Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (review)

Abstract

Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. By Robert S. Cox. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Pp. viii, 286. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.50.)Traditional accounts of Spiritualism begin in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 when mysterious sounds in John Fox's farmhouse were interpreted as messages from spirit communicating with Fox's teenage daughters, Margaret and Kate. When girls were taken to Rochester by their older sister, Leah Fox Fish, new movement began, one centered upon seances where entranced mediums served as brokers between worlds of living and dead. Although Robert S. Cox tells story of Foxes' contagious mediumship in Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism, he notes that it only one of multiple origins of Spiritualism, along with Andrew Jackson Davis's Harmonial philosophy and influences from other prophetic traditions. Given diversity of spiritualist thought and practice, Cox observes that most historians of movement have situated it amidst spiritual innovations in nineteenth century that helped Americans adjust to social change. Body and Soul, however, seeks to go beyond what Cox calls instrumentalist tinge (17) of these interpretations, which view spirit possession as challenge to power relations, by placing Spiritualism within broader history of emotions and reconstructing the conformation of sympathetic body and its relation to spirit society (4).Cox's study begins with an examination of somnambulism in early republic, revisiting conversations over nature of behavior to examine their implications for community, corporeality, and conduct (23). Here Cox provides lucid summary of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theories of sensibility, before showing how somnambulism served as site of contest between different theories of social order. Examining career of Jane C. Rider, Springfield Somnambulist, he argues that sympathy opened broader mental world to women and other people of ordinary social status while raising cultural anxieties about submerged desires of an inner self that potentially could explode into violent loss of self-control. These concerns came to surface in trial of Albert Tirrell, who acquitted of murdering beautiful prostitute Maria Bickford in 1846 after his defense suggested that crime may have been committed in state of somnambulism.After showing how sleeping preacher Rachel Baker raised questions about division between material and spiritual, Cox examines how Americans turned to Spiritualist views, often through related discourses of phrenology, mesmerism, and somnambulism, but always in ways that were rooted in an individual's social experience. The resulting search for a transcendent community that annihilated boundaries of belief, party, and sect, and even of time and space (99), Cox argues, constitutes Spiritualist political economy based on emotion that brought all of creation into an organic unity that provided for progress in afterlife while motivating social action in this world.The most provocative chapters of Body and Soul concern spirit photography, visits from dead by important historical figures, and racial and ethnic components of Spiritualism. Cox relates popularity of spirit photography to larger questions about representations and social power, focusing less on legitimacy of these photographs than on how spirit photography was an assertion of centripetal force of familial and affective ties over and above centrifugal forces of social disruption, including forces of market (135) while, of course, being an extension of that marketplace. …