I’d like to do some wuthering

The title for this post is inspired by a fabulous poem in Eden Summer, a YA novel written by Liz Flanagan. Gothic PhD students: give this a read. You’ll enjoy the touches of Brontesque Gothic. You can find Liz on Twitter @lizziebooks.

 

Battling with imposter syndrome and the attendant ghosts of personal past – body image insecurities, anxiety attacks, identity crises, together with a newly developed stammer that makes an occasional appearance, just to make life livelier, I guess – often leaves me in stasis when silence reigns. I’m trying to push against my own sense of passivity, which comes from a place of fear (of failure, rejection, humiliation), but fuck me, it takes some energy. By the evenings, sofa and TV is all I’ve got to cut through the white noise. Some PhD student, huh? Whenever my sister rings in the evenings, after she’s had her day in the office, I’m in trouble if I’m not “learning how to read”, as she says of my studies.

Finally, last week, I couldn’t face any noise. Not the submissive drone of my own head, nor the inane ramblings of television. So I did what I should do, what I had, once, loved to do – the reason why I applied for a PhD in the first place: I curled up with a book (or, rather, since I’m not actually a cat and so can’t “curl up”, I wrapped a blanket around me and spent ten minutes working out how I can get one arm out in the open to hold the book while keeping it warm). Of course, as a literary history student, I’ve got an ominous mountain to read, but I just needed a break. Coming from a creative writing degree, nineteenth-century fiction doesn’t always fit with my ideas of effective, evocative story-telling; it can be hackneyed, repetitive, and flawed. So I wanted a modern book, and my friend’s debut YA novel was on my “to-read” shelf.

I’ve never considered reading a YA novel. At twenty-six, I’m officially a mature student – I now get to tick the third box in surveys, with a grinning “thirty-four” at the end of the line. Worse, I’ll admit, I’ve allowed the likes of Twilight to become my idea of a YA novel, led by a blank-canvas character designed for an average teenage reader to project themselves onto, to follow a romance of thinly-veiled submission to dominance. But I had faith Liz Flanagan had better empathy, that essential authorial trait that enables the best writers to create living, breathing, feeling characters. Plus, I’d already heard some great extracts. So I settled down with Eden Summer at 20:30, and finished the novel by 23:00.

I’ve not done that before – read a book in one sitting (most of my favourite novels are bloody huge, to be fair). Aside from the fact it’s beautifully human, with some great touches of Gothic musings that appeal to my dark heart, I was carried along by a feeling I’d not truly felt before: hope. The whole plot is driven by this emotion as teenage Jess battles with her own anxieties on her search for her missing friend. I remember Liz saying that hope is vital in YA fiction; without it, the world looks bleak – and certainly Eden Summer deals with a number of raw emotions and experiences, which could make any reader shut the curtains and block fair daylight out. Yet, through Jess’s memories of happiness and sadness, hope constantly emerges – hope for friendship, love, life.

I sound just a little more optimistic and slushy than I would like. I’m a cynical wretch on a regular basis, and a devout atheist in every possible sense. No horoscope can read my fate; no karmic cosmos will give me what I deserve; no mirrored-star will collide with my life to make me trust in soul mates. BS to that. You might think that would make me an active, living person – if the universe ain’t going to sort me out, I’ll have to crack on with it myself – but I’m more spectral than that. Ghosts aren’t real, I know; they’re metaphors for the wrong kinds of death, and I reckon I’ve been killing myself with the weight of what I feel I should be doing, with my own expectations of perfectionism. I’ll be a Doctor of Death by the end of this PhD.

