What I've been reading this week

09/12/22

Good evening!

I hope you are all well and managing to keep warm. I’m really in the mood to hibernate and not do much else beyond reading, which I’ll thankfully have enough time for now that the semester is winding down. Sorry to you all who have to read about it.

This week I seem to have been reading a lot of anti-girl-power texts (or maybe that’s the way I’ve been reading them) — not texts that uphold misogyny, but stories that show the realities of being a woman.

What I’ve been reading and what I think about it

I re-read three Elizabeth Gaskell short stories/novellas for teaching this week: ‘Lois the Witch’ (1861); ‘The Grey Woman’ (1861) and ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852). Actually no that’s a lie, I didn’t re-read ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ because I’ve been writing about it for months for my current PhD chapter, so I didn’t need to revisit it formally because I feel like it is tattooed onto the inside of my eyelids.

‘Lois the Witch’ is one of my favourite short stories because it so expertly cuts through the tensions that surround the Salem witch trials. Lois is not actually a witch, she’s just a girl accused of witchcraft by a community that she is an outsider to. She is newly arrived in America having lost both of her parents in quick succession, and is forced to live with her mother’s brother who has largely been estranged from his English relations. This is the last family that Lois has left and they are largely unwelcoming, being Puritans and suspicious of anyone who may bring new influences into their fold. This is not a girl-power-feminism-we-are-the-daughters-of-the-witches-you-couldn’t-burn type of story, it’s a grubby, uncomfortable story about the real-life impact of socialised misogyny and the danger of mass hysteria. It’s v good!

I actually forgot how much I liked ‘The Grey Woman’, which is a kind of Bluebeard retelling. The protagonist makes a ‘good match’ by marrying a French aristocrat, but is miserable in their large castle that she is not allowed to explore properly. With the help of her maid, she escapes after they both discover that he is freely murdering people that inconvenience him (and also seems to take enjoyment in it). They try and make it back to her home in Germany but she is so traumatised by the events, their tumultuous journey and his pursuit of them that she turns grey. I think the most interesting thing in this is the women’s friendship, and how the maid dresses as a man to escape notice, even after she really needs to. There are interesting queer possibilities in the text that I’d like to spend more time on, when I…have the time.

Something I realised was that I don’t talk about the articles that I read in this newsletter, even though I read between 10-20, sometimes more, per week. I don’t think I’ll talk about a lot of them, but I did want to talk about this excellent deep-dive into the women of the Secret Service by Helen Warrell. I *love* reading about spies and find the entire concept of secret services strange and weirdly alluring and, like Warrell, I do lament the lack of good, quality women characters in spy fiction (even though I love le Carré and will forgive him for many things). It was incredibly fascinating to learn that the awful representation of women in spy media has actually worked to their advantage, because the last person people would expect to be a top-quality spy is a woman, especially middle-aged women. The women who were interviewed (and whose identities are hidden, obviously) were so unassuming, and I think that was written into the article really well — the normality of these people, even when they’re explaining what ‘moving agents’ is, and how they learned how to use a gun. For such a tricky subject where a lot of vagueness needs to be used, Warrell does a great job of detailing as much as she can, so the article doesn’t feel like it has gaps in it. It also has some great photos to go alongside it; Eliza Bourner was asked to read the material and to come up with conceptual images, as they obviously couldn’t photograph the sites they visited or the people they interviewed.

I read, pretty much in one sitting, The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila, translated by Aubrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, and unfortunately it didn’t work for me. The first story, ‘Moses and Gaspar’ was good, but not great, and then I became annoyed that Dávila uses an extremely same-y method to try and build tension in pretty much all of her stories. Basically, there is something strange happening in people’s houses. And that’s it. Sometimes, the Gothic’s tropes (like something that is not fully described creating terror in the home) work really well, but there just wasn’t enough skill there for me.

I also started Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, which is out next year from Fleet. So far I’m enjoying it, and it seems to be tapping into a (justified) trend that is happening in fiction and cultural commentary, that of criticising the True Crime ‘community’. I’ve always felt deeply uncomfortable about people who say they are ‘fans’ of true crime reporting and of serial killers because I don’t think that these kind of real-life events should be packaged as entertainment. There are, quite simply, too many docuseries’, podcasts and dramatisations of the life and times of Western societies worst murderers for this to be considered a niche interest or ‘raising awareness’; this is now genre entertainment that is made solely to make money. Quite honestly, I can see the appeal if you are coming at it from a psychology or criminology perspective, but what I can’t stand is people who see murderers as a hobby. I don’t think it’s particularly kooky to list this as one of your interests, as if it a kind of music or genre of film that you enjoy. What I think we are going to see a significant rise of is writing and media that centres the victims and the families of victims, who often get left out of the conversation (see the recent push back from the relatives of Dahmer’s victims, who were depicted on screen in the series Dahmer without their permission). I’m glad that this kind of criticism is on the rise, because I do think this behaviour needs to be checked.