Elementary, Academia

Leave a comment

Continuing my dark academia streak, I enjoyed Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte.  Although I’m not really a Sherlock Holmes fan, I know enough of the lore to appreciate how deeply steeped this novel is in Sherlockiana.  In the world of the novel Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real people.  Watson wrote the books authored by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in real life.  The books are well known and widely read in the universe of A Study in Charlotte.  The adventures in those novels and stories are, here, factual.  The book is narrated by Jamie Watson, a descendant of John Watson.  While at Sherringford Academy in Connecticut he finally meets Charlotte Holmes, descendent of Sherlock.  They become friends and have a campus murder to solve (thus, dark academia).  I have to confess that I had the image of Jenna Ortega, of Wednesday, in my head as Charlotte.  The two (Wednesday and Charlotte) are similar in many ways.

Although flawed, Charlotte is an inherently likable character.  The story contains enough fun to prevent it from being too grim, even with the death of a Sherringford student and the violent attack of another.  The murderer goes to great lengths to frame Charlotte, and the novel introduces some of the Moriarty descendants as well.  Watson tries to get close to Holmes, but she holds everyone at a distance.  The story includes some family dynamics—the Holmeses rational to the point of being cold, Watson’s mother constantly warning him to stay away from Holmeses while his father eagerly observes how Charlotte works.  Putting the action in Connecticut allows for a trans-Atlantic element since both families are, naturally, British.  The story is well told.

The novel should appeal to those who enjoy detective stories and who appreciate a smart, if troubled female lead.  In this latter aspect, Cavallaro shows herself a perceptive Doyle fan.  Sherlock Holmes isn’t always a perfect character.  He uses drugs and is an eccentric.  This story transfers all of that to Charlotte but making her a young woman while Watson is a rather love-lorn young man, opens the potential for a relationship unlike the classic Holmes and Watson.  I don’t say “romantic” relationship, because Charlotte isn’t really receptive to romance, although her strict rationalism wears thin when something goes seriously wrong.  We all like to believe that there are people a few steps ahead of everyone else, as long as they’re good.  The Moriartys are also masterminds but the novel doesn’t allow us to decide that they’re all bad.  This is an intriguing tale that fits into dark academia in an elementary way.

Witching Season

Leave a comment

Tis the season for movies about witches.  The cult classic The Craft is another one of my old movies—I don’t think I’ve written a blog post about it before.  In any case, this autumn felt like good timing for a movie about female empowerment.  Rewatching it, it was difficult to miss how religion and horror are tied together.  Indeed, the Bible appears in the film as well.  This makes sense since the girls attend a Catholic school.  So what is this one about?  Teenage Sarah has moved to Los Angeles and is having trouble fitting in at school.  She is a “natural” witch who catches the attention of the small coven consisting of Nancy, Bonnie, and Rochelle.  They invite her to complete their coven so that they can invoke Manon, a deity larger than God.  Once they attain their powers, they begin redressing personal wrongs, but begin to hurt others as they do so.

Sarah is the daughter of a witch and her mother died in childbirth.  Sarah has difficulties with using powers to hurt others.  She was primarily interested in a love spell, but it too has consequences.  The coven experiments with even more powerful spells, giving the girls very obvious powers.  Especially Nancy.  Nancy is angry and enamored of power.  Sarah decides she wants out of the coven, but they’ve become too powerful.  Since Sarah tried to take her own life before, Nancy tries to force her to do so, only to succeed this time.  She’s backed up by Bonnie and Rochelle, both enjoying their powers.  Their attack, however, brings out the natural power of Sarah’s witch nature.  In the end, all of them lose their powers except Sarah.  

There’s a strong moral streak through the movie.  Unrestrained power leads naturally enough to abuses—something we’re living through daily in real life.  This is played off against a largely ineffectual Catholic Church.  A street preacher, who doesn’t seem very Catholic, also tries to warn Sarah but his method of using snakes is off-putting, to say the least.  He dies off pretty early in the film.  Religious structures of the monotheistic world have historically closed doors to women.  Some still do.  The power of nature encompasses both women and men, and the power that women have often frightens men.  Again, we see the fear of losing power played out.  This is comically addressed in another witch movie, The Witches of Eastwick.  Indeed, it is directly addressed there.  That’s yet another of my old movies, unless I’ve written about it here before but have lost my powers of memory.