So what, precisely, made my little husk of self-hood emerge from the blanket cocoon in tears after reading Eden Summer for three hours straight? I remember identifying with Jess – the preference for black clothes, the panic attacks, the search for voice as a writer and thus, as myself – but I remember feeling like I have not experienced the positive feelings she flourishes with. And I realised, quite quickly, that I actually want to. There’s a poignant balance between Jess’s body embracing all the feelings in her blood – guilt, fear, desire, loss, hope – and her final affirmation that her choices and wants are worth actively pursuing. Body and mind united; maybe this is the fruition of maturity (in which case, I’m decidedly immature). Jess runs, wuthering-style across Yorkshire terrain, for fear and for freedom in equal measures. And it’s all, really, OK.

My life, I know, has been privileged by a steady drift, without churning waters and storms. I used to feel like an Esther Greenwood, incapable of pinpointing quite what’s wrong with me, why the jar is so suffocating. This easy breeze that has carried my life has made me drift out, out, out. But when I caught a little bit of me in Jess, I understood how much my own fears have held me back, how they cripple me now when I’m supposed to be at my bravest (and yet I’m not even in a war-zone or trying to cuddle a spider).

I’m not going to say I’m fixed because a book told me how to do it. But Eden Summer has meant that I’ve found some more answers to my personal conundrum., and it’s also meant I’ve started switching off the TV at 8pm to read a book. It’s also reminded me of something I said to a friend once, in our philosophical moments (they do pop up, from time to time): that we should pay as much attention to the stitches as we do the body they make up. All the little details that give us pain are inevitably etched on our skin like tattoos, but that should not mean we stop taking risks. Hope is stronger than fear.

And now I sound all slushy again. Thank you, Liz.

A Familiar Face

I gave a writing competition a shot, for the recent Summer 1816: Creativity in Turmoil at Sheffield Gothic. The rules were simple: 500 words max, beginning with their preselected line from Shelley’s Frankenstein. My entry won 3rd prize, which is pretty cool since they were judged by some of the leading Gothic academics I’m studying. The winning entry was absolutely fantastic, which is no surprise – a romanticist scholar, published poet and playwright, Dr Monika Lee’s parody had the whole audience laughing.

So here’s my effort, with some edits – I’ve actually removed the Frankenstein opening, and adjusted my imitations of Victor’s grandiosity to fit more with the overall tone. It’ll do!

 

I stood back, admiring the silence that we shared. The folds of her dress crumpled together under the moth-struck flicker of the lamplight. The lank length of her hair feathered the pillow, ruffling at the crown of her head in the breeze from the open window. Her eyes – distant, deep, still pensive – looked up to the ceiling, and her parted lips were left on the verge of a word she could no longer whisper. Even so, within that expression I read a strange accusation that I had not come across before. She was saying, ‘I know you.’

I turned away and lit a cigarette. She had left a packet of Malboro on the cabinet, where the lamp hummed to the transfixed moth. I needed the air to still me, so I might savour the taste of the night: perfume and salt and smoke, thickly coating my tongue. I exhaled smoke. The blood in my temples clapped like applause; in the absence of an audience, my body congratulated itself. How strange it felt. I breathed in. Stranger still was the lingering picture of her lips etched into my eyelids as she was saying, ‘I know you.’

I looked back over my shoulder and breathed out. I wanted to alter her face, to pick up the pieces and smooth the hard line of her jaw. Make those eyes less familiar, those lips less talkative. She was saying, ‘I know you.’

Breathed in. I paced to the window, breathing out through the small crack. I gripped the window ledge, leaning my forehead against the cool glass. The streetlight outside glared at me, orange and burning and smeared in my weary vision. The cold of the night breeze clung, viscous, to my skin. At my back: ‘I know you.’

A faint shuffling sound cut my ears. Inhaling the smoke, I faced her. She had moved her left leg, I think. It had been turned outward at the knee, only slightly, curling her hip upward as if to close herself. Now it was open. Not dead. To my face: ‘I know you.’

I clung to my breath until my compressed lips pulsed against each other; I could feel my teeth penetrate the fleshy coil of my lips’ insides. Every inch of her body fell under my gaze. The moth-struck flicker of the lamplight danced along the folds of her dress. Her crown of hair ruffled in the kissing breath of air. Her eyes – distant, deep, still pensive – looked up to the ceiling. Her opened mouth, with that faint crinkle of blood in the lace of her chapped lips, clung to the words that choked me.

