{"title":"Stratified heavens: growing up in the Victorian afterlife","authors":"Ashley Miller","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2022.2144215","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"When American spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis wrote in 1868 that there is “an inhabitable zone, or a circular belt of refined and stratified matter in the heavens which recently has been denominated ‘The Summer Land,’” he drew upon advancements in astrology to theorize a very material afterlife (1868b, 18). Davis’s foundational spiritualist theology describes heaven as a Swedenborgian series of ascending spheres, each one increasing in perfection. The afterlife as Davis depicts it is one of endless development, refinement, and progress. Abolished is the idea of heaven as eternal rest: in this deeply Victorian paradise, everything from atoms to immortal souls is working its way upward toward God. And there is perhaps no better guide to the strata of the Summerland than the spirit of an infant. This article investigates the fate of the infant in the Victorian afterlife. I argue that the figure of the infant plays a crucial role in the writings of nineteenth-century spiritualists on both sides of the Atlantic. Believers insisted that lost infants – including ones who died at birth – still had the chance to develop and progress in the afterlife. Depictions of the Summerland offered consolation to grieving parents by describing the nurseries and schools in which the spirits of infants were raised. Those heavenly educational systems were even imported back to earth: the Progressive Lyceum – the spiritualist equivalent of Sunday School – was modeled on visions of education in the Summerland. Yet the spirits of infants who communicated with spiritualists often sent messages that challenged Victorian beliefs about maternity and parentage. Infants in the Summerland raise important questions about what it means to be alive, what it means to be born and unborn – questions that shaped Victorian ideas about reproductive rights, the afterlives of which we still live with today.","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2022.2144215","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
When American spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis wrote in 1868 that there is “an inhabitable zone, or a circular belt of refined and stratified matter in the heavens which recently has been denominated ‘The Summer Land,’” he drew upon advancements in astrology to theorize a very material afterlife (1868b, 18). Davis’s foundational spiritualist theology describes heaven as a Swedenborgian series of ascending spheres, each one increasing in perfection. The afterlife as Davis depicts it is one of endless development, refinement, and progress. Abolished is the idea of heaven as eternal rest: in this deeply Victorian paradise, everything from atoms to immortal souls is working its way upward toward God. And there is perhaps no better guide to the strata of the Summerland than the spirit of an infant. This article investigates the fate of the infant in the Victorian afterlife. I argue that the figure of the infant plays a crucial role in the writings of nineteenth-century spiritualists on both sides of the Atlantic. Believers insisted that lost infants – including ones who died at birth – still had the chance to develop and progress in the afterlife. Depictions of the Summerland offered consolation to grieving parents by describing the nurseries and schools in which the spirits of infants were raised. Those heavenly educational systems were even imported back to earth: the Progressive Lyceum – the spiritualist equivalent of Sunday School – was modeled on visions of education in the Summerland. Yet the spirits of infants who communicated with spiritualists often sent messages that challenged Victorian beliefs about maternity and parentage. Infants in the Summerland raise important questions about what it means to be alive, what it means to be born and unborn – questions that shaped Victorian ideas about reproductive rights, the afterlives of which we still live with today.
1868年,美国通灵学家安德鲁·杰克逊·戴维斯(Andrew Jackson Davis)写道,“天空中有一个可居住的区域,或一个由精细和分层物质组成的环形带,最近被命名为‘夏日之地’”,他利用占星术的进步,推测了一个非常物质的死后(1868b,18)。戴维斯的基础唯心主义神学将天堂描述为瑞典人的一系列上升球体,每一个都在完美中不断增加。正如戴维斯所描绘的那样,来生是一个不断发展、完善和进步的过程。天堂是永恒的安息地的想法被废除了:在这个维多利亚时代的天堂里,从原子到不朽的灵魂,一切都在向上走向上帝。也许没有什么比婴儿的精神更能引导我们了解Summerland的阶层了。这篇文章探讨了婴儿在维多利亚时代死后的命运。我认为,婴儿的形象在大西洋两岸19世纪的唯心主义者的作品中扮演着至关重要的角色。信徒们坚持认为,失去的婴儿——包括那些在出生时死亡的婴儿——仍然有机会在死后发育和进步。对Summerland的描述通过描述养育婴儿灵魂的托儿所和学校来安慰悲伤的父母。这些天堂般的教育系统甚至被带回了地球:进步学园——相当于周日学校的唯心主义者——是以Summerland的教育愿景为模型的。然而,与通灵论者交流的婴儿的灵魂经常发出挑战维多利亚时代关于母性和亲子关系的信仰的信息。Summerland的婴儿提出了重要的问题,即活着意味着什么,出生和未出生意味着什么——这些问题塑造了维多利亚时代关于生殖权利的思想,我们今天仍然生活在这些权利的后遗症中。
期刊介绍:
Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.