The Body as the Crime Scene & Gothic Burial in Johanne Lykke Holm’s Strega
In Bluebeard’s Castle, Judith hears the ghost of Lady Mordaunt sobbing and rattling the chains in which she was imprisoned hundreds of years ago. It is an eerie moment, one where Biller directly invokes former gothic novels and motifs. Usually Biller subverts these gothicised instances, the sublime, supernatural or erotic, for her own equally compelling point or political end. But this episode, though still a red herring plot-wise (we do not discover the ghost nor more of Gavin’s secrets), holds great significance for Judith and the genre.
Let us climb up the narrow staircase with Judith and steel ourselves to encounter whatever apparitional force inhabits the tower. Let us push open the heavy oak door, tremulous of what we will find on the other side. Let us shriek when a bat swoops down from the rafters and shudder at the cobwebs festooning the corners of this cold, forgotten place. Moving around the desolate steeple, let us ruminate with our heroine on the whereabouts of Gavin’s estranged ex-wife, the ironically named Constance – could the cries come from her? Upon discovering Lady Mordaunt’s portrait and belongings, let us feel a sharp sense of foreboding, the chill that runs along the spine and prickles the skin. Let us make our way back down the stairs, pulling the heavy door shut with a heavier heart than when we first heaved it open. Casket-wide, coffin deep, the tower leads to a vault of gothic feminist history of which Judith is just one small part in a long, open and continuous line.
Biller assembles a gothic chorus of women who collectively call from the past into Judith’s present, sounding a warning, a red light, a death knell, to get the hell out of the castle.
The tower as an attic space, which to philosopher Gaston Bachelard symbolises fantasy, flight and the imagination, is another site of imprisonment in the Kosofsky Sedgwick spatial lexis of burial. It is the final destination in the poetics of architecture, the literal dead end of the unhomely home. It is a node through which Biller brings together multiple sources of fictional incarceration and immolation of women; the castles of former Bluebeards, the tombs of their former brides; the ghostly gothic imaginary. We carefully lay out the belongings of Lady Mordaunt – the dress, the shoes, the accessories and accoutrements, the oil painting from which her likeness looks out – and, with Judith, we deliberate on the nerve-jangling rattles of her chains. With her, we also think beyond Lady Mordaunt, to those tremors echoing across pages as well as floorboards, windows and hallways. Comparing her situation to that of the heroines found in Jane Eyre, Rebecca and Wuthering Heights, Judith identifies with the figure of the ‘mad woman in the attic’, blurring the line between herself, Lady Mordaunt, Antoinette Mason and innumerable other women. In this, Biller assembles a gothic chorus of women who collectively call from the past into Judith’s present, sounding a warning, a red light, a death knell, to get the hell out of the castle.
The tower episode, another haunting amongst hauntings, captures the imprint of former gothic writers on Biller. It creates parallels between buried women (Rebecca de Winter, Cathy Earnshaw, Antoinette Mason), who do not feature long in those aforementioned works but whose hold over the narrative, over those who continue to live, remains unparalleled. This turreted capsule of influence – on Judith, on Biller, on us – brings together a corps of women from across times, cultures and places, united in death despite being possibly divided in life. Encountering female shadows, we know in this lonesome space, we are not alone.
This is a world where the fantasy of things matters just as much as their factuality
Yet Biller’s wider work in film has become this place of influence for other women writers operating in the gothic mode. The seeds for themes simultaneously explored and exploded in Bluebeard’s Castle were initially sown in Biller’s films, Viva (2007) and The Love Witch (2016), the aesthetics and politics of which have inspired the work of Swedish novelist Johanne Lykke Holm. The titular characters of Biller’s films may not be literally immured – although Viva’s Barbi endures a psycho-sexual immurement in the stifling confines of her suburban idyll with jockish husband Rick – but the patriarchal worlds through which they move and seek liberation (in the appearance of witchcraft and occultism, Woodstock and the sexual liberation movement of the sixties and seventies) continually constrain and violently apprehend them in this pursuit.