‘I know you.’

‘On Terror’: PDP

It’s been a long while. Battling imposter syndrome has kept me away, but seen as though I’ve got to review my progress, here’s the shortened, parody version.

Supervisors are the new Inquisitors, and they want me to study my own innards which are, for the most part, full of wine and chocolate. Take a look at the withered, wrinkled and loathsome visage of a PhD researcher half way in their first year.

So let me tell you the most significant discovery of my research process. I am not, nor will I ever be, original. I may eventually find new ways of saying old words, or discover a new hue of black with which to stain the Gothic, but I’m not promising anything. I’ve got to the Castle of Udolpho, looked upon its frowning defiance, and I’ve refused to invade its solitary reign I’m more apathetic and anxious than Emily St Aubert and the whole swooning crew of Gothic heroines.

The whole problem is the terror of self-actualisation. Maybe. It’s like Victor Frankenstein, digging up dead bodies to make a new one, and loathing the result because it makes you realise you’re a puny, hubristic human creating a monster from the parts of everyone else’s research. So instead of visiting the graveyards and charnel houses, I’ve virtually hibernated these last nine months. I’ve spent so long imagining the achievement that the process has vanished from the dream and appeared in reality, and now I’m facing a seven-foot corpse that hates me for being too frightened to love it.

I’ve emerged only to fulfil my teaching contract. At least that went reasonably well. I’ve been teaching vampire literature: of course I get to say vagina and penis like a proper grown up. So there I am, pointing at a picture of a woman’s red mouth with her tongue poised to lick the lips, enthusiastically explaining that here’s a visual representation of vagina dentata, but that phallic tongue looks like she’s already castrated her latest morsel. I showed them an extract of Penny Dreadful, too, so they could see what a Gothic petite mort looks like in action (whenever Vanessa casts a spell, there she blows!) Module evaluation forms, mostly, refer to me as “cool” and “fun” (don’t worry, I am also supposedly “helpful”).

I fear they’re delusional. I’m a PhD student. Cool and fun has nothing to do with it. I say these words in seminars like they’re burning my mouth: they have to be said, so I can’t stifle their smoke. The urgency and necessity of delivering lectures had enabled me to excuse myself from conducting research like a professional; there’s always the summer. Well, here it is: the Longest Day. What do I have to show for it?

I’ve got a minus £250 printing credit. At 3p per page, that represents 833 pages (note: despite the use of a calculator, it took a good few attempts to get to this answer). If the average journal article is 20 pages, that’s 40 journal articles, which doesn’t include those I haven’t printed (part of the ‘oooh, this looks interesting, but not yet’, pile). At present, I have reached the 25 book max at my university library, got another 5 from a different library, 22 primary and secondary books from Amazon, 10 from OUP, 10 secondary books already in my ownership, and 20+ Gothic books I’ve gathered since undergrad. So that’s 82 books. Therefore, in 9 months, I should have read roughly 9 books, and 5 journal articles, each month. Not, actually, that bad – if I hadn’t also been teaching and marking for 5 of those months. Of course, I didn’t teach every hour of everyday, but considering this is my first teaching experience, and in some cases I was teaching books not even I’d read (curse you, Homer!), the planning and preparing took twice as long as delivering lectures.

Let’s be lenient with myself for a change, then. Four months to read 82 books and 40 articles: 21 books and 10 articles a month. A book a day. Maybe a pro can handle it. But I’ve realised doing a PhD has nothing to do with reading. It’s about wandering and meandering, fumbling in the dark catacombs – mostly of my own head, entirely of my own making – until I can speak the language of dead authors. Maybe.

