Author Q&A (long version) - R.A. Wodecki on rejecting misogyny in Gothic fiction
(Images: supplied by R.A. Wodecki)
Content warning: mention of sexual assault/rape
Many of us know that sinking feeling of flicking through a classic Gothic horror book and realising: “This story has been great, but why is there so much misogyny?”
Can’t we have the spookiness without demeaning female characters?
There are exceptions, of course - I’m looking at you, Shirley Jackson - but misogyny is just so prevalent in the genre that finding a book free of it is often a pleasant surprise.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why, when I heard R.A. Wodecki promote her novel at the Writers SA winter speed book launches back in July, I knew I wanted to say hello.
When I walked up to her book table and introduced myself, she described her novel to me as “a Gothic horror with rosy bits, and without the misogyny”.
R.A. Wodecki was, in that moment, another pleasant surprise. She was an author who shared with me a refreshing perspective on what Gothic horror should be.
A couple months later, we sat down to have a conversation about this, and about how it influenced her first novel, The Castle: Diary of a Lost Woman.
Here’s a peek into that very conversation, starting right in the middle.
What is The Castle: Diary of a Lost Woman about?
I’m laughing at one of Rosalie’s comments when I realise I haven’t checked the time in a while.
“I’m just going to check what the time is,” I say, reaching for my phone. Wow. It’s been half an hour since we started talking, and I haven’t even asked her the most essential question.
“If you could briefly describe your book to the people who will read my blog, what would you say?” I ask.
She stews for a moment, hand going to her bright, chunky necklace. How to consolidate years of work into a few sentences?
“It’s a cosy Gothic read,” she says.
“Two women get this mysterious email from Romania … and it invites them over to find out what happened to a relative of theirs that’s related to the fictional vampire hunter Jonathan Harker.
“So they head off to Romania and to this castle, and then very Gothic things happen.”
I clap my hands in delight at this last bit and she laughs.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes they do.”
Who were your literary inspirations?
It becomes clear very early into the conversation that we’re both absolute Gothic literature nerds.
“I wanted to start off by asking how you got into Gothic literature, and about your writing inspiration,” I say, hitting record on my phone.
“It’s a pretty simple story,” Rosalie says. “I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”
“It’s such a phenomenal piece of literature that is also science fiction and also Gothic, and it was just a day where instead of reading a book and thinking: ‘I wonder how they do that, I wonder what makes them want to sit down and create this world,’ I read that and went: ‘Oh, I can imagine writing this book.’
“Her story put me so much in the middle of her world that I felt like I could walk around in that world and I could write that story.
“Not because I thought her craft was easy, but because I thought I could exist there and create things.”
‘So … it’s like you felt at home?’ I ask.
“Very at home.”
She tells me she was also inspired by Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings.
“There’s a scene where there’s an angelic beast … and there are broken, Gothic stained glass windows all around him … and she wrote it so accessibly but also lushly,” she says.
What are your thoughts on misogyny in Gothic fiction?
Since the book launch in July, when Rosalie said her book was a Gothic fiction “without misogyny”, I’d been wanting to ask about her thoughts on the topic.
“Were you going into this thinking: ‘I love Gothic fiction but it’s pretentious and misogynistic and I want to do it differently?’” I ask.
I’ve barely finished my question before she cuts in with an enthusiastic: “Yes.”
This will be a passionate conversation. “I want to hear more about that,” I prompt.
“Well, where do I start?” she says, pausing for a moment.
“Mary Shelley’s craft … lots of the time when they contextualise it they mention [Percy Shelley]. I don’t want them to. She wrote the book, she had that moment.
“But people say: ‘Well she wrote the book within a year, how could she have written it in a year… of course she could! It was a stormy night and she’s surrounded by poets and inspired and she wrote it. It’s from her head.
Rosalie later tells me that she wrote the majority of her book in two 12-hour Writers SA lock-in sessions, so it is definitely possible for Mary Shelley to have written a book within a year.
“But then everything in Frankenstein is about men birthing creatures," Rosalie continues.
"So it’s almost flawed in that it’s science fiction, it’s about creation, but it’s like: ‘We don’t need any of you women, we’ll just sort that out on our own and find bodies and stitch them together’.”
I cut in here. “I find it so interesting with female authors way back when [and sometimes still today], because they’re an author, they’re pioneering, but they still think a man has to be the main character,” I say.
“It’s like they couldn’t conceptualise themselves as the main character [in their life, or in their stories], and it’s so sad.”
“So sad,” Rosalie agrees.
“And that’s why I’m a bit delighted with how [my book] ended up.”
“I started trying to have two female mains, and then someone said: ‘No publisher will pick that up’.
“I think now, I still would’ve done it, because I don’t care.” I love her attitude.
“I always wanted for most of the oxygen out of someone’s mouth to be a woman, and most of the conversations to be [between] two women,” she says.
And that’s what she did.
What is your message to readers in this book?
This question - or rather, Rosalie’s answer to it - sticks with me the most out of everything we talk about.
“When you were writing this, did you want it to be purely fiction, or were you trying to make a comment about society?” I ask.
“Both,” she says. I can’t hide my satisfaction.
“I’m an English lit major,” I tell Rosalie, laughing.
