Physics, Psychical Research, and the Self: Evelyn De Morgan's Spiritualist Portraits

This essay examines spiritualist artist Evelyn De Morgan's representation of the self in several paintings c. 1900, including never before discussed portraits. Starting with the portraits' unusual treatment of the face as deflecting psychological legibility, it argues that the ‘self’ that they figure aligns with that described in contemporary scientific writings, notably by experimental psychologist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers and physicist Oliver Lodge. Writing from perspectives sympathetic to spiritualism, Myers and Lodge described the self as immortal, composite and mutable, invisible yet physical, exceeding the confines of the material body, and related somehow to ether. This essay draws on the entangled fin-de-siècle histories of science and spiritualism (and activates some of Gilles Deleuze's later theories) to argue that De Morgan summoned this self into a form at least contingently visible by exploiting the representational potential of the mutable, imponderable ether and its widely assumed properties: energic, (hyper-)spatial, temporal, and spiritual.