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FIVE D r u n k w i t h P o w e r Stor ies of Ghostly Other s The most tolerable sort of Revenge, is for those wrongs which there is no Law to remedy. But then, let a man take heed, the Revenge be such, as there is no law to punish. Else, a man’s enemy, is still beforehand, and it is two for one. —Francis Bacon qtd. in Bernard Capes,“An Eddy on the Floor” T H E S P I R I T U A L C O S T S O F A C O L O N Y : E X P L O I T A T I O N A N D H U M A N L A B O R The work of postcolonial critics has testified that fiction of the Victorian period reflects a persistent and politicized consciousness of imperialism. Indeed, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has argued, contemporary readers of such fiction would be negligent if they failed to trace these connections (“Three Women’s”).This chapter proposes to explore these connections as they relate to ghosts, Spiritualism, and the anxieties to which I pointed earlier. While ghost stories are not the voice of the Spiritualist movement, they pick up the tensions that surround the ghostly embodiments of altered states and reveal the ways in which Spiritualistic concerns emerged in the cultural mainstream , as I explained in chapter 2. Moreover, these tales help us imagine the ways that alternative Spiritualist values, especially as they concern the imperial project, might be embodied. I will open with ghostly narratives that figure race, class, and sexuality as they relate directly to the colonies and life there. I will move, then, to narratives that explicitly address Spiritualism and its 1 2 9 relationship to the colonizing mission. In all of the tales, I will point to the increasingly self-conscious way that alcohol and drugs are figured with relation to these questions. I hope to show two things in this chapter. First, I will argue that each of these narratives demonstrates anxieties regarding the imperial project, and, more particularly, reveals the leveling effect of the spiritual plane in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and between the middle and working classes.The spirits in these tales warn of spiritual and material consequences when the poor are abused or oppressed, just as many real-life séances seemed to suggest.The mediumship of Espérance,Wood, and Fairlamb Mellon implied that it was only by collapsing the boundaries between the self and the other that one could resist the rigid and oppressive structures that limited the lives of women, the poor, and colonized people. Similarly, these ghost stories expose the violence of English imperialism—here, I focus particularly on fiction about India—and call for a recognition of a common humanity between the colonizer and the colonized, a recognition that, in theory, could end imperial violence.These tales also suggest that the tactics of international, imperial violence are reflected in the abuses of the working classes in England, a parallel that redoubles the demand for acknowledgment of a shared humanity and exposes the unjust privilege of the white middle and upper classes at home and abroad. Second, I want to tease out another thread that runs through both these ghost stories and the Spiritualist movement: the relationship of haunting to drugs. In most of these tales, drugs and alcohol are used to blunt the social consciousness I describe above. Male characters in the fiction, many of whom are imperial soldiers, use mind-altering substances to repress or contain their pressing awareness of the exploitative violence in which they are engaged. These efforts, however, prove ineffective; the characters cannot escape the hauntings they have created through their own violence. In fact, courting this type of altered state often leads them back to the ghosts they hoped to diminish . Some of the real mediums I discuss in the next two chapters sought to escape mainstream culture and to move into an altered reality through drug and alcohol use, but ultimately failed. For them, too, drug use often immersed them in the tensions they longed to escape. I will close my discussion with the choices of one medium who rejected drug use both to resist the dismissal of her mediumship and to create a new Spiritualist path to social change, reflecting the ways in which her mediumship also resisted a simplistic imperial imposition...

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