When We Spoke to the Dead:
How Ghosts Gave American Women Their Voice
by Ilise S. Carter (Sourcebooks)
This book is about Spiritualism, the movement in the mid-19th Century that lasted until the early 20th, and, akin to New Thought, won, as so many of its precepts are so blended into conventional wisdom (in the United States at least) that seeing it takes effort.
In particular, the book is a Feminist history of Spiritualism, focusing on major female players, and primarily the Fox Sisters, though it includes people like Madame Laveau to establish that Black America invented everything worthwhile about the U.S..
History is mixed with journalism and a sprinkle of travelog as the author interviews current practitioners and current and historical sites. It veers into the gonzo as the inciting event is the author’s own loss of her father, and the author’s grief in general about him and about others is an companion story.
The writing is stellar. Insightful and sharp, it makes for a real page-turner. I love it to the point of envy. Contra some other reviewers, I thought the more journalistic (and journal-y) parts to be the best in the book. The sense of personal narrative and insight works, both telling a good story and providing interstitial material that connects up bits that might otherwise come over as forced. It feels awesome.
As for it as a history, it is flawed. The premise is great. There is a lot of material here. The section on Beecher–Tilton is well-executed. The author is willing to take a go at the philosophy of science questions that paranormal research has influenced, which I think is a topic worth better recognition, and something that is often avoided due to its difficulty. The history of chiropractic practice never ever gets old. But the book failed my citation dive test repeatedly. There are marvelously unfounded assertions here, not necessarily wrong but either offered up without critical care or without supporting evidence, occasionally (as with sexuality) contradictory in its way to present the subjects of the tale in a better light.
See, what rattles my chains is the “both sides”-ing. I specifically had big hopes of this book in that I understand the author was a performer, and if there is one place where the ‘to catch a thief’ rule applies, it is with the supernatural. It is as if my dead mom was global warming, where people who otherwise show great intelligence and expertise lose their fucking critical facility and make absolute fools of themselves. A huckster will see the trick right away and not get taken.
There is a manner in which I get personally riled up about it. The author suggests that Spiritualism and its derivatives should be looked at like a lot of history, as a mixture of good and bad. I cannot accept that during wartime, with an anti-science administration propelled to power through conspiratorial thinking. But in a more general manner, I think that it breaks the author’s project. It is only under con and hustle that spiritualism can bear a Feminist interpretation.
To throw the title back at the author, if there are ghosts, then American women were silent. Teaching the question devalues what sort of skill and canny that these women had. Even if you dial it back to a benign ignorance on their part, and a sort of desire to participate in the religious experience, the result is to devalue the agency that these women were stealing like Prometheus, and instead paint them like copycats of more patriarchal religious experience.
Instead, the book’s route is to poke at the foma, and note the weird things that happen, which…well, there is a moment in the closing chapter that blows the author’s credibility for me, in her acceptance of a cold reading that, based on all the facts I know about the author, would be about as risky as saying to BookToker that they had strong feelings about The Secret History.
And that is the thing, as a memoir or document of lived experience, great! I want that sort of material. It is fun and I want to read more of it and more like it. As a way of interpreting the past, not so much.
My thanks to the author, Ilise S. Carter, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Sourcebooks, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 