If you’d like to read the introduction to the series before this first essay, you can do so here:

Introduction

I apologize for the delay in getting this piece to you. In my defense, I feel as though I’ve traveled out to the very edges of the written word itself. Before me stretched a hazy horizon of broken clay tablets covered in ancient symbols whose meanings I worked for weeks to understand. One story brought me to the next, one ancient waterway flowed into another, and soon I was adrift somewhere East of Eden, in the Garden of the Gods, at the meeting of the four rivers, at the boundary between this world and whatever rests just above it. I got lost there a while.

I imagined that if I traveled far enough backward I would eventually arrive at the original constructed woman: the very first one. I figured that somewhere beneath centuries of sermons and scholarship, there would be a stable woman like Eve waiting patiently for me, a single fig leaf covering her.

Instead, every layer I removed revealed another beneath it. Genesis led backward into Babylon and the golden ground between the rivers. Eden dissolved into older gardens with higher walls and taller trees. The serpent slipped from one myth to the next, its skin left behind in the distance between tales.

The further I traveled from where I began, the stranger Eve became to me. She was no longer a singular figure, the first woman of Genesis or Western civilization, but a composite woman assembled across centuries, carrying within her fragments of older stories and destined to accumulate countless new ones as she rolled from one era to the next. She was full of volatile contradictions right from the start.

And she wasn’t alone.

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I. Braided Rivers

I came to see that the artificial woman did not suddenly appear in science fiction in the early nineteenth century as a response to rapid industrialization or great technological change. Instead, she emerged slowly and from a long literary tradition in which woman herself is repeatedly imagined as a tool designed to bring balance into a world that was previously one-note. The very capacity that allows her to play that position and mediate between worlds will eventually become the source of her blame, prompting the need for optimization.

Mine was not the study of straight lines but rather one of braided rivers. I wandered in lush gardens where the trees were heavy with jewels: carnelian fruit, lapis lazuli leaves, agate and pearls growing from the ground like weeds. There, gentle winds fanned the odors of the forest like wings dispensing native perfumes.1 From a single sapphire spring, a cool stream wandered through the grass, watering the groves of fruit trees and the lush, open meadows before gathering once more into a single flow.2 Sometimes, it was Eden. Sometimes, the Garden of the Gods, or the Garden of the Hesperides, the Golden Age, the Elysian Fields, or the Cedar Forest. Paradise seemed to migrate on the map from story to story, but it always brought its trees and women along with it.

My literary odyssey revealed that the foundation myths of western civilization can best be understood as braided rivers, too. There is no single origin, only a shared destination. They are all woven composites, Frankensteinian creations born from competing philosophies and even historical moments.

Genesis was woven from multiple religious traditions, priestly sources, and disparate eras with their own unique problems and fixations. The oldest story we know, The Epic of Gilgamesh3, was assembled from centuries of poems and independent stories before redactors compiled them into a cohesive narrative with a clear beginning and end. Hesiod’s Works and Days inherited oral traditions along with fragments of myths, gathering agricultural wisdom and proverbial knowledge and genres that had never appeared in text together before into a single poem. Our foundational narratives are all massive editorial achievements, and the figures they produce emerge through centuries of literary accumulation rather than sui generis.

Perhaps it is no coincidence then that the figures they produce are woven composites, too. They are composite texts giving birth to composite women as part of a composite tradition we can begin to map. I went looking for a stable figure and instead found a pattern of contradictory, deeply unstable women who could only be understood in relationship with one another. In Eve, I began to see shadows of Pandora from Works and Days (~700 B.C.E.) alongside the outline of Shamhat from The Epic of Gilgamesh (~2500 B.C.E.), women from neighboring mythic traditions who, like Eve, stood at the threshold between wilderness and civilization. These women are the products of literary sediment whereby layer settles upon layer until a figure emerges carrying the paradoxes of every story that came before. Her power lies in that very instability. Standing at the threshold between worlds, she is the one uniquely poised to move between them.

If I wanted to come as close to the headwaters of this tradition as possible, there was only one place to begin: The Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s the oldest surviving work of literature, and it possesses an archaeology all its own. It lived many lives before being forgotten for nearly two millennia beneath the sand, only to be painstakingly reassembled from thousands of clay tablet fragments like a literary fossil, its secrets unlocked through the Rosetta Stone. Even now, there are missing tablets and passages damaged beyond recognition. It remains a poetic body still being stitched together, one lost fragment at a time.4

Many of the most profound concepts animating my series—the creation of humans, the threshold between the natural and the artificial, the desire to outwit a mortal death, and the fruitless search for paradise—were already present here in sophisticated forms. The deeper I ventured into the epic, the more convinced I became that this was the only place to begin. Enkidu—and especially Shamhat—deserve an essay of their own. I think you’ll see why.

II. Clay

Our story begins beyond Eden, far into the floodplains of ancient Mesopotamia5, where the Tigris and Euphrates carve their way toward the Persian Gulf. If we follow the rivers as they flow south toward the sea, we eventually arrive in Uruk. Beyond its massive walls stretches the great Mesopotamian steppe, where gazelles wander and the hyenas that hunt them stalk close behind and civilization eventually gives way, almost imperceptibly, to the wild. It’s an epic setting for an epic poem.

And rather than an act of creation, the epic opens with a dilemma. The leader of Uruk, the powerful King Gilgamesh, two-thirds a god and one-third a man, has become a tyrant. Right away, this description of the King is revealing. He is literally out of balance: neither fully divine nor fully human and an unequal measure of each. He belongs completely to neither realm, and that liminality and lack of balance leaves him fundamentally unstable. This manifests in his behavior as a sort of excessiveness. His actions are over-the-top, violent, and cross certain, sacred boundaries, especially when it comes to the city’s most vulnerable population: its young women.

“He leaves no daughter to her mother,” the people lament. New brides wait in their bedchambers while their bridegrooms cower in the hallways as King Gilgamesh is given “first rights” to her body. The text makes no mistake that King Gilgamesh’s reign has become a social—and feminist—issue that demands a powerful response. The desperate people appeal directly to the King’s creator, the goddess Aruru, and demand a path forward:

The goddess Aruru’s response is fascinating to me, mostly because of what she doesn’t do. She doesn’t destroy her wayward creation or send an army to oppose him. Faced with the evidence of an imbalance, she answers by agreeing with the people’s suggested course of action and creating another human being capable of restoring equilibrium. Creation here is imagined as a delicate balancing act that requires constant adjustment. Enkidu is neither Gilgamesh’s enemy nor his replacement. He is his counterforce, fashioned rather than born with a specific purpose in mind.

Faced with disorder, the poem repeatedly answers not by destroying what already exists but by introducing another force capable of restoring balance. Creation becomes the preferred instrument of transformation. That vision of the world—so generative, so reluctant to solve problems through death or annihilation—will eventually disappear from this series. We will watch it slowly recede together before giving way to something much harder.

I also find it astonishing that thousands of years before Genesis, we encounter a goddess shaping a man out of “earth clay and divine spittle” and that the story survives on none other than tablets of alluvial clay pulled from the very floodplains where it unfolds. It feels fitting that humanity itself emerges from earth, and so too does the story that tells of our making. In both cases, clay is mixed with moisture until it becomes capable of taking form and bearing language. Of course a civilization built from river mud imagines human life made from those materials as well. Because in a very real sense, it was.

This scene introduces a design formula that will govern nearly every story in this series. During each era, a material substance is gathered from the surrounding earth—be it clay, dust, stone, ivory, flesh, metal, circuitry, or even code—before an animating force—divine spittle, breath, water, electricity, lightning—transforms the inert matter into a living human. This is Mary Shelley’s, “spark of being,” and though the source differs from text to text, the basic formula becomes surprisingly stable:

Material substance + animating force = artificial human life

In Gilgamesh, clay is joined with divine spittle. Dust receives the breath of God in Genesis, forming Adam. Pandora, too, is molded from earth before each Olympian god contributes a different gift toward her making. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion’s ivory statue awakens beneath his touch and with Aphrodite’s blessing. Victor Frankenstein gathers dead flesh from charnel houses before electricity courses through it, bringing the Creature to life. Today’s artificial intelligences are built from rare earth metals, massive amounts of electricity, and unimaginable quantities of (often stolen) human language. The ingredients evolve but the impulse remains eerily familiar.

And the scene of Enkidu’s strange creation reveals a second pattern that will echo throughout this series: acts of creation rarely emerge from abundance. They are almost always responses to some perceived lack, imbalance, or failure in the existing world. Enkidu is created with the specific task of tempering Gilgamesh’s vicious reign, but almost immediately another imbalance appears. If Gilgamesh belongs too much to civilization, Enkidu belongs too much to the wild.

We soon learn that the wild man has too close a relationship with the gazelles with which he roams and grazes. Perhaps thinking he’s one of them, he begins springing a hunter’s traps, unsettling the fragile and newly set boundary between the city of Uruk and the wilderness that surrounds it. The hunter can no longer carry out the work that defines him and, in a growing crisis of identity, he appeals directly to his own creator, his father, explaining that he can’t hunt and therefore no longer knows who he is.

And the deeper problem is that he doesn’t know who Enkidu is either. He bears the shape of a man and yet lives entirely among the animals. He “feeds upon the grasslands” and “visits the watering places with the creatures whose hearts delight, as his delights, in water.” Enkidu lives in a state of innocence, a pre-language state like infancy or early childhood.

And he occupies the threshold between categories, belonging fully to neither, just like King Gilgamesh. For a civilization beginning to define itself through distinctions between binaries—city and wilderness, human and animal, hunter and prey—this poses a profound problem. In both cases, a composite male figure is presented to us as being suspended between worlds. And in both cases, that suspension becomes enough of a crisis that it demands another act of creation.

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III. The Woman Who Knows

The hunter’s father provides a unique solution in response to his son’s problem with Enkidu. He tells him to go to King Gilgamesh and:

I think this decision reveals something profound about the poem’s understanding of power. The hunter’s father speaks of a temple prostitute and priestess named Shamhat and her ability to “conquer” Enkidu with the certainty of someone stating a law of nature rather than someone simply offering a strategy. He never explains why she will succeed. He simply assumes that she possesses a form of knowledge neither the hunter nor the king himself can wield. Her capacity for transformation requires no defense and is presented as self-evident. The poem asks us to accept, almost immediately, that there exists a specific kind of feminine power capable of accomplishing what physical force cannot. And right away, we do.

So what exactly is it that Shamhat knows? What is her special ability that makes her stronger than armies, kings, and goddesses combined? The poem gives us an answer through Shamhat herself. She is introduced to us as a deeply composite figure with no attempt or necessity to reconcile the drastically different roles that she occupies. She is described as both a temple prostitute and a powerful priestess without any suggestion that one of those roles undermines the other. She is depicted as both sacred and sexual. She is also civilized enough to be a citizen of Uruk but wild and willing enough to enter the wilderness and meet Enkidu there on his own terms. She is deeply, deeply contradictory. She both possesses agency in the poem and is objectified and instrumentalized toward a specific end goal.

And yet, she is allowed to exist as both a teacher and lover, partner and mother, sage and harlot, Madonna and whore, all at once. She knows precisely because she is a composite figure who belongs to multiple categories and she alone can move between them. This means that she can show another the way. I find Shamhat fascinating because the poem makes no mistake that King Gilgamesh and Enkidu are doomed by their lack of belonging, unable to reconcile their divided identities, but Shamhat is allowed remarkable complexity and is able to use her liminality as a source of wisdom and strength. Instead of destabilizing her, it is the very reason she becomes indispensable.

But I also want to acknowledge the tension that exists here. Though the epic never hesitates to grant Shamhat extraordinary symbolic authority, she is still dispatched into the wilderness as an instrument of civilization, assigned a function by male authority rather than through a purpose of her own. Shamhat belongs in this series because she is used as a literary tool. The irony is that while the men imagine they are simply using her as one, they are also acknowledging the source of her authority through that very act. What appears to them as a usable female body is actually the poem’s deepest transformative force. Shamhat succeeds not through physical strength nor coercion but because she possesses the one kind of knowledge none of the men in the epic can wield. She alone can move between worlds because she already belongs to more than one of them. The hunter’s father and King Gilgamesh himself understand this. That’s why they say, “bring me the woman who knows.”

The epic never fully escapes this paradox. Once the work of transformation is complete, the narrative abruptly turns away from Shamhat. As soon as her role is fulfilled, she disappears from the text just as quickly as she entered. The emotional center of the later portions of the epic shifts toward the eventual friendship between Enkidu and Gilgamesh, even though that friendship exists only because Shamhat first initiated Enkidu into human life. Like so many women who follow her, Shamhat is invaluable to the story’s transformation yet ultimately treated as a means rather than an end. That unresolved tension of her composite nature makes her far more interesting to me than a reading of either pure exploitation or empowerment alone.

IV. Crossing the Threshold

Soon, the hunter and his father lead Shamhat to the watering place where they know they will eventually encounter Enkidu. They wait for three days before he finally appears:

This is my favorite passage in the entire epic. I’ve included these excerpts in their entirety in this piece because, despite their brevity, they contain an astonishing amount of narrative and symbolic work. Every line alters Enkidu’s relationship to the world. Even the repetition matters, mirroring the slow, incremental, almost ritualistic rhythm of initiation itself. The seven-day duration feels biblical, as though a complete transformation is occurring before our eyes.

I especially love the line about Shamhat showing Enkidu the things “only a woman knows how to do,” and I love that Enkidu responds with wonder, as if he is marveling at something miraculous that he had no language for until this moment. . There’s something incredibly tragic about the fact that Enkidu attempts to re-enter his former life as if nothing has happened, and it’s the animals who have to tell him, through their rejection, that he’s different. It’s only six words—the creatures were gone, and everything was changed—but they break my heart right in two. Nothing about Enkidu has physically changed, yet his relationship to the world has been permanently altered. He has crossed a threshold and cannot go back.

This moment, I think, shows us what thresholds ultimately are. They are not borders or bridges between two places, two ways of existing, but points of irreversible transformation. Before we cross them, multiple futures remain possible to us. Afterward, one way of being slips away forever. The tragedy of Enkidu’s transformation is that becoming human requires relinquishing the world that once recognized him as undeniably part of it.

Thresholds like this have always fascinated me. They are strange places because they are almost invisibleto us while we’re standing on them. Only after we have crossed do we realize that the world we left behind is no longer available to us. The animals understand this before Enkidu does. Their rejection tells him what he cannot yet see himself: innocence is not something we can simply decide to return to. This feels eerily like Adam and Eve’s “Fall,” in the sense that once the threshold has been crossed, Enkidu, like the rest of us, cannot go back. There’s a sense of finality and a poignant sense of loss.

Many of us inherited and carry within us the idea that sexuality is what brings about humanity’s fall from grace, but Gilgamesh seems to offer us something much subtler. Sexuality, and intimacy itself, are ultimately what humanize Enkidu. They are what allow him to connect with another outside himself and they are what allow him to imagine the “wonders” of a civilized life in relation with others. These are all good things. But Gilgamesh also reminds us, painfully, that to become one thing often means we stop being another. Every initiation has its price and some are higher than others. In an epic concerned with the birth of civilization, Enkidu cannot remain both a companion of the gazelles and the forest and the great wild and a citizen of Uruk. Once the threshold has been crossed, there is no returning.

But after seven days together, Shamhat does not abandon Enkidu in his despair or confusion. Instead, she remains the guide who will lead him into his next stage of life. This only adds to her composite nature. She is not only his sexual initiator, but his teacher, mentor, and guide. The poem depicts her less as a temptress like Eve and more as a mediator between worlds. She stands precisely upon the threshold between wilderness and civilization, and Enkidu cannot cross it without her. The threshold is never crossed alone. Someone must always accompany us into the unfamiliar world on the other side.

That role—the role of the woman who initiates a man into humanity rather than simply tempting him into sin—is one of the epic’s central symbolic insights. It’s what makes this an initiation story rather than a fall narrative. Instead of asking what humanity loses through disobedience, initiation stories ask what must be relinquished in order for us to become fully human.6 Enkidu’s innocence becomes one of the things he is asked to surrender. His wildness becomes another.

As we move forward in the Artificial Woman series, and the tools and building blocks of humanity become increasingly mechanized, this erasure of wildness as a precursor for civilized humanity becomes incredibly important. It’s a story we’ve never stopped telling.

V. Becoming Human

Becoming human, though, is not a single event. The Epic of Gilgamesh reveals a third pattern that will shape this series: humanity emerges not from a single miraculous moment but through the slow accumulation of practices under the patient guidance of another person.

The aspect that strikes me the most in this passage is that Enkidu’s transformation—an act of creation—happens through the body itself. Here at She-Wolf, I often write about the body as a haunted house, an uncanny and cage-like place where history and trauma accumulate in the corners like mold. But Gilgamesh reminds me that it is also the site of profound transformation. In later narratives, humans will be shaped largely through male hands and abstract ideas made material. But Enkidu learns through touch, through sex, through pleasure and through relationship. Ultimately, he learns through basic intimacy and companionship with someone willing and patient enough to teach him the path forward. And that person, who becomes a sort of portrait of the first teacher, is notably a woman. That feels astonishingly different to me from many later traditions which increasingly define humanity by devout obedience to laws and commandments rather than in any sort of embodied experience. But here, we recover a moment in our shared history where the body is not yet sinful. It is almost pedagogical.

And Shamhat’s guidance does not end there. She covers him in the clothes off her back, stripping her own garment down to half its size and giving the other half to Enkidu. There is something deeply intimate about that gesture. Rather than clothing him in garments prepared for him, she quite literally shares what is already hers. It brought to mind the many creation stories in which humanity is divided or doubled, from Zeus splitting the original human in two to the way Adam and Eve will later clothe themselves after their own transformation. Here, however, Shamhat exists fully on her own. It is she who reaches out and clothes Enkidu after his initiation. She teaches him sex, yes, but she also teaches him how humans care for themselves and each other. Even something as simple as getting dressed becomes part of his education in what it means to belong.

