The thing is, I don't think my husband expected me to be able to talk. I don't blame him for this exactly, since he had known me as a statue, pure and beautiful and yielding to his art. Naturally, when he wished me to live, that's what he wanted still, only warm so that he might fuck me. But it does seem foolish that he didn't think it through, how I could not both live and still be a statue. I have only been born for eleven years, and even I know that.
This is the smallest book in my collection but inarguably the loudest.
Fifty six pages devoted to the ongoing rage of women a millennia over.
Women trapped and forcibly forged anew, kept quiet and servile, docile, fertile, vigilantly obedient.
Nameless, faceless women, collared by words, by force, by progeny, who exist solely to be an extension of the men who've claimed them.
Madonnas and whores alike, knees up, spread and ready at less than a moment's notice, willing, unwilling, but always smiling, always loving, always pure and chaste, lest the men realise they're more than a vessel to be filled.
Lest they see what rich, inner imaginings rattle the bars they've caged us behind, what lives we live, how openly we love and feel and exist, how it would terrify them to acknowledge how little we actually need them.
The dichotomy of disgust and desire men possess for women is no more evident in their perpetual bids to control us, their historical and contemporary snatching of our bodily autonomy, their outright refusal to treat us as equals.
It's historical, biblical, mythical.
Galatea may only be the story of a sculpture brought to life and held hostage by her creator, but it's the repeated reality of women since ooze evolved into primate.
Galateaisn't a celebration or a battle cry, it's a witness statement, a pleading look across a room, a question on a message board, a hand signal designed for rescue.
It's a testament to strength even when it's silent, when it's obedient, when it's "owned", of the game women have to play, the mask we adorn simply to stay alive.
The door closed, and the room swelled around me like a bruise. [...] like lungs that had breathed in.
Galatea is a defiant, close-mouthed scream that's been echoing down the generations from the first woman born, to the one now sitting deafly inside the womb.
It's hereditary, it's primaeval, it's innate.
It's enough.
There's so much strength in quiet rebellion, but I just want to scream until my lungs give out.
The term 'incel' wasn't in wide circulation when I wrote this, but Pygmalion is certainly a prototype. For millennia there had been men who react with horror and disgust to women's independence, men who desire women yet hate them, and who take refuge in fantasies of purity and control. What would it be like to live with such a man as your husband? There are too many today who could answer that. But that is the mark of a good source myth; it is water so wide it can reach across centuries.
Four seasons later and I still have an it bugs me but I gotta watch it relationship with this show.
Devi remains the worst, a true narcissist tornado taking down unsuspecting bystanders as she storms her way through one emotion to the next, ie. a teenage girl on television.
And everyone else are shades of bland plonked haphazardly in the background.
The only real reasons to watch it are Eleanor, Fabiola, Trent, John McEnroe's narration, and brief glimpses of Sendhil Ramamurphy's ridiculously handsome face in flashbacks.
I haven't watched the full three seasons in a couple of years but holy shit, it just outright refuses to wane in perfection.
It's nasty, it flirts outrageously with purple prose, it's romantic as fuck, it's campy, and above all, so fucking compelling.
Bryan Fuller knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote this.
Fully (badoom tssh!) knew what it'd do it us.
And even had the audacity to cast Mads and Dancy as cannibal spouses.
Oh, those people-chewing hubbies.
Sometimes you get two actors who simply vibe on screen with instant, combustable chemistry, and it's like being rocked soothingly by a humming rock giant.
A little dangerous, a little jarring, death (of my emotions) is pretty much a given, but damn, it's so cosy.
Fuller has never made anything finer (I'm willing to be proved wrong, anytime you're ready Cannibal Dad), more visually stunning, or with a better story arc (I love Pushing Daisies but it's not this).
FFS, Hannibal has a rolodex of the rude to eat whenever his pantry's low, and it's so ridiculously extra but beautifully on point.
...
*happy sigh*
Who knew murder could be so damn pretty.
Couple'a fanarts because I've got a legion of unorganized ones and this is all I could be bothered to find 🙃:
Often the aesthetic of a thing can supersede the quality of the content for me: Ophelia is one of those things.
It's not the best movie, and Daisy Ridley is awkwardly miscast, but the score, and the cinematography, and the desperately pleasing idea that Ophelia doesn't in fact drown but escapes the clusterfuck that Hamlet dragged her into with no thought to her own safety is very satisfying - personally I think she should've drowned him the moment she saw the emo-brooding fuckwit, the outcome would've remained the same.