What is more, the object aesthetic so brilliantly employed by Biller in Bluebeard’s Castle and poignantly present in both films is summoned by Lykke Holm in her translated novel, Strega. A poetic and potent coming of age story set in the remote Alpine town of Strega, Lykke Holm’s novel charts the life of Rafa, a teenager on the brink of womanhood who spends several months working as a maid for the once grand but now grotesque Hotel Olympic. Channelling multiple literary and cinematic sources for the setting of the hotel and its surroundings – such as Stephen King’s The Shining, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, in addition to Luca Guadagnino’s remake, and many gothic works involving nuns – Lykke Holm moves into the exuberant and excessive ‘thing’ aesthetic of Biller’s oeuvre. Thick with the life and lyricism of objects, the language of Strega takes on the properties and powers of a charm, working on the reader much like the estranged environments and things that work on Rafa and her fellow maids. Like Bluebeard’s Castle, Strega accretes in signifying and referential power; its intertextual and meta-theatrical knowingness is at the crux of its hypnotising force. This is a world where the fantasy of things matters just as much as their factuality; where the heady romance and charm of a lipstick, a biscuit, a necklace, a cup, a cigarette or a dress hold a charge beyond the usual mundanity associated with their material purpose. It is also a space where the line between objectification and embodiment becomes wonderfully and woefully indistinct. At times conflating the young teens with the ultimate feminised and fetishized object, dolls, Lykke Holm creates a Bluebeard’s castle of her own, a realm of increasingly unnerving and encroaching sites, where the life of things approximates that of the girls. Looking at these emerging bodily objects and submerged objectified bodies, the inspirations that lay within or behind them – Biller, Argento and more – will become apparent. In the tower of your wildest fears and fantasies, new objects will be found, new bodies abound, new sounds of cries and laughter, tinkling bells and prayers said out loud.
Red light shocked me into consciousness. A sticky seam of black began to pool at my feet. Darkness obscured the shapes of things, their outlines hazy in the frantic flashing of the emergency light. Slowly my eyes made sense of the jumbled images, distinguished dark from crimson sights. My eyes made out canvases, one stacked against the other, red dust thickly coating their wooden frames. My eyes made out the bulky contours of sculptures tied in white cotton sheets: a decapitated head, a neck, a torso, all seemingly aflame. I shuddered, as I made out the edge of the cardboard box, denuded of the nude in the gallery. “Where are you,” I asked, the red light pulsing to my own. “I’m here,” a strange voice whispered in response. The red light blazed through my red head and my red eyes saw red fingers appear. “I’m here,” she said, no longer whimpering, but defiant, a blood-curdling laugh following gravelly tones. “Where is “here”?” I called, seeing fingers turn white, toes to night, a flash of white hair, a single eye like a red sun burning bright black again. “I am here,” she said, and as I turned to look, I knew that I was the one in the box.
Objects can seduce and repel. They can move and inspire. They can amass affect whilst feeling nothing. They bear witness to the passing of time whilst holding it still.
The opening pages of Strega are saturated with things. We meet Rafa moving amongst the damp and yeasty rooms of her familial home. It is late summer, rain and fog have settled over the town, a certain kind of entombment is already in motion, but one from which Rafa is compelled, almost forced, to escape, if she is to ever become a woman.
“I studied my reflection in the mirror. I recognised the image of a young but fallen woman. I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to it”.
Condensation of breath, condensation of rain, vapour and moisture and the dank mould left from these intense liminal states (whether ecological, sociological or psychological) are repeated throughout Strega. Milk and blood stain the bed sheets, hairpins and sleeping pills and cotton knickers are bestrewn over Rafa’s mattress. The things puncturing this spatial fug convey the threshold upon which Rafa is about to tread; they foretell the destination to which she is already travelling; they signal the ritual she is already initiated into and passing through: girlhood breathing into womanhood. Stripping off her clothes, walking naked through the flat, shedding one life for another, claiming and disclaiming a rite, a figure, no longer hers to occupy, she lowers herself into a bath and allows the map – the hotel brochure – of her future to gleam in front of her eyes before the submerged paper returns to mush. Death and humidity, a certain kind of insufferable suffocation for the yearning teenage body, can no longer be endured. Like the paper, her family romance must disintegrate into watery mulch to transform into the glacial certitude of Strega. Life and liberation are promised at the Hotel Olympic – or are they? Like Suspiria’s Susie Bannion before her, Rafa must make the journey in order to find out where these seemingly antithetical pillars – life and death, freedom and oppression, womanhood and girlhood – stand. The things from home are not just remnants of her prior existence, but amulets, talisman, compasses to orient and guide her as she passes from one stage and place to the next.
