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SIX U n d e r t h e I n f l u e n c e The Fox Sister s and Per nicious Spir its I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. —Charles Dickens,“To Be Taken With a Grain of Salt” A L C O H O L , M E D I U M S H I P, A N D I M P R O P R I E T Y Spiritualism was haunted by a number of scandals, and these scandals were not all sexual in nature. One of the most distressing indignities for Spiritualists and damning for non-Spiritualists was the abuse of alcohol and drugs in the movement . Spiritualism meant, by definition, coming under the influence—most often of spiritual communication, but, as was the case with many young women adherents, of alcoholic spirits as well.The events at a typical séance— tipping tables, ghostly hands in contact with fleshy bodies, conversations with the dead, and the materialization of spirits—may have often seemed bizarre and drug-induced, but they were attended to with deadly sobriety all over Britain. Indeed, many Spiritualists were enthusiastically involved in the temperance movement—an alliance that comes as no surprise considering the faith’s emphasis on the precedence of the spiritual over the material—and antialcohol tirades peppered the Spiritualist newspapers. Still, in a cultural climate of massive and routine alcohol consumption, some Spiritualists overindulged. Though most respectable people drank, the fact that several of the religion’s most famous young female mediums were reported to have tipped bottles as 1 5 1 often as they tipped tables invited harsh criticism from many quarters. The headliners of the British Spiritualist press—Florence Cook, Mary Rosina Showers, and Catherine Wood—all ran into trouble with alcohol and drugs. One Spiritualist leader declared that drink “was often to be found at the bottom of the trouble [with a medium] . . . and intemperance had the direst consequences for a medium’s power” (qtd. in Owen 64). Indeed, the movement ’s founders, the Fox sisters, were notorious for their alcohol and drug use. The coincidence of young female mediumship and alcohol abuse alone merits further study, but there is an even more complex web of connections that emerges from the ideological resistance to oppression that accompanied even the most “conservative” Spiritualist practices.This web links the dangers of the medium’s identity, alcohol use, and social disruption. In the fiction I discussed in the previous chapter, characters attempted to use drugs and alcohol as a means to escape or repress the violence of imperialism , but their complicity in imperial violence was instead exposed by spirits— both alcoholic and ghostly. In the lives of some young women Spiritualists, the flight attempted through drink and drugs was retranslated. They sought to escape the social limitations of the non-Spiritualist world that they often successfully betrayed in the séance, to extend their “improprieties” to the larger social context in which they lived. While many mediums successfully channeled the most resistant moments of the séance to their lives outside, even the most adept of these women were not able simply to cast off the confines of their culture. Attempts to expand their liberation through alcohol use, however , were doomed to failure, just as they had been in the fictional accounts. The inadequacy of alcohol and drugs is evidenced in the story of Spiritualism’s founders, the Fox sisters. They provide a revealing test case, in part because they embodied a dramatic fusion of so many of the social tensions that surrounded Spiritualism and female materialization mediumship as it was read in Britain: the dangers of the movement’s American origins, of sexual violations, drink, and madness. This complex of interconnected concerns offers us a means of reading the Fox sisters’ failed attempt at the extension of Spiritualism ’s potential social transformation. In the extremity and high publicity of their case, we can better understand the tensions that emerged for all women materialization mediums. This discussion will also provide the springboard from which to explore, in the following chapter, another medium’s more successful efforts to recast her social context. To provide the social context for a discussion of the Fox sisters and to lay the groundwork for assessing the ways in which their case may not have been...

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