Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America
288
Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America
288eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520934061 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/26/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ghosts of Futures Past
Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America
By Molly McGarry
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2008 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-93406-1
CHAPTER 1
Mourning, Media, and the Cultural Politics of Conjuring the Dead
From his snug home in an atmosphere in which pianos float, "soft warm hands" bud forth from vacant space, and lead pencils write alone, the spiritualist has a right to feel a personal disdain for the "scientific man" who stands inertly aloof in his pretentious enlightenment.
WILLIAM JAMES "Sargent's Planchette," 1869
In the last third of the nineteenth century, as William James and many of his contemporaries mourned the ability of religion and science to function as mutually productive explanatory systems, the movement calling itself Modern American Spiritualism promised "an experimental science," affording "the only sure foundation for a true philosophy and a pure religion." At a time when science was meant to have pushed religion to the cultural margins, and when the forces of positivism, realism, and rationality should have washed magic from the world, this practice offered a popular religion buttressed by scientific "evidence" of human immortality. A half century after the inception of Spiritualism, William James would find the divide between religion and science intolerable and irrational. As a response, he eventually founded the American Society for Psychical Research with some of the most prominent scientists of the day, to investigate the paranormal using scientific methods. For a much larger, diverse set of Americans, Spiritualism supplied the language and technology to test the unseen boundary between this world and the next.
Spiritualism called into question not only the categories of religion and science but also the divide between the living and the dead, giving nineteenth-century Americans unique access to the afterlife and the possibility of communing with departed loved ones. It thus posed a counterdiscourse to both an aging Calvinism and a growing materialism. Spiritualism extended the promise of a gentle, supermundane afterlife. The Other Side, or the Summerland, as it was often called, was imaginable, familiar, and attainable. This vision held enormous appeal, and Spiritualism was, in the words of one historian, "ubiquitous on the American scene at mid-century."
Spiritualism's appeal was as diverse as the many practitioners it attracted. As the historian Ann Braude has argued, women played particularly important roles in the movement as mediums and speakers, often crafting a specifically feminized, and sometimes overtly feminist, spiritual practice. For many Spiritualists, small-group communalism took the place of institutionalized religion; alternative healing replaced male-dominated medicine; and the voices of priests and ministers were drowned out by those of the spirits themselves. Many Spiritualists denied basic categorical binaries: the distinctions between men and women, science and magic, life and afterlife, the past and the present. They repudiated the power of experts and the necessity of mediating hierarchies at a time in which these forces were taking on a renewed cultural importance.
Nineteenth-century Spiritualists were predominantly middle-class Anglo-Americans of a very specific historical moment. Although they were never of a single political mind, their convictions grew from an optimistic perfectionism and the belief that the world could be radically remade. Indeed, all around them, on a daily basis, nineteenth-century America was being transformed. Concurrent with the birth of modern Spiritualism, as one believer explained, was "the demand for exact justice and equal rights for the sexes. The same impulse was moving the world in a determined moral protest against the institution of human slavery. Under the same divine impetus the theological authority which was the bulwark of despotism was analyzed and criticized in a manner and degree which no previous period would have tolerated." Spiritualism was born of an era of enormous social change and fervent antiauthoritarian impulses.
Yet Spiritualism was more than an antiauthoritarian antinomianism; it was a unique practice centered on communication with the spirits of the dead. A specter of the once-living materialized into being, a ghost is a visitation from the past to the present. Given that tens of thousands of Americans took to the séance table to commune with spirits, it is worth asking why, in certain historical moments, people need to speak with the past. Why, in the middle and late nineteenth century, did Americans want to converse with their dead ancestors, to look backward as they strove forward? And, beyond their desire to do so, why did they imagine that they could?
In some ways, Spiritualism bears similarities to the most radical, anticlerical strains of Protestantism in the nineteenth century: it too sought to make religious hierarchy and expertise obsolete. Yet Spiritualism also took the concept of mediation literally, at once transforming ordinary Americans into spiritual mediums and transfiguring new forms of information and technological media into the means of the movement's proliferation. Moreover, it was popularized in an era when anything seemed possible, when speaking to the dead may have seemed no less strange than communicating across cables or capturing the living on film. Like freezing an image on a photographic plate, the Spiritualists' ghost catching was a collapsing of time: the past preserved in the present for the future. To view this nineteenth-century religion from a contemporary vantage, then, is to engage with emergent technologies and inexplicable occurrences, modern vision and phantasmic visions.
