Book
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
Synopsis
Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House to begin her employment as governess for the wealthy Pounds family. She finds herself not terribly impressed by her employers or their children. But she continues on, learning more about the house, the family history, and the servants, while tolerating the misanthropic or sullen behavior of the children, the jealous cruelty of Mrs Pounds, and the lecherous intrusiveness of Mr Pounds. Her account culminates in the surprises she has planned for the family and their high-society guests during an extended Christmas celebration.
Notes
I don’t want to say too much about this one (but of course, will anyway), not because it’s unremarkable, or because it has significant surprises beyond what’s promised in the title and the premise, but simply because it so confidently and completely speaks for itself.
Knowing that it was so popular, and that it’s appeared on so many lists of recommended books, I went in unsure of which route it was going to take. Was it going to be a mass market black comedy, aimed at a very specific type of reader who grins as if they’re being naughty and describes it as “deliciously wicked?” Was it going to take the Lemony Snicket approach, with an understated account of the horrors and cruelties of those wacky Victorians, along with fun facts like “can you believe they used arsenic in their make-up?!” Or was it going to be a more lurid horror novel, excusing its scenes of explicit graphic violence with the reassurance that it’s okay because you see, it’s all satire?
As it turns out, there’s aspects of all of those, but it’s too insightful and confident in tone to settle into any one of them. I could immediately tell that I should stop making assumptions and just let it do its thing, when I read its excellent opening chapter, with its perfectly evocative first sentences:
Ensor House sits on a stretch of moorland, all raised brows and double chin, like a clasp-handed banker about to deliver terrible news.
I meet its mullioned eyes from the open phaeton, rolling across the moor to my destiny, my breasts jiggling in my corset.
It adopts the format of Victorian fiction, and it makes frequent explicit references to Dickens, but it never comes across as a simple parody. Instead, Feito uses the narrator’s mindset of psychopathy to make her a dispassionate observer of a society that is deeply cruel and built on a foundation of gross injustice, hidden under a performance of sophisticated manners and upstanding morality.
The subject isn’t entirely new, but the voice is. Notty isn’t presented as an anti-hero or a villain, but as someone who was created by this society and also stands outside of it. As a result, the misogyny, racism, classism, repression, and backwards science — which here, isn’t allowed to be cast as simple ignorance, but as a tool to perpetuate all the existing systems of misogyny, colonialism, and classism — isn’t allowed to be safely compartmentalized away as a product of its time. They’re universal.
Meanwhile, Notty is prone to hallucinations or delusions, and curious obsessions, but she also seems to be the only person capable of seeing what’s actually going on.
As I was reading, knowing that the book had become popular, I kept thinking, “I hope they’re not trying to turn this into a movie, because everything that makes it special is what makes it unfilmable.” But of course, they are. However, it sounds like it’s on exactly the right track, both by having Feito herself write the script, and by the perfect casting of Maika Monroe as Winifred Notty. If it is even possible to adapt what makes the book work, these are exactly the people to do it.
Verdict
A confident take on a premise that could’ve easily gone too far in any predictable direction, but manages to be both insightful and entertaining. Creates a character that refuses to be sympathetic or relatable, in a story that satirizes misogyny but never settles into a simple you go, girl! tone, and still somehow leaves the reader with the feeling that she “won.”