MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Alyssa Marie Straight

Candidate for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

______Mary Jean Corbett, Director

______Madelyn Detloff, Reader

______Erin Edwards, Reader

______Gaile Pohlhaus, Graduate School Representative

ABSTRACT

MEDIUMS AND THEIR MATERIAL: THE FEMALE BODY IN SPIRITUAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATION, 1880-1930

by

Alyssa M. Straight

Mediums and Their Material investigates how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century women mediums interrupt and re-contour discourses of the body—biologically, medically, textually—through their representations of technological and spiritual contact. Recent critics have regarded women as particularly suited for mediating communication, be it through technological devices such as the typewriter or telegraph, or spiritualist practices like the séance or automatic writing. What made these women’s bodies so viable for these ends, scholars have noted, was the ubiquitous perception at the turn of the century that the female body possesses “natural” feminine qualities: passivity, moral refinement, spiritual superiority, and sympathy. Developed out of the supposed weakness of the female body, this critical attention on the social construction of femininity and women’s mediation has, to this point, eschewed any discussion of mediums’ actual bodies and the agency those bodies might express. Where most critical discussions of mediation explore the gender lines that qualify, or circumscribe, the female medium’s agency and the vulnerability afforded her by her passive qualities, my project takes a material feminist approach to develop an alternative reading of female mediation that retrieves the female body from paternalistic, patriarchal, and racist constructions, and demonstrates how female mediums’ bodies and their organic function operate as powerful sites of agency. Contributing to both material feminist conversations and the fields of Victorian and Modernist studies more generally by looking closely at the materiality of the bodies employed in spiritual and technological mediation, Mediums and Their Material imagines women mediums and their technological and spiritualist experiences as working in their own time to promote their economic and political development—through authorship, women’s rights movements, and other systems of knowledge conveyance.

MEDIUMS AND THEIR MATERIAL: THE FEMALE BODY IN SPIRITUAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATION, 1880-1930

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

by

Alyssa Marie Straight

The Graduate School Miami University Oxford, Ohio

2016

Dissertation Director: Mary Jean Corbett

©

Alyssa Marie Straight

2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: “Undone and Denied”: The Problem of Female Erasure and the Recuperation of a Material Feminism……………………………………………………………………………………….…1

Chapter One: “A Victim to What We Call Hysteria”: Spiritualism, Nerves, and Psychosomatic Feminism……………………………………………………………………………………...... 15

Chapter Two: “The Face of the Bicyclist”: Technology, Nerves and Fin-de-Siècle Feminism………………………………………….…...54

Chapter Three: “Working Together…With Absolute Trust”: Female Mediation and the Spiritual/Technological Nerve Network…………………………....85

Chapter Four: “Her Own Private Instrument of Justice”: Female Mediation, Public Display, and Women’s Movements……………………………..…122

Chapter Five: “Writing Under Inspiration”: Authorship, Automatic Writing, and the Matter of Bodies…………………………………….149

Coda: Revaluing Female Circulation, or Embodied Ways of Knowing………………………………………………………………………...……………...179

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….183

iii

DEDICATION

To my family. You offered me all the love and encouragement in the world. Without your support I never would have made it this far. Thank you Mom, Dad, David, and Carly! I love you.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Dr. Mary Jean Corbett for her endless feedback, guidance, and encouragement, and for continuously challenging me to further develop my ideas and write better prose. Words cannot express how appreciative I am of her commitment to me and this project.

Thank you to the other members of my dissertation committee Drs. Madelyn Detloff, Erin Edwards, and Gaile Pohlhaus for always listening to me ramble on about my ideas and being so tremendously supportive. Thank you also to the many faculty members at Miami University that have shaped and challenged my thinking including Susan Morgan, Katie Johnson, Andrew Hebard, Jim Bromley, Yu-Fang Cho, and Kate Ronald. I’d also like to thank the English Department for the half-year fellowship and the Graduate School for the Dissertation Research Awards, which greatly assisted in the writing of this dissertation by providing me the time, means, and opportunity to conduct necessary research at the British Library and Library of Congress.

Thank you to Rachel Seiler, Greta Smith, Chanon Adsanatham, Jonathan Rylander, Kasey Butcher, Megan Peters, Leigh Gruwell, and Morgan Leckie for their friendship and for always being ready to read a draft, listen to my thoughts, offer advice, water my plants, or grab a much needed drink!

Thank you to Scott Rollins for loving me through it all—even when I turned into a stress monster. I love you.

And, lastly, thank you to my family. Thank you to my Mom and Dad for encouraging and educating me, even when you weren’t quite sure what it is I do. Thank you to my brother David and sister Carly for keeping it real, always making me laugh, and not letting me take life too seriously. And thank you to my grandmothers Shirlee Straight and Rose Kucynski, my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and all my Pinehurst neighbors for always believing in me.

I am forever grateful to each and every one of the people and organizations listed above. They are all aware of the physical and emotional challenge making it through the PhD has been for me. Without their friendship, support, and care I would never have survived. Thank you!

v INTRODUCTION: “UNDONE AND DENIED”: THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE ERASURE AND THE RECUPERATION OF A MATERIAL FEMINISM

Ironically, this project began with a text that doesn’t really feature in any of the following chapters. Readers of Alfred, Lord Tennyson may recall the deep mourning embedded within In Memoriam (1850), his famous love poem to his deceased friend Arthur Hallam. Of course, scholars of Tennyson also know that Hallam was supposed to be Tennyson’s future brother-in- law, as his sister Emily’s fiancé, and that Emily is suspiciously absent from Tennyson’s poem. This absence is strange given Emily’s implied role in mediating what many critics read as Tennyson’s homosocial desire for Hallam.1 Within In Memoriam, Emily is denied both a platform for and recognition of her grief for Hallam—a denial solidified all the more by the speaker’s usurpation of the spousal role. For the speaker, after all, compares his grief over Hallam to that of a widow: “My Arthur, whom I shall not see,” he writes, “Till all my widowed race be run” (9.17-18). Most important, however, is Emily’s complete erasure from the picture of mourning crafted by the poem. This, in many ways, forms the subject of A.S. Byatt’s neo- Victorian novel, “The Conjugial Angel” (1992), which draws on the spiritual and spiritualist elements of In Memoriam to make visible Emily Tennyson Jesse’s grief over her long-lost love and, as Mary Jean Corbett asserts, “create[] a speaking position for the silenced term in the brother-sister-suitor formation” (299). The novel intimately aligns Emily’s mediation of Tennyson’s and Hallam’s desires—in which her projected marriage to Hallam effectively “enable[s] the expression and experience of homoerotic love” between Tennyson and Hallam “by making a sibling’s spouse one’s own sibling”—with that of the female medium in a spiritual séance (301). Emily’s spousal mediation overlays that of the spiritual mediums Mrs. Lilias Papagay and Sophy Sheekhy, who engage with Emily in séances designed to make contact with Emily’s Hallam. Like Emily, who mediated her brother’s and fiancé’s deep friendship in life, Sophy Sheekhy mediates a spiritual reunion between the ghostly, yet materialized Hallam, and the aged Tennyson. By “cradl[ing]” Hallam’s materialized form to “her cold bosom” (290), she is able to

1By homosocial desire, I am referencing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory in Between Men where she argues that “male homosocial desire” is “route[d] through women” (118). She argues that men’s homosocial desire was only deemed acceptable when routed through a s ocially-acceptable, if nonexistent desire for woman. Sedgwick reads this in Tennyson’s poem The Princess, but it is applicable to Tennyson’s In Memoriam, as Mary Jean Corbett (quoted above), Richard Dellamora, Sarah Rose Cole, Holly Furneaux, and others show.

1 conjure up "in the middle of the room” Tennyson’s “long, brown hand” and narrate his movements to the unseeing spirit of Hallam (292). Simultaneously, the narrator reveals that Tennyson "felt attention somehow on his hand…and held it up as though it was some strange, separate creature he had got hold of" (294). The strange "renewal of touch" (295), mediated by and through the body of Sophy Sheekhy, resonates in both Tennyson’s poem, as the speaker recalls how Hallam’s “hands so often clasped mine” (Tennyson 10.19), and Byatt’s novel, which describes Tennyson’s desire to once more spiritually and physically “me[e]t and temporarily mix[]” with Hallam through the clasping of hands (295). Sophy Sheekhy’s bodily mediation, so gruesomely described as “invading the very fibre of her nerves” (317-318), enables the same “flashing-out of one soul to another, of the symmetry and sympathy of minds, of the recognition” that Emily’s presence between the two men likewise facilitated (301). Such a correlation between Sophy Sheekhy and Emily translates Emily—as a medium who is so passive she is literally absent from the poetic text—into an an active presence within Tennyson’s poem, Byatt’s novel, and the historical record. Byatt’s revision ensures that female mediums are both present and materially pressing on certain Victorian notions of gender, sex, desire, loss, and subjectivity. Her striking representations compelled me to ask then what this dissertation asks now: what would a history of a materially active female body look like? And what happens, especially, when we read female mediums as active and activated by their mediation, rather than passive, absent, or erased? The emphasis these texts place on the materiality of the female body comes out of a “particular fascination with the limits of the body” that Tim Armstrong contends the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed, “either in terms of [the body’s] mechanical functioning, its energy levels, or its abilities as a perceptual system” (5). It is not surprising, then, that discourses concerning gender and gender roles incorporated, produced, and depended on what people believed about the body, in all its raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized permutations. This is particularly true about Victorian Spiritualism, which relied on the talents of a medium, often a woman, like Sophy Sheekhy in “The Conjugial Angel.” The female medium embodies certain qualities that made her particularly suited for mediating communication and relaying messages within the human world or making contact with the spirit world, be it through technological devices such as the typewriter or telegraph, or spiritualist practices like the séance and automatic writing. What made these women’s bodies so viable for these ends, scholars have

2 noted, was the ubiquitous perception at the turn of the century that the female body possesses “natural” feminine qualities—passivity, moral refinement, spiritual superiority, and sympathy. This ideological rubric for the feminine ideal developed out of a sentimental notion of middle- class Victorian womanhood based on the patriarchal construction of the supposed weakness of the female body.2 Gendered assumptions like these have made feminists wary of theories founded on the nature of the female body. After all, feminists have typically found thinking about women, their bodies, and their biology to be a problematic endeavor because science—medical, psychological, and biological—tends to focus on “the” body; the natural sciences have historically reinforced, constructed, and rationalized paternalistic, patriarchal, and racist beliefs and positions (Grosz 25). As a result, feminists have often downplayed the physical, turning instead to the realm of signification, which places meaning on the body and bodies without limiting women to their physical features. Nineteenth-century feminist scholars have certainly done so. Mary Poovey, for instance, acknowledges that the gender differences she explores in Uneven Developments (1988) come out of a biological differentiation of the sexes, explaining that the "binary model of [gender] difference" she attends to is "articulated upon sex" (Uneven 6). But she is quick to point out that the "representation of biological sexuality, the definition of sexual difference, and the social organization of sexual relations are social phenomena," (2), definitively planting herself and her scholarship in the realm of the discursive. "[K]nowledge," she writes, "is socially constructed" (23); and "the construction and deployment" of representations of gender "performed critical ideological work at midcentury" and "were intimately involved in the development of England's characteristic social institutions, the organization of its most basic economic and legal relations, and in the rationalization of its imperial ambitions" (2). Elaine Showalter and Judith Walkowitz, though less emphatic, also situate their scholarship on the nineteenth century in the realm of the discursive. Showalter's Sexual Anarchy (1992), for example, is invested in the fluidity of gender roles during the period. "What was most alarming to the fin de siècle" she explains, "was that sexuality and sex roles might no longer be contained within the neat and permanent borderlines of gender categories. Men and women were not as clearly identified and separated as they had been" (9). Similarly, Walkowitz notes the way in

2 See nineteenth-century feminist critics Mary Poovey, Elaine Showalter, and Judith Walkowitz, as well as historians and literary critics of nineteenth-century spiritualism, Jill Galvan, Marlene Tromp, Pamela Thurschwell, and Alex Owen, as discussed below.

3 which "women of different classes and races all have to rely on cultural constructs to tell their 'truths'" (City of Dreadful 9). This is certainly the case for Virginia Woolf, who recognizes the ways in which the social construct of the Angel of the House, threatens to erase her voice. In “Professions for Women” (1931), Woolf asserts that in order for women to write, they first have to “kill” the Angel in the House. “As I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House,” she explains, “cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed” (59). In other words, they must erase themselves—much as Emily is erased in Tennyson’s poem. Where in the works of feminist critics like Poovey, Walkowitz, and Showalter the body is absent, or at the very least, exists solely on the outskirts of the text, Woolf, in her attempt to carve out professional and public space for young women in the early twentieth century, gives a materiality to the social construct of the Angel in the House, a symbolic figure that she sees as holding women, and herself, to a gendered standard that makes passive their bodies and silences their voices. Woolf recrafts the haunting “phantom” of the Angel in the House into an actual being, a “woman” and "heroine of a famous poem” (58). As "woman," Woolf gives the Angel in the House a physical materiality— one that is further shaped by Woolf’s attempt to "kill[] her" (58). The Angel in the House "torment[s]" Woolf and influences her writing—"she made as if to guide my pen"—and in "self- defence," Woolf "took up an inkpot and flung it at her" (59). As Woolf describes, "[s]he died hard," but she had to die: "Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing” (59). By giving the Angel in the House a materiality, and in so doing, herself a presence and a voice, Woolf is able to work against the traditional notions of Victorian womanhood. As Woolf’s struggle to kill the Angel in the House demonstrates, it is difficult to imagine a way of knowing the body outside of discourse or without the mediation of social institutions. After all, "because gender roles are part of familial, political, social, and economic relationships, the terms in which femininity is publicly formulated dictates, in large measure, the way femaleness is subjectively experienced" (Poovey, Proper x). Femaleness itself, it seems, is outside of bodily experience. We can thusly see how the body is evacuated and replaced by

4 discourse in ways that permeate the field of Victorian studies, as well as feminist theory. That being said, it is equally difficult to imagine knowing bodies outside of the organic systems and physiological processes that govern them. It’s this quandary that inspires Judith Butler (and even Woolf, I would argue) to ask, in Bodies That Matter, “[w]hat about the materiality of the body?” (ix). Her recognition that it is nearly impossible to get outside of discourse, but also necessary to remember the materiality of the body, to “recall” a “bodily life that [can]not be theorized away” (ix), is something that I, like most material feminists, am concerned with. Of course, Butler is often criticized by material feminists because of her “tendency to focus on the discursive at the expense of the material,” which has contributed to “skewed discussions” on materiality, the body, and nature (Alaimo and Heckman 3). We need, as Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman powerfully express, “a way to talk about the materiality of the body as itself an active, sometimes recalcitrant, force”; “Women have bodies,” they claim, and focusing “exclusively on representations, ideology, and discourse excludes lived experience, corporeal practice, and biological substance from consideration” (4). Focusing on the physical and material experiences of bodies, then, can open up a less limiting space to think about and examine lived experiences. Thus, recent feminist scholarship has started to turn back to the body in the hopes of learning more about how bodies and biology could impact, alter, or advance our feminist ideologies, politics, and “evolving corporeal practices” (3). Informed in part by this turn toward a material feminist theory that focuses on the physical world, I seek to fill the gap between discursive and material scholarship surrounding the body, particularly as it relates to the bodies of female mediums whether construed as spiritual and/or technological, in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary texts. By using a material feminist lens to examine literary texts, I recognize that I too run the risk, much like Butler, of “invariably miss[ing] the body, or worse, writing against it” because I am already working with representations of material bodies that have been textually and discursively rendered (ix). The way we articulate materiality, after all, is always already discursive. So, on the one hand, I maintain a sensitivity to how women’s bodies function at the biological level, while on the other, I reflect on how those bodies are represented discursively. There are ways in which the material and the discursive both have something to say, oftentimes in unison, sometimes at cross purposes, about the activeness of the body’s physical processes. In fact, it is this friction

5 between textual representation and the material body that ultimately opens up critical and progressive spaces, as we see in both Byatt’s and Woolf’s texts. The mediums I study in this project attempt to navigate and reconcile the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discourses that limit their bodily agency with their own material experiences. I argue, in fact, that their mediating bodies’ biological and material function resists those gendered, medical, and scientific discourses that work to oppress them. And I also contend that material feminism is, in some ways, indebted to those late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century feminists and female mediums who were themselves reworking oppressive discourses on biology that limited women’s agency. Writers, political activists, and actual mediums, as I explore, contested and reimagined those biological influences in ways that cultivated women’s agency, and talked back to the patriarchal arguments about the weakness of the female body. In many ways, this contention is the central contribution that Mediums and Their Materials makes to current scholarship on mediums and mediation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary criticism on female mediums in the nineteenth century, while emphasizing plenty of subversive possibilities engendered by mediation, still tends to rely on the discursivity of the body and an epistemology of the female body that renders it passive. My work here engages more directly with mediation as it shapes and is shaped by actual bodies in an attempt to imagine how we as critics, and the female mediums themselves, can and do move beyond the idea of a passive female body. Most scholarship on women mediums centers on questions of agency. As the historian Alex Owen explains, “women have been inadvertently marginalized and their activities obscured by exclusionary historical assumptions and concerns” (n.pag). Both her work and subsequent research have sought to re-center women in the spiritualist movement, and show how they “originally held a revered and privileged place” (Owen n.pag). In The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (1990), Owen illuminates the ways in which spiritualism and séance reports contributed to debates around gender identity and sexuality. As she argues, “women’s involvement with spiritualism was at one level all about gender expectations, sexual politics, and the subversion of existing power relations between men and women” (n.pag). Owen emphasizes the importance of nineteenth-century ideas of femininity to mediumship. In particular, she explains that the spiritualist woman was constructed as a “natural” medium because of her “innate femininity” (n.pag). This construction, she argues,

6 allowed women to “accede to positions of power” even though it limited their self-definition. Drawing on material she gathered about the lives and experiences of practicing female mediums at the end of the Victorian period, Owen ultimately argues that spiritualism was a “movement which privileged women and took them seriously” and provided “means of circumventing rigid nineteenth-century class and gender norms” (4). Spiritualism offered women participation in a subculture in which they had opportunities for attention and status denied them elsewhere. But while Owen’s work offers a good starting point for thinking about women in the spiritualist movement, her focus on the social construction of femininity in relation to women’s mediation leaves out any discussion of mediums’ actual bodies and the agency those bodies might be expressing. Other scholars have extended Owen’s argument about spiritualism’s impact on the “woman question,” also centering their discussions on the construction of femininity surrounding women mediums, at the expense of thinking about the body. The literary critic Marlene Tromp, in her book Altered States (2006), recognizes the possibilities of border-crossing and altered perceptions in spirit communication. She argues that “the events of the séance were a barometer for much of what was occurring in the political and social world outside its closed doors and, perhaps more importantly, provided a means of reimagining that outside world” (1-2). Spiritualism and its narratives not only impacted women, but also “became one way in which Victorians reconsidered ideas about gender, race, and class” (2). Tromp, in particular, offers a broader contextual understanding of female mediums’ impact on the social world—opening space for subsequent scholars to consider women mediums’ roles in political and social movements like empire-building and women’s suffrage. She further claims that the spiritualist realm intrigued the Victorians, and their descendants, because “ghosts have the power to violate boundaries with ease, to shape the way we think, and to reveal to us the things that haunt us the most” (2). During spirit manifestations, the medium would often channel or materialize other beings, making it difficult to see where the spirit ended and the medium began, in that “the shifting boundaries between spirit and flesh made the identity of the medium uncertain” (24). It is this space that Tromp reads as transformative because it allowed women mediums to participate in non-normative behavior without the social consequences that typically followed therefrom. As she explains, “women—who were and were not themselves, who were and were not the spirit—could speak publicly and with authority on politics, social controversies, and

7 religious dogma” (26). The séance room, and the spirit conversations that took place there, created opportunities for transgressive behavior—“the disruption of gender codes, the appropriation of ‘othered’ identities, the use of drugs and alcohol, the blurring of identity” (4)— that resulted in new ways of acting in and perceiving the world. Similarly, Pamela Thurschwell argues, in Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking (2001), that discourses on spiritualism, and the psychical research it spawned, led to “wider reconceptualizations of the borders of individual consciousness” (2) and, ultimately, created spaces that “redefine intimate, sexual, familial, and national ties between people” (9). Occult communication changed the way people experienced space and intimacy. Thurschwell’s argument that spiritualism enabled late Victorians to reconceive space and borders also emerges in relation to the representation of communication technologies like the telephone and telegraph. Such reconceptions partially construct the metaphors surrounding female mediums and occult communication, often describing women as machines or automatic technological instruments. In addition, the language of electricity provided a way of talking about mediation and the relaying of messages from other worlds. Séance-sitters formed “circuits” or “batteries” and women mediums were “charged” positively or negatively for message transmissions (Galvan 11). Imagining cultural and communication transmissions in occult metaphors, as Thurschwell explains, creates spaces that are “doubly transgressive” in that they disrupt boundaries and traditional behavioral codes (Thurschwell 3). Both technological communication devices and perceived or felt connections between the spirit and material world “could help annihilate distances that separate bodies and minds from each other” so that intimacy, for example, is expressed in more modern forms through “an expanding sense of sex and gender flexibility” (3- 4). Building on Thurschwell, Tromp, and Owen’s work, Jill Galvan explores the ways in which women mediums navigate or make use of the “right kind of presence with the right kind of absence” (12). She seeks to bring more attention to the gendering at work here, in the hope that it can reveal to us cultural attitudes about communication and knowledge transfer (13). On the one hand, she posits, these women are meant to be passive and automatic—merely there for the benefit of the men that use their services; on the other hand, they are more than machines— and, in that role, are given access to private information that they could potentially make public. Much like Thurschwell, Galvan ties discourses on the female spirit medium to those of

8 technological communication by emphasizing their common linkage through those innate “feminine” qualities that Owen identifies as necessary for spirit communication. She explores different textual representations of the female “communication go-between” or medium within history and literature from the mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries (2). As she convincingly explains, metaphors, language, and cultural perception unite ideas about emergent technology and the cultural fascination with séances. Each chapter of her book, The Sympathetic Medium (2010), while dealing with different aspects and impacts of emerging technology and spiritualist ideologies, works to bring together these two seemingly different concepts as mediated communication: thus “women’s operating, typing, and séance channeling” are not “separate functions, but different expressions of the same one” (11). Described in a similar vocabulary, both the technological and spiritual worlds are firmly rooted in the single idea of the sympathetic woman as communication medium. The woman culturally imagined as both sympathetic and automatic is the ideal for spiritual channeling and operating communication technologies because of her ability to be both present and absent. She connects people across places and spaces with her sympathetic powers, while seeming uninterested in and detached from the messages she communicates. While this project builds on the work of these scholars in particular, it ultimately turns to material feminism to explore the dynamic and shifting connections between the female body, turn-of-the-century feminism, and mediation. It bears noting that I do not find it either odd or anachronistic to use contemporary theories of the body to illuminate nineteenth-century texts. I believe, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests, that material feminist theories, through complicating feminist analyses of patriarchal structures of power, help us to further understand and transform those structures. Thus, these theories can be used to imagine women mediums and their technological and spiritualist experiences in new, even more transgressive ways—ways that open up our thinking about mediation not only in relation to, but also beyond gendered constructions of women’s passivity and automatism. After all, the late-Victorian spiritualist movement coincided with multiple other movements that centered on women’s rights. The 1880s-1920s saw an explosion of women’s presence in public life. Women were concerned with improving their educational and economic opportunities and their legal position. By the 1870s women were being employed as secretaries and clerks as well as nurses and teachers; they were asserting themselves as writers and actresses, and even agitating for access to the professions. It is also the

9 period wherein some women were making their livings as spiritual mediums. As Owen points out, it is no coincidence that Spiritualism was on the rise during this era of female advancement, and I believe it is worth examining why and where these movements parallel, intersect, or diverge from one another. Mediums and Their Material, then, investigates how women mediums interrupt and re- contour discourses of the body—biologically, medically, textually—through their representations of technological and spiritual contact. Where these critical discussions of mediation explore the gender lines that qualify, or circumscribe, the female medium’s agency and the vulnerability afforded her by her passive qualities, I use material feminism to develop an alternative reading of female mediation, one in which female mediums’ bodies operate as powerful sites of agency. Toward this end, I have conducted primary research of first-hand accounts and descriptions of mediums’ bodies and spiritual performances in autobiographies, pamphlets, and spiritualist periodicals like The Spiritualist and The Medium and Daybreak, as well as crucial scientific and medical journals of the time. Examining these materials in relation to both well-known authors and under-read literary texts on spiritual and technological mediation, I seek to isolate and analyze particular phenomena—hysteria, emergent technologies, the séance, authorship, imperialism, and women’s movements—and also to create links between them. As a result, I have organized the materials thematically rather than chronologically. My first two chapters put spiritual and technological mediation in conversation with scientific and spiritualist discourses of the late nineteenth century in order to flesh out the relationships between female sympathy and the broader articulations of women’s agency at the level of the individual body. The following chapters then offer a wider sense of the social, cultural, and political implications of material bodies in relationship to knowledge conveyance, social and political movements, and women’s authorship, respectively. In the first chapter, I examine how Florence Marryat’s The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs (1896) and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) use the possessed female body to critique the medical trend of diagnosing spiritualists as hysterics and to reconceptualize feminine sympathy and mediation as bodily agency. Spiritualist experiences were often attributed to the sympathetic and sensitive nerves of the female medium. Yet medical men like Henry Maudsley insisted on reading the convulsions and contortions of the medium’s body during spirit contact not as evidence of Spiritualist [noun], but of nervous disorder. The hysterical diagnosis instigated

10 a debate between men of science and spiritualists because it exemplified the ways that medical practices sought to control those who operated outside of Victorian social norms, including women participating in spiritualist practices. Marryat’s and du Maurier’s texts engage directly in this debate by illustrating and critiquing the way men of science (mis)diagnosed spiritual mediums as hysterical in order to exert authority over the female body. Using Elizabeth Wilson’s Psychosomatic Feminism and the Neurological Body (2004) to bring a material-feminist attention to the hysterical body, this chapter examines the way in which these novels use the neurological and hysterical female body to construct a more powerful and complex understanding of female mediation, illuminating nineteenth-century ideas regarding women’s “nerves” and spirit communication and revealing the body’s agency through its resistance to pathologizing discourses. In a similar vein, Chapter Two turns our attention to how medical and gendered discourses on the body limited female technological mediums and their use of emergent technologies. Chapter Two focuses on bodies in relationship to technologies of mobility and communication, particularly the ways in which technology-use altered, impacted, or influenced those bodies. For example, women cyclists were often criticized because of the bodily alterations created by physical exercise, even as the improved muscle tone developed through cycling was praised for strengthening the female nervous system. Investigating these bodily changes offers a model of material agency that illustrates the body’s power rather than fragility. Analyzing primary texts about women bicycle-riding as well as Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897)—in which the heroine both types and cycles—this chapter not only considers the implications of bicycles for bodies, but also examines those implications in relationship to female technological mediation and late-century feminism. In The Type-Writer Girl, the bicycle and typewriter mediate the protagonist’s experiences within a more public, less domestic space, uncovering the relationships among women’s bodies, nervous systems, and the technologies that enabled women to enter and participate in the public world. By discussing moments when female technology-users double as spiritual mediums, Chapter Three demonstrates that the questions posed in the first two chapters are inextricably linked. In Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), spiritual and technological mediation are conflated, positioning the female body’s organic systems as a locus for private knowledge and discursive practices that shape nineteenth-century

11 understanding of both emergent technologies and their users. As these novels highlight, the medium’s embodied knowledge also potentially threatens patriarchal structures: as the body publicly “circulates” meaning, it can and does short-circuit. The medium herself ignites meaning and forms that are not part of the intended course. In the two previous chapters, medical knowledge was used to pathologize the active female body. In this chapter, I investigate how male novelists acknowledge mediumship as engendering women’s agency and co-opt discourses of that agency for national and imperial projects. Their novels imagine the female medium in an effort to re-route British interests at home and abroad and seek to circumscribe women’s agency and spiritual and technological knowledge into a narrative where women’s bodies are no longer “short-circuiting” British patriarchy. Henry James’s “In the Cage,” however, offers a counter- narrative, where the female medium’s knowledge refuses co-optation. Thus, as this chapter shows, these mediums at once work for, but are also potentially dangerous to the British state. Chapter Four moves away from the ways in which female mediums’ bodily agency resists co-optation by British imperial projects to consider how female trance speakers and performers set the stage for women spiritualists to advocate on behalf of their sex. Female trance mediums, like Emma Hardinge Britten and Cora Hatch, used spiritualism and performance as tools to agitate for women’s rights and other reform issues on the platform, broadening the reach of the medium and giving her access to diverse audiences and more public spaces on platforms as well as in lecture halls and conventions. Trance speakers were also mediating their cause as mass communication; their bodies, photographs, and speeches were circulated widely across England and America. By looking at first-hand accounts of women's mediums' participation in women's rights activism, as well as Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), I argue that female mediums used their sympathetic and circulating bodies to subvert patriarchal structures, enact a form of feminism that wins an audience over to women's causes, and appropriate scientific and evolutionary discourses on the body. At the same time, however, I show how James's novel puts pressure on the agency that trance speaking affords the female medium. In the novel, Verena Tarrant’s trance performances, like the contemporary mediums she was modeled after, uncover opportunities for an agency that supports nonnormative gender-bending. Verena's tragic end, however, also makes visible and critiques the social and political pressures that force women to conform to the strictures of a traditional femininity.

12 Where women in Chapter Four resist forms of oppression at home, in my final chapter H.D. and Virginia Woolf consider forms of women’s resistance abroad in war-riddled Europe. The concluding chapter emphasizes how female writers appropriate medical and scientific discourses of electricity, nerves, and automatic writing to re-imagine authorship as a liberating embodied experience. Writers of the early twentieth century witnessed not only a transformation of aesthetics through the modernist movement, but also advancements in science and technology that reshaped the body and gave rise to new forms of both physical and textual bodies. Aesthetic and technological movements made the body increasingly vulnerable to penetration not only through experimental and spiritual genres, but also, as Lara Vetter notes, through “everything from radio waves to medical instruments” (1). Such vulnerability often resulted in an acute, collective anxiety about “control over one’s body” that emerged alongside discourses on spiritualism, séances, and automatic writing. The metaphorics associated with electrical currents only served to bolster the connection between science, spiritualism, and technology. As this chapter contends, many modernist women authors took advantage of what Vetter calls the “active arena” of modern science by reimagining their own bodies and their writing processes in quite shocking—that is, electrifying—ways (17). Specifically, I argue that Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and H.D.’s oeuvre forged controversial connections between automatic writing and what the medical sciences established as the nerves of the body. My chapter offers a new understanding of automatic writing as intertwined with the nervous system of the body and argues that Woolf’s and H.D.’s representations of embodied automatic writing enable a sympathetic connection with the past, a prophetic meaning-making, and a resistance to competitive masculinity represented by a war-torn world. As the chapters throughout illustrate, Mediums and Their Material insists that literary representations of textual and spiritual mediums transform and re-articulate women’s bodies as powerful, autonomous, and/or subversive of patriarchal discourses that limit women’s action or, as in the case of Emily Tennyson, render the female body absent. Like Byatt, or rather, by extending her work, this project unpacks how the body comes out of erasure to demand recognition in material ways. Through my feminist literary approach, Mediums and Their Material attempts to reconcile material feminism within the realm of the discursive by re- emphasizing the importance of organic bodies in literary texts and historical conversations about women’s mediation. It ultimately asks whether material feminism can provide a satisfactory way

13 of thinking through and relating to how the biological body impacts feminist politics—be it a mechanism for furthering or thwarting feminist goals—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My project focuses our attention on the female bodies and descriptions of their physicality in discourses on mediation in an effort to reveal new ways of understanding the gender construction of women and their relationship to authorship, nation-building, and women’s activism.

14 CHAPTER 1: “A VICTIM TO WHAT WE CALL HYSTERIA”: SPIRITUALISM, NERVES, AND MATERIAL FEMINISM

In The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867), the nineteenth-century medical psychologist Henry Maudsley painted a “classical medical picture” of one of his Spiritualist patients (Owen 145): A single lady, æt. 38, fancied herself under mesmeric influence, in a state of clairvoyance, and had a variety of anomalous sensation. Rubbed her skin till it was sore in places, bit her nails to the quick, scratched her face, etc. Quasi- hysterical maniacal exacerbations. Irregularity of menstruation, and suspected self-abuse. –Recovery. (Physiology 255) Maudsley, suspicious of spiritualist practices—he called spiritualism “the wail of egoism” (qtd. in Owen 145)—firmly believed that mediums and their followers were unstable and deranged. He even attributed the various convulsions, contortions, agitations of limbs, and other spirit disturbances mediums experienced through mesmerism, séances, or automatic writings to the symptoms of a pathological hysteria. For Maudsley, spirit contact couldn’t possibly be real and those who thought otherwise must have been suffering from hysterical hallucinations. The “single lady, æt. 38,” diagnosed above, is just one example of a female spiritualist that Maudsley labeled as manic and hysterical.3 Denouncing her “mesmeric influence” and “state of clairvoyance” as nothing more than “heavily disguised venereal passions,” he maintains the long-standing link between hysteria and women’s vulnerable female biology and nervous systems (Owen 148). As Maudsley explains, “There is no doubt that so-called swoons, or trances, or cataleptic seizures, befall from time to time persons of a susceptible nervous temperament, especially during the active period of the reproductive functions” (Natural Causes 310). Maudsley wasn’t the only nineteenth-century medical doctor who believed that mediums, specifically female mediums, whether claiming to be possessed by or manifesting spirits, were actually suffering from hysteria rather than communicating with the spirit world. Many physicians linked mediumistic and mesmeric trance to hysteria, and denounced spiritualism as

3 Maudsley most famously incarcerated spiritualist Louisa Lowe in his asylum in 1871. She eventually prosecuted him for wrongful imprisonment and instigated the Lunacy Law Reform movement, as she stated in an address to spiritualists, to “show my country the true nature of its lunacy laws—laws as potent for oppression and wrong, as they are powerless to protect society from, and insure the welfare of, real lunatics” (329).

15 both causing insanity and attracting the insane.4 In fact, “…the connection between hysteria and the supernatural is as old as hysteria itself. The very story of hysteria is a series of displacements of its dominant hermeneutic metaphor—organic or functional, corporeal or spiritual, natural or supernatural” (Mazzoni 3). For Maudsley, the “excitement of religious feelings” was “injurious to the character” and a “direct cause of insanity” (Physiology 210).5 In particular, young women who participated “fervently” in “religious exercises” have “much self-feeling,” leading them to “naturally fly to a system which expressly sanctions and encourages a habit of attention to the feelings and thoughts—a self brooding—which attracts to them the sympathy and interest of others” (210). Ironically, the medium’s ability to “contemplate[e]” her own “feelings and thoughts” is the exact quality that aids her in connecting and sympathetically drawing others to her (210). This attribution of an excess of “self-feeling” to mediums deemed them unnatural and helped establish the superiority of the medical field over the scientifically unconfirmed existence of spirits and spirit communication, invalidating spiritualism as either a science or a religion. Maudsley’s diagnosis of the unnamed “single lady, æt. 38” clearly exemplifies the ways in which medical practitioners sought to control the so-called “abnormal” behaviors of intelligent, unconventional women who operated outside of Victorian social norms—such as those women participating in spiritual mediation. Women who “refused to toe the behavioural line, or give up their “imposture of delusions” (Owen 149), were diagnosed as hysterics who suffered from “moral degeneracy, rampant sexuality, questionable religious excess, or a mixture of all three” (148). Female mediation was especially threatening because it offered women opportunities outside of the traditional domestic sphere. As Alex Owen explains, “Spiritualism validated the female authoritative voice and permitted women an active professional and spiritual role largely denied them elsewhere” (6). By anchoring women’s capacities and disabilities in their biology, Maudsley’s hysterical diagnosis works to deny women this validation as well as any active role in the public world.

4 For example, L. S. Forbes Winslow and William A. Hammond were both medical men who did not believe in spirits or spirit communication. They argued that a belief in spiritualism causes insanity, hallucinations, and hysteria. Dr. Charles Williams also argued that spiritualism can lead to insanity. However, he believed this to be a result of actual spirit possession. These medical men, and others, will be discussed further in this chapter.

5 Spiritualism is applicable to Maudsley’s notions of “religious feelings” as spiritualism was considered by its practitioners to be a religious practice, if not an organized religion. In addition, while Maudsley’s examples of religious feeling mostly refer to dissenters from the Church of England and Roman Catholics, he states that “any form of religion” has an effect on the mind and that it “is necessary to bear in mind that a person’s particular creed is to some extent the result of his character and mode of development” (Physiology 210).

16 Maudsley’s response matches that of other scientific men of the time who “denounced as morbid and pathological” any “categories of behavior that did not conform to a standardized norm” (Owen 141). The connection Maudsley makes between hysteria, the body, and spiritualism often appeared in medical debates, as well as in popular literature of the time, and is something that I explore in this chapter. Maudsley’s diagnosis, however, also demonstrates a problem contemporary feminists have often struggled with when thinking about women, their bodies, and their biology. As Elizabeth Grosz explains, in most feminist scholarship, women’s nature and biology has historically and socially been constructed as passive and vulnerable, as we see in Maudsley’s remarks, preventing women from gaining an education, participating in athletics, and taking on active roles outside of the domestic sphere. Woman’s biology and “nature” thus becomes an “obstacle against which [feminists] need to struggle, as that which remains inert, given, unchanging, and resistant to historical, social, and cultural transformations” (Grosz 23). Moreover, this concept of women’s biology has been used to reinforce, construct, and rationalize paternalistic, patriarchal, and even racist positions (25). While feminists have always been interested in “[t]he phenomenon of hysteria—the corporeal revelation of psychic and cultural conflict,” Elizabeth A. Wilson is quick to point out the trend in feminist studies to “retreat from the biology of hysteria and theorize hysteria as primarily ideational” (4-5). This movement away from the body is in part the result of traditional understandings of the hysterical body that feminists find to be problematic: the notion of the “wandering womb” and the idea that a woman’s problems are “all in her head.” First, the notion of hysteria as the “wandering womb” rested on the belief that the uterus “had a life of its own” and would move about the body, until the woman and her womb “wanted and needed to be filled” by the male presence who would subdue her unruly body by securing her more tightly to the domestic sphere—through sex and/or marriage (Bullough 11). The hysterical woman, in this case, was reduced to a singular organ, representing patriarchal society’s need to curtail or control her desires, whether sexual, social, or political. Second, the common belief that hysteria and hysterical symptomatology all issue from the woman’s head underscores the idea that women have something biologically wrong with their mentality or basic cognitive functions. Both of these historical ideas about hysteria are challenging for feminists because they fix women as biologically weak and inferior to their male counterparts. Moreover, they isolate the brain and the womb as discrete entities that are separate from a complex system permeating the entirety of the female body.

17 The turn to the ideational or discursive, then, has enabled feminist scholars to look past the arguments about biological differentiation that have limited women within a patriarchal society. It has also “allowed feminists to understand how gender has been articulated with other volatile markings, such as class, race, and sexuality, within cultural systems of difference that function like a language” and “revealed the liability of defining and fixing the identity of ‘woman’ in any location or of attempting to assert the superiority of the feminine over the masculine” (Alaimo and Hekman 2-3). As noted in the introduction, this more ideational- centered feminism, while important, has limited the ways in which contemporary feminists have thought about the material body and its biology. As both Grosz and Wilson make clear, our bodies impact our social and political existences: as Grosz puts it, “If we are our biologies, then we need a complex and subtle account of that biology if it is to be able to more adequately explain the rich variability of social, cultural, and political life” (24). Our bodies, in turn, are impacted by the social; we constantly struggle to articulate our biologies through the medium of language dictated by culture. Both Grosz and Wilson seek to fill this gap by making the materiality and biology of bodies more central to feminist discourses. Wilson reminds us that while hysteria is an emotional and psychological ailment, hysterics “also suffer from bodily symptoms: they are paralyzed, blinded, in physical pain, they cough incessantly, and they have difficulty breathing. Perhaps the most obvious aspect of hysteria—the bodily—disability—has been attenuated in feminist accounts of hysterical symptomology” (5). In her book, Psychosomatic Feminism and the Neurological Body (2004), Wilson broadens the terms by which the female body has traditionally been understood, extending “the somatic beginnings of psychoanalysis back further than hysteria,” and approaching the female body not just through “the hysterized body of the patient,” but through much more complex biological and neurological processes (1). She reads hysteria as tied to the whole body, as a material system that communicates and interacts with itself and the world. Thus, the psyche resides in and communicates via “hysterical symptomatology.” Indeed, Wilson argues that “a strong case has been made, via hysteria, that…the psyche is always already the body” (1). This manifests itself most obviously in her discussions of the sympathetic nervous system, or the “strange affinities” and “alliances” of the body’s organs and systems which react and respond sympathetically to the body’s interactions with the world (73). For example, she describes the “affinity of gut and mood,” explaining that

18 the gut responds symptomatically (with vomiting or lack of appetite) to psychological distress, like depression or anxiety (43). In this sense, the gut itself is a “potent psychological organ” (43). Wilson’s attention to female hysteria and neurology, I believe, sheds light on nineteenth- century ideas regarding women’s biology, “nerves,” and spirit communication. Fictional texts of the late nineteenth century that center on female mediums, such as George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and Florence Marryat’s The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs (1896), connect the medium’s ability to facilitate connections and conversations with otherworldly presences, and even living persons, to the female nervous system. As Jill Galvan notes, women were thought to be suitable for mediation and communication specifically because of their sympathetic nerves and sensitive bodies. Indeed, the wires used to connect technological devices were often compared to the nerves of the spiritual medium reaching out to other worlds. Despite such analogies, women’s bodies seem to take a backstage role in the mediation process—they may have active nerves, but their role in communication is often described as and required to be passive or mechanical. Given that this is the case, one might ask how exactly the material body is figured in nineteenth-century discussions of female mediation: focusing more specifically on the body might not only reveal the role of the body in these discourses, but also offer a way to think about a bodied female agency. These literary writers suggest that there is power in women’s bodies, shifting the focus of medical doctors who construe female medium’s bodies, and their reproductive functions, as sites of women’s mental vulnerability and poor nerves. In other words, this literature can be read in productively feminist ways if we pay attention to the whole body as a site of activity and action, rather than as a passive mechanical thing that is operated solely by the mind or by an outside presence. In particular, the bodies and neurological/biological functions of Marryat’s Hannah Stubbs and du Maurier’s Trilby, despite being passive vessels for visiting spirits and male mesmerists to possess, do not necessarily work in passive ways. That is to say, the body’s internal functions and its external manifestations work, regardless of whether or not medical and spiritual practitioners have mapped them into discursive frameworks of meaning. The body is not passive simply because it can be occupied by different consciousnesses; the body is not passive simply because a doctor applies an agent to alter it, like anesthetic, or diagnoses a particular symptom as a sign of “hysteria.” In short, the body in its organic, material being acts. It works actively to fight off infections and continue the circulation of the blood whether we have a

19 language for those processes—as in medical or other classificatory discourses—or not. Spiritualists and spiritual texts, I argue, seize on this concept, negating medical attempts to control or fully map the female body by recognizing it as a material organism with inexplicable processes and endless possibilities. Thus, the female medium’s body in its organic functions possesses an agency that can both make connections with the outside world (be it supernatural or not) and transform the embodied experience of the medium in ways that medical men—and, sometimes, fictional male characters—ignore, misread, and often misdiagnose. While it may seem unusual to use contemporary theories of the body to illuminate nineteenth-century texts, I believe, as Grosz suggests, that material discourses “could be of some use in understanding and transforming the prevailing structures of (patriarchal) power and in refining and complexifying feminist analyses of and responses to these structures” (27). By putting the medical debates surrounding spiritualism and hysteria conducted by Maudsley and his contemporaries in conversation with literary texts—like Marryat’s and du Maurier’s—that take an interest not just in spiritualism, but also in the material bodies of female mediums, it might be possible to use these material feminist theories to “see” women spiritualists and their relationships to hysteria and the sympathetic nervous systems in new, more transgressive and authoritative ways. They may offer a counter-narrative to the medical diagnosis of mediums as hysterical or they may define hysteria as something other than a disabling pathology. After all, Victorian spiritualism, in spite of medical debates seeking to invalidate it and its practitioners, was often deployed by women as a space for female agency. For example, spiritualism provided a platform for discussions about women’s rights and many spiritualists supported the suffragist movement (Braude 296).6 This chapter then, seeks to investigate how analyzing women mediums’ material bodies through Wilson’s theories of the sympathetic nervous system, rather than through Maudsley’s outdated model, offers a more complex and powerful understanding of women mediums. It also critiques how and why women spiritual mediums and their sympathetic nervous systems were and are understood to be hysterical, by redefining “hysteria” and “hysterical symptoms” as a mode of interaction and communication with others in the world.

MEDICAL DEBATES ON SPIRITUALISM, INSANITY, AND HYSTERIA

6 See Chapter Five, “’Her Own Private Instrument of Justice”: Female Mediation, Public Display and Women’s Movements,” for a discussion of how spiritual and technological mediation contributed to early women’s rights reform.

20

Spiritualism was the subject of much scientific and medical interest since its first appearance in England in the 1850s. Medical debates initially focused on whether spiritual communication and supernatural experiences were real. Despite research and investigations by the Society of Psychical Research (SPR), founded in 1882, and other interested scientists and medical professionals such as Sir William Crookes (physical chemist), Cromwell Varley (electrical engineer), Professor Robert Hare (chemist), and Alfred Russell Wallace (naturalist and biologist), the majority of those in the medical field could not be convinced of the validity of such experiments, or of spiritualism in general. As a result, many medical professionals like Maudsley, L. S. Forbes Winslow, and William A. Hammond became particularly interested in examining the sanity of those who believed and participated in spiritualist practices.7 Maudsley dedicated his book, Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (1886), to this pursuit, explaining the importance of understanding how “mankind, in different ages and places from their beginning until now, have had so many different notions concerning the supernatural” (1). He maintained that spiritualists either were suffering from “errors of human observation and reasoning,” or overactive imaginations, or were just plain old crazy—the victims of “mania and delusions” and “hallucinations and illusions” (Natural Causes 2-3). Forbes Winslow even condemned spiritualism as one of the “principal causes of the increase of insanity in England” (5). Forbes Winslow “do[es] not go so far and say that all believers in spiritualism are insane,” but he does contend that “belief in the direct communication with the invisible amounts to an unmistakable delusion” and that “many persons go mad through [spiritualism’s] absurd doctrines” (28-30). While spiritualism was thought to cause insanity, many nineteenth-century specialists in insanity also asserted that a belief in spiritualism was a symptom of a diseased mind. They saw similarities between the mediumistic or mesmeric trance and pathological conditions like hysteria and epilepsy, as well as other physical and psychological symptoms such as “uncontrollable convulsions and aberrant behavior” (Owen 143). In his pamphlet, “Spiritualistic Madness” (1877), Forbes Winslow attempts to explain a belief in spirit communication as caused by the “physiological (or pathological) condition of the nervous centres” or “changes in the

7 Declaring spiritualists to be unstable or insane not only invalidates their belief system, but also works to show that medical science is more developed than the as-yet unproven science of psychical research.

21 organs themselves” (35).8 Locating insanity in the biology of the body, Forbes Winslow argues that these changes in the organs and nerves can cause illusions: Thus, from congestion and other causes, the eye may perceive light, the ear may perceive sound, without these being actually present; and so with the other senses. Under similar circumstances the intelligence is troubled, creates strange associations of ideas, sees visions, and appears abstracted from a real world to live in an imaginary one…yet the source is somatic or physical (35-36). In an attempt to explain how séance sitters all see similar hallucinations, Forbes Winslow argues that changes in nervous centers, as in other pathological conditions such as “glandular, bronchial, and gastric inflammation or irritation…influenza, or cholera,” may also become epidemic and produce “aggregate delusions” (36). He also suggests that psychologically, “if exposed to great moral excitement,” men and women alike are “susceptible of being affected by ecstasy, which becomes in a highly exalted state of enthusiasm, morbid no doubt, and giv[es] rise to extraordinary and unreasonable actions” (31). Maudsley also credits spirit hallucinations to disrupted nerves. He asserts that hallucinations can be caused by “a disturbance or disorder of the special nerve-centres of perception” (Natural Causes 163). These disruptions of the nerves could result from the “direct molecular commotion of nerve-element of which they are constituted, or a secondary effect of the disturbed supply or quality of blood by which their elements are nourished” (163-164). Though these are often temporary, more lasting “brain-disorders” producing hallucinations can result from a variety of diseases, or from a predisposition to “nerve- centres of perception” that have a “certain natural inclination” to “irregular action” (167). Forbes Winslow and Maudsley’s explanations of this religious insanity as related to nervous disease explain why female spiritualists and mediums were frequently diagnosed with hysteria, which was often understood to be a nervous disorder.9 For spiritualism’s medical

8 “Spiritualistic Madness” narrates an evolving religious insanity spanning from the medieval times of Joan of Arc, through the Reformation and the “wandering body” of the “insane,” to nineteenth-century spiritualism (15- 16). He also argues, "The possession of our tables by unseen spirits, and our slates of invisible writing, are simply resuscitations and resurrections, under another form, of the beliefs which prevailed epidemically in t he Middle Ages" (18). He then recounts a number of cases where people who became mediums, or were influenced by spiritualism, became maniacs, suffering delusions, delirium, and even death.

