“The Evidence of [Her] Own Senses”: Gender, Power, and Animal Symbolism in Florence Marryat’s Open! Sesame! (1875)
Natasha Booth-Johnson
Abstract
This article investigates how Florence Marryat uses gendered, animalistic coding in her first Spiritualist novel Open! Sesame! (1875) to characterise the novel’s villain, Agatha, and illustrate a conflict between male passivity and female agency. The novel plays with the tropes of Spiritualist and sensation fiction, presenting a partly sympathetic and incredibly calculating villain whose complex identity as animal, spirit, and (least of all) human nearly drives the romantic hero to his death. It is only through the male medium’s strong-willed wife that he is rescued from his untimely demise. Agatha is frequently and intentionally othered, with animalistic language used to present her, in a multifaceted way, as both separated from her gender, and dangerously in tune with it. Marryat’s Spiritualist fiction thus does not seek to advertise Spiritualism as a practice but instead uses it as a location through which to explore established sensation plots that dissolve binaries such as gender and class.
Keywords
sensation fiction; Spiritualism; Animal Studies; gender; villainous women
Date of Acceptance: 1 July 2026
Date of Publication: 3 July 2026
Double Blind Peer Reviewed
Recommended Citation:
Booth-Johnson, Natasha. 2026. “‘The Evidence of [Her] Own Senses’: Gender, Power, and Animal Symbolism in Florence Marryat’s Open! Sesame! (1875).” Victorian Popular Fictions, 8.1 (Spring): 79-91. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/VMOI3522
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
