I'm looking back at my old projects from Grad School
Here is my first final project that I presented, the first semester I went back
Author’s note: I was so nervous the first semester I went back to grad school because I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with all of the expectations and beats that it had me going through back then. So, this paper felt ambitious and a little boastful, but I really wanted to impress my professor that I had been busy outside of school, and that I was relating the subject material to my personal life.
In the darkness of despair, when the light of sanity fades, the only thing that brings comfort is that time heals all wounds, even when the world is crumbling around us. And, that when one keeps soldiering on, even if it doesn’t work out for us in the ways that we intend, it still works out in our favor for when we love, there is nothing that is unobtainable in this life or the next.
I chose Wuthering Heights and The Little Stranger as the classic and contemporary books to read, which are similar in many aspects, but they also diverge in many ways, as well.
Wuthering Heights explores two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their relationship to one another over the years. It is a story about being poor and meager versus being rich and refined; it is a story about choosing money over love and the consequences of those actions, the jealousy and revenge that spring from that.
In The Little Stranger, it explores the wealth of the Ayres family as they go downhill, struggling to survive. The doctor wants to become part of the family, to steal the last of their luck, and, honestly, with his presence there, as he speculates to himself in the end of the book during the investigation of Caroline’s death, he is the ghost that haunted the family and caused them suffering. I fully believe, after having read it that if he had not been there, the family might have got on better, but, perhaps it was fate.
One of the major themes both books hold up is mental health, or derangement, which is a huge influence on my work and a goal of my writing. The way the books tackle mental health is very interesting and very telling, however, and says a lot about how Gothic literature treats people with mental illness. Even in the time set in post-World War Two England, the way that people with mental illness are treated is not well.
From Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw/Linton has a mental breakdown while pregnant with her daughter, also named Catherine because Heathcliff ran off with her husband’s sister and got married. And, she was in love with Heathcliff and couldn’t bear it, but she couldn’t stand that she was also ignored by her husband as well. So, she fasted, which usually was considered a good and holy thing. From the book Food Restraint and Fasting in Victorian Religion and Literature, “A part of my argument is that the fasts and feasts of the Anglican liturgical calendar operated to moderate fasting- to prevent it from becoming excessive, with excess being indicative of self-focus, whereas moderation enables outward focus (Scholl 13).”
That’s exactly what happened to Catherine. She became too excessive and self-focused, outside of the Anglican ideals, a warning to Emily Bronte’s audience and readership on how not to fast, lest one not become like that.
In The Little Stranger, the mental illness showed its face first in Roderick who had experienced psychosis from post-traumatic stress from the war, according to the doctor. From a book titled The politics of health promotion: Case studies from Denmark and England, the writers admit that “psychoanalysis may have never pervaded the treatment of mental illness in Britain as effectively as in the US or in France, it has not been unimportant either. Psychoanalytic treatment was formally accepted and entitled to financial support from the NHS as early as 1948 (Triantafillou, Vucina 101).” For the sake of the novel, that seems like it was just an emergent thing, and that Rod would have not gotten the care that he needed mentally at the time period, which is a shame since the doctor, who was a on call doctor, is expected to treat everything. It gets tricky because he became too entangled with the family matters, despite trying to remain objective.
Like I said, I believe he was part of the blight that has destroyed the family in the novel.
From a paper titled “Gothic Criticisms: ‘Wuthering Heights’ and Nineteenth-Century Literary History”, by Emily Rena-Dozier, she describes Emily Bronte as someone who “exceed[s] the boundaries of the circumscribed domestic writing (Rena-Dozier 761).” This is very difficult for women of the time period, which Rena-Dozier compares Emily’s own sister Charlotte as being domesticated with Jane Eyre.
I feel that with my writing, as a person who a lot of people mistake as female. There is a sense that one gets thrown into a sense of “if this is slice of life, then you are catering to housewives” and that is your audience. Some of that is true, that it is part of my audience, but that is not totally my audience. My audience are people who have been affected by mental illness, either directly or indirectly. A lot of women have experienced some kind of issue that has made it so that being a stay-at-home mom is easier than holding down a corporate 9-5 job such as ADHD, Post traumatic stress, Autism, Depression. These are just a few of many issues that afflict my target audience.
So, as much as I would love to use the flowery, purple prose of Sarah Walters The Little Stranger, it feels disconnected from my audience. It feels pompous and mean spirited. I don’t think my audience is dumb, but, at the same time, I don’t want to talk down to them. I want to use words that excite them and get them interested in what I’m writing, but I don’t want them to feel stupid. They say the average reader reads at about the middle school level, from when I studied Journalism, and that’s something that’s become part of my writing style.