Writing Ghost

Leave a comment

Despite AI, one of my great regrets is not having learned additional languages in high school.  I took four years of German and the one classmate I knew who was able to convince the administration took two languages, both Spanish and French (gasp!) to become a translator.  In any case, I regret being able to read French only haltingly, with a dictionary.  I watched Colette because it is the biopic of a writer, but I’ve never read any of her books.  I also watched it because it’s considered dark academia, but you already knew that, didn’t you?  Colette lived from the last quarter of the nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century.  Her first husband published a successful series of books she wrote under his name.  The two separated and Colette went on to become a reasonably successful writer in her own regard.

As with most biopics, the details are exaggerated, but still, this is the world of books where fiction and fact aren’t always so far apart as might be supposed.  Interestingly, articles on her husband (Henry Gauthier-Villars), known by the pen name Willy, state that he is best known as the first husband of Colette.  A self-promoter, he had other people do his writing for him.  The movie focuses on what happens when he tried to bring his wife, not yet established in her own right, into his band of ghostwriters.  Not having French, I have never really studied French literature.  If life allowed a bit more time, that is something I’d like to have done.  In any case, Willy was a libertine as well as a self-promoter, the sort that occasionally enters high government position.  And since he was involved in many affairs, Colette explored relationships with other women.  In other words, this is a story that is still very relevant.

Dark academia sometimes involves a literary life rather than a strictly academic one.  I applaud its love of books and book culture.  Some of us miss the days when it was possible to have publishers eager for new material, when books were generally respected instead of widely banned.  The darkness here is clearly the manipulative relationship Willy has with Colette.  He uses her lack of experience in the publishing world to his own advantage, and habitually making poor financial decisions, puts their living situation and security at risk time and again.  I sometimes wonder about my high school friend.  Did she become a translator?  And, if so, is her job, nearing retirement age, under threat from AI?  And this, in the span of a human working life.  A life of books.

Brutal Boys

Leave a comment

Some time back I posted about Steffanie Holmes’ Pretty Girls Make Graves.  It was a first book in a duology and since I’d been trying to keep up with dark academia, it was a recommended exemplar.  As I mentioned in that post, the book ends with a cliffhanger, so I got to Brutal Boys Cry Blood as quickly as I could.  Holmes is a prolific self-publishing author and I found Pretty Girls much better written than the majority of self-published material I’ve read.  Brutal Boys picks up right where the previous novel left off, freeing George Fisher from her predicament and moving her into new ones.  At Blackfriars University, George is investigating the death of her former roommate.  The Orpheus Society, consisting of old money blue bloods, seems to be involved in more than wanton destruction of property and orgies.

Much of the first half of Brutal Boys sets the scene for a relatively happy period in George’s life.  She establishes a polyamorous relationship with the uberwealthy student William Windsor-Forsyth and Father Sebastian Pearce, a teacher and college chaplain.  The three of them are mutually in love, but even as George is admitted the Orpheus Society, a deeper part of the sect emerges.  This group is even more insidious and has designs on human sacrifice.  But I’ve already said too much.

Reading is, of course, a subjective exercise.  My personal experience of this duology is that the first book is better than the second.  It’s not that I feel Brutal Boys is a bad story—it keeps your interest pretty much the whole way through—it just seems to be far more improbable than the first novel.  It is fiction, of course, and there is nothing speculative here.  There are no ghosts or monsters or divine intervention.  Speaking strictly for me, it might’ve helped with believability if there were a little of this.  I was not one of those swept away by Donna Tartt’s inaugural dark academia novel The Secret History, but she did include just a little of a speculative element that allows for a reader to perhaps convince him or herself that this might just possibly happen.  Some writers and readers prefer not to use that escape hatch.  I’ve read good dark academia both with and without speculative aspects to the story, but to me, such mystery adds a little depth to what might be happening.  And I admire self-publishing authors who write well enough to draw you into a second book, which can be a rare thing.

Another Picnic

Leave a comment

It’s curious, the desire to see a movie based on a novel you’ve already read.  I was intrigued to see how Peter Weir might handle Picnic at Hanging Rock.  As my post about the novel points out, the book, as it stands, is ambiguous about what happens to the missing girls.  It was only as I saw the film that I realized just how complex a story was crammed into a relatively brief novel.  Film directors have to make choices and although this one follows the book to quite a large extent, some elements were more clearly implied in the cinematic version.  The suspicion on Michael Fitzhubert was clearer, as was the fear that the girls had been molested.  The character of Mrs. Appleyard, although not exactly kind, is treated somewhat sympathetically.  It’s not implied that she might’ve killed Sara, for example.  Her treatment of the orphan, however, does lead to suicide.

