Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism

Abstract

"The psychic cloud" (to use Arthur Conan Doyle's expression) that rained revelations upon the enraptured sitters in Victorian Spiritualist seances, refuses to be dispelled by the light of skepticism. Spiritualism, sometimes dismissed as a silly fad, has recently been attracting serious scholarly attention. If two decades ago, the excellent studies of the history and cultural significance of Spiritualism by Janet Oppenheim and Alex Owen were exceptions, the simultaneous appearance of books by Marlene Tromp and Sarah A. Willburn signifies a renewed attempt to discover the answer to an intriguing question: why did so many Victorian men and women spent their time listening to ghostly communications and gazing at "materialized" spirits produced by mostly young, nubile, and enterprising mediums? As Tromp cogently argues, Spiritualism was an important strand in the web of Victorian culture and society. She points out that the mediums and their audiences engaged in a complex refashioning of the key concepts of the Victorian zeitgeist: gender, race, and individual identity. Tromp argues that Spiritualist praxis undermined rigid gender roles and created a space of freedom in which women (and men) could negotiate the thorny issues of sexuality and marriage and eventually reconfigure the Victorian codes of behavior, so that "the more innovative aspects of Spiritualism may have found their way into the mainstream" (72). In support of this thesis, she examines the lives of individual materialization mediums and diverse fictional texts, from