Dead Girls

by Alice Bolin

  White Is for Witching is just as fanciful and indulgent and insane as it sounds. It proliferates indecisively with references to myths and fairy tales, not sure if Miranda is a wicked witch from Western fairy tales or the soucouyant, the evil hag in Caribbean folktales who eats children’s souls. She is either Alice in Wonderland, Eurydice, or Narnia’s White Witch. Or she might be an inversion of one of these familiar stories, a princess trying desperately to escape her fairy godmother. All of these narratives lay claim to Miranda’s body, saddling her with the impossible weight of her people’s ugly history. It’s a cautionary tale for white women about what fairy-tale princesses actually inherit, another variation on “you break it, you bought it.”

  I didn’t intend for this to become a term paper about how modern campfire stories about ghosts and witches have their roots in colonial guilt. The political—and yes, feminist—implications of fairy tales and ghost stories have, I think, been adequately established. But it still stands that some of our greatest writers, especially those who are interested in the problem of womanhood, have invented some of the weirdest witches and the angriest ghosts. Beloved is a book I would futilely argue about with kids at the boarding school, a work of unbelievable darkness, beauty, and complexity that languishes too often on high school syllabi. If my students were assigned a book in English class, they assumed they were supposed to slog through it and complain about it. I couldn’t believe the thematic parallels between Beloved and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, especially since Jackson’s book is often treated as some kind of quirky Goth YA, with ersatz Edward Gorey cover illustration, and Beloved, obviously, is not. But both books—through marketing and curriculum—are constantly wasted on teenagers.

  In Beloved, Sethe escapes from slavery with her children, but she brutally murders her older daughter when she is caught in the North, both to spare her child the fate of slavery and to escape having to return herself. For years after that, her house is racked by her child’s ghost, “full of baby’s venom,” a torment that stops only with the appearance of a mysterious young woman. Sethe takes her as the second coming of her dead daughter, whose tombstone read only Beloved. Morrison’s Beloved is a tragic and potent Dead Girl as she dogs the mother who murdered her for a decade and eventually comes back to claim her.

  It is a fair question whether Sethe is supernaturally haunted or psychologically haunted by the traumas she witnessed in slavery and the crime she committed to save her children from that same pain. She seems to be living within a sleepy shadow world thick with memories, symbols, magic, grief, and desire, especially in the house that she does not let her eighteen-year-old daughter, Denver, leave. Denver is the only person who has stayed with Sethe, cleft to her by necessity and fear: her grandmother is eight years dead when the book opens, and both of her brothers have run off. The symbolic significance of the house in Beloved is foremost as a womb for Denver’s perverse prolonged gestation. When Paul D, whom Sethe knew in slavery, sees Denver, he says, “Last time I saw your mama, you were pushing out the front of her dress,” and Sethe says that she still is. When I read the novel, I am drawn to Denver more than any other character, in the same way that we sympathize with the faithful son in the parable of the prodigal son in the Gospels. There are theories about the true identity of the young woman they take to be Beloved, whether she is a demon or a runaway from a nearby town. But to me she is always Denver’s ghost.

  When the house is in the ghost’s thrall, quaking angrily, the furniture walking around of its own free will, it is the sublimated expression of Denver’s rage at her mother. When the grown-up Beloved comes and devours Sethe’s life, she is the full embodiment of Denver’s love and hatred and want. The narration says that “years of haunting had dulled [Denver];” this is meant to indicate Denver’s being haunted, but it leaves the semantic possibility that she is also doing the haunting. There are indications that Beloved and Denver are shades of the same person, like when Beloved is staring at her reflection in a pond, and Denver’s face joins hers in the water. “You think she was sure ’nough your sister?” Paul D asks Denver after Beloved is gone. “At times I think she was . . . more,” she says. It is only once the dark emotions that have helped hold Denver hostage are released, once Beloved and Sethe are “locked in a love that wore everybody out,” that Denver can make her escape into the outside world. Stories like Beloved and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are about how the rhythms of households can hold people like gravity. Denver must find a way to break her orbit around her mother, her binary star.