The best and most uplifting task when I’m feeling like Mr Hyde is on the brink of taking over is to update my bibliography. Its size may come to rival the complete Varney the Vampire, and I’ve read more than I suppose. Remembering it all is the problem, and establishing an efficient note-taking system, and filing system to match, requires skills I simply did not acquire at MA level. Nothing prepares you for Mount Blanc. It’s either climb it, navigate around it, or knock the damn thing down.

I am chipping it away, stone by stone. Somewhere in there, I’m sure, is Eblis. I’ve slowly got into the habit of reading two recent journal articles whenever I finish a novel, and I colour code them according to some typical criteria. That makes it sound like everything is neatly filed away, but I confess I have covered my home study floor in papers I have no idea how to group. I also read, and make post-it notes on, two reviews for the secondary books I’ll be evaluating – I just can’t settle on which to read first. I’ve got three on the go at the moment, and there’s not much difference between them, if I’m honest.

Analysing novels is a different beast to battle. I’ve been trying to at least get through as many as I can before my upcoming paper for VPFA, so I’ve been listening to some humorous Librivox recordings while brushing my teeth in the mornings and cooking in the evenings. When it comes to analysing and picking out quotes, I have to read the book from cover to cover, slowly, scrupulously, with sticky tabs and post-it notes and notebooks. Or, I will be. Only just started the second reading. A third will come later, when I have a particular topic to hunt down. Sometimes, though, even an avid reader has to watch TV. The conferences I’ve been to so far are as wearisome as they are informative; everyone loves everything Victorian, an army of academic ants marching with the same stride. Am I allowed to admit I can’t read Victorian, Victorian, Victorian? Give me a bit of Atwood, or McCarthy, or someone whose name I don’t even know – pretty please!

It’s a guilty pleasure, and of course I don’t indulge. Which can mean I don’t read anything whatsoever. Same goes for writing. I’m a far better writer than speaker; this is my skin, but I shed it whenever I try to settle down and wade through the dreary monotone of academic language. It simply reminds me of some old grouchy man who likes to tell me what to say, and what to think, and how to be. A Manfred or Montoni demanding submission.

I do get to sneak in a few more exuberant phrases of expression in some of my academic writing. The good thing about writing about the Gothic is how easily the language bleeds into the explanation of its purpose; one can hardly justify how Lucy Westenra’s vampiric death is reminiscent of a petite mort without reverting to the exciting language of sex. Ironically, the genre that is most preoccupied with death is alive with vivid images that makes the reader breathe and beat with the pulse of the books – as should the articles that exhume the psychosis haunting it.

So where do I want to be in the near future? In three weeks I’m going to speak about sensation and the Gothic at the VPFA in London, my very first paper. It would be a good idea to write it, I guess. Ultimately I need to sustain a better rhythm of research, and develop one for writing. The PhD cohort at LTU is, thankfully, a supportive community. We’ve been talking (we’re exceptionally good at talking) about holding ourselves accountable to each other, by vowing to write 500 words a week and exchange it among the group. This, I think, would be best; but without them, I will write 500 words a week. I have 100,000 words to go in the next three and a half years, but I need to learn to appreciate the small victories. Like actually getting up in the morning, sometimes.

Facing my own inadequacies is as difficult as facing my own ambitions, but overcoming the former ought to lead to realising the latter. Maybe. We’ll see what Victor has to say.

Gothic Literature and Horror Films: a Personal Paradox

To lose my blog-virginity, I’m going to discuss a hitherto undisclosed (and unexplored) reason for conducting my PhD research in Gothic literature. I will, however, refrain from an intellectual-vomit; plenty of time for that. I’ll give free thinking a go instead.

Ex-boyfriends complain about the difficulty they have understanding me. I’ve always found them frustratingly simple. Some might say this is one of many fundamental differences between the sexes, but I’d put it down to my poor choice of conversationalists.

I’ll admit to a few ironies (certainly not hypocrisies).  The most evident is my love of Gothic literature, and how much time I’ve spent studying it, while suffering acutely from terror merely at the opening credits of a horror film.

