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

Who knew that Susanna Moodie dabbled in séances? I certainly didn't. But after reading Trance Speakers on the link between the supernatural arts and women's social empowerment, I can certainly see why the Canadian author was drawn to such spiritualist practices. Massicotte argues that through trance speaking, many female mediums "were able to publically voice ideas and arguments for the advancement of women's rights while preserving their identities as true women" (9). In pursuit of this argument, Trance Speakers intervenes in the growing critical conversation on nineteenth-century spiritualism by shifting the focus to North America and Canadian women, specifically. The study is notable in its attempt to take trance speaking seriously. Although not a defense of the supernatural arts, neither is the book an accusation of fraud against the women who practised mediumship; rather, Trance Speakers is focused on the cultural forces that drew women to trance as a means to power and social authority (13). To make this argument, the book adheres to a two-part structure: the first on the historical and theoretical accounts of female mediumship and the second on femininity and authorship among Canadian trance speakers.

The first chapter looks at the major cultural debates and attitudes surrounding trance speaking in nineteenth-century Canada. Massicotte cites transnational influences, such as the Fox sisters' importation of the séance from the U.S. in the 1850s (attended by Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Trail), to continental influences such as Emma Harding Britten, the English advocate of spiritualism who toured Canada giving public talks. But this burgeoning spiritualist movement was also the target of critique in the press and within religious communities. The latter group included Evangelicals, Methodists, and the Catholic Church. Massicotte explains how the spiritualist movement benefited from the Victorian crisis in faith following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), and for this reason it was perceived as a threat to religious orthodoxy. Catholics, for example, suggested that the spirits conjured through séances were evil (32) or satanic threats (32), in an effort to deter people from joining the spiritualist movement. Despite such critiques from dominant social and political forces, spiritualism still managed to evolve from a fringe movement on the margins into a serious platform for women looking to rethink gender roles and female authority in the nineteenth century.

The second chapter shifts our attention from historical to theoretical contexts. Massicotte is specifically interested in adapting psychological discourses in order to explain this feminist engagement with spiritualism. "[C]ontemporary studies have largely focused on the cultural impacts of séances," she explains, whereas "authors of the time were fascinated by the authorial voice of spiritual communications," and thus they "put forward new theories of subjectivity through their attempts to explain the spirits' mysterious identities" (43). This chapter charts medical professionals' efforts to exert authority over women's bodies by labeling the unruly a so-called "hysteric." Yet even Freud recognized some kind of curative potential in trance speaking (athough he later switched from hypnosis to the talking cure); "mediums revealed the secrets of the mind" and "made way for new discoveries and provided new interpretations of subjectivity that transformed the definition and treatment of madness" (60). Drawing largely on work by French feminists like Luce Irigaray, Massicotte argues that psychoanalysis, given its early affinity with forms of trance speaking, thus proves useful in thinking through the medium's complicated relationship to language and a symbolic that typically privilege the unified or singular subject.

The second part of the book, on "Femininity and Authorship Among Canadian and Transnational Mediums," begins with chapter 3 on the relationship between mediums and medicine. Massicotte recounts the story of Anna O. (Pappenheim) whose blocked speech could be traced back to her frustrations with gender roles. According to Massicotte, Anna O. serves as a powerful example of orthodox medicine's fight for authority by labeling as "hysteric" those women...