Anything seemed possible, even talking to the dead

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/05/2013 (4836 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canadian writer Claire Mulligan has based her compelling historical novel on the strange but true story of three American sisters who were avatars of the 19th-century’s popular spiritualist movement.

In 1848, Maggie and Kate Fox, two girls living with their family in a sleepy town in New York State, played a mischievous nighttime prank on their mother.

Using a system of rapping sounds, the girls showed they could communicate with the spirit of a dead pedlar buried under their house.

One spirit led to another, and under the skilful management of their ambitious older sister Leah, Maggie and Kate took their show on the road, offering demonstrations of spirit rappings and becoming famous and wealthy in the process.

The Dark opens in 1893 with the once-celebrated Maggie on her deathbed — now poor, alone and addicted to the popular opiate-laced remedy laudanum. A nurse comes to care for her during her final days and so hears and later recounts the story of Maggie’s life.

Each of the 47 chapters begins with the nurse recounting a conversation between herself and Maggie. This conversation provides the transition to the next reminiscence, which often includes memories and stories from the other characters.

Using these conversations to spark the flashbacks seems disruptive to the narrative flow. But by the last third of the novel, the nurse succeeds in becoming a character in her own right, and indeed plays a pivotal role by the end of the novel.

Mulligan, a B.C. native who lives and teaches in Pennsylvania, used the technique of characters telling other characters’ stories, albeit more seamlessly and to better effect, in her first novel, The Reckoning of Boston Jim, longlisted for the 2007 Giller Prize.

As in her previous novel, Mulligan displays her talent for historical research in The Dark. She uses the surging changes of the mid-19th century, including women’s suffrage, the Temperance movement, the abolition of slavery and the carnage of the American Civil War, as well as inventions such as the telegraph, to show a time in which anything seemed possible. Even talking to the dead.

As in Jane Austen’s novels, the precarious struggle of women for social standing and security independent of men is a strong plot element. In The Dark, readers also get a taste of the boisterous American sensibility, as when the sisters try to join Barnum’s circus, or Maggie needs to hide in a closet from a lynch mob, or when the presence of spirits in the room coincides with the liberal use of alcohol.

Love, longing and marriage occur frequently but fleetingly throughout the sisters’ lives. Leah is married three times, and Kate becomes widowed with two children. Maggie’s lover, the famous Arctic adventurer Elisha Kent Kane, disapproved of her profession and failed to fulfil his promises of a formal marriage before his death.

American Barbara Weisberg documented the Fox sisters’ fascinating story in her 2005 book Talking to the Dead, which Mulligan acknowledges as one of her many sources.

There is also a young adult novel, Dianne K. Salerni’s We Hear the Dead (2010), which has been made into a short film premier®ing at Cannes this year.

The popularity of the TV reality series Long Island Medium proves that even today people still try to communicate with the dead — for curiosity, for solace in their grief or, sometimes, as with the Fox sisters, as a way to make a living.

Mulligan serves up plenty of the practical and earthly methods by which spirits can seem to speak, but she also dishes out a few ghosts — ultimately leaving a sense of mystery about what exactly is going bump in the dark.

Mary Horodyski is a writer, researcher and archivist in Winnipeg.