Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Seances, 1850–1930 by Claudie Massicotte (review)

As many books on Spiritualism do, Claudie Massicotte's Trance Speakers begins with a discussion of the three Fox Sisters and the mysterious rappings in Hydesville, New York. However, unlike other authors on this subject, Massicotte concentrates on the Fox Sisters' Canadian roots and the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement that they sparked in Ontario. In this manner, the author offers an illuminating portrait of an aspect of the Fox Sisters' career that has often been overlooked. Further, she suggests that Spiritualism never quite took off in Canada as it did in the United States—particularly in upstate New York's "Burned Over District"—because Canadians were more conservative and therefore less apt to embrace new religious movements. But Massicotte also suggests that, unlike Spiritualism in the United States, which appeared to have declined significantly by World War I, Canada saw a resurgence in Spiritualist practice during that time. Massicotte attributes this to the bereavement suffered by many Canadians not only as a result of the war, but also because of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918.

Next, Massicotte moves from discussing trends in the history of Canadian Spiritualism to considering the lives of specific Canadian women and how they used Spiritualist discourse to gain access to various medical fields and to participate in healing practices. During the nineteenth century, mainstream medical treatments—in particular, "heroic" methods such as bleeding and leeching as well as the ingestion of mercury and calomel—were as likely to kill a patient as to cure him, meaning that less invasive alternative treatments became popular. Such alternative treatments included prayer, fresh air, special diets, homeopathy, and "faith healing." Alternative healing methods provided an opportunity for women—barred from attending medical school—to become healers. Hence, in chapter 2, Massicotte focuses on a fascinating Canadian "healing medium" named Susan Kilborn, who acted as an apprentice of sorts to a (male) doctor who allegedly continued to communicate his thoughts to her after his death, providing her with a much-needed authorial voice. In this portion of Trance Speakers, Massicotte draws on Freud's work and his anecdotal evidence regarding select female patients who, thwarted from their ambitions by cultural and social prohibitions, developed the symptoms of what he referred to as "hysteria." Kilborn added to this discourse (via her spirit control) in penning an essay entitled "The Mysteric" (as Massicotte explains, a portmanteau for "hysteria" and "mystic") in which she explores the phenomenon of the female mystic as hysteric, although from a far more compassionate standpoint than most doctors at the time.

Chapter 3 discusses women and writing—or women writers coping with nineteenth-century gender inequality. She begins with an epigraph from Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own. Woolf's work is significant to Massicotte's argument in that it addresses the material difficulties of writing—that is, the social expectations of everyday life preventing women from becoming writers. Massicotte discusses Susannah Moodie and Anna Smith, two Canadian women writers and Spiritualists. Moodie, who belonged to a family of accomplished writers was (and is) quite well known, whereas Smith—having published only one book—is far more obscure. Nonetheless, Massicotte is able to write eloquently on both women, detailing how they were able to use their ostensive careers as mediums to circumvent social prohibitions against women during that era. For instance, both Moodie and Smith published books that they claimed had been dictated by male spirit controls, yet both books apparently offer a veiled critique of how women suffer within a patriarchal society. Massicotte describes how these women circumvented prohibitions described in Woolf's Room of One's Own.

The fifth chapter examines mediums in the public sphere, or mediums who spoke out in ways that were typically prohibited to nineteenth-century women. A portion of this chapter is dedicated to Emma Hardinge Britten, a British woman who immigrated to New York in the...