Spirited Away: The Death of Little Eva and the Farewell Performances of “Katie King”

Abstract

Depictions of deathbed scenes are commonplace within mid-nineteenth-century United States literary culture, particularly sentimental fiction. They serve a variety of ideological and aesthetic functions and have rightly received a good deal of critical attention. One aspect of their significance and broad impact that has not yet been included within revisionist assessments of the aesthetic and political strategies of sentimentalism provides the primary focus here. The stylized representational modes that characterize the dying of many characters in literary texts, magazine illustrations, paintings and other cultural productions were appropriated by nineteenth-century spiritualists to perform farewells between spirits and the living within the many seances that proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1840s onward. The conventional structure of such partings, predicated on the imminent death of at least one of the participants, focused on an exemplary death in which tearful goodbyes and final words were significant features. Yet when spiritualists appropriated the formulae of such scenes it was within a set of practices that explicitly denied the fact of death at all. Since for spiritualists death was a chimera, the adoption of the symbolism of the deathbed scene as a model for how to facilitate different kinds of departure – not always those that took place between the soon to be dead and those they leave behind – took the rhetoric and practices of dying and transformed them into a new form of performance.