Women and the Victorian Occult

Tatiana Kontou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138867895
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317982517
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Increasingly, contemporary scholarship reveals the strong connection between Victorian women and the world of the nineteenth-century supernatural. Women were intrinsically bound to the occult and the esoteric from mediums who materialised spirits to the epiphanic experiences of the New Woman, from theosophy to telepathy. This volume addresses the various ways in which Victorian women expressed themselves and were constructed by the occult through a broad range of texts. By examining the roles of women as automatic writing mediums, spiritualists, authors, editors, theosophists, socialists and how they interpreted the occult in their life and work, the contributors in this edition return to sensation novels, ghost stories, autobiographies, séances and fashionable magazines to access the visible and invisible worlds of Victorian life. The variety of texts analysed by the authors in this collection demonstrates the many interpretations of the occult in nineteenth-century culture and the ways that women used supernatural imagery and language to draw attention to issues that bore immediate implications on their own lives. Either by catering for the fad of ghost stories or by giving public trance speeches women harnessed the metaphorical and financial forces of the supernatural. As the articles in this book demonstrate the occult was after all a female affair. This book was published as a special issue of Women's Writing.

Introduction

In Hilary Mantel’s recent novel Beyond Black (2005), a modern medium, who makes her living in the suburban commuter belt of south-east England, imagines what her life would be like if she had been born a Victorian:

If you were one of those Victorian cheats? She knew all about it; after all, Mrs Etchells, who had trained her, almost went back to those days. In those days the dead manifested in the form of muslin, stained and smelly from the psychic’s body cavities. The dead were packed within you, so you coughed or vomited them, or drew them out of your generative organs. They blew trumpets and played portable organs; they moved the furniture; they rapped on the wall, they sang hymns. They offered bouquets to the living, spirit roses bound by scented hands. Sometimes they stood at your shoulder, a glowing column made flesh by the eyes of faith. She could see it easily, a picture from the past: herself in a darkened parlour, her superb shoulders rising white out of crimson velvet, and this straight flat creature [her assistant] at her elbow, standing in the half-light: her eyes empty as water, impersonating a spirit form.¹

With these images in mind it is easy to see how contemporary authors are drawn to the world of Victorian spiritualism, with its darkened rooms and crimson velvet theatrics, out of some kind of sepia nostalgia or attraction to eccentricity. However, there is something altogether more profound about this process as authors have returned to the Victorian past in order to ask questions about women’s history, the construction of identity, gender, authorship, authority and the elusive concept of “feminine influence”. The examples of nineteenth-century spiritualism in late twentieth-century fiction are plenty: an episode in Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus features Mignon impersonating the dead, “lit from beneath, clouded with incense, half hidden by lace”.² In Sarah Waters’ 1999 novel Affinity, mediums come with a manual: “to make an object luminous – Purchase a quantity of luminous paint, preferably from a shop in a district where you are not known”.³ The Victorian medium is a figure who subverts femininity and instigates questions of class, sexuality, and the position of women in the private and the public sphere both in this world and the next.

Increasingly, contemporary scholarship reveals the strong connection between Victorian women and the supernatural realm. For instance, Alex Owen, in her seminal study on Victorian women mediums, outlined in detail the ways that spiritualists deployed the cultural register of femininity proper to define mediumship whilst surpassing gender stereotypes during seances: “it [spiritualism] promoted a species of feminine power whilst at the same time interacting with contemporary concepts of acceptable womanhood”.⁴ In Diana Basham’s book on feminism and the Victorian occult, the main role women played in the development of the spiritualist movement is attributed to the similarities they shared with the spirits they were bringing to their audiences:

[women,] like the spirits, existed within an uncertain medium whose dimensions were simultaneously literal and metaphoric. Without legal rights or representation, they had their own metaphoric power in the vague but pervasive concept of “female influence”, an influence that the spirits themselves seemed eager to enhance and promote.⁵

The role of women in nineteenth-century literature and culture, like the term “occult”, resists definitive categorization. The “occult”, as Alex Owen has illustrated in her most recent exploration of the subject, was “often applied without qualification to activities as diverse as divination (astrology, palmistry, tarot reading, crystal gazing, and so on), sorcery, and black magic […] and various kinds of necromancy or spiritualist-related practices”.⁶ Womanhood and, most importantly, femininity also had a diverse range of meanings: the “angel in the house”, the “sensation heroine”, the “New Woman”, the “authoress”, the “actress” and the “medium” were roles which encompassed paradoxical characteristics. Feminine passivity, which was essential for spirit manifestations, was put under rigorous examination by spiritualists and psychical researchers. Just how inactive was the medium under trance? The “angel in the house” was demonized in sensation fiction; the “New Woman” was perceived as both a feminine force and a masculine work force. Women form a strong affinity with the occult because just as the occult suggests a world beyond that of our immediate senses, so do women represent potential beyond those manifested in their usual roles. Both women and the occult challenge the extent of what is natural and/or supernatural and defy containment in Victorian literature and culture.