Though Emily Bronte does use refined words, she repeats them several times such a “vociferate” (to shout), “reprobate” (a funny word for an unprincipled person), and “psalmody” (the singing of psalms or sacred canticles in public worship), like in a school practice reader, so one gets used to using the words and the feel of them when seeing them in the book. I like this use of repetition throughout the chapters because it makes the reader comfortable with the vocabulary that I’m providing and creates an environment in which we are existing if I am trying to elevate the conversation slightly.
Another writer that has shaped me is Sylvia Plath. And, I know it would be easy to say Emily Dickinson because this semester has steered me in that direction, but I have read “Mirror Mirror” several times in my life. Though I am nonbinary, the concept of putting my visage into the mirror, and “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman/rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”
Sylvia Plath is a writer for young people who are afraid of getting old, and I see that now that I am getting old. Perhaps that’s why I don’t often think about her very much now, but she has shaped me as a writer.
Take, for instance, in The Bell Jar when she describes the following scene:
“’We’ll take up where we left off, Esther,’ she had said with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if this were all a bad dream.’
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco’s diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon’s wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between the sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape (Plath 267).”
Unknowingly to my conscious mind, I wrote this that later became part of my book David Lynch is After Me, a memoir about my first manic episode:
“I will be arrested.
But, it’s not really arrested. It’s part of the game. It’s a puzzle I have to work my way out of. And then I’ll solve it, and David Lynch will take my hand and say, ‘make movies with me.’
It’s so convoluted, all of the steps to get from here to there. I have to do it just right, and I’m not sure that I’ll be able to do it. It’ll be ok; I just need to be patient and relax. It’ll come with time; I just need to take it as it comes. I’ve seen it all laid out because I’ve laid it out already. I made this puzzle game. I just need to follow the rules.
I just need to relax. I pace faster (Whipple 109).”
The two talk in a way that feels frantic, frenetic. The styles are different, and I could certainly learn from the use of her lack of punctuation to capture a point. But, they both convey a message of the thought process of the narrator during a moment when thoughts seem to be swirling in their heads at a moment when mental illness is at the height of a moment of high stress.
Another major theme of both the novels is Time and the convention of using seasons to convey the feeling of being part of nature as a setting tool. It is as if the convention is to say, “the very pagan gods of nature are reflecting hardship in the setting by making a very blustery, cold, miserable Winter.” Literally, a Winter of discontent to set the scene.
At the beginning of Wuthering Heights, I had the feeling it was Winter because he has to spend the night at Wuthering Heights and puts everyone out and sees Catherine’s ghost. But, the whole thing feels very nebulous in the beginning because they are disjointed incidents of who people are until we meet Nelly.
And most of the story is Lockwood laid up with an illness chatting with Nelly after returning from Wuthering Heights until he decides to give up his tenancy and comes back to find out that Heathcliff has died the next Summer where he finds out the rest of the story.
It’s beautiful how they show time passing in the book, though, because you get a sense, with every chapter, that this is fireplace talk, and the storms are raging outside, and that, as you, the reader might also be reading during Winter into the Spring, time is also passing day by day, week by week.
Going back to my own work, David Lynch is After Me, I show the passage of time through journal entries which feel a bit more concrete. I had a specific time frame in which I worked through. The course of the memoir is three months during the episode, with the worst of my mania during Winter, but it covers several years since I jump forward and backward in time.
I wrote a poetry book, Psalm of the Psyche Ward completely during a hospital stay of a week, leaving on Christmas Day. That doesn’t seem like a long time, but when you have your freedoms taken away and you’re in a setting with people who can be unpredictable, it is a very, very long time.
It’s fascinating to me, though, the use of weather to convey a mood, which I don’t really do a whole lot in my work.
In The Little Stranger, after Roderick is sent to the mental hospital and it’s around Christmas time, things are getting dire in the house. Doctor Faraday is on a walk with Caroline and the description is fitting for the mood: “The wind there was as solid as a velvet curtain; we had almost to fight our way through it. But we walked briskly, Caroline setting the pace, clearly glad to be out of the house, moving easily on those long, thickish legs of hers, her stride more than matching my own (Walters 227).”
The only thing we get is that the wind is solid, but it denotes “cold to the point of freezing, blowing strongly, and relentless” which, reading the book, which what they were experiencing with the house as well. The problems they were facing were continuous, and the downfall was tragic.
I thought about this work that I had been playing with all semester, my interpretation of Wuthering Heights that I had taking place in Oklahoma. I finally came up with a name for it. It’s called Animals of Oklahoma as a working title because it focuses on the farm that Cathy is trying to take away from Heath after their father, Earnie dies from at the beginning of the story. And, I want to say that it’s Summer when the story begins because the height of when everything goes bad is late Fall.
