The Key to Bluebeard’s Study: Anna Biller and Gothic’s Live Burial of Women
It was just a woman in a box. A hand-painted box, white washed round the edges, the cut out lid open for all to see. People were shuffling into the gallery, feigning interest in the photographs, ignoring the sculpture at the centre of the scene. Hunched over, cradling one leg, then a foot, the woman was mastering the art of contortion. Her left shoulder indecipherable from her left knee, a stone smoothed by strain; her right knee bulbously pale and protruding outwards. The tension in her back was unbearably exposed: her spine a hook, her ribs a cage of skin. I looked up, unable to contain my shock. Why had she been left here? Why hadn’t she been let out? A man caught my eye, shrugged, and continued to look around. A security guard held his gaze towards the far-side of the room. An alarm blinked hypnotically, securing the works that snugly lined the walls. I looked down and the woman appeared to be sinking, a taut nude cornered into cardboard coordinates. My panic rose up, as her barely perceptible breath sunk down. The box, the body, the room, the space swung dizzyingly into view of this, her, my own, shrinking form
In the mode of gothic, to be fenced in, placed in a box, is at once to reveal a secret recess, the shadowy depth, and to be trapped by its inevitable shallowness, its lack of air, its fatal finitude.
Kirsten Justesen, Sculpture #2, 1969, Sammlung Verbund Feminist Avant Garde 1970 Collection, Vienna
We talk proverbially in boxes. Don’t pigeon-hole me, don’t fence me in. We talk factually in categories, classifications presented as rules. Tick the box that most applies to you. We talk of space as if it were being bartered out of time. One bag per person, one person per seat – only. In all these idioms of constriction, expressions of suppression, limitations creep in on us, narrowness surrounds. In gothic literature, confinement is almost always literalised, realised, real. A truth closing in. Scaling the landscape of gothic literature, its doomed and downward interiors, containment is in itself a state to be contained. Castles harbour secret passageways, tunnels and turrets, tombs that make the dead cry out. The architecture of gothic at once expands space, only to shrink it back down. In the mode of gothic, to be fenced in, placed in a box, is at once to reveal a secret recess, the shadowy depth, and to be trapped by its inevitable shallowness, its lack of air, its fatal finitude. It is the paradox of the concealed chamber, the murderous magic of the magician’s box.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s dated, though no less thought-provoking work, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), explores the hallmarks of this genre. She examines these enclosed recesses, pulling back the faded curtain to reveal another enclosure, another walkway, each more claustrophobic and foreboding than the first. Chapter after chapter, Kosofsky Sedgwick unpacks with characteristic brio the sunken structures of quintessential gothic works by the likes of Radcliffe, Lewis, the Brontës, De Quincey, Borges and others. With critical perspicacity she searches the opaque corners of gothic’s hidden worlds to reveal that there is nothing quite so obscure, there is nothing quite so incoherent as meaning. When it comes to these imagined and textual realms, language is like a live burial. She explores this concept in Gothic Conventions, moving from the literal acts of being buried alive, to its correlation within the structural relationship between words and meaning, the signifier and signified. For Kosofsky Sedgwick, language in gothic literature shares in this duality and delusion of depth. Language shares in this dialectic of inner and outer, of live hermeneutic burial “within” and its correspondence to that operating “without”. Gothic language and its interrelated themes and topoi (the haunted house, asylum, castle, the storm-strewn surroundings; madness, murder, melancholy, illicit and incestuous love), however, break down this lineal relationship – that is, the outer casing of words and things do not always coherently carry what exists dormant or dying within. Meaning is, therefore, obliquely conveyed or rather betrayed by language in the gothic text. Whatever is buried in the gloom and gilded glamour of a tomblike book, is not always what you expect.
In gothic, those trapped in the box, those deliberately imprisoned, held hostage or buried alive, are women.
Why, you might ask, is this important to our woman in the box? What does it matter to idiomatic expressions involving space, identity and feeling? In gothic, those trapped in the box, those deliberately imprisoned, held hostage or buried alive, are women. In Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), it is Madeline, the last surviving woman of the ancestral home, who is buried alive in the familial vault by none other than her sickly twin brother, Roderick. In Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Rochester’s first wife, Antoinette “Bertha” Mason, is immured in a secret room, initially unknown to the eponymous heroine. And in Ann Radcliffe’s novella, A Sicilian Romance (1790), the matriarch Louisa Bernini is declared dead by her husband, all the while confined against her will in a cavernous chamber beneath their castle. These are just a few examples of women violently compelled into smaller spaces or left for dead within the layered strata of gothic narratives. Forced into a series of increasingly smaller sites and states, oppressed in will and suppressed in expression, these women (and the feminine as a whole) are punished by the genre, even in the very midst of being embroiled in its mechanics. Yet, this trope – of the woman in the box, tomb, prison or chamber – demands us to go back to the place of burial and privation, and hear the feminine out, literally. In all the above examples, women rise from the dead, break their patriarchal chains, escape from their infernal internment and live to have the last word – even if it is their very last.
To us, this figure may seem cliché or crude, an obvious metaphor for the position of women throughout history. But writers are exhuming the trope; contemporary authors like Anna Biller, Johanne Lykke Holm, Johanna Hedva and Shola von Reinhold, are literalising the metaphor, once again, to bring light to current issues around gender-based violence, institutional abuse, the continued suppression of women’s stories and voices post #MeToo, as well as their continued resistance against these forms of control and erasure. By stepping back into this narrowing predicament and place within the gothic, and also inheriting the simultaneous power and problem of ‘language as live burial’, these women and non-binary authors not only shine a light on the current boxes enforced upon us today, but make what was once silenced heard, what was originally buried come to light and life again. In highlighting these modes of oppression, they are arming us with the means to fight.
I could hear the curator’s voice from outside the gallery. “1969 Sculpture #2 is one of seven editions made by the great avant-garde body artist Kirsten Justesen, whose radical work captured the feminist spirit of the era…” his voice trailed off, another rehearsed script. A group of art students clustered around the work, barely looking down. “It’s just a naked woman in a box,” a lanky boy with thick-rimmed glasses and carefully polished DMs said aloud. “How mediocre,” he muttered, turning to walk out of the room. The other students followed him and the curator scuttled behind, stressing the finer points of Justesen’s “practise”. My eyes followed the last footfall of the group until I was left alone with the ‘sculpture’. The woman appeared smaller than ever, a curvature of limb and shoulder and arm balled into one. From underneath the shape of her, I could hear a sound. A whimper, no, a word, then an almost perfectly pronounced: “I can’t get out!”
Anna Biller’s debut novel, Bluebeard’s Castle (2023), plays right into the trope of the imprisoned woman whilst upending it. Biller takes her inspiration from the folktale ‘Bluebeard’ – which has come to us via the seventeenth-century French writer, Charles Perrault, and his version of the fairy tale (or conte), ‘Barbe Bleue’ – the story of an affluent husband with the titular blue facial hair, who leaves a collection of keys in the care of his young wife and permits her to use all but one. Stoking her curiosity with what is forbidden, with what is concealed, with what lies beyond the surface, the wife naturally uses the key to unlock the one and only chamber denied her. Once inside, the tale dramatically flips into horror and her fate is made clear in this dark abode. In the shuttered and festering murk of the room, clots of blood spool on the floor from the corpses of women that “Bluebeard had married and murdered, one after the other.” Perrault’s tale comes with a noxiously misogynistic moral about the curiosity of women and their supposed powers of persuasion when it comes to men. Biller’s interest in the story, however, lies not in the supposedly unwarranted curiosity of women; nor in the bizarre blueness of a richly vile man’s beard. Her interest lies in the metaphor of the room, in the power dynamics between men and women in coercive and abusive relationships, in the prohibited areas of the psyche as played out by gothic’s opaque interiors and enclosed environments. Bluebeard appears a butcher to contemporary readers, an obvious monster amongst charming princes in the fairy tale role-call. Yet Biller knows the monster is the prince, the castle is the dungeon, the literal hidden chamber, the metaphorical end-point, and it is this she seeks to prove in her modern rewrite of the tale.
