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• W1567399380 abstract "Reviewed by: Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism, and: Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings Elana Gomel (bio) Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism, by Marlene Tromp; pp. xi + 225. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, $65.00, $24.95 paper. Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings, by Sarah A. Willburn; pp. xi + 165. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, £45.00, $89.95. The psychic cloud (to use Arthur Conan Doyle's expression) that rained revelations upon the enraptured sitters in Victorian Spiritualist séances, refuses to be dispelled by the light of skepticism. Spiritualism, sometimes dismissed as a silly fad, has recently been attracting serious scholarly attention. If two decades ago, the excellent studies of the history and cultural significance of Spiritualism by Janet Oppenheim and Alex Owen were exceptions, the simultaneous appearance of books by Marlene Tromp and Sarah A. Willburn signifies a renewed attempt to discover the answer to an intriguing question: why did so many Victorian men and women spent their time listening to ghostly communications and gazing at materialized spirits produced by mostly young, nubile, and enterprising mediums? As Tromp cogently argues, Spiritualism was an important strand in the web of Victorian culture and society. She points out that the mediums and their audiences engaged in a complex refashioning of the key concepts of the Victorian zeitgeist: gender, race, and individual identity. Tromp argues that Spiritualist praxis undermined rigid gender roles and created a space of freedom in which women (and men) could negotiate the thorny issues of sexuality and marriage and eventually reconfigure the Victorian codes of behavior, so that the more innovative aspects of Spiritualism may have found their way into the mainstream (72). In support of this thesis, she examines the lives of individual materialization mediums and diverse fictional texts, from sensation novels to ghost stories. Hardly anybody would argue with the claim (amply documented by Owen) that mediumship offered unparalleled opportunities for women to break out of the stifling corset of Victorian femininity. It is equally evident that the movement that erased the boundary between material and spiritual, and whose professed goal was to perform states of possession and multiple identity, undermined what Oscar Wilde (no believer in Spiritualism) called in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in a man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence (The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [Hamlyn, 1983] 457). The problem, rather, lies in Tromp's deployment of the postmodern theoretical framework of textual analysis to deal with the stubbornly material scene of the séance. For postmodernism, whether of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, or Michel Foucault, sidesteps the problem of representational veracity, focusing on the textual construction of reality. But for Spiritualism, the question of veracity—were the spirits real or not—was absolutely crucial. Bracketing this question as Tromp does creates a distorted image of the fiercely controversial (even within Spiritualism itself) practice of spirit materialization. Tromp abjures any attempt to answer the question of whether or not the phenomena, such as full-scale 'materialization', are real (13); when it becomes most [End Page 751] pressing, as in the many instances of fraud and exposure of the materialization mediums, she circumvents it by liberal use of quotation marks. But Spiritualism, unlike religion, staked its authority on the empirical proof of the existence of spirits. Spiritualism was not a faith, as Tromp calls it, but a misbegotten offspring of positivist science, adopting its rhetoric of material verification. Even a cursory glance at Spiritualist writings shows the obsessive insistence on what Spiritualist Samuel Carter Hall called in 1884 sure and certain and palpable evidence of the invisible world (qtd. in Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 [1985] 63). Spiritualism's emphasis on sensory experience rather than on inner epiphany accounts for many of its peculiar features: its attraction for so many scientists; its strained relationship with Christianity; and its investment in the gross fraud perpetrated by mediums. Had Tromp investigated the cultural effects of Spiritualism as mediated..." @default.
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• W1567399380 title "<i>Altered States: Sex</i>,<i>Nation</i>,<i>Drugs</i>,<i>and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism</i>, by Marlene Tromp<i>Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings</i>, by Sarah A. Willburn" @default.
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