Eeep!

Because Julie Taymor is making the Tempest.
Because this movie rocked my world when it came out and continues to do so today.
Because it is an underappreciated play.
Because Harold Bloom is wrong about Titus.
Because Anthony Hopkins is amazing, Jessica Lange is terrifying and beautiful, Jonathan Rhys Meyers was still androgynous and Alan Cumming is devious.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "

I have always been a little reluctant to read Middlesex, my reservations stem from many places, but mostly I had just heard a lot of upset reviews revolving around the idea of someone trying to write about the experience of growing up intersex who hasn't been there....and of using that person's body as a kind of metaphor for the American immigrant experience. Like any debate about who has the right to write about whom, it can get tiresome and seems pointless in the face of honestly trying to engage with the material in a critical way. Eugenides may be a lot of things, but after reading Middlesex and having read the Virgin Suicides years before, he is an undeniably rich and fantastic storyteller. His characters are well rounded, empathetic, impassioned and engaging - fully developed humans in the context of a changing America. He situates his stories in Detroit, arguably the most obvious symbol of the shifting realities and expectations involved in the so called American dream.

Our narrator, Cal Stephanides begins the story, establishing a framing device wherein we recognize Cal as a stylish, intellectual, 41 year old member of the Foreign Service whose attempts at romance have been less than successful. Cal was born intersex and begins his own story generations before, recognizing the fateful shaping of his physicality through genetics and romance. Cal's story is inseparable from the story of the Stephanides family, a Greek family that emigrated to the United States before the depression. The novel is divided into three major parts, the love story of Cal's grandparents, the love story of Cal's parents, and Cal's own coming of age saga. Eugenides's storytelling techniques, linguistic and referential choices and his subject matter are intimately tied to Greek mythology and drama. In a move that seems to be trying to draw reference to the narrator's gendered hybridity, Eugenidies adopts both first person and third person omniscient narration depending on the situation, allowing us to grow close to Cal while also helping us to delve into the other characters for key moments in the plot. This experiment is alternately effective and distracting, at some points you aren't sure who is addressing you as the reader - it also seems to develop too much at the expense of the climactic point in Cal's life for which the previous narrative was supposedly preparing you. I spent most of the novel waiting to get to know Cal, waiting to really hear what Cal was thinking about himself and his life and what he wanted. Instead we get a long lead up and then a rushed almost dreamy whirlwind of facts, asking the reader to fill in the blanks between 17 and 41. This isn't about wanting a big revelation or that I wanted Cal to wrestle with his identity to the point that some narratives concerning non traditionally gendered people tend towards, I just felt like after all that investment, I wanted to feel like I understood Cal as a character...but all of his choices seemed surprising and almost half hearted. It is in this that I feel Eugenides fails, he fails to fully develop Cal and I feel like this is where the criticisms have come from. Since Cal remains in the background as an individual, hid body becomes the whole of him and he becomes a literary tool in a way that none of the other characters do.

From the framing device we are thrown back into a small Greek village where Cal's grandparents raise silkworms. They flee their country because of war and leave everyone they know behind them, allowing Desdemona and Lefty (brother and sister) to become the husband and wife they had always wanted to be. They come to America alternately opening bars, restaurants, becoming part of the bootlegging trade, having children, wrestling with guilt over their relationship and navigating their new reality as members of the racially charged Detroit landscape. Cal's parents are conceived on a night after Desdemona and Lefty have watched a sexually charged play about the minotaur, a hybrid monster with which Cal finds spiritual kinship. Moments like this draw out the magical realist elements of the narrative. Some of these moments work better than others, I personally loved the minotaur scene because of its hyper dramatic stage setting and focus on Greek mythological underpinnings for contemporary Greek American life. As for Cal's family moving to a street called Middlesex or Cal living in Berlin (a trope campily utilized in Hedwig and the Angry Inch), I could have done without the heavy handed symbols...instead of achieving the impression that Cal's life is a part of a flow of cultural history, it tended to bring you out of the story. So too does the way in which the Eugenides family seems to be at the flashpoints of the past century's historical moments, and not in a "you always remember where you were on such and such a day" kind of way, but in a more Forrest Gump kind of way.

