Presented by Jeanne Phoenix Laurel, Ph.D.

Monday, July 7 - Tuesday, July 8, 2008
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Lyceum Building

Fee: $75.00

Co-sponsored with Center for Spiritualist Studies

During the second half of the 19th century, women were perceived as “angels in the house”, so-named after a long, rather obscure poem by British author Coventry Patmore published in 1854. The idea that women were inherently gentler, more fragile, more spiritually inclined became so stifling that Virginia Woolf, writing in 1931, claimed she needed to kill that angel in order to think.

In her recent book Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America (2ND edition published in 2001), Anne Braude develops the logical connections between women as leaders in the Spiritualist movement in America, and the simultaneous development of a kind of feminism which built upon rather than repudiated this idea of women as domestic angels.

The connection to Spiritualism is that the presenter will be examining the popular culture construction of gendered spheres during the second half of the 19th century. The presenter will be covering ground similar to Braude’s in history through use of her disciplinary training in literature, examining women’s literary production. However, the presenter will also compliment Braude’s work, because she will be able to identify the places where the “Angel in the House” as she speaks for herself has self-contradictory features and tensions that are best examined with literary methodology.

JEANNE PHOENIX LAUREL, is Associate Professor and Department Chair of English at Niagara University where she has worked since 1992. She earned a BA at the University of Albany and her PhD in 1990 at Indiana University Bloomington. Her teaching and research interests include: African-American literature, 20th Century American literature, multiculturalism and gender studies. She is a student medium and healer at the First Spiritualist Temple of East Aurora, NY.

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