Spiritualism and Women's Writing: From the fin de Siècle to the neo-Victorian

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Spiritualism and Women’s Writing

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Spiritualism and Women’s Writing From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian Tatiana Kontou

© Tatiana Kontou 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-20005-0 hardback ISBN-10: 0-230-20005-2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my parents, grandparents and Sam

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Contents List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1 Theatres in the Skull: The Society for Psychical Research and Actress Narratives

15

2 Well-tuned Mediums: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson

43

3 Phantasms of Florence Cook in Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen

81

4 Natural and Spiritual Evolutions: A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects

114

5 The Other World Illuminated: Wiring Science, Text and Spirit in Victoria Glendinning’s Electricity

147

6 Queering the Séance: Sarah Waters’ Affinity

172

Conclusion

199

Notes

204

Bibliography

220

Index

237

vii

Figures 3.1

Spirit photograph of Katie King taken by William Crookes

90

3.2

Florence Cook or Katie King posing with William Crookes

91

3.3

Florence Cook entranced with materializing spirit

94

6.1

‘Spiritualism Made Useful’

192

viii

Acknowledgements This book started its life as a D.Phil. thesis at the University of Sussex. I would, therefore, like to thank first and foremost my supervisor, Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor for her depth of knowledge, endless support and friendship. Warmest thanks are also due to Professor Laura Marcus and Dr Pamela Thurschwell, whose comments, suggestions and faith in this project contributed towards its materialization. In addition, I am grateful to Dr Steph Newell for her invaluable advice on book proposals and positive energy. I am also thankful to Dr George Walter who has been more than generous in allowing me to consult private and un-archived papers on spiritualism. I give special thanks to Dr Corinne François-Denève who introduced me to Florence Marryat’s actress novels and, more importantly, has been a very dear friend. At Palgrave Macmillan, I wish to express gratitude to the anonymous reader, to my editor Paula Kennedy, to Christabel Scaife and Steven Hall. I am indebted to the staff at the Senate House, who made the Harry Price Collection available to me; the staff at the University Library, Cambridge, for helping me find my way in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research; and the staff at the British Library. Thanks are also due to Michèle Roberts and Sarah Waters who have been generous in answering my queries. I have been fortunate in having many good friends whose advice, patience and clear-headedness has been a great help to me throughout this adventure. For intellectual stimulus and immense emotional support I thank: Dr Andrew Mangham, Dr Kumiko Kiuchi, Dr Chris Stokes, Christoforos Diakoulakis, Karen Schaller and Susanne Sklepek. Athanasia Kanellopoulou, Voula Tsoulou and Chrysa Vlotis have been the best friends I could ask for, and made writing – from the beginning of the thesis to book delivery – a less lonely process. I must also express my gratitude and warmest thanks to Mireille Shimoda whose acute editing, eye for detail, support, kindness and friendship made the delivery of this book possible. Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful parents, Maria and Kanakis, who have been endlessly encouraging, supportive and loving. Their generosity and faith in me has been a continuous source of strength.

ix

x

Acknowledgements

None of this would have happened without the love, friendship and help of Dr Sam Thomas who was the psychic force behind this project. If books speak telepathically to us, I need say no more here. The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: from Angels and Insects by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto and Windus. Reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd. For USA rights: copyright © A. S. Byatt. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN; from Electricity by Victoria Glendinning, published by Simon and Schuster; from In the Red Kitchen by Michèle Roberts, published by Minerva. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; from Affinity by Sarah Waters, published by Little Brown Book Group Ltd. For USA rights: copyright © 1999 Sarah Waters. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. For World rights (excluding UK, Commonwealth, Europe, Canada, USA): copyright © Sarah Waters 1999. Reproduced by permission of Greene and Heaton Ltd. Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Introduction

I The past is a fiction that absorbs us. It’s not theft, you understand, an act of generosity; you lay yourself open to a form of occult possession. You complete the other man’s work, like one of those figurines the Egyptian priests used to leave in their tombs. The job doesn’t end with death. And neither does it belong to any individual. The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic. Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (2004, pp. 53, 55 and 118) In his novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), Iain Sinclair forges a link between mediumship and the writing of fiction, between forms of occult possession and intertextuality. Sinclair represents authors as spiritualist mediums, channelling the voices of the past, riding ‘the curve of time’. In turn, the author-medium will become one of the dead voices that he or she now invokes, part of a diachronic wave of ghostly energy that others will give shape to in the future.1 Indeed, ‘the job doesn’t end with death’ – it is a process of constant reinterpretation and reinvention. The literary text, according to Sinclair’s logic, can therefore

1

2


be understood as a materialized spirit – an embodied entity summoned from the netherworld, living and dead at the same time. Unlike those Victorian moralists and men of science who were affronted by the claims of spiritualists, Sinclair does not question the ‘authenticity’ of his author-mediums. To do so would be missing the point – the texts they produce and the roles they perform do not belong to ‘any individual’. However, another question arises from Sinclair’s metaphor: to what extent do these author-mediums ventriloquize the dead? If the dead speak through the medium, then surely we can argue that the medium also speaks through them? How do we distinguish between these new and old voices? How are we to interpret this spectral dialogue between two worlds? What is added and what is taken away? What is lost forever in transmission? Furthermore, if Sinclair perceives the author as a medium, then perhaps we can see the medium herself, the figure that caused such outrage, wonderment and confusion across the nineteenth century, as a kind of author – a typist dictated to from beyond the grave. But the same types of questions return: whose voice is she actually transcribing? How accurate is the transcription from voice to text?2 These relationships – between mediumship and authorship, between history and fiction – form the primary critical framework of Spiritualism and Women’s Writing. Examining the portrayal of mediumship in a selection of ‘neo-Victorian’3 novels, with a focus on the continuing influence of the nineteenth-century séance, this book considers how our understanding of Victorian spiritualism is in turn transformed by these reworkings. As Linda Hutcheon notes, ‘the nineteenth century gave birth to both the realist novel and history, two genres which share a desire to select, construct and render self-sufficient and closed a narrative world that would be representational but still separate from changing experience and historical process’ (Hutcheon, 1996, p. 478). With this assertion in mind, it is part of my intention here to demonstrate that it is not only recent or contemporary fiction that questions these assumptions. Indeed, spiritualism itself can be read as a kind of resistance to ‘realist’ narratives, as a form of opposition to teleological, selective and elitist histories. I will show how the radical elements of spiritualist practices (in terms of its sexual politics, its ‘narrative’ imagination, its complex relationship with the society and culture of the era) are not ‘invented’ by today’s authors but are magnified or coaxed out of hiding instead. The same applies to Psychical Research, the creative/intellectual network spanning many different disciplines that developed alongside the séance.

Introduction

3

The characteristics of the séance challenge the concept of a ‘closed’ experience – spirits ebbing in and out of materiality; strange, half-formed communications from the other side. What Sinclair calls the ‘generosity’ of the medium means that there is no filtering of messages during the séance. No detail is more or less important; no spirit is more valuable than another; no conscious decision is made over who or what is being summoned up. The medium’s body becomes the bridge between the two worlds, blurring the distinction between life and death, and fact and fiction. It is perhaps no surprise then that a significant number of late twentieth-century novelists, preoccupied by questions such as the gendered subjectivity of history and the nature of our ‘access’ to the past, have chosen to revisit the discourses of Victorian spiritualism. Mediumship and Psychical Research become part of a textual network in which the visible and invisible worlds of Victorian life are called back into being. The neo-Victorian novels examined here are all concerned with the figure of the female medium and represent her as an ‘author’ of both fictions and histories, as both the lead actress of the séance and its director. Her position is one of ambiguous influence – she is influenced by the spirits, by the desires of the sitters, by the ambience of the séance, yet she also controls both the proceedings and those around her. The medium is entranced, passive, vulnerable, empty and muted (even when she is speaking, it is an illusion – it is not her words we hear); she is at the same time active, ‘sensitive’, daring, wilful, performative and aware. As Robert Douglas-Fairhurst points out, the notion of ‘influence’ (from immortality to the after-effects of words or actions) saturated the culture of the Victorian era: During the nineteenth century, the vocabulary of influence developed a density in response to the variety and strength of the cultural pressures which were brought to bear upon it. The words and ideas which clustered around influence were central to the attempts of a number of disciplines, from psychology to sanitation reform, to create a shared cultural narrative which would account for the many ways in which people seemed able to move, interfere with, or control one another’s minds and bodies. But because influence was too unstable and plural a concept, too prone to spillage and seepage, to be restrained by any one set of explanations, the same words and ideas also provided a discourse through which these disciplines were able to establish their own points of overlap and conflict. (Douglas-Fairhurst, 2002, p. 4; my italics)

4


Although Douglas-Fairhurst acknowledges that the Victorian concept of influence was ‘prone to spillage and seepage’ (like ectoplasm), he does not make any direct connection with the discourses of spiritualism and the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The title of his study, Victorian Afterlives, does not refer to any occult realm but to the ‘survival’ of authors and their texts. Recalling Sinclair’s author-medium motif, the afterlife in this sense means the continuing influence and reimagining of literary work. Nevertheless spiritualism and the SPR were deeply preoccupied with the extent to which one mind (either living or dead) could exert ‘influence’ on another. Such was the ‘density’ of the ‘vocabulary of influence’ that it found a natural home in the séance room and mediumistic experience. Possessed by a diverse range of spirits (from children to rowdy young men, from doctors to poets, from pirates to deceased members of the SPR), the medium becomes emblematic of this ‘density’, of an overlap or exchange between discourses. She is at the centre of a network of influence, both a polymath and a tabula rasa. In a spiritualist context and beyond, notions of influence and the afterlife are therefore expressed through a complex new language – possession, materialization, trance, automatic writing, precognition, cryptomnesia, psychorrhagy, telekinesis, telepathy and so on. Moreover, the ways in which spiritualism and the SPR adopted concepts from the natural sciences and psychology, as well as the use of cutting-edge technologies, connected the ambiguous, occult influences of the séance with legitimate, tangible developments in Victorian ‘progress’. The everexpanding vocabulary and imagery of the séance contextualized spirit influence within the larger scientific and cultural climate of the time – a vast systemic cabling across the two worlds. In Hilary Mantel’s recent novel Beyond Black (2005), a modern medium who makes her living in the suburban commuter belt of southeast England, imagines what her life would be like if she had been born a Victorian. The dead, it seems, were different back then: They blew trumpets and played portable organs; they moved the furniture; they rapped on the wall, they sang hymns. They offered bouquets to the living; spirit roses bound by scented hands. Sometimes they proffered inconveniently large objects, like a horse. Sometimes they stood at your shoulder, a glowing column made flesh by the eyes of faith. She could see it easily, a picture of the past: herself in a darkened parlour, her superb shoulders rising white out of crimson velvet. (Mantel, 2005, pp. 80–1)

Introduction

5

With these images in mind, it is easy to see how authors might choose to revisit Victorian spiritualism out of some kind of nostalgia or eccentricity, drawn in by its exotic atmosphere and crushed velvet theatrics. However, what I intend to show here is that there is something altogether more profound about this process. By setting their novels in the nineteenth century, by recovering literary genres such as sensation fiction, by exploring figures that have been left out of history, the writers in this study give a voice to the dead. Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen (1990), A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1992), Victoria Glendinning’s Electricity (1995) and Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999) do not just raise the figure of the Victorian medium for theatrical effect (although theatricality is an important theme throughout my analysis). They tap into and construct an ‘afterlife’ that enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century society and culture; they alter our relationship with the past. By doing so, the authors themselves become mediums.4 Questions of literary influence therefore merge with spirit possession. The ‘authenticity’ of both text and séance is explored through mimicry, ventriloquism and Victorian concepts of propriety. Authorship, identity, gender and consciousness are all prone to uncanny transformations, to ‘spillage and seepage’, in these texts. What I will demonstrate here, however, is that the work of Roberts, Byatt, Glendinning and Waters is not anachronistic or somehow better understood by being called ‘postmodern’ or ‘meta-fictive’. Rather, these writers are retrieving themes already present in spiritualism, tracing them back to their origins to 31 March 1848 – when Margaret and Kate Fox, the teenage sisters who famously claimed to have established communication with the spirit of a murdered peddler in Hydesville, New York, marked the beginning of Modern Spiritualism – and to the foundation of the SPR in 1882.5 Indeed, the SPR’s work on levels of consciousness, telepathy, haunted houses and mediumship asks questions that translate very smoothly into the literary realm. The historical research that supports my readings of these women writers allows the book to relocate the ‘modernity’ of certain literary techniques and critical formations (such as intertextuality, multiple or fragmented perspectives, the interior monologue) that have long been attached to the first half of the twentieth century. The study also shows how many of the innovations of modernism are present in the performance and documentation of the Victorian séance. Indeed, by also reading the works of May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson through the prism of Psychical Research, I argue that these two authors directly incorporated aspects of haunted interiority, phantasmal projection, direct

6


speech and automatic writing in their modernist narratives – motifs which are typical of the séance. However, while the likes of Sinclair and Richardson refused to contextualize their experimental aesthetics within a spiritualist setting, the authors who form the central focus of this book make a conscious decision to embrace the fictive potential of a ‘reanimated’ past.6 Psychical Research is therefore the key historical reference point for my analysis of recent and contemporary writing and it also provides a rich critical/metaphorical network through which these novels can be read. Recent criticism has provided a new perspective on spiritualism’s original impact in the nineteenth century. Pamela Thurschwell’s Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking 1880–1920 (2001) examines the crosspollination between science, technology, literature and the SPR in the fin de siècle. Similarly, Roger Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy 1870– 1901 (2002) explores the SPR’s key concept of telepathic communication in relation to scientific, literary and imperialist discourses. Both studies open up the influence and authority of the SPR in fin-de-siècle culture. They reveal how the SPR’s work (which is now largely forgotten) is not simply a charmingly strange footnote to Victorian life, but a vibrant, dynamic body of thought with far-reaching repercussions. However, in the contemporary novels under discussion here, spiritualism and Psychical Research are not explored through the eminent members of the Society, but through female mediums – women who had been largely obscured or even disgraced by the SPR’s experiments. In Hutcheon’s terms, these women are ‘ex-centrics, the marginalized, the peripheral figures of fictional history’. In this light, even ‘genuine’ historical personages ‘take on different, particularized, and ultimately excentric status’ (Hutcheon, 1996, p. 483). In the Red Kitchen, for example, depicts William Crookes, the brilliant chemist and one-time president of the SPR, as a dishonourable character caught between the imperatives of objective research and his sexual desires. The medium Florence Cook, on the other hand, is one of the dominant narrative voices in the story. Each of the novels in this study plays on some variation of this pattern, on an interplay between centre and margin, between vocalization and silence, between liberty and repression. In the nineteenth century, female mediums were objectified in two senses. They were objects of investigation for male scientists and objects of wonder for spiritualism enthusiasts. Very few mediums recorded their experiences of spiritualism on their own terms and their stories were predominantly told by others.7 In the novels that I examine, these female voices are not ‘raised’ to undermine the authority of Psychical Researchers

Introduction

7

but to create a counter-history – a more intimate, emotional and ghostly account of mediumship, a secret history of spirit selves. In addition, the novels often refuse a clear-cut distinction between spiritualism as fraud or trickery and spiritualism as genuine occult intervention. Instead, the focus is on the thrilling and unsettling ambiguity of the séance – the darkened room; the long shadows; the interplay between desire, fantasy and reality; the construction of an imaginative space between the medium, the spirits and the sitters. Spiritualist manifestation in these novels forces us to reconsider our understanding of history, narrative and the afterlife. Two of the novelists, A. S. Byatt and Michèle Roberts, cite parts of Alex Owen’s seminal study The Darkened Room (1989) in their acknowledgements. Owen explores the impact of women on the birth and development of spiritualism (as mediums or supporters of the movement) and how the behaviour of female spiritualists often transgressed social and cultural norms. The study unearths the lives and careers of the women who were celebrated at the height of Victorian spiritualism (from 1860 to 1880), only to be overshadowed by the SPR at the end of the century. Most significantly, Owen links spiritualism with broader Victorian models of consciousness, sexuality and identity without ever becoming preoccupied by the ‘authenticity’ of spirit phenomena. This approach is particularly important if we are to understand mediumship as both living with the dead and living within oneself, as a practice that exists in between the poles of occult possession and theatrical deception. Owen’s work therefore sets a precedent that Byatt, Glendinning, Roberts and Waters all follow. Owen’s history is, in its own way, already a kind of counter-history – a factual, immaculately researched study with sensuous, disruptive, fictional ‘instincts’. She is one of the first to highlight how the Victorian land of the dead was brimming with life. On the subject of history, if the medium can be conceived of as an author (and vice versa), then she can also become a kind of phantasmal historian. The medium ‘channels’ historical information but leaves it undistilled (a mixture of private and public, precise and ambiguous). A closer look at the spiritualist press that flourished in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the transcripts of séances published in the SPR’s proceedings reveals communications that are coy, melodramatic, humorous, tragic, intimate and philosophical. These records, from minute personal details to grand intellectual schemes, build up a unique overview of Victorian consciousness. The recording of spirit history creates a kind of ghostly archive, disordered but insightful,

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an alternative window into the past. What is lost in life is gained in death. It is no wonder then that the resurgences in spiritualism, after its heyday in the nineteenth century, occurred when public history was written at the expense of private lives. During the two world wars, faith in spiritualism was revived as spirit soldiers returned home – writing, speaking and sometimes even materializing through mediums. Oliver Lodge’s Raymond (1916), for example, is both a lament for a life cut short and a celebration of the life that continues after death. Lodge’s unorthodox biography of his son begins with the death notice published in The Times after Raymond’s fall at Ypres.8 Lodge traces Raymond’s life in the trenches through the letters he sent home, only for these documents to give way to communications from beyond the grave. This tender, heartfelt biography stretches the parameters of life and death: in the trenches, death is incorporated into life, whereas in the séance, life emerges from death. More properly, Raymond could be described as a necrography, a book of the dead, a text that begins at a point of convergence between history and the extinction of history. In a sense, the contemporary authors under examination in this study perform a similar action to Lodge – filling out the lives of Victorian women who have been lost to history by using a spiritualist template. They construct lives from real and imaginary materials. Spiritualism and Women’s Writing uses the notion of mediumship in two distinct ways for the analysis of these contemporary works – historically (in terms of context, documentation, research and so on) and metaphorically (in terms of a wider, textual/critical framework). Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of mediumship in this respect is that its subversive quality was legitimized in a spiritualist context. Spiritualism was never free from scandal but actions that would have been considered outrageous ‘in the ordinary world’ were normalized in the séance room. Thus, the writers under analysis here attempt to recover the dangerous, transgressive side of spiritualist practice (particularly its gender politics) by exposing its connections to the wider forces of Victorian society. Byatt, Roberts, Glendinning and Waters borrow from a great variety of nineteenth-century genres and discourses (from natural history to diary writing) in order to locate female transgression in literary and cultural history. The ambiguities of gender norms, for example, or the exploration of feminine sexuality, were not confined to the séance (although the séance provides a first point of reference).

Introduction

9

Returning, however, to the figure of the medium, one of the most important aspects of Victorian mediumship is the way in which it challenged notions of the passive or submissive woman. The medium is portrayed as submissive to both the will of the spirit and to the desires of the séance sitters: A physical medium is entirely passive, and, in truth, performs no work at all. He or she places him or herself into the hands of the circle or investigators, sits on whatever position he or she is assigned, undergoes any tests or fastenings which may be adjudged necessary to render it certain that the phenomena observed are not due to the tricks of said medium. (Adshead, 1879, p. v)9 The medium’s passivity, so crucial to achieving successful contact with the dead, becomes ambiguous or multifaceted – it is a decisive factor in confirming that the manifestations are not fraudulent, but it also functions as evidence that they are not influenced by the medium’s own decision (consciously or not) to construct a spiritual Other. The extreme passivity of the medium, the process of becoming an empty vessel, senseless and inert, is at the same time responsible for the vibrant display of (after)life that constitutes the spirit manifestation. Thus, there is an intricate pattern of subversion beginning to emerge here which the neo-Victorian novels in this study bring to the forefront. Diana Basham comments that ‘Victorian Spiritualism provided a narrative centre capable of generating provocations, complications and controversies around a single issue – the uncertain status of the metaphoric and its ability to usurp and imitate, however temporarily, the status and locale of the law-giver’ (Basham, 1992, p. 107). Mediums, women who would otherwise be occupying themselves with domestic service or child rearing, were able to perform and reinvent themselves through spirit communication. In the séance room, feminine ‘sensitivity’ was an asset rather than a weakness. As I will show, when women were ‘taken over’ by the spirits, they were also able to blur the lines of what was considered proper and improper, or natural and unnatural. Throughout this study, strong emphasis is placed on the performative and theatrical aspects of both spiritualism itself and the neo-Victorian mode used to represent it (in the sense that these novels ‘perform’ the past). I demonstrate how theatricality is inextricably bound up with the proceedings of the séance, spilling over into wider (and ongoing) debates

10


about authentic and mimetic identity. With regard to the novels, I will explore how their reanimated characters can be understood as phantasmal actors, like the materialized spirits brought into the séance room by mediums. We, the reader/spectator, come to see these spirits as real, just as we suspend our disbelief when watching actors on the stage. Their bodies are spectral but tangible, infinitely remote, yet intensely close. Indeed, one of the broader aims of this book is to show how the ghostly is always tipping towards its opposite, always threatening to realize its promise and become fleshy, whole and powerful. While maintaining a rigorous historical backdrop, spectrality, theatricality and gender are the critical ‘keys’ to my analysis of this new/old vision of the Victorians. In light of this, the texts of Roberts, Byatt, Glendinning and Waters are perhaps driven by the same desires and fears experienced by Mantel’s modern medium, a woman ‘out of time’: She remembered her kitchen, the scales, the knives; but not anything she cooked there. She remembered her bed, and her bed linen; but not sex. I can’t keep losing it, she thought, losing chunks of my life, years at a time. Or who will I be, when I’m old? I should write a book … I need proof of some sort, a record of what goes down. (Mantel, 2005, p. 93)

II My first chapter, ‘Theatres in the Skull’, examines the relationship between professional (or stage-based) performance and mediumship by comparing two different fin-de-siècle discourses: Psychical Research and the theory of acting. I argue that the development of new and naturalistic techniques of acting ran parallel to the SPR’s quest to define ‘natural’ mediumship within the ever-widening fields of psychology and science. This will demonstrate the ways in which these discourses directly and indirectly corresponded with each other by exploring the parameters of the inner self and identity in terms of authenticity, mimicry and influence. Using historical sources from the spiritualist and theatrical press, I therefore identify the links between spirit possession and acting on the stage by analysing the extent to which ‘natural’ acting becomes a form of communication with and an embodiment of ‘other’ selves. The interrelated discourses of Psychical Research and acting theory inform my reading of Florence Marryat’s novel My Sister the Actress (1881) and Henry James’ short story ‘Nona Vincent’ (1894).

Introduction

11

The second chapter, ‘Well-tuned Mediums’, follows up the notion of ‘performing’ the self by analysing the presence of spiritualist tropes in the works of May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson. Reading Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), I demonstrate how her sophisticated engagement with spiritualism and the occult is integral to the creation of the experimental ‘psychic’ geography of her heroine. Then I show how the modernist consciousness of Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–67) and its radical gender politics are deeply indebted to the unheralded innovations of Edwardian and Georgian séances. To give weight to this proposition, I read sections of Pilgrimage alongside a selection of early twentiethcentury séance transcripts known as the ‘cross-correspondences’ or the ‘Palm Sunday Case’. The analysis of these works allows us to better understand the connection between femininity, textuality and spectrality that later writers have tapped into. Chapter 3, ‘Phantasms of Florence Cook’, discusses Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen by focusing on the way it recreates the life of Florence Cook, the medium who became one of the stars of British spiritualism. The novel, which draws heavily on the relationship between Florence Cook and William Crookes, relies, to a great extent, on archival material – particularly Crookes’ Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism – in order to expose and explore the manipulation of history. In addition, I closely read the instances of telepathy and haunting in this work through Psychical Research. F. W. H. Myers’ concept of the ‘subliminal self’ and Edmund Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living are used to expose the haunted narrative structure of the novel. My fourth chapter, ‘Natural and Spiritual Evolutions’, unpicks the (perhaps rather unexpected) connection between the Darwinist theory of evolution, spiritualism and literary history. It does so through the analysis of A. S. Byatt’s novellas Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel published together under the title Angels and Insects. These novellas clearly share a number of common themes, particularly the development of natural history and spiritualism. I analyse the texts alongside the writings of Alfred Russel Wallace – an eminent natural historian who later ‘converted’ to spiritualism. Indeed, Wallace’s entomological studies, in which he explored the concept of insect mimicry, provide an important framework for my analysis of Morpho Eugenia’s ‘social’ mimicry and The Conjugial Angel’s ‘textual’ mimicry of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Concepts of authorship, voice, quotation, intertextuality and the muse are discussed in relation to the spiritualist practice of automatic writing.

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Chapter 5, ‘The Other World Illuminated’, focuses on the occult, women’s emancipation and the new, ‘shocking’ technologies of the turn of the century. In particular, I examine how Victoria Glendinning in Electricity reworks many elements of H. G. Wells’ novella Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900). I show how Electricity integrates the new, supercharged vocabularies of scientific progress into the séance room (as opposed to the strictly maintained opposition between science and spirit in Wells). This interchange between discourses, I argue, mirrors the ambiguous status of the heroine – a woman caught between two centuries. In my final chapter, ‘Queering the Séance’, I read Sarah Waters’ Affinity as a form of counter-historical writing – an exploration of Victorian lesbian identity through the narrative tropes of sensation fiction and the séance. In doing so, I argue that Waters does not ‘import’ models of lesbian sexuality into an austere, heterosexual Victorian setting. Rather, she unearths and ‘tips over’ the dissident sexualities and forms of desire already present in spiritualist practice and the sensation genre – thus finding both an unexpected point of origin and a new home for contemporary queer theory. Most importantly, I compare Affinity to Susan Willis Fletcher’s spiritualist memoir Twelve Months in an English Prison (1884), a now largely forgotten work, and show how a large part of the memoir functions as a key source for Waters. In doing so, I explore the different concepts of ‘affinity’ that the novel evokes – literary, bodily and spectral.

III As a final note, a useful metaphor for thinking about the scope and direction of this book and about the neo-Victorian novels under discussion can be found in spirit photography.10 This term was used to describe photographs that revealed a form or object invisible to the human eye at the moment the picture was taken but visible after development. The first spirit photograph was taken by William Mumler in New York in 1862. It was hailed by spiritualists as proof of the existence of the supernatural and by sceptics as a cheap illusion produced by new technology. Ten years later, Hudson and Parks produced spirit photographs in England, provoking a similarly polarized response. According to Frank Podmore, a Psychical Researcher who was sympathetic to the claims of the occult but deeply sceptical of back-room trickery, all spirit photographs were false and created by the manipulation of

Introduction

13

the photographic apparatus. Podmore describes the methods used to achieve the desired effect: (1) A confederate may be surreptitiously introduced and stand for a few seconds behind the sitter; (2) the figure of a spirit may be painted in sulphate of quinine or other fluorescent substance on part of the background; (3) the positive may be printed from two different negatives; (4) the negative may be twice exposed … the method which has been actually adopted by most spirit photographers, and if care is taken in taking the picture of the ghost, that only that part of the plate on which the ghost is to appear shall be exposed to the light, excellent results might be obtained; (5) and in some cases where old glass plates are used, the image of a previous photograph may remain on the glass and may reappear when the positives are printed off; (6) a transparency may be introduced into the camera itself between the lens and the plate; (7) or the actinic light may be allowed to fall upon the plate into the dark room. (Podmore, 1902, p. 125) In a sense, it is not too much of a leap to think of each of the neoVictorian novels analysed in this study as a spirit photograph – a ‘positive printed from two different negatives’, an old plate superimposed on the new, an alliance between the living and the dead, the past and the present. This illusion of reality, of revealing things that are not there, may be considered ‘fraudulent’ by some. At the same time, however, the spirit photograph is a substantiation of narrative desire and curiosity, a ghostly snapshot of a world that is there and not there, that is ours and not ours. In addition, we might consider the way in which the spectral presence in spirit photographs is invisible when the picture is taken but visible after its development. These neo-Victorian novels, as I have already started to demonstrate, operate according to a similar principle. They do not embellish the past as such – they take what was hidden (or invisible) in that past and, with the benefit of hindsight, with the process of ‘development’, they bring it into our field of vision, out of the spirit cabinet and into the light. Thus, there is most certainly a ‘simulation’ at work in these novels but a simulation that refuses its own artificiality. Either by deception or by occult means, the very real desires which these texts represent manifest themselves. To close, I offer the following episode from Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984). In her recollections of her past career,

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the singer Mignon describes an encounter with a medium and spirit photographer who is exposed as a fraud. The case, however, is not as straightforward as it first appears: Yet many of those who had been deceived by Herr M. did not believe in his confession. They took the cherished photographs out of those lavender-scented bureaux drawers in which they shared an old glove-box with, perhaps, a first curl in an envelope, or a rattle of cast milk teeth, and however hard they scrutinized the glossy prints, they never saw Mignon’s face [his accomplice in the séances] but saw another face, and heard, in their mind’s ear, the soft, familiar voice demanding the impossible: ‘Mama! Papa! don’t cry!’ So you could say the evidence of Herr M.’s crime remained, in itself, perfectly innocent. Oh, dear delusion! And still Mama sleeps with the picture under her pillow. (Carter, 1994, p. 139)

1 Theatres in the Skull: The Society for Psychical Research and Actress Narratives

In her spiritualist work There is No Death (1892), Florence Marryat often alludes to mediums and spirit manifestations in terms of artistic talent.1 Somewhat paradoxically, however, this emphasis on theatrical or performative ability is used to verify the authenticity of various spiritualist phenomena. The ‘spirit voices’ which are heard through the mediumship of Rosina Showers, for example, are deemed to be genuine because otherwise ‘Miss Showers ought to have made a fortune in exhibiting her talent in public. I have heard the best ventriloquists in the world, but I never heard one who could produce four voices at the same time’ (Marryat, 1892, p. 115). In another case, Marryat asserts that a young Egyptian belly dancer materialized by the American medium Miss Berry is a bona fide spiritual entity along similar lines. If Berry was a fraud, then she would surely have chosen an alternative career – ‘such twists and bounds and pirouettes’, we are told, would have earned her great wealth ‘on the stage’ (ibid., p. 224). Marryat’s references to the stage and other performative tropes are clearly informed by her own career as an actress and playwright. This experience provides her with a rich depository of metaphors, allusions and technical terms from which to draw in her descriptions of the phantasmal ‘theatricals’ of the séance. Marryat was also a prolific and skilful novelist who was well aware of the impact her words had on readers; it is therefore doubly interesting that she should choose to deploy a theatrical vocabulary associated with spectacle and mimicry in order to authenticate spiritualist happenings. Consciously and unconsciously, she creates a play between artifice and truth, ghostliness and materiality. Nevertheless, what is clear is that the truths of spiritualism form strong links with the Victorian theatre. For many sceptics, mediums could (at best) be dismissed as eccentric artistes or entertainers. 15

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For advocates, as Marryat shows us, if a medium could emulate a materialized spirit perfectly, then she would naturally be performing on the stage rather than in the spirit cabinet. One of the main interests of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), alongside thought-transference, ghosts and hypnosis, was the investigation of spiritualism. The SPR’s rigorous but unfruitful attempts to authenticate spirit materialization and the consequent shift in focus to the mental aspects of mediumship (e.g. trance states, automatic writing, clairvoyance and spirit possession) can therefore be seen as a crucial factor in the remodelling of the séance – eschewing the striking physicality of materialization for the inner hauntings of the mind.2 This inward movement within spiritualism, from the spirit cabinet to the medium’s head, also coincides with changes in acting technique and the writing of dramatic parts for women at the turn of the century. Exaggerated somatic representations of emotion and female stereotypes gradually gave way to a plethora of intricate, psychologically complex and challenging roles.3 Most importantly, the development of new and naturalistic acting techniques runs parallel to (if not overlaps with) the SPR’s quest to define ‘natural’ mediumship within the ever-widening fields of psychology and science. It is precisely this process that brings these two disciplines so close together, far closer than it appears at first glance. The ‘spectralization’ of the actress in this period (one of the key processes that brought mediumship and the Victorian stage together) has been previously commented upon by critics. As Nina Auerbach observes – ‘If ghosts are actors, actors are regularly represented as spectres, emanations, doppelganger, apparitions of the natural self. Actors and ghosts both appear as unnatural impositions of authentic being’ (Auerbach, 1990, p. 18). It is precisely this rift between ‘authentic being’ and its ‘unnatural’, phantasmal projections that the new acting theories tried to both bridge and erase, all the while bringing the figure of the actress closer to that of the medium. Moreover, the relationship between actors and ghostly doubles is also evident and, somewhat paradoxically, made more tangible in a spiritualist context. As Alex Owen points out, the Society’s interest in more psychical and psychological phenomena alongside the developing availability of female roles might have played an active part in the recession of physical mediumship and the rise in numbers of young actresses – women that might have chosen mediumship in previous decades for ‘excitement, social advancement, and release from the mundane’ (Owen, 1989, p. 73). The developments in the concepts of mediumship and spirit communication can be read as a network of interior (subconscious) and

Theatres in the Skull 17

exterior (spirit) influences – a network that coheres into a kind of theatre within the skull. Interestingly, terms used in Psychical Research such as ‘telepathy’ and ‘telaesthesia’ (both coined by Frederic Myers) can be deployed in a theatrical context in order to better understand the process of identification between the audience and the actress on the stage (Barrett, Gurney and Myers, 1882, pp. 890–900).4 Telepathy (which literally translates from its Greek roots as ‘feeling at a distance’) and telaesthesia (meaning ‘perception at a distance’) offer an alternative framework through which to define the experience of theatrical ‘empathy’ and could even be used to describe the success enjoyed by the three seminal actresses of the period – Ellen Terry, Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. Their personal histories and theatrical performances were apotheosized in the press and in the memories of their audiences and still have a hold on us today, although the scarcity of recordings means that we may never be able to fully appreciate the emotional power of their work.5 Acting and mediumship are embedded in a wide range of ‘narratives’ from diverse areas of fin-de-siècle culture, negotiating the mercurial status of identity and the inner self.

The SPR Propelled by the vision of William Barrett, a professor of Physics, the SPR was officially formed in London on 20 February 1882.6 Henry Sidgwick was elected president; Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney were confirmed as honorary secretaries. The SPR was committed to the investigation of ‘that large body of debateable [sic] phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical and spiritualistic’ (Gauld, 1968, p. 138). It was an amalgam of scientific and ‘occult’ interests, an organization which promised to create a new discipline from its constituent parts and attracted a varied membership.7 The primary objectives of the Society are listed below: 1. An examination of the nature and extent of any influence which may be exerted by one mind upon another, apart from any generally recognised mode of perception. 2. The study of hypnotism, and the forms of so-called mesmeric trance, with its alleged insensibility to pain; clairvoyance and other allied phenomena. 3. A critical revision of Reichenbach’s researches with certain organisations called ‘sensitive’, and an inquiry into whether such organisations

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possess any power of perception beyond highly exalted sensibility of the recognised sensory organs. 4. A careful investigation of any reports, resting on strong testimony, regarding apparitions at the moment of death, or otherwise, or regarding disturbances in houses reputed to be haunted. 5. An inquiry into the various psychical phenomena commonly called Spiritualistic; with an attempt to discover their causes and general laws. 6. The collection and collation of existing materials bearing on the history of these subjects. (‘Objects of the Society’ in PSPR, I, 1882–3, pp. 3–5) Since the early part of the 1870s, the group that would become the central axis of the Society – including Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick, Arthur and Eleanor Balfour (who later married Sidgwick) – were involved in examining phenomena which, apart from hypnosis, fell outside the concerns of materialist science. Myers, in his introduction to Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (published posthumously in 1903), comments that this ‘small group of Cambridge friends’ (Myers, 1903, I, p. 7) was not simply trying to use metaphysics to explain these strange occurrences or science to dismiss them. Rather, the aim was to use various kinds of experimentation and observation, ‘the same methods of deliberate, dispassionate, exact inquiry which have built up our actual knowledge of the world which we can touch and see’, to learn about their origins and authenticity (ibid.). Psychical Research not only formed close links with science by using a similar empiricist template but also attempted to explore and define a plethora of occult or otherworldly phenomena through developments in physics, chemistry and psychology.8 As Roger Luckhurst asserts, ‘part of the fascination of psychical research has been in coming to understand how it capitalized on the fissures of scientific materialism, exploiting uncertainty and transition in knowledges and institutions of cultural authority’ (Luckhurst, 2002, p. 2). Oliver Lodge, for example, an eminent physicist who would serve as the Society’s president, experimented in thought-transference in 1884 and in wireless telegraphy in 1894 – preceding in many ways the hypotheses of Marconi’s Hertzian waves (Lodge, 1884, pp. 189–200).9 Similarly, in the early part of 1875, William Crookes’ experiments with spectroscopes had led him to investigate physical mediumship and shaped his later interest in telepathy (Luckhurst, 2002, pp. 24–32). The ‘invisible’ terrain that science was beginning to tackle (X-rays, radio waves, sub-particles and so on) had


formed, at least metaphorically, a series of links with the Society’s objectives. Many of the SPR’s researchers were therefore attempting to turn these metaphorical links into literal, breakthrough connections.10 However, Psychical Research is often perceived as a kind of analgesic response to scientific materialism and rising agnosticism. As Pamela Thurschwell states, the ‘driving desire [behind many Psychical Researchers] was to find scientific proof of survival after death, and thus ally the claims of nineteenth-century positivist science with the older claims of religious faith’ (Thurschwell, 2001, p. 15). Indeed, Janet Oppenheim goes so far as to define Psychical Research as a ‘surrogate faith’11 while Luckhurst concedes that it could also be understood as a ‘fascinatingly scientised rhetoric for sometimes transparently religious yearnings’ (Ledger and Luckhurst, 2000, p. 269). Nevertheless, Psychical Research is far more than a relief system for religious disenchantment – as Thurschwell and Luckhurst have previously argued. It created a ghostly but dynamic series of dialogues between the other world and the outer limits of scientific advancement; it overlapped with exciting developments in psychology and even played a major role in the configuration of late Victorian fiction. Moreover, as Thurschwell indicates, Psychical Research shares a variety of interests that are inseparable from Freudian psychoanalysis – illustrating the extent to which the SPR was not only adopting but actively contributing to the emergence of new terrains of knowledge (Thurschwell, 2001, p. 1). Consider then, as an example, Myers’ illuminating study on the ‘Multiplex Personality’ published in 1886. Not only does this work go some way towards demystifying a particularly troubling and complex disorder but was instrumental in defining a psychological condition which is still very much misunderstood in popular culture today (Myers, 1886, pp. 648–65).12 Moreover, Myers was ardently engaged in continental psychology and would often report on the theories of Jean Charcot and Alfred Binet (especially in relation to hysteria) in the Society’s Proceedings.13 In Human Personality, Myers’ own theory of the ‘subliminal consciousness’ and his vision of the mind as a layered architectural space directly precede and anticipate key elements of Freud.14 Psychical Researchers attempted to challenge and resolve the uncertain distinction between psychological and psychical – a fact which perhaps explains why Freud, Jung and Theodore Flournoy would often contribute articles to the PSPR, each of them demonstrating varying degrees of belief in the communicative relationship between the living and the dead (Gauld, 1968, p. 39l).15 After all, both disciplines used the (rather elusive) term ‘psyche’ as a way of distinguishing their investigations

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from exclusively biological and neurological studies of the brain. Perhaps one of the unique qualities of Psychical Research was the way in which it located the psyche within a simultaneously ethereal and organic network – affected by the brain but also persisting after death. The opaque borderline between ‘psychology’ and the ‘psychical’, between an established and an emerging science, was a major preoccupation of the investigators. They strove to understand the ‘occult’ in terms of natural but unexplored phenomena and committed themselves to desensationalizing the séance and the haunted house. In the first report of the SPR’s Literary Committee, for example, great emphasis is placed on the distinction between ‘evidence’ that is ‘quite unspiced for the literary palate’ and gothic narratives like The Mysteries of Udolpho (Barrett and Massey et al., 1882–3, p. 11). Indeed, Frank Podmore, in his 1908 study of Psychical Research and spiritualism, encapsulates the Society’s aims and rationale as ‘the naturalisation of the supernatural’ – a phrase that clearly indicates how the SPR set out to incorporate the other world into the ever-changing parameters of ‘nature’ (Podmore, 1908). Expanding further, both Phantasms of the Living (1886) and Human Personality are paradigmatic of the SPR’s attempts to detach itself from supernatural or ‘gothic’ allusions and to construct new, systematic theories that would develop the study of consciousness further. In Phantasms, which Edmund Gurney authored with the assistance of Myers and Podmore, apparitions are conceived of not as communications from the dead but from persons who are very much alive. The premise that Gurney and company supported was that these ‘phantasms’ were produced through telepathic projection at moments of great danger, ill health or stress for the recipient. Conscious of the gothic overtones of their vocabulary, Gurney and his fellow researchers justified their decision to use ‘phantasm’ rather than ‘phantom’ by making a critical distinction between the two, as the former is ‘not closely identified with visual impressions alone’ (Gurney, Myers and Podmore, 1886, I, p. 2). The language and the iconography of the ghostly were being redefined, with implications in many areas of Victorian life. Indeed, it is worth noting here that Oscar Wilde parodied this new vocabulary in his short story ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887), in which the eponymous spectre is deliberately treated as a ‘case study’ rather than a frightening apparition. Wilde’s story provides a clear indication of the extent to which Psychical Research was influencing the cultural and literary imagination.16 The phantasms in Gurney’s study (which included anything from audible to tactile to ‘ideational’ manifestations) were therefore categorized as hallucinatory or ‘projected’ forms rather than as bona


fide supernatural beings. In addition, three emotional states were identified as catalysts for phantasmal visitations: (i) anxiety – specifically about someone ill who might die; (ii) grief – in response to a recent death; (iii) anticipation – or expecting someone’s arrival (ibid., p. 506). According to Gurney, these emotions made the ‘agent’ more volatile and the ‘recipient’ more sensitive to projections (felt, heard or seen). Thus, phantasms became intimately linked to inner psychological states and desires. What is more, phantasms can also be read within the theatrical framework that I examine in the second part of this chapter. What emerges is that for the duration of a performance, audience and actress are involved in a complex psycho-spectral relationship – becoming agents and recipients of ‘phantasms’. Over a thousand cases were assessed in the ‘making’ of Phantasms, from which the authors eventually published 702. They deliberately excluded sightings of apparitions which could not be cross-referenced or supported with a convincing story in order to make their analysis more concrete and acceptable to the established fields of knowledge.17 Gurney and Myers tried to place these phantasms within the unexplored realms of (un)consciousness and aimed to establish new psychological theories to account for these strange occurrences. Myers, in his introduction to the study, clearly indicated that the unconscious workings of the mind (of both agents and recipients) were responsible for these apparitions rather than a supernatural, inexplicable agent. Instead, Myers argued that these phenomena remained unexplained because they had yet to be systematically examined by science. He concluded that these unconscious emanations do ‘not follow the familiar channels alone, but are themselves the facilitation of the starting-point of operations which to science are yet wholly new’ (Gurney, Myers and Podmore, 1918, p. liii). Myers understood consciousness as an organized collection of impressions and memories – independent but interlinked, fractions and refractions of familiar objects which intermingled with ‘new objects as real as the old’ (ibid.). This is a part of his developing theory of mediumship and the subliminal self (which forms the core of Human Personality) that portrays the expanding mindscape as an uncharted, haunted territory. Moreover, Gurney’s rigorous scrutiny of apparitions, with a pedantic emphasis on the date, time and other minutiae of a recipient’s testimony, opens up a rich narrative history of psychical transformations and phantasmal realities.18 This may seem unlikely on first consideration as the letters which Gurney received in the course of making the study (narratives of death, danger, lost loves, aspirations and fears) were

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not presented as ghost stories but as ‘scientific’ information. Any elements of these ‘narratives’ which lent too closely to anecdote rather than serious analytical inquiry were stripped away. Indeed, William James emphasizes the demystification of the occult that characterizes the study by drolly remarking that ‘few species of literature are more truly dull than reports of phantasms’ ( James, 1892, p. 736). Nevertheless, the cases are vibrant and arresting documents because they offer a unique view of the ‘other side’ of nineteenth-century existence; they form a sort of afterlife for those who have been excluded, by chance or design, from recorded history. The names and addresses of the recipients, alongside the phantasms they witnessed, become a ghostly database from which we can draw ever-new impressions of the intimacies, anxieties and sensitivities of the Victorian period, the experiences of men and women who would otherwise be lost to us. Whereas Phantasms dealt exclusively with living persons, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, as the title suggests, incorporates states of consciousness from both this world and the next (expanding on the work that Gurney and Myers had already undertaken). Some of Myers’ views on subliminal consciousness had previously been published in the PSPR and were collated, polished and systematized for his magnus opus – merging together psychological theories and spiritualism.19 The study covered hypnosis, trance states, motor automatism (to name but a few examples) and was Myers’ attempt to understand and redefine the parameters of the self – particularly through its various fragmentations and manifestations during séances. The subliminal self was perceived as an all-encompassing faculty through which fractions of other, ‘discarnate’ selves could also emanate during trance states or spirit possession. In addition, just like in Phantasms, Myers attempted to shift the boundaries of nature and normality by coining the term ‘supernormal’ as a replacement for ‘supernatural’. The term is explained in the following way: [P]henomena which are beyond what usually happens – beyond, that is, in the sense of suggesting unknown psychical laws. It is thus formed on the analogy of abnormal. When we speak of an abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but one which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly by supernormal phenomenon, I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits, the action of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, that are discerned in action in everyday life. By higher (either in


a psychical or physiological sense) I mean, apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution. (Myers, I, 1903, p. 5) In summary then, the interweaving of the ‘supernormal’ (or indeed the ‘supernatural’ if Myers’ explanation does not entirely satisfy) with theories of psychology and evolution took place between 1880 and 1900 and reshaped the séance. The drawing-room theatricals of the 1870s, which I will read in the third chapter as visible embodiments of the Victorian subconscious, were interiorized within the medium’s own consciousness. Automatic writing and trance utterances became the dominant expressions of mediumship as the attempts to understand the ‘natural’ laws behind these phenomena intensified. Indeed, Myers’ hypothesis that the Self was a collection of fragments and, at the same time, a fragment of a larger, more mysterious psychical network certainly comes close to a form of metaphysics but his work remains closely bound to the claims of science and psychology.

The stage and the séance: Dramatic roles/subliminal selves In her memoir Both Sides of the Curtain (1940), the actress Elizabeth Robins narrates how she fulfilled her dream of performing on the stage through a séance. The anecdote, recalled for dramatic effect rather than to demonstrate her advocacy of spiritualism, shows how Robins perceived acting as a vocation rather than a profession she simply decided to follow: Not to go into all that, I may say that but for the intensity of interest in spirit-communication felt by the world outside, heaven alone knows how I could have found my way to the stage. My only opportunity came through a chance acquaintance whose grief for a dead daughter had thrown her among the spiritualists. I, at eighteen or so, on a flying visit to New York with my father, had put it into the lady’s head that I was destined to go on the stage and a Medium, whom I had not so much as heard of, then, put it into my new friend’s head that she was destined to help me to my end. Charlotte Cushman the American Tragic actress, appeared in person (to the spirit-seeing eye) for the express purpose of assuring the grief-stricken New York lady that her usefulness in the world was not ended, as she had thought. A great work waited for her. She was to send for Elizabeth. ‘Who is that?’ the medium demanded of the ghost. ‘Why have I not heard of

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her before?’ ‘You will hear of her’. Charlotte said. ‘The world will hear of her. Under my guidance you will help her to go on the stage’. (Robins, 1940, pp. 287–8) This passage begins to expose the deep connection between professional actresses and spirits, between the séance and the stage. Elizabeth Robins romanticizes the beginnings of her career by deploying the spiritualist tropes of the milieu. Indeed, a decade earlier, Florence Cook and Catherine Wood, two of the most popular materialization mediums, discussed their ‘calling’ in similar terms. They both attended séances during which they were informed that they should develop their spiritualist talents.20 If we return to Owen’s claim (cited in the introduction) that the rise in the numbers of actresses corresponds with the recession of physical mediumship, we can therefore detect the pattern emerging here. In the 1870s, the séance was the platform for young women like Cook and Wood to lead dynamic and unconventional lives. In the 1880s, the spirits urged strong-willed girls like Robins to tread the boards. Furthermore, the spirit message which prompted Robins’ stage career was communicated in the presence of a diverse group of older women who are representative of both the domestic and the public spheres (the mother, the medium and the actress). These figures are powerful archetypes of Victorian womanhood, encouraging the young and inexperienced girl to pursue her dreams. Rather than focusing on the séance as a space for the articulation of thespian desires, my emphasis here will be on the multiple ways that stage acting and Psychical Research ‘cross-pollinated’ each other through a shared vocabulary of natural behaviour and fragmented personality. Indeed, besides this common ground, the change in the perception of the acting profession coincided with the SPR’s shift from the physical to the mental or ‘interior’ aspects of mediumship (which were held in higher esteem by investigators).21 In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, acting had been remodelled as a legitimate means of personal, social and artistic improvement.22 Eliza Lynn Linton, for example, argues for the socio-economic merits of acting in her article ‘The Stage as a Profession for Women’ written in 1885. Linton claims that the truly talented actress raises her own status among her peers and the status of acting itself within the broader culture (Linton, 1885, p. 18). She juxtaposes the ‘stage-struck’ girl who ‘thinks she can act without due study and preparation’, the girl who displays ‘a little command of feature, a little power of mimicry and power of representation, memory enough to repeat her lines without stumbling, grace enough


to manage her train without tripping’ with the girl who ‘has a true vocation’, to whom acting ‘is an art to be acquired by earnest study and perfected by much pains’. She concludes that for these actresses ‘our new Dramatic College ought to be the Alma Mater, to whom they would owe what youths owe to Oxford and Cambridge’ (ibid.). Linton’s vision of a meticulous, serious art which would educate young women and develop the finer elements of their characters is not so dissimilar to William James’ presidential address to the SPR in 1894 on the question of ‘authentic’ mediumship. Impressed by Myers’ systematic experiments with automatic writing, James argued that mental forms of mediumship had finally supplanted the ‘base’, physical elements of spiritualist practice: It is pleasant to turn from phenomena of the dark sitting-room and rat-hole type (with their tragicomic suggestion that the whole order of nature might possibly be overturned in one’s own head, by the way in which one imagined oneself, on a certain occasion, to be holding a tricky peasant woman’s feet) to the calm air of delightful studies. ( James, 1896, p. 6) This excerpt hints at a certain elitism behind the Society’s investigation of spiritualist phenomena. James’ belief that Psychical Research would unlock the mysteries of the other world is inextricably bound up with the conception of mental mediumship as a higher, authentic (and respectable) form of communication with the spirits. The ‘dark sittingrooms’, ‘rat-holes’ and ‘tricky peasant’ women associated with physical manifestations are sharply contrasted with the ‘calm air of delightful studies’ – lacking in spectacle but promising more in terms of truth and knowledge. Both Linton and James therefore attempt to ‘redeem’ (or elevate) the figure of the actress and the medium respectively. Just as James argued against unprincipled materialization mediums, Linton condemns women who sought the ‘easy gratification of vanity and egotism, in the display of her [the actress’] pretty person and the centralisation of interest on herself’ (Linton, 1885, p. 18). In the various experiments carried out by the Psychical Researchers, this change was illustrated by the close attention paid to the details of spirit communications. Great weight was placed on determining the spirit’s exact identity as he or she communicated through writing or speech. Significantly, the fresh-faced young mediums of decades past had been replaced by older, often married trance mediums. One such medium, Leonora Piper, a middle-aged mother of two from the USA,

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was to become an object of fascination for James, Myers and later Oliver Lodge – who studied the automatic-writing scripts and trance utterances delivered by her spirit control, a Frenchman known as Dr Phinuit.23 Phinuit, speaking or writing through Piper, would often make valid diagnoses of ailments the sitters might be suffering from and would sometimes speak on behalf of spirits that were too ‘weak’ to communicate directly. Most importantly, Piper’s mediumship was crucial to Myers’ attempt to understand and formulate the extent to which personality survived after bodily death. Unlike physical materialisations where spirits simply had to make an appearance in order to convince sitters of their existence, it was considered vitally important that spirits could accurately recount their memories of life. In a series of séances discussed in Human Personality, the identity of Kakie Sutton, a little girl who died after a long illness and who communicated with the assistance of Phinuit through Mrs Piper, was confirmed along these lines. After Kakie’s spirit performed a song called ‘Row Row’, a favourite of hers, and asked for her toys, a ‘horsey’ and an ‘old ragdoll’ named Dinah, her parents were convinced of the authenticity of the communications. Unlike Florence Marryat’s daughter in 1871 (who made her appearance at the opening of a spirit cabinet), the identity of this spirit child was established through voices and writings channelled by a middle-aged medium (Marryat, 1892, p. 21).24 Most hauntingly, Kakie informed her parents that she still had ‘the pretty little flowers you put on me’, a reference to the lilies-of-the-valley placed in her casket (Myers, 1903, II, p. 246). This last detail prompted Myers to wonder ‘precisely when the consciousness is finally withdrawn from the body’ (ibid., p. 247), a question that not only applies to our understanding of death but to the practices of mediumship and acting in general. After all, both deliberately make use of the body as a kind of ‘vessel’, a living space ‘inhabited’ by characters or spirits. On the stage, the fin-de-siècle actress was also remodelled by an emphasis on interiority – a new respect for the ability to bring characters to life, to create a convincing or ‘authentic’ persona, rather than just physical beauty. Nevertheless, the conception of the actress as superficial, as surface rather than depth, persisted in many forms of mainstream theatrical discourse. Elizabeth Robins, for example, describes an episode in which Henry Irving complained that the profession of the actress was easier than that of her male counterpart – ‘[W]omen have an easy road to travel on the stage. They have but to appear and their sweet feminine charm wins the battle’ (Powell, 1997, p. 158). It can be argued then that this comment, made by one of the most eminent actors of the era, turns


the figure of the actress into a kind of apparition, a one-dimensional and insubstantial form. Irving therefore provides compelling evidence for Nina Auerbach’s claim, already cited in the introduction to this chapter, that the stage actress was ‘spectralized’ during the fin de siècle. It was left to the likes of Robins (who forged her reputation by playing many of Ibsen’s heroines) to challenge and disrupt Irving’s prejudices by portraying complex, demanding characters – a task which required skill, insight and sensitivity rather than just a pretty face. Sally Ledger argues that it was Ibsen who revolutionized both the theatrical and textual representation of Victorian women. Abandoning the excesses of melodrama, his plays dissected the emotional and psychological damage caused by the normative aspects of femininity and social or domestic enclosure (Ledger, 2001, p. 82). As I have already discussed in the case of Piper, we can identify a similar pattern in the séance – moving away from the spectacle of materializations to an emphasis on more ‘measured’ forms of mediumship such as trance utterances and automatic writing. Whereas physical mediumship was ‘iconolatric’ in its representation of gender (moustaches and top hats for men, long flowing hair and veils for women), gender characteristics were communicated more subtly through the nuances of the voice in mental mediumship. It is therefore clear that in the theatre, as well as in the world of the SPR, we have a kind of double motion in play. The emphasis on the inner workings of the psyche was projected ‘outwards’, as it were, as the actress and the medium began to be associated more with talent or genius rather than their physical being. If we compare the prevalent theories on mediumship and acting in the fin de siècle, a number of shared concepts come into focus – identity, authenticity and conscious or subconscious imitation. The relationship between spirits and mediums was discussed by Myers in terms of possession, invasion and substitution (a relationship in which the medium was not always an empty vessel ‘taken over’ by a spirit but involved some forms of reciprocal action and reaction). In the theatre, Denis Diderot’s Paradox of Acting (newly translated in 1883) and William Archer’s counter-arguments in Masks or Faces? (1888) employed a similar template to discuss the relationship between actors and roles – bringing these two discourses into an intimate dialogue. The idea of possession that was so central to mediumship also defines the actress on the stage and the rendition of her roles. Debates contrasting the ‘calculating’ with the ‘emotional’ or ‘instinctive’ actress create an ambiguity as to the extent to which the role is performed or lived. Séance and stage possess each other.

