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INTRODUCTION 1. Mark Twain, “Among the Spirits” (1866) in The N OTES INTRODUCTION 1. Mark Twain, “Among the Spirits” (1866) in The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 66–67. 2. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (London: Papermac, 1995), 154. 3. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 290. 4. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 4. See also Helen Taylor, “Looking Transatlantically,” in Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 6–27. 5. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 4. 6. She writes that “the adjective ‘American’ in American Sensations indi- cates both the hemispheric dimensions of . imperial activity and the process whereby U.S. Americans appropriated the term ‘America’ for themselves, a process that was both bolstered and complicated by what I call the ‘culture of sensation.’” Streeby, American Sensations, 7. 7. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3. 8. Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850–1910 (London: Routledge, 1986); Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989); Ruth Brandon, The Spritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983); Philip Hoare, England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (London: Fourth Estate, 2005); Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Pamela Thurschwell, 186 T RANSATLANTIC S PIRITUALISM/BRIDGET B ENNETT Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1989); Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Howard Kerr, Mediums, Spirit-Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972); R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); John J. Kucich, Ghostly Communication: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2004). Key works on mesmerism include, Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the Cure of American Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alison Winter, Mesmerised: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). As this book was going to press, another two sig- nificant works were published. The first is Marina Warner’s magisterial Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty- first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). The other is Sarah A. Willburn, Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth- Century Mystical Writings (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006). 9. Other readings of the Rochester rappings include those by Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth- Century United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 131–32; and Braude, Radical Spirits, especially 10–12 and 19–20. 10. Owen, Darkened Room, 42, 48. 11. Braude, Radical Spirits, 27. 12. See Lisa A. Long, “‘The Corporeality of Heaven’: Rehabilitating the Civil War Body in The Gates Ajar,” American Literature 69, no. 4 (December 1997), 781–811. 13. Braude, Radical Spirits, 25. For more details of the spread of spiritual- ism see Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (London: Routledge, 1969), 3–18. 14. On the cultures of performance and rhetoric in revolutionary America see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 15. For more on social and cultural practices and their relation to death see Douglas J. Davies, Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites (London: Cassell, 1997), especially 1–22; Michael Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying (New York: Oxford University Press, N OTES 187 1989); Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Allen Lane, 1981). For a more historical account of death in America see Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes to death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). For a theorized account of representing the dead and dying body in con- temporary culture, see Laura E. Tanner, Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 16. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 17. They can certainly be traced within contemporary U.S. culture, which has recently experienced what Jeffrey Weinstock has called a “spectral turn.” Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ed., Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 5. He writes that “Millennial specters ask us to what extent we can move forward into a new millennium when we are still shackled to a past that haunts us and that we have to face and mourn fully.” Ibid., 6. 18. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 198. 19. Ibid., 199. Emphasis original. 20. For more on the relationship between African Americans, spiritualism, and literary culture see Akasha (Gloria) Hull, “Channeling the Ancestral Muse: Lucille Clifton and Dolores Kendrick,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 330–48; and Carolyn Martin Shaw, “The Poetics of Identity: Questioning Spiritualism in African American Contexts,” in Abel, Christian, and Moglen, eds., Female Subjects, 349–62. 21. See Lynn Wardley, “Relic, Fetish, Femmage: The Aesthetics of Sentiment in the Work of Stowe,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels, 203–20 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 204. Wardley notes that “Mecha Sobel’s examination of black and white values in eighteenth- century Virginia demonstrates that it is a surviving West African percep- tion of death as a homecoming and heaven as a home, that by the end of the century becomes ‘an American expectation.’” See also Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, eds., African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997); George Eaton Simpson, Black Religions in the New World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.) On black mediumship in the New World (especially the British Caribbean), see Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 58–60. 188 T RANSATLANTIC S PIRITUALISM/BRIDGET B ENNETT 22. For more on this see Renée Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2000), 159–69. 23. There are too many examples of the appearance of Indian spirits in séances to be mentioned in detail. Two examples from that of famous American spiritualist mediums will suffice here. One is the series of séances given by Mrs. J. H. Conant at the meeting rooms of the spiritu- alist journal The Banner of Light over the course of 18 years. Many spirits, including Indians, spoke through her, and a process of signing their names through her by automatic writing confirmed their identities. The issue of literacy seems not to have been considered here. See Allen Putnam, ed., Spirit Invocations: or, Prayers and Praises (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1876.) The second is that of the spirit of Ouina who commu- nicated through the celebrated medium Cora L. V. Richmond. Her life story was published as: Cora L. V. Richmond, Ouina’s Canoe and Christmas Offering, Filled with Flowers for the Darlings of the Earth (Ottumwa, IA: D. M. and N. P. Fox, 1882.) The title page says that it is “Given through her Medium, “Water-Lily.” 24. See, for instance, Florence Marryat, There Is No Death (London: Psychic Book Club, 1938), 217–18. 25. Bergland, National Uncanny, 3. 26. Ibid., 87, 106. 27. Ibid., 7. Bergland writes that “America was haunted by the ghosts of African American slaves and Indians as well as disenfranchised women and struggling workers. The people who were described and imagined as ghosts were those whose existence challenged developing structures of political and economic power.” See also Kucich, Ghostly Communion, 55. 28. Ibid., 187. 29. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19. An example of the impact of
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