The Seance

In the classic Victorian ghost story, the cultured beliefs of middle- and upper-class gentlefolks (especially those trained in the sciences) crash headlong into working-class folklore.    Authoritative narratives about ghastly goings-on generally rest with the local servant population; any genteel types who wish to survive that axe-wielding, headless haunt had best start paying attention to what the maid or butler has to say.  John Harwood's neo-Victorian The Seance, however, evokes this clash of mentalities only to zero it out.  Instead of a modernized, tech-savvy (for the time) world suddenly disrupted by reminders of the inexplicable and uncontainable afterlife, Harwood conjures up a time in which the only supernatural is scientific whizzery (or flummery) in masquerade.  Far from being "[a]n electrifying Victorian ghost story," as the pull quote on the front cover excitedly attests, this is really a post-Holmesian amateur detective tale.

The Seance owns up to its roots in Victorian sensation fiction (and, for that matter, neo-Victorian sensation fiction) in both its structure and its plot lines.  It consists of multiple first-person narratives, one written in 1889 and two twenty years earlier--a narrative strategy reminiscent of both Wilkie Collins and, more recently, Sarah Waters' Affinity (another novel drawing on spiritualism).  One character, Eleanor, is explicitly and implicitly threatened with confinement to an asylum (shades of Lady Audley's Secret and Charles Reade); another deploys a disguise that references East Lynne.   The Wraxford clan is a decrepit family right out of any Gothic novel.   The horrors, such as they are, center on the thoroughly decayed Wraxford Hall, located where an abbey dissolved by Henry VIII once stood; weird, overgrown, and terminally creaky--"everything seemed to have bowed or sagged or cracked" (257)--it certainly looks like a haunted house, and its history of state-sanctioned intrusion and mysterious deaths makes it a good candidate for a deadly curse.   And then there's the matter of the murder of Magnus Wraxford, burnt to death in a suit of armor (er, long story), probably by his wife, Eleanor.  Did Eleanor then do away with herself and their daughter in the dank depths of Monks' Wood?

But instead of curses, we have generational echoes.  Eleanor, Phoebe Montague, and our frame narrator, Constance Langton, all look virtually identical.  Both Eleanor and Constance are very much the odd female child out: for reasons that are never really clear, Eleanor's mother loathes her, whereas Constance's mother simply prefers her dead daughter Alma to her living one.  (The initial seances all involve Constance pretending to be Alma.)  The novel's men are almost all a singularly unprepossessing lot, mostly because of sheer uselessness.  Eleanor's father dies early on; Constance's father abandons her, and her uncle Frederick, while decent enough, has no great emotional investment in her either; the lawyer John Montague is weak-willed and easily manipulated.   Eleanor's true love is a bit of a wastrel, while Constance's is just not particularly impressive. Authority figures like the police are easily deceived.   The villain, Magnus Wraxford (the name seems to be a shout-out to M. R. James' "Count Magnus"), is as disinterested in his and Eleanor's daughter Clara as the other fathers are in theirs.  Even the representative from the Society of Psychical Research, while he successfully decodes part of the mystery, remains entrapped by his prejudices.  (Interestingly enough, the Society only appears in its capacity as fraud detector, which seems par for the novel's course.)   Although there's almost no mention of "New Women," the novel winds up celebrating strong-minded women like Eleanor and Constance, who turn out to be the only ones capable of full-scale resistance.

Early on, Constance fancies that she "might have been a foundling" (7), and as she reads John Montague's and Eleanor's diaries, she begins to imagine a much different life for herself--one in which she is Eleanor's long-vanished daughter, Clara.  This fairy-tale narrative is considerably abetted by her sudden rise to heiress of Wraxford Hall.  In fact, the one fully supernatural element in this text, as it were, is the act of story-telling.   Magnus, a masterful speaker, mesmerist, and psychologist, has a "wonderfully persuasive" voice (66), and turns out to be the novel's best sensationalist; he is responsible for stitching together events at the Hall (whether by direct intervention or by narration) in such a way as to produce eminently Collinsesque or Braddonesque scenarios.  Eleanor turns out to be an equally sophisticated narrator, albeit for different purposes.  And one character turns out to have spent their life constructing an elaborate fantasy of personal and social success.  It's as if the novel winds up writing against its own genre: the true "curse" resides in sensationalist story-telling, and the only full escape, in the end, is a quick retreat to the comforts of domestic realism and a conventional marriage plot.