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In Psychical Research, ‘authentic’ mediums were assessed according to the premise that their subliminal selves could at any point take over the communication and could also control the spirit itself. This is a crucial change in emphasis from the 1870s – reshaping the medium from a passive receptacle to an active interlocutor. In Human Personality, Myers attempts to explain the different kinds of possession experienced in mediumship. It is important to define these ‘levels’ of possession at this point as some of them can also be applied as critical metaphors to acting on the stage. During a spirit possession, the medium’s ‘own personality does for the time altogether disappear, while there is a more or less complete substitution of personality; writing or speech being given by a spirit through the entranced organism (Myers, 1903, II, p. 189). However, in persons of ‘genius’, the subliminal self must be regarded almost as an entirely distinct entity from the supraliminal (or conscious) self, as if it were a spirit in its own right. The subliminal self therefore occupies the brain centres usually reserved for supraliminal work. Thus, we can say that there is another kind of ‘possession’ in play here: which illustrates … the rapid metastasis of psychical product … of which these highest centres are capable. The highest genius would thus be the completest self-possession – the occupation and dominance of the whole organism by those profoundest elements of the self which act from the fullest knowledge, and in the wisest way. (ibid., p. 193) This complex, secondary type of possession is important for my purposes here because it is based on an understanding of human personality as essentially polymorphous rather than ‘fragmented’. Self and the other merge into a series of substitutions and transformations, ‘whole’ psychical entities within the broader geography of the mind as opposed to the pathologized units (produced by trauma) of the fragmentary model. This challenges the very foundations of our understanding of ‘personality’ and identity. If we are to read this form of possession through acting theory, we can see that ‘self-possession’ and ‘genius’ become metaphorical tropes which illuminate the processes the actress went through to inhabit her roles. The ‘autobiographical’ elements the actress brought to the stage ‘possessed’ the character being performed (rather than vice versa) and turned the role into an emanation of her personal history. Eleonora Duse, whom I will discuss later, is the best example of this style of acting – oscillating


between the concepts of Diderot and Archer but unified by the idea of ‘self-possession’ on the stage. Denis Diderot’s unfinished Paradoxe sur le comédien (1784) had been re-translated in 1883 with an introduction by none other than the sacré monstre of the English stage, Henry Irving. Its impact on contemporary debates about the nature of acting cannot be underestimated. By imagining a dialogue between two speakers, Diderot presents the opposing images of the calculating actor (who strategically studies human nature and then imitates it) and the emotional actor (who becomes so immersed in the role that he forms a deep empathy with the character he is playing). The first speaker asks at one point – ‘If he [the actor] is himself while he is playing, how is he to stop being himself? If he wants to stop being himself, how is he to catch just the point where he is to stay his hand?’ (Strasberg, 1957, p. 15). These questions do not simply resemble the investigative remit of the SPR but are integral (albeit indirectly) to its study of spirit possession and subliminal selves. The actor who plays himself on the stage, who is simultaneously both himself and the character, reconciling the encroachment of otherness with his conscious identity, is bound together with the levels of possession that Myers used to understand the relationship between spirit and medium. In Diderot’s text, the first speaker (who is against the ‘emotionalist’ point of view), argues that an actor ‘who plays from thought, from study of human nature, from constant imitation of some ideal type, from imagination, from memory’ will be ‘one and the same’, consistently true to the role, no matter how many times he has to perform (ibid.). To Diderot’s critics, this was the most difficult aspect of his writing to digest, especially since it portrayed the actor as a simulation or ‘reflection’ of reality (which could never produce the ‘true’ performances that he spoke of). William Archer, an advocate of the ‘new drama’ such as Ibsen’s and one of Diderot’s main opponents, wrote his defence of the emotional approach in Masks or Faces? (1888). The true actor, according to Archer, did not simply observe and imitate human behaviour but clothed himself ‘in the phantom of his imagination’ and learnt to ‘heighten the sensitiveness of his organism to contagion from the emotions of his personage’ (ibid., pp. 223–4). Interestingly, Gail Marshall argues that Diderot’s manuscript (which was unpublished until after his death) is full of ambiguities that were remodelled by his translators and advocates to cater for the tastes of the fin-de-siècle public. Marshall comments that the opposition between emotionalism and anti-emotionalism is strategically orchestrated ‘in order to counteract the implication in Diderot that the best actor might

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be a calculating creature whose theatrical standing relied on a lack of common humanity. This was an implication particularly unbecoming to the actress and one which had to be refuted if she was to remain desirable in, and subject to, the audience’s gaze’ (Marshall, 1998, p. 123). If the actress was only a simulacrum of the heroine she portrayed then she was a void, stripped of her feminine empathy (one of her ‘essential’ gender characteristics). Moreover, the actress’ performance would not ignite an emotive response from the audience if the latter was constantly aware of her calculated approach on and off stage. We can therefore link Marshall’s argument with wider transformations in the period, particularly the fin-de-siècle preoccupation with the influence of one mind on another, with telepathy and with the transmission of emotions, images and ideas.25 Indeed, because Psychical Research addresses these aspects of intellectual and emotive ‘transmission’, the SPR once again becomes central to our understanding of the relationship between the actress and her role, and the actress and the audience. To better appreciate the debate over emotive and intellectual acting methods and its relationship to Psychical Research, it is essential to look at Henry Irving’s introduction to Diderot’s work. Irving, in a sense, acts here as mediator between Diderot’s theories and fin-de-siècle notions of emotional transmission (such as telepathy and telaesthesia). Attempting to resolve the ‘paradox’ at the heart of Diderot’s project, Irving argued that the actor has ‘a double consciousness in which all the emotions proper to the occasion may have full sway, while the actor is all the time on the alert for every detail of his method’ (Strasberg, 1957, p. 120). Significantly, Archer, though cast as Diderot’s opposite, expands on Irving’s proposition: [The actor,] like everyone else, has many strata of consciousness, so that the greatest agitation of the surface-layer may be accompanied by perfect calm beneath. While King Lear is mourning over Cordelia, and feeling in his own nerves all the symptoms of actual sorrow, another section of his mind may be keeping strict watch upon each accent and gesture, a third registering the effect of every touch upon the audience, and a fourth dwelling with pleasure or pain on private and domestic concerns – the notice in yesterday’s Telegraph or the supper awaiting him at home. (Archer, 1884, pp. 120–1) This splitting of the actor’s consciousness is not so far removed from Myers’ theories of human personality (especially the ‘multiplex’


personality) and brings the actor (or actress) ever closer to the practices of mediumship and psychic automatism. Moreover, Myers’ concept of the subliminal self was also formed around the notion of ‘various personalities under one single consciousness’ (Myers, 1891–2, p. 301), of a polymorphous yet unified entity. Archer’s actor is King Lear, a professional at work and an ordinary man at home at the same time. This splitting effect is not only desirable but appears to be completely natural. The actor does not require any extra faculties to achieve this – he is, as Archer states, ‘like everyone else’. Furthermore, unlike the superficial and exaggerated poses used to demonstrate emotion by earlier actors, Archer argues that the biology of the actor becomes attuned to the character he is portraying (another feature of acting theory which resonates with the idea of spectral possession). Archer’s opposition to Diderot’s theories (although the differences between them are not as straightforward as we might think) was recapitulated in his analysis of Eleonora Duse. The great Italian actress was, according to Archer, a living embodiment of Diderot’s folly. Archer argued that Duse’s genius was an amalgam of ‘an inward gift and an outward accident’: The inward gift is an extraordinary imagination, an unequalled power of projecting herself into another personality and living through the minutest details of its experience. The outward accident is that which made her (we are told) a child of the stage, and so gave her, not only hereditary aptitudes, but that early and lifelong habit of dramatic expression which has made her body the perfectly responsive instrument of her mind. (Archer, 1895, pp. 301–2) Rather than presenting Duse’s talent as the result of long hours of study and premeditated calculations, Archer presents her as both a ‘born’ actress (an actress with an irrepressible individual gift) and the beneficiary of happy ‘accident’. This rather romantic conception of Duse’s talent is counterbalanced by Adelaide Ristori, a great actress herself, who identified a more shrewd and strategic dimension to Duse’s performances. Nevertheless, both of these positions (emotive and logical) bring Duse into contact with the otherworldly elements of mediumship. Ristori’s description, for example, of Duse’s physical image as ‘extraordinarily pale … an appearance that one can easily take apart and reconstruct’ casts the actress as a kind of shape-shifter or a spectre (Stokes, Booth and Bassnett, 1988, p. 137). Further on, Ristori portrays Duse as

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an entranced or hypnotized subject, archetypes of the Victorian era that are also closely tied to the imagery and techniques of mediumship: She has a rather curious manner of gesture that has an automated quality, a certain stiff letting go of her arms down her sides with her body tired and drooping, a certain angular way of lifting her arm, holding it in a rather mechanical stiffness, a certain way of raising her open hands with all five fingers pointing outwards that would be utterly intolerably baroque were any other actress to try to imitate her, but which in her produces an effect that holds one’s attention fixedly. From all this I draw the conclusion that Duse is an actress of great skill, of great ingenuity, but that she is by no means an artist of truthfulness, as some of her over-enthusiastic admirers are wont to suggest. (ibid.) As we can see, this description reintroduces the Diderot debate (the question of ‘truthfulness’) while at the same time drawing on hypnosis and trance to communicate Duse’s ‘automated quality’. She is both hypnotized and hypnotizing, Trilby and Svengali at once – her rigid limbs and angular shapes appear to be under the influence of some outside force yet she also ‘holds one’s attention fixedly’. According to Ristori’s reading, Duse skilfully manipulates both herself and the captive audience in a double motion. Similar to Ristori’s conception of Duse as a ‘self-fashioning’ actress, Arthur Symons argued that her talent ‘created itself literally out of her flesh and blood, and it was nurtured upon her childhood’s misery and kept alive by her youth’s ordeals. With an impenetrable reserve she kept her private life at once secret and sacred, only on the stage allowing herself the absolute luxury of opening her heart wild with its unsatiated desires’ (Symons, 1926, p. 60). Significantly, if we are to extend the metaphors of possession and containment further, Symons portrays Duse as the possessing ‘agent’ in a performance rather than as an empty vessel who is possessed by the ‘spirit’ of the heroine. The elements of Duse’s memories and personal life that surfaced during her performances displace previous theories of acting (and, to a certain extent, consciousness). The actress becomes an emanation or duplicate of herself, fantastic and factual, not only reviving her emotional past, but transferring it to the character she inhabits. Indeed, Gail Marshall goes so far as to argue that Duse’s complex autobiographical acting actually displaces the authority of the original text. Without changing the words on the


page, the actress radically alters ‘the conception of her parts that they are scarcely recognisable to the playwright’ (Marshall, 1998, p. 171). This problematic segregation of personalities, fictional and otherwise, as well as the displacement of the writer’s authority, runs parallel to various elements of mediumship. As the medium was inhabited by the personalities of the dead, she was also the hidden source of authority in the ‘textual’ networks of Psychical Research (the documentation of otherworldly voices and events). Indeed, in a deliciously ironic twist, Gurney, Myers and Stead all attempted to make contact with the living after their deaths – controlled and channelled through the mediums they had once investigated. This curious reversal from beyond the grave undermines their power as researchers and reinforces the position of the medium as transmitter and ‘author’ (Luckhurst, 2002, pp. 253–6; Oppenheim, 1985, p. 133). Just as Duse was able to ‘take over’ the parts she played without altering the script, mediums were able to assert themselves creatively using the very discourses which defined them. Expanding on this theme further, we can also find an illuminating symmetry between Symons’ assessment of Duse and Myers’ study of Leonora Piper’s trance communications. According to Myers, the subliminal and the spectral self, like actress and character, are intertwined. The utterances heard during a séance are therefore the amalgamation of both the medium’s and the spirit’s identities: I have spoken of parallel series of manifestations [such as those involving Piper] indicating on the one hand the powers of the subliminal self, which culminate in ecstasy, and on the other the agency of discarnate spirits, leading on to possession. But the phenomena are not, in fact, so simply arranged. It seems probable that when a spirit can control a sensitive’s organism, the sensitive’s own subliminal self may be able to do the same. (Myers, 1903, II, p. 249; my italics) The same questions of authority, control and authenticity which characterize the fin-de-siècle debate over acting surface here in Myers’ text. The medium (or ‘sensitive’ as she is called here) saturates and influences the very spirit she is supposed to be possessed by. In addition, the renaming of the medium as a ‘sensitive’ defines the exchange between the living and the dead as a more spidery, intricate construction – a web of multilayered personalities in which the power relations between mediums and their spirit-controls are constantly negotiated.26

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Although the term ‘sensitive’ implies a certain passivity and weakness (reflected in the way that it was used by other SPR researchers to refer to the organism that was influenced by the spirit), Myers’ hypothesis of cross-influence alters its meaning. The ‘sensitive’ is possessed by a spirit but also capable of controlling it. In the fin-de-siècle theatre, the term sensibility (very closely related to ‘sensitivity’ before their meanings grew apart over time) was debated extensively in Diderot’s Paradox (Strasberg, 1957, pp. 60–4). On the one hand, the actor of ‘sensibility’ was praised for his ability to be carried away by emotion during a performance. On the other, the actor could display this ‘sensibility’ but also modulate it – creating an ambiguity over the extent to which ‘sensibility’ was an act of self-surrender or self-balancing. As the question of sensitivity/sensibility was a central part of the changing conceptions of the theatre and the séance, it was logical that the literary writing of the era would absorb this connection. Two narratives, Florence Marryat’s My Sister the Actress (1881) and Henry James’ ‘Nona Vincent’ (1894) use the notion of being a ‘sensitive’ in their representations of actresses. A long way removed from the usual risqué stories of the theatre that were so popular, Marryat and James record the lives of virtuous, sensitive young women on the stage and depict acting as a haunting experience. Marryat ‘covertly’ used theatrical concepts and motifs to describe mediumship. However, in My Sister the Actress, she reverses this process – deploying mediumistic tropes in order to frame the experience of the professional stage. Indeed, Marryat would often use spiritualist reference points to discuss various aspects of her life and her belief in ghostly phenomena provided her with a rich source of metaphors. The excerpt below demonstrates: Some times I have as many as a dozen plots in different stages of completion, floating in my brain … I never feel at home with a plot till I have settled the names of the characters to my satisfaction. As soon as I have done that they become sentient beings in my eyes, and seem to dictate what I shall write. I lose myself so completely whilst writing, that I have no idea till I take it up to correct, what I have written. (Black, 1893, p. 88) Marryat fashions herself here as an author-medium. Her writing is, in a sense, the product of her ‘sensitivity’ – a dialogue between her ‘subliminal self’ and ‘the discarnate spirits’ who will become her characters. We can therefore read My Sister the Actress on two levels. Not only can


we examine the mediumistic tropes and allusions embedded in the text but we can also conceive of the act of writing itself as a form of mediumship. Published in 1881, the novel exposes the hypocrisy of middle-class society while at the same time attempting to retrieve the acting profession from the social gutter. Indeed, the title of the novel seems to play on the uncertain status of acting. It can suggest affection (for a beloved sibling with a brilliant career) as well as moral concern (promising a lurid tale of the improprieties of the profession). In fact, the words of the title are spoken only once by Hyacinth, the protagonist’s baby sister, who is too naïve to understand their full implications. The narrative unfolds around Betha Durant, who decides to become an actress after her mother’s death and her father’s subsequent marriage to his long-term lover. The defiant heroine ignores her father’s wish that she should return to the family home and submit herself to the authority of her stepmother. After a short and problematic stay at her aunt’s house, Betha is offered a respectable job as a teacher by her former headmistress. However, her decision to reject this offer (which she deems to be financially exploitative) and to take to the stage instead shocks everybody. Betha’s decision is not an easy one. She wavers between the magnetic promise of realizing her talents and the cultural conventions drilled into her by her middle-class upbringing. On the one hand, she is shocked at herself for considering the idea in the first place – ‘But to be an actress! To stand before the footlights and deliver speeches and imitate the gestures of humanity for common men and women to laugh at or applaud, to contemplate such a profession with pride, or even with equanimity’ (Marryat, 1881, I, pp. 170–1). This clearly articulates the anxiety caused by the thought of entering the public sphere and of ‘imitating’ nature for the pleasure of people who are below her class. The widespread belief that actresses not only succumbed to the ‘common’ gaze in a most improper fashion but also that the art itself was somehow false and deceitful is condensed here in this moment of fretfulness. On the other hand, the narrator informs us of something that Betha herself is unable to admit – perhaps for reasons of modesty which illustrate the protagonist’s kind nature, perhaps because it is not becoming for a young lady and reflective of her aristocratic upbringing. ‘The love of histrionic display’, we are told, ‘is inherent in her: it has lain dormant hitherto for want of encouragement but it is her second nature, and her present indulgence proves to be like the first drop of blood to the tiger’ (ibid., pp. 174–5). The description of Betha’s talent as ‘second nature’ lends her young, virginal presence an altogether different

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(through not necessarily contradictory) dimension. It suggests that this ‘second nature’ directs her actions but is at the same time dangerously difficult to trace, mercurial and hidden. Furthermore, the imagery of the tiger, deployed here by Marryat as an allusion to G. H. Lewes’ representation of the actress as a ‘panther on the stage’ (Lewes, 1968, p. 31),27 transforms Betha into a kind of predator – dominating both her audience and the characters she is playing. Furthermore, it turns Betha into a woman who is not satiated by a conventional, ‘domesticated’ life without implying that her desire for fame is somehow at odds with her femininity. ‘Perhaps’, Betha later explains, ‘you don’t know what a strong feeling ambition is! I yearn to be famous. If I had gone on living my quiet life at home with my dear mother, I might not have felt that yearning but I have tasted the taste of it, and I shall never rest now until I have done something worth doing’ (Marryat, 1881, II, pp. 35–6). Perhaps we can even identify the embryonic New Woman in Betha’s words here – in her rejection of the idea of woman as the passive nurturer, in her determination to fulfil her dreams and desires.28 In addition, Betha’s desire for fame appears to have vampiric undertones – ‘it’s meat and drink,’ she claims, ‘and when it fails you, you die!’ (ibid., p. 50). However, as I have already started to show, Marryat’s portrayal is more subtle than that. Betha’s vampiric (or animalistic) desire for the sustenance that performing provides is counterbalanced by the empathetic, ‘sensitive’ elements of her craft, creating an equilibrium between her raw ambition and her femininity. It is precisely this sensitivity (a subtle interweaving of passivity and control) that allows us to explore the cryptic bond between Marryat’s actress-heroine and her spiritualist experiences in more detail. Betha’s very first performance in front of an audience is at a school production of Schiller’s Joan of Arc. The choice of play and, more specifically, the heroine, are significant here. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for relaying the messages she had received from God and was a favourite icon of spiritualists (in whom they saw a medium murdered for her gifts). Perhaps Marryat chooses Schiller’s play not only for its melodramatic qualities but also to obliquely depict Betha’s mediumistic qualities as a performer (as well as the author’s own spiritualist convictions). When the heroine’s performance is rewarded with warm applause, Betha is startled – ‘as though suddenly awakening from a dream’ (ibid., I, p. 3). Besides echoing the moment in which a medium emerges from a trance, this episode illustrates how the budding actress performs using her emotions and heart, losing herself in the role, rather than having carefully calculated it.


On another occasion, Betha is called to recite from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: Betha neither sees nor hears the effect she is producing. She is far away; she has left the room at Albert Gate and gone back into the Past she tells of. She mourns with Arthur – the sob that nearly chokes his utterance has its ghostly copy in her own – she looks through her unshed tears upon the golden tresses with which Guinevere ‘made her face a darkness from the King,’ and she rides away with him in the mist, bereft and alone! As she comes back to herself and receives the thanks of her audience and overhears their compliments upon her talent, the bright lights dazzle her, she feels sick and giddy – the grief of Arthur appears to have renewed her own trouble… (ibid., pp. 154–5) This recital falls comfortably into the category of sensibility/sensitivity that is in play here and elevates the status of the actress. Moreover, Marryat’s phrasing is steeped in mediumistic imagery and language. Betha is not only transported to the past but the ‘ghostly copy’ of King Arthur’s words is transmitted to the audience through her mouth. Similarly, when Betha ‘looks through her unshed tears upon the golden tresses’, it is unclear if she is looking at the Queen or through her (implying that she has fused with Guinevere’s spirit in a mediumistic exchange). In addition, there is also a sense that Betha becomes a medium to herself. That is to say, the words she is reciting identify and give shape to her own inner troubles. Finally, Betha comes back from this mythical world feeling ‘sick and giddy’, an experience common to many mediums and a detail that further elucidates the hidden complexities of Marryat’s prose. Aspects of feminine empathy, theatrical performance, telepathy, telaesthesia and mediumship are all woven together in order to represent Betha’s ‘transportation’. These connections are strengthened in a later episode, in which Betha studies the role of Medea. The eponymous ‘heroine’ of Euripides’ play is spectralized when Betha remarks to a friend that ‘she and I make a fine noise together’ (ibid., p. 248). It is as if actress and character, like medium and spirit, or ventriloquist and dummy, are conducting a ghostly conversation with each other. This togetherness, however, is problematic. Who exactly is in control here? Is the ‘spirit’ of Medea a separate entity or is she another level of Betha’s multilayered personality, another example of her uncanny ability to both inhabit and be inhabited by a diverse range of characters? In another example, when

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Betha is playing Juliet, she becomes so immersed in the role that ‘she closes her eyes and believes that death will come and take her as she lies there’ (ibid., p. 83). Nevertheless, while this oscillating between the living and the dead, between her characters and her ‘real’ identity, might be bewildering it is both the catalyst for Betha’s rise to fame and, rather paradoxically, proof of the pureness of her heart. By embracing her ‘sensitivity’, she realizes that she was meant to ‘soar into the highest regions of dramatic art’ (ibid., p. 90). Ultimately then, rather than threatening or disrupting her identity, it is through the rendition of other characters that Betha manages to find her own self, to fulfil her desires and direct her talent (just as mediumship provided a unique creative outlet for other women). Betha’s life is enriched by the characters she plays. Indeed, Marryat’s subsequent novels dealing with actresses, such as Facing the Footlights (1883) and Peeress and Player (1884), all conform to the notion of the emotional, sensitive actress and skilfully deploy the vocabulary of the séance in order to establish acting as a graceful, complex and legitimate vocation. Although Marryat does not directly introduce mediumistic performances into her texts, it is clear that the actress’ relationship with her characters and the medium’s relationship with the spirits overlap with each other in a highly imaginative and persuasive way. For different reasons, Henry James’ short story ‘Nona Vincent’ also negotiates the connection between the stage and the occult workings of the mind. The story was conceived shortly after the author read an address to the SPR by his brother William in late 1890 (Edel, 1971, p. 175). The paper dealt with an unsuccessful hypnotic session that William James had conducted with Mrs Piper. Months later, Henry James’ play The American was deemed a critical disappointment after Elizabeth Robins, an otherwise very fine Ibsenite actress, was unable to convincingly portray her character. ‘Nona Vincent’ therefore drew these two strands together – forging strong links between the failures of talented, authentic mediums to communicate with the dead and the failures of actresses on the stage. The story revolves around the writing and production of a play which is also called ‘Nona Vincent’. Although we do not know what the play is about exactly, its title is reminiscent of another heroine of the 1890s – Hedda Gabler. Perhaps this allusion points to James’ own interest in Ibsen’s theatre and to his desire to produce similar plays. Whatever the case, the short story deals with the troubles of a young actress named Violet who, despite her gifts, cannot perform the title role satisfactorily. Eventually, however, she succeeds


in mastering the part after she is visited by the woman on whom the character of ‘Nona’ is based. James’ story explores the extent to which a fictional text is informed by living characters and how those ‘characters’ can be usurped by the very fiction they inspired, how the muse can be substituted completely by the work of art. The playwright, Allan Wayworth, models the persona of Nona Vincent on a close friend, the socialite Mrs Alsager. ‘She had not the voice,’ the narrator explains, ‘she had only the vision. The only envy she was capable of was directed to those who, as she said, could do something.’ ( James, 1971b, p. 175). Mrs Alsager is portrayed here as a kind of failed medium, whose vision is neutered due to her lack of communicative skills. The playwright therefore takes on the vision that she cannot bring through to the outer world – he ‘mediates’, as it were, between Mrs Alsager’s unspoken creativity and his own artistic imagination. Allan’s text constructs an uncanny double of Mrs Alsager, familiar yet alien, that is both his and the woman’s who inspired it – ‘she has your face, your air, your voice, your motion; she has many elements of your being’ (ibid., p. 185). This dramatic heroine, however, proves resistant to performance. Violet, ‘who was terribly itinerant’, could play in ‘a dozen theatres but only in one aspect’, whereas Nona ‘had a dozen aspects, but one theatre’ (ibid., p. 188). Violet’s limited acting range is presented as both static (the repetition of a single ‘aspect’) and fluid (as it is employed in a variety of theatrical spaces). In contrast, Nona’s multifaceted and idiosyncratic personality appears to be stifled by the lone theatre in which the play is due to run and by the shortcomings of the actress who is to perform her. Theatrical space is therefore portrayed here in terms of a ‘host’ body, haunted or possessed by the performances that take place within its boundaries. Most strikingly though, the actress and fictional heroine are treated here as equal entities. In fact, it is Nona who appears more ‘alive’ than Violet – constantly evolving and changing while Violet stagnates. Moreover, Violet becomes fainter, weaker, less substantial as Nona’s ‘presence’ grows. As we are told that Violet ‘isn’t in it [the play]’ (ibid., p. 202), the dramatic heroine is discussed as if she was a living, breathing person by both the playwright and his muse: [S]he had faced him again and was talking about Nona Vincent as if she had been the most interesting of their friends and her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal to their sympathy. Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and Mrs. Alsager had taken a tremendous fancy to her. ‘I can’t tell you how I like that woman!’ she

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exclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only be balm to the artistic spirit. ‘I’m awfully glad she lives a bit. What I feel about her is that she’s a good deal like you,’ Wayworth observed. (ibid., p. 184) Later in the story, the distinctions between character and actress, fiction and fact, are broken down further by Wayworth’s blurred vision – ‘he had been trying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in Violet Grey’s person, what substituted in his vision was simply Violet Grey in Nona’s’ (ibid., p. 189). Violet is overshadowed here by the luminous (though as yet unfulfilled) presence of Nona. In relation to this, we can say that Violet can also be understood in terms of failed mediumship. The ‘poor nervous girl’, who is ‘almost morbidly conscientious’ (ibid., p. 192) of the fact that her performance is lacking is unable to channel the spirit, to bring Nona through on the stage. Nona, a textual self who demands embodiment, hovers over both the dramatist and the actress. Violet’s failure to ‘receive’ Nona becomes increasingly frustrating to both the dramatist and the actress, as the latter is not without talent – ‘She was like a knife without an edge – good steel that had never been sharpened; she hacked away at her hard dramatic loaf, she couldn’t cut it smooth’ (ibid., p. 193). Violet’s failed mediumship on the stage is mended when she is not acting. She is, for example, ‘sensitive’ to Mrs Alsager’s feelings for Wayworth – ‘she is in love with you’ (ibid., p. 195). This observation is a repetition, a ‘doubling’ as it were, of the phrase uttered by Mrs Alsager the previous evening to describe the feelings that Violet herself harbours for Allan. In this way, Violet acts as a medium for both Mrs Alsager and her own inner being at this particular moment. The two women therefore mirror each other in this respect but also cancel each other out through Nona’s personality. The strange repetition entangles the three characters in both a web of desire and in the web of plot – the two women are both in love with Wayworth and, unable to speak for themselves, they become uncanny embodiments (as muse and as actress) of his desire to realize his creation, Nona. Nona prevails over both women through a vision that Allan experiences at the climax of the story. Significantly, it occurs at the very moment that Mrs Alsager visits the failed actress to help her get to grips with the role. Nona appears to the dramatist, her ‘face and form, the living heroine of his play … she was not Violet Grey, she was not Mrs. Alsager, she was not any woman he had seen upon earth, nor was it any masquerade of friendship or of penitence’ (ibid., p. 205). This scene


reanimates the Pygmalion myth in which the sculptor’s creation (and object of desire) comes to life: She struck him, in the strangest way, both as his creation and as his inspirer … [I]f she was so charming … it was because he had made her so, and yet if the weight seemed lifted from his spirit it was because she drew it away. When she bent her deep eyes upon him they seemed to speak of safety and freedom and to make a green garden of the future. From time to time she smiled and said: ‘I live – I live – I live.’ (ibid.) James though does not explicitly state that Nona is a ghost or that there is a moment of telepathic communication between them through her ‘speaking eyes’. The scene has an ambiguous, dream-like quality which is reinforced by Wayworth’s drowsiness. Nevertheless, Nona’s lack of resemblance to Mrs Alsager and Violet turns her into a spirit of sorts, a spectral entity who exists independently of the two women who are bound to her.29 Violet’s performance on the night of the vision is so ‘devilish good’, it is ‘as if she had had a revelation of Nona, so convincing a clearness had been breathed upon the picture’ (ibid., p. 207). In fact, rather than anything ‘devilish’, the visit that the actress receives from Mrs Alsager can be explicated in terms of vampiric psychical consumption. While Mrs Alsager is the more powerful of the two women, she willingly allows herself to be ‘fed upon’ and simulated by the younger actress – ‘Somehow she seemed to give it all to me. I took it – I took it. I kept her before me, I drank her in. For the first time, in the whole study of the part, I had my model – I could make my copy’ (ibid., p. 209; my italics). Mrs Alsager is not merely copied but consumed, emptied, drained. Although the story ends with the happy union in marriage of Violet and Wayworth, Mrs Alsager’s absent-presence haunts the text. She leaves for Torquay only to return after the play has run its course, as if she could not exist while ‘Nona Vincent’ was on the stage. James succeeds in knotting a variety of themes into this story, ranging from the relationship of an artist to his creation, to that of an actress to her role. The occult elements of the story, ambiguous but consistently implied, turn ‘Nona Vincent’ into a quasi-supernatural tale. James’ use of telepathic or mediumistic connections between the dramatic character, the playwright, the muse and the actress creates a network of natural and occult communications. This deeply strange love story is built around an unfolding series of ‘theatres in the skull’.

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By way of a conclusion, we can surmise that the struggle to define ‘naturalness’ that runs in parallel through Psychical Research and the fin-de-siècle theatre has two separate but interconnected sides. In the case of the SPR, we have an attempt to unlock the mysteries of consciousness and to understand the automatisms of the multilayered personality. In the case of theatrics, we have the various efforts to create a ‘new drama’ in which women would not be defined through their plastic poses or through the repetition of melodramatic stereotypes but through the intricacies of their inner lives. We can see the effects of both sides in the changing status of mediumship. In the 1870s, only women with a gift for materialization could become mediums. However, at the turn of the century everyone had the capacity to be a ‘sensitive’ and to explore the hauntings of her own mind. Just as the SPR remodelled spiritualism (not to mention notions of doubling, telepathy, hypnosis and so on), the techniques developed by actresses and the discussion they generated are inextricably linked by a lexicon of influence, control, sensitivity and states of consciousness.30 Mediums as well as actresses were able to subtly (and sometimes flamboyantly) manipulate the rules and conventions to which they were accountable. As a final example then, consider the concept of ‘psychorrhagy’ as it was used in Psychical Research. This term describes ‘a special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space’ (Myers, 1903, I, p. xx). This ‘bleeding-out’ of the psyche, as its Greek roots indicate, can be convincingly applied to both mediumship and acting. Indeed, the psychical spillage that produces the phantasm becomes a crucial metaphor in understanding the way that many fin-de-siècle actresses manifested their own lives on stage – turning the dramatic character into a phantasm re-enacting a ‘real’ past, placing themselves both inside and outside of the play. Moreover, the relationship between Psychical Research and acting which is under scrutiny is essential to the study of the modernist and neo-Victorian novels that follows if we are to read them as ‘enactments’ of the past. By blurring the line between authenticity and mimicry, the novels I will examine become sites of ‘psychorrhagy’ – repositories of phantasms from the Victorian past, bleeding through history. ‘Psychorrhagy’, the involuntary emanation of psychical matter, can therefore become a form of intertextuality – of historical phantasms that project themselves into twentieth-century fiction and which, in turn, are reconstructed and projected back into the nineteenth.

2 Well-tuned Mediums: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson

Within the broader framework of mediumship, the intimate connection between spiritual and textual tropes produces a series of rarely asked yet important critical questions. Can we really begin to ‘communicate’ with the spirits after reading an analysis of automatic writing? Does Myers’ Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death actively contribute to the development of mediumship? How is it that a discarnate group of Psychical Researchers appear to take over the minds, voices and hands of living women – as if, in death, they are investigating the possibilities of spiritualism from within the heads of the mediums themselves? Why is it that spirit writings shimmer with a rich gloss of literary quotations and appropriations, from Plato to Dante, Browning to Tennyson? More specifically, in terms of the history and development of certain modes of female authorship, can we read séance scripts as formal experiments in ‘narrative’ technique? And what useful parallels can we draw between the texts produced by Edwardian and Georgian writing mediums and the modernist experiments of Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair? By focusing on two ‘modernist’ authors who, at the same time, are not readily appropriated into the familiar modernist canon (Woolf, Joyce, Eliot and so on), it is my aim here to demonstrate how key elements of ‘modernism’ can be (re)located in the textual and performative practices of the Edwardian séance – tracing out a spectral chain of connection that forces us to rethink certain received notions about the history of literary innovation. In this chapter, I will therefore explore Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–67) and Sinclair’s Mary Olivier: A Life (1919) in terms of ‘literary mediumship’. Famously, the thirteen formidable volumes of Pilgrimage summon the consciousness of its protagonist, Miriam Henderson, in an apparently ‘undiluted’ and unedited outpouring. The movements of 43

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feminine consciousness itself are dramatized, as it were, in a landmark experiment in literary form. Richardson’s narrative flickers between intensely detailed quotidian observation – ‘[she] found a piece of fine glazed green twine in her string box and tied up the neat packet – sealing the ends of the string with a neat blob on the upper side of the packet, and the folded paper at each end’ (Richardson, 2002, II, p. 47) – and deep philosophical reflection – ‘You know in advance when you are following your life. These things are familiar because reality is here. Coming events cast light. It is like dropping everything and walking backwards to something you know is there’ (ibid., p. 13). Thus, by mimicking the rapidity of successive thoughts, by adopting it as a structural and aesthetic principle, Richardson speaks through Miriam and Miriam speaks through Richardson in a seemingly endless series of replacements and substitutions – the self as Other, the author as protagonist, and vice versa. Similarly, Sinclair’s Mary Olivier also unfolds through a single but ‘dynamic’, complex model of consciousness. The narration of the novel shifts between third and second persons. Mary’s mind is placed in the grammatical and conceptual position of ‘you’; she is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ herself at the same time. Through her addresses and appeals to the reader and through her sustained internal reflection, she fashions herself as both Subject and Object. When we first encounter Mary, she is an infant in her cot and she leaves us as a successful poet who has reconciled the ‘you’ who belongs to the pages we have just read, the documented self as it were, preserved in the reservoirs of memory, with the eternal present of her creative inner life – ‘There was something in you that went on, that refused to turn back, to look for happiness in memory. Your happiness was now, in the moment that you lived, while you made rhymes’ (Sinclair, 2002, p. 311). Most significant for my purposes here, however, is the way in which Mary’s mind hangs between the twin enigmas of birth and death – ‘You couldn’t tell when you were really born. And nobody could tell you what being born was’ (ibid., p. 46). There is a ‘you’ without a narrative, without memory, that cannot be accessed, a ‘you’ which mysteriously persists beyond one’s own conscious experience and indeed the experience of others. In death, of course, this absent presence, this strange inter-space that Sinclair projects between subjectivity and negation, is more troubling still: ‘If you died this minute,’ she writes, ‘there would be the minute after’ (ibid.). Time continues – ‘if you died this minute there would be the minute after’ – but without you in it. There would be a story but no one to tell it. The experience of the séance, however, tells us otherwise. The ‘you’ returns, in full body or in stentorian voice, in writing or photography,

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in physical, aural and textual fragments. It is the task of the medium to channel and perform the ‘you’ of the minute ‘after’. This ‘postmortem’ communication, as I shall demonstrate, therefore becomes a kind of post-script – a writing that both stages and takes over the life lived but not gone, a writing which unfolds in the ghostly time of the minute after, a writing that brims with a thousand ‘yous’. In precisely this sense, Richardson and Sinclair act as mediums to the various selves which comprise a life, from infancy to maturity. They summon the fragments which form part of a whole, the multiple elements of a singular ‘I’, creating an identity that is simultaneously both fixed and diffuse as it is rendered on the page. While these novels have been read as heavily autobiographical,1 it is not my intention here to provide a reading in which the spiritualist relay between life and death stands in for the textual transition from living self to fictional protagonist – even if Myers, as we have seen in the previous chapter, indicates that spirit communications referring to particular events in ‘living’ life, are preeminent examples of the survival of bodily death. Rather, my focus here is on the specific elements of Psychical Research and mediumship which provide us with a unique conceptual and historical framework, a haunted infrastructure through which Richardson and Sinclair’s work can be reappraised – mapping out the spectral subtext of their self-conscious literary experiments and complicating the distinction between the ‘Victorian’ and the ‘Modern’. How then does this approach to Richardson and Sinclair function in practice? Firstly, we must acknowledge how the techniques and innovations which characterize their work overlap with the proceedings of the séance – from the incorporation of direct speech to the swift alteration between persons and tenses, to the emphasis on cyclical as opposed to linear time. Simultaneously, however, it must be recognized that the direct creative potential of mediumship, is occluded and/or disavowed in Mary Olivier and Pilgrimage (in contrast to the so-called neo-Victorian novels which I explore in later chapters). In other words, a ‘spiritualist reading’ of Richardson and Sinclair must carefully consider not only the ways in which the séance connects with, prefigures and influences their modern aesthetic but also how their work resists or conceals its haunted power. Indeed, explicit references to spiritualism in Mary Olivier are conspicuous in their absence and mediumship is treated dismissively as a whimsical theatrical pastime in Pilgrimage. Nevertheless, the most important factor here is the collapsible distance between author and protagonist in these texts, as well as between the ‘silent’ thoughts of the heroines and the spoken words of other fictional characters. It is this

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specific amalgamation of thoughts and voices that allows us to draw uncanny (but also rigorously historical) parallels with early twentiethcentury spiritualist practice. To these ends, it is necessary to engage with one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of Psychical Research, known as the ‘crosscorrespondences’ or ‘Palm Sunday’ case named after the day on which Mary Catherine Lyttelton, one of the communicating spirits, died from typhus in 1875.2 This extraordinary case revolved around several automatic writing and trance mediums and spans almost 35 years from 1901 to 1936. Just as Richardson and Sinclair sought to challenge and redefine the coordinates of literary representation, blurring the line between textual and conscious life, the women of the Palm Sunday case obscured the boundaries between the spiritual and the subliminal self, between innovative literary production and otherworldly communication. Put another way, if Richardson and Sinclair were preoccupied with the unalloyed representation of life being lived, bringing together the workings of consciousness with the workings of the text, then the automatic scripts produced by the Palm Sunday mediums can be legitimately interpreted as formal narrative experiments in conveying the afterlife. These writings haunt the more celebrated modern works which both inherit from and sublimate their ghostly aesthetic. Thus, my aim in this chapter is to show how the automatic writing of the Edwardian séance, in theory and in practice, heralds many of the modernist innovations that we observe in Richardson and Sinclair, even if spiritualism itself is banished to the farthest margins of their texts. What is of concern to me here is the point of convergence between the literary creativity of Miriam and Mary represented by Richardson and Sinclair and the creativity of the automatists in the ‘cross-correspondences’. A shared vocabulary emerges at this juncture that can only be fully appreciated by examining the ways in which automatic writing challenges genre and narrative form, the ways in which it weaves strange, radically intertextual connections between self, author and spirit Other. In light of this, we can come to understand Richardson and Sinclair as ‘cross-correspondents’ in themselves. Unlike the remaining authors under scrutiny in this book, these modernist women do not engage with mediumship in a historical or metaphorical context. Their fictions, however, can be shown to be inherently mediumistic in both their composition and their effects. In Ghostwriting Modernism, Helen Sword usefully examines the implications of popular spiritualist tropes for modernist writing in terms of a complex, push–pull dynamic, a seldom-recognized combination of fascination and disapproval. Although Sinclair and Richardson do not

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feature in her study, major figures such as Eliot, Yeats, and H. D. are all included within this framework: Even when they mocked its ludicrous lingo and derided its metaphysical excesses, modernist writers were intrigued and attracted by spiritualism’s ontological shiftiness; its location of authorial power in physical abjection; its subversive celebrations of alternate, often explicitly, feminine, modes of writing; its transgressions of the traditional divide between high and low culture; and its self-serving tendency to privilege form over content, medium over message. (Sword, 2002, pp. 8–9) Similarly, Roger Luckhurst in his Invention of Telepathy shows how various strands of modernist innovation, from surrealism to collage, exhibit strong affinities with elements of Psychical Research, the more ‘intellectual’ dimension of spiritualist inquiry and practice – ‘These kinds of conjecture, where telepathy, mystical communion, supernatural “possession”, and sexual transference overlay each other, became nodal points for Modernist investigators of the limits of consciousness’ (Luckhurst, 2002, p. 262). Indeed, Luckhurst conceives of the ‘cross-correspondences’ as a kind of occult collage and makes a direct technical parallel with literary projects by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. However, it is important to note here that Luckhurst’s study passes over May Sinclair’s substantial engagement with Psychical Research, particularly with the Palm Sunday case, and focuses almost exclusively on her interest in mysticism and modern psychology.3 In the same discussion, Richardson is mentioned fleetingly with reference to the development of psychoanalysis. This chapter therefore draws on the excellent insights of Sword and Luckhurst but at the same time, addresses a significant gap in this field – not only tracing the emergence of ‘modernist’ techniques in the ‘cross-correspondences’ but also reading the figures of Miriam and Mary as mediums. A kind of modernism avant la lettre can be found in these spiritualist texts and within the broader framework of Psychical Research, a ‘modernism’ that is both invoked and disavowed in the experimental narratives of Pilgrimage and Mary Olivier.4

The ‘Cross-Correspondences’ In his article entitled ‘Automatic Writing, or the Rationale of Planchette’, Myers concludes that ‘to decline to investigate “planchette” because “the trail of Katie King is over it all”, is very much as though one refused

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to analyse the meteorite at Ephesus because the town clerk cried loudly that it was “an image which fell down from Jupiter”’ (Myers, 1885, p. 235). The ‘trail of Katie King’ harked back to the physical materializations of the 1870s which had, as I have shown in the previous chapter, been largely discredited by Psychical Researchers. Myers was eager to place automatic-writing mediums under serious scrutiny but was acutely aware of the performative aspects of producing the scripts. The planchette did not offer a definitive break from the disreputable aspects of materialization and a medium could mask their own writing using the nom de plume of a spirit. After detailed investigations of various writing mediums, particularly W. Stainton Moses and Leonora Piper, Myers formalized his attitude in Human Personality. Automatic writing, he reasoned, when not ‘consciously’ fraudulent, could be divided into four categories: A. In the first place, the message may come from the percipient’s own mind; its contents being supplied from the resources of his ordinary memory or of his more extensive subliminal memory; while the dramatization of the message – its assumption of some other mind as its source – will resemble the dramatizations of dream or of hypnotic trance. B. Next above the motor messages whose content the automatist’s own mental resources might supply, we may place the messages whose content seems to be derived telepathically from the mind of some other person still living on earth; that person being either conscious or unconscious of transmitting the suggestion. C. Next comes the possibility that the message may emanate from some unembodied intelligence of some unknown type – other, at any rate, than the intelligence of the alleged agent. Under this heading come the views which ascribe the messages on the one hand to ‘elementaries’, or even devils, and on the other hand to ‘guides’ or ‘guardians’ of superhuman goodness and wisdom. D. Finally we have the possibility that the message may be derived, in a more or less direct manner, from the mind of the agent – the departed friend – from whom the communication does actually claim to come. (Myers, 1903, II, p. 119) For Myers then, the possibilities of automatic writing are embedded in a richly textured communicative network located both within and outside the self – from subliminal consciousness to telepathy among the living, from spirit guides to ‘departed friends’.

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When Myers expired in a sanatorium in Rome on 17 January 1901, his friend, William James, ‘was still sitting leaning back in his chair, his hands over his face, his open notebook still on his knees’ (Luckhurst, 2002, p. 254).5 If Myers had survived bodily death, surely he would communicate through automatic writing, as one Psychical Researcher to another, in order to dutifully consolidate his scientific investigations and the existence of the world beyond. Poignantly, ‘[t]he page was blank’ (ibid.). In late February of that year, however, Leonora Piper in the United States began to receive messages from the discarnate spirit of Myers – an amalgamation which combined elements of his classical education, his love of poetry and his ‘posthumous’ work on Psychical Research. Piper was investigated by Myers when he was alive and now she was controlled by his spirit – a kind of psychical endoscopy. In a script produced in 1908, Myers communicating through Piper writes – ‘I say my utterances echo, echo everywhere’ (Lodge, 1911, p. 232). Piper is here construed as a pure medium, an empty vessel through which Myers’ words resonate during the séance. But if Myers is ‘echoed’ by Piper, he is also ventriloquized by her and becomes ‘a ghost in her machine’ (Luckhurst, 2002, p. 232).6 Piper’s sibylline telegraphy, marked in equal measure by modern communicative technologies and classical learning, alluded in both form and content to the scripts received by four other automatists in England and India who went on to become the principal mediums in the ‘cross-correspondences’. Later in 1901, Margaret Verrall, lecturer in Classics at Newham College, who was a close friend and neighbour of Myers, began receiving messages from him. Two years later her daughter Helen, another classical scholar who had attended a course in psychology at London University, also produced automatic writings purporting to come from the discarnate Psychical Researcher. At the same time, Alice Kipling (sister of Rudyard and known to the SPR as ‘Mrs Holland’), began receiving and transcribing from Myers’ spirit self while based in colonial India. Last but not least, Winifred Margaret Coombe-Tennant (who used the pseudonym Mrs Willett) began automatic writing in 1908 after the loss of her baby daughter Daphne. Once again, the ‘source’ of these mysterious and extraordinary messages was Myers.7 Together, they received hundreds of messages in a ‘crosscorrespondence’. As Jean Balfour states in the PSPR, ‘the essence of a cross-correspondence is that fragmentary messages, such as quotations, or allusions to literary subjects, written independently to several automatists, which are meaningless if taken singly, are found to be intelligible when they are combined together’ (Balfour, 1960, p. 84). The messages

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created a textual patchwork, united by ‘a purpose and a design’ that could not be ‘assigned to any one automatist’ (ibid., p. 84). Initially, the case was seen as a scheme set up by Myers and the discarnate spirits of Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgwick, who also communicated through the mediumship of Mrs Willett and Mrs Holland. Over the years, however, the scope of the ‘cross-correspondences’ grew exponentially and the interpretation of the scripts shifted accordingly, both broadening and narrowing as the messages evolved. Thus, what was at first perceived as systematic proof of the survival of bodily death, a kind of ongoing map of the Underworld, eventually gave way to a more romanticized version of the fragmented scripts. They were seen as cartes postales from Hades, love letters sent from beyond the grave, which were principally addressed to Arthur Balfour, another member of the SPR. Arthur was in love with Mary Catherine Lyttelton and had intended to propose to her on the day she passed away. The messages assured Arthur of her undying love for him and over time built up a beautiful and intricately crafted picture of life after death. The underlying design of these love letters from the Other World was not revealed until the final stages of the case. This element of the story, however, which is closely connected to the quotation and misquotation of poetry in the scripts, must be suspended for the time being and I will revisit the ‘cross-correspondences’ in the fourth chapter, showing how the hidden connections with modernist textual experiments are relocated back into the confines of the Victorian drawing room by A. S. Byatt. Alongside Mary Catherine Lyttelton (often called the ‘Palm Sunday Maiden’) and the discarnate Psychical Researchers, the spirit communicators were: Francis Maitland Balfour, the brother of Arthur who was killed in an accident in the Alps in 1882; Annie Marshall, a married woman with whom Myers was in love and who appears as ‘Phyllis’ in Myers’ autobiography; and Laura Lyttelton, the sister of Mary who had died in childbirth in 1906. A series of ‘interpreters’ completed this complex communicative network: Gerald William Balfour, John George Piddington, Oliver Lodge and Eleanor Balfour Sidgwick. Besides the Verralls, the automatists were not originally connected and the secret engagement between Mary Lyttelton and Arthur Balfour was not known to them until much later in the case. Despite theories of a conspiratorial relationship between the mediums, the case is peculiarly resistant to classification. It cannot be dismissed as a sham in the same way that it cannot be authenticated. If we are to view the scripts as a fragmented but ultimately ‘unified’ narrative which relates the love-story between Balfour and Lyttelton, we can begin to draw clear and productive

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parallels with modernist prose in which the reader is directly required to partake in (and reflect on) the construction of meaning. The focus therefore shifts from the spirit scripts themselves to their interpretation. What is important here is the fact that the scripts must be placed alongside each other in order to reveal their underlying meaning. How then can we read the work of Sinclair and Richardson in similar ways? We know, for example, that Richardson had read Proust and was influenced by his magnum opus. Indeed, she read his volumes in a particularly inventive way, re-conceiving the function of the reader as an authorcreator: ‘I cut all those 5 vol. piecemeal, leaving them all over the room, and read them the same way, taking up the first handy vol. and opening at random. At last the whole thing hangs and hangs, a tapestry all around me’ (Watts, 1995, p. 10). At the same time, however, Richardson could not have been (consciously) aware of the ‘cross-correspondences’ and the striking similarities between her own reading practices, which were then incorporated into the writing of Pilgrimage, and the methods of Psychical Research. Sinclair, on the other hand, was an inquisitive member of the SPR and became fascinated by the case. Having joined in 1914,8 she suggested that the ‘elaborate and evidently purposeful dove-tailing of the scripts’ (Sinclair, 1917–18, p. 67) may be due to the desire of the living to prove survival. Sinclair amalgamated Psychical Research and psychoanalysis to formulate her hypothesis: Now, psychologically, desire, conscious or ‘subconscious’, if it be strong enough, is the most purposeful and designing thing in the universe. Dream-analysis gives us some idea of the extra-ordinary power the psyche has of elaborating and designing its material according to its desire. It even provides the material. (ibid., p. 68) What Sinclair does not clarify though is whether the desire behind the collation of the scripts belongs to the mediums – a telepathic network of communication across minds and continents – or to the group of investigators who painstakingly traced and identified the literary and historical allusions of these spectral writings. Once more, the balance between activity and passivity during the séance is disturbed. This time however, it is not a question of who writes (medium or spirit) but who gives meaning and coherence to these literary fragments (spirit or interpreter).9 Indeed, the scripts seem almost self-aware of the shifting dynamic between medium, communicant

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and investigator – ‘Write the word Selection. Who selects, my friend Piddington? I address the question to Piddington. Who selects?’ (Lodge, 1911, p. 217).10 Piddington, one of the principal interpreters, is positioned here as a figure of authority but also of authorship. The message dismantles the persona of the author, living or dead, by privileging selection over creation. What to include and what to omit, what to interpret and what to discard are based on the editorial and creative capacities of the investigating group rather than the medium or the spirit. In a script delivered by Mrs Willett in 1910, the identity of Myers is interpolated with the poetry of Keats and Shelley, further consolidating the ties between literary allusion and spirit communication which are central to his intricate scheme – ‘The Nigh in Nightingale but Shelley too Myers as well Once more ye Laurels Myers this seems incoherent but don’t be discouraged’ (Lodge, 1911, p. 158). The telegraphic spirit text exposes the shortcomings not of Myers’ ability to articulate himself with precision but of the interpreters’ ability to fully comprehend the clues which are being received through Willett. Attention thus shifted beyond the medium-spirit pairing to the researchers of the case, who were constructed as both ‘outside’ (as objective scrutinizers) and ‘inside’ its boundaries (as the addressees of the messages). This network blurred the distinctions between mediumship, authorship and interpretation. If the investigators continued to work through tomes of poetry and classical dictionaries how did they know they were not becoming mediums themselves in expanding and adding more depth to the spirit messages? The scripts were not, therefore, a closed circuit of meaning. Rather, they were a series of ciphers on which interpreters could project their own meaning and, to return to Sinclair, their own desires for meaning. Indeed, even a cursory examination of the scripts published in the PSPR volumes which dealt with the case shows how a coherent narrative is created precisely in this interplay between script and interpretation. In other words, the investigators were as active in constructing the scripts as they were in deciphering them. Oliver Lodge framed the role of the investigator in the séance by viewing the messages as ‘being limited, or at least curbed to some extent in power of expression, by the range of memory and association – or as some might say by the brain deposit – through whom the answers are obtained’ (ibid., p. 118). In doing so, Lodge was reading the séance, from spirit communication through to interpretation, in gendered terms. He was conforming to Victorian ideas of mediumistic passivity: the medium was effectively powerless in relation to the will of the spirit. However, as a Psychical Researcher familiar with the work of Myers and

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Gurney, he also viewed mediumship as an influence on spirit communications (but not in terms of the subliminal self of the medium hijacking the personality of the spirit). In other words, the medium seems to be the active agent behind the spirit communication. It is the medium’s own intelligence, her ‘brain power’ as it were, that is behind the spirit’s message. We may therefore ask to what extent is the medium constructing these messages and to what extent do the messages reside beyond the consciousness of the medium? The spirits were constrained by the brains of the mediums not by the active and highly intellectual work of the investigators. Interestingly, in this model the perspective of the female mediums can be contrasted with the ‘masculine’ position of the investigators, irrespective of biological sex (Eleanor Sidgwick, for example, was cast as a masculine, properly scientific and skeptical figure). After it was published in the Proceedings, this hypothesis is challenged, absorbed and reinscribed in the séance room. A counter-Psychical Research is produced by the discarnate Myers – an answer to Lodge’s theory. Myers, who would put the medium’s authenticity and capacity under scrutiny while alive, was now speaking through her, accusing Psychical Researchers of prejudice: There is an extraordinary obstinacy of the investigators. They have to do with delicate machines and they won’t take the trouble to study them. A great deal of the atmosphere is too – I shall call it superior – too superior in its attitude. You know the text, he that is not like a little child. It is much better for them to learn than to dogmatise. There is an awful danger in your thinking – a heap of you – that the learning stage is so much over now that you can think you have precedents, can lay down rules, and that sensitives can be standardised. Whereas, as a matter of fact, there are many varieties, and you can’t lay down canons, you can’t bring them up to standard. You have still much to learn; so have we. Do you admit this? (ibid., p. 171)11 The script thus points to a gendered tension between masculine investigator and feminine medium. Whereas Lodge viewed mediums as lacking in intellectual capacity, undermining their mental acumen in summoning a dead male Psychical Researcher, Myers’ spirit offers us a critique of precisely this masculine, short-sighted stubbornness. They

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are too eager, it is suggested, to systematize and categorize, too prone to a dogmatism which threatens both the accuracy of Psychical Research and the integrity of the mediums – feminine, but powerful. The mediums are ‘machines’ but also ‘delicate’, unique ‘sensitives’ whose talents, nuances and varieties are lost to the interpreters. Margaret Verrall, who also contributed a plethora of articles in the Proceedings regarding automatic writing, shares a similar viewpoint with that of the discarnate spirit of Myers and points to the difficulty of negotiating the complexity of the scripts and the desire for precise scholarship which may potentially lead to misunderstandings: I have not been able as I should have wished, to make a complete classification of the contents of automatic script, as much as the matter remains obscure for classification, and moreover, there is a danger that in the desire for complete classification meanings which they do not legitimately bear may be put upon some parts of the writings or episodes may be pressed prematurely into the service of some explanatory hypothesis. (Verrall, 1906b, p. lxiii) Verrall does not locate the scripts’ difficulty in relation to her own powers as a medium but rather in terms of the pressing desire of the investigators to assign meaning and make a coherent narrative, one that would be of service to a ‘hypothesis’ rather than a fact. The article she wrote for the Proceedings is delivered in theoretical and emotionally disengaged language. Verrall is eager to demonstrate that medium and Psychical Researcher are not mutually exclusive roles. She can be both a dissociated and pedantic interpreter and possessed by the spirits. In her automatic writing the same argument is delivered through poetry. The language is playful and the rhyming scheme is an exercise in mnemotechnics. In short, she remembers through rhymed verse, what ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ interpreters tend to forget: Lose not the thread, the tightening clue Will bring the wanderer safely through. Wind the ball close, look not to right Nor left, trust nothing to thy sight. Step slowly with the shortening thread – All perils past, all doubts are fled

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The maze abandoned – reach the goal; – Then Vision flashes on the untrammelled [sic] soul. (Balfour, 1960, p. 227) The script alludes to Ariadne giving a ball of red wool to Theseus in order to find his way out of the Cretan labyrinth in whose centre resided the Minotaur. If the investigators are the wanderers of this textual labyrinth constructed by the discarnate spirits of Myers and company, then the mediums were positioned as Ariadne. They provide the threads with which the labyrinth can be navigated. Perhaps the Minotaur, with his bull’s head and man’s body, half-animal, halfhuman, a being which resists classification, hovers in the scripts. The interpreters are called to feel rather than see their way out of this maze: their souls should be ‘untrammelled’, free perhaps from prejudice and pre-emptive judgements. Elsewhere, Verrall’s script explicitly refers to this tale as analogous to the cross-correspondences – ‘a long clue to unwind, in a mazy labyrinth, but it is Ariadne you will find by following it, not a Minotaur … Here, as in the old story, Ariadne gives the clue’ (ibid., p. 226). Ariadne is both the assistant to and the mastermind behind Theseus’ escape. The mediums in this case are both outside of the literary labyrinth – they are after all ‘scribes’, ‘automatists’, ‘machines’ (they do not produce, they deliver) – and inside it – their subliminal selves may at any minute take over and amalgamate with the script. As one message by Willett explains, the automatists are improving the scheme of the spirits: ‘Those threads extend also in subliminal of automatist. Thus if I would say fire, I Gurney might make an allusion to Phoebus or to Zoroaster. Her subliminal may conceivably go one better and shove in Salamander … Pick out the gold thread’ (ibid., p. 243; my own ellipsis). Returning to Myers’ categorization of automatic writing, we begin to see the various computations at work in these four types of script. The mediums questioned the extent to which their subliminal selves were summoned and took over their writing hands rather than passively accepting their role in the séance as writing apparatuses. Mrs Willett wrote to Margaret Verrall: When I was about 16 or 17 years old, for a few weeks after reading an article on, I think, Psychical Research – I tried automatic writing. I had voluble communications, but I had no one to guide or advise me, and I gave it up. About six weeks ago (that is about the end of

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August 1908) I could not resist the impulse to try for script. After a few feeble attempts it seemed to come – very rapidly, but it is too definite, and therefore I distrust it is being from an external source … I had torn it all up. What worried me was that the words seemed to form in my brain before the pen set them down, just before, as if tapping on the written word … a sort of hair’s breadth beforeness. Most are signed Myers or F. W. H. M. – but I can’t say I think them of value. (Verrall, 1906b, p.48) The ‘hair’s breadth beforeness’ implies intent on the part of Willett to write, rather than the intent of the spirit to possess her hand. If Willett is conscious of the word she is going to write, then there is a threat of ventriloquizing Myers, of a reverse spirit possession. She thus prioritizes automatic writing which comes from an external source to her own literary productions and destroys it. Margaret Verrall also questioned the extent to which her own writing self was behind the production of automatic script. As both medium and active Psychical Researcher, the roles of author and automatist collapse onto each other: There are a few cases where the allusions are definite, and the manner of expression seems to show that the scripts are referring to my own actual knowledge exactly as a third person might do; there are also some cases where the script shows revived memories beyond the range of my conscious recollection; there are a few traces of reference to things thought of by my part just before writing; and there are some traceable connections between my dreams and the automatic writing. (Verrall, 1906b, p. 93) Whereas Verrall resisted categorizing the meaning of the scripts, here she is attempting to distinguish and systematize the extent to which her own self saturates the script. Like Willett, she is puzzled by its ‘definite’ nature but is also aware that involuntary memories, dreams and thoughts find their way into the scripts ‘as a third person might do’. This interpolation of psychic matter problematizes Verrall’s position as a spirit medium and recasts her instead as an author of her own life, the life lived and the life thought. Interestingly, as we shall see in the second part of this chapter, Verrall’s analysis of her own automatic writing heralds the narrative techniques of Sinclair and Richardson – they too are ‘definite’ – their memories, dreams, thoughts resonate through their texts. Unlike Sinclair and Richardson, Verrall wants to dispense of her

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inner self, wipe the slate clean of any traces of her own consciousness. As she wrote in her diary where her own thoughts came unhampered – ‘I had forgotten the psychical invasion theory, which was new to me when I met it in H[uman].P[ersonality]. And I now see that this invasion is just what I want’ (ibid., p. 94). There is an erotic charge to the writing here, a ‘psychical invasion’ which is welcomed and desired, which would establish the authenticity of the automatic script as otherworldly. But Verrall’s words mask her own willpower to evoke, summon and surrender to something that is within her all along. Mrs Holland expresses the same preoccupations and anxieties, not through articles, letters or diary entries but within the script she is producing. She is both addressee and automatist – ‘[t]he absurd thing is that you are afraid that the interest you take in the S.P.R. will make you fraudulent I can feel your pencil shying as it were when I try to form a name that suggests anything you have read – Now I’ll write a list of names your pencil boggles at Henry Sidgwick Edmund Gurney – Stainton Moses – F. W. H. Myers’ (Johnson, 1908–09, p. 201). There is a battle of wills here. Holland is haunted by the discarnate spirits and, simultaneously, by the texts they wrote when living. Unlike earlier writing mediums who vociferously claimed to be completely passive during the production of script, Holland, Willett and Verrall are eager to negotiate and explore the tension between their writing selves and the spirit others.12 This separation establishes the medium’s authenticity and also her honour, if she was to produce writing that was intimate or transgressive. In the case of Mrs Holland and the other automatists of the ‘cross-correspondences’, the transgression is located not in the content but in the form of the messages. The literary past of classical and Victorian poetry beckons and is assimilated in these new verses which reinvent and reinterpret the literary canon. Holland’s poetry is rendered in free verse, including quotations and vivid imagery. It reads like an imagist or surrealist experiment – ‘The steely glitter of Arcturus. “Her hair had grown just long enough to catch Heaven’s jasper glitter” … And the souls going up to God went by her like clear flames’ (Balfour, 1960, p. 230). Consider these two excerpts from the scripts of Helen Verrall and Mrs Holland, in terms of reinvention and innovation. Helen Verrall’s classical education is intertwined here with Myers’ scholarly knowledge – producing a kind of ‘networked’ spiritualist poetics than brings together the ancient and the modern: The flowery mead – asphodel – Persephone – the chariot of Dis foam-flecked steeds Asphodelos

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‘No, no, go not to Lethe’ sleep too brings forgetfulness In the intenser light that heralds in the dawn When the grey clouds roll back from Day’s portal to let the dawn ride forth – the horses of dawn and of death dawn and death. (Lodge, 1911, p. 241) Mrs Holland’s script also makes references to Persephone and classical scholarship. Her writing is disjointed and fragmentary, precariously (and thrillingly) balanced between ‘pure’ poetic creativity and spirit communication. Alliteration, possession and intertextuality (both in terms of the finite body of the scripts themselves and in relation to literary history per se) problematize the categorization of these writings. Was Myers, from beyond the grave, therefore showing us the truly dynamic possibilities of automatic writing? P – persiflage – persist – In penitence – Persephone – Penstemon Oh singer of Persephone from the far meadows desolate – Hast though forgotten Sicily? Through the stilled groves the hidden piping thrills – What forms are these coming – All white through the gloom – The voice of the bird – The torture of the whirling wheel wherein the power of the philter lay (Lodge, 1911, p. 241) While these gossamer threads connecting the subliminal and discarnate selves might resist any kind of conventional classification, they can also be legitimately conceived of as a literary project. The scripts were published privately and given to the investigators. But they could, if we can reconcile (or perhaps suspend) the tension between spirit possession and authorship, be perceived as narrative and/or linguistic experiments. They can be read, in other words, as modern texts. Eerily, one script produced by Mrs Holland and addressed to Mrs Piper points us in this very direction, with its injunction to write – ‘The present occupant of

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my old rooms – News of him – No – I was not concerned with that last message – it was Myers – Not here the other side of the herring pond – “Piper sit thee down and write/In a book that all may read The Stygian River”’ (ibid., p. 273). Mrs Holland’s script makes use of Blake’s introduction to Songs of Innocence, creating an explicitly literary play on words using the terms of the poem and Piper’s name. The script is also conscious of its own resistance to classification, within Psychical Research and within a literary genre. Indeed, perhaps the ‘other side of the herring pond’ also alludes to the complex way in which these scripts both invite and deny comparison with experiments in literary writing. They are red herrings as it were. Thus, I would argue that the central case of Psychical Research in the twentieth century becomes, for literary modernism, a paper boat on the ‘Stygian River’, endlessly travelling towards Lethe and the void of forgetting. Bette London, in her study on literary collaboration between women, argues that ‘automatic writing, by breaking down distinctions between the literary and the non-literary, the original and the copied, the spoken and the written, the product and the process, the spontaneous and the crafted, might be seen to testify to the continued existence of those writing practices, often communal or collaborative in nature, that could not be subsumed under the rubric of the proprietary author’ (London, 1999, p. 171). With this framework in mind, the remaining part of this chapter will deal with the construction of the ‘proprietary’ female ‘author’ in the works of Richardson and Sinclair. Tropes of the ‘spoken and the written’, ‘the product and the process’, the ‘literary and non-literary’ define the automatic writing of the cross-correspondences and also haunt the narratives of Pilgrimage and Mary Olivier in ways that subtly interweave spiritualist automatic writing and innovative literary production. Whereas the mediums I have discussed so far sought to negotiate the tension between inner self and discarnate spirit through an active engagement with Psychical Research, Sinclair and Richardson occlude their literary mediumship by constantly reminding us of the presence of a single heroine and a single author who refracts, divines and delivers the world around her.