The retelling and voicing of previously overlooked, mistreated women in fiction is something I'm enthusiastically drawn to (see: above reviewed Galatea).
Historically the "fairer sex" are mere extensions of the male lead characters, vague apparitions at the edges of the story with nothing more to do than, if they're lucky, facilitate their male cast-mate's actions.
(I realise this is a sweeping generalisation but the percentage is putridly high)
...
Excuse me while I retch in the patriarchy's general direction.
Women are fascinating and worthy of their own story, and not just the queenly, divine ones, but the Ophelias as well.
The women who observe in the wings.
My mum, who studied history at university, is always expounding the importance of the women on the sidelines of history, the women who had to weave an intricate game within a cesspit of testosterone to survive, rise, defeat.
The women who are far more worthy of storytelling than someone who's had everything served to them on a platter simply because they were born with society's "preferred" genitalia.
Ophelia may be fictional, but she's a perfect example of a women used solely to drive a pungently male narrative along, a punching bag for Hamlet's rage against his mother, and ultimately her death a mere sidenote to the story.
It's really not, though, it's highly symbolic of the abuse of women, maybe not even symbolic, perhaps a definite exclamation.
You killed me. It's your fault. You did this. The end.
So, for Ophelia the movie to exist, for her escape from the madness of court and Hamlet himself to become a "reality" is fucking freeing, a victory, a gigantic fuck you to any and all who saw her as a silly little girl who took it too far.
She isn't some drowned girl in a watery bed of flowers, she's not a just a victim, she's a spotlight, a siren call, a goddamn scream.
I'll watch/read anything that gives voice to previously silenced stories.
Safely nestled inside a big hunk of metal in a comfy pilot's chair with a game controller and an endless supply of Pop Tarts and Dr Pepper would be my preferred mode of armoured warfare.
But I get stuck crashed into walls in Mario Kart, so...
Secondly: If you're willing to weave and wend your way through McKinley's truly impressive footnote game (my head spun a little near the end there), then her delightful, loquacious grumpitude it's so very worth it.
Thirdly: So many of my body parts hurt for no fucking reason and everything crunches. EVERYTHING.
It sounds like eating cereal when I do yoga. Wtf...
Fourthly: I really have to read another of McKinley's books; Sunshine fucked me up beyond comprehension, I couldn't even formulate a review it was so brain-wrinkling, and I want to feel those feels again.
"They come every summer and they sing at the windows, you can hear them on every street, if you're one of the girls they want, one of the girls they're looking for. They sing and they call and they cry and it gets to you. It worms its way inside of you and you want, and you hear them until you're so full of wanting that it's all you can think of. And you go, and they take you, and you never come back."
Lou stared at May, wide-eyed and unsettled. "Who are they, May? Who are you talking about?"
May looked straight at her, and Lou wished she wouldn't. She was the girl-in-the-picture May, the broken May, the May Lou had never seen before.
"The goblins," May said. "The goblin market."
...
Hmm.
There is a vast difference in how I opened this book and how I sealed it shut.
Breaking the seal was a heady moment of anticipation, laden with the feeling so unique to reading of: finally.
Finally, months after reading the blurb, purchasing the book, placing it on my shelves, and waiting for my gut to point its mood-based-reading-finger at Not Good For Maidens, I'd at last venture down into the Goblin Market and revel in its depravities, barter with goblin men for their forbidden fruits and gobble it down in spite of the consequences.
I was ready, I knew the rules, and I knew they'd be broken just as they were in Christina Rossetti's poem, the inspiration for Tori Bovalino's tale of sisterly devotion, the allure of the illicit, and the lengths family will go to save one of their own.
"Oh, fuck this," Laura snarled. She came back into the market, back into the horror. Her eyes were furious, full of molten anger. She lowered May to the ground and moved to stand in front of her.
"Who must I talk to?" Laura shouted at the wall of laughing goblins. "What must I do to take her away? I will not leave her here! I will not leave her to market!"
The laughing only grew louder.
May swallowed back her bile, her resolve deepening. There was no way out of the market. She pulled herself into a sitting position, trying to grab Laura's leg or hand as she paced in front of May. She had to go, to cut her losses, to get out of here before she was taken too.
Furious, Laura drew her blade. Her voice was steadier, low and deadly, when she spoke. The goblins hushed to hear her. "I will kill who I must," Laura promised. No, May thought, crawling forward, trying to stop her. No, no, you mustn't. "I will maim whoever stands in my way. But I will take my sister home."
