Where there are fairy tales, there are often forests; where there is American Gothic, there are also forests. Laird Hunt's recent In the House in the Dark of the Woods fuses these traditions, yoking "Hansel and Gretel" and "Little Red Ridinghood," in particular, to Gothic narratives of witchcraft and Puritanism--especially Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." (One of the characters turns out to be named Faith...) Most of the plot, which as we discover near the end actually begins in medias res, is told in the first person by a young wife known only by her wifely identity, Goody. Goody lives with her clearly abusive husband and possibly autistic son in an isolated cabin, although close to some of the "first folk" who still occupy the nearby lands. Her wanderings through the woods lead her to three women: Captain Jane, a mysterious woman in a magical cloak and affinities with the wolves; Eliza, a beautiful young woman (or so, at least, she seems), who is for seem reason trapped in an Edenic house and lands (or so, at least, they seem); and Granny Someone, a stereotypical witch who sends Goody on a classic fetch quest. All three of these women are under the power of a mysterious being known only as Red Boy, who controls not only the woods, but the very identities of all three women: "We are all what Red Boy has told us we are," Captain Jane tells Goody (loc. 1220). The reader up on their colonial America will expect that Red Boy, a competitor to God, must be Satan, although the novel never quite affirms that interpretation.
I'm going to talk about some key aspects of the plot, so let's go below the fold.
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SPOILERS
One of the novel's techniques for producing disquiet, it seems to me, is in its deconstruction of a certain interpretation of witchcraft: one that reads witches and their practices as a proto-feminist, or at least liberatory, alternative to colonial religious culture--one that also positions witches as closer to the land and the indigenous peoples. On the one hand, the novel adopts the classic Gothic convention of splitting domesticity apart from safety. Every home in the novel provides cover for brutality: Goody's mother brutalized her father within their home, and Goody's own husband beats her, ties her up, and eventually throws her out of the house (which, it turns out, is where the novel truly starts); the male singer kidnaps children and imprisons them in his basement, for reasons I'll discuss in just a moment; Eliza's house in the woods is under a glamour, and Eliza's goals in courting Goody's company are not what they seem; Granny Someone threatens Goody once she has entered her house; and Eliza/Faith domineers her husband once she returns home. Notably, what appears to qualify all of these women for their brutal subjection to Red Boy is their status as domestic murderers, as all have killed at least one member of their family. But on the other hand, leaving the dangerous confines of home leads to neither liberation nor community, female or otherwise. The women contribute to colonial violence, as opposed to somehow countering it. When Goody points out to Captain Jane that a potentially friendly first-folk man had been chased out of the woods by a mysterious swarm of insects, Captain Jane coldly responds that some "need to be shown that they don't belong here. That it is no longer their woods. Not any more" (loc. 458). The colonists do not seem to find Red Boy in the forest so much as they bring him, and he is not an alternative to domestic abuse but the supernatural embodiment of it. (Each woman has her own version of Red Boy that corresponds, in some fashion, with her psychology; Goody's Red Boy is a half-robin, half-man, with "arms as large as a man's, as my mother's" [loc. 1800], who reenacts her husband's and mother's violent assaults.) And Goody's experiences with the three women turn out to be a trap. Eliza/Captain Jane/Granny Someone are not individuals so much as roles, the rough equivalent of the Triple Goddess, through which women can, if they desire, progress during each phase of their subjection to Red Boy. Far from offering Goody freedom from her husband in the woods, as the plot leads the reader to expect, the current Eliza seduces Goody into taking her place (and thus freeing her from the house). This betrayal turns out to be just one more aspect of the violence characterizing the triad, as Granny Someone is a cannibal (hence the kidnapped children in the basement, the payment for a magical gift of musical talent) and is herself killed by the wolfish Captain Jane. While members of the triad certain cooperate at various points, their friendship is fraught and conditional at best. In fact, Goody's betrayal occurs at the moment when she returns to Eliza's house, believing that she has finally found "a friend for this earth, for these long days" (loc. 1791) and promises to stay forever. Female friendship turns out to be the entry-point to yet more violence, not an escape from it.
A number of critics have been unhappy with the epilogue, in which Goody's son embarks on his own heroic fairytale quest: “I have a knife and am going to find Mother in the woods and I will bring her home and I will not be weak” (loc. 2057). And it's true that Hunt's goals here are not entirely clear. The boy's epilogue clearly harkens back to the novel's first chapter, in which Goody sets off to find berries--the references to "weakness," sunlight, the stream, the forest, even the word "clear." For that matter, Goody invokes a figurative knife. But this a young boy, not a woman, and while he has engaged in acts of minor violence (tantrums, biting), he is obviously not equivalent to the previous travelers. Knives have appeared throughout the novel, primarily as killing tools--for killing pigs, men, and, indeed, Goody's own mother. Yet it's women who wield the knives, not the men. When the boy picks up his mother's knife, then, and voluntarily goes to the woods, does he break a cycle? Or, in assuming that his mother wants or desires rescuing, does he perpetuate one?
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