Passing from mind to mind: Mediating the self in Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair In the opening sentence of a script written on 1 April 1909, Mrs Holland elongates the running thread connecting ghosts with the theatre – ‘Charonic. The staircase for the unheard, unseen feet of the

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returning’ (Lodge, 1911, p. 273). Lodge attempted to decipher this message with the help of Piddington. He interpreted the word ‘returning’ as ‘revenant’ or ‘ghost’ and Piddington, consulting Liddell and Scott’s Greek Dictionary, added that the ‘Charonean’ or ‘Charon’s staircase’ was a direct reference to the ancient proscenium, ‘a staircase in the [Greek] theatre, leading up to the stage as if from the world below, by which ghosts entered’ (ibid.).13 Unlike Marryat, who had used theatrical references as proof of authentic mediumship, Mrs Holland’s entranced hand is gesturing towards the performative aspects of automatic writing. Myers, as we have seen in the previous section, had viewed automatic writing emerging from memory or the subliminal self of the medium as a form of ‘dramatization’. This ‘dramatization’, however, was not based on explicit acting conventions but was centred on the capacity of the subliminal self to emerge as a spiritual Other not only to the séance sitters but to the medium herself. As Bette London opines, ‘to be a medium one had to become Other to oneself. And mediumistic writing often appears more a reflection of this internalized border than the writing of some exotic geographic homefront’ (London, 1999, p. 129). Mrs Holland was eager to prove that she was not becoming Other to herself through writing; rather, she had a subservient, almost involuntary part in the scripts: ‘You keep your wrist too stiff and we can only get a leverage high up that makes the pencil push in jerks’ (Lodge, 1911, p. 187). She was a passive medium because her knowledge was limited. In a letter to Oliver Lodge she declared, ‘I cannot see that Charon, the ferryman of the Styx, has any earthly – or unearthly – connection with a staircase’ (ibid., p. 274). She categorically asserts, ‘I have no knowledge of the Greek Theatre’ (ibid.). Her mental inactivity in the production of script is reinforced by her lack of Greek scholarship. Bearing in mind that her family opposed her automatic writing, it could, if attributed to her subliminal self, or her inner desires, be perceived as a wilful and selfish act, bordering even on graphomania or a mental malaise.14 If she was not completely passive and unintentional in the composition of the scripts, then she was mimicking her brother’s writing success, accommodating her own work into a psychical canon which invited interpretation in the same way that Kipling’s poems invited literary criticism. May Sinclair’s 1918 review of the first three volumes of Richardson’s Pilgrimage, tackles the same issues of the author performing, becoming in fact the protagonist of her novel. Whereas this slippage is problematized in Psychical Research, it is celebrated by Sinclair. The

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double movement of author and protagonist is represented by the amalgamation of the writing self with its fictional creation to the point that the two become indistinguishable. This doubling effect is not only present in Richardson’s work as we shall see, but in Sinclair’s description of Richardson and Miriam’s interchangeable positions: Rather less obviously she [Richardson] must not tell a story or handle a situation or set a scene; she must avoid drama as she avoids narration. And there are some things she must not be. She must not be the wise, all-knowing author. She must be Miriam Henderson. She must not know or divine anything that Miriam does not know or divine; she must not see anything that Miriam does not see. She has taken Miriam’s nature upon her … Of the persons who move through Miriam’s world you know nothing but what Miriam knows. If Miriam is mistaken, well, she and not Miss Richardson is mistaken. Miriam is an acute observer, but she is very far from seeing the whole of these people. They are presented to us in the same vivid but fragmentary way in which they appeared to Miriam, the fragmentary way in which people appear to most of us. Miss Richardson has only imposed on herself the conditions that life imposes on us all. (Kime Scott, 1990, p. 443)15 Sinclair praises Richardson’s narrative technique, which defies literary conventions and diminishes the symbolic authority of the omniscient narrator. Instead of the all-knowing author standing behind Miriam, Richardson effectively ‘alternates’ with her ‘own protagonist’ – she has become Miriam Henderson. Yet if ‘Miriam is mistaken she and not Miss Richardson is mistaken’. There is an incessant sliding in and out of character here, where Richardson is and is not Miriam. Miriam’s knowledge of the persons that surround her is fragmentary, like the discarnate personalities of the communicants in the crosscorrespondences. Sinclair implies this fragmented vision is ‘imposed’ by Richardson ‘on herself’, who in turn is positioned as a fictional character. However, it is an imposition that stems from the effects of life ‘on us all’ rather than a stylistic decision that Richardson has chosen – both in text and in life, author and protagonist are subject to the same fragmentations. Elsewhere in the review Sinclair reinforces this personality substitution. According to her, Richardson has identified with ‘Miriam’s stream of consciousness’ – ‘[i]t is to Miriam’s almost painfully acute senses

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that we owe what in any other novelist would be called the ‘portraits’ of Miriam’s mother, of her sister Harriet, of the Corries’ (ibid., p. 444). Miriam is represented here as the active agent behind these ‘portraits’ which are delivered to us through snippets of dialogue, through Miriam’s consciousness, but it is not Miriam who has achieved what ‘any other novelist’ would dream of, it is Richardson’s writing which has also created Miriam – the two figures are interchangeable. A year earlier, Sinclair, as I have already touched upon in the previous part, had written a letter to the Journal of the SPR, enquiring about the cross-correspondences. She also stated that she was ‘particularly impressed by the latest Willett scripts’ (Sinclair, 1917–18, p. 67). Apart from the content of Willett’s scripts which are marked by a plethora of references to literature and poetry, her mediumship is also of interest here. As Jean Balfour explains, while entranced [she] never loses her sense of personal identity; she herself is able to describe what she sees and to transmit messages directly. Her sittings are therefore interspersed with comments about her own experiences and remarks upon the material she is being asked to pass on. (Balfour, 1960, p. 98) There is an interesting symmetry between Willett’s type of mediumship and Richardson’s type of character representation. Willett is an active medium, conscious and fully engaged with the spirits she is serving. According to Sinclair, Richardson’s heroine interiorizes and interacts with the characters that populate Pilgrimage. Willett and Miriam both act as mediums to themselves and to other characters, yet Sinclair does not make any metaphorical or theoretical connections between the act of mediumship and Richardson’s use of Miriam as a kind of medium. Sinclair is deploying the ‘stream of consciousness’, a term which is most often associated with William James. James’ Principles of Psychology (1890) introduced the hypothesis that human consciousness was flowing like a stream or a river, rather than being ‘chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance’ (James, 1901, I, p. 239). However, as Suzanne Raitt points out, the term, ‘far from alluding specifically to William James, invokes a range of scientific and popular contexts, none of which are concerned primarily with the nature of perception, but all of which consider at length the question of the limits of individuality’ (Raitt, 2000, p. 219).

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Indeed, Myers had used the same image of consciousness as a stream to discuss the emergence of the subliminal self in automatic writing: Our cerebral focus (to use a metaphor) often shifts slightly, and is capable of shifting far. Or let me compare my active, consciousness to a stream-tug, and the ideas and memories which I summon into the field of attention to the barges which the tug tows after it. Then the concurrent streams of my being are like Avre and the Rhone, contiguous but hardly mingling their blue and yellow waves. I tug my barges down the Rhone, my consciousness is a blue consciousness, but the tail barge swings into the Avre and back again, and brings traces of the potential yellow consciousness back into the blue. (Myers, 1885, p. 234) By using the ‘stream of consciousness’ to discuss Richardson’s narrative technique, Sinclair was tracing connections not only with psychology but also with Psychical Research in a novel that dramatizes the ‘spectrality’ of life rather than the afterlife. Sinclair’s Mary Olivier, which is also rendered through a single female consciousness, has been read alongside Pilgrimage as a new, ‘modern’ form of writing, a breaking away from Victorian realist novels in favour of a more direct and immediate representation of life.16 However, what I would like to suggest here is that Sinclair’s literary influences may also include her knowledge of the cross-correspondences mediums and their automatic scripts. The same claim cannot be made for Richardson as we are unaware of the extent to which she was involved in Psychical Research at the time of writing the first volumes of Pilgrimage. However, what we may claim is that both Sinclair and Richardson deploy a kind of literary mediumship to render their characters on the page. The way that Mary and Miriam are positioned both as authors and as mediators of the world around them shares many similarities with the proceedings of the Edwardian séance. In typical cross-correspondence fashion, one of Mrs Willett’s messages received on 26 June 1913 and accompanied by the drawing of a candlestick and successive lines indicating a staircase, constructs an image similar to that of Holland’s staircase – ‘O dem golden slippers/Walking up dem golden stairs’ (Balfour, 1960, p. 138). The message does not tell who the subject of this action is and the automatic patois makes the matter all the more complicated. In another of Willett’s scripts, medium, message and spirit interpolate on the page, and indeed in time and space: ‘She tells me I must go to bed. She puts a candle in

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my hand and tells me to go upstairs to bed’ (ibid., p. 153). The séance, though, is not over yet; Mrs Willett opens her eyes and sees one of the sitters present: ‘You here! Where am I then? What have you done with my candle? Have you taken it away?’ (ibid.). When the sitter offers to light another for her, she writes, ‘No, I shall light one for myself. But it was my candle I wanted’ (ibid.). The interaction between medium, spirit and sitter blurs spatial and psychical boundaries to the point of not knowing. The next day, how Mrs Willett arrived upstairs in her own room is a mystery. Who is the ‘she’ that places the candle in the hands of the medium? Is she ‘replacing’ the medium, as it were – seeing through her eyes when going upstairs? Or is the medium replacing her own ascent into another spectral stairwell? The question ‘Where am I then?’ is suspended between life and death, between the last step of the Charonean staircase and the end of the séance. ‘Where am I then?’ becomes, in effect, ‘Who am I then?’ If the medium is the ‘Charonean staircase’ whose steps are made out of words then what do the narratives of Richardson and Sinclair tell us about the revenants of memory, of past selves, of the collapsing distances between the author and the subject of her work? How might we conceive of the relations between Richardson and Miriam or Sinclair and Mary in terms of ‘Charonean staircases’? Mary Olivier is a woman caught between two centuries and between two feminine ideals – the Victorian angel in the house, as represented by the figure of Mary’s mother, Caroline, and the New Woman. Cheryl A. Wilson argues that the conflict between nineteenth-century images of femininity and modernity is represented by Sinclair ‘through her manipulation of the literary techniques available to her as a postVictorian novelist’ (Wilson, 2006, p. 223). Thus, Sinclair both summons and banishes the ghosts of a Victorian past by employing a single female consciousness. My focus here, however, is on the particular way in which Mary is constructed as a learned and creative woman, as a writer who breaks away from cultural conventions, (re)fashioning herself and her work in an innovative poetic process. Mary perceives the change in attitudes towards women, from the Victorian milieu to the modern, in terms of haunting, of a gravitational pull towards the past: ‘Supposing the conflict in you was the tug of the generations before you, trying to drag you back to them? Supposing the horror was their horror, their fear of defeat?’ (Sinclair, 2002, p. 312). Instead of internalizing the rupture between her own self and what is expected of her, she positions the past, a past without her in it, in a

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‘them’ and ‘you’ pairing. It is ‘their horror’ that Mary is experiencing, not her own, although she is responsive to it. Like Mrs Willett’s interaction with the spirits, Mary too can feel the haunting power of the past yet consciously resists it and breaks away from it. In a similar way to Mrs Holland’s script, which informs us that ‘I am not one person – there are several of us … Annie is one and Mary’ (Lodge, 1911, p. 187), Mary Olivier is acutely aware of her own multifaceted and multilayered existence, inside and outside the confines of her family environment. However, while Holland’s fragmented writing selves represent individual spirit entities, Mary is sensitive to the various refractions which are contained within one name: Sometimes she had queer glimpses of the persons that were called Mary Olivier. There was Mrs Olivier’s only daughter, proud of her power over the sewing-machine. When she brought the pile of hemmed sheets to her mother her heart swelled with joy in her goodness. There was Mark Olivier’s sister who rejoiced in the movements of her body … And there was Mary Olivier, the little girl of thirteen whom her mother and Aunt Bella whispered about to each other. (ibid., p. 94) Apart from the roles of docile daughter, favourite sister and adolescent, Mary locates her own self in a life closed off, a private inner existence – ‘[h]er secret happiness had nothing to do with any of these Mary Oliviers. It was not like any other happiness’ (ibid.). Mary’s voracious reading, which begins in adolescence and shapes her into the author of her maturity, includes Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Tennyson, Milton and Shakespeare. She later translates Moschus and Euripides, the ancient Greek reconfigured into English, against her mother’s will, who sees Mary’s desire to learn a dead language as a ‘tiresome affectation’ (ibid., p. 126). Protecting herself from this criticism, Mary can go on performing the chores set by her mother automatically: ‘If you went on darning for ever – if you went on darning – Mamma would be pleased. She had not suspected anything’ (ibid., p. 110). She was no Ariadne, no weaver of golden thread – instead, ‘the coarse wool of the socks irritated her fingers’ (ibid.). The transition from reciting poetry to writing is achieved through automatism. Not the automatic writing of the séance, but Mary’s ability to slide into the various roles assigned to her while keeping her mind, her other secret self, active with words at the same time being engaged

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in daily chores. Mary recites Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’, the silent recital of the poem is punctuated by her mother’s voice, ‘[b]etween the lovely lines she could hear Mamma say, “They all scamp their work”’ (ibid.). Mary’s secret happiness intersperses the mellifluous with the quotidian. Similar to automatic writing, which interpolates poetry with direct speech, there is a process at work here in Mary’s mind which allows her to be both inside her mind, reciting the poetry of Tennyson, being lost in his words, and outside, listening to her mother complaining about workmen. Just as Mrs Willett could maintain her sense of self during trance writing, Mary can be both her mother’s opponent in a board game and a poet simultaneously. The episode is described in both the soporific language of ennui and the enervated vocabulary of verse: [i]n the long pauses of the game, when Mamma sat stone-still, hypnotized by the green and white chequers, her curved hand lifted, holding her pawn, her head quivering with indecision. In dreams He has made you wise With the wisdom of silence and prayer Coming and going, between the leap-frogging of the green figures and the white. God Who has blinded your eyes With the dusk of your hair Brown hair, sleek and thin, brown hair that wouldn’t go grey. And the evening would go on, soundless and calm, with soft, annihilating feet, with the soft, cruel feet of oblivion. (ibid., p. 322) Mary’s verse hangs between the minutes it takes her mother to lay down the chequers. The poem comes and goes in rhythmic synchronization with the ‘leap-frogging’ of the board game. The poem holds life in suspension – the ‘brown hair’ will not ‘go grey’ – and instead, in Mary’s mind the evening will be erased with the ‘soft, cruel feet of oblivion’. Sinclair, though, like the mediums who became the stairwells for the ‘unheard, unseen feet of the returning’, does not allow Mary to forget the evening. The composition of the poem is interwoven in the novel with that single, uneventful night with a mother and a daughter at home playing chequers.

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The secret, ghostly excitement that poetry produces, the closed-off experience that separates Mary from her mother is, however, riddled with guilt – ‘Happiness, the happiness that came from writing poems; happiness that other people couldn’t have, that you couldn’t give to them; happiness that was no good to Mama, no good to anybody but you, secret and selfish; that was your happiness. It was deadly sin’ (ibid., p. 234). For Mary, writing is a pleasure that she can only share with herself, a pleasure that does not abide with the image of Victorian womanhood, giving herself up for the happiness of others. Moreover, it is a pleasure which brings to the forefront an economic tension – the servant has to ‘cook and scrub while you made poems’ (ibid., p. 235). Happiness and guilt are negotiated in Mary’s mind through the reception of the poem as if it is delivered to her from outside. Mary’s classical education might be invoking the figure of the muse here, who inspired poets to write verse, but it also shares a common thread with the automatic script produced by Helen Verrall and Mrs Holland, discussed in the earlier part of this chapter. ‘The poem was coming by bits at a time. She could feel the rest throbbing behind it, an unreleased, impatient energy’ (ibid., p. 234). This ‘impatient energy’ is a living, organic form that does not wait for systematization and defies literary convention. It is also something that seems involuntary, leaping out of memory into her present mind: Something bothered her. And in the east one pure, prophetic star – one pure prophetic star – Trembles between the darkness and the dawn. What you wrote last year. No reason why you shouldn’t write modern plays in blank verse if you wanted to. Only people didn’t say those things. You couldn’t do it that way. Let the thing go. Tear it to bits and burn them in the kitchen fire. (ibid., p. 298) In trying to find her poetic voice, Mary struggles between convention and innovation, between Victorian and modernist literary impulses. The ‘modern plays in blank verse’ seem wilfully composed to Mary – ‘if you wanted to’ – and are better thrown in the fire and destroyed (like Mrs Willett’s earlier scripts). This fragmented poem, however, resists destruction: half-formed and doubtful, it lingers on the page, a relic of last year rather than cinders in the kitchen fire – why not write modern plays in blank verse?

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Uncannily, one of Margaret Verrall’s automatic scripts speaks of a similar tension between polished verse and automatic writing. Myers’ discarnate spirit acts here both as fellow poet and literary critic: Oh for a draught of some deep stream – but deep is not the word – clear is better though not yet right. haustus longos deep draughts that quench the thirst. Deep wells of cool no Deep wells and crystal founts πηγαι κρυσταλλινοι αειρρυτοι No not yet the ever flowing crystal fount the source of Life and Joy forth flowing from the Sacred Mount no don’t say obvious nonsense – the rhyme hinders – but you now have the general sense. I can’t think why you will not just put down the words without making up bad verses to disguise from yourself what you are doing. Now write F O U N T no more than that – and off you go to Fountains Abbey – no more. F. W. H. M. (Lodge, 1911, p. 214) The script, according to Verrall’s interpretation, makes direct allusions to the river of Lethe in Dante’s Purgatorio whose waters run crystal clear. What is not crystal clear though is how Myers is constructed here both as the spirit who controls her hand and as her literary critic who playfully creates a game between the ‘fount’ on the page and Fountain’s Abbey where Verrall is urged to go. The script also tells us of something that Verrall cannot admit to herself, that she resists putting down in words. She, not Myers, is the poet here. In her assessment of her mediumship, Verrall distinguishes her normal self from that of her automatism by drawing a distinction between the ‘tendency to break out into verse’ and a kind of innate artlessness: ‘I am no poet’. This separation, however, is obliterated by the intimation that years ago she wrote ‘Greek iambic … but hardly ever made up a line of Latin verse’ (Verrall, 1906, p. 62). Verrall’s script which shares many of Mary’s preoccupations, indicates that they both struggle with form and literary conventions and both see their productions as non-real, non-worthy of reproduction. One is intended for the kitchen fire – although it finds its way onto the page of Mary’s life, and the other is a message that talks about forgetting, about the crystalline waters of Lethe. Both Sinclair’s narrative and Verrall’s script make use of the second person, indicating that they

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are interiorizing this ‘you’, speaking to themselves as Victorian critics and, at the same time, speaking out as modern poets. Sydney Kaplan describes the shift in narrative voice for Mary as a realization of the self both as artist and as protagonist: But when the omniscient narrator gets closer and closer to identification with the character Mary, the pronouns change. Thus she speaks to that other self. ‘You’, she calls it. And then, almost with a startlingseeming inconsistency she switches to ‘I’ … The narrator, then, is also ‘you’, but the ‘you’ who looks back. (Raitt, 2000, p. 217) The narrator, the ‘you’ who looks back, and Mary are at this point compounded. Mary’s life becomes the ‘Charonean staircase’ which harbours her Victorian legacy. The novel, after all, is called a life, blurring the biographical with the fictional and Mary seems aware of this process when her automatism in life finds an outlet in the rich (other) life of her poems. For Sinclair, explicit spiritualist tropes in the novel are conspicuously absent. The fear that Mary feels visiting the London cemetery or towards the death of her brothers does not lead her into the séance, but, as I have already suggested, into another kind of afterlife – poems that ‘have the power to haunt and excite you’ (Sinclair, 2002, p. 125). However, what should by now be clear is the fact that the practices of writing mediumship resonate throughout Sinclair’s text – ‘present’, as it were, in Mary’s ability to compose verse while darning socks, or via the complex way in which she mediates through ‘you’ the characters of her mother, her aunts, her brothers, the men she has loved and the poets that have influenced her. Although the Edwardian séance brought Victorian spiritualism into modernity, the popular conception of spiritualism as a theatrical event based on economic exchange persisted. Sinclair, who shifted from the Victorian to the Edwardian literary scene, was fascinated by mediumistic tropes yet could not bring them centrestage in novels that spoke both of the past and of the future. The typical imagery of the séance, not as it is presented by the Psychical Researchers who interpreted the scripts of the automatists, but as it is portrayed in the Victorian drawing room, is mocked by Richardson, yet she too employs a narrative technique that significantly overlaps with the conceptual framework of mediumship, especially with regard to the innovations of the Palm Sunday case. The very first page of Pilgrimage opens with an image that should be familiar to us by now – ‘Miriam left

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the gas-lit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase was almost dark. The top landing was quite dark and silent’ (Richardson, 2002, I, p. 15). Miriam is preparing for her departure to Hanover to take up the position of pupil-teacher, a position that will mark the beginning of her independent existence, and we begin to climb up the stairs and join her in her ascent from Victorian girlhood to modern New Womanhood. In a 1931 interview Richardson describes the impact of Miriam’s image on the conception and delivery of the novel: When I first began writing Pilgrimage I intended to take on in the usual way. Then in Cornwall, in solitude, when the world fell completely away, and when I was focusing intensely, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t go on in the usual way, telling about Miriam, describing her. There she was as I first saw her, going upstairs. But who was there to describe her? It came to me suddenly. It was an extraordinary moment when I realized what could and what could not be done. Then it became more and more thrilling as I saw what was there. And hopeless of making it clear. (Thomson, 1996, p. 353)17 Notice the terms of the description in this case: ‘in solitude’, ‘the world fell completely away’, ‘focusing intensely’, ‘it came to me suddenly’ and so on. It is an ‘extraordinary moment’ when Richardson encounters Miriam in her solitary climb up the stairs, simultaneously becoming aware of the limits and the boundlessness of her task – narrating both more and less of what can be known of her protagonist. Richardson’s language here is epiphanic at every level, subverting the comfortable fictions of omniscient narration and revealing her newly inflamed desire to ‘produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism’ (Richardson, I, 2002, p. 9) as she writes in the foreword to her novel. The question of ‘who’ is ‘present’ to describe Miriam is substituted by the more searching, more unstable question of ‘what’ there is to be told about her. Like Mrs Willett in the candle and stairwell script discussed earlier, Richardson is within and without the narrative at the same time. The author sees Miriam and then sees through her. Similar to the mediumship of Willett, Holland and the Veralls, Richardson’s prose becomes a kind of ‘Charonean staircase’, although it is not the revenants that return. Rather, it is Richardson’s younger self that makes itself felt – an attempt to recapture a lost past, to bring it back to the immediacy of the present moment

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The ‘considerable mass of manuscript’ (Richardson, 2002, I, p. 10) that would eventually constitute Pilgrimage became for Richardson her life’s work and ended only with her death. Unlike the revenants in the ‘cross-correspondences’, Richardson did not return through automatic script. The foreword to the novel, which Richardson provided begrudgingly to her publishers in 1938 is, unlike the novel itself, written in the third person: Aware as she wrote, of the gradual falling away of the preoccupations that for a while had dictated the briskly moving script, and of the substitution, for these inspiring preoccupations, of a stranger in the form of contemplated reality having for the first time in her experience its own say, and apparently justifying those who acclaim writing as the surest means of discovering the truth about one’s own thoughts and beliefs, she had been at the same time increasingly tormented, not only by the failure, of this now so independently assertive reality, adequately to appear within the text, but by its revelation, whencesoever focused, of a hundred faces, any one of which, the moment it was entrapped within the close mesh of direct statement, summoned its fellows to disqualify it. (Richardson, 2002, I, p. 10) Here, Richardson implies that the script has a power of it own – ‘dictated’ by certain literary conventions and ‘preoccupations’ yet also acquiring a ‘briskly moving’ momentum or life force. Writing becomes a means to self-knowledge; the self that is obliterated by the automatists is celebrated in Richardson. The ‘hundred faces’ that are summoned and disqualified in the novel also draw parallels with the cross-correspondences, with the fragmented spirits, with reality unalloyed and free from literary or spiritualistic convention. Acting as Richardson’s mouthpiece, Miriam sees books as people – ‘They were people. More real than actual people. They came nearer. In life everything was so scrappy and mixed up. In a book the author was there in every word’ (Richardson, 2002, I, p. 385). In these terms then, we might view Miriam herself as more ‘real’ than an ‘actual’ person and Richardson’s foreword as a kind of self-surrender or necessary obfuscation. The book takes on a reality greater than the author’s reflections on the processes behind its production. Departing from the realist, third-person narration of the nineteenthcentury novel, Richardson crafted (perhaps ‘summoned’) a dynamic, feminine prose, ‘unpunctuated, moving from point to point without formal obstructions’ (ibid., p. 12). A visible, self-conscious tension between

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‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ prose therefore emerges in the form and content of Pilgrimage, which is usefully represented to us in the following snippet of dialogue: ‘Try a novel of ideas. Philosophical. There’s George Eliot.’ ‘Writes like a man.’ ‘Just so. Lewes. Be a feminine George Eliot. Try your hand.’ (Richardson, 2002, IV, p. 240) How will Miriam become the feminine George Eliot, as it were? What is it in Eliot’s realist prose, in her omniscient narrator that Miriam shies away from? Miriam is urged to ‘try her hand’ as if that hand will write automatically and produce a feminine prose equivalent to that of Eliot. At a juncture such as this, Richardson identifies, observes and ‘splits’ herself – constructing Miriam as the author who ‘tries’ her hand. Nicholas Royle, in his Telepathy and Literature, reads the omniscient narrator in Eliot’s novels as a form of telepathy. Royle opines that the connection between (and behind) the tropes of telepathy and omniscient narration is ‘massively facilitated by an underlying adherence to the notion of a unified self, and perhaps the most fundamental problem with any attempt to shake up the texts (or readings) of Eliot is that they themselves seem to adhere to such a notion of solidity’ (Royle, 1991, pp. 89–90). As the work of Psychical Research so beautifully demonstrates, the self is anything but unified, and the ‘omniscient’ narrator or the ‘omniscient’ spirit is anything but coherent, cohesive and knowing – it comes to us in fragments, in distortions, in misquotations. Thus the telepathy behind the omniscient narrator which informs Royle’s reading of Eliot is dismantled by the very person who coined the term ‘telepathy’: Myers’ spirit self demonstrates the point of rupture and cohesion between fragmented spirit self and narrator. Richardson thus shares more with this psychical alloy than with the legacy of Eliot. While Miriam’s hand is undoubtedly charged with an ‘automatic’ energy which is more than simply reminiscent of spiritualist practice, it is important to (re)acknowledge here that she does not forge explicit links with the fin-de-siècle and the Edwardian séance. She does, however, construct more readily identifiable links with the theatre. My intensive focus on the Charonean staircase in the scripts and on the way that it functions as a critical metaphor through which we might reconceive of Miriam’s role in the novel is predicated on an appropriation of the ‘unspoken’ spiritualist tropes in Richardson’s text and on the elaborate mediation of theatrical allusions which frame Miriam and

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her life in terms of acting and the stage. The specific question of theatricality, however, must remain suspended for a little while longer as the status of the ‘Charonean staircase’ model requires further elucidation in relation to the problem of omniscient narration. Consider, for example, the moment later in the novel in which Miriam ascends a staircase, combining both a kind of ghostly transmission and an absolute, visceral immediacy: The clock struck ten. Gathering up the newspaper she folded it neatly, put it on the hall-table and went slowly up-stairs, watching the faint reflection of the half-lowered hall gas upon the polished balustrade. The staircase was cold and airy. Cold rooms and landings stretched up away above her into the darkness. She became aware of a curious buoyancy rising within her. It was so strange that she stood still for a moment on the stair. For a second, life seemed to cease in her and the staircase to be swept from under her feet … ‘I’m alive.’ … It was as if something had struck her, struck right through her impalpable body, sweeping it away, leaving her there shouting silently without it. I’m alive. Then with a thump her heart went on again and her feet carried her body, warm and happy and elastic. She tried once or twice deliberately to bring back the breathless moment standing still on a stair. Each time something of it returned. ‘It’s me, me; this is me being alive.’ (Richardson, 2002, I, p. 245) At this ‘extraordinary moment’, Miriam is lifted off the page and suspended on that single stair – like the moment in Henry James’ short story where Nona Vincent comes to life in the eyes of the playwright who has created her, a moment of (telepathic?) reverie. Miriam is doubled up – she is aware of herself as a first person and as a third person, as heroine and narrator of herself. Direct speech is incorporated in a narrative that has come through Miriam’s eyes – she is conscious of her selfhood and of being alive. This ‘life’, however, operates as a kind of stop-start relay between positive and negative charges – ‘life seemed to cease in her’ and ‘with a thump her heart went on again’ (my italics). The return of ‘it’ every time Miriam ascends the staircase suggests that she ascends with all of the past selves she has accumulated, a rising up through the fabric of time and consciousness, within and alongside her. In the final chapter-volume of the novel titled March Moonlight, Miriam is beginning to write the novel we have just read. Miriam’s consciousness and the writing of Pilgrimage comes full circle – the title

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is resonant of the very first image of Miriam ascending the staircase clothed in the March twilight. Bearing in mind that Pilgrimage was finished by the death of its author, we may see the protagonist embarking on the project of writing what we have read, of replacing Richardson and of infinitely being rewritten. Author and fictional alter-ego keep on reinventing each other. In the penultimate page of the narrative Miriam reflects on the nature of writing: While I write, everything vanishes but what I contemplate. The whole of what is called ‘the past’ is with me, seen anew, vividly. No, Schiller, the past does not stand ‘being still’. It moves, growing into one’s growth. Contemplation is adventure into discovery; reality. What is called ‘creation’ imaginative transformation, fantasy, invention, is only based upon reality. Poetic description a half-truth? Can anything produced by man be called ‘creation’? (Richardson, 2002, V, p. 657) Miriam becomes at this point of writing a well-tuned medium through which the past does not stand still but grows and is reinvented through one’s own consciousness. As Mrs Holland writes in one script: ‘That’s the first great freedom, getting rid of time – it’s more exhilarating even than getting rid of matter’ (Balfour, 1960, p. 187). The rupture of time is a possibility for the spirits that Holland serves through writing. Writing then attains magical qualities as it amalgamates past, present and future into a single sentence in similar ways to Miriam’s writing action. This is a particularly important point in spiritualist discourse and one that the remaining authors in this book, especially Michèle Roberts in the next chapter, take into account, reinvigorating the conception of the past as revenant, tuning into frequencies that have not been entirely deadened by the passage of time. If the ‘Charonean staircase’, as I have hinted at, unites a remodeled understanding of the past with certain types of theatricality then references to acting and the theatre consolidate the position of author/narrator as a kind of actress, mediating, performing, becoming the character of Miriam – ‘Perhaps one day she would go on the stage. Eve always said so. People always liked her, if she let herself go’ (Richardson, I, 2002, p. 109). Apart from these overt thespian aspirations, Miriam metaphorically conceives of her life as a theatrical space: She was in a theatre, without walls, her known world and all her memories spread fanwise about her, all intent on what she saw,

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changing, retreating to their original form, coming forward, changing again, obliterated, and in some deep difficult way challenged to renewal. The scenes she watched opened out one behind the other in clear perspective, the earlier ones remaining visible, drawn aside into bright light as further backgrounds opened. (Richardson, 2002, III, p. 78) Miriam sees her life as a kind of revolving theatrical space – all memories, past and present, are born into each other and become the authentic representation of reality: ‘What was it that came from the stage? Something – real … to say that drove it away. She looked again and it clustered once more, alive’ (Richardson, 2002, II, p. 179). As we have seen with reference to spiritualism, the theatre and the afterlife intersect. Miriam’s theatrical experiences are saturated with the language of automatic writing: Miriam flushed as the last words ran automatically from her pen. The sense of the richly moving picture that had filled her all the morning, and now kept her sitting happily under the hot roof at her small dusty table in the full breadth of Saturday afternoon, would be gone if she left that sentence. She felt a curious painful shock at the tips of her fingers as she reread it; a current, singing within her, was driven back by it. (ibid., p. 177) Miriam’s letter-writing is represented in a similar vocabulary to the automatic writing of mediums – the ‘richly moving picture’, the image of the night at the theatre, is summoning her to describe it and she feels the urgency to capture this evening through the sentences she is writing, otherwise everything will be lost forever. Rereading the letter gives her a ‘painful shock at the tips of her fingers’ as if the fingers remember writing it all too well. The thrill and pleasure of this letter does not rest solely on description; Miriam is not merely copying the evening – she reinvents it in prose. Mrs Willett’s mediumship included what she called ‘daylight impressions’ (Verrall, 1906b, p. 1) which she would describe in trance speech or writing. Miriam too is describing her impressions with a similar sort of urgency, driven by a desire to capture what will potentially be lost. Spiritualism though is figured in the novel as a theatrical pastime, an economic exchange and a sham. On her return from Germany, Miriam takes up the position of governess for the young children of a wealthy

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family, the Corries. The imminent arrival of Mrs Staple-Craven at one of Mrs Corrie’s dinner parties is accompanied by the praise of Mrs StapleCraven’s mediumistic talents and of the use of the planchette. Miriam hears the guest before she sees her: ‘a voice out of a play’ (Richardson, 2002, I, p. 371) – and then learns about the planchette: ‘Do you know the planchette?’ she asked, in a faint sing-song, turning with a little bold pounce to the salt-cellar close at Miriam’s left hand. ‘Oh-h-h,’ said Miriam intelligently… ‘Planchette… Planchette… Cloches de Corneville. Planquette. Is planchette a part of all this?… Planchette, a French dressmaker, perhaps.’ She turned fully round to Mrs Corrie and waiting, smiling sympathetically. ‘It’s deadly uncanny,’ Mrs Corrie went on, ‘I can tell you. Deadly’. (ibid., pp. 355–6) Although this part of the novel is set in 1895, a time when planchettes and automatic writing were extremely popular, Miriam does not recognize the word planchette – the only things that come to her mind are either related to fashion, a French dressmaker, and thus removed from her financial sphere, or to do with the theatre as she confuses planchette for Robert Planquette and his popular operetta ‘Les Cloches de Corneville’. Mrs Staple-Craven’s stagy voice and the references to operettas intimate that perhaps Miriam (and/or Richardson) views spiritualism in terms of an empty theatricality – the flamboyant gestures of the séance and the mediumistic practice. A more direct attack on spiritualism is offered by Miriam during a discussion with Mag and Jan, two of her closest friends, who prompt her to take up a job as a piano player for a medium in Gower Street. Miriam is adamant: ‘I don’t approve of séances.’ ‘Have you ever been to one?’ ‘No; but I know I don’t. It was something about the woman when she asked me.’ ‘That is personal prejudice.’ ‘It is not a prejudice; how can it be pre after I have seen her?’ ‘Séances are wrong; because you have taken a dislike to Madame Devine.’ ‘It can’t be right to make half a guinea an hour so easily. And she said a guinea for occasional public performances.’ That’s all; they know now. I had made up my mind. I wanted them to see me tempted and refusing for conscience sake. ‘Good Lord; you’d be a millionaire in no time; why not take it until you are a millionaire and then if you don’t like it, chuck it?’ ‘I should like it all right, my part.’ ‘Well, surely that is all that concerns you.

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You have nothing whatever to do with what goes on on the other side of the curtain’. (Richardson, 2002, II, p. 419) The séance would be accompanied by Miriam playing the piano, constructing an atmosphere of theatrical illusion.18 Miriam’s categorical disapproval is not centred around spiritualism per se but on the monetary exchange between the medium and the sitters, procuring the underworld for ‘half a guinea an hour’. The direct speech between Miriam, Jan and Mag is hijacked by Miriam’s own thoughts: ‘That’s all; they know now.’ Miriam has shared this proposition with her friends so that she can refuse the job on the grounds of conscience, perhaps even because she is tempted by the theatrical excess of playing a part in the séance, veiled and unveiled, unseen but very much heard. What is of particular interest though is that this dialogue regarding a fin-de-siècle séance is preceded by a paragraph which uncannily resonates with the automatic writing of the 1900s: Lolling on the windowsill of their lives to glance at a passing show. The blessed damozel looked out. Learning, heavy on the golden balcony. She knew why not. Heavy blossoming weight, weighed down with her heavy hair, the sky blossoming in it, facing, just able to face without sinking, the rose-gold world, blossoming under her eyes. (Richardson, 2002, II, p. 419) Miriam’s wandering mind evokes Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’ – the fused image of the heavy hair and the sky echoing the myth of Berenice, whose hair is said to have been placed in the sky by the gods. The broken syntax and vivid imagery, while Miriam is thinking of herself in third person, resonate powerfully with Mrs Willett’s script, which also invokes Berenice, the Blessed Damozel, and shifts to a first person narrator: Go back to Coma Berenice – I never could make out whether the threads of that had been identified. It has been said Ariadne and Berenice two constellations compared. The lock of hair – that is the link … Berenice’s vow. She cut the lock from her head. It had been there, the poem says, through the years of the past … All these classical allusions are scattered about and disguise a reality which touches the Blessed Damozel. The stars in her hair were seven. (Balfour, 1960, p. 234)

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Although Miriam is uncomfortable with the basic, amateurish theatricality of the séance, she does not resist its ‘narrative’ potential and, similarly, she does not see life as ending with death. She reflects deeply for example, on the story of a convalescent friend who knows ‘for a positive fact, there is another life’ (Richardson, 2002, I, p. 291). For her, the afterlife is not located in the drawing room but in the secret, hidden and solitary figure. Miriam is taken over by the possibility of an unmediated knowledge of the afterlife: [W]ild clutching thoughts … If only Grace could suddenly appear in her nightgown, to be questioned. Or if she herself could stay on there creeping humbly about in this little house, watering the conservatory and darning dusters, being a relative of the Brooms, devoting herself to Grace, waiting on her, hearing all she had to say. What did it matter if the Brooms wore heavy mourning and gloated over funerals, if Grace upstairs in her room had really seen the white light away in the distance far away beyond the noise of the world? (ibid., p. 292) In the summer of 1944, Dorothy Richardson wrote a letter to her friend John Cowper Powys, relating the experiments of a young woman in automatic writing and sketching: We await results with considerable interest and have advised the child to take her products to the Psychical Research Society. Obviously, don’t you think, she is an exceptionally delicately balanced ‘vehicle’? And if one assumes, as all genuine and disinterested investigations combine now to suggest, that everything thought and felt and experienced since the beginning is somehow availably recorded, then, by a sufficiently well-‘tuned’ medium, anything and everything can be registered and reproduced? Even so, one is tempted to ask: Cui Bono? The alternative, to regard these phenomena as evidence of ‘survival’, demands perhaps more than the material can supply? (Fromm, 1995, p. 507) Richardson’s fascination with the scripts produced by the young woman does not centre around the questions of survival after bodily death but rather on the concept that the past can be retrieved and ‘reproduced’ in a sort of text that captures life in all its inflections. Indeed, one of spiritualism’s claims and a central preoccupation of this book as a whole is the extent to which the past is captured and

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reproduced, the ways through which the past is continuously reinvented. This preoccupation with receiving and reproducing consciousness, through everything thought, felt and experienced, is inextricably bound up with Pilgrimage as we follow Miriam Henderson from her first post as a teacher-pupil in Hanover, Germany, in Pointed Roofs to the novel’s cessation in March Moonlight. Yet Richardson does not make the leap between the well-tuned medium and her own protagonist, perhaps because she is too cautious of representing Miriam as a passive receptacle to the world, a live wire connecting the dead with the living, the past with the present, without choice or infiltration. However, Lawrence Hyde, in a critique of the novel published in the Adelphi twenty years prior to Richardson’s spiritualist experimentation, discussed Miriam in a similar vocabulary: Miriam receives impressions far faster than she can deal with them. She serves principally as a delicate and efficient receiving instrument, a medium through whom we can look at life so surely and clearly that we forget that she is there between us and the pictures which are presented to us, forget even that the pictures are ostensibly only there because of the effect which they had on her. (Hyde, 1924, p. 512) Although Hyde is representing Miriam as an ‘instrument’, a ‘medium’ whom we eventually forget is there, he reminds us in the end that what we have perceived of the whole novel, of Miriam’s world, we have perceived because of her. Thus, her instrumentality, mediation or passivity is a false mask, a pretence to obscure the flashes of reality, of Miriam’s reality. The passivity of automatic writing, the fragmented prose of the ‘crosscorrespondences’ and the prose of Richardson, demonstrate that there is a sometimes hidden connection between Miriam’s mediation of the world around her and the automatist’s mediation of their own desires, knowledge and will. This, however, remains occluded in Richardson: instead of using the Edwardian séance as a narrative key to access Miriam’s consciousness, she creates a picture of spiritualism which is based on deceit, finance and performativity. In the remaining part of the book, I will shift my focus to the contemporary women authors who relocate the modernity of the feminine prose of Richardson and Sinclair to the Victorian séance by speaking through the medium about the cyclical aspects of time, about gender and identity, authorship, authority and autonomy, activity and passivity – in short, the very rendering

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of the self. In a sense, Richardson and Sinclair do what Myers was urging psychical investigators to do: wipe the planchette clean of the ‘trail of Katie King’. Sinclair and Richardson go a step further in effacing all aspects of mediumship from their novels. Yet a closer look tells us a different story altogether. The trail persists. The automatic writing produced during the Edwardian and Georgian séances and the writing produced by Sinclair and Richardson interpolate each other yet their links are hidden, invisible, phantasmal. For Miriam, the planchette is a theatrical invention, a board game – it obfuscates the self. Yet, she tries her hand at writing, fulfils a destiny that has been predicted for her during her time as a young governess at the Corries by a palmist who told her: ‘Whatever you do, write. If you haven’t written yet, write, if you don’t succeed go on writing’ (Richardson, 2002, II, p. 129).

3 Phantasms of Florence Cook in Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen

In an essay examining the relationship between writing and gender, Michèle Roberts describes herself as: an archaeologist reassembling shards of pottery I’ve found. It’s important that you see the lines of glue so that you realize that I made up the pot; it’s not the original (how can I know what that looked like?) but my own version, my own myth. Yet I yearn for unity, yearn to repair the pot, to make reparation. (Roberts, 1983, p. 67) Thus, Roberts’ description of her fiction as simultaneously broken and reconstructed pulls in two different directions. On the one hand, she presents herself as an archaeologist preoccupied with the unearthing and recording of history through the ‘shards’ that have survived the passage of time. On the other hand, she is a mythographer in whose hands the fragments are collected and rearranged into something different – something not quite old and not quite new. Her writing is a conscious amalgamation of historiography and mythopoeia. Both are defined by the desire to (re)capture the past, although a fully realized past will always prove elusive in the end. In its place, a chimerical version is offered up to us, exposing its own artificiality through its cracks and rough edges – exposing the glue that binds together the old and the new, the past and the present, the real and the imaginary. Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen (1990) can be read according to this model (which functions as both a structural and metaphorical framework). Three periods of history are represented by the novel’s three main protagonists: Hat, who is loosely connected to the Ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut; Flora Milk, a Victorian medium based on Florence 81

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Cook; and Hattie, a cookery book writer who lives in London during the 1980s (and who appears to be the only ‘purely’ fictional character of the trio).1 Two more heroines, Minnie Preston, inspired by the wife of William Crookes, and Rosina Milk, the fictional alter ego of Kate Cook (Florence’s sister), complete the intertwining strands of the narrative.2 Roberts salvages these women from the shadows of history by appropriating the language of Victorian mediumship – a language directly informed by the merging of historical and fictional personalities. She therefore questions the extent to which history is an authoritative or faithful index to the past by constantly reinventing the boundaries of time, space and self through spiritualist discourse (which operates on precisely these boundaries during the séance). Roberts presents the past as fluid, mercurial and recyclable. Queen Hat, for example, projects herself into the Victorian era by morphing into the materialized spirit known as ‘Hattie King’ during Flora’s séances. Continuing the chain, Hattie (that is, the twentieth-century Hattie) sees apparitions of Flora as a little girl and a young woman after she moves into a house that once belonged to Flora’s family, while Flora, in an uncanny reciprocation, sees and recognizes Hattie. The dead do not lie still but keep on returning, reinventing their identities through mediums, materializations and automatic writing. This ghostly looping effect undermines the historiographical project that structures the novel. More specifically, the writing of history becomes a kind of mediumistic practice – selective, unpredictable, sometimes failing altogether, voices heard and voices missed, both silencing and ventriloquizing the dead. Roberts asks profound feminist questions about the relationship between private (female) and public (male) histories and, more broadly, about the gender politics of the representation of past events. Indeed, we can argue that In the Red Kitchen gives shape and force to Hélène Cixous’ call for woman to ‘put herself into the text as into the world and into history by her own movement’ (Cixous, 1980, p. 245). This backwards and forwards motion, the woman who writes herself into the historical past and into the history that will pass, is accomplished in Roberts’ novel by recovering the figure of the Victorian medium. As Helen Sword indicates, ‘mediumship has always been closely allied with authorship … spirit mediums have typically regarded themselves as privileged recipients of the written word’ (Sword, 2002, p. 8). Flora and Hattie are both depicted as mediums (literally in the first instance, metaphorically in the second); both are treated as ‘receptors’ of history and as authors of their own selves. Furthermore, alongside Rosina and Minnie, Flora and Hattie appropriate (and ultimately transform)

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real historical documents written by male authors in their personal narratives. This ‘spectral’ plagiarism not only challenges the concept of authorship but exposes the subjectivity of recorded history. These documents are treated as if they were spirits, communicating and communicated through writing mediums. In this chapter, I will therefore examine the ways in which In the Red Kitchen deploys Victorian spiritualism and concepts of Psychical Research to reanimate the lives of women that have been written out or excluded from the historical record. The novel, which draws heavily on the relationship between Florence Cook and William Crookes, regurgitates a range of archival material and, in particular, Crookes’ Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874), in order to expose and explore the manipulation of history. The incorporation and ‘dramatization’ of these historical documents within the fictional narrative reveal the ways that these texts, which are read as legitimate and authentic representations of Victorian lives, are themselves an interweaving of fact and fiction. Susan Rowland argues that ‘In the Red Kitchen is not history but its fictional nature claims to be Other to history, in a way that is differentiated but not wholly different from historical discourse. It is a fiction, moreover, which imagines the voices of women like Florence Cook, which are subordinated in official records of history’ (Rowland, 2000, p. 207). Extending this argument further, the status of the ‘original’ historical documents which Roberts has consulted for her novel is uncannily transformed through their contact with and immersion in the novel. Absorbed and then released by Roberts’ multilayered narrative, they become eerie and strange, unstable and contradictory. I will therefore look at these documents side by side with their fictional ‘counterparts’ – not simply treating them as ‘source materials’ but as part of a process in which history becomes Other to itself through a spiritualist template. Indeed, spiritualist practices from materialization to automatic writing ultimately call into question the power of the dead over the living (and vice versa). They question the extent to which we can control what is past – what is lost but retrievable and what is lost and gone forever. Roberts, as Rosie White comments, is ‘consistently worrying at who records histories and who remembers them’ (White, 2004, p. 181) and this concern resonates throughout the novel as the various female narratives we are presented with not only contradict each other but are riddled with mistakes, omissions and ambiguities. The spectral ventriloquism of the departed becomes a metaphor for the writing of fiction and the re-imagining of women’s voices. Thus, Roberts herself takes on the role of a medium – ‘materializing’ the spirits of Flora

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Milk and William Preston by drawing ‘vital energy’ from the lives of Florence Cook and William Crookes. Instead of using Crookes as a source of social and scientific authority (although he was highly criticized for his spiritualist beliefs during his lifetime), Roberts manipulates his historical persona for her fictional ends – providing us with a new perspective on the dynamics of the relationship between medium and investigator. Can we therefore conceive of this as an attempt to strengthen Florence Cook’s imagined voice by muting or undermining the historical Crookes? Can we legitimately argue that Roberts has created a mouthpiece for Florence Cook, whose own voice was stifled by her spirit materializations and by the public documentation of spiritualism in newspapers and articles?3 Roberts ‘ventriloquizes’ Florence and we are invited into the fantasy of hearing her authentic voice, just as séance sitters believed they were hearing the voices of their dead. Whereas Roberts has been previously read by critics using historical, French feminist and Jungian terms, I analyse In the Red Kitchen through the works of F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney.4 Myers’ concept of ‘the subliminal self’ and Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living are reconfigured in this text and communicated through female heroines who explore and record their psychical experiences in their diaries – usurping the language of the SPR in doing so. The scientific, predominantly male vocabulary of Psychical Research that turned its back on physical mediumship is returned In the Red Kitchen to the women that were excluded from it, returned to mediums like Florence Cook. Roberts’ strategy here of employing the SPR’s public and often elitist language in a private, female ‘autobiography’ destabilizes and redistributes Psychical Research in an exclusively female environment, reclaiming the figure of the Victorian materialization medium from the margins of the Society’s interests and placing her at the centre of a rich network of psychical narratives.

Miss Florence Cook’s mediumship: Historical fragments/ fantastic texts In an 1871 issue of The Spiritualist, Florence Cook makes her debut in the world of the séance: Miss Florence Cook, of 6, Bruce-villas, Eleanor-road, Hackney, E., begun to sit for Spiritual manifestations a few weeks ago. Her mediumship is as yet in its incipient stage, but the manifestations which have already


occurred in her presence are some of them so remarkable that it is evident that very great powers are being conferred upon her by the spirits. (notice in The Spiritualist, I, no. 23, 15 July 1871, p. 177) This introductory note not only heralds the beginning of Florence’s career but also the regular appearance of her name in the spiritualist and mainstream press. As her popularity soared, her gifts were under constant scrutiny by converts and sceptics alike. However, although her supporters wrote paeans about her séances and described the materialized spirit of Katie King who developed under Cook’s mediumship, the only direct clues we have regarding her character are a handful of letters to her patron, Charles Blackburn and a few interviews in newspapers.5 Put another way, Cook’s own personal life is conspicuously blank when we juxtapose it to the plethora of documentation on the materialized Katie King. Interestingly, the question of what constitutes ‘psychic or historical authenticity’ (Thurschwell, 2001, p. 5)6 that is central to Roberts’ text (and indeed to all of the neo-Victorian novels in this study) therefore stems from spiritualistic discourse. More specifically, this question is played out through the ‘narrative lives’ of Florence Cook and Katie King. The ‘biographical’ material that developed around Katie King transformed her into an exaggerated, sensational personality rather than creating a substantive, ‘factual’ reality. Katie was the daughter of another infamous spirit, John King, an audacious buccaneer, who had frequented séances on both sides of the Atlantic. Katie’s life on earth was cut short at the age of twenty-two but this did not prevent her from leading an extraordinary existence – committing a series of lurid and violent crimes that she frequently recounted during séances.7 Her materialized form fascinated many séance sitters (who perceived Katie as proof of the advancement of spiritualism) and tickled the curiosity of sceptics (who did not see an embodied spirit but the medium’s outrageous masquerade). On the one hand, we can assert that Florence was entranced and controlled by this spirit – reinforced by the fact that Katie had demonstrated her independence by manifesting herself in the United States before she materialized in England. Katie has a life (and of course a death) of her own. On the other hand, she can be understood as the embodied projection of Florence’s fantasies, inextricably linked to the medium’s wishes and desires. Florence manipulated the ambivalent psychic states of mediumship to explore ‘the possibilities of another person and another life’.8 Indeed, we can argue that the persona of Katie

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King becomes Florence’s spectral counterpart; a biographical phantasm that clings to the sweeping brushstrokes of history, persisting in the background as the past is both created and destroyed. Florence predicted and defined her place within society and history during an early séance in which her entranced hand delivered a sibylline message – ‘Je suis un esprit’, followed by the English equivalent, ‘I am a spirit’.9 The liminal space that spirits occupied, residing between worlds and bodies, had become for Florence a way of acknowledging her social invisibility – she was a low-paid schoolteacher before she followed her vocation (Medhurst & Goldney, 1963–4, p. 48)10 – and for her to surpass it. She used the unseen realm of the spirits to mould herself into a fantastical, animated narrative. Florence’s urge to become a medium, which was refracted through automatic writing – ‘Get Florrie (Miss Cook) to come to your séances it will be well for both parties’ (Blyton, 1871, p. 175) – simultaneously exposes and conceals her authority and her ‘authorship’. The desire to model a genuine and inventive self, to pass from absence to presence, was fulfilled through Florence’s physical mediumship. She became both artist and artwork. Or, put another way, Florence and Katie King present us with a compelling version of the Pygmalion and Galatea myth – with Florence doubling as the sculptor and Katie as the statue that comes to life. The language of 1870s spiritualism represented mediumship in an ambiguous dichotomy of activity and passivity. This meant that Florence’s creative powers (which were responsible for ‘animating’ Katie King) were apparently annihilated in her entrancement. Florence’s submissiveness during the séance prevented her from turning these fantastic renditions of herself into a lasting, more substantial narrative form. If she could remember what had happened during the trance and subsequent materialization, then she would be too much in control of the process and, as a result, her mediumship would be called into question further.11 Instead, while Florence lay entranced in the cabinet, her fantastic self, Katie King, acted out a series of ephemeral but nevertheless ‘embodied’, stories. It was in the hands of the sitters to record these events for the history of spiritualism – remoulding the medium and the spirit into their own fictions. From the perspective of the sitter, Florence’s passive state not only surrendered the medium to the spirit of Katie King but to their own powers of observation and creativity. Florence became the epitome of mediumship, not only relaying between the living and the dead but between the sitters and their desires as they projected their imaginary narratives on to her séances.