TheGoblin Market is by far one of my favourite pieces of poetry, in part because my fascination with the Fae has been longstanding and continues to grow with each recounting I come across, and the more depraved their depiction in fiction the more I feel drawn to them (Angela Carter's Erl-King was perhaps my first encounter with the more carnal side of the Fae's appetites - fucking brilliant short story, by the way, but everything AC produced was fucking brilliant, so... no surprise there).
TheGoblin Market is a truly special example of that: temptation, the loss of "innocence", ownership of sexuality, bodily autonomy, all the good stuff.
But it's also the way Rossetti refused to shy away from the grotesque otherness of goblins, of their hunger, their baseness, their sharp sensuality, and in full knowledge sent her protagonists to their ruination at the hands of the duplicitous Fae.
(Rossetti was thirty-two when it was first published in 1862, a mind-blowing feat for a poem so supremely confident in its empowerment of women to be distributed for public consumption in an age where they had no rights to their own lives, were still treated like chattel, and had no way to vote their way out of oppression - yet. We got there, but it's still fucking awful out here)
The Fair Folk are so often depicted in fantasy as cruel, wicked creatures with empty hearts and hungry bellies (which is why we love them), but it's rare to encounter their true perversity, the gorge-rising depths they'll sink to when it comes to sating their own pleasure.
This isn't a problem, I love the Fae in all their forms and those stories have brought me endless comfort, but I feel as if I've been waiting for someone to hearken back to Rossetti's immoral, revelling creatures, to truly besmirch the laws of morality and let the goblin-folk do their barbarous thing.
(The closest I've come is Peadar Ó Guilín's The Grey Landduology, a reimagining of The Wild Hunt where humans are transported to a dangerous Fae land and hunted by bloodthirsty fairies who bend and break them into unimaginable creatures born of pain and fear - it's really good, you should read it. Bonus:An Artificial Night, the third book in the October Daye series which takes the Wild Hunt, Tam Lin, and kinda smooshes them together in a creepy child-snatching way - also awesome, read that, too)
And I thought that was going to be Not Good for Maidens, I sincerely did, specifically because it's a retelling, not simply inspired by theGoblin Market, but also because it started so, so well.
Gaspy, breathless sobbing crackled through her speakers. "Please," Neela begged Lou or someone else, someone on the other side of the phone. "I didn't meant to. You have to get me out."
Someone shouted in the background. There was a dull roar above it all, a cackling sound.
"I'm out of time," Neela said, her voice more forlorn that Lou had ever heard it. Lou's palms were slick with sweat. "I'm at the market, Lou. When they ask you where to find me, I'm―"
Something clattered. The phone, maybe? In the distance, Lou heard someone screaming. Her heart plummeted.
Neela.
The line was silent for a second, as if all the sound in the room had been sucked out. And then, just as Lou was about to start the message over again, a very different voice took over.
"Are you coming to Scarborough Fair?" the voice whisper-sung in a rusty alto. A chill ran down Lou's spine. Then, lower, almost inaudible, "We're waiting for you, Louisa Wickett."
The phone fell from Lou's hand.
I got shivers when I read that passage, honest to Maeve shivers - is there anything creepier than a faceless invitation to your horrible, bone-crunching death?, my entire body perking up like the twitching of feline ears, and I thought: this is it, this is the bloody bacchanal I've been waiting for.
...
And so I read on.
And on.
And on, and on, and on.
But those depraved depths refused to arrive.
Even when our past and present protagonists walked us curiously down those legendary, hidden steps into the market, the incivility I was so expecting reminded quite absent.
There were of course the promised stalls, piled high with the goblins' infamous fruit, silks and jewels strung from every available surface, fairy wine spilling from caskets like a mortal's cut throat, and unavoidably, the butchers, where hands are suspended like pig's ears, human offal floating in murky jars, pelvises propped up like sculpture, ready to be cracked in half on the knee of some hungry goblin, greedy to suck the marrow into their pleading gut.
The floor of the market a sticky mess of blood, wine, fruit and straw, a clumping concoction that gums itself to the underside of the invited's shoe, an indelible reminder of where they've been, when and if they make it back to the mortal realm.
They came to a stop in a jagged, toothy archway. And beyond it lay the market in all of its terror.
