The Long Night and the Golden Sun: Behind Saturnalia

The Long Night and the Golden Sun: Behind Saturnalia

by Stephanie Feldman

In 2017, I attended a Halloween performance of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death at the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia’s famous exhibit of medical oddities. It felt like the end of the world, then, or at least the world as I’d known it, and it’s the end of the world in Poe’s tale, too. As a horrific plague sweeps through the kingdom, the Prince gathers his wealthy friends in a sealed abbey, where they hope to remain protected from the Red Death. 

Instead of searching for cures, organizing to help the afflicted, or planning for an uncertain future, the aristocrats throw a wild party. We may be inclined to judge them—the selfish elite, fiddling while the poor burn—but there’s no need. Their celebration will not last. A mysterious guest arrives at the party, a figure with a red mask, and as it proceeds through the ball, it brings death. One by one, the celebrants fall. Their money won’t protect them from death.

I watched this play before the arrival of COVID, but the premise rattled me. Civil society and humanity as a whole are facing existential threats. What will we do? Will we collaborate and strategize, or will we give into despair and abandon ourselves to hedonism? Will those with the most resources share, or will they feast?

I began writing Saturnalia soon after.

Saturnalia doesn’t take place in the past, but in an imagined, near-future Philadelphia. (Poe called our city home for a few years; I’m a native.) My fictional Philadelphia, teetering on climate disaster, celebrates a winter solstice carnival that could unite a diverse city, but instead replicates its inequality—the wealthy celebrating in exclusive social clubs, the rest drinking on the streets, and many hiding behind locked doors as debauchery gives way to late-night violence.

My main character Nina observes, “Every year, the world gets a little worse and the winter solstice carnival gets a little longer,” and as I plunged deeper into our shared challenges, the Saturnalia carnival flourished on the page. Parades dedicated to old gods assembled on broken streets; museums and historic homes became theaters for blood sacrifices; the parks sprouted secret societies and cults. I try to ask big questions with my fiction—in addition to climate change, Saturnalia explores trauma and women’s ambition—but like Poe’s aristocrats and the Philadelphians in my novel, I still like to have fun.

After three years in self-imposed exile, Nina returns to the Saturn Club, where she once dreamed of escaping her working-class background and finding financial and social security. She swore she’d never return, but when a friend asks her to pick up a box he’s left under a library floorboard, she can’t refuse. She’s broke and he’s offered her a cash reward—as well as promises that some powerful people will be in her debt. Also, she admits, she misses those glamorous nights among the city’s elite. Of course, Nina’s task won’t be as simple as retrieving a box. She soon discovers that a cabal within the club has been experimenting with alchemy, and have created something far more powerful—and frightening—than a lump of gold. 

Alchemy, as I learned, isn’t a pursuit for precious metals, but for the magic of life itself. Which makes it an excellent metaphor for any kind of creativity, and especially writing. It’s also great source material. Saturnalia is populated by figments from my research into alchemy: flying peacocks, naked kings, bat blood and grave dirt, clairvoyant spirits, and jealous royals.

As a writer, the essential ingredients for my creations are other texts. The Masque of the Red Death inspired me, but so did Umberto Eco’s Foulcault’s Pendulum, which features scheming occultists and a fabulous party in a Brazilian alchemist’s mansion, and Louise Welsh’s Tamburlaine Must Die, a short novel that takes place over a single night. I read those latter two books decades before I attended the Poe performance, but they stayed with me, little glowing nuggets waiting to be stirred into the pot.

The aspiring alchemists in Saturnalia are also just throwing things into the pot. desperately recreating recipes and experiments from alchemical treatises. Maybe the final ingredient in a novel is always mystery. I can describe the stories that inspired me, the questions that motivated me, the research that supplied this novel, and reflect on my feelings during that time—my fear of climate change, ambivalence about ambition, confusion about sex and power, desire for escapism and adventure. I threw all of that onto the page and shook it up. (Or, you know, wrote and revised and revised and revised for three years.) And out came this woman, Nina, and these monsters—human and inhuman—and this new Philadelphia. Out came all of my fears, but also a hope and optimism I didn’t know that I had—or perhaps didn’t have, until the sun rose over the river following the longest night of the year, the winter solstice, my own Saturnalia. 

And that’s, I think, what I’m most excited to share with readers—not just a dip into our collective fears, an escape into a wild masquerade, but the triumph of a golden sun. “Every year, the world gets a little worse, and Saturnalia gets a little longer,” Nina thinks. But she also says, “Tomorrow will be a little longer than today.” It’s true, literally, but can also be true, figuratively, if we choose to make that story our own. Poe’s royal revelers die; my heroine survives.

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