Talking to the Dead (18 page)

Although many believers were feminists, as the movement expanded a division of labor nevertheless emerged that largely reflected social roles: female mediums generally ruled over uncanny manifestations in the parlor while male mediums expressed themselves in a more “philosophic” vein on paper; men tended to appear onstage as fully conscious lecturers and women as dreamy trance speakers. Even so, mediumship gave women an opportunity to speak in a public forum, albeit in a trance and with their ideas attributed to the spirits.

Believers defended not only the authenticity but also the importance of the various manifestations. One author explained that communications, whatever the type, demonstrated not simply the truth of immortality, but “the
nearness and connection
of that world with this….

“Why ridicule the movements of articles of furniture by unseen power?” he demanded. “If they are spirits, they take the nearest and most convenient thing at hand, and thereby demonstrate a great fact, namely the existence of a spiritual power above all this gross materialism.”
¹⁶

Neither were the messages themselves to be derided. “Their object appears to be now,” he observed, “not to startle the world with any new and wonderful revelations, but to startle it gently, as human nature requires, out of this deep sleep of materialism and unbelief.”

Many of the Fox family's close friends were discovering their own gift for mediumship. Isaac Post found that if he entered a trance, he was guided by the spirits to write down their messages. In 1851, the year that
Uncle Tom's Cabin
first appeared in serial form and Hawthorne's
House of the Seven Gables
and Melville's
Moby Dick
were published, Isaac compiled messages from William Penn, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Emanuel Swedenborg, and others into a three-hundred-page volume called
Voices from the Spirit World; Being Communications From Many Spirits by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium.
The messages, Isaac said, had been transcribed through automatic writing that sometimes occurred in the pres
ence of “A.L. Fish (a rapping medium).” In 1852 Charles Hammond, the Universalist minister who had watched in awe as the furniture danced and floated in front of him at one of the sisters' early seances, produced a book called
Light from the Spirit World; The Pilgrimage of Thomas Paine, and Others, to the Seventh Circle in the Spirit World.

Other acquaintances of the Fox family also became prominent. The Reverend R. P. Ambler, who had accompanied Leah and Maggie to Albany in 1850, wrote
The Elements of Spiritual Philosophy; Being an Exposition of Interior Principles.
And Charles Partridge, the match manufacturer, became a highly successful publisher, joining with the editor Samuel B. Brittan in 1851 to establish a magazine that explored the philosophical questions raised by spirit communication. The two men titled the new journal
Shekinah,
a Hebrew word long used to evoke the radiance of the divine.

The name also reflected the then-current romantic fascination with cultures—Jewish, Catholic, Asian, Native American—that seemed to some Protestants to be foreign and mysterious, even enchanted. Like the spirit world, these alluring “other worlds” seemed to invite investigation, at least insofar as they represented the remote in time, physical distance, or culture. Romanticized views, however, generally bore only an inverse relationship to the actual treatment of minority groups in the culture. As the Native American population disappeared under the brutal onslaught of white settlers, for example, P. T. Barnum was inspired to present scenes of “American Indians who enacted their warlike and religious ceremonies on stage” at his famous museum, and Native American spirits became equally popular attractions in visions and seances. Deemed wise representatives of a simpler, more natural way of life, Native Americans evidently appeared less threatening in immortal than in mortal guise, and like other spirits they were eager to reconcile with their enemies and forgive any trespasses committed against them.
¹⁷

Pleased by the
Shekinah
's expanding circulation, in 1852 the firm of Partridge and Brittan introduced a weekly newspaper called the
Spiritual Telegraph.
Its name, chosen with equal care, underscored the connection the editors made between current technology and the promise of immortality.

Horace Greeley continued to reach the widest audience with news of the spirits. He was publishing less on the issue than in the past, overwhelmed by the deluge of attacks and counterattacks, but in the spring of 1852, in a
review of the
Spiritual Telegraph,
he called attention to the remarkable rise of the new movement, and he gave it a name: “
modern Spiritualism.
”

Its believers he called
Spiritualists.
¹⁸

 

New technology for mass-producing images turned famous names into familiar faces, and in 1852 Nathaniel Currier issued a print of the three spirit-rapping Fox sisters. The portrait was copied from a daguerreotype made by a Rochester photographer in 1851.

