Around the start of the blog, I had mentioned about an article written by Judith R. Walkowitz entitled "Science and the Seance: Transgressions of Gender and Genre in Late Victorian London". I had planned on using that article back then, but honestly forgot about it until now.
(A picture of Georgina Weldon)
Walkowitz focuses her article around the spiritualist, Georgina Weldon. Mrs. Weldon was an aspiring performer who, against her parents’ wishes, married Mr. Weldon to finally live her dream. Her husband eventually became estrange from her after she decided to run an orphanage from their home to educate children. It was not a secret that she was into spiritualism and would even try to conduct séances in the house, sometimes with the children. It is because of her fascination with spiritualism that eventually, according to Walkowitz, made her “a target of lunacy confinement because a public controversy between doctors and spiritualists provided her husband with the means to further his private designs that is, to rid himself of a nuisance wife” (pgs.4-5). The professionals of the medical career felt threatened by the accelerating number of intellectual people who became interested in the spiritual phenomena. Many declared “spiritualists as crazy women and feminized men engaged in superstitious, popular, and fraudulent practices” (pg.5). A lot of these medical doctors who often bombarded spiritualists were specialists in the study of insanity within the brain. They would “denounced the trance as a form of hysteria” and "psychiatrists translated spiritualist communications into the esoteric language of materialist science, as due to local lesions of the brain or unconscious cerebrations" (pg.5). The doctor who Mr. Weldon would call to take his wife, Dr. L. Forbes Winslow, “identified spiritualism as the principal cause of the increase of insanity in England, particularly among ‘weak-minded hysterical women’” (pg.6).
(Picture of Dr. L. Forbes Winslow)
The number of women at the time was much great than men and the ones that were married still found themselves lonely or unhappy. “The private, home like atmosphere of the séance, reinforced by the familial content of spirit communication with dead relatives, was a comfortable setting for women. The séance reversed the usual sexual hierarchy of knowledge and power: it shifted attention away from men and focused it on the female medium, the center of spiritual knowledge and insight” (pg.8). Spiritualism was seen as a source of amusement to many, but some found it slightly exotic; “dramatic sexual displays and inversions were accomplished at materializations: a medium, usually an attractive young girl, would be placed in a cabinet, bound and gagged, while a fanciful spirit would issue forth, sometimes a red Indian, sometimes a swearing buccaneer, sometimes a lovely young female spirit in a diaphanous white gown who sat on the laps of her favorite gentlemen” (pg.9). The article, also, suggest that women were destined to be mediums and connect with spirits because they were fragile and not as smart compared to men, but were pure, static, and quiet. Their natural, soft domineers made them the ideal persons to connect with the unseen world. (This kind of sounds like Owen's book)
In the case of Mrs. Weldon, she was the type of woman who would seem ideal to be a spiritualist, but she was cleaver and determined which aided her in escaping from being thrown into an asylum and fight back in court against those who tried to place her there. She convinced the court that her husband, indeed, conspired with Dr. Winslow to have her thrown into an asylum when she was, in fact, sane. While other women before her tried to have women work around men, “Mrs. Weldon showed how women could take matters into their own hands and act publicly in their own defense” (pg.22).
So that is the last of my study. I would first and foremost like to apologize for not finding much else on other European countries. Either I couldn't find any information or the information I found was suspicious, to say the least. But, in this case, I believe I have found a good about of material to rely on. At the start of my blog, my question was "Why did Victorian Era Europe follow Spiritualism and what does Spiritualism entail?". I believe that I have answered that question to an extent. Through my research, I have found how spiritualism became a popular topic and how it could have seemed interesting for others to look into. Most of these studies either focused on England or just countries in general. So while the question is answered for England, it's a little vague for the rest of the European countries. As I said before, either there was nothing on other countries and spiritualism or the information was too suspicious. But for the few articles that mentioned no countries, it could be possible that they meant any country that had spiritualism (or women as some articles focused on). I mentioned back at the top of this post that the journey wasn't over and I truly believe that, because there could, indeed, be more information out there that either I was not able to access or just not published yet. The idea of looking at spiritualism in history is still an ongoing research for many. Books and articles on the topic are still coming out today and who knows what other pieces of information they might find. I certainly hope you enjoyed reading along with my research and thank you for your interest.
Citation: Walkowitz, Judith R. "Science and the Séance: Transgressions of Gender and Genre in Late Victorian London". Representations. University of California Press. No. 22 (Spring, 1988), pgs. 3-29 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928407>
