Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (review)

The latest of many studies of Spiritualism, Ghosts of Future Past joins several recent books on western Europe in challenging Max Weber's identification of secularization as the basis of modernity. A distinctly modern enterprise in its insistence on scientific grounding and incorporation of such technological innovations as telegraphy and photography, nineteenth-century Spiritualism reveals to McGarry "a narrative in which secularism does not simply or inevitable triumph over an antimodern, atavistic religion" (5) and in which religion functions as a viable basis for political engagement.

In McGarry's cultural history, Spiritualist mediums, "reimagining the corporeal" (49), practiced acts of embodiment or "haunting" that "unsettled immutable binaries" (46) between past and present, male and female, white and Indian, public and private. They gave palpable presence to the racially, sexually, geographically, and chronologically other, freeing themselves from the limitations of the past and the sexualized body and assuming sexually transgressive postures and radical political positions. While the middle-class cult of mourning distanced the dead, Spiritualists drew them near and, forging in their press a "community in print" (21), channeled collective mourning into a "national conversation" about radical reform (49). While their white contemporaries imagined Indians as vanished, or distanced in time and space, Spiritualists evoked militantly "(un)vanished" Indians (73) and supported their rights. Anthony Comstock's censorship campaign and antipathy for flamboyant feminist and Spiritualist Victoria Woodhull, McGarry argues, were driven not only by her titillating coverage of the Beecher-Tilden affair in Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly but by the fact that the materialization of spirits in the séance room, like the movement of pornographic material through the U.S. mail, threatened the boundary between the pure, "private" middle-class home and the morally tainted "public" sphere. Meanwhile, male mediums assuming female voices and vice versa broached subversive sexual identities, subverting the familiar Victorian male-female binary and—the secular focus of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality notwithstanding—pointing to religious sources for the modern discourse of scientific sexology.

Breaking new ground and crackling with new insights, McGarry offers an important addition to the literature. But her engagement with existing scholarship is limited. Her eye for Spiritualism's political radicalism and sexual subversion lead her to engage Ann Braude's Radical Spirits (1989), which ties Spiritualism to radical feminism, and Robert S. Cox's Body and Soul (2003), which emphasizes Spiritualism's racially conservative impulses. But her analyses of male mediums and the reformatory functions of Spiritualist mourning fail to engage recent work on those topics. Nor does she entirely succeed in her larger historiographic goals; indeed, she bolsters some of the traditional paradigms she seeks to displace. Despite over two decades of challenges to the mainstream-fringe binary in studies of American religion, McGarry weakens her case for Spiritualism's relevance after the Civil War by using it uncritically and repeatedly underscoring Spiritualism's marginalization. Thus by the 1870s Spiritualists ceased to occupy the center of women's rights movement (65), and their support for Indians constituted a "lone voice" (88). Likewise, acknowledging an uncomfortable "cultural fit between mainstream America and Spiritualism" (64) after the war undermines her challenge to the longstanding narrative of a midcentury shift from reform to retreat.

Such issues are not unusual in books as intellectually adventurous as McGarry's. Perhaps her jargony prose is similarly symptomatic. But readers who dive in will be richly rewarded.