‘I’ve got out at last,’ said the woman behind the wallpaper. ‘And you can’t put me back.’ It begins, as all good horrors do, with a husband who means well. John is a physician, a man of reason and gentle authority, and therefore utterly unfit to understand his wife’s soul. He prescribes what men have … Continue reading The Woman in the Wall: Madness, Marriage, and the Myth of Care
Category: philosophy
The Trial of God – Faith, Silence, and the Prosecution of Heaven
The Trial of God is a courtroom drama in which the accused is the Almighty Himself, and the charge is silence. It’s not merely literature, but an act of theological rebellion, a Job rewritten for the smoke-stained century. Elie Wiesel, who survived the unspeakable and somehow found words anyway, didn’t write this work to comfort. … Continue reading The Trial of God – Faith, Silence, and the Prosecution of Heaven
No Exit – Hell, Mirrors, and the Modern Soul
No Exit is Sartre’s vision of the afterlife and contains no fire, no pitchforks, and no sulphuric pits; it is, instead, a perfectly reasonable room - which is precisely what makes it horrifying. He replaces Dante’s inferno with a waiting room furnished by IKEA and irony. This isn’t the Hell of theology but of psychology … Continue reading No Exit – Hell, Mirrors, and the Modern Soul
The Man of the Crowd: The Ghost of the City
There are some stories that seem to have been written not on paper but directly upon the human condition, and Poe’s The Man of the Crowd is one of them. It's the story of a nameless narrator, recovering from illness, who sits in a London coffeehouse and watches the endless river of humanity pass by. At first, … Continue reading The Man of the Crowd: The Ghost of the City
The Wooden Shadow: Laura Purcell’s Silent Companions and the Gothic of Hollow Lives
Laura Purcell’s The Silent Companions - a book which proves, if nothing else, that the Victorians couldn’t leave well enough alone. If it wasn’t séances or table-tipping, it was cardboard aristocrats painted to look like Aunt Mildred, propped up in drawing rooms like the world’s most unnerving IKEA mannequins. History assures us they were ‘decorative,’ … Continue reading The Wooden Shadow: Laura Purcell’s Silent Companions and the Gothic of Hollow Lives
Wording 