But, it would be interesting to show a long passage of time such as Heath in the mental hospital in Winter time, and then the final confrontation in Spring to show a sense of renewal and overcoming the odds:
MITSY
I do apologize, Mr. Riley, but it says that you just took your pills just one hour and fifteen minutes ago and are not due for another pill regime for one hour and forty five minutes from now.
Heath hangs his head, rubbing his hair, legs both starting to shake. He looks up at her.
HEATH
Please... please? I just need a fix. I'm struggling right now. I just need something. I'm in a real bad spot right now. I need a drink really bad.
MITSY
I am sorry, Mr. Riley, but alcohol is not permitted in the unit.
HEATH
I'm not talking about a drink. I'm talking about my pills.
MITSY
I am sorry, Mr. Riley, but it is not your time for your pills yet.
Heath rubs his mouth, and Mr. Rogers stops moving and stands up and stands in the corner and begins barking. He looks at Mr. Rogers and smiles and laughs. He holds his hands out.
HEATH
C'mon. C'mon! You couldn't... bend the rules this once. Just this once. Just for me?
MITSY
I am sorry, Mr. Riley. There are no exceptions for anyone.
The phones start ringing all at once, and Heath looks down at them, angrily. He stands up. Mr. Rogers begins barking louder, his body beginning to shake.
HEATH
What do you mean, there's always an exception to the rule! No two people are the same! There's always an exception! You can't just treat everybody the same! This is ridiculous!
I mentioned this previously, but another convention is during the height of high anxiety or mental duress the breakdown of basic details in a scene’s framework break down and become choppy and disjointed as if the very writer itself is becoming affected by the narrator in some way.
Looking at the description of Roderick describe the mirror glass scene in The Little Stranger, the words become italicized to add emphasis, which is unusual for the book, and the word choices are interesting: “Rod stood perfectly still, in that still room, and watched as the shaving-glass shuddered again, then rocked, then began to inch its way across the washing-stand towards him. It was just, he said, as if the glass were walking- or, rather, as if it were in that moment discovering its own ability to walk. It moved with a jerky, halting gait, the unglazed underside of its porcelain base making a frightful, grating sound on the polished marble surface (Walters, 150).”
Going back to Wuthering Heights, at the point when Catherine is reaching the peak of her derangement, Nelly complains to Mr. Linton that she’s been “talking nonsense the whole evening” but then there was this description: “A maniac’s fury kindled under her brows; she struggled desperately to disengage herself from Linton’s arms. I felt no inclination to tarry the event; and, resolving to seek medical aid on my own responsibility, I quitted the chamber (Bronte 167).”
Bronte doesn’t describe much here about the struggle, but it’s powerful. Perhaps it just is for me because I can perfectly see the scene play out since I had gone through a situation that was very similar to the situation in my own life and the imagery is extremely palpable and felt on a human level to me.
That’s what I want to bring to my readers is descriptions that can be so relatable that they can feel it in their “feeling” senses. Something that, to those who have not experienced this things, will feel like a disembodied memory, of something that is like a dream that does not make sense and feels almost nightmarish and, at times terrifying and horrific. But, to those who have experienced these things, a comfort in knowing that they are not alone and have not gone through these sufferings alone and can come out the other side relatively ok.
Talking about mental illness is tricky, though, because is it a healing thing, or is it a trauma dump? And, I’ve walked a fine line of both. I think my first poetry book, Full of Now was more trauma dump than healing that felt unnecessary, such as this poem, “The Fight”:
Solidarity costs nothing
and
Everything
the words fell out of your mouth
like daggers
then sludge
it poured over me
in thick barrels of illness
I coughed in its wake
don’t come down on me
I escaped with my life
but just barely
my head reeling as I drove away
observing the waves of tension
as they flowed
my belly empty
my mind full
and then rode it all the way home
to safety
when you didn’t come
I was first relieved
then sadness filled me
what a reminder
we live in a fallout
we tend our gardens
with poison flowers
come home to get you
my pretty
A lot of the poems were like this (my sister counted seven) about arguments and fights and chaos because it was what I was experiencing at that time in my life. But, as time went on, and the more I’ve been evolving as a writer, the more I’ve looked at my writing, the more I’ve realized how I can change from being the trauma, to using it as a tool to educate and inform.
It’s such a fine line. Mental illness can be such a trigger for people who have experienced these extremes, and that’s what’s so fascinating about things like reading Gothic literature. One goes into knowing that it’s going to be just so. It’s the love of all things dark and strange and beautiful and dead.
It’s like watching a Tim Burton movie. Everybody knows when one turns on a Tim Burton movie the type of aesthetic they’re going to get. First of all, it’s going to have Helen Bonham Carter in it, and probably Johnny Depp because those are his go-to actors right off the bat. Secondly, it’s going to have pinstripes of white and black and everybody is going to be dressed like they just ran out a Victorian mansion costume party, but like more twisted, unless it’s an animation, then it’s going to be even more weird and bizarre and absolutely creepy.