9 Medical men even pathologized spiritualist practices with terms like “psycholepsy” and “mediomania” that were based on the “hysterical model” (Owen 149). This is certainly the case in Forbes Winslow’s account of Joan of Arc, who is “a good example of superstitious madness” (12-13). Women like Joan of Arc and her nineteenth-century spiritualist counterparts were thought to have “minds badly enough organized” to accept their hallucinations as “an article of belief” (Hammond 72). According to Forbes Winslow, Joan of Arc was the “dupe of

22 opponents and non-believers, hysteria offered a perfect explanation of the medium’s odd behavior during spirit contact. As Hammond asserts, “[i]n hysteria, hallucinations…are very common” (77). Hammond relates Emma Hardinge Britten’s account of “[f]our badly-educated girls” who “trifle[d] with spiritual manifestations” as an example (Hardinge Britten qtd. in Hammond 75).10 These girls “requested the spirits lay hold of them.…The spirits complied, seized them, treated them in the roughest manner, and, shaking them, caused them to use the most violent actions and outrageous language, etc.” (75). The priest was called and “got ready his holy water…. After many sallies with the holy fluid, and a vast number of incantations, none of which produced the slightest effect, … [t]he girls still continued to be used roughly, by the discordant spirits they had invoked, until the arrival of some of their spiritualist friends, by whose judicious passes and gentle remonstrance with the spirit, they were instantly relieved” (75-76). Hammond’s analysis of this case is that these girls “were simply hysterical,” of which “no one with even a superficial acquaintance with the normal condition of the nervous system, and the aberrations to which it may be subjected, can entertain the slightest doubt” (Hammond 76). That these hysterics may be interpreted as spiritualistic is beyond Hammond’s belief, despite the fact that only other spiritualists were able to cure the girls’ so-called “hysterical” behavior. He even criticizes a group of spiritualists at a séance he attends, accusing them of inviting him to “consider proofs of spiritual agency” in “disordered nervous action” (76). Hammond’s use of the phrase “spiritual agency” is telling here. The spiritualists interpreted the “incoherent utterances and convulsive movement of the head, arms, and legs” as part of a spirit phenomenon and endowed it with respect and power. Hammond denies this power, even as he seems to recognize the presence of an otherwise inexplicable agency in the scene. He sees the loss of control and the “incoherent” and “convuls ive” movements as the absence of agency or intention, where the

fascination” and “labored” under a “form of madness…termed Theomania,” a pathological disease that caused hallucinations (12-13). Hammond also mentions Joan of Arc as an example of “how greatly a weak, hysterical girl can disturb the community in which she lives,” diagnosing her as a hysteric-ecstatic (132). There seems to be a strong desire in both Forbes Winslow and Hammond to deny Joan of Arc agency by labeling her as hysteric. In her brief history, “Joan of Arc” (1895), Caroline Southwood Hill recognizes this trend of undermining Joan of Arc, explaining that the “churchmen…arrogated to themselves authority over her conscience” (857). They undermined her visions and divine contact by declaring her to be a witch in order to exert their authority over her and to control a mere “girl of nineteen” who resisted both church and state (857).

10 This account is from Modern American Spiritualism (1899), which was written by Emma Hardinge (also known as Emma Hardinge Britten), the famous trance medium. For more information on Hardinge Britten’s trance mediumship, see Chapter Four.

23 spiritualists see these bodily movements as communicative acts. Nevertheless, Hammond eventually diagnosed and treated the medium as a “case of chorea, or St. Vitus’s dance” (76).11 The medical thinking that pathologized spiritualism not only led to a discussion about the types of insanity experienced by spiritualists, but also commenced a debate between the medical field and spiritualists, who were forced to defend their beliefs and experiences. In response to Forbes Winslow, Susan Elizabeth Gay, a writer on theosophy and a self-proclaimed spiritualist, wrote and published “Spiritualist Sanity” (1879), with the hope that a brief sketch of the facts of spiritualism and their moral utility may not only furnish an ample reply to Dr. Forbes Winslow…but may possibly arrest attention among a few of his own profession, to whom this new-born science, with its vast possibilities and grand horizon may be unknown… [and] point to a fruitful field of study which medical dogmatism avoids and too often condemns. (Gay iii) Implicit in this intention is Gay’s critique of Forbes Winslow and his medical contemporaries, who have “never read any reliable work on spiritualism” or “had any personal experience of the facts which have…been successfully submitted to the examination of men of science” (Gay 5). She recounts examples of spiritual phenomena—mediums speaking languages they don’t know, “writing produced without human agency,” “moulds of spirit-hands, feet, and faces taken under test-conditions,” and “prophecies that have been made and verified”—as scientific proof of the validity of spiritualism, challenging her reader to ask “[w]hat lore concerning monomania, dementia, or hysteria will explain this?” (Gay 16-17). Gay also argues that “Spiritualism owes its hold on society almost wholly on the ground of its capacity to satisfy thinking minds. Common beliefs, particularly in religion, are merely the results of education and habit, for which in nine cases out of ten hardly a single philosophical reason can be given” (34). For Gay, the fact that esteemed social, literary, and scientific people “could avow a belief in spiritualism” demonstrates how strong the evidence affirming it must be (7).12 That medical men like Forbes Winslow or Maudsley would argue that these smart,

11 Chorea, or St. Vitus’s Dance, is a neurological disorder, reminiscent of epilepsy, that was characterized by involuntary muscular movements of the face and hands. It gets its name from the “dancing mania” of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or the jerky movements of religious “fanatics” in the middle ages (Fahn vii).

12 Gay relies on the idea that those who believe in spiritualism are in fact logical thinkers. She references Alfred Russell Wallace, who explains that a number of “[c]lergymen…literary men and lawyers, physicians in large

24 reputable men and women are suffering from delusions is absurd; she demands that they are, “by all laws of honour and honesty, bound to consider that evidence” before concluding that spiritualists are insane (Gay 8). Gay suggests that science has already proven that things exist that cannot always be experienced with the human senses: “We cannot see everything, and we can only hear a limited number of sounds” (8). She explains that “Electricity and magnetism are invisible agents, but their achievements prove their existence beyond the shadow of a doubt. The enormous power which keeps our world swinging steadily around the sun age after age, and orders the ‘stars in their courses,’ is invisible; so also the fluid which conveys our messages for thousands of miles upon an iron wire” (8).13 That our senses cannot perceive certain scientific phenomena, she concludes, does not mean that they do not exist or are outside the realm of possibility. Thus, spirit contact might also be possible, even if it is not visible to everyone, or remains unexplained by science. In response to Forbes Winslow’s ideas about spiritualism and health, Gay references other medical men, like Dr. Eugene Crowell (Gay 24), who claim that there are far fewer accounts of insanity attributed to spiritualism than the “nearly ten thousand persons…confined in the public asylums of the United States” that Forbes Winslow estimates (Forbes Winslow 6). While Gay admits that physical mediumship can be a “drain on the vital force,” which “undoubtedly tend[s] to exhaust the nervous system,” it is only dangerous to those mediums “of excitable temperament, vicious life, or weak mind” (24). In her refusal to characterize all mediums as “excitable” or “weak,” Gay disagrees with Maudsley, Forbes Winslow, and numbers, men of science…, secularists, philosophical sceptics, [and] pure materialists” have all “become converts through the overwhelming logic of the phenomena which spiritualism has brought before them” (Wallace qtd . in Gay 14-15). She includes a list of well-reputed men and women who are spiritualists including Thomas Adolphus Trollope, Harriet Martineau, Cromwell Varley, the Grand Duke Constantine of Russian, Napoleon III, Victor Hugo, Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, and Giuseppe Garibaldi. From this list, she concludes that "[i]t is an insult to common sense to suppose that all or any of these men, representing utterly different professions and classes of mind, and exhibit in marked ability in their life-work, are the victims of contagious disorder and delusion; and the fallacious objection which have [sic] been urged by persons who carefully abstain from all enquiry into the facts of spiritualism, have been already a hundred times over answered by men accustomed to the mental training demanded by such pursuits as chemistry, medicine, law, and the most abstruse studies in natural science" (Gay 15).

13 Maudsley rebuts Gay’s popular spiritualist argument. He concedes “that matter does undoubtedly exist in so fine, subtile, and, so to speak, spiritualized a state as to be imperceptible to human sense, and in that condition is amazingly active…[and]… that, though we cannot then perceive it by sense, it is possible we may nevertheless be affected powerfully by it” (Natural Causes 160). But he calls the logic behind the spiritualist argument into question, explaining that it is a great “leap…from this admission to the creation of a world of spiritual beings of human kind and form” (160). Furthermore, Maudsley argues that this “leap” is to go back “to the dark days of knowledge… for it is certain there has not been any discovery of new laws and properties of matter in these latter days to warrant in the least the belief of its taking the visible form and substance of a ghost” (161).

25 Hammond that women are by nature already always inclined toward the hysterical. Moreover, she reminds her readers that not all spiritualists are mediums and that it is absurd to say that a belief in spiritualism “could exercise any possible influence injurious to ‘a sound mind in a sound body’” (24). In fact, Gay goes so far as to claim that such a belief actually supports good health: “the anxieties and sorrows consequent on sickness and bereavement have been entirely removed by a knowledge of spiritualism, which has restored many to mental and bodily health” (24). Likewise, Crowell argues that “[a]n intelligent belief in Spiritualism favours those conditions of mind and body upon which sanity depends. Being both a religion and a philosophy, it is based upon demonstration, which banishes all the terrors of false theology…while at the same time it proves to the satisfaction of every earnest seeker that there is a happier and better world” (Crowell 129). For Crowell and Gay, having a belief system that provides peace, hope, and happiness cannot possibly have the dangerous ramifications Forbes Winslow claims. That he asserts that it does can be chalked up to a desire to impose his own view of social order on the world. As Crowell states, “[t]he charge against Spiritualism of its tendency to unsettle the mind is nothing new. The same accusation has in all ages of the world been hurled against every reform movement and against every reformer” (128). While Forbes Winslow’s and Maudsley’s views on spiritualism were supported in most medical literature of the time, they seem to have had little effect in curbing spiritualist practice. This is certainly the case with Gay and Crowell, who suggest that spiritualists have something meaningful to offer the world that is beyond the understanding of men like Forbes Winslow and Maudsley. “Almost all great discoveries, reforms, inventions, and changes of thought,” Gay writes, “have been initiated by single minds, and have triumphed, in defiance of opposition, by the sheer force of their truth” (34). Placing the spiritualist in the role of reformer, Crowell and Gay seem to acknowledge the importance of spiritualism not only for consoling the grieving, or providing evidence of life after death, but also in challenging existing social and political norms.14 Female mediums, in particular, saw spiritualism as a space where they could impact their social world. Reports of transgressive behaviors during séances contributed to debates on spiritualism, specifically regarding women’s identity, gender roles, and sexuality. The famous Florence Cook is an example of a female medium who defied traditional gender norms. During a

14 For a more in-depth discussion of spiritualism and reform, see Chapter Four.

26 séance, Cook would channel Katie King, a spirit of the daughter of a seventeenth-century brigand. Katie “flirted with her sitters, touched them, and kissed them”; she also “playfully uncovered” her “ankle and leg” (Tromp, “Spirited Sexuality” 73). According to Marlene Tromp, there was always a slippage between Cook the medium and Katie the spirit, making it difficult to identify the actor: “the acts of one being are intimately connected with those of the other” (73). Tromp explains that this “slippage” gave female mediums power. They “could channel a spirit of any temperament or character, embody and, in some sense, become whomever they might choose” (68). As a result, spiritualism gave way to “a kind of sexual pandemonium” where “[f]aces and knees were caressed while the lights were out, gentlewoman submitted to be kissed by strangers, and the most private recesses of the past and present were exposed to the public eye” (67-68). These behaviors not only led to and condoned flirtations, trysts, and extra-marital affairs, they also gave women “access to a whole new range of behavior”—behavior that “could claim heavenly authorization” (68). The medical turn toward diagnosing female mediums as hysterics was partly an attempt to normalize and control their class- and gender-defying behavior. As Alex Owen explains, The struggle that ultimately ensued between physicians and spiritualists circulated implicitly around the key issue of the construction of normalcy and, by extension, normative womanhood. The physicians who adopted an aggressively anti- spiritualist stance often recognized that there were elements of spiritualist practice that subverted conventional behaviour, but sought to portray these as evidence of a pathological condition. (139) In particular, “they regarded with distaste and suspicion the close involvement of women in spiritualist practices”; by “likening female mediumship to hysteria,” they also linked women mediums to “unsavoury” sexual feelings (139).15 Any behavior that deviated from social norms could signal madness, leading men like Maudsley to focus on the “depraved instincts” of insanity. As Maudsley explains, “From a practical point of view, anyone may be permitted to be as eccentric as he pleases, to go as much as he likes off the customary track of thinking, and

15 Owen’s argument focuses on the social behaviors and practice of female mediums in relationship to the hysterical diagnosis, representing the hysterical diagnosis of spiritualists as more ideationally-centered in favoring emotional actions and reactions of the medium, rather than the organic function or reflex of the body whose ability to act and connect is separate from consciousness.

27 doing, so long as his deviations do not compromise social order” (Natural Causes 151). We see this most evidently in Maudsley’s diagnosis of the “single lady, æt.38.” It is also evident in the case of Georgiana Weldon, whom Forbes Winslow attempted to incarcerate in his private lunatic asylum on the grounds of her spiritualist practices. Her participation in a spiritualist community, as well as some of her other eccentric behaviors, and her radical politics—wearing rational dress, supporting vegetarianism, and taking in and educating poor orphan children—compounded to make her a clear candidate for insanity. However, Weldon managed to uncover the plot against her and save herself by publicly accusing Winslow of conspiring with her estranged husband to put her in the asylum. Judith Walkowitz, who recounts Weldon’s public campaign against Forbes Winslow, explains that Mrs. Weldon interpreted the male conspiracy of doctor/family friend/husband as a ‘traffic in women,’ in which doctors colluded in the private sexual designs of men by defining female resistance as madness…the spiritualists likened the actions of the ‘mad doctors’ to the sadistic pleasures of the hunt, while even the British Medical Journal, not commonly given to gothic allusions, invoked the example of Rochester and Jane Eyre to illustrate how men might use lunacy confinement to further their sexual self interest. (“Science and the Séance” 14-15) Weldon managed to thwart the scheme of the medical men and to hold Forbes Winslow accountable. Her experience dramatically and publically illustrated the fears and dangers of practicing spiritualism, as well as how hysteria as a diagnosis made spiritual women vulnerab le to medical authority. Where spiritualism gave these women power and allowed them to subvert conventional behavior, their denigration as depraved madwomen sought to undermine that newfound agency and once more put them under the thumb of a patriarchal system of power. Forbes Winslow asserted that women were particularly susceptible to the hysteria caused by spiritualism because they are already weak-minded and emotional: “The community of believers contains a large proportion of weak-minded hysterical women, in whom the seeds of mental disorder, though for a time latent, are only waiting for a new excitement to ripen into maturity” (20). Hysteria, as a pathological disease, was associated with “the essence of the ‘feminine’” primarily due to “[i]ts vast, unstable repertoire of emotional and physical symptoms—fits, fainting, vomiting, choking, sobbing, laughing, paralysis—and the rapid passage from one to another,” which suggested “the lability and capriciousness traditionally

28 associated with the feminine nature” (Showalter, Female Malady 129). The term “nature” was, of course, fully loaded, in maintaining the rigid gender roles of the period. Darwinian psychiatrists, like Maudsley, believed that “there is sex in mind as distinctly as there is in body” (Maudsley qtd. in Female Malady 122). From the most conservative point of view, women were believed to be naturally capable (both mentally and physically) only of reproducing and raising their children, and tending to their husbands and homes. Women who acted outside of these domestic duties were setting themselves up for a hysterical episode: “Mental breakdown…would come when women defied their ‘nature,’ attempted to compete with men instead of serving them, or sought alternatives or even additions to their maternal functions” (Female Malady 122). Thus, as Elaine Showalter describes, At the same time that new opportunities for self-cultivation and self-fulfillment in education and work were offered to women, doctors warned them that pursuit of such opportunities would lead to sickness, sterility, and race suicide. They explicitly linked the epidemic of nervous disorders—anorexia nervosa, hysteria, and neurasthenia—which marked the fin de siècle to women’s ambition. (121) The threat of hysteria, then, became a convenient way for psychologists and nerve doctors to regulate female behavior and oppose women’s attempts to change or improve “the condition of their lives” (18).

HYSTERIA AND SYMPATHETIC AGENCY Linking female spirit mediation to hysteria was convenient, especially given the fact that hysteria was a term often used to describe “a group of symptoms too wide and too varied to be easily comprised under a precise term of description, and of whose real nature and origin we haven’t sufficient knowledge to indicate exactly the pathological processes at work” (Clarks 3- 4). The idea of “nerves” in the Victorian age was varied and often as inexplicable as spirit communication and hysteria: “Nerves existed physiologically and metaphorically, conjuring complicated and sometimes contradictory associations. Occasionally conveying an idea of courage and vigor, they more often stood for fragility and weakness. They suggested sensitivity, sympathy, and above all, a suffering that frequently defied medical knowledge and curative skill” (Oppenheim 3). However, the physical symptoms of hysteria—“full-scale paroxysm, temporary convulsions, palsies, motor and sensory impairments, respiratory obstructions, and

29 speech disorders” as well as abstention from food, “sudden fits of weeping…chronic lassitude …and profound melancholy”—were not overlooked by medical men of the time (181). Because hysteria could never fully be diagnosed as either solely mental or physical, most doctors were never sure whether to cure the body with medicine or attempt to restore the mind with “moral exhortations” (5). Nerves became more popularly associated with personality and often moods like “edginess, agitation, and irritability” (9). Thus, the ideas of “nerves” and hysteria were more broadly defined by intense emotion or as something psychological. It is this association with emotional feeling as well as the intense physical experiences of the medium during spirit contact that contributes to the female spiritualist’s diagnosis as hysterical. Yet, women were also, at first, thought to be ideal for spiritual mediation because of their association with emotion, specifically sympathy and sensitivity, “often imagined to be the product of women’s [already] delicate nervous systems; and an easy reversion to automatism, or a state of unconsciousness” (Galvan 12). Similar to Maudsley’s claim that a medium’s “self- feeling” draws “the sympathy and interest of others” to her, as sympathetic and emotional beings, women mediums were thought to be able to “reach out feelingly to others and thus to facilitate networks of communication” (12). Moreover, these extensions of the self were imagined to transfer the inward thoughts of the séance sitters to an outside spiritual presence, just as the nerves of the body transfer messages from the brain to other organs. This is perhaps most evident in Marie Corelli’s The Soul of Lilith (1893), where El Râmí uses mesmerism to create a connection between himself and Lilith’s soul through the nerves of her unconscious body. In El Râmí’s connection with Lilith, his “own brain” acts upon hers “in a state of trance” (Corelli 39). Through touch, El Râmí is able to connect his brain to Lilith’s “nerves and arteries” and send “brain-waves” and suggestions through her inert body to her spirit (49). Interestingly, the language surrounding spirit mediation and the medium’s ability to sympathetically reach out to other worlds is reminiscent of Hammond’s language describing hysterical women’s nerve- centers as causing an epidemic of “aggregate delusions.” Thus, it wasn’t a coincidence that sympathetic nerves were attributed to both hysterical women and female mediums. Women’s nervous systems, both biologically and spiritually, were considered more capable of making sympathetic connections. Through the sympathetic, sensitive, and thusly automatic body of the female medium, communications can be sent and received, and intense impressions can be created.

30 The connection between sympathy and nerves is also evident in Wilson’s work on the importance of the body to feminist “cultural, social, linguistic, literary, and historical analyses” (8). Building on Galen, the ancient Greek physician and philosopher, Wilson contends that “sympathy” signifies communication between various, unconnected parts of the body.16 Quoting the historians of medicine Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, she writes, “‘Sympathy,’ or its Latin equivalent ‘consensus,’ was a rapport thought to exist between parts of the body, especially the organs, that were not anatomically connected…. As Galen had originally pointed out, this involuntary interrelationship of sympathetic harmony in the body was effected by way of nerves or blood vessels” (Clarke and Jacyna qtd. in Wilson 73). In this way, sympathy was often used clinically to explain “strange affinities” or connections between diseases and bodily pain, like “the kinship of nasal symptoms with uterine diseases” (73). The concept of the “nervous condition” meant a connection through which distant organs could respond sympathetically to each other’s pain. In this sense, sympathy is an intra-subjective phenomenon taking place within the individual body; however, Wilson (like nineteenth-century spiritualists) also sees sympathy working in an intersubjective way as something that not only connects organic matter within one’s own body, but also connects one’s organic matter to other material bodies (whether physical or spiritual).17 Though later discovered to be operating as a reflex, “[t]he vestigial terminology of ‘sympathetic’ and ‘parasympathetic’ registers the long-established character of nervous substrate: a reflexive affinity for other organs and bodies” (Wilson 73-74). Wilson considers Charles Darwin’s own nervous system and its kinship with “other organs and bodies” as a chief example. Darwin, it seems, suffered from a nervous condition. While his condition was

16 The idea of sympathy as “puzzling organic alliances” (Wilson 73) was widely used and “remained synonymous with ‘reflex” up until the nineteenth-century” (Clarke and Jacyna qtd. in Wilson 73). As Wilson explains, modern physiology later “condensed sympathy into the structure and function of the au tomatic nervous system” (Wilson 73).

17 Wilson’s definition of sympathy is applicable here because it resembles a spiritualist understanding of the female medium’s sympathetic qualities. The term “sympathy” was used in the nineteenth century not only as a way of relating to others on an emotional level or as creating a “community of feelings” (as, say, George Eliot promoted in her novels as a way of expanding one’s worldview and sense of belonging), but also to mean affinity or connection more generally—“[a] (real or supposed) affinity between certain things, by virtue of which they are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence, affect or influence one another (esp. in some occult way), or attract or tend towards each other”—and even pathologically as “[a] relation between two bodily organs or parts (or between two persons) such that disorder, or any condition, of the one induces a corresponding condition in the other” (“Sympathy,” OED).

31 in remission, his daughter, Annie, became terminally ill with symptoms that mimicked his own “chronic complaint” (74). As Annie “succumb[ed] to ‘Bilious Fever with typhoid character,’ Darwin’s stomach condition returned acutely, and he was confined to his sickbed as Annie died” (74). Darwin’s experience, Wilson suggests, demonstrates that there is “something sympathetic in so-called direct nervous action” (74). Wilson employs sympathy in her theories of the nervous body, explaining that “the nervous system innervates the entire body” and as a result of this nervous stimulation or communication, “distal parts of the body (such as the stomach) have the capacity for psychological action” (34). Wilson further extends the operation of sympathy within the body and amongst the nerves to include other bodies and interactions with the outside world. As she explains: What the outside world engenders in the psychological sphere is relations to others, and through this the development of the self. It is the dynamics of intersubjective relations that allow the self to emerge and stabilize. These relations to others are psychologically generative only to the extent that they are internalized (ingested, absorbed, excreted). (Wilson 44) In other words, hysteria could be psychology beyond the head, a “reflexive affinity” of sympathy with “other organs and bodies” (74). In analyzing a particular contemporary case, Wilson describes a man, Andrew Solomon, who experiences intense depression that is partially manifested in gastrointestinal difficulties. On one occasion, he lost control of his bowels whilst buying groceries. On his return home, he experienced a panic attack and threw up repeatedly. Wilson reads Solomon’s gut as “turning itself inside out, unsure whether to digest or respire …unsure how to situate itself in relation to the rest of the body and to the world” (46). “His diminished capacity to be with others,” she argues, “is not being played out in his head and then transferred to the gut; the gut itself is unable to take in the world, to let others pass through him and be absorbed” (46). Later, we learn that Solomon’s ability to enter into a relation with his father is also a result of his gut. His father, in response to his son’s inability to eat, cuts up his food and feeds it to him, joking that one day when he loses all his teeth, his son can return the favor. This “relation of reciprocated care” works to help Solomon feel connected to others, ultimately aiding his recovery (45). What this means for Wilson is that the “gut” and the enteric nervous system (ENS) that dictates its action

32 are “attuned to the outside world,” and that the gut is a “vital organ in the maintenance of relations to others” (45). Sympathetic connection, then, is not just something that connects organs and nerves internally, but something that reaches out to make connections between other people’s bodies and even, I would argue, in the case of spiritual mediums, spirit presences: “direct nervous action is always in intimate sympathy with other organs, other bodies, and other systems” (77)—biologically, culturally, socially, and perhaps, even otherworldly!

RECONSIDERING HYSTERIA: SYMPATHETIC COMMUNICATIONS IN TRILBY George du Maurier’s Trilby demonstrates the power of sympathetic connection and biological agency discussed above. In the novel, Svengali, a Jewish musician and hypnotist, mesmerizes Trilby, a working girl and artist’s model. Through his possession, Svengali is able to achieve his own dream of becoming a famous vocalist, by transforming a tone-deaf Trilby into his musical mouthpiece. Ironically, even as Svengali uses Trilby’s body as an outlet of communication, that body is also delivering other messages—ones of warning and distress—that are being misread and misdiagnosed. Thus, I argue, du Maurier’s novel brings attention to the “hysterical” bodies of female mediums and the challenges of interpreting those bodies. Other critics, including Rosana Nunan, Amy Lehman, Elaine Showalter, and Jill Galvan, read Trilby as a novel concerned with the effects of the trance state on female hysteria. Much as I do, Nunan argues that Trilby is concerned with “staging the difficulty of resolving the stigmatization of hysteria as illness” (n.pag). Her argument, however, is primarily invested in how du Maurier uses hysteria as a way to “theorize scientifically the artist or genius as a being uniquely capable of harnessing the power of the subconscious…mind for their [sic] artistic ends” (n.pag). She reads Trilby’s hysteric trance state as agential in its ability to transform Trilby into a well-renowned vocalist and artistic genius, rather than an hysteric or a dehumanized automaton.18 In contrast to Nunan, and to my own reading of Trilby, most critics including Daniel Pick and Jonathan Freedman, as Fiona Coll points out, tend to “elide Trilby’s own experience as a thinking, feeling subject in favour of an emphasis upon Svengali’s powers of mesmeric influence” (744). Thus, Svengali emerges as the “locus of meaning for the novel” and situates Trilby and Svengali in “dynamic opposition: Svengali is the active agent, the masterful

18 See also Fiona Coll’s reading of Trilby as “tractable object” derived from “the long cultural genealogy of the automaton” (743).

33 manipulator, and the driving force of the narrative. Trilby, on the other hand, is the innocent victim, the collateral damage, the inert handmaiden of Svengali’s unquenchable ambition” (745). Like Coll, Nunan, and Phyllis Weliver,19 who all resist this polarizing reading, I bring attention to and center meaning on Trilby, considering her so-called hysteria and Svengali’s mesmeric influence over her in more complicated terms. Trilby’s body, I argue, despite its possession by Svengali, makes its own sympathetic and material connections—to other characters in the novel, namely Little Billee, as well as to the audiences for whom Trilby performs as Madame Svengali. Thus, I contend, the novel demonstrates the ways in which hysteria becomes an effective way of pathologizing sympathetic and biological connections that are generally misunderstood, and recognizes the trance state as a platform for Trilby’s sympathetic agency—an agency that presses against Svengali’s attempts to diminish her willpower and her material body. When first introduced, Trilby is described as bearing herself with an “easy, unembarrassed grace, like a person whose nerves and muscles are well in tune, whose spirits are high” (du Maurier 8). She is an independent and modern woman—she works for a living, she smokes cigarettes, has sexual relationships with the male artists that paint her, and dresses in men’s clothing. The third-person narrator describes her as dressed in “the gray overcoat of a French infantry soldier” and “male slippers” and laments that it is a “pity” that Trilby isn’t a boy as she would have made a “singularly handsome” and “jolly one” (8). She is artless, natural, and without shame or fear: she asserts an “individual, independent subject-hood” (Coll 758) that is demonstrative of her “erotic attractiveness” and “powerful will” (Nunan n.pag). These characteristics are indicative of Trilby’s “resist[ance] [to] the formation of hetero-normative social bonds” (Coll 757) even as they are “celebrated as details that make [her] unique” (756). Her initial uninhibited way of life and the pressure it puts on the normative social structures of her time is eventually disrupted when she falls in love with a young artist, Little Billee. Her relationship with Little Billee signals her attunement to the social strictures she had previously disregarded. This attention is marked by Little Billee’s reaction upon seeing her posing nude for a fellow artist. Trilby reads his “shocked” expression and feels shame for the first time in her life: “She turned alternatively pale and red, pale and red all over, again and

19 Weliver argues that Trilby’s possession by Svengali is limited and that “[b]ecause her past identity and mannerisms are not abdicated while mesmerized, Trilby’s personality creates at least part of her image as La Svengali” (264). Weliver ultimately suggests that “Trilby rises above attempted methods of containment to author her own performance” (261).

34 again, as the thought grew up in her—and soon the growing thought became a torment” (45). Trilby’s blushing can be read as a reflexive or sympathetic action—an “involuntary” expression or gesture of emotional response of the “nervous system” (Wilson 70-71). Drawing on Darwin, Wilson explains that some “responses are native to the nervous system” and “function independently of will” (71). “No routine of habit, no effort of self-control will be able to override the reflexive impetus of the nervous system once activated by a strong emotion like terror or joy” or, in Trilby’s case, shame (71). For Darwin as well as contemporary neurophysiologists, blushing is “under the governance of the autonomic nervous system; the smooth muscles encircling the facial capillaries are relaxed under the influence of the sympathetic nervous system, allowing for greater blood flow to the face” (Wilson 75). Blushing is particularly unique, however, because it cannot be caused by any other action of the body—rather, it is a result of the influence of mind, or psychological action. In particular, blushing happens in response to what is perceived to be in another’s mind. As Darwin explains, “It is not the simple act of reflecting on our appearance, but the thinking of what others think of us, which excites a blush” (Expression of the Emotions 325). Not only is blushing a psychosomatic event, it is also intersubjective in that the “muscles, nerves, and blood cannot be separated from the thoughts and actions of another” (Wilson 76). For Mary Ann O’Farrell, the blush in particular is “an apparent sign of the body’s separable will and of the body’s willful intrusion into social orders” (15). In other words, the blush “facilitates the real work of manners” and, “betrays” a body that is acting against social restrictions (15). The “blush of embarrassment” both “supports and perpetuates the social scheme…[and] control[s] the flirtations of vice and virtue” (18). The reflexive action of the blush that Trilby experiences is directly tied to her shame and fear of Little Billee’s impression of her actions and the acknowledgement that she isn’t conforming to the traditional feminine norms of her social world. It also portends the sympathetic connections that Trilby later makes with both Svengali and Little Billee. Though she mends things with Little Billee, the “new-born feeling of shame” is unendurable for Trilby and she gives up sitting nude for artists. Coll sees this incident of “humiliation” as the “first serious blow to Trilby’s sense of cohesive self” (760). Just as the blushing— “pale and red all over, again and again”—marks her body’s reflexive action, Trilby also undergoes a “strange metamorphosis” after being observed modeling nude by Little Billee (49):

35 [S]he grew thinner, especially in the face, where the bones of her cheeks and jaws began to show themselves, and these bones were constructed on such right principles (as were those of her brow and chin and the bridge of her nose) that the improvement was astonishing, almost inexplicable…she lost her freckles as the summer waned and she went less into the open air. And she let her hair grow, and made of it a small knot at the back of her head…her mouth, always too large, took on a firmer and sweeter outline, and her big British teeth were so white and regular that even Frenchmen forgave them their British bigness. And a new soft brightness came into her eyes that no one had ever seen there before. (48) Trilby’s sympathetic response to her feelings for Little Billee, made visible through her material body, transform her from boyish and athletic to the conventional nineteenth-century British woman. She loses her freckles, grows out her hair, becomes pale; even her teeth take on a “regular” Britishness. As she emerges as a “more properly feminine, and more ‘ladylike,’” character, she becomes more attractive to the men around her (Coll 760). Little Billee, for instance, ardently “campaign[s]” for her hand in marriage after her sympathetic bodily alterations bind her more closely to “the standards of the day” (760). Trilby’s bodily changes are especially appealing to Svengali, who is most aware of her transformation. He frequently comments on her new appearance, especially her thinness: “‘Ach Drilpy,’ he would say, on a Sunday-afternoon, ‘how beautiful you are! It drives me mad!...I like you thinner; you have such beautiful bones!...And, ach! what a beautiful skeleton you will make!’” (49). As she loses flesh, the internal structures of her body becomes more visible; the more skeletal Trilby is representative of Svengali’s desire to “discipline” her into a more “ordered bodily comportment” through his mesmeric influence (Coll 756). As Coll argues, “Svengali’s hypnosis of Trilby…can be seen as a literalization, or condensation, of the effects that accumulate simply by living in a world that demand[s] of her to be more British, more ladylike, more regular, more ‘in her right mind’ than she would otherwise choose to be” (Coll 761). As Trilby shrinks, she is subsumed into the Svengali, the foreign other, rather than into Little Billee, the Englishman. As Trilby takes Svengali’s name and performs the role of his wife, she is materially reduced into his mouthpiece— a “disembodied voice” that Coll describes as a “non-singular and singularly non-existent” subjectivity (743).

36 Svengali’s fascination with this new Trilby depends on her sympathetic body, made materially visible and malleable, through her increasing thinness and her sympathetic blushing to Little Billee’s “shaming” of her. This impressionability is also exhibited through her nervous system and in her responses to Svengali’s mesmerism. Trilby suffers from a “neuralgia in her eyes” that “generally lasted twenty-four hours” at a time (du Maurier 27). Svengali, a world-class mesmerist, offers to cure “Trilby’s sufferings” (27). Perhaps because of her “hysteric” eyes— “red with weeping” with “great black rings round them”—Trilby is especially susceptible to Svengali’s hypnosis. Much like El Râmí in Corelli’s The Soul of Lilith, Svengali’s “self- indulgent and highly-strung…bundle of nerves” is able to connect through his gaze to Trilby’s own “impressionable nature” (29). Once made, this connection is lasting for Trilby, who can never quite be rid of his name, which “went ringing in her head and ears till it became an obsession, a dirge, a knell, an unendurable burden” (29). Trilby’s friend Taffy and her fiancé Little Billee warn her against both her own susceptibility and Svengali’s powers, explaining that Svengali’s use of hypnotism is unnatural: “He mesmerized you; that’s what it is— mesmerism! ...they get you into their power, and just make you do any blessed thing they please—lie, murder, steal—anything! And kill yourself in to the bargain when they’ve done with you! It’s just too terrible to think of!” (29). Taffy’s warning foreshadows Trilby’s fate to the reader—especially as the story continues. Trilby’s neuralgia of the eye suggests a potential nervous disorder that resembles the other “hysterical” symptoms she acquires as a result of her interactions with Svengali. Under his hypnosis, Trilby loses all control of her bodily movements. When Svengali orders her to open her eyes, keep her mouth closed, and stay seated, the “spellbound” Trilby can only do as instructed, until Svengali consciously “sets her free” (28). His hypnotism, however, does cure her of her eye pain—in a method similar to that used by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud to cure nervous disorders in their patients.20 Hammond would diagnose Trilby’s response to Svengali’s mesmerism as a form of hysteria called “catalepsy,” which is often mistaken for “trance- mediumship” (Hammond 123). Catalepsy is a “suspension of the understanding and of sensibility” where the muscles tend to “preserve for a long time any degree of contraction which

20 In Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud and Breuer discuss using hypnosis to cure hysterical symptoms. They explain that “each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked ” (6) and agree that hypnosis is an effective way to make a patient “more susceptible to a therapeutic suggestion” (7).

37 may be given to them. Thus if the arm of the cataleptic patient be extended it remains so for several minutes, sometimes hours” (115).21 He explains that cataleptics are often believed to be possessed and “such afflicted persons are by some authorities regarded as being under demoniac influence” (118). Trilby’s representation of possession as similar to how doctors represented cataleptic hysteria positions Svengali not only as a mesmerist, but also as a medical authority— who diagnoses and cures her hysterical symptoms, and uses his role as authority to capitalize on her sympathetic talents. While curing Trilby of her original neuralgia, Svengali uses his medical authority to take complete advantage of her body. Upon discovering that Trilby’s lungs and mouth are ideally made for singing, Svengali becomes obsessed with making the extremely tone-deaf Trilby into a classically trained singer. Through hypnotism, Svengali is able to achieve this goal, turning the innocent Trilby into the diva Madame Svengali. Under Svengali’s power, Trilby again suffers bodily alterations, reminiscent of hysterical symptomatology—her face becomes “narrower and longer, her eyes larger, and their expression not the same…she seemed taller and stouter, and her shoulders broader and more drooping” (122). Trilby’s cataleptic appearance is unrecognizable from the Trilby at the beginning of the novel. Her behavior too, is altered: she is “cold” and unlike her usual self. When running into Little Billee in the park, Trilby “cut him dead,” something the old Trilby “could never have done” (129). When Trilby is at last released from Svengali’s power by his death, it is revealed that she can no longer sing and she experiences symptoms that other characters interpret as “hysterical” in her grief over Svengali’s unexpected death. In fact, a doctor even diagnoses her with “some great nervous shock,” a diagnosis that the nurse agrees is “pretty safe” based on Trilby’s symptoms (139). Trilby is also declared witless due to her loss of memory regarding her singing career. She suffers rapid aging, “waxen whiteness” and “frosty wrinkles”—“all the straightness and elasticity seemed to have gone out of her” (144). These symptoms—of shock, lost memory, aging, and overall weakness—could, and most often would, be read as signifying hysteria, especially given Trilby’s earlier complaint of neuralgia in the eye, and the odd transformation of her body under Svengali’s influence. Furthermore, her recently possessed body does exhibit

21 Hammond also describes other symptoms of catalepsy: "The eyelids are sometimes wide open, at others gently closed; the pupils are dilated and do not respond to strong light; the respiration is slow, regular, but generally so feeble as to be perceived with difficulty; the pulse is usually almost imperceptible, but is rhythmical and sluggish; the face is pale, the mouth is half open, and the rigidity of the body and the coldness of the extremities add to the death-like appearance which impresses all beholders" (116).

38 signs of being a hysterical and nervous body: in addition to having trouble remembering, she experiences mood swings when confronted with her “marvelous musical career, and everything connected with it” (145). She also has trouble sleeping, eats little, and appears “ill and weak and worn out” (145). The doctors who visit her “could not say for certain what was the matter with her, beyond taking the very gravest view of her condition”; despite their various cures, her “insanity” and the accompanying “physical prostration” only increase (145). These symptoms eventually and unsurprisingly lead to her death. Trilby’s misdiagnosis, and the constant pathologizing of her body by medical men, seals her tragic fate. These doctors assume that once deprived of her husband and career, she loses her wits, whereas the narrative instead presents her nerves as destroyed by Svengali’s mesmeric cure. Under Svengali’s insidious care, her body was not only possessed, but also reduced to a more docile body22— something that would no doubt alter its physical responses. This is clear to the readers of the novel in ways that it isn’t clear to Trilby’s friends. It isn’t until after Trilby’s death that they learn that Trilby had been hypnotized by Svengali the entire time. As Svengali’s assistant Gecko explains: There were two Trilbys. There was the Trilby you knew, who could not sing one single note in tune. She was an angel of paradise. She is now! But she had no more idea of singing than I have of winning a steeplechase at the Croix de Berny. She could no more sing than a fiddle can play itself…Well, that was Trilby, your Trilby! that was my Trilby too…But all at once—pr-r-r-out! presto! augenblick! ...with one wave of his hand over her—with one look of his eye— with a word—Svengali could turn her into the other Trilby, his Trilby—and make her do whatever he liked…you might have run a red-hot needle into her and she would not have felt it…Well, that was the Trilby he taught how to sing…that Trilby was just a singing-machine—an organ to play upon—an instrument of music—a Stradivarius—a flexible flageolet of flesh and blood—a voice, and nothing more—just the unconscious voice that Svengali sang with… (Trilby 164- 165)

22 By “docile” body, I’m alluding to Michel Foucault’s terminology in Discipline and Punish, where he defines the docile as bodies produced through discipline, which “increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (138). I see Svengali’s mesmeric treatment of Trilby as representative of a larger social requirement or disciplining that transforms her body and makes it obedient to the accepted social norms for women of the period.

39 As it turns out, the hysterical symptoms experienced by Trilby were the result of her body being “play[ed] upon” by Svengali, as if her body were a musical instrument. That her symptoms are related to Svengali’s mesmeric hold over her doesn’t mean that spiritualist connection causes hysteria in women; rather the text, by assuring us that possession and hypnotism are real and by offering other examples of hysteria and sympathetic connection (like the neuralgia of the eye) that are unrelated to spiritualism, dismantles Maudsley and other medical psychologists’ (mis)diagnoses. After all, the doctors who diagnose Trilby have no understanding of her mesmeric connection to Svengali. The text is explicitly telling us that the doctors are misreading the female body with respect to hysteria. Nunan suggests that du Maurier himself was invested in the idea that “symptoms of hysteria do not necessarily denote mental weakness” (n.pag.). Citing a letter to his friend, Felix Moscheles, Nunan argues that du Maurier “explicitly links mesmerism with the concept of spiritual disembodiment” as well as the theories of psychical researcher Frederic Myers, who studied the similarities between hysterical individuals and the practice of mesmerism (n.pag).23 Myers argued that hysterical symptoms in patients or Spiritualists did not signify mental weakness; in fact, he asserted that symptoms of hysteria do not always indicate a “fragmented” or “disaggregated” psyche (53). In some cases, he states, “we are looking for integrations in lieu of disintegrations; for intensification of control, widenings of faculty, instead of relaxation, scattering, or decay” (Myers 53). For Myers “the widenings of faculty” in the hysterical patients can “reach the point where the vague name of hysteria must give place to the vague name of genius” (53). Trilby, Nunan concludes, is representative of du Maurier’s interest in Myers’ theories, and signals du Maurier’s attempt to “explore[] the implications of a non-pathological approach to emergences of the subconscious” (n.pag). Du Maurier’s work to negate a pathologizing view of hysteria is enhanced by comparing Trilby with the one character in the novel that does experience symptoms that could more obviously be recognized as “hysterical.” Little Billee’s hysteria offers a sharp contrast to those symptoms experienced by Trilby. After she refuses to marry him, Little Billee experiences a complete collapse: he “gasped and screamed and fell down in a fit on the floor” (du Maurier 74). Not only are his symptoms more expressly related to an overly sensitive personality, but his loss

23 Nunan makes a persuasive case that du Maurier, though he was “skeptical of religion” and a disciple of Darwin, was “interest[ed] in the possibility that the undiscovered regions of the psyche would provide evidential proof of a spiritual realm continuous with the observable realities of the material plane” (n.pag).

40 of Trilby to Svengali also leaves him with epileptic seizures and brain fever. Moreover, his initial characterization contrasts with Trilby’s “in tune nerves” and strong sense of independence. Little Billee is described as “highly-strung, emotional, over-excitable, over-sensitive, and quite uncontrolled” (123). Most important are the ways in which Little Billee’s hysteria, like Trilby’s, is manifested through his body’s inability to feel. He describes his “curious symptom” as feeling “like some poor live bird or beast or reptile, a part of whose cerebrum (or cerebellum, or whatever it is) had been dug out by the vivisector for experimental purposes; and the strongest emotional feeling he seemed capable of was his anxiety and alarm about this curious symptom” (79). Ironically, it is only through seeing Trilby and hearing her sing that he is cured of his depression. Though Trilby’s “hysterical” symptoms progress and reduce her vitality and subjectivity, the sympathetic qualities that instigate her mesmeric trances also put pressure on a reading of Trilby as the “non-singular and singularly non-existent” automaton of Coll’s reading. As Madame Svengali, Trilby is more than a disembodied voice—she is a sympathetic agent that is able to put her audience under her spell, as though Svengali’s powers, like nerve-endings, reach out through Trilby to the larger audience. As if in a trance or “dream,” the audience experiences intense emotion— “half the people in the house were in tears”—in response to her “strangely sympathetic quality!” (115). The audience is described as a “storm” that “grew and spread and rattled and echoed—voice, hands, feet, sticks, umbrellas” in reaction to Trilby’s music (116).24 Little Billee is no exception. Upon hearing Trilby sing, “Little Billee had lost all control over himself, and was shaking with his suppressed sobs—Little Billee, who hadn’t shed a single tear for five long years!” (115). Making eye contact with Trilby, whose “dove-like eyes looked straight over Svengali’s head, straight in his own direction—nay at him—something melted in his brain, and all his long-lost power of loving came back with a rush” (116). The “magical bond” or sympathetic connection experienced by Trilby and Little Billee is remarkable as it restores Little Billee’s ability to feel. This connection is also reminiscent of the bond Wilson

24 Trilby’s ability to connect to the audience is similar to nineteenth-century descriptions of how some stage actors connected with their audience. Amy Lehman, for instance, draws connections between hysteria, stage performance, and mesmeric influence, explaining that the stage actress would emotionally abandon herself to the role and that this mimicked trance in a way that went “beyond acting into what could be described as hyst eria, in which the actress's normal sense of self is overtaken by another consciousness” (57). Thus, “[v]ocabulary common to descriptions of hysterics, trance performers and stage actors suggests conflation of these roles—the subjects 'lose themselves,' are 'possessed' or 'taken over' and furthermore might 'entrance' or 'mesmerize' those who watched them" (57). For a more thorough discussion regarding sympathy, stage-acting, and the theater of trance, see Chapter Four.

41 describes between Solomon and his father. That Trilby, despite being in a mesmeric trance herself, recognizes and reaches out feelingly to Little Billee and the audience at large shows that even though her mesmeric relationship to Svengali is problematic, it still opens Trilby up to new ways of communicating, particularly through her voice and music. Moreover, the same sympathetic body that makes Trilby easily possessed by Svengali is also the very thing that reveals to the readers that her life and agency are in jeopardy—something the doctors and her friends fail to discern repeatedly throughout the novel. Trilby’s symptoms, misdiagnosed by the doctors as hysteria, turn out to be her bodily response to intense communicative and sympathetic action. It is almost as if through her sympathetic connection with Little Billee, Trilby is able to take on his hysterical symptoms as her own. Much like the nervous connection she has with Svengali, Trilby demonstrates a bodily function of sympathetic reflex that puts her more “in tune” with the audience members and Little Billee. Not only does it allow her to connect with and cure Little Billee of his symptoms, it also gives her a platform to connect to and communicate with a larger social world.

