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Women: A Cultural Review

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Ghostly Narratives
Lucy Le-Guilcher Published online: 16 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Lucy Le-Guilcher (2011) Ghostly Narratives, Women: A Cultural Review, 22:4, 446-448, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2011.618705 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.618705

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L U C Y L E - G U I L C H E R

R E V I E W

Ghostly Narratives
Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Womens Writing: From the Fin de Sie`cle to the NeoVictorian, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 52.00 hardback 978 0 2302 0005 0.

PIRITUALISM and Womens Writing is a thought-provoking book which asks readers to think anew about a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts. The neo-Victorian novels examined here are all concerned with the figure of the female medium and represent her as an author of both fictions and histories, as both the lead actress of the se ance and its director (3). Focusing on the fiction of Miche ` le Roberts, A.S. Byatt, Victoria Glendinning and Sarah Waters, Kontou advocates that an analysis of [s]piritualist manifestation in these novels forces us to reconsider our understanding of history, narrative and the afterlife (7). Chapter 1, Theatres in the Skull, examines the relationship between professional (or stage-based) performance and mediumship by comparing two different fin-de-sie ` cle discourses: Psychical Research and the theory of acting (10). Offering a history of the Society of Psychical Research (SPR), which is both a key historical reference point and a rich critical/ metaphorical network through which these novels can be read (6), Kontou closely reads Florence Marryats novel My Sister the Actress (1881) and Henry Jamess short story Nona Vincent (1894) in order to look at how closely related the SPR and stage acting were in terms of their focus on interiority. There are some interesting ideas here, particularly in relation to issues of power. As Kontou summarizes: It is as if the actress and character, like medium and spirit, or ventriloquist and dummy, are conducting a ghostly conversation with each other. This togetherness, however, is problematic. Who exactly is in control here? (37). In chapter 2, Kontou stays in the nineteenth century before launching into her analysis of the neo-Victorian novels. Kontou explores the notion of performing the self by analysing the presence of spiritualist tropes in the works of May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson in order to better understand the connection between femininity, textuality and spectrality that later writers have tapped into (11). Here, Kontou proposes that the textual and performative practices of the Edwardian se ance (43), such as automatic writing, can be linked to modernist narrative techniques. In both discourses boundaries collapse: author and character merge into one

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Women: a cultural review Vol. 22. No. 4. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.618705

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REVIEW 447

another and time folds in on itself, resulting in the writing taking on a ghostly life of its own. Phantasms of Florence Cook discusses Miche ` le Roberts In the Red Kitchen (1990) by focusing on the way it recreates the life of Florence Cook, the medium who became one of the stars of British spiritualism (11). Here, Kontou seeks to (re)capture the past (81) in order to recuperate some of the marginal figures who have been excluded from the history pages of the Victorian era, particularly the female materialization medium. Central to this chapter, and the volume as a whole, are issues surrounding the manipulation of history and the power of the written word.
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Indeed, spiritualist practices from materialization to automatic writing ultimately call into question the power of the dead over the living (and vice versa). They question the extent to which we can control what is past* what is lost but retrievable and what is lost and gone forever. (83) Kontou uses a range of historical and fictional texts alongside her close reading of In the Red Kitchen to explore the haziness surrounding where fact ends and fiction begins. Kontou uses photographs of Florence Cook and her spirit Katie King to extend this notion of ambiguity to spirit and medium, and the difficulty in separating, or distinguishing, medium and spirit from one another. Natural and Spiritual Evolutions uses Byatts Angels and Insects (1992) to explore the (perhaps rather unexpected connection) between the Darwinist theory of evolution, spiritualism and literary history (11). Specifically, Kontou looks at how the various ways in which natural history and spiritualism can be seen as locked together in a dialogue over mans physical and psychical evolution (114 15). For Kontou, science and se ances are not as far removed as we might think, and she uses Byatts novellas to demonstrate how a range of discourses haunted the nineteenth-century home and the lives of its inhabitants. The Other World Illuminated concentrates on Glendinnings reworking of H.G. Wells novella Love and Mr Lewisham in her novel Electricity (1995), one that mirrors the ambiguous status of the heroine* a woman caught between two centuries (12). Here, [e]lectricity becomes a metaphor for the pulses and shocks of spirit communication; the se ance becomes a way of understanding the unseen forces of electricity (148). In Glendinnings book, spiritualism is lit up by electricity, allowing Charlotte, the central character who is a medium, to clearly see both herself and the world she inhabits.

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In Queering the Se ance, Kontou explores how, in Affinity (1999), Sarah Waters creates a form of counter-historical writing* an exploration of Victorian lesbian identity through the narrative tropes of sensation fiction and the se ance (12). In Waters novel, another Victorian figure is taken from the margins and placed at the centre of a narrative. But this story does not exist alone. For Kontou, the twentieth-century novel is drawing vital energy from its nineteenth-century predecessors, and Kontou incorporates Susan Willis Fletchers Twelve Months in an English Prison, Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh and Henry Jamess The Turn of the Screw into her analysis (175). Clearly, a huge amount of research has gone into this book. It is well written with lots of signposting, and offers some original and interesting readings. For me, it emphasizes how fluid history is, and how important the written word is in recording, and re-recording, these histories. For Kontou, these novels are textual se ances, haunted works in which past and present, living and dead are bound together (200).

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