Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Richard B. Westbrook was president of the American Secular Union while Craddock was serving as the group’s corresponding secretary. Schroeder speculated that Westbrook, otherwise known for his scientific rationality, was actually Craddock’s mystical sex guru. Portrait by Mary Elwell, 1900, Wagner Free Institute of Science.

  What Schroeder did have was a theory about Craddock’s psychoneurosis that required first her sexual satisfaction, then her sexual frustration, and then mystical substitution. Schroeder charted her hysterical descent this way: Craddock, once introduced to Westbrook’s “very enticing technique,” could not live without this ecstatically orgasmic practice, and yet, for whatever reason, Westbrook had stopped pleasuring her. That deprivation—“a period of sexual starvation, doubtless accompanied by masturbation with an increased feeling of guilt”—left her primed for a religious resolution of her madcap sexual urges. Haunted by memories of her past sexual ecstasies with the occult ex-clergyman and tormented by these no longer fulfilled desires, Craddock increasingly drifted away from objective realities into the world of unbridled sexual fantasy. Desperate, she began to sanctify that dreamland, to find the necessary compensation for the loss of Westbrook in “delusional intimacy with mystical or superhuman powers.”29

  Craddock was clearly not the only one floating off into sexual reveries and wish-fulfilling fantasies. Schroeder had turned Westbrook into a sex magus, Craddock into his Tantric consort, and the psychoanalyst into the revealer of buried secrets. In his role as Craddock’s posthumous therapist, Schroeder had become thoroughly captivated by his own whimsical story of her descent into religio-sexual mania. He had, in effect, created a self-serving fantasy in which the secular psychoanalyst served as the antidote to the shamanic ex-clergyman. The enlightened scientist made himself the bearer of a new kind of male expertise that could demystify the hidden sexual conflicts that produced such female delusion. If Craddock had toppled down a spiritualist slope into psychosis—a tumble that carried her from lewd daydreams to nocturnal hallucinations—the secular therapist was in a position to secure others from the precipice of mental illness and moronic supernaturalism. Indeed, whatever else was to be gathered from the case history of Ida C, this much Schroeder thought quite clear: It showed that “puritanism and mysticism are really problems of mental hygiene.”30

  THE REAL ACTION in Craddock’s sex life was in her imagination. During her early mediumistic efforts in 1892, she had begun to sense a clairaudient connection to various spirits, none more important than the shade of the young businessman who had courted her when she was in her late teens. Among the ghostly communications she heard from her departed suitor, now known as Soph, was that he still loved her and that he wanted another “chance to try to win me after I should come over to his land.” So began Ida’s renewed courtship with Soph, as if death no longer separated the two of them, as if romantic regret could be overcome. Though Ida could not see Soph—she saw his face only once in a half-awake moment, “the same face as on earth,” but now “permeated with a wonderful spiritual light”—he nonetheless emerged as her “daily Borderland companion . . . quite near and dear to me.” Here, in the gray areas of consciousness and coherence, Ida admitted to him and to herself that she loved him and that she wanted to be his wife—not merely in the world beyond the grave, but “right here and now.” The idea of becoming the wife of an “unseen spirit lover” was, she knew, quixotic, perhaps even “quite a joke,” but she found the prospect too alluring to resist. That there was a castle-in-the-air unreality to it all, she was ready to admit, but that there was also something “spiritualizing” and “uplifting” to this nuptial union, she was unwilling to deny.31

  Contained within the poignant loneliness of Ida’s phantasmal intimacy with her departed lover was a dense spiritualist relationship—one that proved no less sustaining and powerful for its hallucinatory immateriality. At times Soph functioned less as a spouse than an assisting angel or saint, helping her, for example, to find lost articles, such as “my pocket-knife, with buckskin purse cover” that she had misplaced. “Soph, indeed, seems at times a veritable St. Anthony of Padua in this respect,” Craddock commented of his mundane interventions. At other times Soph seemed to represent a spirit of Yankee time-discipline: He exhorted her on the virtue of punctuality and even gave her internal prompts to make haste—“Now, dear love, you have but a few minutes left.” He also helped her reach her appointments safely, serving as something of an angelic guardian. “Soph seems to make a point,” she noted, “of escorting me to and from places, day and night.” Adrift, as Craddock so often was in one city or another, the illusion of company and protection provided tangible relief from the reality of loneliness and vulnerability. “I rejoiced at having a husband who yearned to protect me,” she wrote. As an angel or saint, Soph exercised quotidian powers of comfort and protection; he was a heavenly intermediary with an eye on Ida’s everyday needs and burdens. Craddock was not looking for a redeemer but a companion. She needed saving from isolation, marginality, and harassment, not from sin.32