  In Beloved, Morrison writes about how, after the Civil War, freed black women created makeshift households, “configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men.” Women’s lack of mobility is our weakness and our strength: we even now find it difficult to escape abuse and dysfunction, but we create networks of protection, rooted and secret. Morrison’s novel is a testament to how black women authored the survival of black society after slavery, founding a matriarchy on all the violence and terror they’d been subjected to.

  Sethe relies on the kindness of other women, like the poor white woman who massages her feet and helps to deliver Denver in the middle of the forest. Her neighbors cast her out after she murders her daughter, essentially isolating her and Denver in their house, but in her final showdown with Beloved, the community of black women are the ones who come to Sethe’s aid, assembling to chase Beloved off. The women sing, “building voice upon voice . . . a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.” These women love and protect their pariahs, recognizing them as essential elements in life’s daily rhythm.

  In Morrison’s other most famous novel, Sula, when the title character returns to her village, she is instantly met with suspicion for having left, for being unmarried, independent, and educated. But her unwholesome presence, witchily announced with a plague of robins, immediately has a moralizing effect on the community. As they take part in rituals of “counter-conjure” against Sula’s powerful magic, they also begin to “cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes.” Morrison identifies this productive scapegoating as a kind of equanimity in the face of both happiness and tragedy from a people who had weathered one calamity after another, for whom “plague and drought were as ‘natural’ as springtime.”

  This spiritual equilibrium, a way of thinking much older than Christian ideas of darkness and light, produces all the twinning in these witch stories, women finding their equal and opposite halves: Denver and Sethe, Constance and Merricat. In White Is for Witching, Miranda starts dating a girl she meets at college named Ore who is ethnically Nigerian but was adopted by white parents. Although she is infatuated with Ore (literalizing the feeding theme in the book, she says she wants to eat her), Miranda’s curse usurps their relationship. Ore seems to develop an eating disorder, too, and grows thinner and thinner, and when they go home to visit, Miranda’s house is affronted by Ore’s presence and tries to drive her out. One can read the book as a fairy tale about a girl, Ore, trying to escape the grips of a hungry witch, Miranda. In Sula, the best friends Sula and Nel share in their magic, too. As girls, they perform an intricate spell in which they dig holes in the ground with twigs and then bury bottle caps, cigarette butts, and other trash, and then, just after, they accidentally kill a tiny neighbor boy by flinging him into the rushing river. It’s an indication that they are possessed of something powerful and dangerous, that they might be violating some social order with a “friendship [that] was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s.”

  In adulthood, Nel is lured by the call of romantic love, finding in marriage not an uncanny closeness but the gift of someone who “saw her singly.” Sula’s magic grows big on its own, effecting strange calamities and luring men away from their wives with her pow
erful beauty, a birthmark looming over her eye looking either like a rose or a copperhead snake. Sula sleeps with Nel’s husband out of a perverse desire to be close to her, mistakenly thinking that they still shared everything. Their friendship is over after that: Sula dies young, and Nel grows old, haunted by her grief over her lost friend. It is difficult not to feel for Nel, who rejects her friend and her truest self in the process, collaborating with the rest of society to cast Sula out. If we expect women to enforce societal rules, their ruthlessness is a kind of survival, too.

  I’ll reiterate: it is upsetting, all of these imperfect or failed strategies for living while female. Sethe eventually finds redemption and freedom in romantic love, but Miranda dies, and Sula does, too. It’s clear that if both good and bad witches are going to find ways to survive, their methods will not always be ones we approve of. Toward the end of her life, Shirley Jackson became so agoraphobic that she could not even leave her bedroom, and she wrote, shortly before her death, a novel that glorifies the agoraphobic instinct, about two sisters who are rightfully terrified of the outside world. In perhaps the most subversive element of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Constance and Merricat live happily ever after. Merricat is afraid of the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of growing up, but she thrives in the daily and weekly circles of domestic time: routines of meals, chores, seasons. At the end of the book, she and Constance live and eat happily, harmonizing with their garden’s growing cycles and consuming the talismanic preserves Constance buried in the earth. They are village legends: the townspeople tell one another scary stories about Constance and Merricat eating children, and they bring offerings of food to quell the sisters’ anger, performing counter-conjure like the neighbors in Sula. The sisters become more witchy than ever before, hidden and alone in their spooky house on the edge of town.