Bluebeard’s Castle takes place in, you guessed it, a castle, but its rooms are manifold, its potential for discovery and entombment endless. In Biller’s version Bluebeard becomes Gavin (aka Sammy – for his identities are as numerous as the castle’s concealed chambers) and the curious young wife becomes Judith, a successful upper-class writer of gothic erotica and romances. Biller, therefore, transforms the gothic narrative and its spaces into a self-reflexive game; her novel offers a humorous and horrific twist on a genre that here grotesquely folds back on itself to reveal and conceal where true intent lies and the actual bodies are buried. In her capacity as gothic novelist, Judith at once fantasises such illusory depth for her own relationship, only to suffer its true suffocating shallowness and Sadean scenarios in reality. Gavin, a supposed Baron who offers everything, but reveals nothing, plays up to the genre, courting her and presenting himself as a Byronic lover. All the while, he is hiding his true exploitative, abusive, violent intentions. Biller’s self-reflective gothic-novelist-within-a-gothic-novel plot becomes a compelling opportunity both to interrogatively revel in the conventions of such a genre and expose the history of violence to women therein concealed.
Gavin’s supposed ‘makeover’ of his new wife is the first step towards her being trapped in the proverbial coffin.
The fiction of Bluebeard and its dismal dungeon of dismemberment looms everywhere in Judith’s mind and within the Manderfield castle. Mouldering rooms lead to more mouldering galleries. An attic space is haunted by the rattling chains and continuous crying of a ghost, the former Lady of the house who is said to have been murdered by her husband centuries ago. The chapel itself leads onto a crypt, which in turn leads to the final resting place of this same murdered woman. In this haunting space, which is also haunted by the fictional mode of the gothic, Judith begins a novel entitled Bluebeard’s Castle and a libretto for an opera with the same theme and name. Recurring dreams of mutilated women merge in Judith’s unconscious with the confined spaces of the home, her husband cosplaying in them as Bluebeard, a demon, a fox, a ghostly but brutal masculine force that exceeds their sexual sub-dom dynamic to render her the victim and him the perpetrator in the waking nightmare that is her life. Loaded references to women from gothic literature and film – Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Hitchcock’s Melanie Daniels (and his real life victim, Tippi Hedren) etc. – extend this blurring of fact and fiction in Judith’s life, but also map out the layers of trauma accruing throughout the text. Biller takes us across and beyond the superficial mirroring structure of gothic confinement to expose the entrapment in which her heroine has found herself.
Anna Biller
But it’s not just the self-reflexive narrative that buries Judith alive, demonstrating in the process the simultaneous extensiveness and limitedness of the gothic; it is the thinning parameters of Judith’s own body – as a cishet woman, as an abused daughter, sister and wife, in addition to being a gothic novelist within a gothic novel – that further entombs Biller’s heroine. In the ever confining plot of this novel, social identity becomes another box into which Judith is betrayed; embodiment itself another incarcerating experience, as well as the inevitable cause of her tragic end. In fact, Judith’s marriage to Gavin begins this development of embodiment as entombment – or rather, Biller’s language of social becoming is paradoxically that of Sedgwickian burial too. Whizzing her away to Paris and effectively grooming Judith into the starlet she has always dreamed of being, Gavin’s supposed ‘makeover’ of his new wife is the first step towards her being trapped in the proverbial coffin. Here, Biller’s own design skills and eye for material detail – so potently and symbolically realised in her fantastically arch feminist films, Viva (2007) and The Love Witch (2016) – meet Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ in its sinister delight for objects. In Paris, Judith’s Hitchcockian “bleached platinum…gold” bob-look, as directed by Gavin in a hair salon, transforms her into someone “reminiscent of Eva Marie Saint…in North by Northwest”. Showering her with lavish gifts, a whole closet of clothing, lingerie and accessories (“an art deco-diamond ring, an Edwardian sapphire ring, and a Victorian ruby ring”), Gavin transforms the formerly insecure, sexually reticent and highly intelligent Judith into a “goddess”’, “the heroine of her own romance”, and a desirable woman to all who behold her (“men stared at her with that lustful darkness in their eyes”). This “reinvention” as Judith herself terms it, is not, in Biller’s eyes, oppressive, but a sign of Gavin’s ever growing objectification of his wife and of Judith’s own acceptance to the abusive actions that come with being objectified: having your will, your account, your voice diminished, trivialised, suppressed and eventually silenced. Love-bombed with expensive things, Judith becomes an expensive thing in and of herself, another jewel to lock away in the casket of Gavin’s supposed affections – and, of course, within the condemned castle.
