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1. SPIRITED SEXUALITY: SEX, MARRIAGE AND VICTORIAN SPIRITUALISM
- State University of New York Press
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ONE S p i r i t e d S e x u a l i t y Sex, Mar r iage, and Victor ian Spir itualism I have reason to know that the power at work in these phenomena, like Love,“laughs at locksmiths.” —Sir William Crookes, F.R.S., “Miss Florence Cook’s Mediumship” D R AW I N G R O O M E R O T I C S Spiritualism was sexy. From its humble beginnings in 1848, thisVictorian faith of “sittings,” mediums, and spirit contact thrilled its practitioners and detractors alike and broke countless rules of decency and decorum in spite of the fact that it was nurtured and developed in the drawing rooms of the proprietous middle classes. The darkened parlor of the séance invited and embodied the disruption of the ordinary. In this world, 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 just 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. Unsurprisingly, these signs of disarray presaged the erotic tales of trysts between nubile, young mediums and their benefactors, as well as mediums’ secret nuptials and pronouncements regarding extramarital “spiritual affinities” and “free love.” In the face of all this sexual pandemonium, the men and women who engaged in these activities still moved in polite society , a phenomenon that had a significant impact on relations between the sexes and the institution of marriage. 2 1 To understand this impact, we must turn to the most titillating of all these disruptions, the receptive bodies of mediums, often young and feminine, which provided the primary channel for intercourse with the spirits.Through mediumship , musical instruments floated in the air and were played without the touch of human hands, tropical flowers filled rooms in the dead of winter, and ghosts granted spiritual advice. But the immaterial ponderings and playful antics of the long dead were not all the mediums channeled. Florence Cook, possibly the most famous medium in history, was fifteen years old1 when she began to publicly materialize spirit body parts such as hands, arms, and faces.2 She was seventeen when she first offered up her body as the venue for the stunning “full-form materialization,” the physical embodiment of a spirit manifested through the spiritual energy and, as some theorists later claimed, the ectoplasm of the medium. A medium entered a secluded space in a darkened room, and, after a few moments of the circle’s devotional singing or praying, a fully materialized “ghost” would emerge from that space, while the medium remained inside.This space was often a specially constructed and heavily curtained cabinet or recess in the room, and to ensure that the spirit was not the medium in disguise, measures—sometimes dramatic or extreme—were taken to keep her there. She might be bound to the chair within by chains or ropes; have her hair nailed to the cabinet; have a string run though the hole in her pierced ear to a weight attached outside the cabinet—she might even, in some cases, be caged. (See figures 1 and 2 for images of a spirit and materialization cabinet.) Mediums materialized both female and male spirit entities, who entered the séance to do more than give advice about living a consecrated life. They flirtatiously engaged with the sitters, tendering kisses or the chance to squeeze their limbs or feel their hips as proof of their materiality. Born into and groomed for polite society, the young women who produced these scandalous displays did so under the aegis of Spiritualism—and their behavior did far more than simply upset etiquette. While it certainly reaffirmed many culturally conservative values in its rhetoric and sometimes figured women in socially repressive ways, Spiritualism also undermined the social structures that defined a narrow circuit of behavior for women. This “unevenness,” as Mary Poovey describes such contradictory social constructs, granted women a new kind of self-determination, a selfdetermination that led to many unconventional choices. In this chapter, I will look at this phenomenon through the case of one medium, Florence Cook, and through her, I will argue that mediumship provided one means of resisting gendered limitations—a form of resistance I will examine in relation to other issues in...