The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, The Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (review)

The possibilities for remote communication opened up by new transcribing technologies (electric telegraph, photography, film, and typewriter) in the latter half of the nineteenth century attracted interest simultaneously with publicity surrounding paranormal phenomena: spiritualism, hypnotism, automatic writing, and telepathy. At the confluence of both forms of mediated information exchange, Jill Galvan argues, were women acting as communication go-betweens in roles ranging from spiritual mediums and hypnotic subjects to office workers, typists, and telegraph operators.

The Sympathetic Medium gives the fullest treatment to date of the historical and economic forces that created the conditions of possibility for the rising figure of the “mediating woman” as a “sensitive machine.” While others have noted the parallels between female mediumship and women’s increasing involvement over the course of the period in technological modes of communication, Galvan draws new attention to the cultural place of the mediating woman. Interpreting literary fiction, popular narratives, and other genres, she identifies key similarities in how the women performed mediating functions: relaying knowledge, publicizing others’ messages, connecting individuals, and, more generally, serving as a sensitive element within networks of communication, information, and outreach. How women were envisioned by some of their contemporaries, particularly literary authors, and how fiction itself came be seen as a narrated mediation during the years from 1859 until 1919 are additional themes of this intriguing and rich book.

Galvan provides convincing evidence that the expanding role of women as conduits of technologically mediated communication served several cultural purposes. Women’s supposed capacities for automatic or mechanical behavior allayed worries about human-relayed transfer of conversation and knowledge, seeming to provide a “disinterested conduit.” However, frequent claims for the mediating woman’s automatic or mechanical behavior also created conditions of insecurity, including concerns about privacy. As she shows in an important discussion in the book, the “mediating woman” inspired and responded to a variety of priorities as well as preconceptions: to say that female media were imagined as mechanical overlooks the full range of virtues they were thought to bring to communication scenarios. These included what Galvan calls “sympathetic excess,” an affective or spiritual quality that enabled automatized females to establish interpersonal networks through mediumistic sympathy and knowledge of an employer’s volitions.

For historians of technology, the author’s discussion of how notions of femininity inflected concepts of communication will be of interest. Another key idea is that literary and popular narratives help us understand both the mediating woman’s role in culture and the ideological contexts that accompanied her rise. Chapters 1 and 2 explore literary narratives of the threat to privacy posed by mediating women. Chapters 3 and 4 examine fictional tropes of women as efficient media through discussions of George Du Maurier’s idea of the “phonographic unconscious” in Trilby (1894) as well as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Case of Identity” (1891), a story that features an automatized woman as an instrument of discovery, “a detective device.” The book’s final chapter explores the literary appearance of men as occult relays in George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” (1859) and Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless” (1902).

The Sympathetic Medium explores a relatively unexplored cultural aspect of the technological feats of transmission and communication in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain and the United States. In doing so, it puts the role of gender in new media in a new light. It might be used in history of technology courses either in its entirety or in part, perhaps in conjunction with one or more of the novels under investigation. It is disappointing, however, that the work does not draw on feminist Science and Technology Studies to deepen its analysis. Naomi Oreskes, for example, also has explored the idea of the “disinterested conduit” as a gendered paradigm. Judy Wacjman’s pathbreaking studies of work, gender, and organization are relevant as well. It is also surprising that there is comparatively little discussion of race, class, and...