This story isn’t simple to untangle even in the book.  Being literature, it isn’t clear exactly what is happening throughout.  It allows for ambiguity.  The novel never explains how the girls went missing or what happened to them.  Hanging Rock is presented as mysterious, almost a portal.  One way the movie deals with this is by invoking Poe.  It begins with a voiceover reading “Dream within a Dream.”  Indeed, the movie is shot with a dream-like quality.  The roles of the male characters is, appropriately, understated.  The story is about women and coming of age.  It’s often considered an example of dark academia.  Appleyard College isn’t a school at which fair treatment is doled out and Miranda, the most accomplished student, is compared to an angel, adding to the dreamlike quality of it all.

Using Poe to frame a film may not be entirely fair.  It does signal the viewer that what follows may or may not be reality.  Although Wikipedia can’t be considered the final authority—anyone can edit it—it lists (as of this writing) the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock as an adaptation of Poe’s famous poem.  Maybe by implication, but the story is clearly that of Joan Lindsay’s novel.  She presented this, in the sixties, as an account of an actual event, which it is not.  I found it interesting that dialogue was added to the film that doesn’t appear in the novel.  Overall, however, this seems to work as an art film.  The movie has been hailed as the greatest Australian movie of all time, and just this year was rereleased in theaters.  I’m glad to have seen it, but remain curious.

Dark Romance

Leave a comment

My study of genre leads me to believe that there really may be no such thing.  Or at least many aspects of genre are open to question.  In the case of Steffanie Holmes’ Pretty Girls Make Graves, there’s no doubt that one genre is dark academia.  Indeed, this is book one of a duology titled “Dark Academia.”  Although self-published it is quite well done.  There’s a lot of backstory, and George (Georgina) Fisher, the protagonist and narrator, is a character from a previous series by Holmes.  Another genre that fits here is romance, although this novel is more than that.  Maybe a bit of the story will help.  George is a new student at Blackfriars University in England.  From California, she has trouble fitting in among the blue bloods that are the usual make-up of the student body.  She soon learns about the Orpheus Society, the secretive organization that pulls the strings on campus.  Then her roommate, the girlfriend of a prominent Orpheus Society member, goes missing.  George decides to investigate. 

Consciously aware of dark academia, Holmes aims directly at the heart of it and offers a compelling story that keeps readers interested from cover to cover.  I was never quite sure what was going to happen, and I do have to add a warning—this first book does end on a cliffhanger, so be ready to commit yourself to book two.  George is so well drawn that it’s not hard to care for her and start rooting for her against the secret society types who can buy themselves out of anything, including murder.  (I have to say, that part is a little too close to reality in the current US of A, so it may be a trigger for some.)

My regular readers (if any) know that I’m on a dark academia kick at the moment.  There’s so much to like in the genre.  Holmes makes clear the close ties between dark academia and horror; they share a common ancestor in the form of gothic literature.  The sheer variety in the novels classified this way means that not all of the books will contain every element associated with the genre, but Pretty Girls Make Graves comes close.  Holmes also effectively writes the ostracism of the outsider into the tale.  Anyone who’s had trouble fitting in (or may still have trouble fitting in) will recognize the scenario and its fallout.  Let’s hope, though, that they don’t end up like George at the end of volume one, even when they enjoy reading the book.

Philadelphia Story

Leave a comment

I’m guilty of a little home-state pride when I consider Philadelphia as a seedbed for diverse filmmakers.  Perhaps the most famous is M. Night Shyamalan, but I recently watched Tayarisha Poe’s first feature, Selah and the Spades.  Poe (and Edgar Allan also lived in Philly) is an African-American woman, and like Shyamalan, writes and directs her own movies.  Selah and the Spades came out in 2019, just as we were settling into pandemic life, but it is a gentle kind of dark academia.  A coming of age story set in a fictional Haldwell Boarding School, it features three African-American leads.  The violence is mostly offscreen, but there is a darker story here.  Selah heads the Spades, one of five factions of student-led extracurricular life on the elite campus.  She’s a senior who doesn’t want to face college—she enjoys her power and doesn’t want to appoint a successor.

