The Female Fantastic

Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s

Lizzie McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, Rebecca Soares, Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell, Rebecca Soares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351107778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For women-identified writers of both eras, the fantastic offered double vision. Not only did the genre offer strategic cover for challenging the status quo, but also a heuristic mechanism for teasing out the gendered psyche's links to creative, personal, and erotic agency. These dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity, are linked in intriguing and complex matrices to key moments in gender(ed) history.

This volume contains essays from international scholars covering a wide range of topics, including werewolves, mummies, fairies, demons, time travel, ghosts, haunted spaces and objects, race, gender, queerness, monstrosity, madness, incest, empire, medicine, and science. By interrogating two non-consecutive decades, we seek to uncover the inter-relationships among fantastic literature, feminism, and modern identity and culture. Indeed, while this book considers the relationship between the 1890s and 1920s, it is more an examination of women's modernism in light of gendered literary production during the fin-de-siècle than the reverse.

Section III

The Fantastic and the Modern Female Experience

Fantastic People

Scott Rogers

During the second half of the nineteenth century, England witnessed a remarkable interest in spiritualism. This movement was, initially, largely dominated by male “mesmerists” or “mediums” who often worked with a female assistant or patient as a part of the performance of spiritualism. As a result, spiritualism allowed both the men and women performing it and the men and women who were attracted to it to engage in conduct that was, often, far outside traditional Georgian and Victorian norms. While the following may seem an odd fit for a collection of essays about women and the fantastic, some brief attention to the gender politics associated with late Victorian spiritualism might provide a bit of context for the ways twentieth-century writers deployed the fantastic in their art.

One of these mid-Victorian mediums—and one whose life intersects with English art in interesting ways—was a medium named Daniel Dunglas Home. Home was born in Scotland in 1833 and emigrated to America when he was a boy. At some point in his teens, he began to claim that he had special powers that allowed him to communicate with the dead, and by the time he was a young man, he was conducting séances at private gatherings. After achieving a modicum of success, Home returned to Europe and took his show on the road. Claims about his supernatural abilities are indeed impressive. In his discussion of Home in After Lives: A Guide to Heaven (2009), John Casey reports that Home could

alter his body dimensions … Normally five feet ten inches tall, he grows, on one occasion, to six feet six inches so that ‘there was a space of four inches between his waistcoat and the waistband of his trousers. He appeared to grow also in breadth and size all over’.

(372)

Casey also describes some of Home’s other feats, as recorded in William Crookes’s “Notes of Séances with D. D. Home,” which had been published in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research:

He then held his fingers up, smiled and nodded as if pleased, took up a fine cambric handkerchief belonging to Miss Douglas, folded it into his right hand and went to the fire. Here he threw off the bandage from his eyes and by means of the tongs lifted a piece of red hot charcoal from the centre and deposited it on the folded cambric … Occasionally he fanned the coal to a white heat with his breath … Presently he took the coal back to the fire and handed the handkerchief to Miss Douglas. A small hole about half an inch in diameter was burnt in the centre … but it was not even singed anywhere else.

(103)

After a séance in 1871, Crooke claims to have witnessed Home making an accordion play even though his hands and feet were held by participants at the séance:

In this manner is was physically impossible for him to have touched the accordion with hands or feet. The lamp also gave plenty of light to allow all present seeing any movement on his part. The accordion now commenced to sound, and then played several notes and bars. Every one present expressed themselves quite convinced that this result could not possibly have been effected by Mr. Home’s agency.

Mr. Wr. Crookes now said that the accordion was brought up to his knees and pressed against them. He put his hand down and took it by the handle. It then played in his hand, Mr. Home’s hands and feet being held by others as before.

(113)

Other witnesses reported seeing Home levitate out a window (Casey 372). Given these feats, it is not surprising that Home sometimes performed for illustrious audiences: William Cullen Bryant, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Anthony Trollope, Napoleon III, Conan Doyle, and many nobles. On July 23, 1855, he performed at a house in Ealing, where Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were in attendance.

Like many people at the time, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was quite interested in spiritualism. Her interest should not be snickered at. Many respectable figures of the day found themselves keenly interested in spiritualism—an area of inquiry that was, it is important to remember, potentially a branch of empirical science. Just as alchemy had attracted such luminaries as Isaac Newton, the spiritualist movement promised to answer many of the questions Victorians had about the relationship between the world they knew and the world they hoped lay beyond.

To put it mildly, Robert Browning was extremely skeptical, believing these mediums and spiritualists to be frauds—and often ones with motives that were sexual in nature, as these séances encouraged physical contact either as a way of invoking a spirit or as a way of providing evidence of the presence of a spirit. During the séance, Home reportedly contacted a child of the Brownings who had died in infancy and conjured a “head” out of thin air. Unfortunately for Home, the Brownings never lost a child in infancy. Robert Browning pounced on the “head,” which he revealed to be Home’s bare foot. Home was caught out as a fraud a number of times: he failed to fool Empress Eugenie (again using his feet); he “dematerialized” a “splendid row of emeralds of great value,” which were of course not returned by the “spirits” (Casey 374); he swindled an elderly widow of £75,000, which resulted in a lawsuit that determined him to be a fraud and ordered him to return the money. If it were not enough that Home died, denounced by Harry Houdini “as a humbug, a pervert, and a moral degenerate”—who also “insinuat[ed] that [he died from] syphilis” (Casey 375)—Robert Browning published “Mr. Sludge, the Medium” in his 1864 collection, Dramatic Personae. The poem begins with this:

NOW, don’t, sir! Don’t expose me!

Just this once! This was the first and only time, I’ll swear,—

Look at me,—see, I kneel,—the only time,

I swear, I ever cheated,—yes, by the soul

Of Her who hears—(your sainted mother, sir!)

All, except this last accident, was truth—

This little kind of slip!—and even this,

It was your own wine, sir, the good champagne,

(I took it for Catawba, you’re so kind)

Which put the folly in my head!

(Browning 1–10)

In the poem, Browning transforms Home from a respected medium to an embarrassment, a charlatan, and a fraud who eventually admits “Whatever put such folly in my head, / I know ‘t was wicked of me” (Browning 33–34). Just as Home had attempted to transform himself into something extraordinary due to his connection with the supernatural, Browning reveals him to be, in fact, extraordinarily human—and ultimately it is Home’s basic humanity that undergirds his appeal. He was a huckster who preyed upon the desires of his audience to know what lay “behind the veil,” as Tennyson put it in In Memoriam (1849)—a poem which, itself, attempts to follow its subject somehow beyond the human and into the afterlife, only to fail to find any reassurance or certainty beyond simple insistence that such an afterlife exists (section 56 line 28).

Home was of course one of many famous mediums operating in England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the “mesmeric séance[s]” of Franz Anton Mesmer to the mediumship of Gladys Osborne Leonard, the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was “the occasion for contests over authority in science, medicine, and intellectual life” (Winter 1, 4). Spiritualists were of course not exclusively men; women played key roles in the history of the spiritualist movement, often serving as the subject of the mesmerist. As Amy Lehman explains in Victorian Women and the Theater of Trance (2009), there are deep connections between the performance of mesmerism and the Victorian attempt to treat it as a new form of science, and women were often the subjects of mesmeric treatment:

A woman performing in a trance state in the Victorian era might be found in a number of different contexts: as a professional medium, a Spiritualist trance speaker, or as the medical subject of scientific experiments on the effects of mesmerism or hypnotism. In all of these cases, she appeared to enter into an altered state of consciousness in which she could access and manifest esoteric wisdom, spiritual entities, or even normally hidden aspects of her own personality.

(2)

Even Charles Dickens—no doubt attracted to the theatricality of it—took up mesmerism in the 1840s to provide relief to Madame De la Rue, who suffered from “convulsions of the limbs, headaches, insomnia, and neurasthenic symptoms including catalepsy” (Lehman 35). One such subject, Elizabeth O’Key, a young woman under mesmeric treatment by a Dr. John Elliotson, was the subject of a long report in The Lancet. This report led Lehman to draw a remarkably incisive conclusion about the theater of mesmerism (and by extension many other forms of spiritualism): the performance of mesmerism allowed both those being mesmerized and those in attendance to break sharply with social or sexual mores. Women performing these entrancements were “able to assert and express [themselves] with unusual freedom, through characters which were either aspects of her own personality” or entirely other (Lehman 48).

One modernist medium, Gladys Osborne Leonard, appeared to adhere to the legacy of traditional Victorian standards of female conduct. Her biographer, Susy Smith, describes her as perfectly in keeping with such standards of behavior and demeanor. She was “quiet and tranquil, forthright, simple and direct. She is gracious, with a native dignity and kindliness … [She is] poised, wise, and serene …” (Smith 22). In her youth, she claimed to have access to a spirit named “Feda” in the afterlife: “Feda told them that she was to be Gladys’ spirit control. She also said she was Gladys’ great-great-grandmother, a Hindu by birth, who had been raised by a Scottish family until the age of thirteen” (Smith 19). Smith (an incredibly credulous biographer) admits that there exists some “question of Feda’s real nature,” but explains that although “The idea of losing her identity in trance was repugnant to Gladys” the two eventually

began a long ‘association’ of a most unusual nature. The Feda personality and Gladys were friends; sometimes they seemed almost rivals, sparring for the use of the body known as Gladys Osborne Leonard. But they were never able to communicate with each other except with the assistance of a sitter who would relay their messages.