  If Soph was a rather conventional angel in the help he offered, he was by no means a conventional husband—rather, he served as the mystical imagining of the ideal husband for the newly emancipated woman. Craddock’s hallucinations, in other words, were also a dream of the transformation of marriage. “I love him more than ever,” she reported of Soph at one point in her diary. “It begins to seem as though we were getting to be comrades.” That expression of intimacy bespoke Craddock’s companionate ideal for marriage—a union that was to be at once sexual and intellectual, physical and spiritual. At another point, for example, she imagined that Soph was staging a play in the other world and thrilled at her husband’s artsy creativity:It seems like a fairy story that this cultured and artistic man should care for me as his life-companion—me, who [has] always passionately longed for the society of cultured people, but whose entire life, with the exception of my schooldays, has been mostly passed among my intellectual inferiors, the virtuous, respectable, kind-hearted, but oh, so dull people of the middle class. I get at times just hungry for a little association with people of brains and culture. . . . Sometimes I do wish the hour would hurry along when I can get over there and study and work up intellectually to become his true comrade.

  Soph, the spirit husband, was the specter of the earthly husband Craddock never found, a companion who personified intellectual aspiration, emotional sensitivity, and sexual reciprocity. Craddock, in recording her relationship with Soph, had taken flight from reality as a way of imagining a new relational world for women of initiative and ambition like herself.33

  If Craddock imagined Soph as an ideal companion, the relationship they enjoyed was never one of uncomplicated pleasures. Far from it. Even comrades had quarrels, bad sex, and petty miscommunications. After one “semi-hypnotic” encounter with Soph, for example, Craddock became annoyed about her saggy, uncomfortable bed and peevishly snapped: “I did think that a husband who couldn’t get his wife a comfortable bed to lie on, no matter how plain, oughtn’t to expect her to go to bed with him.” During another of their spiritual (yet densely physical) embraces, Craddock found that Soph was “lacking in his usual ardor.” She soon realized what the problem was: Despite having perfumed herself with a fragrance Soph liked before going to bed, Ida still had the odor of onions on her breath from dinner, and that was hindering Soph’s passion. Though he remained tender and polite, his affections were simply not at their usual level. (In spiritualist cosmology, the spirit borderland had all the trappings of the physical world, and that necessarily included the full range of sensory perception—olfactory as much as the rest.) In imagining a spirit husband for herself, Craddock had projected a world that was both wildly idyllic and routinely flawed. The commonplaceness of so many of the problems the couple faced added a peculiar day-to-day realism to a journal ostensibly devoted to spiritual introspection and religious experience.34

  While her relationship with Soph had its minor
pitfalls, it also had much darker moments—ones that Craddock had prepared herself for, at least to some degree. She had studied enough about the history of witchcraft to expect a demoniacal and nightmarish underside to her experiences. The “Demon Lover” was every bit as much a part of the folklore that she had scrutinized as the “Angel Husband.” “So many women with spirit lovers come to grief in time,” she remarked, “and the lover becomes, apparently, diabolic.” As her spiritualist experiences unfolded, Craddock definitely found out for herself that divine blessings were regularly paired with demonic ordeals—that bright moments of ecstasy could swiftly give way to dark nights of despair. Indeed, there were moments in her diary in which the whole pursuit of a heavenly bridegroom looked like it could end in sheer terror and madness. “It really looks like incipient insanity,” Craddock wrote after a series of disturbing hallucinations that included tactile sensations of physical assault. Suffering from “chronic eczema,” she considered her skin to be excessively sensitive, abnormally so; she suggested, indeed, that she had “the skin of a medium,” a condition that allowed her to sense Soph’s presence more keenly and yet also subjected her to horrible bouts of “fiendish touch.” Several times in her diary such “infernal touches”—whatever they were and wherever they came from—left her feeling helpless and unstrung.35

