Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America

In the first chapter McGarry addresses the gender politics of the spiritualist movement. Like Braude and Owen, McGarry points out that spiritualism was the only nineteenth-century religious movement that openly recognized the equal rights of women, and spiritualist meetings provided a public forum in which women could express their own political views and opinions. McGarry adds, however, that Spiritualists often went further than most suffragists by also advocating free love, voluntary motherhood, and marriage law reform.

In the second chapter McGarry examines the spiritualists’ engagement in Native American issues. During séances, for example, spiritual mediums frequently channeled Indian spirit guides who openly expressed their anger and resentment towards white people. While these spirit messages may be interpreted as expressions of white guilt, McGarry argues that spiritualists also “labored for progressive reform and took part in concrete work undergirded by a commitment to ameliorating the damage done by white colonists” (p. 80). Not only did spiritualists meet with Native Americans at conventions and camp meetings, but “the Spiritualist press was a lone voice calling for justice for Native Americans” at a time when Native Americans were being consistently demonized in the mainstream press (p. 88).

In the third chapter McGarry explores the connections between spiritualism and obscenity law. While the claims here are slightly more tenuous, McGarry argues that Anthony Comstock’s attempts to control the mail system contradicted the spiritualists’ desire to promote the free exchange of ideas. By promoting free love, for example, the spiritualist press was often accused of publishing obscene material, and Comstock himself even attempted to arrest several spiritualists for publishing such material in their newspaper. McGarry also draws a connection between the spiritualists’ use of photography and Comstock’s fear that this technology would bring “a contaminated public culture into the sanctity of the private sphere” (p. 114). Just as séances enabled the channeling of spirits, in other words, new technologies of reproduction and distribution enabled the transmission of potentially dangerous and infectious information.

In the fourth chapter McGarry examines the ways in which the scientific and medical establishment attempted to rationalize spiritualist practices by characterizing them as a form of hysteria. In the 1870s, for example, neurologist Frederic Marvin claimed that spiritual mediums suffered from a disease caused by an unhealthy tilt of the uterus, which he referred to as “mediomania” (p. 125), and neurologist George Beard described the spiritualist trance state as a form of atavistic regression or “dissolution” (p. 147). Spiritualists, on the other hand, saw sickliness as a source of religious power or “a state of possibility” (p. 132), and they believed that the trance state provided “a heightened consciousness” (p. 147). Spiritualism thus represented a challenge to the medical establishment, which sought to control and discipline allegedly unruly female bodies.

In the fifth and final chapter McGarry examines the ways in which spiritualism challenged gender binaries and influenced the development of sexological science. Female mediums like Mary Walker and Radclyffe Hall, for example, were widely known as “inverts” because they were mannish and wore men’s clothing, while male mediums like Jesse Shepard and Wilberforce J. Colville were often described as effeminate, delicate, and “unfit to enter the married state” (p. 167). By introducing the concept of “spiritual affinities,” spiritualists also promoted the idea of attachments between people that were independent of marriage and not restricted to members of the opposite sex. Spiritualism thus promoted queer lifestyles and introduced a distinction between gender and sexuality that would become increasingly significant in the twentieth century.

Much of this material will already be familiar to readers, as the spiritualists’ commitment to women’s rights and Native American rights has been addressed in several previous studies. McGarry’s most important contribution, however, is her discussion of the sexual politics of the movement, which is extremely fascinating and long overdue. The characterization of spiritualism as a proto-feminist movement tends to obscure the function of male mediums, and McGarry provides an excellent analysis of the ways in which these mediums also challenged dominant ideologies related to gender and sexuality. The only section that appears somewhat weak is perhaps McGarry’s discussion of photography. Although McGarry draws some interesting theoretical connections between the spiritualists’ use of photography and Comstock’s attempts to resist this new technology, she seems to have missed an opportunity to explore the role that sexuality played in spirit photographs. Photographs of ectoplasmic materializations, for example, frequently depicted spiritual mediums in sexually provocative positions, and it would have been interesting to explore how these photographs were also implicated in nineteenth-century obscenity debates. Given McGarry’s interest in spiritualism as a reform movement, it is also surprising that she does not address the spiritualists’ ties to the abolitionist movement. Her anecdote concerning Virginia slave Henry “Box” Brown, who successfully mailed himself to an abolitionist organization in Philadelphia and then publicly reenacted his escape as a kind of “spiritualist manifestation” (p. 119), seems to suggest a fundamental connection between the emancipation of slaves and the manifestations of spirits, yet this connection is never clearly articulated or developed.