The revelations of modern science provided new language for spiritual communication, but Spiritualists' embrace of technology was more than mere analogy. Samuel Morse's electrical telegraph was introduced in 1844, four years before the Fox sisters' invention. Spirit rapping was almost immediately dubbed the "spiritual telegraph," as was one of the first Spiritualist newspapers, which extended the metaphor as it spread the news. In a literalization of what the critic Jeffrey Sconce has termed "haunted media," the Spiritualist press was driven by the information-gathering power of contributing mediums as well as worldly editors. During the Civil War, "spirit helpers" played an important role as Spiritualist newspapers competed with one another to disseminate information about battles and war dead faster and, arguably, more accurately than the mainstream press could promise. Even Thomas Watson, the famed assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, experimented with the telephone as an aid to spiritual communication. Nineteenth-century phenomena such as spiritual telegraphy, automatic writing, and spectral photography functioned as new media; at the same time, Spiritualists understood their own embodied religious practices and practitioners as media. Spiritualist media and performance were not merely attendant to the religion, a way to get out the word: mediation was Spiritualist practice itself. The medium's bodily transformation in the séance circle was an individual experience collectively mobilized.
Mediums extrapolated the new ability to communicate across land and water via wires and cables to a link across time itself. Spiritualist communication became more than either popular science or an amusing parlor game: it functioned as a powerful means of connection, offering grieving Americans an outlet for mourning. Collective consolation, as well as disparate personal longings for community, however, gave rise to another voice within Spiritualism, one that renewed the call for utopian reform and reimagined the obligations of citizenship in this world.
After situating Spiritualism within antebellum mourning cultures, this chapter illustrates the ways in which the sense of collectivity forged by consolation, in presence and in print, opened a path to interconnected political practices. While tracing Spiritualists' broad involvement in myriad personal, social, and political reform movements of the nineteenth century, I ground Spiritualist politics in Spiritualists' own unique relationships to dying and to the dead. Untangling the relationship between mourning and social change on the one hand and a rising consumer culture and middle-class sensibility on the other, this chapter charts the ways in which, in this moment, mourning became militancy.
CONSOLATION AND CONNECTION
In some ways, Spiritualist media predated Spiritualist mediums. More precisely, the popular religion that became known as American Spiritualism was rapidly disseminated by an existing group of skilled writers, editors, and lecturers who came of age during the mesmeric movement that laid the intellectual groundwork for its successor. At the same time, Spiritualism grew out of American Victorian mourning cultures that were themselves made manifest through new markets in commercialized memento mori and flourishing print media. This particular confluence of markets and media contributed to the movement's explosive growth and widespread circulation. Within a few short years following the Fox sisters' "Rochester Rappings," the Spiritualist press became a community in print, linking disparate local spirit circles into a national network.
The Shekinah, one of the first Spiritualist newspapers, included pages of letters from readers to the editor, Samuel B. Brittan, asking for comfort, consolation, and sometimes assistance in contacting dead loved ones. Likewise, beginning in the late 1850s, the Spiritualist newspaper The Banner of Light published a regular column, "The Messenger," which included communications to readers from the spirits of the dead through the mediumship of Mrs. J. H. (Fannie) Conant, whose services were engaged "exclusively for the Banner of Light." Some mourners directed their letters personally to well-known Spiritualists. Judge John Worth Edmonds of the Supreme Court of New York became a prominent spokesman for the spiritual cause when, mourning his wife's death, he approached the nation's first medium, Margaret Fox, to help him make contact with his deceased spouse. After attending séances led by the Fox sisters, Edmonds converted to Spiritualism; he resigned from his final post on the New York Court of Appeals in 1853 to devote himself fully to spreading the spiritual news.
In 1853, the Shekinah published an exchange between Edmonds, described as "one of our most distinguished citizens," and a woman identified only as "an intelligent lady at the South." She wrote to Edmonds because she knew that "he too had lost a spirit mate." Edmonds answered one of her letters with the assurance that "the intelligent lady's" dead mate was still with her: "Believe me, if you have in the Spiritual World one dearer you than life, he is ever around and near you, watching over and guarding you, conscious of your every thought, rendered more happy by every evidence of your purity and affection, and striving to make his presence known to you." Edmonds further offered his condolences and the possibility that he might contact the departed on her behalf. "I feel that this letter will not afford you all the consolation you deserve," he wrote, "and if at any time you desire more, do not hesitate to write me. If I knew who your dear one was, perhaps I might be able to converse with him for you."