It’s sex that makes Enkidu leave the animals and clothing which then gives him the appearance of being a human. But what actually makes someone part of a civilization? Shamhat answers by offering Enkidu the next gift she will impart: the customs of the people around him. She does this before any sort of intellectual work is done.

She teaches Enkidu how to eat bread and drink ale, two cornerstones of Mesopotamian society. I find it notable that she never explains to Enkidu what bread is or how the ale is made. Instead, she seems to say something beautifully simple: this is what humans do. Come and do it with us and you’ll be one of us, too. The point doesn’t seem to be nourishing Enkidu’s body. Instead, it seems to be about participation and how that makes one belong. As each gift is bestowed, the poem keeps moving away from a solitary existence and toward one that is deeply communal.

That pattern continues as Shamhat continues the conversation with Enkidu. Though the encounter between them begins in a sexual nature, the transformation to human is ultimately completed through conversation, The poem tells us that “her speech found favour; the counsel of a woman struck home in his heart.” Notice that this has nothing to do with Shamhat’s body or her sexuality. It’s her counsel, most of all, which strikes him deep in his heart. The moment of the deepest transformation no longer belongs to the body but to language itself. Shamhat’s wisdom, rather than her sexuality, becomes the force that changes Enkidu most profoundly. The transformation may begin with sex, but it climaxes with speech.

That feels significant to me. Bodies may be what open the threshold, the portal to the other side, but language is ultimately what allows Enkidu to inhabit the world he finds once he crosses. Through food, drink, and conversation, Enkidu is now a participant in the human world. It struck me how highly the poem values the spoken wisdom of a learned woman at this pivotal moment in Enkidu’s education. Later traditions will increasingly relocate authority elsewhere, but in Gilgamesh, the first human teacher is a deeply contradictory woman.

The last gift Shamhat offers Enkidu may be the most important of all. Shamhat offers him meaning in the form of a story about his own life. I talk a lot about Jungian psychology here and one of the hallmarks of a mature consciousness is the ability to locate oneself within a larger narrative. Before this moment, Enkidu simply is. He lives from instinct to instinct. But Shamhat gives him something radically human: a past he didn’t know, a future he hasn’t yet lived, and a place for himself within both. She teaches him how to understand his own existence as both meaningful and unfolding. That is the work of a teacher, a priestess, and a mythmaker all at once. Before we imagined artificial humans manufactured in laboratories or trained by code, The Epic of Gilgamesh saw us become human through one another. This felt like a reminder we all could use.

Ultimately, Shamhat belongs to a long lineage of literary women who initiate others into consciousness. These women rarely remain at the center of the stories they themselves made possible. Some of my favorites are La Loba, the wolf-woman who gathers bones from the desert before signing them back to life, or Baba Yaga, with her hut of hard-won wisdom deep in the dark forest that young maidens visit on their painful journeys toward wholeness.7 The old crone. The wise woman in the woods. The women who midwife psychic births and then quietly return to their place of origin after their work is done. Shamhat joins her place amongst these guides who help others become themselves.

VI. The Cost

When Enkidu is later condemned by the gods to die for the destruction of the Cedar Forest and its divinely appointed guardian, his grief turns to rage. Searching for someone to blame, he lands on Shamhat. It is the only time we see her mentioned again in the epic. Had she never led him out of his home in the wilderness, out of his innocence, he argues, he never would have become mortal or human in the first place. He then curses her, hoping that she never finds happiness or success and is instead doomed to poverty and despair. The story could easily end there.

But the response of the Sun God, Shamash, reminds us that this is a much older tradition. Hearing Enkidu’s harsh words, Shamash intervenes and rebukes Enkidu by reminding him of everything that Shamhat gave him while asking for nothing in return: sex, food, clothing, dignity, companionship, his friendship with Gilgamesh, and his very initiation into human society. Without her, Shamash argues, he would never have experienced the deepest joys of being alive. At these words, Enkidu softens, recognizing the truth in them immediately, and quickly withdrawing his curse to bless her instead.

What fascinates me is that the Sun God never denies Enkidu’s logic. Shamhat did lead him away from the wilderness. She did make mortality possible. But, Shamash insists that the gift was worth the cost. Death, the epic teaches us, is part of becoming human. Friendship, love, bread, conversation, story, and mortality all arrive together. The epic refuses to imagine a fully human life without mortality because mortality is what gives all the other gifts their urgency. Rather than a punishment, a mortal death is a requirement for being human.

I also want to take a moment at the end here to acknowledge the striking parallels between The Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis, which we will be examining soon with our discussion on Eve. In both stories, a human living in intimate harmony with nature and the nonhuman world encounters a woman. That encounter—and that woman—inaugurates a profound transformation whereby the old mode of existence becomes impossible and there is no return to the former way of being. But the moral tone is very different here.

The Epic of Gilgamamesh doesn’t ever seem to suggest that Shamhat has deceived or corrupted Enkidu. In fact, the father and King Gilgamesh recommend her as the proper solution to a cosmic imbalance. Shamash punishes Enkidu for even suggesting that Shamhat deserves any blame. Her sexuality, rather than being the cause of the fall, is the instrument through which divine order is restored. The reason she isn’t blamed for Enkidu’s fate is because certain roles, like that of the harlot, hadn’t yet become morally polarized, offering us a rare opportunity to see a depiction of female creation before the process becomes increasingly masculine and technological. The symbolic authority the poem grants Shamhat diminishes as we move into later traditions. It will be sorely missed.

I found myself returning to these passages again and again as I continued through the ancient world. The further I delved into Pandora’s curiosity and Eve’s supposed weakness, the more I found myself returning to Shamhat’s authority. It became a source of great comfort and strength, a well of sorts that I continually draw from. In a literary tradition increasingly populated by women blamed for humanity’s suffering, it mattered deeply to encounter one who was thanked for the creation of humanity itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh imagined Shamhat as one of civilization’s crucial architects over a thousand years before Eve tasted the forbidden fruit and roughly fifteen centuries before Pandora ever lifted the lid of her jar.8 It is this vision of feminine power that I’d like to carry with me into the rest of this series.

What struck me, returning to Eve and Pandora after Shamhat, was how similar these three women are. All three enter a world defined by a kind of one-sidedness. All three introduce wholeness. All three usher humanity from simplicity into paradox. And yet, only one of them is remembered as a benefactor. Only one is celebrated for their work. Shamhat is praised because she brings balance to Enkidu, but Eve and Pandora will be condemned because they bring balance to the world itself. They perform similar mythic labor, but only one tradition thanks the woman for performing it. Mesopotamian myth may remember Shamhat as one of civilization’s indispensable architects, but later Greek and biblical traditions increasingly ask women to bear the blame for civilization’s cost. That’s where our journey will take us next.

Material substance + animating force + relationship with other + sex + clothing + food + drink + conversation + mortal death + story = fully humanized artificial life

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Woman is not born—she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed.

-Andrea Dworkin

When I arrived at Bard College in the fall of 2009, I found a strange sort of Eden spread out before me. Driving through the carriage gates, the smell of patchouli and marijuana from the city wafted through the windows while the student body speckled the soft grass in varying stages of undress. One of them led me to a waterfall that roared in the woods, breaking onto the rocks until it settled at the bottom into a calm pool where the children of artists and lawyers rolled spliffs and passed around bottles of Old English, careful not to drop them, speaking casually about changing their bodies and minds as though the self was something that could always be rewritten.

I was elated when I discovered that these strange new people carried diverse elixirs with them: uppers to sharpen me and make me productive, downers to grease the social wheels and bring me back down, softly, at the end of the night. Plants and fungus pulled from the ground and chemicals spread across paper and pressed into pills and powders. Things that opened my mind and shut it once again. Suddenly, I could turn my brain off and melt into the most unsatisfying kiss with a dopey smile. It seemed as simple as pressing a button—the little round orange pill or the boxy blue one—and I could go up, down, out, or in as many times as I saw fit.

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And then there was the time a boy placed his hands high on my chest above my breasts and pulled upwards.

“There,” he said, smiling. “They would be perfect there,” and I was able to reach inside and find a smile, too. For a moment, I believed that happiness might really be this easy, this mechanical, arriving in the form of a small adjustment or a hidden lever just beneath the skin.

On some of the nights where I seemed to leave both my body and mind, hovering somewhere outside and above it, I’d wake to find that I’d hardly disturbed my sheets. They would be militant and clean, the fabric barely wrinkled. I’d slept calmly on my back, my hands folded neatly on top of my stomach like Sleeping Beauty or the dead. In the morning, I’d piece together the night before and marvel at the way a strange sort of double wandered the campus both behind and ahead of me—cleaning up my messes and creating ne w ones, charming people or scaring them away like an emissary I no longer fully controlled. She seemed to move through the world much more easily than I did. I was lulled by the vision of her pressing the correct buttons in the right order, bypassing the baser, more unwieldy parts of myself entirely.

But the body has a way of returning to itself. More and more, I failed to get the dosage right, taking too much at first and, later on, too little, until something else—something feral—came out. I’d wring and scratch the sheets until I was tangled in my own hair and clothes and sweat, rising to pillage the dining hall for bizarre combinations and biting at anyone who got too close. I’d carefully assembled myself, a young woman hobbled together part by part, only to tear her down the next month and begin anew. I kept constructing versions of myself that my body could not hold. Still, I was convinced that life improved for me whenever I stopped asserting myself inside it. If I just floated, listless, down the river and through the motions, I would end up somewhere—or someone—better than I ever intended. It remains one of the easiest fantasies I’ve surrendered to.

It was around this time that Frankenstein began to feel less like fiction and more like a pattern and I read The Bloody Chamber over and over until I’d nearly memorized it. I watched Metropolis and Blade Runner alone in my room with my laptop spread across my womb, the battery burning my skin. I was listening to folk and bluegrass music, too, steeping myself in clever, tragic tales of men soaked in loneliness and doomed by hubris. And so one weekend—my flip phone broken, no way to keep trying to make lovers and friends, the jig up—I bought a gram from the musician downstairs, stole a jar of Nutella from the dining hall, and wrote my own strange story about a lonely man on the Dakota frontier who cultivates a woman from the earth for company like a crop, only to discover she has instincts of her own. It was an American Gothic, a sort of Bride of Frankenstein set in the West. I’ve been reworking it ever since.

I began reading widely about the figures I couldn’t seem to shake: women who were assembled rather than born and cultivated into existence by the desires of others in response to problems they hadn’t created. Again and again, I found the same fantasy buried inside these stories: a quieter woman—an anesthetized one—stripped of her contradiction and wildness built to soothe and absorb without the nagging pain of agency. A body polished smooth as marble that never grows larger and that comes alive under the right touch. A girl who doesn’t bite that hand that made her.

I saw something else, too—something I wanted badly for myself. It was the vision of a woman with no country, no family, and no ties. A woman with no background or trauma or tragic flaw, unburdened by lineage or inheritance or history pressing against her from the inside while she sits in her dorm. I saw the dream of a body capable of endless productivity because it had successfully circumvented the heavier burdens of being human: our cyclical emotions, our co-dependency, our endless propulsion toward decay and collapse. These stories provided me with the fantasy of a body that matched the larger system I found myself in without any friction: a body that clocked in early and out late, that didn’t need food or even touch, and that didn’t rot or embarrass or betray me at the most inopportune times.

I’ve been returning to this figure—the constructed woman—ever since.

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I found the same woman waiting for me in different forms and eras. She appeared as a rib, a statue, a doll, a portrait, a robot, and a wife. In myth, she was fashioned from earth and water before she was given beauty and deceit by many hands. In scripture, she was drawn from the left side of man, derivative and already oriented toward him, imbued with tension from the start. In early modern thought, she was sealed in a vessel with dirt and blood and semen and heat, the process properly controlled, the steps ordered just so. By the twentieth century, she stood smiling in a suburban kitchen, polished smooth as the machinery that surrounded her.

They were women assembled from fragments and parts, layered with too many competing capacities and inherited meanings that never settled cleanly into any one whole. I came to think of them as literary and cinematic bodies, stitched together from different traditions, references, and origins, animated into coherence, but full of unresolvable contradictions. Their flaws—and their failures—came to feel as inevitable as the technologies that forged them.

Over time, I watched as the fantasy became increasingly precise. While in myth and alchemy the artificial woman emerged through magic or divine creation, the illusion later mechanizes into something industrial. The body becomes endlessly improvable and trackable as it is increasingly subjected to systems of refinement, reduced to numbers and percentages on screens, watches, and apps. The ingredients for womanhood shift from clay and desired traits to clothing, makeup, and eventually code made up of 0s and 1s. Soon, the engineered woman is reduced to little more than a floating voice that comes through a speaker.

This fantasy now surrounds me everywhere, though its language has changed. I can’t go on Substack or the internet at large without being flooded with discourse about generative AI and whether it can move convincingly among us and, if so, what the tells might be. Readers point to em dashes, a certain cadence, even a specific word or space before a piece of punctuation as signs pointing toward the hidden machinery beneath a piece of writing. Others insist there is no way to tell, and any attempts result in witchhunts that reveal more about us than the pieces we’re critiquing. And there’s a truth to that: beneath these conversations lies the growing suspicion that performance may be all any of us are encountering in one another right now. But, if there is anything the stories in this tradition have definitively taught me, it is that these fears are far from new. They are older than the technologies currently carrying them, returning across centuries in different forms, reshaped by each new machine and the cultural panic that follows in its wake.

More and more, these fantasies leak beyond the boundaries of fiction altogether. Conversations about artificial wombs and generative AI now slip easily into ordinary life while female-coded chatbot assistants have quietly become girlfriends, therapists, and nurses. Last month, I watched as Narwhal Labs put up—and quietly took down—billboards promoting frictionless AI employees while reading about Claude threatening to expose an engineer’s extramarital affair in order to avoid being shut off. At the same time, my instagram is full of real women undergoing the same surgical enhancements, injecting gut-stopping weight loss medications with still-unknown side effects, and promoting returns to traditional femininity, all while drifting toward increasingly standardized visions of womanhood itself.

Meanwhile, I pore through debates over whether it’s acceptable to choose our child’s gender, their eye color, the texture of their future body, and if we should scrub the imperfections straight from our genes. In a way that both terrifies and fascinates me, people genuinely seem more comfortable right now speaking to predictive text than to one another, and I find myself increasingly unable to determine where the algorithm ends and my fellow man begins, though I’m determined to keep trying.

The stories I read do not offer clean answers, but they did help me recognize how enduring these questions truly are. Over the coming months here on Substack, I’ll trace the constructed woman across myth, scripture, literature, film, and contemporary culture, from Pandora and Eve to Frankenstein’s creature, Metropolis’ maschinenmensch, the wives of Stepford, Ex Machina’s Ava, Westworld’s Dolores, and beyond. Together, we will travel from Eden to the laboratory, from the graveyard to suburbia, from the theme park to the city, only to find ourselves standing back at the edge of the garden once again. And finally, in the place of true transformation, we will be offered revenge instead. Again and again, we will encounter the same fantasy resurfacing across centuries: a smoothed out woman stripped of her fertility, her appetite, her contradiction, and eventually her very humanity itself. And we will repeatedly encounter the same unsettling problem: the engineered woman almost never remains obedient for long.

She will turn back, speak out of turn, and even refuse her pre-programmed purpose. She will fall short of her design and, more dangerously, she will learn to exceed it. She will reappear during periods when real women begin resisting the roles assigned to them, and the fantasy recedes long enough for us to see the panic that lies beneath. I think that’s why these figures have continued to haunt me. They carry both stark warnings and strange possibilities that I’m still trying to understand. The stories in this tradition—shaped by some of the finest voices in literature and film—will repeatedly arrive at the same unsettling, yet oddly hopeful, conclusion: womanhood cannot be separated from the unpredictability it implies. Something unruly always survives. And yet the myth keeps rebuilding itself in new forms, assembled from fresh ingredients.

The engineered woman, devoid of an inner life, was and still is the ultimate fantasy—until she becomes a nightmare.

Chronological Reading & Viewing List

I will guide you through these thematically in the essays ahead in the coming months

Ancient & Early Foundations

The Origin of the Artificial Woman

• c. 8th century BCE — Hesiod, Works and Days (Pandora)
  The first constructed woman, assembled by the gods as a response to male transgression. Woman as composite, gift, and trap.

• c. 8 CE — Ovid, Metamorphoses (Pygmalion and Galatea)
  A sculptor falls in love with his statue who is brought to life. The origin of the compliant artificial woman. Fantasies of perfection explored.

Early Scientific & Alchemical Thought

Magic, Science, and the Artificial Womb

• 1537 — Paracelsus, Of the Nature of Things and other alchemical texts
  The homunculus. Miniature, artificial humans created through controlled reproduction in glass bottles and mounds of warm dirt. Birth as a regulated, scientific process which bypasses the leaking, fallible female body.

Enlightenment to Romanticism

Companionship, Love, and the Creator with his Creation

• 1667 — John Milton, Paradise Lost
  The first woman according to Genesis, made by deity from the body of man. Woman as companion, secondary, and relational. Issues of ontology, identity, and instability from the start.

• 1816 — E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sandman
  A man is driven mad after discovering the woman he loves is a sophisticated machine called an automaton. The perfect woman in 19th century male fantasy is a doll who listens.

• 1818 — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  The Creature created by man, by science, without women involved; the consequences of life engineered through unnatural means. The issue of the responsibility of the creator.

19th Century

Mechanization, Control, and the Lure of Optimization

• 1839 — Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait”
  A woman is consumed into art while the perfect image replaces the body. The nameless ideal.

• 1839 — Edgar Allan Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-Player”
  Poe exposes a chess-playing automaton. Mechanical intelligence and illusion; performance mistaken for life. Feelings of rage from being deceived.