RESISTING HYSTERIA: MARRYAT’S MEDICAL CRITIQUE While du Maurier’s text seeks to establish a way of reading hysterical symptoms as sympathetic connection, Florence Marryat’s The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs and her spiritual memoir, There is No Death (1891), offer a more direct critique of the medical community’s targeting of female spiritualists. Whilst displaying the powers of a sympathetic and bodily agency, Marryat is certainly cautious, being aware of the common diagnosis of hysteria to explain the unusual experiences of spirit contact. There is No Death is littered with small asides or comments that are meant to reassure her reader that what she is recounting is factual and real, rather than an illusion, delusion, or nervous disorder. In fact, she jokingly calls her visions “optical illusions,” but is careful to express that the circumstances under which they appeared were “something more than mere temporary disturbance of my visual organs” (There is No Death 47). She also remarks that “[m]any medical men attribute such experiences entirely to a diseased condition of mind or body” and relates a personal experience where her own sanity was called into question (56). After the birth of her daughter, Florence, whom she named after herself, Marryat explains that she experienced for a short time “physical weakness and nervous excitability” (64). She adds, tauntingly, that this post-labor weakness and excitability is

42 something to which “most medical men would have attributed any mysterious sights and sounds I might have experienced before” (64). Marryat, then, is no stranger to the risks that practicing spiritualism posed to young women. Not unlike Georgiana Weldon, discussed above, Marryat also utilizes the media to critique medical discourses. The purpose of Weldon’s public assault on Forbes Winslow and his cronies “was to vindicate her own sanity and to prove that a belief in spirits was less dangerous than a belief in ‘mad doctors’” (Walkowitz, “Science and the Séance” 16). Marryat’s objective is similar; in There is No Death, she seeks to make the doctors who disbelieve in spiritualism seem silly. She calls to task one skeptical doctor for being a “complete disbeliever in the existence of a God and a future life” as well as in “spiritualistic experiences” (There is No Death 56). She recounts that this "Dr. H—" could not be persuaded to believe, even in the face of evidence that he himself had agreed was undeniable. She asks him, “what he should think if he saw them with his own eyes,” and he replied that “he should say his eyes deceived him” (56). This "Dr. H—" is so intent on disbelieving in spirits that he would sooner mistrust his own senses. This tale of Marryat’s is an amusing anecdote, but also a very pointed one. She seems to suggest that it is more absurd or “mad” to disbelieve your own senses—eyes, ears, and touch—than it is to believe in the supernatural. By making him the butt of her playful tale, Marryat succeeds in undermining “Dr. H’s—” authority. Both Marryat and Weldon re-write the traditional narrative about lunacy doctors in order to draw attention to their unethical behavior. Appearing as she did in the streets, newspapers, and public courts, Weldon’s critiques were obviously more public than Marryat’s. And they were also successful because, as Walkowitz argues, she “satiriz[ed] the melodrama of sexual danger” by “renovat[ing] the older melodramatic script” (“Science and the Séance” 15). Elaine Hadley recognizes the way in which melodrama, and the “melodramatic mode,” was invoked in a “myriad of social contexts during the nineteenth century,” including texts and speeches by “theatrical audiences, paupers, married women, and reformers” (3). The melodramatic mode, as she defines it, was a cultural formation “crucially expressive in nonlinguistic forms of representation—physical gestures, political actions, visual cues…costumes and props” (4) and was a direct response to “social, economic, and epistemological changes” of the social climate (3). Weldon’s melodramatic display was thus used to put Forbes Winslow and other lunacy doctors on the defensive—turning the tables on the doctors by calling their ethics and authority

43 into question. Similarly, in The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs, Marryat challenges medical authority by using a melodramatic plotline to expose her audience to the horror of Hannah’s situation and draw attention to the ways in which medical men misdiagnose women to exert control and authority over them for the advancement of their own medical or scientific agenda, and even at times for increased sexual access. Marryat’s The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs tells the story of a physical medium who unwittingly gets caught up in and is destroyed by the machinations of Professor Ricardo and the spirit of his dead wife, Leonora. That the novel is about challenging male authority is established from the very first pages, when Ricardo, who is actually the Marchese de Sorrento, murders his adulterous wife. Worried that he behaved impulsively and mistrusting the instincts that triggered his action, he despairs that he murdered Leonora unjustly. Ricardo dedicates his life to learning the truth, explaining to his friend and confidant Doctor Steinberg, that his “one object in life now is to learn the truth—to hear if I were only the rightful agent to avenge a great wrong, or if my mad jealousy prompted me to commit a murder” (The Strange Transfiguration 20). “It is for this reason,” he confesses that he has studied “the Art of Magic” and, more specifically, the art of the séance (20). He seeks to speak to the spirit of his dead wife and learn the truth about her adulterous affairs. Unfortunately, nothing goes quite as he had planned, and Leonora ends up possessing Hannah in order to kill her murdering husband and enjoy the life that he unceremoniously cut short. Given the plot, one can easily read this novel as a cautionary tale that outlines the dangers of spiritualist practice for both spiritual mediums and those who become obsessed by its powers. Yet it also offers a critique of the medical debates surrounding spiritualism—suggesting that spiritualism is in fact real, and that medical men are acting in their own self-interest, and at the expense of female mediums, by diagnosing them as hysterical. The dangers of spiritualism are first introduced through Doctor Steinberg, Professor Ricardo’s co-conspirator. Upon learning about Ricardo’s interest in spiritualism, Steinberg warns him of its harmful effects: I conclude you study Witchcraft and Black Magic! Well! I am a Lutheran and have been reared to consider such studies wrong, and practiced only by the children of the Devil, but I know nothing of them myself. What is your object in thus ruining your health? I cannot imagine any sane man who has duties in this

44 world to fulfil, caring about such rubbish. True or false, leave it to those who have no more serious aim in life, and think only of your health and yourself. (12) Drawing on contemporary medical debates, Steinberg determines that Ricardo’s belief in spirits and his obsession with spiritualist practices is endangering his health and sanity. When Ricardo explains to Steinberg how he burns incense to attract spirits who “come, and sit down on the floor beside [him],” the doctor accuses Ricardo of having an over-active imagination, or of having exhausted his nerves: “You let your imagination run away with you,” he explains; “You work so hard all day and permit this morbid fancy to occupy your tired brain by night, until it has become in a measure, diseased” (22-23). Steinberg ultimately chalks up Ricardo’s experiences to “a species of delirium or mental intoxication,” and advises him to spend his time in less strenuous activities (23). Steinberg changes his ideas about spiritualism, however, after he agrees to sit in on one of the Professor’s séances. In the séance room, a materialized spirit physically touches him. While frightened by this experience, and at first doubtful that it was a spirit entity, he is eventually forced to conclude that “there was some force ulterior to my own in the little room last night” (44). Steinberg, a new convert, determines to aid Ricardo in his practice in order to help advance scientific research. In his willingness to engage in spiritualist practices, Steinberg is forced into accepting spiritualism as real. This narrative twist seems to be a direct comment on Marryat’s medical contemporaries, and recalls Gay’s accusation against the medical field of coming to conclusions about spiritualism without making any attempt to study it. By Ricardo’s converting Doctor Steinberg, Marryat seems to be engaging in a similar debate—demonstrating that Steinberg’s medical diagnoses are unfounded and the result of ignorance and inexperience. Nevertheless, in the novel, spiritualism is hazardous to the health, but not in the way that Maudsley, Forbes Winslow, or Doctor Steinberg believe it to be. This conclusion instead coincides with the view of doctors like Charles Williams, who observed that spiritualism was dangerous because of the antics of the spirits themselves, rather than because it created disturbances in the “nerve-centres.” In “Spiritualism and Insanity” (1910), Williams, like Maudsley and Forbes Winslow, does argue that spiritualism is dangerous to the health of its practitioners. For Williams, however, the insanity caused by spiritualism is primarily the result of a destroyed will taken over by an evil spirit. He shares the opinion of Reverend A. V. Miller, whom he quotes: “I feel no difficulty in agreeing that these cases of possession amount to

45 lunacy, but it is a lunacy arising from the fact that the spirits have responded to the invitation given to them in Spiritualism, and have entered in and taken possession of the mind, so that it is henceforth at all times subject to the abnormal impressions produced upon it by the spirits, who often appear to take fiendish delight in making sport of their victims” (Miller qtd. in Williams 47). We see this in Marryat’s novel through Leonora, whose possession of Hannah poses a threat to the safety and well-being of both Hannah and Ricardo. The novel doesn’t just re-evaluate the medical arguments that link spiritualism and insanity. It also suggests a critique of the medical practices that misdiagnose spiritualist women as hysterical. This misdiagnosis is demonstrated through the spiritual adventures of Hannah— whose physical and emotional care is neglected by the medical men around her. Hannah’s experiences as a medium are at first attributed to her idiocy. In her job at the boarding house, Hannah is often accused of being “daft” as well as clumsy (The Strange Transfiguration 42). Her employer, Mrs. Battleby, claims that Hannah “ought to be in the Hidiot Hasylum, if all had their doo” and attributes her idiocy to her spiritual powers. “Why!” Mrs. Battleby exclaims, “she’s done nothing since she come here, but ‘op about after the tables and chairs…she’ll set the cups and saucers and glasses spinning like tops. And then when I remonstrances with ‘er, she’ll cry like a ninny and say she’s not done nothing…which is all nonsense” (42). Hannah also sees “shadders” and hears “woices” that frighten her (47, 66). While Mrs. Battleby and Hannah do not understand her mediumistic powers, Professor Ricardo does. He and Steinberg recognize that Hannah is “countrified and stupid” and use that to their advantage, as Hannah is exactly the physical medium they’ve been looking for to aid in their séances and experiments (44). Unlike the well-educated, upper-middle-class Weldon, who was well-connected in the spiritualist world, Hannah’s lower-class status and concomitant lack of education further expresses her vulnerability and enables Marryat’s melodramatic critique of medical authority. Hannah is unable to protect herself from the men that wish to exploit her powers and essentially hold her hostage for their scientific inquiry. Steinberg and Ricardo waste no time in publicly diagnosing Hannah with “hysteria”—a finding that is believable to both Mrs. Battleby and Hannah, who do not know any better. As the professor explains to Mrs. Battleby, “I attribute the whole business to the state of Hannah’s nerves—that she is a victim to what we call hysteria” (49). He persuades Mrs. Battleby that Hannah can be cured of her “nervous tremors” and the “St. Vitus’s dance” (53) she suffers from

46 by “giv[ing] way to the feeling” (55). By instigating her spiritual powers in a formal séance, they hope they will relieve her of her daily hauntings. But, more importantly, under the cover of “curing” her of her nervous disease, the Professor and Doctor gain “access” to her body and its powers for their studies and to initiate contact with Leonora. Intentionally misleading Hannah into thinking they are curing her of her ‘illness,’ they exploit her power in their spiritual séances. But Ricardo and Steinberg, comfortable in their medical authority over Hannah, underestimate the perceptive powers of her employer. Mrs. Battleby, uneasy about the amount of time Hannah is spending with the gentlemen, eventually suspects that Hannah is being “used” and “accessed” in a different way entirely. Mrs. Battleby collates the spiritual goings-on with a sexual threat. In a letter to Hannah’s mother that equates this secretive behavior with Hannah’s complete ruination, she writes that “there is goings on hupstairs wich I don’t approve of, and I’m afraid she ain’t no good with the gentlemen” (91). Mrs. Battleby begins to question the medical diagnosis offered by Steinberg as a subterfuge for covering up lewd or immoral behavior. Despite her earlier comments about Hannah’s idiocy, she recognizes that Hannah is “hignorant and hidle,” but as she explains to her neighbor, “she ain’t no more hill than you or me!” (87). Skeptical of the doctor’s diagnosis, Mrs. Battleby spies on the Professor and Doctor only to conclude that “[t]hey were practicing Sorcery in this mysterious little chamber, and had dragged the poor gal, with her dancing tables and chairs, and her ‘shadders’ and ‘woices’ into it, with themselves” (89). Despite the not-so comforting assurance that the trio was engaging in “Sorcery” rather than sexual acts, Mrs. Battleby’s concerns about Hannah’s modesty aren’t unfounded. Once Hannah’s mother and Mrs. Battleby discover the séances taking place in Ricardo’s rooms, they both disown Hannah. Worried that losing Hannah will put an end to his experiments, Ricardo marries her in order to retain access to her mediumistic powers. True to the diagnosis of hysteria and to the assumption that she does have spiritual powers, Hannah experiences some odd nervous and bodily behavior during the séances conducted by Steinberg and Ricardo. In the first séance that Hannah participates in, her body is possessed by a spirit control who explains how his possession works: “I am talking now through the medium, that is, I am using her vocal organs” (58). The spirit proves this by using Hannah’s vocal cords to speak while Hannah drinks a glass of water. Upon waking from this experience, Hannah becomes “hysterical”—she rushes “helter-skelter” and falls into a chair “kicking her huge feet against the floor” (61). When she composes herself, she tells the Professor her

47 symptoms: “I do feel so queer-like, as if my legs was all bruised. And my eyes seem weighted, as if I had lead on ‘em…I’ve got no use of my legs at all” (61). Moreover, she begins not only to witness tables moving and plates slipping, but starts seeing “a nasty black-eyed creetur, with a beastly voil” in the house, which turns out to be the ghost of Leonora (62). Here, Marryat represents Hannah as experiencing hysterical symptoms, possibly as a way to demonstrate how the signs of mediumistic powers look a lot like the symptoms of hysteria. As the séances continue, Hannah becomes increasingly available to the whims of the spirits, and her behaviors and her looks become altered. Hannah changes—her speech and manners improve and her low spirits disappear. Moreover, “a kind of brightness had settled over her features, which much redeemed their homeliness,” and “the gross humility that had overpowered the girl, entirely disappear[ed], to give place to a species of pride in her attainments as a medium” (141). She becomes “almost dominant in her manner” as if “her soul had but just waked up and was astonished at its own power” (156). Though it is hard to tell where Hannah begins to lose herself entirely, as the Professor and Doctor give her lessons in manners and speech, it does become clear to the reader that Hannah’s body is being possessed during the séances by Leonora. This discrepancy over who is controlling Hannah’s body complicates the question of bodily agency—almost implying that Hannah and Leonora both have and are denied agency in equal degrees. Certainly, Marryat recognizes the confusion of identity associated with spirit possession and manifestation. In Marryat’s accounts of spiritual phenomena in There is No Death, she explains that “to those who do believe in the possibility of communion with disembodied spirits, my story will be interesting perhaps, on account of its dealing throughout in a remarkable degree with the vexed question of identity and recognition” (9). Marryat works to unravel the complicated question of who/what the spirit/being is that is manifested in the séance. For Marryat in particular, during spirit manifestation or possession, the spirit and the medium it inhabits are interchangeable. In one example, Marryat describes a visit from the spirit of her daughter, Florence, who the sitters all agreed “greatly resembled her medium” (110). Florence, seemingly perturbed by the remarks, proceeded to lead Marryat to the drawing-room where Miss Showers, the medium, was “reposing in an arm-chair” (110). To Marryat’s surprise, Miss Showers “appeared to be shrunk to half her usual size…Her arms had disappeared, but putting my hands up the dress sleeves, I found them diminished to the size of those of a little child…The

48 same miracle had happened to her feet, which only occupied half her boots” (110). Marryat explains this phenomenon, stating that “these strong physical manifestations” were produced by the “borrow[ing], for the time being, from her life, and could never (so [the spirits] informed me) put the whole of what they borrowed back again” (112). In this case, the spirit and the medium are continually borrowing and sharing the same material and altering one another with each exchange. Thus, as her spirit daughter explains to her, “I have borrowed the other half from [the medium], which combined with contributions from the sitters, goes to make up the body in which I show myself to you… You see that I can detach certain particles from her organism for my own use, and when I dematerialize, I restore these particles to her, and she becomes once more her normal size” (113). As Sarah Willburn explains, Marryat here “offers a scenario in which Miss Showers, while still Miss Showers, is also inhabited by another creature…that is stealing away or ‘borrowing’ from her vitality and not leaving her body as the spirit found it. Her identity is not single or fixed at this moment” (85-56). Thus, identity is never clear, as the physical material and consciousness’ of Hannah and Leonora are in constant exchange. Leonora also plays with this idea of a blurred identity. On the one hand, Leonora declares that Hannah’s body is “a lovely tool”; on the other hand, she alludes to the fact that her actions while possessing Hannah’s body are Hannah’s as well. In an argument with Steinberg, she tauntingly suggests that Hannah “didn’t seem so very pure, whilst she was holding her secret assignations, unknown to you, with Gueglielmo [her supposed lover], did she? nor so unsophisticated when she gave séances to attract the aristocracy to her house, and bound them to secrecy because you so highly disapproved of such doings” (The Strange Transfiguration 273). Hannah is eventually possessed full-time by Ricardo’s murdered wife Leonora, who seeks revenge, power, and wealth and intends to get those things through the use of Hannah’s body. Leonora becomes so consumed with living her desired lifestyle that she ends up murdering Ricardo and profiting off of Hannah’s skill as a medium. She even seduces Doctor Steinberg into marrying her. Hannah as Leonora is improved—she is more socially mobile, becomes educated, and has an assertive manner that would have been impossible for Hannah to assume on her own. Nevertheless, Hannah’s possession does not leave Hannah and her body without agency. We can read Hannah’s improvements—socially and physically—based on Marryat’s theories on blurred identity, and Leonora’s cryptic comments as more than just Leonora’s manipulations. Moreover, Hannah’s own body exerts an agency that is beyond Leonora’s control as the latter struggles to

49 maneuver Hannah’s larger body and its physicality in the world. “It is so difficult to train her large, flat tongue to lisp the soft, Italian syllables,” she complains, “or to play the coquette with those enormous hands of hers and those splay feet” (273). Hannah’s physicality operates independently of Leonora, and even of Hannah herself. Leonora’s use of Hannah is not a usurping of Hannah’s agency; Leonora’s séances prove that this is not the case. Hannah’s mediumistic talents—imbedded in her biological and sympathetic function, much like Trilby’s—are still active in spite of Leonora’s “control” of her body. In response to a question about whether or not it was possible for her to “call back the spirits of the Dead,” Hannah/Leonora replies, “No one can call them back…But they come all the same, when they get the opportunity” (235). This, we learn, is definitely the case, as “an old man’s face” hovers above each of the séances Hannah holds for Lady Loreley and her aristocratic friends (236). Hannah’s trance state, which calls forth spirits, also works while she is asleep; it functions similarly to the “forced” trance state that Ricardo and Steinberg place Hannah under in their initial experiments by “treat[ing] her with Ilex aquifolium, Conium maculatum, and Æthusa cynapium, which drugs, though most valuable in themselves, always have the effect of producing a quiescent state in the patient, after which they are unable to recall what has passed” (81). In this somnambulic trance state, as Hammond explains, “the subject performs acts of which there is no complete consciousness, and often none at all. Consequently, there is little or no subsequent recollection” (33). In somnambulism, the whole brain is in a deep sleep; however, the spinal cord, and thus the nervous system, remains awake and, most importantly, the automatic nervous system is “unduly exalted in power” (33). It seems that in spite of Hammond’s and Williams’ desire to deprive the somnambulic and possessed body of consciousness, and thus to assert their own conception of agency, it is impossible to do so because, as they both admit, the “nervous system[] remains awake.” Thus, even in sleep, Hannah’s nervous system can reach out and connect to the otherworld. “More than once,” we are told, “as his wife slumbered by his side, [Steinberg] had fancied he heard a faint, gasping whisper on the air, in the tones of his old friend” (The Strange Transfiguration 251). Indeed, Ricardo, like the other spirits that are drawn to Hannah, continues to come at every opportunity. Eventually, when Steinberg finally learns of Hannah’s séances, and crashes one, he sees Ricardo’s materialized spirit. It is here that Steinberg learns of Ricardo’s murder by Hannah’s hand. And it is Hannah’s body that ultimately restores Hannah to herself and sends Leonora back

50 to the spirit world. As she moves away from Steinberg and their argument, she slips on the carpet and "the great unwieldy body, unable to recover itself, had rolled with a scream of terror, down to the very hall, where it lay inert and unconscious" (276). Despite the changes in Hannah, the doctor doesn’t immediately recognize that she is possessed. He questions her treatment of past relations, and can’t understand her inability to recognize the people she used to know like Joe Brushwood, her former fiancé, who cast her off when it was discovered she was working as a medium for the Doctor and Professor. When Joe comes to visit her as the wife of Steinberg, Hannah doesn’t recognize him or his name and refuses to hear his petition to return home to her dying mother. Steinberg wonders whether these behavioral and physical alterations are the result of “her unexpected rise in life and position,” and the high-class companions she makes as his wife (246). He also considers the possibility that the séances she was involved in had taken their toll on Hannah and attempts to remove her completely from the practice of spiritualism “by keeping her quiet and free from all these trances and controls,” in the hopes that she might one day “return to the amiable and child-like disposition she had enjoyed” (250). The Doctor eventually recognizes the changes in Hannah, and confronts her as Leonora—but not in time to save Hannah’s life. Steinberg is left to mourn Hannah and to face his role in causing her death. Before her fall, Leonora accuses Steinberg of instigating and neglecting Hannah’s mediumistic possibilities: “If you had not made her sit, night after night, to minister to your pleasure, until her brain and body were both so wearied, that it was an easy matter for me, or any other who had chosen, to oust her spirit and take its place,” she argues, then these events might have been prevented (272). As a doctor, she concludes, he and the professor should have considered the “consequences” of making Hannah “sit” until she lost “her spirits and her strength and her power to resist” (274).25

25 Williams claims that “the pursuit of Spiritualism” is injurious primarily because “it weakens and destroys the Will-Power” (12). The constant need to have “perfect passivity in the minds of the sitters” leads to a “chronic passivity,” which allows the minds of the medium to be particularly open to spirit possession, or inept at ignoring and dismissing “the silly, wicked and insane thoughts and suggestions which come into the minds of most of us daily” (18). In the spiritualist with a diminished will, the spirits or “morbid thoughts or suggestions” find a mind that is “‘prepared’ and therefore favourable soil” (18). Mediums are at special risk according to Williams, because they are “developed” and thus more prone to trance states. He describes how the medium is easily “exhausted” and “if it happens to be a woman perhaps she cannot sit at a circle again for weeks or months” (32). Sometimes, when the séance is over the medium is “found with face pale as death, and lying back apparently lifeless on the chair,” or “with mouth drawn, lips and cheeks perfectly livid, quite unconscious, and yet breathing so heavily that to the eye of a medical man he or she presents all the symptoms which are present in an apoplectic fit!” (32-33). While Williams takes these effects to be a strong argument not just for spiritualism causing insanity, but also in “favour of spiritualism and the phenomena of the séance-room,” he argues that “these phenomena and these mediums are under

51 Leonora’s words linger as the narrative closes, and reveal the fears and dangers of dabbling in spiritualism. Steinberg’s intentional misdiagnosis of Hannah as hysterical makes visible the fear women spiritualists had of being dismissed as having disordered or excitable nerves, rather than spiritual powers. It also provides a larger critique of how these men use their medical authority to exert control in ways that are just as dangerous, if not more so, than actual spirit possession. Ricardo’s desire to possess Leonora is so great that he murdered her in order to obtain it—although, as Marryat points out, even in the spirit world, Leonora was beyond his control. Likewise, Steinberg succumbs to his desire to control and possess Hannah. He becomes jealous when he discovers Hannah holding secret séances for aristocrats, while simultaneously refusing to hold private séances for him. He also uses possessive language in reference to both her and her mediumistic powers. In observing one of her séances, he exclaims, “What a gift she possessed! What a power to set her above the ordinary run of women!” and feels pride “to remember that she was his—that no one could take her from him—that Hannah was his wife, and his medium for evermore” (256). His desire to possess the knowledge of Hannah’s skill, the use of her powers, and her body results instead in Hannah’s possession by Leonora and her eventual death. Both Ricardo and Steinberg learn that the spiritual and bodily agency of Hannah/Leonora trumps their own patriarchal and medical authority. *** The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs and Trilby both call bodily diagnosis into question, while complicating the relationship between hysterical symptomology and the sympathetic capabilities of the body’s organic function. By bringing both Hannah Stubbs’ and Trilby’s experiences with possession to light by using Wilson’s theories of the sympathetic nervous system, we can understand how misreading the body as hysterical can obscure other possibilities that would emphasize the subject’s greater capacity for sympathetic and personal connection. After all, it is through Trilby’s mesmeric connection with Svengali that she is able to connect with and cure Little Billee’s hysteria. Likewise, Hannah’s natural sensitivity to the ghostly world—whilst harmful to her in the end—furthers connections, enhances her own

the control and patronage of Some One Else just the opposite of Divine, and that He also has power!” (33). This certainly becomes the case with Hannah, who not only experiences these post-possession symptoms, but also loses more of herself to Leonora as the novel progresses.

52 confidence and education, and connects her with, for the first time, two “friends” that take a real interest in her abilities. Moreover, it is by loo king at the physical bodies and symptoms of these characters, that we, as readers, come to understand the real cause, or at least Marryat’s take on the cause of their symptoms. Wilson’s theory of sympathetic nerves, in particular, offers a productive way of understanding female mediums and their “hysterical symptoms” as related to and signifying their interactions with others in the world without dismissing the material body. In both Trilby and The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs, the eponymous female protagonists experience seemingly “hysterical” symptoms that develop from their relationships with those around them. In the midst of these interactions, the men of the text insist on reading Hannah and Trilby’s bodies as hysterical, either for their own ends or by their own inattention to what these women’s bodies are actually doing or communicating. Ultimately, in both texts, the (mis)reading of women’s bodies, whether intentional or unintentional, implies a larger critique of the treatment of women mediums’ bodies and their sympathetic proclivities. Our biologies tell a story about our experience in the world, and a closer inspection of those textual bodies may tell a more complex story than someone like Maudsley would see or accept. By looking at the biological and organic functions of women’s bodies and their symptoms, we as readers recognize not simply a loss of control to a biological mania, or the abuses of men; instead, we perceive new and radically different ways through which bodies communicate with the world and express their own agency.

53 CHAPTER 2: “THE FACE OF THE BICYCLIST”: TECHNOLOGY, NERVES, AND FIN-DE- SIÈCLE FEMINISM

Alice Meynell, in her short, observational essay “The Woman in Grey” (1896), asserts that “the figure of a woman on a bicycle in Oxford Street” reveals the problematic logic of late- nineteenth-century hereditary theory. Scientific thought of the time limited the possibilities of women’s improvement by invoking the “influence of heredity,” a term Meynell borrows from an unnamed source (239). Meynell points out that “[p]rofessors take it for granted” by their own “slow process of reason” that “women derive from their mothers and grandmothers, and men from their fathers and grandfathers” (236). As a result, women continue to pass down their physical weakness and domestic instincts to their female children, who inherit none of their fathers’ logic or strength. For Meynell, the woman in grey contradicted the basic biological theory that women had limited physical and mental capabilities; she had a “watchful confidence” and “was immediately dependent on no nerves, but her own” (239). Inspired by the cycling woman in grey, Meynell indulges in her feminist critique, turning these unnamed professors’ understanding of women’s lack of physical strength and mental acuity against them. Furthermore, she suggests that it is the professors’ reasoning skills that are lacking when they developed a faulty theory that “fosters the ignorance of women” and justifies and excuses their subjection (237). Meynell concludes her essay by suggesting that women are not only capable of developing exceptional skills (like confidently and independently riding a bicycle), but that their sons as well as their daughters can benefit from the liberated woman’s positive experiences and education.26 "From the lessons of an unlessoned mind,” she writes, “a woman's heirs-male are not cut off in the Common Law of the generations of mankind. Brutus knew the valour of Portia was settled upon his sons" (239). The qualities of the cycling woman in grey—her “watchful confidence,” “common security,” as well as “the judgment, the temper, the skill, the perception, the strength of men and horses” she acquires and utilizes in her riding—are qualities for future generations to admire and emulate (238). The woman on the wheel demonstrates that women’s abilities are not and need not be curtailed by their contemporaries’ deterministic and

26 In The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin theorizes that secondary sex characteristics “are present in both sexes” with each transmitting “the characters proper to its own male and female sex to the hybrid offspring of either sex” (263). In other words, Darwin believed, similarly to Meynell, that “equal transmission of characters to both sexes is the commonest form of inheritance” (266).

54 oversimplified theories of heredity. Through her ability to ride a bicycle, the woman in grey, who had been “educated to sit still,” shows that any woman is capable of “doing what nothing in her youth could well have prepared her for” (238-239). Thus, the lady bicyclist allows Meynell to re- write hereditary and biological theory, and woman's role in it, as well as to advocate for the “unsure condition of liberty and content[ment]” that women were clamoring for (239). The bicycle, the inspirational technology of movement through which Meynell makes her feminist argument, became the impetus that provided women with access to freedom, education, and public spaces. “The Woman in Grey” is just one example of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century discourse on the relationship among women’s rights, the bicycle, and medicine and biology. While the bicycle became a springboard for early feminist thinking, not just for Meynell, but for New Women in general who “signaled new, or newly perceived forms of femininity” and advocated “women’s right to education, employment, and full citizenship,” women cyclists also garnered much ill-attention (Richardson and Willis 1). Prior to and during the “bicycle boom” in the 1890s, a lady who cycled was a threat to late-Victorian masculinity and physical ability and was said to have “hopelessly unsexed herself” (Campbell Davidson 10). As Lillias Campbell Davidson wrote in her Handbook for Lady Cyclists (1896): Cycling women were regarded with a kind of pious horror by society and by the public at large…she was stared at and remarked upon in town, and hooted and called after in country districts. It was supposed that no woman would take to so masculine an amusement unless she was fast, unwomanly, and desirous of making herself conspicuous; and accordingly all cycling women had to suffer from this supposition. They had to endure hard things spoken and written about them, and they had to harden their hearts against much public scorn, in order to persist in what they found a delightful form of exercise and recreation, to which their common sense told them they were quite as much entitled as were men (10). This negative attitude was evident in popular culture, which depicted images of the mannish New Women on bicycles. It was also expressed through poems, short stories, and even medical discourses. One example, Jerome K. Jerome’s satirical spoof on women cyclists, “Women on Wheels” (1905), blames the bicycle for “undermining the femininity of the nation,” suggesting

55 that women cyclists neglected their wifely and maternal duties, and even participated in sexual encounters with their male bicycle instructors (35). Indeed, the pioneering woman cyclist, not unlike depictions of the New Woman, “was seen either as a bespectacled, physically degenerate weakling or as a strapping Amazon who could outwalk, outcycle and outshoot any man” (Richardson and Willis 13). Both depictions had negative implications for the women who hoped to improve their general health through cycling, to utilize cycling as a form of transportation, or to symbolically imbue the bicycle with the ability to liberate all of womankind. Such depictions of lady cyclists “embodied hopes and fears about racial development” and resulted in much study of the health and bodies of women cyclists and of cycling’s overall influence on women’s reproductive organs, looks, and dress (13). Women cyclists were often criticized because of the bodily alterations created by physical exercise, even as the improved muscle tone developed from cycling was praised for improving the constitution and the delicacy of women’s nerves. On the one hand, critics discouraged women from cycling because of their perceived natural feminine weakness, or because it was deemed unladylike; on the other hand, proponents of the bicycle credited it as the “rescuer of woman from her special ills: oppressive clothing, inactivity and nervous-reproductive weakness” (Whorton 80). As Patricia Marks explains, the bicycle enabled the New Woman to exercise her “power more fundamentally, changing the conventions of courtship and chaperonage, of marriage and travel” (Marks 174). Scientific studies of the time linked the bicycle to a number of nervous and physical disorders like “Bicycle Face,” the set expressions and strained eyes of female bicyclists as they rode. Often associated with stressful riding and the effort of balancing and steering, bicycle- riding was thought to tax the senses and overly exert the nervous system, as were such bicycle injuries as “Bicycle Fright,” “Cyclist Figure,” and “Cyclist’s Neurosis.” One nineteenth-century female physician and novelist, Arabella Kenealy, argued that these various cycling diseases could even alter personality. Combined with the development of muscle, these injuries could detract from feminine sensitivity and result in a “loss of charm, of mysteriousness, of gentleness” (Marks 175). Kenealy goes so far as to claim that the physical exertion of bicycle-riding could redirect energy necessary for procreation, endangering evolution as well as the existence of the human race—an argument that directly contests Meynell’s.

56 In this chapter, I juxtapose literary texts that incorporate cycling women like Meynell’s “Woman in Grey,” Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897), and Frances E. Willard’s autobiographical account How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (1895), with these various conversations on women’s cycling, specifically the scientific and medical discourses about women’s loss of femininity and physical deterioration, as well as first-hand accounts of cycling by lady cyclists. Much as in Chapter One, where I consider the ways in which medical debates influenced readings of the organic function of female spiritual mediums, in this chapter I explore how nineteenth-century physicians read evidence of women’s bodily and biological changes, arguing that ideological assumptions about bicycle-riding affected their interpretations of that evidence. These late-Victorian physicians’ interpretations also impacted how most contemporaries understood and evaluated the bicycle’s biological, social, and political impact. Controversy surrounding the lady cyclist was manifested along multiple fronts, all of which concerned themselves with women’s bodies—first, that cycling resulted in a lack of charm and modesty, as depicted in women’s unskilled riding and choice in clothing; second, that women cyclists developed an unappealing or masculine physique; and, third and in congruence with the first two oppositions, that cycling was unhealthy for women. Though the lady cyclist’s health and body was up for debate regularly in medical journals and pamphlets, some literary texts sought to transform these negative medical discourses about female cyclists’ bodies. For example, in Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl, the body of the protagonist, Juliet, and her cycle are intrinsically connected. Allen’s depictions of the bicycle and of the female cyclist re-purpose popular discourses on cycling, demonstrating instead that the woman’s material body is made better and more powerful as a result of her bicycling. Examining these literary arguments alongside popular medical discourses on the lady cyclist—both positive and negative—reveals a model of material agency, one that illustrates a female body that is powerful, rather than fragile, one that allows women to rewrite the limiting medical and evolutionary arguments about women’s bodies in more positive terms. That technology can alter and improve the body and its interaction is not an unusual concept for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Tim Armstrong notes, “[a]t the end of the nineteenth century, it could still be said that many technological developments were modeled on the body—particularly the deficient body, the telephone emerging from research on the mechanism of the ear; the typewriter from a desire to let the blind write by touch; film from

57 persistence of vision” (81). For those alive at the turn of the century, technology offered “a re- formed body, more powerful and capable, producing…a fascination…with the interface between the body and the machine” (78). In such representations, the distance between the human body and technology collapses; the body is mechanical and the mechanical is an “extension or development of the body within an evolutionary perspective” (80). As Armstrong so eloquently puts it, “we are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men” (83). For example, the telephone may be based on the human ear, but it also “changes the structure of the brain” (83). Considering technology like the bicycle within this “evolutionary perspective,” this chapter tells a revised history of the bicycle and its impact on women. Most notably, I argue that the bodily transformations and connections women experience as a result of their technology-use is a material expression of feminine agency. By examining the interaction between Allen’s protagonist, Juliet, and her bicycle, I elaborate the relationship between women’s bodies, sensitivity, and nervous systems and the technologies that allowed them to enter and participate in the public world. Much like the bicycle, communication technologies also impacted the way in which women considered their bodies. In fact, the “modern-style two-wheeler triggered revolutions both social and technological” and was viewed in similar terms as other technological advancements like the telephone, typewriter, and telegraph (Herlihy 3). In The Type-Writer Girl, for example, Juliet is shaped by her type-writer, just as she is by her bicycle. Each brings her into and helps her to mediate her experiences within a more public, less domestic space. Analyzing these connections, I hope in this chapter to signal ways of considering how the bodily discourses surrounding these emergent technologies impacted discourses on women’s rights, employment, and mobility.

WOMEN ON TWO WHEELS: THE HISTORY OF WOMEN’S CYCLING Before the Bicycle Boom of the 1890s, when women’s cycling became not only possible, but popular, the bicycle was primarily built for and used by men. The earliest bicycle prototype was created in 1813 by Karl von Drais, who was determined to invent a human-powered vehicle. It was essentially a mechanical four-wheeled carriage that could carry up to four passengers: “One or more riders supplied the motive power by working a cranked axle with their legs and feet, while another handled the steering by means of a tiller” (Herlihy 19). With this prototype

58 being difficult to operate, and not practical for the independent traveler, Drais later developed the “laufmaschine” or “running machine,” more commonly known as the “velocipede” in 1817 (21). The velocipede consisted of a wooden bar that was supported by two wheels; the rider rested on a saddle attached to the bar and “propelled [the machine] by thrusting his [sic] feet alternately against the ground” (Alderson 12). Though “the idea of man in self-propelled motion” dates back much earlier than the velocipede, Drais’ machine was one of the first two-wheeled, or “light vehicle[s],” to be operated by “human muscular effort” (Alderson 11-12). Developed further by coachmaker Denis Johnson, the “hobby-horse,” a more elegant velocipede model, was released in 1818. The hobby-horse “sparked an unprecedented flurry of experimentation with human- powered vehicles” and created a public interest in bicycle development. The velocipede movement itself didn’t last too long: not only did riders get ridiculed for making use of the machine in public spaces, it was also difficult to use unless riding on the smoothest of roads. Moreover, the velocipede was thought to be dangerous to the rider; the London College of Surgeons condemned the machine, arguing that it could cause “ruptures”—severe cramps and hernias—in the cyclist (Herlihy 38). But, by the 1860s, the velocipede gave way to the invention of the French bicycle—similar in shape to the velocipede because it boasted two wheels, a saddle, and handlebar, different in that it had pedals attached to its front axle. The first bicycle, also known as the “boneshaker,” was of simple design, but (as its name implies) extremely uncomfortable to ride, especially on common cobblestone drives. The boneshaker, like the velocipede, was replaced by a high-wheeled machine called the Ordinary by 1870. While the velocipedes and the bicycles that had come before had wheels of almost equal size, the Ordinary sported a very large front wheel that was as much as 48 inches in diameter. The idea behind the Ordinary was to decrease the overall weight of the machine and make it possible to achieve faster speeds (Alderson 37). These were necessary alterations to make the bicycle more valuable to the men of privilege who were the primary patrons of cycling. These men were not only interested in collecting the newest and best bicycle models, as the “latest toy[s] of fashion”; they also desired these machines for bicycle-racing—a popular sport that came with the advent of the two-wheeler (Rubenstein, “Cycling” 59). Men of the lower classes, though they were intrigued by the racing scene, were prevented from purchasing a bicycle of their own and taking up the sport because bicycles were much too expensive. As David Rubenstein notes, “the desire to cycle would have been inhibited by cost and also by the

59 long working hours, lack of paid holidays, and disinclination for physical exercise which normally accompanied life spent at manual labour” (59). However, those of the middle class who had time, money, and desire were big supporters of the cycling craze. Popular among professional men like doctors and clergymen, cycling became an “ideal form of middle class self-expression, especially for those who wished to be in the forefront of social behavior at the time when values were fast changing and active forms of recreation were becoming increasingly popular” (59). While the Ordinary, or high wheeler, flourished through the 1880s, working-class men, the elderly, and women more generally “longed to share in the joys of cycling without incurring the usual risks of serious bodily injury” (Herlihy 200). Both the boneshaker and the Ordinary were great advancements in the industry; however, they were perceived as completely unsuitable for genteel female use. The boneshaker, with its low maneuverability, was too rough a ride for most ladies of the time, and was very heavy for the few women who did attempt to take up the challenge. With the advent of the high-wheeled bicycle, women, in their long skirts, were prevented from riding the two-wheeled bicycles altogether, as they couldn’t perform the vault that was required to mount the machine. Moreover, even if a brave lady could make it onto the high mount, she had to be very careful not to fall off, for risk of serious injury. These women were forced to be contented with the use of the tricycle, which bicycle-makers released for women and older men. The introduction of improved tricycles by bicycle-makers “attract[ed] legions of wealthy patrons of both sexes and of all ages” (200). Indeed, up until 1886, one-third of the riders in England were tricyclists (Sturmey 11). Fortunately for women, the Ordinary, formerly the dominant bicycle on the market, was losing favor by the mid-1880s, as people suspected it was more dangerous than the bicycle trade had initially led them to believe. Bicycling World, a cycling magazine of the time, even wrote that “many a hardy and skillful bicyclist has been seriously and permanently injured by a forward fall off the high mount,” concluding that “this country needs safety bicycles for there is a large class of would-be riders who are deterred from enjoying the sport” (qtd. in Herlihy 226). The rising number of wannabe cyclists demonstrated a need for a two-wheeled machine that was both secure and appropriate for men of all ages and classes, as well as for those women who desired to enjoy the pleasures of riding. These desires led to a return to a lower-mount bicycle, known as the “Safety.” These bicycles included “rear-driving,” which propels the bicycle from

60 the back wheel rather than the front wheel, and the rubber or “pneumatic tyre,” released commercially in 1890 (Sturmey 11). The new “Safety” made cycling for a larger mass of people more possible; it also sported sophisticated mechanisms—gears, tires, and accessories—that were more “modern and efficient” (Rubenstein, “Cycling” 48). With the advent of mass production, bicycle prices also dropped: older models were being sold for cheaper prices, making the cycle affordable to less wealthy classes of people. Men and women could now utilize the cycle for recreation and transportation. Cycling clubs, cycling tourism, cycling rinks and classes, and cycling magazines and journals flourished during this time and appealed to both male and female cyclists. As Rubenstein shows, “the most commonly accepted figure of annual cycle production during the boom years was 750,000, and the number of cyclists was often assessed at over one and a half million” (Before 216). With the invention of the safety bicycle, a demand amongst society women for the two- wheeler became especially and surprisingly apparent: “[i]ncreasingly, they ditched their trusty tricycles in favor of the sleeker low-mount bicycle” (Herlihy 244). Bicycle-makers began releasing more and more women’s bicycle models. One lady cyclist of the time explains this phenomenon in Wheel magazine, asserting that “[a] sudden desire awoke in the feminine mind to ascertain for itself, by personal experience, those joys of the two-wheeler which they had so often heard vaunted as superior, a thousand times, to the more sober delights of the staid tricycle” (qtd. in Herlihy 244). An avid bicyclist of her day who often wrote advice columns for women cyclists and published narratives of her cycling tours across London and the Alps, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, explains in “Cycling” (1894) that it could not be made widely popular for women until the invention of the “safety”: the “early tricycles made for us were meant to be very ladylike, but they were sadly inappropriate…it was an instrument of torture rather than pleasure as whoever has tried to work it knows” (249). For Pennell, the safety was the ideal cycle for women as it “deaden[ed] vibration,” making riding much more comfortable than it had previously been on the tricycle or boneshaker (253). With rising female interest in cycling, more attention was “paid by makers to women’s machines” which led to “more women…seen on the roads” (250). Indeed, by 1896, a third of all bicycle orders were for women cyclists, “compared with only one in fifty in 1893” (Rubenstein, Before 216). Because cycling was now less exclusive, and available to women, it became widely accepted as a “vigorous, independent movement” which marked “the defeat of orthodox

61 conservative opinion” that women should stay still (216). Now women and men of all ages and classes were free to travel wherever and whenever the spirit moved them. This attitude, naturally, raised some controversy, especially as the Bicycle Boom became more associated with women cyclists and in particular the New Woman. Despite the newfound popularity of cycling amongst women, ladies who cycled were considered to be “improper,” and were often deemed “more radical” or, as Eliza Lynn Linton might call them, “wild women” (Pennell 252).27 This attitude wasn’t as far-fetched as it seems; the Boom itself revealed that women cycling was about more than enjoying the sport or participating in an idle pastime. The bicycle, it seems, created new women—not just in terms of making them stronger by encouraging healthy outdoor exercise, but also by promoting a desire for female emancipation (and not just from heavy skirts and corsets). The bicycle became symbolic of women’s public and circulating bodies. It was even utilized by early feminists for campaigning during the suffrage movement as women cyclists increasingly came to view cycling “as a noble cause to be promoted among all women as a means to improve the general female condition… To feminists, the bicycle affirmed nothing less than the dignity and equality of women” (Herlihy 266).

THE DANGERS OF “UNFETTERED LIBERTY”: OPPOSITION TO LADY CYCLISTS The claim that the bicycle was, as the Times wrote on August 13, 1898, “a social boon” and in some respects a “social revolution” caused quite a stir, especially where women were concerned (qtd. in Rubenstein, “Cycling” 71). There was much discussion about the bicycle and the newfound freedoms it afforded women. While Campbell Davidson, a cyclist and promoter of women’s cycling, suggested that “cycling for women will not only become a national, but a universal institution; and women all over the world are going to be the better for it, both in mind and body, not only in their generation, but in the generation to come,” a number of men and women were reluctant to agree (1). And some, like Linton, argued against female cycling altogether, claiming it was a dangerous freedom, an “intoxication which comes with unfettered liberty” (“Cycling Craze” 177). This debate was encoded within the terms of the New Woman versus the Angel in the House dichotomy, but because of the large numbers of women cyclists

27 Pennell makes note of Linton’s negative opinion of exercising women. See “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents” (1892) where Linton argues that some women make “sights ” of themselves in their “desire to assimilate their lives to those of men” (172). “Not content with croquet and lawn tennis…” they have “taken to golf and cricket” and other “exercise even more violent than is good for the average women” (172). Pennell as sumes Linton’s opinion of women cycling to be similar to her opinion of women playing golf and cricket.

62 (across all classes, marital statuses, and ages), the lines between these two cultural icons were not quite so easily or firmly drawn. New Women wanted to cycle because it afforded them freedom and opportunity; however, women’s cycling also ruffled the feathers of more traditional men and women because it displaced the socially constructed and internalized ideology of women as submissive, “self-sacrificing and self-regulating…radiating morality and love” (Poovey, Uneven 8). Debates of this nature led some women who cycled to be cautious riders by, for example, resisting the two-wheeler on a principle of conservative modesty. The tricycle was considered more appropriate for ladies because it did not require them to vault, indecorously, onto the high mount; women could also more safely ride the tricycle in their skirts and dresses (Herlihy 200). As Pennell notes, “women…have seemed absurdly conservative [when it comes to cycling]; they cling to the three wheels, as if to do so were the concession that made their cycling proper” (252). Women’s mannish and unladylike behavior and dress were most commonly invoked in debates about the propriety of cycling. Most writers on cycling (whether male or female) engaged in conversation about the fashion best suited to riding and the controversy surrounding rational dress. Women wearing knickerbockers, and even divided or shorter skirts, while hassled in public, were often supported in cycling guidebooks and even some medical journals. These writers encouraged knickerbockers as ideal for cycling because they would not get caught in the wheel while pedaling, as women’s skirts or dresses could. In addition, the lighter and looser material associated with divided skirts, blouses, and the removal of the tightly laced corset enabled an easier and healthier riding experience. Pennell notes that “of the greater comfort and safety secured” by adopting knickerbockers, “there can be no question; the chief drawback to this costume…is its conspicuousness” (261) Many current historians (including Rubenstein and Marks) focus their attention on how bicycling heralded greater freedom of dress for women in the nineteenth century, since women of the time formed societies for national dress reform, such as the Rational Dress Society (1881), the Health and Artistic Dress Union (1890), and the Rational Dress League (1898), as a way to “promote the wearing by women of some form of bifurcated garment, especially for such active purposes as cycling” (“The Rational Dress League” 4). But women’s cycling clothing was often viewed as scandalous. As Rubenstein relates, women cycling publicly in rational dress were often subjected to ridicule, hostility, and even violence:

63 Alys Russell…lost a friend who had seen her in rational dress, and the editor of the Rational Dress Gazette was struck by a meat hook while cycling in Kilburn… The hazards involved were summed up by Kitty Jane Buckman in a letter written in August 1897 to her brother S.S. Buckman, geologist and cyclist: “It certainly can’t be worse to ride in Oxford than in London, especially London suburbs. It’s awful. One wants nerves of iron, & I don’t wonder now in the least so many women having given up the R.D. Costume & returned to skirts. The shouts & yells of the children deafen one, the women shriek with laughter or groan & hiss & all sorts of remarks are shouted at one, occasionally some not fit for publication. One needs to be very brave to stand all that.” (Before 218) Despite these reactions, some women still continued to promote rational dress. Perhaps because of the strong reactions about women in knickerbockers, women cyclists became especially concerned with the ways in which they represented themselves publicly. As one of the largest complaints against lady cyclists concerned their unladylike behaviors and dress, it became important that the lady cyclist be “at all times,” as Miss F. J. Erskine makes clear in Lady Cycling (1897), “neat, smart, and in harmony with her workmanlike machine” (25). This harmony meant that the lady cyclist should avoid wearing unfashionable riding clothing like “ridiculous blouses and flower-garden hats,” as well as big skirts that would make her look like the “balloon jib of a yacht” (25). Likewise, Campbell Davidson attempts to distance the lady cyclists of the boom era from their predecessors, by accusing those pioneer women of having failed to regard appearance as important while “accustom[ing] themselves to their new pastime” (22). Their need to ride as fast and as far as men required them to “cast aside all feminine charm of looks” (22). Lady cyclists “are wiser nowadays,” she argues, and have discovered that cycling can “be made graceful, pretty, and charming, as well as enjoyable” (22). While Campbell Davidson doesn’t argue against the use of rational dress, she insists that if it is worn, it ought to be “rendered neat and becoming” (30). Women of the wheel now “know how to ride well, and to look well in whatever they do” (22). Evelyn Everett Green, in “Cycling for Ladies” (1896), assures her readers that women “as a rule” do not ride in unseemly ways, like the men who double their backs up over the handlebars. Women “sit up remarkably straight and carry themselves well” (51). In addition, lady cyclists are much safer bikers than men and thus

64 their “chances of escaping accidents are slightly lessened” because they “can dismount on an emergency just a shade quicker and more steadily than men” (52-53). By suggesting that women riders are good cyclists who are also elegant and graceful riders, Erskine, Campbell Davidson, and Everett Green assure their detractors that women cyclists aren’t masculine in form, feature, and movement; rather, elegant cycling enhances their feminine grace and looks. Women like Everett Green, Campbell Davidson and Erskine are clearly writing in response to a critique not only of women’s fashion, but also of their ability to remain “feminine” in the pursuit of exercise and when infiltrating the male public domain. These charges concern not just women’s freedom of movement, but the very physicality of their bodies—their looks and movements. It wasn’t just what they rode in, but how they cycled that mattered. These accusations and concerns regarding whether or not women’s bodies were “graceful” or “charming” were also tied closely to ideals about feminine modesty—primarily raising questions about who was allowed to attain or view this new cycling female body, and under what conditions. The cycling phenomena overall resulted in a provisional equality of the sexes. It brought men and women “together on equal terms more completely than any previous sport or pastime” (Rubenstein, “Cycling” 65). Women and men would join co-ed cycling clubs and tour across country together. Moreover, young ladies would take riding lessons from young men, or ride off ahead of, or without, their chaperones. While many took this to mean that women were taking advantage of the liberties granted them by cycling by engaging a little too closely with men, Campbell Davidson seeks to counteract that argument: Anything that throws men and women more together in their pleasures is of benefit to both, and the beneficial effect of cycling shows itself in both man and woman in this respect. It is a great boon to married people to have a mutual amusement which does not separate them, but, on the contrary, brings them more closely together; and if managing mammas are right, and cycling has done an enormous amount towards increasing the marriage rate of late, it has also done as much towards making marriage happy, and keeping it so. (121). By arguing that cycling promotes and enhances marriage, Campbell Davidson seeks to dispel the ideas that women who cycled were sexually promiscuous. She also reasserts the idea that lady

65 cyclists do not seek “mannish pursuits” at the expense of their femininity: the overwhelming message of this passage seems to be that the bicycle is not so liberating that it causes women to no longer require marriage or desire adherence to proper heterosexual femininity. Rather, cycling can encourage lady cyclists to meet, marry, and stay married to respectable men. In “Cycling and Health,” Dr. Oscar Jennings takes up this question of modesty and charm, suggesting that “an opinion has been expressed that for young girls, cycling leads to dangerous familiarities” (270). Medically speaking, however, Jennings argues in favor of women cycling because “it is the best means of diverting the minds of young girls from the romantic and morbid ideas fostered by unwholesome restraints of mind and body” (269-270). The “morbid ideas” Jennings is referring to stem from the “long-standing fears about masturbation…and the apparent ease of the fact for females on the cycle” (Whorton 86). Indeed, one of the most common fears of physicians was that the bicycle would lead women down a path of immorality as “self gratification might be readily and inconspicuously achieved by tilting the saddle pommel up and pudendum down” (86). However, Jennings alleviates these coded fears by concluding that the physical exertion required by cycling leaves women and their bodies too well rested for any indecent recreation. But the depiction of women cyclists as “unsexing” the female race frequently displaced these counterarguments. Furthermore, some opponents argued that a woman’s “masculine” attachment to the cycle, and the independence she gained from it, meant that she renounced marriage altogether by becoming “wedded” to the cycle (qtd. in Whorton 85). Opponents observed that not only had the wheel “displaced the horse, [but] in women [it] has, in a measure, replaced the uterus” (qtd. in Whorton 85). An 1898 article in the The Medical Record makes this attitude even more apparent: [Women] have little desire for matrimony which they come to regard as a…kind of bondage…. Consequently they prefer to remain spinsters, and a quasi third sex formed…. Womanhood in its physiological and motherly sense is sacrificed to narrow hips, atrophied breasts with retracted nipples, and a development of brachial, leg and abdominal muscles that would do credit to a lightweight. (Rockwell 949) This extract demonstrates how the controversy surrounding women’s cycling and its accompanied emancipation was addressed in the medical field and in relation to women’s sexualized bodies. Indeed, public discussions regarding the lady cyclists’ charm and clothing

66 were heavily predicated on medical ideologies about cycling women's bodies—their lack of feminine physique, beauty, and reproductive abilities. Just as in other respects, for women who were too public, too outspoken, or operated outside of the “conventional” model of femininity, medical discourse provided a method of containment.28 As a result, much debate ensued in the medical field about whether or not it was healthy for women to ride bicycles, and what larger impact women’s cycling would have on the British nation and its future generations. Perhaps the most aggressively outspoken opponent of female bicycling (and sports altogether) was Arabella Kenealy. Kenealy was a practicing physician from 1888 to 1894, as well as a journalist and novelist. In “Woman as an Athlete” (1899), Kenealy, much like the writer in the Medical Record article, puts a scientific spin on the public accusations that women cyclists were unfeminine and immodest, ultimately arguing that the new muscles gained through exercising on the bike altered women’s personalities and biology. For Kenealy, this is not only representative of the dangers of cycling, but also a threat to the human race. As she argued much later in Feminism and Sex Extinction (1920), the primary function of women was to “regenerate the race” and women’s new muscular frame and lack of feminine charm prevents this, as it “despoils their sons of their virility” (Heilman and Sanders 294). “Woman as an Athlete” sets up these larger arguments about women’s role in sexual reproduction and its impact on evolution by scientifically responding to the question: "In what manner have the changes which have recently taken place in the physique and energies of women been effected?" (636), which she asks in response to a friend's observation that "It is wonderful what athletics do for women…. A year ago Clara could not walk more than two miles without tiring; now she can play tennis or hockey, or can bicycle all day without feeling it" (636). Kenealy’s inquiry into this question takes on an evolutionary tone as she continues to pose questions about women’s athleticism and its effects on their bodies: “Have reserves of force, impoverished and abeyant under an older-fashioned up-bringing, been called into activity and use by new regimes of thought and training? Were women what they were from lack of

28 See Mary Poovey’s Uneven Developments. As she explains, “women’s reproductive function defined her character, position, and value, and this function was only one sign of an innate periodicity, and that this biological periodicity influenced and was influenced by an array of nervous disorders —constructed the woman as essentially different from man and, because of the quasi-pathological nature of this difference, as a creature who needed constant and expert superintendence by medical men” (37).

