The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
In 2018, Emma Donoghue, author of Room and Wonder, among other novels, began The Pull of the Stars inspired by the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Spanish Flu pandemic which killed millions worldwide. The novel takes place over a period of three days in the fall of 1918, when Julia Powers, a nurse midwife, cares for sick and pregnant women in a makeshift Fever/Maternity Ward in a Dublin Ireland hospital. In this “small square of the plague-ridden war-weary world,” Julia deals with crisis upon crises: fatal skyrocketing fevers, multiple premature deliveries, life-threatening hemorrhages, and a stillborn birth. Ms. Donoghue has stated that although she did not write her story for any contemporary relevance, by the time she turned in the final draft to her publishers, the coronavirus, and news of its deadly effects, was spreading around the world. This has added an eerie new relevance to this gripping, tender, and heartbreaking story.
The novel is divided into four parts: “Red,” “Brown,” “Blue” and “Black,” which correspond to the colors of the victims’ faces as the flu progresses. It provides the reader with a master class in how an author can take specific events, characters, and settings and create a story that deals with universal themes such as the lives and bodies of women; the effects of war, poverty, marginalization, misogyny, and abuse; the power of the Catholic church and its teachings; the horrors of unmonitored institutionalization; and the frustration with the fact that women, and very often women of color, while heroically working to save lives, are poorly paid, work brutal hours, and possess no security.
The author states that in conducting research for her book, she found that the question of health kept drifting into political issues. And as we are all realizing during COVID, health IS political. Who can write a drama about health care and divorce it from its social and political context? In trying to serve her patients, Julia contends with the reality that in 1918, as in 2021, the causes for higher death rates among the communities of the marginalized or impoverished are definitely not confined to the field of medicine.
The patients served by Julia are struggling to survive within a culture of poverty where women are obligated to pump out one baby after another no matter what. The following quote describes the effect of this expectation on one woman who is literally shattered and worn out by making babies.
Haggard at thirty-three years old, pale but for those flame-red cheeks, her belly a hard hill. Eleven previous deliveries, it said on Ita Noonan’s chart, seven children still living, and this twelfth birth not expected for another two and a half months. (Since Noonan had been able to tell us nothing about when she might have conceived or when she’d felt the quickening, Sister Finnigan had had to make a stab at the due date based on the height of the uterus.)
My job wasn’t to cure all Ita Noonan’s ills but to bring her safe through this particular calamity, I reminded myself, to push her little boat back into the current of what I imagined to be her barely bearable life. [Kindle Version, p. 26]