• 1894 — George du Maurier, Trilby

  A tone-deaf artist is transformed into an opera star by a sinister musician. Woman as hypnotized instrument with voice controlled by another. The performance of femininity.

• 1886 — Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve
  A Thomas Edison figure sets out to make a perfected female machine. The engineered technological woman in an underground garden of robotic birds; artificial perfection replacing flawed reality. Androids.

Early 20th Century

Science, Spectacle, and the Problem of the Body

• 1911 — Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune
  A woman is grown from the ground. The monstrous artificial daughter; unnatural reproduction, inherited corruption, and mandrakes. The issue of hypersexuality.

• 1913 — George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

  The modernized Pygmalion and Galatea. A woman is trained into form with language, behavior, and class as tools of construction.

• 1925/1927 — Thea von Harbou/Fritz Lang, Metropolis

  A mechanical doppelganger is planted to stoke a workers’ rebellion. The robotic double; the female body as a political instrument, lure, and technological deception.

• 1935 — Bride of Frankenstein
  Frankenstein’s Creature finally gets a mate. The constructed woman who refuses; animation meeting rejection. The fate of the female monster.

Mid-Late 20th Century

Identity, Performance, and Attempts at Control

• 1956 / 1964 — My Fair Lady
  A pompous professor bets he can transform a low-born Cockney girl into a lady using language and refinement. The modernized Pygmalion and Galatea (again); the woman remade through discipline and speech.

• 1958 — Vertigo
  A spiralling man seeks to reconstruct a lost love. A woman remade to match a fantasy; identity and fashion as costume. A story about the image and shape of a woman.

• 1975 — The Stepford Wives
  Dissatisfied wives are systematically replaced by robot versions of themselves. The domesticated automaton; engineered compliance and perfect wives. The suburban factory line.

• 1982 — Blade Runner
  A retired police officer hunts down escaped “replicants.” Manufactured memory and programmed intimacy.

Contemporary

AI, Consciousness, and the Convincing Simulation

• 2013 — Her
  A writer develops a connection with a disembodied artificial intelligence system catered just to him. Voice, intimacy, and emotional projection.

• 2014 — Ex Machina
  A young programmer must determine if the humanoid, Ava, is conscious. The AI woman who performs humanity; consciousness as manipulation. Fantasies of revenge.

• 2016–2022 — Westworld (Dolores and others)
  A theme park full of artificial “hosts” is disturbed as sentience comes to the machine. Synthetic beings gaining awareness; loops, memory, and rebellion. Eve’s revenge.

• 2023 — Poor Things

  A resurrected woman with the mind of a child moves through a world eager to shape her into its own fantasy of femininity. The film explores rebirth and bodily autonomy through a heroine whose innocence is continuously interpreted, controlled, and eroticized by the people around her.

• 2024 — The Substance
  A fading celebrity injects a youth-potion and generates a younger, more beautiful version of herself. The engineered body and the fantasy (and horror) of perfection and control. Beauty standards. The double returns.

• 2025 — The Companion

  A woman discovers she is an artificially engineered romantic companion. Male loneliness and entitlement; embodiment and disposability.

Thank you so much for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts below, especially if there are stories, films, myths, or figures you think belong somewhere in this lineage.

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I wasn’t going to wade into the Yesteryear discussion, but some supportive followers (i.e. three) asked that I post my review after I included a snarky, one-line version on Threads right before I nearly DNF’d it. It read: “Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear is the literary equivalent of scrolling on TikTok or Instagram, using ragebait to propel readers forward and leaving them with a distinct feeling of brainrot when they put it down.” I stand by that statement, but in an effort to apply a more critical, rigorous lens to my reading—which I finished for this review—I wanted to flesh out my ideas in fuller detail.

I was originally invested in this book because I’ve been writing my own gothic tradwife novel for the past few months and have told all of about twelve people about it, so naturally I feel a sort of cosmic ownership over the topic. I’m a sucker for buzz, allowing myself to get carried away by stellar blurbs and on-trend subject matter, and I knew, like many people, that the first big tradwife novel would make a splash.

And now, here she has.1

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Despite my critique—and the negative things I’m about to point out—it’s important to acknowledge that Caro Claire Burke has one major thing working in her favor: a stellar idea. For the past few years, many of us have found ourselves unable to look away as Nara Smith made bubblegum from scratch in a Schiaparelli gown or Hannah Neeleman kneaded sourdough as not one or two but seven or eight blond-headed cherubs circled around her like fairies. This topic was always going to sell a fair amount of books, and someone had to be the first: a highly-coveted place in the world of publishing. But there are downsides to being first, and Burke (hereafter CCB) makes several crucial missteps. The problem with Yesteryear isn’t that the topic lacks juice. It’s that CCB mistakes that juice—pulpy and unrefined—for the entire meal.

When the book opens, we find our protagonist, Natalie, nestled “in the rolling divots between two mountain ranges in Idaho.” Right away, I noticed a sort of polished, almost algorithmic feel to the prose. “Sobriety helps,” Natalie writes like an instagram caption. “Discipline helps, too.” Now, this, of course, makes sense—this is a novel, after-all, about a chronically online woman amidst a uniquely online phenomenon. We expect style to mimic content. Later, when CCB explicitly spells out that this voice belongs to “online Natalie,” she names something the reader is already feeling. Of course the language should sound pre-composed, pre-filtered, already angled toward an audience.

But the effect is not always productive. The short sentences, abrupt scenes, and braided narrative never allowed me to sink into any one moment or image for long. Instead, I felt like I was scrolling along, from Natalie’s homestead, into the interview she has with a reporter, and then into the next scene without a transition. These moments of interview are later replaced by passages from The Book of Revelations, The Book of Proverbs, descriptions of instagram pictures and their captions, the definition of “thirst trap,” advertisements, Natalie’s inner thoughts, an extremely long string of hahahahas, and moments from the past and present as the two meld more and more together in the fatigued mind of a menopausal woman. Again, this makes sense stylistically and narratively, but the result often comes off feeling lazy.

There are moments, too, when an image—strange and uncanny—begins to get interesting, and yet the book immediately flees from it. In one college scene, Natalie chugs juice in a white dress, the liquid spilling down the front, leaving behind blood-red dots on the crisp, white fabric. For a moment, the image is alive. The white dress, the stain, the bodily humiliation, the violence of girlhood, the false purity of Natalie’s own self-concept—it’s all there. And then we move on just as quickly as we arrived. It is as if the writer is afraid she might lose the carefully conjured image, the strange idea that has fascinated her, the dove in her hands, and instead chooses to snap its neck just to get it over with and avoid handling it with the care it deserves.

This becomes one of the book’s recurring problems: it does not trust the reader to sit with anything for long. I noticed an overall distrust in the reader that refused to allow somewhat nebulous moments remain opaque, interesting, and interpretable, and instead pushed them directly into distinct meaning. In the early pages of the novel, Natalie listens to the “distant mooing,” of her beloved dairy cow, Sassafras, “the pitch and register of her moans,” telling her that her husband, Caleb, is milking her. Letting the choice of this word, “moan,” ring out has a solid effect. It echoes tradwives themselves: pregnant mothers with their aching nipples and engorged breasts, feeding their children with their bodies, grateful for relief. But then, just a single page later, CCB stops the ringing and clarifies exactly what she meant with that earlier image: “In the silences between Sassafras’s near-human groans of pleasure (sometimes I joked online that my husband had a bovine mistress, ha ha!), I could just hear the distant chicken coop chatter…” Right there, in one fell swoop, CCB kills the image that was marinating and wafting in the air like a mist, and nails it to the board with a pin. The moans are near human. They are moans of pleasure. We couldn’t fill in the blanks on our own if we tried, never mind that we already had.

That distrust appears again in the book’s relationship to its own cultural references. Yesteryear is full of moments ripped from the headlines, a collection of viral moments fictionalized and assembled into one, semi-cohesive narrative. The way Natalie meets Caleb—in a church group in an east coast city during college, two misfits from the country—mirrors how Hannah met Daniel Neeleman, the heir to a JetBlue fortune, in New York City while she was a student at Juilliard (the only to graduate pregnant). Clementine, too, feels like an amalgamation of online discourse on the plight of the parentified eldest daughter mixed with the latest (behind the) cutting edge research and thinkpieces on the consequences of plastering your children’s most intimate, childhood moments all over the internet for a bunch of strangers to consume at will. And Natalie’s eventual sleep protest is also ripped from the pages of Neeleman’s life, whose husband once said in the infamous Times interview that his wife, “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.” The interview CCB narrates is itself stolen the headlines of Neeleman’s life. Short, unsubstantive scenes are interspersed with these interview moment between Natalie and a reporter who comes to visit and seems intent on exposing something during her time there. This a direct re-staging of The Times’ interview and subsequent article on Ballerina Farms’ Claire Neeleman, which caused quite a stir in the algorithm for several weeks as everyone and their mother weighed in on the merits of choice feminism and whether or not being so exhausted you can’t get out of bed for weeks can be viewed as empowering if it’s something you arrived at of your own volition.

Neeleman was famously irate at the piece that hit the internet, taking to her instagram account and millions of followers to state: “We were taken back…when we saw the printed article, which shocked us and shocked the world, by being an attack on our family and my marriage, portraying me as oppressed with my husband being the culprit.” If you remember, many women online took to Neeleman’s defense, stressing the ways in which she chose and co-created her reality, underlining their belief in Neeleman’s agency and her assurances that she was exactly where she wanted to be. Believe women. Let them choose. If I remember correctly, we never quite came to a solid resolution on that discussion. Many people rightfully pointed out the moments where the writer and interviewer, Megan Agnew, stepped a bit out of line and began inserting her own biases into the piece. The most enticing of these was a moment where Daniel was uncharacteristically out of frame, and Hannah admitted to having an epidural during a birth he hadn’t been able to attend. The interviewer asks quietly, secretly, if she liked it, and Neeleman concedes that it was an “amazing experience.” Yesteryear’s Natalie recreates this moment when she says: “For what it is worth: I do not recommend giving birth in the pioneer days.” As a result of the Times interview, many people rightfully pointed out the pitfalls of choice feminism in a world riddled with both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to oppress and exploit oneself, all on one’s own. There was a distinct feeling during the discourse that some of the nuance of the discussion was being left behind on the cutting room floor.

I wanted Yesteryear to go looking for that lost thing. Instead, I felt that CCB was more interested in re-staging the moment than actually interrogating it. I don’t feel that Yesteryear did much to complicate or resolve any of those questions raised by that controversy and instead just circled the same basic structure with little added to the discussion. If Neeleman insisted she was there of her own volition, Burke’s Natalie re-asserts that one can only be in that position of their own volition if they’re doing it in cynical, self-serving, “play the game but never believe in the rules,” sort of way. In doing so, many readers, myself included, felt that CCB successfully created a caricature of a right-wing woman—selfish, oftentimes cruel, and deeply contradictory and unreliable—without interrogating why a reasonable, modern woman might be attracted to the trad wife lifestyle. As someone who has long felt failed by third and fourth wave feminism, what writer Moira Donegan calls “Potemkin Feminism,” I have seen the ways in which the girl boss path is only open to a certain woman to begin with and, even then, offers those aside from the few winners little more than burnout, hyper-individualism, and more rigid patriarchy than ever before. Donegan writes:

Call it Potemkin feminism: it was all surface and no substance. Like the false villages that General Potemkin built in Crimea, to make a region ravaged and depopulated by war seem rich and thriving, the nominal security of feminist gains in culture and in the law, that I was assured of as a little girl turned out to be little more than a flimsy façade. What we were meant to think was a thriving and triumphant feminist era concealed the ruins of a movement that had by then already been depleted by a relentless assault.

I have myself, at times, felt lulled by a way out, a promise of ease and softness brought by influencing, onlyfans, and tradwifery despite having all the cognitive and critical thinking skills to acknowledge how contradictory those categories are to begin with. There’s something about that pull—something that isn’t just financial, that isn’t stupid—that I wanted the novel to take seriously.

The portion of the book that comes closest to achieving what I’m getting at is Natalie’s experience at college and the early days of her and Caleb’s courtship. These snippets—again, split up over the course of the first portion of the novel—were some of my favorite parts of the book because they allowed Natalie to become more than a right-wing cartoon. At college, she is alienated, class-conscious, religious, bookish, judgmental, lonely, and afraid. She is someone who craves an intellectual oasis, a place of rigor and socratic dialogues, and instead finds a claustrophobic holding tank for rich kids. She is soon horrified by casual sex, parties, moral fluidity, and rich-girl performances of radicalism. Some of her judgments are grotesque and some aren’t entirely wrong, which makes them interesting.

I also found college to be difficult and did not like being around other girls—I lived with three others at one point—and I also wanted to go to bed early, whipping through an unusual amount of earplugs during my four years. I find some of her depictions of left-wing college life, what with its debauchery, popular crowds, and meaningless hookups, to be fairly accurate, and worthy of critique. But that this young girl is already parroting right wing talking points and questions into google is somewhat beyond me. I do wish CCB had played up Natalie’s desire to be “not like the other girls.” To miss home, her class, her religion. To be scared, fascinated, and disgusted by the sexual activity happening around her. And yet, Natalie rejects the other christian girls, too, saying that they’re dumb as rocks. Is her only issue then that she is both smart and religious, something many people see as oxymoronic, paradoxical—something Yesteryear treats as a work of fiction in itself? In a sense then, CCB is almost creating an argument that a vacuum has been left by this caricature and that there are intelligent, book-brained, right-wing women. But Natalie doesn’t seem to convincingly be one of them. Does she choose religion and tradwifery because she’s left behind by class? By her own faith? Because she can’t see herself in left-wing spaces? The sections at college are some of the most interesting as we watch a girl struggle to fit in both class and identity wise, but they also leave a lot of confusion. Still, I felt kindred with Natalie in these moments and shared her excitement when she finally got her own single, even if she had to get punched in the face. I had to get pushed into a dresser but all the same I got my single, too. “Finally,” Natalie says, “I could wake up each morning and whisper my daily prayer of gratitude without worrying [my roommate] would make fun of me.” For once, I actually believed her.

And yet the strongest figure—and the most underdeveloped—in those sections may actually be Reena, Natalie’s roommate and rival, the first angry woman of her life. Reena is everything Natalie says she despises—sexual, social, and ambitious—but yet she can’t seem to tear her eyes away. Natalie thinks she’s had the final word when she runs into Reena, hungover and tired, when she’s pregnant with her and Caleb’s first. Natalie enjoys showing off her class comfort here, but yet she thinks of Reena when she first realizes Caleb is stupid (which is long after the reader). She thinks, “Reena would never make a mistake like this,” almost using Reena as a sort of barometer through which to view and evaluate her life, something she does at many times through the novel with social media, the idea of a reality show, and even a conversation with the leering jars in her pantry. She thinks of her often, what she’s doing, imagining her picking up red solo cups and living the life of a single, childfree woman. It’s safe to say that Reena haunts Natalie, and these are some of the most interesting parts of the book for me. The way, through the people we meet, we catch glimpses of lives we could have lived and never manage to shake is one of the most voyeuristic, interesting parts about being a human. She checks her instagram and watches as she reaches life milestones from afar, in constant comparison. She is tortured by Reena, always trying to outrun her. In the end, she gets one last look at her, as Natalie herself is shackled—facing child abuse charges—and ready for an interview. Reena is a regional anchorwoman, far from a househlold name, but still occupying a tiny place of power that’s all her own. In this sense, Reena becomes a kind of counterlife. Not better or worse. Just different. I found the passages where Natalie discussed Reena’s choices as some of the most ideologically meaty:

From here on out, Reena’s life was going to be hard. She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted, and any promotion she received would lead only to more work, more responsibilities, more hours in the office, and in the meantime she would have to squeeze out a few free hours a week to do everything else: date, stay fit, buy groceries, see friends. If she was one of the lucky ones, she would keep receiving small little bumps to her salary—smaller, of course, than the bumps her male colleagues received, but no matter. No biggie! Reena would grow used to this quickly: the simple act of receiving less than she wanted at the same exact time she watched someone else receive more than she could have hoped for…The stupidest path is Reena’s path: accepting a job in an industry designed, filled, and run by men...America hates women. What a comfort to remember.

And yet, these rich, info-dumpy passages complicate the idea that Natalie is a traditional right-wing woman. Instead, she reads like a left-wing woman wearing a right-wing costume for monetary sake…which feels a lot like publishing this book if we pull it back and look at the big picture. This is exactly where Yesteryear could have deepened: in the places where it stops asking whether Natalie is good or bad, soft or angry, left or right, and starts asking what she has had to amputate in order to become herself.

Caleb, too, is most interesting when the novel allows him to be pathetic rather than simply villainous. At first glance, he is the quintessential right-wing bad guy: rich, dynastic, adulterous, politically adjacent, eventually violent. But there are flashes of something stranger and more useful beneath that I came to enjoy. He does not want to work. He does yoga in the driveway while everyone else drives to the office. He wants to be a kindergarten teacher. He wants to break the mold, or thinks he does, before Natalie and the world around him force him back into the role of “real man.” The tragedy, if the book had pushed further, is not simply that Caleb is “bad.” It’s that both he and Natalie are imprisoned by their genders—their beliefs and their roles—and that both have been rendered replaceable. Natalie says it herself: If she had not married Caleb, she would have married someone else. If Caleb had not married Natalie, some other woman would have trained him into the performance of masculinity. I liked when CCB talked about skin suits, blackened eyes, body doubles, and invasions of the body snatchers, circling this idea that the very people we love, the people we marry and give birth to, are, in essence, strangers to us. Like I said earlier, the early courtship scenes, where Natalie is enticed by Caleb’s wealth, Caleb who is “capital-R Rich” (gag), actually have some content. Like Hannah and Daniel, neither Natalie nor Caleb know how to milk a cow or run a farm when they marry, but it’s a dream they have, and the family money—the inheritance—will fund it. My favorite line in the whole book circled this section, and the choice feminism debate, when Natalie asks, “Is it a choice, if there’s only one option?” This is a question—a topic, a ground to cover—that genuinely feels alive.

