My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen

Got me looking so crazy in love

I received an ARC (publishing 14 May 2024) for this novel the morning before my flight to Bali, so it arrived at the perfect time.

Now this is a real gothic sapphic novel. It doesn’t just have gothic packaging (crumbling house, sexually repressed women, etc) but substantial, meaty, juicy ambiguity and a true-blue lesbian protagonist. Not to mention, postcolonial critique that I will admit is out of place in a novel that mimics the 20th century form (too much self-awareness), but which I found nevertheless charming. We’ll never go back to the past, so why bother even trying to create an ‘authentic’ representation? I think we should just play with what we have and retroactively lend a voice to the minorities from that time. It’s not like their perspectives were given much thought or documentation in the annals of literature.

Having just read ‘The Girl and the Ghost’ by Hanna Alkaf, I was given whiplash by this novel’s version of a girl and her ghost. Roos Beckman has spent all 21 years of her life knowing nothing but starvation, exploitation, and abuse by her guardian, a woman who makes a living by pretending to be a spirit medium. Roos is the key to her success as Roos has a real spirit-companion who can crawl into her mouth and possess her, lending her supernatural strength and stamina. She was bound to this spirit when she was a small child and accidentally flicked some blood onto the creature. Since then, this spirit has been her protector and only friend. Interestingly, the language used suggests a bond that borders on romantic—at the time, Ruth says, “You need never be alone again now, Roos. You have named me and let me drink from you. We are wedded to each other now, you and I. You’re my helpmeet and yokemate, and I am yours. I shall keep you safe.” Roos also describes Ruth’s actions as finding a someone “to love and hold.” Definitely sapphic, no matter how you spin it.

Roos recounts her story to a Doctor Montague, whose job is to assess whether or not she can be deemed mentally fit to be charged for murder of Agnes, fifteen years older than Roos, recently widowed, and of Javanese descent (she identifies as Indo). Agnes took a liking to Roos and took her in because Agnes also has a spirit-companion, whom she named Peter Quint (as in, from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw). The way both Roos and Agnes love their spirit-companions is beyond rationality, possibly manic, almost as if these spirits were vital parts of themselves and they could not carrying on living without them. I guess if you really wanted to, you could say that it’s the manifestation of the split between the Ego and Id, similar to another classic like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Of course, you can also agree with Montague/ the rest of society and see them as figments of a very lonely imagination. What’s attractive about this story is that you’re invited to renounce the safe and conventional in exchange for the improbable and extraordinary.

Montague’s reports of their sessions intersperse Roos’ narrative and show us how she responds to his attempts to pick apart her recount. Montague’s questions often reek of misogyny as he seems to be trying to trick her into revealing her insanity or deviance and his psychoanalytical influences lack any subtlety. For example, he asks Roos if being possessed by Ruth “brings [her] pleasure” or “arouses [her].” His reasoning is that she used sexual imagery:

“Possession as penetration. The salty taste as you swallow her down, the need to submit or else bleed and be in pain . . . Any psychoanalyst would conclude that Ruth is your love object and you wish to have intercourse with her, to put it bluntly.”

The funny thing is that Roos and Ruth are both women, or at least coded as women, and Roos especially has only ever had any kind of physical reaction to Agnes, never a man, but Montague is unable to envision love between women as anything more than a warped expression of heterosexuality. There is absolutely nothing remotely heterosexual between Roos’ bond with either Ruth or Agnes. He is simply projecting a tired fantasy of the hysterical woman seeking the phallus onto her.

We come to see Roos’ strength of will when she repeatedly resists these attempts to pigeonhole her into the Mad Repressed Lesbian box. She also accuses Montague of deliberately sexualising her words and turning his accusations against him: "It’s nothing like that, and you’ve a filthy mind for thinking it could be . . . Would you have intercourse with your mother, Doctor? Or with your sibling?” If Montague can certify that Roos is schizophrenic, she will be acquitted, but if he finds out that she is merely a consummate liar, she will stand trial for murder.

The twist, when it comes, brings to mind the incestuous undertones of 18th century gothic fiction (‘Castle of Otranto’, I’m looking at you) and which was recently made lurid in Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Crimson Peak.’ I do think it possible to read incest and inbreeding as metaphors for racism and exclusionary politics—these white people want so badly to consolidate power (and in this case, land rights/ property/ the right to existence) that they end up imploding. Willemijn exemplifies this as the infant she conceived with her own brother dies within mere hours, after which she requires a hysterectomy that renders her barren and the damage from which ensures she is terminally ill.

The key question in this novel is the same as in Henry James’ work: so are the ghosts real or not? Are they symbols of societal dysfunction that results from patriarchy?

Montague seems to think that they are definitely the result of untreated psychosis. Even when Roos says that Willemijn also saw her brother’s ghost, Montague believes that they were simply having a shared hallucination since Willemijn was doped up on morphine and the other two were crazy to begin with. There is some evidence to support this: when Agnes and Roos take medication, they become unable to see their spirit-companions anymore. This does suggest that the spirits never existed in the first place. Roos rebuts this by saying that there are pills that can make you see spirits, so pills making you unsee them does not prove their non-existence.

At the same time, there is also evidence to suggest the contrary. A lot of stuff happened that does not seem possible without supernatural help. We’re talking about three women, one of which is a skinny waif, one is middle-aged, and one is one cough away from dying from late-stage tuberculosis. How would they be able to move so many life-sized stone statues across the estate grounds all by themselves? How would any of them be able to break off pieces of it and throw them through the windows? Lastly, after Roos is the last one standing, how would she have the strength to transport Agnes’ corpse all the way across the forest to the bog? We read previously that Agnes is much taller than her and her head only comes up to Agnes’ sternum. There is no way Roos can carry her fresh corpse over such a long distance by herself.

The ending was more forgiving than I had expected and I was relieved to find out that Montague was not a horrible person. He really wants his patients to just be able to support themselves and live an okay life, and to that end, he gave Roos employment and allows her to keep her ghost, which in his books, is to allow her to continue to be schizophrenic and rely on her delusional coping mechanism without forcing treatment on her. I found this ending way more radical than anything else in the novel because it centred on acceptance. Not incarceration, not lobotomy, but acceptance of her condition and helping her integrate into larger society. This in turn allows Roos to continue loving Agnes into re-existence. Even if it’s not real, it’s real to Roos, and that’s all that matters.

Similar reads:
• Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (the original gothic sapphic fantasy)
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang