SPIRITUALISM

Among the pseudo-scientific fads of nineteenth-century America were several that had to do with ghosts or spirits. One of these fads, spiritualism, can be distinguished from a more general interest in ghosts (poltergeists) as well as from a more general sense of being religious or spiritual. The nineteenth-century fad called spiritualism, in its narrow sense, refers to the practice of "communicating with the dead," often during a séance. The fad took hold in 1848 and thrived for a decade, lost some momentum, and then gathered steam in the decades following 1870, both in practice and in various literary recollections of what had occurred a generation earlier.

Arguably some spiritualists genuinely believed in their powers to contact dead spirits, but those spiritualists who conducted séances most often were enterprising charlatans who, for a fee, invited gullible or curious sitters into a darkened room, where the spiritualist pretended to be in a trance and posed questions to a "dead spirit." The spiritualist then claimed that it was the dead spirit guiding his or her hand over a Ouija board to spell out answers to questions, tipping tables, blowing trumpets, or rapping on a table, seemingly in code. Although most spiritualists conducted séances in private settings, a few made public appearances in lecture halls and drew large crowds. Spirit photographers such as William Mumler, Frederick Hudson, and W. H. Harrison claimed that their blurry photographs were pictures of dead spirits, and a spirit postmaster, James Vincent Mansfield, bragged that he had active mail service to heavenly ghosts. Specifically he claimed that in a 30-year period he had delivered 100,000 sealed letters to spirits who permitted him to transcribe their replies.

The beginnings of the spiritualism movement in 1848 can be traced to a bedroom in Hydesville, New York, where the twelve-and thirteen-year-old sisters Katherine Fox (1836–1892) and Margaret Fox (1833–1893) discovered that they could make a loud rapping noise when they cracked their toe joints against the bedstead. The girls delighted in telling their superstitious mother that they had contacted the spirit of a murdered peddler, who, they claimed, responded with audible raps. Mrs. Fox flew next door and told neighbors, who told more neighbors and eventually newspaper editors. Having discovered that they were celebrities, Kate and Margaret continued to practice their "talent" in communicating with the dead. An older sister, Leah Fox (1811–1890), living in Rochester, soon got into the act, and the three became a national sensation.

Other tricksters decided to capitalize on the Fox sisters' success. Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), a shoemaker who had championed mesmerism and established a reputation as the "Poughkeepsie Seer," soon reported that he too had heard rappings. Among other self-styled spiritualists of the next few decades were Katie King (aka Florence Cook, 1856–1904); Lenora Piper (1857–1950), a Boston housewife who met with some of the leading intellectuals of the day; "Dr." Henry Slade (1840–1905), a con man who won the trust of a few prominent physicists; and Alexandre Aksakof (1832–1880), a Russian spiritualist and statesman who took Henry Slade to Russia to perform.

One spiritualist, J. R. Newton, claimed that he could contact Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. Another, Thomas Lake Harris, specialized in contacting "literary spirits," including those of Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Lizzie Doten, another medium specializing in "literary spirits," conceded that her awe of Shakespeare interfered with her ability to be a medium for his messages; however, her awe of Robert Burns was sufficiently mild so she could adequately represent his messages.

Until roughly 1860 spiritualism thrived, partly because it appealed to a public hungry for some promise that religious faith could be reconciled with new scientific theories. Spiritualism seemed to offer physical proof of a metaphysical reality: the audible or visible "replies" of the "dead spirits" seemed to provide empirical proof of the existence of an afterlife. The public was also at least curious about a phenomenon that combined some of the most interesting aspects of mesmerism, another pseudo-scientific fad of the early nineteenth century, with a new technological innovation, the telegraph, which involved tapping messages in code to send over a great distance. To one believer spiritualism also affirmed evolution, if earthly beings evolved to a higher, spiritual status. For some women spiritualism offered something else, an alternative means of having a voice and of making a living in a world that offered women few venues for either. Alex Owen argues in The Darkened Room (1989) that nineteenth-century spiritualism provided women on both sides of the Atlantic with a vehicle for subverting existing power relations between men and women. Indeed many of the early adherents of spiritualism were associated with reform movements of some kind, whether socialism, abolitionism, or women's rights, though not all feminists were sanguine about spiritualism: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were chagrined that their fellow feminist Victoria Woodhull was a spiritualist who attributed her charismatic speaking skills to a spiritual mentor, Demosthenes. (In 1871 Woodhull was elected president of the American Association of Spiritualists.) Affirmations of the movement were documented in texts such as Emma Hardinge Britten'sModern American Spiritualism (1870) and Nineteenth Century Miracles (1884).

However, from its beginnings, enthusiastic endorsements of spiritualism were mixed with religious denunciations, satirical literary responses, and skeptical calls for investigation, suggesting something about the ambivalence of the age. Rarely, though, did the exposés stifle interest in the movement. For example, in the Cambridge investigation of 1857, three Harvard professors, including Louis Agassiz, exposed the Fox sisters, although the investigation did little to quash the sisters' popularity. Conjurers were vocal critics of the psychics, but the tattling of cheats on other cheats did little to dampen public interest. In 1866 P. T. Barnum (1810–1892) called spiritualists the "humbugs of the world," and in 1876 Washington Irving Bishop (1856–1889), a hawker of quack nostrums, exposed the spiritualist Anna Eva Fay (1851–1927) as a fraud, but neither killed the movement. When Margaret Fox was exposed again in 1888, she recanted her clairvoyant claims but then recanted her recanting and still drew crowds.

