The London Séance Society: A Novel

The London Séance Society emphasizes the status of Victorian London as a thoroughly sexist culture with rigidly defined gender roles. The Society itself represents a microcosm of this culture, for it is a patriarchal institution that generates wealth and influence even as it actively excludes women from its operation. Early in the novel, Morely recalls a conversation with Volckman in which the men discuss the possibility of inviting wives to the Society’s secret dinner parties. When Volckman replies, “Gentlemen retreat to the Society to escape their wives” (36), his offhand comment underscores the misogynistic reasons underlying the Society’s decision to exclude women from its premises. In addition to underscoring the sexist leanings of the Society, this interaction also indicts the men in Victorian culture for their conviction that women must remain limited to strictly defined, traditional roles. Thus, the male characters only ever speak of the women in their orbit as wives, mothers, and daughters. In their eyes, women can only be defined by their relationship to a man, and they can only have worth in this culture if they perform their appointed roles as expected. When Vaudeline tells Lenna about her fraught relationship with her mother, she says, “She much prefers to boast about my younger sister, who is a mother with a brood of beautiful children” (89).