Still, it is the heroine herself, nameless though powerfully recounting her own tale, who is the most precious object in her collector-husband’s eyes.
Biller’s novel inevitably recalls Angela Carter’s famous rewriting of Bluebeard, known to us as The Bloody Chamber. Transported to an almost “amphibious place”, a castle marooned from the nearest village yet eerily in control of it, Carter’s heroine knows she is entering “a sea-siren” space of deadly isolation. Yet the first-person narration is punctuated rather alarmingly and excessively with rarefied things: rococo artwork, antiquarian erotica, jewel-encrusted dolphin taps, gold-leaf strewn ebony bedsteads, an ominous ruby choker and innumerable other precious accoutrements that would not be out of place in Aladdin’s cave. Still, it is the heroine herself, nameless though powerfully recounting her own tale, who is the most precious object in her collector-husband’s eyes. A connoisseur in the unspoilt brilliance of women, Carter’s Bluebeard, a waxy cigar-smoking leonine presence, wastes no time in pre-empting Gavin’s penchant for brutally transmogrifying his new bride into another thing to add to his morbid cabinet of curiosities. Yet it is these very things that alert the heroine’s mother to the trouble afoot in this chateau of horrors. In this, Biller takes her cue from Carter, laying a trail of associations, allusions, embedded symbols and resonances in these listed objects, forewarning us both to the narrative turn ahead and the destined site of trauma in the depths of the castle.
That the language of objects should have the potential both to alert and avert the traumatic endings they foretell is indicative of Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of live burial in language. Gothic’s literalisation of hidden depths goes outwards into the very mode in which it is told – to the hard surface values of the symbolic, to the refracting jewel-like images of the semiotic – and back down again. In using and becoming objects of a kind, Biller and Carter’s heroines embody the literal buried state that awaits, whilst also signifying the possibility of altering it, of rising outside of the objectified, submerged condition, of (dis)owning the destiny marked out for them.
The whimper had been faint at first. I was alone in the gallery, sans students, curator, security. “I can’t get out”, she repeated, quiet but forcefully pronouncing every word. “I. CAN’T. GET. OUT”. I stood, feeling defeated, wondering how I could, indeed, pull her from without the box. “I will help you,” I said gently, placing my seemingly heavy hand lightly on her back. It was cool to the touch, marble clear, stone-hard. I gasped, pulled away. How would I help her?
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou is a writer, the founding editor-in-chief and general arts editor of Lucy Writers, and is currently completing her PhD in English Literature and Visual Material Culture at UCL. She regularly writes on visual art, dance and literature for magazines such as The London Magazine, The Arts Desk, The White Review, Plinth UK, Burlington Contemporary, review 31, Art Monthly, The Double Negative and many others. From 2022-2023, Hannah managed an Arts Council England-funded project for emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds, titled What the Water Gave Us, in collaboration with The Ruppin Agency and Writers’ Studio. She is working on a hybrid work of creative non-fiction about women artists and drawing, an extract from which is published in Prototype's anthology, Prototype 5.