Judging from literature and artifacts of the period, as well as exchanges in the Spiritualist press, the burden of mourning seemed to fall primarily on white, middle-class women, reflecting their position as keepers of domesticity and pillars of home and society. Though their letters to Spiritualist newspapers mourned spouses as well as children, little girls seemed to hold a particularly treasured place in women's hearts. A typical letter ran: "She was but a little child, my little ——, scarce five years old; but as an only daughter, had become doubly dear to me." Both women and little girls figure prominently in this discourse. Men were largely absent from these exchanges as mourners, though they did function as purveyors of advice and solace.
In many ways the epistolary "consolation literature" printed in the Spiritualist press, and Spiritualism itself, fit squarely within a larger mid-nineteenth-century, middle-class sentimental culture, one that had a particular fascination with death. In attempting to understand the Victorian cult of the dead, a scholar's first impulse is to assume that the mortality rate rose during the period. Indeed, historians have shed new light on Americans' relationship to death in the antebellum period by charting demographic trends in life expectancy. As Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein detail, the Revolutionary War generation saw a "gradual increase in life expectancy between 1750 and 1790, in spite of the Revolutionary War; yet, while survival statistics vary among geographic regions, we have also learned that the average American's life span declined after 1790, from approximately fifty-six to forty-eight years by the time of the Civil War." Scourges of typhoid, yellow fever, and tuberculosis undid the expectation—at least among the more prosperous classes—that medical science could reduce mortality. An additional seven hundred thousand Americans died during the Civil War. The epidemics of the "cholera years," which spread with a new rapidity in increasingly populated cities and among the urban poor, combined with the devastation of the war years, cast the shadow of death over the promised progress of the nineteenth century.
Evidence of the Victorians' obsessive interest in death is widely available in the literature and theology of the period, as it is in memento mori. A remarkably high proportion of the lyric poetry of the era, especially by women writers, addresses the themes of death and dying, bereavement and mourning. The historian Ann Douglas has termed the memoirs of women and clergymen written in the 1850s as veritable "exercises in necrophilia." Indeed, the deathbed scene was a ubiquitous literary convention in the mid-nineteenth century, not only in fiction but also in sermons, memoirs, and biographies. In this genre, a moving death was more important than a significant life: the deathbed was the focus and telos of every life, however short.
Intricate rituals of sentimental culture effectively adjusted the social focus from the dead to the living. Antebellum mourning manuals functioned like etiquette books, prescribing elaborate funerals and bereavement rituals. Dress marked different stages of mourning, each with its own corresponding rituals and obligations. The first stage of mourning demanded black: "'A dead solid color' of black that gave no hint of blue or rust." This stage mandated lockets, brooches, earrings of black jet, and a veil, which could be lifted in the second stage of mourning. The so-called rural cemetery movement of the mid-nineteenth century, which saw rolling cemeteries on the edge of townships replace family and church graveyards in town centers, was another sign of change in community practices as well as in the physical place of the dead. Like the new mourning culture, resituating the dead from a central place in daily life to its spatial periphery marked a shift from communal grief to broader societal mourning.
Historians have described Victorian mourning customs in both the United States and Britain as "extravagant displays" that imposed a heavy burden on bereaved families. As the historian Karen Halttunen has argued, in a society increasingly stratified by class, pomp-filled funerals and imposing gravestones became a means of asserting status and respectability, of differentiating oneself from the lower orders. These rituals became visible signs of a mourner's "Christian piety, social benevolence, and sincere sensibility." A baroque protocol was used at once to mark proper Christian bereavement and to unmask the insincere mourner or pretender to middle-class status.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ghosts of Futures Past by Molly McGarry. Copyright © 2008 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Mourning, Media, and the Cultural Politics of Conjuring the Dead
2. Indian Guides: Haunted Subjects and the Politics of Vanishing
3. Spectral Sexualities: Free Love, Moral Panic, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Law
4. Mediomania: The Spirit of Science in a Culture of Belief and Doubt
5. Secular Spirits: A Queer Genealogy of Untimely Sexualities
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Ghosts of Futures Past offers a fresh and important perspective on significant issues in mid-nineteenth-century cultural history."—The Journal of American History