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British women’s supernatural tales written during the nineteenth century challenged the ideals of Victorian femininity and restrictive gendered roles such as wife and domestic servant. The female medium, through her power of communicating with spirits and establishing authority during séances, also transgressed femininity through her freely expressed behavior in front of sitters and skeptics. The real-life female medium, I argue, inspired the ghost stories of Victorian women writers such asRhoda Broughton and Mary E. Braddon. In this paper, I contend that the female spiritualist in Broughton’s “Behold! It was a Dream” (1872) and Braddon’s “The Shadow in the Corner” (1879) illustrates her authority in the domestic sphere by portraying anxiety of the bedroom. This paper utilizes an intersectional theoretical framework of Michel Foucault’s docile bodies and Sandra Bartky’s feminine docile bodies to demonstrate how the societal, policing gaze compelled Victorian women to perform femininity even in the domestic sphere – a space where women assumed they had authority. I also examine how the intersections of gender and class affect the female spiritualist’s transgression of gendered space. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the influence of spiritualism on British women’s ghost stories, especially tales that illustrate the horrors of patriarchy.

women's writing

Gender, Space, and the Female Spiritualist in Rhoda Broughton’s “Behold, it was a Dream!” (1872) and Mary E. Braddon’s “the Shadow in the Corner” (1879)