67 opportunity and stress of circumstance?” (636). “Revolving” around these and similar questions, Kenealy suggests that “knowledge of physiology and medicine forbade me to entertain the belief common to the laity that a regimen of habit and diet could result in material increase of forceful production” (637). In other words, Clara’s newfound energy and strength are merely the result of hypertrophying her muscles and of destroying the healthy balance of “mental, emotional, and physical” well-being, rather than a change from a prior state that suppressed her energies in carrying out her traditional, womanly duties (638). Though her medical theories are now outdated, Kenealy firmly believes that “the power of a healthy adult can be increased only at the expense of some other power” and since the “modern woman has inordinately added to her muscle-power” through bicycling, the body must compensate with the loss of “human capability” (639). By becoming active in sports, Clara, and her “modern” sisters, are not only “deifying muscle” over feminine nature (638), they are also sacrificing their “higher and more valuable factors”: by gaining muscle, Clara’s body loses other important “womanly faculties” (638-9). Kenealy characterizes Clara’s behaviors after taking up cycling to document her lost womanly qualities. She claims that after exercising, Clara was “as dissimilar as though she had been another personality” (639). Not only had her physical beauty been altered—from being “suggestive,” “elusive,” and “charming” to “defined,” “unwavering,” and “direct”—but her very movements, tone of voice, and physical shape had been transformed (639): The mechanism of movement is no longer veiled by a certain mystery of motion which gave her formerly an air of gliding rather than of striding from one place to another. In her evening gown she shows evidence of joints which had been adroitly hidden beneath tissues of soft flesh, and already her modiste has been put to the necessity of puffings and pleatings where Nature had planned the tenderest and most dainty of devices. Her movements are muscular and less womanly. Where they had been quiet and graceful, now they are abrupt and direct. Her voice is louder, her tones are assertive. She says everything—leaves nothing to the imagination (640). These descriptions of Clara as assertive, muscular, and outspoken clearly align the lady cyclist with the figure of the New Woman. For Kenealy, the woman’s body and its “natural” balance

68 and qualities have been altered by the mere act of bicycle-riding. The added muscle and lean figure represents a threat to Clara’s overall attractiveness to men—as well as to her feminine temperament. Clara’s body further deteriorates by a disease of the nerves which Kenealy attributes to cycling. According to Kenealy, “the greatest charm of Clara's face” was “lost in the suspicion of a 'bicycle face'” (641). This “face of muscular tension” (641) was a malady first diagnosed by Dr. A. Shadwell. He defines it in “The Hidden Dangers of Cycling” (1897) as the “the peculiar strained, set look so often associated with this pastime” (833). As he explains: Some wear the 'face' more and some less marked, but nearly all have it, … Has anybody ever seen persons on bicycles talking and laughing and looking jolly, like persons engaged in any other amusement? Never, I swear. Doubtless they can at a pinch, but in practice they don't. All their attention is given up to the road and the machine. With set faces, eyes fixed before them, and an expression either anxious, irritable, or at best stony, they pedal away, looking neither to the right nor to the left, save for an instantaneous flash, and speaking not at all, except a word flung gasping over the shoulder at most. (833) Shadwell suggests that it is this odd riding behavior which causes the cyclist to be ridiculed in the street, and dares the “enthusiast” to “deny the description” (833). It is impossible to ignore or avoid Bicycle Face while riding, “for let the attention wander for more than an instant, and the odds are heavy on a spill. The machine is so excessively crank; it cannot stand the slightest shock. To ride it safely entails a double strain—a general one on the nerves and a particular one on the balancing centre” (833). Because Bicycle Face was caused by the “double strain” of the rider while attempting to keep her balance, it was classified during the time as a nervous disease, or mental excitement—often resulting in dementia, insomnia, or headache. This kind of strain upon the nervous system is exclusive to the bicycle, making cycling an especially dangerous sport (831). As the incidence of Bicycle Face demonstrates, constant energy and attention must be paid to the cycle to keep from losing balance, or to avoid running into things. This natural instability of the machine and the “incessant tension” of riding “is the thing which tells upon the nerves” (833).

69 While Bicycle Face like other nervous disorders and physical abnormalities—Kyphosis Bicylistarum, or “Cyclist’s Figure,” “Bicycle Hernia,” Cyclist’s sore-throat,” “Bicycle Fright,” “Bicycle Hand,” and “Bicycle Foot”—was attributed to all riders of the cycle, once women began riding these potential injuries were reintroduced and discussed in relation to women and their bodies “with greater urgency, since women were by nature more delicate” (Whorton 82). These other diseases, especially those that contorted the body, like Bicycle Face or Cyclist’s Figure—a curvature of the spine caused by bending over the handlebars—were taken up as threatening to the future health of the race because they were thought to be transmissible through heredity (71). Medically, Kenealy focuses her fear on Bicycle Face, perhaps because it is not only a visible representation of the physical and mental distress biking can cause the female body, but also an obvious physical abnormality, or mark of disease. Kenealy’s concern that “the greatest charm of Clara’s face” was “lost in the suspicion of a ‘bicycle face’” is directly tied to her fear of Clara’s and all women’s evolutionary derangement. Symbolically, Clara’s Bicycle Face represents the end of women’s natural sympathies, a complete disruption of the feminine ideal, and a decline in female attractiveness—all of which could be detrimental to the evolutionary future of the British race. It is the replacement of these qualities with assertiveness and confidence in body and mind that Kenealy finds especially threatening. These fears regarding the lady cyclist’s lack of a feminine body are further expressed by Kenealy’s critique of Clara’s altered personality. As Kenealy continues, we see that Clara’s new energies are redirected. Now instead of participating in the more “feminine” pursuits of caregiver, comforter, and nurse, she is consumed only with the “pursuit of pleasure” (“Woman as an Athlete” 640). Prior to exercising, Clara was "one of those invaluable girls” who would care for those who were sick or in trouble (640). Clara's "resources had been always at the disposal" of her father, mother, and siblings; she would soothe ruffled tempers, sympathize with her family's distresses, or help instruct her younger siblings in their lessons and crafts. Now, Kenealy laments, “Clara finds no time for any of these ministrations. Clara is off bicycling upon her own account" (640). With these strongly articulated arguments, Kenealy is making a distinction between increased muscles, motor capability, and energy on the one hand, and actual improved health on the other. According to Kenealy, increased muscularity—and the resulting loss of

70 sympathetic faculties in women—is actually representative of diseased nerves29: “any extreme of muscle-power in a woman is in itself evidence of disease” and degeneration (641). Athleticism in women contributes negatively to the evolution and reproduction of the British race, not just in that those diseases could be transmitted from mother to child, but because of its impact on women’s child-rearing capabilities in general. A number of doctors conceded that women’s cycling was damaging to their reproductive health. Dr. J. Beresford Ryley advised women to quit cycling during menstruation, or while pregnant, because as women, and thus possible mothers, they should be careful to manage their own reproductive health. Others doctors such as W. S. Playfair (Crump 134-135) and James Chadwick raised concerns about woman’s physical placement on the bike (Whorton 83). They argued that the saddle, “as the point of contact between the machine and the woman’s reproductive organs, “could contract the birth canal, hypertrophy the reproductive muscles (through pedaling), displace the uterus, distort the pelvic bones, or cause general bruising and discomfort” (83). Much like these medical professionals and the Medical Record article cited above, Kenealy claims that female athleticism inhibits child-bearing and/or leads to degeneration in women’s offspring. While women are expending their muscles on bicycle-riding, they can’t be used for reproduction; thus babies who are born of cycling women will be “poor creature[s]” that suffer from “physical deterioration” and an inability to “assimilate milk” because the muscles that should have been spent fashioning well-formed children are being wasted on the bicycle (643). She ends her essay by calling for ladies like Clara to “retain [their] womanhood. For womanhood is a beautiful achievement of evolution which it is a crime to deface” (643). The New Woman, she contends, is striving for ideals and qualities that will leave her unsatisfied because “the thing she asks is not the thing to satisfy her nature” (645). By ignoring her nature, the cycling woman becomes a “neuter”— she defies “the mightiest forces of the universe and evolution” and forfeits her ability to bear and train up future humanity (655). Despite Kenealy’s strongly-worded “scientific” study, many women cyclists and writers as well as medical professionals encouraged and promoted bicycle riding for women’s health. In direct response to “Woman as an Athlete,” Laura Ormiston Chant mockingly suggests that it is

29 While some argue that women’s nerves are strengthened through cycling, others like Kenealy posit they are distressed. This is not unlike arguments made about women’s use of other technologies. Women are said to be ideal for communication technologies because of their naturally sympathetic nerves; however, these descriptions of nerves and sympathy in women are often undermined by the strength, mental acuity, and independence of women in positions of technological mediation. See Jill Galvan’s The Sympathetic Medium.

71 “somewhat premature to accuse Clara of ‘squandering the potentiality of the race’ because she has taken to bicycling, in view of the fact that the first ladies’ cycle was put on the market…so few years ago” (746). She asks her readers to let “natural selection” decide what is preferred in women, arguing that it can “be trusted to decide in favour of the muscular as against the unmuscular of either sex” (Chant 746). Likewise, Jennings makes it clear to his readers that bicycling can only advance the human race. There is nothing that is not “absolutely and wholly curable by exercise and diet” including rheumatism, gout, obesity, asthma, constipation, diabetes, varicose veins, hernias, hemorrhoids, nervous affections, dyspepsia, and liver disorders to name a few (18).30 Jennings also contends that without sufficient muscular activity the human race “vegetates and wastes away” (22). Lack of exercise not only “benumbs the intelligence,” it also “obscures the moral sense” and produces unhappy, obese, and neurotic people. For him, the cycle specifically “is calculated to banish all kinds of nervous maladies” and can never be said to cause them (295). Alice Meynell’s “The Woman in Grey” aligns well with Jennings’s ideological position and stands in direct contrast to the evolutionary arguments Kenealy makes in “Woman as an Athlete.” Meynell is not limited by a (mis)conception about woman’s true “nature,” as is clear by her overall implication that women are capable of evolving into more intelligent and physically healthy versions of themselves. As she notes, “[a] woman, long educated to sit still, does not suddenly learn to live a momentary life without strong momentary resolution" (239). Rather, the “vibrating pause of perpetual change” that the bicycle makes as women pedal onward suggests the evolution of women toward something better through cycling (239). For Meynell, the woman in grey is an example of an exceptional modern woman because of the qualities and freedom cycling has afforded her. The language of freedom and equality surrounding the woman in grey makes this clear; she is described as "taking her equal risk" (238). In addition, her muscular body is described not as "diseased" or as missing a certain mysterious grace, but rather as charm itself. Where Clara is no longer "charming" because she has lost that elusive quality of movement, the woman in grey embodies that movement. Meynell

30 For other doctors who confirm the curative powers of cycling see "The Influence of the Bicycle in Health and in Disease" by Graeme H. Hammond, and “A Report on Cycling in Health and Disease” by E. B. Turner. Additional support and testimonials from doctors can be found in Luther Porter’s Cycling for Health and Pleasure.

72 describes the cyclist as being “seated upon a place of detachment between earth and air,” and suggests that she is able to flee “upon unstable equilibrium” (239). The woman is able to make herself “light, so as not to dwell either in security or danger, but to pass between them” (239). And, certainly, as the observer, Meynell is charmed. The ability of the woman to move her cycling body with such ease, without fear or difficulty, as she seamlessly weaves in and out of the “two streams” of traffic, “overtaking and being overtaken” with “perfect composure,” also symbolizes her more noble personality (238). By existing in a perfectly balanced space—both physically and mentally—she is able to claim an independence, self-assurance, and fearlessness that eludes most of her contemporaries. Indeed, her very air of "liberty and content" inspires Meynell herself. She confesses that the woman in grey gave "watchful confidence to averages" and that was "her strangest and greatest success" (238). While Kenealy insists that Clara’s personality becomes hardened, assertive, and direct, Meynell’s woman in grey contradicts these presumed negative qualities by describing them as positive, liberating, and admirable. The woman in grey through her body’s movements on the bicycle demonstrates qualities of “judgment,” “temper,” “perception,” “courage,” and “confidence” that symbolize an evolved and healthy woman. She embodies the “genuine lady cyclist, neatly dressed and nicely mounted,” supported by women like Campbell Davidson and Erskine, calling “for no fair criticism but what is favorable” (Leechman 167).

JULIET’S CYCLING BODY IN THE TYPE-WRITER GIRL The woman in grey and her body tell a different evolutionary story regarding women’s nerves and technology than is apparent in some of the medical discourses surrounding female cycling. This evolutionary narrative is further developed in Grant Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl. This short first-person novel follows the typewriting adventures of Juliet Appleton, who describes her social and political philosophies regarding capitalism, evolution, and women’s independence; the treatment she receives as a typewriter at various places of employment; and the love triangle between her, her employer, and his fiancée. Throughout Juliet’s narrative, it becomes clear that as a single, twenty-two-year-old woman, Juliet values and craves independence, freedom of movement, and access to the public world. These values get written across the story in a number of ways, but primarily through the technologies—the bicycle and the typewriter—that Juliet uses to secure her independence and employment. Juliet romanticizes

73 these technologies, writing them into mythical narratives of freedom, justice, and even danger. She also relates herself to these technologies on a material level—actually coming to embody their functions, movements, and qualities as part of her own organic function and persona. This embodiment provides Juliet with a language through which she can better express not only her relationship with these technologies, but also her value as woman and laborer within the social and political system of late-Victorian England. In The Type-Writer Girl, Juliet represents a more evolved, working woman than other literary representations of typewriting girls. As Clarissa Suranyi explains, where other textual representations of the typewriter girl—like Bella Thorn in Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903) or Mina Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), both of which are discussed in the following chapter—“humanized and feminized” the workplace, sending the message that “the Victorian angel in the house could be successfully transplanted into the business world and could exert a positive influence on it,” Juliet is neither overly feminine nor “self-sacrificing” (9). While she does hold some traditional stereotypes about gender roles, Juliet’s primary objective is to break open the boundaries of traditional womanhood. As a New Woman, the college-educated Juliet smokes, wears rational dress, and rides her bicycle. Furthermore, she writes her story in evolutionary discourse, narrating a struggle of self versus environment.31 Juliet utilizes the “struggle for existence” ideology to affirm her rights as a woman to pursue a career, behave as she chooses, and experience adventures. As she states, “in this age the struggle for existence has become one of the rights of woman” (Type-Writer Girl 28). Her take on evolutionary theory rests primarily on her self-perception as someone striving to succeed in a male-dominated environment. For example, upon receiving her first job as typewriter at Flor and Fingleman’s law offices, she writes, “I have proved myself fittest by the mere fact of survival. Matthew Arnold had taught me, indeed, with much sweet reasonableness, that there was not any proper reason for my existing, but I like to exist. The sole remaining question, was, Could I adapt myself to my

31 Allen himself was a biologist, specifically interested in Darwinism. He wrote Charles Darwin in 1893, a book on the life and work of the naturalist. In his assessment of Darwin’s work he notes that the principles of Darwin have and will no doubt be misunderstood and “tacked on to what are in reality the principles of Lamarck” (Charles Darwin 199). In addition, Allen wrote a few essays on evolution and women—where he suggests that he supports the “modern woman’s demand for emancipation” and is an “enthusiast of the Woman Question” (“Plain Words” 212) even as he notes that women must for the evolution and continuance of the race of mankind mother children, “whether we have wives or not” (220). Thus in The Type-Writer Girl Juliet represents an (intellectually and physically healthy) evolved New Woman despite the fact that she herself does not marry or produce children by the end of the novel.

74 environment? If so, I had fulfilled the whole gospel of Darwinism” (32). Though she takes some liberties with Darwin, this adaptability to environment and pursuit of personal growth guides Juliet’s adventures. The advantages that help Juliet move toward her evolutionary destiny are her typewriter and bicycle, both of which turn out to be more than just technological resources. Rather, they represent the advanced characteristics of the “modern” and “true womanhood” that Juliet values—assertiveness, liberty, and adventure. Throughout the novel, Juliet’s bicycle riding is directly associated with her freedom. For example, once while riding Juliet proclaims, “I rode on, glad to be free once more” (87). As she relates her bicycling experiences, descriptions of her riding are tied to women’s freedom from traditional patriarchal roles: "How light and free I felt! When man first set woman on two wheels with a pair of pedals, did he know, I wonder, that he had rent the veil of the harem in twain? I doubt it, but so it was. A woman on a bicycle has all the world before her where to choose; she can go where she will, no man hindering” (42-43). Here, Juliet echoes the final lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), recasting them in order to associate the bicycle with women’s freedom from traditional patriarchal roles. Where Adam and Eve, “[t]he World all before them, where to choose” with “Providence th[e]ir guide…hand in hand” make “th[e]ir solitary way” out of Eden, Juliet implies she needs neither man, nor Providence, to guide her; her cycle alone leaves the world open to her (Milton 12.646-649). Strikingly Juliet’s descriptions aren’t dissimilar to other women’s non-fictional narratives of the cycle. The novelist and columnist Lady Violet Greville explains that “women who prefer exercise and liberty, who revel in the cool sea breeze, and love to feel the fresh mountain air fanning their cheeks” are the “better, the truer, and the healthier” for cycling (iv). Likewise, Pennell argues that the lady cyclist is granted “all the joy of motion…and of long days in the open air; all the joy of adventure and change. Hers is the delightful sense of independence and power” (264-265). Juliet’s desire for freedom and her attempts to achieve it are represented by the bicycle. Just as Meynell’s woman in grey’s cycling body represents the advancement of women through “the vibrating pause of perpetual change,” so Juliet’s cycle propels her upward on the evolutionary chain of survival in a capitalist and patriarchal world. The bicycle literally moves her from one location to another, and one job to the next, onward through her adventure of self-realization.

75 The sense of freedom Juliet receives from cycling is more fully achieved by Juliet’s collapsing of her physical body and identity into the cycle. In the novel, Juliet’s connection to the bicycle operates on two levels: one where others lower her and her body to the mechanical and objectified level of the machine, and one where she creates and repurposes this body/bicycle relationship for her own advanced sense of self, as well as for monetary and social gain. Most notably, the merging of Juliet with her bicycle becomes apparent during her visit to and escape from the anarchist commune, where the bicycle becomes a symbol of Juliet herself. Here, Juliet provides more description of the communists’ reaction to her bicycle than to her, which is strange, given that Juliet, a single, educated, middle-class Englishwoman, seeks to join a rag-tag group of immigrant laborers. Though he is surprised to learn Juliet is an anarchist, Rothenberg, the leader of the commune, is more interested in her bicycling clothes than in her ideas. "My costume took his fancy," she writes (Type-Writer Girl 46). His and his comrades’ interest does not end here, as Juliet winds up giving the comrades cycling lessons every evening because of their devotion “in equal parts to myself and my bicycle" (57). Juliet gives readers the impression that, much like at Flor and Fingleman’s, she is only offered employment at the commune because of her attractive figure. When Juliet first tells the commune her name, “[e]ach man drew himself up and stroked his chin with the very air of a Romeo” (48), and she describes having “resisted the temptations” of the comrades “who would fain have discoursed to me the words of love in many uncouth languages” (56). Their reactions to Juliet ultimately become the source of tension between her and the male comrades who complain that Juliet “takes no notice of them,” despite giving them nightly cycling lessons. When pressured to give them more of her time and attentions, Juliet refuses and threatens to leave the commune. As recompense, the anarchists attempt to keep her bicycle in exchange for the loss of her physical body and its labor. As Leon, one of the comrades argues: “This machine is ours…[w]hatever any comrade brings into the Community is common property. We will give you your dividend and let you go; but this you must leave with us” (58). Juliet understands this claim on her bicycle as a claim on her own person and refuses to accept it. She angrily rejects their alleged ownership of her bicycle: “Sir,” she says “in [her] most commanding voice… ‘you shall not touch my machine. If you venture to detain it […] I will move for a mandamus to compel you to show cause why you should escape the penalties of praemunire’” (58). Though appropriating the masculine, legal language learned at Flor and

76 Fingleman’s, language of whose exact meaning Juliet is somewhat uncertain, she successfully argues that the communists have no legal right of supremacy over her or her bicycle. At her refusal, they again try to bargain for her labor at the commune, entreating her to stay on, in hopes of maintaining ownership of her and her cycle. Juliet, with her hand “laid firmly” on her machine, leaves immediately, retaining her bicycle, her body, and compensation for her labor, and heads to London to “be once more a type-writer” (58). While the anarchists sought to relegate Juliet and her bicycle to the realm of group property, wherein Juliet’s body is merely another mechanized cog at work for the function of the community, Juliet sees this arrangement as a form of “coercion” that subjects her to the “tyranny of public opinion” (57). She declares herself an “individual” and rides her bicycle literally to freedom from social, political, and gendered constraints (58). Juliet’s body is further united with the mechanics of the bicycle through a repurposing of the medical discourses surrounding women’s bicycling and nervous systems. On her ride to freedom from the anarchist commune, Juliet references Shadwell’s Bicycle Face. She suggests that the malady represents the rider’s thoughtfulness while riding, rather than a “nervous” condition of her body. While admitting that the “bicycle in full swing…is not an ideal place for calm reflection,” Juliet is able to overcome the “face of the bicyclist” by meditating on her previous troubles and experiences, as well as her future goals and resolutions (59). Bicycle Face loses its destructive intent; Juliet’s nerves and physique are not diseased or deformed by her cycling. Furthermore, Bicycle Face gets redefined as an antidote to nervous disorder: the bicycle has a calming and productive effect on her mental well-being. As her bicycle propels her forward and onward towards presumably better things, she contemplates, once again, the evolutionary journey she has undertaken. Though she determines that “[e]nvironment was triumphing all along the line,” her readers recognize that her very act of cycling is an evolutionary triumph (60). The Bicycle Face she suffers from is not the Bicycle Face of Kenealy or Shadwell. It does not mean nervous collapse, or the end of the human race; rather, it represents her will power, mental capability, and physical strength. When Juliet later crashes her bicycle into the “foreign body” of a fellow cyclist, Michaela, this body/cycle union is further developed (61). In the spill, the impact itself injures Juliet’s body and bicycle; it also “shattered [Juliet’s] nerves” (62). The speed with which she flew down the hill and the result of impact all register the effects of the bicycle on the human

77 body. Her description of the accident suggests an overall confusion about what damage she is looking at (damage to body or to cycle parts), for though she says she “enquire[d] which of her limbs is broken” before assessing the damage to her wheel, she doesn’t notice until much later that her hands are bleeding, while she immediately registers the pain of having “twisted” the “front wheel…out of human recognition” and having punctured a tire (62). Though she mentions her nerves are “shattered,” her attention is mostly fixed on the destruction of the bike, rather than her own wounds. And it becomes clear that the tears Juliet cries are over the destruction of the combined system of bike and rider. She admits no real separation between her own body and that of her bike: “I burst into tears outright and sank down on the ground by my broken cycle” (62). The broken cycle and shattered nerves recall that moment when Juliet “tighten[ed] my loose joints, metaphorically and literally,” signaling that Juliet’s shattered nerves are both literal and metaphorical symbols of her bike’s damaged frame (61). Juliet’s language of union with her cycle is here tied to her desire to take control of her surroundings and to establish herself as a powerful woman. With the blending of her material body with the bicycle, Juliet’s body is stronger, faster, and more valuable than before: economically, socially, and even (as we see at the commune) sexually. She is able to adopt a more dominant and commanding presence, as is illustrated in her refusal to hand over her bicycle to the commune and in her response to the bicycle crash. Though she bursts into tears, she also retains her “dignity” by “tak[ing] the aggressive first” as is “always a good plan, in [the] case of collision” (61). This idea of the cycle as representative of evolution, or a more positive movement through life, also resonates in the feminist temperance reformer Frances E. Willard’s autobiographical bicycling sketch, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle. “In her writing,” Edith Mayo comments, Willard’s “bicycle and its techniques of mastery become an extended metaphor for life itself. The principles by which one masters riding the bicycle are those by which one masters life” (12). Willard expostulates on this in her text, stating that “I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world, upon whose spinning wheel we must all learn to ride, or fall into the sluiceways of oblivion and despair. That which made me succeed with the bicycle was precisely what had gained me a measure of success in life—it was the hardihood of Spirit…the persistence of will…and the patience” (32). Here, Willard’s metaphor of tackling and mastering the bicycle represents that of tackling and mastering life and its detriments. However, while Willard sees the bicycle as something to be dominated, she also, like

78 Juliet, becomes part of the bicycle she seeks to control. She talks about having complete knowledge of her cycle—recognizing that to be a successful rider, one must be “thoroughly acquainted” with the other and must be “slowly seasoned one to the other,” enduring the same climate, seasons, and “stress of life” (54). Further, she suggests that the bicycle is an extension of the body as a “Stradivarius violin” is of the musician— “molded” together in “harmony,” the bicycle must be “like the well-worn robe, the easy shoe” (54). As witnessed by her bicycle crash, Juliet does not ride with the ideal charm of Meynell’s woman in grey, or in the “harmony with her workmanlike machine” recommended by Erskine or Campbell Davidson. Juliet is still evolving, something that is made clear compared to the woman whom she crashes into. This girl, Michaela, is an inexperienced cyclist, and is portrayed as “a wisp of a figure” and as “timid small atomy” (61), compared to Juliet, who is described later by Michaela’s fiancé as being “full of intrepid self-reliance; a woman with nerve, audacity, spirit” (119). While Juliet does experience a bit of shock from the collision, Michaela is inconsolable. As Juliet explains, she was “nervously shaken” and “would have fainted…if…she was injured” (63). The comparison Allen makes between these two characters only increases the reader’s belief that Juliet is a much more evolved, independent, and admirable character. Juliet has nerve; she doesn’t suffer from nerves. The Type-Writer Girl incorporates the discourses surrounding women’s bodies and the bicycle technology by repurposing them to emphasize the importance the machine has for women in the period, like Juliet. Though Juliet contracts Bicycle Face, we find that the putative ailment represents nothing more than Juliet’s ability to ride the cycle while thinking profound thoughts and ideas. The bicycle, for the most part, is written onto and as part of Juliet’s own body and identity as a way of symbolizing how women can use technology for their freedom, adventure, and financial independence. In this way, Allen repurposes the bodily discourses surrounding women’s bodies and technologies, arguing for the evolutionary improvements technology can offer to women.

THE BICYCLING BODY EXPANDED: JULIET AND THE TYPEWRITER Juliet's bodily relationship with the bicycle as well as with the medical and social discourses surrounding women's cycling is not unlike discourses about women's relationships with other technological devices of the time. The bicycle, perhaps, more tangibly demonstrates

79 the relationship between the machine and the material body because it makes the woman's body and use of technology publicly visible (as women ride up and down public roads), and requires the full use of the body in order to power the machine. It also physically altered women’s appearances—by promoting changes in dress, altering women’s figure by modifying their muscles and frames, and giving them a general healthy glow. As Juliet demonstrates in The Type-Writer Girl, however, these mechanical, bodily contentions about women also surface in discourses on women's operation of communication technologies. For example, the typewriter, like the bicycle, was also said to “unsex” women. As Christopher Keep relates, “Women typists were felt…to presage the collapse of the family: lured away by the promises of an exciting life in business, they would abandon the sacred responsibilities of raising the new generation” (“Cultural Work” 401-402). Typing not only “unsex[ed] them[],” but it also “endanger[ed] that continuous transmission of cultural values from mother to children on which society depended” (402). By using her typewriter to gain work in the “public sphere of business and commerce,” Juliet doesn’t just change social and medical perceptions of her sexuality and reproductive capability; she also undermines traditional notions of feminine respectability by rejecting the domestic sphere (402). Thus, Juliet as a cyclist and typewriter was perceived to be “be a danger not only to [herself], but to the moral integrity of the nation as a whole” (403). Juliet’s threatening materiality isn’t just the result of her circulating body: it is the way in which her circulating body— “working among men, machines, and money”—is biologically altered (402). Such work, it was believed, weakened a woman’s “innate sensitivity” and “spiritual superiority” (402). Female typists didn’t just fail to reproduce, they developed nervous capabilities that were detrimental to the nation’s evolutionary future. These fears contrasted sharply with the ideas about women being natural technological mediums because of their sensitive and sympathetic nerves. Women’s sympathy, conceived of as the result of their active nerves, was a boon for typists and telegraphers as their “good system of involuntary muscles” meant that they were “faster than men in light rhythmical activities” (Stubbs qtd. in Otis 137). Women’s fingers, according to one typewriting manual, were “especially adapted” for typewriting (Harrison 9). Their sympathy and sensitivity was also valued in human-mediated exchange because it enabled their “reversion to automatism” (Galvan 12). This automatic state was a presumed “self-extension” of “feeling”—one that meant women in stations of technological mediation were passive, discreet, and easily-manipulated tools for the

80 use of the men around them (12). Juliet, in her role as typist, runs the risk of becoming an automatized extension of her typewriter. Much like she does with her bicycle, Juliet associates her very body with her typewriter, and her typewriter with her economic station and job security. In her first typewriting position, she describes her role in this way: For three mornings and three afternoons I endured Flor and Fingelman’s. It was a question of self versus environment... So I continued to click, click, click, like a machine that I was... On the fourth day, however, the rebel in my blood awoke…I felt I must strike one blow for freedom. (Type-Writer Girl 35) Juliet responds in a complex way to her role as typewriter. On the one hand, she must become as automatic as the machine that she works upon. She recognizes the “fundamental truth” of that role for her survival. On the other hand, she sees the typewriter and her union with it as both something to protest and the means by which she can protest. As Galvan explains, women were able to “transform mediating apparatus into the carriers of intentional self-to-self communication” (17). In other words, women, like Juliet, as a result of their automatic presence, were able to work on behalf of their own interests. Thus, we see Juliet using her typewriting to “strike one blow for freedom.” Fleeing home, she proceeds to sit down “at my private and particular Barlock—the same on which I am indicting these present memoirs—to write out my resignation for Flor and Fingleman” (37). The resignation, quite feisty, cleverly exaggerates the legalese used by her employers and makes a bid at female equality in the workplace. She writes: “Whereas I have found the post of Shorthand and Type-Writer (female) which you have deigned to bestow upon me, in the aforesaid office, highly disagreeable to my mind and brain…I have made up my mind not to return to your messuage or tenement this afternoon, nor on any subsequent date, but to relinquish entirely the aforesaid post of Shorthand and Type-writer (female)” (37). After giving up the typewriter and retiring for a while to the anarchist commune, which wasn’t quite anarchist enough for her, Juliet resolves to “head back to London and be once more a type-writer” (58). She takes up another secretarial position—this one much more suited to her feminist ideals. Rather than desiring a “Shorthand and Type-Writer (female),” this ad pleases Juliet because it asks for a “Lady Type-writer, or something of the sort: certainly not…a (parenthetical) female” (75). This position, at a publishing house, also required “a lady of

81 education, who can take down instructions and write down letters to authors on the subject- matter of their works, without need for correction” (78). In this position, Juliet finds the freedom she has been seeking and the ability to make use of her Girton education. Not only does her new employer, whom she calls her “Romeo,” value her mind, instead of her figure, her useful fingers, or her automaton-like qualities, but he also introduces her to high-profile authors and re- introduces her to a higher society than her role as typist would usually permit. Most importantly, he encourages her to try her hand at writing, not just typing. While there are ways in which Juliet becomes machine-like, and likens her body to the mediation technologies she uses, there are also ways in which the automatic qualities associated with her technology-use are something she can put on or make use of for her own benefit. Juliet can become the typewriter when she needs to in order to protect her position or assert a silent agency. She uses it to her advantage, but casts it aside when it seems to hinder her action too much. Nevertheless, even when she casts off the role of typewriter—something she does literally and symbolically by pawning the machine—she finds that she cannot achieve a complete freedom without it. Her attempt to reach complete equality at the anarchist commune backfires. There, her labor is not valued in and of itself because she finds that the men who invited her in expect a social relationship that she is not prepared to provide, not unlike her employers at Flor and Fingleman, who sexualize her mechanized body. Juliet describes her interview at Flor and Fingleman in terms of the slave or marriage market. While her employer approves of her skill, saying it’s “good enough,” Juliet imagines that those words “were intended rather for them than for me, and that they bore reference more to my face and figure than to my real or imagined pace per minute” (30). Her body never is fully separated from that of the machine, as we see by her repeated refrain of the “click, click, click.” Indeed, Juliet seems more comfortable experiencing her relationships through mediated devices. Juliet’s relationship to her Romeo, for example, emerges from her mediation of his correspondence. After transcribing some private poems that she realizes belong to him, Juliet sees them as eternally bonded because “we shared a Secret in common” (98). Later in the novel, when acting as mediator between her Romeo and his fiancée, the “sympathy and magnetism” that make her negotiations between the two so successful are products of being “a typewriter myself” (128). The mechanical role she takes on as typewriter makes possible her freedom to pursue her economic and political ideals, even as it also becomes something to work against. For Juliet, the

82 economic stability, the prospect of earning her bread, is all enabled by the typewriter and offers her an ultimate freedom of action. “The strict necessity of earning my livelihood” is one that Juliet continually associates with women’s rights and a freedom to work in the world (32). She continually compares her search for work as part of her Odyssey (a book that, following Samuel Butler, she believes to have been written by a woman) and her bid to “go forth into the world in search of adventures” (26). Her relationship with the typewriter—both becoming it and resisting it—provide her the very material with which she is able to do so. It also affords her with the material she needs to write and publish her first book. The very narrative we are reading, we are told, is the product of her newly realized self, as well as herself as typewriter. As she makes clear, her typewriter is the mechanism she uses to write “these present memoirs” (37). While Juliet becomes a/the typewriter for economic resources, she gets more than she bargained for. In the slippage between self and machine, there is room for her to act in certain ways, whether discreetly or out in the open. Through her embodiment of the typewriter and as we’ve seen earlier, the bicycle, Juliet is able to realize her feminist ideals. *** Women’s interactions with technology, as demonstrated by the bicycle, were often contested within discourses of the period. The bicycle in particular led to discussions about women’s looks, figures, health, femininity, and reproductive capacities. On the one hand, these discussions aimed to undermine women’s advancement. On the other hand, representations of women cyclists in literature, magazines, and personal accounts shifted this bodily focus in more positive ways—and re-affirmed the positive impact cycling could have for women’s health, nervous systems, and independence. As Willard makes clear, “we rejoiced…greatly in perceiving the impetus that this uncompromising but fascinating and illimitably capable machine would give to that blessed ‘woman question’ to which we were…devoted; …we saw that the physical development of humanity’s mother-half would be wonderfully advanced by that universal introduction of the bicycle” (43). She, like Meynell and Juliet, sees the bicycle and the discourses surrounding women cyclists as having an evolutionary and a political impact. Rather than damaging women’s ability to be capable mothers and wives, the bicycle could develop in women physical and mental qualities that would only improve the future of humanity. This discussion about women’s bodies and technology also expands to include technologies beyond that of the bicycle, as we see with Juliet and her typewriter. Similar to her

83 bicycle, Juliet’s typewriter becomes intrinsically connected to her identity—both for her employer and personally. My analysis of this relationship will be further expanded in the next chapter where women’s material bodies—their sensitive and sympathetic nervous system— collapses discourses on technological and spiritual mediumship to establish the female medium as a locus for knowledge. Thus, the mediums’ nerves don’t just allow them to transform into new and productive bodies through their technological mediation, they also extend their physical and social mobility by sympathetically tapping into larger communication networks.

84 CHAPTER THREE: “WORKING TOGETHER…WITH ABSOLUTE TRUST”: FEMALE MEDIATION AND THE SPIRITUAL/TECHNOLOGICAL NERVE NETWORK

The texts addressed in this chapter root knowledge within the female body, locating within its materiality a network that can transmit sympathetic and nervous information. As such, the novelists shade their female mediums with agential possibility. As automatized and nervous extensions of the technology they use, women are able, “overtly or covertly,” to act “purposely and in their own self-interest” (Galvan 14). I build on the previous chapters here in order to unite the medical discourses that trouble female technology-users somatic bodies to the sympathetic nerves of spiritual mediums. Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys (1903), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Henry James’s “In the Cage” (1898) all offer moments when female typists or telegraphers double as spiritual mediums or experience occult connections. In this way, the spiritual and technological are not “separate functions, but different expressions of the same one,” as Galvan argues, but are, rather, undifferentiated from each other (11). The medium, whether facilitating communication through technology or the séance, is described in similar ways, and ultimately read in both cases, as a technology in and of herself. Thus, for the purposes of this chapter, we can read technological and spiritual mediumship as collapsed into a single condition or state; doing so is perhaps messier, but essentially more productive as it demonstrates how the organic female body, with its mediumistic possibilities and sympathetic nervous center, becomes a locus—not just for knowledge, but also for extended physical and social mobility. Moreover, I argue, the body and its nervous and biological systems, as centers for communication and the exchange of knowledge, are also at work forging discursive practices that influence how that knowledge is received, as well as how it alters the meaning behind the messages female mediums deliver across the communicating parties. The texts discussed in this chapter also shape perceptions not only of emergent technologies, like the typewriter, but also of recontoured bodies, like the typewriter girl. Yet, as these novelists underscore, the medium’s use of occultist and experimental technologies, as well as her embodied knowledge, is potentially threatening to patriarchal structures: the body “circulates” meaning publicly, and at times, it short circuits—sparking meaning and forms that are not part of the current route, but are rather inspired and rerouted by the medium herself. Such associations make her body and its inexplicable phenomena a public event: as her body mediates knowledge, she becomes a materially active participant in media culture.

85 Whereas in the two previous chapters, women spiritual mediums and technology-users were resistant to medical knowledge that sought to pathologize the active female body, in this chapter, I explore how male novelists accept mediumship as a form of women’s agency that is empowering. Despite or, rather, because of their recognition of the medium’s material agency, Gallon and Stoker co-opt discourses of the medium’s sympathetic and active “nerves.” Such a co-optation, I show, attempts to map women’s agency (as medical discourse does in earlier chapters) onto new cultural and embodied terrain—i.e., national and imperial projects. These novelists imagine the agency of female mediums as a means to re-route British interests at home and abroad. Recognizing that women mediums possess—and are possessed by—a material agency through their spiritual and technological knowledge, they seek to circumscribe that agency into a narrative where women’s bodies are no longer “short-circuiting” British patriarchy; instead, these imagined mediums are rendered conduits for—but are also potentially dangerous to—the state. By contrast, James’s “In the Cage” puts pressure on the narratives that redirect the female medium’s threatening spiritual and technological body by refusing to co-opt the female medium’s knowledge for patriarchal or imperial aims. Rather, James’s novel reveals the dangers of the medium’s knowledge—primarily her power and potential to make private knowledge public. Positioning the medium and her “pleasure of knowing” as a specifically sexual threat, James casts the medium’s knowledge as a part of an open circuit—making it dangerous, but also resistant to co-optation (62).

CROSSED WIRES: EMBODYING SPIRITUALISM THROUGH TECHNOLOGY Before I unpack these male-authored mediations of women mediums, I want to sketch a bit of context because it may seem strange to us, at first, to consider both the spiritual medium and typist in the same vein. Yet “writings of the period encourage this composite view, in that they often associate occult modes of communication and protection with technological ones” (Galvan 8). In part this is because the mechanics of emergent technologies were neither believable to nor widely understood by the general population. The advancement of science and technology amazed an audience that had never before been able to connect to and converse across vast distances in real time. Just as in “The Spirit of Sarah Keech” episode in Gallon’s novel (which I will consider below), a number of other texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated typewriting, and other new and seemingly unexplainable

86 technologies such as the telegraph, with automatic writing or spirit communications. John Kendrick Bangs’ The Enchanted Type-Writer (1899), for example, emphasizes the mystical nature of the typewriter, ultimately connecting it to the supernatural. In the novel, the unnamed narrator is amazed and mystified by the typewriter he finds in his attic. He takes it apart and examines it as if he were exploring an unknown land. As he explains, “with a whole morning, a type-writing machine, and a screw-driver before me I could penetrate the mysteries of that useful mechanism…It was exhilarating” (Bangs, n.pag Chapter 1). The mystery of the machine’s mechanics turns out to be small given the special powers this particular machine holds; despite his careful dissection of the machine, our narrator soon discovers that his typewriter is “manipulated by unseen hands” (n.pag Chapter 1). When typed on with human fingers, the typewriter only spits out gibberish— “somewhere between the keys and the types [the words] were lost”—but when visited by spirits from the spirit world, the typewriter is capable of marvelous and magical feats. Jim Boswell, the ghost who makes use of the machine in order to put out his spirit paper The Stygian Gazette, tells the narrator how the typewriter translated by itself “a story of Alexander Dumas’ about his Musketeers” from the “French original” into “American” English. “Think of it!” he cries, “That’s an advanced machine for you!” (n.pag Chapter 1). Here the typewriter remains uncanny despite both the spirit’s supernatural knowledge and the narrator’s exploration of its mechanics. The mystery of technology also aligns with the supernatural in Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless” (1902). In this short story, the narrator is waiting to see the result of Mr. Cashell’s telegraphic experiment; he seeks to use his telegraph to communicate wirelessly with a sister- telegraph at Poole. While hooking up his machine, Mr. Cashell acknowledges the mystery inherent in the experiment. He tells the narrator that the electricity that enables the wireless technology to work has the “unknown Power” to reveal unspecified “wonders” (558). These “wonders” unfold before the narrator’s eyes as the story progresses and the electric impulses of the telegraph trigger occult phenomena. As Mr. Cashell uses electricity to send messages wirelessly across England, he also transforms those around him. Mr. Shaynor, in correspondence with the electricity of the telegraph, enters a trance state and automatically writes messages from the spirit of John Keats, and Mr. Shaynor’s love interest, Fanny, is transformed into the erotic

87 woman on an advertisement hanging in the window.32 Her body, electrified, is infused with kaleidoscopic light. Kipling’s “Wireless” links discourses on spiritualism, technology, and the female body through the advancements of “what we call Electricity” (558). These texts, as well as many others, marveled at the “wonders” and seemingly magical possibilities of communication technologies.33 Technology’s capabilities are imagined beyond the advancements they already afford. The typewriter, which already can be used to quickly take down dictation, can instantly translate it as well, and the wireless telegraph, which can send messages across immense geographical distances, can also send messages from beyond the veil. While Kipling illustrates the cultural currency such overlapping representations garnered, the endless possibilities of both emergent technologies and spirit contact sparked much consideration by spiritualists and scientists alike. The occult and the technological influenced and formulated one another. The mechanics of emerging technologies, as well as the sciences that made them possible (i.e., electricity), were seen as mysterious by many, lending them to supernatural interpretation and comparisons. The very fact that communication technologies could relay messages across vast distances instantaneously evoked the image of a spiritual medium breaching the impossible distance between the material world and the spirit. One example Galvan provides concerns an early telephone user who compares his experience of listening to a friend on the wire to hearing a “voice from another world” (qtd. in Galvan 8). “Here,” he explains, “I was speaking to a person far away from me whom I could hear as though he was at my side and yet I could not see him” (qtd. in Galvan 8). In this example, the telephone extends and magnifies the user’s hearing so well that it is like contacting someone in the spirit world. Critics such as Galvan and Laura Otis, among others, illustrate how the occult and the technological influenced and helped formulate one another. Otis explains that one of the reasons that people of the nineteenth century “thought of physical forces, mental states, and social changes in the same ways” was “because they use the same words to describe them. At the same time, of course, they applied terms like ‘electric’ to all three concepts because they thought about

32 Mr. Shaynor’s Fanny is obviously meant to draw parallels to Keats’s fiancée Fanny Brawne. By channeling Keats, Mr. Shaynor is resurrecting and comparing Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne to his own.

33 In addition to the examples I provide here, many other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts combined the technological with the supernatural including, but not limited to, Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-Man” (1866) and Agatha Christie’s “Wireless” (1925).

88 them in similar ways. The vocabulary of electronic communications shaped thought, which in turn shaped the language of communications” (Otis 12). In addition to the common language of electricity in both spiritual and technological communications, the nerve network of the human body was integral in shaping spiritualist practice and building new technologies. The typewriter and telegraph were both built on a system that privileged organic sense perception, as both typists and telegraphers utilized their own embodied experience in the typing and transmission of messages. For example, Sir Isaac Pitman’s A Manual of the Typewriter (1893) emphasizes the importance of the (human) typewriter’s senses, especially in one who excels at the vocation.34 The telegraph, likewise, was reliant on the nervous system, and the telegraph system itself was built on the nineteenth-century model of the human nervous system. Samuel Morse, for example, compared his telegraph lines to the nerves of the body, predicting “it [will] not be long ere the whole surface of this country [is] channeled for those nerves which are to diffuse, with the speed of thought, a knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land” (Morse qtd. in Otis 120). Moreover, the telegraph as a device was itself modeled after organic and living bodies. Otis emphasizes Morse’s and his colleagues’ use of “electrophysiology” to “build communication systems that matched the body’s own ability to transmit messages” (Otis 120). Indeed, Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the first electric battery, fashioned his “battery powered communications device…[the] Voltic pile on the electric organs of a fish” (121). Communication technologies weren’t just modeled on the nerves of the body, they also relied upon organic material for their operation. The basic anatomical elements of the nervous system, according to nineteenth-century neurologists, are the nerve cells and nerve fibers: the “[c]ells have trophic and excitant functions and are organized into functional groups called ganglia” and the “purpose of fibers is to connect the cells and to conduct impulses and information throughout the nervous system” (Lazar 345). In the nineteenth century, these

34 Typewriter manuals were widely used by typists of the time. The genre was meant to illustrate how typewriters work and “sell the virtues of the technology” (Walker 117). Each model of the typewriter came with its own manual. Additionally, typewriting manuals like Pitman’s were produced to help users care for the machine and type more efficiently. I reference Pitman’s manual in particular because it “set the pattern for other early typing manuals” (118). Isaac Pitman & Sons was the most prolific producer of typewriting manuals, releasing “[f]rom 1891 onwards… small booklets of instructions on how to use various makes of typewriter” including Instructions on the Bar-lock Typewriter (1891), Instructions on the Remington Typewriter (1891), and Instructions on the Calligraphy Typewriter (1893) (118). For more information on the history of the typewriting manual, see Sue Walker.

89 elements were understood to be “interconnected in a great, continuous nervous network, much like a great railroad network would be constructed with stations (cells or ganglias) and connecting tracks (fibers)” (345). This nervous model was organized linearly “both within and between a sensory unit, a processing unit, and a motor unit” which together feels, changes sensory information into motor function, and “accounts for intelligence” (345). The body’s sensory unit (comprised of the five senses) provided ways “to detect, translate, and record a great variety of signals” which inspired communications engineers to use the body’s “wires” or nerves as organic receivers in their technological devices (Otis 121). For example, the German Vorselmann de Heer proposed an “‘electro-physiological telegraph,’ in which the ten fingers of a willing subject served as the receiving device” (121). He would alter the voltage based on the receiver’s “sensibility” (121). The inventor and founding father of electrical engineering, Werner von Siemens, when checking his cables’ insulation had “workmen stick their hands into chambers of water, relying on the mild shocks they got” to determine where the wires were faulty (121). And physicist William Thomson “applied the telegraph wires to his own tongue” while remodeling the transatlantic cable “and found that he could indeed ‘taste’ the differences among signals.… Like a human tongue, a telegraph key could speak as well as taste” (121). Theories based on the similarity of the telegraph wires to organic sensory perceptions were also inseparable from discussions of the women who primarily operated communications technologies like the telegraph and typewriter. These theories also borrowed from and helped shape those concerning spiritual mediums, who were often also technological mediums. Spiritualists frequently made use of communication technology in their séances, and psychical research on spiritualist practices like spirit writing, automatic writing, telepathy, and the séance were understood in scientific and technological terms.35 Theodora Bosanquet, for example, acted as Henry James’ secretary and took dictation of his novels on her typewriter; when he passed away, she claimed to receive automatic messages from the spirit of the deceased James. The famous Madame Blavatsky was called a “human typewriter” because “her Theosophical text Isis Unveiled was allegedly dictated to her by spirits. As one observer noted, she ‘loaned her body as

35 The typewriter frequently appeared in séances, as is evident in Bella’s séance experience in The Girl Behind the Keys as well as in Bangs’ The Enchanted Typewriter. The spiritualist movement, as Anthony Enns points out, “introduced a wide range of writing practices designed to enable communication with the dead” and spiritual mediums “engaged in the act of taking dictation from disembodied spirits during séances” (Enns 55). Many spiritualists would take stenography lessons, which was often used by typewriters and secretaries who took dictation. Ads for stenography classes would frequently appear in spiritualist periodicals. Spiritual mediums also doubled as secretaries.