The factions plan communal pranks, and each has its own specialization.  The Spades supply the alcohol and drugs to the student body.  This involves some violence, as is to be expected.  Selah has a record of ruining her protégés before they can become her successor.  The movie focuses on Selah’s relationship with Paloma, a transfer to the school who seems a promising new leader.  But Selah has difficulty letting go and the drama plays itself out in a student-led prom after the administration cancels the official prom due to the factions’ actions.  There are lingering shots and some art house elements to the film, making it a drama rather than a thriller.  Dark academia encompasses several genres and this is, as I say, a tamer one.

Philadelphia is a city with a generational history for me.  My mother, who was born in New Jersey, lived in Philly for some time as a child.  She found the city a scary place and unwittingly passed that fear onto me.  I’ve been to Philly several times, of course.  My main concern is driving there—the traffic is always intense and I don’t know my way around very well.  It is a diverse city.  While it’s too early to tell if Tayarisha Poe’s work will center around eastern Pennsylvania (I can’t find a summary of her second movie, The Young Wife, that states outright where it is set), it does underscore that the cinematic world is reaping some benefits from the city of sibling-like love.  And such things happen best when diversity is given a place to shine.

A Father’s Day

Leave a comment

Some thoughts I hope I’m allowed to share on Father’s Day: I recently saw a review of The Wicker Man that pointed out (rightly) that my treatment of gender was outdated.  Similarly, the (few) readers of Nightmares with the Bible make a not dissimilar observation about my use of Poe’s formulation of women in danger.  I am very much aware that gender studies (which wasn’t even a potential major when I was in college) have done much needed work in clarifying just how complex a phenomenon it is.  I have posted several times on this blog about precisely that.  Still, we all write from a position.  My training is not in horror studies, and it’s not in gender studies.  My writing, despite the price, is intended for non-academic readers, but I too may be between categories here.  I’m trying to escape the academy that has already exiled me, but the framing of my questions is too academic.  I get that.

I also write from the perspective of a man. There’s no denying that I write as a straight, white male.  This is how I experience the world.  And how I experience horror.  Returning to Nightmares, I think my point might’ve been better expressed as noting that writers, directors, producers, and others in the film industry understand that viewers of their particular films may be more moved by a female possession than a male.  Or, in Wicker, that publicly expressed concerns about rape and sexual violence are more commonly expressed by women.  Statements can always be qualified, but that happens at the expense of readability.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch after all.

Academics can’t be blamed for doing what they do.  They critique, poke, and probe.  My books since Holy Horror have been intended as conversation starters.  But they’re conversation starters from the perspective of a man who watches horror and tries to understand why he reacts to it the way he does.  There is an incipient ageism, I fear, that sometimes discounts how people raised to use “man” when referring to mixed or indeterminate genders—taught so earnestly by women who were our teachers—sometimes take our earliest learning for granted.  Those early lessons are often the most difficult to displace.  I try.  Really I do.  I’ve had over six decades looking at the world through a straight man’s eyes.  I welcome comment/conversation from all.  Of course, my intended readership has never been reached, and they, perhaps would have fewer concerns about my view.  Romance (hardly a feminist-friendly genre), after all, is one of the best selling fiction categories, even today.  And many of the writers—generally women—express the gender-expected point of view. That’s a genre, however, outside my (very limited) male gaze.

Hop In

Leave a comment

Especially the first part, of Mona Awad’s Bunny, is so well written I almost laid down my pen for good.  I really enjoyed this one.  Once the story gets deeper, into the second and third parts, questions begin to arise as to what’s going on.  One reason for this is the story becomes speculative in nature and Awad’s not about to give away what’s “really happening.”  Set among a set of five graduate students at the prestigious Warren University (the name is a hat-tip), the novel is often considered dark academia.  It starts out pretty light, and although Awad maintains her deft hand, it grows progressively darker as the tale goes on.  Samantha Heather Mackey is enrolled in the writing program with a cohort of four “perfect” women—the kind many guys go for.  Sam’s an outsider, though, writing dark and troubled stories while her classmates garner the professor’s praise.

The “perfect” women call each other “Bunny” and they eventually invite Sam into their clique.  This annoys Sam’s best friend and sometimes roommate, a local artist who isn’t a student.  But Sam is caught.  She learns that the Bunnies actually transform rabbits into their ideal boyfriends.  They haven’t got the process down pat, though, and the resultant hybrids often have various deformities.  Sam is the only one who can’t do this transformation.  Until she does.  But it doesn’t turn out like anyone expects.  I’d better draw my plot summation to a close there, otherwise I might hop into spoiler territory.  I wouldn’t want to do that because I recommend reading this one for yourself.  Awad’s writing is beautiful and compelling.  I did wonder if I’d interpreted everything correctly when I finally put the book down.

