Girl House! ™
It is Less Fun Than It Sounds
If you’ve ever watched more than a frame of America’s Next Top Model, you know that it’s one of the most distilled examples of media’s war against the idea of being a woman, a glistening, hyper-compressed gem of body horror and psychopathy, basically a Stanford Prison Experiment in a producer-mandated pixie cut and early-aughts low-cut jeans and sponsored by… Zappo? That can’t be right.
I have seen this show put models on scales and read out their weights on air (this should have been investigated by at least three government agencies). I have seen them do a bulimia-themed photo shoot. I have seen them do a “sexy high schoolers”-themed photo shoot. I saw them do a funeral-themed shoot that happened to take place directly after one of the models learned of a friend’s death. I actually saw them do this twice! You really lose the deniability when you do this a second time, Tyra!
All that to say, when I was recently rewatching Cycle 6 (FOR SCIENCE. It was SCIENCE-oriented rewatching) and realized that they had put the girls up in the John Sowden house in Los Feliz, a place that is famous for almost certainly being the site of the Black Dahlia murder, what I felt was a really thudding sense of inevitability.
I mean yeah, it’s Frank Lloyd Wright but PICK A DIFFERENT HOUSE!
This synergy actually makes perfect sense to me as a decision made primarily for the aesthetics that also unwittingly connects to the commodification of female suffering as entertainment, and specifically as a glamorous setpiece!
Anyway, this season wasn’t that memorable to me but they were really playing with fire because they are shoving these under-rested, underfed models who won’t have full use of their frontal lobes for another five years into a powder keg and making them duke it out over lifetime supplies of Smackers lip gloss and Veronica Mars guest spots and I just probably wouldn’t add latent psychic Old Hollywood woman-murdering energy to that environment but, again, Tyra once interrupted a girl crying about the untimely death of her high school best friend to tell her it was time for The Coffin Challenge Sponsored by Tampax. “Ghoulish.” That’s the adjective for it.
This really has a tenuous at best connection to the rest of the newsletter I just really needed to talk to you guys about this because if at least one and potentially all 13 girls had been driven insane by their, again, too on-the-nosely haunted surroundings, they would have fit right into other literary Girl Houses.
I feel like I’ve seen enough to crown Shirley Jackson the ruler of the Girl House, a genre I just invented but which she owns. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a girl named Merricat lives with her sister in a big, decrepit house that has recently become a good deal emptier. Merricat and her older sister Constance spend most of the book working very hard to not bring up the fact that Merricat (spoilers) definitely poisoned the rest of their family by putting arsenic in the sugar bowl (for which Constance was put on trial and ultimately acquitted) and this is made harder by the fact that everyone in town always wants to bring up the poisoning thing. Constance and Merricat live an isolated existence. Merricat only sees people who aren’t her sister, elderly uncle, or cat Jonas on her biweekly walks into town to pick up groceries, where somehow both she and they are the left guy in this cartoon.
Merricat compulsively undertakes rituals at the borders of the estate to try and keep out interlopers, weaving herself and her sister into their own kingdom, reinforced by an understanding only the two of them share. And sure, this understanding is primarily about murder, but that’s Girl House™, baby!
The house in Woodworm is deeply haunted. Generations of hardship, and more so anger about that hardship, seep into the walls like layers of smoke. A girl steps carefully among the shadows, making sure not to touch any clothes she doesn’t recognize that seem to roll out from under the bed (“Fool me once,” she says). Her grandmother has an endless stack of cards with saints on them and receives prophecies from angels that look like giant insects. There’s a patriarch’s skeleton walled up behind the wardrobe, an infinite number of cats in the garden, a parade of ghosts wandering in from their shallow graves in the hills, and endless gossip swirling around these two women. They’re witches, they do curses for a price, the granddaughter was the last person to see the local heiress’s son alive.
As in Castle, an acquittal is not enough to assuage the town’s suspicions. As in Castle, the primary emotion on display is not fear or loneliness but a simmering, insidious rage that coats the living like dust. “My grandfather wasted away in his bed after a year in this house because he couldn’t hack the malice that dripped off the ceilings. We women grew up here, but my granddad didn’t and he wasn’t cut out for this shithole … That’s what does for everyone in this family. It might be their own or it might be other people’s, but it’s hatred every time. The old woman’s right that we get eaten up by anger, though it’s not because we’re born with something twisted inside. It twists up later, bit by bit, from all that gritting of teeth.”
G I R L H O U S E !
In 1950, Idlewild Hall is a boarding school in Vermont that serves as a depository for society’s unwanted girls. A half-century later, the abandoned grounds become a place Fiona Sheridan can’t leave alone — the place where her sister was murdered. Her doubts about her sister’s case become entangled in her attempts to solve the mystery of a missing girl from the ‘50s and questions about what became of four roommates that nobody seemed to care about. And through it all, Mary Hand, a living ghost story that always seems to appear in times of tragedy, her veiled figure hanging off of the unfortunate Idlewild residents, appearing in their textbooks and journals and in bathroom mirrors and, fifty years later, clinging to Fiona as she tries to separate lore from reality.
The cycle that pervades in The Broken Girls is restless anger — from schoolgirls in the face of indifference to a death, from a sister whose life was shattered, from the story of Mary Hand that began as a cry for vengeance. It’s about the pit of injustice that starts a ghost story, and the chance we have to rewrite one if we’re willing to push that first spade into rotten soil.
If you’ve got a weirdly specific trope to request or have a book you think should’ve been included in this bundle, let me know at tropemachine@substack.com.