90 one might one’s typewriter’” (Enns 72). The doubling of spiritual and technological mediums was possible because of the ways in which the female nervous system and its sensitivity were imagined as ideal for all forms of communication. The sympathetic nervous system, as discussed in Chapter One, is just as relevant to technological mediation as it is to spiritual mediation and is another example of how the discourses surrounding women’s spiritual and technological mediation overlap. Just as the medium’s sympathetic nerves facilitated otherworldly connections that blurred the lines between medium and spirit, the sympathetic rapport between the typist or telegraph operator and her technology created connections between them, their clients, and the world-at-large. Sympathy in both instances “draws a woman outward, until her own self ‘blends’ with other selves” (Galvan 39). Thus, the technological medium whose nerves are tapping into the machine becomes part of that machine—just as women cyclists, like Juliet, became extensions of their cycle and its mechanical circulation, as discussed in Chapter Two. Supporters of the transatlantic cable hoped that the active nerves of the operators would, due to the machine’s reliance on their organic systems, tap into and create “new, living bonds” that would “promote ‘sympathy,’ linking people like organs in a body” (Otis 136). This imagined “nerve network” (121) of “human sympathies” would link the organic and mechanic, through nerves, wires, and electromagnetic waves, and lead to the “meeting of minds and hearts” across the nation, and even the world (Galvan 24). The female medium’s material body is thus enveloped into a larger networked body. Her neurological organic function and sensory perceptions were crucial to the operation of technological apparatuses: the typewriter and telegraph only worked as well as they did because of the sensory acuity of their operators. The machine required the hands, ears, and eyes of the operator, and the capacity for sight, hearing, and touch that results from excited nerves. The typist who excelled at her work, for example, would have to be in tune with the machine, able to recognize any typing mistakes by “feeling” (Pitman 9)—either through the sensory perception of touch or by intuition. As we will see in Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys, a woman’s intuition stems from her ‘feminine’ nerves and sensory perceptions: “woman has a greater refinement of nervous organisation, which gives her a rapidity of perception and a rapidity of thought which appear as intuitive insight” (Hollander qtd. in Luckhurst 218). She is able “to read the slightest external signs [for] what passes within” (Luckhurst 218). Thus, women’s sensitive nerves were

91 thought to lend them superior tactility or responsiveness, as well as deductive thinking skills (218). Sensory perception, as a by-product of nervous action, was also essential for enabling communication within the operator’s own body and with the external world. According to physiologist Johannes Müller, “Sensation…consists in the communication to the sensorium, not of the quality or the state of the external body, but of the condition of the nerves themselves, excited by the external cause. We do not feel the knife which gives us pain, but the painful state of our nerves produced by it.… We communicate…with the external world merely by virtue of the states which external influences excite in our nerves” (Muller qtd. in Otis 42). What produces meaning (pain) is the nerves’ active response to external stimulation (the knife penetrating the skin). The female medium, as the receiver of incoming transmissions, is essentially a live wire, whose sensory perceptions interpret and convey that meaning. Thus, the mediator doesn’t just transmit messages or forge connections; she makes meaning and knowledge out of those connections. The mediator who interprets and conveys that meaning thus shapes—even produces—knowledge. The medium whose nerves are actively engaged in communicating becomes inseparable from the message and the knowledge those nerves transmit. Communication itself, as James W. Carey explains, is intrinsically linked to knowledge, as “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed” (23). The act of communicating, ultimately, constructs what we know and how we see the world. The medium doesn’t just become a part of the message, but ultimately helps to shape it.36 Christopher Keep explains that “the body encodes itself as the necessary ‘noise’ in the circuits of transmission, always adding its own signature to every communication” (“Blinded By” 152). Both typewriting and telegraphing affect language— and through language construct reality. The telegraph, for example, was seen as a “‘thing to think with,’ shaping the thoughts that it wired” (Otis 204). In Ella Cheever Thayer’s novel Wired Love (1879), the telegraph operators and their unique methods of transmission provide a signature that could not only convey emotion, but also reveal personal information about the operator. Nattie, the protagonist and female telegrapher, and her mysterious correspondent, “X n,” try to guess

36 One is reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s slogan, “the medium is the message” from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), in which he argues “the scale and form of human association and action” is shaped and controlled by the medium itself (9). Of course, while McLuhan understands “medium” in a broad sense, he is primarily thinking about medium in terms of texts.

92 one another’s gender based on the way in which their messages come across the sounder. “X n” is able to correctly guess that Nattie is a “lady” as “there is a certain difference in the ‘sending,’ of a lady and a gentleman, that [he] had learned to distinguish” (22-23). In another scene, Nattie can tell “judging from the way the movable portion of the ‘sounder’ danced” that the incoming message was “emphatic” (14). These examples show how the telegraph operator inevitably constructs and influences the way in which the message is read based on the style or interpretation of the transmitting. Sometimes, Thayer’s novel suggests, the messages are transmitted incorrectly or misinterpreted. Nattie, in one such instance, distracted by a customer, thinks an incoming message reads “Send the hearse” (17), when in reality it’s “Send the horse” (18). Fortunately, Nattie’s misinterpretation is caught in time, but she and her fellow operator can’t help but “[i]magine the feelings of the sender of that message, had he found a hearse awaiting his arrival instead of a horse!” (19). Like the children’s game of telephone, one can never be sure that one’s message will not be altered and changed as it passes from one operator to the next; so, too, the message is “cathected and de-cathected in new ways” as it circulates through the medium’s nerves and wires and is exposed to “reinterpretation and negotiation” (Thurschwell 90). That knowledge could be altered or acted on by the medium gave her a power that many found unsettling. Certainly, the attempts to depict the telegraph or typewriter girl, as well as the spirit medium, as automatic and passive, and thus absent from the informational exchanges in which she participated, was a response to her potentially threatening positionality. At the same time, as witnessed in spiritual communication, the receptivity of the female medium, who could occupy and blur the boundary between self and other, was also read as dangerous. The transmutable nature of the medium—who could be woman, spirit, hysteric, and even automatic machine all at once—scandalized the nineteenth-century public, especially those men who read technological and spiritual female mediums as circulating themselves in public ways that disrupted the status quo. Indeed, the cultural icon of the typewriter girl, as discussed in Chapter Two, much like the woman cyclist, put pressure on received ideas about what it meant to be a “proper” woman. Frequently associated with the New Woman movement, both figures represented a population of women who sought economic and social independence before—or at the expense of—matrimony and maternity.

93 GALLON’S ORGANIC MECHANISMS: FEMALE MEDIATION AND SENSORY DETECTING Gallon’s detective novel, The Girl Behind the Keys, reveals the ways in which the female medium can and does utilize the information she gathers “behind the keys” of her typewriter, and often through her sympathetic connection with the machine. In this first-person novel, Gallon’s protagonist, the typewriter Bella Thorn, takes a job at the Secretarial Supply Syndicate. Unbeknownst to her, the company is a front for her employer Mr. Larrard’s con operation. Bella accidentally at first, and then intentionally as the tale unfolds, takes on the role of amateur detective, making use of her typewriting skills, in order to frustrate the nefarious plots of Mr. Larrard and his gang of criminals. The importance of the typewriting narrator’s relationship to her typewriter is established from the very start of the novel when she is saved from impending starvation by a newspaper advertisement requesting a “[y]oung lady…with knowledge of typewriting” (28). Established immediately as Bella’s savior, the typewriter and Bella’s own knowledge of the profession protect her throughout the rest of the novel. In response to the ad, she is soon hired at the Secretarial Supply Syndicate, Limited. As its only legitimate employee, Bella is likewise used to cover the operation. Her employer Mr. Larrard sends her out on what seem like typical dictation jobs, hoping that she, as a naïve young woman, will unknowingly aid in their criminal activities. Where Mr. Larrard and the Syndicate attempt to co-opt Bella’s particular skill set for their own uses, Bella and her active organic function—tied to the spiritual and technological nerve network—resist being drawn into their schemes and in fact, work actively to dismantle their organization. In so doing, the knowledge she acquires and her mediumistic talents are in turn used by her journalist boyfriend and Scotland Yard, who like Bella, intend to stop Mr. Larrard’s dangerous plotting. As a typist, Bella becomes, in her own and Mr. Larrard’s eyes, as mechanized as the typewriter itself. At her initial interview for the typewriting job at the Syndicate, Bella is told that her value as a typist relies not only on her typing skills, but also on her discretion. Bella seems to understand this instinctively, even though she is at this point unaware that Mr. Larrard’s desire for secrecy is criminal in nature. When she is asked to audition her skills by taking down Mr. Larrard’s message—which turns out to be a letter of blackmail—Bella doesn’t even blink. Commenting on her lack of surprise, Larrard no doubt approves of Bella’s reply: “you seem to forget,” she explains, “that a typist in my position has to become a mere machine; her fingers are

94 the only things that matter about her” (Gallon 34). Bella recognizes that her fingers act as an extension of the typewriter, rendering her body machine-like. Mr. Larrard values these automatic qualities in Bella and seeks to cultivate them further; he instructs Bella to “keep[] always that calm impassive look on your innocent face” and warns her to “forget, at the end of the day, all that has happened during that day” (31). Mr. Larrard’s presumption that Bella is not just herself a typewriter, but also as inanimate as the typewriter, often leads him to mistake her tact for either forgetfulness or ignorance. Along with Bella’s sensory perceptions—her intuition, observational skills, and sympathetic and embodied connection with the typewriter—this oversight enables her to interfere when necessary in order to work against her employer’s interests without her meddling ever being discovered. Bella manages to placate Mr. Larrard’s suspicions about her misdirecting the Syndicate’s scheming by performing the part of a simple, weak woman, whose only concern is making a living. Despite Mr. Larrard’s acknowledgment that Bella is either “precious dangerous, or precious useful” (48), Bella’s refrain of “I don’t understand” seems to satisfy Larrard, who is repeatedly taken in by her mechanized demeanor (e.g., 48, 65, 117, 170). As Bella explains, “[h]aving always a placid exterior, I was, to all appearances, as much a machine as that at which I worked; and I think, in time, he began to cease to think that I need be considered at all” (67). As a result, the typewriter is not just an extension of Bella’s fingers or nervous perceptions; it is also a tool that extends her ability to know. Moreover, her typewriting body is more mobile than ever before—where the typewriter goes, Bella, as its sole operator, goes as well. In a series of episodes, Bella, as communication medium-turned-detective, makes use of her particular position and access in what Galvan calls her “productive duplicity” (145). She mimics the functionality of her typewriter in order to gain access to and gather intelligence, but she does so on an organic level. Through her nervous sympathy and her intuitive and embodied knowledge of the typewriter, Bella actively (though surreptitiously) thwarts Mr. Larrard’s plotting. My view of Bella as an organic extension of the typewriter is established mostly through her familiarity with the machine. Her body, its nerves, and sensory perceptions are the means by which she gains knowledge of the gang’s activity and circumvents its impact. Her body’s sympathetic connection to the typewriter recognizes when it has been tampered with, and the knowledge of how the typewriter is meant to function helps her to discover how critical she and her typewriter are to the Syndicate’s plans. For example, in a chapter entitled “The Diamonds of

95 the Danseuse,” Bella is sent to take dictation for Mr. Percy Whittaker, who we learn has stolen some famous diamonds. Mr. Whittaker, posing as a “good-humoured boy” who is “wonderfully interested” in the typewriting machine, has Bella explain “all about it, and what the parts were for” (50). His particular curiosity extends to the “little round things, like barrels,” on the end of the machine (50). Bella explains to him that “they were the barrels on which the ribbon was wound” and demonstrates their operation by “winding the ribbon and showing him the little metal cylinder on which it automatically wound itself up” (50). With his new knowledge, Mr. Whitaker hides the stolen jewels in the cylinder during a break from the lesson. Upon resuming her position at the machine, Bella immediately notices that something is amiss; she “heard some part of it rattle” and accuses Mr. Whittaker of breaking it while he was exploring its inner workings. He warns her not to “be pulling it to pieces,” as an “amateur should never meddle with a delicate thing like that” (59). Mr. Whittaker’s patronizing suggestion is laughable, given that Bella has just finished schooling him on the typewriter’s operation. Bella is anything but an amateur when it comes to the typewriter. Suspicious of the rattling noise, she inspects the typewriter thoroughly when she gets home. Her inspection reveals her expertise even further and almost resembles a doctor checking over a sickly patient: I tilted the machine back, to have a look at the levers. Everything seemed sound; I tested them, one after the other, and found nothing wrong. Letting the machine down flat upon the table again, I heard once more that rattling. Carefully testing every inch of it, and even removing various parts, I came at last to the conclusion that the rattling was in those little rollers or drums, round which the ribbon was wound.… In five minutes I had loosened the screws, and taken out the long steel bar which supported the drum; two more screws held the flat end of the drum in place, and these I also loosened. As the end of the little metal reel fell off, a glittering cascade of stones tumbled out on the shabby cloth which covered my table. The diamonds of the danseuse were before me. (60-61) Given that the typewriter (the machine) and the typewriter (the girl) are often assigned the same qualities—mechanical, passive, inert—and Pitman’s insistence in his typewriting manual that the typist’s knowledge and sensory perceptions must be completely in tune with the machine, Bella’s knowledge of the putative biology of her machine could be equated with self-knowledge.

96 Bella is aware of how the machine ought to function and is thus sensitive to its dysfunction, in almost the same way that she would be of her own body. As Pitman makes clear in his manual, the medium’s, or here, the mediator’s sensitivity to sensory perceptions is crucial for operating the machine and for quality typing. For example, Pitman explains that the ear is crucial in determining “when the writing is approaching the bottom of a page”: “At the beginning of a page, the sound produced by the striking of the type against the cylinder through the paper is sharp and crisp. As the bottom of the page is approached, the sounds become louder and more drum-like” (7). The ear must be trained to “detect the difference” and will then “inform the operator” of when to insert a new sheet of paper (7). Where the ear is helpful in noticing when a paper should be replaced, the (human) typewriter “will have no difficulty in feeling whether the paper lies properly or not” (7). While perhaps Pitman is referring to the sense of touch, the emphasis on the word “feeling” seems to suggest that the talent of the typist in completing these tasks is also left to her intuition and experience—it is credited to the typist’s knowledge and familiarity with the machine. Pitman emphasizes the need for a “familiarity with the keyboard” as well (7). While it is necessary for the operator to be familiar with the placement of the keys, an over-familiarity can lead to errors: “The operator who has advanced beyond the stage of the beginner is prone to push the pace too hotly, with the result that one key is often unwittingly substituted for another” (7). However, the talented typist’s familiarity and intuition will alert her or him to any mistakes that may have been made. Based on touch and feel alone, the typist “will become conscious of the existence of an error, whenever one has been made, without reference to the writing at all” (7). In fact, the best typists are those whose familiarity with the keyboard is so great that they go by the sense of touch alone, and do not require the eyes at all (7-8): “The typist must learn to have confidence in his manipulation. If the mind be kept on the task at hand, if the manipulation be more than mechanical and automatic, if the brain be kept at work as well as the hands, there will be no time lost in constantly examining the writing” (11). By “look[ing] at the levers,” “hear[ing] the rattling,” “loosen[ing] the screws,” and “testing every inch of it,” Bella finds the gems hidden in the “rollers or drums” (Gallon 60-61). With the discovery of the stolen diamonds, Bella “saw the plot in a moment. Who was to suspect a little typewriter, carrying home her machine, after the day’s work, to her lodging” (61)? Otis’s representation of the sympathetic connection of the nervous system of the body to technology is clearly in play here: Bella’s nerves, which enable her sensory perceptions—touch, hearing, sight,

97 and even intuition or familiarity—also enable her to diagnose the machine and the situation. Bella’s intuition is representative of what Smajic calls the “dual impulse in detective fiction to both embrace and reject alternate ways of seeing and knowing” (181). Thus, like clairvoyance, telepathy, or even spirit communication, Bella’s “miraculous feat[]” of deductive reasoning and intuition represents an alternate practice of knowing (181). The intuitive and sympathetic nervous connection between Bella and her typewriter is also evident in “The Spirit of Sarah Keech” episode, which draws on more traditional spiritualist discourses.37 Mr. Larrard, eager to con the Pashleys out of the money they inherited from their wealthy Aunt Sarah Keech, plays on their shock and confusion upon their receiving such a large sum. They approach Mr. Larrard for advice, hoping that he might be able to arrange a séance with a spirit medium so they can contact Sarah Keech from beyond the grave and ask her what they are to do with the money. Mr. Larrard stages a séance using wires under the floorboards to connect two typewriters in adjoining rooms, so that keys pressed on one typewriter will respond and type on the other. While the Pashleys are in the next room with a con woman from the Syndicate performing the role of spiritual medium, Mr. Larrard dictates messages to Bella, who then types them into the machine. Mr. Larrard hopes that by receiving typewritten spirit messages from Sarah Keech, the Pashleys will be encouraged to put their inheritance into Mr. Larrard’s keeping. Bella fortunately circumvents this plot, in ways similar to how she acts in “The Diamonds of the Danseuse.” Through her knowledge of the machine as well as her embodied connection to it, Bella intuits that there is something wrong with the typewriter. She describes how she “grasped the machine at either side of the keyboard, and started to move it into a position better to suit [her]” but, much to her “surprise,” the typewriter “was fixed” (Gallon 77). Though Bella doesn’t fully understand that the messages being dictated to her by Mr. Larrard are the fake spirit-messages being received by the Pashleys in the adjoining room, the typewriter’s odd behavior under her fingers spark her interest and suspicions. In addition to being “fixed” in place, the typewriter keys resist her touch; they “moved sharply” and “wanted much thumping

37 The emergence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century detective fiction “coincided with the rise of spiritualism” (Willis 60). Thus, it is no wonder that detective fiction makes use of spiritualist motifs. As Chris Willis explains, both spiritualism and detective fiction “attempt to explain mysteries” and the role of the medium is simila r to that of the detective in a murder case, as “[b]oth are trying to make the dead speak in order to reveal a truth" (60). Other detective fiction that includes spiritualist ideas are Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House (1932) and The Sittaford Mystery (1931), as well as Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison (1930). All make use of spiritualism and/or the séance to either set up the narrative or unravel the mystery.

98 before they would go down fully” (79). Typewriting manuals of the time reveal that any experienced typewriter would recognize by feel that something was wrong. As Pitman’s manual expresses it, “A good machine encourages” a good “quality of touch” (3). The “springs” should be of “an elastic temper” so that the “fingers should almost rebound from the keys” (3). Just as in the “The Diamonds of the Danseuse,” Bella’s sensory perceptions—the materiality of her body—are in tune with the inner workings of her typewriter. Her nervous system can intuitively determine that something is amiss with the typewriter by feeling or touch alone. Encouraged by Mr. Larrard to overlook these warning signs, Bella remains suspicious and uses her position as typist to gain access to the room and the typewriter the next day, where she is surprised to find the typewriter typing messages without human assistance. Worried that the spirits or something “unholy” is responsible, Bella pulls out the sheet of paper and reads the note which, translated from the spirit’s misspellings and incorrect grammar, reads “Jane Pashley, Paragon Hotel, Westminster” (Gallon 82). Bella, with a “dreadful feeling” that she “was probing secrets [she] did not understand,” heads to the address, which she believes was written by Sarah Keech’s “spirit fingers.” After a brief conversation with the Pashleys, she realizes more is at work than spirit contact. She immediately returns to the office building to investigate: I began carefully to examine the typewriter in every part. It was firmly screwed to the table; but, by bending down, and peering underneath, I saw that a most ingenious arrangement of thin steel levers had been fixed, as in the machine in the other room, to the bars which supported the keys, and by means of which the type was set in motion. Having no knowledge of mechanics, it is impossible for me to describe all the mechanism; but in a little place in the wall, which was shrouded, as in the other room, by a curtain, was a curious arrangement of cranks, so fixed that when I pressed down a key in the machine in Neal Larrard’s room, the lever which went through the wall operated on the identical key in the other machine. I began to understand how it was that the spirit of Sarah Keech had managed to work the typewriter so successfully. (88-89) Bella discovers a series of levers and cranks that connect the typewriters in a way that mimics the nerve network imagined by the scientists, psychical researchers, and technological and spiritual mediums of the fin de siècle. The wires connecting the typewriters resemble the nerves of the body. While human entities, rather than spiritual ones, manufacture the séance-typewriter

99 connection in Gallon’s novel, it nonetheless requires a sympathetic nervous connection to work. Thus, Bella’s nerves reach out through her fingers: to the keys of the typewriter, through the wires to another typewriter, and to the eyes and ears of the Pashleys, who read and respond to that message in particular ways. The typewriter, as an extension of Bella’s own nervous system and embodied experience, unites her organic body with the interconnected technological one. Recognizing this circuit and her role in it, Bella arranges a second séance with the Pashleys, wherein through the use of the complex network of typewriters (both human and technological) she mediates an amended message from the “spirit” of Sarah Keech, warning them to get away from Mr. Larrard as quickly as possible. In this case, Bella acts first as the technology (and mouthpiece of Mr. Larrard), and then later as both the “brain” directing the revised messages to be sent to the Pashleys and the “spirit” entity of their aunt. Bella essentially multiplies her identity in working simultaneously as technology, medium, agent, and spirit. Moreover, the nerve network Bella taps into combines the organic, technological, and (potentially) spirit material; the distinctions between these parts are challenged, forming a larger networked system or body of which Bella (and the Pashleys) is a part. Bella’s automatic writing, enacted by her hand, as the extension of the typewriter becomes a “synecdoche for the writer, for writerly authority” (Armstrong 187). She makes use of her mechanical self, in a way that expresses her own authority due to the nerve network between the two machines. Bella’s sympathetic connection to and “specialized knowledge” of the typewriter give her, as Arlene Young argues, “a level of power over others” because her profession is “not well understood by most people” (13). Certainly, the Syndicate, whose goal is to utilize Bella’s power for its own gain, is repeatedly thwarted and ultimately dismantled by it. Where the syndicate uses her typewriter as a “front” or “blind” to cover their tracks from the authorities, Bella literally uses a “blind” typewriter—which is symbolic of her sympathetic and intuitive material agency. “Blind” is a specialized typewriting term used for certain models of typewriters where “the type bars hit the underside of the roller so that the typist could not see what she or he was typing. The text was only visible when the carriage was lifted” (Young 141 fn.1). Typing blind relied completely on the sense of touch “to ensure the accuracy of…transcription” (Keep, “Blinded By” 150). The words would move “unseen” from the typewriter to the page. The term “blind” also further embeds Bella in the cross-discourses of the spiritual and technological—lending her ability to type by feel a particular uncanniness. The practice of “spirit typtology” or “table-

100 rapping,” which was commonly used during the séance to communicate with spirits, was inspired by the invention of the typewriter and telegraph. It made use of a series of taps, which resembled Morse code, to send messages and even dictate literary works.38 Bella’s use of the “blind” thus further aligns her typewriting and detective work with occultist practices. And, given the degree to which her sensory nerves influence her ability to “detect,” the term is especially ironic; Bella’s “blind” typing further reminds the reader of her uncanny intuition and the sensitivity of her sympathetic nervous system. Olive Norton, a young woman whom Bella aids in “The Haunted Yacht” episode, uses the metaphor of the blind typewriter when she puns that Bella is “here only as a blind to cover all that is done” (Gallon 123). Bella literalizes this later in the novel, rescuing Vincent Kendale in “The Swingley Green Tragedy” by exchanging a series of blind messages with him via her typewriter—right under Mr. Larrard’s nose. By pretending to give Vincent lessons on typing, the two organize an escape plan. Bella’s only resource, in this case, is the machine at her fingertips, and because she recognizes it as the key to her access and expression, she makes full use of it— typing messages where she can’t speak them. The “blind” metaphor comes up again in the final showdown between Scotland Yard and the Syndicate. With a gun pressed against her side, Larrard forces Bella into her desk chair, blocking the dead body of Daniel Maggs, which is hidden beneath the desk. When the man from Scotland Yard shows up to search the place for Maggs, Larrard uses the name of the business as a shield from wrongdoing: “if you will have the goodness to look at the inscription on the door,” he says, “you will see that this is a typewriting office, and that we have our own respectable business to attend” (181). Ironically, Bella quickly turns from being Mr. Larrard’s “blind” to being his shield, as gunshots are fired and Bella gets hit in the arm.

38 The term ‘typtology’ itself is “a word coined from the Greek ‘tupto’ or ‘I strike’”; spirit mediums were also occasionally referred to as “typters,” a “word that foreshadowed the term ‘typist’” (Enns 60). Another model of spirit writing, loosely termed the ‘Kitchen Table Model,’ was based on the typewriter’s function. “[E]ssentially a table with a hole in the centre and a circle of letters printed on one side of the flat surface,” Enns explains , "[a] sheet of paper would be placed over the hole, and when the letters were pressed typebars would strike the paper from underneath. This device, which was patented in 1868 as the ‘Sholes, Glidden and Soule Type-Writer,’ not only represents the origin of ‘understrike’ technology, but also illustrates how the typewriter incorporated various occult engineering principles. The typebars on Sholes’ apparatus would strike the bottom of the table when a particular letter was pressed, just as the spirits would allegedly ‘rap’ or ‘knock’ against a table when a medium’s hand passed over a particular letter" (68). The understrike typewriter required blind typing, preventing the typist from visibly seeing the writing that was produced. To read what she had written, the typist would have to lift the carriage up or roll the paper through the machine.

101 By acting the “blind,” or rather the sympathetically intuitive detective, Bella’s disruption of the criminal activities in each episode demonstrates not only her material agency, but also the dangerous potential that agency has. Her sympathetic connection to and embodied knowledge of the typewriter makes Bella privy to information that is damaging. Gallon dismantles Bella’s threat to traditional gender norms by writing her mediation into a narrative where it benefits the British nation. Rather than use her knowledge to capitalize economically (she could easily have walked off with the stolen jewels, for example), join forces with the criminal gang, or even worse, let it go to waste by doing nothing at all to thwart the Syndicate’s harmful actions, Bella uses it to aid in an investigation of the Syndicate at the behest of two men who hold positions of power within the British patriarchal system: her investigative journalist boyfriend, Philip Esdaile, and the “grey-haired” detective of Scotland Yard. Philip—who had “certain wild ideas concerning” Bella (he wants to marry her!)—is surprised and pleased to discover her association with the Syndicate, which he had been “on the track of…for months” (39). He encourages her to “go on; to fight these people in the dark” (45). Bella protests that she is only a “weak woman,” but Phil, seeing the advantage in her position, manages to persuade her to “bring” the “dangerous gang…to justice” (45). Bella is likewise enlisted in the final episode, “The Return of Mr. Maggs,” by Scotland Yard to help bring the thief Daniel Maggs, and ultimately the entire gang, into police custody. She realizes her position as the “human buffer between the forces of law and order” outside of the office and “that desperate band of criminals in the inner room” and knew it was her only “chance” (174). She reports the murder of Maggs to the grey-haired officer watching the office, only to be directed by him back into the Syndicate office to help with the bust. Though she is reluctant, the officer insists, “We want you”: “you know too much about the business for us to let you go like that” (178). Here, Bella’s knowledge of the Syndicate is recognized and co-opted by Scotland Yard. It gets used for and by the state, rather than according to Bella’s own discretion and intention. Her status as typewriter, which bolsters her own independence and challenges the criminals, adheres to and works on behalf of the English patriarchy in the end. The threat of her power to utilize the knowledge she gains about the Syndicate to act in her own self-interest— which, as an independent and skilled New Woman making her own salary, is considerable—is by the novel’s end successfully rerouted for the state. Moreover, after the final showdown, Bella retires as a technological medium and typewriter, confessing that there is no “great necessity” to

102 continue as she has married Phil, whose career, it is implied, has been made as a result of Bella’s detective work (183). Relinquishing the typewriter allows her to more fully embrace her new role as wife and pass on her authorial ambitions to a more appropriate, masculine author. The first-person account of her heroic deeds gives way to the (presumably) masculine journalistic voice as she concludes her narrative with a newspaper clipping on the Syndicate’s trial, which recounts the “commendatory remarks” that Bella received from the Judge, echoing the journalist’s own compliments of her “remarkable” feats (183). Thus, Gallon’s novel effectively recognizes Bella’s material agency and its potential threat to society and renders that agency valuable and productive in protecting the British nation—a feature it has in common with a far more famous novel of technological mediation.

MINA’S BODY OF KNOWLEDGE AND MEANINGFUL PRODUCTION Within Stoker’s Dracula, Mina Harker, much like Bella Thorn, acts as a spiritual and technological medium: she embodies the material and intuitive agency that comes with these crossed knowledges. What’s more, Stoker’s Mina provides a striking contrast to the coquettish and aristocratic Lucy Westenra, whose manifest sexual charm, sympathetic capability, and telepathic blood connection to Dracula render her threatening to traditional ideals of Victorian womanhood. Mina, in turn, is an active and crucial agent in the novel, but her activity is exactly what “gets utilized”—and I invoke the passive voice purposefully here—for the good of the state, and particularly in the service of global Western imperialism. Much like The Girl Behind the Keys, in which the men of the novel privilege Bella’s sympathetic nervous connections in their efforts to aid Scotland Yard and the nation more generally, Dracula’s Van Helsing, with his band of merry men, relies on Mina’s technological and telepathic agency as a means for knowledge-gathering, transmission, and translation. The novel itself even relies formally on Mina’s editorial agency to make the imaginative project of imperialism possible. With her excellent set of secretarial skills—most notably stenography and typewriting— Mina is responsible for translating and mediating the dispersion of knowledge among Van Helsing and his male recruits: Jonathan Harker, Quincy Morris, Arthur Holmwood, and John Seward. Van Helsing’s team depends on the use of progressive technologies such as shorthand, the telegram, the phonograph, and the typewriter in order to defeat Dracula. And Mina, as a typist, collects and transcribes their records in order to make them available for “collective

103 analysis” (Galvan 72). With Galvan and Leah Richards, I agree that Mina’s spreading and sharing of knowledge becomes a requirement for survival, as well as for legitimizing the group’s strange experiences and interactions with the villainous Count Dracula, whose systematic invasion of London threatens the British nation. However, the sharing of knowledge that is so essential to the novel is, I argue, not just important for survival or authentication purposes; it becomes the very means and method through which Count Dracula’s activities and locations are tracked. Without Mina’s careful documentation, the Count would remain untraceable, unmappable, unavailable, and thus unreal to society. Mina’s records, I argue, allow her and her fellow trackers not only literally to capture Dracula, but to make him visible and real to the public through a reproducible narrative. It is Mina as the (re)producer of knowledge who is responsible for both Dracula’s demise and the end of the threat that he represents to the English nation. Through her secretarial and mediation skills, Mina is unofficially drafted by Van Helsing as necessary to the preservation and protection of the British Empire. The “new,” or at least preserved, British nation to which Mina’s mediated agency gives birth not only secures the safety of the British nation from the colonial other, but also safeguards and promotes the imperial project. Her meticulous documentation of Van Helsing band's effort to expel Dracula from England (and more specifically from Mina herself) grants her an agency that is tied directly to her secretarial work and labor. Mina’s other labor, the birth of her son at the end of the novel, represents an idealized future for Britain. Given the name Quincey after the American cowboy in their band, Mina’s son embodies an expanded Anglo-empire. After all, Quincey senior is the only masculine figure in Dracula who does not suffer an emotional crisis. He is also the one who heroically gives his life to preserve the English nation and ensure Mina’s safety. Insisting “that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into” their son, the Harkers claim this American hero for England’s future and jointly ensure that it is a masculine one (326). Carrying the “bundle of names” of each male member of their “little band,” young Quincey, it is implied, is blessed with the best qualities of each man, and presumably those of Mina herself.39 Beyond giving birth to the future of Britain, which arguably places Mina in the traditional role of

39 Mina, the only female member of the band, embodies a masculine femininity that will, the novel implies, be passed down to her son. As Galvan explains, Van Helsing’s description of Mina as “a brave and gallant woman” (Stoker 327) in this same passage reflects his earlier use of the term “gallant gentleman” in reference to Quincey Morris (326). The “echo of the epithet here,” she asserts, underlines the “taxonomical challenge of [Mina’s] character: her chimerical combination (in Van Helsing’s earlier words) of a ‘man’s brain’ with a ‘woman’s heart’” (Galvan 85).

104 “mother of the nation,” Mina’s active participation in imperial projects is, somewhat paradoxically, the means through which she fashions an agency that upends her circumscribed role as the traditional woman. As such, I read Dracula as a novel that is in part about women crafting their own access to information and participation in mediation and communication. Both a technological and spiritual mediator through her typing and transcription work and her telepathic blood link with Dracula, the character of Mina offers a more complex negotiation of new and traditional Victorian womanhood. Mina’s agency—its problems and possibilities— is, as with other mediums, actualized through her transcribing, editing, and mediating between men. That Mina is figured in this way reveals much about the relationship between nineteenth- century ideas of femininity and what Galvan calls the “modernizing concepts of communication and knowledge transfer” (2). Mina, as the mediator of knowledge, is explicitly tied to technology as well as authorship. The relaying of information in which she participates becomes a creative construction whereby her acts of textual reproduction—writing, typing, mediating, translating, and transcribing—acquire “an agency and association” with “labors and practices” classified with production (Levy 9). Examining Mina as a technological and even spiritual mediator, then, can help us to understand the ways in which women’s mediation, tied to authorship and agency, is also related to woman’s role as nation-builder. Mina’s mediation leads, after all, although perhaps unexpectedly, to authorship—wherein Mina becomes the author of the novel, the author of Dracula (the vampire), and the author of the British nation (in particular material ways). In other words, Mina’s complicated femininity, as well as her relationship to technological and spiritual mediation and authorship, turns out to be a function of empire. Stoker creates Mina as a way of rethinking women’s roles during the late nineteenth century, and more specifically their role in nation-building. Even more complicated, perhaps, is that while Stoker (through the medium of the novel) creates a woman character with a material agency that moves beyond motherhood and traditional patriarchal/familial hierarchies, Mina still contributes to the betterment of Britain’s patriarchal empire: she is empowered in and by a national(ist) discourse that co-opts her mediation, even as she is complicit in male-dominated discourses regarding imperialism. With her feminine identity tied up in a multitude of discourses and roles, Mina becomes a perfect representation of the power that accrues to women’s knowledge and understanding, and the way

105 in which it gets used in preserving and building the nation through both biological reproduction and literary production. Mina’s cataloguing of information combats the fear and illegibility of the threat that she, her friends, and the British nation experience in the form of Dracula. From the very beginning of the novel, the Count is described as an elusive, unmappable presence. Dracula as a being is able to change forms—he can turn into a bat or wolf. His body itself is unreadable: is he living? is he dead? At one moment, he is described as an “old man” with “astonishing vitality in a man of his years” (Stoker 23-24), and the next as “a tall, thin man” who had “grown young” (155). He eludes a solid materiality. He can dissipate into thin air as dust or fog. He casts no shadow, and mirrors and photographs fail to capture his reflection. His location is under constant question and his ethnic heritage is inscrutable. Dracula is wholly undocumentable at first and, as a result, Jonathan and the others doubt his existence. Jonathan repeatedly questions what he sees in Castle Dracula, asking “what manner of man” is Dracula, or “what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?” (39). Jonathan’s experience of Castle Dracula makes the vampire’s unmappability most apparent. While traveling in “that far East,” Jonathan has no clear route to take, no easy mode of transportation, and no knowledge of the local customs. He notes that the “further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains,” and though the country is beautiful and “very picturesque,” it is also “very mysterious” and “unknown” (13-14). Most distressing of all is Jonathan’s inability to locate any complete map of Transylvania. Indeed, Castle Dracula does not show up on any available map: as Jonathan writes, “I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordinance Survey maps” (10). This lack of documentation forms an extreme contrast to the materials Dracula has collected about England. His study contains a wealth of information on the West, a “vast number of English books…bound volumes of magazines and newspapers” with all sorts of information from “history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law —all relating to England and English life and customs and manners” (25). Dracula has access to histories of verified documents, helping him to assimilate to London life, while Jonathan stumbles around the “East,” blind and unknowing because he lacks access to maps and histories. Acquiring knowledge becomes the method through which conquering and colonizing is possible for Dracula, and his potential for doing so inspires the fear and unease Jonathan, Mina, and their

106 friends feel toward him. Their inability to know or understand Dracula makes him more threatening. Therefore, the hunters’ first step in defeating Dracula is to make sense of him; to render him legible. The mapping of Dracula’s physicality, history, and location becomes necessary for navigating, understanding, and eventually capturing him; the novel itself becomes a form of entrapment—of making real and confirming the strange. The ideology of conquest through knowledge and documentation is, as Thomas Richards explains in The Imperial Archive, quite common to the time, when “people in Britain began to think differently about what it meant to hold on to an empire. The narratives of the late nineteenth century are full of fantasies about an empire united not by force but by information” (1). Domination itself became not just a matter of “military might, economic muscle, and political pull,” but of gathering information and organizing archives (T. Richards 2). “The British collected information about the countries they were adding to their map,” Richards comments, so “they surveyed and they mapped” (3). Furthermore, in Dracula, conquest doesn’t just come via information; rather, the fantasy of empire within the novel utilizes the information collected to conquer, or at least to enable a more strategic use of force. If anything, Mina’s mediation work and textual mapping is like that of the war office, supplying fighters with the information they need to make a more precise and effective attack. If the way to defeat Dracula is, in part, to capture or “know” him, the narrative certainly attempts to do so, and it enables Mina to take on a central role in that task. While the surveying and mapping that Thomas Richards discusses were considered to be the work of an “old boys’ network,” in Dracula, it is Mina, in all her feminine glory, who becomes responsible for the gathering, surveying, and mapping of knowledge (63). Her organization and compilation of various narratives finally corner and contain Dracula, in a way that mimics the imperialist method of knowledge-gathering and mapping, within the solid and reproducible form of the novel. Almost immediately, Stoker establishes Mina as the mediator of knowledge and even the editor of the text itself. Mina's reserved abstraction of how the novel comes into existence—that is to say, her vague editor's preface—frames the narrative as a whole, veiling it in deeper mystery until the unpacking of its pages reveals her as the compiler and editor of the final text. Appearing after the frontispiece and dedication, Mina's editorial framing is a trope of the gothic genre, reminding us of similarly "framed" stories of horror in gothic staples like Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), and, even more recent and relevant, Stoker's

107 own The Lady in the Shroud (1909). Within this familiar gothic trope, a character or group of characters hint at how the pages to follow have come into existence, obscuring and delaying our understanding of what's to come even as they appear to direct the audience on how to read the text at hand. What's interesting about this framework is that in Dracula, Mina defers her responsibility in crafting the "papers." Refusing to name herself as the texts’ compiler, she does, in the preface, insert herself as the complete text’s author. "How these papers have been placed in sequence," she writes, "will be made manifest in the reading of them" (Stoker 5). Mina's authorship and role as editor are thus revealed, as we witness, through her own accounts and those of Jonathan, Van Helsing, Seward, and Holmwood, who frequently reference her role in the transcription and compilation of the various documents that make up Dracula.40 Van Helsing, for example, claims Mina as the mediator or conduit through which all knowledge must pass, exclaiming that Mina’s textual editing and transcription work “open[] the gate for me” (163). Through Mina’s typed journal entry, which she transcribed from her own shorthand, she reveals her knowledge about Lucy’s sleepwalking experiences to Van Helsing. It is by reading the transcript of Mina’s journal, Van Helsing acknowledges, that he finds the evidence he needs to support his diagnosis of Lucy and discovers the means for saving her soul. As the “gatekeeper” or mediator of knowledge, Mina reproduces others’ words and then circulates them. Mina copies and organizes Jonathan's, Dr. Seward's, Lucy’s, and her own journals, while systematically compiling the additional newspaper clippings, letters, and telegrams in chronological order that together make up Dracula. Even before Mina understands the full extent of Dracula’s threat, she has an intuitive insight, the result of her sensitive nerves, that transcribing and copying her and Jonathan’s journals will be important at a later date; as she expresses in her journal, “I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing. Then we shall be ready for other eyes if required” (161). Thus Mina is able to “read the slightest external signs” around her to discern “what passes within” (Buckle qtd. in Luckhurst 218). This “conventional insight,” or intuition, is what Thomas Buckle praised as women's deductive patterns of thinking, compared to the “slower inductive thought” of men, who lack women’s heightened sensory perceptions and

40 In reading Mina as the compiler and editor of the documents, and the author of the prefatory note, I’m troubling readings like Leah Richards’ that infer that Jonathan Harker is the editor of the documents because of his authorship of the novel’s final “Note.” His signature at the end marks Jonathan’s approval of the text and Mina’s secretarial work, but as the rest of the novel and Jonathan himself indicate, Mina is the one responsible for constructing the text.

108 advanced nervous systems (Luckhurst 218). Mina’s quick thinking is even at work in her desire to record “verbatim” her initial conference with Van Helsing. Such scenes explicitly place Mina’s somatic body as editor and writer, in addition to her role as “mere” transcriber. Mina’s attention to writing down details exactly as they happen and recording accounts and conversations precisely as they were relayed shows her attention to discovering the truth. She recognizes that in the future, these documents, as well as those of her other compatriots, need to be reliable because they will be used to influence the opinion and action of others. Whereas Jonathan could find no resources to prepare him for his first vampiric encounter and entrapment at Castle Dracula, Mina’s help in publishing and reproducing their findings in a narrative form that they see as a scientific, methodical record that is “exactly contemporary” addresses a much needed lacuna in the imperial archive (5).41 After Mina’s labor, future Jonathans and those like him will be able to return from the British Museum armed with texts on the Count. Mina’s mass-production of these same documents so that everyone can have easy access to them mimics Dracula’s threat of reproducing himself in London—“where, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless”—by suggesting that, yes, indeed, Dracula will be produced infinitely throughout London, but not in the way he thinks (54). Dracula’s reproduction will not occur through the destruction of English bodies, but rather through the technological circulation of Mina and her documents. The novel Dracula itself is what gets reproduced, rather than vampirism, in the period when “commercial book publishing became a mass market business” (Weedon 2). In Dracula, as Leah Richards argues, the “potential spread of vampirism creates a need for these particular texts, and the same technological advances and methodologies in printing and publishing that satisfied the needs of a vast reading public make the exchange of information in Dracula possible” (441). In this sense, then, Mina’s documents, which make up the novel itself, can be read, as Leah Price might suggest, as a “physical thing” with a particular use value (4). As Price notes, “nineteenth-century understandings of, and feelings toward, the uses of printed matter” are directly tied to the relation between “reading (doing something with the words), handling (doing something with the object), and circulating (doing something to, or with, other persons by means of the book—whether

41 Auerbach references this use of language as “an appeal to the empirically based Victorian scientific method” in a footnote to her preface in the Norton edition of Dracula (qtd. in 5n2).

109 cementing or severing relationships, whether by giving and receiving books or by withholding and rejecting them)" (6-7). Dracula in particular is concerned with circulation; the text, as Mina is quick to point out, must be mass-produced and shared in order to defeat Dracula, primarily because the documents are given a truth-value that combats the anxiety and fear created by Dracula’s invasion. That anxiety can only be mastered by containing it within the pages of Mina’s constructed novel. The more the truth gets out, is read and reiterated, the more authority it has and the more protection it can offer. Mina alone seems to understand the importance of this shared literacy and broad circulation. She lectures Dr. Seward on the topic when he is reluctant to share his journals with her, explaining that she needs access to his writing “[b]ecause it is a part of the terrible story, a part of poor dear Lucy’s death and all that led to it; because in the struggle which we have before us to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we can get” (Stoker 197). Mina elaborates, “We need have no secrets amongst us; working together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than if some of us were in the dark” (197). For Mina, the putative privacy of the personal journal is sacrificed to its public function. Van Helsing appreciates and commends such foresight in Mina. Without her transcribed journals, he would never have been able to piece together the clues behind Lucy’s illness. He praises Mina, exclaiming, “how can I say what I owe to you? This paper is as sunshine…I am daze, I am dazzle, with so much light” (163). Van Helsing admires Mina for her diligent note- taking, while acknowledging her power to reveal secrets and mediate private knowledge. Within the novel, it is not enough that “the material be collected by firsthand observers and written down; it needs to be shared” (L. Richards 440). Only by knowing everything that can be known can the group defeat Dracula. The reproduced and identical copies that Mina circulates amongst the group members mimic “the shift from a culture that disseminates information only to a privileged few to one that distributes information on a large scale, transcending boundaries of class, location, and gender” (440). The mass production of Mina’s documents informs a wide audience and is itself, much like the hands that compiled and edited it, a “relayed—mediated or channeled—communication” (Galvan 18). Documentation and the authority it holds becomes extremely important as the characters undertake their quest to rid the world of the Count. Mina, as the most astute member of her group, makes the most of this process, not only through the documents she organizes, but also

110 through her use of her trance-like connection with the Count, cultivated when he exchanges blood with her—which, like her mass-produced documents, puts her material body into circulation. Mina, we learn, has the power of sympathy necessary to reach out and connect with others, making her not only a vulnerable subject of Dracula’s enforced mind-connection, but also a natural spiritual mediator. Mina provides comfort and “sweet sympathy” to Quincey Morris as he cries over the loss of Lucy. She explains that it is her “woman’s nature” that allows her to comfort him, even going so far as to attribute it to her innate “mother-spirit” (Stoker 203). Thus, in addition to her business-like, logical, “man’s brain,” Mina holds the “woman’s heart” that makes her a naturally sympathetic mediator of the spiritual and technological (207). This sympathy also allows Mina to use her telepathic connection with Dracula to physically “locate” him within the world. Mina’s telepathy embeds her further within the overlapping discourses of the technological and spiritual communication network. Van Helsing, intrigued by the possibility of Dracula and Mina’s blood connection, explains his theory of telepathy, suggesting that the link between Mina and Dracula is a result of “the geologic and chemical world…[and] doubtless…something magnetic or electric in some … combinations of occult forces” (278). In other words, Dracula and Mina communicate via "pulses of energy that affect the mind" in the same way "as they do needles and wires" of communication technologies (Otis 211). Likewise, Hilary Grimes explains that "minds touch other minds" telepathically in the same way that “machines transmit messages” (29). Mina, as a spiritual and technological medium acts as “mind, body, and machine” (29). Moreover, according to James Knowles, founder and editor of The Nineteenth Century, telepathy “by a more subtle and excellent way of sympathy” could convey “words…which cannot be uttered, visions of influences and impressions not elsehow communicable” and could even “carry one’s living human presence to another” (863). Thus, Mina’s nerves don’t just reach out to the nerve network to reach Dracula; her telepathic connection also communicates her own materiality. This is perhaps most evident when the group loses Dracula’s trail in Varna, and so Mina resolves to “go over all carefully, and perhaps …arrive at some conclusion” (Stoker 304). Mere lines later, she makes her discovery, revealing that the Count was returning to his castle by the river Pruth. Citing her own typescript as the source contributing to her intuitive conclusion, she explains to the others that she “read in the typescript that in my trance I heard cows low and water swirling level with my ears and the creaking of wood. The Count in his box then, was on a river in an open boat…” (306). As if her

111 material presence, and not just her mind, is merged with Dracula telepathically, Mina is able to experience the sensory details that Dracula likewise experiences. These auditory clues enable her to discover the river the missing vampire is taking to his destination. Mina values the mass production, sharing of knowledge, and telepathic powers that grant her these particular insights in the face of male allies who continuously seek to exclude her from the group’s collective fund of knowledge and full participation in knowledge production. They justify this exclusion by couching it in terms of protecting her, as a woman, from harm. Van Helsing first attempts to ban Mina from the battle against Dracula, arguing that it is “no part for a woman…hereafter she may suffer—both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams” (207). Such statements stem directly from Victorian conceptions of women’s weaker nerve force and consequent “inability to withstand mental and emotional strain” (Galvan 77). Ironically, Mina’s mental fortitude makes her the most resolute and distinguished member of the group. Rather than experience mental distress herself, it is Jonathan, Mina’s husband, who suffers from periodic “violent brain fever” and a premature whitening of the hair from nerves and stress (Stoker 95). The men’s exclusion of Mina, based on cultural assumptions about women’s greater nervousness and bodily vulnerability, represents their attempt to contain her in a safe, domestic role. Dr. Seward suggests as much, stating “Mrs. Harker is better out of it…it is no place for a woman, and if she had remained in touch with the affair, it would in time infallibly have wrecked her” (224). Similarly, Jonathan seems to think that once Mina compiles the text, her “job” is finished, and she can be left out of the “future work” (223) and return to her “own home” where she would be “happier…with her daily tasks to interest her” (230). “I am so glad she consented to hold back and let us men do the work,” he writes; “now that her work is done, and that is due to her energy and brains and foresight that the whole story is put together in such a way that every point tells, she may well feel that her part is finished” (218). While giving her the credit she deserves, Jonathan excludes her from any of the “serious” business, reinstating traditional gender roles and order by reducing Mina to a stereotypical conception of the mere secretary, who passes the reproduced documents to her male boss without having any stake in their content or outcome. Jonathan and the rest of the men fail, at first, to recognize, Mina’s role in not just compiling knowledge, but making meaning out of that knowledge. She is an irreplaceable part of their technological and spiritual network—in fact, I would argue, she is the brains of the operation.

112 It is not her participation that ruins her; rather, it is the dangers of concealing information and perpetuating feminine ignorance that are to blame. Perhaps, were the men aware of their own fragility, they would realize that they are unable to protect Mina. Their focus on Mina’s weakness, rather than on a retrospective realization of their own, is exactly what provides Dracula with the perfect opportunity to target her. One could argue that Dracula, as a superior reader of British knowledge (we know from Jonathan’s journal that he has mastered the language and read many texts on British culture), recognizes Mina’s strategic role in transcribing and producing knowledge for the band of men. It is both this recognition of Mina’s capabilities and his uncanny understanding of the men’s vulnerability that provide Dracula with the means and motive for establishing his blood link with Mina, and by extension with the rest of the knowledge that the group has hitherto gathered. When the highly guarded and regulated Lucy is left alone and isolated she is vulnerable to attack. Similarly, it is when Lucy is left in the dark, and unable to take the proper precautions for self-preservation, that she succumbs to Dracula’s (sexual) invasion. As a result of her ignorance, Lucy eventually participates in Dracula’s project of reverse colonization as he seeks to expand his property holdings. But this is also an expansion of his monstrous male reproduction, as Lucy is reborn as one of Dracula’s “ever-widening circle of semi-demons” (56). The lesson here quickly becomes that women, and Mina in particular, have an important role to play in the “future work” of the English nation. Dracula has access to female-dominated domestic spaces, as well as the public streets of London. Therefore, all people of England, both men and women, must become responsible warriors in the fight against such threats. Directly after her encounter with Dracula, the men decide that once more Mina should be taken into their “full confidence; that nothing of any sort—no matter how painful—should be kept from her” (253). The men are forced to recognize that Mina’s material agency—the result of her participation in the technological and spiritual nerve network—is necessary to the protection of the nation not by her ability to reproduce sexually, but by her acts of knowledge-gathering, archiving, and textual (re)production. Only through finally incorporating Mina’s secretarial, mental, and even telepathic powers of mediation does the group make progress in its quest. Through Dracula’s telepathic attack, Mina’s body literally becomes the battlefield upon which the fate of England is decided. As Dracula’s invasion shifts from the city of London to Mina’s own body and mind, the fight moves from being about evacuating Dracula from London to evacuating him from Mina. Here, Mina’s body literally becomes representative of the English

113 nation and, as such, reinforces her centrality to the novel. Mina as the mother of the Empire needs to be protected and secured, even as she seeks retaliation through the collection and control of knowledge. Dracula, like Van Helsing and his band, recognizes the power Mina wields and invades her body in an attempt to gain access to her knowledge. He also attempts to destroy and cut off the transfer of knowledge from the group in an attempt to cripple its progress. In his rapid exit from Seward’s house, Dracula makes “rare hay of the place,” destroying all the original documents the group relied upon for information: “all the manuscript had burned, and the blue flames were flickering amongst the white ashes. The cylinders of [Seward’s] phonograph too were thrown on the fire, and the wax had helped the flames” (249). Much like the physical documents and technological devices thrown on the fire, Mina, the carrier and classifier of knowledge, becomes a body of knowledge for Dracula to destroy. Unfortunately for Dracula, he fails in both endeavors. Mina has responsibly made copies of her files; his usurpation of Mina’s textual mind, which he attempts to read like a document, is inevitably foreclosed when he realizes that Mina, as a technological communication device, operates as a window into his own movements. While he intends to read Mina for information, it is, ironically, he who becomes a document that Mina and Van Helsing decipher. In addition to Mina’s body being the “map” or the “device” of communication between Van Helsing and Dracula, Stoker also seems to be writing the anxieties of the time that centered on women and textual production onto Mina’s body. As Jennifer Fleissner notes, women’s writing in the nineteenth century “threatens accepted ideas about femininity—and must be silenced at all costs” (418). But in the historical context in which Dracula was written, women’s writing as secretarial work was invaluable to the “masculine business world” even while woman’s mass production of literature potentially threatened the ideals of these same men (419). Stoker, I would argue, wants to situate Mina’s writing as a productive force for the British empire, seeking to retaliate or work against male fears of female literacy. Positioning Mina and her skills as a service to the English nation, rather than a threat to the patriarchal hierarchy, seeks to alleviate these fears. Stoker even presents the novel as Mina’s compilation, giving the reader the feeling that the text (if not completely, or realistically) was written by a strong, yet feminine woman. Indeed, Mina’s writing is less a threat within the novel than what brings the novel into being. As the reproducer of the documents, Mina becomes the producer of the actual novel itself

114 —writing her own esteemed qualities onto the future world she has helped to make possible through her actions. As the mediator of various texts and thoughts, Mina alone provides access to knowledge, which contributes directly to the safety of the nation. Her secretarial and even journalistic skills, as well as her “natural femininity,” make her the only character within the novel that can generate the documents needed to destroy Dracula, giving birth to a restored England. While Mina is quick to catch on to the fact that catching Dracula means sharing knowledge, her manly allies “only fully learn the lesson through painful trial and error” (Galvan 79). Finally, though, the male characters become accustomed to Mina as the possessor of both wifely, “feminine” qualities—namely, her sympathy—and more independent, “masculine” ones, as writer and intellectual. Van Helsing happily thanks “[t]he good God” that “fashioned” Mina “for a purpose…when he made that so good combination” (Stoker 207). That these qualities bring light to the darkness caused by Dracula is made further evident when Mina’s book helps her to locate Dracula for Van Helsing’s warriors. Van Helsing acknowledges that “her eyes have seen where we were blinded. Now we are on track again” (306). Such acceptance and idealization of Mina’s unique labor makes it possible for Stoker to position Mina as integral to improving the English nation, and putting it back “on track,” while alleviating male anxieties about female literacy. Contrary to veins of current feminist theory that are critical of women’s complicity in nationalist and imperial projects, enormous numbers of women of the 1890s, including many we would now call “feminist,” articulated a desire to contribute to building a more expansive British nation. While contemporary feminists might be troubled by Mina’s involvement in the imperial project, Stoker’s conception of Mina as a knowledge-producer for the nation seems to underscore exactly the boundary-pushing feminine empowerment characteristic of protofeminists of the late- Victorian period.42 To be sure, women’s agency in the novel, and the discourses surrounding that agency, through which Mina's mediumship operates, does the work of repairing the culture of masculinity that Dracula threatens. Nevertheless, Mina’s agency is no less agential because it is co-opted in ways that reinforce patriarchal and imperialist projects. Her role in preserving and repairing the masculinity damaged by Dracula’s conquest is certainly designed to uphold the patriarchal and imperial structures of nineteenth-century Britain. However, Mina’s mediation and

42 See Antoinette Burton’s Burdens of History, which recognizes late-century British feminists’ “collaboration in [imperialis m’s] ideological work” (2). Burton notes that “woman as the savior of the nation, the race, and the empire was a common theme in female emancipation arguments before and especially after 1900” (3).

115 agency make it clear that women, and female mediums, do have a role to play in the forging of the future English nation.

JAMES’S OPEN CIRCUIT: RESISTING INTELLIGIBLE KNOWLEDGE While Stoker and Gallon ultimately imagine the woman spiritual/technological medium and her sympathetic nerves as an agent for the British nation and its imperialist interests, Henry James challenges that very co-opting of the medium’s material agency by refusing to make her knowledge transparent. “In the Cage” denies the disclosure of knowledge that the unnamed telegraph girl possesses, denying also any clear, operative routes across imperial or national boundaries for the circulation of such knowledge. As Galvan asserts “While some writers sought to legitimate the medium’s work, James…accentuated the dangers she brought to the vocation or the vocation brought to her” (Galvan 25). By keeping her knowledge secret, James leaves her an open circuit—a live wire—whose agency is more volatile and less approachable. In other words, James “amend[s] or interrogate[s]” the mediating woman, rather than bringing her “into focus” (24). Arguably, James’s project stems from his own personal stake in how information was gathered and circulated. James was, after all, part of the class that “wired everything”: according to Andrew J. Moody, “James spent a good deal of time in London’s telegraph offices, and he remarked that the local office had ‘so much of London to give out, so much of its huge perpetual story to tell’” (57). When James moved to the Sussex countryside in 1898, his only method of communication was by letter and telegram. James’s new reliance on the telegraph network meant that he was aware of how much of his personal information was being mediated by a telegrapher. James’s concern regarding “what it might ‘mean’…for confined and cramped and yet considerably tutored young officials of either sex to be made so free, intellectually, of a range of experience otherwise quite closed to them” is what “In the Cage” explores as it narrates how a poor telegraph girl, with an imaginative curiosity, an abundance of sympathy, and an erotic desire to know, becomes personally invested in the messages she transmits and their wealthy senders—Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen (W. Stone qtd. in Otis 163). Most importantly, the novella thematizes the question of how knowledge is made and how much information the telegraph operator can know based on a series of telegrams and brief personal encounters.

116 The telegraph girl in James’s story has a variety of knowledge-gathering skills—all of which are attributed to her sympathetic nature and “wonderful nerves” (“In the Cage” 11). Her sympathy, much like Bella’s and Mina’s, taps into a larger network of wires and nerves. As the telegrapher, “every time” a telegram is “handed in” it is “an addition to her knowledge” (40). This knowledge is received both through the telegram itself as well as her observational skills and “gift for keeping the clues and finding her way in the tangle” (23). Knowles suggests that the telegraph’s ability to relay messages across wires could also be replicated in the human brain. Citing the wireless telegraph as an example, he argues that if a “small electric battery can send out tremors or waves of energy which are propagated through space for thirty miles or more,” than “a mechanism as the human brain…which is…analogous to an electric battery” should be able to “generate and emit tremors or waves of energy which such sensitive ‘receivers’ as other human brains might catch and feel” (857-858). The telegraph girl of James’s novel, it seems, is capable of “a certain expansion of…consciousness” that enables her via the nerve network to “gather[]” “impressions” (“In the Cage” 12). She can read and measure those whose telegraphs she dispatches—an “instinct of observation and detection” that is akin to the telepathy described by Knowles and that takes place in Stoker’s novel. This talent upends her role as mediator, as she becomes a telepathic communicator and not just the unobtrusive relayer of messages. By extending her role, the telegrapher poses a particular problem within the frame of the novel by ceasing to “to be simply the conduit of others’ thoughts and feelings” (Galvan 23). As a communicator, “she is never sufficiently absent as a medium, instead [she] obtrude[es] intellectually on Everard and Lady Bradeen’s communications” (23). Her sympathy is used not just to transfer knowledge, but to uplift her own self-perception and feelings of power. She makes connections and exploits them or, at the very least, she revels in the control she has over those within range of her telegraphic and telepathic powers. The telegraph girl sees knowledge as her way to gain mastery over those of a wealthier, higher class than hers. She “track[s] and store[s] up against them” all of the “squanderings and graspings…struggles and secrets and love-affairs and lies” in order to achieve a “triumphant, vicious feeling of mastery and power, a sense of having their silly, guilty secrets in her pocket…thereby knowing so much more about them than they suspected or would care to think” (“In the Cage” 22). With those secrets, she has at times a desire, and an ability, to “betray, trip up, to bring down with words altered and fatal” or, alternately, “to help, to warn, to rescue” (22).

117 Thus, she experiences feelings of ownership over the ladies and gentlemen whose conversations, connections, and dramas she oversees and observes, even referring to them as “her ladies “and “her gentlemen” (31). In a conversation with her friend Mrs. Jordan, the girl brags about her knowledge of her wealthy patrons, explaining, “I find out everything” (31). Knowledge for the telegrapher is a tool of role reversal—allowing her, as medium, to be active instead of passive, a communicator instead of receiver, and more importantly the possessor rather than possessed. Her position, as James narrates, “flickers” between an “antipathy and sympathy,” and she remains unpredictable as a result (23). Desiring mastery and control, she oscillates between feelings of immense jealousy of and scorn for her aristocratic patrons, and a desire to ingratiate herself with that class. Thus, she has conflicting fantasies of using her knowledge to either blackmail or aid her patrons. The telegrapher’s conflict and her investment in what appears to be an illicit affair between Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen, as well as her interpretations of the telegrams she dispatches, generate a complicated relationship of intimacy with and power over Everard. Her sympathetic connection to him, in particular, borders on the dangerous, as Everard is forced to acknowledge the power of her knowledge and the intimacy it creates between them. In the one meeting that takes place between Everard and the telegraph girl outside of the telegraph cage, she tells him that the other patrons of the post-office see her, as she puts it, as “if I had no more feeling than a letter-box”; they “don’t know,” she explains, “that I’m not stupid” (61). While she revels in her intelligence and her “harmless pleasure of knowing,” Everard is forced to admit that her “knowing” is “what has been between us” (62). The knowledge, in many ways, helps her forge an intimate bond with Everard, and a power over him, that he is forced to recognize, much to her satisfaction. He tells her that “you have me by this time so completely at your mercy that it doesn’t in the least matter what I give you now” (40). Her blackmailing fantasy eroticizes this intimacy and their mutual recognition of her knowing. The telegraph girl imagines “going to him in the dusk of evening at Park Chambers and letting him at last have it” (42). Her fantasy, described as “a scene better than many in her ha’penny novels,” is one of exchange (42). The terms of the exchange are unclear, however, as the “it” remains, much like the knowledge she holds, unspecified. “It” seems to refer to some undisclosed information from one of the telegrams, but could easily be substituted for her body itself, which she hopes to exchange as a “purchasing medium” (42). In their real-life encounter at the park bench, which closely

118 resembles the telegraph girl’s fantasy, she expresses to Everard that she would “do anything” for him (58). Once again, the “anything” here is unspecified, but erotically coded: Never in her life had she known anything so high and fine as this, just letting him have it and bravely and magnificently leaving it. Didn’t the place, the associations and circumstances, perfectly make it sound what it was not? and wasn’t that exactly the beauty? So she bravely and magnificently left it; and little by little she felt him take it up, take it down, as if they had been on a satin sofa in a boudoir. (58) Her knowledge—intimate, erotic, bodied, and unrevealed—equates the danger of sexual promiscuity and the public circulation of prostitution with the threat of publicizing the private messages of others. Her telegraphic and telepathic means of generating knowledge about Everard include her in a public network of social exchange, even as her participation in that exchange gives her the illusion of inclusion in a much more private erotic network. She chooses “to show him in some sharp, sweet way that she had perfectly penetrated” his circle of friends, engagements, and his relationship with Lady Bradeen and “now lived with it in a kind of heroism of sympathy” by using her knowledge to assist him (40). This moment of sympathy, however, is not one of her supplication or erotic surrender to him; rather, the telegraph girl, when the time of the unknown “danger” arrives, taunts him, and makes him work for the knowledge he requires and that she already knows (40). Withholding the knowledge he desires inflames his anxiety, which she sees and savors. Her sympathetic connection with him gives way to an antipathetic and antagonistic play of power. Putting on a prim and sophisticated persona that she refers to as the “young woman at Knightsbridge” (82), the telegrapher dangles the information before him, relishing the delay of his relief as a source of her own personal (sexual) gratification. The “knowing” she experiences from this game gives her “the deepest thrill she had ever felt”: It came to her there, with her eyes on his face, that she held the whole thing in her hand, held it as she held her pencil, which might have broken at that instant in her tightened grip. This made her feel like the very fountain of fate, but the emotion was such a flood that she had to press it back with all her force (83). The sexual satisfaction, implicit in the word “flood,” that she experiences in withholding knowledge from Everard is the climactic moment of the text because it is the moment where her

119 agency is at its most dangerous to him—she is in complete control of the knowledge: “she knew now so well what she was about that she could almost play with him and with her new-born joy” (83). When she finally does reveal the information Everard is after, her gratification gives way to a feeling of superiority. “No happiness,” the narrator writes “she had ever known came within miles of it” (87). Many critics including Galvan, Otis, and Thurschwell read the telegrapher, despite her mastery of Everard, as unsuccessful in her aims—one whose desire to possess knowledge, and through that knowledge raise her economic or social standing, is thwarted at the end of the novel as she hastens her impending marriage to the grocer Mr. Mudge and retires to a less central post office. They read this sudden retreat from circulation as a humiliated response to her “failure to know” (Otis 168), arguing that the knowledge she possesses is ultimately incomplete and even built around her romantic fantasies of “intimate access to the privileged lives of [her] clients” (Thurschwell 95): she only “imagines herself a psychic sensitive and in a position to know and reveal all” (Galvan 36). On some level, this assessment of the telegraph girl is correct: nothing is gained from her “knowledge” outside of a brief feeling of mastery; at the very end of the novel she is disgruntled by the fact that her friend Mrs. Jordan, who runs a flower shop catering to the aristocratic class, knows more about Lady Bradeen and Captain Everard than she does. Listening to Mrs. Jordan gossip about him, she admits to herself that she doesn’t “know so much about him as that!” (“In the Cage” 98). Her realization that she doesn’t know everything, however, doesn’t necessarily eliminate the authority that her knowledge holds. She knows enough to wield power, and to do so in a way that is threatening and sexual. The content of the knowledge itself is inconsequential to the story, however, which is in part why it is never revealed to the reader. The ideological project of the novel is, after all, about the anxiety of not knowing what private information telegraphers might have access to, or being uncertain about what they do know. Thus, as readers, we are left in the dark about what the scandal between Lady Bradeen and Everard is and the full nature of their relationship (although we can assume it to be an affair of some kind); how much each character actually knows is never divulged, which allows the reader to feel this anxiety and uncertainty. It is also left to reader interpretation to determine what role the telegraph girl actually plays in the scandalous events. In the end, she provides Everard with the “correct” information from the missing telegram in order to “save” him, but whether it does so or not is immaterial. What is important about the

120 knowledge is how it can be used and the anxiety over an unnamed danger that it can cause. It is perhaps important to consider that the only reason Everard needs saving in the first place is because of the telegrapher’s meddling. Indeed, the mix-up with the telegram could have been the result of the telegrapher’s suggesting the correction of a “wrong word” in one of Lady Bradeen’s telegrams, presumably based on knowledge she had previously received from earlier messages (47): “Hadn’t it been settled weeks before?” she thinks, “for Miss Doleman it was always to be ‘Cooper’s’” rather than ‘Burfield’s’” (48). The girl’s perceived knowledge becomes a powerful tool and the telegraph girl herself a threatening presence, one that contrasts sharply with the normative idea of the technological medium as an absent or evacuated presence. The medium as “live” wire ultimately becomes, as a body of knowledge, a force that resists the state and, by implication its imperial projects, rather than a materially active and agential tool—like Bella and Mina—in service to it.

121 CHAPTER FOUR: “HER OWN PRIVATE INSTRUMENT OF JUSTICE”: FEMALE MEDIATION, PUBLIC DISPLAY, AND THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

James’s telegraph girl establishes the female technological and spiritual medium’s danger to the overwhelmingly patriarchal values of the nineteenth-century social and political world. What makes her so threatening is not just her ability to know, but also her power to make public or withhold important information. This threat of circulation is one that also resonates with female mediums who put their material agency on display in order to advocate publicly for reformist causes. Both George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) feature women taking advantage of their roles as technological mediators to endorse their feminist politics publicly and in ways that ultimately put their mediation into circulation and further their cause—a cause that also happens to be threatening to the powers of patriarchy. In The Odd Women, for example, Mary Barfoot opens a school that trains young women to be typists, and then she and Rhoda Nunn place them in positions around London where they can be paid for that particular labor. For Miss Barfoot emergent technologies are a way to help young women become independent, but she also uses them to distribute her feminist message. Her philosophy—which she teaches to the girls she trains during her monthly “four- o’clock address”—is that such women “are winning souls, propagating a new religion, purifying the earth!” (99). In Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919), women contribute to feminist periodicals and pamphlets to “circularize the provinces” (134). Within the novel, the typewriter is given special credit for furthering these aims and those of the suffrage movement: Sally Seal, who works for the suffrage society to which Mary Datchet, one of Woolf’s protagonists, belongs, affirms the typewriter to be her “own private instrument of justice” (207). Justice, according to Sally Seal and her co-worker Mr. Clacton, can only be achieved by “circulariz[ing]” the right information via communication mediation. Mary Datchet, for example, is urged by Mr. Clacton to consider herself “in the light of a telephone exchange—for the exchange of ideas” (200). At the “centre of an enormous system of wires, connecting…with every district of the country,” Mary and her fellow suffragists infiltrate the nerve network through their technology use. As a result, they have their “fingers upon the pulse of the community,” learning what the people of England are thinking and “put[ting] them in the way of thinking rightly” (200). Via “the rapid spasmodic sounds of Mrs. Seal’s erratic typewriting” the suffrage society can “generat[e] and stimulat[e]” their message of emancipation in the minds of people throughout England (201).

122 This technological mediation, where women’s work and bodies circulate publicly in order to advance women’s rights movements, parallels the circulating spiritual body of Verena Tarrant in Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886). Though set in an American, rather than English context, The Bostonians takes up the question of female mediation and women’s rights in similar ways as Gissing and Woolf’s texts. In James’s novel, Olive Chancellor seeks to promote the women’s rights movement, by publicly touring Verena, an inspirational or trance speaker, who gives lectures promoting the women’s rights movement across America and England.43 James modelled Verena’s trance mediation on the famous trance speaker Cora L. V. Hatch, who sparked the public imagination in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and set the stage for women spiritualists to speak on behalf of their sex.44 Trance speaking was commonly used to support reformist issues, and women’s rights issues in particular. In many ways, it was part of the larger spectacle that the women’s rights reformists participated in to attract attention to their cause. As Mary Jean Corbett and Lisa Tickner describe, for example, during the suffrage movement, women would engage in pageantry, “mass protests and confrontations” (Representing 154), and “tak[e] to the streets” to deliver their arguments to the masses (Tickner 55). In so doing, the suffragists sought to “produce[] and control[]” the spectacle they created (Tickner 81). Leaders of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) utilized the spectacle they made to their own advantage, “accurately gaug[ing] the tenor of the times” by “adapting ‘theatrical methods’ to a political

43 Though set in a different context, it is important to note, that as Angela Hesson, points out, “James’s transatlantic lifestyle exposed him to both English and American issues and events in the women’s movement” (462). As she explains, the 1880s in both America and England was a “period in which much legal discrimination remained, and strict social restrictions were also imposed upon women. Decency and decorum were perceived as the most important aspects of feminine behavior” and “[t]he New Woman became an icon of fin-de-siècle gender transformation, symbolizing an increase in woman’s education and independence and embodying many of the advances that culminated in the suffrage movement” (462). These occurrences, and the “crossings and recrossings of influences and connections throughout the nineteenth century” all became a part of what Sigrid Anderson Cordell sees as the “explicit organization of a transatlantic women’s movement signaled by the International Council of Women in 1888” (4). James was aware of the various discourses taking place in both settings and as a result, I would argue, that we can read James, Gissing, and Woolf in the same context, especially as it relates to the use of technological and spiritual forms of mediation, which were taking place and being discussed in similar and overlapping ways in both England and America. And, as Anderson Cordell, rightly expresses, “books and periodicals were published and read transnationally throughout the nineteenth century”; if we read texts “strictly along national lines” we can “lose sight of a crucial aspect of literary and intellectual influence” (4).

44 Cora Linn Victoria Scott (birth name) was also known under the names of her various husbands: Hatch, Daniels, Tappan, and Richmond. Her contemporaries always referred to her by the name of her current husband. To avoid confusion, I’ll refer to her as Cora Hatch, as that was the name she used when she first achieved celebrity status in the Spiritualist world.

123 cause” (Representing 154). Josephine Butler, who sought to engage in public discussions about women’s issues, namely the repealing of England’s Contagious Diseases Acts, also made use of theatrical tactics. Elaine Hadley, in particular, sees Butler’s speeches as utilizing “melodramatic rhetoric to communicate to [her] audiences” (193). The melodramatic mode, as discussed in Weldon’s case in Chapter One, worked to “transform[] private individuals into public spectacles in order to render them interpretively visible in society and through this accomplishment to assert the social grounds for identity” (204). The theatrical could thus,be an important tool for women’s “economic, political, and vocal empowerment” (205). In a similar vein, trance speakers like Hatch were infamous for the theatricality and melodrama inherent in their lectures. Hatch, for instance, was praised for her spontaneity, fluency of language, and the intensity through which she was able to entrance her audience, all of which put her spectators in mind of theatre. In an 1857 review, Frank Leslie’s Illustrative Newspaper described Hatch’s performance as “a masterpiece of acting—and of acting it is” (qtd. in McClymer 195). Female trance mediums, like Hatch, Emma Hardinge Britten,45 and the fictional Verena, exploited the theatricality of their spiritual mediumship to agitate for women’s rights on the platform.46 While reminiscent of the small séances held in private drawing rooms, trance speaking broadened the reach of the medium, giving her access to diverse audiences and more public spaces. Aside from their public appearances on platforms, lecture halls, and at conventions, trance speakers were also mediating feminist principles as mass communication; they were advertised publicly in periodicals, publicity sheets, and photographs. Making use of technological mediation as in Gissing and Woolf’s novels, trance speakers’ bodies, images, and speeches were reprinted and circulated as they spread their message of women’s emancipation to audiences across America, England, and Europe. James’s, Gissing’s, and Woolf’s novels all recognize the circulating, very public, and correspondingly agential bodies of female technological and spiritual mediums, emphasizing the role of female mediation in women’s rights movements. In this chapter, I look at and contextualize each of these authors’ works within first-hand accounts of women mediums’ participation in women’s rights activism, which appeared in spiritual periodicals such as The

45 Emma Hardinge Britten (birth name Emma Floyd) is frequently referred to as both Emma Hardinge and Emma Hardinge Britten. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to her throughout as the latter.

46 Female trance speaking began directly after the advent of the spiritualist movement and by the mid-1850s trance lectures were standard practice at the meetings of spiritualist societies (Braude 98).

124 Medium and Daybreak and The Spiritualist. I argue that female mediums recast their “private instruments” as public bodies for women’s rights activism, essentially subverting patriarchal structures and gender norms to enact a form of feminism that aims to win an audience over to women’s causes. Of course, in their varying acts, these women also seek to further the aims of spiritual and technological mediation. Focusing on James’s novel, in particular, I examine the ways in which Verena’s bodily display and performance on the platform, like Hatch’s own, become the acts that grant her agency and authority within the feminist movement in the 1880s.47 James’s novel, however, complicates this agency, demonstrating the limits of mediumship and women’s rights reform in a world of compulsory heteronormativity. In the novel, Verena is ultimately seduced away from her feminist cause by the handsome, but misogynistic Basil Ransom. The reader, I suggest, is not meant to be satisfied by Verena’s abandonment of her feminist principles and lecturing career to marry the conservative Basil, as is evident in the novel’s closing line which suggests that Verena’s and Basil’s marriage, “so far from brilliant,” will result in Verena’s “destined” misery (464); rather, James’s novel places pressure on the agency that trance speaking affords the female medium. Ultimately, The Bostonians reveals the complexities of Verena’s experience as a trance medium, reformist, and woman in love, while still acknowledging the gender-bending and bodily agency of Verena’s mediumship, especially as it critiques a worldview that limits, based on Verena’s single/married status, her social and political action.

GENDER-BENDING PERFORMANCE IN FEMALE TRANCE THEATER In what was known as a “trance speech,” Emma Hardinge Britten’s The Place and Mission of Women (1859) reinforced the burgeoning connection between the Spiritualist movement and women’s rights activism. “[T]he subject of Woman and Marriage now agitates society with a power that portends a mighty change,” she proclaimed, and “let none call himself or herself a Spiritualist who is not willing” to defy public opinion on behalf of women (3). Hardinge Britten wasn’t the only spiritualist establishing the movement as central to women’s emancipation; spiritualist newspapers and periodicals of the Victorian period were abuzz with

47 Cora Hatch was hailed by suffragist Paulina Wright Davis, at the 1870 U. S. national convention for women’s rights, for her impact on the movement, stating that though Hatch “[n]ever identified with any party, she has, nevertheless, done a great work in a most womanly way” (qtd. in Braude 96). Davis’s admission of Hatch’s public speaking acknowledges the importance of trance mediums to the early feminist movement.

125 support for women’s rights. The Spiritualist Newspaper, for example, featured a variety of spirit- inspired poems and articles petitioning spiritualists to advocate for women’s “co-equal right” (“Womanhood” 6), including support for the Married Women’s Property Acts, revision of the lunacy laws used to “treat a person as insane, because we disagree with her opinions” (Stainton- Moses 49), and marriage reform. In “More Freedom For Women,” the newspaper sought to remind spiritualists that they “would do well to look with kindly eyes upon all measures for the alleviation of human unhappiness, and the subject of more liberty for women deserves special attention" (49). Likewise, the Spirit Messenger and Harmonial Guide called women’s rights “the most important reform issue of the day” (qtd. in Braude 58). Hardinge Britten and her spiritualist community believed that spiritualism “alone can vitalize and reform” because it “is bound to cast the light of its divine and radiant morality” onto the public at large (The Place and Mission 3). As trance speaker J. J. Morse declared, “Spiritualism…is a most substantial aid to human progress”; “the Spiritualist who intelligently apprehends the problems of Spiritualism, who reasonably and intuitively perceives the existence of his own divine nature and the communion of souls, is a better, a nobler, a stronger man for that knowledge…and in every walk of life he is better fitted to cope successfully with all its dangers and discordances” (275). Spiritualism as a religion taught “the necessity of Forbearance, Forgiveness, Charity…and Hope,” all of which were seen as qualities that would “lead[] Humanity upwards and onwards” (276). Spiritualism was specifically an ideal platform for advocating women’s rights as it “provided a religious alternative that supported individualist social and political views” and ultimately rejected a society that was not democratic in nature (Braude 6), especially one in which “prescribed gender roles [were] inconsistent with the principle of individual sovereignty” (61). A Miss S. Hill declared as much in the Agitator, another spiritualist periodical: “How can [women] be our own sovereigns as long as we allow others to think, feel, and act for us, and are content to be ourselves, the mere appendages of those who presume to prescribe for us our appropriate spheres?” (qtd. in Braude 61). Hill and her fellow spiritualists sought to reform gender roles as they were not necessarily compatible with their notion of individual sovereignty or what they understood to be “the divine order expressed in human nature” (Braude 61). In spiritualist practice and ideology, women were equal to men; and, through their mediumship, women were granted an authority denied them in other aspects of society, politics, and religion.

126 While women’s public speaking was generally frowned upon—it was feared that (much like female cycling or typewriting) “the practice would give rise to a third sex”—female trance speaking was never questioned (at least not by spiritualists) because the medium was perceived as a passive conduit for a higher power (Braude 108). Hardinge Britten testifies to this fact, explaining that the spirits compelled her to speak, overcoming her own doubts about whether such activities were appropriate for women: ...that I, a woman, and moreover, ‘a lady by birth,’ and English, above all, that I would go out, like ‘strong-minded women,’ and hector the world, on public platforms! oh, shocking! I vowed rebellion—to give up Spirits, Spiritualism, and America; to return to England and live ‘a feminine existence’ once again. With these magnanimous resolves upon me one week, the next saw me on a public platform, fairly before the world as a trance speaker (qtd. in Braude 84). Hardinge Britten absolves herself of any gender bending because she speaks on behalf of and with the authority of the spirits. Her rhetoric makes it clear that it was a gift she couldn’t help acting on; at the same time, publicly declaring her reservations that her public speaking made her unladylike only reinforces her femininity and her credibility as a medium. The very performance of the trance speaker—her role-playing, as she takes on the personalities and voices of different spirits; her transformation of manner and expression; the perceived effect of her dress and beauty—likewise granted the speaker a measure of agency, while further reassuring audience members that she was not only genuine, but also no real threat to the feminine ideal. Similar to female mediums in the séance circle or private parlor, trance speakers used theatricality to their advantage, playing with and subverting the feminine stereotype, giving the speaker even more power. As Amy Lehman explains, “the performer can disclaim personal responsibility for any words or behaviors that transgress normal social, gender or psychological roles” because she is in “an altered state of consciousness” (7).48 Thus, the female trance performer was able to “transcend her normal social role for the first time and speak authoritatively, not only about the glorious Spiritualist afterlife, but about more earthly (and controversial) issues such as abolition, women’s rights or the position of Native Americans” (2).

48 Lehman borrows from Marlene Tromp here, who argues in Altered States that the female medium “controlled, at each séance, what and who they would be, and, furthermore, could claim heavenly authorization for those choices – or any other choices they might make” (23).

127 Trance speaking as a movement, much like mediumship in general, made it possible for women to challenge their prescribed gender roles. On the one hand, it supported and reinforced traditional feminine qualities—ignorance, purity, youth, beauty; on the other, these same qualities, combined with spirit influence, enabled women to push the limits of traditional femininity and speak passionately and publicly about reform issues that weren’t terribly popular. Female trance speaking was ideal for pushing boundaries because of its potential for “intensifying narratives of the intrinsic superiority of female nervous sensitivity” and “its utopian potentials for transcendent, telepathic (hetero- and homo-sexual) affinity, that offered potential value” to both the New Woman and the woman medium (Luckhurst 232-233). That it was often the impetus for giving women purpose and a public voice only furthered its gender-bending value. Not only that, but female trance speakers utilized their public venue and sympathetic qualities to critique the popular biological differentiation arguments that restricted women to the private sphere. These same arguments—which emphasized and revised traditional ideas about women’s “natural” sympathy, their delicate nervous systems, and evolutionary theory—directly impacted and influenced female trance speakers’ feminist and reformist causes. Hatch and Hardinge Britten embedded within their speeches for women’s rights counterpoints to the common evolutionary arguments about biological differentiation that limited women to their second-class citizen status. Medical and scientific men of the time insisted women’s bodies and delicate nervous systems were less developed than man’s and, as Henry Maudsley puts it, woman, “by virtue of her sex,” has “a slightly greater predisposition to insanity than...man" (Psychology 208).49 This evolutionary argument justified not educating girls equally alongside boys. Boys, after all, were katabolic and active, girls merely passive (Luckhurst 215). Where most men of science pointed to men’s larger brains as proof of male superiority, nerve doctor Bernard Hollander looked instead to the “superior development of the posterior lobes in women, and their consequently greater connection to the autonomic nervous system and the feelings of the body” (Luckhurst 217). “Their sympathetic nerves are more numerous,” Hollander explains, which is why “women feel more keenly the emotional side of mental life” (qtd. in Luckhurst 217). Such sensitivity and sympathy, Roger Luckhurst argues, was at the center of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man. Sympathy, Darwin argues, “forms an essential part of the social instinct, and is indeed its foundation stone” (122); “those communities, which

49 For more on Maudsley’s thoughts about women’s nervous systems, see Chapter One.

128 include the greatest numbers of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best” (130) as they cultivated a moral sense and the “the social instincts” of “the love of praise…and the still stronger horror of scorn and infamy” that enable them to “value justly the judgements of [their] fellows” (133). Darwin regarded sympathy as the “product of a long evolutionary acquisition” (Luckhurst 217)—one that distinguished cultivated societies from those that were more barbaric, uncivilized, or made up of “bad men” (Descent 140). Thus, women’s sympathetic nervous systems and intuitive capabilities placed them, and female mediums in particular, at the top of the evolutionary ladder, “herald[ing]” an “emergence of a co-operative ‘social instinct’ and new levels of complexity in evolution” (Luckhurst 217). Psychologist Granville Stanley Hall certainly agreed with this assessment. While he did concur with Maudsley that women were the weaker sex, he also saw women, because of their active nerves, as evolutionarily more advanced than man: “she is at the top of the human curve from which the higher super-man of the future is to evolve” (qtd. in Luckhurst 216). Women, then, were “more prophetic of the future as well as reminiscent of the past” (Hall qtd. in Luckhurst 216). Both Hatch and Hardinge Britten utilized this alternative nervous and “sympathetic” lens for understanding women’s biology, acknowledging the complexities of female mediumship in relation to their desires for female equality and the agency it afforded them. They worked to privilege the female body and its organic function over man’s in their trance speeches. For example, in her trance speech “Spiritualism, and its Work for Women,” Hatch emphasizes women’s superior nature and intuition: ... in the gifts of the spirit the powers have been equally possessed by woman; and in the exercise of those gifts, women, from education and comparative isolation, may possess even an advantage over men…If reason sways man, intuition is the silent power with which woman produces wonders. And thus it has come to pass, that women are chosen as prophetesses, and speak with tongues, and minister spiritual gifts, because of this high power of intuition, which makes them ever- active. (371) Hatch’s emphasis on the “ever-active” ability of women’s “high power of intuition” and the agency it provides female mediums to “speak” and “minister” challenges the dominant ideas about the importance of women’s passivity to female mediation. For Hatch and her supporters, the female trance speaker’s mediumistic power and intuition is the direct result of her active

129 “cerebral development and general organic susceptibility” (“Cora L. V. Tappan” 9). The material make-up of trance speakers like Hatch, the Medium and Daybreak explains, is much like her active intuition; it is what allows the spirits to “give expression to ideas and language…which they would fail to accomplish through another [organism] not so endowed” (9). Hatch’s organic and active intuition is also similar to what Hardinge Britten refers to as “inspiration,” which she explains is “strictly chemical” (The Place and Mission 4). Inspiration “reaches the brain” through “the affinitizing principle…called magnetism, which outreaching to the magnetism from thought, forms the compound [called] knowledge or inspiration” (4).50 This particular form of organic knowledge is directly tied to the “peculiar organism” of women—“the fineness of their nerves, the susceptibility of their sensations, the absence of that large, coarse, and physical development” of men (4). Indeed, Hardinge Britten suggests that such fineness of the female nervous and biological systems not only makes women better suited to be “the finger which shall point upward,” or the true “spiritual ascendant in human nature” (4), but also signifies their evolutionary advancement and organic “advantage over men” (Hatch, “Spiritualism, and its Work” 371). Trance speaker Lizzie Doten claimed that one day woman’s superiority would be recognized; woman, she declared, “is the divine Shekinah, the Holy of Holies, in her man shall recognize the image of his God, and kneel and adore” (qtd. in Braude 86). Hatch’s active intuition and Hardinge Britten’s organic inspiration, both akin to the concept of sympathy and the sympathetic nervous system (discussed in Chapter One), work to subvert the typical biological and evolutionary narrative that oppresses women.51

50 Hardinge Britten uses the word affinity in the scientific sense to explain the “chemical attraction” between elements: “the tendency of an element to unite with another element to form compounds; the tendency of a molecule to combine or form a bond (of any kind) with another” (“Affinity,” OED). Based on her spiritual mediumship, I think it is also important to note that the term affinity was often frequently used in a spiritual context to suggest the “state of being psychically or spiritually connected” to another person or spirit (“Affinity,” OED). Thus, in Hardinge Britten’s case, the chemical affinity that enables her mediumship also enables her spiritual affinity with the spirit controls that guide her speeches, and the affinity, or sympathetic connection , she is able to create with her audience.

51 Darwin's evolutionary theory and adjacent discussions about eugenics were prominent in other attempts by nineteenth-century women to free themselves from their subject status. One of the major ideas that women took away from Darwin's theories was that they are not naturally inferior, or unintelligent, rather their "nature" is socially constructed. Darwin's suggestion in The Descent of Man that children “inherit [the] superiority” of “those individuals” or parents that “generated or nourished their offspring” was highly challenging to nineteenth-century gender categories, and women used Darwin to promote feminist causes like women's education (243). Given the laws of inheritance, they argued, it is important to educate women and potential mothers in order that their c hildren may biologically inherit their knowledge. Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), for example, critiques and takes up Darwin in this feminist way. The novel, “replete with evolutionary references, including titles for separate ‘books’ emphasizing heredity and development,” ultimately suggests the importance of educating women, even on

130 This line of argument reinforced women’s superiority and emboldened female mediums to assert their rights in other public ways—both on and off the platform. Their speeches were littered with references to “woman’s propelling powers” and “the depths of her genius and capacity” (The Place and Mission 9), as well as their desires for “a better and higher destiny” for women. Hardinge Britten “demands” for women an occupation beyond the “one mission…open to woman—that of being laid on the counter for man to choose, as toy or ornament” (7). Openly critiquing the marriage market, law, and the “vice of modern polygamy,” or the double standard that “applauds” men and “degrade[s]” women (“Marriage” 6), Hardinge Britten “demands a mission” or “some occupation” for women in religion, law, and education (The Place and Mission 7). In “Spiritualism, and Its Work for Women,” Hatch petitions for an “elevat[ion]” of the “standard and products of women’s labour” and to see to it that there are not “unemployed, unoccupied, homeless girls” and that women are “not uneducated” (370). Furthermore, both Hardinge Britten and Hatch acknowledge the fact that “civilization is built up by man and for man” (370) and that woman existing in such a society “requires equality with man in the right to govern her person, her property, her children…in the right to enter into schools, and the associations of commerce and trade, and to hold positions in the government” (The Place and Mission 4). Thus the range of issues represented by women in trance speeches was not limited to just rethinking biological determinism or notions of femininity, it was also concerned with finding alternatives to marriage and opening up public spaces for women to learn, work, and have a political voice through suffrage and legislation: “With the introduction of those social laws that make it possible for man and woman to sit together in deliberation in legislative assemblies, with the introduction of those sentiments that make it possible for literature and art to be adorned with the influences of woman’s mind and thought, you have the blossoming out of the flower of the nineteenth century” (Hatch, “Spiritualism” 370). In many ways, actually, the medium’s resistance to biological determinism made possible the opening up of those very public spaces through her conscious and unconscious manipulation of her own body on the platform. The sympathetic quality of the female medium’s body, along with her organic inspiration or intuition, was also a quality that added to the credibility of the female trance speaker and her reformist cause. These women drew upon familiar cultural modes sensitive topics through the tale of Edith, who contracts syphilis from her husband and gives birth to a syphilitic child (Schmitt 28). Had Edith received information from her parents of her husband’s sexual misadventures prior to their marriage, she and her child would not have been “sacrificed in this way” (Grand 300).

131 of performance that the public knew how to read as both a form of entertainment and a powerful force of public critique. Just as suffragists and actresses knew that “personality” was “the key to political (as to professional) power,” so too, did female trance speakers (Corbett, Representing 155). Like the actress, they embodied the nineteenth-century theory of “natural acting,” which Lynn Voskuil explains was a common theatrical practice that was promoted by theater critics George Henry Lewes and William Hazlitt. A “natural actor,” as she describes, is confidently and “instinctively able to project her own self-consciousness as part of the creative process and ‘give herself entirely up’ as Hazlitt puts it, ‘to the impression of the part.’” (Voskuil 31). Furthermore, the actress, in order to perform naturally, must “produce a virtual reality so convincingly mimetic that audiences cannot distinguish between players and their parts, as if the person does not play the role but becomes it” (29). Thus, female trance speakers, by inviting spirits to take possession of their bodies, are “natural” in that they give themselves up to their parts, literally becoming the various spirits they channel. In such a performance, audiences are aware of a theatrical element, even as they read the speaker’s possession/performance as completely natural. Formerly an actress on the London stage before receiving her calling as a medium, Britten knew exactly, as did Hatch, how to engage her audience by bringing common theatrical tropes to the platform—namely, her skill as a public speaker. She was lauded as a “brilliant orator” whose speech was simultaneously capable of “sympathizing with the poor and oppressed” and “reclaim[ing] the degraded and fallen of her sex” (“Complimentary Resolutions” 250). Lacking any of the “hum’s and ha’s and repetitions” of a poor public speaker, Hardinge Britten’s language was “free, flowing, without a limp, a halt, or a shuffle” (Howitt 308). One reviewer, the writer and editor William Howitt, dazzled by her stage presence, recognizes, in his review “Mrs. Hardinge” (1870), the spectacular and theatrical nature of her trance performance: On whatever subject she speaks, though proposed on the instant…[y]ou have the great facts and truths of the topic, and in an order as lucid as if it were the effect of the most careful study and arrangement. Rising from a simple but solid proposition, she ascends by a truly musical scale of the very highest reach of the theme, and leaves you at once enlightened, charmed, and astonished. The elocution, the action, and delivery, if a little theatrical, are feminine in their mode, masculine in their vigour, and angelic in their sentiment. (Howitt 308)

132 Howitt illuminates at least part of the audience’s response to Hardinge Britten. Listeners and watchers recognized the “little theatrical[ity]” embedded in her trance performance, but their response was to be “enlightened, charmed, and astonished.” Moreover, her theatricality didn’t dissuade the audience from believing in the reality of the performances, at least in Howitt’s view: “All this she says the spirits give her. Well, good and kind souls! They do themselves and herself the greatest credit, for their deliveries are of the most noble conceptions, most advanced opinions, the most philanthropic aspirations” (308). Most important, perhaps, is Howitt’s ready acceptance of Hardinge Britten’s credibility, and the way in which the theatricality of her trance speech enables a sort of toppling of traditional gender norms. Hardinge Britten is feminine in her affect, but masculine in her rhetoric and “vigour.” Likewise, popular writer and skeptic Nathanial Parker Willis conceded, in the Home Journal, women’s aptness for lectureship. He was so overcome by both Hatch’s appearance—he describes her as a “delicate-featured blond, of seventeen or eighteen, flaxen ringlets falling over her shoulders, movements deliberate and self-possessed, voice calm and deep, and eyes and fingers no way nervous”—and her overall performance that his “instinctive feeling…made no objection to the propriety of her performance”; the combined effect “prepared [him] to believe her an exception—either that a male spirit was speaking through her lips, or that the relative position of the sexes is not the same as in the days of St. Paul” (Willis qtd. in Braude 95; emphasis mine). Much like Hardinge Britten’s as described above, Hatch’s power on the platform—her feminine (and thus appropriate) looks combined with her “male” speech and self- possession—transgressed typical gender norms, making it possible even for skeptics regarding spiritualism to overlook the fact that a woman was speaking publicly on political and religious matters. The power of language and the affect that “enlightened, charmed, and astonished ” Hatch’s and Hardinge Britten’s audiences relies in part on the “imaginative contracts” between the audience members and the performers on stage; “the audiences must willingly suspend disbelief, and accept…what is seen and heard as genuine” (Lehman 1). While it would be easy to dismiss the performance as fake, audience members, especially those with faith in the spiritualist movement, were easily persuaded that the trance performance was legitimate. This perception of legitimacy was further aided by the quality of the performance itself. The natural acting Hatch and Hardinge Britten employed created “emotional and intellectual effects in spectators”

133 (Voskuil 13). For Lewes, such a social interaction between the audience and performer “establish[ed] sympathetic community” that granted the spectator “the capacity to not only experience but also to understand their own feelings in epistemological terms, to recognize instinctively but also intellectually how their own emotions could function as important building blocks of character and community” (13). Members of the audience, overcome by the relatability of the feelings espoused by the actress, was united in their sympathetic reaction to the performance. They felt and responded to the emotions the actress “naturally” portrayed. Furthermore, the medium’s sympathetic and delicate nervous system, which enabled spirit contact, also worked to encourage audiences to be drawn in by, physically and emotionally affected by, or to act in sympathy with the trance speaker and her aims. The otherworldliness of Hatch’s trance speeches, for example, was often commended for the way they reached out and provoked the audience. In one particular instance, in a lecture on “The Realm of the Spirit,” the Medium and Daybreak describes the audience as “in tears” which could “scarcely [be] repress[ed]” by those with their “eyes on the speaker” (“Cora L. V. Tappan” 8). Hatch, who delivered the lecture, is described as producing “with unwonted energy…a highly intellectual discourse, which took command of the whole mind” (8; emphasis mine). Her ability to take “command” of the audience’s “mind” resonates with the language of entrancement; the audience, hearing “something more in the speech than the mere words…particularly…when the eye was turned to the speaker,” is possessed by the medium, her spirit influence, and even the speech’s content (8). It was no wonder that such tactics could be used by feminist and/or trance speakers to create within the audience a community that would be drawn to act in accordance with the moral and ethical issues of which they spoke. Much like trance speakers who would willingly give themselves over to their spirit guides, actresses on stage would often emotionally abandon themselves to the roles they were playing, allowing their “normal sense of self” to be “overtaken by another consciousness” in a way that was often read as “hysterical” (Lehman 57). As in my reading of Trilby in Chapter One, it is my argument here that the hysterical body—of both the female medium and, in this case, the stage performer—indicates an active nervous system, one that is reaching out to make connections among people, spaces, time, and even spirit presences. That the actress’s persona on stage, or in this case, the trance performer’s effect on the audience was described in terms of entrancement, mesmerism, and even hypnotism—as “spell-binding,” “mesmerizing,” or

1 34 “entrancing”—speaks to the ways in which acting and trance were conflated, and the degree to which the “ineffable charisma” and sympathetic qualities of the female trance speaker appealed to the senses of the audience: as Lehman attests, “women onstage seemed to acquire both the hypnotizing charm of Svengali and the allure of Trilby” (33). This slippage among acting, performance, and trance speaking reinforces the idea that the stage or platform was a space that combined spiritualism and activism. The so-called “passive” body of the medium in trance is not only active—in its ability to be entranced by spirits and to entrance the audience—but is activist,52 in that the trance speaker transforms into a feminist speaker. The abandonment of self enables just one form of gender-bending that grants these women agency over their bodies, and in turn amplifies activist causes to the bodies of others—namely the audience.

COMPULSORY MEDIATION IN THE BOSTONIANS The Bostonians generally concerns the complexities of women’s experience; more particularly, it considers the ways that female trance speakers and early feminists struggled to fulfill their active public role as spiritual reformers in the midst of social and political critiques that demanded women sacrifice their independence (and celebrity) to the domestic sphere. The novel follows the career of the innocent and beautiful Verena Tarrant, a sympathetic trance medium, who teams up with reformer Olive Chancellor to use her spiritual gift to agitate for women’s rights. Given that Verena was modeled on the trance speakers of the nineteenth century—specifically, Cora Hatch, whom James reportedly “went to listen to the preaching of” in 1863 (Selected Letters 8)—it is clear that James was aware of the conflicting discourses surrounding female trance mediums and other women on the stage or platform, and their multifaceted gender performance.53 Verena captures the balancing act of the female medium’s performance as she teeters between asserting her active and sympathetic agency in heralding her feminist cause on the public platform; lessening her role in that activism by downplaying her

52 Though I am using the term activist here to denote a “person engaged in or advocating vigorous political activity,” it is important to note that the word wasn’t used in this respect until after the turn of the century (“Activist,” OED).

53 Such critics as Martha Banta, Susan Wolstenholme, and John McClymer have all made connections between James and occult practices. Wolstenholme, for example, suggests that both James brothers were interested in the “sociological implications of spiritualism” (581). James, she contends, was influenced by his brother William’s psychological studies of spiritualist practices, and his contribution to the founding of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1884. Both McClymer and Wolstenholme also verify that Hatch was, in part, the inspiration behind Verena and her precursor, the fictional trance-lecturer Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat, in The Bostonians.

135 gift; and reassuring her love interest, the conservative Basil, that she conforms to the traditional feminine and passive role of the ideal woman of the time. Verena’s trance speeches in the novel, much like those of Hatch and Hardinge Britten, successfully relay her feminist agenda because of her quality of performance. A substantial body of literary criticism has read The Bostonians as “unfeminist” and “a testament to the author's dislike of gender reform” (Petty 378). As Leslie Petty points out, “mid- twentieth-century critics like Lionel Trilling comment sympathetically on what they see as the novel's endorsement of a traditional world view” (379).54 Critics including Barabara Bardes, Suzanne Gossett, and Thomas F. Bertonneau cite the final scene of the novel, where Basil whisks Verena away in order to marry her and thus prevents her from giving a lecture on women's rights, as proof of James's “anti-feminist bias” (Petty 379). Other critics such as Judith Fetterley, Terry Castle, and Kathleen McColley are more generous to James, suggesting that “there is nevertheless a more revolutionary message latent in The Bostonians”; they read the text as one that subverts heterosexual norms (Fetterley 152). McColley and Castle, for example see James as “privileg[ing]” “female relationships and their implied homoeroticism,” which hint at the “liberating possibilities inherent in female friendship” (McColley 151). My reading, contextualized as it is within female spirit mediation, negotiates between these two common interpretations: James, rather than showing disdain for gender reform, challenges traditional gender roles of the period. The homosocial female friendship cultivated by Olive and Verena represents and acknowledges, as Sharon Marcus would argue, the “typical” Victorian world “that made relationships between women central to femininity, marriage, and family life” (1). Victorian women, she asserts, were not only defined in relation to men, they “formed legible and legitimate bonds with one another” (26). By presenting the potential of women's homoerotic friendship, only to let the marriage plot and the misogynistic Basil win out in the end, James troubles the validity of female friendship, especially those that unite women in political action, in his insistence on this salient fact: the odds are always in compulsory heterosexuality's favor. Though Marcus argues that “almost every Victorian novel that ends in marriage has first supplied its heroine with an intimate friend” and that marriage “does not negate the bonds

54 Trilling writes that The Bostonians creates a world where “the sacred mothers [are] refusing their commission and the sacred fathers [are] endangered” (qtd. in Petty 379). Likewise, Alfred Habeggar asserts that the book is anti-feminist and a “reactionary” attempt to uphold conservative views on gender (qtd. in Petty 379).

136 between women,” the complexities of Verena's spiritual mediumship—which paradoxically is publicly active and privately passive—and Basil’s own desire to squash Verena’s mediumship and political endeavors by removing her from Olive’s patronage reveals how James is marking the inevitability of the marriage plot, even though he refuses to sanction it (76). Thus, much like Hardinge Britten, who sought to both affirm her agency in the performance and disavow it, James’s Verena simultaneously confirms both the spirit influence, and her resulting passive trance state, and her own agency in delivering her speeches. On our first introduction to her, the narrator verifies that her talent is the result of “some power outside” that “seemed to flow through her…as if she was called” (Bostonians 56). At her impromptu lecture at Miss Birdseye’s, Verena announces that the “considerable eloquence” emanating from her “isn’t me” (55), and the narrator assures us that Verena “let it come out just as it would—she didn’t pretend to have any control” (56). At the same time, however, James suggests that her gift, in part, is fashioned out of Verena’s own experience, comparable to that of growing up in a theatrical family. She had been “nursed in darkened rooms, and suckled in the midst of manifestations”; had “attend[ed] lectures” as an infant; “been passed from hand to hand by trance-speakers”; and “grown up among lady-doctors, lady-mediums, lady-editors, lady- preachers, lady-healers” (86). It is hinted that these early acquaintances, as well as her father’s mesmeric healing practices, may have influenced her talent and her politics—and as a spiritual medium, Verena is already susceptible to outside forces; her early introduction to feminism is no exception. These female influences, who actively “rescued themselves from passive existence,” serve as an example to Verena, who has the possibility to “rescue [herself] from passive existence” through her mediumship and open advocacy of “equal rights, equal opportunities, equal privileges” for women, investing her with an agency and intention, despite the mystical source of her lectures (233). Furthermore, as we see Verena’s principles develop, she gains even more control over her stage presence; in preparation for her debut lecture to “a big Boston audience,” Verena practices in advance, refusing “to trust inspiration…without knowing where she was” (404). Verena herself believes that she has “a certain amount of imagination” which contributes to her success; “she supposed she couldn’t be so effective on the platform if she hadn’t a rich fancy” (86). This “fancy,” along with her innocent, young, and beautiful appearance, manages to inspire and entrance her audience. The quality of her “inspirational” speaking is described by

137 newspaperman Mathias Pardon as “exquisite; so fresh and poetical” (53), and the suffragist campaigner Mrs. Farrinder acknowledges begrudgingly her “fine command of language” (66). Though “theatrical” (53), and “melodramatic” in appearance (59), her performance is described as being “naturally” so (53); it’s “quiet…serious,” “strange, sweet, crude, absurd, enchanting” (59). Verena makes use of the melodramatic and natural acting tactics of Hardinge Britten and Hatch; the narrator explains that “she was in possession of her part. She played it with extraordinary simplicity and grace” (59). The control implied here once again contradicts the attribution of passiveness to Verena’s trance state, as well the idea that the actress or medium suffers from hysteria. She actively takes possession of her role and of the audience. It is this odd combination of being both passive instrument and active speaker that has the entrancing effect upon the audience. This effect is demonstrated most notably by the reactions of both Basil Ransom and Olive Chancellor, each of whom is spellbound by Verena and her performance. Characterized by her sensitivity and capacity for feeling deeply, Olive is especially susceptible to Verena’s influence on the platform, particularly the “strange spontaneity,” “artless enthusiasm,” and “personal purity” of her manner (53). She is described as suffering a “tragic shyness” (10) with a “nervous manner” (11) and an intense desire to “give” herself to others, “to know everything that lies beneath and out of sight…to enter into the lives of women” (36). Both Basil and Mrs. Farrinder recognize immediately that Olive “felt the universal contagion” of, and had “been powerfully affected” by, Verena’s performance (65). Basil’s negative description— provoked by the strange bodily response in Olive—of Verena’s speech as promoting the spreading of a disease, rather than as a sympathetic response to Verena’s performance, makes it clear that what Basil reads as “universal contagion” actually marks the beginnings of a strong affinity between Olive and Verena, one that is manifested through a nervous connection. Olive’s physical (and perhaps sexual) reaction to Verena’s otherworldly speech is revealed in her “extraordinary face”; her “eyes were enlarged” and “there was a red spot in each of the cheeks” (67). Olive’s blush—a sympathetic response of her nervous system to Verena’s talent—reveals the enormity of Verena’s effect and the homoeroticism of Olive’s response; when “Verena rises to eloquence[, i]t’s as if the chords were strung across [Olive’s] own heart; she seems to vibrate, to echo with every word” (233). This sympathetic connection deepens in the course of the novel to “unite[] the two young ladies” (233), supporting the “tacit consensus” (Kishi 100) among critics that Olive is “the first

138 fully conceived lesbian protagonist in modern fiction,” and that James’s novel is interested in the homoerotic possibilities of female friendship (Van Leer 93). Olive’s desire, catalogued in her response to Verena having “moved her as she had never been moved,” gives her the “sense that she found here what she had been looking for so long—a friend of her own sex with whom she might have a union of soul. It took a double consent to make a friendship, but it was not possible that this intensely sympathetic girl would refuse” (Bostonians 81-82). And Verena doesn’t; she becomes Olive’s companion and protégé, even as Olive “constitutes herself” as Verena’s “protectress and devotee” (84). As the sympathetic “union of soul” between the two women matures, so does Verena’s commitment to their shared cause. Verena’s admiration for Olive and her “intensity of emotion” for women’s rights ignites a similar feeling in Verena, who becomes more passionate about using her “divine” gift to “move the world” (83). Olive with a “glance that was the beginning” “[takes] possession” of Verena and spurs on Verena’s commitment to the cause (80).55 Olive and Verena, united by “their mutual gaze” (84) and their shared cause, “work together for a great good” (233). They capitalize on Verena’s “gift of expression,” “youth,” and ability to attract attention and influence a wide audience by bending the “ear of the public” in favor of the suffrage movement (102). Basil is likewise deeply “fascinated” by Verena’s talent; to “his starved sense she irresistibly appealed” (61-62). However, his fascination incites him to wrest Verena away from her homoerotic relationship with Olive and the feminist cause their female community inspires and supports. While Verena’s sympathetic powers also influence Basil, he is most entranced by Verena’s manner and appearance, rather than the content of her addresses. In his assessment of Verena’s appearance, it is clear that his attraction to her is physical, but that that attraction is undercut rather than enhanced by the threatening politics and gender-bending inherent in her public display: There was, however, something rich in the fairness of this young lady; she was strong and supple, there was color in her lips and eyes, and her tresses, gathered into a complicated coil, seemed to glow with the brightness of her nature. She had curious, radiant, liquid eyes (their smile was a sort of reflection, like the glisten of

55 Wolstenholme also notes, in accord with Banta, that “Olive is consistently described in spectral terms” (583). As such, she must take possession of Verena and her mediumistic talent like “a spirit in the other world” to communicate her feminist principles to the world (583).

139 a gem), and though she was not tall, she appeared to spring up, and carried her head as if it reached rather high. (59) Her appearance—which is at once feminine in her youth and beauty, and masculine in her confident attitude and strong figure—provokes Basil, who is hypnotized by her affect and repulsed by that fact. He realizes that he, along with the “the whole audience,” had “lost all sense of time” because they were so caught up in Verena’s performance. So entranced is he that he “wondered afterwards how long she had spoken” and reflects that “it was not what she said,” but the “picture and figure…the visible freshness and purity” that has captivated him (61). Verena’s beauty, innocence, and youth are reminiscent of Hatch’s, whose visual impact on the platform was widely observed. The audience considered her youth and appearance— “average stature, slender build, but of extremely good figure,” fair complexion, natural “charms,” and the “artistic simplicity with which she dresses”—as marks of the authenticity of her performance (“Cora L. V. Tappan” 8). The younger and more innocent the trance medium, the “less ability” or “desire” she would have to “practice trickery” (Banner of Light qtd. in Braude 87). Verena’s appearance is no exception; Ransom’s fascination with Verena’s appearance—her “sweetest, most unworldly face”—is at odds with her confident and masculine performance on the platform. He sees the performance as an “exhibition,” similar, perhaps, to the spectacle of the suffragists and women’s rights campaigners, who marched in the streets and spoke on platforms. It is clear that he dislikes not only the feminist bent of her speech, which he calls “ridiculous” (Bostonians 271), but also the publicness Verena’s talent engenders (59). Her “gift” and the “still-burning passion that animated her,” which simultaneously entices and “delight[s]” him (271), is also his “humiliation”; he determines that “she was meant for something divinely different—for privacy, for him, for love” (272). Basil’s attraction and “love” for Verena skew his interpretation of her commitment to the cause and he imagines that “the inanities she uttered—the rights and wrongs of women, the equality of the sexes, the hysterics of conventions, the further stultification of suffrage, the prospect of conscript mothers in the national Senate”—were not ideals she actually believes in (62): “the necessity of her nature was not to make converts to a ridiculous cause, but to emit those charming notes of her voice, to stand in those free young attitudes, to shake her braided locks like a naiad rising from the waves, to please every one who came near her, and to be happy that she pleased” (62). Revising her intentions and reinterpreting her trance speeches to this

140 effect, Basil makes it his mission to persuade Verena to step down from her platform and remove herself from the public eye by becoming his wife.

THE THREAT OF FEMALE CIRCULATION Basil’s fear of Verena’s circulation and public body is perhaps no surprise, given the social, political ramifications of the female body on display. Compounding that fear is the fact that Verena’s circulating, very public body is acting on behalf of a cause that threatens Basil’s conservative and normative views on gender roles. As is evident by the reviews of trance speakers of the time, the popularity of female trance performances, with their ability to tap into the hearts and minds of the audience, not only led to a deeper belief of spiritualism and a wider audience to support their feminist cause, but also created a celebrity culture marked by their “renown” as “beloved” speakers (N. Kilburn qtd. in “Marked Success” 582). Hardinge Britten is often described as “a true friend” whose “deep sincerity and love of human happiness” influences even those who would “oppose her principles” (“Emma Hardinge-Britten [sic]” 252). She writes herself that “earthly friends declared my trance addresses…were just what was required for the public rostrum” (qtd. in Wallraven 296). It is no wonder then, that she and her sister-speakers were packing in audiences of “between 700 and 800 people in a most attentive and favourable manner” as they toured across America and Britain delivering their message of reform (N. Kilburn qtd. in “Marked Success” 582). The circulation of their bodies and messages on world-wide lecture tours and the extended reach of the various spiritualist magazines and newspapers that reprinted transcripts of each oration made sure that their message and teachings were received by the public at large. Such circulation of the female medium and her feminist cause extends beyond that of the spiritual medium and into the realm of the technological medium. In The Odd Women, Miss Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn’s roles as teachers—who circulate feminist ideas and business skills amongst their students—are constructed in similar ways to the female trance speakers on the platform. Miss Barfoot is described as “quite like a man in energy and resources” (36); the narrator confesses that Miss Barfoot’s abilities “were of a kind uncommon in women, or at all events rarely developed in one of her sex. She could have managed a large and complicated business, could have filled a place on a board of directors, have taken an active part in municipal government” (63). Instead, her skills are used in developing these traits in younger women: “she

141 held the conviction that whatever man could do, woman could do equally well” (63), aiding them in becoming self-sufficient via “pursuits nowadays thrown open to their sex” (63), and “propagandiz[ing] for female emancipation. Indeed, her “mission…in the world” was to encourage her charges to become “invaders,” essentially infiltrating “what had been exclusively the men’s sphere” (151) and to “do away with that common confusion of the words ‘womanly and womanish’”: “If woman is no longer to be womanish, but a human being of powers and responsibilities, she must become militant, defiant…Let a woman be gentle, but at the same time let her be strong; let her be pure of heart, but none the less wise and instructed” (153). To overturn these traditional gender norms, Miss Barfoot argues, women “must carry on an active warfare, must be invaders” (153). The typewriter girls, as New Woman circulating in the male public sphere, thus put pressure on conventional feminine norms. As Christopher Keep explains, “Typing…is such a course of training because it is ‘something new, something free from the reproach of womanliness.’ More than simply providing for their ‘daily bread,’ white-collar office work allows women the opportunity to redefine the very premises of womanhood. The keyboard will startle them from the torpor of domesticity and waken them to the new possibilities of intellectual and financial independence” (“Cultural Work” 410). Beyond “invading” the male domain, typewriting also connected women to feminist causes through its ability to construct and transmit propaganda. In Night and Day, this is the case with Mary Datchet, whose work in the suffrage office is specifically designed to circulate publicly, even when and if her body doesn’t. Mary’s suffrage office work—her typing up of pamphlets, reading and writing of letters, and organizing of entertainment and benefits in support of the cause—in one sense mechanizes her. Inspired to “efficiency” by the sound of Mrs. Seal’s typewriter, she only halts from her productivity when the sound lulls, compelling her to take a break and get lunch to “set that other piece of mechanism, her body, into action” (39). Her mechanized body, once energized, is able to tap into a larger “network” or community of workers and suffragists. Mary imagines “that she was the centre ganglion of a very fine network of nerves which fell over England and one of these days, when she touched the heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing together and emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks” (73). Not unlike the spiritual mediums, who organically influence their audience, Mary imagines herself, as a central mediator, plugging in to an interconnected community and spreading her message outward. The powerful metaphor privileges the action of

142 her mechanized body—while it doesn’t circulate per se, it still exerts agency, that body acts as an epicenter for the textual material that she circulates and distributes. Even in her personal life, Mary loans out her rooms to friends for “any purposes whatsoever. Being, as they were, rather large and conveniently situated in a street mostly dedicated to offices off the Strand,” they were an ideal site for people to hold meetings to “reform the state” (48). Thus, she puts her body metaphorically and literally at the center of reformist action and activism within her public and private life. The modes of circulation in both of these novels nonetheless betray certain anxieties about the circulation of feminist causes. Night and Day, for example, while detailing Mary’s work in the suffrage office, is also critical of such circulation. Woolf’s narrator satirizes Mary’s co-workers at the office, poking fun at their idealizing the role of technology in supporting their movement. Mrs. Seal’s scatterbrained, yet passionate work is ridiculed by Woolf, as is her outburst on how “the glories of the future depended in part upon the activity of her typewriter” (81). At the same time, however, Mary’s role in the nerve network emphasizes the importance of technology’s role in facilitating women’s suffrage. The Odd Women also emphasizes the dangers of circulation, but in a more specifically sexual way. In contrast to Miss Barfoot’s invasion of the male sphere, Gissing emphasizes the typist’s circulating body as “the object of fixation in the office or even while moving around the city, often when commuting from work” (Gray 493) for those men who observe her. Indeed, the novel represents several women whose perceived sexual availability in the public sphere leads to their “fall,” including Monica, who, in the course of the novel, marries a man she meets while walking around the city by herself and then has an affair with a second man she meets in a similar way. Returning to James, we can see how the possibility of Verena’s wide circulation has the potential to imitate the successes of Hardinge Britten and Hatch. Verena’s father, Selah Tarrant, hopes to see her “advertised among the ‘personals,’” and that her celebrity will grow enough to have “some journalistic mention every day of the year” (Bostonians 103). Likewise, friends of Verena’s who also contribute to the suffrage movement—like Olive, Mathias Pardon, the Burrages, and Miss Birdseye—work throughout the novel to uplift their cause by “producing her in public” (126). Over the course of The Bostonians, Verena speaks “in a blaze of fireworks” at the Feminist Convention, tours Europe, and in the final scene is poised to make her debut at the Music Hall in Boston where “Photographs of Miss Tarrant—sketch of her life!” and “Portraits of

143 the Speaker—story of her career!” are available for further circulation by and to audience members (443). Basil’s desire to remove Verena from the platform through marriage is really a desire to take her out of circulation—to privatize her gift, rather than allow her to spread her message publicly to the masses. Removing her from the limelight would not only limit the dissemination of her feminist message and the threatening gender-bending agency she embodies on stage, but it would also restrict her potentially dangerous relationship with Olive. Thus, Petty and Anthony Scott argue that Olive and Verena's relationship is "questionable" and "destined to fail, not because it is so different from the heterosexual norm, but because in its imbalance of power it is too much like it" (Petty 392). Certainly, this critique is justified given that Olive's power over Verena is not unlike Basil's. Olive also desires to "[take] possession" of Verena (Bostonians 80), and Verena's promise not to marry is given out of her desire to "please" Olive as she is "completely under [Olive's] influence" (241). Nevertheless, the female-centered intimacy that grows out of their shared work is notable, especially in relation to Basil's perception of it as threatening. Indeed, Basil’s desire is just as much to curtail Verena’s gift, and what it represents to his masculinity, as to destroy the feminist cause—“to reform the reformers”—and uplift his own diminished manhood. Basil’s life as a former southern plantation owner was disrupted by abolitionists: his “family was ruined; they had lost their slaves, their property, their friends and relations; their home; had tasted of all the cruelty of defeat” (13). Such defeat is not aided by his failed attempt to start a successful career as a lawyer in New York City. For Basil, such a desire takes the masculinist form of battle where his “victory” would be to “‘squelch’…at a stroke” Verena’s “engagements…campaigns…[and] the expectancy of her friends”: in other words, he seeks to reduce her from public figure and independent woman to the “old-fashioned idea” of “woman as the toy of man” (405). Verena’s inspirational speeches are filtered through the perspective of Basil, perhaps as a way of limiting the totalizing mediation of the feminist trance event. By making Basil the “medium” through which the spiritualist event is interpreted, James’s narrator is emphasizing Basil’s influence over Verena and simultaneously mediating the reader’s experience and interpretation of Verena’s spiritual talents. James's use of free indirect discourse, especially, is a formal technique that reveals Basil's attitude that "women were essentially inferior to men"

144 (198); and his desires—his sexual attraction to Verena's body and his disapproval of her public speaking—enforce a compulsory heterosexuality, not just on Verena, but onto the novel itself. Adrienne Rich defines compulsory heterosexuality as the “societal forces which wrench women's emotional and erotic energies away from themselves and other women and from woman- identified values” (Rich 637). Borrowing from Kathleen Gough, Rich explores a list of “characteristics of male power” which she sees as “enforcing heterosexuality” and creating and sustaining sexual inequalities (638): “men's ability to deny women sexuality or to force it upon them; to command or exploit their labor to control their produce; to control or rob them of their children; to confine them physically and prevent their movement; to use them as objects in male transactions; to cramp their creativeness; or to withhold from them large areas of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments” (Gough qtd. in Rich 638). Basil utilizes these societal forces and his particular “male power” to control Verena by distracting her from her spiritual talent and life's work in the hopes of removing her (through marriage) from a public life and feminist community he finds disagreeable. Moreover, his success in redirecting Verena's attention onto himself, forces her to break her promise to Olive that she won't marry, and the feminist principles that her and Olive's partnership represents. Basil eventually persuades Verena to sacrifice the celebrity of the Music Hall and what that signifies to her feminist cause in order to become “charming to [him]” and he does so through his own masculinist “charm” (402). Just as Verena and Olive are able to build a sympathetic understanding between them, Basil is easily able to use that sympathy and Verena’s own “nervous passion” (454) to “take possession of [her]” and replace her convictions with his much more narrow-minded ones (327). Basil takes the mediumistic language of possession— through which women mediums, as I have shown, resist patriarchal forms of containment—and translates it back into the language of patriarchy, of possession as ownership, of woman as property. Framed in a discourse of “love,” Basil, reminiscent of Verena’s mediumistic powers over her audience, is able to exert his “will” over Verena. As the narrator describes: “The essential was to show her how much he loved her, and then to press, to press, always to press” (399). Verena readily gives in to this pressing of his will and admits that it is stronger than her own: “it keeps me sitting here long after I should have started for home,” she confesses, and even impels her to deceive Olive about her relationship with Basil. Although she is horrified by Basil’s revelations—and his desire to preserve “the masculine tone” he believes “is passing out

145 of the world” by restricting women to the home—his influence, which takes on mesmeric overtones, is such that she finds herself compelled to listen and believe his “exaggerations [and] misrepresentations” (343): Verena gazed aghast at the colorless dust into which, in three short months…such a conviction as that could crumble; she felt it must be a magical touch that could bring about such a cataclysm. Why Basil Ransom had been deputed by fate to exercise this spell was more than she could say—poor Verena, who up to so lately had flattered herself that she had a wizard’s wand in her own pocket. (396-7) Verena’s “wizard’s wand” is appropriated by Basil’s “magical touch,” easily persuading Verena to “sacrifice” her own aims and agency to Basil’s version of what Rich calls “male power.” While James’s narrator points out that the reader may find Basil’s ideas and “state of mind…painfully crude" (198), they are, as Petty explains, “only mildly exaggerated versions of quite typical arguments against woman’s rights” (392). His convictions would “carry the weight of the majority behind them in the world” and this can readily explain, at least in part, the seeming ease with which Verena succumbs to his worldview: “One could make the case that ‘as a representative of his sex,’ Basil is the ‘most important personage in [this] narrative’ because he embodies the strength and seductiveness of conventional thought” (392). Verena’s attempt to escape his influence and hold on to her own ideals can’t help but fail in the final battle of the novel, when Basil successfully—through the persuasive tactics of his “male power” (Rich 637) and use of “muscular force”—prevents Verena from taking the stage at the Music Hall (Bostonians 463). Verena, ultimately, finds herself torn between her friendship with Olive and future goals for the feminist movement and her “love” for Basil. As she explains to Olive: “I don’t dislike him…But how can I love him when he tells me he wants me to give up everything, all our work, our faith, our future, never to give another address, to open my lips in public? How can I consent to that?” (384). “I don’t want to embrace his ideas,” she admits, “but I like him better than any gentlemen I have seen” (386-7). The culminating moment of the novel, which has Verena “beseeching” Basil to let her perform in the Music Hall, being compelled by him to abandon once and for all her life’s work, and ultimately giving a victory to Basil and his traditional world order, leaves James’s audience inclined to agree with Verena’s mother’s response to Basil’s acts as “the most horrible, wicked, immoral selfishness I ever heard in my life!” (456). James makes

146 no secret of the fact that Verena has made the wrong choice: “But though she was glad,” the novel concludes, “she was in tears. It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed” (464). Olive recognizes the dangers of the compulsory heterosexuality that Basil represents; she remains suspicious of the men in the novel, particularly those who befriend Verena. Basil's attempts to “command” Verena's “labor” through “the institutions of marriage and motherhood” (Gough qtd. in Rich 639), in particular, is feared by Olive, who extracts a promise from Verena that their cause and friendship will not be thrown over by Verena's attraction or marriage to a man. She warns Verena never to “listen to young men when they try to mock and muddle you” (Bostonians 135). They “don't care for you; they don't care for us.” Olive explains: “They care only for their pleasure, for what they believe to be the right of the stronger” (135). What at first appears to the reader as Olive's jealous hold on Verena and the potential of her speaking talent turns out to be the lesson of James's narrative, especially as Verena gets forcefully swept up and out of the Music Hall by Basil at the novel's conclusion. Thus the narrative becomes a political one that is critical of the forces by which women “have been convinced that marriage, and sexual orientation toward men, are inevitable, even if unsatisfying or oppressive components of their lives,” while at the same time acknowledging marriage’s tragic inevitability (Rich 640). Verena, as a medium, is easily influenced by spirits, by Olive's feminist principles, and Basil's masculinist manipulation. The same sympathetic connection that works on Olive and Basil, it seems, can also work on Verena: “sympathy is just sympathy. It takes in Miss Verena and it takes in all others” (Bostonians 130). And though Verena is “the possessed” for both Olive's and Basil's competing worldviews, in terms of possession, James seems to say, patriarchy ultimately wins out. *** While the publicness of the female medium and her circulating body gave her access to diverse spaces, audiences, and opportunities, it also set fire to the cultural imagination, illuminating the potential dangers inherent in woman’s infiltration of a public/masculine space, as represented in James, Gissing, and Woolf. Women's rights activism relied, in part, on women spiritualists to "mediate" their gender-bending abilities to members of audiences who had yet to fully endorse or embrace all of the non-normative work of the women's rights movement. The power of their performances, because of the complexity of masculine and feminine qualities they

147 embodied, in addition to the publicness of those bodies, provoked renewed interest in some of the more subversive aspects of the women’s rights movement. James’s, Gissing’s, and Woolf’s novels all capture and re-mediate that subversion, demonstrating in various ways that the spiritual trance speaker (and even the female technological medium), while agential and progressive on stage or in public, is also always already limited by a traditional worldview that desires to contain and control her. The conclusion of The Bostonians especially reveals the possibilities and anxieties surrounding female mediumship. Verena’s trance performances, like the contemporary mediums she was modeled after, uncover opportunities for an agency that both enacts non-normative gender-bending and simultaneously engages and spreads an activist message to an audience shaped by nineteenth- century understandings of traditional femininity. Verena epitomizes the work Mediums and Their Material has undertaken. She represents the figure of the female medium, who has potential for agency and action, but ultimately, through misreading or the habit and intention of patriarchal discourses, is written in terms of passivity. What happens to Verena in James’s narrative is, ultimately, what nineteenth-century discourses on the female body and present scholarship on female mediation eventually does: render the female body as passive. Given this trend, one can read James as prescient; he sees the tragedy in circumventing the female medium’s agency and anticipates this trend in discourse on female mediation and early feminism. What this dissertation has tried to do, is not to read Verena as representative of female mediums and their material, but rather as a figure who ushers in a point of departure—a place where we, like James, can acknowledge the fragility of the female body, but also the threat of its material agency. Such a departure opens up possibilities to subvert and critique patriarchal discourses, like compulsory heterosexuality. What’s more, it offers a space to imagine how the active female body rewrites our own feminist perspectives, and like the medium’s body itself, envisions how nineteenth-century gender norms are perhaps more malleable than we’ve previously conceded. This imaginative space is capitalized on by Woolf’s Orlando and H.D.’s autobiographical works. As demonstrated in the final chapter, both Woolf and H.D. envision an active female mediation that simultaneously privileges a feminine/feminist writing tradition, and resists traditional notions of gender.

148 CHAPTER FIVE: “WRITING UNDER INSPIRATION”: AUTHORSHIP, AUTOMATIC WRITING, AND THE MATTER OF BODIES In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), Orlando’s fictional biographer narrates a curious incident of automatic writing. While composing her epic poem “The Oak Tree,” “to her astonishment and alarm, the pen began to curve and caracole with the smoothest possible fluency. Her page was written in the neatest sloping Italian hand with the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life” (174). Orlando’s writing is impeded by what she thinks is “some infirmity of the quill,” but which turns out to be something else entirely—a spirit entity, more specifically the Spirit of the Age, which haunts Orlando throughout the last third of the novel (174). The Spirit of the Age in the nineteenth century—unlike the earlier “Elizabethan spirit,” “Restoration spirit” and “the spirit of the eighteenth century,” which Orlando had “scarcely been aware of”—“was antipathetic to her in the extreme” (178). This spirit “took her and broke her”; it had determined to “bend” the “fixed lines of her character” (178). For Orlando’s pseudo- biographer, the Spirit of the Age is a “mysterious power” that “tak[es] us by the hand and mak[es] us look much more closely into the reasons why people do and say and think things” (“Character in Fiction” 504). The spirit controls Orlando’s quill, attempting to “tak[e] her by the hand” and influence her action and thought; to “bend” her to the forces of the time—a time that rolls in ominously, a “turbulent welter of cloud” that “covered the city”: “All was dark; all was doubt; all was confusion” (Orlando 165).56 This age, when “the home—which had become extremely important—was completely altered” and “[l]ove, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases,” was characterized by propriety, formality, and separation of the sexes: “The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated” (167). For Orlando, who throughout the novel queerly fluctuates between essentialist and constructed ideas of identity—between homosexuality and heterosexuality, femininity and masculinity, time and space, fictions and truths—especially experiences the pressure of the Spirit of the Age, and for the first time, she feels the need to succumb to the ideologies of the time: to put away her breeches and dress in the crinoline that was foisted upon and marketed to young women of the nineteenth century, to buy into the domestic ideal of Victorian womanhood. Thus it is no surprise that the Spirit of the Age, in what can only be Woolf’s satirical personification of the tensions it embodies, haunts Orlando as she writes. Orlando is “repuls[ed]”

56 In this respect, the Spirit of the Age that haunts Orlando is reminiscent of the Angel in the House that impedes Virginia Woolf’s writing in “Professions for Women,” as mentioned in the Introduction.

149 by this “involuntary inspiration” of the “ink flowing” across the page, and not just because it was writing “insipid verse” (174-175). Her body responds physically to the spirit’s onslaught. She is “all of a quiver” (174), and becomes “conscious” of an extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her, as if she were made of a thousand wires upon which some breeze or errant fingers were playing scales. Now her toes tingle; now her marrow. She had the queerest sensations about the thigh bones. Her hairs seemed to erect themselves. Her arms sang and twanged as the telegraph wires would be singing and twanging in twenty years or so… (175) Orlando’s hairs stand on end; she tingles and vibrates. Her automatic writing in this scene is embedded in discourses that, like those discussed in Chapter Three, connect her material body to a larger spiritual and technological network of nerves and wires. As her body is taken over by the Spirit of the Age, Orlando and her quill write—“ink flowing”—with the “involuntary inspiration” of the passive automaton or machine: she is, after all, described as “twang[ing]” like “telegraph wires.” This technological metaphor also evokes comparisons to discourses on electricity. With her “hairs…erect[ing] themselves,” the text seems to suggest Orlando’s very materiality has been “shocked” by this unconventional writing experience; she responds as if she were a “live” wire. The combination of electrical, technological, and spiritual elements—or what Lara Vetter calls religio-scientific discourse—in Woolf’s narration derives from an acute collective anxiety at the turn of the century over the unruly body, and in Orlando’s case, the tensions of a body that resists conforming to the Spirit of the Age. Industrial and technological advancements “evoked conceptions of the human body as newly vulnerable, with a particular ‘awareness of corporeal fragility’” (Laity 425 qtd. in Vetter 15-6). As a result, the body was perceived as increasingly penetrable by “everything from radio waves to medical instruments” and was “no longer understood to be a closed system” (16). Orlando’s body, especially in this scene of automatic writing, is thus assumed to be outside of “finite natural laws” and fits in with Vetter’s definition of the “modern” body; Orlando’s body is “uncontainable” and open to “seepage across borders previously thought inviolate—between self and other, male and female, human and machine, body and soul” (16). Through this automatic writing, Orlando’s body is clearly “playing out tensions of dual and seemingly opposing pressures upon identity, tensions which create a web of possibilities” (Burns 347).

150 Orlando tries to make sense of the “great cloud which hung…over the whole of the British Isles” during the “nineteenth century” through the written word (Orlando 166), and specifically religio-scientific discourse, which brought together a variety of discourses on science, e.g., the medical, technological, physical, and mathematical—as well as such religious traditions as the “esoteric, otherworldly, metaphysical, paranormal, spiritual, mystical, spiritualist, supernatural, magic, psychical, or occult” (Vetter 23).57 Religio-scientific discourse especially shapes modernist women’s writing because women experienced this crisis of embodiment intensely. Having “historically… been denied control over their own bodies,” women writers utilized religio-scientific discourses to reveal their “anxiety about the body’s integrity” (2) and to “negotiate[] the demands on, and threats to,” their “radically unstable bod[ies]” (17). These discourses were also, I argue, used to affirm women’s bodily agency and their place in a primarily masculine writing tradition. Woolf’s use of religio-scientific discourses in Orlando, then, provides a way to work out the tensions of Orlando’s identity and authorship— to reveal and empower her unruly writing body. Woolf’s parodic invoking of the Spirit of the Age, as a personified spiritual force out to possess and restrict Orlando, repudiates a tradition of masculinist modes of authorship that left out women writers. Orlando’s understanding of the Spirit of the Age and its purpose is related to the historical and literary-historical conceptions of the term, coined by William Hazlitt, who invoked the Spirit of the Age to comprehend—both to understand and to unify as one—the various literary achievements of the 1820s-1840s in a single stroke.58 The men who embodied Hazlitt’s tradition were associated with a “bias to abstraction,” “the progress of intellectual refinement” (Hazlitt qtd. in Schlicke 833), a “love of paradox and change,” and a “dastard submission to prejudice and to the fashion of the day” (Hazlitt 23). Thus, the Spirit of the Age, for Hazlitt, represented the best men and best characteristics, as well as the signs, tradition, and the prevailing temper of the time that they and their writing embodied.

57 Woolf’s knowledge and practice of the occult by no means reaches H. D.’s level; however, Woolf was, according to George M. Johnson, aware of spiritual and occult discourses. Spiritual and scientific knowledge and language appear in Woolf’s writing; she was aware of the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) and the field of “second wave psychology,” which posited that the mind consisted of “psychic energy in perpetual movement” (140).

58 Hazlitt strictly discusses the male authors and artists he sees as embodying the “Spirit of the Age” such as Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, among others.

151 Woolf’s citation of Hazlitt’s intellectually refined and socially acceptable men to define the literary production of the nineteenth century contrasts sharply with the situation of Orlando, who struggles against conforming to the Spirit of the Age and what it represents. Orlando’s body, which “vacillat[es] from one sex to the other” and depends on clothing alone to “keep the male or female likeness,” cannot easily simulate that of the nineteenth-century woman (Orlando 139). From another point of view, Woolf’s rejection of Hazlitt is also similar to her repudiation of the late-Victorian or “Edwardian” male authors in “Mr. Bennett and Mr. Brown” (1923) and “Modern Fiction” (1919). Woolf works against their tendency to “write of unimportant things…making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring” (“Modern Fiction” 2088). She sought instead to violate and destroy the “artificial” conventions of her predecessors (“Mr. Bennett” 21). Orlando’s writing, then, alongside Woolf’s own, becomes an act of resistance—for writing that meant something, that came “closer to life” (“Modern Fiction” 2089). Orlando’s encounter with the automatic pen, and the electric and nervous tingling and quivering, can thus be read as a bodily representation of Orlando’s anxieties regarding her complex identity and the shifting time-scheme of the novel’s action, as well as a resistance to the masculine authorial tradition of the nineteenth century. Woolf’s Orlando uses discourses on automatic writing and electricity to make sense of Orlando’s complicated agency as a female author, in the midst of her fluctuating materiality and the rapid changes and societal norms of the nineteenth century. Woolf, I argue, uses automatic writing and religio-scientific discourses to tease out the tensions surrounding women’s bodies, identities, and writing, and most importantly to situate female writing as a materially active experience: “Her case,” the biographer explains, “proved it—that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver” (Orlando 177-8). I enter into my discussion of H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) via this brief reading of Woolf’s Orlando (which I will return to later in this chapter) because Orlando’s writing in and against the spirit of the nineteenth century, and the material response of the female body in the midst of these tensions, illuminates a somewhat similar set of authorial and cultural tensions in the writing of H. D. As Susan Stanford Friedman explains, as a modernist writer, H. D. “attempt[ed] to create what the culture could no longer produce: symbol and meaning in the dimension of art,

152 brought into being through the agency of language, the Word or Logos of the twentieth century” (Psyche 97-8). H. D. utilizes the “agency of language” in her writing, like Woolf, to repudiate traditional Victorian modes of authorship and heteronormative spaces, while also seeking to make sense of the pre-war/post-war world of the early twentieth century within a heavily male- dominated literary scene (Friedman, Penelope’s Web x). According to Ann L. Ardis, the “men of 1914”—a “coterie of writers and artists centered around James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis who credentialed themselves, each other, and the literary field” (2)— employed “exclusionary moves and anxious territorialism” to redefine “the cultural work of literature” and “secure” the “cultural legitimacy” of their own experimental texts (7). These moves essentially excluded women from the modernist literary moment. With the paradigmatic modernist assumed to be an “autonomous male free of familial and communal ties…revolt[ing] against the tyranny of authority” (Felski 2), women writers had to find their voice within the “silent space of the feminine” that male modernism “fix[ed]” them into (Penelope’s Web 3). As Suzanne Juhasz writes, the woman writer is conflicted by socially constructed notions of what it means to be “woman” and more specifically, her desire to be both “woman” and artist: “The conflict between the two ‘selves’ is an excruciating and irreconcilable civil war, when both sides are in fact the same person. If she is ‘woman,’ she must fail as ‘poet’; ‘poet,’ she must fail as ‘woman.’ Yet she is not two people. She is a woman poet whose art is a response to, results from, her life” (qtd. in Psyche 36). Thus, despite H.D.’s and Woolf’s participation in “the same literary tradition that produced the mature work of the ‘established’ [male] artists” and their occasional recognition as important intellectual figures in their own time and in contemporary criticism, they were, in many ways, struggling to achieve legitimacy as women writers in a masculinist modernist tradition (Friedman, “Who Buried” 802).59 Their recourse, as I will argue in this chapter, was not solely to promote women’s writing, but to carve out their own artistic visions through an “agency of language,” which was as much concerned with the power of the written word itself as it was dependent on how that word was written. Woolf and H. D. were certainly aware of and worked to emerge from this feminized space of silence. H. D. scholars Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis both argue that H. D. forged a place for herself among male modernist writers through her "syncretic vision," which

59 For a thorough discussion of H. D.’s relative neglect by modernism’s scholars and contemporaries, see Friedman’s “Who Buried H.D.? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in ‘The Literary Tradition.’”

153 enabled her to engage in a feminized mythmaking and quest narrative, as in, for example, her long poem Trilogy, which "plac[es] woman at the centre of inquiry, and ask[s] about the inscription of gender and the female in traditional culture" (Blau DuPlessis 19). As Friedman explains, her "experience as an analysand with Sigmund Freud and her exploration of esoteric tradition" (Psyche ix) enabled her to "construct a new symbolic system that did not objectify her self as woman" (211). Rather, she set herself apart from her male counterparts through a mythmaking that subversively "transform[ed]…old mythologies" into a "new synthesis of symbol" (212). Similarly, Blau DuPlessis credits H. D.'s use of Greek materials to "justif[y] her own writing" (22) and "bolster[] her own cultural ambitions as a woman writer: to synthesise 'woman' with 'writer'" (22-23). By incorporating H. D.’s late prose work into these discussions of H. D.’s syncretism, I depart from Friedman’s psychoanalytic and Blau DuPlessis’s feminist recovery work by arguing that H. D. utilized automatic writing and religio-scientific discourses to construct an active and embodied model of female authorship. In H. D.’s works, Notes on Thoughts and Vision (1919), Majic Ring (1943-4), and Tribute to Freud (1956), an automatic-writing model of authorship helped her to visualize, connect to, and draw inspiration from a world that spans different times and spaces, both geographic and otherworldly. H. D.’s supernatural experiences on her trip to Corfu, Greece in 1920, similar to Orlando’s mediumistic encounter with the Spirit of the Age, represents her desire to make sense of a changing world—and in H. D.’s case, a desire for connection with that world. For example, in both the tableaux vivant Delia Alton narrates in the autobiographical novel Majic Ring and H. D.’s autobiographical account of the writing on the wall in Tribute to Freud, the narrators psychically connect to figures from past ages. H. D.’s works make sense of these events and others through her use of discourses on electricity, the nerves of the body, and the supernatural phenomena of automatic writing. In these texts, authorship is established through the writing process—described as a loss and regaining of bodily control—and through the female author’s somatic mediation, where the body’s nerves are active, electric, and receptive to inspirational forces. For H. D., as for Woolf, the electrified body “absorbs and emits its power—linking inside to outside, body to world, self to other”—and in doing so opens a “prospect fraught with both promise and danger” (Vetter 23). H. D.’s formation of automatic writing within a religio-scientific context is especially notable as it made space for her to conceive of a body that was active and productive. As has

154 been made clear in previous chapters, spiritualism has, as Vetter puts it, “a long tradition of advocating a passive body and mind, an absolute subjugation to deity,” where female mediums are imbued by religious or spiritual authority with the power to speak (Vetter 17). Science, especially the science of electricity, on the other hand, “is very much an active arena” (17). H. D. takes advantage of this female prophetic tradition, as well as this “active arena” of science, to describe her body and writing process in electrifying ways. Reluctant to accede to the traditional ideas of passive mediumship in her automatic writing experiences, she recognizes discourses on psychoanalysis, electricity, and the nervous system as a way to exert control over the “unruly” body of the female medium and demonstrate her authorial agency. H. D.’s conception of automatic writing, I argue, envisions automatic writing as an active form of writing—an active engagement with language—that encompasses a feminized mysticism and makes room for a sympathetic connection with the human race and the present age; it constitutes both a prophetic meaning-making and an embodied resistance to competitive masculinity represented by a fragmented, war-torn world. In the rest of this chapter, then, I bring together works by H. D., discourses on technology and spiritualism, as well as medical accounts of automatic writing in order to establish both female authorship and writing as bodily experiences. By doing so, I seek to understand what is happening in moments of physical writing, and to show that thinking about authorship as both embodied and otherworldly can reveal a space of agency and control for women writers. Given H. D.’s esoteric knowledge and the chaos of her present moment, it is no wonder that discourses linking spiritualism, science, and the material body seep into her visions of the modern world. H. D.’s various works show that authorship is wrapped up in more than just the act of writing—it gets intertwined with the material body and its sympathetic communion with the world; with issues of gender and desire; and with the present age and the social tensions that shape it.

THE MATERIAL BODY, MEDICAL PATHOLOGY, AND PASSIVE WRITING Automatic or passive writing was made popular by spiritualists and mediums. In fact, “many stalwarts of the spiritualist movement began as passive writers, and what impressed them was the fact that they found themselves transcribing lengthy and coherent messages quite independently of their conscious volition” (Owen 123). The question of consciousness was vital to automatic writing and, of course, to mediumship in general. A passive mind, or the

155 “meditative process of ridding the mind of all thoughts,” was essential to mediumship and the process of automatic writing (123). As in other forms of mediumship, women were thought to be better suited for automatic or passive-writing mediumship than men because “the feminine mind…is more plastic” (Spear qtd. in Enns 73). Presumably, it was easier for the female medium who was “long on piety and short on will” to surrender her identity and agency in order to become the writing tool of a spirit entity (Galvan 62). As it caught on, automatic writing became closely linked with not only Victorian psychic research, but also psychological experiments. As Tim Armstrong notes, “the demarcation between the two areas was not always clear, and some, like [Frederic] Myers…a founder of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882—moved between contexts” (188).60 Furthermore, as the Victorian era settled into modernism, discourses on spirit and automatic writing developed into, and overlapped with, discussions on the unconscious mind and manifestos on creative writing. André Breton, for example, discusses automatic writing in relation to Surrealism in his 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism.”61 Moreover, automatic writing was consistently tied to the literary world, as mediums published the creative work they dictated from spirits during their trance state, or received automatic writings from famous deceased authors. Possibly one of history’s best-known automatic writers, Georgie Yeats, illustrates the complications surrounding attributions of authorship. Her automatic writing, done in partnership with her husband W. B. Yeats, was “an extraordinary exercise of wifely ‘influence’ on the career of a major literary

60 Myers was an influential psychical researcher at the fin de siècle. He linked his study of mediumship to developing theories on the unconscious mind, and in his theory of automatic writing, “psychology, neurology, and the occult bec[a]me a part of the same discourse” (Kontou 137). He believed that the unconscious could be tapped into through the medium’s trance state, and that the unconscious was not just “the receptacle of forgotten and repressed ideas” (Myers qtd. in Lehman 57), but as Lehman describes it, a “source[] of creativity, inspiration and even genius, and a way for human beings to gain access to 'worlds beyond themselves'" (57). Moreover, Myers thought automatic writing was the result of “departed spirits” were able to “‘interface’ with the brain of the medium, creating a kind of spectral neurology” where the automatic writing opened up a “two-way relationship between the haunting and the haunted” (Kontou 136-137).

61 Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” encourages writers to adopt writing practices that resemble automatic writing, primarily the idea of writing as quickly as possible, without conscious thought or revision: “Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written…Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur” (qtd. in Enns 75). As Anthony Enns explains, “Breton was clearly aware of the similarities between spiritualist and Surrealist writing practices… he even argues in his 1933 essay ‘The Automatic Message’ that these are the same methods ‘towards which the surrealist poet must tend’” (Enns 75). However, Breton is clear that while Surrealists should emulate automatic writing, unlike spiritualism which “proposes…the dissociation of the subject’s psychological personality,” “Surrealism proposes nothing less than the unification of that personality” (qtd. in Enns 75).

156 figure[,] as the manuscripts demonstrate” (London 181). Yeats, however, diminished Georgie’s authority in writing the texts, “admit[ing] only to the partnership” (181): “George...[has been]…helping me at my work,” he wrote, implying that the automatic writing manuscripts were authored by him alone (Yeats qtd. in London 181). They were, in fact, eventually published under his name in A Vision (1925). The question of who has the right to claim authorship, Georgie or her husband, is further complicated by the “host of spirit controls and guides” whose writings make up A Vision, ultimately “reflect[ing] a profound uneasiness with the alternative articulations of authorship that mediumship dictates” (London 188). Can Yeats, or even Georgie, claim authorship of writing done by a spirit’s hand? Naturally, this problematic question of authorial agency led to difficulties in distinguishing who the actual author was—the spirit or the medium? As in the case of Georgie Yeats, claims to authorship were often gendered. Indeed, the author-spirits sending the messages were usually men, and the automatic writers were typically female mediums.62 Locating agency within automatic writing is complicated further by automatic writers themselves. Female passive writing mediums like Louisa Lowe suggested that automatic writing wasn’t all one-sided: instead of being an empty writing tool for the spirits, Lowe fondly recalls developing an “unusual power” that allowed her to “dialogue[] together” with “Passive Writing” and “Spirit-land” (qtd. in Owen 171). In addition, female writing mediums also expressed the importance of employing their own agency within the “passive” state during automatic writing. As Alex Owen explains, “They accepted the necessity for watchfulness along with the belief in evil or mischievous spirits. At the first signs of approaching disturbance, the wildly shaking hand or manic script, these women ceased to write” (123). The ability to “cease” writing suggests a level of control and presence of mind that contradicted the presumption of passivity. Nevertheless, the common theory on automatic writing—whether it was believed to come from a spirit entity, or from within the writer’s own subconscious—was that passivity, or at least a distracted inattention, was necessary for its achievement. This was also Gertrude Stein’s conclusion after conducting experiments with psychologist Leon Solomon to determine “the limits of normal automatism, and, if possible, show them to be really equal to the explanation of

62 For example, Theodora Bosanquet, mentioned in Chapter Three, who dictated spirit messages from the late Henry James.

157 the second personality” (Solomon and Stein 493). “Real automatism,” Stein writes, “comes whenever the attention is sufficiently distracted” (499). Automatic writing was, of course, suspect to the scientific community, which resulted in its being pathologized by medical professionals, who observed that hysterics, maniacs, and others with nervous disorders were often skilled automatic writers. The late-nineteenth-century doctor J. Wiglesworth explained, “[w]e should say that the phenomena of automatic writing and such like, have more analogy with some of the milder forms of mania, and epileptic states” (1390). According to Wiglesworth, these phenomena result from the fact that the “highest controlling faculties of the brain” are disturbed in nervous patients, while the “automatic working of lower centres” is heightened (1390). Dr. Charles Mercier likewise attributed automatic writing to nervous derangement, comparing it to petit mal, a disease of the nerves that caused a series of little seizures and was characterized by brief lapses of consciousness. As Mercier wrote in the British Medical Journal in 1894: The nervous mechanism of automatic writing has its nearest ally in that of petit mal. In the latter affection the highest nerve regions are placed suddenly out of action, and their subordinates act without the guiding action of the superiors, stimulated and directed by peripheral impressions only. In this condition the patient will do whatever he has been in the habit of doing, provided that some more or less appropriate peripheral stimulus is provided.… Thus, if a woman is seized with petit mal when she is cutting bread and butter, she will continue to use the knife, but will use it inappropriately—will cut, as in one case, her arm; or, as in another case, her child’s throat. A soldier, thus seized, finding his rifle in his hands, will load and discharge it. A clerk so seized, with a pen in his hand, will continue to make more or less intelligible marks on paper. (198) Other medical professionals of the time also explained automatic action as a nervous response; James Rorie called it a “reflex-cerebral activ[ity]” (141). In “Automatic Writing II,” published in The British Medical Journal in December 1893, an anonymous author connects this reflex activity to “cell memories” (1225). He (presumably) explains that “correct manifestations of mind are based upon the integrity of cells which received impressions from the external senses and assimilate them as a memory” and that “these memories are stored up, and can be evoked both by the will and against it” (1225). In other words, an automatic writer in his or her

158 concentrated state is merely drawing on his or her muscle memory, or the “the workings of his [or her] cell memories” (1225). For example, during a “waking state,” or even while dreaming, “a strong cerebral excitation evokes a motor act” which manifests as automatic writing, “especially in the person whose avocation is in the handling of the pen, whilst the vagaries of the ‘revelations’ are merely the inco-ordinated expressions of cells in irregular action without a will to guide them” (1226). When the “attention is strongly concentrated,” the body, nerves, and/or reflex-action can perform everyday actions out of habit, especially if the muscle memory is directed by objects with particular uses, like the poet or clerk unconsciously scribbling on paper because he or she is holding a pen (1224). Though the automatic writing in spiritualist discourses, as commonly understood both then and now, requires a passive body and mind, pathologizing medical discourses of the late nineteenth century do suggest that the automatic writer’s body was materially active as we see in the reflex theory of automatic writing—where the cells know and act to a particular purpose even if the medium’s body is in a passive or trance state. While many nineteenth-century physicians sought to read a belief in spiritualism, spirit mediums, and those who claimed to be automatic writers as hysterical or insane, as I argued in Chapter One, that very diagnosis reveals the action and agency of the automatic writer’s body. These medical doctors, ignoring the belief that automatic writing was directed by a spiritual or supernatural agent rather than the writer herself, maintained that the automatic writing of the so-called passive and unconscious body was actually a nervous response, or the body operating on a cellular level to act out certain habitual tasks or actions through a sort of muscle memory. Where medical discourse around spiritualism and mediumship sought to pathologize, and thus discredit, all mediums as hysterical, medical discourse on automatic writing, while discounting the possibility that the writings were delivered by a spirit entity, used medical and scientific inquiry to justify and explain its possibility. The scientific and medical interest in understanding how automatic writing and automatic action in general worked led to medical theories that, contrary to those on hysteria, which denied the nervous body agency, actually confirmed that the body and its nerves were materially active— even suggesting that these automatic states were controlled by or could be initiated by the automatic writer. For example, Mercier suggests that much like the sufferer of petit mal, the automatic writer needs only to “produce[] artificially that removal of the control of the higher nerve regions over the lower” (198). With luck, “the lower nerve regions which actuate the

159 movements of writing being thus uncontrolled, and being stimulated by the presence of the pencil in the hand, proceed to act, and produce marks upon the paper” (198). In other words, by actively making his mind passive and, as William T. Stead, expresses it, “‘disconnect[ing] his hand from his conscious brain’” (Stead qtd in Mercier 198), the writer can produce movement or writing automatically.63 Similarly, Dr. A. Campbell Clark points out that “passiveness of the will” is actually a misleading term: rather, achieving the passivity necessary to produce automatic writing requires an active concentration of mind. As he explains, “all psychologists will agree” that passiveness and “concentration of thought” are “incompatible” and that “concentration of thought implies more or less exercise of will—not suspension of it…the fact that concentration is required clearly demonstrates that—spook or no spook—a man must be dead to external sense and all other mental stimuli; that he must acquire a state of mental isolation” (Clark 37). Thus, a medium or automatic writer, despite giving up her “will” or making her mind passive, in commanding her body into a meditative state exhibits control over the automatic writing that takes place. During the practice of automatic writing, agency or “will” is never, as Clark intimates, fully suspended. And, if the will is there, and the material body active, even if the medium is in a “passive” state, then the possibility for agency and creative expression is present. Many physicians of the time, if not pathologizing spiritual and automatic writing as a nervous disease, like petit mal, attributed it, unsurprisingly, to psychological causes rather than supernatural ones. Open to the idea of automatic writing, although uncertain of “what actual works shall be written” and the “quasi-accidental circumstances” of their authorship, Mercier is adamant that even though “we are at present not fully acquainted” with all of the “circumstances” surrounding automatic writing, “we know enough of them to be sure that they are not supernatural” (198). Mercier’s reluctance to attribute the active disconnection of the nerves of the body from the consciousness to spirit entities suggests, as did other physicians of

63 William T. Stead, the journalist and infamous author of the Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885), was, after attending a séance in 1881, a committed spiritualist and automatic writer. In 1902, he published After Death; or Letters from Julia, which was a compilation of the conversation he produced via automatic writing from the late American journalist Julia Amis. In its introductory materials he assures his readers of his “absolute belief in the authenticity of the communications received” and that they are in no way “from my conscious mind” (6). He explains that the writings were produced “in the same manner. Sitting alone with a tranquil mind, I consciously placed my right hand, with the pen in the ordinary way, at the disposal of Julia, and watched with keen … interest to see what it would write…” (12). His interest in Spiritualism eventually negatively impacted his professional reputation and at the time of his death on the Titanic, he was regarded by many as a fanatic.