I refuse to psychoanalyse the situation. I do, however, remember as a child I kept myself awake with fears of my parents’ death, though I don’t remember how “death” was officially introduced to me. No grandparents had died back then, and there were no pets to mourn. My goldfish never survived, true, but to this day I do not consider fish pets. Pets are petted – pettable. Goldfish are un-lamentable.

That’s not to say I’ve not watched a few horrors beyond the opening bars of darkened screen to the accompaniment of stringed music, or survived beyond. The slashers are not so much a problem; I know there’s some evil in the world, but apparently they’re all in American backwaters. It’s ghosts, demonic possessions, zombies – they’re all the real killers. I could talk about any of those, but the demonically possessed is a little easier for me to approach for now. After all, zombies are members of the uncanny valley, but I have promised no psychoanalysis.

Of course there’s a long history of such terrors in literature before any fanged ones made their on-screen debut. I do find it fascinating to interpret, precisely, why terror takes so many nefarious shapes. Devils, articulate corpses, vampires, animalistic cretins – they are all embedded in ideology as secretly as whispers in the dark. As Nina Auerbach puts it in Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), ‘no fear is only personal: it must steep itself in its political and ideological ambience, without which our solitary terrors have no contagious resonance’ (p.3).[1]

What is it, then, that scares me so much about horror movies? I’ve promised no psychoanalysis. As a feminist, then, I’ll theorise that what I’m looking at when I see these writhing, possessed bodies of women, is that ol’ maniac-me in the attic. The continued misuse of women’s bodies in horror films, and a child’s (again, usually a girl), harks back to the duality of spirits we women are supposed to have. The Madonna-Whore dichotomy is the original Jekyll and Hyde, only any sexuality in Stevenson’s Gothic classic was securely hidden in the closet.[2] The thrashing, churning bodies sprawled across the bed sheets – and even those upside down on a ceiling – have a peculiar relationship to a sexuality unleashed.

Sexual promiscuity is equally a concern for the Gothic literature of the nineteenth-century, too. This is why Lucy Westenra is so utterly annihilated in Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The recipient of three marriage proposals, she would sooner marry them all to spare inflicting disappointment upon any of them. How very unladylike! Many critics have suggested Dracula’s attack on Lucy, and the subsequent, rape-like blood transfusions used to save her, are Stoker’s punishment for such suggestive behaviour.[3] Her death scene as vampire – all that writhing and moaning, again – is overtly sexual, complete with phallic thrusts of the penetrative stake.

The threat of death is almost always associated with sex in the Gothic. From necrophilia in The Monk (M. Lewis, 1796), incest in The Fall of the House of Usher (E. A. Poe, 1839), to lesbianism in Carmilla (S. Le Fanu, 1871), sex and death are unbreakably bonded, however implicitly they may be invoked. But Gothic literature doesn’t frighten me. Sex won’t kill me, I know. It might not always thrill me as much as the guys assume, but it won’t kill me.

When I am made to watch films like The Exorcist (1973), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), and The Last Exorcism Part II (2013; an oxymoronic film), I’m watching a woman’s body breaking at the command of male guttural voices disguised as demons. Hair tumbling, mouth gaping, and legs akimbo, the body is tormented by the demands of a male audience before snapping up again into the missionary position. Has anyone ever noticed how similar that flat-backed, straight-armed position is to the body in a coffin? Sex and death, again. It’s uncanny.

Of course, there are many, non-feminist (and non-psychoanalytical) explanations to my fears of horror films. It’s in the music, the visualisation, the craft of some of the best writers and directors. Another paradox of this Gothic literature/horror film divide is my appreciation of Del Toro movies (not his 2007 offering of The Orphanage; I couldn’t face that one). That’s a topic for another blog, maybe, but I know I ought to acknowledge the exception that proves the rule.

So why is someone with a long history of terror for things that go bump in the night studying its original, literary form in the first place?