Florence’s mediumship and Katie’s materialization can be read in literary terms through the narrative motifs of fantastic literature – where notions of the double, of fragmented bodies and identities, as well as collapsible time and space prevail.12 By fashioning herself as an embodied fantastical narrative, Florence Cook performs a kind of mimesis (by complying with the conventions of her gender role) and at the same time surpasses this by introducing elements of the marvellous (the materialized spirit).13 Indeed, the descriptions of her séances portray Florence as the epitome of stereotypical femininity. She is young, innocent and passive in her mediumship whereas Katie is active, shrewd and dangerous. However, both the medium and the materialized spirit act out the role of the muse – inspiring the literary and pictorial representation of the other world by the spiritualists who attended the séances. A Mr Bielfield, for example, produced an oil painting of Katie based on a spirit photograph – an image which illustrates Katie’s double function as both the passive muse and the controlling agent behind the portrait.14 She is pictured with her eyes shut (she is unreactive and inert), yet she controls the perspective of the viewer. Somewhat uncomfortably, we look at her in the knowledge that she might open them at any moment and direct her gaze towards us. Her seemingly submissive pose contains a hidden power; Katie can impose herself on the world of the living when she pleases. Related to this, it is interesting to note that Marryat frequently employed the image of the double in her portrayal of the medium and the spirit – ‘She often materialized and got into bed with her medium at night, much to Florrie’s annoyance; and after Miss Cook’s marriage to Captain Corner, he told me himself that he used to feel at first as if he had married two women, and was not quite sure which was his wife of the two’ (Marryat, 1892, p. 140). More explicitly, Katie King is described as ‘the double of Florrie Cook’ (ibid., p. 141), although the spirit insists that she ‘was much prettier than that [Cook] in earth life. You shall see, some day – you shall see’ (ibid.). Marryat therefore depicts this doubling effect in terms of two separate physical entities but also constructs an eerie psychical network linking the medium and the spirit together, as if they were two halves of a single personality or consciousness. Marryat used a vocabulary that simultaneously undermined the reality of the spirit materialization, as it turned Katie into the fictional creation of Florence, and reinforced the medium’s gifts – emphasizing the involuntary production of the spirit and the ways in which it drew from Florence’s psychical and bodily energies. During Florence’s séances, the motif of the double that was so central to gothic fiction had become a way of challenging the limits of

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consciousness, identity and socio-cultural propriety.15 The materialized spirit was at times perceived as ‘a mixture of the individualities of Katie and Miss Cook’ (Anon., 1873c, p. 452), a hybrid entity that was difficult to classify or separate out into its constituent parts. This amalgamation of Florence and Katie during séances becomes a narrative trope in Roberts’ novel as the ‘fictional’ Flora Milk and the ‘historical’ Florence Cook are yoked together. More specifically, In the Red Kitchen borrows from and overlaps with William Crookes’ Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism – a work which pivots around the premise that Cook and King were two distinct personalities, different from each other not only in character but in appearance. Nevertheless, in spite of his intentions, Crookes’ narrative actually does more to blur the differences than accentuate them. The photographs, for example, that Crookes included in this work – images of the author standing next to the materialized spirit and of Florence deliberately posing as Katie King – are meant to emphasize their dissimilarity. In fact, they make the task of distinguishing between medium and spirit even more problematic. These photographs depict Katie King as a role that Florence inhabits, a performative extension of herself, part of a fantasy play that Crookes is intimately complicit with. They are ostensibly designed to give weight to Crookes’ scientific approach to the ‘case’, but what they ultimately demonstrate is just how faint the dividing line between ‘fantastical’ and ‘historical’ documents really is – at least in a spiritualist context. I will return to this point later in the section. Firstly, however, I will explain how Cook actively turned to Crookes in order to nurture and validate her ‘spirit double’. Cook met Crookes after a spirit-grabbing incident which threatened both her social reputation and her mediumistic credentials. The episode marks the beginning of the process in which Florence’s public image and Katie’s manifestation during the séance merged into each other. Attempting to expose Florence as a fraud, William Volckman grabbed Katie and unsuccessfully tried to capture her. Katie (with the aid of two sitters) managed to escape and return to the spirit cabinet (Anon., 1873b, p. 461). The incident is, in a sense, a spiritualist version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Both Orpheus (instructed not to look back at the spirit of his wife as she follows him out of Hades) and Volckman (instructed to look but not touch when the spirit enters the room) break the conditions on which they have been admitted to the Underworld and, as a result, Eurydice (Katie) disappears into the darkness. Florence directed her powers of self-invention towards Crookes after he had proved to be a sympathetic investigator of spiritualism in his


experiments with D. D. Home.16 Florence was well aware of Crookes’ gendered, socio-cultural authority and his potential usefulness in protecting herself against accusations of fraud. She therefore chose to be redefined through the prism of Victorian science.17 Crookes’ discovery of the element thallium in 1861, his experiments with cathode ray tubes and the invention of the radiometer in 1875 (which demonstrated that objects in a vacuum were influenced by radiation), had paved the way for Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays in 1896 and had established Crookes as one of the pre-eminent figures of Victorian and Edwardian science.18 At the same time, these scientific successes were often overshadowed by Crookes’ involvement in spiritualist matters.19 Through a series of newspaper articles and personal communications, Crookes had been attacked and ridiculed for his faith in Home’s mediumship20 and his theory of ‘psychic force’. This ghostly energy was supposed to emanate from mediums and sitters – producing, under favourable conditions, a spirit manifestation as the result of this collective effort. It was adopted by spiritualists and mediums as an all-encompassing theory and used to validate even the most dubious examples of physical mediumship.21 In a public letter to The Spiritualist, Crookes described Florence as ‘young, sensitive, and innocent’ (Crookes, 1874, p. 102) – defending both her feminine qualities and public image while also setting a template for the manifestations that occurred during their test séances. Crookes’ Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, which he described as a ‘juxtaposition of spiritualistic exaggeration’ with ‘scientific coolness and precision’ (ibid., p. 6), was published some eight years before the official formation of the SPR. Researches amalgamated his scientific rigorousness with a highly descriptive, at times sensual language that actually has very little in common with the SPR’s more measured approach to the occult that was to follow. Florence Cook (of her own volition) was once more being reinvented through a language that, despite its ‘scientific’ pretensions, was as equally excitable and impressionistic as the language of spiritualists. Nevertheless, Crookes’ investigations were still notionally anchored in a ‘respectable’ cultural sphere, still tied to the dominant orders of knowledge in Victorian society, and Florence was able to exploit the air of seriousness that this provided. Alongside a series of test séances, Crookes used photography in his investigation of Florence and Katie in order to document the distinction between medium and spirit (see Figure 3.1).22 The séance room was turned into a photographic studio – ‘Five cameras, one of the whole-plate size, one half-plate, one quarter-plate, and two binocular stereoscopic cameras which were all brought to bear upon Katie at the

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Figure 3.1

Spirit photograph of Katie King taken by William Crookes.

same time on each occasion on which she stood for her portrait’ (ibid., p. 108). These cameras, however, were not simply ‘documenting’ the materialized spirit. Katie was both stylized and fragmented through this process. Her body was viewed from different angles and displayed in various sizes (whole, half-size and quarter-length), a ghostly precursor of our relationship to cinematic close-ups and erotic iconography of women on screen. On another level, these photographs represent fantasy scenarios – episodes of imaginative play, scenes in which private desires were articulated.23 Katie had become an object of fascination, the object of Crookes’ gaze (which, like medium and spirit, was also ‘doubled’ in the sense that it was focused directly on Katie and through the photographic lens). Crookes’ voyeurism, however, as both ‘spectator’ and ‘director’, was buried beneath the mantle of both scientific ‘observation’ and common spiritualist practices – protecting the honour of the medium and the scientist by masking the exchange of fantasies played out here (fantasies which cut across gender and class barriers). The photographic eye created a fetishized ‘safe distance’ between the onlooking Crookes and the spirit-subject. However, the dynamics of this relationship between observer and observed (alongside the distinction between medium and spirit) were


made more ambiguous on the occasions that Crookes participated in the photographed scene. In one such image, we see Crookes and Katie posing together, her bare foot on the floor. ‘Afterwards,’ explains Crookes, I dressed Miss Cook like Katie, placed her and myself in exactly the same position, and we were photographed by the same cameras, placed exactly as in the other experiment, and illuminated by the same light. When those two pictures are placed over each other, the two photographs of myself coincide exactly as regards to stature etc., but Katie is half a head taller than Miss Cook, and looks a big woman in comparison with her. In the breadth of her face, in many of the pictures she differs essentially in size from her medium, and the photographs show many other points of difference. (ibid., pp. 109–10) Interestingly, the hazy copy of the photograph included here (Figure 3.2), originally published in a spiritualist magazine, is usually perceived to be the first image in this experiment (i.e. a photograph of Crookes and

Figure 3.2

Florence Cook or Katie King posing with William Crookes.

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Katie King). However, because the second image of Crookes and Florence has been lost, it is simply impossible to distinguish between them. This uncertainty creates another doubling effect in the fictionalization of the medium – the difference between Katie and Florence is forever ambiguous and untraceable, in spite of Crookes’ best efforts. Crookes, the male onlooker who inserts himself into the pictures he controls, remains still and unchanged while the female object (Katie/Florence) is mercurial, elusive, mysterious. In addition, we can identify the same pattern, the same preoccupation with emphasizing the physical differences between Florence and Katie, if we return to Crookes’ notion of ‘psychic force’ (or the human organism’s ability to ‘materialize’ thought-forms). During the séance, ‘psychic force’ would assert itself and separate Florence from Katie – a psychical process with tangible, physical consequences. Indeed, according to Tzvetan Todorov, ‘the multiplication of personality, taken literally is an immediate consequence of the possible transition between matter and mind: we are several persons mentally, we become so physically’ (Todorov, 1975, p. 116). Thus, it is not just through photographs that Crookes attempted to construct two distinct physical and psychical entities but also through his written reports (and his wider conceptual understanding) of séance proceedings. In this sense, Todorov’s argument becomes a kind of extension of Crookes’ theory, establishing a complex and dynamic relationship between mind, matter and text. Expanding on this, consider the list of physical differences between Florence and Katie that is quoted below – the bodily outcome of psychical ‘multiplication’. Crookes very deliberately focuses on the physical (as opposed to the psychical) in order to avoid associating Florence with symptoms of multiple personality and other pathological conditions:24 Katie’s height varies, in my house I have seen her six inches taller than Miss Cook. Katie’s neck was bare last night, the skin was perfectly smooth both to touch and sight, whilst on Miss Cook’s neck is a large blister, which under similar circumstances is distinctly visible and rough to the touch. Katie’s ears are unpierced whilst Miss Cook habitually wears earrings. Katie’s complexion is very fair, while that of Miss Cook is very dark. Katie’s fingers are much longer than Miss Cook’s, and her face is also larger. In manner and ways of expression there are also many decided differences. (Crookes, 1874, p. 107)


Significantly, the spirit is depicted as beautiful (or at least unblemished) whilst the medium is flawed – lending an extra dimension to the network of power relations here. The potential impropriety of the male scientist’s gaze (if his sights were set exclusively on a working-class medium) is disguised by the idealization of Katie, an embodiment and at the same time a refraction of his desire. It should therefore be clear by now that Crookes’ role in these ‘experiments’ was not simply that of the detached, objective scientist but something altogether more ambiguous. Crookes became a fundamental part of the experiments he was observing – he lived his experiments, relaying between fantasy and reality, between this world and the next, performing in a variety of different roles. Katie would often consult Crookes on the details of séance proceedings (requesting information about the sitters and so on) while Crookes would advise Florence on the colour of her dress to ensure that the differences between medium and spirit were accentuated.25 This is, to borrow Bakhtin’s phrase, a ‘life turned inside out’, a ‘life drawn out of its usual rut’, a life with no clear division between ‘performers and spectators’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 122). During a séance held in Crookes’ home, for example, the scientist was invited by Katie to observe the entranced Florence. Thus, the spirit assumes the role of the director of the séance while the scientist appears to become the obedient helper: In a minute she came to the curtain and called me to her, saying, ‘come in to the room and lift my medium’s head up, she has slipped down.’ Katie was then standing before me clothed in her usual white robes and turban head-dress. I immediately walked into the library up to Miss Cook, Katie stepping aside to allow me to pass. I found Miss Cook had slipped partially off the sofa, and her head was hanging in a very awkward position. I lifted her onto the sofa, and in so doing had satisfactory evidence in spite of the darkness, that Miss Cook was not attired in the ‘Katie’ costume, but had on her ordinary black velvet dress, and was in deep trance. (Crookes, 1874, p. 105) This incident is saturated with elements of theatricality – the costumes, the darkness, the medium’s fall. The ‘roles’ here, however, are more complex than we might think. Although Crookes is ordered about by Katie, Florence’s helplessness and passivity means we can argue that his superior position (as a scientist, as a member of the upper classes and as a man) is reinforced. Nevertheless, by embracing the

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spiritualist context of the scene, the power relations are reordered. It is not Crookes or Katie who dominates here but the entranced medium. Her ‘surrender’ makes the manifestations possible; she orchestrates the proceedings of the séance, her perceived vulnerability is only a veneer. Indeed, these two readings are by no means incompatible. Florence’s entranced body, partially slipped off the sofa, and Crookes’ chivalrous gesture both conform to a staple scene in Victorian iconography – the image of Sleeping Beauty. As Nina Auerbach explains, the Sleeping Beauty, ‘as a type of female power, both dormant and revealed … seems to contain in herself both victim and queen, the apparent passivity of the one modulating imperceptibility into the potency of the other’ (Auerbach, 1982, p. 41). There is perhaps no better way of summing up the mediumship of Miss Florence Cook. While Florence emulated the role of the Sleeping Beauty, her dreams were therefore turned into physical realities enacted in the séance (see Figure 3.3). On another occasion, during a séance held in Cook’s family home, we can see that her séances (and the three-way relationship that underpinned them) did not just draw on the broader cultural registry of the

Figure 3.3

Florence Cook entranced with materializing spirit.


era but also referenced episodes from her previous experiences within a spiritualist framework: Katie never appeared to greater perfection, and for nearly two hours she walked about the room, conversing familiarly with those present. On several occasions she took my arm when walking, and the impression conveyed to my mind that it was a living woman by my side, instead of a visitor from the other world, was so strong that the temptation to repeat a recent celebrated experiment became almost irresistible. Feeling, however that if I had not a spirit, I had at all events a lady close to me, I asked her permission to clasp her in my arms, so as to be able to verify the interesting observations which a bold experimentalist has recently somewhat verbosely recorded. Permission was graciously given, and I accordingly did – well, as any gentleman would do under the circumstances. Mr. Volckman will be pleased to know that I can corroborate his statement that the ‘ghost’ (not ‘struggling’ however), was as material a being as Miss Cook herself. (Crookes, 1874, p. 106) In this passage, Crookes evokes the Volckman episode in order to discredit his spirit-grabbing experiment and to demonstrate that Katie is an authentic spirit. By repeating Volckman’s methods, he mocks the fuss and bluster of spirit grabbing and, more significantly, turns the whole incident inside out. Katie’s materiality, as tangible as any ‘living woman’, actually becomes proof of her otherworldly status. Reading between the lines, it appears that ‘spirit’ and living body (a body with weight, force, depth, mobility and sensuality) come together to form the ‘ghost’. Thus, despite Crookes’ rather jocular tone, there is a profound opposition between spirit and body being played out here. Indeed, the image of woman beatified in death that formed such a powerful template in the artistic and literary representations of the nineteenth century may well be behind this. These beautiful dead women, more beautiful than when alive, like Millais’ ‘Ophelia’ or Rossetti’s ‘Beata Beatrix’, present us with an ‘ornamental’ life within death – just as Crookes is able to reconcile Katie’s corporeality with her spectrality.26 An incident that on the surface reads like a spiritualist in-joke therefore reconnects itself with the gender politics, the art and the erotics of the period. The importance of Katie’s physical form, her spirit-body, is further emphasized in Crookes’ descriptions of her ‘ever-varying expression’ and her ‘mobile features’. At one moment, she is ‘overshadowed with

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sadness when relating some of the bitter experiences of her past life’. At the next, she smiles ‘with all the innocence of happy girlhood’ and recounts ‘anecdotes from her adventures in India’ (ibid., p. 110). Katie’s body therefore becomes a kind of living-dead text, an animated storybook, her expressions changing according to the tale she is recounting. Her body becomes a pictorial representation of emotions past and present – pliable but objectified so that further narratives can be inscribed upon it. The collapsed, entranced body of the medium brings forth Katie King and, in turn, Katie’s memories and whimsies are ‘written’ across her features. The narrativization of Florence and Katie was extended by Crookes when he invited his readers, advocates and sceptics alike, to compare his séance reports with Florence Marryat’s, who was often present at these events (ibid.). Crookes’ intention was to show up the distance between his scientific observations and Marryat’s more emotive approach. Marryat’s work (which was published in the spiritualist press and later in There is No Death) portray Katie as a ‘woman fair as the day’ (Marryat, 1892, p. 140) who at one time had allowed Marryat to observe her ‘perfectly naked’ (ibid.) body – not just making her femininity explicit but her differences from the medium. While all this was taking place, Cook was ‘wrapped in a deep trance’ (ibid., p. 141). Thus, Marryat’s accounts of the Cook/King séances, written with undisguised enthusiasm and unscientific artistry, reached the same conclusions as Crookes. Crookes’ strategy by inviting this comparison (playing the rigour of science against the gusto of spiritualism on its own terms), was therefore to show how both discourses could produce an identical result – Cook and King were separate entities, physically and psychically. What this reveals to us today is how Crookes and Marryat both constructed their versions of Katie King, words which became flesh, from Florence Cook’s entranced body – active and passive, vulnerable yet powerful. In his final article on this ‘case’, Crookes made one last attempt to validate Cook’s mediumship and prove that Katie was a genuine visitor from the other world. He did this by making use of both Cook’s femininity and logical, masculine reason: To imagine that an innocent school-girl of fifteen should be able to conceive and then successfully carry out for three years so gigantic an imposture as this, and in that time should submit to any test which might be imposed upon her … to imagine, I say, the Katie King of the last three years to be the result of an imposture does more


violence to one’s reason and common sense than to believe her to be what she herself affirms (Crookes, 1874, p. 111) If Cook really was a fraud, the argument seems to imply, she would need the cunning, guile and brazen immorality of a sensation heroine. Nevertheless, Crookes’ apparently unshakeable conviction has puzzled historians and Psychical Researchers alike and there has been much speculation as to what was really taking place behind the scenes. On the one hand, it seems highly unlikely that such a successful and celebrated scientist would fall prey to a spiritualist impostor.27 On the other hand, a hypothesis based on Crookes’ sexual relationship with the young medium does not fully account for his conduct – on several occasions he had Florence stay at his house while his wife Ellen was pregnant – or his apparent willingness to jeopardize his hard-earned scientific career. Whilst it is true that Crookes’ fascination with the unknown had led him into a series of encounters with spiritualism, Crookes had initially wished to find ‘natural’ answers in physics or chemistry to explain these phenomena. His fascination with Florence and Katie, however, a fascination we will never fully understand, led Crookes along an altogether different path. Eventually though, he would return to this template and later served as president of the SPR. His attention was refocused on to telepathy and the erosion of mental and physical distances. As the nineteenth century came to a close and the twentieth century dawned, Crookes bid farewell to the stunners and spirits of the séance.

Miss Flora Milk: Living figures/spirit doubles If we recall the two photographs discussed in the previous section, one in which Florence is ‘posing’ as Katie and the other in which the ‘real’ Katie manifests herself, we are provided with a useful reference point for the analysis of In the Red Kitchen. Both photographs not only fulfil the fantasy of Katie King but also expose the extent to which reality and imagination radically interpenetrate each other in spiritualist history. In the Red Kitchen negotiates the same issue by continuously challenging and reinventing the historical personae and documents on which the novel is itself based. The letters written by Kate Cook (Florence’s sister) to the spiritualist patron Charles Blackburn, for example, are remodelled as letters from Rosina Milk to a Mr Redburn. William Crookes’ Researches is also a subject to the same transformative process – Minnie Preston sends letters to her mother describing the séances she holds

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with Flora and refers to her husband’s investigation of the young medium. Thus, a public document is absorbed and recontextualized within a private communiqué, a pattern that is repeated throughout the novel. The basis on which we distinguish between the fictional and the historical is called into question, just as the ‘lost’ spirit-photographs erode the distinction between the staged and the authentic. Interestingly, the ways in which historical figures become fictional characters resonates with Frederic Myers’ preoccupation with the survival of personality after bodily death. Like the slippage between real and imagined history in the novel, Myers describes the ways in which messages from the spirits were warped or refracted during the séance by making a poetic allusion: The very faintness and incoherence of … a spirit’s message, besides being a kind of indication that we are dealing with the imperfection of an actual reality rather than with the smoothly finished products of mere imagination, does also in itself constitute a strong appeal to our gratitude and reverence. Not easily and carelessly do these spirits come to us, but after strenuous preparation, and with difficult fulfilment of desire. So came Tennyson’s Persephone; – ‘Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies All night across the darkness, and at dawn Falls on the threshold of her native land, And can no more’ They commune with us, like Persephone, willing and eager, but, ‘dazed and dumb with passing through at once from state to state.’ They cannot satisfy themselves with their trammelled utterance; they complain of the strange brain, the alien voice. What they are doing, indeed, they desire to do. (Myers, 1903, II, p. 276) With Myers’ framework in mind, we can understand the historical figures portrayed in the novel as disrupted (or disruptive) spirit voices – as the ‘trammelled utterances’ of Florence, her sister Kate and Crookes. Roberts’ textual ‘mediumship’ channels these voices from the past, making them both familiar and strange, coherent and undecipherable, at the same time. Moreover, the novel’s refusal to provide a definite conclusion to the story of Crookes and Cook (or indeed any of the characters) can be linked with Myers’ notion that ‘imperfection’ constitutes the ‘actual reality’ of spirit messages. Roberts very self-consciously presents us with an ‘imperfect’ text, with breaks and gaps and inconsistencies, rather


than a ‘smoothly finished product’. This is not designed, however, to affirm the ‘reality’ of the novel but to expose the fragility and artificiality of all historical and fictional narratives. She proves Myers right in the sense that, if a concrete distinction between the real and the imagined is untenable, then ‘imperfection’ is the only ‘actual reality’ we have – spirit voices struggling to make themselves heard. The heroines of In the Red Kitchen are thus alternately positioned as mediums and spirits, as ventriloquists and dummies – generating a series of mistaken identifications and scrambled messages. As Steven Connor argues, ventriloquism, just like mediumship, ‘has an active and a passive form, depending upon whether it is thought of as the power to speak through others or as the experience of being spoken through by others’ (Connor, 2000, p. 14). In Roberts’ novel ventriloquism and/or mediumship actually become narrative tropes in their own right. What is more, they are instrumental tools in her exploration and interrogation of recorded history. The most reverberating example of this ‘ventriloquism’ is the way in which the novel ‘raises’ the voice of Kate Cook. Kate had begun to sit for séances in the early 1870s – much to the dismay of her sister Florence, whose own mediumship was threatened by the newcomer’s physical materializations.28 Significantly, Kate’s letters to Charles Blackburn describing the materialized spirit Lillie borrowed heavily from Florence’s séances, sometimes to the point of outright plagiarism.29 When Kate was asked by Blackburn to hold a joint séance with her sister, she flatly refused – ‘My mediumship always teach[es] me to be sisterly and it pains me to have people speak so unfeelingly of family ties. I do not intend sitting with Florrie. I have my own mediumship and she has hers.’30 In the Red Kitchen, however, leaves the possibility of Rosina and Flora participating in a séance together open-ended. In one of Minnie’s letters to her mother, we learn that ‘Flora and Rosina worked with him [William, the ‘fictional’ Crookes] in his study to produce those full materializations’ (Roberts, 1999, p. 83), implying that Rosina is more closely involved with her sister’s mediumship than she is willing to admit. Nevertheless, in the novel’s opening letter, Rosina accuses her sister (the more talented medium) of being ‘a liar’ and ‘a fake’, distancing herself from Flora’s séances. Thus, Kate Cook’s letters to Blackburn, which make very little reference to Florence, are transformed (fictionalized) into slanderous, passionate communications – saturated with envy, spite and sororal discontent. Rosina dehumanizes her sister by drawing on the typical motifs of ‘dangerous’ Victorian femininity. Flora is a

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‘monster in silk skirts’, who ‘sucks the life out of people’ and ‘bewitches’ them. With ‘those red lips of hers stealing their lifeblood away’, she is turned into a vampire, a wicked creature who charms ‘the ladies as much as the gentlemen’ (ibid., p. 1). Instead of giving herself up to the spirits, Flora draws sustenance from the ‘bewitched’ sitters and her séances are depicted as deliberate, calculated frauds. Flora is portrayed here in the same vocabulary that was applied to the sensation heroines of Wilkie Collins and M. E. Braddon – the woman who ‘doesn’t look vicious’ but who uses her innocent appearance to dupe the unwary (ibid.). Just as the ‘real’ Florence Cook was constructed through various narratives in her lifetime, the fictional Flora Milk is circumscribed as a dangerous, demonic female by the ventriloquized voice of Kate/Rosina. However, a contrasting image of Flora is presented by Minnie – who describes the young medium in almost identical terms to those used by Crookes (see Crookes quote on page 20: ‘to imagine that an innocent school-girl of fifteen…’). Minnie therefore takes over Crookes’ position and exposes the way in which private and public documents become deeply ‘unstable’ once their authors are dead. A letter addressed to her mother becomes the spirit double of Crookes’ text: It is impossible to suspect one so young, innocent and beautiful of deceitful intent, and I am, I must say, shocked that you have allowed your mind to entertain such dark thoughts of one who is not only pure as an angel and incapable of falsehood, but whose conduct has been readily submitted to the calm and objective scrutiny of William himself. (ibid., p. 34) In addition, with further allusion to Crookes, Minnie stresses the fact that Flora is ‘a schoolgirl’ (ibid., p. 22) in order to highlight her youth and naivety. These contrasting images of Flora compete against each other in the novel as her séances and her desire for creative fulfilment both reinforce and challenge this dichotomized conception of femininity – the monster and the angel. Whilst Minnie’s letters ventriloquize the historical Crookes, Rosina’s expose another forgotten aspect of spiritualist history – that Kate had managed to usurp Florence’s place as the focus of Blackburn’s interest. This is represented by Rosina’s tombstone which, tellingly, bears the legend ‘Rosina Redburn … Beloved wife of Charles Redburn’ (ibid., pp. 116–17).31 The afterlife of the fictional characters is therefore as significant, in a narrative sense, as the afterlife of the historical characters.


Just as spirits transformed the domestic environment with revelations, accusations and words of sorrow or love during the séance, the novel attempts to do the same through its ghostly narrative systems. When the opening letter of the novel invites both the addressee and the reader to ‘Listen’ (ibid., p. 1), we are being invited into a séance – a séance where spirits incessantly take control of each other’s positions as interlocutors of what really happened. Furthermore, because In the Red Kitchen is entirely composed of letters and diary entries, the reader is subjected to a carefully maintained illusion of intimacy or close contact. Reading becomes listening – as if we had been given a private audience with the various characters. The heroines may be spectral but they have what Connor calls a ‘vocalic body’, a body that is made up solely from the power of voice. It is a ‘body in-invention, an impossible imaginary body in the course of being found and formed’ (Connor, 2000, pp. 35–6). The novel therefore exposes a compelling link, historical and conceptual, between ventriloquism and the séance. More importantly, however, it demonstrates how these vocalic bodies not only invent and reinvent themselves but also the historical personalities they are formed from. The second letter that Rosina sends to Redburn allows us to develop this notion further. In it, Rosina describes an incident in which a Mr Andrews grabs the spirit materialized by the entranced Flora. This immediately recalls the Volckman episode that I have previously discussed. The spirit face, we are told, ‘bore a striking resemblance to Flora’s own’. Andrews ‘grasped the spirit’s arm in his own’ and ‘was sure that Flora had somehow come out of the cabinet’. ‘Flora [was] crying out’ and ‘was discovered dishevelled and breathing heavily, back inside the cabinet, with the ropes that had bound her hands twisted loosely around them and the knots gone’ (Roberts, 1999, p. 58). Unlike the Volckman episode though, the loose ropes incriminate Flora and the letter becomes another ‘betrayal’ of Florence Cook (whose own body was found carefully secured in the cabinet). The letter epitomizes the power of the vocalic body. Rosina’s ‘voice’ is more forceful and substantial than the medium’s powers of materialization. This process, however, is not a one-sided affair. Just as Rosina reinvents the Volckman episode to the detriment of her sister, Flora reinvents Crookes’ spirit photographs as the scientist’s authority is further marginalized. Instead of the pictures, we have Flora’s own voice describing the relationship between medium and ‘investigator’. In Flora’s terms, the photographs are ‘doubled’ once again, becoming a set of

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ghostly negatives more erotic and more unsettling than the ‘originals’ ever were: Hattie [the spirit] doesn’t like to stand still, as you have to do for five minutes while the camera works. She comes out as a blur, because she moves too much. So William takes a second set, using me as a model for Hattie. Just to record her gestures. He places me in different positions, lifting my arms, adjusting my leg, tipping up my chin with his finger. He puts me in the attitudes Hattie strikes. He opens the front of Hattie’s robe to show her breasts, flicking the nipples to stiffen them. (ibid., p. 122) During these photography sessions, Flora is split into two. She acts as Hattie and then becomes Hattie as the narrative subtly changes from the first to the third person (‘He puts me in the attitudes’ modulates into ‘He opens the front of Hattie’s robe to show her breasts’). Crookes’ notion of ‘psychic force’ therefore becomes libidinal force, the controlled realization of an erotic fantasy as Preston substitutes Flora for Hattie. Indeed, the fantasy is dependent on this splitting – ‘Hattie is shameless, because she is a spirit’ whilst Flora ‘knows nothing’. Flora ‘would never do what Hattie does. Flora is a good girl’ (ibid., pp. 122–3). On a wider social level, the dualism between Flora and Hattie is maintained through class. Whereas Flora comes from a working-class background, Hattie King (as her surname suggests) is of royal parentage. Hattie’s ‘aristocratic descent’, her ‘ladylike poise and dignity’ (ibid., p. 96) are juxtaposed with Flora’s modest upbringing. Hattie is described as ‘outspoken and articulate’, Flora as ‘modest and shy’. Hattie ‘discusses brilliantly upon a variety of topics’ whereas Flora is ‘simple and ignorant’ (ibid., pp. 96–7). The gulf between them is emphasized once Flora moves into Preston’s mansion. However, Flora’s subordinate position is not as straightforward as we might think. Her status within the household, rather than as an object of investigation, places her under Minnie’s control as opposed to William’s: I’m her pet, captured from the savage wilderness, tamed and trained to perform for the amusement of ladies and gentlemen in evening clothes. Minnie can’t trust me to prowl neatly among the knives and forks and finger-bowls, though any slips with coffee cups can be forgiven just so long as I make sure to go into trance afterwards. But the spirits aren’t treated that way. I can’t turn Hattie on and off like


a tap. She comes to me when she chooses: she’s a queen of a greater country than Bayswater. (ibid., p. 74) Nevertheless, in spite of the mistrust she causes, Flora’s mediumship still challenges the conventions of social status and the politics of personality by exposing them as unstable constructs. Hattie King, after all, is both a spirit and Flora’s own fantastical embodiment. Indeed, even Minnie, for all her patronizing upper-class myopia, is able to partially detect this: She [Flora] never presumes, delicate and refined as her sensibilities so surprisingly are, to suppose that we are equal: her attitude towards me is governed by the warmest gratitude and respect. It is the knowledge of hers of the barrier between us … She is so unfortunate as to have the aspirations, if not the capacities, of a lady. (ibid., p. 66) What Minnie cannot see is that Flora does have the ‘capacities’ of a lady when she takes the form of Hattie, her spectral superior. The class gap between medium and spirit is solidified and loosened at the same time.32 Thus, the lofty ‘aspirations’ that may have led Florence Cook into spiritualism also inspire Flora – whose talents would otherwise be stifled by her gender and class. Flora’s mediumship is, on the one hand, a rejection of her position as an infant school teacher (although teaching is better ‘than going into service like Mother did, as she keeps reminding me’ (ibid., p. 32)) and, on the other, an embodied version of Flora’s muted ‘authorial’ voice. Indeed, her love of words, instilled by her printmaker father, is suppressed after his death and mediumship therefore provides a powerful (if unorthodox) alternative: That’s over. Long ago. I’m too busy helping Mother in the house, looking after the younger ones, to have time to play childish games like making books. I still read every one I can lay my hands on, though, stuffing myself with the tattered romances I pick up cheap on market stalls, collections of legends and fairy tales borrowed from the circulating library, working solidly through the family Bible; avid. Where do you get it from? Mother puzzles: much good will it do you. Put that foolishness down, will you. Come and help me. Down on my knees, mechanically brushing the stairs, still dreaming, the stories running through my head.

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With Rosina I can act them out. Gone is the lethargy that descended after my father’s death and lays me out so often on the sofa; gone, the headache that struck this morning. (ibid., pp. 19–20) The ‘lethargy’ that Flora experiences is reminiscent of Cook’s undiagnosed health problems as a girl – ‘so drowsy and heavy she scarcely ever seemed to be fully awake.’33 Flora, like Florence, finds a way of living out the stories in her head by fictionalizing her own body and identity. She not only escapes her domestic malaise but achieves financial independence. ‘Paid for all by myself,’ she remarks after buying a pair of slippers, ‘the best I could afford. With William’s money, but I earned it’ (ibid., p. 107). In addition, this process of ‘embodiment’ (or the concretization of Flora’s psychical fictions) is also represented through her father’s printmaking: My father makes the pages of books, lifting letters one by one from the trays where they are kept in multiples like different sorts of sweets and arranging them into lines, backwards, like mirror-writing, in a frame called a forme. When he’s filled it, he locks it into place so that no words fall out and spoil his neat sentences, then it’s carted downstairs to the printing press. (ibid., p. 19) The use of the term ‘forme’ here suggests we can find a metaphorical equivalent to the material art of printmaking in spiritualist practice. The printmaking ‘forme’, quite literally, secures words – it prevents them from falling apart, from being forgotten or destroyed. Similarly, Flora’s assumption of spirit ‘forme’ means that her own words (long suppressed by her mother and social status) are recorded, examined and given lasting value by the various spiritualists and scientists who surround her. Flora’s first encounter with Hattie King (alias Queen Hat, the distinction between them is never entirely clear) occurs during the burial of her father at Highgate cemetery. The appearance of the spirit is prefigured by Flora’s contemplation of the meaning of death, which she does not perceive as an end but as an organic process, part of the cycles of nature – ‘the lilies have eaten him, gulping his white flesh in their thick white mouths. We shall bury the lilies and they will spit him out onto the mouths of worms’ (ibid., p. 3). This constant exchange between life and death, the recycling of matter, connects the novel’s three main heroines (in the sense that Flora, Hattie and Queen Hat are all part of


each other, psychically and physically) and invokes Myers’ theory of a Universal Self made up of the souls of the living and the dead (‘We are every one members one of another,’ he asserts, borrowing from Sophocles) (Myers, 1903, II, p. 282). As Flora looks up, she receives the fright of her life: [T]he woman standing on the cropped turf between the tombs, a silver staff in one of her hands, a tall jewelled crown rising above her black brows, a pleated white cloak falling from her shoulders. And curved about her handsome haughty face, a curled white beard. The earth drops under me, opening up to let me in, the sky turning black in the pit of my stomach. (Roberts, 1999, p. 4) Queen Hat (who is and is not Hattie King), is a figure misplaced in time and space; a figure who instigates the development of Flora’s mediumship and is fuelled by her desire for historical presence. As Hat appears to her, Flora sinks into the earth in a metaphorical burial. In this first encounter, Flora’s loss of consciousness becomes a kind of inverted resurrection – the earth does not break open to produce the dead, but to devour the living. Indeed, the swapping of positions between the living and the dead is at the heart of spiritualist debate and is a constant preoccupation in the novel. Flora remarks that ‘the necropolis’ where she buries her father ‘is just like home’ (ibid., p. 3) – an early indication that the world of the dead will become as familiar to her as everyday domestic life. In contrast to this, the ‘twentieth century’ Hattie’s first sighting of Flora occurs in the basement of her newly acquired home in Hackney. Flora, who wears a black velvet dress, addresses Hattie as a beloved, long-awaited friend. Both women are portrayed as ‘real’ and as ‘ghosts’ – as their timeframes collide, Flora sees a glimpse of the future and Hattie sees a glimpse of the past. Or, to use Gurney’s term, they become ‘living phantasms’. Hattie’s momentary loss of self (‘I looked down at myself for reassurance’, ibid., p. 57) further enhances this notion in the sense that they are not only ‘living phantasms’ to each other but to themselves. Tellingly, Hattie records Flora’s apparition in her diary ‘as though’ she was ‘a real ghost’ (ibid., my italics) – exposing the ambiguity of their respective positions. Hattie’s twentieth-century clothes seem strange and exotic to Flora and, as a result, the medium mistakes her for her spirit control (Hattie King/ Queen Hat) – another example of the psychical and physical connections that bind these three women together across history. This ‘connection’

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is accentuated by the fact that Hattie’s momentary loss of identity is put right when Flora calls her by her name. It is the name of a woman she is and is not, the name of a ‘living phantasm’; a name that returns Hattie to both her senses and her ‘self’. Interestingly, the diary entries featured in the novel, which amalgamate the heroines’ private thoughts with descriptions of ghost sightings, often resemble the collection of testimonies put together by Edmund Gurney in Phantasms. In many respects, Gurney explored the fragmentation of time and space and the ‘apparitional’ status of the self that In the Red Kitchen negotiates almost a century before its publication. Gurney suggested that hallucinations were based on ‘an impression or impulse transferred from another mind’ (Gurney, 1886, I, p. 496) and thus presents us with a useful theoretical framework for coming to terms with the novel’s ‘living phantasms’. Gurney and Myers’ fusion of experimental psychology with Psychical Research had started to analyse both the various ‘levels’ of consciousness and the parameters of identity. Apparitions were largely attributed to heightened emotional states experienced either by the ‘agent’ or the ‘receiver’ (ibid., p. 506). In Roberts’ novel, the moments in which the protagonists appear to each other as ‘ghosts’ occur as the result of precisely such emotional states. Hattie’s first encounter with Flora, for example, takes place during the early stages of Hattie’s pregnancy and their subsequent meetings on two further occasions follow a tragic miscarriage. These are moments in which Hattie’s sense of self is both most intense and most fragile, in which she is ‘sensitive’ to an unseen world. Similarly, Flora sees the ghost of Queen Hat at her father’s funeral. Indeed, it is only Hat who is not troubled by these sightings. She is, in herself, inhabited by both life and death, an incarnated myth, the daughter of the Father of all Gods, drifting across time (Roberts, 1999, p. 54). Let us therefore examine one of the novel’s most significant ghost sightings in more detail. On one occasion, after her miscarriage, Hattie sees a little girl sitting at a table. The girl is playing with pieces of broken type and forming words: I stood up, uncertain what air I balanced against, what dimension held me, how much I was solid and how much I was a loose collection of atoms34 mixed with the flow that I clearly saw made up what I was pleased to call a chair, a table leg. I was transparent and I dissolved; ‘I’ no longer existed; ‘I’ was just a linguistic convenience, not any kind of truth … I used my eyes, not my hands, peering across the wood of the table top … to see what word she was making with


the letters she laid out so carefully. HAT. HATE. HATE … HATT. HATE. HATTE. HATTIE. HATE. I. (ibid., pp. 104–5) The little girl, a younger version of Flora, is forming Hattie’s name with the pieces of type. By doing so, she mirrors the earlier episode in which Hattie records Flora’s presence in her diary. It is as if Flora has summoned Hattie by writing her name, as if writing carries with it an occult power, collapsing distances, time and space. As Hattie’s sense of self dissolves, it is reassembled as she sees her name being formed in this haunted typography. However, similar to Myers’ concept of the polymorphous self, the letters might be dispersed or rearranged into something other at any moment (significantly, they spell Hat before Hattie). Thus, although Hattie is spectralized here (becoming ‘transparent’ like an apparition) she experiences a form of mediumship too. The experience of ‘dissolving’, of being uncertain as to what ‘dimension’ holds her, is strongly reminiscent of the experience of the séance – a process that Flora herself has undergone many times. The recording of one’s story and one’s name is therefore crucial to the construction of identity in the novel and to the simultaneous solidification and fragmentation of historical time and place. Flora, Hattie and Hat are all bound up in a process of ‘life-writing’, recording their experiences and recording themselves. In doing so, however, they expose spectral pathways into other lives and other personalities. Writing (from typography to diary entries) represents an attempt to substantiate these apparitions, to make the spectral tangible. Queen Hat, above all else, desires to be written into history – ‘To write,’ she explains, ‘is to enter the mysterious, powerful world of words, to partake of word’s power … To write is to deny the power of death, to triumph over it … Writing, I live; I enter that world beyond the false door of the tomb; my existence continues throughout eternity’ (ibid., p. 24). Indeed, it is Hat’s desire for a body of words, a more lasting body than her embalmed flesh, which triggers Flora’s mediumship. Flora becomes a ‘scribe’ as well as a psychic receiver, ‘a faithful scribe who will spell me right and let me rise … One whose hand will dance at my spelling’ (ibid., p. 133). Through Flora’s mediumship, Hat becomes an embodied text, a living narrative. Drawing the various threads of my analysis together, In the Red Kitchen is therefore constructed around an interchange between different ‘forms’ of bodies – the vocalic body, the textual body and the fleshy, vulnerable, impermanent body. However, the textual body is no guarantee of permanence, as Hat discovers during an episode in which Flora experiments with a Ouija

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board. As Hat attempts to communicate, her royal title (Pharaoh) is mistranscribed as ‘FARE. O! FARE’ (ibid., p. 46). Irritated by the mistake, the spirit adopts a new strategy and introduces herself as ‘Hattie King’. Whilst this new name may contain a sly allusion to her lofty status, it is further testament to Hat’s ‘disappearance’ from history. Her true name (and thus her true story) cannot be fixed in its original form and she will remain forever as an elusive spirit, caught between two worlds. Flora believes that she has made contact with the spirit of Hattie King (the spirit who will later materialize through her mediumship), but she has failed to become the scribe who will write Queen Hat into history. Hat is written into the margins once again, a footnote in the textual body of Victorian spiritualism. In the Red Kitchen therefore contains contrary impulses. On the one hand, writing offers an occult resistance to extinction and loss. On the other, writing is threatening in itself due to its dematerializing power. Through the ‘text’ of the Ouija board, Hat becomes Hattie King and her communications across time and space are mis-written. Flora’s diaries, which are written ‘for no reason except to please myself’ (ibid., p. 18) and yet provide a rich and intimate history of her life and mediumship, the answers to so many of Hattie’s questions in the twentieth century, are left boxed up in the attic and unread. Indeed, when a relative of Flora’s comes to pick up her belongings, the photographs that form part of this record are described as ‘fading fast on glossy pasteboard’ (ibid., p. 138), signifying the gradual slippage out of history that each of the heroines battles to escape from. Similarly, when Hattie catches a glimpse of the diaries (which bear Flora’s surname, ‘Milk’), she mistakes them for exercise books – ‘Something about milk’ (ibid.). Thus, ‘messages’ from the past are never comprehended in totality, never received as they were intended. The fullness of the histories embedded within them is never realized; it is always misspelt. Hattie is left wondering ‘why yet again I was dreaming about a ghost in Victorian clothes’ (ibid., p. 119). Nevertheless, in spite of their inability to see the connections, Hat, Flora and Hattie are part of the same shimmering material – fragments of histories resurface through each of them as reveries, dreams and desires, like Myers’ concept of the Universal Self. Myers perceived the Self as a kind of patchwork, a consciousness that was based on a multitude of thoughts and emotions and of other ‘subliminal’ selves. In Human Personality, Myers made the following proposition: [T]hat part of the Self which is commonly subliminal, and I conceive that there may be, – not only co-operations between these


quasi-independent trains of thought, but also upheavals and alterations of personality of many kinds, so that what was once below the surface may for a time, or permanently rise above it. And I conceive also that no Self of which we can have cognizance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger Self, – revealed in a fashion at once shifting and limited through an organism not so framed as to afford it full manifestation. (Myers, 1903, I, p. 15) In accordance with this notion, Hattie remembers her childhood fantasies of ‘exotic royal parentage, a crowned and jewelled father who would ride up with a train of elephants and camels to claim me’ (Roberts, 1999, p. 27) in an uncanny parallel with Queen Hat’s opulent lifestyle. Hattie’s family romance therefore represents more than an attempt to contend with her status as an orphan. Subliminally, as it were, Hattie becomes the ‘scribe’ that Queen Hat has been searching for. Furthermore, this subliminal relationship is expanded through the publication of Hattie’s first successful cookery book. Entitled Recipes for Death, the book is inspired by a Tutankhamen exhibition (ibid., p. 13) and brings the Londoner and the spirit-Queen into deeper (but indirect) contact. The same pattern applies to Flora. Both Flora and Hat, for example, are taught to write by their fathers. If we understand Myers’ Universal Self as an entity that cannot fully manifest itself to us, we can understand why it is that Flora, Hat and Hattie fail to identify each other but are intimately bound together at the same time. This idea becomes clearer when we consider one of Flora’s earliest memories of being locked in the kitchen cupboard when she ‘was a naughty child, roaring and sobbing’ (ibid., p. 2). This traumatic memory is mirrored by Hattie’s experience of discovering a sobbing child in the basement of the house – she ‘turned the key in the lock, pulled the door open, and saw her, a little dark heap on the floor’ (ibid., p. 118). The child that Hattie comforts is not an ‘apparition’ or ‘ghost’ in the strictest sense but the product of a subliminal interchange between life and death, past and present, history and fiction. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that this continuous ‘recycling’ is the only constant in the narrative. The Bayswater house of William Preston becomes, in the twentieth century, the orphanage run by nuns where Hattie spends her formative years. The ghost stories that Hattie remembers of a lady in blue appearing at dusk rocking an invisible baby (ibid., p. 40) eerily connect with Flora’s reminiscences of Minnie Preston (ibid., p. 75), whose daughter Rosalie died as a toddler and wears a blue dressing gown

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about the house. When Hattie and her lover visit the cemetery, Hattie reads the inscription on Flora’s grave and they decide that if she falls pregnant with a girl they should name their baby Flora (ibid., p. 117). Again and again, Flora, Hat and Hattie are linked together like a set of Russian dolls, one inside the other, through the endless computations of identities and memories. According to Myers, the Self functioned in a similar way to a house – an overarching structure supported by foundations and organized internally according to certain practicalities and practices (Myers, 1891–2, p. 302). As a critical template, this provides further insight into Roberts’ novel – not least because the Hackney house once inhabited by Flora and later by Hattie is such a potent site of haunting. Myers uses a domestic metaphor to show how the ‘dicta of consciousness’ go far deeper than ‘the ordinary observer’ could ever have anticipated – ‘I receive my letters at my front door, and I give my orders in my library. Why should I suppose that my house is governed by an imaginary conspiracy in the kitchen?’ (ibid.). This not only creates a vivid picture of the Self as an architectural space35 but, by drawing on the complexities of Victorian class relations and domestic organization, articulates the way in which supraliminal and subliminal selves operate outside a clear-cut master/servant relationship. The kitchen, contrary to first impressions, is just as powerful as the upper levels. The comparison here with the title of Roberts’ novel is therefore irresistible. The red kitchen is the place where Flora holds her séances and Hattie sees Flora’s ghost. The red kitchen, whose colour implies both warmth and violence, becomes a haunted place precisely because it lies at the heart of the home. It controls and nurtures the family from below, influential yet hidden. The red kitchen is part of the subliminal realm which links the novel’s characters together, a source of wonder and unease. It is a feminine, welcoming space but also a place of shadows and whispers and ghosts; a place where the past ebbs in and out of materiality, where old ingredients and new are mixed up over and over again. Continuing with this theme, it is interesting to note Hattie’s admission that she never kept a diary before she moved into the house in Hackney: The past, my own past, has not mattered to me. Now, in this house, the past surrounds me and holds me, and my own past leaps back at me in flashes. Impossible to hold gleaming drops of water in my fingers; the past leaps away in a trail of silver; yet I need to go on trying


to hold it second by second. I want to tell you my stories. I want to record my life with you. I want to give myself a history. That’s all. (Roberts, 1999, p. 17) The house becomes a spatialized historical consciousness; it demands that the past be revealed and recorded. The house effectively becomes a character in its own right, complete with a ghostly double like the women who inhabit it – ‘[A]nother house, a secret one twinned with this, invisible mirror image’ (ibid., p. 25). Significantly, the redecoration that Hattie undertakes actually has the reverse effect. Instead of ‘updating’ the house, it reveals more of its past – ‘I took off layers of history, a sodden shredded palimpsest curled under my feet’ (ibid., p. 28). After her first encounter with Flora, Hattie comes to realize that the ‘old, invisible house’ will always endure – ‘You don’t really alter a hundred and thirty years of history with fresh coats of plaster and paint. You can’t shut a house up by papering over its gaps; the house has many mouths [recalling Connor’s ‘vocalic body’] and keeps talking to me’ (ibid., p. 54). This personification of the house as a living, speaking entity can also be connected to Flora’s mediumship. ‘I’m the speaking tube in this house in Bayswater’, she remarks to herself, ‘a corridor for others’ voices … I must be scoured, emptied out, hollowed by fire, burnt white as a bone. I am the cave they enter’ (ibid., p. 92). Flora’s mind and body become architectural spaces. She is the house and the house is her – the ‘cave’ the spirits enter. After Flora and William’s relationship comes to an end with a visit to the Salpêtrière, she has a complex fantasy in which the house and Hattie King are fused together as a kind of mother figure, comforting and sustaining her in a maternal embrace: If the wall were soft, and warm. If the wall breathed steadily, in and out. If Hattie were the wall. If Hattie were the house. If her strong body could comfort and sustain me, hold me. If her walls were strong enough to hold me up and hold my pain. If the house could stoop over me, console me, mourn with me. (ibid., p. 131) Hattie, in the twentieth century, who loses her unborn child and mourns for it, therefore fulfils Flora’s desire. She ‘shares’ Flora’s grief as it is subliminally transmitted through the house. In addition, as Flora reminisces about a game played in the dark with her sister and cousins, the house is again depicted as a conscious being – ‘[T]he house holds us

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gently in its dark arms, and it chuckles, transforming itself’ (ibid., p. 31). When Flora surrenders to these ‘dark arms’, the house lets her ‘expand into something, someone, larger than a child or my ordinary daily self’ (ibid.). Flora continues this game into her old age, taking the darkness of the house ‘inside’ – ‘a whole soft black world in which colours fizz and spark like fireworks, melting and reforming and melting again, the space behind my eyes a glowing loom weaving patterns I can swim in and out of as I watch’ (ibid., p. 17). Flora’s childish game, losing herself in the ‘infinity’ of darkness contained within the walls of the house, also resonates with the experience of mediumship. Her description clearly mirrors the experience of entering a trance state – ‘I’m a dark ooze swirling and spreading, no boundaries, no tight clothes to hold me in I’m liquid darkness rolling over the rug, under the bed’ (ibid., p. 32). This image is particularly evocative of Myers, who perceived subliminal selves as ‘imperfectly miscible fluids of various densities, and subject to currents and ebullitions which often bring to the surface a stream or a bubble from a stratum far below’ (Myers, 1891–92, p. 307). Once more then, we can see how Psychical Research allows us to conceptualize the novel’s imagery, narrative structure and characterization in a way that reflects the fluid, ghostly realms of consciousness it was so preoccupied with. The novel ends as it begins with a letter from Rosina to Redburn. Rosina claims to have materialized a spirit named Katy King, a spirit even more exotic than Hattie. The letter betrays both her sister and her sister’s ‘real’ counterpart, Florence Cook (the name is a barely disguised reference to the infamous Katie King, Florence’s spirit-control). This perhaps becomes Roberts’ way of acknowledging her own ‘betrayal’ of Florence Cook – betraying her by fictionalizing her. Nevertheless, Roberts revisits Victorian mediumship to show that spiritualism provides a fictional space in which ghosts can be raised, in which spectral ventriloquism is a possibility and the impersonation of the dead is legitimatized. Flora Milk, William Preston, Minnie and Rosina are all constructed from their historical ‘bodies’, like the ectoplasm drawn out from a medium during a materialization séance. In the Red Kitchen reclaims the figure of the physical medium from the margins of spiritualist history and ventriloquizes her using the rich critical and imaginative language of Psychical Research – a discourse that had abandoned physical mediumship but one that was asking the same fundamental questions about spectrality, identity and levels of consciousness. These questions were at the heart of Victorian and Edwardian society and culture, even if those who asked them have been dismissed as cranks or eccentrics. What Roberts shows


us is that they are as vital as they ever were, providing a new (and old) way of understanding history, text, mind and body. Like Orpheus, Roberts and the other authors that I consider in this book make a journey into the Underworld in search of Eurydice. Their journey is driven by a desire to retrieve what has been lost in the shadows, to substantiate the ethereal construction of the Victorian woman, to materialize women’s history. However, In the Red Kitchen demonstrates that we cannot look into the past directly; we cannot turn our gaze backwards as Orpheus did. Instead of looking back and losing Eurydice forever, Roberts attempts to listen to the whispering voices coming out of Hades – slowly, inevitably walking away but listening and recording these whispers in the process, allowing these whispers to become vocalic bodies and bringing these ghostly women into the light.

4 Natural and Spiritual Evolutions: A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects

The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. A. S. Byatt, Possession (1991, p. 104) Really mere novel-writing of a sort, Acting, or improvising, make-believe, Surely not downright cheatery Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge, the Medium (1970, p. 864) In her essay ‘True stories and the facts in fiction’, A. S. Byatt analyses the relationship between ‘precise scholarship and fiction’ (Byatt, 2001, p. 92) by using the writing of her two Victorian-set novellas, Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel, as examples. Published together as Angels and Insects in 1992, these novellas amalgamate real and imagined histories, historical and fictional personae, in a way similar to Byatt’s earlier novel Possession (1990). These works also share a number of common themes (particularly the development of natural history and spiritualism). However, whereas Possession switches between the past and the present, between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, Angels and Insects is set exclusively in the past – simulating Victorian perspectives on natural history and spiritualist experience. Although Possession appears to place natural history and spiritualism in opposition, my aim here is to show how these two discourses interact with and complement each other in Angels and Insects. This complimentarity functions not only within Byatt’s narrative but within the wider framework of nineteenth-century culture.1 I will explore here how the various ways in which natural history and spiritualism can be seen as locked together in a dialogue over man’s 114

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physical and psychical evolution. Similarly, while the two novellas themselves may appear to be separate entities, sharing just a minor character and the general historical backdrop of Victorian England, they are in fact interdependent. A ‘combined’ reading of both works not only exposes the anxieties generated by Darwinist thought, anxieties which may account to some extent for the rising interest in spiritualism, but also how spiritualism actively encompassed Darwinist logic.2 In Morpho Eugenia, Byatt’s characters suffer from metaphysical angst instigated by Darwinism – questioning their religious values, debating the existence of the soul and what it means to be human. In The Conjugial Angel, a belief in the afterlife, a theory of evolution that encompasses both the living and the dead, is produced from precisely the values and experiences that have been fragmented or destabilized in the first novella. Thus, the theories of evolution and natural selection that cause such discomfort in Morpho Eugenia are recovered and reconciled in The Conjugial Angel through spiritualism. These seemingly disparate discourses are woven together by the spiritualist circle at the centre of the narrative, producing a unique conceptual template through which life and death are connected. At a stylistic level, Morpho Eugenia mimics the conventions of natural history writing in order to explore the shock of Darwinian knowledge, whereas The Conjugial Angel uses elements of gothic and sensation fiction. A closer reading will therefore illustrate how the novellas both deploy and subvert naturalist and gothic motifs. The two novellas tackle the theme of evolution on a biological and psychical level respectively. Both works draw from the deep reservoirs of imagery and metaphor provided by the natural and the supernatural worlds – a crucial factor in Byatt’s painstaking (and extremely convincing) simulation of nineteenth-century writing. In order to uncover the historical and critical ‘keys’ to Byatt’s work, I analyse the novellas alongside the writings of Alfred Russel Wallace – an eminent natural historian who later ‘converted’ to spiritualism. Wallace, with his inventive double viewpoint, is an invaluable resource here. His writings not only help us to understand how the narratives of Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel are interconnected but also how conceptions of the natural and the supernatural pollinated each other. Wallace and others were able to overcome the problem of Man’s position in evolutionary history by extending Darwinian ideas into metaphysics and the afterlife. Evolution was not just a rigid scientific absolute but a rich, imaginative topos stretching from insects to angels. Indeed, Wallace’s

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entomological studies, in which he explored the concept of insect mimicry, provide an important framework for my analysis of Morpho Eugenia’s ‘social’ mimicry and The Conjugial Angel’s ‘textual’ mimicry of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. By addressing the impact of natural history, this chapter therefore sheds new light on the trafficking between the living and the dead that has been (and continues to be) the focus of the book as a whole. Furthermore, by drawing on the SPR’s work on the survival of bodily death, particularly the investigation of the famous Palm Sunday scripts, which I discussed earlier alongside the narrative techniques of Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair, I also read the relationship between The Conjugial Angel and In Memoriam in terms of occult ‘possession’. Part of the novella is based on a fictional account of the séances held at Emily Tennyson’s Margate home and, as a result, Byatt presents us with a haunted version of literary biography (a ‘necrography’ as it were), a possessed text. Indeed, it is important to note here that the spiritualist context of The Conjugial Angel makes the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, or the authentic and the imagined, even more complex than usual. This is because mediumship, in Byatt’s terms, is not simply the practice of raising the dead but a platform for creative expression. Through the automatic-writing medium Lilias Papagay, Byatt sets up an important critical connection between the heroine’s profession and the act of making up stories from fragments of reality. ‘Mrs. Papagay’, we are told, ‘represents one reason for involvement in spiritualism – narrative curiosity. She is interested in people, their stories and secrets, she will imagine, she is a version of Sludge-as-Browning, the medium as artist or historian’ (Byatt, 2001, p. 106). Thus, just as Robert Browning’s fictional ‘Mr. Sludge’ becomes the author’s mediumistic alter ego, Lilias Papagay acts as a mouthpiece for Byatt – bound together in a textual séance.

