disgruntledowl

 

The Beguiled (Cullinan, 1966). I read this one in anticipation of the movie at the end of the month. A wounded Union soldier is taken in by the students and headmistresses of a girl's boarding school in the Civil War South, but more time they spend in close quarters with each other, the more their lives begin to unravel. The book is chock full of Southern gothic elements, and the prose is rich without being too flowery. I also found the book really useful in terms of how to tell a story from multiple points of view, including how to distinguish narrators when writing in the first person. Still, the book left me with the same question, I had after watching My Cousin Rachel: what drives the way the author approached gender? Cullinan is a man, but he tells the story exclusively from the point of view of the women living in the school; we only hear about the singular male character from their perspective. Several of the characters--male and female--prove capable and/or charismatic, but practically everyone is deeply flawed: vain, prideful, manipulative, jealous, debauched. I’m still mulling over whether Cullinan’s narration choices were purely structural ones to create suspense; if there’s a misogynistic subtext; or if he might was trying to demonstrate that anyone, regardless of sex, can be corrupted.