The most effective and gripping section of the novel is during Cal's adolescence when she begins to feel herself fall in love with a classmate and friend, a girl we come to know only as "the obscure object" (thusly named because of Luis Bunuel). After I got over my annoyance that Eugenides would literally refer to Cal's first love as an object (really???), their story became the most straightforward, honest and familiar point of the novel. Callie's relationship with the object is acknowledged quietly by both of them, takes subtle but emotionally fraught forms, leaves both parties utterly confused and assured simultaneously and comes bubbling to the surface in the face of a growing awareness that it cannot exist in the open in their world. Callie's adolescence is difficult to begin with since her pre adolescent beauty turns into an awkward phase that cannot be ignored, and her relationship with the object forces her to perceive herself as different from her peers. Apparently, Eugenides wrote a pared down section of this part of the book for the New Yorker, which I am desperate to read. He captures the angst that sits right next to absolute joy as your best friend in adolescence curls up to you while complaining about a boy and the terror in a possible misstep.

Everything after this feels a bit underdeveloped, Cal is rushed to a gender identity specialist (for those who are familiar with the history of the intersex and or transgendered rights movement, this doctor will resemble the very real Dr. John Money), learns that he is genetically male and runs away to San Francisco. This is a part of the novel where it does feel that Eugenides is out of his depth, he fails to capture queer culture in San Francisco in a believable or even emotionally honest way and attempts to recapture the magical realist style that nurtured the first half of the book. After investing in Cal for so long, the reader is left to draw their own conclusions, fill in the gaps and just leap to the future without a sense of how Cal really and truly becomes who he is. I do not regret reading Middlesex, I just wish that it had either been much longer or much shorter...an odd request I know, but one that I hope makes sense.

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

“Judge (leafing through book: The Odyssey): It's written here, in this book — a book we must needs consult, as it is the main authority on the subject [...] it says right here — let me see — in Book 22, that the maids were raped. The Suitors raped them. [...] Your client knew all that — he is quoted as having said these things himself. [...] However, your client's times were not our times. Standards of behaviour were different then. It would be unfortunate if this regrettable but minor incident were allowed to stand as a blot on an otherwise exceedingly distinguished career. Also, I do not wish to be guilty of an anachronism. Therefore, I must dismiss the case.”

The Penelopiad is Margaret Atwood’s contribution to the Canongate Myth Series, a series of classical myths and tales retold by a contemporary author with the intention of bringing foundational stories into a different context. Penelope takes us through the story of the Odyssey from back home in Ithaca, shifting the focus of the story from Odysseus’s adventures and fleshing out Penelope as a character while engaging the social inequalities implicit in every aspect of life ancient Greece. Penelope addresses us from her present life in Hades, her relationship with her parents, her marriage to Odysseus and her rivalry with cousin Helen (of Troy). Atwood’s own brand of feminism has always remained wary of sweeping assumptions about the possibility or necessity of any kind of universal sisterhood. While Penelope and her interrupting chorus commit a metafictional revision of literary history, she also blames Helen for the tragic events that unfold in her life and seeks to recast her as a shallow, heartless woman who doesn’t have the capacity for perspective even while trolling the afterlife.

Penelope fleshes out parts of this incredibly familiar stories with the details of the lives of the women, confronting the rumors and speculation surrounding her as well as the reputation she reluctantly has assumed. She has been lauded as the faithful, ideal wife, fending off persistent suitors out of loyalty to her adventurous husband. Her wits presumably counterbalance the radiant beauty of Helen and Calypso and her resistance to the suitors proves her worth as a wife. In telling her own story, she humanizes herself exposing her craftiness but also her exasperation at her situation and the fact that she is in on Odysseus's deceptions from the get, choosing to placate his ego for the sake of a return to peaceful marital life.

She is also filled with guilt at the murder of her maids. She makes clear to us that they were a part of her plot throughout, sent to spy on the suitors and plant false information, sustaining the ruse that kept Penelope and her house independent. Odysseus takes his revenge on the maids and the suitors, slaughtering them all claiming that even if they were raped, they should have asked for his permission beforehand. The maids interrupting choruses take us through several literary forms from laments to a contemporary courthouse. They explain themselves and attempt to shift the blame onto Odysseus, complicating the story of his heroism. Even in the courthouse his actions are explained away as being "of the time" (see quote above) - a familiar justification for public figures (real and fictional alike) who have committed atrocities against people who have for myriad reasons been a part of a minoritized group that has now (whether de facto or de jure) gained equality.