Although the movement was declining in the closing decades of the century and the first decades of the next, some spiritualists thrived, including Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), who together withHenry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) founded the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky's powerful personality attracted many to her blend of occultism, counterfeit miracles, and Asian philosophies. Other adherents of theosophy were simply drawn to neo-Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation and a cycle of life and rebirth. Another clairvoyant and spiritualist, Edgar Cayce (1877–1945), claimed that in previous incarnations he had been a warrior in Troy, one of Christ's disciples, and an angel predating Adam and Eve.

Certainly spiritualism enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in the decades following the 1870s, but it is not spiritualism per se that best marks the period between 1870 and 1920. Rather, it is the boyhood recollections of spiritualism in the fiction of Mark Twain (1835–1910), William Dean Howells (1837–1920), and Henry James (1843–1916). If the heyday of spiritualism in the 1850s was its life, the literary recollections of spiritualism in the next half-century might be considered its afterlife.

HOWELLS'S RECOLLECTIONS OF SPIRITUALISM

As William Dean Howells recalls in Years of My Youth (1916), "Spiritualism was rife in every second house in the village with manifestations of rappings, table tippings, and oral and written messages from another world through psychics of either sex but oftenest the young girls one met in dances and sleigh rides" (p. 106). While Howells dealt with spiritualism most directly in his autobiography, he continued to address it in such works as The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897), Questionable Shapes (1903), and Between the Dark and the Daylight: Romances (1907). His most nuanced depiction of the rise and fall of spiritualism was captured in his 1880 novel The Undiscovered Country, a critical but compassionate portrait of Boynton, a character who eventually discovers that his faith in spiritualism is unfounded. As Howard Kerr persuasively argues in Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals, the fictional Boynton was most likely modeled on the historical Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877), a man who had written a pro-spiritualism article for the Atlantic Monthly, which Howells then edited.

Owen, the son of the social reformer Robert Owen, had been skeptical about the claims of some of the most flamboyant spiritualists of the early 1850s. A few years later, when he was exposed to the less dramatic spiritualist techniques of Florence Cook and her "spiritual guide" Katie King (presumably the same person since they were never seen onstage together), Owen dropped his critical stance and developed a "spiritual hypothesis," which he elaborated upon in Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860). This, together with his 1871 book The Debatable Land between This World and the Next, helped to rekindle nationwide interest in spiritualism, for Owen was considered a reputable scholar and statesman. He had served in both state and national politics, had advocated for the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, and had served overseas as a diplomat. His cautious investigation of spiritualism had piqued the interest of scientists, including Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who, like Charles Darwin, developed a theory of evolution. In 1875 Owen wrote an article for the January issue of the Atlantic Monthly explaining why he believed that Florence Cook and Katie King were either outright frauds or supernatural beings, arguably the latter. Just as the magazine was going to press in December, Owen discovered that King was indeed a fraud, and he tried to retract his article. It was too late, however, and his well-established reputation was seriously blemished. Owen died two years later.

Howells too had been caught by the unfortunate timing of Owen's article, unable to halt its publication and unable to protect Owen from considerable embarrassment. Although Howells had always been skeptical of spiritualists' claims, he had been moved by Owen's sincere and thoughtful inquiry and his unsuccessful attempt to retract his argument.

The Owen-like protagonist of The Undiscovered Country, Boynton, is treated at least as sympathetically as the other characters, especially Mrs. Le Roy, the spiritualist who conducts the séances. Like Owen, Boynton hoped to stave off scientific materialism and to preserve what he could of the ethical basis of organized religion. As Kerr points out, Owen had in The Debatable Land called for proof that "intercourse from beyond the bourn is not forbidden to man" but found out otherwise, as does Boynton, who, at the end of The Undiscovered Country, recognizes the impossible when he quotes Hamlet: "The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns."

As Kerr points out, Howells's The Undiscovered Country has less in common with other anti-spiritualist satires than it does with earlier psychological studies of single-minded delusion, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) explores in the The Blithedale Romance. For Howells and others, spiritualism provided one vehicle for psychological realism.

TWAIN'S WRITINGS CAPTURE THE AMBIVALENCE

From mid-century on, the spiritualism movement provided humorists and satirists with a steady supply of material for their tales. Throughout the 1860s Twain burlesqued "true" ghost stories in his pieces for the Virginia City Enterprise. In one burlesque of the spiritualist Ada Hoyt Foye's séances, Twain asks for a spirit named John Smith and is answered by the rapping of every John Smith who had ever perished and who is now confined with the others to an infernal Smithsonian Institution. Here and elsewhere the butt of Twain's humor is usually the spirit and not the spiritualist.