Morpho Eugenia: Narrative motifs of natural history, the grotesque and the shadow of Alfred Russel Wallace In an early episode of Morpho Eugenia, Byatt’s text is densely packed with biblical, mythical and literary allusions – each of which is related to the ‘problem’ of natural history and to the question of how history in general is understood and narrated. The protagonist William Adamson is invited by his host and patron Harald Alabaster to prolong


his stay at Bredely Hall. He is presented with the task of sorting through Alabaster’s extraordinary collection: Here were monkey skins and delicate parrot skins, preserved lizards and monstrous snakes, box upon box of dead beetles, brilliant green, iridescent purple, swarthy demons with monstrous horned heads … geological specimens and packs of varied mosses, fruits and flowers, from the Tropics and the ice-caps, bears’ teeth and rhinoceros horns, the skeletons of sharks and clumps of coral. (Byatt, 1995, p. 24) Confronted with these specimens, Adamson’s task (as his name suggests) resembles the biblical Adam – called upon to name the animals created by God (Genesis, 2:18–19). Unlike Adam, however, he is overwhelmed by the scale of the job, baffled by Harald’s vague request to ‘Make sense of it, lay it all out in some order or other’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 25). Harald attempts to reconcile his Christian faith with the development of evolutionary theory, hoping that by putting his collection in order, by framing it in some kind of narrative, the divine plan of the Creator will eventually emerge – a ‘natural theology’. Adamson, an expert in natural history who has explored the wonders of the Amazon, therefore becomes an angel of redemption, charged with the task of restoring Harald’s shaken faith. Along similar lines, Harald is also using the natural world to seek a form of immortality here, a legacy that will last through the ages. He asks Adamson to use the family name when classifying his next discovery – ‘a monstrous toad or savage-seeming beetle in the jungle floor … Bufo amazoniensis haraldii – Cheops nigrissimum alabastri – I like that, do not you?’ (ibid., p. 18). Adamson is unable to ‘devise an organizing principle’, but ‘doggedly’ continues the process of ‘making labels, setting up, examining’ (ibid., p. 25). As the task becomes more and more frustrating, we move further away from Eden, and it begins to resemble one of those oneiric visions where a repetitive task leads forever into itself rather than to its completion. Indeed, Adamson is portrayed as caught between reality and fantasy – ‘William found himself at once detached anthropologist and fairytale prince trapped by invisible gates and silken bonds in an enchanted castle’ (ibid., p. 21). It is also possible to draw a parallel between Adamson’s task and the story of Eros and Psyche, which is recounted to the Alabaster daughters by Miss Mead at a later stage in the novella. After breaching an oath to Eros, Psyche is forced to wander

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the globe and complete a selection of impossible tasks set by Venus. She must, for example, sort out a ‘mountain of mixed seeds’, which she achieves with the help of an army of ants (ibid., p. 43). On hearing this story, Adamson is made to reflect on his own situation. Like Psyche, he has a mountain to sort through but no army of ants, no deus ex machina, to save the day. It would be too hasty, however, to claim that Adamson perceives himself as the victim of an increasingly godless age. On the contrary, the more he observes, ‘the more he himself became aware of a huge, inexorable random constructive force, not patient, because it was mindless and careless … but intricate, but beautiful, but terrible’ (ibid., p. 73). In a sense, Byatt herself is confronted with a similar task to Adamson’s – arranging the fragments of the past into a coherent narrative. By revisiting the aftermath of what Freud calls the ‘second blow’3 to man’s narcissism, the profound shock effect of Darwin’s discoveries, Byatt attempts to form a coherent (but fictional) emotional history, recapturing the disenchantment and confusion experienced by so many Victorians. A snippet of dialogue perfectly encapsulates the themes that Byatt negotiates here – ‘“We are not Nature”, said Elaine. “What else are we?” asked Matty Crompton’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 32). This question echoes throughout the narrative as the protagonists and the text itself struggle to produce fixed or convincing answers. The answers come from a range of different (though not necessarily divergent) discourses – from the theological to the biological in the case of Byatt’s characters but also in terms of the narrative modes she employs. Animals, insects and humans are either played off against each other or, more unsettlingly, depicted as distorted mirror images. Fusing together natural history with excerpts from poems by Tennyson, Ben Johnson and Milton (a technique very much in keeping with the ‘narrative’ approach of science writing), the novella constructs a complex, three-dimensional model of Victorian consciousness. As Gillian Beer explains, nineteenth-century scientific writing drew heavily from biblical and literary texts as these were still perceived to be authoritative sources of ‘concrete’ knowledge (Beer, 1996, pp. 196–7). Furthermore, Beer informs us, quotations from and allusions to ancient philosophers or poets did not only appeal to the shared learning of the intended audience but also established a sense of continuity from the past into the future (a future which had been rendered potentially uncertain by science) (ibid., p. 210). This ‘fusion’, in which a number of different discourses combined to create a form that was simultaneously old and new, is even represented in Byatt’s title. Morpho Eugenia is both


human and insect, referring to the novella’s beautiful heroine and a type of tropical butterfly. In addition to this, Byatt informs us that the novella ‘is related to the reading of Darwin in connection with George Eliot’s novels and essays’ (Byatt, 2001, p. 92). This adds another layer to the novella’s links with the Victorian past – specifically with the role of women as the authors of natural history.4 By playing up the conventions of natural history writing, the text becomes polyvalent – it is at once literal and allegorical, alternating between entomological and anthropological levels. An ‘inset’ story written by Matty (Matilda) Crompton, for example, entitled ‘Things Are Not What They Seem’ (Byatt, 1995, pp. 119–40), illustrates this point in a number of ways. The story, which reads like a fairy tale, conveys factual elements of natural history through anthropomorphism (talking caterpillars and so on) and literary allusions to the Odyssey (the Circe episode in particular). However, it also uses representations of natural selection and insect mimicry to communicate personal secrets. Matty encrypts her desire to be viewed by Adamson as a young, sexual woman in the story (through its biological rhythms) and also attempts to warn him that his sense of family bliss is as illusory as the camouflage of caterpillars and butterflies. Byatt therefore deploys mimicry, parody and allegory to represent the development and impact of natural history but also to open up the gendered social and personal lives of her characters within a Victorian context. She alludes in particular to Samuel Bates’ 1862 explanation of mimicry in insects and to Wallace’s refinement of the subject in 1864. In doing so, she claims natural history for her own creative purposes – using mimicry and natural selection as a way of understanding gender performativity, incest and the social status of servants. In a sense then, Morpho Eugenia, when read in parallel with Wallace’s theories, reverses the anthropomorphism process of the Victorians and presents us with natural history in its ‘raw’ form. Significantly, three female characters (Eugenia Alabaster, Matty Crompton and the serving girl Amy) all acquire insect- or animal-like characteristics. Thus, a short discussion of Wallace’s work on mimicry becomes essential to a critical reading of how these women are represented in the novella. According to Wallace, mimicry is ‘the resemblance of the one species to another in a different group’ – a resemblance that is ‘entirely superficial, and is always strictly confined to those characters which cause the one to look like the other’ (Wallace, 1866a).5 The chief function of mimicry is protection from predators. By mimicking either another species or an inanimate object, insects were not only difficult to identify by

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sight but also created problems in their scientific classification. However, Wallace’s observations in the Amazon had allowed him to modify and perfect Bates’ theories of mimicry among insects and birds. Wallace overturned the common but false belief in the supremacy of the male by arguing that a female’s demure colours and ability to mimic were essential to the survival not only of the individual but of the species. In a paper presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1866, Wallace made the following assertions: It is necessary for the preservation of the race, that the female insect should live longer than the male, because she has to deposit her eggs in a proper situation, during which she is necessarily exposed to the attacks of her enemies. She wants protection, therefore, more than the male does, and anything that makes her less conspicuous is an advantage. Gay colours will therefore be generally injurious, and the inevitable ‘survival of the fittest’ will prevent their development. But now another principle comes in. It is well known that numbers of insects and some birds derive a great protection from enemies by their colours assimilating with the ground colour of their haunts. Many moths and beetles exactly resemble the bark of the trees on which they usually repose; others closely imitate sticks or leaves, or even the dung of birds. (Wallace, 1866b) In addition to this, Wallace notes the ability of several insects and butterflies to mimic the colouration of males from another species (ibid.). Given the Victorian context of Morpho Eugenia, this notion would be particularly problematic when transposed to a human level. Byatt therefore reverses this aspect of insect mimicry when it is applied to her male and female characters. Adamson, for example, observes that ‘we men wear carapaces like black beetles. And you ladies are like a flower garden in full flight’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 7). At a later stage, the narrator makes a similar observation – ‘There is a pleasing paradox in the bright balldresses, the floating of young girls in our world, and the dark erectness of the young men’ (ibid., p. 40). Through Adamson’s perspective, we are confronted with a wider nineteenth-century viewpoint in which women were cast as a fragile and endangered ‘species’. According to this logic, the ballroom becomes an exercise in Darwinian sexual selection in which vulnerable women decorate themselves in bright colours in order to attract a mate. Similarly, during Adamson and Eugenia’s wedding night, Adamson is


‘afraid of hurting’ his new wife and employs a faux-naturalist context that misrepresents the position of the female – ‘How the innocent female must fear the power of the male, he thought, and with reason, so soft, so white, so untouched, so untouchable’ (ibid., p. 67). A cultural stereotype therefore overrides (or substitutes itself for) Adamson’s knowledge of the natural world. This, however, is quickly overturned by Eugenia’s explicit sexuality. Before and after her marriage, Eugenia is engaged in a sexual relationship with her brother Edgar, resulting in numerous offspring. When this revelation is finally made, Adamson realizes why he has always felt emotionally detached from these children, lacking in paternal instinct – ‘I have never felt – not in my heart of hearts – any warmth to all those – white children’ (ibid., p. 155). It also clarifies his long-held suspicion that Eugenia either had ‘no inner life’, or that ‘it was locked away, inaccessible to him’ (ibid., p. 154). Naturalistic mimicry is therefore used to portray Adamson’s troubled relationship with his wife. Eventually, he comes to realize that her docile exterior, a façade as convincing as an insect mimicking its surroundings, has made her unreachable – sheltering her from both the public outcry her deeply transgressive behaviour would cause and her husband (who only discovers her secret when prompted by mysterious, unseen forces). Expanding on the theme of mimicry, Matty Crompton is depicted as a demure, asexual spinster throughout the novella. However, in the final reckoning, she reveals herself as a driven, adventurous young woman to a disillusioned Adamson. Prior to this revelation, Adamson perceives her as an entirely ‘sexless being’ (ibid., p. 105) and her plain brown dresses, for example, stand in sharp contrast to Eugenia’s more colourful and classically feminine attire. On the surface at least, Matty is a drone to his wife’s queen bee. She hides both her personality and her physical characteristics, presenting herself as a woman ‘between thirty and fifty’ (ibid., p. 156). She does so partly to sustain (and perhaps protect) her richly imaginative inner life and partly, when the time is right, to enable her to follow her bold aspirations of a ‘real’ life outside the conventions of Victorian marriage and domesticity. Furthermore, Matty’s mimicry of a dowdy spinster shields her from the predatory advances of the males of the Alabaster family. Indeed, she is wise to do so when we consider the fate of Amy, the young serving girl whose social status and ‘bird-like prettiness’ of which she is ‘wholly unconscious’ makes her easy prey (ibid., p. 97). Amy is raped by Edgar and becomes pregnant, then sent away to the workhouse. When Matty asks Adamson to look at her as she really is, she therefore reveals both her physical and emotional self to him – ‘My name … is

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Matilda. Up here at night there is no Matty. Only Matilda. Look at me’ (ibid., p. 157). Matty’s desire to be seen by Adamson and the ‘growth’ of her body and personality (reflected in the way her name is ‘extended’) resonates with the themes explored in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871).6 After all, Carroll’s Alice books are deeply concerned with questions of scale and anthropomorphism, with the ordering of the insect and animal world, with identity and desire. We can therefore argue that Adamson and Matty take turns in playing the role of Alice in the novella. They shrink and expand according to their changing circumstances and environments. The taboos that are broken in Bredely Hall turn the stately home into a twisted Wonderland – a place where the logic of the everyday world does not apply. Just as Alice grows into a young woman at the end of Through the Looking Glass, Matty (through her own initiative) grows into Matilda. This is further illustrated by Matty’s successful publication of her insect stories, earning her enough money to become independent and fulfil her dreams of travel and adventure, exchanging the stifling Bredely for the vast expanses of the Amazon. Adamson’s trajectory, at least until the ‘rabbit-hole’ reopens, operates in reverse – from intrepid explorer to live-in groom. It is important to emphasize at this point that the concept of insect mimicry does not only apply to Byatt’s female characters but to the form of the text itself – mimicking, as I have already noted, a popular Victorian natural-history book. By following the conventions of this form, studding the narrative with literary, biblical and mythical allusions, Byatt creates a web of connections with the cultural reference points of the nineteenth century. Thus, Harald’s quotations from Tennyson in his writings become an expression of anxiety over the status of Man’s ‘spirit’, signifiers of a hope both lost and found. In Memoriam becomes a repository of religious yearning and Harald’s choice of line, ‘an infant crying in the night’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 87), is used as evidence of a continuing divine presence in the world – ‘We are fearfully and wonderfully made, in His Image, father and son, son and father, from generation to generation, in mystery and ordained order’ (ibid., p. 89). However, the quotation turns against itself and Harald, without knowing it, becomes a mouthpiece for nineteenth-century religious doubt. The line he chooses, as Gillian Beer explains, had become ‘an accepted description of the anxiety in Victorian experience and the inadequacy of language to cope with the new understanding, evolutionary and thermodynamic, of the universe’ (Beer, 1996, p. 212). The image is meant to reassure but what it actually reflects is the acute


sense of helplessness caused by radical developments in natural history. Men become crying infants in a vast, godless universe, waiting for a father who never comes. These anxieties are also shared by Adamson, who attempts to reconcile his investigations as a naturalist with a sense of some higher plane of existence – a theme that is reminiscent of the interchange between science and spiritualism depicted in The Conjugial Angel. Returning to the question of mimicry, however, it is necessary to examine the character of William Adamson in more detail. Adamson is based on the historical Alfred Russel Wallace, and Byatt mimics the eminent scientist in fine detail. This is a recurrent trope in Byatt’s work, whose protagonists often correspond or converse with historical figures in imagined ‘historical’ moments. Jackie Buxton, for example, argues that the fictional characters in Possession (Ash and LaMotte) ‘are given historical weight through their interaction with non-fictional figures: Coleridge, George Crabbe, Ruskin, Edward Manet and George Frederick Watts, while Maud and Roland are “filled out” through reference to the poetic fictions of Tennyson and Browning’ (Buxton, 2001, p. 96). Similarly, Adamson is portrayed as having a correspondence with Wallace that influences his metaphysical reconciliation between Man and nature (Byatt, 1995, p. 115). Indeed, we might say that the fictional protagonist and historical figure operate in a ghostly alliance. There is an uncanny doubling effect at work here, in which Adamson becomes increasingly ‘real’ and Wallace increasingly spectral. Wallace’s correspondences with Adamson and Harald (to whom he sends specimens from the Amazon) transform the historical figure into a fictional shadow. Byatt disrupts the balance between the real and the imaginary, perhaps even gesturing towards the occult by describing Wallace as the ‘vaguer’ of the two men (ibid., p. 11). Wallace is only briefly mentioned in the narrative while Adamson (who adopts the former’s ideas and theories) becomes the central figure in the text. Wallace’s ‘presence’ both haunts and feeds Adamson’s persona, providing him with shape and substance, filling him out. There are, however, some significant differences between the two men. Wallace’s theory of natural evolution (which he also applied to human beings) was a major influence on the development of his spiritualistic beliefs.7 Adamson, in contrast, does not venture into the other world and remains suspended between his faith in a higher power and the facts of nature. Moreover, Wallace’s socialist and humanitarian interests had led him to the notion of natural selection as a universal maxim – which could not account for the presence of the speech organs, for example, or for Man’s mathematical

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ability or capacity for abstract thought. Because of these ‘gaps’ in the theory, Wallace deduced that a great power inaccessible to our regular senses must have been guiding the patterns of natural selection (hence the attraction of spiritualism). Wallace’s work was therefore the product of an extraordinary concoction of religious or spiritualist yearning, evolutionary biology and humanitarian commitment. Moral feelings, for example, were considered to be integral to the ‘natural’ improvement of the species and continued to evolve after biological death. References to Wallace also establish an invisible thread running through the two novellas – the link between fireflies, philanthropy and phantasms. A biographical comparison of Wallace and Adamson intensifies the doubling effect that Byatt engineers, the play of authentic and mimicked presences. Both men grew up in relative poverty and were largely self-taught. Both men fund their expeditions to the Amazon through wealthy collectors (Wallace’s trip was primarily financed by Samuel Stevens, a collector of British Coleoptera and Lepidoptera). Similarly, as fiction and history slide into each other, Harald Alabaster buys specimens from Wallace (Byatt, 1995, p. 17) and later from Adamson, who follows in Wallace’s footsteps (he travels to the Amazon in 1849, ‘one year later than Wallace and Bates’, ibid., p. 11). Wallace loses the richest and rarest part of his collection of Amazonian insects to a fire in 1852, while some seven years later Adamson’s prize specimens are ruined in a shipwreck. In 1864, Wallace wrote an article about natural evolution in humans (a subject that Darwin had avoided in his earlier theories), while Adamson speculates on natural selection and Man. In his ant study, the Swarming City, Adamson cannot bear to think that man is ‘predestined’ to act purely for the continuation of the species and is inclined to believe in the uniqueness of our ability to overcome primal biological imperatives. Just as Wallace’s socialism led him to favour environmental factors over notions of in-built evolutionary ‘programming’ or predisposition, so Adamson chooses to see men as ‘individual creatures, full of love, fear, ambition, anxiety, and yet I know also that their whole natures may be changed by changes in their circumstances’ (ibid., p. 113). The mimicking of Wallace therefore becomes increasingly elaborate the more we learn about Adamson’s fictional life. Both men were disillusioned with religious teachings that presented a merciless God and a torturous afterlife for sinners. During a conversation with Harald, Adamson informs him that: [W]e were told to imagine the slow advance of ages – grain by grain – and the huge time before the earth would even appear to be a little


diminished, and then thousands of millions of millions of aeons – until the globe was smaller – and so on and so on until at last the final grain floated away, and then we were told that all this unimaginable time was itself only one grain in the endless time of infinite punishment – and so on. (ibid., p. 35) Similarly, Wallace recounts a sermon he witnessed on eternal punishment in his autobiography, a source which Byatt has ‘copied’ through Adamson. As Wallace describes: After the most terrible description had been given of the unimaginable torments of hell-fire, we were told to suppose that the whole earth was a mass of fine sand, and that at the end of a thousand years one single grain of this sand flew away into space. Then – we were told – let us try to imagine the slow procession of the ages, while grain by grain the earth diminished, but still remained apparently large as ever, – still the torments went on. Then let us carry on the imagination through thousands of millions of millions of ages, till at last the globe could be seen a little smaller – and then on and on, and on for other and yet other myriads of ages. (Wallace, 1995, p. 88) The two passages not only share the same imagery but represent powerful emotional and spiritual epiphanies. Adamson is ‘cleansed’ by his decision to ‘reject that God’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 35), just as Wallace is liberated from a ‘degrading and hideous’ (Wallace, 1905, p. 88) religion. As a result, Wallace turned to an alternative belief system, a system that had no conception of reward and punishment in the afterlife but saw the transition between life and death in terms of ‘continuous’ evolution. It was largely drawn from Darwinian theory and his own observations as a naturalist: The organic world has been carried on to a high state of development, and has been kept in harmony with the forces of external nature, by the grand law of ‘survival of the fittest’, acting upon ever varying organizations. In the spiritual world, the law of the ‘progression of the fittest’ takes place, and carried on in unbroken continuity that development of the human minds which has been commenced here. (Wallace, 1875, p. 109)

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Adamson, however, is unable to form a coherent metaphysical system that will allow him to reconcile biology and spirit – ‘Where do the soul and the mind reside in the human body? Or in the heart or in the head?’ He is deeply troubled by ‘the terrible idea – terrible to some, terrible, perhaps, to all, at some time or in some form – that we are biologically predestined like other creatures, that we differ from them only in inventiveness and the capacity for reflection on our fate’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 113). Nevertheless, it is clear that the question of the existence of the soul, central to the thinking of both men, is a question that is negotiated in the no-man’s-land between science, philosophy and theology. The novella employs a highly visual style, a detailed and emotionally detached descriptive mode in which humans, insects and other elements of the natural world have the same status. This not only emphasizes the uncertainty over Man’s ‘uniqueness’ in the order of being but creates a peculiar distance between reader and text – placing us in the position of the naturalist looking through a lens or a spectator viewing a painting. We are invited to observe the characters as we would observe a beetle or an ant. The effect of this, however, is somewhat paradoxical. Because of the ‘distance’ that Byatt creates, the natural world is de-familiarized. It appears strange and enchanted – reminiscent, for example, of Gustave Doré’s illustrations, naturalistic and grotesque at the same time (Herendeen, 1982, pp. 304–27). Furthermore, it is interesting to note that Doré’s work was criticized by Ruskin as ‘false grotesque: subtle and difficult to identify, but no less evil for that’ (ibid., p. 325). This statement resonates powerfully with Byatt’s depiction of life at Bredely Hall, an image of both paradise and corruption. Consider, as an example of this ‘subtle’ grotesque, the glass ant-hive and formicary that Adamson and Matty put on display in Bredely. As they observe the hive, waiting for ‘the Kingdom underground to give up its secret history’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 143), they are surprised and thrilled by the insect drama that unfolds. The ant queen is killed by a rival who then carries the corpse in her pincers to protect herself from attack. It is ‘as though she were a ghost, or a possessing demon, animating a puppet-queen’ (ibid.). Adamson therefore uses the language of the gothic, the grotesque and the spectral to record the life of the hive in his notebook. More significant in terms of this gothic or grotesque ‘effect’, however, is the parallel that emerges between the ant world and Bredely Hall’s social system. Men and insects are arranged together in the narrative to create a double vision of natural and social evolution.


Both Bredely and the ant colony operate according to a system of queens and workers. Lady Alabaster, we are told, ‘spent most of her day drinking – tea, lemonade … herbal infusions … borne by parlourmaids, on silver trays’ (ibid., p. 26) while Eugenia ‘dozed and sewed as her attendants fed and groomed her’ (ibid., p. 74). The ladies of the house are carefully maintained in order to maximize their chances of producing healthy offspring. The servants, like worker ants, are hard to distinguish from each other, faceless figures scuttling along the corridors and back passages of the great house. Indeed, William astutely observes at one point that ‘everyone had their place and their way of life, and every day for months he discovered new people whose existence he had not previously suspected, doing tasks of which he had known nothing’ (ibid., p. 22). On another occasion, Adamson notes that his whole existence is dependent on a system of workers whom he cannot name or identify, whose lives are mystery to him. As a result, the question of who is really ‘master’ of the house comes into focus:8 The servants were always busy, and mostly silent. They whisked away behind their own doors into mysterious areas into which he had never penetrated, though he met them at every turning in those places in which his own life was led. They poured his bath, they opened his bed, they served his meals and removed his dishes. They took away his dirty clothes and brought back clean ones. They were as full of urgent purpose as the children of the house were empty of it. Once, rising at 5.30 because he could not sleep, he had gone through a door towards the kitchen, intending to slice himself some bread and walk down to the river to watch the dawn on the water. He had surprised a kitchenmaid, a diminutive little black sprite with a mob cap, carrying a broom and two large buckets, who gave a little cry on seeing him unexpectedly, and dropped one bucket with a clang. (ibid., p. 74) The description of the young servant girl as a ‘sprite’ is another example of Byatt’s ‘subtle’ grotesque – a delicate combination of naturalistic or biological metaphors with the ghostly or supernatural. Indeed, this is encapsulated later in the novella when Amy (the girl above) is asked to remove some beetles that have strayed into the kitchen. Adamson calls her a ‘beetle-sprite’ (ibid., p. 96), an explicit conjunction between the insect and the spectral worlds. Arabella Buckley’s The Fairyland of Science (1878), a popular Victorian text which attempts to explain the invisible forces of gravity and

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magnetism to children (Buckley, 1878, pp. 3–4), compares, as the title suggests, the wonders of science and nature with a magical ‘fairy-land’. ‘Why do we love fairy-land?’ she asks in the opening section; ‘What is its charm? Is it not that things happen so suddenly, so mysteriously, and without man having anything to do with it?’ (ibid., p. 5). Byatt constructs Bredely Hall in a similar way through the play of visibility and invisibility in the narrative – turning the unseen forces of nature into the silent and unseen servants of the house. Adamson, unaware of his wife’s relationship with Edgar, is sent an anonymous message instructing him to visit Eugenia in her bedchamber and, as a result, discovers the incestuous couple. It is never clarified who sent the message or if it was mistakenly addressed to him. The ambiguity here, however, leaves open the possibility that the servants are affecting the destiny of the masters – they are ‘natural’ forces that cannot be controlled and ‘supernatural’ in the sense that they exert their influence in a spectral fashion. Furthermore, Adamson’s fate is decided in two episodes that recall the ‘fairy-land’ of ghosts and spirits. The first of these involves a game much like Scrabble, in which Adamson constructs the word ‘insect’. Matty, however, reorders the letters to form ‘incest’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 153). Similar to the use of the planchette during spiritualist séances, Matty’s intervention both reveals and echoes what Adamson has recently found out for himself. Not long afterwards, Matty makes the following observation about the spectral servants with whom they share the house – There are people in a house, you know, who know everything that goes on – the invisible people, and now and then the house simply decides that something must happen – I think your message came to you after a series of misunderstandings that at some level were quite deliberate. (ibid., p. 155) Along the same lines she adds: There are people in houses, between the visible inhabitants and the invisible, largely invisible to both, who can know a very great deal or nothing, as they choose. I choose to know about some things, and not to know about others. I have become interested in knowing things that concern you. (ibid., p. 155) The house is therefore portrayed as a haunted space (as well as a space with its own spectral presence, recalling Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen).


By doing so, Byatt reintroduces the superstitious atmosphere of old into a ‘materialist’ age. This ghostly trope is by no means incompatible with the world of biology and natural history. The servants, frequently represented as a collective presence, resemble the ‘intelligence in the nest’ that Adamson identifies in ants – an ‘intelligence’ formed from natural instinct but also an intelligence capable of organizing and revolting against the established order (ibid., p. 110). Thus, by reverting to gothic or grotesque imagery, Matty manages to convey to Adamson both the ‘natural’ hierarchies of the house and the sense of mystery that still lingers in the world. Indeed, this mirrors the wider development of Victorian science in which mythological and fantastic motifs were incorporated into objective study. The Linnaean system of nomenclature, for example, not only anthropomorphizes insects but also ‘re-enchants’ them by creating connections with the mythic past – naming them after Greek and Trojan heroes. As Matty states, ‘it is amazing how much – how much of mystery, of fairy glamour – is added to the creatures by the names bestowed on them’ (118). For Adamson, the naming process becomes a way of reconciling the ancient and the modern, as his experiences in the Amazon demonstrate: There I was, in lands never before entered by Englishmen, and round me fluttered Helen and Menelaus, Apollo and the Nine, Hector and Hecuba and Priam. The imagination of the scientist had colonized the untrodden jungle before I got there. There is something wonderful about naming a species. To bring a thing that is wild, and rare, and hitherto unobserved under the net of human observation and human language – and in the case of Linnaeus, with such wit, such order, such lively use of our inherited myths and tales and characters. (ibid., p. 118) Adamson’s appreciation of Linnaeus offers important insights into various aspects of nineteenth-century culture. Far from rejecting or neglecting the past in favour of new truths and new worlds, there is instead a kind of recycling process at work, a process that both mythifies and domesticates at the same time – bringing the Amazon into the English country garden by, perversely enough, appealing to an ‘imported’ Hellenic tradition. Before moving on to The Conjugial Angel, a useful way of bringing together the analysis so far is to think of Morpho Eugenia (with its fusion

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of science, poetry, fairy tale, the gothic and myth) as a kind of Victorian miniature painting. Indeed, the novella’s very deliberate ‘levelling’ effect, in which men exist on a par with insects, recalls the miniature representations that were so popular in the 1860s and 70s. The novella plays with our sense of perspective and our position as observers, refocusing our gaze from the macroscopic to the microscopic. As Nicola Bown comments on the cultural value of the miniature: Victorian perceptions of the relation between human, natural, and supernatural worlds found an especially vivid expression in the miniature, because the miniature came to represent the problem of how that relation could be conceived in an era of widespread religious doubt. The miniature turns theological questions into perceptual ones, because it makes visible any acute uncertainty about how large humans are. (Bown, 2001, p. 115) Significantly, Byatt brings the narrative to a close by informing the reader that there are ‘Two more pictures’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 158) remaining – the first of a confrontation in Eugenia’s bedchamber and the second of Adamson and Matty travelling on board Captain Papagay’s ship. This strengthens the alliance between Morpho Eugenia and its Victorian pictorial ‘predecessors’. By inhabiting the narrative tropes of natural history, the novella demonstrates that the Darwinist moment, far from being an ‘ahistorical’ moment of disenchantment, reintroduced ways of magical thinking through allegory and metaphor – transcribing the spirits back into the natural world at the same time as they were banished.

The Conjugial Angel: Spiritualist evolution, poetic afterlives and the ‘Palm Sunday Case’ In his article ‘The subliminal consciousness’, Frederic Myers, whose theories of the psyche were greatly influenced by Darwinian evolution, makes the following assertion: The idea of a soul which precedes and outlasts the body, and which retains memories, or receives intimations, belonging to a world in which the body does not dwell – this assuredly, whether as religion or as philosophy, as revelation or as speculation, has been one of the dominant tenements of the traditional wisdom of the past. (Myers, 1891–2, pp. 304–5)


The ‘wisdom of the past’, however, is precisely what is placed under such stress here – in both Morpho Eugenia and the broader Victorian framework that informs Byatt’s work. This climate of doubt prompts the central character in The Conjugial Angel, Lilias Papagay, to ask herself ‘large questions, such as why had the Dead just now, just recently, with such persistence, chosen to try to break back into the land of the living with raps, taps, messages, emanations, materializations, spiritflowers and travelling bookshelves?’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 170). Her question, however, has already been answered by Christabel LaMotte in Possession. The dead have been awakened because of religious and epistemological uncertainty: When they were sure in their unthinking faiths – when the Church was a solid presence in their midst, the Spirit sat docile enough behind the altar rails and the Souls kept – on the whole – to the churchyard and the vicinity of their stones. But now they fear they may not be raised, that their lids may not be lifted that heaven and hell were no more than faded drawings on a few old church walls, with wax angels and gruesome bogies – they ask, what is there? And if the man in shiny boots and gold watch-chain or the woman in bombazine and whalebone stays, with her crinoline hoop-lifter for crossing puddles – if these fat and tedious people want to hear spirits as Gode does, why may they not? The Gospel was preached to all men, and if we exist in successive states, the materialists among us must waken in this world and the next. Swedenborg saw them sweat unbelief and rage like heaps of glistening maggots. (Byatt, 1991, p. 365) According to this perspective, the driving force of spiritualism is the pressing desire of the living. Victorian Man attempts to glue together the fragments of religious belief, blurring the boundaries of the occult, the natural and the psychological in the process. Paradoxically though, Christabel’s argument draws on elements of the very evolutionary theory that has caused such angst; she believes in a world where psychical development continues to occur after death in a way that mirrors the biological evolution of the species in life. Similarly, Myers’ ‘wisdom of the past’ is portrayed as a quasi-biological trait, a reflex in which faith in the existence of the immortal soul is passed on from generation to generation. Belief, as it were, becomes instinct. However, in The Conjugial Angel, the avid Swedenborgian Mr Hawke notes that ‘We live in a material time … apart from metaphysics,

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the time is gone by when anything is made out of nothing’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 167). Thus, the spiritualists in the novella are not only trying to communicate with the dead but also to substantiate the afterlife through contemporary theories of evolution. This is primarily achieved through Swedenborg’s conception of successive states of consciousness. Moreover, Alfred Russel Wallace’s theories of psychical evolution (which are in complete harmony with his observations as a naturalist) are also incorporated in the narrative. Wallace recast old beliefs into the new templates of ‘scientific’ thinking: [I]t is the body that develops, and to some extent saves, the soul. Disease, pain, and all that shortens and impoverishes life, are injurious to the soul as well as to the body. Not only is a healthy body necessary for a sound mind, but equally so for a fully developed soul – a soul that is best fitted to commence its new era of development in the spirit world. (Wallace, 1898, p. 335) The survival of bodily death is the novella’s dominant theme, a question that is explored through the automatic writings received by a spiritualist group. Both the characters and the reader are left to speculate as to the origins and veracity of these ghostly texts. In this sense, the novella expands the kind of metaphysical probing seen in Morpho Eugenia. Moreover, the focused gaze of the naturalist, in which men and insects are viewed through the same unforgiving lens, continues to run through The Conjugial Angel’s spiritualist context. For Mrs Papagay, spiritualism becomes a ‘discipline’ through which she is able to closely study the workings of human nature. The enclosed, stifling drawing room becomes an ant-hive, a hothouse, a place of observation and discovery. The ‘traffic with the dead’ that takes place there becomes ‘the best way to know, to observe, to love the living, not as they were politely over teacups, but in their secret selves, their deepest desires and fears. They revealed themselves to her, to Lilias Papagay, as they would never have done in usual society’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 171). The séance provides Papagay with a unique, ‘endoscopic’ vision of the living – that is to say, a viewpoint in which spirit communications modulate into the expression of the sitters’ innermost feelings. In this respect, The Conjugial Angel overturns Byatt’s earlier, ‘scientific-grotesque’ mode – transforming conceptions of the natural and the supernatural through psychical evolution. To clarify, the narrative is based around two distinct but interrelated kinds of evolution. The first is Man’s spiritual evolution (articulated


here through the theories of Swedenborg and Wallace). The second we might call ‘textual’ or ‘literary’ evolution – a process through which the novella offers a critical interpretation of itself, exploring the ‘afterlife’ of language and questioning ideas of author and origin. At the centre of this is Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the epic poem written as a tribute to his beloved friend Arthur Hallam. Byatt’s narrative absorbs and transforms the poem through its occult communication to the spiritualist circle. Indeed, In Memoriam had ‘evolved’ into nineteenth-century consciousness and, as I touched upon earlier, became a celebrated expression of both religious doubt and personal grief. Furthermore, spiritualist magazines such as the Medium and Daybreak would often quote from Tennyson and, in a curious doubling, spirit messages would sometimes include fragments of the poem. In Memoriam therefore becomes a deeply private, intimate text (adopted and re-expressed by spirits and mediums alike) and also a form of public property at the same time. Byatt describes the pervasive effect the poem had on the nineteenthcentury imagination by reusing its most quoted line – ‘“Ah dear, but come though back to me,” Mrs Papagay murmured to herself, along with the Queen and countless other bereaved men and women, in one great rhythmic sigh of hopeless hope’ (ibid., pp. 176–7). The poem becomes an evolutionary ‘wave’, a textual-emotional circuit that connects ‘countless’ men and women from various levels of Victorian society and culture. Before discussing the status of the poem in more detail, however, I will focus on the first of the evolutionary forms that Byatt incorporates into The Conjugial Angel – examining the ways in which naturalist evolution is spectralized. Rather than renouncing Darwinian theories in favour of a reaffirmed magico-religious faith, the characters in the novella (who represent a large proportion of Victorian spiritualists), find a pattern similar to evolutionary theory in Swedenborg’s visions of heaven and hell. Thus, the naturalist-materialist perspective is integrated into the various levels of the afterlife. This is illustrated by a discussion of the physical characteristics of angels – ‘It has been pointed out that an angel would need a protruding breastbone of several feet to counterbalance the weight of its wings, like a bird, like a big bird, you know an arched breastbone’ (ibid., p. 202). There is a strange pragmatism to this evolutionary theology, adopting the rigour and worldliness of naturalist discourses. Indeed, the image of delicate, ethereal angels appears to have been replaced by ‘a clumsy form of poultry’ (ibid.). This discussion of angels is triggered by the appearance of a peculiar creature during a séance. Sophy Sheekhy, the other principal medium

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in the novella, is the only character who can see this spirit-beast but is unable to describe its colours and figure successfully. The image she presents is incoherent, merging organic and inorganic matter together. The creature is ‘the shape of a huge decanter or flask … it has a long beak … or proboscis … it doesn’t wish me to describe it, I can tell’ (ibid., pp. 201–2). Sophy’s inability to communicate a ‘stable’ vision to the rest of the sitters means that the creature both invites and resists classification according to a naturalist schema – ‘I don’t know if it has a train or a tail or winged feet’ (ibid., p. 202). Thus, the ‘Visitor’ becomes a signifier of the wholly ‘other’ world but also aligns itself with natural evolutionary progression as it is composed by reptilian, mammalian and avian characteristics. Similarly, Alfred Russel Wallace attempts to debunk the popular image of angels as ‘winged beings’ with ‘golden harps’. If these beings existed, he argues, then surely they would appear at séances. In place of this, spiritual entities such as angels were conceived of in ‘natural’ evolutionary terms (that is to say, in human evolutionary terms). Wallace uses the testimony of mediums to support his claim: How is it that whether the medium be man, woman, or child, whether ignorant or educated, whether English, German, or American, there should be one and the same consistent representation of these preterhuman beings, at variance with popular notions of them, but such as strikingly to accord with the modern scientific doctrine of ‘continuity’? (Wallace, 1875, p. 115) This ‘continuity’ makes itself felt in The Conjugial Angel – although Sophy’s Visitor represents continuity with the animal world as opposed to the human. Indeed, even the séance attendants, contrary to the occult/domestic setting, are described with reference to naturalism. Mrs Papagay resembles a parrot when she wears ‘a hat heavy with darkly gleaming plumage, jet-black, emerald-shot, iridescent dragonfly blue on ultramarine’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 163), whereas Sophy is dressed in ‘dove-coloured wool with a white collar’ (ibid., p. 164). Mrs Hearnshaw, a regular sitter, is described as a ‘calyx’ (ibid., p. 194) and Captain Jesse as ‘a great white plumed creature’ (ibid.). The members of the spirit circle embody the exotic Darwinian imagery that had taken such a hold of the Victorian imagination. Their clothes become zoomorphic flourishes, bringing a hint of the Galapagos to Margate.


Significantly, however, Swedenborg’s understanding of Man as the centre of all existence had nullified the shock of becoming a mere ‘species’ within spiritualist circles – counteracting the implication that ‘men were no better than creepy-crawlies’ (ibid., p. 189). In the novella, an anthropocentric depiction of the cosmos reasserts itself through Mr Hakwe, who is eager to communicate Swedenborg’s theories to the rest of the spiritualist circle – ‘the various Heavens and Hells of the Universe, which he was shewn was in the form of a Divine Human, every spiritual and every material thing corresponding to some part of this infinite Grand Man’ (ibid., p. 166). As part of this system, angels are perceived as ‘thought-forms’, the manifestation of Man’s divine energy in ‘the lower world of the Spirits’: Swedenborg has many curious things to tell us of angelic offgivings, reliques of past mental states stored up inwardly for future use. He believed for instance that such offgivings were inserted into infants in the womb as reliques of past states of angelic conjugial love – an affection is an organic structure having life – so we may in certain circumstances be made sensuously aware of it. (ibid., p. 203) Interestingly, Myers’ notion of a Universal Self that I discussed in the previous chapter (which, it is worth remembering, was presented as objective science) shares a number of elements with Swedenborg’s Grand Man. Myers’ assertion that the ‘supraliminal consciousness’ is like a ‘floating island upon the abysmal deep of the total individuality beneath it’, the ‘waves’ which are ‘under one end of our narrow standing-place … continuous with the waves which wash under the other’ (Myers, 1891–2, p. 329), implies a similar ebbing and flowing of being and knowledge. Both Swedenborg and Myers engage with the idea of an active, continuous relationship between the past and the present, a constant process of recycling and resurfacing. The afterlife is not therefore perceived as an Other plane but as an extension of the world of the living that we are unable to comprehend in full. Captain Jesse, the husband of Emily Tennyson and in whose house the séances are held, argues that ‘the spirit world may be juxtaposed with this, may riddle it through like weevils in bread, and we might just not see it because we haven’t developed a way of thinking that allows us to see it’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 182). Although this particular image hints at an anachronistic knowledge of quantum physics, Captain Jesse makes a crucial point with regards to Victorian ‘evolutionary’

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spiritualism. The other world is not ‘extinct’ – we simply lack the cognitive-linguistic means to access it. In contrast to Captain Jesse’s position, however, Byatt’s use of In Memoriam points to those aspects of thought and language which do connect this world with the next. This is achieved through spirit communications, ghostly messages that are mediated through written text. Before taking this any further though, it is important to note here that The Conjugial Angel’s depiction of automatic writing is not in complete accord with the novella’s 1875 setting, a time when physical mediumship was at its peak. ‘Mrs. Papagay was convinced that Sophy could make the spirits materialize if she chose, like the famous Florence Cook, and her control Katie King’ (ibid., pp. 169–70), but Sophy is more comfortable with words. As the immaterial does not deteriorate, she wonders ‘why the dead should want to have their bodies back’ (ibid., p. 170). Thus, the séances in Jesse’s drawing room have more things in common with the séances held at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, where materialized spirits had finally departed and gave way to ‘mental’ forms of mediumship. Byatt is retracing the ‘trail of Katie King’ (Myers, 1885, p. 235), to borrow a phrase from Myers, which had been wiped clean from experiments in automatic writing. By moving forwards, with the mediumistic partnership of Lilias Papagay and Sophy Sheekhy, a Victorian duo resembling the collaborations of the Edwardian automatists in the Palm Sunday Case, she is retrieving the hidden link between the Victorian spiritualist practices, ranging from materialization to writing, and twentieth-century concepts of intertextuality, fragmented narratives and language games. Rather than necessarily perceiving The Conjugial Angel as post-modern, we can observe how the novella relocates the innovations of modernist narrative techniques, which I have discussed in the second chapter, right back into the Victorian séance. If anything, the novella becomes a post-mortem addition to the history of spiritualism, to literary interpretation and reinvention of canonical texts. Returning to In Memoriam, the fictional Tennyson comes to view his poem as a ‘parasite, like mistletoe on dying oaks’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 268) – a parasite that feeds on the presence of both the poet and Arthur Hallam, acquiring ‘a matter-moulded kind of half-life’ (ibid.). With this combination of the natural and the spectral in mind, sections of the poem are quoted and misquoted throughout the novella, appearing in a series of automatic scripts. We can better understand this process by returning to Myers’ theory of automatic writing. Rather than accepting that the subconscious was responsible for these texts, Myers proposed that


departed spirits were able to ‘interface’ with the brain of a medium, creating a kind of spectral neurology. Furthermore, Myers describes automatic writing and trance states in terms of possession – a subject which I explored in the first chapter in relation to acting. Here, however, poetry becomes both a possessing agent and is possessed itself. The extent to which this ‘possession’ takes hold manifests itself visually in the medium’s writing style. As the entranced medium transcribes a message, her handwriting is described as ‘so unlike Sophy Sheekhy’s innocent loops and circles. It was somewhere between Arthur’s [Hallam’s] small quick hand, and Alfred’s [Tennyson’s] also small and quick, but less pinched’ (ibid., p. 216). This graphological amalgam of personalities begins to demonstrate how Sophy is not only haunted by departed spirits but also by Tennyson’s text. Myers’ work on automatic writing creates a two-way relationship between the haunting and the haunted, a framework through which we can read the jumbled mixture of phrases and styles in Sophy’s transcriptions. As Myers states: The transparency which renders the one possession possible facilitates also the other. This may be the one reason for the admixture seen in most trance utterances, – of elements which come from the sensitive’s own mind with elements inspired from without. To this source of confusion must be added that influence of the sensitive’s supraliminal self also, whose habits of thought and turns of speech must needs appear whenever use is made of the brain-centres which the supraliminal self habitually controls. (Myers, 1903, II, p. 249) Psychology, neurology and the occult become part of the same discourse in Myers’ theory of writing-possession – elucidating several moments in the novella in which these formations are difficult to distinguish from each other. Moreover, Tennyson’s creative process in the writing of In Memoriam can also be read according to this model, allowing us to view the poem as a form of cross-correspondence between the living and the dead. A letter to James Knowles in which the ‘historical’ Tennyson discusses the composition of In Memoriam ties in the themes of automatic writing and spirit control with the question of the poetic imagination – ‘It’s a very impersonal poem as well as personal … It’s too hopeful, this Poem … more than I am myself … The general way of its being written was so queer that if there were a blank space, I would put in a poem’

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(Tennyson, 2003, p. 364). Tennyson’s compulsion to fill the empty pages with verse connects the poem more tangibly to the fictional séance proceedings of The Conjugial Angel and also evokes the presence of Arthur Henry Hallam. It is as if Hallam is guiding Tennyson’s hand, vicariously ‘reliving’ his death, burial and physical disintegration. However, the spectral/textual networks that feed into the writing of the poem do not manifest themselves in terms of conventional ‘ghostly’ tropes. Again and again, the poem uses natural imagery in order to represent the transition between life and death as a wholly organic process. Biological matter is constantly remade into something else. Thus, Hallam’s spirit is re-embodied through natural systems – ‘Old Yew, which graspest at the stones / That name the under-lying dead, / Thy fibres met the dreamless head, / Thy roots are wrapt about the bones’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 221). Or, as another example: ‘And from his ashes may be made / The violet of his native land’ (Tennyson, 2003, p. 142, part xviii, lines 3–4). Furthermore, the fact that the poem was first published anonymously with the inscription ‘A. H. H.’ (Arthur’s initials) compounds the link between In Memoriam and the séance. The author and the intended ‘recipient’ are unnamed, the A. H. H. resembling the sequence of letters produced by a planchette. In addition, the various narrative positions adopted by the poem (the beloved, the friend, the wife, the mother) creates a polyphony of different voices, messages sent ‘backwards’ from the living to the dead. This notion resonates with The Conjugial Angel in the sense that Sophy often feels that the living can ‘haunt’ or ‘possess’ in much the same way as the dead. The desires and demands of the living become the animating force behind her trances: [S]ome of the things which came, or could be called up, were whole human beings, with faces and histories, and she had learned slowly and painfully that she was required – from both sides it seemed – to mediate between these and those others who neither saw nor heard them. The more the weight of hope, the more the sucking whirlpool of grief here that called and called, the harder it became for Sophy Sheekhy to do as she was asked, to invite these particular comers among all others, to make them stay and speak. They strangled her, she felt sometimes, the living not the dead. (Byatt, 1995, p. 193) In the case of Mrs Hearnshaw, for example, Lilias is acutely aware of ‘the pull’ between medium and sitter, ‘a pull of pure pain and a kind


of glittering emptiness, and she knew instinctively she must take a hand, if the hunger was to be met and not magnified’ (ibid., p. 196). With Myers’ psychical theories in the background, this appears to be a case of living minds controlling each other rather than an example of otherworldly possession. Sophy feels that Mrs Hearnshaw’s loss of her baby daughters pulls at her ‘like a great beak’ (ibid.) and Lilias identifies the desire of this grief-stricken woman for consolation rather than the appearance of any spirit child. Thus, when Papagay acts as a writing medium, she does not take up the pen in order to transcribe obscure or mysterious spirit messages. She might prefer her ‘messages to be more tactfully ambiguous, like those of the Delphic Oracle’ (ibid., p. 199) but in this case produces an explicit prediction – Mrs Hearnshaw will soon fall pregnant and give birth to another daughter, whose name should be Rosamund instead of Amy (the name of each of her deceased children). Papagay realizes ‘that she had not until now been quite sure that the passive writing was not done by some other part of her coherent Self’ (ibid., p. 169). Papagay’s insights here expose a communication not only between medium and spirit but also between the ‘unconscious’ of the medium and sitter (that is to say, between ‘some other part’ of their ‘coherent’ selves). The text also points to the ways that Mrs Papagay measures the parameters of her own identity through automatic writing. As Mrs Hearnshaw is aware but fearful of the pregnancy, it seems as though her consciousness has somehow influenced Papagay’s text. Furthermore, through the novella’s amalgamation of poetry and automatic writing, spirit messages become more important than the materialized bodies of the dead. As with Papagay’s message to Hearnshaw, the text replaces the spirit body. With this in mind, consider Tennyson’s lines from In Memoriam – ‘So word by word, and line by line, / The dead man touched me from the past, / And all at once it seem’d to last / The living soul was flash’d on mine’ (Tennyson, 2003, p. 194, part xcv, lines 33–6). As Tennyson reads through Hallam’s letters, the words become a kind of ‘body’ in their own right, capable of ‘touching’ the reader/sitter in this textual séance. The poem therefore provides us with the key to how automatic writing operates. However, this linguistic ‘reconstruction’ of Hallam is ultimately subverted in The Conjugial Angel when the words fail and Hallam’s unearthed body visits Sophy. In stark contrast to an evolutionary conception of the afterlife, the undead Hallam is portrayed as a zombie-like figure – ‘He stood there, trembling and morose. The trembling was not exactly human. It caused his body to swell and contract as though sucked out of shape and pressed back into it’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 249). Hallam’s ‘brows and lashes’

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are ‘caked with clay’ (ibid., p. 250) as if he has literally just risen from the grave. Significantly, the undead Hallam seems to be animated by In Memoriam, summoned as though the poem were an incantation, given a ‘half-life’ by the text’s emotional power. When Sophy informs him that he has been greatly mourned, it does not bring comfort to him but great unease – as if he too is being haunted by those left ‘behind’ in the land of the living. Hallam is trapped in a kind of limbo – ‘I walk. Between. Outside. I cannot tell you. I am part of nothing. Impotent and baffled’ (ibid., p. 250). In a sense, Hallam is ‘between’ the two texts, stranded in the grey, unmapped zone where In Memoriam ends and The Conjugial Angel begins – between Tennyson’s admission that he cannot ‘dream of thee [Hallam] as dead’ (Tennyson, 2003, p. 172, part lxviii, line 4) and his ‘materialization’ in Byatt’s narrative. It is perhaps this inability of the poet to imagine his friend as dead, combined with his famous assertion that ‘a poet never sees a ghost’ (Chapman, 2003, p. 48) which keeps the fictional Arthur from presenting himself to the one man who would so deeply wish to see him resurrected. After Hallam appears to Sophy, she receives a vision of the elderly but living Alfred and relays this information to the undead figure in her bedroom. Hallam is delighted by this rare moment of reconnection – ‘You would think I could hear his thoughts,’ muses Hallam, ‘but I cannot’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 253). Sophy therefore performs a séance in reverse, poignantly opening up a rift between the conception the living have of the dead and how the dead actually are (or are imagined to be by Byatt). Arthur has not ‘evolved’ to some higher plane of being – he shakes in Sophy’s presence, smelling of earth and unable to communicate with his loved ones. As we have seen earlier in the case of the ‘cross-correspondences’, for a nineteenth-century audience well versed in both the Bible and in poetry, séance scripts became a kind of puzzle requiring scholarly identification and collation. This is reflected in the novella by the several occasions in which the sitters are called upon to identify fragments of the automatic scripts being transcribed. One message, for example, contains passages from the Book of Revelation: ‘Thy voice is on the rolling air / I hear thee where the waters run / Thou standest in the rising sun / And in the setting thou art fair. Revelation 2, 4’ (ibid., p. 205). The angel standing in the sun, however, is not from Revelation 2:4 but from chapter 19, as Mr Hawke is quick to point out. The message also contains jumbled quotations from Hallam’s essay on Theodicy and Tennyson’s poem (‘Theodicaea Noviss Novissima. Lost Remains, his loved remains sail the placid ocean-plains thy dark freight. Lost, lost’, ibid., p. 204) and from Dante’s


Vita Nuova (‘Never forget our Lady who is dead’, ibid.). To Emily, these passages evoke memories of her short engagement to Arthur, comparing Dante’s love for the dead Beatrice to her love for Arthur. For Mr Hawke, however, the messages must be interpreted according to Swedenborgian philosophy. The messages therefore become polyvalent, striking a different chord with different sitters. Furthermore, the séance does not only establish communication with the dead, but also with the past, as Emily remembers Arthur’s visits to the Tennyson’s Somersby home. Sophy’s writing mediumship generates an intricate web of memories and desires that criss-crosses the spirit circle. The spiritualist context of The Conjugial Angel has prompted various readings of the novella in which the text itself is conceived of as a séance – where notions of intertextuality, authorial voice and spectral communication are amalgamated.9 Furthermore, the novella’s mimicry of historical personae and its reinvention of In Memoriam tie in questions of mediumship and spirit control to notions of the Muse and the poetic imagination. Alfred, Arthur and Emily (who attempts to contact her lost fiancé through a séance rather than a poem) control and are controlled by each other – in text, in life and in death. ‘As above, so below’. This network of psychical connections, however, does not only apply to these historical personae and their fictional ‘doubles’. Byatt’s work (in theory and in practice) allows us to make an explicit link between the position of the medium and the position of the writer. Thus, we return to Byatt’s notion of the ‘medium as artist or historian’, or perhaps even a more subversive model in which it is impossible to distinguish between medium and artist at all, between poetry and automatic writing, between history and fiction. Tennyson himself had flirted with spiritualism, although he remained more cautious than his brother and sisters (who had become enthusiastic converts) (Elliot, 1979, pp. 89–100).10 Despite his reservations, both his poems and his study of the supernatural represent an active engagement with the ideas and emotional structures behind spiritualism and Psychical Research. Lilias Papagay, on the other hand, embodies the complete fusion of creative and spiritualist practices. We are told that she ‘had considered writing stories for a living, but her skills in language were unequal to it’ and her prose ‘stilted’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 168). Mrs Papagay’s automatic writing, however, is teeming with ‘life’, mirroring Mrs Verrall’s failed attempts in writing verses while her entranced scripts glimmer with poetic innovation. Indeed, as Byatt notes, Mrs Papagay ‘lived more and more in the passive writing’ (ibid., p. 169). This writing is wild, beautiful, both lucid

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and mysterious – her words are ‘hooked into each other, until out of the scribbling rose a message or a face, as a rambling pencil … might change tempo from aimless marks to urgent precise description’ (ibid., p. 197). The difference between active and passive writing here is problematized (just as the notion of entrancement problematized the extent to which materializations were ‘controlled’ by the medium). Writing itself is portrayed as a form of haunting – as a force that is both inside and outside the writing medium at the same time, neither original nor borrowed. Spiritualism therefore provides a framework in which intertextuality can be recast. Mrs Papagay’s favourite Tennyson poem is Enoch Arden – the narrative of which reminds her of her own ‘aborted novel’ (ibid., p. 176). This novel takes on an anthropomorphic corporeality, an aborted foetus that never reaches full term. In another sense, however, it is a spectral presence, haunting Tennyson’s more successful text, lingering in its shadow. Interestingly, both works are conceived at the same time and Byatt creates an ambiguity as to which author ‘influences’ the other (as if their thoughts and creative impulses are somehow psychically linked). This question of influence is also explored through Sophy’s private attempt to contact the spirit of Arthur. She finds herself reciting lines from Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes (ibid., p. 248) which eventually prompts Hallam to materialize. If we take into consideration both Arthur’s admiration of ‘Keats’s sensuous imagination’ (ibid., p. 256) and the comparison he makes between the poetry of Keats and Tennyson,11 the spectral/textual network of influence within the novella is exposed. As James Najarian argues, Tennyson ‘uses sensuous Keatsian language to indicate how close Arthur and he were on the first’s visit to Somersby’ (Najarian, 2002, pp. 66–7). Najarian goes on to delineate several parallels between the sexuality of the two poets and the gender politics of their work (both were accused of being effeminate after the publication of their first collections). This creates a strong connection between them, a system of influence that encompasses both life and text. It is therefore no surprise that it is Sophy’s recital of Keats that brings forth the spirit of Arthur. The power of these words reactivates a complex network of memories, emotions, quotations and allusions. This system of narrative haunting reaches its apotheosis at the end of the novella with Mrs Papagay’s refusal to marry Mr Hawke and her husband Captain Arturo’s miraculous return after his presumed death at sea almost ten years ago. The tragic ending of Enoch Arden, in which a long-lost husband arrives home to find his wife remarried, is


overturned – ‘And he buried his face in her hair, and she put her empty arms around his fullness, lean but lively, remembering his shoulder, his ribs, his loins, crying out “Arturo” into his greatcoat and the wind’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 289). In a sense then, Lilias, who is originally drawn to the séance room to verify the death of Arturo, keeps the possibility of his return ‘alive’ through the practice of automatic writing. By weaving together In Memoriam, Enoch Arden and countless other threads (not least Homer’s Odyssey) with her own desires and sensitivities, she suspends and animates the world around her. As a final way of exploring this relationship between the literary and the spectral, I will demonstrate how The Conjugial Angel is linked to the ‘cross-correspondences’ or Palm Sunday Case. As we have already seen, the SPR case studies in general constitute a literary genre in their own right. The specific details of the Palm Sunday Case show how Psychical Research was engaged with a very modern kind of literary theory long before this practice was codified and institutionalized in the twentieth century.12 In relation to this, both the novella and the case study turn the séance into a sort of literary circle, in which the sitters not only attempt to identify the source of the spirit messages but the plethora of quotes and allusions that the spirits employ. Comparing The Conjugial Angel and the SPR’s ‘Palm Sunday’ transcripts therefore reveals a system of ‘influence’ that brings the two texts into dialogue. The Conjugial Angel opens with a mis-quotation – ‘Lilias Papagay was of imagination all compact’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 163). This foreshadows the literary drama that will unfold during the séances but also brings us back to the theme of narrative haunting. The line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream originally reads ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact’ (Shakespeare, 1963, p. 142). This Shakespearean triptych of the lunatic, lover and poet is central to both the novella and the Palm Sunday Case. Mediumship was pathologized by Victorian medicine and mediums were often associated with lunatics, an association poignantly re-enacted by Flora Milk’s visit to the Salpêtrière in Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen.13 Without too much of an imaginative leap, Shakespeare’s lines could therefore be rephrased (or mis-quoted) once again to form an epigram for both works: ‘The medium, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.’ As I have explored earlier in this study, the automatists received communications from several spirits who used similar imagery, themes and ideas bound to convey messages of undying love to Arthur Balfour from Mary Catherine Lyttelton. Janet Oppenheim suggests that those who ‘interpreted and collated the scripts were subconsciously compelled by

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their own knowledge of the story to put the fragmentary pieces of the puzzle together’ (Oppenheim, 1985, pp. 132–4). This particular theory creates a strong connection with The Conjugial Angel. The séance sitters decode spirit messages in light of their knowledge of Emily, Alfred and Arthur’s relationship, just as the interpreters of Palm Sunday are compelled, like detectives, to produce a narrative from the fragments presented to them. Arthur Balfour was not made aware of Mary Lyttelton’s attempts to communicate with him until 1916 and was initially sceptical about the veracity of the messages. However, as he approached the end of his life, Balfour became convinced that Mary really was the source of these otherworldly communiqués and attempted to send a message back to her. Prior to this point, the identities of both her spirit and the intended recipient had been in question (compounded by the cryptic nature of most messages). It had taken more than a decade to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Significantly, this ‘puzzle’ included quotations from Tennyson, Dante and Rossetti, alongside references to nursery rhymes and children’s songs. With this in mind, Byatt’s conception of poetry as ‘the sensuous afterlife of men’ (Byatt, 2001, p. 113), a notion that directly informs the writing of The Conjugial Angel, creates the clearest ‘crosscorrespondence’ yet between these two texts. ‘Poems are the ghosts of sensations’, she writes in the novella (Byatt, 1995, p. 251) – they belong to both the living and the dead. In the Palm Sunday Case, certain images came to stand for Lyttelton and Balfour – deciphered in the same way that Emily can recognize a part of herself in Tennyson’s ringlet-haired maiden, ‘though Alfred had made the meek dove’s hair golden, not raven’ (ibid., p. 234). Lyttelton was portrayed as the ‘Palm Maiden’, the ‘Lady with Candle’ (uncannily recalling a photograph of her, in which she is dressed in black and holding a candle, just about to ascend a staircase), as a ‘blossom of May’ (because of her nickname and birthday), as cockle shells or scallop shells (because of the children’s rhyme ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary’), as Rossetti’s ‘Blessed Damozel’, as Dante’s Beatrice, as a firework (the Catherine wheel), as a moon and as Berenice (who as legend has it cut her hair off in exchange for the safe return of her husband, alluding to Mary’s shorn tresses which Balfour had kept in a silver box) (Balfour, 1960, pp. 102–3). Similarly, Arthur Balfour was portrayed as a ‘faithful knight’, a pilgrim (after Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem ‘His Pilgrimage’), as ‘King Arthur’ (after Tennyson’s Idylls of the King) and more indirectly through references to Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (his godfather). Allusions


to Tennyson’s poetry therefore create a spectral/textual bond between Arthur Balfour and Arthur Henry Hallam. The name ‘Arthur’ (and its various encryptions) resonates through both texts, inviting and resisting identification. Broken down or complete, half-remembered or perfectly recited, oblique or explicit, Tennyson’s work feeds into and is transformed by the Palm Sunday scripts and the novella. In The Conjugial Angel, Emily recounts the moment of Arthur’s death to the spirit circle. Arthur’s father, we are told, ‘was able to sit by the fire with him, supposing they were both companionably reading, until it struck him that the silence was too prolonged, or maybe that something was amiss’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 174). It is a deeply poignant and painful memory. However, it is the image of Arthur sliding silently between sleep and death that is significant here. In one of the Palm Sunday scripts, a quotation from Thomas Hood’s ‘The Deathbed’ recreates a very similar image for Mary: ‘a tomb rest is sweet – We watched her sleeping when she died – and dying when she slept’ (Balfour, 1960, p. 141). The underlined verb here (‘watched’) deviates from the original, which reads: ‘We thought her sleeping when she died.’ The mis-quotation means that the poem is appropriated by the spirits; a subtle alteration to a text that was familiar to the interpreters creates an interesting and unsettling ambiguity around watching, thinking, sleeping and death. This doubling of Arthur Hallam and Mary Lyttelton also manifests itself in a number of other spirit messages. One fragment of text transcribed by Mrs Willett, for example, reads ‘all the promise of life unfulfilled’ (ibid., p. 137) – a description which certainly rings true for both of them. On another occasion, the spirit of Edmund Gurney, again communicating through Mrs Willett, uses In Memoriam to convey the depth of Mary’s feeling: ‘My love involves the love before – I shall not lose thee though I die – say that’ (ibid., p. 113). Furthermore, remembering that Sophy Sheekhy evokes the materialized spirit of Hallam by reciting Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes, a message transcribed by Mrs Verrall makes a comparison between Keats and Tennyson, stating that the two ‘make a pair’ (ibid., p. 102). It seems that doubles are contained within doubles here, radiating through text and séance. A full-scale comparison of the 3000 scripts of the Palm Sunday Case and The Conjugial Angel would be a fascinating but ultimately unfeasible task. Using the links that I have highlighted here, however, we can see that both the novella and the scripts demonstrate just how profound the interchange was between the spectral and the poetic in the nineteenth-century imagination. Whereas Emily holds séances to

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‘reclaim’ Arthur Hallam from his living death in Tennyson’s poetry, so the Palm Sunday scripts use a ghostly poetics to make contact with Arthur Balfour in the land of the living. Byatt therefore explores the themes and critical issues raised by these extraordinary, exhausting documents – love, death, memory, authorial voice and the levels of the psyche. Byatt’s ‘mimicry’ of the nineteenth century therefore manifests itself in two distinct (but interrelated) ways. In Morpho Eugenia we are presented with the natural and fairy-tale worlds of Victorian science (explored through insect mimicry) whereas in The Conjugial Angel questions of mimicry and authenticity are played out through spectral poetry and quotation. As a closing image, the way in which both novellas combine history and fiction, science and myth, natural and artificial matter can be thought of in relation to the tapestry produced by Eugenia. The tapestry is an ‘elegant arrangement’ of Lepidoptera butterflies. It does not quite adhere to ‘scientific principles, but it has the intricacy of a rose window made of living forms, and does show forth the extraordinary brilliance and beauty of the insect creation … she got the idea from silk knots in embroidery’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 15). This iridescent embroidery, which represents the borrowings and interchanges between the natural and synthetic worlds, becomes the template for Byatt’s fictional histories – the link between angels and insects.

