Humanities Honors Program

In this thesis I argue that the influx of female writers of sensationalized Victorian supernatural fiction overlap with the female mediums and participants of the supernaturalist movement, for the ultimate dissemination of the separate spheres ideology, thorough transgressive boundary crossing, ultimately seeking to bolster women’s entrance into the professional sphere, ushering in the “New Woman.” Both movements converge to undermine the Victorian female condition and respective ideals of femininity and womanhood (True Womanhood, Real Womanhood, Public Womanhood, and New Womanhood) through periodicals, short stories, Spiritualist forums, and the séance, women became the catalysts for the “New Woman” of the twentieth century. Thus, the dead become the medium for silenced and oppressed women, a means through which they can transgress social boundaries. Through these figures of transgression, women were able to highlight the failings of various societal institutions and common narratives of Victorian society, such as the “angel in house,” the marriage narrative, and the domestic narrative. Furthermore, bringing attention to how the perpetuation of such narratives reinforce the ideologies of these societal institutions, ultimately leaving women vulnerable to a system, in which they have no place. Thus, the woman writer, the female ghost, the female medium, and the professional woman become similarly characterized by disembodiment, a displacement from society, which is created and sustained by patriarchal structures and systems in which women are relegated by notions of traditional gender roles through the perpetuation of harmful ideologies such as the separate spheres ideology. A societal oppression only transcended by death, which serves as a mode of boundary crossing. Thus, the threshold of death became analogous to boundary crossing of female mediums and female writers, which transgressing the boundaries of the domestic sphere securing their voices were heard in the public sphere.