Mary and the Rabbit Dream
by Noémi Kiss-Deáki
Coach House Books
232 pages
$25
A good historian understands that history is, at its core, a narrative—one usually written by those in power. Noémi Kiss-Deáki is one such historian. Mary and the Rabbit Dream, Kiss-Deáki’s debut novel, is not the first to tackle the subject of Mary Toft, an eighteenth-century woman who claimed she could give birth to rabbits. Dexter Palmer’s Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen explored the sensationalism of the original event by emphasizing the tension between skepticism and the desire to believe in something more.
Kiss-Deáki offers a different approach. Her prose, marked by repetition and a cyclicality that feels playful even in the most tense and disturbing moments, is reminiscent of the nursery rhyme “The House That Jack Built.” Kiss-Deáki’s main contribution lies in her critical feminist lens, which covers the micro and the macro alike, recognizing that external factors can transform people, particularly women, into prisoners within their own bodies, not just in the broader world.
Drawing from the medical accounts of key doctors in Mary Toft’s case—Nathaniel St. André, Cyriacus Ahlers, and Sir Richard Manningham—Mary and the Rabbit Dream intervenes in places where these men showed little interest, clear about “which information they want and which information they don’t want,” and in doing so, tells a story of lost power. Mary’s journey begins with a miscarriage that is taken advantage of by her mother-in-law, Ann, her weakened state making Mary “the ideal person to use in the way Ann Toft wishes to use her.”
While not a character study, Kiss-Deáki is regularly preoccupied with the fact that contemporary accounts of the “the Rabbit Woman” had no consideration for Mary as an individual, only for her body. Descriptions of Mary’s “fair complexion . . . strong and healthy constitution . . . small stature and . . . stupid and sullen temper” dehumanize her. Her body is treated as an object and violated, her weakness, silence, and lack of resistance taken as complicity to the point where “there was no difference between . . . [a] bagnio, a brothel, and a prison.”
Set against the development of empirical science, Kiss-Deáki foreshadows how rabbits will play a key role in pregnancy tests for women in the twentieth century. And yet, the novel is also increasingly pressing, the eighteenth-century perceptions of birth and midwifery acquiring a new edge of horror given the dissolution of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing fight to preserve women’s bodily autonomy across the world.
Despite being a key perpetrator in Mary’s story, there remains something haunting when the reader is told that Ann Toft’s plan to “set the system on fire” and rise from poverty fails because “the system can’t be set on fire,” and it “eats everyone, sooner or later, and especially the poor.” Violence, Kiss-Deáki reminds her readers, can be enacted by those who are themselves victims of violence.