Atwood's reworked revision of the Odyssey brings into sharp focus the consequences and flipside of the familiar adventure story that for generations was the standard for good literature and cultural entertainment. Odysseus sets out and we only hear of Penelope when he departs and returns because presumably what's happening at home is neither interesting nor essential to our story. Ultimately Atwood uses this idea as a springboard and continues to play with our preconceived notions about perspective, the assumption of female passivity, storytelling and our common literary ancestors through breathing life into a previously flat character.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

"Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us."

Alternately referred to as his magnum opus and a self indulgent failure (even by Waugh himself), Brideshead Revisited is by far Waugh's most popular work. The multilayered story of Charles Ryder and the different incarnations of his love affair with an aristocratic family can mean many things to many people and has yielded varied interpretations.

Charles Ryder is having a normal introduction to college life until he meets Lord Sebastian Flyte and his troupe of flamboyant, inebriated aesthetes. Charles falls right in to their group and into Sebastian quickly and easily. Sebastian is charming and silly, he has a teddy bear named Aloyisius with whom he has conversations and to whom he defers for decisions. They become inseparable, even spending their vacations by each other's side. Charles comes to Brideshead, the home of the Flytes and gets swept up into their lives as quickly as he was swept up in Sebastian. Sebastian's sadness at sharing his friend with his charming family begins to weaken him slowly and he turns to drink. He eventually becomes nonfunctioning, stealing money, disappearing for months, ruining family holidays. Sebastian leaves the country and his friendship with Charles becomes nonexistent. Charles goes about his life, with Brideshead and the Flyte family hovering behind him, always hearkening back to a beautiful memory. He becomes a painter, gets married to a beautiful woman who helps his career and has two beautiful children. After spending two years in the jungle painting he returns home and by chance re-encounters Julia (Sebastian's sister) whose marriage is crumbling and whose resemblance to Sebastian has always held Charles's attention (hmmm...). They fall in love and proceed with divorcing their spouses and returning to Brideshead. Lord Marchmain, the patriarch of the family returns home after their mother's death (he has been living abroad with a mistress and renounced his faith), in order to die at home. The subject of having a priest read him his last rites becomes a point of contention between Julia and Charles and her father's deathbed return to the faith leaves her with the conviction that her affair with Charles is morally wrong and that she must end it. Our last image is of Charles, years later having returned to Brideshead. He is now in the military and they are using Brideshead as a temporarary supply station. His nostalgia is suffocating and his regret palpable, he kneels down in front of this once great home and prays.

Waugh converted to Catholicism very seriously in his life and this was his most obvious attempt to create a means to express his very personal and passionate conversion through secular, literary means. Charles Ryder is agnostic and is continually digging his heels in to the sentiments and opinions of the Flytes and each and every character eventually goes through a conversion moment, weakening Charles's resolve and isolating him. Perhaps it is my personal sensibilities, but this is the most alienating aspect of the book for me. In every moment that Charles refutes something as superstitious or offensive or nonsensical I am with him and his conversion at the conclusion of the book seems motivated by extreme loneliness and deep deep regret instead of true religious experience. Sebastian ends up serving in a monastery but still plagued by alcoholism and rejected by the monks. Julia denies herself true love and Lady Marchmain seems to be crippled by her faith into being cold and manipulative.

The prose of this novel is uncharacteristically flowery for Waugh. He wrote Brideshead after a parachuting accident and has confessed that in a time of great deprivation and discomfort that his nostalgia for the excess and comfort of upper class English life overcame him. It drips from the edges with food and wine and celebration and his decision to craft Ryder into a painter of architecture only cements that extravagance. Ryder paints aristocratic homes in a time of decay, preserving the monuments of class fueled British excess. His decision to return home after painting other monuments displays his loyalty to that excess and ultimately to Julia.

The last third of Brideshead describes Ryder's love for Julia, the way that it crept up on him, their brief but assured affair and the ultimate demise due to Julia's Catholicism. Waugh's attempts to craft this love story fell short for me, as it stands in such stark contrast with the natural beginnings of the love story between Sebastian and Charles. Although Charles does acknowledge that Sebastian was "the forerunner", his love for Julia seemed to be what he settled for when Sebastian went away, and while Sebastian and Charles' relationship is never explicit, it is heavily alluded to throughout by all parties.