Dark academia comes in a rainbow of colors.  Here, although comi-tragic, there’s something seriously wrong at Warren University.  There are plenty of books and classes, as well as intrigues among ingenues.  And also some serious reflection on expectations and how they affect relationships.  Friendship and what it really means.  Loneliness, and how it creeps into the lives of creative people.  It’s also a story about writing and learning to write.  As noted above, it succeeds wildly in this.  There are definitely horror vibes about the tale, but it’s so well told that you might lose track of the fact that they’re there.  When Margaret Atwood praises a book, it’s worth paying attention.  While not dark and dreary, Bunny shows the sub-genre off as one of great potential.  It’s worth twitching your nose over.

Finding Fossils

Leave a comment

Mary Anning was a real woman.  She made valuable contributions to paleontology in the first half of the nineteenth century, although she wasn’t always credited for her work.  The movie Ammonite is a fictionalized account of her life at Lyme Regis, where she lived and discovered dinosaur fossils.  Being fiction, the movie focuses on how Mary “came out of her shell” by entering into a relationship with Charlotte Murchison (also an historical person, wife of the Scottish geologist Sir Roderick Impey Murchison) who was left in her care when she came down with a fever after trying to recover from melancholy by taking the sea air.  Mary had established a life of independence and wasn’t really seeking relationships; her mother still lived with her and, according to the movie, they had a distant but loving regard for each other.

I was anxious to see the film because it is sometimes classified as dark academia.  Since I’m trying to sharpen my sense of what that might mean, it’s helpful to watch what others think fits.  The academia part here comes from the intellectual pursuits of Anning and the academic nature of museum life (one of her fossils was displayed at the British Museum).  Anning, who had no formal academic training, tried to make a living in a “man’s world,” and in real life she did contribute significantly to paleontology.  The dark part seems to come in from her exclusion from the scientific community, and perhaps in her love for Charlotte, a forbidden relationship in that benighted time.  Of course, this relationship is entirely speculative.

Fictional movies made about factual people make me curious about the lives of those deemed movie-worthy.  Ammonite is a gentle movie and one which raises the question of why women were excluded from science for so long.  No records exist that address her sexuality—not surprisingly, since she lived during a period when such things weren’t discussed.  Indeed, she didn’t receive the acclaim that she might have, had she lived in the period of Jurassic Park.  She was noticed by Charles Dickens, who included a piece on her in his magazine All the Year Round, in 1865, several years after her death.  These days she is acknowledged and commemorated.  This movie is one such commemoration, although much of it likely never happened.  As with art house movies such as this, nonfiction isn’t to be assumed.  Nevertheless, it might still be dark academia.

Peace

Leave a comment

Mother’s Day should be a time for peace.  In these days when misogyny is in style, it’s an especially important holiday.  The one holiday to explicitly honor women, it’s always been an occasion for reflection for me.  We have 364 days of warring and hatred, and one dedicated to the givers of unconditional love.  I can imagine a different world.  One in which women don’t have to become alt-right to gain positions of authority.  Where compassion and humane treatment would be world priorities.  I can imagine.  Although fathers are necessary too, we have no shortage of men pushing forward their personal agendas.  None of them would be where they are without mothers.  And women are the ones who give us care.  I can imagine a world where Mother’s Day wouldn’t have to feel so politicized, almost polemical.

With all eyes on Pope Leo, I can’t help but think how many treat Mother’s Day like an indulgence.  You know you want to get back to your vices, so why not pay for them in advance?  Celebrate mothers today so we can get back to business as usual tomorrow.  I don’t believe that we’ve lost the ability for transformation.  We can make the world a better place.  Think what it would be like if, before undertaking some cruel action, a person stopped to imagine their mother watching them do it.  Would not the world start to improve?  It is a world where we seem to prefer guns to roses, but it’s also a world with an unwritten future.  Pay attention to your mother.  Maybe things will start to get better.