Daguerreotypes themselves were the product of a relatively new process developed in France and first introduced into the United States in the 1840s by Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph. Like the telegraph, the daguerreotype was an innovation with resonance for the Spiritualist movement, for the images created by the process eerily evoked ghostly second selves. Later in the century, when new technology made negatives possible, photographers would produce pictures that purported to show actual spirits—pale, transparent apparitions—hovering next to mortal subjects.

The Currier print of the Fox sisters, while it makes no otherworldly claims, is memorable. Maggie and Leah, each with her hair piled in an austere topknot, both draped in shawls as enveloping as religious robes, sit on either side of the luminously beautiful Kate. Standing a step behind her sisters, Kate wears a demure high-necked dress, and her hair falls almost to her waist in two long braids. The image is reminiscent of an icon: a youthful saint with her watchful ministers at her right hand and her left.

While the Currier print has a quality of genteel religiosity, there is nothing remotely saintly about the daguerreotype of Kate and Maggie taken by Thomas Easterly when the girls visited St. Louis, Missouri, in 1852. This portrait reveals two lovely flesh-and-blood young women, dressed in fashionable gowns with square-cut necklines and tight-fitting bodices. The fabrics look rich even in black and white. Each sister wears her glossy hair pulled back softly in the style of the day. Their sensuality—Maggie's earthiness and Kate's delicacy—is dignified, natural, and visible. The two youngest Fox sisters, as John E. Robinson of Rochester had noticed, were growing up, and the impact of their mediumship on their personal lives, and vice versa, would become increasingly complex.

1852–1857

I
N THE FALL
of 1852 Kate was fifteen and Maggie nineteen. They were financially secure, able to afford luxuries for themselves and their loved ones, but freedom from gossip and innuendo was not so easily purchased. Kate and Maggie—like many working-class girls—mixed constantly and informally with strangers, men other than their own relatives. However well chaperoned by Margaret or Leah, the two young mediums greeted their public in rooms where the lights were often dim, where intimate feelings were exchanged, and where hand-holding was an integral part of the moment—scandalous behavior at the time. The beliefs and practices that gave Kate and Maggie the means to live like the respectable middle class in effect excluded them from a comfortable niche within it.

Not that they necessarily craved stuffy respectability. Kate may have longed for the protective veneer of a conventional middle-class home, but Maggie openly thrived on the excitement and challenge of her mediumship and on the attention it brought her from men and women of all social ranks. Snubbed by some, the Fox sisters were the darlings of others,
and many of their wealthy and fashionable clients pampered them with gifts of jewelry and the best French champagne.

The sisters' developing sexuality, however, began to create a new problem, one that hadn't existed in the early years of their mediumship. Although the word
demon
had been hurled at them occasionally, and they even had been hounded once or twice by jealous wives, in the past they had generally been perceived as country children. Youth had helped protect them from unwanted advances and accusations of improprieties.

By 1852, however, little Kate had blossomed into a beauty with the slender figure and perfect features of a heroine in a sentimental novel. She was moody, clouds crossing her brow when her sunny enthusiasms and tenderhearted affections were replaced by self-pity or frustration, but she radiated tremendous vulnerability and charm.

Maggie too had grown into a vital, attractive young woman who, while she lacked her sister's languishing grace, had eyes that shone with intelligence and wit, a warmly expressive face, and a petite, shapely figure. A friend later described her as “sparkling and irrepressible,” her “buoyant glee…held in check but not dashed by the fear of breaking bounds, and possibly giving offense….” By nature happy and impulsive, this friend testified, Maggie “had learned self-command from being frequently in the presence of persons uncongenial to her….”
¹

A creature of controlled passions rather than of passing moods, Maggie, like Kate, was charismatic. Biology and maturity were transforming both sisters into truly terrifying beings: sexual women who could be perceived and portrayed as seductresses and, worse, ones with otherworldly powers.

This image of course is an old and familiar one: Eve, the temptress; Circe, the sorceress; the Sirens who used their wiles to lure men into danger. In the nineteenth century, however, women's sexuality became doubly suspect, a trait at odds with the era's idealized image of femininity.
²

In the past in Christian America, men and women alike had been viewed as sexual creatures, and if fornication and adultery were forbidden, procreative sex within a happy marriage had been seen as an enjoyable, even blessed, activity. Premarital sex, while far from condoned, was often forgiven so long as the couple married or remained together. As
the nineteenth century progressed, however, the economic incentive, if not the religious injunction, to be fruitful and multiply diminished, while new information about birth control made nonprocreative sex more of an option. For women, who endured the dangers of childbirth, the idea of sex for pleasure was at once alluring and guilt provoking. Carnal desire contrasted too sharply with the modesty and spirituality expected of those who inhabited the feminine sphere. Women who violated the ideal, in demeanor or behavior, might be labeled coarse, deviant, or seductive.