(Smith 20)

Like other mediums, Leonard’s “spirit control” provided access not just allegedly to the realm of spirits, but also to essentially sanctioned alternatives to the expectations of Georgian and Victorian female behavior.

As Marlene Tromp explains in “Spirited Sexuality: Sex, Marriage, and Victorian Spiritualism,” Victorian séances were often incredibly tactile experiences:

The darkened parlor of the séance invited and embodied the disruption of the ordinary. In this space, the linked hands of the sitters violated customary barriers of age and gender, and the intimate spaces underneath the tipping tables set the stage for more than simply spiritual stimulation. Faces and knees were caressed while the lights were out, gentlewomen submitted to be kissed by strangers, and the most private recesses of the past and present were exposed to the public eye.

(67–68)

Female mediums who had “materialized” a spirit would often encourage participants to touch the spirit, or the spirit would expose parts of its body to demonstrate that it was indeed materialized. Records associated with perhaps the most famous medium of the nineteenth century, Florence Cook, allow us to see this behavior quite clearly. Cook, who operated in the 1870s, materialized a spirit named “Katie King.” King, Cook contended, was “the spirit-world daughter of a seventeenth-century brigand turned governor of Jamaica” literally bodied forth into the room where the séance was taking place (Tromp 73). Cook’s materializations were particularly sexualized. Tromp explains that Cook would lift “her white spiritual drapery to expose the nakedness of her feet underneath …” (73). Cook’s feet and ankles were not the only parts of her body that she sometimes sexualized. Tromp details how Cook wore low-cut garments that exposed her neck and arms, much to the delight of her male sitters, and that she encouraged at least one sitter to examine “this young ‘spirit’ woman’s bosom,” revealing, at last, that “Katie wore none of the traditional women’s underclothing” (73, 74). These séances provided a relatively sanctioned framework for what are clearly wild deviations from Victorian standards of polite sexual conduct—as Tromp explains, such scenes “suggest both the level of violation made possible by the séance and the confidence in its blamelessness” (74). When we consider the ways that séances allowed participants—and perhaps particularly women—to explore the possibilities of female conduct that lay beyond the confines of traditional Victorian and Georgian strictures, it is unsurprising on one hand that Robert Browning would have been profoundly uncomfortable with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s attraction to these performances and on the other, that she would have found such performances deeply attractive.

The essays contained in this section explore the myriad ways that authors deployed the fantastic as a means of exploring alternatives to traditional expectations for women’s behavior or identities. Some accomplished this by using time travel as a means of exploring the relationship between “normative time” and “normative lives,” as Elizabeth English argues that Burdekin does in her work. Others achieved this, as Mary Clai Jones argues, by representing the revenge of a revivified Egyptian harem girl who breaks with even the supernatural stereotype of the mummy who metes out her revenge on the English to present us with one who “refus[es] all objectification, consumption, or domestication” by rejecting the colonial trope that insisted that such figures could be absorbed into proper English domestic life. Some, as Jennifer Mitchell argues in her discussion of Radclyffe Hall’s “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, explored the limits of representing “queer subjectivity” in modern English life. Some attempted to subvert existing literary genres such as the Gothic, as Andrew Hock Soon Ng argues, in order to interrogate the material conditions in which women lived. All of these essays, in the end, explore how female bodies can be transformed or modified in ways that render them somehow more than human—and embrace the supernatural and the fantastic as a means of exploring the boundaries of what existences were now possible for women in the modern world.

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.” The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning. Modern Library, 1934.

Casey, John. After Lives: A Guide to Heaven. Oxford UP, 2009.

Crooke, F. M. R. “Notes of Séances with D. D. Home.” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 6, 1889–90, pp. 98–127.

Lehman, Amy. Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance: Mediums, Spiritualists and Mesmerists in Performance. McFarland, 2009.

Smith, Susy. The Mediumship of Mrs. Leonard. University Books, 1964.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. In Memoriam, edited by Erik Gray, 2nd ed., Norton, 2004....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Toward a Female Fantastic
• List of Contributors
• Section I Heaps, Rubbish, Treasure, Litter, Tatters: Fantastic Objects in Context
• Section II Profoundly and Irresolvably Political: Fantastic Spaces
• Section III The Fantastic and the Modern Female Experience: Fantastic People
• Section IV Invitation to Dissidence: Fantastic Creatures
• Index