Saskia Vogel by Bette Sans
Objects can seduce and repel. They can move and inspire. They can amass affect whilst feeling nothing. They bear witness to the passing of time whilst holding it still. They contain and frame space, and organise it according to their own organisation. Things in Strega, like in Bluebeard’s Castle, not only populate the narrative, but drive it, shaping the course of a protagonists’ life. The obsession with objects in both novels points to their own objectivization; that is, to the objectification we, as readers, make of language, make of narratives, make of books entire (for isn’t a book a special kind of gothic entombment too?). When it comes to the translation of Strega (a process of simultaneous exhumation and reburial), objects, says writer and translator Saskia Vogel, were intrinsic to it. When planning for the translation, Vogel asked Lykke Holm what material she would compare the novel to and the author replied, “polyester”. The mood and fabric of this world was to cloy and stick (not unlike the weather in Rafa’s home town); it was to appear shiny though it was false, exciting though it could potentially cause harm. Polyester was the material of the maids’ dresses, a synthetic fabric indicative of their class as well as their line of work. That the idea of this material is both buried within the translated language, and adjectivally decorates the surface of the novel, transmogrifies Strega into its own doubly charged, charmed thing. From objects it has sprung and to a deadly, objectified state it edges forward.
The Hotel Olympic may not function exactly like Biller’s tower in Bluebeard’s Castle, but, in these guestless yet ceaselessly serviced rooms, it enshrines the chilling destinies from women in past horror films and novels.
This objectification is hinted at in Strega the place, which is in a permanent state of near-perfect and almost sentient artificiality:
“The mountains appeared to be lit up from below by a bright spotlight. At the foot of the mountain, the trees stood in perfect rows, as though dipped in wax and coated in glitter. On the rhododendrons hung dewdrops of silicone. A roaring waterfall…seemed frozen in time.”
Locked in its own crystalline artifice, Strega is decorously and sinisterly laid out as if it is anticipating Rafa’s arrival. Unlike her hometown by the sea, where life hangs heavy in a condensed state, Strega is spellbound whilst being spellbinding to behold. The hotel, with its red-faded-to-pink exterior fares no better, except it appears palsied under this witch’s magic – unless, of course, it sits at the epicentre of such enchantment? From Italian to English, Strega does translate as witch after all.
Cleaning the corridors with Rafa, climbing the stairs with Judith, we discover a host of violence revisited on women, the evidence of which is swept under bedsteads and hidden under floorboards, kept in closed cupboards and unlocked lofts, but at others it is there, right before our eyes, in a pool of red light.
The Hotel Olympic typifies Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theories on the gothic. It is a gaudy red gem in the white crown of Strega’s landscape, another grandly symbolic object in and of itself. And it literalises language in burial: the paradox of gothic space being at once a succession of ever opening yet enclosing hidden recesses, of open-ended meanings under the cover of clipped and object-oriented prose. What is more, rooms in the Olympic have a life of their own. They sigh with secrets and heave with audible histories. They smell of sacrificial raw meat despite being cleaned religiously. There is a room with lilac water, the description of which is reminiscent of Argento’s palette for Suspiria; there is a mirrored hall not so unlike that in Guadignino’s remake of the same film. Mirrors move from the micro – those Rafa and the girls continually stare into so as to steady their anamorphic selves – to the macro – whole walls of reflective surfaces revealing a million faces whilst concealing a million more. In one of the rooms, Rafa finds a newspaper cutting about a quadruple murder. In another, red light garishly flares with an occult intensity. The Hotel Olympic may not function exactly like Biller’s tower in Bluebeard’s Castle, but, in these guestless yet ceaselessly serviced rooms, it enshrines the chilling destinies from women in past horror films and novels. Cleaning the corridors with Rafa, climbing the stairs with Judith, we discover a host of violence revisited on women, the evidence of which is swept under bedsteads and hidden under floorboards, kept in closed cupboards and unlocked lofts, but at others it is there, right before our eyes, in a pool of red light.