I believe in the transformative potential of holidays.  We have to take their lessons seriously.  I’m sure I’m not the only working stiff who lives life anticipating the next holiday when things might change for the better.  We have to remember, however, what the holidays teach us.  Not treat them as simply facile days of obligation.  Think of Mom and then get back to the grind.  It doesn’t need to be a grind.  We can learn to cooperate and get along, just like Mom told us to.  Instead of isolating such thoughts to a single day, we could repeat them like a mantra.  I don’t know about you, but looking at the headlines, I could do with a bit of peace and love.  And I still believe that things can, and likely will get better.  And I give the credit to our mothers.

Shadow off Campus

Leave a comment

I’ve been to quite a few academic conferences in my life.  Some have been held in neighborhoods declared “unsafe.”  I even had a job interview in a hotel room (such can’t happen now) with a college that didn’t want to pay the fee for using the society’s services.  (A friend who’d also interviewed with the same school said to me afterwards, “I thought they were going to jump me!”)  (Neither one of us got the job.)  I even went to a conference where I had to drive through a crime-ridden neighborhood to get to an off-site hotel.  But I’ve never been to a conference where someone was murdered.  That’s the premise behind Kathleen Kelley Reardon’s Damned If She Does.  Reardon’s keenly aware of the kinds of issues women face in the professorate.  There are some unsavory guys in the profession and power is very difficult to wrest from those who hold it (generally white men).  In this follow-up to Shadow Campus, she tells Meg and Shamus Doherty’s experience with murder, and more, at an academic conference.

Academics are so necessary for studying things closely, opening up true understanding.  They are, however, people too.  And people can be petty, vindictive, and selfish.  They’re usually not inclined to murder, however.  I’ve been meaning to read that book about the murder of a religion professor at the University of Chicago several years ago precisely because such things are so unusual.  In dark academia, however, events like that are fairly common.  The thing is, many academics are also quite smart.  If someone were to put their mind to an undetectable murder, hmm.  The old gray matter starts churning.

In Damned If She Does, the apparent motive is publication in prestige journals.  In the end, it turns out that there’s more to it than that, but it’s somehow believable that a matter like publication could lead to homicide in academia.  As an editor, and writer, myself, I know how important publication with specific presses can be.  Even after doing this for over thirty years, an acceptance notice creates a sense of validation like no other.  Dark academia explores such territory.  I suspect that I’ve always been a bit naive when I’ve attended conferences.  I go, present papers, and keep interactions, well, academic.  I’ve heard whispers of them being places of temporary flings and I’ve seen colleagues use them as places to party.  On occasion I’ve seen established scholars very inebriated.  They’re people too, of course.  And as long as nobody is murdered, the code seems to be that what happens at a conference stays at the conference.

Horror Adjacent

Leave a comment

We have the basic facts, but still, it takes a good bit of imagination.  We simply don’t know what the life of Mary Shelley was like, as experienced by the woman herself.  The movie Mary Shelley isn’t a horror film but it’s horror adjacent.  How could a movie about the woman who invented Frankenstein be anything but?  The handling of Haifaa al-Mansour’s film is generally as a drama, or a romance.  The story takes the angle that it was her stormy relationship with both Percy Shelley and her own father that led Mary to express her feelings of abandonment in her novel.  And while we have to acknowledge the liberties all movie-makers take, it does seem interested in keeping fairly near the known details of Mary Shelley’s life.  Although other women were also writing then, it was still a “man’s world” she tried to break into.

I confess that one of my reasons for wanting to see this film was that Ken Russell’s Gothic had a powerful impact on my younger mind.  That movie, which is over-the-top, being the first I’d seen telling the tale, had become canonical in my mind.  I know the dangers of literalism, and I wanted to see someone else’s take on the story.  Al-Mansour’s treatment takes a female perspective to the narrative.  It seems that Percy Shelley and Lord Byron were both advocates of what might now be termed a playboy lifestyle, and that Mary, daughter of forward thinking Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, was fairly liberal herself.  Although Percy Shelley, like Lord Byron, was quite famous in his time, that didn’t always equate to financial solvency.  I could relate to parts of that quite well—full of creative ideas and shy on cash flow.

Mary Shelley didn’t rock the critics, but many felt it was a thoughtful treatment.  It is dark and gothic, but with no real monsters.  It did explain a bit of inside baseball about Ken Russell’s film.  Both movies make use of Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare to explore the famous meeting of Byron and the Shelleys that led to the writing of Frankenstein.  Indeed, Gothic makes a good deal of it.  Mary Shelley explains that Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had an affair with Fuseli.  I was unaware of that connection.  Something was clearly circulating among the Romantics, many of whom knew each other and, in their own ways, became formative of culture centuries down the road.  And although many critics weren’t impressed, I think it’s about time that a woman’s point of view was brought to Mary Shelley’s life in a world not kind to women.  Even if a woman gave the world one of the most influential books of the nineteenth century.

