no subject

[lotesse]

Baby Jane plays the Cinderella playbook in the wrong key, and it gives you the tools you need as a reader to understand the shape of this story, the way that meanings will continue to hit. We're in the Gothic, all right, and a fairy tale, too, but don't think we're doing pretty melodrama or smooth romance. This one, the first chapters tell us, is going to be messy.

Baby Jane should be Cinderella, but her relationship to the house is all wrong. I saw a genius gifset on Tumblr of shots from the Disney Cinderella emphasizing the way that Cindy is threatened by/absorbed by her house, as both a prison and a Sisyphean housekeeping task. Jane doesn't take well to the subservient role, prettily keeping kind and keeping house as a good Cinderella ought. She's angry, resentful, unattractive. She's friends with the servants, but not like Sarah Crewe, or other nice little poor girls in other books.

She's just such an outsider, at Gateshead with her relatives, and after. Houses in literature can immure, but they also protect, and Baby Jane gets none of that. The intense episode with the Red Room exposes her to a Gothic that rapidly becomes expulsory, not imprisoning at all. Which is more horrifying, her story asks us, to be enclosed as a good girl in a looming house, or to be sent away from the house as a naughty girl, made homeless? Neither is great.

This tension, I think, is basically going to structure the whole rest of the book. And, I think, that's why it's essential that Jane be herself, small, poor, plain, an outsider, no fairy story's heroine. She lacks melodramatic oomph in either direction, neither the sweet golden girl heroine nor an intriguing, empowered "dark woman," not a sexy-crazy nymphet or a motherly "little woman." All of those figures cause the story of the relationship between Girl and House to settle into a interpretable meaning pattern, as if there's some sort of easy solution.

It's clear to me why Baby Jane appealed to me when I first read this book as a teenager myself. Now that I'm older, I think she continues to come to my mind because of her connection to the unsolved/unsolvable feminist problem of The House, that you don't want to eat you, or take away your edge, but you do want to shelter you. I haven't solved that problem myself. In this moment of self-recovery after pandemic and quarantine, it occupies me very actively.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Fascinating! I was heartbroken by her cold childhood and thrilled by her courage. I had never read a book until then with such sadness inflicted on a child and it made a huge impression on me. The memories of reading about her and her one little doll are very vivid.

[sophia_sol]

Which is more horrifying, her story asks us, to be enclosed as a good girl in a looming house, or to be sent away from the house as a naughty girl, made homeless?

oh wow, yeah, I'd never put those thematic parts together to notice what it's doing, but this is so clear now that you've pointed it out.

A lovely, thoughtful post on this!

[staranise]

Oh, YES. I am bouncing in my seat. I just read so much frigging meta about gothic house tropes in The Locked Tomb, and now you're turning the whole subject to an entirely new angle that I wasn't thinking about. Houses are.. I'm looking for a word and can't find them. The opposite of a symbolic sword. Not the thing through which a character has agency over the world around them; the place, the labyrinth or oasis or cultivated garden, in which they can (or can't) mediate how the outside world has agency over them. A bit of a prism.