The sympathetic medium : feminine channeling, the occult, and communication technologies, 1859-1919

224 Pages·2010·2.382 MB·English

by  Galvan, Jill Nicole

(cid:2)
THE SYMPATHETIC MEDIUM

THE SYMPATHETIC
n
MEDIUM
FEMININE
CHANNELING,
THE OCCULT, AND
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES,
1859–1919
Jill Galvan
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2010 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review,
this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in
any form without permission in writing from the pub-
lisher. For information, address Cornell University Press,
Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2010 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Galvan, Jill Nicole, 1971–
The sympathetic medium : feminine channeling, the
occult, and communication technologies, 1859–1919 /
Jill Galvan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4801-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Channeling (Spiritualism)—History—19th century.
2. Women mediums—History—19th century.
3. Communication—Technological innovations—
History—19th century. 4. Spiritualism in literature.
5. Mediums in literature. 6. Communication in
literature. 7. American literature—19th century—
History and criticism. 8. English literature—
19th century—History and criticism. I. Title.
BF1286.G35 2010
133.9'1082—dc22
2009028973
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally
responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent
possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials
include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free
papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly
composed of nonwood fibers. For further information,
visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
(cid:2)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Tuning in to
the Female Medium 1
1. Sympathy and the Spiriting
of Information In the Cage 23
2. Securing the Line: Automatism and
Cross-Cultural Encounters in
Late Victorian Gothic Fiction 61
3. Du Maurier’s Media: The Phonographic
Unconscious on the Cusp of the Future 99
4. Telltale Typing, Hysterical Channeling:
The Medium as Detective Device 135
5. Literary Transmission and
Male Mediation 160
Epilogue 188
Bibliography 195
Index 209

