The Representation of Mesmerism in Honoré de Balzac's "La Comédie humaine"

The Author: K. Melissa Marcus is an assistant professor of French at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. She received her B.A. in French and Political Science, and an M.A. in Political Science, at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She was awarded her Ph.D. in French from Stanford University, where she lectured before coming to Northern Arizona University.

"At a time when literary criticism has finally discovered the body, Dr. Marcus makes a significant contribution to Balzac studies by carefully demonstrating the surprising role that mesmerism plays in the representation of the interaction of body and soul in 'La comédie humaine'. Like Cureau de la Chambre in the seventeenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer proposed a way of 'reading' the passions that was attractive to those 'moralistes' - Balzac among them - who sought an explanation of the complexus of factors driving human nature." (Ronald W. Tobin, University of California, Santa Barbara)
"Both the scholar and the general public will find much of interest in a new study of Balzac by K. Melissa Marcus. Her book contains a brief history of mesmerism and its influence in France, an understanding of the forces that attracted Balzac to Mesmer, and the occult side of the human psyche. In our own age of sophisticated technology, Marcus's book speaks to the yearning for the transcendental, and our curiosity about para-scientific phenomena at the outer reaches of human experience." (Pauline Newman-Gordon, French Department, Stanford University)