“A MERE INSTRUMENT” OR “PROUD AS LUCIFER”? SELF-PRESENTATIONS IN THE OCCULT AUTOBIOGRAPHIES BY EMMA HARDINGE BRITTEN (1900) AND ANNIE BESANT (1893)

摘要

Occult women writers in the Victorian age were confronted with a double marginalization in patriarchal society, being displaced due to their gender, and thus largely excluded from the production of master discourses, and being marginalized for their spiritual beliefs deviating from institutionalized religions. The strategic discourses that are therefore required to legitimate their textual productions become especially visible in occult women's autobiographical writing. Thus, this article analyses the Autobiography of Emma Hardinge Britten (1900) and Annie Besant's An Autobiography (1893)—texts by the most famous and fervent adherents and propagators of two important strands of Victorian occultism: while Britten was a medium and speaker for spiritualism, Besant became the spokeswoman of theosophy. Read in comparison, these autobiographies generate particular approaches to occultism in the Victorian age, specifically for women. Whereas Britten appears to be passive and modest by her discourse of the instrument for supernatural powers, Besant presents herself as an active agent, employing the discourse of Lucifer. These discursive strategies shed light on the problems and possibilities of occult women's life writing in the nineteenth century, which is uneasily situated between experience and strategies of explaining the “truth”, as well as between exasperated legitimizations and the claim to scientific proof. These discursive attempts at writing occultism are furthermore based on the establishment of a relation to various supernatural or occult “others” who serve the purpose of validating personal authority.