NB: This review contains some minor plot spoilers.
‘The blindfold hurts. His inexperience shows in the knot. It’s tight but crude, and has captured a hank of my hair.’[1]
Erin Kelly’s latest novel Stone Mothers, to be published in April 2019, explores incarceration in many of its forms. Consequently Kelly expertly deploys Gothic motifs, themes and devices that were present in the earliest examples of Gothic fiction.
As Alice Cresswell states;
[i]mprisonment and the feeling of isolation is a theme in many gothic texts. In [The Castle of] Otranto, the prison-like nature of the castle is an example of this. Particularly when Isabella tries to escape Manfred; she can never escape the castle and instead must trawl through its winding corridors and underbelly. The fact she cannot escape adds heavily to the suspense filled nature of the novel as we are sure she will be caught.[2]
In Stone Mothers the novel’s unsettling qualities are drawn from the characters’ own physical, mental and emotional imprisonment and feelings of isolation.
The most obvious, physical representation of incarceration is the Nazareth Hospital itself. Earlier known as The East Anglia Pauper Lunatic Asylum, readers encounter Nazareth initially as Park Royal Manor, a newly refurbished residential development in 2018, then a closed and crumbling Mental Hospital in the 1980s, and then finally as an operational mental hospital in the 1950s. Kelly’s narrative, progressing backwards chronologically, peels away the building’s layers, exposing its catastrophic impact upon the lives of those who were bound up with the fate of that institution.
The symbolic nature of Nazareth Hospital is inescapable. It represents a physical manifestation of the many ways in which we are incarcerated as a consequence of societal attitudes, physical and mental ill-health, and the secrets of a past that constantly threatens to resurface. Initial protagonists Marianne Thackeray and Jesse Brame are entrapped by the secrets of their youth, secrets that irresistibly return with the most catastrophic consequences. As Nazareth Hospital’s past is hidden by its refurbishment into Park Royal Manor, Marianne Smy’s impoverished and disadvantaged past identity is hidden by her reinvention as Dr Thackeray, art historian. However, as Nazareth’s past is always just beneath the surface, Marianne’s personal past is never far away. Her Suffolk accent is occasionally evident, a reminder that the secrets of her past are always with her.
Similarly Baroness Helen Greenlaw’s past continues to hold power over her. Her own incarceration in Nazareth in the 1950s as a pregnant, unmarried teenager evokes the imprisonment and isolation that befalls those who lack influence in any given society and at the same time fall foul of contemporary societal norms. The only means of escape available to Helen is to swap the abusive constraints of Nazareth Hospital with the alternative incarceration of marriage to man she doesn’t love or respect.
In many ways all of the novel’s characters are imprisoned and isolated. In the present day Debbie, Marianne’s mother is isolated and incarcerated by her worsening dementia. Jesse Brame is a prisoner of both his disadvantaged background and his obsession with the past. Marianne’s daughter, Honor, is threatened by her mother’s secrets and is constrained by her own mental ill-health.
It is this consistent and powerful engagement with these themes that ensures that Stone Mothers offers both a compelling narrative and an intelligent, coherent use of Gothic devices in order to address the durability of those societal forces that would incarcerate us all.
[1] Erin Kelly, Stone Mothers (London: Hodder & Stroughton, 2019), p. 3.
[2] Alice Cresswell, ‘Gothic Literary Devices’, The Castle of Otranto website edited by Alice Cresswell. Available at https://castleofotranto.wordpress.com/contextual-mini-essays/gothic-literary-devices/ [accessed 15 December 2018], para 3 of 5.
Precarious Gothic 