The Patience of Pearl: Spiritualism and Authorship in the Writings of Pearl Curran

Notes

233 Introduction: From Spiritualism toVivisection 1. James Laughlin, Peter Glassgold, and Frederick R. Martin, eds., New Directions in Prose and Poetry 40. PW poems were selected and edited by Stephen E. Braude, who has since published a study of the PW “case” in Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life after Death (133–76), concluding that PW was a secondary self of Curran’s subconscious. Pamela White Hadas’s poem appears in Beside Herself: Pocahontas to Patty Hearst: Poems. 2. See Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. 3. David Abbott, Behind the Scenes with the Mediums; Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death. For the Metropolitan exhibit see Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. 4. “A Nut for Psychologists,” in Walter Franklin Prince, The Case of Patience Worth, 393. Curran originally published the essay in the Unpartizan Review. Prince’s study, first published in 1927 by the Boston Society for Psychic Research, will hereafter be cited as CPW. 5. Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning: A Novel, xii. 6. Patience Worth Record 1:98 (hereafter cited as PWR), quoted in Irving Litvag’s Singer in the Shadows: The Strange Story of Patience Worth, 86 (hereafter cited as SS). 7. Pearl Lenore Curran, Hope Trueblood, 3. 8. Curran, Telka: An Idyll of Medieval England, 16. 9. See Joseph Jastrow, “Patience Worth: An Alter Ego,” in Wish and Wisdom: Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief, 78–92; John Hix, “Patience Worth—An Unsolved Phenomenon,” 83– 88; Rosalind Heywood, Beyond the Reach of Sense: An Inquiry into Extra-Sensory Perception, 107–11; and Robert Goldenson, Mysteries of the Mind: The Drama of Human Behavior, 44–53. 10.Mia Grandolfi Wall,Rediscovering Pearl Curran: Solving the Mystery of Patience Worth. Wall’s study includes previously unpublished correspondence between the Currans and a Connecticut admirer of PW, Milo Leon Norton. 11. Gioia Diliberto,“Ghost Writer.” Notes 234 Notes 12. With others who have written on this subject, I reserve capitalized Spiritualism for the historical movement. See Sheri Weinstein’s “Technologies of Vision: Spiritualism and Science in Nineteenth-Century America,” 138n1. 13. Ann Braude,“Women’s History Is American Religious History,”87–107. For the close interweaving of literary, political, and culturally gendered strands in the history of Spiritualism , see Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America; Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism, 5, 22–24; Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America; Caroline Field Levander, Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture; Susan Danielson,“The Woman Question, Free Love, and Nineteenth -Century American Fiction”; Daniel Cottom, Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals; Russell M. Goldfarb and Clare R. Goldfarb, Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century Letters; and Howard Kerr, Mediums and Spirit Rappers and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900. 14. Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, 137–39. 15. On the origin of the white crow metaphor used by James to express his interest in the possibly “supernormal” powers of the Boston medium, Leonora Piper, see R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology and American Culture, 146–47. 16. See Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism; Eric T. Carlson, “The History of Dissociation until 1880,” 8–9, in Quen, ed., Split Minds/Split Brains; and Ernest Hilgard, Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human Thought and Action, 133–35. For a history of the Ouija board in America and copyright claims to the name, see Stoker Hunt, Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game, 5–6. 17. Morton Prince, The Unconscious: The Fundamentals of Human Personality Normal and Abnormal, 204–10. See Eugene Taylor, William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin , 106. For Janet on dissociation as a “failure (in the face of disturbing events) to synthesize ” vs. later assertions of nonpathological capacities for dissociation, see Stephen Braude, “Memory: The Nature and Significance of Dissociation,” in Jennifer Radden, ed., The Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Companion, 106–8. Adam Crabtree, in “Explanations of Dissociation in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in Quen, ed., Split Minds/Split Brains, 85–93, situates Prince’s work among the explanations of dissociation. 18. Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study in Abnormal Personality. Prince also wrote an...