Spiritual Matter: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, Whiteness, and Material Performance

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the “physical manifestations” of nineteenth-century Spiritualism including animated objects, tipping tables, spiritual machines, spirit materializations, ectoplasm, as well as cases of animating human remains. I discuss the American spirit mediums Jonathan Koons, John Murray Spear, J.H. Conant, Elizabeth Denton, Anne Denton Cridge, Mary Schindler, G.A. Redman, Mary Comstock, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Kate and Maggie Fox, Margery Crandon, the English mediums Florence Cook and Elizabeth d’Esperance, and the French medium Eva Carrière. While my analysis is rooted in the American context, I follow where these repertoires traveled, which allows us to see this form of mediumship as a transatlantic phenomenon.I argue that these spirit mediums turned racial Whiteness (particularly feminine Whiteness) into a practical spiritual technology through literalization. Literalization, as a logic of performance that collapses the gap between matter and meaning, uniquely exposed the implicit racial and sexual meanings behind Spiritualist activities. Ultimately, I contend that Spiritualist material performance comprised a set of experimental practices employed to test the power of White identity to transcend matter by absorbing material powers associated with racially othered spirits. The first two chapters look at White mediums channeling Indian and Black spirits, the third looks at how male mediums employed female bodies as spiritual resources, and the fourth looks at how female mediums racialized and sexualized Whiteness through materialization.