Twain, like many skeptics, may have hoped privately that it was indeed possible to contact dead spirits. Justin Kaplan suggests in his 1966 biography that some of Twain's most vitriolic attacks on séance swindlers may have resulted from his having tried and failed to contact his dead brother Henry. After his daughter Susy's death in 1896, Twain attended séances with his wife. However, before and after 1896, he burlesqued the fad in his fiction, where he created numerous ridiculous spiritualists, mesmerists, and phrenologists.

In 1883 Twain and Howells penned the farce "Colonel Sellers as a Scientist," in which a scientist attempts to reach a ghost with batteries. Twain developed the story in The American Claimant (1892), where Sellers concocts a cheap and easy way to revitalize the New York City police force: materializing legions of dead police spirits with his electric batteries. Twain's notebooks identify the character later named Manchester in Life on the Mississippi (1883) as "Mansfield": arguably both Manchester and the Dauphin in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were modeled on the spirit postmaster J. V. Mansfield, whom Twain may have visited in real life.

JAMES'S WRITINGS SUGGEST KINSHIP

Henry James's interest in spiritualism is evident as early as 1874 in his story "Professor Fargo," in which the professor pretends to be a spiritualist medium in order to gain control over a beautiful deaf mute. In this story James, like Howells in The Undiscovered Country, shows his debt to Hawthorne, who used trances in part to explore the tangle of sexual desire and control. A dozen years after writing "Professor Fargo," James returned to spiritualism in The Bostonians (1886). In this novel a spiritualistic lecturer, Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat, seems to be modeled on the spiritualist Ada Hoyt Foye, who was prominent on the lecture circuit. Basil Ransom, a young skeptic, struggles with Olive Chancellor for control of Varena Tarrant, a woman who has visions but does not quite claim to possess the supernatural powers of mediums such as Miss Birdseye. Here Ransom gives voice to some of James's literal anti-spiritualist and anti-reform sentiments and thus provides a bridge between James's earlier anti-reform satires and his later studies of consciousness. While James treated the spiritualists ironically, he used them to explore his interest in alternate personalities, of interest to him as they were to his brother William James, who wrote about mutations of the self in The Principles of Psychology in 1890.

THE PROMISE OF CONSOLATION

Spiritualism, like other pseudo-scientific fads of the era, was in part a response to tensions between scientific certainty and religious doubt. It seemed to turn empiricism on its head and use it to demonstrate, not to demolish, a physical basis for faith in an afterlife.

Lest one be too smug about the gullibility of those taken in by spiritualists, it is important to acknowledge that one is often most curious about that which one cannot adequately explain. It is also important to remember how badly many Americans needed consolation—for loved ones lost in the Civil War, which had claimed more than a half million lives; for faith shaken after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859); and for faith in any sure thing.

Even Newtonian physics was being called into question, especially in the areas of thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and some nineteenth-century physicists speculated that heat flow and energy had spiritual as well as physical significance. For example, both William Thomson, who coined the term "thermodynamics" in 1854, and Rudolf Clausius, who coined the term "entropy" in 1865, subscribed to the idea that physical laws had metaphysical implications. In such a climate it may not be so surprising that Sir William Crookes, inventor of techniques for studying the cathode ray, endorsed the Fox sisters in 1871 and within the next few years published several articles in the Quarterly Journal of Science defending spiritualism on "scientific" grounds.

As Frank Podmore suggests in his 1902 analysis Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism, the evidence for spiritualists' claims was insufficient and often outright fraudulent. Nonetheless, something in their quest to understand spirituality might shed light on the deepest recesses of human consciousness. Podmore cautions us not to forget that "even the extravagances of mysticism may contain a residuum of unacknowledged and serviceable fact" (p. 361). As evidence of Podmore's point, the American Society for Psychical Research, established by William James, mistakenly endorsed a number of pseudo-scientific charlatans, yet the society also pioneered investigations of the unconscious and of mental illnesses.

See alsoOrientalism; Psychology; Scientific Materialism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Howells, William Dean. Between the Dark and the Daylight: Romances. New York: Harper, 1907.

Howells, William Dean. The Landlord at Lion's Head. New York: Harper, 1897.

Howells, William Dean. Questionable Shapes. New York: Harper, 1903.

Howells, William Dean. The Undiscovered Country. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880.

Howells, William Dean. Years of My Youth. New York: Harper, 1916.

Howells, William Dean, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens. "Colonel Sellers as a Scientist." In The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells, edited by Walter J. Meserve. New York, 1960.

James, Henry. The Bostonians. London: Macmillan, 1886.

James, Henry. "Professor Fargo." Galaxy 18 (August 1874): 233–253.

Owen, Robert Dale. The Debatable Land between This World and the Next. Philadelphia: G. W. Carleton, 1871.

Owen, Robert Dale. Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885.

Twain, Mark. The American Claimant. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1892.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883.

Secondary Works

Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966.

Kerr, Howard. Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

Nye, Mary Jo. Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth Century England. London: Virago, 1989.

Podmore, Frank. Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism. 2 vols. New York: Scribners, 1902.

Randi, James. An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995.

Martha D. Patton