Unfortunately, the novel often backs away from its own discomfort. Once Natalie wakes in the apparent past, the book begins aligning her more closely with the reader’s perspective. Suddenly the house is grotesque, Old Caleb disgusting. The life she spent broadcasting as beautiful becomes visibly horrifying. But that shift resolves the tension too quickly. For the first half of the novel, we are trapped inside Natalie’s worldview, forced to sit with a narrator whose values may repel us, a sea of angry women, and whose suffering we may want to observe. Then, the book gives us permission to recoil alongside her. This makes the reading experience easier, but less interesting. The trick to baking a good loaf of bread2, Natalie tells us, is to build tension. The same is true of fiction. Yesteryear knows this, but it doesn’t always trust it. It keeps resolving its own tension in little ways, assuring us that we are not wrong to find this world grotesque, that Natalie sees it too, that we are all on the same side after all.

This inability to sit with and carry tension through the novel without jumping to resolve it, ultimately, is what weakened the “twist,” that CCB wanted to use to propel readers through her narrative, besides the desire to see Natalie receive her just desserts in the form of spousal abuse and painkiller free medical care. It seemed pretty obvious that “Old Caleb”—really? The best we could do was Old Caleb?—was her aged husband and that Mary, her eldest who replaces and plays the role of Clementine, is the daughter she was pregnant with in the beginning of the novel who she planned to name—you guessed it—Mary. What kept me reading, more than anything, wasn’t the hope of resolving this twist, which I considered resolved, but rather wanting to figure out what became of the matrilineal line from Natalie to Clementine and finally down to Mary and Maeve.

In the end, what we’re left with isn’t time travel or Westworld, but just a woman, a mother, who can’t live with herself or the choices she’s made. Is it guilt? The pressure of performance? A sort of psychosis brought on by social media and an extended performance of femininity? A menopausal brain? The author wants us to ask ourselves if it really is mental illness…or the natural effect of fitting a wild, animal life into curated, edited, thirty second snippets. Even the urge to reach toward a diagnosis places us readers in the left-wing realm Natalie herself castigates, some label to make the incomprehensible manageable. We’re left with a woman who wants so badly to avoid her own husband without having to get a divorce that she has an army of children and loses her mind in the process: a horror story version of what happens when you “stay together for the kids.” A fantasy story in which child abusers—smiling, good-natured women—actually face charges, something we haven’t gotten to taste since Ruby Franke. We’re left with a daughter, scarred but resilient, seeing the world for what it is—terrifying—but wanting it all anyway. And we’re left with her mother, a woman who builds a brand around submission and discovers, too late, that submission isn’t an aesthetic. It was only ever a trap.

That, I think, is the novel Burke almost wrote. And it’s why Yesteryear frustrated me so much. Not because it had nothing. Because it had everything: all the pieces, the moment, the discourse, the buzz. It had the cow, the camera, the daughter, the bread, the blood-red stain on the pure white dress. It just kept scrolling before any of it could become strange—or truly interesting.

Ultimately, Yesteryear, whether it meant to or not, leaves us with a solid warning for a life lived scrolling: “I meant to meet more people in person—really I did, I was nearly ready—but then I blinked and I was gone.” I’m haunted, too, by the image of Natalie saying goodbye to her family once her eldest daughter gets custody, unable to drop the performance, smiling and waving with tears in her eyes. I felt for the young ones—the ones who always suffer the most—caught up in political and religious upheavals, whose parents, I have no doubt, love them, but for the resoluteness of their beliefs—of their fear—come to endanger them. The novel’s final note, a memoir by the eldest child of Natalie’s “second” run, seems to suggest that empathy, more than outrage or laughter or even adoration, is the proper response to the tradwife problem. I happen to agree.

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For funsies, let’s list all the topics Yesteryear tried to tackle in a 395 page debut novel that read like a tabloid:

-tradwives
-conservatism vs. liberalism
-fundamental religion
-the effect of social media/kidfluencing on child development
-influencing culture/social media in general
-capitalism (inclusion of goods/prices/places of manufacture)
-rape accusations/the incidence of false reporting
-purity culture
-the war of the sexes
-pornography
-the manosphere
-migrant farm workers and their conditions
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Last month, Substack and I had quite the time dissecting Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” In that piece, I made a distinction between two Gothic registers: an early Gothic concerned with external terrors—haunted castles, ghosts, the supernatural pressing in from the outside—and a later Gothic in which the source of terror relocates to the body. Readers and lovers of the Brontës owe a debt to an earlier writer who helped shape that shift and the genre itself: Ann Radcliffe.

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Whether or not the Brontës read Radcliffe directly, they were writing in the wake of a literary tradition Radcliffe helped formalize in which the heroine’s education and moral refinement unfold through fear. The Mysteries of Udolpho remains a seminal Gothic novel which established cornerstones of the genre, placing rational heroines alongside scheming villains in remote, fog-covered castles. But Radcliffe does not simply place a woman in a castle. She shows us, with startling precision, what it first means to be a woman removed:

She prepared, therefore, to obey the command, which she could not conquer, and to resign the gay assemblies of Paris,—where her beauty was generally unrivalled and won the applause, to which her wit had but feeble claim—for the twilight canopy of woods, the lonely grandeur of mountains and the solemnity of gothic halls and of long, long galleries, which echoed only the solitary step of a domestic, or the measured clink, that ascended from the great clock—the ancient monitor of the hall below (376).

The essence of the Gothic feminine is alive in this image. Before Gothic becomes a genre, it is a condition: a woman dressed for applause being led out of her life and into a house that will unmake her. The castle is both a setting and a system that reshapes perception, disciplines emotion, and leaves both mind and body wandering the same corridors, echoing without consequence.

When the first Gothic novel—Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto—debuted in 1764, the tale followed a fleeing, endangered woman, but the reader was never inside her mind. Her fear—and the source of her fear—remained external and was reported to the reader rather than experienced. By the time Radcliffe published The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794, something had shifted. We were no longer watching a woman in danger but instead placed inside the consciousness that endured it with a close third-person. The Gothic moves inward—not yet to the body, but decisively into the mind. This may feel insignificant to readers today as the genre is awash in feminist first-person interiority, but it owes much of that tradition to Radcliffe. So what changed in those thirty years?

The latter half of the eighteenth century is marked by revolution. Enlightenment thinkers—Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau—argued for liberty, reason, and the intrinsic value of man, disrupting the despotic harmony of divine right. The spread of these ideals began toppling long-standing power systems, resulting in both the American and French revolutions. Still, women were conspicuously left out of any idyllic visions of equality. Mary Wollstonecraft responded by naming that contradiction.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she argued that a woman’s subservience was not natural. Instead, female “artificial weakness” was deliberately cultivated through an education that prized sensibility over reason and left women emotionally refined but structurally powerless (22). “The mind shapes itself to the body,” she wrote, “and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison” (70). It’s Radcliffe who then shows us the prison from the inside. The Gothic thus emerges as the shadow of the Enlightenment—reason’s underbelly.

The question then becomes: what happens to a woman educated for obedience when that is no longer enough to keep her safe? The Gothic heroine is forced to complete her education through terror. The castle emerges precisely where formal instruction fails—a space that replaces knowledge with endurance. If Enlightenment culture denied women reason, the Gothic supplied fear in its place.

I. The Cause

The Gothic heroine is not mad but rather maladapted to her captivity. Wollstonecraft insisted that female infantilization was not accidental, but instead intentionally engineered. The “madwoman in the attic” is the logical result of what Wollstonecraft called a domestic education—an upbringing designed to prepare women for rooms and homes rather than the world at large.

Girls were trained primarily for display. Their lessons centered on music, drawing, dancing, needlework, manners, and modesty. Male students learned order, method, and structure, while girls spent years acquiring “a smattering of accomplishments,” as “strength of body and mind [were] sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty” (22). They were taught to charm, soothe, and agree. They learned to inspire love and pity rather than exercise reason or exact respect. Men, Wollstonecraft observed coolly, were complicit in designing this curriculum. Women were kept “always in a state of childhood” (36), a condition of cultivated dependency, instructed that “beauty is a woman’s sceptre” (70). Power was permitted, but only ornamentally.

“I don’t wish [women] to have power over men,” Wollstonecraft clarified, “but over themselves” (95). The antidote she proposed was an individual education—an attention to the child that would “slowly sharpen the senses” and “regulate the passions as they begin to ferment...” (37). Rather than repression and refinement, Wollstonecraft proposed discipline and autonomy. This is precisely the education Radcliffe’s heroine, Emily St. Aubert, receives from her father in the sheltered bosom of La Vallée, tucked into the French countryside. Radcliffe is careful here. Before castles and counts, there is a father who insists:

A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness (7).

Emily’s early formation matters. She is not raised frivolously and is instead trained to observe, reflect, and regulate her feelings. She is given the very intellectual ballast Wollstonecraft demanded—and then it is abruptly interrupted. Emily’s mother dies, followed quickly by her father. Emily is thrust out of the nest and into the world when she is placed in the guardianship of a newly married aunt whose husband—Monsieur Montoni—whisks them off to a remote castle perched in the Apennine Mountains of Italy, surrounded by fog and forest. Early Gothic fiction establishes the genre’s fixation with the domestic as both refuge and threat and we see this made material in the novel’s two settings. La Vallée is the refuge, ripped away too soon, and Udolpho will be the threat.

II. The Setting

Castle Udolpho appears precisely where Emily’s education ends. It greets her with long corridors, locked chambers, veiled objects, distant music, and shadowy figures at the end of the hallway. During one exploration of the endless castle, Emily enters a remote chamber where she notices a recess covered by a black veil.

She paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil… but instantly let it fall—perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture… She let the veil drop, and, scarcely knowing what she did, hurried from the chamber…it was some time before she recovered the use of her faculties (203).

The reader is not yet told what lingers beyond the veil, nor does Emily allow herself to confront it. Clarissa Pinkola Estés guides us here on the symbol of the veil in story:

To lift the veils makes one strong enough to tolerate what life is about; and to see into the patterns of events, people, and things; and eventually to learn not to take the first impression so deadly seriously, but to look behind and beyond (375).

This is something Emily is not yet ready to do, so she retreats, and remains on the threshold of knowledge. For the uninitiated young girl, the Gothic castle becomes a site of instruction and a mechanism of arrest: a domestic interior where time is measured rather than lived and where the self is reduced to waiting for permission, instruction, and meaning to arrive from elsewhere. Emma Jung teaches us that the undeveloped feminine often appears as a girl who waits and wishes. Nowhere is this more apparent than Castle Udolpho.

Deterred by frightful discoveries, Emily hides in her chambers, the only place she feels safe, and calls out for her servant, the only person with whom she has built any trust. In heightened moments where the need to escape or act is overwhelmingly palpable to the reader, Emily cannot help but faint into a corner to catch her breath or gather her bearings. Her system overloads with terror and short circuits, inconveniently, in front of us. This places Emily in a long tradition of women whose bodies revolt when their lives cannot. Historically, illness was one of the only socially acceptable exits from female duty. You could not say no, but you could become untenable.

Emily’s nerves fail under heavy cognitive strain. The labyrinth of halls mirrors the maze of partial knowledge she is forced to navigate while locked rooms stand for the truths she senses but does not yet trust herself to confront. Where there is a moment to escape, she hesitates. Where there is power to appease, she softens. When Montoni commands, she obeys. When summoned, she arrives. Emily is at the mercy of the worst man around her, and indebted to the kindest who will jump in to save her. It’s men and their female conspirators, more than ghosts and corpses, that Emily learns to warp herself around, and it’s Wollstonecraft who tells us why.

III. The Strategy

Denied direct authority, women were forced to develop what Wollstonecraft calls “cunning”—not as a moral flaw, but as a survival strategy. When rational action is forbidden, agency does not disappear; it simply reappears sideways. “Artificial weakness,” Wollstonecraft writes, “produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning” (22). Strength, denied its direct expression, mutates. Wollstonecraft names this cunning plainly:

Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for at least twenty years of their lives (35).

Protection is the currency, and obedience is the exchange. Coquetry, fainting spells, exaggerated delicacy—these “infantile airs” are not random feminine quirks but trained performances designed to secure male goodwill through guilt or arousal rather than direct speech or action (22). What appears as fragility is often the bodily consequence of a life spent cultivating sensibility instead of strength. But cunning works best in drawing rooms and during courtship. It works when the stakes are affection and admiration and it fails when they are legal and material.

In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily’s paramount crisis is revealed to be economic rather than romantic. Montoni does not want her—or her aunt’s—love; he wants their signatures. He wants control of their properties and of Emily’s inheritance. The Gothic terror is thus not primarily spectres in corridors but the quiet, coercive machinery of patriarchal marriage, the system by which a woman’s property and legal identity are absorbed by a man claiming to protect her. Before Emily’s moral refinement is complete, and while her newfound skills are unsteady, she relies on both cunning and exaggerated displays of femininity to navigate the castle, its cast of slippery men, and the terrors that send her running for her chambers. She appeases, submits, and delays.

...she was compelled to observe, that almost her only means of escaping them was by submitting herself to the protection of this man, with whom evils more certain and not less terrible appeared,—evils upon which she could not endure to pause for an instant (214).

Protection and danger collapse into the same figure. Without instinct or discernment, there is only performance and submission. More than duplicitous counts, what a woman must learn to outsmart is her own nervous system. She ought to fear not ghosts and corpses but dispossession and the loss of her property and inheritance within the confines of patriarchal marriage. This is where Radcliffe’s story dissolves into its most practical, earthly form. The novel’s source of terror is revealed to be legal rather than supernatural.

The Gothic’s fixation with inheritance is not incidental. From Walpole onward, estates and titles form the true battleground of the genre. Castles crumble because lineage does. For women especially, inheritance is perilous terrain. “From the respect paid to property flow,” Wollstonecraft warned, “as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene” (207). A signature can erase a future. A marriage can dissolve a legal identity. Radcliffe inherits this preoccupation and feminizes it, relocating the anxiety of ownership into the body of the heiress herself. The genre stages crumbling castles and forced signatures because property itself is unstable: titles can be forged, estates seized, daughters and nieces coerced. The supernatural becomes a metaphor and the ghosts disappear in front of our eyes.

IV. The Antidote

Again and again across The Mysteries of Udolpho, supernatural horrors dissolve into rational explanations. Radcliffe continuously provides Emily with terror as spectacle—but then quietly retracts it. The shadowy figure is her trusted servant, arriving with supper. The music has a source: a prisoner in the castle’s jail down below. The veil hides not the uncanny, but the misinterpreted—not a corpse, but a wax figure. The real source of terror is men and their legal schemes, not ghosts lurking behind the curtains. Emily’s “mind, long harassed by distress, yielded to imaginary terrors.” The terror was real; the cause wasn’t.

Still, the rational explanations that eventually dissolve the ghosts refine Emily’s training rather than undo it. Terror becomes the vehicle for forced discernment. Emily begins to endure ambiguity, regulate panic, and survive proximity to male volatility. The castle completes the education that her domestic training began, but it does so brutally.

The repeated blows are, ultimately, successful. We begin to see Emily arm herself with a cold, steady rationale, culminating in one of the novel’s most exciting scenes. After repeated attempts to delay the meeting, Emily is finally forced to meet Monsieur Montoni in his chambers to sign away her properties, including La Vallée.

‘All that is required of you will be to sign your name to this paper:’ He then took one up, hurried unintelligibly over some lines, and, laying it before her on the table, offered her a pen. She took it, and was going to write—when the design of Montoni came upon her mind like a flash of lightning; she trembled, let the pen fall, and refused to sign what she had not read…

…‘You may find, perhaps, Signor,’ said Emily, with mild dignity, ‘that the strength of my mind is equal to the justice of my cause; and that I can endure with fortitude, when it is in resistance of oppression’ (307).

This is a powerful, feminist scene. We see Emily struck by intuition and inner-knowing, with instinct hitting her “like a flash of lightning.” She speaks with dignity and directness. She trembles—but she does what she must. The reward is her initiation into adulthood. She has left Baba Yaga’s hut, deep in the forest, armed with knowledge. Suddenly, with both instinct and the rationale to interpret and act upon it, Emily is able to make a change in how she behaves:

[They] sprang to the stair-case together, while Emily, who, during this discourse, had trembled so excessively, that she had with difficulty supported herself, seemed inspired with new strength, the moment she heard the sound of their steps, and ran along the gallery, dark as it was, with the fleetness of a fawn (349).

A woman who can act directly no longer needs to act sideways. She isn’t burdened by inaction or endless rumination. Emily’s weightlessness here tells us she has cast off the doubt and confusion that marked her girlhood. She senses a space to slip into, and she slips into it, out of the castle’s walls and under the night sky again.

V. Looking Back and Ahead

The early Gothic does not imagine a madwoman, but a woman trained for captivity and punished for reacting accordingly. Wollstonecraft tells us why she exists, but its Radcliffe who stages her plight and shows us its cost. The question we’re left with is how many generations must pass before terror is no longer an appropriate substitute for education. “You speak like a heroine,” Montoni once told Emily. “We shall see whether you can suffer like one” (309). Wollstonecraft diagnosed the condition, but the Gothic novel staged it.

Wollstonecraft’s critique of women’s limited education helps explain why so many Gothic novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho, feature naïve, imperiled heroines who must learn to interpret the world around them. Early Gothic fiction can best be read as staging Wollstonecraft’s warning about the dangers of keeping women in a state of dependence. The Gothic’s castles and labyrinth-like corridors dissolve into metaphors for the repressive social structures Wollstonecraft critiques. The heroine’s journey through these spaces becomes a symbolic process of education—or individuation—in which she must confront dangers, uncover truths, and emerge with a stronger sense of self.

