Such pleasant talks!": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, In After Days, and the Discursive Mood of Utopian Friendship

In 1910, Harper and Brothers published an essay collection titled In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life. Its premise—that writers like Henry James and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps possess the authority to define the contours... [ view full abstract ]

In 1910, Harper and Brothers published an essay collection titled In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life. Its premise—that writers like Henry James and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps possess the authority to define the contours of the afterlife—suggests how print culture organized shared visions of cosmology. Even as the volume’s status as a miscellany marked these visions as collectively congenial, each account remains provisional. I explore the relay between metaphysical conviction and provisionality as it was rendered by popular literature and mediated by fin-de-siècle print culture. I examine Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar, a bestselling novel of Spiritualist consolation that describes a utopian afterlife; and In After Days, to which Phelps contributed. Drawing upon queer theorists like Leo Bersani, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lee Edelman, I argue that Phelps and In After Days’ authors locate their visions in the erotics of linguistic play. Reveling in the imaginative and relational potentials of the fin-de-siécle secular, these writers render utopia as a mood, discursively produced, whose realization demands an ongoing, amorous act of intersubjective re-signification between intimate friends, authors, and readers – the collaboration, that is, between literary invention and anti-teleological friendship.