A Spirited Way to a Rational Home: Cultivating Normativity through the Victorian Spiritualist Interior

Abstract This paper describes the role that Victorian spiritualism played in the domestic interior’s establishment as a place for rational personal states, beliefs, and modes of behavior. In an age of pragmatism, spiritualism highlighted the irrationality and outdated origins of an outlook on the home that depended on faith. Widely published anecdotes of spirits communicating through household furniture in Britain and America drew an ordinarily private realm into heated public debate. Furthermore, spiritualism proved empowering for women who redirected their energy toward leadership, and paid and fulfilling domestic work. From the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the spiritualist home provided a measure for the content and limits of domestic normativity. This essay fills a gap in the interior’s history by describing how spiritualism’s influence on the Christian home has shaped our contemporary understanding of the domestic interior and the state of our lives within it.