5 The Other World Illuminated: Wiring Science, Text and Spirit in Victoria Glendinning’s Electricity

In his introduction to H. G. Wells’ novel Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Jeremy Lewis argues that Ethel, the spouse of the eponymous protagonist, is based on Wells’ first wife Isabel, who worked as a retoucher of photographic negatives. Lewis does not make the connection between Ethel’s involvement in fraudulent spiritualism and Isabel’s profession explicit. We are prompted, however, to make this association for ourselves. Although Isabel was working as a photographer’s assistant (who enhanced conventional pictures rather than inserting spirit forms), her job ‘has, perhaps, something in common with the conjuring forth of ectoplasm or unearthly presences’ (Wells, 1994, p. xxxviii). Whereas Isabel and Wells’ marriage collapsed in its early stages, the novel insinuates that the shaky union between Ethel and Lewisham is temporarily strengthened by the arrival of their first child – ‘The future is the Child. The Future. What are we – any of us – but servants or traitors to that?’ (ibid., p. 188). Almost a century after the publication of Love and Mr. Lewisham, Victoria Glendinning revisits the issues dealt with by Wells in her own novel Electricity (1995). The relationship between progress (as represented by science) and retrogression (as represented by faith in spiritualism); social injustice; the New Woman; the differences in education between the sexes; male and female sexuality – all of these features of Wells’ text are resuscitated in Electricity through a female perspective. Furthermore, electricity is used as a metaphor in both narratives to depict sexually charged relationships and the workings of the séance. Although Glendinning does not refer directly to Love and Mr. Lewisham in her narrative, a comparative reading will focus on the underlying connection between the female characters in the two novels. More specifically, I explore how aspects of Ethel’s character and the woman with whom she is sharply contrasted (the intelligent and educated Miss 147

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Heydinger), are echoed in Glendinning’s Charlotte Mortimer, an amalgam of Wells’ heroines. Glendinning’s Electricity reopens a series of links with Victorian science and spiritualism, just as Love and Mr. Lewisham attempts to sever them. Whereas in Wells the languages of spiritualism, science and domesticity appear to be irreconcilable, Charlotte Mortimer is depicted as a polyglot in Electricity. Her narrative is infused with the languages of the men she has loved (the languages of electricity and botany) and the women she has been influenced by (employing the vocabulary of women’s emancipation and spiritualism). Charlotte’s short career as a medium is depicted as a gateway into the minds and desires of her clients and as means of self-knowledge and authorship. Her mediumship gives shape to a multilayered and metaphorical text as she switches between voices and discourses to record her own story. Thus, spiritualism is treated neither as a sham nor as a metaphysical reality. Rather, it is a means of releasing innermost desires through speaking and listening, absorbing the vocabularies of others in the process. Moreover, Glendinning’s use of electrical and spiritualistic imagery creates a ‘supercharged’ exchange between the two. Electricity becomes a metaphor for the pulses and shocks of spirit communication; the séance becomes a way of understanding the unseen forces of electricity. The novel’s protagonist does not conform to the stereotypical representation of women either as domesticated girls or New Women but tries to find her way among these two models of identity by encompassing both private/domestic and public/professional discourses.

Borderland: Fairytales of science/technological séances During a séance depicted in Electricity, to which Charlotte has been invited by her lover Godwin, the sitters are arranged around a table according to whether they function as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ conduits for the spirits. The arrangement reminds Charlotte of an electric circuit and she notes that electrical science and spiritualism are far more similar than they appear to be – ‘Spiritualism seemed its mirror image: a search for effects’ (Glendinning, 1996, p. 155). Indeed, as Steven Connor explains, there was a ghostly trafficking between science and séance. The technologies of the nineteenth century were depicted in the other world through a ‘phantasmal commentary’, incorporating the advances of the ‘real world’ into its spectral counterpart (Connor, 2006). The spirits dwelling in the laboratories of eminent scientists and Psychical Researchers would ‘apport’ technological and scientific breakthroughs into the séance environment, ‘networking’ between this world

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and the next. This dynamic interchange between science and spiritualism has produced a rich repository of metaphors and images, stretching from the Victorian/Edwardian era to the contemporary moment. The two discourses haunt each other and the links between them have become a fertile ground for cultural historians in the past two decades.1 With original sources in mind, however, leafing through the pages of magazines such as The Review of Reviews, Borderland, The Spiritualist and the PSPR demonstrates just how profound this spectral circuit was – a circuit condemned in Wells and celebrated in Glendinning. Charlotte’s nickname, ‘Wirewoman’, given to her by Godwin, sets up a series of connections within the interior world of the novel – with her husband’s job as an electrician and later with her stint as a medium (both professions are concerned with channelling types of energy after all). Moreover, Godwin’s name also forges links with literary history as it is resonant with William Godwin, the father of Mary Shelley (and thus, by association, to Shelley’s electro-gothic creation, Frankenstein). By the early 1880s, the period in which the novel is set, Louigi Galvani’s theory of electricity as fluid had been superseded by Michael Faraday’s theory of electricity as force. The breakthrough came in 1834 when Faraday altered forever our understanding of electromagnetism. His concept of lines of ‘flux’ emanating from charged objects or magnets provided a way of visualizing electrical and magnetic fields – a force in nature and in the human body which passed from particle to particle (Otis, 2002, pp. 107–10).2 The vocabulary of electromagnetism can be linked to the development of mesmerism in the 1840s. In 1845, Karl von Reichenbach conducted a series of experiments with ‘sensitives’3 (usually women of a nervous disposition), during which magnetic objects or crystals were placed near their bodies. After observing how these objects affected their senses (feeling hot or cold, seeing coloured auras and so on), von Reichenbach declared that he had discovered a new force known as ‘Od’.4 At the same time, Faraday’s experiments with magnetic objects demonstrated how light (as opposed to bodies) could be polarized in an uncanny parallel with von Reichenbach’s more outré investigations (Winter, 1998, pp. 276–80). Furthermore, the new language of electricity – vital energy, activity and passivity, negative and positive poles, conductive ‘mediums’ – is very clearly ‘plugged-in’ to the language of spiritualists, leading figures such as Faraday and Tyndall conducted experiments on the forces behind table tilting (Oppenheim, 1985, p. 327).5 Regardless of the outcome of such experiments, electricity had taken hold of popular imagination and had entered the séance room. An example of the extent to which scientific and technological developments

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were adopted by avid spiritualists can be found in Catherine Crowe’s Spiritualism and the Age we Live In (1859). Crowe perceived the human body as ‘a sort of Electric Battery’ and used this notion to explain the mysterious ‘agency behind the movement of tables’ (Crowe, 1859, p. 107). Similarly, Cromwell Varley had performed electrical tests with Florence Cook in which the medium was wired up in the spirit cabinet and attached to a galvanometer while Katie paraded around the room, free of ‘wires trailing behind her’ (Noakes, 1998, p. 153). In the historical moment that Glendinning’s text occupies, electricity had only recently been mastered. Edison had invented the light bulb in 1879 while electric light was used to illuminate public places for the first time in 1880 (Otis, 2002, pp. 105–128).6 It is therefore not too farfetched to argue that the electrical networking of public places played some part (at least obliquely) in the direction and development of spiritualism. More specifically, Myers’ concept of the Universal Self (a notion that persists in returning here) was conceived of as a psychical ‘network’ of the personalities of the living and dead – a network that united the ‘social and individual body’ (Armstrong, 1998, p. 21) in a metaphysical sense just as the illumination of public space and the wiring of houses performed the same action in the material world. At the very least, there is a crossover between the transformative effects of electricity, ‘connecting’ people as it were, and Myers’ psychic grid. Charlotte’s nickname, which already hints at the broader relationship between the human body and electrical energy, becomes more acute when she describes her dealings with her customers in terms of circuitry – ‘I … was opened to their secrets and closed off from their ordinary lives’ (Glendinning, 1996, p. 211). Mediumship, however, does not only lead us to electrical matters and there are other forms of ‘connection’ that must be taken into account here in order to fully understand the way that Glendinning wires us into the fin de siècle. Mediumship provides Charlotte with an education in social, sexual and emotional ‘electricity’, enabling her to understand all frequencies of human behaviour. This is demonstrated by Charlotte’s recollection of an erotic encounter with Godwin, who has a fetish for spanking. The episode only makes sense to the heroine in retrospect – ‘I have heard about such desires and their fulfilment from my clients, since then. At the time I was puzzled and inadequate’ (ibid., p. 128). This intimate new awareness is essentially psychological (if we are to think of the relationship between sitters and medium), but it is presented to us here as physical. The remark comes before we find out about Charlotte’s involvement with spiritualism and we are misled into thinking that she is a prostitute.


When her short-lived spiritualist career comes to an abrupt end, one of Charlotte’s plans is to become a typist, a profession which was accessible to women at the time and which substantiates her penchant for writing. ‘I could learn to do automatic writing,’ she thinks to herself, ‘not the Mosses’ kind, but with a typewriting machine’ (ibid., p. 249). The term ‘automatic writing’, which was used in reference to both mediums and to female professionals of the fin de siècle, therefore exposes another link between spiritualism and the technology and the gender politics of the era – the medium as typist and the typist as medium. Furthermore, the ‘Mosses’ kind’ of automatic writing which Charlotte rejects is resonant with W. Stainton Moses, one of the most celebrated writing mediums of the late 1870s and 1880s, another allusion which blurs the boundaries between the secretarial and the spiritualistic in this episode. In Love and Mr. Lewisham, Ethel works as a typist for the wealthy spiritualist Lagune. Her duties, one might speculate, would involve taking transcripts of séance proceedings. The link between mediumship and typing is therefore compounded by its presence in both works. Ethel records the words of departed spirits, a process in which her fingers ‘animate’ the typewriter and make the words appear on the paper, disrupting the intimacy between eye, hand and letter which characterizes non-technological inscriptions.7 After her stepfather Chaffery is caught simulating spirit phenomena, Ethel’s secretarial duties are positioned more explicitly in the occult realm. With Chaffery’s authenticity in question, Lagune is convinced that Ethel is ‘indisputably mediumistic’ (Wells, 1994, p. 74). As Lagune presses his fingertips on her temples and she transcribes the message he passes on to her through telepathy, she quite literally becomes an apparatus for thought-reading, a human typewriter (ibid., p. 97). Indeed, Thurschwell argues that the technologies of the typewriter and the telegraph created fantasies of accessing the thoughts and minds of others, diminishing the distances between people as well as between bodies and machines. Secretaries, she opines, ‘are, on the one hand, tools – ideally meant to function as unmediating recorders of another’s thoughts, like the dictating machines they themselves employ. On the other hand, secretaries are as mediums, never themselves unmediating’ (Thurschwell, 2001, p. 90).8 In addition, just as Charlotte’s mediumship is represented in terms of close communication between herself and her clients, Ethel’s telepathic experiments are viewed by Lewisham as improperly intimate – ‘Let them [spiritualists such as Lagune] thought-read their daughters and hypnotize their aunts, and leave their typewriters [Ethel] alone’ (Wells, 1994, p. 98). Such close contact, physical and psychical, may be appropriate

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between family members but not between employer and employee. Indeed, Ethel notes that ‘only the possible dishonour of mediumship could have brought their marriage about’, with Lewisham’s proposal coming before she can further degrade herself by working with spirits (ibid., p. 111). For Lewisham, mediumship is not simply harmless nonsense but a dangerous, transgressive profession. Both heroines represent how science, technology, spiritualism and socio-cultural notions of ‘intimacy’ are interconnected. This connection is not a unique characteristic of these two novels but has its roots in the Victorian spiritualist press of the fin de siècle. With reference to the occult magazine Borderland (1893–7), we can see how science and spiritualism were not only intertwined but sometimes exchanged places – spiritualism was classified as a ‘natural’ phenomenon while technological advancement, using Connor’s phrase, was accommodated into the spirit world as a ‘phantasmal commentary’. Although its name does not make the connection between science, technology and the occult as explicit as the Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph (1855–7) and the British Spiritualist Telegraph (1857–9), W. T. Stead’s finde-siècle quarterly Borderland nevertheless suggests a blurring of boundaries between these discourses in the public imagination.9 In fact, the word ‘borderland’ is used in Electricity to describe the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness that Charlotte explores through mediumship (Glendinning, 1996, p. 198), a word that Charlotte remembers being used ‘in another context’ (ibid., p. 199) by the misogynist Dr Bullingdon Huff to denote Charlotte’s frail psychological state after the death of her husband (ibid., p. 178). However, in Stead’s magazine, ‘borderland’ signifies how the technological and scientific advancements of the fin de siècle became a way of renegotiating the relationship between the marvellous to the quotidian, a way of writing ‘fairy tales’ in ‘everyday prose’.10 This is demonstrated by the range of features included in Borderland. Summaries of the PSPR, studies on crystal gazing, automatic writing, yoga and theosophy were printed alongside articles on telephony, telegraphy, X-rays and radio waves. The articles would merge into each other, creating a ‘circuit’ of shared imagery, terminology and metaphor.11 One of the journal’s most striking features, for example, was Stead’s automatic writing – a series of articles that he had ‘received’ from Julia Ames, an American journalist who had died three years before the first Borderland issue went to press. Stead was adamant that the writer of the column was indeed Julia, answering questions about the finer points of spiritualism from the other world. This shows how Stead was in the thrall of both spiritualist practice and technological


progress. In his life and work, he became an amalgam of the two, styling himself as a typewriter for this truly ‘foreign’ correspondent.12 Similarly, an article which recounts an automatic-writing séance in the first issue of Borderland is entitled ‘Typewriting Extraordinary’. It describes, quite literally, a ghost in the machine – a spirit who possesses and operates a typewriter ‘with an astonishing degree of swiftness and dexterity’ (Anon., 1894, p. 61).13 The typewriter positioned in the centre of the table effectively replaces the human medium – who is responsible for channelling the spirit but does not become part of its manifestation. The near-illegible scribbles of entranced hands have been superseded by typewritten manuscripts, ‘as good [and as tedious] as letters one receives from first-class business houses’ (ibid.). This brings the supernatural even closer to everyday experience and makes the links between the typist and the spirit world, between Ethel and Charlotte’s line of work, both compelling and banal. On another occasion, Stead used the telephone as a metaphor for mediumship and telepathy: Now if I am asked to explain how my automatic hand got that message, I cannot explain it … The more I experiment with telepathy the more is the conviction driven in upon me that the mind uses the body as a temporary two-legged telephone for the purposes of communication at short range with other minds, but that it no more ceases to exist when the body dies than we cease to exist when we ring off the telephone. (Stead, 1893–94b, p. 508) Technology is depicted here as both secular and religious – embracing the modernity of technological progress but creating a metonymy between this world and the afterlife. If we exist after we ring off the telephone, we also exist after we leave from our bodies. Stead’s argument also demonstrates how technological metaphors replaced the organic in nineteenth-century thinking about the mind and body.14 The ‘two-legged telephone’ epitomizes the way in which technology was swiftly accommodated into a spiritualist setting, turning mediums into ‘operators’. This is reproduced directly in Electricity when Mrs Bagshut, Charlotte’s spiritualist tutor, attributes mistaken identities and incorrect names as cases ‘of ethereal mishearing, or faulty connection, like a bad telephone line’ (Glendinning, 1996, p. 201). The power of this new language is emphasized when Charlotte notes Mrs Bagshut’s confession ‘that she had never seen or used a telephone, and neither had I for that matter’ (ibid.).

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While Stead was turning himself (and others) into a communications device, the new science of X-rays ‘radiated’ into the representation of healing mediums. The German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered the X-rays in November 1895 by placing his hand between a Crookes Tube and a fluorescent screen. Just a few months later, X-rays were used in hospitals to diagnose broken bones or to locate foreign objects in the body such as bullets or shards of metal (Grove, 1997, pp. 141–73). By providing images of the human skeleton, X-rays demonstrated both life in death and death in life. It follows then that they were discussed in an issue of Borderland in conjunction with von Reichenbach’s Odylic force. The article extensively lists the similarities between Crookes and Gassiott’s experiments with radiant matter and von Reichenbach’s theories, arguing that ‘the visibility of the one and the invisibility of the other to all but a small number of “sensitives” may be explained on the supposition that only a very small quantity of force is concerned in the Reichenbach phenomena, so that exceptionally sensitive persons are affected’ (Bell, 1897, p. 35). X-rays made an invisible world discernible and penetrable for the first time. Indeed, the X-ray did not only lead to breakthroughs in medicine but offered a new way of seeing that triggered the literary and cultural imagination, connecting with and transforming earlier representations of ghosts, death and invisibility.15 Furthermore, the fact that Röntgen’s discovery was made using a Crookes Tube forges another link between science and Psychical Research. In his 1879 lecture on ‘Radiant Matter’, Crookes had demonstrated that phosphorescent particles could be made visible when contact was made between two distant electrical poles in high vacua within a glass tube. Crookes believed that this phenomenon was indicative of ‘matter in a fourth state of condition’, a notion that uncannily resembles his theory of ‘psychic force’ in the earlier part of the decade. Although the particles were later identified by J. J. Thomson as electrons, Crookes’ experiments set a precedent that led to the discovery of the X-ray (Luckhurst, 2002, pp. 79–82).16 It would be a mistake, however, to legitimize Crookes’ scientific work at the expense of his involvement with spiritualism. Such was the close relationship between the two fields, we might even argue that Crookes’ experiments with D. D. Home and Florence Cook created a conceptual framework in which his ‘scientific’ Tube could be realized. Indeed, Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen makes the connection between ‘psychic force’ and ‘Radiant Matter’ explicit when Flora Milk learns that her scientist patron has received the Nobel Prize – ‘You could say that was partly due to me’ (Roberts, 1999, p. 18).


We can take this notion of spiritualism preceding and/or facilitating technological advancement even further. In the article from Borderland discussed previously, the idea of a ‘sensitive’ being able to perceive Odylic force (and therefore see the body through a kind of X-ray vision) turns the sensitive into a kind of machine – a technological device or tool. Odylic force certainly precedes the X-ray as another article from the same edition suggests – ‘For given the possibility of rendering the body of every sick person diaphanous, by good sensitives, these will be in a position to discern what internal organ may be morbidly affected, and what progress it is making towards amelioration or deterioration’ (Anon., 1897a, p. 36). According to this model, the internal body becomes ‘readable’ to the sensitive – a living, breathing X-ray machine. It is also a process (at least theoretically) that collapses the distances between one body and another, between the inside and the outside, between life and death, mirroring many characteristics of mediumship in this respect. The voices of technology and the voices of the dead became increasingly intertwined during the fin de siècle – uncannily anticipating later developments in twentieth-century ‘haunted sciences’ such as Electronic Voice Phenomena and even the current popularity of techno-horror films such as Ring (1998).17 The work of both Wells and Glendinning is fundamentally marked by this synthesis. Spiritualism opened up imaginative spaces that science and technology would make tangible, only for these ‘tangible’ developments to be reabsorbed back into the netherworld.

Ethel and Charlotte: Women, science and séance in Love and Mr. Lewisham and Electricity ‘Do you know what “cf” stands for?’ he asked. I was embarrassed. If he did not know, he was either very stupid or all these preparations were being made on the basis of a dreadful misunderstanding. ‘You know what it stands for,’ I replied. ‘Yes, but it does not just mean “Charlotte Fisher”. It is what they put in learned books, to refer the reader to another version of the argument in another place. They put “cf” as an abbreviation of “confer”, which is Latin for “compare”. I learnt that at the Institute.’ I was in truth subjected to an onslaught of conferring and comparing. I was frayed and fragmented. (Glendinning, 1996, p. 56)

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The initials of Charlotte’s married name in Electricity, which she embroiders on her handkerchiefs a few days before her wedding to the electrician Peter Fisher, cleverly ‘abbreviate’ the heroine’s fragmented self, her status as a fin-de-siècle young woman torn between a professional and a domestic life. Defined primarily as a daughter and a wife-to-be, Charlotte is forced to grapple with the roles that her family and the wider culture have imposed upon her. At the same time, she is pulled towards strong-minded characters who wish to mould the young heroine in line with their personal interests and beliefs. However, rather than simply submitting to the pressures exerted on her, Charlotte turns them into malleable material with which she discovers and constructs herself. As a result, Peter’s speeches about electricity, Aunt Susannah’s conservative aphorisms about relations between the sexes, Godwin’s interest in geology and botany and Mrs Bagshut’s mediumistic language are all incorporated into Charlotte’s own narrative collage, into the ‘writing’ of her life. Perhaps more interestingly, ‘cf’ stands for a literary/biographical comparison (if we refer to its Latin roots, as Charlotte points out) of two other heroines of the fin de siècle – Isabel Wells and her fictional alter ego, Ethel Lewisham. Wells’ fascination with Isabel, even after their marriage had collapsed, inspired the character of Ethel in Love and Mr. Lewisham, while Ethel is partly evoked in Electricity through the character of Charlotte.18 The notion of spiritualistic ‘cross-correspondence’ becomes central to our understanding of how these three women intersect and collide with each other, real and imaginary. Just as the mediums of the Palm Sunday case transcribed fragmented messages to be deciphered by a team of interpreters, so Isabel, Ethel and Charlotte form a kind of triptych. We can only see the full picture, however, if we can piece together the elements of literary, spiritualist and scientific history that connect them. A very short ‘biographical’ parallel between the couples here – Isabel and Wells, Ethel and Lewisham, Charlotte and Peter – will expose the ways in which these lives are uncannily linked and will shed light on the analysis that follows. In 1884, Wells entered the Normal School of Science in South Kensington. Mr Lewisham wins a scholarship to attend classes at the exact same institution. In 1883, Peter Fisher goes to London having been offered ‘the opportunity of employment in the electrical engineering workshop of Mr. de Ferranti’ (Glendinning, 1996, p. 6) and becomes a lodger in Charlotte’s family home. Wells moves to a house in Euston Road belonging to his Aunt Mary and falls madly in love with her daughter Isabel, who worked in a photographer’s shop.


Lewisham falls in love with Ethel during his days working as a low-paid teacher in a boys’ school in Whortley, Sussex, but the couple part. Three years later, as a science student in London, he is re-acquainted with Ethel during a failed séance. Meanwhile, as the days pass, Charlotte and Peter proceed ‘to fall romantically in love’ (ibid., p. 11). Wells marries Isabel whom he divorces after a year, having fallen in love with one of his biology students, Amy Catherine Robbins. Peter reports to Charlotte that one of his professors is engaged to be married to a student named Miss Marks (ibid., p. 70). Lewisham and Ethel’s marriage is severely shaken after Lewisham grows disenchanted with his wife’s intellect and seeks the company of Miss Heydinger. Ethel meanwhile has become the object of desire for a young aspiring writer whose enigmatic presence in the novel lends more depth to Ethel’s otherwise flighty persona. When Lewisham and Ethel confront each other, she cries out ‘I’m … as loyal as you … anyhow’ (Wells, 1994, p. 166). Charlotte and Peter’s marriage falls apart as they both take lovers. Charlotte thrives in her relationship with Godwin, Peter’s employer, while Peter finds happiness with a maid shortly before he dies of electric shock.19 This list is far from exhaustive. However, although the parallels are very strong, Love and Mr. Lewisham draws heavily from the author’s experiences as a young man, whereas Electricity’s historical and literary sources are more ambiguous and the narrative is given exclusively through Charlotte’s voice. The two novels mirror each other but the image is distorted. Indeed, while Lewisham grows tired of Ethel’s incessant reading of novelettes and his own aborted work ‘comes to an evil end’ (Wells, 1994, p. 152), Charlotte’s autobiographical notebooks have all the drama of one of these fin-de-siècle tales – adultery, spiritualist fraud, mutilation, electrical death, romance and sexuality. It is as if she becomes the author of Lewisham’s unfinished project by writing her own life. Similarities between the characters from their physical appearance to the miniscule details of their finances could go on for pages but this short version exposes how real and imaginary figures are reproduced and remade through both fact and fiction. Moreover, the reproductive technologies of the nineteenth century (the phonograph, the typewriter and so on) make this reproduction of people and their lives somehow more plausible, in which images and voices survive after the physical body has deteriorated. Although Wells attacks spiritualism and Psychical Research through his mouthpiece Lewisham, elements of the séance pervade the novel. Lewisham condemns spiritualist practices as ‘trickery’ (ibid., p. 55) and the Psychical Research books that fill Lagune’s library are dismissed as

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‘witless, meandering imitation of philosophy’ (ibid., p. 65). Mr Lagune, with his high social standing and his scientific studies, is a caricature of Psychical Researchers. Lagune ‘came to the biological lectures [at the Normal School] and worked intermittently, in order, he explained, to fight disbelief with its own weapons’ (ibid., p. 55). Lagune’s strong conviction that Psychical Research should be treated as a developing materialist science is an amalgamation of familiar spiritualistic arguments of the epoch. In particular, it recalls Oliver Lodge’s speech to the Spiritualist Association in which the professor argued that systematic experimentation with mediums would ‘ultimately gain the ear of the orthodox scientific world … and after some years may be able to dictate terms of truce with other scientific societies of no better or more scientific standing than itself’ (Lodge, 1897, p. 163).20 Lagune’s enthusiastic, quasi-scientific language also heralds the fusion of electricity and séance in Glendinning’s novel. His arguments are emblematic of the ways that spiritualists used the developing mainstream sciences to draw parallels with Psychical Research. In a debate with spiritualist sceptics, he argues that ‘You might as well refuse to study electricity because it escaped through your body. All new science is elusive. No investigator in his senses would refuse to investigate a compound because it did unexpected things’ (Wells, 1994, p. 73). In Electricity, during a similarly heated debate about spiritualism, Charlotte counters Peter’s cynicism by playing on the limits of his scientific knowledge – ‘Even you do not know enough about, oh, electrons and atoms, to be quite certain’ (Glendinning, 1996, p. 139). Returning to the figure of Lagune, Wells had opposed spiritualism and its illegitimate interaction with science in a review of Frank Podmore’s Apparitions and Thought Transference (1894). Focusing on Podmore’s theory of telepathy, Wells argued passionately that if people begun to believe in elusive phenomena such as thought-transference then they could revert to believing in witchcraft and miracles. He asserted that this ‘scientific man’ was taking advantage of his status to give a false authority to Psychical Research and other atavistic beliefs (Luckhurst, 2002, p. 120).21 A few years later, Wells invented Lagune – a character that encompassed everything that he had condemned here, disgusted by the time and money invested in the fruitless and retrogressive pursuit of spooks and spectres. Wells examines the relationship between spiritualism and science in terms of social and economic disparities. Chaffery, for example, is pertinently described by Miss Heydinger as ‘Sludge, the Medium’ (Wells, 1994, p. 63) an allusion to Browning’s fraudulent hero. Chaffery, as one


Edwardian critic puts it, is ‘alive to his villainous and most adroit finger tips. His defence of cheating is a whole rogue’s philosophy done in a couple of pages’ (Parrinder, 1972, p. 81).22 Wells uses Chaffery’s conman persona in order to explore the social politics of the fin-de-siècle class divide. The deceitful medium hypnotizes Lagune, who signs a blank cheque made out to him (Wells, 1994, p. 178). However, without ever condoning his actions, Wells demonstrates how Chaffery’s exploitation of naivety and ignorance brings him the financial freedom to pursue his dreams and make something of himself. Thus, Wells’ criticism of spiritualism has a strongly materialist, even humanitarian dimension in the sense that one’s potential can be fulfilled providing one can afford it. As Chaffery writes in a farewell letter – ‘[T]here is more than a touch of the New Woman about me, and I feel I have still to live my own life’ (ibid., p. 175). The identification of Chaffery with the New Woman is not used for comic effect here but exposes a need for financial emancipation – an emancipation that would free the likes of Chaffery from spiritualism’s wicked grasp. Wells attacks Psychical Researchers by turning their interest in scientific testing into a grotesque side effect of money and leisure time. It is they who are ‘unnatural’ or ‘strange’, not the psychical phenomena they investigate. Chaffery, for example, mocks Lagune by claiming that ‘a thing so vain, so unmeaning, so strongly beset by cackle, could only be the diseased imagining of some hysterical phantom. Do you believe that a thing such as Lagune exists?’ (ibid., p. 175). Chaffery’s vitriolic speech about the scientific examination of spiritualism exposes a network of psychological and economic exploitation: Two respectable professors of physics, not Newtons, you understand, but good, worthy, self-important professors of physics – a lady anxious to prove there’s life beyond the grave, a journalist who wants stuff to write – a person that is, who gets his living by these researches just as I do – undertook to test me. Test me! … Of course they had their other work to do, professing physics, professing religion, organizing research, and so forth. At the outside they don’t think an hour a day about it, most of them never cheated anybody in their existence, and couldn’t, for example, travel without a ticket for a three-mile journey and not get caught, to save their lives … Well – you see the odds? (ibid., pp. 118–19) Chaffery’s words are a blistering attack on what Walter Benjamin calls ‘the humid backroom of spiritualism … the goings-on in the

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conventicles of down-at-heel dowagers, retired majors and émigré profiteers’ (Benjamin, 1997, p. 228). What his speech also reveals is how spiritualism’s appeal is socially and economically stratified. Aristocratic Psychical Researchers are seeking a means of making their beliefs respectable, while working-class mediums are simply seeking a means of survival. In spite of this fierce criticism, Wells nevertheless employs romantic and spiritualist imagery at various stages in the novel – particularly in his depiction of Ethel. She is portrayed, for example, as a kind of siren; her youthful beauty and the desire she inspires in Lewisham prevent him from achieving his ‘Career’. This is encapsulated in the final symbolic act where Lewisham tears up his ‘Schema’ (a document listing his grand aspirations) and throws the fragments in a waste-paper basket that Ethel has bought for him (Wells, 1994, p. 189). During an intense argument, Lewisham articulates what has been heavily insinuated all along – ‘In one year … all my hopes, all my ambitions have gone’ (ibid., p. 166). He feels deceived and betrayed by Ethel but is inextricably bound to her. Throughout their courtship and engagement, Ethel is an idealized figure – as if she has been ‘retouched’ like one of Isabel’s photographs. This is expressed in a montage of images that Lewisham retrieves from memory – ‘Ethel, sunlit in the avenue, Ethel, white in the moonlight before they parted … Ethel new wedded … And at last Ethel angry, dishevelled and tear-strained in that ill-lit, untidy little room’ (ibid., p. 157). This series of ‘photographs’ are juxtaposed against the harsh realities of the final image; the retouching process is undone. Indeed, as Peter Kemp argues, Ethel is ‘associated with dishonesty and subterfuge’ (Kemp, 1982, p. 93). from the very beginning of the novel. The first meeting between Lewisham and Ethel (and their reunion three years later) demonstrates this clearly – saturated with fateful undertones. When Lewisham first sees Ethel she is immersed in her writing. Watching from a short distance, he whispers to himself, ‘It’s her’ (Wells, 1994, p. 9) as if her image awakens a sense of recognition in the young man. Ethel, who is initially unaware of Lewisham, is portrayed as otherworldly, as a figure from a painting or a novel. Consider the description of their subsequent encounter through a spiritualist lens: He was near trembling with excitement. His paces, acts which are usually automatic, became uncertain and difficult. One might have thought he had never passed a human being before … Then their eyes met … She looked demurely into his face. She seemed to find


nothing there. She glanced away from him among the trees, and passed, and nothing remained in front of him but an empty avenue, a sunlit, green-shot void. (ibid., p. 9) This episode is tinted with the characteristics and atmosphere of the séance. Both Lewisham and Ethel take on spectral qualities – Lewisham ‘trembling’ like an entranced medium or a newly materialized spirit (as if ‘he had never passed a human being before’) and Ethel vanishing into thin air like an elegant lady ghost. Moreover, the piece of paper on which she has been scribbling, salvaged by Lewisham after it is carried away by a breeze, is inscribed with text that resembles the nonsensical statements and proclamations of automatic writing. The repeated line ‘Come! Sharp’s the word’ that Ethel has been copying in ‘a boyish hand uncommonly like Frobisher ii’s’ (ibid., p. 10) turns the heroine into a kind of medium or mimic. Literally, she is copying out the punishment set for a young pupil by Lewisham. Metaphorically, we might understand this incessant, ‘automatic’ repetition in mediumistic terms, a repressed undercurrent bubbling up to the surface of the novel. The obliquely spiritualist ambience is complete when Ethel re-enacts the departure of spirits, or Orpheus reaching the gates of the underworld – ‘She walked fast, then slowly, looking sideways once or twice but not back, until she reached the park gates. Then she looked towards him, a remote, friendly figure, made a gesture of farewell, and disappeared’ (ibid., pp. 13–14). When the two meet again they are described as being ‘in a highly electrical state’ (ibid., p. 30). This metaphor is of course essential to Electricity but in relation to the novel’s original context, it frames the romantic feelings of Lewisham and Ethel in thoroughly new, modern terms. After Ethel returns to London she writes a love letter to Lewisham, ‘typewritten on thin paper’ (ibid., p. 39), a gesture which also turns an older romantic trope into a very modern experience (just as typewritten messages transformed the séance). The typed letter may appear to be a rather formal communiqué but its content still stirs Lewisham’s emotions. He feels Ethel’s ‘presence’ in the room – ‘That “dear” was just as if she had spoken – a voice suddenly heard’ (ibid., p. 41). The couple’s relationship is given a more explicit spiritualist edge when they are reunited after three years during a test séance at Lagune’s house. Although this chapter, entitled ‘Manifestations’, exposes spiritualism as a sham and plays on the social divide between workingclass mediums and wealthy researchers, there is something else being

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‘manifested’ here, something that has lain dormant for a long while – Lewisham’s love for Ethel. The servant ‘raps’ to let Lewisham into the séance room, with its ‘air of mellow dignity’, ‘the green-shaded electric light’, the furniture ‘akin to that in the South Kensington Museum’, and the ‘social superiority of the chairs’ (ibid., p. 57). He sees her across the room momentarily and the gas is lowered. Although the novel is set in the 1890s, the spirit manifestations are anachronistically portrayed. The scent of violets, the spirit limbs which caress the hair and cheeks of the sitters and the invisible hand playing the tambourine are all phenomena of decades past. By relying on these motifs, Wells may well have found it easier to ridicule and discredit spiritualism – targeting crude, corporeal manifestations as opposed to the complex psychological mechanisms more typical of fin-de-siècle séances. ‘Material’ phenomena were easier to imitate and therefore easier to expose – backed up by the ‘pure’ forms of science advocated by Lewisham and his friends. Psychical or psychological phenomena, on the other hand, were more taxing. This is demonstrated by Lewisham’s reflections on the subject of thought-transference. The security provided by an encyclopaedia is momentarily breached when it occurs to him that thought-transference is ‘one of the most possible things in the world. He blushed, rose clumsily and took the volume … back to its shelf’ (ibid., p. 103). Returning to the séance scene, Lewisham’s glimpse of Ethel before the gas is lowered turns her into more of an enigma. He ‘sat in the breathing darkness, staring at the dim elusive shape that had presented that remembered face’ (ibid., p. 58). Somewhat surprisingly then, Wells uses the conventions of the materialization séances of the 1870s to explicate their strange bond. The ‘remembered face’ and the ‘elusive shape’ begin to take form in Lewisham’s memory and stir up buried emotions. This phantasmal encounter results in Lewisham temporarily forgetting his ‘detective responsibility’ (ibid., p. 56). It is perhaps the only moment in the novel in which Wells slackens his rigorous, hardline approach to objective scientific inquiry. The spiritualist ambience which he initially mocks takes on a different quality. The darkness, the close touching of hands and the sense of nervous expectation are enough to deceive even the most vigilant observer – ‘He became aware of a peculiar sensation down his back, that he tried to account for as a draught’ (ibid., p. 59). The séance becomes a frightening but sensual game in which Lewisham is caught up in spite of himself. A luminous object is ‘ghostly … unaccountable … marvellous’ (ibid., p. 61). Soon afterwards, however, the séance is dismantled and becomes a cheap


theatrical performance – ‘The tambourine fell noisily to the floor’ and ‘the medium’s face changed’ (ibid., p. 62) when another sceptic catches hold of the luminous phantom hand. Lewisham comes to his senses and cries ‘Caught!’ He expects Ethel to be impressed by his actions but soon realizes she is also involved in the fraud when he spots her putting away the pneumatic glove. On the one hand, this moment of exposure vindicates Lewisham’s beliefs. On the other, it destroys the image of the ethereal and angelic Ethel. Moreover, the exposure compromises Ethel’s position as a ‘respectable’ typist, and she is propelled into taking an active part in telepathic experiments with Lagune. In a chain reaction, Lewisham’s conviction that science is essentially progressive and spiritualism is degrading and exploitative leads him to take action and he marries Ethel. She is therefore objectified once again – ‘Your mind is your own … I won’t have it! At least you are mine to that extent’ (ibid., p. 98). Lewisham’s chivalry is rather paradoxical here as Ethel is transported from being the possession of her employer to being the possession of her husband. Ethel, both as an independent woman and as a possession, further demonstrates the problematic position of so many women at the turn of the century. A woman can either ‘belong’ or she can be educated, independent and alone like Miss Heydinger, whose love for Lewisham is thwarted. The despairing question Heydinger asks herself – ‘Why was I made with heart and brain?’ (ibid., p. 82) – elucidates the position of the New Woman as it was imagined in the wider culture. She was a creature energized by a period of great change but caught between her emotions and her intellect. While Love and Mr. Lewisham ends with a heartbroken Miss Heydinger and a pregnant Ethel in a temporarily restored marriage, Electricity opts to explore the full range of female experience in the fin de siècle through the persona of Charlotte Mortimer. Glendinning refuses to provide a definitive end for her heroine, who is animated by both her heart and her brain. Indeed, the novel closes with Charlotte debating the choices she has in front of her and leaving them open – ‘I could become educated and trained like Hertha Marks [the female student at the South Kensington Institute] … I could do drawings and diagrams for technical textbooks and manuals … But then, I should like to marry again. I might marry some handsome, clever young parson … Or I could marry Thaddeus Thompson’ (Glendinning, 1996, p. 249). In contrast to Wells, Electricity records the life of its heroine in three notebooks – as if the novel was a condensed version of the Victorian ‘triple-decker’ (Showalter, 1982, p. 180). The three-volume formula of

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conflict with male authority, followed by guilt and then redemption is loosely mimicked by Glendinning. In the first notebook, Charlotte falls in love and marries ‘as a bid for freedom’ (Glendinning, 1996, p. 49) from her suffocating domestic environment and her father’s sexual advances. The second notebook describes Charlotte’s life with Peter, her affair with Godwin and ends with Charlotte grief-stricken and alone. The third and final notebook finds Charlotte training and working as a medium before she is exposed in a failed séance and loses her professional credentials. Redemption comes, but not in the way we would expect from a triple-decker. As Charlotte is married at the beginning of the narrative, there is no conventional happy ending here. Indeed, by the end of the third ‘volume’, she is widowed and facing an uncertain future. It is this sense of possibility, however, a multitude of different options in both the public and private spheres, that ‘charges’ the novel’s final moments. Charlotte’s notebooks, with their ‘stiff covers’ and ‘peacock feather’ pattern, used to belong to Godwin’s late mother (ibid., p. 110). They can therefore be conceived of as a kind of phantasmal matter. It is as if the dead mother has left them blank for Charlotte to ‘materialize’ her thoughts and experiences in a great cathartic outpouring – ‘I came upon the peacock-patterned books in the dresser drawer and immediately began writing. It has been an emptying out. I remember less and less, if I now lost these books I should be able to recall scarcely a quarter of what I have written’ (ibid., p. 249). There is a deep urgency behind Charlotte’s writing; she must record her life lest her memories disappear – evoking the spirit’s need to communicate with the living for fear that it will be forgotten. This process also clearly resembles the automatic scripts of writing mediums. Indeed, a central motif in the twentieth-century novels that I have discussed so far is the necessity of writing as a directly or indirectly mediumistic process. The recording of words, moods, ideas and stories allows the medium to become an author rather than an apparatus. Whereas in Roberts the three heroines are writing their lives through death, the notebooks in Electricity are very much of this world. By writing, Charlotte is able to invent (or ‘author’) herself. She does so, however, by absorbing (and/or mimicking) the powers and discourses of others. Her mediumship and Peter’s electrical science provide her with the vocabulary which allows her to realize a life in words – ‘I do have a drive of my own. There is a me who has a plan when I do not. Mr Moss calls it the secondary self. I should call it rather the primary self. It plugs in to the certainties of others, takes something from each one’s power


source, and goes on its way’ (ibid., p. 248). By merging the language of Psychical Research and electrical science, Charlotte personalizes these prestigious public discourses – ‘mixing’ metaphors to the point that the boundaries between them become indistinct. Moreover, the ‘peacock pattern’, a popular fin-de-siècle decorative motif, is charged here with meaningful undertones regarding women’s position within Victorian culture and their resistance to being muted by cultural convention. Significantly, the peacock is a flightless bird, ‘grounded’ by its evolutionary trajectory. Its multicoloured feathers have meant that it has long stood for beauty, exoticism and luxury. However, the peacock’s unmusical ‘voice’ alters its image, as if it cannot be both beautiful and expressive. Charlotte’s notebooks break this pattern: I wish I had a language of my own. An outside language. Mostly women do not. Women have the languages of the bed, the kitchen and nursery. These are indoor, inside languages. Aunt Susannah, for all her fluency, was monoglot. Miss Paulina has, or had, the language of Women’s Rights, which has a narrow lexicon, but perhaps I should have studied it as a first step. Women are grounded birds. We have wings, but do not learn any of the languages necessary for flight. (ibid., p. 218) The dichotomy between interior, domestic language and the exterior, narrow vocabulary of the women’s movement is a problem for Charlotte, who refuses to conform to either of these monoglot models of fin-de-siècle womanhood. This refusal is manifested earlier in the novel through the wedding gifts that Miss Paulina and her sister present to Charlotte – a pen holder with nibs from the former and Mrs Beeton’s Household Management from the latter (ibid., p. 65). As symbols of conventional and unconventional womanhood, the pen and the book represent a stark, uncomfortable choice for Charlotte. She uses ‘that very same pen-holder now, to write this’ (ibid., p. 66) whereas Household Management has been boxed up. Nevertheless, as the ambiguous ending indicates, Mrs Beeton may be needed in the future. We can therefore argue that Charlotte’s ‘authorial mediumship’ occupies and remakes the depiction of Isabel/Ethel by Wells/Lewisham. By ‘plugging into the certainties of others’, she transforms these certainties into metaphors through which she carves out her own thoughts and experiences on her own terms. As Charlotte explains to her mother, metaphors are used ‘either because you cannot find any other way to express what you mean, or in order to make a poetic or colourful effect’

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(ibid., p. 15). In a sense, this assertion validates Charlotte’s strategy of living through the metaphors she acquires – especially if we read it in conjunction with her desire to invent a new language, to break out of the ‘narrow lexicon’ of fin-de-siècle female existence. Indeed, even Charlotte’s relationship with Peter is understood in terms of metaphoricity – ‘But it was not just Peter Fisher, this stringy, wordy, ardent young man that I wanted. I wanted something else that could be reached through and beyond him. He was my metaphor’ (ibid., p. 27). This theme is expanded further through the question of electricity itself. While Peter’s scientific training enables him to understand the workings of electricity in great detail, Charlotte’s ‘literary’ education (ibid., p. 23) allows her to view it as a system of metaphors. The way in which their discussions of electrical matters take on an intimate and erotic quality demonstrates this very clearly. Peter’s explanation that ‘Electricity … is a medium of communication between two objects’, for example, elicits a coy response – ‘Or two people?’ (ibid., p. 16). Electrical vocabulary is rife with sensuous or sexual ‘currents’, recalling Ethel and Lewisham’s ‘electrical state’. Unbeknownst to Peter, charges and attractions become metaphors for the articulation of sexual desire – ‘The body which has been rubbed is called “the excited body”, and when the body is sufficiently excited and touched – even your hand – there is a crackle, and a spark passes through both bodies. That’s the electric spark’ (ibid., p. 28). Charlotte is well aware of the ‘facts of life’ and starts to blush, reversing the equation of the sexually aware, dominant young man and the inexperienced, naïve girl. An embarrassed Peter realizes the implications of his speech and quickly tries to restore a sense of propriety – ‘I don’t mean bodies in the sense that you think. It’s the word the books use’ (ibid.). Charlotte admits to herself that her sexual self-knowledge is ‘indelicate, perhaps indecent … I have never read about it in any book, nor in any ladies’ magazine’ (ibid., p. 56). Through electricity, however, she finds a language that can express this ‘indecency’, a way of coming to terms with her sexual awakening that she would never find between the pages of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.23 Alongside the use of electrical metaphors, Charlotte’s sexuality is also embellished with the language of botany (and later geology) through her liaisons with Godwin. Linking us back to Byatt for a moment, she describes her desire for Godwin as ‘like one of those foreign flowers in the greenhouses at Morrow which open up their gross carnivorous lips the moment they are touched’ (Glendinning, 1996, p. 123). Comparing herself to an exotic flower is not only a way of ‘narrating’ her sexuality but also marks her as a kind of foreign entity, outside the conventions of


fin-de-siècle womanhood through her involvement with her husband’s employer, attempting to understand herself by projecting her desires and her body into a botanical discourse. Godwin therefore functions in a similar way to Peter in providing Charlotte with a different kind of language from which to borrow and construct her metaphors. For my purposes here, however, the most important point is how these various metaphorical systems (electrical, botanical, geological and so on) feed into the experience of mediumship and spiritualism. Godwin defines the medium as ‘the magnetic link between the sitters and the spirit world. She is a medium of communication’ (ibid., p. 137). This metaphor is not only significant because it resonates with Peter’s earlier explanation of electricity but also because it begins to demonstrate how different vocabularies (especially electrical discourse) entered and enriched the séance room. Indeed, the circle in Charlotte’s first séance is depicted as an electrical circuit – ‘male and female should sit alternately, and negative-passives should alternate with positive-actives’ (ibid., p. 153). The arrangement of binary opposites (which represent both scientific and socio-cultural conventions) is a crucial factor in successfully communing with the spirits. When the circuit is complete and the ‘current’ is flowing, Charlotte starts to feel a ‘strange sensation’ in her head, ‘as if there were a feather tickling my forehead from within’ (ibid., p. 155). She attends the séance as a sitter but quickly discovers her capacity for mediumship after identifying that a spirit baby is trying to communicate. While Charlotte’s recent miscarriage may well determine her desire to speak to the unborn child, she also articulates the experience of the other female sitters – ‘There was a slow sigh from all around the table, and from someone a sob’ (ibid., p. 156). These signs of identification show how Charlotte’s maternal yearning and loss enable her to become a ‘Wirewoman’, connecting the inner lives of the other women to her own. Electricity, however, modulates into geology, not only representing her mental state but also her transition from Peter’s high-voltage sphere of influence – ‘The tickling sensation behind my forehead spread until my whole head was an empty geode being caressed from inside by feathers … I removed my right hand from the table and placed it on the amethyst in my bag’ (ibid.). The image of the amethyst, given to her by Godwin and traditionally associated with honesty, and Charlotte’s description of her head as a ‘geode’ are neither electrical nor explicitly otherworldly. Moreover, the crystalline cavity in which spirits and desires are given shape goes against Peter’s understanding of the unconscious mind as a ‘cesspit’, as

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a repository of ‘chaos’ and ‘filth’ (ibid., p. 139). Instead, it is depicted here as something natural, timeless, beautiful and precious. However, although the séance has a profound effect on Charlotte, she does not fail to observe the politics of spiritualism and questions the medium’s powers of communication – ‘I saw that the only gap in the circle was between the little fingers of Mrs. Carney [the housekeeper] and Lady Cynthia. Perhaps it was a question of social class?’ (ibid., p. 154). This not only recalls Lewisham’s understanding of spiritualism as a social malaise in Wells but also connects back with Peter’s stance on the matter. According to Peter, ‘table-tilting and automatic writing and all that is a game for dissipated toffs’ (ibid., p. 139) and a false comfort for the poor and the vulnerable, who ‘are deceived by vulgar commercialism and fraud, just as they are by canting clergy’ (ibid.). He warns Charlotte that if communication with the dead was a provable reality ‘it would be a scientific revolution as important as Copernicus or Darwin’ (ibid., p. 138). After Peter’s death, Charlotte is left without a stable income and decides to become a medium in spite of her husband’s past reservations. His influence, however, is still felt: I had almost no experience of the world. Whatever I did to earn my living must be done behind closed doors, alone, or rather alone with a client, but in such a way that I could remain in control. I was not proud of my decision then, and still less am I proud of it now. There was no alternative, other than an even more shameful one. It seemed inevitable, too, in order to preserve my connection with Peter. He had manipulated an invisible force for profit, and I intended to harness a rival force for the same purposes. (ibid., p. 191) This excerpt articulates a plethora of issues surrounding both mediumship and the position of women in fin-de-siècle society. Charlotte’s decision is retrogressive in the sense that mediumship represents unscrupulous profiteering but progressive in the sense that it saves her from prostitution (the ‘even more shameful option’) and maintains a ‘connection’ with her deceased husband. This desire for communication with Peter is not realized through the séance itself but through a metaphorical circuit, a shared or overlapping language that links electricity to spiritualism. Moreover, the enigmatic nature of Charlotte’s profession, which can only be performed behind closed doors, plays with the notion of ‘intimacy’ between two minds.


Interestingly, Charlotte’s training as a medium conforms to templates familiar from psychoanalysis – ‘For the initiation, I lay on her sofa, with my feet up, covered by a rug. She [Mrs Bagshut] turned the gas down low, so that we were in the deepest twilight, and she herself sat where I could not see her’ (ibid., p. 198). However, unlike psychoanalysis (and indeed Psychical Research), Mrs Bagshut ‘does not like the word “unconscious”’ (ibid., p. 199) and refuses to define spiritualist communication in any specific vocabulary. What Charlotte learns from these sittings is how to lay herself ‘open’, how to be ‘receptive to what comes from other’s minds’ (ibid., p. 200). Nevertheless, the similarities with psychoanalysis continue when Charlotte realizes that ‘what the women really wanted was not to listen but to talk. They did not want messages – or was it that I, the stranger, opened to their secrets and closed off from their ordinary lives, was message enough?’ (ibid., p. 211) The fact that Charlotte’s amethyst is used as a point of focus during her séances further distances her mediumship from the occult and moves it closer to the psychological or psychoanalytic. A series of articles published in Borderland on crystal gazing demonstrate an important shift away from an externalized ‘other’ world to the internal stratification of the self. The crystal was perceived as a powerful mental stimulus, helping to release images and sensations that the gazer had not ‘consciously’ created. Crystal gazing was explicitly not a form of thought-transference; the crystal provided no ‘portal’ into the mind of others or some mysterious occult realm. Rather, it was believed to be an exercise in liberating introspection, connecting the conscious mind to its deeper structures. Myers, for example, saw crystal gazing ‘as a form of automatism, a means by which the sub-conscious self may send messages to the conscious self’ (Goodrich-Freer, 1893, pp. 117–21).24 Keeping this under consideration, Charlotte’s séances are far more like therapy sessions than anything else: I listened, in those dark autumn afternoons, to rich women with veiled faces, to poor women with darned cotton gloves … So many whispered stories, nightmares, terrors, so many tales of what happened twenty years ago and of what happened last week, tales of hardship, sacrifice, desire, incomprehension, disappointment, sickness, sorrow, betrayal, and, against all the odds, a defiant sort of hope. It was hope, not despair, that brought them out of their houses. Despair crouches behind closed doors. (Glendinning, 1996, p. 211)

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These stories are both other to Charlotte and her own; they represent a collective psychical network of women’s thoughts and experiences, the underbelly of Charlotte’s life story. However, unlike psychoanalysis or Psychical Research, these stories are not recorded or turned into ‘case studies’ – ‘I think it would be wicked to commit to paper the confidences given to me in my professional capacity’ (ibid., p. 209). Charlotte’s refusal to write down her client’s secrets, at the same time as she writes her own, creates this curious absent/present relationship. These stories are an essential part of her narrative, but they remain hidden from us, ‘there but not there’. This kind of mediumship does not therefore rely on theatrical flourishes and spectacular materializations but on Charlotte’s ‘sensitivity’ to the needs of her clients, on her ability to receive and interpret their desires. The communication with the dead that takes place is not a supernatural event but an imaginative process, moving through different levels of consciousness. This is demonstrated by her own ‘contact’ with lost loved ones – ‘My mental dialogues with Peter and with Godwin – and, to a lesser extent, with Miss Paulina and with Aunt Susannah – continued unendingly. I talked and argued and pleaded with them in my dreams, and in my head’ (ibid., p. 205). It is these imagined, spiritualistic dialogues that allow Charlotte to fine-tune her authorial voice. There is, however, another way of reading Charlotte’s mediumship. In a sense, her powers of observation and her ability to ‘see through’ her clients transforms her into a kind of X-ray machine. Just as the X-ray penetrates the surface of matter and ‘photographs’ what lies beneath, Charlotte pierces the appearance of her clients and sees their innermost being. Just as the ‘sensitive’ was able to perceive Odylic force, as I have previously discussed, her clients become ‘transparent’ to her: [A]cute, rapid observation: cut and colour and material of the sitter’s clothes, her hair, her hands, her rings, her complexion, her figure, her shoes, her gloves, the trimming of her hat, the inflexion and accent of her voice, her mood, her temperament … When a lady had been with me for just five minutes, I could have told an enquirer more about her than I would have guessed after five hours in her company, before. (ibid., p. 211) This process is not without its price though. Charlotte’s mediumship is an exhausting experience; she must absorb the shocks and power surges


that it brings – ‘Aunt Susannah short-circuited me. The contact was broken. The current did not flow. Energy drained from me daily, I could feel it ebbing’ (ibid., p. 244). Again, Charlotte uses electrical and spiritual metaphors in tandem in order to describe the inner workings of her psyche, creating her own original language in doing so but a language derived from both the living and the dead who surround her. Significantly, when electricity literally enters the séance, the impact is quite different from the power of her creative metaphors. Lured by the promise of greater wealth, Charlotte attempts to make her séances more spectacular by running a current between her and the sitter. ‘The effect was electrifying … For once, imagery is precise’ (ibid., p. 228). This marks the beginning of the end of Charlotte’s career. In a way, electricity releases her from the desires of the spirits and her clients, jolting her into life like one of Frankenstein’s experiments. Spiritualism in the age of technological progress is not, however, presented as a pure sham as it is in Wells. Instead, it is a means of mapping and realizing the inner self, of reconciling deep-seated desires with the social and cultural conventions of the fin de siècle. The connections between spiritualism and electricity do not ‘belong’ to Glendinning but, rather, their historical actuality is made tangible again, wired up for the eyes of a new century. For Charlotte then, having learnt how to read the minds of others, she now turns all her attention on herself. She does what Isabel or Ethel could not and fills the pages of the notebooks – ‘I wrote nothing then. It was not the right time. But if not now, when? It is my own story after all’ (ibid., p. 3; my italics).

6 Queering the Séance: Sarah Waters’ Affinity

Pa used to say that any piece of history might be made into a tale: it was only a question of deciding where the tale began, and where it ended. That, he said, was all his skill. And perhaps, after all, the histories he dealt with were rather easy to sift like that, to divide up and classify – the great lives, the great works, each one of them neat and gleaming and complete, like metal letters in a box of type. (Waters, 2000, p. 7) With these words, Margaret Prior, the protagonist of Sarah Waters’ second novel Affinity (1999), starts her tale of love, imprisonment, spiritualism and deceit. Besides pointing to her indecision over where exactly to begin her story, Margaret’s thoughts articulate a wider problem in history writing, in the transition from event to narrative. Indeed, she expresses an anxiety about the exclusivity and classification of public histories which has been prevalent in each of the recent or contemporary novels that I have analysed as part of this book. In Affinity, Waters amalgamates a range of nineteenth-century literary conventions and aspects of Victorian spiritualism to construct a history of female sexuality and lesbianism; she creates a fictive (and potentially subversive) space in which stories that have been previously suppressed or untold can find a home. Waters uses the sensation genre, prison narratives and spiritualist memoirs to create a kind of counter-history, the antithesis of the ‘great lives’ and ‘great works’ of men.1 The novel is built around the lives of middle-class spinsters and fraudulent mediums, figures that have been continuously excluded from the narration of the past. 172

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Affinity follows Waters’ first Victorian-set novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), which takes place in fin-de-siècle music halls and the world of male impersonation, and precedes Fingersmith (2002), a lesbian sensation novel based on Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Through this Victorian trilogy, Waters actively transforms the figure of the nineteenth-century lesbian – from an ambivalent, secretive, dangerous existence in the literature and culture of the era to centre-stage, to fullblown hypostasis. Thus, Affinity does not simply replicate the themes of In the Red Kitchen or Angels and Insects by resuscitating marginal historical figures or providing new perspectives on familiar ones. Waters frees the lesbian from the medical texts of Havelock Ellis, where lesbianism is ‘diagnosed’ as a form of pathologized sexuality,2 and situates her at the heart of popular culture. When we begin to scrutinize the status of lesbianism in Waters’ novels in more detail, one of the most significant critical issues at stake here – for both the terms of this chapter and for the question of ‘queer Victoriana’ per se – therefore begins to emerge. With specific reference to Affinity, Waters explains that she had to invent the figure of the lesbian rather than borrow from historical discourses – ‘It was … a question of doing something more or less in the same period as Tipping, but very different in that while the first novel deliberately had a wide range of models for lesbian communities, I wrote Affinity with characters who for the most part didn’t have any lesbian models at all’ (Hogan, 2004). As a result of this, we might surmise that this insertion of lesbian sexuality into the Victorian epoch is largely anachronistic on the part of Waters.3 However, in this chapter I will demonstrate that Waters’ ‘invention’ is far from anachronistic and is actually rooted in pre-existing elements of sensation fiction and spiritualism, two Victorian discourses in which transgressive and unconventional women were able to thrive, where sexual and social propriety were continuously overturned.4 In addition to this, I will use the process of the materialization séance as a metaphor for Affinity’s conception and realization. Just as the spirits drew vital energy and matter from the entranced medium secured in the cabinet, the novel draws on Victorian texts in a similar way – especially from Susan Willis Fletcher’s Twelve Months in an English Prison. Published in 1884, this largely forgotten work, locked away in cabinets like the mediums the narrative depicts, provides the ‘life-force’ that Waters channels for Affinity.5 If we are to read Affinity in terms of the materialized spirit – as partly fictional and partly real, as simultaneously domestic and phantasmal – we can therefore begin to see how the novel both borrows and inherits from Fletcher’s account of her conviction

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as a fraudulent medium and, to a lesser extent, Marryat’s accounts of séances with Mary Rosina Showers and the mediumship of Catherine Wood and Annie Fairlamb. Waters, in this sense, becomes a medium herself – the bridge between the new imaginative space of Affinity and the Victorian past. Indeed, as the title of the novel suggests, Affinity is not only concerned with the close relationship between women and spirits but also with the intimate, sometimes hidden ties that connect different forms of texts and narratives, the links between Victorian and contemporary preoccupations about the recording of history and the articulation of female desire. As Henry Skekleton, a critic of materialization séances, argued, ‘Even if these phenomena were proved genuine … I preferred to consider them due to some little-known natural laws, some abnormal concentration of force which was able to objectivate and materialize the thought forms evolved from our own conscious or subconscious intellects’ (Skekleton, 1894, p. 30). It is my intention here to explore Affinity in terms of this complex and mysterious relationship between spirit and matter. Having previously argued that the materialized spirit was the medium posing as a visitant from the other world, Skekleton asserts that these forms could in fact be embodied manifestations of our own minds. He thus proposes that the power of the imagination and our conscious and subconscious desires can bring these figures into the séance room. On another level, we can read these spirit materializations as a narrative process in which Waters and the other authors under analysis in this study are engaged.

