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Women: A Cultural Review

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Ghostly NarrativesLucy 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

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

Ghostly Narratives

SPIRITUALISM and Womens Writing is a thought-provoking bookwhich 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

seance and its director (3). Focusing on the fiction of Michele 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 comparingtwo different fin-de-siecle discourses: Psychical Research and the theoryof 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 Offering a history of the Society of Psychical Research(SPR), which is both a key historical reference point and a rich critical/metaphorical network through which these novels can be read (6),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 athow closely related the SPR and stage acting were in terms of their focuson interiority. There are some interesting ideas here, particularly inrelation to issues of power. As Kontou summarizes: It is as if the actressand character, like medium and spirit, or ventriloquist and dummy, areconducting 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 launchinginto her analysis of the neo-Victorian novels. Kontou explores the notion

of performing the self by analysing the presence of spiritualist tropes inthe works of May Sinclair and Dorothy Richardson in order to betterunderstand the connection between femininity, textuality and spectralitythat later writers have tapped into (11). Here, Kontou proposes that thetextual and performative practices of the Edwardian seance (43), such asautomatic writing, can be linked to modernist narrative techniques. Inboth discourses boundaries collapse: author and character merge into one

Tatiana Kontou,Spiritualism andWomens Writing:From the Fin deSie`cle to the Neo-

Victorian, PalgraveMacmillan, 2009,52.00 hardback978 0 2302 0005 0.

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

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another and time folds in on itself, resulting in the writing taking on aghostly life of its own.

Phantasms of Florence Cook discusses Michele Roberts In the RedKitchen (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 torecuperate some of the marginal figures who have been excluded from thehistory pages of the Victorian era, particularly the female materializationmedium. Central to this chapter, and the volume as a whole, are issuessurrounding the manipulation of history and the power of the writtenword.

Indeed, spiritualist practices from materialization to automatic writ-ing ultimately call into question the power of the dead over the living(and vice versa). They question the extent to which we can controlwhat 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 closereading of In the Red Kitchen to explore the haziness surrounding wherefact ends and fiction begins. Kontou uses photographs of Florence Cookand her spirit Katie King to extend this notion of ambiguity to spirit andmedium, and the difficulty in separating, or distinguishing, medium andspirit from one another.

Natural and Spiritual Evolutions uses Byatts Angels and Insects

(1992) to explore the (perhaps rather unexpected connection) betweenthe Darwinist theory of evolution, spiritualism and literary history (11).Specifically, Kontou looks at how the various ways in which naturalhistory and spiritualism can be seen as locked together in a dialogue overmans physical and psychical evolution (11415). For Kontou, scienceand seances are not as far removed as we might think, and she uses Byattsnovellas to demonstrate how a range of discourses haunted the nine-teenth-century home and the lives of its inhabitants.

The Other World Illuminated concentrates on Glendinningsreworking 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 becomesa metaphor for the pulses and shocks of spirit communication; the seancebecomes a way of understanding the unseen forces of electricity (148). InGlendinnings book, spiritualism is lit up by electricity, allowingCharlotte, the central character who is a medium, to clearly see bothherself and the world she inhabits.

REVIEW 447.......................................................................................................

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In Queering the Seance, Kontou explores how, in Affinity (1999),Sarah Waters creates a form of counter-historical writing*an explora-tion of Victorian lesbian identity through the narrative tropes ofsensation fiction and the seance (12). In Waters novel, another Victorianfigure is taken from the margins and placed at the centre of a narrative.But this story does not exist alone. For Kontou, the twentieth-centurynovel is drawing vital energy from its nineteenth-century predeces-sors, and Kontou incorporates Susan Willis Fletchers Twelve Months inan English Prison, Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh and HenryJamess The Turn of the Screw into her analysis (175).

Clearly, a huge amount of research has gone into this book. It is wellwritten with lots of signposting, and offers some original and interestingreadings. For me, it emphasizes how fluid history is, and how importantthe written word is in recording, and re-recording, these histories. ForKontou, these novels are textual seances, haunted works in which past

and present, living and dead are bound together (200).

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