own belief as to houses. Will you submit your skepticism to a trial?”I replied that I would.He said: “I have hired a house for a week. I want you to sleep there two nights. To be brief,” he added, “I make no suggestive statement. I have furnished one room, the second story back. Occupy it two successive nights, and, mind you, it is not a question of ghosts.”The next night he called for me.We had a long drive in a hansom to a suburban house near St. John’s Wood. Here Secton gave me a key, and left me at the door.The dwelling was large, and had a small walled garden behind it. It was about eleven when I lighted the candle I found in the hall, on the floor, for the house was, as he said, unfurnished. It smelt close and musty. I walked through several rooms to a little conservatory. I found nothing unlike a multitude of other so-called villas.I went to my room, locked the door, lighted three candles, set my shaving-case and toilet affairs on a chair, for want of a table, and went to bed. It is proof of my indifferent attitude of mind that I slept well. I awoke early, about six, and, to my surprise, felt a strange sense of depression, a melancholy so convincing that I seemed of a sudden to understand how it was that men may desire to die. I sat up with a feeling of horror and of recoil as from an abyss. I struck my repeater. It was after six o’clock. As I looked about me in the dim light, I saw my razor lying open on the bed. It startled me. I was sure I had left it on the chair.I got up and walked about the room, and after a little began to be more myself. As it was very warm, I opened a window. When I turned toward the bed, the razor, closed, was lying on the chair. I began to dislike the adventure and again to feel the cloud of melancholy, like a shroud, about me.I dressed and went home, and after breakfast was as usual. By nightfall I had explained it all to my satisfaction, and, reassured, went gaily back to the house.Nothing unusual happened. I smoked a cigar or two, read a sleep-compelling novel, and went to bed at ten. I woke twice in an hour, conscious each time of fear, the product of dreams which at once faded past recall. After this I was unable to sleep. I was restless and uneasy. At last I got up, and in the darkness had abruptly a sense of alarm which was like a possession; that is, as of a thing, a mood, which owned me. I found a match, and lighted all my three candles. I was in a cold sweat and afraid with the fear a nightmare brings, and with this terror I was, also, in a mood of deep gloom. I dressed and went to a closet to find the novel I had left on the shelf. I was resolved to dismiss these sensations. As I took it, I saw some empty vials, and one which was half full. I took it up, and uncorked it, and smelt it to learn what it might be. It was laudanum. I staggered across the room with it in my hand, and with an oath threw it into the fireplace. I had resisted the deadliest temptation life had ever set in my way.I went slowly down-stairs, and must have been in a queer condition, for I seemed to be moving with an onerous use of will power. At last I was out in the air and was at once relieved. After walking about for hours, I reluctantly went back to the house, and up to my room. The fragments of the bottle I had broken when I threw it on the hearth were gone.As I stood in amazement, looking about me, I felt a slowly gathering renewal of the melancholy of the night before. Was it all a dream—or what? My reason and my will power were affected by the mood of gloom, and by the desire, the longing to—I would not say it even to that confidant, my own mind. I hastily put my toilet things in a hand-bag, and went away to get, at home, a bath and breakfast. The feeling of depression was with me until evening.When I called on Secton and made my statement he asked if I were satisfied. I replied that, as to the razor, it must have been a lapse of memory, and possibly—Secton broke in: “But I say, man, do you leave open razors on your bed and forget them? Or do you mean me to believe that it is a habit of yours to get up in your sleep and shave yourself?”“But,” said I, “how else can I explain it?”“That is just the question. I can explain it. What about the laudanum?”I replied that I must have been, in some way, the fool of my own suggestive imagination.“Well,” said he, “you certainly reason very oddly. And so you remain unconvinced.”“Of what am I to be convinced?” I said nothing of my melancholy mood, nor of the temptation. I hated to think of what was an absolutely new, and as surely very humbling, remembrance for a man as decisive as I.He sneered as he returned: “You wished to test the value of my belief that houses have active memories and may affect, as with a moral malaria, those who live in them.”“Yes; that is put fairly. What of that house—what does it remember?”“I will tell you. Three persons have taken their lives in that house; no one can live in it.”“Stop!” I said. “Were they all of one family?”“Yes.”“That,” I urged, “seems to me to lessen the value of your test.”“Does it?” he said. “For them, perhaps; but not for you. Now be fair.”I said it required thought.I think he knew that I had not been entirely frank, for he asked if I would try another night in the same house.I said, “No.” Upon which he replied, smiling:“I do not ask why. I am satisfied.”Secton has good manners. He might have made himself disagreeable.ENGAGEMENTS: Have thoughts about this column? American Gothic Studies invites responses to this and other essays published in the journal in the form of Engagements. These short pieces (250–1000 words) are meant to encourage dialogue between writers for and readers of American Gothic Studies. They should respond to an article, interview, provocation, or exhumation published in a prior issue of the journal. 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