  As Washuta writes, she learned from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid “that romance hinged upon the girl’s physical transformation to fit the prince’s notion of perfection.” When she was a little older, she learned how to enact that kind of transformation in teen magazines, which “seemed to follow an editorial assumption that every reader dieted, even if the practice was a passive state set in place by default.” Those same teen magazines are where I first read about RavenWolf and her spells for teen witches, as if their only purpose was to provide more or less desperate remedies for teen-girl neuroses. In seventh grade we had to write down our worst fear, and I wrote “school shootings” and then quickly erased it, afraid someone would see and, deeper down, that writing it would make it come true: even seeing the words was scary. At that time, and before, I would write my anger and my self-hatred in my diary and then I would go back in later and destroy or deface the pages, sometimes writing mocking marginalia like I was my own bully. I was afraid to make my darkness real by writing it; reading my own dark thoughts was both embarrassing and rife with talismanic power. Revising my diary was a ritual to carve those feelings from myself, protecting my inner life even in a space that was supposed to be secret.

  One of RavenWolf’s protection spells is the “Chameleon Spell,” to make the teen witch disappear. It is a meditation exercise, in which the spell caster must memorize a magic poem, “then practice making the edges of [herself] fuzzy while chanting the poem.” This spell is, in other words, the same thing that girls do in hallways, classrooms, and walking down the street: close their eyes and pray to be less conspicuous, less exposed. This is why We Have Always Lived in the Castle’s fairy-tale ending is so moving. Jackson’s weird sisters achieve what every teen witch seeks: if not love, at least invisibility.

  And So It Is

  The reality soap opera is a form that has been unfairly ignored by our popular critics. Even the masterpieces of the genre have not received their due, no in-depth analyses of the narrative techniques of Jersey Shore or Laguna Beach or The Hills. After the age of eight, when my parents made the questionable decision to allow me to have a TV in my room, I spent hours every day watching anything the pioneering producers at MTV found fit to put on the air. I was obsessed particularly with the classic The Real World, the first modern reality show, where attractive twentysomethings with widely varying lifestyles were forced to live together and got in constant, inevitable fights.

  My uncle bought me a book about The Real World from Barnes & Noble and I studied it purposefully, preparing myself for when I turned eighteen and I could audition to be on it, which had quickly become my greatest dream. The book helpfully included the actual questionnaire that potential cast members had to fill out, including questions like “How important is sex to you?” and “What are your thoughts on affirmative action?” which I, as an elementary schooler, answered to the best of my ability. But beyond its most famous reality programming, MTV has made more addictive and sublime reality shows than I can list, including Rich Girls, in which Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter and her best friend want to start a charity to give the poor used mattresses, and Sorority Life, where producers got a bunch of random co-eds to rush the only sorority at UC Davis that would agree to be filmed. I watched these shows with fascination as a tween, particularly because, if you are not very familiar with the effects of alcohol, the way that drunk people act is upsetting, confusing, and mysterious.

  Despite being tacky artifacts of Bush-era cultural cravenness, these shows do a surprising amount to interrogate the concept of “reality.” It is common knowledge that every stilted, mesmerizing minute of The Hills was scripted for the cameras, its stars eventually acting out fictional feuds and relationships, their daily lives and experiences no longer having any impact on the direction the story lines took. Even with shows that are less staged, the disturbing fact is that a reality show changes its stars’ lives more than their lives change the show. Jason Wahler, who starred on both Laguna Beach and The Hills, has said that he became an alcoholic on the set of Laguna Beach, a show following a group of rich high schoolers in Orange County. He went on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew to deal with his addiction five years later, adding a new narrative of “reality” to lay over his real life.