In his The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Roger Luckhurst posits how “the novelty of psychical concepts helped the self-definition of the New Woman, herself a novel object”.⁷ The female sensitive became in late Victorian culture a locus of occult as well as emotive appropriations. Sensitive nerves—the privilege of women and effeminate men—were not a sign of fragility but psychical tools with which to access the minds of the living and the dead. Psychical researchers preferred the term “sensitive” to “medium” when talking about spirit communication, further consolidating the links between feminine attributes and spectral manifestations through a neurological template. Nerves provided the nexus for the normal and the “supernormal”, a term which further illustrates how the Victorian supernatural was perceived as a yet unexplored territory of the natural world.⁸

Interestingly, the growing debates on women’s rights, fertility control, anti-vivisection, temperance and education forged strong links with spiritualism and theosophy, consolidating the trafficking of ideas between the supernatural and the cultural. Eleanor Sidgwick, one of the earliest (if not founding) members of the Society for Psychical Research, officially formed in 1882 to investigate telepathy, spiritualism, hypnosis and hauntings, was a laborious investigator of telepathic communication between the living and the dead. She was also principal of Newham College, taking an active part in higher education for women. These seemingly disparate occupations bring to the forefront the way that the occult and the secular were intertwined in women’s daily lives. We just have to imagine how the modern Victorian girl sat behind her typewriter to be dictated to both by discarnate spirits and incarnate bosses.⁹

Women’s empathy, sensitivity and passivity intrinsically bound them to the occult and the esoteric—from clairvoyants who could predict the future in crystal balls to the epiphanic experiences of the New Woman, from theosophy to telepathy, women were either the subjects of examination or investigators themselves as the many case studies of psychical research demonstrate. This special issue addresses the various ways in which nineteenth-century women expressed themselves and were constructed by the occult through a broad range of texts. By examining the roles of women as automatic-writing mediums, spiritualists, authors, editors, theosophists and socialists, and how they interpreted the occult in their life and work, the contributors in this issue return to sensation novels, ghost stories, autobiographies, seances and fashionable magazines to access the visible and invisible worlds of Victorian life. The articles included here demonstrate how nineteenth-century women deployed the supernatural on literary and metaphorical levels in order to engage with contemporary debates on medicine, imperialism, property laws, politics, the New Woman question, theatricality, Christianity and domesticity—discourses that problematized rather than resolved their ambiguous status.

Sensation fiction authors like Mrs Henry Wood, M. E. Braddon and Florence Marryat used occult tropes in their narratives to draw attention to the equivocal position of women both within the domestic and the social domain. In the first article of the collection, Andrew Mangham reads the potent image of the female undead which figured in the novels of Mrs Henry Wood in relation to contemporary medical theories on apoplexy. Women, whose access to scientific discourse was restricted to amateur interest, tackled the occult and scientific knowledge through its fictive potential. Mangham illustrates how gothicized portrayals of women brought to the surface the negotiation between masculine medical discourses and their feminine appropriation in sensation narratives. One of the most representative of sensation novels, M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), is the focus of Elizabeth Lee Steere’s essay on Victorian servants and spectrality. Steere takes issue with Phoebe, Lady Audley’s maid, to demonstrate how demonic and ghostly motifs become metaphorical vehicles for social mobility and gender transgression. After the publication of Lady Audley’s Secret, Braddon was haunted by the novel’s success and her readers’ voracious appetite for more marvellous plots. Kate Mattacks unfolds this relationship in her article, which investigates Braddon’s theatrical career, her success as the author of Lady Audley’s Secret, and the tension between spirituality and theatricality as played out in Braddon’s Edwardian novel Beyond These Voices (1910). Mattacks reads the novel’s protagonist as a site of conflict in Braddon’s work between aesthetic spirituality and performative spiritualism.

The way that spiritualism was deployed by women to talk about their own lives, their religious beliefs and their political convictions is another facet of the Victorian occult which is under scrutiny in this special issue. Georgina O’Brien explores how Florence Marryat’s spiritualist advocacy was mediated through her sensation novels and editorial work in London Society. O’Brien traces Marryat’s own image construction as a scientific investigator of spiritualist phenomena rather than gullible sitter through Marryat’s roles as author of popular fiction and editor of a popular magazine. The religious undertones of spiritualism in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novels and short stories are examined in Roxanne Harde’s article. Harde discusses Phelps’s religious and social convictions through the author’s representation of spirits, mediums and the image of Christ. The texts Harde chooses to analyse bring to the surface Phelps’s view of spiritualism as an elixir for an austere Christian doctrine. The intersection of spiritualist and socialist beliefs is examined next in Sarah Edwards’ essay on the automatic writings and political convictions of a prominent Birmingham family. The spirit messages and poems that three of the Holden daughters received from their departed mother and their spirit guides are read alongside their father’s socialist essays. Edwards unpicks the spectral and political connotations of “co-operation”, a term that brought to the forefront the position of women at the centre of the spiritualist circle and behind the political arena. Mediumship and theosophy as potent discourses in Victorian women’s autobiographical writing are explored by Miriam Wall-raven in the next article. Wallraven contrasts Emma Hardinge Britten, the spiritualist trance speaker, and Annie Besant, the spokesperson for theosophy, to examine the ways that these vociferous advocates of two of the most important strands of the Victorian occult wrote about their private and public lives. Wallraven demonstrates how Britten fashioned herself as a passive medium to write her life narrative, whilst Besant identified with Lucifer to depict her unconventionality and defiance of exclusively feminine roles.

