As anyone with the internet knows, once you start reading certain posts, ‘The Algorithm’ starts feeding you more of the same. Sometimes, however, strange stories come through my news feed that feel random… or perhaps not.
One such ‘news’ article that landed on my desk was “The most absurd female deaths in literature” … and of course, I just had to read it. As it turned out, it was slide show with about 50% information, 50% ads… but in the name of research, I pushed through almost all the slides.
First up – the ‘author’ of the slideshow wasn’t as sympathetic as I thought from the title of the presentation… there was a bit of cringe in the way that some character-perishing was worded, and some of the ways the women in the novels died was more ill-informed than absurd.
Nevertheless… Let’s have a look, shall we?
>>>SPOILER ALERT<<<
The books which I am about to refer to are all ‘old’ – but I can’t guarantee that reading this post won’t ruin the joy of reading them in the future… proceed with caution!
OK, so here’s what the website said (I don’t fully understand their logic in the order of the material, but I kept it as is, although I did skip a couple) and my feedback on what I discovered is in [square brackets]:
+ ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893) is a Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Nancy Barclay develops “brain fever” after the shock of her husband’s death. Her beautiful chestnut hair is cut off to release the fever-heat, but the article implies she still dies. [OK, so we’re off to a rough start because this is not what I discovered. Instead, Nancy faints from shock, can’t speak, is declared insane and, unable to defend herself, is accused of her husband’s murder, but is eventually vindicated… I couldn’t find a reference to her death… but there is a pet mongoose called Teddy that kept me entertained for a while.]
+ ‘David Copperfield’ by Charles Dickens: Mrs. Copperfield is described as a nagging and lazy wife, and even though her husband tries to scold her back into line, she isn’t able to recover from childbirth and passes away from her “willfulness“. [Again, this is iffy. From what I can tell, she dies from grief and childbirth complications, but I’m not up for reading the whole book to confirm.]
+ ‘Daisy Miller’ (1879) novel by Henry James: Ms Miller, a young American lady holidays in Italy and is considered both charming and crass by the aristocrats. She then has the audacity to be strolling through the Colosseum at night with a young Italian man and promptly succumbs to “Roman fever” and dies 5 days later. [Turns out this is not so mysterious, “Roman fever” was malaria, and I’m guessing James was making a morality-point.]
+ ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832) by poet Alfred Tennyson: the cursed Lady (who I’ve written about before in my post “Our Woven Selves“) falls in love at first site with Sir Lancelot, leaves her tower-prison to go find him, and dies before they can be united. Dying with a “beautiful face” was apparently code at the time for the ‘wasting disease’ or tuberculosis. [My memory is that she died because of the curse, and I couldn’t find any reference to tuberculosis.]
+ ‘Gormenghast’ (1950) by Mervyn Peake: is a fantasy novel in which the fragile and ethereal Lady Fuchsia Groan dies falling from her tower window when she is startled from her daydream by a “knock at the door“. [This does seem to be the case – more below.]
+ ‘La Bohème’ the opera by Giacomo Puccini (was based on a book written by Henri Murger in 1851): Mimi, a young bohemian living in Paris apparently passes away after she struggles to catch her breath walking up a flight of stairs. Her love-interest Rodolfo comments on her “cold hands“, and again, appears to be alluding to tuberculosis. [This I can confirm.]
There were more examples, but they seemed to get looser and less detailed as the article progressed (as if the publisher was losing interest in the fluff-piece). Examples included: ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’ (1985) by Patrick Süskind, includes several women who are killed because they “smell too good”. Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel ‘The Awakening’, has the central character, Edna, swim until she disappears. In ‘Little Women’ by Louisa May Alcott, Beth dies of being too generous with her blankets which causes her to get ill. And there was another What-the-Dicken’s: Miss Havisham in ‘Great Expectations’, the jilted lover, who wears her wedding dress for decades, and wanders too close to the candles and catches alight.
The story that I most liked, and think should have been number one on the list of unusual ways to be unwritten, was the short story ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rappaccini is a scientist who specializes in poisonous plants, and keeps his daughter, Beatrice, in a garden-prison filled with them. She eventually becomes both immune to their poison, and poisonous herself. In a very Romeo and Juliet way (or perhaps Adam and Eve), Beatrice falls in love with Giovanni, a neighbor, and drinks a potion to reverse her condition, but alas, she dies… creating perhaps the ultimate story about toxic relationships… or toxic parents… you decide.
And then I confess the ads got the better of me, and I gave up on the original article.
I found another site (FarOurMagazine.co.uk) which listed more crazy ways women were written out of novels. Although it didn’t site sources, they felt out-there enough to be real (and many seem to relate to the above). There was something in the brutal over-simplification that was (accidentally?) amusing:
- Cold hands
- Beautiful face
- Missing slippers
- Wrist fevers
- Night brain
- Going outside at night in Italy
- Shawl insufficiency
- Too many pillows
- Garden troubles
- Someone said “No” very loudly while they were in the room
- Letter-reading fits
- Drawing-room anguish
- Not enough pillows
- Haven’t seen the sea in a long time
- Too many novels
- Pony exhaustion
- Strolling congestion
- Sherry served too cold
- Ship infidelity
- Spent more than a month in London after growing up in Yorkshire
- Clergyman’s dropsy
- Flirting headaches
- River unhappiness
- General bummers
- Knitting needles too heavy
- Beautiful chestnut hair
- Spinal degeneration as a result of pride
- Parents too happy
- The Unpleasantness
Overall, I felt a strange mixture of melancholy and amusement (but didn’t want to lean too heavily into either in case I wrote myself off)… but I just had to follow up one thing further: was there REALLY a character called “Fuchsia Groan”??? Well, yes, there is, and a quick glance at Wikipedia told me:
The novel describes Fuchsia as “a girl of about fifteen with long, rather wild black hair. She was gauche in movement and in a sense ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich – her eyes smoldered”.
Fuchsia is a dreamer and a romantic, who escapes the dull pace of life in Gormenghast by reading fantasy tales. She frequently disappears into her secret attic rooms to fantasize and sulk. She scrawls on walls with charcoal and makes such wild claims as “[W]hen I am Queen, I am going to burn down the castle!”
I can’t decide if she’s quite wonderful, or slightly insane! (I’m getting Madame Bovary / Bertha Mason vibes for sure). Either way, I doubt she deserved to be tossed by the writer from a tower-window… although, it was probably a plot device in Chapter 75: she had fallen for a man of low morals (pun intended), and although he (probably) wasn’t to blame for her fall, his own position in the castle becomes precarious once she is gone.
OK, so this week has been a strange detour off the usual path of mindfulness, health and healing, but I promise I’ll get back to regular broadcasting soon!
Take care taking care out there,
Linda x
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