| By 1850 the spiritualist movement in the United States had shown that performing the occult could be profitable work. By 1870, advertisements for the services of palmists, conjurors, clairvoyants, fortunetellers, mediums, and card-readers appeared regularly in the classified columns of urban daily newspapers. In the first decade of the twentieth-century, cities and states began passing laws against telling fortunes for money. This dissertation explores the meanings of occult work through newspapers, literature, film, graphics, and 1,430 seer advertisements in papers from San Francisco, St. Louis, Boston, New York, and Chicago.;Chapter One shows that middle-class perceptions of "rural innocence" allowed authors to romanticize the occult worker early in the nineteenth-century. Chapter Two asserts that mediums used the notion of "innocence" to make money channeling spirits, to assert that class disenfranchisement made mediums especially qualified, and to use prevailing notions of gender and race to justify their work. Chapter Three argues that middle-class perceptions of the "self-made man" led some writers to dismiss the occult worker as disrespectful of the market system and advertising's role in it. Chapter Four uses fortuneteller advertising to demonstrate that occult workers appropriated the language of professionalism in conjunction with declarations of ethnicized, racialized, gendered, and class "otherness" to validate their claims to status. Chapter Five shows how writers viewed seers though dominant notions of female professionalism. Chapter Six looks at the role of social purity and nativist language in the criminalization of fortunetelling in the early twentieth-century and shows that seers responded to criminalization by advertising not the power of the disenfrachised self but the effectiveness of the institutions and products with which they now aligned themselves. |
