Dissertation
An Age of Uncertainty: Conflicts in Nineteenth-Century Science, Authority, and the Female Spiritualist in British and American Women’s Supernatural Fiction, 1854-1937
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2022
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000004340
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/124751
Abstract
My dissertation explores how the real-life and fictional female spiritualist within the movement of spiritualism contests the dominant Eurocentric masculinist, white supremacist, ableist assumptions of the female mind and body, which became cemented in medical science during the nineteenth century. This project examines the importance of the fictional female spiritualist in British and American women’s supernatural fiction, such as tales by Rhoda Broughton, George Eliot, Rosa Mulholland, Pauline Hopkins, Edith Wharton, and Ellen Glasgow. My dissertation includes a thorough historical and cultural examination of how the professionalization of nineteenth-century medical science in Britain and the US pathologized women. I contend that the fictional female spiritualist in British and American supernatural fiction undermines the authority of nineteenth-century science and medicine by collapsing the Cartesian dualism of the mind/body split, contests the influence of the male psychical researcher, and mobilizes physical illness and hysteria to assert her feminist, occult power.
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Details
- Title
- An Age of Uncertainty
- Creators
- Lindsey Ivone Carman
- Contributors
- Pamela Thoma (Advisor)Carol Siegel (Advisor)Donna Potts (Committee Member)Louis McAuley (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- English, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 189
- Identifiers
- 99900882928901842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation