In the interests of trying to improve my own short story writing, I am reading two collections by women writers I revere. The first is Claire Keegan’s Antarctica (1999). A few months ago I read ‘Foster‘ on the recommendation of a writing friend. The story was originally published in the New Yorker, and Keegan, as I understand it, later developed it into a novella.
The story, written from the point of view of a young girl, is set in and around a farm in Wexford, Ireland. I loved the story because of what it left unsaid. The girl is staying with an unfamiliar aunt and uncle (the Kinsellas) to give her pregnant mother a rest. Initially the stay seems idyllic, but as time goes on, the prose illicits apprehension, concern, and the sense that all is not what it seems. We can only know what the little girl sees and hears. Is the little girl safe with the aunt and uncle?
I feared the worse. Why did they want to look after her? What were they going to do to her? That scene when she sits on her uncle’s knee? A moment of gentle kindliness and affection? Or something sinister? The shock of discovering the Kinsellas’ past, when it is finally revealed, was unexpected and horrifying. I, as many readers no doubt did, went back to reread the work looking for the foreshadowing, the subtle hints and gestures. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, deserving both of several reads and the accolades it’s received.
With this in mind, I started on Antarctica and the short story that gives the collection its name. The writing is spare and tight. I was pulled in straight away. A happily married woman wonders how it would feel to sleep with another man. She sets out to find a stranger to have sex with. She finds one, they have sex, and all is well. Until it isn’t. And he turns out to be a monster. He ties her up, imprisons her, and degrades her. I was disappointed and surprised.
We are now more than twenty years on since the story was published. But I wonder if Keegan would write it in the same way today. The story is beautifully crafted. The collection went on to win prizes. But for me, there’s already too much male violence against women where women are degraded and defiled without having to read about it (or watch it in tv series or movies where the violence is clearly gratuitous and misogynist). No matter how good the writing is, I cannot read this type of story for entertainment.
Which leads me into my own writing. I noticed recently, when writing scraps and fragments from prompts, generally with friends in cafes, that I often write about coercive control. It doesn’t generally involve physical violence, but manipulation, humiliation, verbal abuse and gaslighting are regular themes. When I realised I was doing this I was spooked. What was I doing? And more importantly, why was I doing it?
I looked back at the work to check my representation of women. I threw some of the writing away. I rewrote other pieces. I empowered the female character, or switched the roles, or transferred the violence from the individual to a corporation or the state. But some of the work I left untouched. Is writing about coercive control any different to my discomfort around the story of a man locking a woman to a bed with handcuffs (in Keegan’s ‘Antarctica’).
Perhaps. Coercive control, now a criminal offence in the UK, is a relatively recent arrival in public conciousness. Literature and other media have a role in building both awareness and understanding of how this control manifests, particularly from women’s perspectives. For example, coercive control became a topic of national conversation around 2016/17 when the BBC ran it as a slow-burn story line in The Archers. So writing fiction about this abusive behaviour may be enlightening. It may speak to people caught up in these behaviours, or people who are yet to understand what it entails, or people who are simply looking for a different perspective.
If this is the case (and I’m not simply justifying my own hypocrisy here) it raises two questions:
- Am I up to the task of crafting literature that people want to read around this difficult and sensitive theme?
- Why do I find myself writing about it continually, irrespective of the original prompt?
Today is not the day to answer these questions. Today is a day to continue through the second slim volume of short stories I’m reading to improve my writing; Deborah Levy’s Black Vodka (2013). I am only four stories in, but my writing crush on Levy, developed after reading The Man Who Saw Everything, remains pure, loyal and wondrous.
The image (cropped) is taken from an article in the Toronto Star on 19 July, 2016.
SANDERLINGS 