In the spirit cabinet: Affinity’s Victorian predecessors After the usual lapse of time occupied as we were told by entrancement, ‘Florence’ appeared holding aside the curtain. She was robed from head to foot in white; her head-dress was, as before net or tulle; her bodice, sleeves and shirt were of soft material, described by the ladies as resembling merino, by ‘Florence’ as being cashmere. She wore white pearl buttons in place, she said of gold, which she was unable to procure. (Podmore, 1902, II, p. 101)6 She was always attired in white drapery, but it varied in quality. Sometimes it looked like long cloth; at others like mull muslin or jaconet; oftenest it was a species of thick cotton net. (Marryat, 1892, p. 143)


‘This is the way we make ladies dresses.’ As he did so a small quantity of muslin appeared in his hands, which he kept on moving in the same manner, whilst the flimsy fabric increased and increased before our eyes, until it rose in billows of muslin above ‘Joey’s’ head and fell over his body to his feet, and enveloped him until he was completely hidden from view. (ibid., p. 119) These excerpts, which describe the ethereal clothes of the spirits that appeared during materialization séances, can be classed as typical representations of Victorian ghostliness. The white veils resemble the outfits worn by amateur actresses in domestic theatricals. Indeed, as a minor character in Affinity comments, ‘most of the ghosts performing tricks at séances are actors, dressed in muslin’ (Waters, 2000, p. 100), pointing to the direct, conscious application of theatrical elements during the séance. The muslin, however, is not simply a whimsical façade but transforms the medium into a spirit on a somatic and psychical level. Marryat, for example, informed her readers that Katie King ‘used to say that nothing material about her could be made to last without taking away some of the medium’s [Florence Cook] vitality, and weakening her in consequence’ (Marryat, 1892, pp. 143–4). Recalling my earlier work on Cook, King and spirit photography, we can argue that the spirit costumes become more than theatrical props; they simultaneously blur and intensify the dividing lines between medium and spirit, between body and soul, between life and afterlife. Using the production of the spirit fabric as a metaphor for Affinity will demonstrate how the twentieth-century novel is drawing ‘vital energy’ from its nineteenth-century predecessors. As I have already begun to explain, a variety of interlacing spirit text(iles) have been used by the author to ‘fabricate’ Affinity.7 I will therefore examine the historical texts which Waters stitches together in her tale, the texts which she integrates into her own vision to produce a kind of ‘phantasmal matter’. Just as the medium was transmogrified by draping her head and body with white muslin in the cabinet, Waters transforms her sources into a lesbian counter-history. In doing so, Waters substantiates the models of lesbian identity that she ‘invents’ – the muslin veil becomes the spirit. The histories of the Victorian séance that I analyse here haunt Waters’ novel and, in turn, the novel haunts them. The ‘affinity’ between them is a two-way process, a correspondence across historical time and space, an interweaving and rewriting of the same story.

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If we are to return to the issue of imitation or ‘performance’ during the séance, which prompted many sceptics to question the spirit’s independence from the medium, the relationship between Affinity and texts such as Twelve Months in an English Prison becomes both clear and uncanny. The memoir of Susan Willis Fletcher, an American medium who served a year in prison after being convicted of fraud, is so similar to Waters’ novel that we can infer that she has used Fletcher’s text as a blueprint (even though it is never credited as a source).8 Indeed, the similarity is such that if Waters did not write Affinity with any prior knowledge of Twelve Months then there are surely, as Her Majesty the Queen is alleged to have written, ‘powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge’.9 Fletcher’s ordeal begins in 1881 almost a decade after Affinity is set. During that year, the medium was charged with ‘obtaining jewels and clothing of great value by undue influence on false pretences from a lady’ (Fletcher, 1884, p. 1). The trial, highly publicized in both the spiritualist press and mainstream newspapers, revealed a web of amorous encounters between Fletcher, her husband (a medium himself) and the lady in question, a Mrs Hart-Davies. As a result, spiritualism became associated with a doctrine of free love. Three years later, Twelve Months in an English Prison was published and offered Fletcher’s perspective on the scandal and trial. Though ostensibly a factual memoir, Twelve Months resembles the popular melodramatic novels of the 1860s and 70s with its narrative of imprisonment and redemption. The account of the development of Fletcher’s mediumship also borrows heavily from the spiritualist press. By combining these different elements, it provides us with a florid but thrilling version of the trial and Fletcher’s emotional journey. Fletcher fashions herself as a tormented heroine; she is ‘doubled’ in the sense that she has authorial control over the narrative but also takes part in it as the central character. This is made evident during her description of the trial when she states, ‘I was in a kind of maze, much as if I had been sitting in a theatre, and seeing a play enacted on stage. I was a spectator of things done and endured by another’ (ibid., p. 319). In another episode, the doubling effect radiates outwards as Fletcher deploys her theatrical metaphor further to shed light on the crossexamination of Mrs Hart-Davies – ‘It will require but little imagination to reproduce the scene, and appreciate the parts played by the different actors’ (ibid., p. 203). Furthermore, laughter is occasionally heard from the ‘audience’ at the trial as if they too were watching a play. It seems that Fletcher is subconsciously compelled to inform the reader of the performative elements in her story and expose the gap between what


is written and what is experienced, to show how she mediates between different levels of reality. Fletcher is therefore an author-medium par excellence – as both a practising spiritualist and as the ‘bridge’ between public and private versions of herself. Although the memoir is embellished with theatrical or sensational elements, the morality and authenticity of the séance is never questioned. Interestingly, the sanctity of the domestic realm is not threatened by fraudulent spiritualism but by the unscrupulous and promiscuous sitter, Mrs Hart-Davies. Fletcher receives a spirit message forewarning her of her ordeal (‘Beware! The day of your trial is at hand’) on the same night that her husband gives a lecture entitled ‘Beware of the Foes of your own Household’ (ibid., p. 31). The home is a dangerous, subversive space just as it was in the sensation genre. Indeed, when the heiress moves in with the Fletchers, their relationship with her becomes increasingly entangled and morally dubious.10 Moreover, Fletcher’s innocence and suffering are depicted through the familiar tropes of angelic rather than demonic femininity. She has been forsaken by her ‘guardian spirits’, presenting herself as a kind of martyr to the spiritualist cause: We are protected from some misfortunes; others fall upon us. We are guided and guarded; but great calamities, or what seem to be such, come upon us without warning. My husband and I were both fascinated with this woman … Our guardian spirits were either as much blinded as we, or they were prevented … from giving us information. (ibid., p. 63) This ‘fascination’ with Hart-Davies is portrayed as a quasi-Christian test of faith, a ‘great calamity’ that comes ‘without warning’. Her attraction is so powerful, however, that neither Fletcher nor her husband can resist her. During Hart-Davies’ appearance in court, it is revealed that she had ‘proposed to form a triangle, or trinity, and it was to be composed of the Fletchers and [herself]’ (ibid., p. 210). This emphasis on the dangerous allure of Hart-Davies and the underlying theological/moral structures that it evokes is very much in keeping with both the sensation genre and popular theatre. If further evidence is required, we can observe that the text itself is divided up into theatrical ‘acts’ with titles such as ‘A Divorce. An Engagement. A Marriage’, ‘How She Came to Live with Us’, ‘Spirits in Prison’ and so on. Combined with commentaries on prison reform and reports of the trial in the press, the text is both coherent and multifaceted, exhibiting a unique sensitivity to the culture and gender politics of the era.11

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Focusing more specifically on the motifs of sensation fiction begins to clarify the text’s relationship with Affinity. Twelve Months overturns a classic sensation formula by casting Hart-Davies as the perpetrator rather than the victim (contrary to her claim that she was mesmerized and tricked into naming the Fletchers as the beneficiaries of her will) (Fletcher, 1884, pp. 194–6). It is Fletcher who is the victim, not the wealthy heiress. She is ‘framed’ by a woman who ‘hated and despised’ her, a woman who prevents ‘Mr. Fletcher from paying her the attention she had a right to expect from him’ (ibid., p. 101). With a melodramatic clenching of the fist, Hart-Davies declares, ‘I will have my revenge upon her!’ (ibid., p. 102). The trial does not therefore represent the righting of a wrong or the restoration of the social and moral order. It is a vengeance that cannot remain untold. In Affinity, Waters adopts and subverts the conventions of sensation fiction just as Fletcher does – not only to evoke the ambience of the period but to break open the limited conception of lesbianism in Victorian society and culture. Selina Dawes is sentenced to four years in Millbank prison for ‘fraud and assault’ (Waters, 2000, p. 27). In a direct parallel with Twelve Months, Selina’s ‘victim’ is a young heiress named Miss Sylvester (ibid., p. 98). Indeed, during Hart-Davies’ crossexamination (which is reproduced verbatim in Fletcher’s narrative) she is asked whether she believes ‘in the affinity of spirits’ (Fletcher, 1884, p. 210; my italics). Even sub-plots such as the relationship between Fletcher and a prison warden are integral to the structure of Affinity. In Twelve Months, Fletcher informs us that ‘the treatment of a prisoner depends upon the character and disposition of the warder’ (ibid., p. 329). After Fletcher delivers a spirit message from the dead husband of her warder, we are informed that, ‘In strict accordance with their instructions they [the prison staff] treated me with all the kindness their rules would allow, and with such civility as one would scarce look for in such a place’ (ibid., p. 409). In Affinity, Selina receives special treatment from her warder Mrs Jelf after she delivers spirit messages from Jelf’s dead son. Indeed, Mrs Jelf becomes the narrative axis of the entire novel – the link between Millbank prison and Margaret Prior’s residence, establishing a secret correspondence between the two locations. For now though, it is enough to say that even the most cursory comparison of the two texts would uncover a network of similarities, right down to the most insignificant details. Mrs Hart-Davies, for example, gives a necklace to Susan Fletcher with the note ‘I send you a souvenir of mamma and myself, which I beg you will wear at the dinner’ (ibid., p. 71) while Selina is


given a similar gift by her patroness Mrs Brink – an emerald necklace that once belonged to Brink’s late mother (Waters, 2000, p. 171). However, it is not my intention here to expand this comparison or to speculate on why Waters has never acknowledged Fletcher as a source. Rather, my focus is on how Waters’ novel ‘occupies’ Twelve Months (and other historical sources) in order to construct a legitimate and plausible model of Victorian lesbian identity and how this affinity between texts can be understood in terms of haunting. It is therefore important at this stage to map out the wider discourses that Affinity ventriloquizes – discourses on women and medicine, spiritualism, prison reform, class, gender as well as popular forms of fiction. Although Affinity cannot be described as a sensation novel per se, it clearly shares many of the genre’s key characteristics (dark secrets, fraud, deceit, sex, death and so on). Most importantly, the sensation novel’s preoccupation with female villainy (typically manifested through women who disguise their evil nature by embodying Victorian gender stereotypes), creates a ‘loophole’ into which lesbian sexuality can be projected.12 In her introduction to M. E. Braddon’s Trail of the Serpent, Waters argues that sensation writers negotiated the ‘oppressive social forces which might drive individuals – and women, in particular – into deceit, blackmail, bigamy, murder and madness’ (Waters, 2003, p. xv). In turn, Waters explores how ‘oppressive social forces’ drive women into ‘assumed’ heterosexual identities and how suppressed lesbian desire could express itself through what outlets were available. For E. S. Dallas, a contemporary critic of sensation fiction, the Victorian ideal of feminine domesticity and passivity was threatened by the sensation heroine: When women are … put forward to lead the action of a plot, they must be urged into a false position. To get vigorous action they are described as rushing into crime, and doing masculine deeds … If the novelist depends for his sensation upon the action of a woman, the chances are that he will attain his end by unnatural means. (Dallas, 1969, p. 297) Dallas attacked the representation of these women as ‘unnatural’ – a concept that Waters deliberately erodes by alternating between notions of the unnatural and the supernatural to the point at which they become indistinct. Somewhat perversely, Dallas linked the ‘feminine influence’ (ibid., p. 295) that these narratives displayed and exerted (from the production of sensation fiction by women to the representation of

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heroines) to the systematic blurring of consistent gender behaviour.13 Through Dallas’ concept of ‘feminine influence’ (ibid.), we can see that Waters does not simply subvert the sensation genre but counters the criticism it received. Moreover, the question of ‘feminine influence’ is tinted with sexual and spiritualistic connotations in Affinity, portrayed as a mysterious force that manipulates the central characters. During a discussion of Selina Dawes in Margaret’s house, it is noted that ‘with girls like that there is invariably an older woman or a man at the back of them’. It is probable that she ‘fell foul of some sort of influence’ (Waters, 2000, p. 99). However, Margaret responds to this by asserting that ‘the only influences … were spiritual’ (ibid.). ‘Feminine’ and ‘spiritual’ forms of influence are provocatively intertwined. Furthermore, Dallas’ anxiety about the disruption of gender norms, a process through which women perform ‘masculine [and therefore unnatural] deeds’ (Dallas, 1969, p. 297) is also a preoccupation that Waters picks up on. The ‘masculinity’ of women is embodied in aggressive behaviour, in the articulation and exchange of desire, as well as through the materialized spirit of Peter Quick (who emerges as a result of Selina’s mediumship). In her analysis of gender ambivalence in Victorian fiction, Lynda Hart argues that representations of aggressive women are interconnected with the figure of the lesbian. The lesbian ‘functions in a structural dialectic of appearance/disappearance where the aggressive woman is visible … the silent escort’ (Hart, 1994, p. x). Hart traces this relationship between aggression and lesbianism in a variety of sensation narratives. Her queer reading of M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, for example, identifies Robert Audley as rather epicene and obsessed with George Talboys, whereas the murderous Lucy Audley displays her only signs of tenderness and affection through her relationship with her maid Phoebe (ibid., p. 45). The intimate relationship between the lady and her maid can also be read as a disruption of nineteenth-century class divisions. However convinced we are by Hart’s reading, it is impossible to dispute that ‘affinity’ between two women posed a major threat to the normative social order: Homosocial bonding between women was doubly perilous. Not only would it remove women from their function as objects of exchange to facilitate heterosexuality, but it would also constitute a pairing, a doubling that would lack a third term, an intermediary figure, on which to displace the violence of mimetic rivalry. (ibid.)


Affinity incorporates such ‘doubling’ into a spiritualist environment through Selina and her lover Ruth Vigers, who also acts as the materialized spirit of Peter Quick. Thus, the transgressive pairing of Selina and Ruth means they are removed from the heterosexual ‘marketplace’ but also protected from the condemnation that their relationship would undoubtedly bring. Quick functions as a masculine ‘intermediary figure’ – a way of articulating their desires creatively and (at least on the surface) accommodating them into dominant heterosexual norms. Nineteenth-century moral criticism of sensation novels, alongside queer and feminist reappraisals of the genre, are therefore equally important sources for Waters’ fiction. Or perhaps, more accurately, she finds a way of reconciling the two. Whereas Dallas sees grotesque or ‘unnatural’ copies of men and Lynda Hart finds a displaced, absent/present lesbianism in female aggression, Waters perceives the sensation genre as a repository of strong, unconventional women and attempts to ‘tip it over’ – opening up a viable space for the realization of lesbian experience and desire (Waters, 2004). Waters pays homage to the genre by studding the narrative with affectionate references and allusions to sensation texts. Although sensation novels did not normally use explicitly supernatural elements, they often evoked supernatural motifs and narrative tropes.14 In Affinity, it is never certain (until the finale) whether supernatural or human agency is behind the strange happenings in the narrative and the novel oscillates between the possibility of authentic and simulated spirit phenomena. Waters inserts ghosts and spirits into the sites of Victorian modernity that provoked so much anxiety – the prison, the middle-class home and, most contentious of all, the mind. A clear example of this anxiety can be found in Margaret’s visit to Millbank. Though excited by the prospect of her visit to the prison, she is overtaken by the irrational fear of being mistaken for a prisoner – ‘I had begun to worry that the men might take me for a convict just arrived, and lead me to a cell, and leave me there!’ (Waters, 2000, p. 9) On another occasion, Margaret’s concerns are specifically tied to her knowledge of sensation fiction. She asks her sister-in-law Helen ‘if she remembered Mr. Le Fanu’s novel, about the heiress who is made to seem mad?’ Inspired by her reading, she is struck with the wild thought that her mother ‘is in league with Mr. Shillitoe [the prison governor]’, and means to keep her on the wards (ibid., p. 29). Margaret’s anxieties, however, also reflect the very real threat of false incarceration or psychiatric committal. Through Margaret, Waters establishes the tone of the novel and her references to works such as Uncle Silas and The Woman in White prefigure the sensational plot that will be woven against the heroine. Furthermore, the

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different documents that make up Affinity (letters, diary entries, spiritualist newspaper clippings, trial proceedings etc.) are reminiscent of the sensation genre’s formula – pasting together different points of view, formal and informal documentation, testimonies and confessions, that all served as clues in the unravelling of the central mystery. Besides the issues already discussed, sensation fiction also voiced nineteenth-century preoccupations with insanity, depression and even drug addiction. Although such matters were freely discussed in medical texts, they were only alluded to in more respectable fiction. Waters’ portrayal of drug addiction and depression is therefore inspired by elements within sensation fiction but also by medical discourses on women’s mental capacities and reproductive systems. Margaret, who has attempted to commit suicide in the past, is treated for a nervous disease with chloral and laudanum. However, Waters undermines the theories of doctors such as Henry Maudsley by exposing them as misogynistic instruments of subjugation. Margaret’s depression is diagnosed as severe anxiety triggered by her hypersensitive (and therefore feminine) disposition. Nevertheless, we are left to infer that the real source of Margaret’s nervous disease is romantic disappointment after Helen, with whom she shares an intimate bond, decides to marry her brother. Helen is unable to cast off the ideals of marriage and motherhood. Thus, rather than remaining with Margaret and becoming a spinster in the public eye, Helen finds a substitute (or as Hart puts it, an ‘intermediary figure’). She constructs a simulacrum of her relationship with Margaret in much the same way that Selina and Vigers construct a ghostly version of heterosexual coupling during the séance. Waters creates an interplay between Victorian medical discourses and the contemporary understanding of sexual identity. Margaret Prior can be perceived both as a nineteenth-century ‘case study’ and as a lesbian heroine who refuses to comply with normative or pathologized womanhood. The link between mental illness and sexuality in Victorian medicine was pervasive and many aspects of a woman’s identity were equated with the health of her reproductive organs.15 Henry Maudsley’s view of the relationship between women’s health and education, although challenged at the time, is one of the most notorious examples of this. Furthermore, Maudsley was at the height of his powers in the early 1870s when Affinity is set. His 1874 article ‘Sex in Mind and Education’ (Maudsley, 1874, pp. 466–83) was disseminated on a much wider basis than was usual for a ‘scientific’ study. Maudsley proposed that women’s mental capacities were directly related to their reproductive organs. If they were to strain their minds with educational pursuits, they would damage their child-bearing functions and ‘produce


a puny, enfeebled, and sickly race’ (ibid., p. 472) Women, according to Maudsley, are prisoners of their sex: [T]here are many women who have not the opportunity of getting married, or who do not aspire to bear children; for whether they care to be mothers or not they cannot dispense with those physiological functions of their nature that have reference to that aim, however much they might wish it, and they cannot disregard them in the labour of life without injury to their health. They cannot choose but to be women; cannot rebel successfully against the tyranny of their organization, the complete development and function whereof must take place after its kind. (ibid., p. 468) Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was a vociferous opponent of Maudsley and argued the case for women’s education. Anderson emphasized the negative outcomes of a docile female existence and asserted that the biggest threat to a young woman’s health was ‘dullness.’ The young girl just out of the schoolroom with nothing further to occupy her mind or body was prone to bouts of this ‘dullness’, a condition detrimental to both ‘her health and morals’. Anderson continues by stating that ‘there is no tonic in the pharmacopoeia to be compared with happiness, and happiness worth calling such is not known where the days drag along filled with make-believe occupations and dreary sham amusements’ (Anderson, 1874, p. 590). Indeed, this quote would make an apt epigram for Affinity; it evokes what it means to be a woman, biologically and socially, at the heart of the nineteenth century and anticipates the exchange between ‘makebelieve’ and authentic experience that is so crucial to Waters’ novel. Margaret is well aware of the ‘dullness’, the mental and physical inertia, that threatens her future – ‘I shall grow dry and pale and paper thin … like a leaf, pressed tight inside the pages of a dreary black book and then forgotten’ (Waters, 2000, p. 201). In a way, this ‘dreary black book’ represents a female future as envisaged by the likes of Maudsley. Margaret is to be squashed and interred between its covers, desires unfulfilled and freedoms never realized. Nevertheless, in spite of Margaret’s sense of foreboding, she challenges these rigid stereotypes of femininity – ‘But people, I said, do not want cleverness – not in women, at least. I said, “Women are bred to do more of the same – that is their function. It is only ladies like me that throw the system out, make it stagger”’ (ibid., p. 209). When Margaret talks of ‘ladies like me’, she not only distances herself from the dominant Victorian ideology of femininity but also from normative

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heterosexual models. Her extensive (and in that sense masculine) education and her refusal to marry and reproduce make her a problematic, transgressive figure. However, while she may attempt to make the system ‘stagger’ she must suffer for her difference – constantly plagued by illness and a prisoner not in Millbank but her own home. Indeed, the road her house is built on, ‘Cheyne Walk’, alludes to Margaret’s invisible imprisonment. As her mother’s states – ‘You wouldn’t be ill like this … if you were married’ (ibid., p. 263). It is also important to note here that medical aftercare and the healing process were marked by gender stereotypes as much as ‘diagnosis’. If doctors and physicians were predominantly male, then it was a woman’s responsibility, with her ‘sensitive’ nature, to act as a ‘carer’ (particularly with regards to children and the elderly). Dr James Mack, an American spiritualist and mesmeric healer practising in London in 1875, argued that ‘physicians, like poets, are born not made. That even in the ordinary practice of medicine, that man is the most successful who is by nature best adapted for attending upon the sick’ (Mack, 1879, p. 35). Interestingly, the orthodox view that women were better equipped to nurse (as opposed to detection, study and diagnosis) was employed by spiritualist healers to justify the rising numbers of women in the profession, to assuage doubts about the propriety of women working outside the domestic sphere. Waters therefore expands on the Victorian resistance to the oppressive medicalization of womanhood by portraying a spiritualist setting that is sympathetic to alternative models of both healing and sexuality (even if spiritualism was largely reliant on preset gender roles to facilitate such models). In Affinity, Selina and her spirit control Peter Quick (played by her lover Ruth) use the healing process as a way of exploring their sexual desires and accommodating lesbian fantasies into spiritualist practice. Chandos Leigh Hunt was perhaps the most famous female healer of the era and her guidelines on magnetic healing (one of the few examples of published work on this issue) are reanimated in the novel.16 An active healer in the 1870s, as well as a novelist, public speaker and antivivisection campaigner, Hunt used a technique known as ‘The Form’. This involved using mesmeric ‘passes’ (repetitive hand movements around the body) and ‘Insufflations’ (the act of breathing deeply upon the patient to strengthen life-force). The following description of her craft demonstrates: Commence by ten minutes breathing, ie. Warm Insufflations on the nape of the neck, gradually descending to the small of the back; then


ten minutes of Curative-passes from the top of the head to the end of the spine; then ten minutes Curative-passes over the face, commencing on the top of the head, passing over the eyes, and drawing off at the chin; then ten minutes breathing on the heart, five minutes passes from the chest down the arms, concluding by then ten minutes long Curative-passes, i.e. Curative-passes commencing on a level with the crown of the head, going straight down to the middle of the body, branching towards the hips finally drawing off at the toes. Now this ‘Form’ will occupy about an hour, but although I have laid down a time, you must use your discretion in varying it with every patient, as the case demands. (Hunt, 1885, p. 149) What is so striking about ‘The Form’ is the great intimacy between healer and patient – intimate, perhaps even ‘improper’, but not invasive or degrading. ‘The Form’ erodes the distance between healer and patient, literally and metaphorically, hinting at a relationship in which both parties are active participants. With close reference to Leigh Hunt’s techniques, Waters turns ‘The Form’ into a more explicit means of sexual or erotic contact between women. The patient, Miss Isherwood, is instructed by Peter Quick to unclothe Selina: I felt her do all this, my eyes being still shut tight, because Peter had not said that I might open them. I felt her arms come about me & her face come close to mine. Peter said ‘How do you feel now Miss Isherwood?’ & she answered ‘I am not sure, sir.’ He said ‘Tell me again, what must your prayer be?’ & she said ‘May I be used.’ He said ‘Say it then.’ She said it, & then he said she must say it faster, which she then did. Then he came & put his hand upon her neck & she gave a jog. He said ‘O, but your spirit is still not hot enough! It must grow so hot you will feel it melting, you will feel mine come & take its place!’ He put his arms about her & I felt his hands on me, now we had her hard between us & she begun to shake. He said ‘What is the medium’s prayer Miss Isherwood? What is the medium’s prayer?’ & she said it, over & over & over until her voice grew faint, & then Peter whispered to me ‘Open your eyes’. (Waters, 2000, p. 262) Through spiritualist practice and mediumship, an erotically charged scene is enacted in which the psychical and the sexual overlap. The spiritualist

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healing process may well be ‘fraudulent’ in a purely medical sense but it becomes a coded way of acknowledging and valorizing lesbian desire. Continuing this theme of ‘queering’ the séance, Waters also uses the ambiguities surrounding sex and gender in Swedenborgian philosophy. According to Swedenborg, spirits from the higher planes of existence were practically genderless. Selina expresses these ideas in a conversation with Margaret – ‘But the guides are neither, and both; and the spirits are neither, and both. It is only when they have understood that, that they are ready to be taken higher’ (ibid., p. 210). Margaret argues that this transcendent ‘synthesis’ would produce ‘a world without distinction … a world without love.’ Selina counters her asserting that the condition of being ‘neither and both’ would produce ‘a world that is made of love’ (ibid.). Spiritualism therefore provides a sensuous, fantastical, erotic topography – a real and imaginary space in which gender norms are overturned and forbidden pleasures are enjoyed. In The Darkened Room, Alex Owen describes an interaction between Florence Marryat and Katie King. Marryat is called upon to feel the naked body of the materialized spirit. Although this scene may well be read in terms of lesbian erotics by the modern reader, Owen is quick to remark that ‘the innocence of the encounter was not in question’ (Owen, 1989, p. 228). At another private séance involving Mary Rosina Showers and Marryat, the young medium shared a bed with the novelist while the materialized spirit of John Powles (a departed friend) stroked Marryat’s hair and affectionately laid his face on hers (Marryat, 1892, p. 70). Both of these encounters were perfectly ‘proper’ in the sense that their spiritualist context made them permissible within the confines of the Victorian era. Waters, however, uses spiritualism as a way of imagining a Victorian lesbianism without forcing a modern, anachronistic conception of same-sex desire into a world that could not ‘openly’ accommodate it. The histories that Waters bases her fiction on are like entranced bodies – passive, vulnerable yet substantial, open to interpretation. Diana Fuss argues that the image of the homosexual as ‘spectre and phantom, as spirit and revenant, as abject and undead’ (Hart, 1994, p. ix) has ‘haunted’ gay and lesbian critical strategies. Waters incorporates the notion of the lesbian apparition in Affinity but transforms it into a very visible, corporeal form – the bawdy Peter Quick who ‘was always kissing ladies’ (Waters, 2000, p. 152). Peter Quick, whose name recalls Henry James’ Peter Quint from The Turn of the Screw and also reveals the fact that he/she is a ‘live’ spirit (quick as opposed to dead), mimics heterosexual behaviour in order to break away from its restrictions.


Waters does not need to ‘invent’ this cross-dressing character and is in fact drawing on the ‘male’ spirits that materialized under the control of very feminine and innocent-looking young mediums such as Mary Rosina Showers, Catherine Wood and Annie Fairlamb. Catherine Wood’s life story is representative of many working-class women who developed mediumistic powers. Born in 1854 to a poor family, Wood went into service when she was fourteen. Her father, who had become interested in spiritualism, convinced her to join him at a meeting in 1872 and a year later she emerged as a fully-fledged medium and was employed by the Newcastle Society to give regular séances (Adshead, 1879, p. xi). Many lower-class women became professional mediums as an alternative to the tedium of service, although Wood’s family background is clearly an influential factor here. As for Annie Fairlamb, very little biographical information is known. Annie initially acted as a chaperone for Wood and the two later went on to conduct séances together. As Annie’s powers of materialization developed, the duo separated and their friendship came to an end (Owen, 1989, p. 57).17 Although we can only speculate as to the precise nature of their relationship and the reasons behind their falling out, we can see how parts of their stories have been fictionalized in Affinity. Consider, for example, a séance in which Wood had withdrawn to a cabinet that had been specially made for the occasion. A succession of spirit forms made themselves present – a woman, a small child and ‘a large one’ believed to be a man (Adshead, 1879, p. viii). Furthermore, many of Wood’s séances can be understood in terms of dominant and submissive sexuality. Wood was often tied to a chair, her arms and legs securely fastened with ropes. Similarly, in a series of test séances held by the Newcastle Society, the results of which were subsequently published in the 9 March 1877 edition of Medium and Daybreak, Miss Wood was not only fastened but placed inside a galvanized wire cage (ibid., p. 2). Although outsiders may have found all this rather strange, spiritualists were able to justify such practices by arguing that they were necessary for the legitimate investigation of psychical phenomena. However, while Miss Wood was happy to comply with these peculiar experiments, she could not guarantee that spirit manifestations would occur. In light of these experiments, it is not difficult to imagine how materialized spirits, when they did appear, would become playful, bawdy, violent or socially transgressive. In another of Wood’s séances, Benny, a male spirit with a dark beard and whiskers, appeared in the room and after strolling around ‘walked across the floor towards the chair on which the young lady [Wood’s friend Miss Coltman] sat and gave

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her the promised kiss’ (ibid.). Whereas the female medium is subject to the male investigators’ wishes, Benny (Wood’s alter ego), parades freely around the room and kisses the young, attractive lady without fear of causing offence or breaching decorum – the antithesis of the helpless, caged medium.18 Affinity is not therefore a ‘fictional’ account of nineteenth-century lesbian sexuality. Rather, as I have shown here, it is an exploration of where lesbian desire was able to ‘materialize’ within the various levels of Victorian culture and society. Moreover, the discourses that Affinity both borrows and subverts do not just provide us with a fresh perspective on the past. They allow us to see contemporary sexuality as the product of the nineteenth century.

Affinity’s Spectres In her study The Apparitional Lesbian, Terry Castle argues that the metaphor of spectrality has been consistently employed to portray female homosexuality in Western culture (an approach also taken by Diana Fuss, whom I cited earlier). The figure of the lesbian is always evanescent or ephemeral, lingering in the shadows, ‘a pale denizen of the night’ (Castle, 1993, p. 2). Expanding on this premise, she makes the following claims: What of the spectral metaphor and the lesbian writer? For her, one suspects, ‘seeing ghosts’ may be a matter – not so much of derealization but of rhapsodical embodiment: a ritual calling up, or apophrades, in the old mystical sense. The dead are indeed brought back to life; the absent loved one returns. For the spectral vernacular, it turns out, contains its own powerful and perverse magic. Used imaginatively – repossessed, so to speak – the very trope that evaporates can also solidify. In the strangest turn of all, perhaps, the lesbian body itself returns: and the feeble, elegiac waving off – the gesture of would be exorcism – becomes instead a new and passionate beckoning. (ibid., pp. 46–7) Affinity’s queer spiritualism is a perfect example of how ‘the spectral metaphor and the lesbian writer’ is a formula that retains its ‘powerful and perverse magic’. Moreover, the novel does not only draw from the materialization séance but also, in a wider sense, calls up a whole range of female ‘ghosts’ – the spinster, the servant, the prisoner. Beyond the question of lesbianism, Waters adopts the spectral metaphor to


explore how these ‘apparitional’ women (opaque, marginal, ambivalent) use their invisibility to exist both inside and outside Victorian convention. Consider, for example, Margaret’s realization in the reading rooms of the British Museum. She suddenly becomes aware of the number of spinsters reading there alongside her – ‘Perhaps … it is the same with spinsters as with ghosts; and one has to be of their ranks in order to see them’ (Water, 2000, p. 58). It is the first time she becomes aware of her unmarried status and she does so by identifying with these lonely, ghostly women – women who have swapped the marital bed for the library. Spectrality therefore gives way to a very tangible politics here, to very real needs and wants, encompassing women’s economic, educational and social position. With the apparitional quality of Victorian women in mind, my focus shifts to the different images of haunting that the novel employs. More specifically, I explore the ways that working-class women (as opposed to middle-class spinsters such as Margaret) are also portrayed as spectral beings. Although spectrality can be understood as a form of disempowerment and weakness, I examine how the novel uses the spectral metaphor in terms of surveillance, manipulation and the fulfilment of desire. As Castle argues, the ‘very trope that evaporates can also solidify’. I will also consider how the novel’s close references to Aurora Leigh and The Turn of the Screw can be read as moments of haunting, as ‘textual’ apparitions. Affinity stitches together the diary entries of Selina and Margaret, alongside excerpts from spiritualist books and court cases. While Mr Barclay, Margaret’s brother-in-law, argues that women are only capable of writing ‘journals of the heart’ (ibid., p. 70), expressing the deeply embedded Victorian conception of the emotional woman, the novel itself amalgamates official and intimate discourses, confessions and séance directions. In a sense, the novel is a journal of the heart, as it alternates between Selina and Margaret’s private thoughts. This narrative polyphony evokes the sensation genre but also makes it difficult for the reader to acquire a stable vantage point from which to make sense of the story and the ulterior motives of its protagonists. Although Selina never admits to spiritualist fraud, and Margaret receives mysterious spirit gifts, the authenticity of spiritualism is undermined by Selina’s notes on the tricks of the trade – ‘To keep a flower from fading. – Add a little glycerine to the water in the flower’s vase. This will keep the petals from falling or turning brown. To make an object luminous. – Purchase a quantity of luminous paint, preferably

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from a shop in a district where you are not known’ (ibid., p. 74). Alongside Selina’s demonstration of ‘dermography’, or writing on the skin with salt and a knitting needle (ibid., p. 167), Waters places the veracity of the spirit manifestations in question at the same time as she urges the reader to suspend their disbelief. It is not until the end of the novel that the riddles are solved and the supernatural is banished altogether – reverting to a pattern familiar from sensation narratives. One of the key factors in creating the novel’s uncanny, cryptic quality is the fact that the character who ‘controls’ the plot, who controls the lives of both Margaret and Selina, who mediates the reader’s perspective, is never given a voice. We only hear about Ruth Vigers indirectly – from descriptions in Selina’s journal and a few sparse references in Margaret’s. If we return to Castle’s ‘apparitional lesbian’, we can see how Waters appropriates and extends this concept. Ruth’s spectral power is at the centre of Affinity. Her polymorphous elusiveness is further enhanced by her multiple addresses, by her displaced ‘presence’ as the materialized Peter Quick and by her different names. She is called Ruth by Selina and Vigers by Margaret (for whom she works as a servant). The two sides of her name are never linked together until the dramatic finale. Indeed, even after her identity is exposed, Margaret struggles to remember the face of the woman who has exerted so much influence on her life – ‘I could not say, cannot say now, what shade her hair is, what colour her eye, how her lip curves’ (ibid., p. 340). Ruth’s status as a servant is of particular importance here and represents another reworking of a key motif in Victorian culture. She is omniscient, ubiquitous but invisible. The domestic servant operated in between the public and the private spheres. In the city, servants had a freedom to move about, anonymous and unnoticed, that was deemed inappropriate (or dangerous) for their mistresses. In the household, servants occupied either the basement or the attic, always located above or below their employers. Thus, the servant played a major role in Victorian fiction – a figure that knew family secrets and could destroy a household, a figure who could bring the private world to public attention. The servant was often a figure of low morals, whose influence could contaminate a respectable family. Most significantly, the servant was often associated with magical practices or the supernatural. As Eve M. Lynch explains: Long before a ghost could show its spectral form to the master and mistress of the household, every maidservant and butler had bumped into the visitor somewhere on the back stairwell. And like


the apparition appearing out of nowhere, the silent housemaid appeared from out of nowhere at the pull of the cord, responding to some as yet unspoken desire of the mistress or command of the master. Like the ghost, the servant was in the home but not of it, occupying a position tied to the workings of the house itself. (Lynch, 2004, p. 67) Hence, the servant entered the cultural imagination as an outsider ‘secretly looking into the hidden world of respectability’ (ibid., p. 68) a figure of mystery and power.19 Spiritualism’s many working-class mediums shared, or perhaps ‘embodied’, some of this mystique and sense of threat. Although spiritualism crossed the many levels and substrata of the class system, a particularly large number of servants went on to become powerful mediums. The case of Catherine Wood discussed earlier is just one example among many. Podmore, for instance, describes a séance in which Ellen, the servant of Rosina Showers, ‘professed to see spirits moving about the room.’ On another occasion, an ‘insensible’ Ellen performed a full materialization, in which her spirit control Peter ‘prescribed some good wine and other delicacies for the medium’s supper’ (Podmore, 1902, p. 100).20 As early as the 1860s, various articles and cartoons in Punch picked up on the ‘spectrality’ of servants and satirized the relationship between domestic staff and spiritualism. In an article entitled ‘A Faithful Spirit That Can Make Himself Generally Useful’, the author imagines a ‘Spirit-of-AllWork’ who combines the ‘respective offices of maid, cook, valet, commissionaire, boots, and secretary’. The article informs us that the miraculous ‘Spirit-of-All-Work’ is an ideal servant because it does not ‘slam doors, or tramp heavily up and down the stairs, or chat over the area-railings with the housemaids of next door’ (Anon., 1861, p. 64). Through Punch’s fiercely middle-class ideology, servants are doubly dehumanized (robbed even of their spectral powers) and the spirit world is ‘automated’. Similarly, an engraving in the same magazine depicts a group of upper-class men and women being served at a dinner table by phantasmal servants. Suspended above them is a selection of musical instruments being played by invisible players. It is simply titled ‘Spiritualism Made Useful’ (Anon., 1876b, p. 216) (Figure 6.1). The interplay between servitude and spectrality is therefore apparent once again. Indeed, the association is so ‘natural’ that the well-dressed diners show no signs of shock or surprise, enjoying their meal and making polite conversation. While spiritualism provided unique and socially dynamic opportunities

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Figure 6.1

‘Spiritualism Made Useful’, Punch, 14 December 1876.

for many working-class women, the class politics of Punch nevertheless made them felt in the séance. Former servants who gave private séances for wealthy patrons were often treated according to their social and economic origins. Florence Marryat, for example, comments that many patrons were unimpressed with small-scale phenomena and would demand more and more spectacular results from the mediums they presided over. Although there are no documented cases of what today would be called ‘abuse’, it is clear that some mediums were


placed under enormous physical and mental strain by their superiors (Marryat, 1894, pp. 267–8).21 In Affinity, Selina Dawes experiences similar treatment from her patron Mrs Brink. When the heroine is visited at her modest lodgings, Mrs Brink treats Selina as an object (or at least damns her with faint praise by doing so). She describes Selina as ‘far too rare a jewel to be kept in a poor box like this’ (Waters, 2000, p. 95). The ‘poor box’, however, is substituted for confinement at Sydenham, Mrs Brink’s aristocratic household. Selina has to move into the room once occupied by Mrs Brink’s mother and wear the dead woman’s clothes. Furthermore, she is not paid a proper salary and has to rely on ‘gifts’ from her patron. Selina herself is therefore turned into a spectral presence. She is neither servant nor guest and, most unsettlingly, she must ‘live’ as the embodied spirit of Brink’s mother. Selina, in this sense, is pushed out of herself and her identity is consistently eroded in a ‘feminine’ Oedipal game: I have said to Mrs. Brink that she must not expect her mother to come every night, that sometimes she might see only her white hand or her face. She says she knows this & yet, each night, she grows fiercer, she draws me nearer to her, saying ‘Will you come, O! Won’t you come a little nearer? Do you know me? Will you kiss me?’ (ibid., p. 173) Selina also begins to ‘lose’ herself in the moments when she is made to play the aristocrat at Brink’s dinner parties. Wearing an expensive emerald necklace on Brink’s insistence (her working-class outfits would be ‘improper’ at such occasions), Selina catches her patron’s reflection and then her own in the mirror – ‘I saw her face in the glass, she had her eyes upon me, & my own eyes, that had been made so green by the shine of the jewels, seemed not my eyes at all but another person’s altogether’ (ibid., p. 172). Thus, Selina is doubly displaced – removed, at least temporarily, from her class and psychically disorientated by playing the role of Brink’s mother. Indeed, Selina’s position in the household is as nebulous and uncertain as her position as a medium, as the interlocutor between the living and the dead – ‘The spirit-medium’s proper home is neither this world nor the next, but that vague & debatable land which lies between them’ (ibid., p. 73). When Ruth visits Selina for the first time at her new residence, the association between ghosts and servants grows stronger – ‘She had come quietly, not like Betty used to come but like a real lady’s maid, like a ghost’ (ibid., p. 119). In spite of their contrasting professions (Ruth the

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servant, Selina the medium) both women are spectralized – not only by their lesbianism but by their ‘imprisonment’ in the Brink household, by the tense emotional and spatial politics of the Victorian home and family.22 Indeed, ‘domestic spectrality’ is a key theme throughout the novel and even Margaret’s house, in spite of its climate of ‘dullness’, shares something of this quality – ‘Mother said, ghosts! – It was all anyone in this house seemed capable of talking of. She could not say why we didn’t just go down and join the servants in the kitchen’ (ibid., p. 99). In Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism (1878), D. D. Home subtly addressed the question of spiritualist fraud by dividing mediums in three categories: The first is made up of persons who, while really possessing medial gifts, will, when much tempted, resort to fraud. The second section consists also of mediums: but of mediums who, being utterly unprincipled, rather prefer to cheat than not, and who will, therefore, lie and deceive even when no encouragement exists to do so … In the third class I place those charlatans who, though destitute of any real claim to the title of medium, find it profitable to impose themselves as such upon credulous spiritualists, and to imitate the phenomena by methods of more or less dexterity. (Home, 1878, pp. 324–5) It is important to emphasize here that according to Home even the most gifted, ‘authentic’ medium could be tempted into enhancing or embellishing their manifestations (although this kind of fraud may be the result of a kind of ‘somnambulism’, rather than any conscious intent to deceive). In Affinity, Selina admits that before she moved to Sydenham, she would often resort to such tricks – ‘some days the spirits come to one; on other days, they must be helped’ (Waters, 2000, p. 168). ‘Did it make the spirits less true,’ Selina argues, ‘if she sometimes passed a piece of salt across her flesh – or let a flower fall, in the darkness, into a lady’s lap?’ (ibid.). Tricks allow desires to be realized and beliefs to be affirmed. There is a psychical reality in deceit. Bearing this in mind, we can see that Selina’s identity crisis in the ‘service’ of Mrs Brink (who pushes and pushes the medium into materializing her departed mother) actually leads to the materialization of something quite different. If the séance was a switching post for reality, fantasy and desire, an interplay between sitter and medium, a combination of utter corruption and innocence, we can understand Peter Quick as a spectral rebellion against Mrs Brink and the performative expression of sexual desire.


Selina’s mediumship does not simply represent the ambiguities of spiritualist trickery. It is a way of expressing or, more accurately, performing her passion for Ruth – ‘It was like losing her self, like having her own self pulled from her, as if a self could be a gown, or gloves, or stockings … It was everything to me, it was my life changed. I might have moved, then, like a spirit, from one dull sphere into a higher better one’ (ibid., p. 166). This emphasis on performativity, on changing selves as one would change costume, links Selina back to the actress-medium of the fin de siècle that I discussed in chapter one – women who would ‘wear’ different identities in order to realize their goals and desires. Indeed, one of the typical moral lessons of spiritualism is that appearances can be deceiving and Waters directly incorporates this lesson into the structure of Affinity. We are told by Margaret that Selina’s face is a picture of renaissance virtue and innocence – ‘I was sure that I had seen her likeness, in a saint or angel in a painting of Crivelli’s’ (ibid., p. 27). Over the course of the narrative, we are led to believe that she really is a kind of ‘saint or angel’, albeit one who has unjustly fallen into hell. When the final revelation arrives and it is revealed that Selina and Ruth have conspired to escape to Italy, we (and Margaret) are shocked by her daring, her effrontery, her resourcefulness. In light of the theatrical interchange between Selina and the materialized spirit of Peter Quick, it is perhaps no surprise that Waters describes mediumship as a ‘queer career’ (ibid., p. 162) – a deliberate play on the fluctuating fortunes of that much contested term. Significantly, the materialization of the spirit relies on what Judith Butler has called ‘the hyperbolic status of gender norms’ (Butler, 1993, p. 237), on bold, powerful signifiers of gendered identity. Selina sits entranced in a dark cabinet and waits for the spirit to come into materiality – ‘Then it was not at all as I had thought it would be, there was a man there, I must write his great arms, his black whiskers, his red lips. I looked at him & I trembled, & then his brow went smooth as water, & he smiled & nodded’ (Waters, 2000, p. 193). The exaggerated, domineering masculinity of Peter Quick may seem at odds with the lesbian sexuality that drives the materialization. However, if we consider this ‘performance’ as a form of cross-dressing or ‘drag’ (a theme which Waters explores in more depth in Tipping the Velvet), then the erotic and subversive elements of this scene become clearer. As Butler writes: The resignification of [gender] norms is … a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its

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rearticulation. The critical promise of drag does not have to do with the proliferation of genders, as if sheer numbers would do the job, but rather with the exposure or the failure of heterosexual regimes ever to fully legislate or contain their own ideals. (Butler, 1993, p. 237) The image of Peter Quick therefore ‘queers’ the ‘imperatives of heterosexuality’ (ibid.). Indeed, the ladies who gather to watch the materialization are under the impression that, as a spirit, ‘kisses from Peter Quick don’t count’ (Waters, 2000, p. 218). The spirit of Peter Quick takes on an extra dimension if we consider the link that ‘he’ offers us to Peter Quint in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The central question in James’ text is of course whether the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are genuine supernatural beings or whether the governess is suffering from some kind of neurosis. Waters follows a similar pattern in Affinity in the sense that the ‘authenticity’ of the manifestations is always an open question until the novel’s finale. Furthermore, the way in which Quint is ‘paired’ with the handsome young Miles and Miss Jessel with Flora has been read by many critics as a coded expression of same-sex desire. Indeed, the SPR’s Frederic Myers was amongst the first to point out this – ‘The little girl feels lesbian love for the partially-materialized ghost of a harlot governess; the little boy … feels pederastic passion for the partially materialized ghost of a corrupt manservant.’23 The link between homosexuality and the ghostly in James’ novella and the various interpretations of it therefore has a tangible influence on Affinity. The figure of the governess, the woman who transgresses her lowly status and becomes the dominant voice in the narrative, is also an important reference point. If, as T. J. Lustig argues, the governess is ‘a medium of exchange, crossing borders and enabling borders to be crossed’ (Lustig, 1994, p. 190; my italics), then Selina, literally and metaphorically, performs the same role in Affinity. If Twelve Months in An English Prison is Waters’ unacknowledged source for the main body of her narrative, then The Turn of the Screw is a more shadowy presence, haunting the margins of this reimagined old world. While the spirit world provides Selina with unique ‘powers’, the ability to express and experience same-sex desire, the ability to control and manipulate the minds of others, it should also be noted that she is controlled by spectral forces herself. Consider the striking image of the wax mould of Peter Quick’s hand – ‘Here … was the grossest thing of all … the hand of a man – a hand of wax, yet hardly a hand as the word has meaning, more some awful tumescence – five bloated fingers


and a swollen, vein ridged wrist, that glistened, where the gas-light caught it, as if moist’ (Waters, 2000, p. 130). This image is a literal and symbolic manifestation of the ‘hand’ that guides the narrative, the hand that controls the destinies of both Selina and Margaret. The open hand has long been a symbol of power, from ancient Egypt to Kabala to Catholicism, and this is no exception. This hand, however, does not belong to the divine or mystic realm – it is the worn and swollen hand of a servant. As we find out in the end of the novel, it belongs to Ruth Vigers (whose humanity and spectral otherness is captured here in wax at the same time). It is the hand that sends spirit gifts to Margaret (placing locks of golden hair on her pillow), the hand that scrubs the floors of Mrs Brink’s kitchen, the hand that caresses Selina. As Margaret states – ‘Vigers came to us from nowhere … From nowhere, from nowhere’ (ibid., p. 336). Vigers is the subversive servant, the arch trickster, the invisible puppeteer. After learning that Vigers has used her ghostliness to steal her clothes and money and read her diary, Margaret realizes that she no longer has a private world, that her passions and secrets have been exposed and manipulated – ‘She left me only this [the diary], to write in. She left it neat and square, and with the cover wiped clean – as a good maid would leave a kitchen book after taking out a recipe’ (ibid., p. 340). Before bringing the analysis to a close, we must also consider Waters’ references to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh (1857) – a source which greatly illuminates the novel’s treatment of gender and same-sex desire, a text that haunts Affinity like The Turn of the Screw. In Aurora Leigh, the eponymous protagonist is a poet who questions the position of women in Victorian society. Aurora rejects the ideals of womanhood as dull and sterile – ‘As long as they keep quiet by the fire / And never say “no” when the world says “ay”, / For that is fatal, – their angelic reach / Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn, / And fatten household sinners’ (Barrett-Browning, 1978, p. 51). Aurora refuses to marry her cousin Romney and chooses to pursue poetry instead. After a relative refuses to marry her friend Marian Erle (who is betrayed by her servant and bears an illegitimate child), Aurora and Marian run away to Florence together. Affinity, as should be clear, borrows from and is haunted by this tale of female rebellion. Ruth swindles and betrays Margaret (whose pet name is Aurora) and then flees to Italy with Selina (whose forged passport bears the name Marian Erle). In a way, the liberating transgressions of Aurora Leigh are materialized in Affinity, creating a psychical/textual loop in the history of female authorship. This haunting, however, is nothing to be

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scared of. As Barrett-Browning writes, ‘Natural things And spiritual, / who separates those two / In art, in morals, or the social drift, / Tears up the bond of nature and brings death, / Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse, / Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men, / Is wrong, in short, at all points’ (ibid., p. 170). By drawing from a wide range of nineteenth-century preoccupations and source materials, from spiritualism to women’s education, literature to court cases, prison reform to middle-class homes, Waters offers us a model of lesbian sexuality (and, more broadly, of gender transgression) that is not an anachronistic ‘import’ but a ‘tipped-over’ version of a pre-existing Victorian reality. More than anything else though, it is the séance room, the space where everything was fluid, in which different kinds of sexuality evolve and materialize, a process that is carried outwards into the wider world. The apparitional lesbian comes to life. We can also see how the ‘affinity’ that the novel shares with other texts (with Aurora Leigh, with The Turn of the Screw and, most significantly, with Twelve Months) turns it into a kind of ‘spiritualist blue-book’. At one point in the narrative, Arthur, Margaret’s brother-inlaw, describes how mediums keep ‘books of names, like ledgers, which they circulate amongst themselves’ – ghostly databases that were used to store vital information about family trees, births, deaths and so on. Affinity is caught up in a similarly intimate exchange with its ‘predecessors’, filling in blank spaces, swapping information, building up a sensuous psychical reality that transcends questions of mere fraud and authenticity. As Selina states, ‘some days the spirits come to one; on other days, they must be helped … Did it make the spirits less true?’

Conclusion

I It’s the gradual effect of brooding over the past; the past, that way grows and grows. They make it and make it. [T]he more we live in the past, the more things we find in it. That’s a literal fact. Henry James, ‘Maud-Evelyn’ ( James, 1971a, pp. 617 and 625) On first consideration, it might seem strange to conclude this book by returning to the fin de siècle. It might appear as if things had come full circle, pulled in by the gravitational force of history, dragging the contemporary works that I have explored over four chapters into a kind of time warp. However, by offering a short analysis of Henry James’ ‘Maud-Evelyn’ (1900), a story written on the cusp between two centuries, it is not my intention to erase any connection with the here and now. Rather, I will use James as both a way of bringing together some of the recurring tropes in Spiritualism and Women’s Writing and as a way of showing how the contemporary moment and the Victorian past slide into each other. This process is not a tear or rupture in the fabric of history but an ‘unfolding’, an opening up, a constant making and remaking. It is a way of thinking about the old and the new as intimately woven together, as cut from the same spirit fabric. As a result, the ‘neo’ in neo-Victorian becomes as illusive as the ghostly ‘others’ that haunt these novels and James’ story.

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‘Maud-Evelyn’ (1900) is the deeply peculiar story of the Dedricks, a couple who lose their daughter at a young age, and Marmaduke, a man who is drawn into an eerie relationship with them. Following the death of their beloved Maud-Evelyn, the Dedricks construct an elaborate and unsettling fantasy world, behaving as if their daughter is still with them. From the couple’s perspective, Maud-Evelyn grows into a spectral but very real young woman, whom they communicate with regularly through mediums. After spending his holidays with the Dedricks, Marmaduke is slowly taken over by this weird unreality. He begins to fancy that he knew Maud-Evelyn when she was alive and even consents to staging a marriage with the ‘phantom’ daughter. Marmaduke, however, does not need the assistance of a medium to make contact with his bride. Spiritualists are ‘ugly and vulgar and tiresome, and I hate that part of the business’ (ibid., p. 614) Instead, he constructs make-believe narratives and memories, a kind of deliberate self-delusion, conscious and unconscious at the same time. He uses Maud-Evelyn’s perfectly preserved room as a ‘museum’ (ibid., p. 624), as a way of building an imaginary relationship with her through the relics of her short life. As Lavinia, Marmaduke’s close friend and first love, explains, ‘They make her out older, so as to imagine they had her longer; and they make out that certain things really happened to her, so that she shall have had more life. They’ve invented a whole experience for her, and Marmaduke has become part of it’ (ibid., p. 618). The ‘elongation’ of Maud-Evelyn’s life (or, more properly, her afterlife) can be used here to represent the potential of spiritualism as a narrative form. Maud-Evelyn is neither entirely true nor entirely false, an entity produced by the complex intersection between history, desire and imagination. As I have shown over the course of this book, the texts of Michèle Roberts, A. S. Byatt, Victoria Glendinning and Sarah Waters can be understood in the same way. Their novels are ‘textual séances’, haunted works in which past and present, living and dead are bound together. Maud-Evelyn, in this broader sense, is always with us. She continues to grow, to develop and change. She dies and is resurrected a thousand times over; her ghost will keep returning as long as we want her to stay a while longer. She is the product of an infinity of yearning. James may be hostile to spiritualist practices, but I have chosen this story for precisely this reason. Indeed, his misrepresentation of mediumship as a thoroughly ‘ugly and vulgar and tiresome’ business shows how the full spectrum of spiritualist experience actually encompasses the themes so dear to him – memory, longing, fakes and originals, the terms and conditions of our ‘contract’ with the past.

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The contemporary authors in this study therefore show us the ‘vulgarity’ of spiritualism, its trickery, its lack of a moral centre, its sensational theatrics and cheap thrills, but they also expose its profound complexity, its continuing power. The lights in the séance room may be dim, but they persist over time, allowing these writers to navigate a path between this world and the next. Although Marmaduke rejects the mediums who prey on the Dedricks, he becomes a medium himself – summoning Maud-Evelyn from the fragments of her history that have survived and through the force of his own desire. As James notes, communicating with the dead is ‘contagious’, once we make ourselves open to what has been lost, it becomes impossible to stop (ibid.). Roberts, Byatt, Glendinning and Waters try to give a shape to this process; they try to ‘communicate’ with those who were passed over in life, whose loves and losses and transgressions were never adequately recorded – women who may have lived far longer than Maud-Evelyn but are just as ghostly.

II In the first two chapters of this book, I located spiritualism at the heart of the social and cultural life of the nineteenth and early twentieth century – demonstrating how the discourses of spiritualism permeated the society that had spawned it, cutting across the borders of various genres and disciplines, blurring the lines between theory and practice. In turn, spiritualism, in spite of the closed door of the séance room, displayed a remarkable ‘openness’ or ‘sensitivity’, an ability to tap in to the world around it as well as the world of the dead, absorbing lessons from science, technology, theatre and literature. Moreover, we have also seen how Psychical Research often prefigured breakthroughs in more ‘legitimate’ fields of Victorian knowledge that have gone on to define the modern mind and body. Spiritualism was not just a fad or a silly, decadent pastime. It truly represents the ‘spirit’ of the age. The purpose of this part of Spiritualism and Women’s Writing was not simply to provide a historical backdrop to my analysis of contemporary fiction (although this is clearly an important factor). By highlighting spiritualism’s different levels and textures, I established the critical/metaphorical framework in which these neo-Victorian novels could be read as a mediumistic continuation of spiritualism’s own narrative structures. Roberts, Byatt, Glendinning and Waters therefore use mediumship as a way of narrating female experience and constructing a history that is very different from the familiar images of Victorian emotional and sexual repression. If these texts are ‘made’ of anything, then it is spirit

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matter, or ectoplasm. As Lawrence Rainey asserts, ectoplasm is ‘part of a protofeminist language of the body … a mirror image of libidinal desire’ (Rainey, 1998, p. 148). Ectoplasm, a substance that is defined both by inward and outward movement, that is both part of and alien to the medium, is the glue that binds together past and present. Thus, whilst the term ‘neo-Victorian’ is certainly useful in the sense that it allows us to produce a critical map of an important development in contemporary writing, it is also somewhat misleading. These novels, as acts of mediumship, are Victorian – because there is nothing in them that is wholly, entirely, radically new and because the Victorians are us. As Mathew Sweet argues: Blame them [the Victorians], or thank them, for the suburban housing estate. For the fax machine. For the football league, political spindoctoring, heated curling tongs, vending machines … feminism, the London Underground, DIY, investigative journalism, commercially produced hardcore pornography … free universal education, product placement, industrial pollution … environmentalism, fish and chips … X-ray technology … global capitalism, interior design and Sanatogen – the stuff that surrounds us in the early twenty-first century world, both the good and the bad. Despite such evidence, we have chosen to remember the Victorians not as our benefactors, but as sentimentalists, bigots, jingoists, and hypocrites. The Victorians invented us and we invented the Victorians. (Sweet, 2001, p. xii) Indeed, each of the authors in this study goes some way to ‘materializing’ Sweet’s thesis. Although Sweet does not acknowledge the legacy of spiritualism, it is telling that he echoes the language of the séance in summing up his position: ‘[T]hey are still with us, walking our pavements, drinking in our bars, living in our houses, reading our newspapers, inhabiting our bodies’ (ibid., p. xxiii). Even the elements of these novels that might be recognized as thoroughly modern and postmodern (fragmented selves, intertextuality) can be traced back through the haunted innovations of Psychical Research. In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom outlines a similar interplay between the living and the dead in relation to the literary text. He describes this process by using the Greek term ‘apophrades’ – the days when the dead returned to the places they once inhabited. According to Bloom’s model, however, the power of the dead can only be harnessed

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if we call them back to life, if we somehow remodel them in our own image – ‘The mighty dead return, but they return in our colors, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own’ (Bloom, 1997, p. 141). Thus, the dead who return through us are tinted with our own voices, our own mannerisms, perhaps even taking a part of us with them when they return to Hades. Apophrades, like Sweet’s dismantling of the ‘them and us’ formula in our relationship with the Victorians, is at the heart of the séance and the heart of Psychical Research – in the permeable identities of mediums and spirits, in the subliminal consciousness, in the cross-correspondences of automatic writing. It is also at the heart of the novels of Roberts, Byatt, Glendinning and Waters.

Notes Introduction 1. It is possible that Sinclair’s image of the author as medium is influenced by T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). Not so long after the heyday of spiritualism, we can see echoes of mediumistic discourse in Eliot – ‘What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ (Eliot, 1951, p. 40). 2. Throughout spiritualist discourse, the concept of authorial voice is explored in relation to mediumistic practice. This becomes explicit in the large number of mediums who claimed to be possessed by literary figures such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James – sometimes even producing ‘spectral texts’ bearing the names of these deceased authors. For a discussion of the problems of authorial identification, library categorization and mediumship, see Sword (2002, pp. 49–75) and London (1999, pp. 150–78). Also see Thurschwell for the relationship between Henry James and his typist Theodora Bosanquet after his death (Thurschwell, 2001, pp. 86–114). 3. By ‘neo-Victorian’ novel, I mean the novels written in the twentieth (or indeed twenty first) century that are set in the Victorian past, often blurring the distinction between historical scholarship and the literary imagination. I first encountered the term in Dana Shiller’s article, ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’ (1997). 4. Our identification with the Victorians is a rich and problematic topic which has found expression in a wide range of analytical forms – from critical theory and philosophy to the study of popular culture. A good example of this range would be the contrasting ways in which the so-called repressive hypothesis, the image of the stilted Victorian prude, is rejected by both Michel Foucault in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (1990) and Matthew Sweet in Inventing the Victorians (2001). Through the specific question of spiritualism, this book is also trying to address the extent to which the Victorian ‘other’ is encompassed within us, in our own sense of cultural, historical and gendered identity. 5. Although a substantial amount of historical and archival material regarding spiritualism comprises a large bulk of this study, it is not my intention to produce a history of British spiritualism here. For full-length studies of spiritualism, see Doyle (1926, volumes 1 and 2) and Podmore (1902). Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (1985) is also an invaluable resource. For a history of the formation and experiments of the SPR, see Gauld (1968). 6. The influence of Psychical Research on modernism is not the main focus of this book and deserves a lengthy study in itself. However, it is of interest to note the conceptual overlap between the theories of the SPR and modernist 204

Notes

7.