But the market, the market―it was everything she hadn't known to fear. Goblins bustled around, and people too―it was easy to see which ones traveled with the market, belonged to them somehow, because they were emaciated and dark-eyed, stumbling through the various stalls like ghosts. The other humans, bright-eyed, laughing, either paired with goblins or in small groups of their own, marveled at the wonders there.
It was grotesque and gorgeous, like the goblins themselves. At a far stall, Lou could see human hands hanging liked plucked chickens, some of them dripping blood. The stall next door was ridden with tattoos cut from human flesh. There were bottled things Lou could only assume were human, thick blood and varieties of dark and light urine, and greasy, yellow fat, and something that Lou instinctively felt was spinal fluid. She swallowed hard and looked away from that section. An aisle over, she saw fabrics hanging down, all shades of silks and knits and intricate gowns.
And the fruits. Of course there was goblin fruit, aisles and aisles of it, rows and barrels and crates and stalls of every color. She directed them toward this aisle and away from the humans, toward the quinces and pomegranates and plump, juicy pears. They were all too bright and shiny, like plastic.
And, of course, the goblins themselves, bustling around, selling their wares, tempting the "brave" humans, tricking them into selling not only their souls but their bodies.
Those same humans dazedly stumbling after them, too fruit-drunk to realise their fate at the end of a goblin's cleaver as they laugh and spin and feel no pain as the Fae slice and pull and tear at them.
There's an aftertaste to reading these scenes, a sweet acidity, a burning phlegm that sticks to the walls of your throat and no amount of water can wash down.
It's addictive and putrid, and I wish, wholeheartedly, there had been more.
The time we spend in the goblin market and the grisly, labyrinthine chambers tangled beneath felt like mere moments within the story, meanly rationed out as glimpses of its depravity.
If Fae logic is to be followed, seconds in the mortal realm should equate to hours, days, years in Faerie, a lifetime to lose yourself in its taut clutch; a loss of time sorely missing from this story, and what ultimately felt like a failure in my enjoyment of it.
Perhaps its my love of the Fae clouding my judgement, but when I read something of them, when I'm granted access to their peculiar lands, I want to to bask in it, gorge and be gorged upon by all its offerings just as an enraptured mortal would devour their ensorcelled fruit whilst the goblin-folk nipped at their extremities, checking for the perfect crunch.
But those indecent depths were merely glanced at, when they should have been stared down in challenge.
A lure, a bargain, an inevitability.
"Come buy, come buy."
Come buy, indeed.
But where Not Good for Maidens may have missed the mark as the Goblin Market retelling I desired, it triumphed as a story of unwavering love.
Romantic, platonic, familial, maternal.
If you look at the original poem, it is ultimately a story of female empowerment, sex, and devotion:
Two sisters.
One lured by ethereal temptation, the other sacrificing all to save them.
And the consequences of both actions.
The bond between sisters, blood or chosen, can be unshakeably fierce. You love them even when you hate them, you'll raze the world to the ground if anyone dare hurts them, you'll protect them even at the cost of yourself.
Neela always knew. Neela always understood. No matter how vulnerable Lou was, no matter how many fractions or scars she revealed, Neela did not change how she looked at or spoke to Lou. And Lou knew that if someone cut deep into her heart and searched for the pearl inside of it, the ounce of meaning, they would peel back the bloody muscle to find Neela.
And now, she was gone.
Trust me, it's true, I have two sisters who drive me crazy but I'd do anything for them, even try my luck in the goblin market if they lost their sense to sharp-toothed horrors and shiny trinkets.
(To be fair, it's probably me that'd fall for their trap, but it's okay, I have verbal confirmation from both sisters that they'd come for me. The eldest couldn't promise she wouldn't marry Jareth's fancy ass, though. Understandable, honestly)
It's not a bond everyone experiences, but when you do it's not something you necessarily choose or even question, it simply is, and if I boil NGFMdownto its core, it's the act of selfless rescue between family that radiates out.
Both Lou and Laura descended into hell to recover a piece of themselves, a person they simply cannot live without, just as Rossetti's Lizzie did in the original poem.
[Lou] pulled away before Neela could hold her tighter, even though Neela cried for her, even though every sob was another knife to Lou's heart. She'd come back, she'd come back, she'd come back. With every heartbeat, she knew she had to return―but first she had to make it out.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here a pitiful warning to three women who knew better, who knew that hope's the thing that saves you, that cradles you with each step, that gifts you the courage to venture down, and down, and down.
