Monster, She Wrote is what might be described as a popular history. There's a section for each author covered, and within that section is an overview/critique, a list of the author's best works, and a list of similar authors. That last section I particularly liked.
The authors begin with women writers of Gothic novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since, they say, "There's a strong argument that horror as it exists in the twenty-first century evolved from the Gothic novel..." They cover six women in this section, the two best known (because I've heard of them) being Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Ann Radcliffe. Now six is not a statistically significant number. But I was still surprised there were that many, in part because conventional wisdom tells us that women in the past just could not and did not work.
Later sections of the book tie time periods to subjects such as ghost stories, the occult, pulps, and paperback horror. I was particularly interested in women writing in various fields in the twentieth century. These writers moved around with work, some writing for television as well as paperbacks. Or, like Shirley Jackson, writing horror as well as domestic stories for women's magazines. I like the idea of not allowing yourself to be tied to one thing.
The last section, The Future of Horror and Speculative Fiction, included interesting people whose work I'm now interested in reading. In fact, I've already read a short story by Helen Oyeyemi.
The Housewife Writer
For some time, I've been interested in women who self-identify as housewife writers. There aren't a lot of them, but I am trying to focus my Women's History Month reading on that. I'm not talking about homemaking as women's God-given role, what they are born to do. I am talking about homemaking as life maintenance, eating and putting clothes on backs and who does that for themselves and others? Why is that not considered as significant as roping a steer or running a store? I have a theory.
In their section of Monster, She Wrote called Haunting the Home Kroger and Anderson say, "Historically, women have been consigned to the domestic realm, running the household and caring for children." "Many of the women profiled in this book struggled with that dichotomy: the pressure to care for home and family, and the need to tend their writing career. Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that woman have long grappled with."
They include Shirley Jackson in that section. I consider her to be the ultimate housewife writer. More on that before the end of the month.
No comments:
Post a Comment