Mesmerism, although demystified by James Braid in 1843 as a neurological fact, did not lose its allure in the public imagination, but instead hypnotic states were used as tools for the articulation of discourses ranging from women’s property rights to imperialism. Susan Poznar’s article oscillates between the various concepts of “will”. “Will” as financial legacy and will as “willpower” are played out through the image of the mesmerized woman in popular fin-desiècle novels. Poznar illustrates how the anxiety produced by the changing property rights which allowed women financial independence was viewed by a selection of male and female authors as problematic and threatening both to masculine property and female propriety. Sarah Willburn looks at the hypnotic allure of the dark and hybrid bodies in late Victorian popular fiction. Race and gender are both seen as construing characters whose occult powers and eerie energies are threatening and potentially deadly to those around them. Willburn shows how for late Victorian novelists such as Florence Marryat, Marie Corelli and Cora Linn Daniels, the Other body was equated to a foreign body with the power to subjugate and eventually destroy the white domestic, and reads colonization as a geographical and psychical process.

Finally, our attention is turned to the New Woman and her representation in late Victorian Gothic. Nick Freeman’s essay sheds light on Edith Nesbit’s often overlooked career as an author of adult fiction. Freeman’s reading of Nesbit’s ghost story “Man-Size in Marble” (1893) explores the ways that Nesbit’s representation of menacing ghosts is a critique on the ambiguity of the New Woman’s position both within a domestic and an artistic setting. Freeman’s analysis goes on to show how Nesbit’s narrative subverts the conventions of the late Victorian ghost story to draw an acute criticism of the infantilization and eventual destruction of women.

The variety of texts analysed by the authors in this issue demonstrates the many interpretations of the occult in nineteenth-century culture and the ways that women used supernatural imagery and language to draw attention to issues that bore immediate implications for their own lives. How does the occult subvert dominant masculine discourses into a female realm? How did women use the Other world to provide a criticism for contemporary society in which they were central and marginal at the same time? What kinds of metaphors do spirits, ghosts, mediums, mesmerists, theosophists, spectral actresses, evil servants, dead bodies and vampires offer in understanding womanhood in the nineteenth century? Either by catering for the fad of ghost stories or by giving public trance speeches, women harnessed the metaphorical and financial forces of the supernatural. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, the occult was, after all, a female affair.

Tatiana Kontou

University of Sussex

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the peer reviewers for their acute and insightful comments and suggestions for each article included in this issue. I would also like to thank Sam Thomas, Kate Mattacks, Kumiko Kiuchi, Christoforos Diakoulakis, Corinne François-Denève, Chrysa Vlotis, Jen Cooke and Susanne Sklepek for commenting on earlier versions of this introduction and for discussing with me the many inflections of the Victorian occult.

Notes

1 Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (London: Fourth Estate, 2005) 80–81.

2 Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984; London: Vintage, 1994) 139.

3 Sarah Waters, Affinity (1999; London: Virago, 2000) 74.

4 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989) 9.

5 Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1992) 108.

6 Alex Owen, The Place of Encha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Life after Death: Apoplexy, Medical Ethics and the Female Undead
• 3. “‘I thought you was an evil spirit’”: The Hidden Villain of Lady Audley’s Secret
• 4. Beyond These Voices: M. E. Braddon and the Ghost of Sensationalism
• 5. “Above the breath of suspicion”: Florence Marryat and the Shadow of the Fraudulent Trance Medium
• 6. “God, or something like that”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Christian Spiritualism
• 7. Co-operation and Co-authorship: Automatic Writing, Socialism and Gender in Late Victorian and Edwardian Birmingham
• 8. “A mere instrument” or “proud as Lucifer”? Self-Presentations in the Occult Autobiographies by Emma Hardinge Britten (1900) and Annie Besant (1893)
• 9. Whose Body? The “Willing” or “Unwilling” Mesmerized Woman in Late Victorian Fiction
• 10. The Savage Magnet: Racialization of the Occult Body in Late Victorian Fiction
• 11. E. Nesbit’s New Woman Gothic
• Index