Ida Craddock and Theodore fuckin' Schroeder

[lb_lee]

Mori: Okay guys. I'm gonna tell you about some old dead Freudian lawyer's mouth-breathing fanfic and I'm gonna make him all y'all's problem now. (Told ya we wouldn't quit doing stupid info-dumps about many-selved slapfights of yore.)

Okay, so before I talk about Theodore fuckin' Schroeder, I have to talk about Ida Craddock. I've mentioned her before, and a biography of her, Heaven's Bride, is up on pluralstories, but in quick summary, she was a fascinating bookworm who married a ghost in the 1890s, made sex ed manuals from what she learned in intimacy with him, and got her books burned, sent to prison, and finally harassed to death by Anthony Comstock for it in 1902. (Her suicide note, laying the blame at his sanctimonious feet, did help bring about his downfall.) If you get a chance, we really recommend learning more about her, because I am really not doing justice to the rich wildness of her life.

We have a book of some of Craddock's occult writings that we grabbed from the local new age bookstore, combining Heavenly Bridegrooms (her book-length history of people marrying gods, angels, and spirits throughout history--a decent amount is distorted due to the research limitations placed on her as a woman in the 1890s, but it's still really interesting!), Psychic Wedlock (her manual of how to marry a spirit successfully), and Spiritual Joys (a description of sexual religious ecstasy). We've also read Heaven's Bride and done a little digging into Vere Chappell's Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock. However, both our book and Chappell are interested in Craddock's non-autobiographical (especially occult) writings, while Schmidt (the author of Heaven's Bride) seems at a loss to deal with Craddock's whole "married a spirit" thing and tries to avoid it as much as he can.

However, Ida Craddock did have a psychical diary and an unpublished, unfinished autobiographical manuscript among her possessions. As all her books were getting burned by the law and her mother (her only relative) kept trying to institutionalize and imprison her for her own good (Ida had to flee the country to avoid that, then finally got nabbed), she bestowed all her stuff to a staunch friend of hers, a fellow freethinker, before she died.

Enter Theodore fuckin' Schroeder.

Schroeder was not the staunch friend who inherited Craddock's works. He was a lawyer who never met her. More importantly, he was a Freudian who was ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that "all religion is ultimately reducible to sexual excitement and sexual ideas." In other words, if you just got laid properly, religion and superstition would disappear. (This, by the way, was tied up in a lot of ideas about how women were more prone to mystical experience due to hysteria and sexual frustration--the poor dears marry ghosts and Jesus just because they can't get laid with the real thing! This is at least a century-old idea!)

Schroeder was positive that Ida Craddock would be the perfect patient for his proof, never mind that she was dead and he never met or knew her. Why should that stop the power of SCIENCE?

So Schroeder goes up to Staunch Friend. He asks, can't he please have Craddock's papers? He promises not to do anything with them she'd disapprove of! But Staunch Friend replies that he has READ Schroeder's work, and Theo, kindly go fuck yourself.

Schroeder says, "FINE. I'll WAIT."

And then Staunch Friend dies on the fucking Titanic in 1912, because this whole fucking story is full of improbable absurdities like that, and all HIS stuff is passed on to his daughter.

Schroeder now approaches the daughter. "Can't I pretty please have Craddock's papers?"

She says sure, and Schroeder, dizzy with glee, gets to work pounding out his psychological analyses of a woman he's never met and who he's positive was a "religio-sexual maniac" with a "homosexual fixation" but "might have gotten married and avoided both insanity and suicide." (All quotations I give from him are from "One Religio-Sexual Maniac," an article from the 1936 Psychoanalytic Review that was a BEAR to find and which frameacloud will OCR when they aren't moving across the country.)

And because Schroeder squatted on Craddock's psychical diary and autobiography like a fucking gargoyle dragon, and because all HIS papers (and thus all HER papers) are undigitized in boxes in the fucking special collection of Southern Illinois University in fucking Carbondale, a place where I am NEVER going to be able to with my finances, if I want to learn anything more about Ida Craddock's Borderland marriage, I have to go through Schroeder.

