The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian EnglandA highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums—it's an exploration of the era's gender relations. The hugely popular spiritualist movement, which maintained that women were uniquely qualified to commune with spirits of the dead, offered female mediums a new independence, authority, and potential to undermine conventional class and gender relations in the home and in society. Using previously unexamined sources and an innovative approach, Alex Owen invokes the Victorian world of darkened séance rooms, theatrical apparitions, and moving episodes of happiness lost and regained. She charts the struggles between spiritualists and the medical and legal establishments over the issue of female mediumship, and provides new insights into the gendered dynamics of Victorian society. |
Contents
The Spiritualist Context | 1 |
2 Victorian Spiritualism and the Spiritualist Woman | 18 |
Light and Shadows | 41 |
4 At Home with the Theobald Family | 75 |
5 Women Healers in the Spiritualist World | 107 |
6 Medicine Mediumship and Mania | 139 |
7 Louisa Lowes Story | 168 |
Other editions - View all
The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England Alex Owen No preview available - 2004 |
Common terms and phrases
1877 Select Committee accepted active American amongst Annie appeared Association asylum became behaviour believers BNAS Brislington British Chandos Leigh Hunt circle Cited Commissioners communications disease Emma Hardinge Britten emphasised experience fact female femininity feminist Florence Cook Florence Marryat Forbes Winslow Frank Podmore free love Freud friends gender Georgina Georgina Weldon healers healing Henry Maudsley homeopathy husband hysteria ibid incarceration insanity interest issues James Burns Journal Katie King later lectures Leigh Hunt letter Logie Barrow London Louisa Lowe Lunacy Law lunatic magnetic male marriage materialisation medicine mediumistic mediumship mesmerism middle-class mind Miss Wood Modern Spiritualism moral Morell Theobald movement nature nineteenth-century passive writing patients phenomena physician private mediums Psychical Research Psychoanalysis question reform religious reports séances sexual sitters social Spirit Workers spiritualist practice spiritualist press spiritualist women Swedenborgian took trance unconscious Victorian Weldon whilst William Crookes woman young