The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny

by Terry Castle

The work of leading scholar Terry Castle, called by the New York Times "always engaging...consistently fascinating," has helped to revolutionize eighteenth-century studies. The Female Thermometer brings together Castle's essays on the phantasmagoric side of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Taking as her emblem the fanciful "female thermometer," an imaginary instrument invented by eighteenth-century satirists to measure levels of female sexual arousal, Castle explores what she calls the "impinging strangeness" of the eighteenth-century imagination--the ways in which the rationalist imperatives of the age paradoxically worked to produce what Freud would later call the uncanny. In essays on doubling and fantasy in the novels of Defoe and Richardson, sexual impersonators and the dream-like world of the eighteenth-century masquerade, magic-lantern shows, automata, and other surreal inventions of Enlightenment science, and the hallucinatory obsessions of Gothic fiction,
Castle offers a haunting portrait of a remarkable epoch. Her collection explores the links between material culture, gender, and the rise of modern forms and formulas of subjectivity, effectively rewriting the cultural history of modern Europe from a materialist and feminist perspective.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, 18th Century, Academic, Gothic, Literary Criticism, Theory

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 1995

About the author

Terry Castle was once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today." She is the author of seven books of criticism, including The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (1993) and Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women and Sex (2002). Her antholoy, The Literature of Lesbianism, won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award in 2003. She lives in San Franciso and is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

Reviews

[Abbie O'Hara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collection of varied essays that center on gothic literary conventions and how they reflect the ontologies of horror through history: how do we interpret the spectral? How has one generation to the next inverted these suppositions? Most interesting of all, the essay on Radcliffe's Udolpho, pinpoints Freud's uncanny as a representation of modern Enlightenment as the inspiration of modern horror conventions. Through the suppression of the supernatural, we have created a horrific reality where our spectral imaginings must then be synonymous with the rational and real. Udolpho seems to blur the lines between death and life: dead characters are evoked on our living memories of them. Once this line has been crossed, who is to say that the living then cannot be dead as well? Compelling and thought-provoking!

...

Freud’s theory of the uncanny can serve as a historical allegory for the 18th century. Enlightenment theory is the uncanny representation of man. The suppression, the control and domination has, in itself, become something distorted and horrific in its incarnation. "Once again, because the infantile wish has been distorted by repression, we now react with horror and uneasiness at the thought of a doll moving like a human being,” (12).

“That this supernaturalization of the mind should occur precisely when the traditional supernatural realm was elsewhere being explained away should not surprise us. According to the Freudian principle, what the mind rejects in one form may return to haunt it in another. A predictable inversion has taken place in The Mysteries of Udolpho: what once was real (the supernatural) has become unreal; what once was unreal (the imagery of the mind) has become real. In the very process of reversal, however, the two realms are confused; the archaic language of the supernatural contaminates the new language of mental experience. Ghosts and spectres retain their ambiguous grip on the human imagination; they simply migrate into the space of the mind.” (135)

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Castle's essay on The Mysteries of Udolpho (Chapter 8) in college and it has stayed with me - haunted me even! - for the past two decades. The central points of the 11 essays that comprise this work are that the rationalization process of the 18th century and its "death of magic" was inextricably tied up with a new sense of the uncanniness of the identity and the imagination itself. Although my preference is for the last four essay pieces dealing directly with "spectralization," the whole volume is a gem.

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the best academic book I've read thus far. Castle's prose is concise, well thought out, and utterly compelling. She has a knack of crafting clear arguments that take the reader on historical journeys through events and literature, taking complex ideas and explaining them in simple turns to make the text enjoyable and, perhaps most importantly, fun to read. The introduction explains that this was put together as a response of sorts to Freud's famous essay on the uncanny, exploring uncanny elements of history and literature in the 18th century. We begin with transgressive elements in famous 18th century novels, particularly those involving women and sexuality, before moving into studies of masquerade and carnival. The book, incredibly, becomes even better during a late chapter on Ann Radcliffe, while the following two chapters on phantasmagoria and spectrality are two of the best pieces of writing I've ever encountered: erudite, eye-opening, and capable of imparting new levels of historical understanding. The final chapter, on the famous case of two women who apparently travelled back in time to meet Marie Antoinette, is oddly personal and affecting. I borrowed an online copy of this book from my library, but it's so good that I had to get hold of a hard copy too.

[Ronnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whelp, this is it. The last book of literary essays that I began reading in the Winter Semester of 2025 and decided to continue reading until I finished it despite not having read most of the novels the essays were about. I have no idea what it is about Terry Castle's scholarship that draws me, but it's the second of her book of essays that I read cover to cover this year, and I enjoyed them even despite not having read most of the novels.

The last three essays, in fact ("Phatasmagoria and the Metaphysics of Modern Romance," "Spectral Politics: Apparition Belief and the Romantic Imagination," and "Contagious Folly: An Adventure and Its Skeptics") don't really require any prior reading at all, and are about the waning belief in ghosts and spirits in light of Enlightenment Philosophy, and were all very intriguing; I tore through those three much faster than I did the previous eight essays.

Anyway, I like Castle's writing and her scholarship, and I had very much enjoyed this book of literary essays.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of post-structural essays about 18th century English culture unified in Freud's idea of the 'uncanny'; the conflict that arises between the rational imperative and the subsequently rejected (indestructible) offal of irrationality.

Part 'one' deals with gender and sexuality, part two; the spectral. The latter contains the pinnacle in the author's ideas.. the relocation in consciousness of the ghoul from without (really existing ghosts) into the Freudian haunting from within.

This book probably deserves a '5 star' review but unfortunately she taunts the corpse of Henry Fielding, and has a sense of humour failure with satire... or maybe she's too critical, and I feel guilt about misogynistic conservative humour. Either or both.

[tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating study of the intersections between science, gender and culture in enlightenment england

[Karen]

* Understanding Oppression: Gay Rights (The Whitman Society)

The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Ideologies of Desire) by Terry Castle