ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Scriptotherapy and Spiritualism: Narrativizing Maternal Grief in the Late Nineteenth Century

• In Event: Science and Spiritualism: Current Perspectives and Future Directions

English Abstract

Prominent authors of the supernatural distinctively aestheticized spiritualism to imagine the spirit world from the perspective of mothers bereaved of – and yearning to reconnect with – their departed children. While women writers of ghost fiction oscillated between belief and scepticism in their literary responses to the contested science of spiritualism, they were at the same time united by the movement’s capacity to narrativize lived experiences of grief and loss. As a result, the spiritualist movement produced an array of scriptotherapeutic literature through which premature loss could be mediated, soothed, and even healed. Ardent spiritualist practitioners like Florence Marryat sought to defend the ‘science of Spiritualism’ by presenting séance communications with her lost daughter as empirical evidence of post-mortem existence. Those more sceptical but comparably bereaved, including Scottish author Margaret Oliphant, used spiritualism as a means of envisioning a new mental science which intellectually tested the limits of religious faith. Whether believers or sceptics, women writers turned to the spiritualist ghost story as a powerful form of scriptotherapy: a means of writing and working through loss. This paper will therefore demonstrate the entanglement of the writing and grieving process, through which women writers of the supernatural carved out space and time to concurrently mourn and create. In doing so, this paper stresses the therapeutic capacities of the ghost story and the consolatory role of the spiritualist movement to examine how the contested science of spiritualism shaped maternal identity, cultures of mourning, and therapeutic expression in the late nineteenth century.

Author

• Emily Vincent, Durham University