TW. Domestic Abuse. Helpline: 08000271234
When I was handed the WayWORD festival leaflet, I won’t lie, what first drew my eye was the ‘I Had Too much to Dream Last Night: Wine & Performance.’ Unfortunately, though, I had to deem it irrelevant to the literary world. Instead, it was ‘Women Re-written: Elle Machray and Mairi Kidd’ that rather stuck with me as an event that would be worth attending.
The drive from Edinburgh to Aberdeen was one I actually looked forward to. Armed with the Havisham audiobook, cruise control and a Lucozade, I was ready to basically sit back and relax. That was until, in typical fashion, a man in a van had the audacity to interrupt my easy-going journey. It was then I found myself wondering how women have been labelled as bad drivers. Who pushed this narrative and built the stereotype? Especially when, in my experience anyway, women are far more considerate road users. Little did I know at that point that the event would discuss one of the motivations behind rewriting historical women was the desire to break them out the boxes they had been put in.
Charlotte Havisham, in Machray’s novel, goes from Dickens’ jilted and heartbroken woman, rotting away in her wedding dress, to being business-savvy, compassionate and driven, highlighting the ways in which men have tended to diminish women’s worth in novels. Meanwhile, Kidd was motivated to address the missing (or covered up) parts of Shelley’s history that have gone unrecorded, perhaps because it might have, at the time, tainted Shelley and her family’s image. Kidd had no doubt that Shelley was a genius, but her novel Poor Creatures was about conveying the good, bad and ugly.
This raises an interesting point regarding rewriting women. There is good reason to be suspicious of the genre, given its tendency to either portray the protagonist as overly good or noble or fail to escape misogynistic tropes. Thus, the novels can be hit or miss. However, these authors showcased how, with mindfulness, care and some grit, the rewriting of women can be remarkably successful and resonate with a modern-day audience.
While discussing themes of misogyny and abuse, Machray discussed that she rewrote ‘the woman that I saw because it’s the women that I knew.’ Her novel features the coercive control exerted by Compeyson over Havisham, as well as the physical abuse of Molly by her partner. In the month of October, we are reminded that domestic abuse can take many forms, and while the world of Miss Havisham is a fictional one in a historical setting, in real life, and to this day, women lose their lives to domestic abuse. Kidd reinforced the importance of writing about the raw and dark parts of life, but doing so with care, to suit the audience while respecting the past. In this way, authors, through their novels, can reclaim parts of the history where women have been written out or falsely represented, without dressing up the past as an idealised version of events.
I drove home proud of my driving abilities and reflecting on how rewriting women’s stories could shed light on different sides of history that have previously been glossed over. And from now on, I will be digging deeper into male-centric views in novels that have dominated literature.
