In Steven Millhauser’s Eisenheim the Illusionist, I think that he is trying to convey that magic is a form of art. Something like magic has to be heavily argued for as it is something that only people that go to the show can talk about. It isn’t something physical that can be put on the internet. One has to be sure to go to the show to see it and be able to talk about it with other people that are required to be at the show to talk about it. He was also trying to say that during the time that Eisenheim was doing magic, that it hasn’t been doing well. This is as if they were trying to do something that had been a new media and that wasn’t fully respected as an art. It was also during the time when painting was at its high and that was more or less the most popular form of media that a lot of people had gotten into.
In the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long dissolution, the art of magic flourished as never before. (215)
Also, during this time period the magicians were doing things that some people weren’t liking. This was making people view magic as something that maybe shouldn’t exist. Where the things that were happening would be considered normal in today’s world, it just wasn’t for them. Those in law and that backed them, were trying to keep this from becoming the normal in this medium. Millhauser could have been trying to keep those kinds of influences out of the light by having them be arrested and keeping the people to what they know and not changing how the world operates. He didn’t want anyone else to believe that this is how they should act and what they should create.
The decision to arrest the Master during performance was later disputed; the public arrest was apparently intended to send a warning to devotees of Eisenheim, and perhaps to other magicians as well. (235)
Interesting observation; if this story had actually been published during the nineteenth century, I wonder if readers would have thought it to be fantastic due to the fact that “magic” was still seen as somewhat unexplainable back then, whereas modern readers (myself included) can read this story and not see anything fantastic about it since we now know exactly how such illusions are created and carried out.