Around Us

Leave a comment

Our Wives Under the Sea is a gentle, but chilling horror story by Julia Armfield.  Two women are married and one of them is a marine biologist being sent on a submarine to explore deep ocean life.  A planned three-week voyage becomes six months and when the sub finally surfaces again, Leah, the biologist, has “come back wrong.”  She’s transforming.  Something happened to her under all that water.  Told alternately by Leah and Miri, the story is one of loss and mourning and lack of any reasonable explanation.  Haunting, in a word.  The writing is exceptional.  And probing.  I quite enjoyed this book.  I can’t recall how I first heard about it—it was published in 2022—but I knew I wanted to read it even then.  The sea is that way.  Moby-Dick, cited in an epigraph, has always been my favorite novel.  One of my early reading memories is Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (also cited here).  The story is a winner.

There’s something about the ocean.  We, in reality, know little about it.  Penetrating the crushing depths requires a well-funded science, something we’ve moved away from in favor of personal greed.  Life takes unexpected forms deep under the surface, even as we deplete the resources we can reach—over-fishing and consuming.  We’re never told what it is Leah and her crew-mate see so far down.  We all know of lantern-fish (lately in the news) and other sub-surface terrors.  We don’t know the potential life we might discover if we only cared to look.  The company that sent Leah down, however, is as shadowy as the government.  Promising help but not answering the phone when you call.  Yes, this is a haunting book.

Mostly, however, at least in my reading, it is about coping.  We attach our lives to others and when something changes them we have to try to adjust, because love is that way.  Caregivers understand.  The novel evokes both the endless draw of the ocean and its mystery.  Even as a child I wanted to live on the stormy east coast, preferably in Maine.  I wanted to be near the water.  As my mother was in her final decline, one of her dearest wishes was to return to the ocean.  She’d spent a fair bit of her childhood in New Jersey and always felt the draw of the sea.  She was no swimmer, but just being near the ocean was something she loved.  And that has passed down, it seems, to my generation.  Fearful yet drawn.  It is the dilemma that can lead to effective horror stories that make you both think and feel.

Dark Smile

Leave a comment

Romance.  It’s not the same thing as Romanticism, but it’s often part of drama.  It can, and often does, feature in horror.  Tender feelings toward someone we really love seem to be a human universal, even if social structures don’t always support such feelings.  Maybe I’m trying to make excuses for why I watched Mona Lisa Smile, but there is an underlying reason.  More than one expert considers it an example of dark academia.  I was curious, and honestly, it’s easier to get my wife to watch dark academia than it is horror (for that I’m on my own).  This was a film I’d heard about many times, but hadn’t watched any trailers for, so I wondered what it was all about.  In short, Wellesley.  One of the seven sisters.  But more than that—women struggling for equality in the 1950s.

A fictional Katherine Ann Watson takes up a post teaching art history at Wellesley, back in the day when a doctorate wasn’t required.  In order to demonstrate her expertise to her very well prepared students (I never, in nearly 20 years teaching, had students show that level of eagerness for any subject) she introduces them to modern art.  Traditional Wellesley isn’t prepared for that.  Moreover, she encourages them to develop careers of their own in a period when the MRS degree was still a main reason for women to attend college.  Watson’s own life isn’t without romance; a boyfriend back home in California and another professor at Wellesley both vie for her affections.  Some powerful students, however, make her life difficult and despite her popularity as a teacher, the administration allows her to remain, but with severely clipped wings.  She decides to fly instead.

Amid all the social commentary, a darkness remains.  A large part of it is patriarchy, but academic politics—driven by money—is the main culprit.  As Watson is essentially forced out, her students see her off with a display of camaraderie, making this, in some ways, quite similar to Dead Poets Society.  There were a few triggers for me.  Years ago I was indeed called into the Dean’s office and handed a letter to read.  While not nearly as dramatic as either Dead Poets Society or Mona Lisa Smile, I had students demonstrate their support for me as I was forced out.  Katherine Ann Watson seems to have had better prospects than John Keating, but both movies remind us that academic politics are dark indeed.  Even if it’s couched in the genre of romance.