(cid:2)
Acknowledgments
I have lived with this book a long time and owe
many thanks to those who have enabled and guided my efforts along the
way. I’m grateful to my graduate school mentor, Joe Bristow, for pushing
me early on to clarify the terms of my argument and for continuing to
be committed to my success in the profession ever since. Kate Hayles first
motivated my interest in topics that would eventually lead me to this book
and went on to offer invaluable early direction of the project. Many thanks
also to Michael North and Mary Terrall for their insightful readings of this
work in its earliest stages, and to Jonathan Grossman, who gave me excellent
advice at a critical juncture. Over the years, many others have read sections
or commented on aspects of the book, including David Brewer, Georgina
Dodge, Richard Dutton, Linda Ferreira-Buckley, Beth Hewitt, Cricket Keat-
ing, Valerie Lee, Karen Leick, Marlene Longenecker, Jim Phelan, Elizabeth
Renker, David Riede, Clare Simmons, Mytheli Sreenivas, Rebecca Wanzo,
Roxann Wheeler, and members of UCLA’s Nineteenth-Century Reading
Group. I am also grateful to the very helpful anonymous readers at Cornell
University Press, as well as to Peter Potter for offering editorial guidance that
has been both incisive and encouraging.
Writing this book has given me the opportunity to engage in an excit-
ing conversation with others about Victorian technologies, the occult, and
gender. Joe Bristow, Jennifer Fleissner, Kate Hayles, Marty Hipsky, Laura
Otis, and Anne Stiles all generously shared with me unpublished manuscript
versions of their work. At numerous conferences, I have been challenged and
enlightened by my fellow presenters and by audience members; I’m espe-
cially appreciative to Laura and many others who invited me to take part in
their panels.
The rare-books collections at the Harry Ransom Center at the University
of Texas at Austin were a great aid to my research. I also thank UCLA and
its English Department and the Ohio State University’s College of Humani-
ties, which offered helpful financial support at different phases of the writ-
ing process. Earlier versions of material in chapters 1, 2, and 5 appeared as
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
journal articles—respectively: “Class Ghosting ‘In the Cage,’ ” Henry James
Review 22 (2001): 297–306; “Christians, Infidels, and Women’s Channeling
in the Writings of Marie Corelli,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003):
83–97; and “The Narrator as Medium in George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil,’ ”
Victorian Studies 48 (2006): 240–48. I am grateful to the editors for permis-
sion to use the material here.
Finally, I offer thanks to the people who have sustained me in many ways
during the writing of this book. I have been inspired by the tenacity and
optimism of my father, Carlos Galvan. My mother, Janice Galvan, gave much
to enable my early successes and continues to be a constant source of affec-
tion and support. Last and most of all, I thank my husband, Dan Seward, for
always listening and for being generous with his time, energy, and patience.
This book is dedicated to you.
Introduction
Tuning in to the Female Medium
In The Soul of Lilith (1892) by Marie Corelli, a
scientifically ambitious man uses a woman to discover the secrets of the heav-
ens. The Lilith of the title lies entranced in a makeshift spiritual laboratory in
a locked room in a London house, subjected to a brilliant Middle Easterner
named El-Râmi. Having revived Lilith’s dead body six years previously, El-
Râmi now tethers her soul. While she is unconscious, her soul traverses the
immortal regions of the universe, but he, a skilled metaphysical engineer, may
call it back anytime he wishes, querying Lilith about her cosmic experiences.
El-Râmi’s ultimate goal: to glean empirical knowledge of God—His realm
and whether He exists.
Lilith is a woman-turned-communication device, a way for El-Râmi to
receive data from afar. Her body is a “machine” with what amounts to an
on-off switch, and which he keeps running smoothly through regular injec-
tions of something called “Electro-flamma.”1 But if her function is techno-
logical, it is also spiritual, in that the information El-Râmi seeks comes from
a great beyond. That her mechanical body coupled with her soul-messages
makes her so difficult to categorize—is she a personified telegraph, or more
like a séance medium?—underscores that she represents not so much any
1. Marie Corelli, The Soul of Lilith (1892; London: Methuen, 1905), 37, 231.
1
2 THE SYMPATHETIC MEDIUM
one particular instrument or method as a communicative medial role. Lilith
connects to another place, bringing new intelligence from there to here. At
the same time, Corelli does not let us forget that this medium is a woman,
emphasizing Lilith’s beauty, which inspires a dangerous ardor in El-Râmi and
a jealous sense of rivalry with his brother.
A bestselling author with a flair for crafting plots that resonated with the
public, Corelli genders transmission in a way that would have been familiar
to readers by the late Victorian period. The nineteenth century witnessed
remarkable feats of transmission: ghostly messages turned up in séances, the
telegraph and telephone sent words almost instantaneously through the
“ether”—both created previously inconceivable forms of interpersonal con-
nection. Uniting these communications was not just their mysteriousness
but also their need for a go-between, someone to mediate them; very often
it was a woman who carried out this task. The Soul of Lilith translates into
the stuff of transcendental romance a figure that had emerged by Corelli’s
day in multiple locales, ranging from the office, a common site for women
telegraphers and typists, and the telephone switchboard, an almost exclusively
female workspace, to the séance, where women predominated as spirit and
hypnotic channels.
Focusing on Britain and the United States around the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, this book explores depictions of the female com-
munication go-between. As I argue, the work of mediating others’ transmis-
sions was a single vocation that took many specific forms—typing, telegraph
operating, telephone operating, and occult mediumship; for reasons having
to do with ideal conditions of dialogue and knowledge exchange, people
viewed women as particularly well suited for this vocation. By examining
this gendering, we gain a revealing vantage point onto nineteenth-century
ideas of femininity as well as modernizing concepts of communication and
knowledge transfer. One consequence of the feminization of channeling is
that a distinct feminine trope arises in literature and culture. The female
medium possesses certain recognizable emotional and psychological char-
acteristics and is repeatedly implicated in situations involving private infor-
mation and its antitheses, publicity and disclosure. Yet this figure is at once
emblematic and pliable: she signifies diversely across individual narratives
and spans multiple genres. The Sympathetic Medium tracks her pervasive and
versatile literary presence.
Understanding the cultural place of the female medium requires appre-
ciating the birth during the nineteenth century of a complex new world
of technological and occult communications. Inventors came forward with
a host of transmitting, transcribing, and recording technologies. In 1837,