But, the point is, it has a feeling to it that one comes to expect.
That’s what I got from Wuthering Heights is that it’s part of a movement that established a style of literature that we’re still building off today that is cannon: a feeling of a tormented love story that includes generational curses, that only our children can break, and, in heaven, we will be together again, and our ghosts will walk these moors because that’s where we are truly free together.
It's terribly romantic, in a Gothic kind of way.
Anyway, to summarize, the themes of mental illness and time play a big part in the books Wuthering Heights and The Little Stranger and have had a huge effect on my work. I mean, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today without having been affected by mental illness and how it showed itself. I think that there are quite a few stigmas that come from the Victorian age, through the time in which the Little Stranger is set in (post-World War 2) about how to handle people with mental illness.
You can tell. The way that they handle Catherine is basically like a child where they confine her, and Emily Bronte describes her as become almost comatose until Heathcliff comes to see her which may or may not have agitated her into premature labor, causing her to die in childbirth. She’s a hellcat until she’s not, then she’s a waif. Then, she’s disposed of because it doesn’t suit the story anymore. It feels a bit objectifying at times, but that’s how women were treated.
But, the fascinating thing is the same thing happened to all three family members in The Little Stranger, which was the point of the novel. It felt like they were being chewed up and spit up, like the house was turning them into chewing gum, and that was the point. First, it was Roderick. Then, it was Mrs. Ayres. Then, finally, it got the Caroline. It took them out one after another after another. I really had hoped that Caroline would get away, but then she didn’t. I wanted to believe that she was murdered, that it wasn’t just another senseless accident. But, it was part of the weird shadows that were part of the house.
I wrote a screenplay called The Shadow on the Window while trying to get into another grad school, and I keep thinking about it recently as a piece that I want to reexamine because I think it might have potential. It’s about a Black woman who is going through a lot of stuff emotionally, but also at the same time, being stalked, but being gaslit that her experiences aren’t valid by her mother and her therapist in microaggressions. I’m mentioning it because the treatment of her in the mental hospital is fascinating. She goes from being treated very poorly in the hospital by certain staff members, to finding a nurse who believes her and stops mistreatment, a turning point in the story.
NURSE 2
The ghost?
RILEY
Yeah.
She walks from behind the station to her room. The nurse turns on the light. Riley, looking down, follows behind her. The two stand over the bed that's empty.
NURSE 2
Huh, that's weird.
Riley looks up at her.
RILEY
You see it too?
The nurse looks at Riley.
NURSE 2
What are you talking about? Of course I can see it.
The two walk out of the room to the supply closet next to the TV room. The nurse enters and leaves Riley. Riley crosses her arms and rubs them, warming herself. The nurse returns with a white cotton blanket that is steaming a little, a pillow that is light blue, and a set of thin sheets.
RILEY
(whispers)
Thank you.
And, time is interesting as well. It plays out in so many interesting ways. I was just thinking about the movie Somewhere in Time, a very Michigan movie about the Grand Hotel on Mackinaw Island starring Christopher Reeve who plays an actor in Los Angeles. And, an old woman comes up to him and hands him a watch after a show, and he finds out it was this woman who was an actress. He takes a vacation and sees her picture on the wall and becomes enamored with her and becomes obsessed with the idea of traveling back in time to meet her, back to Victorian Michigan.
If only time travel were that easy, I would have gone back to a couple different places and times already. It’s not, and you can’t. However, the magic of movies and the power of Christopher Reeves worked, and he got his sweetheart. But, that ends up with a similar ending Gothic theme as Wuthering Heights in that they are together in the end, in death, and that, true love lasts even beyond death which is interesting because wedding vows state “til death do us part”. Apparently, when it’s real love, even death cannot separate lovers. I guess tide and time will tell for sure.
Works cited
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper and Row, 1971.
RENA-DOZIER, EMILY. “GOTHIC CRITICISMS: ‘WUTHERING HEIGHTS’ AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERARY HISTORY.” ELH, vol. 77, no. 3, 2010, pp. 757–75. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40963185. Accessed 19 Oct. 2022.
SCHOLL, LESA. FOOD RESTRAINT AND FASTING IN VICTORIAN RELIGION AND LITERATURE. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Triantafillou, Peter, and Naja Vucina. “Promoting Recovery in England.” The Politics of Health Promotion: Case Studies from Denmark and England, Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 99–114. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv18b5fjj.9. Accessed 20 Oct. 2022.
Walters, Sarah. The Little Stranger. London: Penguin Books, 2009.
Whipple, Ari. David Lynch is After Me. Guerilla Genesis Press, 2021.
Whipple, Ari. Full of Now. Alien Buddha Press, 2020.