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  • Invisible Hosts: Performing the Nineteenth-Century Spirit Medium's Autobiography by Elizabeth Schleber Lowry
  • Laura Thiemann Scales
Invisible Hosts: Performing the Nineteenth-Century Spirit Medium's Autobiography. By Elizabeth Schleber Lowry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. xxviii + 157 pp. $80.00 cloth/from $64.00 e-book.

To be a Spiritualist medium in the nineteenth century was to test and transgress the boundaries of femininity, argues a new book by Elizabeth Schleber Lowry. Invisible Hosts shows how four female mediums—by inhabiting the public sphere, transforming the meaning of piety, embracing economic self-sufficiency, and advocating for social change—negotiated the gap between the submissive True Woman and the subversive New Woman ideals and revealed the false binary of those models. Writing in an admirably jargon-free style, Lowry examines the autobiographies of the mediums Leah Fox Underhill, Amanda Theodosia Jones, Nettie Colburn Maynard, and Emma Hardinge Britten, works that to date have not been examined side-by-side nor in such detail. In addition to its incisive readings of the autobiographies, Invisible Hosts offers a solid introduction to Spiritualism and a helpful review of the scholarship on the movement.

Lowry breaks her study into seven pithy chapters, organized thematically, which allow her to compare and contextualize the four autobiographies. Two primary strains of inquiry emerge: how Spiritualism engaged with contemporaneous Christianity, and how Spiritualist women navigated and redefined the role of women in the public sphere. Assuming that her readers' primary point of reference will be evangelical autobiography, Lowry begins the volume by comparing that form to Spiritualist autobiography, showing that unlike the spiritual autobiographies of evangelical women, Spiritualist autobiography was typically non-hierarchical and triumphalist in tone. Throughout Invisible Hosts, Lowry uses rhetorical analysis to examine the Spiritualist use of Christian discourse. For instance, she examines how Spiritualists seeking out middle-class Christian audiences countered accusations of witchcraft, blasphemy, or fraud by linking Christian doctrine with Spiritualism (e.g., depicting Christ as a medium), conflating [End Page 237] Christian piety with Spiritualist optimism, and incorporating Christian iconography and liturgical practices into their performances. These chapters clarify the methods by which Spiritualism, which started as a fringe practice, became a part of mainstream American culture in the nineteenth century.

The role of women in the public sphere is the most prominent topic of the book; four chapters explore the ways that Spiritualist women took the stage and created new models of domesticity. The women in Lowry's study challenged expectations for women both in their behavior and in their teachings. Although these female mediums embodied and advocated for the so-called feminine virtues of love, piety, and caretaking, they did so while breaking norms by traveling widely, accepting payment for work, and largely rejecting the expected timeline for marriage and childbearing. The tension between these contradictions animates Lowry's analysis. In her chapter on payment, Lowry shows how class anxiety affected Spiritualist practice; mediums worked with their wealthy patrons to obfuscate the exchange of money in order to maintain the sense of their work as pure, authentic, and socially elite. Lowry also offers provocative hints of how exhausting the lived experience of these mediums must have been, as they ceaselessly balanced the need both to maintain and transgress the boundaries of the domestic sphere. She describes the mediums performing séances and demonstrations in the home, for instance, as both "framing the private sphere as a malleable construct" and eliminating the possibility of "relief from the pressures of the outside world" in the home (46, 52). Their bodies invaded by spirits and their homes invaded by the public, these women experienced both liberation from norms and the stress of threats to their safety and well-being. In these chapters the book might have productively engaged more fully with work like Molly McGarry's Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth Century America (2008) on Spiritualism's queering of gender binaries, marriage practices, and temporality itself. Such theorization would help uncover the links between mediums' teachings and the way they lived their lives.

Throughout the book, Lowry relies on Frances B. Cogan's concept of "Real Womanhood" to complicate the oversimplified...

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