Ruck, Muck, and a Closed System of Truth: Science, Spiritualism, and the Negotiation of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

This project examines how the confluence of nineteenth-century England’s educational reform, periodical literature, and scientific community growth contributed to a public dialogue between science and spiritualism that positioned the two as antithetical. I argue that this media-borne dialogue entrenched in the public consciousness a scientific domain claiming authority through masculinized, exclusionary language that effectively enclosed knowledge within objective measurement, while dismissing spiritualist notions of embodied knowledges based in affect. In doing so, I locate the under-recognized bridge between the printed medium of the debate itself and its durable influence on public discourse, occurring as it did at precisely the moment to best influence the broadest public. The first chapter examines the confluence of educational reform, burgeoning print culture, and rising science professionalization that formed the ideal delivery platform for the promulgation of a cultural narrative pitting objective knowledge against the subjective. The second chapter examines contemporary newspaper and journal articles to find science repeatedly metaphorized as solid ground, “objective”, and masculinized, while spiritualism is shadowy, irrational, and feminized. Metaphors of light and landscape recur from both sides, with spiritualist voices further claiming unquantifiable and communal experience as of equal value to the material “useful knowledge” privileged by science and institutional schooling. The final chapter analyzes texts from George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marie Corelli, and Richard Marsh for representations of science, scientists, and those deemed outside their circles. There I discern a reflection of the media debate that finds unexpected – if unsettling – compatibilities between spiritualism and science, rejecting the alleged incompatibility of objective and subjective knowledge. All the texts speculate as to the parameters of human physical and mental life, but notably, none resolve the argument.