She spoke to me through the clot of congealed blood hardening like a bit in her mouth. She was turning into stone, she said. They all had. Women who had stood up to the Institution. Women who had pulled down walls with their bare hands and would rather eat dirt than the lies the Institution had sold them. She told me her life story. Something about a village in a remote mountainous region. Something about seeing stars and dead goats and gun shots before dawn. Something about a clandestine movement of whose presence she learned after a forced marriage, a child, another child, a bigger child, the last one born with a single blind eye in its head. She told me the women spoke through signs with their hands when tied behind their backs. She told me away from the valley other women communicated in chants and songs, in black paint on white stones stolen from the Institutions’ walkways. She told me she had endured and enjoyed the best fight of her life, until now, until this branch of the Institution had found her crouching beneath a hedge, alone. “There are many women they silence by burying us alive in boxes,” she said. “Every arm of the Institution, be it a museum or a politician’s home, has at least one woman boxed, cowed and slowly turning to stone.” “Will this happen to me?” I whispered. “Yes,” she replied. “Unless you can find a way out on your own.”
Johanne Lykke Holm by Khashayar Naderhvandi
If the tower is a kind of archive of horrors, a site that testifies to immurement whilst immuring women in Bluebeard’s Castle, then the Hotel operates as “a monument to long-dead maids and their shrouded knowledge”. Treated like “rag dolls'' and enduring an abusive form of socialisation through “service” – “they poured boiling water over our feet and made us dip them in cold ice” – the bodies of the girls become a living archive of all they collectively endure, an embodied “crime scene” returned to again and again throughout the narrative. The crime of “arranging oneself into a woman” everyday; the crime of attempting to rebel against the normalisation of violence towards women; the crime of internalising the violent objectification of their own selves; the crime of accepting that violence in multiple shapes, forms and words is the rite of passage when you’re female-presenting. The hotel is, therefore, at once a place of containment and an open training ground for the girls, moulding their persons whilst divesting them of personhood so as to turn them into one monolithic doll-like presence. This is literalised again when the girls are required to bring a coffin-like box containing a life-size doll into the hotel for a festival, only for one of them to go missing after the revelries. The doll, secured in a vault in the town, but ceremoniously conveyed up the snowy cliffs via a cable car, has the hair of a human, the “dull…eyes of a corpse” and the body of a young woman. A transactional object, the doll will also become a transubstantial one too. For the doll is a chilling reminder not just of what you could become, but of what you actually are in the world of Strega. Uncannily life-like yet artificial, the doll becomes animated in a performance that one of the girls stars in. Swapping places with her, the real and fake merge, the life of one taken over by the lifelessness of the other. Cassie, the girl who is swapped mid dance and who goes missing not long after, is never found. Although she is not in the coffin – the doll is returned to town with utmost care and dignity, unlike the girl – the intimation is that she, too, has been buried somewhere, her body sacrificed to the ritualistic violence epitomised by the hotel, the animatronic doll, the crime scene expanded beyond her absent form to the sinister presence of Strega’s unnervingly alive landscape. Items belonging to Cassie are found – a comb, a necklace, a compact mirror – around the girls’ dormitory and the hotel gardens, but there is no body, no shred of evidence, no actual scene of the crime. The crime scene itself endures the most gothic end: it is everywhere and nowhere, in front of you and hidden before your very eyes. The doll, a stark reminder of what the world attempts to do to young women, outlives the real girl, but only because Cassie fulfils what is required of her: she succumbs to, she accepts, she approximates the space of a box.
If gothic was once about reliving your worst nightmares, opening up the repressed in order to suppress it once more, and putting order to the disorder that was women’s minds and bodies, then feminist works that reclaim the mode go against this convention of returning to repressive conditions and positions.
Translated when the case of Sara Everard was reported, Strega and its non-scene of scenic brutality paradoxically provides space to grieve those lost to such violence – a space that was denied women when Everard’s rape and murder came to light. Gathering the remnants of Cassie’s things, much like Judith collects Lady Mordaunt’s belongings from the tower, Rafa and her fellow maids grieve her loss and remember her life through her belongings. Without a body, these items stand in for her, no longer proof of the world that used and abused her, but totems emblematic of the fact that she was very much here, alive, and longing to live – a truth no box can hide.
If gothic was once about reliving your worst nightmares, opening up the repressed in order to suppress it once more, and putting order to the disorder that was women’s minds and bodies, then feminist works that reclaim the mode go against this convention of returning to repressive conditions and positions. They expose the repression and retrogression at the heart of Bluebeard’s Castle or the Hotel Olympic – of all carceral sites – exhume the bodies and dismantle, albeit one brick and box at a time, the bloody chambers of our world, so as to reveal the stories, cries, desires and former chains of women past. A dress, a necklace, a mirror are never what they seem but clues to prior lives, the truth of which is yet to be exhumed.
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.
