The novel I am going to introduce to you now is the reason I started this blog. It also is the reason I began writing the witching novel at all, and found a voice to not just write, but live and speak in. It showed me how to make a story out of something you do not want to live through but have to. It taught me how to find an aesthetic for pain, especially the kind that seems to be invisible.
But first of all, a few warnings. This one is going to be intense. As always, I am going to give you mild spoilers of the kind that for me make reading more interesting, but if you want to avoid that, just skip to the last paragraph. Then, of course, a content warning regarding the novel itself and this post discussing it is needed. This novel deals with mental health and 19th-century medicine, so not just the condition of our main character is tough but also the treatment being described in terrifying detail. This is a warning for topics such as depression, bipolar disorder, suicide and all kinds of medical procedures.
That being said, let‘s start!
The novel „The asylum for wayward Victorian girls“ is a partly autobiographic novel written by Emilie Autumn, who originally was known as a musician with a gothic-touch developing in her work from her second album onward.
Set in the 19th century and still partly autobiographic? Yes, you‘ve read correctly. This is possible because the novel follows two plot lines taking place in different times.
The starting point of the novel is in our time, in which Emilie survived a suicide attempt and therefor ends up hospitalized. All these early diary entries are written with a dark sense of humor that every time has me somewhere between laughing and crying. She manages to make every situation, every conversation feel absurd. From her therapist taking the medication she overdosed with from her and not giving it back, although without she would „ lose it and run into the traffic“ so that she has to stay hospitalized, to the nurse being disgusted by Emilie‘s boots with decorative skulls on them while „next door people are dying“. Every moment feels awkward and wrong and the reader is lured into the mindset of a person having a problem with being alive right there and then. This becomes more and more extreme as the situation at the hospital worsens for her. While waiting for a bed in the right ward for her problem, she has to stay much longer than the three days, in places where no one knows how to deal with her. She is not allowed any privacy, because of the suicide risk, and is only allowed one of her books and a red crayon to write into it (since a pencil is seen as risky in her hands).
Because of this experience, Emilie printed extra large margins into her novel and invites the reader to use it as a diary in times of need. This is a detail I love about the book, and it was in the first covid lockdown in 2020 that I actually made use of it.
Another fun fact about this: While I used this novel about Emilie‘s mental health crisis to write down my thoughts during the pandemic, Emilie used a book on the bubonic plague to document her mental health crisis … I enjoyed that little connection very much.
But back to the novel.
Once the absurdity of her whole situation is established and for her and the reader barely endurable anymore, Emilie begins to find letters from the other plot line within her bubonic plague diary. Yes, she just finds them. They appear from out of nowhere and we are now following two stories. That of Emilie in our time waiting for being treated, and that of Emily in the 19th century.
Emily in the 19th century is a young musician, who also ends up in a so-called hospital after trying to drown herself to get away from the man who hired her (bought her actually) to play music for him and who also abused her. Emily survives and is brought into the asylum, where she will spend the rest of her life with other girls being locked away in the basement of the house for most of the time.
We could have a discussion about whether this other storyline is made up, is a hallucination (which Emilie actually hints on at one point of the book), or is just a metaphor for an escape rout deeply needed. I will not decide on this, and leave it up to you, should you ever read it. Simply that we can discuss all of these options is another thing I love about the novel.
As the novel continues, we follow Emily of the past through years in the asylum, while our Emilie in the present is more and more in the background. We follow Emilie through all kinds of cruel practices which actually are not made up. This part of the novel has been researched so well that it has gotten some very good critiques and has even been in use for university courses at some point. These details range from the categories that are used on all the difficult girls locked away in the basement to the treatment Emilie receives eventually. To cure her hysteria, her uterus is only one thing that is being removed. Another one of the girls actually survives a lobotomy.
It is cruel and dark years that we follow Emilie through. It is tough to write them and make them appear to fit into a kind of plot, but I think the novel actually accomplishes this, even though certain fantastic elements are added even in the past, and once again, we can ask ourselves if they are simply fantastic, another proof for Emilie‘s madness (as she calls is herself even there once), or a metaphor for survival. Maybe it can be any of these things, depending on what the reader needs.
To me, reading the novel always feels as if following both the Emilies into a world that is deprived of any feeling, any sense of being alive, and the narration around them still provides each of these moments with a sense, a feeling, a colour, a melody.
I once dated a music journalist who laughed about me for listening to Emilie’s music and for having read her book. He called me pathetic for finding strength in sharing Emilie’s issues. It made me enjoy all of this even more, to be honest. It’s a thing a priviliged white man made fun of me for.
While the reader gets to know Emily of the past in all detail, the news about our Emilie are more vague and blurry at some point. We followed Emily of the past through an upbringing to be a musician, into the hands of her abuser, and also get to know her daily life at the asylum. Our Emilie however sometimes takes back over the novel with another disturbing detail about her current treatment, or even her past, but it is not as well-described, and leaves more questions than it answers. I would say that Emily of the past is used as a way to tell us all the things that Emilie of the present is not able to tell us about herself … and now you know where I have this idea of having a witch giggling in my head from.
The last paragraph
I hope I did not give away too much, because I recommend giving this book a try very much! If you can deal with its content, of course. My version of it, as you can see, is written into, has post-its from many different reading session in it, and I think there will still be more. I have found sentences in there which I still wish to just cut out and put on the wall. It showed me how to live through things that are too terrible to think of, and put them in a story that is worth it. It is a wonderful work of literature, I think.
Also, Emilie‘s third and last album „Fight like a girl“ (check it out here) tells the story of Emily of the past. Based on that album and the novel, she is even working on a musical version in New York. I can‘t wait to see how that turns out. That a story originally too terrible to live through can result in this much art is the most encouraging thing for me.
Mistress witch writes 