There have been a few adaptations of Brideshead, most notably the 2008 version with Ben Whishaw (one of the most exciting actors on the planet in my opinion) as Sebastian. This adaptation took the skeleton of Waugh's story and manipulated it into a highly emotional, more explicit narrative focused on the dueling love stories with Charles as well as casting Lady Marchmain as having the most definitive agenda and absolutely ruthless follow through. Makes for some pretty steamy stuff if I do say so myself. It lacks the self consciousness of Waugh's text, keeps the British nostalgia and utilizes religion as more of a prop than an intricate part of any one character. This is one of the cases in which I found myself wishing that the novel I read resembled the movie I had seen the year before. I must say though that I think a major deficiency of both the novel and the film is the lack of development of Charles himself. Aside from his painting and his lack of relationship with his father, his only traits come into relief in relation to others. It is difficult to invest in the story of someone who is the least compelling character, he struck me as an entirely undeveloped Nick Carraway. In Waugh's case it is clear that he used Charles as a foil for his typical audience, an agnostic urbanite whose ambitions are not endemic to his quality of life...but I think in doing this he does a disservice to his story which somehow survives this misstep by virtue of the Flyte family. Personally I have always preferred Waugh as a satirist, his dark humor is deeply affecting and perfectly crafted. His serious novels are a bit snobby (and have a tendency to display a kind of confusion that never appeared in his pre Catholic days...hmmm), but then again what would British nostalgia be without snobbery?

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

"Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out—all of them writhing in agony except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more. With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself, Tess’s first thought was to put the still living birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had found them till the gamekeepers should come, as they probably would come, to look for them a second time. “Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o’ such misery as yours!” she exclaimed, her tears running down as she killed the birds tenderly."

So, I finally got around to reading Tess of D'Urbervilles. I have always (or at least as far back as I can remember), known what it was about, it is one of the many works that you are assumed to have read once you pass a certain point in your education, especially if you have an English degree. You learn to associate a certain number of key words you learn to associate with Hardy in general and with Tess specifically, but I tried to approach the novel with fresh eyes.

Tess's life is devastating, she comes from a poor family in rural England and takes care of the family while her parents drink at the local bar - where everyone stands outside at a ledge to drink. Her father learns that they are descended from one of the great English families, the D'Urbervilles (Tess has known her family as the Durbeyfields previously) and her mother encourages her to seek out their nearest relation in the hopes that she will be taken in and married off to improve their station. She leaves and gets taken in by Alec D'Urberville whose moral turpitude is less than stellar and whose one liners and persistent almost comical seduction kept recalling a kind of Hugh Grant figure as I was reading. From the get, Tess and the reader both know that something is eerie about him, but her class and family situation along with her sex disallow her from following her instincts and despite her attempts to allay him, D'Urberville eventually seduces her.

This moment sets Tess's life in motion. She has a child out of wedlock and is ostracized by her community, and when she meets the love of her life she does not allow the development of that love. Hardy is Tess's most ardent supporter, his descriptions of her are beyond romantic and focus on her simplicity, beauty and steadfastness. This is one of the many reasons for the initial censorship of the novel, Hardy exposes a sexual double standard without complicity, melodramatically dragging Tess through the mud for an act that she had no power to prevent. She meets Angel Clare, an ex-religious scholar from a well to do religious family who has come to the farm in order to learn the craft of gentleman farming. He is taken in by Tess by the very qualities with which Hardy himself seems mildly obsessed. He pursues her and eventually convinces her that she is indeed worhty of marriage. They are swept up in love and although you want to be happy for Tess you can just feel disaster on the horizon. On their wedding night Angel confesses that he had an affair in his younger days and Tess finally feels free to confess her past as well, a day later Angel abandons her and she is left again to work alone, too ashamed to ask her family or his for assistance. What ensues is pure tragedy, Tess running back and forth between jobs and running into people from her past and having to relate her estrangement perpetually. When she finally gets to the point where she is willing to ask for help she runs into none other than Alec D'Urberville who is fresh off the heels of a religious conversion, claiming to have changed his ways and apologizing for his brutishness. When Tess reveals that she had his child and their child died, D'Urberville returns to business as usual and proceeds to follow Tess and continually offer her help that clearly has strings attached. He wears her down, convincing her that her husband will never return and that life would be better with him - a gentleman who would support her family and who is trying to make up for wrongdoings. She relents just as Angel Clare steps foot in England to return to her. Completely devastated upon his return, she murders Alec D'Urberville and chases after her husband. Their attempted escape leads them to a terribly dramatic capture at Stonehenge and Tess is eventually put to death for murder while Claire marries her sister.