  At the start, E!’s short-lived 2010 reality show Pretty Wild was a completely generic specimen of the reality soap opera. The show follows two teenage socialites, Alexis Neiers and her sister Tess Taylor. Neiers is baby-faced and vapid, whereas Taylor is a year older, sexier, and more world-weary. The girls are trying to start their modeling careers, dreaming of being in Playboy just like their mother, Andrea Arlington Dunn, had been in the eighties. The show has countless silly reality TV setups: Tess goes on a lackluster “date” with singer Ryan Cabrera, who has been courting girls with reality shows since 2003, when he dated Ashlee Simpson at the time of her MTV series. (He was also one of Audrina Patridge’s love interests on The Hills.) The girls gamely play up their shallow, ridiculous personas for the camera. Neiers talks about how she is eager to be in the music video for Mickey Avalon’s new song “Rock Bitch.” “It says in the song, ‘sliding down from heaven on a stripper pole,’” she says. “And I was like, ‘That’s totally me!’”

  The family’s weirdo factor is their mother’s wacky spiritualism. Their house is decorated with three-foot Buddha heads, and Dunn says that she’s designed her homeschooling curriculum around The Secret. The family prays incessantly, ending each prayer with the affirmative “and so it is” instead of “amen.” Dunn is often shown wearing the earclips that go with her “frequency meter.” This might have been all the show was: Playboy, vodka cranberries, The Secret. But three events changed the show’s course and its destiny, making it a significant artifact of Hollywood crime history and a testament to the competing realities of “reality,” journalism, and film.

  The first was the revelation, shortly after the show started filming in summer 2009, of Neiers’s involvement in the Bling Ring, a group of L.A. teenagers who over less than a year stole more than $3 million of goods from celebrity homes, including, fittingly, Audrina Patridge’s Hollywood Hills mansion. The second was Ne
iers’s arrest, in 2010, for possession of heroin, the yearlong stay in rehab that gave her health and sobriety, and her admission that during the filming of Pretty Wild she “had an over-$10,000-a-week drug habit,” “smoking twenty 80 mg oxys a day” and “doing tons of cocaine.” The third was the film based on the story of the Bling Ring, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, which bases characters on Neiers, Taylor, and Dunn. The show forms part of the Bling Ring story’s first draft, and it is a source of documentary evidence that others telling the story have relied on; Coppola’s film faithfully reenacts long scenes from Pretty Wild. But the show is not a documentary, and especially with Neiers’s later revelations, it is interesting particularly for what it invents and leaves out. Since the Bling Ring has been depicted in so many genres, the show is a study in reality TV as a form of fiction.

  Pretty Wild makes for uncomfortable television: the real strife in its subjects’ lives resists the conventions of staged reality TV, a form that is placid, awkward, and artificial. At times the staged scenes spin out of control, as the family’s problems assert themselves unexpectedly. In the last episode of the series, the producers broach Neiers’s addiction lamely, with scenes of Dunn finding a bottle of Xanax and a sleepy-looking Neiers walking around holding a blanket. Dunn says that Neiers has been acting strange “for the past two days.” She must have been aware of Neiers’s substance abuse before then, considering that by Neiers’s later account, when the show wasn’t filming she was “living at a Best Western on Franklin and Vine” because of her drug habit. During the episode, Taylor, Dunn, and Neiers’s younger sister, Gabby, decide to have what they call “a little intervention.” But the intervention escalates scarily and unexpectedly. Shortly after their supportive opening comments, the family starts yelling at Neiers, following her as she runs through the house and saying, “You are a drug addict!” and “You are crazy!” “Everyone saw Anna Nicole like this, too,” Dunn says to her. “And look at her now.” That hits so close to the reality of Neiers’s drug problem that I find myself hoping it wasn’t in the script.