And HE IS THE WORST.

I don't just mean his smarmy smugness about how if Ida Craddock had just treated sex less sacredly, she would've gotten happily married and been "a useful woman" instead of getting harassed to death. I don't even mean his absolute conviction that he is showing Ida Craddock's ass instead of his own.

It's that he makes things up.

HE JUST MAKES THINGS UP!

See, Theodore fuckin' Schroeder's whole fucking THESIS about Craddock REQUIRES he disavow a part of her biography that she was very firm about: that Soph, her spirit husband, was her only sex partner. She has been firm about this, her friends were firm about this, and nobody has found any evidence, far as I know, that this wasn't true. But Schroeder's tiny rat brain simply cannot accept this idea, and his whole thesis require she have been boned and 'bandoned by a couple dudes, because of Freudian reasons that won't mean anything to adult humans of the 21st century. So he comes up with this elaborate real person fanfic about Ida Craddock's sex life that is entirely made up. He's not even LYING, exactly, because he truly does think this and that she just lied about it, but it means that I have to be very careful how I read him, because he's so tunnel-visioned that he will misread things to prove his thesis.

All that said, he DOES liberally quote Ida Craddock's psychical diary and autobiography, and I do feel pretty safe trusting those--not least because she's the better writer. She'll beautifully describe "a divine-sexual ecstasy" as "it as though the Great Power of All There Is held one by a firm, tender hand, detained in a secret retreat of exquisite beauty, where vivid colors and softly rounded forms are seen," and Schroeder will respond, "puritanism and mysticism are really problems of mental hygiene." In my print-out, my margin note to that is, "Sir, you are a swine among pearls."

It really grinds my gears that THIS chump (and his mouth-breathing wankfic) got a fucking platform for years in the Psychoanalytic Review despite his mediocrity and stupidity, while Ida Craddock, who was a LOT more eloquent and insightful, got fucking imprisoned, almost institutionalized, and harassed to death. I hate that HE is the only reason we have access to some of her papers at all.

It is some slight comfort that even in this bullshit situation, where Schroeder sets the terms of the match between them and controls entirely what she gets to say, he STILL fucking loses. Aleister fucking Crowley, of all people, upon reading this shit, went, "Only a lawyer could be so shameless. He begs the question with regard to this particular case, assuming that her relation with the angel was pure hallucination, of which he has no evidence whatsoever. He argues that, since one person both loves and is religious, religion is nothing but a morbid manifestation of the sexual instinct. One does not have even to disagree with him to see how worthless is his reasoning." (Indeed, he and his people then went and reproduced some of Craddock's work, seeing her as a sexual mystic!)

God, I can't believe I'm probably going to have to read MORE of this piss-ant's shit. (Schroeder, not Crowley.) At least I'm getting PLENTY of support for our hypothesis that noncorporeal sex is linked to homosexuality and masturbation in people's minds!

Comments

[synecdoches]

We hadn't actually read any of Ida's work until today, but it's quite interesting! Knowing the time period she lived in, it makes a sad kind of sense that she was harassed so badly for her statements. Psychic Wedlock has a lot of ideas in it that I disagree with, but the agency and sexual freedom of women is a very prominent point, and that would not have been popular in the 1890s.

Question: She uses the term "on the Borderland" and you've invoked it again here. Do you know if this is a term she created to describe her trans-corporeal marriage, or a term that was in use elsewhere at the time? She lived during a time of significant occultism in the USA, so I wouldn't be shocked to learn "Borderland" was a descriptive term for liminal connections.

--Wizard

[lb_lee]

I don’t know, since my knowledge of Western occultism is dogshit, but if Borderlands WERE a more general use term (and I suspect it was), I would go looking for it in the spiritualism stuff of the time; they were among Craddock’s influences. Schmidt mentions in his bibliography Ann Braude’s book, “Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America,” which I’ve been meaning to check out! It might be a good place to start.