Hardy is making a few statements, criticizing the Victorian standards of morality in general and the sexual double standard specifically, simultaneously implicating Tess in a long line of corrupt noblemen while lamenting the abuse she receives at the hand of rigid class structures and depicting the technology, development and modernity of the time in stark and devastating contrast to the beauty and simplicity of nature that becomes increasingly distant. Hardy crafts his prose in a way that exalts Tess as an extension of natural beauty and mocking the weakness he sees as a result of urban life. Clare literally deteriorates when away from Tess, the town is the place where everyone goes to drink and shirk their responsibilities, the most scholarly in the novel are the furthest from religious experience. Hardy goes so far as to align Tess with pagan ritual and nature religion, painting a picture of her as a sacrifice laid out upon Stonehenge for the modern world to destroy (heavy handed....yes, but I can't deny shedding a few tears for Tess at the end of it all). Because I was prepped for the narrative beforehand, by years of summaries and its placement in literary histories and studies of movements, I knew what to expect from Tess, but I did not expect this novel to be so undeniably captivating and readable. You feel for Tess constantly and you shake your fist at the sky when the world throws another obstacle into her life.

Up at the Villa by W. Somerset Maugham

"But I’ve sometimes thought that if I ever ran across someone who was poor, alone and unhappy, who’d never had any pleasure in life, who’d never known any of the good things money can buy—and if I could give him a unique experience, an hour of absolute happiness, something that he’d never dreamt of and that would never be repeated, then I’d give him gladly everything I had to give."

While Up at the Villa is an extremely slender, compact novel, its exploration of the consequences and manifestations of gender and class relationships of the colonial English with the rest of the world sharpens the intensity of this surprisingly suspenseful tale. Mary Leonard is staying in a friends villa in Florence and while not causing the men around her to swoon she spends her time walking through her garden and attending sumptuous dinners with what little "society" exists in the small expatriat community with which she is surrounded. Her husband has recently passed and she immediately faces a proposal from Edgar, a dear family friend, a "world shaper" through his deployment in the British colonies. Marriage to him would provide stability and status but not love. She postpones her answer for a fateful two days in order to mull it over and finds herself somewhat taken with a flirtatious young rogue, whose reputation and sexual exploits precede him. He also proposes marriage although seemingly half in jest, offering Mary the opposite of her life with Edgar.

After attending a dinner at a restaurant in town, Mary decides to indulge one of her greatest romantic fantasies. Having been doted on her entire life, she has developed a sense of herself as a kind of gift to the world, and in the most literal sense decides to give herself to someone whose life she pities, someone who has nothing. She invites a young Austrian refugee into her villa for one night, thrusting him into a world he would never otherwise experience. As he professes his love for her, she calmly explains her position. To her, it seems ludicrous that he could imagine anything different, imagine that she could care for him or that they would ever see each other again. When he reacts, she offers him money, further aggravating the insult. In one grand move, he uses the gun Edgar had given her for her protection against just 'those kinds of people' to end his own life at the foot of her bed.

Mary is thrown into a tailspin, never having witnessed violence directly, still in shock that her moment of charity could be interpreted as insult and paralyzed with the fear of being caught. She immediately calls Rowley, her American playboy, to help her out of her desperate system. She calls him because of his supposed low moral character and is forced to acknowledge the practical implications of her large mistake. Rowley helps her cover up her mess, encourages her to put on her bravest face and asks nothing of her. It is with shocking ease that Mary continues on with her life, even as the body of her recent paramour lies anonymously by the side of the road. Edgar's return and demand for her answer to his proposal prompts her to confront her desire for stability with her desire for partnership and new found camaraderie with Rowley.

Maugham's prose is refreshingly spare - leaving the reader to navigate and superimpose the very familiar feelings and emotions that Maugham takes for granted. The narrative leads the way and the lack of flourish lends itself to revealing just enough about the characters for us to interpret their motivations on our own. By the end we feel close to our characters even though we literally do not know very much about them. Instead of filling in the blanks, Maugham impregnates those blanks with meaning and allows us to do the work.

Mary stands as the perfect example of Maugham's concern with the times, expressing the dual impulses of his era to embrace novelty, sexual freedom and individual expression while simultaneously digging its heels into the ground due to the Victorian sense of morality and tradition. England stood on a cultural and artistic precipice and Maugham likes to straddle that line. It is impossible for Mary to end up with Edgar, because she has so drastically violated social mores and although she is being seemingly condemned to a life with Rowley, it is clear that this will be the more fulfilling life for her.

