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May. 5th, 2022 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWhen I went home a few weeks ago, I brought Dana Lyons' The Tentacles/Spin the Web Tight (a two-novel anthology) with me as my emergency Gothic, which I had picked up a few years ago in a used bookstore for the princely sum of one dollar a few years ago because the cover looked like this and I had to know:
I was disappointed to discover that the tentacles were entirely metaphorical; or, rather, to be more specific, the tentacles were misogyny all along!
The Tentacles opens with heroine Hilda, having had a rapturous whirlwind romance and marriage, meeting her husband's amiable fun-loving father and cold abrasive status-obsessed mother for the first time; in a surprise twist, she starts to bond with her rude and socially awkward but overall well-meaning mother-in-law while realizing that her father-in-law is, like. always around? ALWAYS around?? talking about how his wife and Women In General have ruined his life and it's a little uncomfortable??
After the mother-in-law dies, the father-in-law convinces Hilda's husband that he's simply desperately in need of company and the family must come back to live in the family mansion with him, after which he gradually begins maneuvering the situation so that Hilda's life becomes more and more constrained while her husband happily quits his job and plays golf and drinks at the country club.
The portrayal here is so interesting because, like, it's a truly and genuinely terrifying portrait of gaslighting and erosion of autonomy and the ways that men close ranks against women, it was really very effective for me, And Also the life that Hilda desperately loved and is desperate to get back to is being a suburban housewife, with her husband miserable at a job he hates that he goes to for eight hours every day BUT leaves her alone in her own space so she only has to prepare one big meal for dinner instead of dinner AND lunch -- and like this is genuinely presented as an ideal, not ironic, and the fact that the husband does not want to go back to the job he hates is a sign of the father-in-law's pernicious influence (at least from Hilda's POV, as much as one takes it at face value.) Also there's a whole thread about corporal punishment which Hilda, the mother-in-law, and the narrative all think is necessary and important for child-rearing and the men frame as another example of Abuse Of Men By Women. So an artifact of its time, but in compelling ways and with a compelling anger and fear driving it.
(Then the sequel takes it a step further by positing that now that Hilda's husband is trying to kill her for the presumed crime of murdering her father-in-law, the Right Man for Hilda is in fact her husband's counterculture cousin who lives in a hut on the beach and interviews beatniks, and I agree he's a more compelling figure but I do have a hard time seeing how Hilda who DESPERATELY loved her little suburban house could mesh well with this particular lifestyle ....)
I was disappointed to discover that the tentacles were entirely metaphorical; or, rather, to be more specific, the tentacles were misogyny all along!
The Tentacles opens with heroine Hilda, having had a rapturous whirlwind romance and marriage, meeting her husband's amiable fun-loving father and cold abrasive status-obsessed mother for the first time; in a surprise twist, she starts to bond with her rude and socially awkward but overall well-meaning mother-in-law while realizing that her father-in-law is, like. always around? ALWAYS around?? talking about how his wife and Women In General have ruined his life and it's a little uncomfortable??
After the mother-in-law dies, the father-in-law convinces Hilda's husband that he's simply desperately in need of company and the family must come back to live in the family mansion with him, after which he gradually begins maneuvering the situation so that Hilda's life becomes more and more constrained while her husband happily quits his job and plays golf and drinks at the country club.
The portrayal here is so interesting because, like, it's a truly and genuinely terrifying portrait of gaslighting and erosion of autonomy and the ways that men close ranks against women, it was really very effective for me, And Also the life that Hilda desperately loved and is desperate to get back to is being a suburban housewife, with her husband miserable at a job he hates that he goes to for eight hours every day BUT leaves her alone in her own space so she only has to prepare one big meal for dinner instead of dinner AND lunch -- and like this is genuinely presented as an ideal, not ironic, and the fact that the husband does not want to go back to the job he hates is a sign of the father-in-law's pernicious influence (at least from Hilda's POV, as much as one takes it at face value.) Also there's a whole thread about corporal punishment which Hilda, the mother-in-law, and the narrative all think is necessary and important for child-rearing and the men frame as another example of Abuse Of Men By Women. So an artifact of its time, but in compelling ways and with a compelling anger and fear driving it.
(Then the sequel takes it a step further by positing that now that Hilda's husband is trying to kill her for the presumed crime of murdering her father-in-law, the Right Man for Hilda is in fact her husband's counterculture cousin who lives in a hut on the beach and interviews beatniks, and I agree he's a more compelling figure but I do have a hard time seeing how Hilda who DESPERATELY loved her little suburban house could mesh well with this particular lifestyle ....)
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Date: 2022-05-06 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-05-22 12:46 pm (UTC)