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INTRODUCTION P e r f o r m i n g R e a d i n g s “Do you believe,” he asked,“that the spirits of the dead can return to earth, and show themselves to the living?” . . . “You ask me a question,” I said,“which, after five thousand years, is yet undecided. On that account alone, it is a question not to be trifled with.” —Wilkie Collins,“Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman” [C]ultures are not monoliths; people are not stamped out like coins by the power machine of social convention.They are constrained by social norms, but norms are plural and people are devious. —Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice G H O S T S T O R I E S This is a book about ghosts and the ways in which people may have put them to the “devious” uses Nussbaum describes in the epigraph above. My argument here speaks to the cultural uses of ghosts in nineteenth-century England and of a “new” religion called Spiritualism, which simply embodied the belief that a sincere seeker could contact those who had crossed over to the “other side” for comfort or insight. Despite a general social expectation for middle- and upperclass reasonableness, sensibility, and incredulity, the attractive spiritual and material promises of the faith ensured that this religious movement and its metaphors cut across class and gender boundaries and reached a sizeable audience . It is my contention that the effects of Spiritualism and the stories it told were much wide-ranging and more substantial than previous scholarship suggests .The events of the séance were a barometer for much of what was occurring in the political and social world outside its closed doors and, perhaps more 1 importantly, provided a means of reimagining that outside world. I explore the ways that beliefs about the spirit world and its impact on the material world might have actually participated in the transformation of social codes in the nineteenth century, leaving us a legacy that persists into our own cultural moment. Spiritualism and its narratives became one way in which Victorians reconsidered ideas about gender, race, and class. It contributed, in this way, to the more apparently political movements that materially changed the position of women in England and abroad. These may seem to be extraordinary claims for the effects of telling what amounts to ghost stories, but the tales I examine here—from newspaper reports to fictional narratives to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research—compel us to reassess the role of ghosts and Spiritualism inVictorian culture and to find our previous intellectual attention to the subject wanting. Consider, to begin, the prevalence of ghostly phenomena in the life of all the cultures we know.1 Nearly everyone thrills at the thought of ghosts, has stories to tell about them (or wishes they did), or vehemently disputes their existence —all of which evidence a social investment.2 For centuries, ghosts have captured the imagination of even the most fervent unbelievers, who might still feel titillated by the prospect of being spooked in a haunted house or by a tale of vengeful spirits. Our fascination alone makes ghosts a significant cultural phenomenon and, thus, an important subject for study. But there is more—a rationale for turning to ghosts in a study that focuses on social change. Many of the reasons ghosts intrigued the Victorians (and continue to intrigue so many of us) relate to transformations or transgressions of the social context: ghosts have the power to violate boundaries with ease, to shape the way we think, and to reveal to us the things that haunt us the most. Ghosts cross the sacred barriers between life and death, between cultures, between people; they transcend time, space, and history. An Indian or ancient Egyptian ghost might appear in aVictorian drawing room, or a three-hundredyear -old spirit might return to his descendants. As Manuel Aguirre argues, ghosts “function as a door through which we enter the Other reality” (208). The appeal of ghosts may lie in their power to dispel what seem to be very rigid boundaries, especially in a world that teaches us through the often violent relations between people, nations, and cultures3 how significant these boundaries are. Indeed, we have been telling ghost stories that emphasize this power for centuries, passing them on from one generation to the next. Another vital aspect of ghosts—especially as they become sites of social change and as we...

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