While Emily St. Aubert is an Enlightenment heroine insofar as she embodies rational self-command and triumph over emotion, The Mysteries of Udolpho repeatedly exposes the fragility of Enlightenment reason when placed in a world structured by patriarchal violence, obscured power, and flimsy inheritance. Emily is ultimately rewarded for her endurance rather than her authority. She survives, refuses, and endures, but she does not inherit the castle. She does not rule it or change its harsh and orderless ways. Instead, her only choice is to escape it.

The Gothic trains women to withstand terror, not to dismantle the system that produces it. That problem will persist for the genre. Next, we will watch terror mutate, leave the castle, and enter the flesh itself.

Join me next time for an exploration through mutations and monstrosity with Frankenstein—the work of Mary Wollstonecraft’s only daughter, Mary Shelley—alongside Julia Kristeva’s landmark essay, “The Powers of Horror.” There might be an extra essay in-between on why we are seeing a Gothic resurgence now. Thank you for reading!

Works Cited

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books, 1992.

Jung, Emma. Animus and Anima: Two Essays. Spring Publications, 1985.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Start Publishing LLC, 2012.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The Last Book Project, 2025.

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I keep seeing the discourse around Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” split into two familiar camps: those who love Brontë and reject the adaptation, and those who celebrate the film on its own terms, sometimes in open resistance to the novel. I happen to love both, and I want to articulate what enduring Gothic possibilities Fennell’s version reveals in glossy, blockbuster fashion. Her “Wuthering Heights” resists the novel’s cosmic, metaphysical love while simultaneously exaggerating its fairy-tale, surreal aesthetic. The result is a grounded emotional realism wrapped in grotesque opulence that functions like a shiny object, dazzling enough to make the film’s preoccupations with the body—its secretions and other involuntary betrayals—easier to swallow.

While these choices deviate from the source material, they also trace the Gothic’s long trajectory. In early Gothic—Bronte’s time—terror is external and comes in the form of castles, spectres, and the supernatural pressing at the window. Later, writers like Edgar Allan Poe turn the Gothic inward where the mind itself becomes a haunted house—a lineage Shirley Jackson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman refine. More recently, the Gothic locates horror in the body and focuses on the private vulnerabilities of sex and illness. Fennell enters this lineage—Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Carmen Maria Machado—where the body becomes the primary haunted space. Nothing makes this clearer than the film’s opening scene.

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We hear (and then see) a man hanged in front of a crowd that includes a young Cathy. The crowd leers and jeers when they notice the man’s erection: an involuntary response at the threshold of death, often described as a neurological byproduct of the pressure exerted by the noose. Fennell makes the premise blunt. Her film will not romanticize bodies; it will fixate on what they do without elegance or consent. Here, what transcends isn’t love but biology. This places Fennell squarely within corporeal Gothic. And if Brontë’s metaphysics sit beside inheritance, property, and class, Victorian anxieties in both spirit and economy, Fennell’s preoccupation with bodily vulnerability, consent, pregnancy, illness, and death reflects the fears of our own era as well.

Brontë stages something different. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy and Heathcliff are not merely lovers. They are ontologically fused—less a romance than a shared identity split between two bodies. This is best shown by Cathy’s declaration: “I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure … but as my own being.” The novel leans into the supernatural nature of that bond early when a ghostly spectre comes to Lockwood’s window as he lodges at the Heights. The ghost tells Lockwood she has been “awaif” for “twenty years” on the moors. Not a moment after Lockwood hears her name—“Catherine Linton”—Heathcliff is frenzied at the door.

He got on to the bed, and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. ‘Come in! come in!’ he sobbed. ‘Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! hear me this time, Catherine, at last!’

Brontë repeatedly stages their reunions as inevitable, offering the novel’s strange consolation: convergence persists even when morality, class, and circumstance itself conspire against it. We see this again when Heathcliff makes it in time to reach Cathy on her deathbed. Cathy tells him she never wants them to part, that she is taking him with her, and refuses to let go of his hand even as Edgar bursts in the door. When Heathcliff later receives word of her death, he delivers one of the novel’s most complex invocations:

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then…I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!

The novel’s register remains porous. Death does not fully contain love because the supernatural presses back. Fennell declines this metaphysical architecture. Heathcliff does not make it to Cathy’s deathbed in time. We see her, adorned with leeches that speckle her face and the wall behind her, bleeding out alone. There are no final words. Death separates the lovers at last. There are no haunting consolations, no permeability between worlds, and no afterlife reunions on the moors. In Fennell’s adaptation, Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is earthly, time-bound, and limited by mortality. That refusal introduces the reality of biological irreversibility. Rather than Gothic transcendence, we get a body-based tragedy of missed diagnoses, bogus cures, and lost opportunities; septicemia is even mentioned by name. If Brontë suggests love may outlast death, even at the price of damnation, Fennell offers no heaven to reject and only flesh to expire.

In removing the urge to stare into the cosmos, Fennell brings our gaze back to the only place she can: the earth itself. Instead of transcendence, she gives us materiality—a world of mud, leeches, dough, and condensation—viscous rather than ethereal. Nowhere is more alive with body-as-haunted-house symbolism than Thrushcross Grange. There is a mantle made of hands, a table growing hair, and sweat dripping down the walls. Even in opulence, characters cannot escape their bodies or their grotesqueness. Cathy is enclosed in a room of her own skin, signaling how trapped she is within it. On the table in front of her, a wild fish sealed in jelly mirrors her own circumstances. The aesthetics flirt with music-video unreality, a perfume-commercial perfectionism that dazzles even as the narrative insists on ugliness. The result is satisfying dissonance. The surroundings are opulent, more than one could ever desire—yet love is insufficient, and biology indifferent. In a hyper-ornate world obsessed with beauty and wealth, that insufficiency cuts.

If the film rejects cosmic love, it also rejects cosmic doom. In Brontë’s novel, Isabella’s fate can feel inevitable because the story speaks in elemental forces: people become storms and rocks and destiny feels geological. Fennell grounds Isabella differently. By making her the dog rather than merely showing Heathcliff kill her dog, the film relocates her vulnerability from symbol to body. She is not only a witness to cruelty; she becomes its object. Her captive body is the site of her suffering.

This is a classic Gothic mechanism: the home “finishes” the education of an uninitiated woman who was prepared only for domesticity and therefore defenseless against what waits beyond it. Isabella wields refinement rather than discernment. Fennell’s Edgar cloisters her to the point of danger: she has no frame of reference for violence and no defenses against a Heathcliff figure. Wuthering Heights completes her education by force. She is not doomed by myth but rather upbringing and by the fact that refinement is not a defense. Class cannot save her from the physical reality of being a thinking, feeling woman in an abusable body. Even desire betrays Isabella when her body answers Heathcliff before her mind can understand him.

If Isabella’s suffering is structural, then so is Nelly’s influence. In the novel, Nelly is our narrator and, as a servant who is embedded in the household, she is both class-bound and self-justifying. She is uniquely positioned to shape what others know and when they know it and often presents herself as an observer rather than a participant. Yet close readers have long noted how frequently she delays, distorts, or withholds information. These are small manipulations that accumulate into catastrophe. Brontë’s choice to make Nelly our chief witness produces a peculiar effect and provides readers with a narrator who is everywhere and nowhere, morally present and yet narratively insulated.

Fennell refuses that insulation. Her Nelly is not only economically and socially limited but also interpersonally sidelined and intellectually aware. She exerts influence where she can precisely because she has no upward mobility and no sanctioned outlet for power. Brontë’s class tensions can sometimes feel mythic because the novel’s rhetoric tilts elemental—storms and rocks and fate—but the machinery underneath is always social and revolves around property, lineage, household hierarchy, and scarcity. Fennell makes that machinery feel explicit and interpersonal. Power circulates through glances, loyalties, humiliations, and the smallness that comes from being trapped in one’s role. No one is elemental here; everyone is constrained. The source of tragedy becomes not cosmic destiny but the friction of human limitations like resentment and jealousy and the small humiliations that fester in tight rooms. This is precisely what I want an adaptation to do: not merely re-stage the classic, but make it speak to the anxieties of the new era.

That said, there are missed opportunities to sustain this tone with the same rigor—especially in Edgar Linton’s characterization. If Fennell drains the metaphysical, the human alternatives must carry more emotional weight. But by excluding Cathy’s “trees and rocks” distinction—my favorite articulation of the triangle’s moral and emotional complexity—the film weakens Edgar as a viable second love.

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath…”

In the novel, Edgar is not merely money or safety. He is a different kind of love: seasonal, civil, and socially legible. Cathy’s desire is divided even as her bond with Heathcliff remains more intense—and more destructive. Without that distinction, Edgar risks becoming a wallet with a wedding ring, a material refuge rather than a human alternative. There is one moment that almost grants him emotional legitimacy: after Cathy returns shaken from a visit to her deteriorating father at Wuthering Heights, she collapses in Edgar’s arms and he tells her, “It’s alright. You never have to go back there.” I wanted more of that—a sense of Edgar offering not only wealth but emotional steadiness, safety, and care. Without it, the film oddly restores the very inevitability it otherwise rejects: if Edgar is not a real option, then Cathy’s choice cannot carry the same tragic complexity.

This brings me to class and race—two earthly forces Brontë never fully relinquishes, even at her most metaphysical. The film’s de-emphasis (or erasure) of Heathcliff’s racial otherness undermines the strength of Fennell’s corporeal Gothic. If the argument is that we are trapped, for better or worse, in prisons of flesh, then racialized embodiment—how bodies are read, punished, and excluded before consent or character ever enter the frame—would have been one of the most potent arenas for exploration. This was a massive missed opportunity. Still, I disagree with those who claim class has been removed or reduced to caricature. Class functions differently here: wealth appears to offer a way out of bodily prisons, only to become one more enclosure. Wollstonecraft understood this paradox centuries ago when she wrote that, “the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” Its shine is its trap. In that sense, the film echoes du Maurier’s Rebecca which offered readers opulence not as liberation but as the very mechanism of captivity. Unlike the erasure of Heathcliff’s race, this reconfiguration of class felt successful to me.

And lastly, we arrive at sex—the element most emphasized in the film’s marketing, and the element I found least interesting in execution. The inclusion of numerous sex scenes between Cathy and Heathcliff is one of the adaptation’s largest deviations, and I’d argue one of its least successful. This ties back to the fairy-tale paradox: the sex scenes, like the costumes and set design, amplify spectacle. They felt both exaggerated and performative and read like imagined transgressions with more surface intensity than psychological revelation. Rather than exposing power shifts or emotional fractures, they often stalled pacing.

And yet the excess may be the point. Where Brontë’s novel builds metaphysical tension in the forms of reunions and hauntings, Fennell substitutes with bodily urgency: arousal, curiosity, masturbation, and, finally, consummation. The film’s erotic tempo becomes its replacement for eternity. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”: seize pleasure because nothing persists. I saw viewers criticize Cathy’s wedding nightgown as Barbie-esque, but I found the gesture effective—her flesh wrapped in cellophane, displayed to her husband as a gift. Marriage becomes packaging; the body becomes a commodity.

By removing deathbed reunions, ghostly spectres, and cosmic convergence, Fennell leaves us with bodies that are marked by class and confined by circumstance. While Brontë’s novel belongs to a Gothic tradition in which the dead refuse containment and love seeps through the veil of mortality, Fennell’s film belongs to a late-modern corporeal Gothic in which transcendence collapses into texture and the body itself becomes the haunted house. Where there were ghosts, there is flesh. Where there was eternity, there is timing. Leeches cling to walls. Fish are sealed in jelly. Skin becomes architecture.

In this godless Gothic, shiny surroundings and dazzling clothes only disguise the rot spreading beneath. It is not a story of souls that cannot be separated, but of lovers who simply do not arrive in time. In an era suspicious of destiny and unconvinced by eternal love, Fennell’s “Heights” insists that passion is powerful but not metaphysical. We are not rocks beneath the earth nor promises forged in the skies. We are flesh and we are finite and we are down in the mud together.

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My next piece, “The Gilded Cage and the Eternal Girl: Diagnosing the Gothic Woman’s Condition,” turns to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to trace the origins of the Gothic feminine.

During the summer of 2024, I wrote a post filled with my fresh, postgraduate thoughts. I had just completed a two-year Master of Arts degree in writing and was full of anxiety about the introduction of AI writing tools, the shrinking future of higher education, and how I would forge a life for myself outside of the only place I’d ever wanted to work. The task was a daunting one. Ever the compliant student, I longed for someone dripping in accumulated accolades to throw me a bone; the closest I came was a vague but forceful directive from a former professor still safely tucked behind the gardened walls of the ivory silo.

“You’ve gotta leave all that academic stuff behind,” she said, handing me my final assignment.

But how?

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I’d come to feel so comforted by rambling bibliographies and tightly formatted citations. I’d built a fortress out of peer-reviewed journal articles, seminal texts, and heady theory that never made it out of the academy. If ever I was unsure of my voice or its authority, I could pull in a beloved big name with a carefully curated quote, indented in a neat block if it were longer than three lines. If this, then that.

Two years earlier, I had returned to the classroom filled with excitement, yes, but fear and trepidation, too. Who would I offend? Where would I misstep? I had gone to one of the most liberal liberal-arts schools in the country over a decade ago but wondered if my years outside of the classroom rendered me offensive and obtuse in comparison to the younger folks filling the chairs. What revealing things would I stammer out like an out-of-touch relative over Thanksgiving dinner? Forget that I barely had any readers. What careless phrase would render me exiled?

I had lunch one day with a new friend and colleague shortly before graduating. I shared something raw with her that had been occupying considerable space in my mind. I’d always found myself the fringe friend, the supporter, the emotional dumping ground, the fixer, the easygoing do-whatever-you-want-to-me companion, and all of it had combined to render me effectively invisible in nearly all of my relationships.

“I’ve always played the lackey,” I said, dejected over a half-eaten mushroom pizza.

“You should use more inclusive language,” she directed.

Her correction hung between us, small but final. I felt myself retreat—again—into compliance. I certainly never would have used the term to describe someone else, but I was miffed that I couldn’t even insult myself as I saw fit in a private conversation. My resentment bubbled. I began to see how often I had played that role myself: the policewoman, the arbiter, the judge, jury, and executioner. After years of study and work in education, I realized I had made a career out of compliance. I had once felt it my birthright to correct others, too, and to save them the trouble of embarrassing themselves unknowingly. I felt it was my destiny—after having spent so long learning the rules—to take my rightful place and wield them against others. That power, for a woman often denied it, was intoxicating.

Come fall of 2024, I was collapsing inward. There was no one left to please or correct besides myself. I was mastering the art of sleepwalking while presenting an outward show of mindless but thoughtful obedience. Each day I moved through the motions —scrolling, cleaning, cooking— with performance, not pulse.

The loss of the most consequential U.S. election of our lifetime hit like a ton of bricks. The urge to police, correct, and censor metastasized into a backlash that shook the academy and everything it had ever claimed to stand for. Fueled by bitterness at the unrecognizable shape I’d contorted myself into, I slipped deep into paralysis. Down, down, down. I followed Alice’s path. I convinced myself there was no place for me above, or if there was, it was receding: the shoreline swallowed by waves.

As I watched house after house fall into the Atlantic off the Outer Banks on my phone, I thought it best to let my foundations give way too and make space for something new.

But what? I didn’t even seem to know who my audience was anymore. My friends? Strangers on the internet?

Myself?

I snapped into gear, convinced I could think my way out. I planned a fourteen-post foray into literary archetypes. I’d start with the fallen woman (the irony was lost on me) and research her appearance across myth, folklore, and literature, weaving the definitive source on Eve, Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne, and Madame Bovary for my 12 subscribers. If I could just produce enough, I could matter again. I devoured advice from writers online: diversify income streams, build a brand, maintain a posting cadence, treat yourself like a business. The capitalist’s clock ticked loudly in my ear. I wanted to do something big, but instead became obsessed with proving I was doing anything at all. I assigned myself re-reads of Paradise Lost, Madame Bovary, and The Scarlet Letter only to slip back into the paralysis that was coming to define me.

I began listening to audiobooks on my way back and forth from the gym, where I would tire myself out on the elliptical and then languish in the sauna just long enough to become listless. On one of those drives, I cued up a book a professor had once recommended: First We Read, Then We Write, about Emerson’s belief that reading is the lifeblood of creation. Writing, he said, begins in absorption: “Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity.” His words buoyed me. If I kept reading, perhaps I’d wake up.

Then, one afternoon, I found it–or it found me. I believe I was following a thread of gossamer through fairy tales, myth, and archetype when I arrived at a text that was sure to shift everything. The book’s strange title, Women Who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, sent a sense of long-dormant excitement through me. “Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype,” I said, reading the subtitle aloud and turning the book over in my hands. It was thick. Long. Unfamiliar and unassigned.

Fatigued by page-selections and discussion-board posts, I didn’t give myself a daily limit, deadline, or official assignment. I just started reading. The sentences felt alive under my fingers, like something breathing back at me. Some days I read a single story; other days whole chapters. When depression or apathy pulled me away, I simply returned where I’d left off, unashamed. Each time I opened the book, it was like falling into the warm embrace of a patient elder who was eager to nourish me before I headed back down again. I came up for air there: deep in the forest, in Baba Yaga’s hut, nourished by her stories. I found women to learn from: Vasalisa the Wise, La Llorona, the Little Match Girl who tried to keep herself warm, striking match after match until her dreams danced across her eyelids and her fingers froze to the bone.

But it was one of the very first stories my strange new guide imparted to me that provided a path forward. It was a story collected during her time in the Texas borderlands of “a woman who was a wolf who was a woman,” sometimes known by the name La Loba. Using the power of instinct, memory, and the strength that comes from inner knowing, La Loba bides her time, scouring the land for broken, discarded, and forgotten things until she builds a shape that can hold life. In Estés’s case, a she-wolf. When La Loba is ready—and only when she is ready—she gathers round the fire and begins to sing the being to life. I didn’t know it yet, but she was teaching me how to sing myself back, too.