Not for one second did this ring inconceivable or silly within the confines of a tale of cruel, impossible creatures, it's an allegory after all, and it didn't ring false in Bovalino's tale either.
Women are powerful, they're brave, they're frightened, they shouldn't be punished for dancing with the devil, innocence is a patriarchal construction to control us.
Rossetti saw that, Bovalino knows it, and so in her novel devoted it entirely to those women.
May who chose the goblin's world and fell in love.
Laura who lost all but kept everything.
Eitra who fought against her nature and her shackles.
And Lou, who saw a chance to choose for herself and took it.
I can't think of anything more feminist than a woman taking control of her own being and refusing to have that control taken from her.
Not Good For Maidenstruly, spectacularly owns this narrative and for that reason it kept me wrapt.
But perhaps because I'm quite the goblin myself, because I crave an audience to their unleashed baseness, my heart couldn't fully commit to the safety of The Witchery with Lou and her family, safe behind herb-scented, consecrated walls, casting spells and mixing potions.
No, this goblin-hearted creature wanted to walk the stalls of the marketplace, drink merry with the goblins and guzzle their fruited temptations.
Even if it meant being next on the menu.
She was dressed in starlight and blood; she was a girl of the surface, a girl of the market. Maybe next year, the goblins would return to find her bones.
There was a song she was supposed to remember. She hummed it, dazed, vision tinted with blood, as she stared up at the ceiling.
Are you going to Scarborough fair?
Are you?
Are you?
Which is a worrying thought when this novel held a queer familiarity for me.
I've walked those cobbled streets that spindle off from the York Minster like the spokes of an enchanted wheel, stippled with darkly lit parlours filled with curiosities; a goblin market in itself.
I've hopped from cobble to cobble in my unselfconscious youth, happy to be sequestered down what felt like ancient streets with their history and their secrets.
They were my favourite part.
In the midst of summer, when the market arrives.
And lures the curious to see their wares.
Who knows what would have happened if my parents hadn't hurried us homeward before nightfall, who knows what glamoured creature would've spirited me off to revel the night through with the inhabitants of the Unseelie Court and dance with the Market Prince.
I do.
Because I would have let them.
I wouldn't've even put up a fight.
But I know the rules, perhaps because every Celt does, born with an inherited warning system to survive the trickster Gentry:
🍓 Don't trust anyone with abnormally long incisors
🍓 Skirt the edges of a fairy ring
🍓 Keep your true name close
🍓 And never, ever eat anything in the faerie realm
And if you ever find yourself trapped?
"See this? Parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme. [...] That's the trick in and out of the market. Parsley and sage to get safe passage in, to enter peacefully. And rosemary and thyme to leave without trouble. [...] Parsley and sage in, rosemary and thyme out. That's the most important thing to remember."
The minute I figured out this was a queer parody/pastiche/celebration hybrid of your classic small town murder mystery (which took an embarrassingly long time), I fell hardcore in love with it.
You've got Kate Box(love of my Rake life), the strait-laced, disgraced former detective doing her best to hunt down a toxic-masculinity serial killer with a taste for tongues.
Her flighty but lovable veterinarian, feeder wife, Alicia Gardiner, who I've been in love with since Offspring.
And their monster in the middle, Madeleine Sami, your typical crackpot detective with a drinking problem - she's feral and I adore her.
It's the perfect storm of brooding and imbecilic, a veritable feast of wtf did I just see?, and so profoundly woman it kicked me in the vagina a little bit.
In a good way.
I'm pretty sure.
Either way, it's really fucking good, and if there isn't a season two, I might have to be really upset.
And I don't wanna be upset.
I want to think about this stinky goblin and remember all the wickedly weird/gross things she did.
So much better than I was expecting, entirely because I loved the book and I'm trying to be less of a perfectionist dickhead about adaptations, but these things take time, y'know?
Luckily this adaptation actually seemed to take account of its source material and attempted to relay the message of The Power to the screen without resorting to showy rewrites for the sake of shock grabs.
The message in the show remains the same as in the book (which isn't called The Power of Women for a reason):
Power is dangerous no matter who wields it.
It's how you wield it that matters.
That's the fundamental point, and one I'll always agree with.
But as a woman, the idea of developing a power that not only levels the playing field between men and women but tips it in our favour, that grants us the safety to walk alone at night - or day, leave a drink unattended, speak up, wear both earphones in public, show our skin, be alone in a room of the opposite sex?
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