If respectable women were required to be—or look—demure, men had other problems. Success in the masculine sphere of the workplace seemed to require a level of aggressive, competitive energy that—medical doctors somberly warned—could easily be drained away in the careless expenditure of seminal fluid. Virtue and wasted energy, metaphors for America's hopes and fears, reflected quite literal concerns of the day.

If sexuality was viewed as unseemly in a woman, lust was conceived of as natural in a man. His sexual exploits were tolerated, evidence of his animal side. He might find relief in guilty pleasures, such as sex with prostitutes or, if single, in flirtations with girls who were livelier than the lady he might choose for his wife. Much as he might love the beguiling woman with whom he dallied, it was her reputation, of course, that was damaged if he failed to propose.

Although attitudes toward sex were more conflicted than in the past, passion expressed in words, not deeds, remained paradoxically acceptable. As mutual affection rather than economic factors became increasingly important in choosing a mate, many couples expressed their sentimental and even sexual yearnings in love letters. With rates of premarital sex in decline by 1850, yet with a premium newly placed on romance, love letters served as a release from the pent-up emotions inevitably stirred by courtship at a time when middle-class young people were marrying later.

For Maggie, now approaching the age of courtship and marriage, but also for Kate, the world of sexual mores and relationships was filled with contradictions. No longer just ciphers for the spirits, they were becoming women with their own earthly needs, whose behavior could be assessed and judged and whose position in society was complex. Although they
moved easily among the great and famous of their day, they also worked for a living in a profession that brought them into contact with all sorts of men, a profession regarded by many as disreputable. Unconventional, charismatic, and filled with a hunger for life, they were at risk in a society that smiled on romance but blamed the woman for a couple's mutual indiscretions.

 

In October 1852, at the urging of Philadelphia's Spiritualist community, Maggie and her mother visited the City of Brotherly Love, where they rented the spacious bridal suite at Webb's Union Hotel. The sunny parlor was soon filled, as elsewhere, with men and women eager to investigate the spirits as well as to ogle the medium. One visitor, the noted explorer, author, and lecturer Elisha Kent Kane, quickly surrendered to Maggie's charms.
³

“Once in the mornings of old,” Kane wrote, later recalling his first meeting with Maggie and spinning it into a fable, “I read in a penny newspaper that for one dollar the inmates of another world would rap to me the secrets of this one; the deaths of my friends, the secret thoughts of my sweet-hearts; all things spirit-like and incomprehensible would be resolved into hard knocks, and all for one dollar!…With that, all alone, I wended my way to a hotel, and after the necessary forms of doorkeepers and tickets—by Jove, I saw the ‘spirit.'”
⁴

By the “spirit,” Kane meant Maggie, of course, who appealed to him with her kindhearted warmth, youthful energy, and unusual beauty. But he also sensed other qualities in her that both attracted and disturbed him: her aura of mystery, her paradoxical double nature, “that strange mixture of child and woman, of simplicity and cunning, of passionate impulse and extreme self-control….”

Equally unsettling to him was her profession. After briefly showing interest in the spirits, he quickly pronounced himself adamantly opposed to the rapping—declared it altogether a fraud—although he couldn't say for certain how the sounds were made.

“Take my advice and never talk of the spirits either to friends or strangers,” he once scolded Kate. “You know that with all my intimacy with Maggie, after a whole month's trial, I could make nothing of them. Therefore they are a
great mystery.
”

Kane, whom Maggie called “Lish,” or sometimes “Ly,” wrote letters suffused with the passionate sentimentality of the nineteenth-century gentleman, and these form the basis of a slim volume about the couple's courtship titled
The Love-Life of Dr. Kane.
The book was published on Maggie's initiative in 1866, but its contents have long been disputed for several reasons. The letters are linked by a narrative, labeled a memoir, whose anonymous author may have been either Joseph LaFumee, a newspaper editor with the
Brooklyn Eagle,
or Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, a popular author, both of whom befriended Maggie.
⁵
Most likely at the Fox family's behest, this loyal friend and misleading author—LaFumee or Ellet—distorted facts, for example by portraying Maggie as a naive thirteen-year-old girl rather than as a nineteen-year-old woman when she first met Kane. In addition, some letters in the collection were edited for the book's publication. But other correspondence in archives and libraries substantiates the compelling story of the couple's love affair.

