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Spirited Detection: Science and the Supernatural In SPIRITED DETECTION: SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION A Dissertation by LAURA ELIZABETH PERRINGS Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Mary Ann O’Farrell Committee Members, Maura Ives Claudia Nelson James Rosenheim Head of Department, Maura Ives August 2016 Major Subject: English Copyright 2016 Laura Elizabeth Perrings ABSTRACT This study examines the use of supernatural elements in Victorian-era detective fiction. By focusing on critically neglected detective stories involving ghosts, clairvoyance, dreams, mesmerism and providence, I highlight the genre’s emphasis on what counts as evidence, and I argue that Victorian detective stories use the supernatural to address questions of epistemology that extend beyond the fictional world to reassure readers in the midst of significant social, political, and religious changes in Britain. I illuminate how these texts treat pseudo-scientific, scientific, and supernaturally-received knowledge, and explain the implications for character morality, as defined by providence, when supernatural and scientific phenomena like clairvoyance and mesmerism are used by detectives and criminals. The second chapter examines the use of supernaturally-received and perceived evidence and how the supernatural appoints detectives to solve crimes. I argue that instances of prophetic dreams and the intervention of ghosts and providence in fictional investigations grant reassurance to the readers by reestablishing order at the conclusion, an order which does not exclude the moral grey area occupied by the detectives who transgress the social order in order to restore it. The third chapter focuses on Seeley Regester’s The Dead Letter (an American novel that was popular in England) to argue that Victorian detective fiction morally-coded supernatural and pseudo-scientific abilities in a way that supports a providential understanding of justice and social order. ii The fourth chapter discusses the Victorian anxiety about conflicting modes of knowledge as figured through the tension between providence and criminal mesmerism. The criminals in the stories examined in the chapter use mesmerism to effectively rewrite the providential narrative, and their victims struggle to reassert their own narrative authority but ultimately must rely on providence to solve the case. Due to the multitude of Victorian definitions for supernatural phenomena, I conclude with appendices in which I provide a flexible and controlled vocabulary in XML tags to encourage and facilitate further exploration of the patterns of how the supernatural is used in detective fiction. The appendices examine how our modern efforts to categorize elements of text (including supernatural phenomena) mirror the nineteenth-century desire to categorize and thus control knowledge. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... iv LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................ vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER II BETWIXT AND BETWEEN: THE SUPERNATURAL SOLVING OF CRIMES ............................................................................................................................ 26 Nineteenth-Century Debates about the Supernatural ................................ 31 The Tension of Evidence in Detective Fiction .......................................... 39 A Murder is Announced…But Does Anyone Heed It? ............................. 44 The Interpretation of Empirical and Supernatural Evidence ..................... 57 Empowering the Called Detectives ........................................................... 69 Who is Chosen and Why ........................................................................... 76 Punishment and Morality .......................................................................... 88 CHAPTER III CLAIRVOYANT LENSES AND CLOUDED MORALITY: MESMERISM AND CLAIRVOYANCE USED BY INVESTIGATORS ...................... 96 Clairvoyance and Mesmerism ................................................................. 104 The Dead Letter Case Study .................................................................... 114 Working with Supernatural Evidence ..................................................... 118 Mobility and the Privilege of Gaze ......................................................... 132 The Punishment ....................................................................................... 147 Burton, the Detective Mesmerist ............................................................. 150 The Battle of Wills .................................................................................. 159 CHAPTER IV “NEFARIOUS ENDS”: CRIMINAL MESMERISTS AND PROVIDENCE ................................................................................................................ 166 A Threat to Order and Morality .............................................................. 171 iv Page The Fear of Invasion and Loss of Agency .............................................. 191 The Struggle for Order and Control ........................................................ 199 Restoration of Order ................................................................................ 224 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION ........................................................................................ 240 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................. 248 APPENDIX A TAGGING THE SUPERNATURAL: A DIGITAL EXPERIMENT .... 263 Choosing a Method ................................................................................. 265 Editorial Decisions and the Customized TEI Tags ................................. 272 Editorial Bias ........................................................................................... 280 APPENDIX B DICTIONARY OF ELEMENTS AND ATTRIBUTES ........................ 284 APPENDIX C TEI-ENCODED TRANSCRIPTION OF “THE DIARY OF ANNE RODWAY” ..................................................................................................................... 294 APPENDIX D TEI-ENCODED TRANSCRIPTION OF “THE GHOST OF FOUNTAIN LANE” ............................................................................................................................ 345 v LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE Page 1. Burton Mesmerizes Lenore ................................................................................... 143 2. Hypnotism Contortions ......................................................................................... 144 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure. (Van Dine) Published in September 1928 in The American Magazine, the author S. S. Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” imposes restrictions on the genre that would not have been recognized sixty years before. Looking back on the genre and taking the Sherlock Holmes stories as the epitome of Victorian detective fiction, as many scholars do, it may be tempting to deny that there is anything clairvoyant, mesmeric, or otherwise “pseudo-scientific,” “purely imaginative,” and “speculative” about the genre and its detectives. However, the detective genre has its roots in a blend of Gothic literature, ghost stories, religious tales of divine justice, and romances as well as the “rational and scientific” stories Van Dine prefers. As several scholars of recent years have compellingly argued, an understanding of the detective genre that does not allow room for the supernatural or preternatural is too reductive.1 The genre’s boundaries are 1 For instance, Maurizio Ascari’s book A Counter-History of Crime Fiction (2007) and Michael Cook’s recent book Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story (2014) both explore the generic hybridity of detective fiction and especially focus on the inclusion of the supernatural in detective fiction. 1 not so rigid or exclusive as Van Dine and others have made them sound. Ingrained in the genre is a tradition of belief that justice will always triumph, that murder will out, and that tradition is usually related to a divine or supernatural influence. The work of detective fiction scholars who exclude the supernatural from the genre rests on an ahistorical understanding of what “science” was in the Victorian period. By delving into the archive of supernaturalism, I discovered a more complete understanding of how the texts themselves are examining different Victorian theories about ways of knowing and addressing the anxiety in the Victorian era about what was true and what stabilized their community. While Van Dine declares that the “method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific,” Victorian authors often wrote murders
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