Unsurprisingly due to its potential for steamy drama and high style, Up at the Villa was made into a film a decade or so back - starring Sean Penn, Jeremy Davies, Sydney Pollack and Kristin Scott Thomas. I haven't seen it, although the trailer makes it look as drippy as you might imagine. It would be interesting to see the gaps in Maugham's prose fleshed out visually, the translation from fiction to film obliterating Maugham's crafted style while retaining the skeleton of his narrative.

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

"A black bucket of misery tipped itself up over Melanie's head. part of herself, she thought, was killed, a tender, budding part; the daisy-crowned young girl who would stay behind to haunt the old house, to appear in mirrors where the new owner expected the reflection of his own face, to flash whitely on dark nights out of the prickly core of the apple tree."

I admit that this is my first exposure to Angela Carter, long overdue and much anticipated. The Magic Toyshop is Carter's reenvisioning of mythology and fairy tale using Melanie a young teenage girl to enact and experience the terror of emergent adulthood and the consequences of new sexuality. The novel begins with this sentence, "The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered that she was made of flesh and blood." She discovers her body through an artistic history, imagining famous paintings with her as the centerpiece, filtering her sexuality literally through the male gaze. Her first act of transgression is stealing her mother's wedding dress and running around in the night, pretending a kind of adulthood that she is not ready for. She destroys the dress and when she learns of her mother's fate she assumes that it is somehow her fault through this small rebellion. Her parents are killed in an accident and her comfortable life is disrupted and she is shuttled off to her Uncle's along with her siblings. Although Melanie is nothing if not resilient, her Uncle's is a terrifying place. He is a joyless, abusive man who ironically makes his living crafting toys automata and amusements. His wife, who became mute on their wedding day, brought her two brothers to live in the house. Their joy and sense of unity appears only when Uncle Phillip is away, when they can play music and dance together in his absence.

Melanie begins to fall in love with Finn, her aunt's brother. Finn is unkempt and forward, a talented painter and her Uncle's apprentice. Carter fully captures the apprehension of Melanie's age, where alternating desires seem to do battle for dominance and your body, brain and heart all want different things. Finn is not the love about which she has fantasized and she is unprepared for the reality of her feelings. She discovers a peephole carved by Finn into her room and alternately covers it up and spies on him herself. Carter is constantly circling back to familiar fairy tale and mythological imagery. Melanie mentions the tale of Bluebeard several times in order to relate her feelings of captivity and immediate danger upon her arrival in Uncle Phillip's house and although this peephole (which in the original tale served to entice Bluebeard's wife into disobeying her husband and exposing his secret and consequently inspiring her murder) is transposed onto her relationship with Finn instead of with Phillip, it is one of many moments that links the men of the house despite their enmity. Carter is careful not to leave any one thing cut and dry - Finn and Francie are still implicated in the patriarchal structure of the house as well as the cultural legacy they inherited (it is no coincidence that Melanie's first fantasies of herself as a sexual being is followed by Finn's paintings of her aided by a peephole).

In the most explicit of Melanie's rituals of adolescence Phillip forces her to take part in a staged version of Leda and the Swan in which Leda/Melanie gets chased and ravaged by a giant puppet swan controlled by Phillip. This drama is only performed for the family, which somehow makes it even creepier and Melanie's extreme panic induced by the very real feeling of entrapment as a result of being assuaulted by a giant swan has the edge of comic tragedy.

This performance serves as the breaking point for the family. Phillip takes Melanies little brother to an exposition of model ships and while he is away Finn murders the puppet swan, the incestous relationship between Aunt Margaret and Francie is exposed to Melanie, Finn takes a shower and everyone gets drunk together in a kind of dizzying revelry. For a moment Phillip's spell is broken and it seems possible both to the characters and the reader that everyone can get away. Phillip returns and burns down the house attempting to murder his family and envisioning himself as a long suffering martyr whose revenge is morally justified. We are uncertain what happens to anyone apart from Finn and Melanie whose final realization that they have both lost everything and that their intertwined fates have left them with only eachother, seem to quietly acquiesce to the world.

I have not as of yet, seen the film - although the screenplay was written by Carter herself so hopefully it will be able to capture the kind of hazy fairy tale quality that permeates the novel, translating her brand of magical realism would be a feat to say the least. For anyone interested, the entire film is on youtube! She also adapted The Company of Wolves, a short story, with Neil Jordan for a 1984 film. Lots to see, lots to see!