“I love that stuff. I’m always thinking: ‘Tell me about the commentaries about society. I want to know what the messages are. I want to know what the themes are.’ So, yeah, what message were you trying to convey?”
She smiles, thinks again for a moment. The smile turns into a frown.
“We seem to want to make female-presenting heroes broken,” she begins.
“That’s [supposedly] the only way we can make a strong, feminine-presenting character is to break them first and we so often do that by chucking in a history of being raped, if not actually have it in the book.”
In my head, I’m taken aback by this. I’d never realised just how true what she’s saying is.
From Alex Stern in Ninth House to Miranda in All’s Well, a lot of my favourite female-presenting characters are broken or damaged in some way - and they are depicted as interesting because of that.
“I’m so sick of that,” Rosalie continues: “Because that’s not fair, even if that’s reality for lots of humans, and it is.
“Can you give me a world where that’s not true? And actually represent these strong characters who are just strong for the virtue of strong?
“And that doesn’t mean they’re unflawed; they are flawed, real humans, [who don’t] have to be crushed by the universe to achieve it.
“That’s my main thing that I wanted to talk about through Anna and Catalina. I wanted their strength to be their friendship,” she says.
How did you tie this approach into a Gothic horror style?
“I like the ambiguity of Gothic literature,” I tell Rosalie.
“You know, are they just having a breakdown and imagining things? Or, is there a supernatural force at play?”
“Yes, I absolutely wanted that!” Rosalie chimes in.
“Lots of older Gothic literature suggests it’s because they were not sane, and that’s fine, but again, we don’t always need to break characters.
“There’s pressure people can be under without having to be diagnosed and they can go through horrors and come out a changed person, but not a broken person,” she continues.
“The perception I wanted around one of those characters was: ‘Is this person experiencing these things, or are they under some sort of mental stress or strain, or maybe is there something magical, or is there something else that I can’t see?’
“And I wanted to really work on the ‘I can’t see’, because the ‘I can’t see’ lets you decide if it was magical or if it was her senses being so heightened that she cannot logically think anymore.
“I Definitely wanted to play in the world of what is real and what isn’t, and I wanted to see what people thought about who’s the monster in this book.
“What’s the monster? Who’s the monster? I want to have people think about it and tell me what they think the monster is. I don’t want to tell them … the reader gets to choose who the monster is,” she finishes.
How do you address superstition versus logic in the real world within your book?
Rosalie has worked in a variety of fields throughout her life, from education to forensic medicine. I wanted to know how that influences her writing.
“As someone who has worked with scientists and is also into Gothic literature, were you trying to address science versus logic in the modern day?” I ask.
“Yes, definitely,” she answers.
“You don’t necessarily need to be a scientist to know that your phone is not magic.
“Your phone is not magic, you know it’s not magic, but do you know how microchips work? No!
“But someone does, and there are people out there who can explain it to you, and create it, and they are not magicians.
“So, in the modern context, we function around magic all the time. But it seems like magic if you present it to [people from] the past and that’s a beautiful, logical mind coping with what actually doesn’t look natural, and they do that in that book,” she says.
This leads us to talk about the fictional village in The Castle.
“You’ve got these younger people in the village saying: ‘We don’t have to stay here, we don’t have to keep doing this. We can leave.’ They're going: 'Reject tradition, embrace modernity'! And the older people are saying: 'No, this is how it has to be,'” I say.
“Were you also basing that on the real world when writing?” I ask.
“Yes,” Rosalie says.
“[The old people] are living in a place which has these centuries old stories … and they have so many of these stories that they’re living under the tropes set by them.
“And the young people are like: ‘Could you just not?’” She laughs.
“We have enough history and we have enough knowledge that we can weave it into our present. We don’t have to sit in your past and never grow."
That’s a beautiful idea, and it rings true for the creation of Gothic literature, too. We don’t need to sit in its misogynistic past; we can embrace a more inclusive present - and still make it just as eerie.
“So you can embrace all these beautiful, amazing, dramatic things,” Rosalie continues, “and still grow and make space for modern thinking and less-isms.
“We don’t have to hold onto the -isms, we can actually let that go and still embrace all that story as well and bring it forward.”
“Yeah, without killing people,” I interject.
“Without killing people!” Rosalie cries. “We don’t have to kill people to continue to live [in the village]!”
We both laugh.
Final thoughts, where to access the book
This was only a small slice of our conversation - I would have loved to include Rosalie’s self-publishing journey if there was time - but I still find it so thought-provoking.
Modern authors like Rosalie are bringing a fresh perspective to Gothic literature.
Gothic literature can be spooky without demeaning female-presenting characters.
It can present strong female friendships and still put its characters through perilous situations.
It can be ambiguous without always breaking female-presenting characters through sexual assault.
This isn’t to say that works of classic Gothic literature aren’t brilliant - they are - but modern Gothic literature is moving on.
To wrap it up, I’ll leave you with Rosalie, who’ll tell you where you can access her book, The Castle: Diary of a Lost Woman.
“And because I’ve got global rights [to the book], I’ve got friends who’ve bought it overseas and total strangers who’ve bought it overseas, and people in Australia - and oh my goodness what a beautiful sentence, that’s so fun!”
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