15 years ago, when I first started thinking about going back to university to do my PhD, I considered studying Gothic Literature and its relationship with Gothic Architecture (both the original Medieval version, and the neo-gothic copies that were being made in the late 1800s – early 1900s).
In preparation for any future studies, (and because I discovered how enjoyable “sublime terror” could be), I read a huge amount of early gothic literature.
One of the things that I noticed then, and randomly thought about again the other day, is how much the titles of several books embraced a tenuous interpretation of an uncertain reality.
“The story of Dorian Gray” (1890) for example, by Oscar Wilde, is about a man who is able to live a sinful life but retain his innocent appearance, because his portrait-painting bears the brunt of his transgressions instead of his living self. But even if you didn’t read a single page of the story, the word “Gray” gives you a hint of a life lived in a liminal state, which is neither definitively black or white, good or evil, young or old… (a bit like my post about living in the orange-zone.)
R.L. Stevenson’s “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (1886) also implies there are two types of people, and again, the name hints at something that needs to be read between the lines; Jekyll holds the essence of a heckling-jackal, whilst Hyde is both secretive and animalistic. As the story unfolds, we discover the plot secret is that the two men are one and the same; the light and shadow of the same self.
In Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” (1847), the gothic aspects come from intermittent events; the possibly haunted Red Room, a lightening-struck tree, disembodied voices drifting over the moors, and of course the mad woman in the attic. Here, the title is subtle, but still significant, used as a foreshadowing clue. Eyre = air-heir (inheritance) = two things any orphan needs to survive.
Perhaps my favorite Gothic nightmare is one that was written with a feminist bent. It is the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s worth a read, so I won’t spoil it, but it involves a depressed young lady moving into an attic room for some “rest therapy”. As time passes, goodwill versus gas-lighting, cure versus curse, solitude as treatment versus abandonment, bedroom versus prison, all become as confusingly intertwined as the knotted-scrolls of the curlicue design of the room’s “sunny” > “jaundiced” yellow wallpaper.
At the risk of making this post a bit longer than normal, all the reminiscing about haunted bedrooms prompted me to write a migraine-related gothic short-short story of my own. First, let me say that it is genre-true in its attempted darkness, so I guess I should offer a trigger-warning and, secondly, the story is a form of faction (factual fiction – but I’m ok – truly). Lastly, remember that I’m no author – so as you read, be curious and critical, but kind…
Until next time, take care, and stay sunny, Linda x
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She woke from a dream in which her double bed was being gnawed by termites. It left her feeling incredibly unnerved, given she slept in an old bedframe made of iron. What sort of pincer-teeth must an ant have to chew through metal? A moment later, her attention shifted to her own face. The pain was still there. The pain was always still there. It felt as if someone was stabbing her in the eye. Not once, quickly and aggressively, but leisurely, with a blunt butterknife, turning it back and forth as it burrowed through the soft jelly of her eyeball and then into her brain. Her hand drifted to her face, and found, as always, an eyeball intact, no gaping-wound, no slick and bloody mess, nothing in fact, that would justify the aching.
She glanced around her gloomy 3 by 3 meter bedroom and wondered whether it was dawn or dusk. She rolled over, carefully, to avoid triggering another bout of vomiting, and read the clock. Slowly, she moved numbers around in her head until she eventually arrived at a conclusion; 40. She had been sick in bed with a migraine for 40 hours.
“32 to go”, she mumbled, acknowledging that most of her migraines lasted a full three days. There was some comfort in knowing she was past the halfway mark, and yet, the relief evaporated with the realisation there were so many more hours of agony to go.
Still lying on her side, her sore eye buried in the pillow, she blinked and heard the raspy up-down of her eyelashes; too loud. She listened to the sound of her heartbeat transferred strangely to her jawline; too loud. She heard the children next door as they arrived home from school; way too loud. She tugged the pillow over her face to muffle their joy, briefly imagining the pillow pulled further over, harder down.
Through the feathers, she heard a new sound. Subtle but persistent. It had the grind of an ancient roller-shutter closing under duress. There was no roller shutter in her loft-apartment. She released the pillow and heard the sound again, louder this time; thump, thud, whistle, whine, impossible to define, yet definitely mechanical. Or, architectural, perhaps. As if something in her room was under construction.
It was the sound of her migraine, she realized, whilst knowing that was not possible. The noise was pain itself; frustration, resistance, halting humiliation, followed by a long loneliness… and then after a brief pause it started up again. Pause and pound, pause and pound, a pulsating manifestation of her illness.
Reluctantly, she pulled herself into a seated position and tried to determine where the sound-sensation was coming from. The walls. The sound was definitely coming from behind the walls. No. Wait. The sound was not coming from behind the walls… it was coming from the walls themselves. Three of her four walls had moved closer to her bed. Her room was now only 2 meters by 2 meters wide.
A wave of nausea caused her to clench her teeth and screw her eyes shut. She waited, allowing herself to ride the wave, and then looked again. There! This time, she saw it happen; as the grating sound occurred – the walls moved. And a moment later, they did it again! In fact, the walls had almost reached her bed. In a few moments more they would be pushing against her bed… against her…
She crawled into the middle of her bed and rose into a squatting position. She was as far from the walls as she could be, when they banged into her bedframe. The thump, thud, whistle, whine, now had a new scrapey-achey edge to it as the metal bedframe began to buckle and twist.
With a bang, the legs of the bed collapsed, and the mattress folded up around her. For the briefest of seconds, she imagined herself as snug as a bug in the center of a flower, gentle petals enfolding her… but no… she was in danger… and unable to escape… the encasing-mattress was smothering her. Still, her mind rebelled against reality, and she imagined herself in a cocoon, a place of restful protection and transformative power. As she began to feel the familiar crush of concrete on skull, however, she took one last breath from within her linen-lined coffin and silently cursed the universe.
When she woke from her broken, pain-filled sleep, she was gasping from yet another nightmare in which she had been trapped in her bedroom, devoured by her own disappointment…
And yet, as she touched her face to feel the pain that was always there, she knew she had not slept for days… the horror was real.
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The Mindful Migraine 
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