‘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
Tag: 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 Divine Discovery of Desire
Federico Andahazi’s The Anatomist If literature ever flirted with anatomy, it must surely have blushed at first touch. Federico Andahazi’s The Anatomist peels back not merely the skin of the body, but the corset of civilisation itself, revealing that the true heart of the Renaissance was never made of marble or reason - but of … Continue reading The Divine Discovery of Desire
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Some novels are so steeped in fatalism that one half expects the pages to sigh when turned. The Mayor of Casterbridge is such a book - a work that feels as though it were written not with pen and ink, but with plough and sorrow. It’s a tragedy of the English soil, where destiny is … Continue reading The Mayor of Casterbridge