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The Reluctant Spiritualist:
The Life of Maggie Fox
By Nancy Rubin Stuart
Harcourt, 2005. 393 pages.
Reviewed by Tim Davis
This impressive new biography tells the fascinating story of Maggie Fox -- the reluctant spiritualist and self-confessed fraud. As a thoroughly researched history, the book also tells the provocative story of nineteenth-century American spiritualism’s popularity.
The Maggie Fox story begins innocently enough in rural New York in 1848. Fourteen-year-old Maggie and her younger sister Katy devised a simple prank to vex their superstitious mother. The girls tied apples to strings and mimicked ghostly nighttime footsteps on the floorboards by alternately dropping and retracting the apples. Mrs. Fox was convinced that a spirit haunted the farmhouse.
The girls then invented more humbuggery. They first flustered their mother by covertly snapping their fingers, and then they devised a hands-free method by which they would create sounds by snapping their toe joints. They “soon became so adept that they could ‘knock,’ as they dubbed their stunt, while standing on the floor in shoes or barefoot or even while sitting on a chair”; moreover, by executing their technique “silently and persistently upon the furniture, the repeated raps sometimes caused a table or chair to vibrate and even move from its original position, inevitably frightening the already agitated Mrs. Fox.” Mrs. Fox believed it was all caused by a spirit with whom she sought to communicate. Maggie and Katy, opportunistic innovators, then invented a scheme through which a counting of the “knocks” could be interpreted as coded answers to Mrs. Fox’s questions.
News of the Hydesville “spook house” soon spread, and curious visitors came to witness the strange phenomenon. Maggie and Katy gleefully obliged all visitors. Journalists, clergymen, and hundreds of strangers converged upon the farmhouse. The Fox girls were becoming famous, and -- most significantly -- they enjoyed the attention. They were becoming more proficient at “knocking,” and their persuasive performances were becoming more elaborate. By early April in 1848, Maggie, Katy, and the “spirits” were irrevocably linked. It had all been an innocent prologue to all that would follow, and -- as the author Nancy Rubin Stuart notes -- it was already too late for the girls to admit that it had all begun as a hoax; clearly the “price of confession must have been too steep when compared to the rewards of local celebrityhood.”
With prologue established, the first key supporting player in the drama of the rise and fall of Maggie Fox made her appearance. Maggie’s and Katy’s 34-year-old sister Leah had learned of their antics. Whatever her motives might have been at first -- and those deserve close scrutiny -- she intruded herself upon the scene and soon became the girls’ protector and promoter. “While Maggie and Katy spent their days dreaming up still other pranks, Leah had decided it was time to share the spirits with an audience beyond her immediate household.” The girls moved beyond the small stage of Hydesville and were soon conducting money-making theatrical séances on stages and in homes (organized and promoted by Leah) in Rochester, New York City, Buffalo, Albany, and -- in the next few years -- Ohio and Pennsylvania. By the early 1850s, the girls were making 150 dollars a day! Maggie and Katy had become commercially viable mediums through which thousands of enthusiastic Americans sought spiritual communion with the dead.
To understand the Fox girls’ success and popularity, simply look at America in the nineteenth century. As documented by Stuart, the country was a perfect host for the Fox girls’ performances. It was the age of Transcendentalism, Shakers, Millerites, and the Second Great Awakening; but it was also the age of magnetic healing, phrenology, illusionists, and hucksters. In this environment of spiritual hunger and gullibility, the Fox girls became more famous and prosperous.
As time went on, Leah became relentless in her control of the girls, and Maggie became less interested in her role as a spiritualist. Now the second and arguably most significant player in the rise and fall of Maggie Fox entered the scene. Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, aristocratic explorer and adventurer, met the vulnerable Maggie in Philadelphia in late 1852.
Maggie Fox and Elisha Kane became romantically linked (perhaps even married), and he became one of America’s most famous heroic figures of the era. Quite significantly, however, as a condition of their relationship, Elisha insisted upon Maggie’s promise to abandon spiritualism. Without her promise, the relationship would be doomed.
All of the foregoing becomes merely the first act in the Maggie Fox drama. The remainder of the tragedy, told by Stuart in a richly detailed and easy-to-read narrative, tells of a woman whose control over her own life ended when she left Hydesville: Maggie would become controversial, famous, and prosperous as America’s premier spiritualist; she would become the unhappy pawn in a game of deceit and greed played masterfully by her sister Leah; she would become the conciliatory fiancé, melancholy “bride,” and disenfranchised “widow” of an American aristocrat for whom she was unsuited and unacceptable; she would also become one of America’s most vociferous if not completely persuasive critics of spiritualism; finally, in the last act of this drama, she would become the wretchedly impoverished and lonely alcoholic who would die in obscurity in 1893.
The Reluctant Spiritualist is certainly a not-to-be missed biography of a fascinating personality. But it is much more. It is the enigmatic history of a curious but important period in the spiritual history of America. When you finish reading the book, and when you consider the thousands of people who remained unshakeable in their beliefs in Maggie Fox’s powers as a spiritualist -- even after her curiously motivated denunciations -- you will probably ask yourself, among other questions, the central question at the heart of the book’s argument: Was Maggie Fox’s special version of spiritualism a hoax, or -- at some level far beyond the young girls’ childish games and beyond the older sister’s elaborately produced theatrical presentations -- was there something ineffable and genuine happening? It is, after all, a question worth considering.
Tim Davis lives in the tiny Gulf coast community of Lillian, Alabama, and teaches literature at the University of West Florida, across the state line in nearby Pensacola.
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