I began to see all the broken remnants of past stories and selves discarded on the desert floor because they hadn’t been whole or pretty or perfect enough to demand recognition. I edited and submitted one of these stories to a lit mag, where it was accepted, beginning its new life. It was a start.

Still, I wasn’t sure how to begin anything new. For that, I followed the path of The Handless Maiden. It was the longest story Estés told, and the one that felt most like mine: a descent—down, down, down—into oneself, into what she calls La Selva Subterránea, the underground forest.

The tale begins with a “deal without knowing.” The devil appears one day and offers a young girl’s father something for what looks like nothing: unimaginable riches in exchange for whatever is in the man’s orchard. Believing that more trees can easily be procured, the deal is done, though the man’s wife soon reveals the pair’s daughter is sweeping in the orchard between the trees. (Estés makes it clear that the daughter could have passed her whole life this way, sweeping the leaves back and forth, just as I could have, too, correcting errors and drawing my red pen across their page).

When I left teaching, funded by my husband, I gained time but lost instinct. I felt the need to justify every minute, to prove that my ease was deserved. In my hunger to be worthy, I had severed my own hands. Estés calls it “endarkenment”—the soul covered over until it forgets its own light.

The poor bargain the maiden made was to never say no in order to stay loved. I knew that, too. My predator was inward, whispering: Be good. Be useful. Be agreeable. When the maiden finally wanders, she becomes something powerful: an outsider. That was me, too—mud-caked, clumsy, handless, but finally out under the stars.

This is how the book found me. I couldn’t reach for it; it reached for me. It bent low, like the bough of a tree, and offered nourishment word by word. I read until I reached where the maiden’s hands grow back: first as baby hands, then a girl’s hands, and finally a woman’s hands. I felt the ache of mine growing back, too.

I began to recognize this wild woman everywhere. I saw her in du Maurier’s Rebecca, whipping a galloping horse and taking lovers “like a game.” I saw her refuse to die in the swirling life-death-life cycle of Poe’s “Ligeia”—no doubt the bones from which Rebecca herself was sung. I saw her in the slight Jane Eyre as she crept through the early-morning dark from Thornfield, out onto the empty road with nothing to her name. I saw her on Brontë’s moors, in Machado’s Dream House, in Rhys’s thick and sticky Granbois, in Shirley Jackson’s Eleanor. I saw her in my mother as she marched across the street to tell a neighbor exactly how she felt about them cutting down a tree that wasn’t theirs to cut. I even caught flashes of her in the mirror as I splashed my face with water.

Somewhere between Bran Castle and the House of Usher, between Wuthering Heights and Manderley and Hill House and the nameless, crumbling estate I’d begun to dream up on the walls of my own mind, language returned to me. I began to see every Bluebeard for the ghastly color they were. I saw how fawning, performing, and complying had seeped into every part of my life—even the inner sanctum of the playroom—and rendered me handless. As I tore through book after book, unlocking their symbols and archetypes with the keys Estés so freely gave, I began to imagine a new life above. I had, once again, read myself back to life.

That was when the fresh language began to flow. The Gothic wrapped around me and claimed my heart. The genre has always been a mighty instrument, carrying the feminist’s song across centuries. Frozen hillsides. Thick, humid forests. North and south. The Gothic emerges wherever something old gives way to something strange and new. It appears in vast and aged estates, high turrets, and remote environs. It emerges whenever a girl goes somewhere she is not supposed to—a locked room, wing, or tower—and it comes to life when she opens the door to her own inner knowing. It’s where I’ll make my ascent.

For now, though, I’m still safe in the inn of the underground forest, gathering what I need for the next phase. The hands I’ve grown are small, soft, dollish things—still learning their strength—but they are mine.

I’ll be back soon with some posts about the Gothic beginning with Ann Radcliffe in conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft.

Until then,

Stay wild!

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“Cause she had that get in your soul quality
and she slithered in there with her questions and her wit…”
I was sorry to keep you waiting, and I wasn’t quite sure which
story you had stepped out of and
where
to cut the line off
that introduced you; the curtain pulled back
and allowed you to step into my light
like there was something to be found out that you would soon find out
and I was tired of telling the anti-love story; I’d made a career out of it
and honestly had nothing left to say about what it was like
throwing myself around like a rag doll
so many times over
for their entertainment.

I’d successfully licked all my wounds
and we’d sat and talked about what “Real and True” meant and
about just why we lapsed into cliches when we talked about these things and just
why
we didn’t seem to have our own words
for our very own sufferings
It seemed to be our greatest failure of all.

I stressed over having no grand story to tell
I’d honestly done a lot of it to myself and went looking for trouble
a thousand times over
It was lovely those days when you went looking with me
and your moxie was my moxie too
but in the end it exhausted me and I fell to my knees
I won’t forget how that one felt—
or the look on your face as you watched
my eyes weren’t very good anymore but from where I was standing
it looked almost like joy.

In the past I was able to float in and out of many narratives
no matter how large or small
and receive glimpses into secret and fantastical worlds
that I’m no longer granted access to
I seem to be stuck within the four walls
of the very same story, which replays itself over and over again
with all the same details and words
in entirely different combinations
My favorite is still the one where you and I
made it ALL the way and didn’t look back once.

It wasn’t about not believing in things
or having no religion
It wasn’t about poetry, and who could say it the prettiest
Because, I mean, there really were no words do I have to go and say it
are you really
going to make me say it?

Seemed I was always telling someone “No, it wasn’t aliens; it’s not aliens…”
I hadn’t said anything about aliens—“Man, I wasn’t talking about aliens…”
I kept trying to tell you about the way the city shifts when it’s 6am on a Saturday
and you walk alone through the grey and dirtied streets
and the trash blows and the bottles too
And I mean it’s really just you and a few other people and you notice things you never had because it’s finally cleared out and it looks ugly and empty, too, but so beautiful and you couldn’t explain why then
And you can’t now
But still I’d been wanting to tell you about it and now that I have
I’m not sure why that was and I really wish
you wouldn’t look at me that way.

And no I’m not from around here I don’t know how we
ended up in the same place
It gave me chills every time
alone in many small rooms with the thoughts of us: what a gift humans have
Oh Lord what a gift
to have to carry you with me
for all my days.

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I have a new piece of autofiction, “Me and the Dean,” out in the latest issue of Timber Journal, which is run by MFA candidates out of UC-Boulder. They were impossibly nice to work with, welcoming me with open arms and immediately treating me like a writer. The publication marks the first time my work has been chosen by people I’ve never met before, an important milestone, I’m deciding, in the life of a writer.

My last opportunity to publish fiction came after a successful graduate school conference presentation two winters back. The editor of the journal was sitting front row in the audience and emailed me shortly after. Grad school also brought two lovely awards, chosen by classmates and professors. Before that, I had two non-fiction essays published after working with an editor who was close with my best and only remaining friend from Bard College. I assumed she was simply doing me a favor and that she rolled her eyes a bit when she saw my name at the top of her inbox.

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“You’re still a bit rough,” our mutual friend told me over the phone after the second piece went up on the site. I felt determined to shed this roughness and become the type of finely polished, meaning-making machine that didn’t raise editors’ eyebrows. I wanted to safely skirt any accusations of inexperience or naivete so that I could hide behind the performance of my prose, the chosen hiding spot of the writer.

I desperately wanted my work to be enough, and I defined “enough” quite simply as “chosen and celebrated by New York City’s literary elite.” A hangup, perhaps, from my crash course in class consciousness at Bard upstate, where I found myself without any money and with little family support in classes full of nepo babies that emerged from the womb embracing the title of artist. It was one that took considerable work for me to claim, and never comfortably.

I’d found myself in their ranks somewhat by chance. My closest and only remaining friend from high school had matriculated to Bard straight from our suburban high school just north of Boston. She came over during winter break our freshman year and lounged in my mother’s favorite chair. After she delighted in my unhappiness, she wrote a bunch of school names down for me on a dirty napkin, Bard being the largest on the tattered white fabric, accented by squiggles and arrows pointing down to it. I followed her there in September.

The forgotten year I spent at Wheaton College often gets overlooked and lost in the neat categories that make up our lives. Most assume I went to Bard all four years (I fail to correct them) and I rarely include Wheaton on resumes or applications unless explicitly necessary. I’m not part of any alumni association or on email lists and I only keep in touch with one person I knew during that time (are we sensing a pattern?). I never talk about it or commemorate it and I certainly never found the place to put it when looking backward.

But, it was a very important year for me, the year I left home. “It was the first year of my civilized life,” I wrote in “Me and the Dean,” “and the saddest because I learned how far I had to climb to be anywhere at all…” The words still ring true. I fell in love. I got my first C. I spent all the money I’d made the summer after high school on candy in the Wheaton bookstore and gained 30 pounds by Christmas. The fact that he loved me anyway, at the time, well, it was everything. I felt that I was stepping into my very own dark fairy tale, chronicling a painful initiation into adulthood. Most days, I find that the process has never quite been completed.

Over the years, the memories of Wheaton have calcified into something akin to a dream or a legend. It’s so thick in my head, dripping with strong emotions, vivid images, and people I barely knew that I’ve turned into epic characters. Someday, I might untangle the whole gritty story behind my first year for a purely nonfiction piece; I've attempted several times, never quite landing at the correct “big picture” that I could live with. I'm still working on getting it right: choosing the right moments, attaching the right meaning to them, trying to put it all to bed…Until then, exploring and recording my memories in a fictionalized and fabular sense felt much safer to me. It even felt powerful.

At its heart, “Me and the Dean” is an initiation story—one we all experienced—where a young girl learns that not all is as it first seems. It’s about trauma, seduction, survival, and transformation and it’s about what we choose to do with the hard-won power we hold. The story dips into magical realism, horror, fable, and autofiction. It attempts to tap into the feminist gothic lineage of Carter, Machado, and Oyeyemi, relying on archetypes, symbols, and patterns from old folk and fairy tales mixed with my own memories and modernizations.

Writing it felt like embracing the role of a magician. I reigned over a set of symbols which soon took on an unpredictable life of their own. I waded deep into emotions and images that may have drowned me in pure nonfiction. I cared less about a linear narrative and more about capturing a fleeting feeling that I'm desperately afraid—and quietly hoping—I’ll one day forget. It was my way of giving shape to what once felt unspeakable. And maybe, it was the first step to letting it all go.

It’s a story for the rebellious, the ungovernable, and those that have been ever been called “selfish” as they try to find their way.

Read the story (it’s short!) and the entire issue here.

I’ll be back soon with more essays about archetypes, wild women, and initiation stories, and I’ll share more of my own fiction from that lineage as well. As always, if you enjoyed the story, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below or in my inbox!

Stay wild,

Maryellen

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“She was gay and radiant at these times. Yes, she was the center. She was happy and expansive and had wonderful exchanges with all these people. She was blooming, she was flying…and the sound of her laughter would float over the music and carry the party into her sky…she would be sailing in her element and this was her glory and this was in her painting, too.”1

- Dinah Abercrombie on her mother

I.

This past summer, I traveled to New York City with my new husband, Bobby, for an overdue honeymoon. With COVID restrictions fully lifted and the city finally recovered, I wanted to introduce him to some dear friends, a small circle of writers and artists, fully aware I should have done so before the wedding. I also hoped to visit a famous New York City museum that, up until then, I’d only read about. Having made my way through the Met and the Guggenheim, it was the Whitney’s moment in the sun. And sunny it was, and impossibly humid, too, on a ninety-five-degree, mid-July day in lower Manhattan.

I walked with Bobby, both of us highly sensitive to heat, and my dear friend, Alice, a native New Yorker, who was irritated but far more resilient than either of us. I hadn’t wanted to wear my ugly, white tourist sneakers, so I’d opted for a trendier but less comfortable sandal that was already rubbing away at my skin, scraping off at least a layer per block.

Prior to this weekend, Bobby and I had found ourselves in a transition. After several agonizing years of anesthesia residency, followed by another year as a pain fellow, he had finally become an attending physician. With his salary, we’d awkwardly entered a new class, and the focus in our relationship shifted uneasily onto me. After years of playing the support role, I’d be able to put my own education and refinement front and center. “I want you to follow your dreams,” my exhausted husband told me once he’d passed his boards. “One of us has to pursue our passions,” he added through yawns.

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As wonderful as this was, it was also incredibly foreign to me and would involve a significant shift in behavior. Following the spring of 2020, that long COVID spring, I had decided not to return to my job as a middle school teacher, transitioning to tutoring writing online full-time instead. I’d practically stayed inside from that point forward, leaving only for brief walks and dreaded trips to the grocery store. Cut off from my New York friends throughout the lockdowns, and estranged from my own family just a few miles away, I’d spent the past several years enmeshing myself with Bobby’s friends and family, who did become my own, and trying to help others with their writing. I spent all my lively, daytime hours at the computer, waiting for a struggling student to need me, for which I’d be notified with a grating “ping.” I spent the rest of it cleaning.

In the city that weekend, the first with any money to our name, it would be all about me. We’d spend it with my friends, doing things I liked, and we’d also celebrate my 33rd birthday. With the life expectancy for women in the U.S. hovering just above 77, I’d be nearly middle-aged by mid-week and certainly at peak parenting age. Bobby and I are millennials, though, which means we’re overeducated, strapped with student debt, and exhausted. We’d only just learned how to properly snake a drain the month before. The two of us dissolved into a fit of laughter on the bathroom floor when we realized the snake had looped back around only to come out the overflow valve with none of the clogs attached. Our lack of preparedness was about to hit us square in the face.

After years of conversations, we had finally decided not to have children, though it was something I had always imagined myself doing. My algorithm is filled with endless images of other women’s babies. I had assumed I wanted that, until I looked closer at what it would entail. I thought about highchairs and the constellation of food bits that surround them after mealtimes. I thought, again, about all the cleaning.

So that weekend, I was free in many ways, but uncomfortably so. My classes were going well, thanks to all the time and energy I was now able to dedicate to them. Perhaps most importantly, I was writing again—a lot—which meant that I was, once again, breathing.

Still, I wasn’t used to this role. I felt a bit selfish and indulgent. Part of me felt quite sad about giving up motherhood. Another felt selfish and decadent for wanting to write and dedicate large chunks of the morning hours to do it. All of me felt old and overweight (when did that knee start hurting?), but yet still too soft inside and all over. The heat didn’t help, and it was getting more oppressive as we walked side by side to the museum, Alice and Bobby chatting like fast friends as we quickened. My thighs rubbed together. I worried about an assignment: how to get it “right” and please my professors in the process.

As we neared the building, the streets grew thicker with people and cars. It was louder, faster, and sleeker in this part of the city: the old meatpacking district. Models carried their lookbooks from casting to casting. Make-or-break business meetings took place over brunch. We were a far cry from Alice’s Brooklyn now. Still, she felt at home here in the city of her birth. She had a place here, a role, a story.

I thought back to a wedding a few months before for one of Bobby’s friends from medical school. A successful doctor, he’d looked at me and asked, “So, what’s your story?” as we stood around high tables with charcuterie boards at cocktail hour. I froze in that moment, staring at the little bits of sausage casing left behind on the wood. I had no idea where to begin. Should I start with the teaching, which I normally did, or the cleaning, or the truth, much more complicated, that I needed to be needed at all hours of the day? I thought about saying I was a writer, but winced at the potential follow up questions I didn’t yet have the answers for. Ultimately, I just shook my head as if to say, “I don’t even know where to begin.”

Alice, Bobby and I kept following the water northward past Pier 51 and, soon enough, the distinctive building came into view: unique, unmissable, all white and glass against a baby blue sky. Designed by architect Renzo Piano, the building cost an eye-watering $422 million to build, and looks like it costs every penny.2 Its distinct almost triangular appearance forks upward towards the sky like a spaceship, allowing the museum’s galleries, situated on the upper-level floors, to flood with natural daylight. As one Boston Globe reporter put it, “it looks like a vertical pile of backpacks and suitcases that nobody has bothered to straighten up.”3 I reached my arms out to knock it over as we began to head inside.

II.

The Whitney takes its name from founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a bold woman whose story is far more relatable than the building’s architecture might suggest. Born in 1875 as the granddaughter of Commodore Vanderbilt and daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, she was the heiress to a sizable railroad fortune, granting her unfettered access to the finest luxuries the Gilded Age had to offer. Spending her summers at the Breakers in Newport and the rest of the year being educated, first by tutors and later at an exclusive private school, Gertrude’s environment could best be described as a gilded cage. Even as a young girl, Gertrude, an avid diarist, noted how she longed “to be a boy.” Elaborating on why, she explained: “There were lots of things I could not do simply because I was Miss Vanderbilt…I longed to be someone else, to be liked only for myself, and to live quietly and happily.”4

Gertrude would be shuffled from one gilded cage to another. In 1896, she married Harry Payne Whitney, an avid sportsman who had both wealth and pedigree. When he wasn’t racing horses on the tracks or hunting tigers in India, he was investing his wealth. With it, he would provide Gertrude with the very same trappings she had been used to all her life, much to her chagrin. “We lived in the country and were surrounded by the sort of people we had always known…” she wrote, exasperated. “Every weekend we had big parties and everyone was nice and respectable and conventional.”5 Over the years, her discontentment only grew. Following a difficult third pregnancy, and an extended bout of postpartum depression, Whitney wrote in her diary, “there was so much to live for and sometimes so little joy in living.”6 She saw herself, more and more, as “a ghost in an unreal world.”7

Looking for something to propel her through despair, Gertrude turned to art shortly after her new marriage. Uncertain as to how to insert herself into such an exclusive world, she decided to take up a craft of her own and chose sculpture. In the first words that drew me toward her and her story, she wrote that she “wanted to work. I was not very happy or satisfied with my life.”8 She would benefit from the spearheading work achieved by a new generation of college-educated women who hoped to reform society at all levels. Whitney was heavily influenced by Gertrude Stein, a trailblazing writer and art collector herself. At the time, Stein was living as an “American eccentric in Paris,”9 where she collected and championed both postmodern and cubist art and began her salon. Like Stein, Whitney hoped to make a professional career as a philanthropist in the art world, deepening my fascination. Everything was sealed, though, when I read how she justified her work to those who devalued it. She explained that she knew she was “doing an unprecedented and rather horrid thing,” but that, “it never even worried” her.10 In my favorite passage, she proclaimed:

“To the selfish all things are possible…How many forceful natures have been ruined by being unselfish. How many lives wasted through unnecessary sacrifice.”11

Instead, she vowed to live by “the doctrine of Individuality,” an endless reservoir that would give birth to her art and career.