Kane, the indomitable, sentimental suitor who wooed Maggie in 1852, teasingly called her his “Circe,” the enchantress whose wiles ensnared the hero of Homer's epic
Odyssey.
He meant the nickname affectionately, but it carried a bite.

His favorite poem was Tennyson's “Ulysses,” and like the hero, Elisha Kent Kane was a wanderer, an explorer; however, Kane's most famous journeys took place in the frigid far north rather than under Mediterranean skies. The remote Arctic region with its winter-long nights, shimmering mirages, and miles-wide ice sheets had defeated intrepid sailors for centuries, even as the hope of finding a northwest passage from Europe to Asia had beckoned them onward. In the nineteenth century the hunt for an open polar sea through which ships could sail across the top of the Americas intensified. The effort came to be seen as more than a commercial enterprise; it acquired the symbolic power of a quest into the unknown, a challenge that could prove the courage and mettle of heroes.

In the late 1840s, just such an expedition of one hundred men, led by the seasoned British explorer Dr. John Franklin, vanished. Exploration, already fraught with emotion, quickly evolved into a humanitarian mission, and in 1850 thirty-year-old Kane joined one of several rescue expeditions that sailed in search of the missing men.

Slim, about 5'7" tall, with intense eyes and aristocratic, narrow features, he by no means looked the part of the daring adventurer, if by that one imagines the burly trapper who invaded the inland wilderness with his rifle on his back. Born to a well-to-do Philadelphia family in 1820, he was the oldest of seven children. His maternal grandfather, a wealthy manufacturer, had made his fortune in flour mills and counted Thomas Jefferson among his close friends. Kane's father, John Kintzing Kane, was a highly respected jurist and an intellectual with an abiding interest in science and natural philosophy. On both his mother's and his father's side, Elisha Kent Kane's family was a proud one, influential in local affairs and on the national scene.

Privilege offered no protection against disaster. In his late teens Kane contracted rheumatic fever, a disease that permanently weakened his heart. Despite recurring periods of depression and invalidism, he refused the role of victim. By the time he left for the Arctic in 1850, he had studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, been appointed to the post of assistant naval surgeon, and accompanied expeditions to China, India, Africa, and Europe as well as to Central and South America. His parents had been a source of encouragement but were now beginning to urge him to settle down.

By 1850 Kane also had left a few broken hearts behind him. One relationship almost certainly produced an illegitimate child, and he had developed a pattern of literally sailing away when a relationship became too close. He may simply have been a cad or a rake; more likely, he consciously or unconsciously wished to live what threatened to be a brief life to the fullest, whether in romance or adventure, no matter the consequences for others.

The Arctic rescue mission joined by Kane in 1850 returned in 1851 after sixteen months away with little positive news to report on the fate of Dr. Franklin's men. Only a small makeshift graveyard had been found; the survivors apparently had journeyed onward. Could anyone have remained alive after the passage of so many years? Most people who understood Arctic conditions felt justified in surrendering hope, but Dr. Franklin's widow and Elisha Kent Kane were not among them.

To save the long-lost Franklin, and certainly for other reasons as
well—the thrill of discovery, the fame it bestowed—Kane was determined to return to the Arctic, this time as commander of his own expedition. Death had shadowed him for many years, and his name on a map of the world—as it appears today on Kane Basin, an ice-locked bay off the northwest coast of Greenland—must have promised a more assured immortality than any Spiritualist could offer.

He began an arduous process of fund-raising for the new expedition, writing a book about the first expedition (he hoped it would bankroll the second one), hounding government officials and private donors for money, and giving endless rounds of lectures. His energy and enthusiasm, his pleasant and agreeable speaking voice, and his endless store of information and anecdotes enchanted his listeners, somewhat to his discomfort. He wryly compared himself to “his rivals” who also performed for paying audiences. He named as his competitors the aging magician Blitz, the popular opera singer Alboni, and the philosopher Emerson.

“We are all of one feather,” the explorer complained. “No matter: so that I get my money, I do not care.”
⁶

In the spring of 1851 he suffered a series of seizures—a family friend called the bouts a nervous collapse, but they more likely stemmed from his chronic disease—that physically and emotionally depleted him. That summer his beloved fifteen-year-old brother, Willie, died after a brief illness. Slowly, Kane recovered from stress and sorrow and resumed his work: writing, lecturing, and fund-raising.