160 the time, that automatic writing was actually the outward expression of the unconscious. A more palatable theory was derived from the rise of psychoanalysis in the 1890s. Dr. W. J. Mickle believed that automatic writing was merely the result of the “ordinarily latent” content hidden “beneath the threshold of consciousness” becoming “manifest” through the mechanical act, or bodily habit, of writing (199). Thus in this light, we could perhaps read Orlando’s possession by the Spirit of the Age as provoked less by an actual spirit, and more by the unconscious manifestations of the social pressures she feels to “fit” into the social and cultural norms of the nineteenth century. The anonymous author of the British Medical Journal article, “Automatic Writing and Mr. Stead,” explicitly connects this idea of automatic writing to artistic creation: “There are then stories of impressions, more or less organically connected with each other in the brain, which… may be brought to light” (1015). Reminiscent of the Romantic-era writers like Coleridge or Keats, the poet in his half-sleeping moments may compose and seem to commune with other beings. In some probably there is—by habit assisting a peculiar nature—a power to draw upon the unconscious store—the dream stuff, to use a convenient phrase—of the brain, and once having granted this it is not hard to suppose that the mechanical expression through the machine may be got very readily to work. (1015)64 Even Kipling draws on this Romantic conception of writing in “Wireless” to describe the automatic communication between the spirit of Keats and the somnambulistic Shaynor, as discussed in Chapter Three. The medical field saw automatic writing’s origin, whether supernatural or psychological, in a body that is materially active—in terms of its brain function and nervous reflexes—even in its passivity, distracted consciousness, or trance state. Active materiality and active passivity, it seems, were both necessary for automatic writing, and H. D. deployed both concepts in theorizing female authorship and artistic production.

H. D.’S AUTOMATIC WRITING, JELLYFISH NERVES, AND ARTISTIC RECEIVING STATION

64 This is certainly something that H. D. experiments with in her writing as a direct result of her interest in psychoanalysis and work with Sigmund Freud. As Friedman explains in Psyche Reborn, “Freud’s hypotheses about the nature of the unconscious went beyond an epistemology of the inner psyche into an ontology of religion and art…[that] profoundly reshaped H. D.’s understanding of her identity and destiny as an artist” (70).

161 H. D. experimented with the scientific, medical, and spiritualist discourses noted above, drawing on and mixing metaphors from them in her theories of automatic writing and female authorship. Her grasp on spiritualism was much less tenuous than Woolf’s: she had a variety of interests in the occult, mysticism, and spiritualism, all of which came through in her work. She made use of tarot cards, horoscopes, and star charts and she read “scores of books on astronomy and astrology, spiritualism, magic…angels, the Kabbalah, fortune telling, Nostradamus, and the ancient religions of China, India, Greece, Egypt, Rome and Native America” (Vetter 19). In addition to her interest in mystical and occult practices, her own supernatural experiences in Corfu in 1920 inspired her works. These experiences took place after a series of traumatic events including the deaths in quick succession of her brother (in World War I) and her father, her divorce from Richard Aldington, and the difficult pregnancy (during which she suffered from double pneumonia) and birth of her daughter. During World War II, she joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR)—which focused on the work of abnormal psychology and psychical phenomena, including research on dreams, hypnotism, mesmerism, spiritualism, electromagnetism, the séance, and automatic writing—and ultimately set up her own home (séance) circle with the young medium Arthur Bhaduri, where she sought not only advice and guidance, but also communication with the spirits of soldiers killed during the wars.65 H. D. was deeply affected by the events of World War II; she survived both the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, and sought out esoteric religions such as occult and spiritualist practices, like many others during the time, as a way to reassure herself that the universe was ordered. In 1941, she wrote in a letter that “the supernatural within reason, is anodyne” (5 October 1941 qtd. in Psyche 170): she believed it could ease the difficulties in life and offer “meaning embedded in the harsh realities of nightmarish existence” (Psyche 170). H. D. ultimately “fought for a view of modernity based in the spirit” (Penelope’s Web 8). She wanted to use her spiritualistic gifts to connect to, understand, and relate to her present age, and to the tradition and ages that preceded it. By doing so, H. D. felt that she could help put an end to the war by “reassimilat[ing] the events of the war and the present world to “bygone patterns and mythic narrative” that H. D. saw as recuperative and healing (Blau DuPlessis 28).

65 These séances, which H. D. participated in during and after WW II, are detailed in H. D.’s autobiographical novel The Sword Went Out to Sea (1946-7). In the novel, H. D.’s narrator, Delia Alton, describes her automatic writing as “scribbling in a notebook, a sort of rough shorthand of the messages” with “air-men, not so very recently lost in the Battle of Britain” (187).

162 In Notes on Thought and Vision, in which she theorized a “transcendent, ecstatic state of heightened consciousness and artistic expression,” H. D. makes use of spiritualism, electrical metaphors, and the medical explanations of automatic writing to imagine artistic capability as tied to the active or heightened nerve centers of the brain (Kibble 42). She positions the artist as a medium, visionary, and “poet-prophet” who “acts as a kind of radio receiver and transmitter of divine knowledge and enlightenment” and emphasizes “the role of the somatic, the body, in artistic creation” (Vetter 57). Drawing comparisons between the artist-medium and technological modes of communication, H. D. imagines that “[t]wo or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought, could direct lightening flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of dead, murky thought” (Notes 27). For H. D. the artist-medium is an electrified “receiving station” sending out and making meaning from “lightening flashes” of thought, idea, and vision that can “bring the whole force of power back into the world” (27). The kind of communicative ability she puts in the hands of the artist-prophet is one of electric agency and power—it can shape, change, and transform the world. The “receiving brain” or the power of the great artist-prophet is embedded in her visionary and artistic process, which requires the artist to tune into both the mind and body. As H. D. explains, there are “three states of manifestations of life: body, mind, over-mind” (17): the development of the body and mind can lead to a “window into the world of pure over-mind,” or connect one to a space of artistic creation and inspiration. She describes the over-mind materially, as a “jelly-fish or anemone,” “like water, transparent yet with definite body, contained in definite space,” that can plug into the nervous system of the body. The jelly-fish, she writes, has “long feelers” that “reach[] down and through the body” and stand “in the same relation to the nervous system as the over-mind to the brain or intellect” (19). The “long feelers” or nerves are, essentially, super-charged feelings that extend out and about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jelly-fish reach out and about him. They are not of different material, extraneous, as the physical arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain. The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jelly-fish feelers are the jelly-fish itself, elongated in fine threads. (19)

163 Like the nervous system running through the body, the over-mind is materially active; its “feelers” connect and run down throughout the body directing intellectual action. For H. D. these feelers can be centered in the head, a “state of consciousness,” but are just as easily visualized “in the love-region of the body or placed like a foetus in the body” (19). Although it is clear that the over-mind/jelly-fish mind is not gender-specific (as H. D. references male artists who have been able to tap into their over-minds), her centering of the visionary power within the womb and/or vagina, and even her reference to women’s reproductive capacity and sexual energies, certainly privileges not only the woman artist, but specifically the organic female body as a source of artistic and erotic inspiration. In her experience, the state of jelly-fish consciousness, or over-mind, is tied to the birth of her child: “For me, it was before the birth of my child that the jelly-fish consciousness seemed to come definitely into the field or realm of the intellect or brain” (20). The jelly-fish mind and its feelers, centered in the woman’s womb and/or “love-region,” emphasizes the importance of female desire and the female body in artistic production. Much like the material body and its nervous system, as explained in Chapter One, which can reach out to forge connections sympathetically with the outside world, the jelly-fish feelers are conduits that can span across time and space. This sympathetic connection can be tapped into through meditation or achieving a “passive” state of mind. H. D. shows how this is possible by describing her own sympathetic communications with Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, in particular the “Delphic charioteer” which has a “hypnotic effect on [her]” (25). She explains, “If we had the right sort of brains, we would receive a definite message from that figure, like dots and lines ticked off by one receiving station, received and translated into definite thought by another telegraphic centre” (25). Like Orlando—whose body, receiving automatic messages from the Spirit of the Age, “twanged” like “telegraph wires”—H.D. visualizes her spiritual or sympathetic connection through both the sympathetic nervous system and the sending and receiving of messages via telegraph wires. Crossing spiritual, technological, and even scientific registers—as the communication mediums do in Chapter Three—H. D. imagines the charioteer sending messages in Morse code’s “dots and dashes” (25) through the electrified nerves, or jellyfish feelers, of her artist’s “receiving brain” (27). The artist whose body-mind-over-mind is “wired in,” or psychically in tune, can access a special knowledge or vision that can then be re-packaged and sent out through her own mode of expression.

164 The electric nervous center and embodied receiving station is not unique to Notes on Thought and Vision as a method of sympathetic communication with supernatural entities, or even with artistic inspiration and vision. In Majic Ring, H. D. also uses the receiving-station metaphor to explain the odd communications from spirits at the séance table. She describes the séance circle seated around her William Morris table as “a little private wireless station” where “sometimes an unrecognizable entity would come and tell us a story” (Majic Ring 8). Much like the Delphic charioteer’s communication in dots and dashes, the spirits at the séance table “tapped out” their messages “like telegrams” (8). That the messages were received at the table once owned by William Morris—“and was said to have been the table he used, when he was painting”—is not coincidental, especially given the artistic connection H. D. establishes in Notes between the artist/receiving station and great works of art like the Delphic charioteer (8). She sees her “home-circle” gathered around the séance table or receiving station as dedicated to “the creation of something out of nothing” (65). The “creation” generated (by the spirits and sitters) around the séance table ripple outward: “we receive from the centre, the dot, and our centre- circle or cycle must inevitably set up a corresponding slightly larger ripple on the surface of the air or the sea of vibration around and about us” (65). H. D.’s material body—as the jelly-fish consciousness, electrified nerves, and spiritual receiving station—primes her for her role as poet-prophet and automatic writer in Corfu, represented in Tribute to Freud as the writing on the wall and later in Majic Ring in the tableaux vivant scene. In Majic Ring, after her automatic and spiritual “possession” in Corfu, H. D.’s alter-ego and protagonist Delia explains that she had “been a sort of receiving station, I, the positive receiving agent that gave off the sounds as the gramophone record repeats songs and words from operas and plays” (135). With the help of the “intense psychic” and perhaps sexual “quality” of Gareth (Bryher’s alter-ego),66 Delia/H. D. is turned-on: a “live-wire” who “received the live-messages” (135). The electrifying, visionary, and supernatural experiences in Corfu, as narrated in both Tribute and Majic Ring, can be tied back into the theory of artistic inspiration in Notes. H. D. characterizes the unique visions she sees in the hotel at Corfu in 1920 (which took place after completing Notes in 1919) as “shadow or…light pictures,” and attributes their

66 Bryher is the pseudonym of author Winifred Ellerman. She was H. D.’s lifelong friend. H. D. credits Bryher for her recovery after her mental breakdown following her divorce, the birth of her daughter, and recovery from double pneumonia in 1919. She accompanied H. D. on her trip to Corfu, Greece in 1920 where H.D. experienced her series of visions.

165 presence to a supernatural force. She positions herself as the medium or prophet who receives the “light pictures” or visions: “For myself, I consider this sort of dream or projected picture or vision as a sort of half-way state between ordinary dream and the vision of those who, for lack of a more definite term, we must call psychics or clairvoyants” (Tribute 61). H. D. draws on a tradition of prophecy that was utilized by female poets and preachers, who “learned to invoke scriptural authority for the right of women to speak in public” (Mellor n. pag.).67 Thus, “affirming her creative center as female” by positioning herself as a prophet, as she does in Notes, H. D. opens up a feminine space for her artistic and authorial agency (Psyche 150). We see her reliance on a female-centered prophecy in Trilogy, too, where she redeems Eve as “Our Lady universally” (102), transformed into “Psyche, the butterfly, out of the cocoon” (103). The redeemed Eve heralds a new religion: “she carries a book, but it is not/ the tome of the ancient wisdom, / the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages/ of the unwritten volume of the new” (103). Here, H. D. reimagines “the patriarchal foundations of western culture” in a radical woman- centered mythmaking (Psyche ix). To do so, she positions herself as the “voice and the figure of Woman as poet, mystical seer, and god” (Barnstone viii). The prophetic visions she describes in Tribute appear as automatic writing on the wall, like “transparencies, set before candles in a dark room.… [u]pon the elaborate build-up of past memories, across the intricate network made by the hair-lines that divided one irregular bit of the picture-puzzle from another” (Tribute 43). The “series” of writings are described as being drawn by an automatic and supernatural hand: “The moving finger writes” (80).68 Evoking discourses

67 In England, the tradition of the female prophet dates back at least to the early seventeenth century. Women who sought access to the public realm would often invoke scriptural authority in order to do so. Claiming they were the mouthpiece of God or divine inspiration, these women were granted an agency to speak their political and religious opinions. Part of the female poet’s prophecy meant calling on and claiming to speak for all things virtuous. Insisting “she spoke on behalf of Virtue, a virtue that she consistently gendered as female, a virtue that in Christian nation must govern both the private and the public sphere,” the female prophet was able not only to speak about politics, but also to offer suggestions for considering issues of government policy or commercial advancement (Mellor). This scriptural authority, as well as the belief that these women were performing a godly duty, allowed female prophets to break out of discourses on “feminine subservience, inferiority, and obedience, which were founded in, and justified by, women’s inferior or unequal bodies and minds, and manifested most clearly in theological, medical, and legal writings” while still maintaining their respectability (Hinds qtd. in Smith 91).

68 This description recalls the biblical story of Daniel and King Belshazzar where “the fingers of a man’s hand” appear and write on the wall (Daniel 5:5). Daniel is called in to translate the disembodied hand’s message, and concludes that it is a message warning of the King’s demise. The writing on the wall H. D. witnesses is recognized as part of this “tradition of warnings or messages from another world or another state of being” in biblical and classical literature (Tribute 75). Drawing on this biblical story, H. D. likens herself to Daniel, who as “an excellent spirit, knowledge, understanding, interpreting dreams, solving riddles, and explaining enigmas” is the only one capable of explaining to Belshazzar “what the writing means” (Daniel 5.12). Daniel’s message—“Mene,

166 on automatic writing, as discussed above, H. D.’s “moving finger” is called into question, not for its prophetic message, but in terms of its authority as the text explores the question of who is actually writing. “The writing, at least, is consistent. It is composed by the same person, it is drawn or written by the same hand”: “Whether that hand or person is myself, projecting their images as a sign, a warning or a guiding sign-post from my own subconscious mind, or whether they are projected from outside—they are at least clear enough” (68). While H. D. never discusses the physical act of the writing on the wall, she questions the authorship of the projections—suggesting that they may be written by the disembodied, otherworldly “moving finger” or hand, or even conjured by her mind in a dream-state. While at times described as “draw[ing] itself before [H. D.’s] eyes,” the writing on the wall is often in question—is it supernatural? Is it a manifestation of H. D.’s subconscious? Is it a symptom of distressed nerves, or “megalomania” (Tribute 76)? H. D. eventually seems to resolve the matter—the writing is something that comes from her, yet remains supernatural or mystical in origin—even while working within Freud’s psychoanalytic framework and considering his suggestion that her experience is a “dangerous symptom” (60). Freud suggests that the writing on the wall is a hallucination of sorts—caused by the “many unresolved terrors, perils, heart-aches, dangers, physical as well as spiritual or intellectual” that H. D. faced prior to her trip to Greece with Bryher in 1920 (60). H. D. ultimately rejects that interpretation. When considering it as a “hieroglyph of the unconscious or subconscious,” she seems reluctant to commit to Freud’s diagnosis of the writing as a “symptom”: she writes, “it is no easy matter to sustain this mood, this ‘symptom’ or this inspiration” (70). Her replacing the word ‘symptom’ with “inspiration” may suggest a reluctance to submit to a diagnosis, or to the passivity that the word ‘symptom’ provokes. Inspiration for H. D. instead operates on a number of levels. It is at once a way of referring to some form of “possession” by a divine or supernatural influence, and a way of describing the output of that divine influence. She describes herself, for example, as “writing under inspiration” (Majic Ring 122)—implying the “breathing in or infusion of some idea… into the mind” or the “awakening or creation of some feeling or impulse” (“Inspiration,” OED). She also links inspiration to the crucifixion of Christ. Delia’s medium Ben Manisi tells her that

Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”—is prophetic and signals the King’s imminent death. By paralleling this biblical story, H.D. further defines her mediumship and artistic talent within a prophetic tradition (5.25).

167 “Inspiration was crucified”—that “inspiration had led to recognition and recognition to love and love to crucifixion” (Majic Ring 119), drawing on the theological use of the word as an “immediate action of the Spirit of God among the human mind or soul” (“Inspiration,” OED). By using inspiration, H. D. is uniting her visionary experiences and writing to a divinity—the same influence under which scripture was written. Her allusion to inspiration as “crucified,” though admittedly a “poetic symbol,” ultimately gives inspiration a materiality (Majic Ring 120). Paralleling it to Christ, the divine in human form, at his crucifixion suggests not just a divine materiality, but a suffering body. Hence, H. D. recognizes the great labor and responsibility in the inspiration she receives. As one “writing under inspiration”–-or housing it in her receiving body—H. D. claims her body as both divine and suffering. She also gives inspiration “form, limitations, boundaries” and locates herself in a tradition of divine prophecy (Majic Ring 141). She prefers, then, to see the writing on the wall as inspiration, rather than symptom, because “these visions brought messages that could reaffirm her belief in and her knowledge of ‘highest truth.’ As indicators of her ability to fuse art, religion, and healing, these visions did not point to a ‘ruthless egoism’ or dangerous megalomania, but rather to a new destiny as poet-prophet” (Friedman, Psyche 101). After all, to be diagnosed, or to have a symptom, is never a choice, but to think of the writing on the wall not as a symptom, but a vision, or inspiration, opens up the experience to possibilities of meaning and agency. Pairing Freud’s use of the word “symptom” or, rather, replacing it with her own word “inspiration” both declares the writing on the wall as coming from an outside/otherworldly and prophetic source and allows her to take ownership for the creation of the projected images themselves. That she “sustains this mood, this symptom, this inspiration” confirms that she is, in a sense, the receiving agent, but not necessarily a passive vessel through which the “inspiration” writes (Tribute 70). That it is no easy matter to “sustain[] this mood” required to produce the vision harkens back to Mercier’s and Clark’s theories that achieving a passive mind demands a conscious brain or active will. H. D.’s materiality, or jelly-fish consciousness, is directing or permitting the visionary writing to take place. When sharing her visions with Bryher in both Tribute and Majic Ring, she tells Bryher, “I can break away from them now, if I want—it’s just a matter of concentrating,” and asks, “what do you think? Shall I stop? Shall I go on?” (70). Here, H. D. makes a conscious choice to “go on” with the visionary experiences. She not only chooses to continue, but becomes an agent in their creation. Delia’s mediumship gives way to her artistic

168 performance. Similar to the trance speakers in the previous chapter, her authorship, or automatic writing, takes on the form of performance art, where she is simultaneously active performer and “possessed” by spiritual or divine forces. Delia’s tableaux vivant experience differs from H. D.’s writing on the wall. Rather than symbols, Delia sees “random projections from that great-storehouse where we are told, all the past is rolled and neatly filed and edited” (Majic Ring137). Not only does she “see[]” these pictures or projections, but she also becomes those images: “the peculiarity of the ‘seeing’ here is, that I am, at the same time ‘being’ the picture, too” (137). Though it isn’t a traditional model of automatic writing, the way H. D. describes Delia as “‘being’ the picture,” a mild form of “possession” that inspires an automatic performance piece, implies some interesting similarities between automatic writing and reflex action. In a conscious trance state, Delia receives images, which she then narrates to Gareth. In so doing, her body transforms from one being to the next— from a tree, to medicine man, to the Native Americans Minnehaha and Echo, to a Spanish woman on the California coast, to a Pacific Island girl, a Japanese girl, a white Vedic Indian boy, and finally the Lady Rhea. The exoticism and cultural imperialism inherent in Delia’s/H. D.’s performance was not uncommon in materialization séances at the fin de siècle. According to Marlene Tromp, mediums channelizing colonized others were common, given the “cultural anxieties surrounding imperialism” (76). For Tromp, “the disruption of the medium’s identity in the séance—the slippage between the self and the spirit—made the materialization of nonwhite spirits an equally powerful disruption of imperial politics” (77). Though perhaps participating in a problematic cultural appropriation, H. D. is, I would argue, less interested in the question of imperialism. Instead she seems to be engaged in a strategic essentialism where she can, through the strange collapsing of time implicit in her sympathetic mediumship and the tableaux vivant, become all at once every woman, and in some cases man, within the “great storehouse” of the past. In so doing, H.D. is able to imaginatively extend the boundaries of the self and marry and support her worldview with these romanticized figures of the past. Where Vetter sees Delia’s tableaux vivant as a “poetic” interpretation of “the voice of the divine” which “radically counter[s] centuries of religious tradition” that sought to “suppress[] …one’s individual voice” (71), I read Delia’s tableaux vivant as akin to automatic writing, a poetic and bodily performance—“dance as [] moving pose, a symbol” (Majic Ring 109). H. D.’s transformation and materialization of other

169 spiritual bodies or remnants from the past, I suggest, doesn’t just enable her own active artistic performance, but also helps her to sympathetically become one with—that is, commune with, understand, and give voice to—these various spirits she venerates. As a medium of sorts, Delia is simultaneously a “receiving agent” and artist, as she accepts visions and performs them. In accordance with Vetter, I argue that Delia’s automatic performance “in depicting a mixture of poses and dance—by oscillating between passages of stillness and movement—the protagonist of H.D.’s novel both invokes the passive state of the mystic or medium to attain an otherworldly experience, and counters the vulnerability of such a state with an active model of engagement with the supernatural” (98). In so doing, I maintain that Delia’s performance is analogous to an automatic writing that positions her body as simultaneously passive/receiving and active/agent. Delia, “possessed” by these otherworldly beings, is essentially turned into an automatic body that performs moving pictures and messages. At the same time, however, Delia remains a controlling agent, as in H. D.’s experience with the writing on the wall. Just as H. D. “sustain[ed] the mood” in Tribute, here Delia “possessed the mood” and interpreted the scene, even as she permits her body to perform the seemingly passive and automatic actions. As she describes, “the thing had happened and it would go on, unless I jerked myself out of the mood. Though I was ‘possessed,’ I in turn possessed the mood, was aware of my surroundings; this was no trance state” (Majic Ring 114). Delia remains aware of her surroundings even as she gives herself “gladly and willingly” to the spirits controlling her. She explains that even as she “possessed the mood,” she also was able to narrate what she sees, and engage in conversation with Gareth, who watches her performance. The supernatural experience, which H. D. narrates slightly differently in Tribute and Majic Ring, is part of a series of strange events that happened on her trip to Greece. These events—“pictures, ‘real dreams,’ actual psychic or occult experiences”—haunted her throughout her life, so much so that she felt compelled to write about them (Tribute 58). As she describes in Tribute, she was drawn to psychoanalysis and Freud as a way to work out the strange experiences: “I want his opinion…I could not get rid of the experience by writing about it. I had tried that. There was no use telling the story, into the air, as it were, repeatedly, like the Ancient Mariner” (58). H. D.’s reference to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner connects back to Romantic-era norms of inspiration. It is also apt given the supernatural dimensions of that poem; the fact that the supernatural experiences took place on her and Bryher’s ship to Corfu haunted

170 her—and like the Ancient Mariner’s, demanded to be shared.69 Though she circles around the nature of the experiences and their meaning in each of her works, she ultimately reads the writing on the wall/tableaux vivant as a prophetic message, or communion with inspirational forces. The writing on the wall and the tableaux vivant unite H. D./Delia sympathetically with the fabric of the world, much like Orlando’s poem “The Oak Tree.” Majic Ring theorizes time as a palimpsest that folds over and in on itself. That time is layered in this way suggests that at any one moment, a person can experience all time, all versions of themselves, anticipating Woolf’s Orlando, who lives across the ages and experiences a variety of identities. Where Delia’s automatic dance is a spiritual way of merging with, or understanding, all these different times and places at once, however, Orlando’s possession by the Spirit of the Age seeks to “fix” her identity into one time and space. In the final chapter, time itself, with the “sound[ing]” of the “twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty- eight” ushers in the “present moment” (Orlando 241). This “present moment” is preceded by both an acceleration of time and a sense of timelessness as Orlando is haunted by the striking of each hour, which locates her material body firmly and violently in the present—it “shower[s] down upon her head (239) and “hurtle[s] through her like a meteor” (236). At the same time that Orlando is forcibly made aware that she is part of this present moment, she still manages to “forg[e]t the time (237): “Whether it had struck nine, ten, or eleven, she could not say” (239). Throughout all, Orlando’s own identity and materiality fluctuates: she is simultaneously her “single self, a real self” (230), and a series of selves which “are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand” (226). Thus, Orlando exists or “call[s] upon” all of these selves as once, changing through them, as the time concurrently accelerates and collapses around her: Orlando may now have called on the boy who cut the nigger’s head down; the boy who strung it up again; the boy who sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet;

69 H.D.’s “Greek scene” was made up of “four psychic or visionary or occultic experiences” (Tryphonopoulos xxxv). Each contributed to her “creative and spiritual self” (xxxv). Two are discussed or alluded to in Tribute to Freud and Majic Ring. The first is the writing on the wall at a hotel room in Corfu, the second is the “‘dolphin vision of 1920 aboard Borodino with Rodeck” (xxxv). H. D., “convinced that a group of dolphins is accompanying the boat[,] ‘sees’ three of them leaping together in perfect unison” (xxxv). She later discovers that her vision and the presence of Rodeck were real. She uses this experience to construct “a wisdom tradition that included mythological ‘dolphins’” (xxxv) who become her “guide, and inspiration, as well as ‘the instrument of the new dispensation’” (xxxvi).

171 the boy who handed the Queen the bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the young man who fell in love with Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or upon the Ambassador; or upon the Solider; or upon the Traveller; or she may have wanted the woman to come to her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life; the Patroness of Letters; the woman who called Mar…or Shelmerdine…or Bonthrop…or all three together. (226). Orlando’s “variety of selves”—her present self, “Thirty-six; in a motor car, a woman,”—as well as herself as the “snob…the leopards…[her] ancestors…Greedy, luxurious, vicious…Truthful… Generous…Lying in a bed of a morning on fine linen; listening to the pigeons; sliver dishes; wine; maids; footmen…” etc. (227-228)—stands in direct contrast to the stability of the Oak Tree in her garden. The Oak Tree, which has been standing since 1588, is essentially a symbol of England; its roots, or “bones…running out like ribs from a spine” connect Orlando to the world. The biographer reveals to the reader how Orlando likes to lay on the ground with the roots beneath her because doing so makes her feels as though “she was riding the back of the world” (237). The constancy of the tree, which has only “grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted” over the years, is what inspires Orlando’s poem. Orlando’s struggle, as a writer and as a complex identity in the modern age, is to keep “no trace in [her poem]” of that “modern spirit” (206). Rather, Orlando seeks to let her poem represent her complete and complex identity. Nestled “in her breast” (207), and “composed with a regard to truth and nature, to the dictates of the human heart,” “The Oak Tree” speaks to the “truth” and “nature” of her life across time, space, and genders (206). Delia’s dance, like Orlando’s poem, is representative of her ability to reach out and sympathetically connect with all of human life across time and space. Delia recognizes a pattern in the series of moving poses; these visions span across time and geography: We have, it is now apparent, been circling counter-clockwise, we are making a circle or rather a semi-circle around the world or around this spirit-world or spirit- clock. We are matching a minute hand that goes very fast, on to America, across America, to the Pacific islands then on. The minute hand goes fast, but the hour- hand stands almost still. It is still within the hour, since we started the game ‘for fun,’ this play that turned out indeed a ‘play,’ a drama of most exciting content. We are still in-time, within the hour in that bed-room, for the telling of this takes

172 far longer than the acting of it. The acting was speeded-up by the contingency of the movement, by the crowded rushing feel of wings, of inspiration certainly. (Majic Ring 124). Delia questions whether her automatic performance is a replay of her “past lives, thrown up on the screen of memory” (114). H. D.’s suggestion here seems to be that Delia’s “past lives” are somehow imprinted on her material body, similar to Rorie’s and Mercier’s suggestion that the automatic writing is the result of the cells acting out reflexively the habits of the body over time. In Delia’s layered or circular conception of time, her automatic writing “circle” is imagined as the “screen” of an historical “memory” replaying the reflexive actions of people as time and space. H. D. correspondingly wonders if the writing on the wall, and the “lines” that the “moving finger” eventually forms into “the ladder…Jacob’s ladder,” are “symbolic of ages or aeons” (Tribute 80-81). The other writings, in particular the “curve like a reversed, unfinished S and a dot beneath it, a question-mark” (43), are understood to “have represented a series of question- marks, the questions that have been asked through the ages, that the ages will go on asking” (82). Inspiration—the receiving of it, the writing of it, the importance of it—are concepts that plagued H. D. and she certainly believed that being able to look back through time and space, and connect with those who came before, or even with past versions of herself, could help her answer some unknown question, or make meaning out of the chaotic and shocking world of the early twentieth century. This effort is perhaps best represented by the last two figures Delia becomes in her automatic dance: the white Indian boy of the temple and the Lady Rhea. The Indian boy, a “young priest of some high mystery,” is unlike the other figures Delia materializes; he is recognized by Delia as a Christ-like figure with an important message—he has a “thing that he wants to tell” (125). Delia understands this argument, despite the fact that “not a single syllable of his rapid, vivid, dramatic argument is intelligible to me” (127). As she narrates, she once again becomes the figure she envisions, and soon his argument is her argument: “I am talking, I am saying these words. It is as if I had a new set of throat muscles, of fine inner nerves that have never been used before” (127). He/Delia is arguing for “all these people and everyone,” and his voice, which sings of “all the dead, dark peoples of the earth who are dead” (127), has Delia reflecting on “people in London,” presumably those affected by World War I (130). The message itself, Delia explains, is “for, literally, the forgiveness of sins” (133). H.D./Delia’s spiritual

173 embodiment in this automatic performance is, in part, H.D.’s attempt to “constitute[] a spiritual practice deeper than recollection, genealogical curiosity, or literary gesture” (Augustine 3). As Jane Augustine explains, H.D. sought in her writing to “recapitulate[] the commitment made by her Moravian forebears” whose church “espoused universal peace, racial tolerance, and understanding among hostile cultures, including the native tribes whom the Europeans encountered upon arrival in the North American wilderness” (3). Though another example of a potentially problematic identification with people of other cultures and ethnicities because it seems to erase the struggles and violences inherent in past times, Delia’s embodying of the Indian boy is, nevertheless, a way for H. D. to “link[]…the personal with the universal, the private myth with the ‘tribal’ myths” (“Who Buried” 802). She seeks to reenter the historical past to “bring about [the] universal peace and tolerance” her forebears championed (Augustine 3), and initiate what she describes as a “world unity without war” (qtd. in Augustine 3). Not only are Delia and the boy arguing for all people, but they are also “scatter[ing] over the whole face of the globe” the “seed of the Secret Wisdom…love your enemies and thou shalt not kill” (133). H. D.’s embodiment of these mythic figures in her performance is selective, however. On the one hand, she is omniscient and can encompass all people across time and space embodying the entire race, and on the other, she’s directing her message toward the people of London in particular. As a medium with “fine inner nerves” or the jelly-fish “receiving station,” Delia is able, through her performance, to “broadcast” the Indian boy’s message of healing “to the universe,” especially London, which she sees as especially in need of such healing (133). The palimpsestic layering of time is evident—as this ancient boy of the temple sends a message that is relevant to the war-torn world that traumatized H. D. Through the “symptom” or “inspiration” of these spiritual experiences, Delia narrates in Majic Ring, Delia becomes the medium, not just of the Indian boy of the temple, but also for the delivering of his message, a new prophecy, to her present world. In her vision and embodiment of Lady Rhea, “the spirit of the earth, endowed with its occult power,” Delia again becomes the mouthpiece for a prophetic message. As Lady Rhea, who “speaks the same language as the white Indian boy” and whose message Delia can’t interpret, though she knows “she is singing of the sky, of the stars,” Delia is destined to “thwart Time…and will save the new leader or the new spirit or the new god of the new dispensation” (Majic Ring 141). Clothed in “fabulous jewels and gems” that are “etherealized, full of traditional occult power” and “wealth” (138), the Lady Rhea

174 is given both a spiritual and material power. “She is a Spirit” (128), and also, as Delia describes her, an organic materiality: she “has a body and bones. She is as actual, as real as the marble of the little square House or shrine that enclose her” (141). Composed of bone, rock, marble, and the earth itself, Lady Rhea holds within her wisdom and knowledge of centuries. She is materially made up of, and thusly the savior of, “the old occult knowledge” who is able to “thwart” the onward momentum of Time itself. As earth, Lady Rhea’s material knowledge and “ideas run counter to those of Time” (141). Indeed, for Delia, the Lady Rhea won’t just “thwart Time,” she’ll also save the occult knowledge and inspiration that Delia and H.D. value. The Lady Rhea, and Delia herself through her becoming of the Lady Rhea, is that elusive inspiration that defies clear definition: “But time, clock-time, will not defeat her. She is hidden in her little marble cell or shrine. And I was hidden with her. She remained hidden and this hiding of the inspiration was the ‘inspiration crucified’ that Ben Manisi spoke of” (141). Delia equates Lady Rhea (and herself) with “inspiration crucified,” a body suffering in her battle against Time. She is essentially the “inspiration” that “runs counter to clock-time” (141), mentioned throughout Majic Ring. Inspiration, it seems, must be rooted in the wisdom of the earth, both spiritual and bodied, and operate against linear time, and by becoming Lady Rhea—who is inspiration—Delia takes on Lady Rhea’s spiritual and prophetic mission as her own. Delia’s/H. D.’s prophetic inclination here is reminiscent of her recuperation of Eve in Trilogy as discussed above, and is also present in Tribute, specifically, in the dream of the Princess: she was a dark lady…she is Egyptian. She appears at the top of a long staircase; marble steps lead down to a river. She wears no ornament, no circlet or scepter shows her rank, but anyone would know this is a Princess. Down, down the steps she comes…I, the dreamer, wait at the foot of the steps. I have no idea who I am or how I got there. There is no before or after, it is a perfect moment in time or out of time. I am concerned about something, however. I wait below the lowest step. There, in the water beside me, is a shallow basket or ark or box or boat. There is, of course, a baby nested in it. The Princess must find the baby. I know that she will find this child. I know that the baby will be protected and sheltered by her and that is all that matters. (Tribute 53-4)

175 Inspired by the picture of Moses in the Bulrushes that H. D. remembers from her childhood, she wonders, in her session with Freud, whether or not she is “the baby in the reed basket” or “the child Miriam,” a figure, who in the picture, is “half concealed in the rushes” (Tribute 55). The dream leaves her wondering, and Freud deduces that she, “in the deepest unconscious or subconscious layers of my being,” wishes to be the baby Moses, “to be the founder of a new religion” (Tribute 55). Freud’s dream analysis reassures H. D. of her destiny as artist-prophet, and demonstrates one of the reasons she was so drawn to psychoanalysis. As Friedman explains, their “collaborative translations” of H.D.’s hallucinations and dreams “helped her to establish an artistic identity that would fuse the functions of art and religion” (Psyche 73). The dream of the Princess, who protects the “founder of a new religion,” along with her union with the Lady Rhea, and the writing on the wall, particularly the “Delphic tripod of religious and artistic oracle,” all worked together to “confirm[] H.D.’s destiny as a poet-prophet for the ‘city of ruin,’ the war- ravaged century” (74). Freud’s theories of the unconscious also supported the spiritual connection she was hoping to make with the past “ages and aeons.” More particularly, Freud, borrowing from Ernest Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, “brought the past into the present,” suggested that “the traits and tendencies of obscure aboriginal tribes, as well as the shape and substance of the rituals of vanished civilizations, were still inherent in the human mind—the human psyche” (Tribute 16).70 This idea—“the childhood of the individual is the childhood of the race—or is it the other way round?—the childhood of the race is the childhood of the individual” (16)—to which H. D. clings in Tribute, essentially explains that each individual bears within them the psychical inheritance or knowledge of the “whole race, not only of the living but of those ten thousand years dead” (Tribute 71) . The symbols from the past can, essentially, appear in dreams of the

70 Haeckel’s theory essentially argued that “the embryos of higher forms pass through the adult stages of the lower animals,” representing the successive stages of their ancestors’ evolution (Davidson 5). Freud was, as Stephen Jay Gould, remarks a “devout recapitulationist” (156). Freud professed as much in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916): “Each individual” he explains, “somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race” (246-247). In his preface to the third edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1914), his belief in Haeckel’s theory is further expressed: “ontogenesis may be regarded as a recapitulation of phylogensis, in so far as the latter has not been modified by more recent experience. The phylogentic disposition can be seen at work behind the ontogenetic process” (xxvii). Freud's theory of recapitulation "implied first that the study of historical records led to an understanding of the self and secondly that the exploration of the individual psyche led to knowledge of human history. Psychological quest is historical quest; the pe rsonal past is the cultural past” (Psyche 80). As Friedman explains, H. D. found in recapitulation theory “a way to relate the individual to time, and particularly to myth, religion, and art as records of time" (Psyche 80).

176 present because “the individual repeats in some abbreviated fashion during childhood the whole course of the development of the human race” (Freud qtd. in Psyche 79). Such a theory,might also help us make sense of H. D.’s appropriations of the figures in the tableaux vivant. H. D.’s becoming of each figure is her attempt to not only tap into the psychical and spiritual knowledge of those who came before her, but also provide her own mystical and feminist spin on Freud’s psychoanalytic frameworks. H. D.’s interpretation of recapitulation theory encompasses her effort to “transcend the isolation of the single self existing in an instant of historical time”: by “recapturing her own childhood, she could recapture the past of the human race” (Psyche 82-3). As Joseph Riddel explains, H. D. “bears within herself…the ‘whole race’ and relives in her own consciousness the recurrent and hence real experience of all history” (qtd. in Psyche 82-83). Working in tandem with her prophetic/poetic “inspiration”—the suffering body that can herald in a new religion—as well as her automatic writings/performance, H.D. uses Freud’s recapitulation theory to take on the trauma of war, while also enabling a healing forgetfulness. She can overlook the other violent traumas embedded in the history of the race she embodies in order to romanticize the recuperative messages she sees as part of that mythic and mythologized past. By uniting the present war-torn world through her prophecy and automatic writing/performances, H.D. can imaginatively “bind[] all humanity/to ancient wisdom” (Trilogy 24) which, according to DuPlessis, H.D. sees as the “ultimate good/god/goal” (88). The strange visions she sees in Corfu and the embodied experience they provoke emerge from H. D.’s desire to feel connected to a world that has been fragmented by war. She is imaginatively able to resist time and become all people across all time in one body/experience. Like Woolf’s revisionist Spirit of the Age, H.D. thus develops a uniquely female understanding of authorship that is marked by its timelessness. Both H. D. and Woolf’s Orlando, through their automatic embodied experience, bend the mores of their time. Clearly, spiritual or even visionary communication is not only connected to the material body, its nervous centers, but also, for H. D. and Woolf, signifies the female artistic space. Where Orlando’s body’s electrified, nervous response to automatic writing reflects the tensions she experiences, and attempts to resist as a female author in the nineteenth century, H. D.’s electric nerves and jelly-fish feelers open up a space for the female poet-prophet to tap into the entirety of the “whole [human] race.” The religio-scientific discourses that H. D. uses to describe her automatic writing and mediumistic experience opens up a space and an authority for her to transcend not just the modern masculinist

177 writing tradition, but also as a method for connecting her writing—and its prophetic content— sympathetically across time and space, shaping our own interpretations of the past, and our violent engagements in the present. Furthermore, her use of syncretic and spiritualist discourses and philosophies to participate publically in discourses on authorship, the nation's imperial and political engagements, and women's rights, all while challenging medical pathologies and patriarchal attempts to limit her action and writing, centralizes H.D. is in many ways, as the epitome of this project. Her materially active automatic writing characterizes Mediums and Their Material's argument about the ways in which late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century women mediums were emphasizing the importance of their body and its organic function as a way to challenge the gender discourses that restricted their movement, ambitions, and political and economic growth. In so doing, she along with the other spiritual and technological mediums discussed in this project, demonstrate the value of returning our feminist attention to the materiality of the body.

178 CODA: REVALUING FEMALE CIRCULATION, OR EMBODIED WAYS OF KNOWING

Writers and mediums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century persistently imagine the intricate ways in which the material body’s organic function actively works against discourses of women’s innate passivity. In so doing, they complicate continually the narrative of material feminism’s movement away from the discursive elucidated in the introduction. Rather than emphasizing the separateness of materiality and the body, Mediums and Their Material has shown the complex ways in which discourse is already material. In other words, the material bodies of female spiritual and technological mediums are already engaging in communicative acts through their use of technological and spiritual media; their social exchange of information, propaganda, and blood (as in the case of Mina Harker); and, most importantly, through the complexities of the sympathetic nervous systems of their bodies. Such communicative acts, which were simultaneously produced by and enabled the mobility and circulation of the female body, open up a number of questions not just about spiritual and technological mediation and early feminism, but also about what it meant for women to be communicating at all. What did it mean for women to be writing—either as authors of literary texts, as mediums writing automatic spirit communications, or as secretaries dictating and transmitting messages? What did it mean for women to use their materiality to “read” the world differently? To participate in communicative acts that sought to alter their social, political, and domestic positionality? In what other ways outside of technological and spiritual communication technologies were women participating in embodied ways of knowing? My project raises but does not answer these questions, as it focuses primarily on the ways in which circulation is threatening, rather than on the ways in which female circulation is epi- phenomenal. Nevertheless, Mediums and Their Material certainly lays the groundwork for revaluing the circulation of, and material feminisms enacted by, female mediums at the turn of the century. It considers the ways in which material feminisms arise within various forms of circulation and exchange that are often overwritten with erotics, sexuality, and marriage markets, as examined in my reading of the telegraph girl in James’s In the Cage, as well as the way that circulation takes place within the body itself through the overlapping discourses on the nervous system and technologies of mobility, as in Marryat’s Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs, Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl, and the nerve network of both Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys and Stoker’s Dracula. In both Woolf’s Orlando and in H.D.’s automatic mediumship and literary

179 aspirations, we can even think about material feminism and circulation in terms of authorship, textual production, and the circulation of literatures through lending libraries and publication. Such a revaluing provides us with a way, much like Byatt’s novella, of reading the “undone and denied” Emily Tennyson (Byatt 229), as not just the absent mediator of the Tennyson/Hallam romance, but as a circulating figure, whose very “absence” speaks volumes. In other words, it opens up agential possibility for women who would otherwise be silenced, ignored, or neglected. These material forms of female circulation and exchange are, I would argue, part of a trend that is already beginning to emerge in popular culture, particularly in the horror genre. The horror film Unfriended (2014), for example, follows a group of teenagers who are haunted via their social media accounts—Facebook, Twitter, Skype, YouTube, among others—by the spirit of their dead classmate, Laura Barns. Barns’ spirit uses technological media to open communication amongst the teenagers, forcing them to reveal the secrets, lies, and bullying—the brutal assault of body-shaming the friends set in motion after posting a video of Barns’ blacked- out drunk and soiled body on social media—that contributed to her suicide. A terrifying commentary on the dangers of social media and consequences of bullying, this cybernatural thriller unites spiritual mediumship with the technological literacy of Blaire Lily, Barns’ best friend. The film even captures this modern digital literacy in its formal components: shot from the perspective of Lily’s computer screen, it focalizes her perspective as she faces her role in and pieces together the mystery of Barns’ death. Lily’s female mediumship is further complicated by the technological medium and the anonymity inherent in the digital world. Lily’s technological agency is undercut by Barns’ revenge, which is particularly powerful, as she uses the technology to physically humiliate and brutally murder the group of friends. Lily’s mediumship acts as a cautionary tale as it brings to light the deadly and vexed relationship between girls and their use of technology as a means of social communication and manipulation. The recent television show, Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), is likewise invested in thinking about spiritualism and embodied ways of knowing and communicating, but through a neo- Victorian take that reconciles our present interpretations of mediumship through the Victorian past, rather than the neo-gothic revenge narrative of Unfriended. Taking place in the 1890s, the series follows characters from nineteenth-century British and Irish novels such as Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), as well as the

180 lead character and fictional medium Vanessa Ives. Inspired by these nineteenth-century gothic narratives, Penny Dreadful’s spiritualism takes on a Victorian aesthetic—one that is mediated by our perception of the Victorian era, and particularly by how we imagine or re-imagine the Victorian gothic. Ives’ mediumship, however, isn’t limited to the realm of the aesthetic. It is represented in explicitly material ways, borrowing from other popular depictions of spirit possession such as The Exorcist (1973). Ives’s body under spirit control exhibits labored breathing, rolled-back eyeballs, unusual contortions, and jerky epileptic movements, and is even thought by her family to have succumbed to an “inextricable” illness (“Closer Than Sisters”). She is even described by one observer during a séance as “having a monster within her” (“Séance”). Much like the mediums discussed in this dissertation, doctors attribute her possessions to brain disorders, seizures, catatonia, and “hysteria of a psycho-sexual nature” and attempt to cure her through surgeries and hydro-therapies at a woman’s asylum (“Closer Than Sisters”). The very materiality of Ives’s mediumship, however, ultimately imbues her with “sight beyond this world” and for a very particular purpose (“Closer Than Sisters”): to atone for her betrayal of and to rescue her friend Mina Harker from Dracula before she is turned into a vampire. As she explains to her ally Ethan Chandler, “Mina wouldn’t appear to me if it weren’t for her great need. I interpret these signs as best I can” (“Resurrection”). Vanessa’s mediumship opens a channel of communication between her and her lost friend, revealing a woman-to- woman ethical imperative to her organic mediumship, which works to circumvent those forces that would bind her and Mina not only to the violent masculinist force of Dracula, but also to the social mores of their time. Vanessa is a woman who wants adventure—to travel to India or Africa and experience sexual desire—rather than succumb to the traditional domestic life of a Victorian woman: she is “drawn to the deep ocean, to the dark whisper, a mirror behind the glass eyes. To life at its fullest” (“Closer Than Sisters”). Her particular mediumship makes available to her these kinds of escapades. It gives her a way of interacting with and participating in the world at large, while also affirming the importance of female-centered relationships. Instances of mediumship in both these present and past representations have a similar political valence as they draw on the relationship between the organic and spiritual and emphasize the connections between female circulation and embodiment. This understanding of the female medium as intertwined with discourses on material feminism signals ways that turn- of-the-century women were thinking about their own agency and allows us to conceive of

181 feminine agency in more materially powerful ways than we would have otherwise imagined, given the pervasive reduction of femininity, even within discourses on mediumship, to passivity. Re-emphasizing the importance of looking at and locating the female body in literary texts and historical conversations on women’s spiritual and technological mediation, this project ultimately suggests that material feminism provides a more satisfying way of understanding, relating to, and thinking about female agency and feminist politics, both then and now.

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