In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

SEVEN H a u n t e d Elizabeth d’Espérance, Social Justice, and the Evolution of Mediumship At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back. —Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx The aim that we wish to attain of teaching [S]piritualism to the world is one great lesson to which all others are subservient, which is to teach the world in what goodness consists, and then to make men live it out. —William Cowper, Spiritual Notebook T R A N S F O R M A T I O N A L H A U N T I N G S Elizabeth d’Espérance1 was haunted by the ghosts of her own materializations. She distrusted their reality, feared she was an unintentional fraud, and spent years working through her questions about mediumship.As she described it in her autobiography: “I had begun to have a feeling of dissatisfaction with respect to these materialised forms. I could not analyse my own feelings with respect to them, but a vague sense of doubt that had not yet grown into a thought, began to puzzle me. I hardly knew how it arose or where it came from, but I could not get away from it,—it haunted me constantly” (Shadow Land 339). Though plagued by doubts, she did not disguise her fears or take flight from Spiritualism or from her mediumship. Instead, her concerns led her publicly to interrogate the movement and her place in it. These inquiries 1 8 1 fostered changes in her practice of Spiritualism, reconfigured her mediumship by disrupting a stable sense of “self,” and eventually brought to the fore a fertile philosophy for social change activism. All mediumship had changed at the turn of the century, and some of these changes may be related to shifts in the kinds of social politics to which I have spoken throughout this book.While mediums like Florence Cook continued to practice their trade well into the 1890s and 1900s, the attention focused on the stars of full-form materialization who had dominated the ’70s and ’80s diminished, and Espérance took a more central role in press accounts of the movement.The reduced attention on mediums like Cook was in part because traditional full-form materialization took a less central place in the movement. I would link social concerns to both the decentralization of full-form materialization and to Espérance’s choice to keep it at the center of her Spiritualist practices. Its decentralization in the movement overall may have been related to the fact that the issues engaged in/by the altered space of the materialization séance were being taken up more fully in the public discourse: women’s voices were heard on a whole range of issues, including suffrage and property rights; the working classes were increasingly finding a voice in social and political realms; and the certain foundations of imperialism were beginning to crumble. These changes made the kinds of tensions that had invigorated the materialization séance less pressing and perhaps less necessary. Furthermore, over time, mediumship and full-form materialization became increasingly self-conscious and rote.There were fewer and fewer surprises in the practices of the stars of the ’70s and ’80s; the performances had become hackneyed. One might say Spiritualism had reached a point of decadence—both in practice and in philosophy . It is perhaps not surprising that change would be necessary for the movement to remain vital. In fact, the thesis I have forwarded about Spiritualism ’s relationship to social issues implies the expectation of change and evolution —both in the culture and in Spiritualism itself.While I do not read Spiritualism as the source of all this social change, I see it as one participant in the shifting mainstream values that made large-scale social change possible. These shifts did not mean the abandonment of full-form materialization for Espérance, however. She persisted in spite of the fact that she recognized that “many professing Spiritualists . . . while accepting all the facts of clairvoyance , clairaudience, inspiration, and automatic writing, [drew] a line at Materialisation . Consequently, of all the manifestations with which Spiritualists are familiar, Materialisation has fallen into the greatest disrepute with the world at large” (What I Know 5).When the pressure was greatest on mediums to turn to other practices, Espérance continued to maintain materialization’s centrality, and she...

Share