“It’s a terrible story, and one way to tell it is this: two girls in love and a fog of wasps that cursed the place forever after.”
-Emily M. Danforth. Plain Bad Heroines.
There’s a line in Sally Rooney’s Normal People where Connell describes one of his professors discussing, quote, “’the pleasure of being touched by great art.’ In those words it sounds almost sexual. And in a way, the feeling provoked in Connell when Mr. Knightly kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.”
There is nothing necessarily indirect about the connections to sexuality in Plain Bad Heroines, and this lack of indirectness is what makes for what has been one of the most engrossing, twisting, romantic (and Romantic), and horrifying reads of my year. Summarized briefly, as I have been trying to do among the many friends and coworkers I have been recommending the book to since beginning it (yet before ending it, a dangerous proposition) a book split between two narratives: One the one hand the fallout at a New England boarding school in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s after the death of two girls in love at the hands of the wasps that curse the place, and the modern-day efforts to film a movie about them at the same cursed location.
What could go wrong?
Well for one, the wasps. Specifically, the eastern yellow jackets, “aggressive when provoked, relentless when defending their underground home… Most crucially for our purposes here, you should know that when they’re in distress, yellow jackets release a pheromone to call on potentially thousands of their angry friends to help them come get you.” They are this book’s ever-present, unnerving guardians, flitting about the pages (sometimes literally in illustrations), recalled and compared in metaphor and simile to rustling leaves, buzzing phones, and humming walls. They are distress incarnate, revenge in flight, and so pervasive one can’t help but feel them as the narrator describes, encouragingly, how “when you wake dry-mouthed and shuffle to the bathroom to cup your hand beneath the faucet you’ll startle to feel the flick of them about you, the brush of their wings near your ear, their sticky-footed landing in your hair, against your neck, the pulse of their buzz through these pages seeping into your skin…” I, as you all well know from my previous blog post, am terrified of all things that fly about with intent to sting, and yellow jackets are always near the top of that list.
This being said, Plain Bad Heroines serves as a fantastic kind of exposure therapy because of just how descriptive, enthralling, and darkly funny its narrator is. I think that was what first sold me on diving in as deep into the book as I did, from the admission right near the opening: “And who, you ask, am I? The voice telling you to come this way, to follow me? Some hazy apparition with a beckoning hand? A thousand yellow jackets shaped to look like a body with intention, one prone to scatter into diverging paths if provoked? I can promise you that by the time we reach the end, you’ll know me much better than I know you… Finally, let me say, right up front, how sorry I am about all the potential for puns.”
Considering that there’s a chapter titled, “Trifle with the Trifle,” and a setting named “Spite Manor,” how couldn’t this book intrigue me? The narrator remains sly, snarky, and so thoroughly engrossed in telling this wicked, romantic (and Romantic), beautiful story that you find yourself not caring in the slightest if you’re being lied to, or misled, or hypnotized by all that buzzing around you and the characters. Perhaps that’s giving the narrator too much credit, but it’s desired credit, and I feel it’s earned. Although, so far I have only spoken of the horror, the unease, and the creep.
There’re two sections of the book I use to try and sell people on it, when I discuss it with them. One more than the other, because it is just so perfectly, desperately, enthrallingly romantic and… cute. It says, in more words than others, that sense of what Fitzgerald writes about Gatsby’s smile understanding you just how you want to be understood.
“Merritt might have kissed her. I don’t know. I can’t say because she didn’t do it. But she might have. I can’t properly explain might have, either. Who could explain that? Certainly not Merritt. They didn’t really know one another. And Merritt didn’t kiss people she didn’t know. She didn’t even kiss people she did know. And she was with the Harper Harper, with all the Harper Harper neon about her, in her leather jacket, with her somehow-wave-tossed hair and her chic, baddass, but still lemon-soap ways. With her Gal Pal Annie apparently off painting into the night. And Merritt was the unknown, prickly, rapidly aging wunderkind from Connecticut in the perhaps regrettable, trying-too-hard T-shirt and dangling vertebrae earrings.
“It was like she’d already breathed too much of the movie-magic fairy dust that seems to sometimes hover over that town, and now it was in her nose and lungs, the effects of full-on Hollywood hay fever setting in and leaving her sticky eyed and brain fuzzed and on the perpetual edge of something like sneezing. Which, as you know, my dear sneezing Readers, is actually a very vulnerable state: chest muscles compressing, throat closing off, and a powerful rush of air building inside your body.
“It’s not a state you want to linger in. You just want to sneeze and get it over with.”
The other is simply the entirety of the chapter “Libbie Brookhants Takes a Bath.” It’s like a perfect, beautiful, horrific short story in and of itself.
Merritt Emmons, by the by, is one of the three titular heroines of the modern-day setting, the other being the mentioned Harper Harper (a rather astute warning of naming children after characters and authors) and Audrey Wells. Merritt herself received most of the little sticky notes I use to mark quotes I like because she is the perhaps more observant, more engrossed, and more Romantic of the characters. She embraces that sense, fully, of the ephemeral and almost exploitative nature of the everything, of the moments, the horror and the joy. It’s a uniquely relatable attitude, prickly as it makes her appear to others. Who wants to be reminded about the quest to be remembered when they’re living in a moment they feel should last forever?
There’s one exception to this, the book’s final grand theme, and one that, despite my own personal, introspective questions on the matter, I feel hesitant to touch for fear of misaddressing it. The importance of recapturing and recontextualizing history, especially the history of narratives regarding sexuality, is monumental. This I think ties as much into the romance and the horror of the book, the significance of a story like this, and the stories within it, merely existing. It can be uncomfortable, even off-putting, for some, as Merritt’s literary mentor, and a member of that wonderful Brookhants family admits fully:
“Even now, even with the book written, she’s still embarrassed by how messy and fleshy it is when I forget to keep it only in the past for her- the stink of it has her wrinkling her nose. That’s history for you, my darlings. When you dig it up, it always carries a whiff of rot.”
So, then, we can only think of the yellow jackets, “as they go about their days sucking sweetness from the rot.” We are left with a sweet-smelling, beautiful, haunted, rotting book surrounded by a swarm of yellow jackets, beckoning us in. Maybe now that it’s over, I will smell orange blossoms, mashed apples, and woodsmoke (although right now I’d kill (maybe) to smell anything), or hear buzzing in my walls, or the tune of Annie Lisle out my window. I’ll also recommend this red-covered book (smile, dear Readers) to tons of people not only for its voices, but for its romance, its horror, its sublime relatability and purpose, and its fascinating take on what exactly composes a story.
In that sense, I’ll also offer the same encouraging warning given to Merritt Emmons on her writing project (and my favorite line of the book):
“’Come now, dear,’ Elaine said. ‘If you’re determined to sail such ruinous waters you might as well boast about the voyage.’”