The London Séance Society: A Novel

The London Séance Society emphasizes the status of Victorian London as a thoroughly sexist culture with rigidly defined gender roles. The Society itself represents a microcosm of this culture, for it is a patriarchal institution that generates wealth and influence even as it actively excludes women from its operation. Early in the novel, Morely recalls a conversation with Volckman in which the men discuss the possibility of inviting wives to the Society’s secret dinner parties. When Volckman replies, “Gentlemen retreat to the Society to escape their wives” (36), his offhand comment underscores the misogynistic reasons underlying the Society’s decision to exclude women from its premises. In addition to underscoring the sexist leanings of the Society, this interaction also indicts the men in Victorian culture for their conviction that women must remain limited to strictly defined, traditional roles. Thus, the male characters only ever speak of the women in their orbit as wives, mothers, and daughters. In their eyes, women can only be defined by their relationship to a man, and they can only have worth in this culture if they perform their appointed roles as expected. When Vaudeline tells Lenna about her fraught relationship with her mother, she says, “She much prefers to boast about my younger sister, who is a mother with a brood of beautiful children” (89). Vaudeline’s sister is respected for being a model mother, while Vaudeline is ignored because she chooses to reject traditional gender roles. Even more dangerously, she works to achieve a degree of financial freedom that is typically reserved only for men.

Despite their liberated viewpoints, the female protagonists of The London Séance Society nonetheless remain hampered by the omnipresence of patriarchal power structures and must therefore occupy liminal spaces between the strictly defined gender roles of Victorian culture. Even so, they still manage to use existing gender roles for subversive purposes. For example, Evie infiltrates the Society by dressing as a man and gains continued access to the Society’s resources by maintaining this façade to protect Morely’s propriety. Lenna and Vaudeline also dress as men when they visit London-based women who are connected to Volckman; their clothing choice is a disguise that only works because it affords them the invisibility and access enjoyed by Victorian men. However, the advantages of this subterfuge only extend so far. Lenna, Vaudeline, and Evie often find themselves in social situations in which their gender renders them powerless, such as Evie’s initial inability to access the Society. Additionally, the narrative describes numerous instances in which women use sex to gain a measure of power in a society that renders them powerless. Evie trades Morely sex for information, Mel and the other sex workers trade sex for money, and Vaudeline uses sex as a last resort to escape Morely’s violence. Sex thus becomes a form of power and capital for the women of Victorian culture who are denied access to more conventional forms of power.