By understanding the fears of our Victorian past, I am, in some ways, hoping to understand the fears of our present. I admit, I have found it difficult to engage with the present; I’d sooner bury my head in a book than venture to the big, bad outside world. The ideologies I uncover dominating the Gothic continue to resonate with modern relationships, and this is a frightening fact for me. My exes don’t want to know the madwoman of my subconscious, that creature of sex, and passion, and love; they would rather not listen to the ramblings of my creativity. In turn, I’m made to feel anxieties which never did belong to me in the outset – to doubt my sexuality, my creations, my language.

The more I think about it, the more I realise my fear of horror films is not my own. It doesn’t belong to my body, my mind, my sexuality. These possessed women of horror are constructed by the ghosts of a patriarchal literary history, condemning the awakened woman and bringing her to the brink of orgasm (on the bed, up a wall, on the ceiling), before severing the pleasure. It’s punishment for liberalism, and I’m invited to squirm in my seat, with a pillow over my face.

Yet I earned a reputation for writing “creepy sex stuff”, according to my undergraduate supervisor. Fair enough. I’d written an odd short story about a woman saved by her cat from a would-be rapist. I also wrote How’s Your Husband? in which a Desperate Housewives-style woman jogs at midnight to avoid the scrutiny of perverts, mistaking the policeman investigating her husband’s disappearance for one such pervert. Then there was Sex in the City, a title chosen to make the men in the room freak out before they realised that no, I would never in a million years write about some sorority crew strutting through the streets of New York. I wrote it, thinking about Frank Miller’s 2005 graphic film Sin City (it’s an exceptionally slow film, but I enjoyed the colours).

They’re all pretty embarrassing five years down the line, though the latter was well-liked at the time. It just confuses my tastes all the more, I suppose. Sex, violence – sure, let’s write that up. My current protagonist-project is affectionately known (mostly to himself) as Havl the Whoremaker. But write horror? I’d scare myself, even if I wrote it badly.

This is potentially another reason for studying the Gothic: to get to grips with how to make sex a thematic point without sticking to the patriarchal missionary position. Sure, Stoker’s Dracula eventually restores the fin-de-siècle world by killing off the slut and bouncing a baby on the married woman’s lap. In fact, most of the Gothic authors celebrated in the long nineteenth-century restore sexual balance in particularly heterosexual, patriarchal terms, however much they’re recognised for subverting the norm and waving the flag of Revolution. It was a step forward, even so, to write about forbidden desires with such daring in the first place.

I’d like to write another “creepy sex stuff” story. My research focuses on the relative absence of Gothic novels in 1850 and 1860, when Sensation novels soared to success instead. If I could find a balance between my love of Gothic literature and fear of horror films, I could fill in that gap – write a Gothic horror set in those decades, something Mary Shelley would be proud of. Allow desire to run its course, without severing orgasms on the ceiling.

I don’t suppose I can explain my personal paradox just yet. Maybe I don’t need to, anyway. Having a little mystery about oneself should be a good thing. It reminds me of one of my favourite “love songs” by a beautifully pessimistic band, Coldspecks: ‘You cut me open, just to see what’s within/ Clean up these organs; wrap your words with my skin/I guess I’m just looking for a transplant lover, with infinite regrets…’ Do I know what it means? Not entirely. Do I like it, even so? Definitely.

[1] Auerbach’s delightful exploration of all things vampiric is a must-read, and I’ve been indebted to this quote on many other occasions (see Introduction, p. 3).

[2] A closeted acknowledgement to the coded homosexual features of R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

[3] The implicit sexual imagery associated with almost every encounter with the women of Dracula make it plausible to suggest that even the most averse to feminist theory could not possibly fail to notice Stoker’s representation of women. In case I am wrong in this, try just one essay on the subject, like M. Brock, ‘The Vamp and the Good English Mother: Female Roles in Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Stoker’s Dracula’ (pp. 120-132), in: From Wollstonecraft to Stoker (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2009).