Author Q&A (short 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?”

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 had 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”.

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 conversation.

Q. What is The Castle: Diary of a Lost Woman about?

A. It’s a cosy Gothic read. 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.

Q. Where can we access your book?

A. You can buy it on Amazon as an eBook and paperback. You can also borrow it on Libby. 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!

Q. Who were your literary inspirations?

A. It’s a pretty simple story. 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. I 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.

Q. What are your thoughts on misogyny in Gothic fiction?

A. ROSALIE: 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: But then everything in Frankenstein is about men birthing creatures, 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".

ALANA: 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. It’s like they couldn’t conceptualise themselves as the main character [in their life, or in their stories], and it’s so sad.

ROSALIE: So sad. 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 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.

Q. What is your message to readers in this book?

A. We seem to want to make female-presenting heroes broken. 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. I’m so sick of that, 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.

Q. How did you tie this approach into a Gothic horror genre?

A. Lots of older Gothic literature suggests it’s because [the characters] 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. 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.

Q. How do you address superstition versus logic in the real world within your book?

A. ROSALIE: 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. 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.

ALANA: In the fictional village in your book, 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". Were you also basing that on the real world when writing?

ROSALIE: Yes. [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? 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."

So you can embrace all these beautiful, amazing, dramatic things 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.

ALANA: Yeah, without killing people.

ROSALIE: Without killing people! We don’t have to kill people to continue to live [in the village]!

Final thoughts

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.