21 - Rebecca West, Modern Spiritualism and the Problem of Other Minds

Summary

REBECCA WEST IS not typically identified with spiritualism or occultism. She did not avow an explicit interest in spiritualism, nor did she move in spiritual or occult circles, like several of her modernist contemporaries. Yet her fictions are filled with otherworldly events, apparitions, telepathic readings and acts of spiritual communion between the living and the dead. Both The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Harriet Hume (1929) portray women protagonists who behave like spiritual mediums or telepaths, projecting themselves into the minds and bodies of other characters. West’s optimism about the possibilities of such interpsychic rapport is reflected in her critical essay of the same era, ‘The Strange Necessity’ (1928), in which she declares: ‘it does not seem at all unlikely that we should have a mind-consciousness which tells us as fully about other people’s minds as our body-consciousness tells us about other people’s bodies.’ Her interest in spiritual mediumship (communication between the living and the dead) and telepathy (psychic communication between the living) is thus tied to an investment in the hidden powers of the psyche and its capacity for interpsychic exchange across physical, social and psychic boundaries.

In this chapter, I argue that West’s novels Harriet Hume and The Return of the Soldier join the language of modern spiritualism to an investigation of consciousness, in which characters distanced by gender, class and experience are linked intersubjectively through non-traditional channels. Jenny conjures the perspective of her shell-shocked cousin, Chris Baldry, recently returned from the war, and mediates a story of male trauma for the reader. Harriet Hume forges intimacy with her lover, Arnold Condorex, while also anticipating his deceptions via the mechanisms of telepathy. Yet, as I go on to show, the fantasies of psychic access that these two novels present, managed through female mediums and narrators who function as vicarious inhabitants of other minds, also point reflexively to the potential for unreliability consonant with modernist epistemologies. That is, the optimism about the ability to access other minds and to render those minds transparent is tempered by a modernist sensibility that emphasises the fallibility of human perception and the limits of subjective knowledge.