Literary Dimensions Seminar

Abstract: From the start of the Victorian spiritualist revival of the early 1850s, séance participants were haunted by spirit-hands, which provided palpable evidence of the supernatural. Spiritualism's manual fixation could in large part be ascribed to the fact that the hand in the nineteenth century had become a privileged signifier of various kinds of truth: of the superiority of the human over the animal, of evolution, gender, character, personal identity, and so on. Skeptics of spiritualism, however, challenged the truth-telling functions of spirit-hands by insisting on their fraudulence and uselessness. My presentation first examines the ways in which believers and skeptics addressed the redundancy of spirit-hands, and then moves on to discussing a mode of writing that took advantage of this redundancy to assert its own original approach to the supernatural: the ghost story. Focusing on Sheridan Le Fanu's "Ghost Stories of the Tiled House" (1863), I argue that the genre distanced itself from the self-referentiality of spiritualism to establish its own literary proprietorship over spectral hands.