Séances and spiritualism

Séances and spiritualism in the novel center on Lydia Wells’s planned gathering at the Wayfarer’s Fortune, where the missing Emery Staines is to be summoned before an invited circle. The séance promises a way across the boundary between the living and the dead, but its preparations are as revealing as any alleged communication: grief and uncertainty make the prospect attractive, while skepticism, exclusion, and the staging of a Chinese guest expose the social performance built around it.

A séance against the uncertainty of death

Walter Moody’s interest in the séance arises from his changing belief about Emery Staines’s fate. Until he receives a message that afternoon, Moody has half-believed that Staines survived the wreck and would be found. The message leaves him thinking that Staines can only be dead, and that he is gone forever. That shift—from hopeful expectation to presumed death—makes the séance more than a diverting curiosity: Moody says he would give any money for a seat at Lydia Wells’s gathering because he wants access to knowledge that ordinary evidence has failed to provide.

The conversation between Moody and Aubert Gascoigne gives the proposed ritual a personal, even uneasy dimension. Gascoigne imagines how startling it would be to have his own shade summoned unexpectedly; Moody, by contrast, says he would be relieved if his shade were called and suggests that the afterlife might be dreary. Their remarks do not establish what either man believes about survival after death. Instead, they show death being approached through humor, speculation, and a longing to know what cannot be confirmed. Staines’s uncertain fate supplies the immediate pressure: the gathering is meant to address a disappearance that has become, in Moody’s mind, a death without a body or an answer.

Lydia Wells’s gathering and its intended medium

Lydia Wells plans the séance at the Wayfarer’s Fortune, the former hotel where she and Anna Wetherell are preparing the rooms. The evening is divided into a party beginning at seven and the séance itself at ten. This arrangement places spiritualism in a social setting: the promised contact with the dead is scheduled as the central act of an evening gathering, with selected guests and a designated assistant.

Anna is named in the paper as Lydia’s aide. Moody is caustic about how brief her apprenticeship appears to have been and questions, in turn, the quality of her training and of the supposed subject. His objection reveals a practical skepticism about the credibility of the medium and the preparation behind the performance. Gascoigne answers with a joke that connects Anna’s experience as a prostitute to an imagined expertise in secrets and hidden arts. The exchange treats her proposed spiritualist role not as a formally established vocation but as something other people interpret through her past, alternately doubting her competence and turning that past into a rationale for it.

The staging also unsettles the simple idea of a private communion between mourners and the dead. Moody has not formally met either woman, but has seen Lydia and Anna hanging drapes in the front windows of the former hotel. Their silhouettes and gestures awaken his curiosity about their relationship and about the preparations occurring inside. The scene makes the séance’s material arrangements—drapes, rooms, invitations, and an appointed hour—part of its significance. Before any spirit is called, the gathering is already being fashioned as an event for an audience.

Skepticism, exclusion, and the invited guests

Moody and Gascoigne want to attend, but neither has been invited. Gascoigne feels the exclusion particularly keenly because he considers himself the first friend Lydia made in Hokitika; nevertheless, she has neither visited him nor received him since the afternoon of 27 January. His interest combines curiosity about spiritualism with a sense that friendship ought to have earned him a place. Moody, meanwhile, questions whether Anna’s sudden appointment is credible, yet also wants to witness the séance. Skepticism does not remove his desire to be present; uncertainty intensifies it.

Benjamin Löwenthal represents a more explicitly qualified form of skepticism. He tells Francis Carver that he had intended to go to the Wayfarer’s Fortune as a skeptic but with an open mind, and asks whether Carver expects to attend. Carver refuses, and Löwenthal jokes that Carver’s skepticism may exceed his own. The exchange presents spiritualism as something that can attract an observer without requiring prior belief. Attendance itself becomes a way to test, watch, or judge the claims being made.

Lydia’s invitation to Ah Sook reveals a sharper imbalance between the séance’s organizers and its participants. As he is leaving, Lydia grabs his forearm and insists that he come that evening. Anna points out that he has no ticket; Lydia dismisses the practical objection and describes him as an “Oriental presence,” treating his appearance as an element that will improve the gathering. She even considers whether he might smoke a pipe so that curling smoke would add to the scene, though she says smoke indoors makes her ill. Anna’s reminder that Ah Sook has not consented briefly identifies the difference between being invited as a person and being recruited as an effect.

A meeting misunderstood

Lydia asks Ah Sook whether he knows Emery Staines, then tells him that they are going to bring Staines to the Wayfarer’s Fortune that night and speak with him. Ah Sook recognizes the name. He understands Lydia’s announcement as good news: he concludes that the prospector has been found alive. The scene therefore shows how the séance’s language can carry incompatible meanings. Lydia describes a planned spiritualist encounter; Ah Sook, who has no reason to know the word séance, understands from context that it is a scripted meeting to which Staines has been invited.

Anna explains the arrangements more carefully. The party will gather in the room, the men will sit in a circle, and Staines will stand in the center. She repeats the unfamiliar term and describes the proposed positions and participants, allowing Ah Sook to grasp that Lydia is asking him to return and sit on a cushion in the corner. He agrees to come, but his agreement follows an explanation that has not dispelled his initial inference that Staines is alive. Lydia interprets his stillness as a theatrical quality, comparing him to a living statue; Anna, by contrast, does the work of translation that makes his participation possible.

In these preparations, spiritualism is neither confirmed nor simply dismissed. The séance gives characters a form in which to direct their longing for contact and certainty, but it also turns belief into a matter of presentation: who is invited, who serves as an aide, who is displayed, and who understands the terms. The contrast between Moody’s desire for news of the dead and Ah Sook’s hope that Staines has been found alive makes the gathering’s central uncertainty especially clear. Before the séance begins, its promise has already divided into different expectations.