  Craddock’s unhinging was especially evident in her recurring fears of improper sexual pleasures—fears that often left her conflicted and disoriented. She repeatedly excoriated herself for any imagined participation in “unnatural” practices—that is, for being involved in anything other than a fantasy of heterosexual intercourse. She remained particularly terrified of masturbation; the culture’s epidemic fear of this “secret vice” recurrently seeped into her spiritualist experience. In valiantly trying to refuse the “base physical pleasure” of masturbation, Craddock’s mystical piety regularly trembled with anxiety, if not panic. Given the invisibility of her lover, she lived in dread of being self-deceived not only about Soph’s very presence, but also about the line between his supposed actions and her own: Were her hallucinatory fantasies, she occasionally worried, only a form of “mental masturbation”? That her angelic lover sometimes disregarded the rules against masturbatory forms of stimulation—say, offering more than a passing salute to the clitoris—only made the hypnotic fantasies harder for her to decipher. It did not help that one of the few authorities Craddock had immediately at hand for decoding masturbation was a notorious French treatise, Pierre Garnier’s Onanisme, which detailed the dire effects of self-abuse on human health and civilization.36

  To Schroeder, Craddock’s spiritualized sexual reveries represented an obvious masturbatory practice as well as a compensatory device and coping mechanism. Dreaming up Soph ameliorated the guilt and inferiority complexes that had been produced through her illicit sexual pleasures, including the two torrid affairs he had ascribed to her. That Craddock remained enmeshed in her culture’s sexual proscriptions, particularly those surrounding masturbation, was painfully clear; indeed, those interdictions at times produced mad levels of worry, melancholy, and self-reproach in her. Despite the psychic burdens she carried, though, the dreamworld Craddock inhabited by night was not simply depressing and fear inducing. Often enough, she managed to struggle through her panic over masturbation to achieve an acceptance of bodily delight—or, at least, a temporary abandonment to it: “Let the orgasm come,” she heard Soph whisper to her at one point when worrying again about “a base masturbation,” and this time she did: “I had succeeded beautifully.”37

  Craddock saw the intense conflicts she experienced—in body, mind, and soul—as a spiritual struggle that led not only to sexual pleasure, but also to mystical illumination. “I felt I had begun to care for God as, I think, the most mystical nuns must care for their divine Spouse, Christ,” she related on New Year’s Day 1902 near the end of her diary keeping. “I loved my husband, it was true, and was supremely happy in his mateship. But the Presence of God overwhelmed us both in the most beautiful and indescribable way.” Of all the delusions on display—both Schroeder’s and Craddock’s—perhaps the most shocking was not Craddock’s fantasy of an angel lover, but Schroeder’s confidence in psychoanalysis to say all that needed to be said about Ida C’s over-brimming imagination. The ecstasy of revelation versus the voice of reason—that is an old and almost tiresome choice, but fortunately it is not the end of this story. The scholarly Miss Craddock had already made sure of that.38

  ONCE SOPH HAD COME BACK into her life, Craddock pursued various efforts at self-explanation: What exactly did she mean when she claimed to have a spirit for a husband? She played with different allusions and parallels—literary, artistic, and scholarly—as much to explain herself to herself as to anyone else. Hers proved a lush and beguiling project of self-interpretation.

  Craddock’s trusted confidante William Stead always warned her that the careful framing of her experience was of the essence; she needed, in his view, to emphasize that Soph was part of an elaborate dream-world; otherwise, she would simply be viewed “as stark, staring mad.” As a well-read occultist, Stead had very explicit advice for Craddock on how to relate her mystical experiences to the outside world. “Instead of talking about a spirit husband,” he counseled, “you should be most careful to say that you for many years had a very curious and vivid and consecutive series of dreams; that your dream-life had become to you quite as real as your waking life, and that in these dreams you lived the full life of a married woman.” That slant, Stead thought, might “elicit sympathy” or, at least, “excite curiosity” rather than provoke derision and justify institutionalization. For Craddock to pursue the husband of her dreams was, in Stead’s strategic estimate, a safer and saner construction than claiming outright to have found a spirit husband.39

