The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies (review)

Jill Galvan's new monograph, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, is a well-paced and fascinating read that details the cultural milieu out of which women could come to be prominent or even exclusive professionals in media communications. Galvan, an English professor, mines several Victorian short stories and novels for the associations between women, mesmerism and spiritualism, and communications. Reading literature against the phenomenon of mediumship and the rise of white-collar communications jobs brings labor history, the occult, and fiction into new and fruitful conversations.

Galvan takes as her premise the fundamental paradox unearthed by Ann Braude and Alex Owen over twenty years ago: Spiritualism provided women a platform for public speaking and religious authority on the condition that the woman herself was understood to be absent. This liminal state where the body is present as a vehicle for spirits but the mind or consciousness is absent creates a new paradigm, according to Galvan, for seeing women as the appropriate mediums for a host of new communication technologies. Galvan argues that the high Victorian era created much of what we currently understand as communication: information that required mediating by a third party but was potentially profitable, volatile, or damning. Moreover, she argues that the technologies made users uncomfortable by the very absence of their interlocutors and required a sympathetic (in both senses) voice and ear to mediate difficulties.

Galvan explores how women came to dominate the fields of professional typists, court stenographers, telephone operators, and to a lesser but still significant extent, telegraphers. This new breed of white-collar female workers required new conventions and the reader learns that the "hello girls" of telephone operating worked in a replication of domestic order, with "matrons" calling the shots, salons for browsing reading material, and even the creation of the lunch room so that the "girls" could eat at work unmolested by the suggestive gazes of strange men. Still associated with the very potent stigma of needing money, the media girls of the fin de siècle negotiated the absolute priority of marriage and leaving the work force forever with the entrenched associations of low-class factory women and even prostitutes. Walls were created, real and imaginary, to keep these nice girls away from strangers but the social coding of women and money and sexual permissiveness was inescapable in certain cases.

Like spiritualist mediumship, the media girl was successful to the extent that she could erase her own consciousness. Handling sensitive information and often ornery clients, women in communications were the vessels of transmitting information, not for understanding it or acting upon it. Galvan uses the word "automatism" for this nearly trancelike state, where work is done but not intellectually processed: touch typing, writing in short hand, and benignly listening to the sounds but not words of those using the telephone all required this mental absence. Practical matters intrude, of course, and the ability to pay women less than men, their more "sensitive" approach to customers with problems, and the decreased likelihood of corporate spying or takeover all contributed to this new labor pool.

Galvan reads these phenomena into and against several literary productions from the Victorian period. Her literary analyses include works by Marie Corelli, Georges Du Maurier, George Elliot, Robert Browning, and a brief foray into Modernism with T. S. Eliot. Among those that might be of most interest to students of the occult are Henry James's In the Cage, her subtle parsing of Sherlock Holmes's star-crossed Irene Adler, and of course Bram Stoker's Dracula. The James story recounts the genteel trials of a young female telegrapher who creates a fantasy interaction with the wealthy clients who use her services. She also knows unsavory practices that the object of her affection undertakes, and in a crushing scene where she wishes to become part of his world, he in turn sees blackmail...