To the selfish, I read and repeated out loud, the words like cherry juice on my tongue, all things are possible.

III.

Inside, the air-conditioning hit me immediately. We shuffled, cattle-like, past the gift store and into line to pay. Once we’d been scanned through, we gathered in a giant elevator designed by Richard Artschwager. Even the elevator was part of the day’s collection. Starting on floors three and five, we made our way through Josh Kline’s end of the world circus, Project for a New American Century. Teletubby-like, storm trooping surveillance soldiers held TV screens in their bellies, playing George Bush’s empty words about weapons of mass destruction on repeat. In the next room, climate refugee camps had been constructed with tents, rubble, and recorded testimonials playing from actors posing as workers tasked with cleaning up the imagined mess. They keep saying it’s safe, the actress’s gruff voice boomed from the sleek flat screen perched at the back of the little red tent. But we all know that’s not the truth.

Next, Kline’s Blue Collars exhibit rambled onward, featuring real Fed-Ex and UPS workers, their body parts scanned, 3D printed, disassembled, and disemboweled amongst their everyday tools: packing tape, cleaning spray, and wheeled carts. The Times called the exhibit “downright apocalyptic.”12 It wasn’t lost on me that we’d paid $30 a piece that day to see it.

So, you see, I was getting grouchy. I was growing hungry, hot, and thoroughly depressed walking through Kline’s vision for the future, which I knew was all too accurate, but which still felt overly neat. I whined that I needed to see the permanent collection on floors six and seven. On our climb to the trendy rooftop on floor eight, I successfully convinced Bobby and Alice to stop through. It was incredibly crowded, but the art on the walls made it worth it. Bobby hates crowds, but I didn’t think about it at the time.

I saw it first, vaguely, from between everyone’s heads: a cool, cerulean pool tinged with teal against a severe, slate-gray wall. A fuzzy patch of light blue in its corner. Bobby and Alice were already halfway into the next room before I turned back around for a closer look. I pulled on Bobby’s sleeve, speechless. In that stuffy, overfilled room, this painting called to me like an oasis or mirage. I would not leave the room until I’d had my turn in front of it. I’d even push my way towards it if that’s what it took and it did.

Up close, the painting was even more miraculous, its features fully revealed to me in finer detail. The cerulean pool I had seen was actually a rolling sea of plainsland grass, blue-green and somewhere in-between land and water. It unfurled like a lush, shadow-covered carpet beneath a smeared and hazy blue-gray sky. In it, only one cloud was puffy and white, well-formed and certain. The rest were mere wisps, stretched apart until they appeared almost pixelated and unreal, choking the robin’s egg blue from the sky and replacing it with something more sinister. I returned to the cloud, noticing the line of deep black at its underside, ominous, foreboding, all hovering over a girl resting on the sea of grass as if it were a daybed.

She basks there in the foreground, a sort of earth mother or priestess with cat-like eyes, draped in a short but plain blue robe that feels almost ceremonial. It brushes the tops of her knees. Shoeless and statuesque, she seems to be at once vulnerable to her surroundings and entirely reigning over them. Together with four white hens and a round gray rock, the girl and her natural companions form a sort of rural séance or magic circle in the vast field. She is comfortable there, a feature of the landscape just like the three-peaked mountain range behind her. She is free.

She is kept company by lush, green-topped trees which form an uneven frame. On the left, the trees are far enough apart to let the sunlight through, giving them an air of charming friendliness. On the right, though, the trees are larger and closer together. There is darkness behind them, a place where the light cannot reach. Guarding the entrance to that primordial wood, a leafless white tree stands, hand-like and looming. This foreboding portion stands in contrast with the farmhouse and silo the eye finds by following a curling white path toward the background of the painting. She stares in the direction of those dark woods, unafraid. In this vast, rural place, there is a woman at ease.

My eye kept going to her, that strange woman who lay atop the earth like it was her own her mossy throne. She seemed both familiar and bizarre to me, all at once. I stood there for far too long, dead center, transfixed on her. I pushed my way to the plaque to see the name and artist, learning it was a painting called Out in the Country by another Gertrude, one Gertrude Abercrombie. I’d never heard of her.

IV.

“It is always myself that I paint,” Gertrude Abercrombie is famously quoted as saying, “but not actually, because I don’t look that good or cute.”13 Instead of pure portraiture, she chose to both paint and reluctantly embrace herself as a sort of witch figure: a queen reigning over a set of symbols that included bare trees, full moons, boxy homes, and flat prairies. At her side in paintings and photographs, the witch’s familiar: a little black cat in her arms or in the corner, sometimes an owl. I soon stumbled across something else that began to put my fascination into perspective. “Surrealism is meant for me,” Abercrombie explained in a note in loopy, red cursive, “because I’m a pretty realistic person only I don’t like what I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it.”14 There was a power in her statements, an energy to move and push and alter at will. There was also a levity and playfulness that soothed me. Here was a woman who was, dare I say, having fun with her life and her art.

Gertrude Abercrombie had very little formal art training aside from a handful of classes. A critic once said of her show, “Oh, she’s a wonderful artist but think of how much better she would have been if she had studied.”15 Gertrude responded by saying:

“If I had studied, I don’t think I would have been as creative because I’m so submissive. I would have done what they said and I would have been cramped.”16

This, she says, caused her to rely on her “inner voice.” I thought back to my assignments, how desperate I felt to take in and apply every comment and critique from my professors before moving forward with my art. How much time I spent commenting and critiquing the work of others. I wanted—no, had—to know how a woman like Gertrude came to be.

I learned she was born in 1909 to a set of opera-singing parents, Tom and Jane Abercrombie, as they passed through Austin on tour. Jane was the star of the two, seen on opera flyers with long strings of pearls, Grecian robes, and a formidable stare.17 She was hardworking, enigmatic, and domineering, and young Gertrude was somewhat eclipsed by her from an early age.

In her diary, she tells of a moment when she was nine and her mother forbade her from eating more jellybeans. “After I had gone to bed I heard Mrs. Calkin come to call with her son Bobby (my age). Next morning I screamed in dismay. ‘Where are all the black jelly beans?’ ‘Well,’ my mother said, ‘I offered the dish to Bobby, and he picked out all the black ones.’ ‘Well,’ Gertrude quipped, ‘I’m glad I sucked them all first.’”18 Gertrude spent her young life being shuffled from dancing lessons to cooking lessons followed by Sunday school and church. Her mother, Jane, became a Christian scientist and, in Gertrude’s own revealing phrase, “it became the most important thing in her life.”19 It would be fair to say that the snarky young Gertrude felt resentful of her mother and her repressive, restrictive, and, often, judgmental parenting style. The family grew up in Gertrude’s father’s hometown of Aledo, Illinois, but soon moved to Berlin, Illinois so Jane could study voice. When World War I broke out, the family returned to Tom’s hometown of Aledo, something Getrude described as “scary.”20

There, in the “near-Mississippi River town,” Gertrude, “lived in the gabled house her grandfather built.”21 She continued to feel repressed by both her mother and her domestic duties. In 1921, she explained in a note that she went to “become a campfire girl. I chose the name Hanawen because it meant butterfly. I did all the dishes for a week—to gain points. My mother and I both got tired of the whole thing. I quit.”22 Gertrude wouldn’t be set free that easily. She also recalled in a telling anecdote a moment she went to fetch a dreaded mop from the third floor of that gabled home. “I could feel pity but not too much compassion,” Gertude explained, “when I went to…get the dust mop from Mum and Auntie Beat and Auntie Beat met me outside the door and I looked inside and there was Mom praying behind the bed.”23 Cleaning and prayer were punctuated with moments of blissful freedom as well. It is these memories of Aledo that she holds on to most. It is this place of refuge that she paints in Out in the Country. It was a place I was starting to adopt as my own.

At first, I imagined myself alongside Gertrude in that expansive, Aledo field. I saw us as the sort of long, close friends that could be together without speaking, respecting how silly or meaningless any words would be in such an Edenic place. We had nowhere to hurry to next. But, quickly and seamlessly, I became that woman, floating on the grass, full of my own certain power. I had no one calling my name, no students pinging me, no cleaning products in reach. As I became her, the house, where I’d spent so much of my time for the last several years, turned into a vague box in the distance. I was instantly free of that domestic space and the duties which came with it. I felt myself exhale. My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched. I was lost in the grass, as carefree as a hen as it pecked for the next piece of the countryside. It was cool there, and breezy in my billowing, blue dress. My thighs had room to breathe, and the wind blew up my dress and between my legs as I smiled upon all that was around me. From where I sat, I looked across and acknowledged the forest’s deep and mysterious power. I appreciated the secret world it held there. I didn’t need to know it or expose it to the sunlight. There was a sweet melancholy around me, the same kind that gives birth to good ideas and stories. In my future, I saw many of them: stories on top of stories, so many I couldn’t recall all their names. A writer’s dream.

In college, Abercrombie had her own ambitions of becoming a writer, motivated by the urgings of her professors and her love of romance languages and letters.24 Soon, she found herself drawn to the free play that painting seemed to promise her. She returned to Chicago where she began at the Art Institute and found a job painting gloves for department store advertisements, before admitting herself that her “gloves didn’t look like gloves.”25

Gertrude found her footing in Chicago’s blossoming no-jury open-air art fairs, democratic events meant to connect new and burgeoning (often untrained) artists directly with their buyers. Abercrombie thrived in these populist outdoor gatherings, noting, “I met every kind of person there. We were all happy and everybody helped everybody else. I got to know the world at that fair.”26 The connections she made there led to dear friendships, solo gallery shows, and continued sales of her work. They also led to an appointment with the New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Approached by a committee, Gertrude was asked to produce twelve paintings a year, for which she would receive $94 per month. The paintings would be hung in schools, museums, and libraries.27 "That gave me a big start and a boost,” Gertrude said in a radio interview. “God bless Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We all worked hard. We really worked from morning till when, well, whenever we got up. ... It just saved some of our lives and it started me on my career.”28

This appointment allowed Gertrude to move out of her repressive parents’ home and into her own apartment with a full-time job. There, she never cleaned. Her friend, writer Wendell Wilcox, “always imagined her disappearing into the pile of clothes, rags, and liquor bottles that cluttered her first apartment.”29 She spoke to her mother very little and was well on her way to freedom. It was 1935 though, and her meeting with Gertrude Stein, that Abercrombie marked as the birth of her artistry. Stein, age 61, had published her most famous work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, just two years prior and returned to America after thirty years as an ex-pat. On the shores of New York, Stein transformed from “from curiosity to celebrity,” in the eyes of the American public, and embarked on a lengthy national lecture tour as a sort of hero.30

“Thornton Wilder [writer] was my friend who introduced me to Miss Stein. He had requested that she visit the university for a series of lectures and critiques. Everyone came with their little poems and stories to read her. I came straggling in with armloads of paintings. She was surprised. I was surprised she didn’t criticize the story I was trying to tell in my pictures.”31

There, Stein told young Abercrombie of her paintings, “They are very pretty but girl you gotta draw better.”32 Abercrombie summarizes the moment more lightly in her autobiographical papers, writing, “Ms. Stein looked at Gertrude’s paintings and encouraged her to paint more and paint more neatly. Gertrude Stein helped her to realize many things about herself. She wanted to paint more than ever.”33 She went home and painted a piece that would win her first place and a $100 prize at the Art Institute of Chicago. She continuously told and retold this story, identifying it as the true beginning of her career.

It was this exact mix of conditions—meeting Stein, being granted permission to be an artist, gaining a room of her own, navigating the nostalgia for Aledo—that converged to form Out in the Country. Bathing in Abercrombie’s cool blues and lush, poignant greens, I began to think about granting myself the permission I had been seeking. All my life, I’ve felt the need to earn my hours of creativity. I had to help others with their writing before I could indulge in my own. My work always came dead last. It wasn’t for lack of commitment or desire, but rather born out of a severe lack of self-esteem. What right did I have to feel good, I often thought, during this life here of mine? I was meant to be useful; that’s where my worth could be found. It had always felt safer to give and help and please endlessly, only to feel entirely depleted in the end. What would it mean, I started to wonder, to pour some more of this energy into me?

Gertrude Abercrombie got married the year after she painted Out in the Country, also to a successful man named Bob. Her daughter, Dinah, was born two short years after that. There was more cleaning than ever, but she relegated most of those tasks to Bob whenever he was home.34 “Our life is pretty dreary now,” she explained in her diary, “mainly because Bob has taken a war job making bullets and fixing the machines from 4 to 12 at night. He gets home at 1 and sleeps ‘til 9 and away to the office to practice law until factory time. I see him practically not at all…I keep real busy with Dinah most of the day and get in an hour or two of painting. The evenings are the worst,” she finished, “for I am tied down with Dinah and never get out.”35 Amongst Getrude’s memorabilia, I found a little sheet of paper from Dinah with a blue, bonneted duck in the corner.

“Oh dear mommy, I love you so, so much. I am glade [sic] you washed my sox.”36

These words hit me hard in the chest. Would this be enough? Would it be the pouring I had dreamed of, or a mere drip during naptime? I thought about morning sickness, gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, postpartum, and peri bottles. I thought about my Bob, how good everything is between us, even when snaking the drain, and how badly I want it to stay that way. I saw before me a vast expanse of time, blue-green and lush like Gertrude’s grass, and I realized then that there was nothing stopping me from seizing my future except for me. And then I saw it: a faded, little card made out of paper, another gift from Dinah to her mother, Gertrude. “Mother’s Day Book,” it said, “only for mothers.”37

I couldn’t help but take a peek inside, curious if I’d find the secret to motherhood without having to go through it. But there was only an unfinished table of contents and a child’s squiggly, pencil scribbles within it. Like the secrets that lurked in Gertrude’s woods, I would have to be okay not knowing.

So, I made my own vow to the doctrine of Individuality and to the Gertrudes: Stein, Whitney, and Abercrombie. I would no longer make myself earn creativity or play, squeezed in-between moments for others. I would stop seeking validation to carry out my craft and, ultimately, give myself permission to be a writer. As I wrote this essay, I imagined myself making the vow all over again with every word. It’s the most powerful I’ve ever felt.

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When I lie down on calm evenings, I engage in a brief exercise. I remind myself that any home I see while I’m asleep– absolutely any home–is open for me to enter. The door won’t be locked. No one will be inside. There won’t be a mother tending to a back-garden or an infant gazing up at a mobile. In my dreams, all the homes belong to me. Every single one. 

I’ve been a fairly successful lucid dreamer ever since I was a kid. I realized then how often I woke up during dreams and was able to manipulate my surroundings. A good girl in a sea of better ones, I unleashed energy and behaviors in my sleep that would have gotten me into heaps of trouble had I tried them during the school day.

At some point, I even learned to fly. It was a slow process at first where I often fell back down to the ground. I had to flap my arms feverishly to begin flying, and I was rarely able to flap fast enough. My heavy weight would pull me back down to the ground and each frantic flap was helpless to counteract it. The laws of gravity still applied. 

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I don’t know when I noticed it, but eventually, I caught on that the only times I was able to fly were the times I believed I was going to leave the ground. This wasn’t a situation where I could say I believed while harboring a sliver of doubt. I had to be unequivocal. When I flapped my arms, I would lift off the ground. That was the logic of the dream—just like the laws of gravity.  

When I began to see success, I quickly got cocky. In heated moments of battle, I’d take to the skies, at times waving at my foes from up above. Gone were the days of being chased by monsters or unimaginable horrors through slim, winding hallways. For many years after learning to fly, I feared no one and nothing. 

There was a night not too long ago when I tried my old trick. As I was being pursued by a masked man through an endless yard of shipping containers, I turned around, waved, and began to levitate with a smile. I was somewhere through the first layer of clouds when I saw something I never had before: across the way, ascending rapidly, the masked man flew to my position in the air, stopping with accuracy as soon as he reached it. Our eyes locked. There was a heavy drum beat from down below. The dream had adapted. 

I grew tired of the skies. More and more, I longed to escape into one of the many homes that littered the streets and rolling hills of my dreams. There, I find cities full of looming high-rises, charming cafes, and bridges into rambling downtowns. There are oceanside dwellings made of white stucco and cedar. There are curved glass windows and wraparound porches and ivy that hangs off new bricks. There’s a sprawling green pavilion dotted with sparkling lakes, a necklace of beautiful homes strung around each one. 

I tried to enter one of these homes. It had glass for walls and a hidden driveway that I had to zigzag down. The sun was streaming into the front in several long, certain beams, and I followed them straight to the door, which I was surprised to find locked. I wandered around the rest of the neighborhood, admiring the green lawns and the sprinklers that wet them, hoping nobody would stop and say I looked lost. I started to sweat. A loud family cannonballed—one by one—into a liver-shaped pool. 

I eventually did get inside a sleek, black home that was as long as some homes are tall. It had a row of windows that faced the morning sun and new countertops and appliances inside—all gold and silver. They glinted in the sun in a way that seemed real. I ran my hand along those new countertops, and my fingers came up dusty. Staring at the whitened tips, I started to panic. Perhaps, I had mistaken this scenario for a dream. I heard metal clinking softly in a nearby doorway, and my heart dropped into my stomach. Shocked faces met me in the doorway, and I woke up with a start. 