  Craddock was attracted to Stead’s notion of placing the whole relationship with Soph in a dream state. Everyone knew, she once remarked, that “things happen in queer ways in dreams,” and so that realm provided a creative, romantic, and even erotic license, a surreal sphere that nonetheless remained within the range of “normal experience.” In exploring the possibility that her relationship with Soph was all taking place on a “dream plane,” Craddock drew particularly on George Du Maurier’s popular novel Peter Ibbetson (1891), a tale of two childhood companions who are painfully separated from one another and who yet remain soul mates into adulthood. Eventually, the star-crossed lovers, Peter and Mary, meet again, but she is already married, and he ends up in a jail cell for murdering her current husband, a pitiless aristocrat, in self-defense. Again tragically separated, they reconnect nightly in an idyllic world of dreams and thus keep their exalted union alive. (The story, adapted to stage and cinema, proved of enduring appeal; in 1935, it took on its most renowned incarnation, a feature film directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper and Ann Harding.) In a lover’s world of elusive reminiscences and gossamer fantasies, Peter and Mary had discovered “a life within a life” through “the magic of dream-land.”40

  Not surprisingly, Craddock loved the story from the first time she encountered it. “Have you ever read Du Maurier’s ‘Peter Ibbetson’?” she gushed to her friend Katie Wood in 1898. “If not, I do want you to get it as soon as you can and read it over. I thought of you many times when I was reading his description of the happy days of his childhood, and thought of how much you would enjoy it. . . . To me, it is a lovely poem, some parts of which are worth reading over and over again.” Soon, Du Maurier’s novel had made its way into Craddock’s own diary of spiritual experiences. (It helped, no doubt, that Mary was also a diary keeper; indeed, she was intent on preserving a voluminous record of her psychical excursions with Peter through their magical dream world.) In one passage in her journal Craddock spoke specifically of her efforts to “master the art of ‘dreaming true,’ like Peter Ibbetson.” In one half-awake moment, as she was coming out of a dream, she heard Soph tell her explicitly: “Now, dear love, I want you to meet me in dre
am-life night after night, as Peter Ibbetson met his sweetheart.” Craddock had a rich vocabulary for talking about her experiences—hypnotic trance, fantasy, hallucination, mental masturbation, waking vision, subjective consciousness, among other terms, were scattered through her diary—but Du Maurier’s literary example had particular resonance for her. “Night after night,” she recounted, “as I compose myself for sleep, I make a stern resolve to go over into dream-life wide awake, as Peter Ibbetson did.”41

  This spirit photograph, taken in 1891, revealed a ghostly figure holding a wreath above William Stead’s head. Victorian photography was haunted with specters and made Craddock’s own angelic imaginings apiece with these wider cultural fascinations.Borderland 2 (1895): 310.

  Craddock also looked to the visual arts for complementary imaginings of her dreamy relationship with Soph. The most obvious pictorial resource was spiritualist photography. Images of departed loved ones hovering as ghosts around the living would have been utterly familiar to her: William Stead sat for a spiritualist portrait as did Craddock’s fellow sex radical Elmina Slenker. In one particularly emblematic episode, a spectral Abraham Lincoln had even appeared in a picture of Mary Todd Lincoln (the shade of the assassinated president placed his filmy hands on the shoulders of his grieving widow in a gesture of comfort). Though there is no record of Craddock posing for such a portrait, spirit photographs were commonplace icons in the late nineteenth century. Given her own interest in materializing the spiritual world—for example, through automatic writing, she thought that she had once received Soph’s signature—it would be surprising if she had not at least considered obtaining an apparitional photograph of her husband. At one point in her diary she noted reading a book on spirit photography and had actually used one of its plates to imagine what a female spirit named Stéphanie looked like. Whether or not Craddock explored this particular medium through a studio visit, this much at least is apparent: Not only had she heard the spirits as interior voices, she had also caught tantalizing glimpses of them as spectral presences in Victorian photography.42