A friend of mine sent out an email to a bunch of people, possibly for further use in a project:
"what does the phrase "feminist haunted house" mean to you? what do you want it to mean? what are you afraid it might mean? etc."
I said: "everything? everywhere? you know how it seems, both in movies and sometimes in reality, like everything is built on a slave/indian/colonial burial ground or potter's yard? like if you could just dig under any building, you'd find all this ignored/forgotten-about death it was built on? and possibly in digging would release, for good or ill, a lot of rage/sadness about that death? well, i suppose most theoretical digging eventually leads you to the body of some feminist idea or person. i'm not sure if that's the point at which the haunting starts or stops. but i'm pretty sure Susan B. Anthony is lurking in your house, scaring your cats.*"
Anyone else?
*Because, as everyone knows, animals are highly sensitive to paranormal activities of all kinds. Especially feminist ones.
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2 comments:
It makes me think of the strong women in every era or century, who have helped their sisters, quietly, in kitchens huddled together, spiriting the abused woman away, helping her disappear, feeding and caring for each others' children, teaching the girls how to resist, defy, outwit, outlast, outplay the patriarchs, or the older women who stood up to the alpha males in the family, shouting them down, or shaming them when it was needed, the midwives and abortionists rowing babies into and out of the world, the women who raised their families alone, women like my mother,who worked themselves into an early grave. I think of women leaving the stains of bravery like drops of blood in a house, in its sewing room, its garden, attic, cellar,on its porches, but mainly in the kitchen. Stand in an old house's kitchen and breathe it in.
funny that the idea of a feminist haunted house should come up....in the year, 1999, i accumulated a debt of $19.50 to the New York Public Library for the following books:
Mrs. Dalloway
Desire and Domestic Fiction
MLA Handbook for Writers
The Juvenalia of Jane Austen
Between Self and World
Readings on Jane Austen
Virginia Woolf A to Z
The Flight of the Mind: Virginia' Woolf's Art and Manic Depressive Illness
Virginia Woolf's Vision of Life and Her Search for Significant Form
The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination
A Room of One's Own
I was writing a feeble attempt at a college-level term paper in high school. I recently renewed my NYPL membership and they wouldn't loan me more books unless I forked over the cash. When I paid, they gave me this listing all the name of the books I had owed money for, which now strike me as a funny collection of books.
As you can tell from the list of books, in my earlier days a feminist I was really fascinated by the idea of female eccentricity cast as madness. All of which is to say that I think there's something inherently feminist about haunted houses; I don't have to imagine an explicitly feminist haunted house because feminism seems to lurk in the wings of every haunted house for me: the scene of domesticity gone awry, of marginal or deviant femininity. In 'Jane Eyre,' is Mr. Rochester's mansion haunted by real spirits? No, it's haunted by Mr. Rochester's mad wife trapped in the attic.
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