Crossing Over: Situating the Gothic Rhetorics of Nineteenth-Century Female-Identified Mediums

Abstract Rhetorical features of nineteenth-century female mediums are highlighted in order to situate them alongside other women rhetors and writers who challenged nineteenth-century cultural practices and who espoused a sense of enlarged gendered possibilities. They are “border-crossers” who, in trance states, complicate concepts of voice, agency, and collaboration, crossing boundaries of gender, race, and class in liminal rhetorical spaces. Their discourse is prophetic and healing, akin to that of other Victorian Spiritualist or New Thought female figures, and is also a magical variation of Gothic rhetoric, comparable to that of female authors who turned to ghosts and ghostliness in Gothic literature.