8.

9.

10.

1.

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language experiments – the stream of consciousness, epiphanic visions, the fragmented self and so on. Furthermore, writers such as W. B. Yeats and H. D. were actively involved in séances and closely followed the work of the SPR. See Sword (2002). With the exception of Elizabeth d’Espérance, who wrote about the effects of mediumship on her understanding of consciousness and sense of self. See d’Espérance, Shadow Land or, Light from the Other Side (1897) and Northern Lights and Other Psychic Stories (1899). See Lodge (1916, p. 3). For a discussion of World War I and the resurgence of spiritualism, see Doyle (1926). Both Doyle and Lodge were accused of lax observational skills, overtaken with emotion after both lost their sons in the war. For spiritualism in World War II, see Hazelgrove (2000). Paul Fussell also describes the exaggerated representations of spiritualism during World War II in works such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975, pp. 328–35). By ‘physical’, Adshead refers to mediums who could materialize the spirits of the dead during séances, a manifestation that was particularly popular in the 1870s and subsided towards the end of the century. For a contemporary description and discussion of spirit photography and its methods, see Podmore (1902, pp. 118–25). See also Sidgwick (1891); Bush (1920); Price (1922) and Glendinning (1894). For a discussion of spirit photography, from its beginning as a Victorian tool against mourning and loss through to its legacy in popular modern films such as The Sixth Sense and The Others, see Thurschwell (2003, pp. 20–31). See also Marina Warner, who examines the role of the medium as a ‘photographer-telepathist’ in Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (2006, pp. 221–36).

Theatres in the Skull: The Society for Psychical Research and Actress Narratives

1. Florence Marryat was a woman of many talents. She was a popular novelist, mostly of sensation fiction, an actress, opera singer, playwright, editor for the London Society (1872–6) and an avid spiritualist whose experiences recorded in There is No Death and The Spirit World provide a vibrant account of Victorian spiritualism. For biographical information on Marryat, see Black (1893) and Sutherland (1988). 2. Henry Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, Arthur Balfour and his sister Eleanor had test séances in 1875 with the materialization mediums Miss Wood and Miss Fairlamb that were inconclusive. Although a committee was established to investigate physical phenomena after the SPR was founded, the focus of the investigations was on ‘mental’ or ‘interior’ forms of mediumship. For a discussion of the early investigations in physical phenomena that might have contributed in the SPR’s subsequent interests, see Gauld (1968, chapters 4 and 5). 3. For details of the predominant Victorian theories of acting and the representation of emotion through bodily imagery, see Taylor (1989).

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Notes

4. For information on Myers’ definition of telepathy, see Thurschwell (2001, chapter 1), and Luckhurst (2002, chapter 2). 5. For a discussion of these actresses (including their lives, roles and acting techniques), see Stokes, Booth and Bassnett (1988). Also see Knepler (1968). 6. For more information on the history of the SPR and biographical notes on its founding members, see Gauld (1968). Also see Oppenheim (1985) and Thurschwell (2001). In addition, Luckhurst (2002) discusses the SPR’s formation and the careers of its members – with backgrounds in disciplines ranging from classics (Myers) and music theory (Gurney) to physics (Oliver Lodge), chemistry (William Crookes) and philosophy (Sidgwick). 7. Members of the British National Association of Spiritualists (BNAS) had joined the SPR but were increasingly dissatisfied with the scepticism with which Psychical Researchers were reviewing mediums. Following the assessment of William Eglinton’s mediumship by Eleanor Sidgwick between 1886–7, many spiritualists left the Society and were diametrically opposed to Sidgwick’s harsh criticism of the medium. See Oppenheim (1985, pp. 135–41). Also see Luckhurst (2002, pp. 57–8). 8. For the links between Psychical Research and Chemistry and Physics, see Luckhurst, op. cit. For new developments in Psychology and Freud’s theories, see Thurschwell, op. cit. See also Noakes (1998). In the following chapters of this book, I discuss the metaphorical relationship between scientific discourses and spiritualism in more detail, especially in Chapters 4 and 5. 9. In 1897, Lodge wrote a letter to The Times commenting that he had made a plan similar to Marconi’s (who used electromagnetic waves to signal across space). The letter is reproduced under the title ‘Telegraphy without Wires’ in Borderland (Anon., 1897b, p. 314). 10. Both Luckhurst (2002) and Noakes (1998) analyse the careers of Crookes and Lodge through the interconnection of their disciplines and interests in Psychical Research. 11. Oppenheim entitles one of her chapters on Christianity, Spiritualism, Agnosticism and Psychical Research ‘A Surrogate Faith’ (1985, pp. 59–103). 12. Binet states that Myers’ work on this issue ‘summed up the theory of multiple personality’, quoted in Luckhurst (2002, p. 112). 13. See, for example, Myers’ ‘Binet on the Consciousness of Hysterical Subjects’ (1889–90, pp. 200–5). 14. In ‘The Unconscious’, a paper that was published in the PSPR, Freud emphasizes the importance of the unconscious in ‘Psychoanalysis alone’ and tries to extricate his discourse from Psychical Research. However, his theoretical interest in telepathy and in forms of influence between the living reveal that the ties between Psychoanalysis and Psychical Research were closer than Freud would perhaps like to admit. See Luckhurst (2002, pp. 270–8). For discussion of the importance of ‘psychical’ reality in both Psychoanalysis and Psychical Research and, more specifically, the way that these discourses are based on similar themes of the dead existing within us and ‘telepathic’ communication, see Thurschwell (2001, pp. 4–7 and chapter 5). 15. Also see Thurschwell (2001, chapter 5). For Flournoy’s experiments in subliminal psychology and mediumship, see Sonu Shamdasani (2006). 16. Rather than causing fear and panic, the ghost’s first appearance is portrayed in following manner: ‘Mr. Otis began to suspect that he had been too dogmatic

Notes

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

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in his denial of the existence of ghosts. Mrs. Otis expressed her intention of joining the Psychical Society, and Washington prepared a long letter to Messrs. Myers and Podmore on the subject of the Permanence of Sanguineous Stains when connected with Crime. That night all doubts about the objective existence of phantasmata were removed forever’ (Wilde, 1998, p. 63). The letters relating the sightings of phantasms are held at the SPR Archives, University Library Cambridge. Although Gurney, Podmore and Myers were extremely careful in selecting which cases to include and which to omit, their study was, inescapably, based on narrative testimony rather than any kind of repeatable scientific tests. As a result, Phantasms was left open to attack and received harsh criticism. See Innes (1887, pp. 174–94). See, for example, Frederic Myers (1891–2, pp. 298–355; 1893–4, pp. 3–128). Florence Cook claimed that she received messages telling her to become a spirit medium during a séance that she attended with her mother. However, in an interview at a later stage in her career, she intimated that she had received a spirit message while experimenting at home (see Owen, 1989, p. 43). Catherine Wood also claimed to have received a message during a séance urging her to develop her talents (ibid., p. 57). I discuss Cook’s and Wood’s mediumistic vocation in Chapters 3 and 6. For a study of the socio-economic status of the actress in the second part of the nineteenth century and, in particular, the unfair association made between actresses and prostitutes, see Davies (1991). Critics argued that acting was as prestigious an art as writing and painting. Actors, in fact, merged elements of these other forms together in their performances (Craik, 1886, p. 416). For the experiments with Leonora Piper, see Myers (1903, II, pp. 237–51). Also see Gauld (1968, pp. 246–74). Myers, James, Lodge and Hodgson contributed many articles to the PSPR regarding Piper in the last decades on the nineteenth century and the early part of the 1900s. For a discussion of this episode, see Kontou (2007). This concept becomes a central argument in Thurschwell (2001). For a discussion of the cultural implications of women’s ‘sensitivity’, from medicine to spiritualism, see Luckhurst (2002, chapter 6). Lewes was referring here to the great actress known only as ‘Rachel’. Although Marryat was averse to the New Woman idea per se, and wrote a novel against it in the late 1890s, her actress-heroines and her exposition of the position of women within the domestic sphere covertly conform to this notion. It is more probable that Marryat was against the way the New Woman ideology was promoted in terms of rejecting a procreative role (rather than an emphasis on financial independence and freedom of choice). It is interesting to note an episode described by Florence Marryat in which her daughter, the actress Eva Ross Church, ‘appears’ one night to her mother wearing the dress of one of the characters from the production of ‘The Colleen Bawn’ in which she was playing. Marryat quotes from a letter later sent by Eva in which she informs her mother of the costume she wore at the performance that matched the costume worn by the apparition (Marryat, 1892, pp. 42–3) See Powell (1997) for an extensive discussion of the image of the actress.

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2.

Notes

Well-tuned Mediums: May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson

1. Gloria Fromm does an excellent job in tracing the biographical elements of Richardson’s life in Pilgrimage – see Fromm (1994). Suzanne Raitt suggests that for Mary Olivier ‘Sinclair drew on vignettes and events from her own history to write a story of a woman who shares her own given name, her religious doubts, many of her intellectual passions … and the year of her birth’ (Raitt, 2000, p. 217). 2. A plethora of articles have been devoted to the ‘Palm Sunday’ case and published in the PSPR. The SPR archives in Cambridge have holdings of the transcripts under the names of the various mediums that took part in the case. Jean Balfour’s ‘The Palm Sunday case: New light on an old love story’ (1960, pp. 79–267) is a good starting point. 3. For a discussion of mysticism in May Sinclair’s novels and short stories, see Kinnamon Neff (1980, pp. 82–108). For a discussion of Sinclair and Richardson in terms of female mysticism, see Law (1997). 4. The influence of Psychical Research in Sinclair’s work is usually focused on her Uncanny Tales (1923). David Seed in his essay ‘“Psychical” cases: Transformations of the supernatural in Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair’ argues that Sinclair’s interests in the SPR and the supernatural was incorporated in her Uncanny Tales as means of stretching the parameters of realistic representation in narrative (Smith and Wallace, 2001, p. 58). Seed focuses on the thematic content of the supernatural rather than its influence in narrative structure, particularly in Sinclair’s earlier novels. Similarly George M. Johnson reads Sinclair’s involvement with Psychical Research in her ghostly tales and in Audrey Craven (1897) but he does not explore how the ‘crosscorrespondences’ and Sinclair’s interest in telepathy might have shaped her more experimental novels, namely Mary Olivier and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922). Johnson examines these novels in terms of psychoanalysis and psychology with which Sinclair was engaged throughout her life (Johnson, 2006, pp. 101–43). 5. Luckhurst quotes here from Dr Axel Munthe’s memoirs, The Story of San Michele, who treated Myers during his illness. 6. After Richard Hodgson’s death in 1905, Piper claimed to be receiving messages from him. Luckhurst discusses Piper’s ‘strategy of incorporating the Society’s researchers into her panoply of posthumous contacts, transforming her operators into intermittent ghosts in her machine’. For Piper’s involvement in the ‘cross-correspondences’ and her mediumistic involvement in William James’ family, see Luckhurst (2002, pp. 230–4) and Lodge (1911). Jean Balfour (1960), completely drops Piper’s name and contribution from the case. One possible interpretation for this exclusion is that Piper’s very public mediumship and the number of spirits she was serving were perceived with suspicion by later Psychical Researchers in the twentieth century. 7. For brief biographical details of the automatists, see Balfour (1960, pp. 97–8). 8. One of Sinclair’s earlier biographers, Theophilus Boll, downplays her active interest in Psychical Research by stating that ‘[s]he had an artist’s interest in the occult story as a creative exercise, and in the mysteriously happening psychic phenomena in life, but had not patience with the assumption that

Notes

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

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psychic phenomena were matters for scientific exploration according to a scientific methodology’ (Boll, 1973, p. 105). However, Suzanne Raitt indicates that by the mid-1920s Sinclair was attending séances with the medium Catherine Dawson Scott, where she tried to communicate with her brother Frank who had died in India in 1889. Sinclair was cautious of her own desire to communicate with her brother and not wanting this to interfere with the authenticity of the phenomena she came up with a test that would verify or disqualify the manifestation. Sinclair wrote to the medium – ‘My brother was a gunner. I’m going to put a question about artillery wh. only a gunner could answer. A friend, a gunner, has given me a good one: What happens if a gun is fired at an angle of 45º when you increase your elevation? If I get the right answer I shall know it is really Frank, because it cd.n’t be even in my subconsciousness. But if I don’t get the right answer I’m afraid I shall conclude there’s nothing in it’ (Raitt, 2000, p. 135). Leigh Wilson makes a similar point in her article on the case arguing that ‘[l]ack of meaning rather than clarity defined the cross-correspondences, and in this way significance and power shifted from authorship to interpretation’ (Wilson, 2007, p. 22). Mrs Willett wrote this message on 5 June 1910. Script produced by Mrs Willett in 1910. Myers describes one case of automatic-writing mediumship in 1885 where the young and reputable medium insisted that ‘It must be a spirit … which guides my hand; it is certainly not I’ (Myers, II, 1903, p. 169). Interestingly there is another connection here between the ‘Charonean staircase’ of the ancient Greek theatre and the Victorian stage. In 1863, John Henry Pepper of the Royal Polytechnic Institute and his associate Henry Dricks raised the ‘first ghost on record that was worth being patented, and that proved a source of nightly profit for its raisers’. ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, as it became widely known, was a three-dimensional apparition that interacted with actors on a stage. The ghost was an optical illusion created with the aid of slanted mirrors and an actor hidden below the proscenium. This spectral being was a star of the Victorian stage, demonstrating its appeal to a broad cross-section of theatre-going audiences by appearing in both Hamlet and Christmas pantomimes. The two inventors created a ‘method of dispensing with the silvering of a mirror and produced the reflected image by means of a simple seat of plate glass, placed before a back-ground, or darkened scene’ (Highley, 1873, pp. 518–22). The actor, whose image produced the ghost on stage, was hidden from the public’s view, in a room below the stage which they referred to as the ‘ghost-pit’. Also see Naughton (2004). Alex Owen, citing Freud’s and Charcot’s work on hysteria in the 1880s, comments that ‘writing could operate vicariously in the place of speech and hysterical patients were able to write “more fluently, quicker, and better than others did or that they themselves had done previously.”’ (Owen, 1989, p. 214). May Sinclair, ‘The novels of Dorothy Richardson’, first published in the Egoist, 5 (April 1918). Raitt argues that Sinclair’s review of Richardson ‘has set the terms for most subsequent critical analyses of Mary Olivier’ (Raitt, 2000, p. 214). Similarly, in her introduction to the novel, Jean Radford argues that Sinclair began working on the novel shortly after having written the review, suggesting that

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Notes

Sinclair was following Richardson’s single consciousness technique (Sinclair, 2002, p. iii). 17. Quoted from Louise Morgan’s ‘How writers work: Dorothy Richardson’, Everyman (22 October 1931). 18. Interestingly, Florence Marryat, in The Spirit World, advises the reader on the various aspects of spiritualism, from automatic writing to successful materialization séances and suggests that music should be played during the séance. Especially the ‘solemn tunes of the harmonium blend admirably with the human voices’ (Marryat, 1894, p. 288).

3.

Phantasms of Florence Cook in Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen

1. According to Rosie White, Queen Hat is based on the historical figure of Queen Hatshepsut (c. 1540–1481 BCE). Hatshepsut was the daughter of Thutmose I of Egypt: ‘After the death of her half-brother and husband, Thutmose II, the young Thutmose III succeeded, but she soon replaced him as the effective ruler and reigned until her death twenty-five years later.’ (White, 2004, p. 183). 2. See also Melissa Pritchard’s Selene of the Spirits (1998) which is very loosely based on the lives of Florence Cook and William Crookes. Pritchard’s novel centres around the doomed love affair between the young medium and the eminent chemist. 3. A similar point about the fictional voices given to women mediums that were marginalized in the records of spiritualism and nineteenth-century psychology is made by Rowland (2000, p. 201). 4. White, for example, discusses In the Red Kitchen using Julia Kristeva’s notion of ‘women’s time’ (White, 2004), and Rowland offers a close reading of the novel in terms of Jungian analysis (Rowland, 2000). 5. These letters are examined in Hall (1962). Hall manipulates the historical material to fit his argument in the book – that Florence was a fraud and Crookes was her lover and accomplice. Ten years before her death in 1904, a brief interview with Florence Cook recounting the beginnings and the development of her mediumship was published in Light (15 December 1894, pp. 607–8). 6. Although Thurschwell asks this question in relation to psychoanalysis, it can also be applied to the neo-Victorian (sub)genre and the ‘ventriloquizing’ of historical figures. 7. For Katie King’s life story, see Basham (1992, p. 181). Also see Marryat (1892, p. 140). 8. Mikhail Bakhtin’s phrase. I use it here because it is rooted in Bakhtin’s discussion of ‘dreams, day-dreams’ and ‘insanity’ in the Novel. These states ‘destroy the epic and tragic wholeness of a person and his fate … he loses his finalized quality and ceases to mean only one thing.’ Mediumship, as I have shown and will continue to show, offered the same ‘possibilities’ of doubling, divergence and reinvention (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 116). 9. Thomas Blyton gave this information about the mediumship of Florence Cook in a letter published in the correspondence section of The Spiritualist (Blyton, 15 June 1871, p. 175). This appears to be the first mention of Cook in this particular newspaper.

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10. Also see Owen (1989, p. 47). 11. At the turn of the century, Elizabeth d’Espérance was one of the very few materialization mediums to write about her psychological and emotional state when entranced. Espérance was brave enough to describe a ‘spirit-grabbing’ incident in which she was caught emulating a spirit. However, she records the event in a way that blurs the extent to which she was consciously or unconsciously taking part in a ‘psychical drama’. There is no clear distinction between pretence and reality (d’Espérance, 1897, p. 298). 12. This chapter does not deal extensively with the genre of fantasy and how it is accommodated in the spiritualist séance. However, I am using some key elements of the fantastic to support part of my argument here. For the classic work on this subject, see Todorov (1975). Also see Jackson (1988). 13. Jackson argues that fantasy incorporates elements of both the mimetic and the marvellous (Jackson, 1988, p. 34). 14. A photograph of the painting is held in the SPR archives, University Library Cambridge (Crookes file). The painting is also briefly mentioned in an anonymous article entitled ‘Spirit Forms’ (Anon., 1873c, p. 454). It is also worth noting here that the painting is reminiscent of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (produced after the death of Elisabeth Siddal). Both paintings represent women that appear empowered through their entrancement. 15. Most letters to the spiritualist newspapers would pose questions about the extent to which Katie resembled Florence and vice versa – only to reach the conclusion that the medium and the spirit were two different entities. For a representative letter where the author compares and contrasts the two, see Hall, FSA (14 June 1874, pp. 298–9). 16. For a compact discussion of Crookes’ life, scientific experiments and his involvement in the SPR, see Oppenheim (1985, pp. 338–54). Also see Luckhurst (2002, pp. 24–31, 75–85). For more extensive biographical information on the life and work of Crookes, see Fournier D’Albe (1923). 17. In a letter to Charles Blackburn, Florence affirms Crookes’ scientific authority by stating: ‘Mrs. Guppy [a medium who heavily criticized Florence and who would later become Mrs Volckman] will be surprised when she sees the papers. It will stop her nonsense. I believe she is saying all sorts of horrid things about me.’ (Undated, Medhurst Box 1, files on William Crookes, Blackburn-subfile, SPR archives, Cambridge University Library). 18. For a discussion of Crookes’ radiometer and work on radiant matter, complete with the pictorial evidence, see Luckhurst (2002, pp. 79–80). 19. In a letter to Charles Darwin dated 17 January 1873, the author A. D. Elliot addressing Darwin writes: ‘I intend to read Crookes in the Quarterly Journal of Science, but if I find that he believes in any solution, except the simple and evident one, viz. that he has been cheated, I shall certainly think small [illegible] of his judgment.’ (Crookes File, SPR archives, University Library Cambridge). 20. Luckhurst (2002) discusses the continuous attacks on spiritualism and Crookes in articles by William Carpenter throughout the 1870s. These articles were collected and published in book form (Carpenter, 1872). 21. Katie King claimed that the loud raps produced by her were due to the psychic force her husband John had sent her (The Spiritualist, II, 1872–3, p. 6). 22. From the forty-four negatives of varying quality, only a few remain. Crookes and Cook had initially agreed that they would present a small selection of

212

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

Notes negatives to a very close circle of friends. However, some made their way into public newspapers (much to the distress of Crookes). When Oliver Lodge was questioned about the photographs he had replied that ‘though I knew Crookes pretty well, he never showed me the photographs. I don’t know why Crookes never showed me the pictures; I never asked to see them, but then I didn’t know of their existence. He was I think in later life rather reticent about that episode, for he had described it in rather a flippant manner at first.’ (Letter from Oliver Lodge to James B. Mayberry, 9 February 1932, Oliver Lodge Papers, SPR archives, University Library Cambridge). This argument is influenced by Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Mulvey, 1998, pp. 585–95). If Florence was accused of suffering from multiple personality then her mediumship and spirit materializations would be tarnished – ‘diagnosed’ as the result of psychological malfunctions. Although the 1880s saw an interaction between studies in spiritualism and psychology, a decade earlier this ‘cross-over’ was viewed with suspicion. For more on double consciousness and multiple personality in nineteenth-century medicine and culture, see Hacking (1995). Described by Crookes in a letter to Charles Blackburn (11 May 1874, SPR archives, University Library Cambridge). For a discussion of the dead woman as spectacle and source of pleasure, see Dijkstra (1986, pp. 25–63). See also Bronfen (1993). For a clear and detailed discussion of Crookes’ belief in spiritualism and telepathy in a scientific context, see Oppenheim (1985, pp. 348–54). The correspondence between Kate Cook and Charles Blackburn is kept in the SPR archives, University Library Cambridge, in the mediums’ files under Florence Cook’s name. For a description of Kate Cook’s séances, see Marryat (1892, pp. 147–52). Letter from Kate Cook to Charles Blackburn, dated 8 April 1879. After Florence Cook died in poverty at the age of forty-eight, Kate married Florence’s husband and together worked their way into Charles Blackburn’s heart and fortune. Blackburn left Kate Cook a great deal of money after his death (Owen, 1989, pp. 73–4). In an uncanny coincidence, Myers’ ‘Multiplex Personality’ article in The Nineteenth Century is followed by an article titled ‘Sisters in Law’ which debates the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act. It might not be too far-fetched to argue that Florence Cook’s presence hovers between the two articles, a kind of spirit relay between the SPR’s loss of interest in physical mediumship and Kate’s marriage to Elgie Corner. It is interesting to note that Ellen Crookes, unlike her fictional counterpart Minnie, experienced a kind of social subversion and was not afraid to document it in a public letter addressed to Florence. Ellen had to act as maid during a séance by helping the spirit put on a boot: ‘On two occasions Leila, whose feet were always bare, took one of your [Florence’s] shoes off, and asked me to put it on her foot. I knelt down by her side, and tried my utmost to squeeze her foot into it, but found it impossible to do so, her foot being so much larger than yours.’ (Crookes, 25 June 1875, p. 312). A Mrs Everett recorded this in her diary after a private conversation with Florence, I, 1882. (The diary is held in the SPR archives, Medhurst, William Crookes File, Box 3.)

Notes

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34. ‘Like atoms,’ Myers writes, ‘like suns, like galaxies, our spirits are systems of forces which vibrate continually to each other’s attractive power’ (Myers, 1903, II; my italics). 35. Myers also used the metaphor of a house built on gravel – explaining how the different strata are of differing importance to different people (i.e. the owner, the geologist and so on) (Myers, 1891–2, p. 304).

4.

Natural and Spiritual Evolutions: A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects

1. Natural history and spiritualism are the primary interests (and modes of critical thinking) for the characters of Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte respectively. Despite Ash’s exposure of the medium Mrs Hella Lees (an allusion to George Hyde-Lees, W. B. Yeats’ medium wife) during one of her séances, the reader is left to wonder as to what extent the séance is ‘truly’ fraudulent. As Sally Shuttleworth argues in ‘Writing Natural History: Morpho Eugenia’, Ash’s ‘scientific’ evidence ‘carries little weight in a text preoccupied with the verbal hauntings of the past where both Victorian and modern protagonists express their fears that their recreations of the past are themselves forms of forgery’ (Alfer and Noble, 2001, p. 151). 2. Janet Oppenheim discusses the appeal Darwinist thought held for British spiritualists and focuses on the cross-pollination between the careers and spiritualist beliefs of Wallace, Romanes and Robert Chambers (editor of the eponymous journal) who had written a controversial naturalist study arguing the case for human evolution before he became an advocate of spiritualism (Oppenheim, 1985, pp. 267–325). 3. In Freud’s essay ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’ (1917), he argues that the narcissism of Man has suffered three major blows. The first is represented by the astronomical theories of Copernicus, the second by the biological theories of Darwin and the third by the birth of psychoanalysis and the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious. Gillian Beer discusses the essay in Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Fiction (2000, pp. 8–14). 4. George Eliot’s diary record of her trip with G. H. Lewes to Ilfracombe and the portrayal of Darwinist theories in her fiction have influenced both Possession and the novellas under discussion (Byatt, 2001, p. 92). 5. From a letter to the editor of The Atheneum, 1 December 1866. 6. The connections between the Alice books and Morpho Eugenia could be taken further. Alice’s experience of losing her identity, disorientated by her various physical transformations, can be taken to represent the problems in ‘perspective’ caused by the Darwinian revolution. Furthermore, the references to looking through a number of different ‘lenses’ (the looking glass, the telescope and so on) also create a connection with the gaze of the naturalist in Byatt (whose text alternates between ‘close-ups’ of insects and humans). 7. For an illuminating discussion of Wallace’s theories, see Kottler (1974, pp. 145–92). For a selection of quotations by Wallace and a similar discussion of his spiritualist beliefs, see Smith (1992). A good collection of passages including Wallace’s scientific, spiritualist and social writings alongside

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

5.

Notes biographical details is to be found in Berry (2002). Also see Wallace’s own writings on his experiences with spiritualism (Wallace, 1875) and Spiritualistic Experiences (1918). This issue evokes the line spoken by Helen Mirren (playing a servant) in the film Gosford Park (dir. Robert Altman, 2001). ‘I know it before they know it themselves,’ she states in reference to the master/servant relationship. See, for example, Poznar (2004, pp. 173–89), Hadley (2003, pp. 85–99) and Maack (2002, pp. 255–78). Also see Colley (1983, pp. 123–7). Tennyson was an honorary member of the SPR and was interested (personally and ‘poetically’) in theories of the afterlife and alternative states of consciousness. He collected ghost photographs and attended séances. On one notable occasion, in which he attempted to contact his son, the medium broke down in tears as a result of the Poet Laureate’s questions. He also met Alfred Russel Wallace (Wallace, 1918, p. 13), who recommended a medium to him. However, compared to his brother Frederick and his sisters, Tennyson remained something of a sceptic. As Byatt explains, ‘Arthur had liked the Nightingale in his [Keats’] poem on the Arabian Nights, “Apart from place, withholding time” in its singing. And the Nightingale had found its defiant voice in his [Tennyson’s] poem for Arthur’ (Byatt, 1995, p. 270). Janet Oppeneheim briefly discusses this aspect of Psychical Research (Oppenheim, 1985, pp. 133–5). Doctors like Henry Maudsley defined ‘mediomania’ as a disease of the nervous system. According to Maudsley, the illusion of spirit intervention was produced when the ‘natural nervous substrata engaged in [a] disordinate, abnormal, or, so to speak, unnatural function’ (Maudsley, 1886, p. 134). Even passivity, an agreeable feminine trait, was demonized in counterarguments against spiritualism. C. Williams, for example, describes the ‘serious injury to the mental organism which is bound to result from constantly getting into the habit of forcing the Will to become perfectly passive’ (Williams, n.d., pp. 6–7).

The Other World Illuminated: Wiring Science, Text and Spirit in Victoria Glendinning’s Electricity

1. In the indispensable The Other World, Oppenheim provides a detailed exploration of the convoluted relationships that spiritualism had with biology, psychology, physics and chemistry. Thurschwell’s Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking suggests that the fin-de-siècle technologies of the telephone and the telegraph substantiated, in the spiritualist and public imagination, the claims of mediums who communicated across space and time with the dead, as well as the developing theory of telepathy. Similarly, Luckhurst’s The Invention of Telepathy comments on the blurring of boundaries between ‘orthodox’ and ‘occult’ science. Connor’s Dumbstruck proposes that the popularity of the direct voice phenomenon in séances appeared simultaneously to the development of the gramophone and devices for recording speech. Richard Noakes’ thesis ‘Cranks and Visionaries’ explores scientific interest in spiritualism and the attempts to understand and test the phenomena under laboratory conditions.

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2. Also see Iwan Rhys Morus (1993, pp. 50–69). 3. The same term used by Myers, it should be noted, to describe mediums (as I explored in chapter 1). 4. Baron Karl von Reichenbach (1788–1869) was a chemist and neurologist who proposed that there was a unifying force in nature. The ‘odic’ or ‘odylic’ force was a kind of efflorescent light that only a few select people could see called ‘sensitives’. Reichenbach’s Letters on Od and Magnetism was published in England in 1852 and his theories were adopted by many spiritualists. The examination of Reichenbach’s work was one of the SPR’s main objectives. 5. Faraday announced that the movement of tables was due to ‘unconscious muscular action’, cited in Luckhurst (2002, p. 26). 6. Also see Armstrong (1998, chapter 1). 7. The much-quoted Friedrich Kittler comments on the disruption between eye, hand and letter-writing caused by the invention of the typewriter – ‘The linking of hand, eye and letter in the act of writing by hand intimates the translation from mind to hand to eye and hence from inward and invisible and spiritual to outward and visible and physical, projecting in effect “the continuous transition from nature to culture.” The typewriter, like the telegraph, replaces, or pressures, that fantasy of continuous transition with recalcitrantly visible and material systems of difference: with the standardized spacing of keys and letters; with the dislocation of where the hands work, where the letters strike and appear, where the eyes look, if they look at all.’ (Seltzer, 1992, p. 10.) 8. See also London (2005, pp. 91–110). 9. Carolyn Marvin, for example, describes many anecdotes emphasizing the dichotomy between concrete scientific knowledge of the operation of the telegraph and the telephone and popular conceptions of how they worked in When Old Technologies were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth-Century (1988, p. 111). 10. The words of one Professor Bixby. The article was originally published in the Arena and was edited and reprinted in Borderland under the title ‘From Röntgen Rays to the Existence of the Soul’ (1896, p. 320). 11. W. T. Stead was a prominent fin-de-siècle journalist. To some, he is the father of new journalism. Stead wrote regular features for the Pall Mall exposing child prostitution in Britain and went on to edit The Review of Reviews and Borderland. His interest in spiritualism did much to besmirch his reputation. Indeed, such was his enthusiasm for spiritualism that he often criticized members of the SPR for their caution and scepticism, in spite of his efforts to publicize their cause. For a discussion of Stead the spiritualist, see Oppenheim (1985, pp. 33–4) and Luckhurst (2002, pp. 117–47). 12. As should be clear, I am using the word ‘typewriter’ here both literally and metaphorically. This is historically correct (i.e. not anachronistic) in the sense that the word was used to describe both the person writing on the machine and the machine itself in the nineteenth century. For a discussion of this see, Kittler (1999, p. 183) and Thurschwell (2001, chapter 4). 13. The article was first published in the American spiritualist magazine Light of Truth and reprinted in Borderland. 14. For a discussion of how the telegraph and the nervous system were perceived in similar terms and the shift from organic to technological images in discussing the body and the mind, see Otis (2002, pp. 105–28).

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Notes

15. Arguing along similar lines, Grove explores the ghostly or supernatural qualities of X-rays and their effect on the public imagination (Grove, 1997). 16. Also see Crookes (1879). 17. Recording and making contact with the dead through the use of radios and microphones is known as Electronic Voice Phenomenon or EVP. It was largely pioneered by Konstantin Raudive in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raudive, a Latvian parapsychologist, was inspired by the Swedish writer Friedrich Jurgenson, who claimed to have heard the voices of the dead in radio frequencies. Raudive claimed that the dead talked in multiple languages and that their personalities were severely altered after death. For a discussion of Raudive’s ‘postmodern spiritualism’, see Connor (2000, pp. 374–5). Interestingly, the creative relationship between new technologies (from analogue to digital) and the afterlife continues today with the success of Japanese horror films such as the Ring trilogy (dir. Hideo Nakata) in which video cassettes, computers and telephones are possessed or haunted by vengeful female spirits. 18. Isabel’s refusal of Wells’ sexual advances years after the couple had separated is discussed in West (1984, pp. 256–7). As West points out, a literary version of one of these encounters can be found in The History of Mr. Polly (1910) – demonstrating how Wells was not only drawn to Isabel physically but how she continued to ‘haunt’ his fiction. 19. All biographical references for H. G. Wells are taken from Mackenzie (1973) and West (1984). 20. The speech reproduced in Borderland was titled by Stead ‘How should Spiritualists Regard Scientific Men?’ 21. H. G. Wells’ article appeared in Nature (1894) under the title ‘Peculiarities of Psychical Research’ and is mentioned by Luckhurst. 22. Unsigned Review, Daily Chronicle, 14 June 1900, reproduced in Parrinder (1972). 23. A typical periodical for both ‘ladies’ and women of the middling ranks that ran from 1852–81. 24. The article was written by a ‘Miss X’ who was later revealed to be Ada GoodrichFreer, a member of the SPR and co-editor of the journal (see Luckhurst, 2002, pp. 130–1).

6.

Queering the Séance: Sarah Waters’ Affinity

1. The great flourishing of the sensation novel took place in the 1860s, with the likes of Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, M. E. Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Ellen Wood and later Florence Marryat enjoying immense popularity. Over time, its appeal gradually faded and book production dwindled away during the late 1870s. The fad had run its course. From the moment of its conception, the genre was essentially a hybrid form – an amalgam of popular narratives that included the Newgate novel, the Gothic romance, lurid journalism such as The Illustrated Police News, so-called silver fork novels and, at least to some extent, realism. These novels dealt with family secrets and their revelation, bigamy, crime, illegitimacy and the inadequacies of the law – especially when these matters concerned women or intruded on the prescribed limits of female experience. The truly unsettling aspect of these plots, however, was

Notes

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

217

the fact that they unfolded in respectable middle-class homes. The sensation novel brought lust, murder and intrigue to the sitting room and the pantry. In the confines of domestic space, reputable young wives or daughters were leading double lives and committing crimes of passion. For a more detailed overview of the conventions and history of the sensation genre, see Brantlinger (1982, pp. 1–28) and Flint (1993, pp. 274–93). Also see Hughes (1980) and Loesberg (1986, pp. 115–38). See, for example, Chauncey (1982–83, p. 120). Jeanette King argues that the lesbian elements in Affinity are inserted through a late twentieth-century perspective in her study The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005, p. 83). Lynda Hart argues in great depth that the figure of the lesbian is made very apparent in 1860s sensation fiction. This is achieved by transposing the masculine traits of active desire and criminality to the domestic sphere – traits which were absorbed by the sensation heroine. Hart’s point is that ‘the shadow of the lesbian is laminated to the representation of women’s violence, that indeed it is the lesbian’s absent presence that both permits women’s aggression to enter the spectacular field and defuses the full force of its threat’ (Hart, 1994, p. x and pp. 29–46). The narratives of Twelve Months and Affinity mirror each other in an uncanny fashion (in terms of characters, form and content). Waters, however, does not acknowledge any fictional, historical or critical sources in Affinity – in contrast to Roberts and Byatt, for example, who cite Alex Owen’s study as an invaluable resource. Dr Richardson’s account of a séance by the medium Mary Rosina Showers. Originally published in Medium and Daybreak, 3 April 1874. The Latin verb texere (to weave) is used in reference to both textiles and narratives. At the time of writing this chapter, I knew of no study that has drawn this parallel. I contemplated asking Sarah Waters about her knowledge of Twelve Months on several occasions but each time I decided that a definitive answer would somehow betray the relationship between these two texts. For a study so preoccupied with the spirit world, I felt that to put an end to this enjoyable ambiguity would be akin to a spirit-grabbing incident. Since then, my curiosity took the better of me though and during a conversation with Sarah Waters, I finally grabbed the spirit and realized that Waters was delighted to have found this book when researching material for writing Affinity. Cited as the epigram to Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black. We learn from the cross-examination that Hart-Davies had often kissed Fletcher – ‘I cannot say how many times I have kissed him, but I always kissed him as a brother’ (Fletcher, 1884, p. 213). Similarly, the spiritualists Louisa Lowe and Georgina Weldon used the power of melodrama and sensation fiction to campaign against lunacy laws and the condition of married women. Both Lowe and Weldon were unfortunate enough to reproduce the plot of The Woman in White in their own lives. Their story exposes how ruthless husbands could manipulate a patriarchal legal system and the belief that communicating with spirits was a form of insanity in order to get rid of their wives. Lowe was falsely incarcerated in an asylum, while Weldon was fortunate enough to escape the mad doctors

218

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

Notes with the help of Lowe herself. For an extended discussion of Louisa Lowe’s life story and ordeal, see Owen (1989, chapter 7). See also Lowe’s own writings on the Lunacy Laws (Lowe, 1883). For an extensive analysis of Weldon’s campaigns, see Walkowitz (1992, pp. 183–9). For Weldon’s own words, see Weldon (1882). For a detailed analysis of the ways in which sensation fiction challenged gender stereotypes and the cultural anxiety this produced, see Pykett (1992). Also see Cvetkovich (1992). Pykett highlights the paradoxes inherent in the gendering of the sensation novel, as it was interpreted as a ‘feminine’, ‘un-feminine’ and ‘anti-feminine’ form (Pykett, 1992, pp. 31–5). See Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel, The Woman in White. The first encounter between Walter with the Ann Catherick (the eponymous heroine) on Hampstead Heath is a particularly effective example: ‘there in the middle of the broad, bright-high road – there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave enquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her’ (Collins, 1998, p. 20). For a discussion of women’s nervous diseases in the nineteenth century as well as the relationship between nervous diseases and the reproductive system, see Oppenheim (1991, pp. 181–232). Also see Showalter (1987). For a discussion of Leigh Hunt’s spiritualist beliefs and methods of treatment, see Owen (1989, pp. 124–36) and Barrow (1986, pp. 50–2). For a discussion of Wood and Fairlamb’s careers after the pair split, also see Tromp (2006, chapter 4). At this séance, Miss Wood agreed to being tied but insisted on sitting in the wire cage with the door open (Adshead, 1878, p. 5). In the 2001 film The Others (dir. Alejandro Amenábar) starring Nicole Kidman, a group of servants seek work at an isolated house on the island of Jersey. The film’s uncanny secret, revealed in the final act, is that the servants (and the mistress of the house) are ghosts. The film is set during WWII but is thoroughly Victorian (Jamesian in fact) in both its atmosphere and conception of the ghostly as bound up with domestic or familial anxiety. As a recent reworking of the servant-as-spectre metaphor, it elucidates Lynch’s argument that the servant was ‘in the home but not of it’. Peter, the materialized spirit in this case, would later become the spirit control of Rosina Showers. Marryat also describes how many mediums were prone to alcoholism, often instigated (or made worse) by their patron’s insistence that they should drink when socializing with them. For a detailed discussion of the abuse of alcohol and drugs by mediums and the dramatic demise of Kate and Margaret Fox, Mary Rosina Showers, Catherine Wood and Annie Fairlamb, see Tromp (2006, especially chapter 6). Throughout this study, the house has been a key motif in both my historical exploration of spiritualist practices and my critical analysis of the ‘textual séance’. The house has functioned as a representation of consciousness in Myers, as a site of shifting histories and haunting in In the Red Kitchen, as a tainted ‘nest’ in Angels and Insects. Interestingly, in his recent documentary The

Notes

219

Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2006), Slavoj Žižek describes the levels of the Bates’ household in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as representative of the Freudian mind – ground floor (ego), top floor (super-ego) and basement (id). I hope that I have shown that this kind of critical thinking does not begin and end with the birth of psychoanalysis and has a much longer, deeper history. 23. Letter from Myers to Oliver Lodge, 28 October 1898. Cited in Luckhurst (2002, p. 242).

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Index acting calculating or emotional 29–30 changes in technique 16, 24 changing selves 195 as immodest 35 and mediumship 27 and Psychical Research 24 as second nature 35 self-fashioning 32 as vocation 25 actors, relationship with roles 27 actresses perceptions of 26 spectralization 16, 27 Affinity 5, 12 and Aurora Leigh 197–8 prison 181 Twelve Months in an English Prison 176–9 ventriloquism 179 afterlife, meaning of 4 aggression, and lesbianism 180 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 122 ambiguity 7 ambition 36 amethyst 167, 169 angels 133–4, 135 Angels and Insects 5, 11, 114 anthropomorphism 119 anticipation 21 anxiety 21 apophrades 202–3 Archer, William 27, 29, 30 architecture, of mind and body 111–12 Ariadne, myth of 54–5 Auerbach, Nina 16, 27, 94 Aurora Leigh 197–8 authenticity 5, 15–16, 57 author as medium 45 position in narrative 70 as protagonist 60–1, 74

authorship 5, 11 autobiography, in acting 32 automatic writing 6, 11, 23 categories of 48, 55–6 investigations of 48 literary allusion 67–8 as literature 58–9 In Memoriam 137–8 and modernist literature 46 Myers’ theory of 136–7 as passive 60 performance 60 roles of author and automatist 55–6 separate from normal self 68 as transgressive 57 uses of term 151 and will 57 ‘Automatic Writing, or the Rationale of Planchette’, 47–8 automatists, separation from spirits 57 Bakhtin, Mikhail 93 Balfour, Arthur 50, 144 Balfour, Francis Maitland 50 Balfour, Gerald William 50 Balfour, Jean 49, 62 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 197–8 Barrett, William 17 Basham, Diana 9 Bates, Samuel 119, 120 beauty, in death 95 Beer, Gillian 118, 122 Benjamin, Walter 159–60 Bernhardt, Sarah 17 Beyond Black 4, 10 biblical allusions, Morpho Eugenia 116–17 Binet, Alfred 19 Blackburn, Charles 99 Blessed Damozel 77 237

238

Index

Bloom, Harold 202–3 Borderland 152–3, 169 Both Sides of the Curtain 23 Bown, Nicola 130 Buckley, Arabella 127–8 Butler, Judith 195 Buxton, Jackie 123 Byatt, A. S. 5, 7, 8, 11, 114, 118 Carroll, Lewis 122 Carter, Angela 13–14 Castle, Terry 188, 189 character representation, and mediumship 62 characters doubling of fictional and real 123–6 interconnections between real and imagined 156–7 Charcot, Jean 19 Charonean staircase 60, 64, 70, 72, 73, 74 Cixous, Hélène 82 class 103, 189 Connor, Steven 99, 148 consciousness 5, 20, 27 in Mary Olivier: A Life 44 in Pilgrimage 43–4 splitting 30–1 subliminal 22 Cook, Florence 11, 23, 84–97 depiction of 6 and Katie King 85–6, 87–8 as passive medium 86–7 social position 86 studied by William Crookes 88–93 theatricality of séances 93 Volckmann attempts to expose as fraud 88 Cook, Kate 99 Coombe-Tennant, Winifred Margaret 49 costume 174–5 counter-history 7, 12 creation, and selection 52 Crookes tube 154 Crookes, William 11, 18, 154 attempt to discredit Volckmann 95 depiction of 6

photography 90–2 role in experiments 93 as scientist and spiritualist 88–9 study of Florence Cook 88–93 use of ‘masculine’ reason 96–7 cross correspondence 46, 47–59 as analogous to myth of Ariadne 54–5 combining elements to make meaningful 49–50 and The Conjugial Angel 143–6 expanding scope 50 images 144–5 influence on May Sinclair 63 interpreters 50 as love letters 50 May Sinclair’s interest 62 as occult collage 47 position of researchers 52 spirit communicators 50 telegraphic writing 52 cross-influence 33–4 Crowe, Catherine 150 crystal gazing 169 Curative-passes 185 Dallas, E. S. 179–80 Darwinism 11, 115, 118 ‘daylight impressions’ 75 death 95, 98, 116, 132 dialogue, imagined 170 Diderot, Denis 27, 29, 34 direct speech 5–6 domestic servants 190–1 double, as motif 87–8 doubling 123–6, 145, 176–7 doubt, religious 122–3 Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert 3–4 Duse, Eleonora 28–9, 31–2 education, and women’s health 182–3 Electricity 5, 12 depiction of séance 148 fragmented self 156 historical context 150 imagery 148 language 148

Index literary and scientific associations 149 parallels with Love and Mr. Lewisham 147–8, 156–7 representation of women 163–4 structure 163–4 training for mediumship 169 electricity, and sexuality 166 electromagnetism 149 Eliot, George 72, 119 emancipation 12 embodiment, of spirits 95 emotion, and phantasmal visitations 21, 106–7 empathy 17 Enoch Arden 142–3 Eros and Psyche 117–18 eroticism 102, 185–6 evolution 114–15, 132–3 evolutionary theory 115–16 Fairlamb, Annie 187 Faraday, Michael 148–9 femininity, Victorian ideology 183–4 fiction influence of living characters 39 portrayal of historical figures 98–9 and scholarship 114 Flournoy, Theodore 19 Fox, Margaret and Kate 5 Freud, Sigmund 19 Fuss, Diana 186 Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth 183 gender 5 applied to interpretation of séances 52 applied to mediums and researchers 53–4 communication of characteristics 27 disruption of norms 180, 195–6 of prose 71–2 and representation of past 82 gender politics, Pilgrimage 11 Ghostwriting Modernism 46–7 Glendinning, Victoria 5, 8, 12, 147 gothic fiction, motif of double 87–8 grief 21

239

grotesque 126, 127 Gurney, Edmund 11, 17, 20–2, 106 hands, symbolism of 196–7 Hart, Lynda 180 haunted interiority 5 ‘haunted sciences’ 155 haunting, images of 189 historical figures, as fictional characters 98–9 history 7 Holland, Mrs see Kipling, Alice (Mrs Holland) Home, D. D. 194 homosexuality 186, 196 houses, as living entities 111–12, 128–9 Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death 18, 19, 20, 22–3, 108–9 Hunt, Chandos Leigh 184–5 Hutcheon, Linda 2, 6 Hyde, Lawrence 79 Ibsen, Henrik 27 identification, between audience and performers 17 identity 5, 9–10, 27, 121–2 imagery 37, 69–70, 148, 186 images, in cross correspondence 144–5 imitation 27 imperfection 98–9 imprisonment, within home 194 In Memoriam 11, 122, 133 as cross correspondence 137–8, 139 In the Red Kitchen 5, 6, 11 allusions to historical figures 99–101 depiction of mediums 82–3 depictions of class and social status 103 doubling of medium and spirit 101–2 eroticism 102 historical figures as fictional characters 98–9 as journey into the underworld 113

240

Index

In the Red Kitchen (Continued) letters and diaries 101 links between protagonists 105–6, 109–10 positioning of heroines 99 presentation of past 82, 83–4 protagonists 81–2 reclamation of mediums 112–13 recycling of matter 104–5 spirit grabbing 101 use of archive material 83, 97–8, 99–101 ways of reading 81–2 incest 121 independence, of women 104 influence 3–4, 142, 180 interior monologue 5 interiority 26 interpreters, as authors 52 intertextuality 5, 11 intimacy 151–2 The Form 185 Invention of Telepathy 47 Irving, Henry 26–7, 30 James, Henry 10, 34, 38–42, 196, 199 James, William 22, 25, 38, 62 ‘journals of the heart’ 189 Jung, C. G. 19 Kaplan, Sidney 69 Keats, John 142 King, Katie appearance 91–2 biography and person 85–6 corporeality 95–6 as dominant 93–4 as double of Florence Cook 87 Kipling, Alice (Mrs Holland) 49, 57–60, 74 language 4, 20 of automatic writing 75 electrical and spiritual 171 Electricity 148 epiphanic 71 mediumistic 37, 161–2 of mediumship 86

and sexuality 166–7 of women 165 Ledger, Sally 27 lesbians, portrayed as spectral 188–9 Lewis, Jeremy 147 Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism 194 Linton, Eliza Lynn 24–5 literary collaboration 59 literary evolution 132–3 literary influence 5 literary text, as materialized spirit 1–2 Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking 1880-1920 6 Lodge, Oliver 8, 18, 50, 52–3, 158 London, Bette 59, 60 Love and Mr. Lewisham 12, 147–8, 151, 156–7 attacks on spiritualism 157–8, 162–3 mediumistic language 161–2 spiritualist imagery 160 Luckhurst, Roger 6, 18, 19, 47 Lustig, T. J. 196 Lynch, Eve M. 190–1 Lyttelton, Laura 50 Lyttelton, Mary Catherine 46, 50 Mack, Dr James 184 Mantel, Hilary 4, 10 marriage, and health 184 Marryat, Florence 10, 87 as author-medium 34 influence of career 15 séance reports 96 Marshall, Annie 50 Marshall, Gail 29–30, 32 Mary Olivier: A Life 11, 43, 44, 63–9 Masks or Faces? 27, 29 ‘Maud-Evelyn’ 199–200 Maudsley, Henry 182–3 meaning, creation of 52 medicine gendered roles in 184 and sexual identity 182 mediums as authors 2 continuing stories after death 45 demands on 192–3

Index as entertainers 15 as historians 7 Home’s categories 194 influence on spirit communication 53 as lunatics 143 network of influence 4 as obscured or disgraced 6 Psychical Research into 28 as researchers 54 roles of 3 as scribes 107–8 as ‘sensitives’ 33–4 sensitivity to others 170 as sources of authority 33 treatment of 192–3 working class 191–3 and writers 141–2 mediums, objectification 6 mediumship and acting 27 authentic 25 authorial 165–6 and character representation 62 as historical and metaphorical 8 language of 86 as literary device 201–2 and performance 10 relationship to theatre 16–17 training for 169 as way of realizing aspirations 103–4 mental capacity, and reproductive function 182–3 mental health, Victorian attitudes 182 mental illness, and sexuality 182 Milk, Flora 99–100, 102–3, 104–5 mimicry 5, 119–22, 141, 146 minds, influence over others 30 modernism 5, 43, 47 modernist literature 46–7 Morpho Eugenia 11, 114 allusions 116–17 ant allegory 126–7 depiction of servants 127, 128 detached descriptive style 126 doubling of fictional and real characters 123–6

241

evolution as theme 115 mimicry, parody and allegory 119–20 quotations and allusions 118–19 textual mimicry 122 understanding and narration of history 116–17 Victorian consciousness 118–19 as Victorian miniature 130 Moses, W. Stainton 48 ‘Multiplex Personality’ 19 Mumler, William 12 My Sister the Actress 10, 34–8 Myers, Frederic 11, 17, 18, 21, 22–3, 27, 28, 98 after-death communication 49 ‘Automatic Writing, or the Rationale of Planchette’, 47–8 communication through Leonora Piper 49 cross-influence hypothesis 33–4 on crystal gazing 169 death of 49 functioning of self 110 stream of consciousness 63 study of Leonora Piper 26, 33 ‘The subliminal consciousness’ 130–1 theory of mind 19, 23, 30–1, 110 The Turn of the Screw 196 Universal Self 108–9, 135, 150 Najarian, James 142 narration, and telepathy 72 narrative, fragility of 99 narrative haunting 142–3 narrator 61–2, 69 natural history in Morpho Eugenia 119 and spiritualism 11, 114–15 naturalness 42 necrography 116 Nights at the Circus 13–14 ‘Nona Vincent’ 10, 34, 38–42 norms 7, 8, 180, 195–6 occult 12, 20, 22 Odylic force 154, 155 Oppenheim, Janet 19, 143–4

242

Index

Orpheus and Eurydice 88, 113 Owen, Alex 7, 16, 186 ‘Palm Sunday’ case see cross correspondence Paradox of Acting 27, 34 Paradoxe sur le comédien 29 passivity 9, 52, 86 past, as available 78–9 peacocks 165 performance 10, 36 performance skills 15–16 performativity 194–5 personality 28, 31, 98 perspectives, multiple and fragmented 5 phantasmal projection 5 phantasms 20–2 Phantasms of the Living 11, 20, 21–2, 106 Phinuit, Dr 26 photography 90–2, 101–2, 160 Piddington, George John 50 Pilgrimage 11, 43, 60–3 consciousness in 43–4 imagery of séances 69–70 Miriam as medium 78–9 portrayal of spiritualism 75–9 theatrical allusions 72–3, 74–5 Piper, Leonora 25–6, 33, 48, 49 Podmore, Frank 12–13, 20 Possession 114, 123, 131 possession in acting 27, 32 in automatic writing 137 levels of 28 by the living 138–9 occult 116 of women 163 power, derived from spirit world 196–7 press, spiritualist 7–8 Principles of Psychology 62 propriety 5 prose, gendered 71–2 protagonist as author 116 psyche, use of term 19–20 psychical evolution 132 psychical invasion theory 57

Psychical Research 2–3 and acting 24 applied to In the Red Kitchen 84 and experimental psychology 106 as historical reference point 6 into mediums 28 and modernism 47 and religion 19 and science 18–19 psychoanalysis 169 psychology and the psychical 20–3 and Psychical Research 106 psychorrhagy 42 Punch 191 quotation

11

‘Radiant Matter’ 154 Rainey, Lawrence 202 Raitt, Suzanne 62 Raymond 8 reading, as listening 101 recycling, in narrative 109–10 reinvention, of self 9 religion 19, 123 religious doubt 122–3 researchers, mediums as 54 Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism 11, 88–9 Richardson, Dorothy 5–6, 11, 43, 69–72 influence of Proust 51 interest in automatic writing 78–9 as medium 45 Ristori, Adelaide 31–2 Roberts, Michèle 5, 7, 8, 11 description of fiction 81 as medium 83–4 Robins, Elizabeth 23–4, 26 roles, as performed or lived 27 Röntgen, Wilhelm Conrad 154 Rowland, Susan 83 Royle, Nicholas 72 scholarship, and fiction 114 science 12 as fairy-land 127–8 as masculine 53

Index and Psychical Research 18–19 and religion 123 and sexuality 166–7 and spiritualism 148–9 séance reports, Crook and Marryat 96 séances 3 activity and passivity 51 as electrical circuits 167 as expressive of sexuality 187–8 imagery of 69–70 influence of science 23 as model for literary understanding 45 as presenting opportunities for women 23–4 role of investigator 52 roles of actors in 93–4 scripts as puzzles 140–1 textual 200 theatricality 93, 161–2 tricks 194–5 second nature, acting as 35 second person, use of 68–9 selection, and creation 52 self fragmented 156 functioning of 110 parameters of 22 sense of 65 subliminal 26 self-awareness 73 self-invention 164–5 self-possession 28–9 sensation fiction 178–82 sensation heroines 100 sensibility 34, 37 ‘sensitives’ 33–4, 42, 149, 155 servants 190–1, 197 sexual identity 182 sexuality 166–7, 182, 187–8 Shakespeare, William 143 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 143 Sidgwick, Eleanor Balfour 50 Sidgwick, Henry 17 simulation 13 Sinclair, Iain 13 Sinclair, May 5–6, 11, 43 influence of cross correspondence 63

243

interest in cross correspondence 51, 62 as medium 45 review of Pilgrimage 60–1 Skekleton, Henry 174 social class, and spiritualism 168 Society for Psychical Research (SPR) 4, 5, 17–23, 116 effect on spiritualism 42 elitism 25 influence of 6 objectives 17–18 research interests 16 space, as consciousness 110–11 spectres lesbians as 188–9 servants as 190–1 spinsters, as spectral 189 spirit grabbing 88, 95, 101 spirit photography 12–13 spirit world, as source of power 196–7 spirits clothing 174–5 corporeality 95–6 male, controlled by women 186–7 as ungendered 186 spiritual evolution 132–3 spiritualism aspects of 201 as dangerous and transgressive 8 driven by desire of the living 131 effect of SPR 42 and electrical science 148 and eroticism 185–6 evolutionary 135–6 and evolutionary theory 115–16 and financial emancipation 158–9 fraudulent 189–90 influence of women 7 and natural history 11, 114–15 as object of science 149–50 place in society 201 portrayed in Pilgrimage 75–9 as resistance to realism 2 resurgences 8 and science 148–9 as scientific discipline 132 and social class 168

244

Index

spiritualism (Continued) socio-economic factors 159–60 SPR research 16 Tennyson’s interest 141 as theatrical pastime 75–6 themes 5 Spiritualism and the Age we Live In 150 Stead, W. T. 152–3 stories, recording 107 stream of consciousness 62–3 subliminal consciousness 22 substantiation 107–8, 132, 164 supernormality 22–3 Sutton, Kakie 26 Swedenborg, Emanuel 133, 135, 186 Sweet, Matthew 202 Sword, Helen 46–7, 82 Symons, Arthur 32 technologies 12 technology, as secular and religious 153–4 telaesthesia 17 telepathic communication 6 telepathy 17, 72, 151–2 Telepathy and Literature 72 telephones 153 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 11, 122, 133, 136, 141 tension, gendered 53–4 Terry, Ellen 17 text 119, 139 textual séances 200 The Anxiety of Influence 202–3 The Apparitional Lesbian 188 ‘The Canterville Ghost’ 20 The Conjugial Angel 11, 114, 130–45 ant allegory 132 and cross correspondence 143–6 evolution as theme 115 mimicry 141 readings 141 relocation of modernist narrative techniques 136 séance scripts as puzzles 140–1 use of In Memoriam 136–7 The Darkened Room 7, 186 The Fairyland of Science 127–8

The Form 184–5 The Invention of Telepathy 1870–1901 6 the muse 11 The Spiritualist 84–5 ‘The subliminal consciousness’ 130–1 The Turn of the Screw 196 theatre, parts for women 16 theatricality 5, 9–10 and authenticity 15–16 and ghosts 59–60 Twelve Months in an English Prison 176–7 theories, of acting and mediumship 27 theory of acting 10 There is No Death 15 ‘Things Are Not What They Seem’ 119 Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There 122 Thurschwell, Pamela 6, 19, 151 time, rupture of 74 Todorov, Tzvetan 92 trance utterances 23 transmission, intellectual and emotive 30 ‘True stories and the facts in fiction’ 114 truthfulness 32 Twelve Months in an English Prison 12, 173–4, 176–9, 196 typing 151 unconscious, understandings of 167–8 undead 139–40 Universal Self 108–9, 135, 150 vampirism 41 Varley, Cromwell 150 ventriloquism 5, 99, 100 Verrall, Helen 57–8 Verrall, Margaret 49, 54–5, 56–7 Victorian Afterlives 4 Victorian consciousness, Morpho Eugenia 118–19 Victorians, legacy 202

Index vocabulary, shared between modernist authors and automatists 46 voice 11, 69, 99 Volckmann, William 88, 95 von Reichenbach, Karl 149 Wallace, Alfred Russel 11, 115, 119–20, 123–4, 132, 134 war, resurgence of spiritualism 8 Waters, Sarah 5, 8, 12 diversity of sources 198 as medium 174 portrayals of nineteenth century lesbians 173 techniques 172 use of sensation fiction 181 Wells, H. G. 12, 147, 156 opposition to spiritualism 158, 162–3 White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings 1 White, Rosie 83

245

Wilde, Oscar 20 will, and automatic writing 57 Willett, Mrs 52, 55–6, 62, 63–4, 75 see also Winifred Coombe-Tennant Willis Fletcher, Susan 12, 173–4, 176–9 Wilson, Cheryl A. 60 women aggressive 180 health, and education 182–3 language of 165 as possessions 163 sexuality 121 social position 168 Victorian view of 120 Wood, Catherine 23, 187–8 writers, and mediums 141–2 writing 107–8, 142, 164 X-rays 154

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