Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 by Christine Ferguson (review)

In her new book on the transatlantic Spiritualist movement, Christine Ferguson offers a rich supplement to previous scholarship. She argues that, if we examine the full body of Spiritualism’s philosophical and literary corpus, “we find … potent, impassioned and often deeply troubling articulations of biodeterministic selfhood and eugenic utopianism” (5). Beginning with phrenology and Owenism, Ferguson charts Spiritualism’s relationship to notions of heredity and what she reads as a foundational biofatalism in the movement. Utilizing this framework, she dissects the movement’s vexed understanding of mental and physical difference and disability, exploring both the eugenic strain and the contrary impulse to read mental weakness as availability to the higher plains. Next, she brings her insights about reproduction and the goal of perfecting humanity to bear on Spiritualist conceptions of both race and criminality. Examining, for the first time in an extended study of Spiritualism, Cesare Lombroso’s biodeterministic beliefs about criminality against the backdrop of his conversion to the faith, Ferguson highlights the movement’s endorsement of Lombroso. She follows this thread through its relationship to mental incapacity, which “transformed the born deviant from a figure of abjection into the potential redeemer of the human race” (16). Finally, she turns again to fiction to assess the movement’s commitment to literary naturalism rather than the gothic and sensationalistic fiction with which contemporary critics have often associated it.

Ferguson makes an important contribution with this study, not only by plumbing these previously unexamined trends, but also by tracing patterns in the largely understudied literary works of the Spiritualist faithful. The book’s real strength lies in the corrective it issues regarding several elements of the scholarship on Spiritualism. First, it explores different ground than the gender-based analysis of most recent Spiritualist scholarship, introducing the important theme of eugenics to assess the movement’s beliefs, practices, and impact in the period. Second, and as a result, it engages issues such as criminality, about which Spiritualists have much to say but which most scholarship has neglected because of the relatively focused track it has tread. While there has been much to learn about gender politics through Spiritualism, studies with other frames of inquiry are a welcome addition. Finally, Ferguson’s more substantive engagement with the fiction of the faith offers insights we could not have gleaned from newspapers and diaries alone.

In her efforts to steer the scholarship in a new direction, rectifying the narrowness of the past, Ferguson sometimes overcorrects and (ironically) renders Spiritualism as flat as she laments it has been made by others. These problems seem to be the result of an apparent expectation for intellectual unity and rational coherence from a religious belief system with a very diverse body of beliefs and no central governing structure or authority. As a movement, Spiritualism might have had both an earnest commitment to social justice and eugenic beliefs that contradicted those social justice values—or, similarly, expressed a commitment to individual will while clinging to strict notions of heredity. As individuals, too, believers might have wholly contradictory faith views, a very human phenomenon the argument sometimes disregards. Ferguson claims, for example, that despite Spiritualism’s “strenuously egalitarian tone, [it] abandons the will in favor of an innative explanation” (35). Though we should value her introduction of the innative, we can’t discount the vocalized Spiritualist interest in free will or see ideological tensions as an “abandonment” of one element of the beliefs. A movement’s failure to achieve its ideals does not render those ideals less significant for study—though insights into the tensions, as Ferguson rightly indicates, are critical to a rich understanding. Likewise, in her astute readings of the literature of the faith, she seems to suggest a kind of conscious and coherent generic manipulation: “Spiritualist believers,” she notes, “from the mid-nineteenth century onwards knew that if their movement were...