| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity. By David Chapin. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. viii, 257p. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $80; paper, $24.95.)

Something in David Chapin's new book brings to mind a historical version of DNA, a double helix composed of the lives of the arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane and his paramour Margaret Fox, the Spiritualist medium. Intertwined in the public mind by virtue of their ardent affair, and perhaps marriage, the two shared a penchant for aggressive self-promotion and for seeking fame by placing themselves on display before a public fascinated with exotic and unknown terrains (Kane presenting the arctic, Fox the afterlife). They were, Chapin argues, epitomes of the "Culture of Curiosity" that flourished in antebellum America, in which vestigial appeals to Enlightenment ideals of moral betterment through scientific knowledge were commingled with the new world of mass culture and commercial profit through public amusement. The "performance of mystery" for which Kane and Fox were renowned earned them both the fame they eagerly sought, but, ironically, also brought them a level of public scrutiny that caused each great discomfort. Kane, as Chapin suggests, struggled with his proximity to the baser forms of mass entertainment as he increasingly became an entertainer, rather than the scientist and educator he wished to be. Yearning for middle-class respectability, Chapin argues, Fox similarly discovered that as her fame and independence grew, her social status as a respectable woman became increasingly tenuous.

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