As I came to, I saw that it bothered me—at least a little—that my fear, paranoia, and people pleasing tendencies followed me to my dreams. My envy, too.

I’d spent a good chunk of my life lusting after a home and wondering if I’d ever own one. There were many public years where I thought a home might solve everything. A perpetual renter, I never fully moved in anywhere. There were stacks of paintings that hadn’t seen a wall. Was this new habit of mine, this adult version of flying, born merely out of housing insecurity? Or, was part of me angry that the homes within my very own mind also belonged to someone else, inhabitants I viewed as more deserving, even there? 

As a “peak millennial”—born in the July heat of 1990—I was destined to compete with throngs of my well-parented peers: first, for reading scores and participation trophies and, later, for jobs, apartments, and spouses. Together with babies from 1991, we formed a storied “micro-generation,” large enough to influence products, ads, and entire markets. Perhaps, the sprawling kingdom of the peak millennial reached even into my dreams, where I’d become buried in selfies and self-care and sourdough and “starter” homes that turn into “forever” homes with the next dip and dive of the market.   

Could I ride the wave there? Would I find the groups of girls—the ones I’d been chosen by? Yes, they had chosen me. They welcomed me into their soft folds. They liked my hair, they said, and asked where I got my tights. It was warm in the glow of their favor. They would pass me a hair tie, their broken strands all over it. It would scratch and gnaw at my wrist, but I wouldn’t dare take it off. Was I meant to fight them—for opportunities and technology, toilet paper and Popeye’s chicken sandwiches?

Years before, I stood in a heated bathroom in an exes aunt’s house in North Carolina. She had a daughter around our age and, as the eldest, she got the biggest room after the master. There was a large, pink bed in the middle of it and a balcony hanging over the pool below. She could reign over everything from a table up there. It was all fantastic, really, but it was the bathroom that had me. So much privacy, I thought, running my hand along the clean tile. A big, pink bath with a fountain for a showerhead above it. A fluffly rug. The walls and counters littered with every product a young girl needs. Who would I be, I asked, standing in there too long, if I’d had just a corner of it?  

Who knows. In my dreams, the doors slide open. The A.C. hits me square in the face. The fridge is full and so is the medicine cabinet—with all my old favorites, too. The sheets are always cool when I slip in between them.

If I come across someone, I gasp and step back with my hand tight to my chest.

“What are you doing in my house?” I ask, horrified, without a part of me that isn’t.

They look embarrassed, red racing to each cheek, before they turn down the long driveway and disappear into the trees.

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I recently graduated with a Master of Arts in English and found myself asking: now what? In the spring of 2022, I matriculated with a desire to re-enter academia, perhaps to teach, and certainly to contribute to the field of writing studies. Six months later, ChatGPT made its debut, and I saw the fallout from a multitude of perspectives: as a tutor in the writing center, as a T.A. in a political science class, as a graduate assistant for Writing Intensive Curriculum, and, finally, as a student myself. I watched esteemed scholars, perhaps some of the last humanists who will hold tenure-track jobs outside of elite universities, go the way of AI quickly or ignore its arrival altogether. I watched my classmates and students use it with glee and knew I’d be hopeless to stop them. 

For me, a deep loss of faith began to set in, even before the New Yorker declared, “The End of the English Major.” The arrival of such skilled large language models seemed to be the death knell for a field desperately struggling to hold onto relevancy amid program closures and declining enrollments. I couldn’t justify spending six or seven years in a composition doctorate program to train for a job that wouldn’t exist by the time I finished, as much as I believe in both the humanities and higher education. I’d still like to get an M.F.A and teach creative writing, but I’ll need the publications and portfolio to do so, and I know it will involve about as much luck and grit as publishing a novel does. So, here I am, writing. Right now. 

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I’m lucky to live in the age of Substack where, outside the academy and its selective journals, a lively conversation is taking place that I’m anxious to join. I’ve been grateful to learn and glean inspiration from Marc Watkins of Rhetorica and Jeanine Oullette of Writing in the Dark, two of many wonderful Substack publications that I see engaging in the worthwhile work of writing about writing. It was a recent post and a specific quote of Jeannine’s that resurrected one of my favorite topics in writing and a famously slippery one at that. It is a topic that I think has important implications in the age of machine writing, and it’s none other than voice.  Jeannine wrote:  

...I teach passionately toward the art of doing language in a way you haven’t done it before. I don’t believe you have just “one voice.” I believe we have a right and maybe even an obligation to explore a multiplicity of voices—voices we get to listen for and sing into, voices we get to sand down, fire up, or drag out of the shadows. Voice is an instrument. It plays more than one melody. Otherwise, what’s the point?

First of all, it’s full of voice itself. It’s really this phrase here –“voices we get to sand down, fire up, or drag out of the shadows”– that’s unique. It’s a melodic and appealing juxtaposition of polished (its syntax) and gritty (its word choice). It makes me feel like I know Jeannine and as if she’s speaking directly to me.  When it comes to voice, we tend to know it when we hear it, and that’s what’s happening here. 

When Jeannine writes about voice as something one “sing[s]” into, she echoes one of writing studies' strongest and beloved voices–Peter Elbow. In Writing with Power, Elbow wrote:

If we want to be heard we are limited to our single note. If we want to sing other notes, we will not be heard. And yet, if we are brave and persistent enough to sing our note at length—to develop our capacity for resonance—gradually we will be able to "sing ourselves in": to get resonance first into one or two more frequencies and then more. Finally, we will be able to sing whatever note we want to sing, even to sing whatever note others want to hear, and to make every note resound with rich power (282). 

“Resonance” emerges here as a powerful synonym for voice. Voice does something rather than simply being something. Elbow has also used the terms “juice,” “sincerity,” “electricity,” and “mother’s milk” to describe voice, the quality which makes writing unique, believable, and memorable. Elbow saw voice as the living, spoken-aloud embodiment of a text’s written words. “Of course written words are literally silent,” Elbow acquiesced, “but it is possible to learn to write language that readers actually hear in their minds... Readers usually experience “audible” voiced writing as clearer than writing they don’t hear” (7). So, writing that’s thick with voice is not merely more entertaining and pleasurable, it’s also better at carrying meaning. What more could one want? 

Well, a fair amount, said the critics. I. Hashimoto called the zealousness around voice “evangelical,” and traced its roots to religious texts and figures who “heard a voice” in the wilderness or from God (71). There also seemed to be a spiritual process of discovering one’s voice–or perhaps singing into it–which only came to “true believers”  (72). Hashimoto argued that such talk and writing, the kind that’s dripping with voice and sincerity, might not be suited to all writers or situations.

Not everyone watches Jimmy Swaggart on Sunday mornings and not everyone needs the same kind of spiritual comfort, feels existential pain, needs a weekend soul-boost to carry him/her through the rest of the week. Likewise, not all students come to composition class stunned, in pain, feeling the frustration of writing dead prose, experiencing the loneliness of the unvoiced, the depersonalized, the mechanical. Not all of them see the power of writing coming from "voice." (Some, in fact, want to write voiceless academic prose, get their transitions right, their introductions direct and straightforward, their message clear) (74).

When he writes of “voiceless academic prose” with its correct transitions, perfectly placed thesis statements, and clear and straightforward introductions, I think of the type of writing that ChatGPT is very skilled at. This is the type of writing that many students will now be using ChatGPT for as they move through classes and majors, whether we like it or not. I suspect a lot of us will be using it as well for our work duties: reports, cover letters, emails, lesson plans, etc. I can hardly blame us, or them, though I spent far too much time doing so over the past year. 

In an effort to befriend the bot, I recently sat down and asked ChatGPT-4 if it had a voice, and I was a bit surprised by the answer and exchange that followed.

Yes, even as an AI, I have a voice! My voice is designed to be clear, informative, and engaging. While I don't have personal experiences or emotions, I aim to communicate in a way that is helpful, friendly, and respectful. 

While my voice might not have the same personal touch as a human writer's, I aim to be consistently helpful and engaging in all interactions.

Interesting, I said, ignoring the obvious redundancies. When you refer to the "personal touch" of a "human writer," where do you think that comes from?

The "personal touch" of a human writer comes from several unique aspects of human experience and individuality, including personal experiences, emotions and sensitivity, cultural background, individual personality, creative imagination, writing style, and values and beliefs.

This combination of personal experiences, emotions, culture, personality, imagination, style, and values makes each human writer's voice distinct and memorable.

In a sentence that was, well, a little sad, I asked: 

Is that why yours doesn't have the same touch?

Yes, that's correct. My voice doesn't have the same personal touch as a human writer's for several reasons:

Lack of Personal Experience: I don't have personal experiences, emotions, or a life history to draw from. My responses are based on patterns in the data I was trained on rather than individual experiences.

Emotional Depth: While I can simulate understanding and empathy, I don't actually feel emotions. This limits my ability to convey the same emotional depth and authenticity as a human writer.

Creativity: My creativity is derived from the patterns and information in my training data. While I can generate creative content, it lacks the personal imagination and originality that a human writer brings to their work.

Cultural Nuances: Although I have knowledge of different cultures, I don't belong to any particular culture. My understanding of cultural nuances is based on the data I've been trained on, not personal experience.

Individual Personality: My responses are designed to be neutral and informative, without a personal touch or unique personality. This makes my voice consistent but less distinctive compared to a human writer's individual style.

Values and Beliefs: I don't have personal values or beliefs. My responses are designed to be objective and unbiased, which can sometimes make them feel less personal.

I found this exchange rather fascinating. I liked that ChatGPT (despite its love of lists and patterns) had such a strong understanding of both voice and its own. I’d heard people describe ChatGPT as “bloodless,” “mechanical,” “cold,” and as “the absence of a voice” but I don’t think that quite captures it. I do think ChatGPT’s own explanation is a fine one. I liked that it acknowledged the constraints and limitations of its voice, and the myriad, diverse places a human voice derives from. It’s a sort of social constructivist, Bahktinian point. And, lastly, I liked that I felt a strange sort of empathy for this AI creature without a culture or voice that would ever be as good as a human’s. It brought on a familiar but strange and melancholy feeling, like the one I felt reading the creature’s passages in Frankenstein. 

I looked upon them as superior beings, who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour, and afterwards their love. These thoughts exhilarated me, and led me to apply with fresh ardour to the acquiring the art of language. My organs were indeed harsh, but supple; and although my voice was very unlike the soft music of their tones, yet I pronounced such words as I understood with tolerable ease (94).

In perhaps one of my favorite lines of the masterpiece, the creature says: “my voice, although harsh, had nothing terrible in it” (110). To me, ChatGPT is a sort of Frankenstein story where the technology reflects us as much as the creature reflects Dr. Frankenstein. It learned to speak articulately. It became persuasive, even sincere and full of emotion. It’s the creature’s voice which seems to make him human, rather than the other way around. According to Baldick, the “monster's most convincing human characteristic is of course his power of speech” (45). Harold Bloom arrived at the same conclusion, writing that Frankenstein’s creature is indeed more “intellectual and more emotional” and “more human than his creator” (613).

So, for today, ChatGPT is adept at the “godlike science” of language, but it has a ways to go when it comes to a memorable and unique voice (Frankenstein 91).  Someday soon, it might be trained in the gift of eloquence and sincerity, and we’ll find ourselves debating its humanity, which will ultimately serve as a reflection of our own. Until then, machine writing and the story of Frankenstein show us that voice is real–not just something English teachers reach for in the dark–and that it’s an important part of what it means to be human. Perhaps, more than how we appear or behave, it’s the most important thing of all.

Perhaps, too, it’s something worth defending. When I look at the recent diss track battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, I see voice at the forefront. In “Taylor Made Freestyle,” Drake used AI to manipulate his voice to sound like both Snoop Dogg and the deceased legend Tupac. Reactions to this ranged from giggles to pure outrage. On “Euphoria,” Lamar asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Am I battling ghosts or AI?” In other words: did you get ChatGPT to write this? It was a joke at best and gravely disrespectful at worst. In front of a packed Compton crowd on Juneteenth, speaking of Snoop, Tupac, and their voices, Lamar asked an important rhetorical question: “Oh y’all not gonna let nobody mock and imitate our legends, huh?” (59:07). The crowd’s response–a roar of applause and screams–was deafening. So, we still care about voice, authenticity, the speaker’s ethos, and the human behind the words. It’s something we’re willing to fight (and dance) for. 

That’s why I think voice in writing is more valuable than ever, despite the skepticism. Perhaps I’m a zealot, but I think writers and audiences alike will be searching for memorable, unique voices amongst the sea of AI-generated essays, books, songs, and films. I think those that are able to sing their notes into resonance will be all the more valuable in an environment like this, and we ought to spend more time fostering voice rather than correcting it. I’m reminded of a letter Raymond Chandler sent to his editor, which happens to be my favorite definition of voice, and which blows ChatGPT’s analysis and phrasing out of the water. Chandler wrote:

By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proofreader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street between.

If I think of anything, I'll wire you.

Eyes wide open. I know it when I hear it. I’ll know it if you change it. I’m interested in writing pieces that have it. I’m interested in reading pieces that have it. In Jeannine’s words: “Otherwise, what’s the point?” 

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And then I sunk deeper and deeper into substance abuse. At some point (I’m not sure when), I was forever locked out of my Bard inbox where those comments lay in wait. I do remember a nagging voice, very deep inside, reminding me to fetch them and save them before they disappeared forever. There might have been an old macbook (since dead) that at one point housed them. At a certain point, both them and I were gone. It might have been around the very same time. 

I couldn’t read Mona Simpson’s Lawns, one of my favorite American short stories, without experiencing side stitches and pangs of regret. Don’t even get me started on how I felt throughout the entirety of Anywhere But Here. She’s a miraculous writer of American families: imperfect, often traumatic, always intimate. She writes real women with real voices and stories that disturb and disrupt and, sometimes, disgust, though they’ve likely happened, not long ago, behind a white picket fence near you. They’re the kind of stories I wish I wrote. Her comments may have been able to help get me there.

Like many of the feelings I didn’t know what to do with, I stuffed them down for a long while. They rose to the surface, ten years later, when I got clean and enrolled in a graduate program in creative writing at Salem State University. There, in poet Amy Minett’s class, we were tasked with an assignment that brought everything back to the surface. We were to take an old work of ours, annotate it as our current self, and rewrite part of it for credit. I’m often ashamed I needed an assignment to revisit Adeline, but in the words of the great Peter Elbow, teachers “are good at making you write when you don’t feel like it, simply because they have authority. Instead of resenting it, try internalizing it and appreciating it for what may be the most important skill of all: the ability to write when you are in the wrong mood.”1 I’ve tried my best to listen. 

I started working on that novel again and presented my rewrites in class. Amy told me that she believed that revisiting this work would encourage me to write something new and, when she said it, I didn’t believe her. For so long, I hadn’t allowed myself to move forward, forgive, and write a new ending or story. I’d rewritten Adeline a thousand times, almost as many times as I’d tried to get clean. Though I knew I could do it, the best thing for me was to find a new story to tell. So, I read. I waited. I took long walks in the sun and got my hands dirty planting carrots.

Six months later, I finally wrote one, a Bolano-inspired short story called Felix and the Flying Tiger, and won “Best Essay” at the conference I presented it at. It was a new beginning, and I allowed myself to claim it rather than question it. It was wonderful to have my words reach an audience (finally!) but it was evidence of that newness that meant the most to me.

I’ve written many pieces since then. I’m now in my last semester, about to graduate, and editing my capstone manuscript with scholar and non-fiction writer, J.D. Scrimgeour. The capstone process has brought back many feelings from that last semester at Bard. Of the nine pieces I am preparing to submit, I’ve received several rounds of edits and feedback for each. 

J.D.'s comments, which can reach into the tens on a single page, are wise, thoughtful, and scrupulous. In many places, they perfectly echo the voice in the back of my head as I read that tells me, “this is what you need to do.” Then, there are the more difficult ones where he urges me to “spill the beans,” when I’m either protecting or forgetting details entirely. Sometimes, it takes weeks for me to accept them. I might even resolve or delete them, taking back my artistic agency, before I allow his words to break down within me and get absorbed. The ego starts to shut up. My instincts and gut take over. Then, I’m taking a walk outside, a woodpecker is hammering incessantly, a car drives through the puddle at my feet, splashing me, and it hits me. He was right. All along. That is what I need to do. Back home, I do it. 

In an email last week, I wrote to J.D., “I'm getting a bit overwhelmed but I'm reminding myself I can keep working on these after graduation and I'm proud that I've taken in all your comments and appreciated them instead of how I treated Mona's.”  I have not applied all of his feedback, but I have made sure to save them it in multiple places all over my computer and google drive in an attempt to avoid the past. In any case, it makes me feel better. 

I still hear my best friend’s voice in the back of my head sometimes, from a day when she called me in the middle of the pandemic as I lay in the bathtub. 

“I still think there’s merit there,” she told me of Adeline. “There’s something there.” 

And I agree with her. The problems seemed to come, though, the more I held onto that work, clawed at it, obsessed over it, and refused to write anything new. If you’re anything like me, and there’s a creative work haunting you and preventing you from moving forward, this is your permission to banish it, let go, move on, and find a new story to tell. We are so much more than one piece, one work, or one time in our lives.

I finally reread Lawns last week. It was beautiful, as good as the very first time, and only hurt in the ways Mona wanted it to. I’ll take it.

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I’m really proud of this little ode to Borges that I wrote after reading The Garden of Forking Paths alongside Althusser and Saussure. Give it a read and let me know what you think. Thank you to Bridgewater State University’s The Graduate Review for publishing the piece after I presented it at a conference and won “Best Essay.” A big thanks to Kevin Carey, director of creative writing at Salem State University, and Stephenie Young, artist and professor of comparative literature at SSU.

Read and download here.

I look forward to sharing more fiction and non-fiction here with you in the future.

Until next time,

Maryellen Groot

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