MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the 1870s, a group of free love radicals mounted a campaign in opposition to state-sanctioned violence against women. This violence was perpetrated against prostitutes in the form of unjust incarceration and against wives in the form of marital rape. One of the movement’s leading public figures, presidential candidate and medium Victoria Woodhull, argued that a vast psychic unhappiness caused by women’s sexual dissatisfaction held all of humanity back from an apocalyptic shift that would punish the oppressor, liberate the enlightened, and spiritualize humanity. Woodhull was only fourteen when she met and married her abusive and alcoholic first husband. Mediumship afforded her a means to gain independence and remarry. She went on to champion the free love movement’s call for marriage reform, contraception, and legalization of prostitution. Woodhull’s quest for women’s enfranchisement mirrored her own personal quest for agency as a public speaker.Although mediumship had been her springboard to a career as a public figure, she was constrained by her identification as a trance performer. The spirits of the dead were considered to be responsible for the ideas and words that she conveyed. Working through the lens of performance theory, I argue that Woodhull pushed at the boundaries of the trance role assigned to her by transforming herself into a theatrical double for her spirits. She played her spirits as a conscious interpreter, elevating herself to a place of prophetic authority. For this reason, Woodhull deserves to be added to the conversation about the American transition from spiritualism to occultism. She expanded the meaning of trance to the breaking point, pushing beyond mediumship into occult self-development. She not only established a program for personal spiritual growth through sexual liberation but argued for this-worldly results for other-worldly revelations, re-shaping the social landscape by spiritual means.