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Mediums and Their Material: the Female Body in Spiritual and Technological Mediation, 1880-1930

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Mediums and Their Material: the Female Body in Spiritual and Technological Mediation, 1880-1930 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”
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