The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre by Matthew Wilson Smith

Reviewed by: The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre by Matthew Wilson Smith Macy Jones The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre. By Matthew Wilson Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 221. 39. 95, cloth. In the introduction to The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre, Matthew Wilson Smith asks, “How did we come to think about ourselves not as souls but as nerves” (1). Smith’s monograph provides an answer by treating the brain as neural subject with a history that can be traced through both scientific discovery and artistic evolution. The book is an investigation into the invisible lines that link development of the theatre of sensation by way of modern dramaturgy and the growing scientific field of neuropsychology. Smith, a professor in the Department of German Studies and the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies at Stanford University, crafts a narrative of ideological exchange between the arts and sciences that created the unique style of modern drama. Smith’s stated purpose is to move the needle back in the neuroscience timeline. While noting the explosion of neuroscience in the twentieth century and its influence on literary theory, he argues the earlier work in this field is essential to understanding the development of modern drama. Throughout the content chapters, Smith presents case studies of major theatre stage works paired with important shifts in neurology, which he characterizes as “a dialogue between theater artists and neurological scientists at a particular moment” (13). These dialogues are compelling to uncover, as Smith establishes direct personal connections between many of the scientists and dramatists in his research. Dramatist Joanne Baille’s work, for example, reflects the scientific theories of her brother Matthew Baille (who wrote the first study of pathology) and personal friend Charles Bell (medical writer and famed pathologist). Smith examines George Büchner’s Woyzeck and explains how Büchner’s dissertation (which posits the brain developed as part of the skull, which is itself an extension of the spinal End Page 253 column) created Woyzeck’s involuntary gestures while still allowing for freewill. When addressing the unique medical spectacles of hysteria shows, Smith traces how the rise and fall of Jean-Martin Charcot led to Grand Guignol, the “bastard child of stage Naturalism and Gothic melodrama” (145). After Charcot’s hysteria experiments lost favor in the medical community, two of his former students, Alfred Binet and Joseph Babinski, wrote Théâtre Médical plays for Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol to parody Charcot and his work. These personal connections provide Smith’s argument: science and theatre experience a symbiotic exchange as though connected to each like a nervous system. Smith doesn’t limit his scope to melodrama. In one case study, he provides a close reading of Wagner’s Parsifal to argue music and sensation share a common thread. Smith focuses on the described effect of Wagner’s works. Smith uses both pro-Wagner and anti-Wagner analysis to prove the same point: the purpose of Wagner’s works was to hypnotize the audience into a pure sensation experience brought on by the neural effect of the works. This chapter is dense and singularly focused on Wagner’s use of libretto, score, and staging to create a neural link between the hypnotized audience and the hypnotic performance practice. Smith also visits the short story form, taking Charles Dickens’s real near-death experience during a train derailment and linking it to the discourse of rail travel, melodramatic adaptations of railroad anxiety, and Dickens’s attempt to process his lingering trauma through writing. He connects industrialization and representation as a “clarity of crisis in melodrama in an age of industrialized nervous sensation” (77). Smith utilizes issues of the Lancet dedicated to the new phenomena of chronic nervous shock. The shock, called “railroad spine, ” is the result of both the physiological trauma of the body being constantly knocked about by the motion of the train and the psychological trauma of the constant threat of the train derailment. Smith examines this unseen villain in Charles Dicken’s “The Signal-Man. ” This work, though not. . .