“A Higher Power to Feel”

Abstract

This article examines the relationship among gender identity, spirituality, and emotion and addresses the largely unexamined subject of male grief in Victorian America by analyzing the way in which mid—nineteenth-century Spiritualist men deployed grief in their narratives of religious redemption. Participating in a broader cultural conversation about gender in the Victorian middle class, these men suggested that grief and Spiritualist commitment would counteract the repressive effects of the market revolution and the ideology of domesticity on male identity—and reinforce male power—by encouraging an emotionally expressive and domestically engaged style of manhood. Spiritualist men publicly presented their private experiences of introspective “grief work” to do the “cultural work” of shaping a conception of masculinity suitable to a rising Victorian middle class.