The Accursed

Began: July 2024

Completed: September 1

My review

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Part 1: The Demon Bridegroom

The Unspeakable I

• p.107 — “& so on & so forth … & explained that I am a Christian woman, & did not believe in such phenomena as “spirits.”

The Burning Girl

• p.127 — Annabel & Willy discuss women’s suffrage. And why can’t brothers and sisters form a household and just live?
• Annabel is in love and feels Damned. Out of reach and unsaved.
• Todd sees the burning girl in the wooded bog. And finds kinship for the first time. And his cousins find an enemy.

The Spectral Wife

• Upton Sinclair. Another take on the confines of love. And a hot take, at that.
• he will be a moral voice to look upon the elites of Princeton
• “For all her youth and angelic beauty, she shall soon regret her life.”

Part 2: The Curse Incarnate

The Duel

• Nobody can agree on Axson Mayte’s appearance. Is he a spectre? A demon? A friend of the Princeton elite? He left a tip to a hotel porter and the dollars vanished from the porter’s pocket within the hour they were given.

… were anxious for Josiah and his family to know that they had been deceived in believing that Mayte was a gentleman, a “close, personal” friend of the former Rer-erend Winslow Slade.

The Cruel Husband

• Mrs A Burr is not a fan of Wharton’s House of Mirth.

“So much is confused and complicated in the world, it is very exciting to think of murder, as a solution.”

• We are getting told the aftermath through Mrs Burr’s journal. Dabney descending into debauchery. Josiah has become a wanderer of the wilds.
• Count English von Gneist. From Wallachia. “The sole living heir of nothingness.” A writer of theological texts. A vampire? Or herder of vampires?
• Mrs Burr awakens in the middle of the night wondering if her “third eye” is opening.

The search cont’d

• Months have passed in the story. And I love how when reading a novel, you can fluidly move back and forward in time.
• Annabelle had been carrying on with Mayte for awhile. Exchanging letters, according to the gardener.
• The story is starting to turn around several axes of women who are up to thinga unbeknownst to those who believe they know them best.
• Was MIT supposed to become Harvard’s “science department?”
• Wilson and Josiah discussing undergraduate “eating clubs. Josiah became notable for ignoring the invitation to join Ivy.

Makes me think of the criminal episode to which I listened yesterday. Fraternities at CofC. A significant % of college donations come from people involved in fraternities and sororities. Is this the actual purpose of college? Society? High society?

The Bog Kingdom

• Anna’s story rings untrue to me. Probably says more about me than her story itself.
• The horrors. And also just the lack of light shed upon Anna’s motivations.
• The species of bird mentioned, “Archaeopteryx” - has to be the same one in Bellefleur. That swooped in and took away the baby.

August 5, 2024

The Curse Incarnate

• Woodrow blames Anna’s death on her being a woman - that even years of Christian upbringing cannot always overcome the initial disadvantage of that biological fact

“Voices”

• Josiah dives to New York. Goes to bookstores and is thrilled by pedestrians and the bustle of the city. ==And reads Sinclair’s Jungle== and questions his family fortune and status.

Bluestocking Temptress

• Willy is maturing into a desirable young woman — and there’s a hint that one of her suitors is her Uncle … weird.
• I don’t know what the title means

August 6, 2024

The Glass Owl

• Todd learned to read, somehow — and had a nighttime premonition that something terrible would happen to Wilhelmina at the school at which she taught — a warning which was ignored by Horace. Rocky Hill school.
• Todd found a glass owl in the snow. Brought it in, amidst the protests of the house staff. Rubbed it, and it came to life.

The voice of the novel has changed. It is more omniscient, having read all the diaries of the character — occasionally quoting from each one in the middle of the text. Like a collage of their thoughts and experiences — but still viewed from up on high. God-like, but also in doubt as to its perspective, motives, veracity, truthiness.

Snake Frenzy

Woodrow Wilson:

For Woman, whom Nature has burdened with a load far heavier than Man—that is, propagation—must be judged with tolerance and forbearance in areas where, with no regard for intention, she has seriously lagged behind man.

Defeat at Charleston

• Wilson has “turmoil in Central America”
• and is undone by a vision of Andrew West while speaking

My precious darling

aka, the long Woodrow’s letters chapter

• Woodrow Wilson “… could be no friend of” Samuel Clemens - whose satirical writings give strength to the Antichrist.

These are the "It's just common sense" and "The world is getting worse and worse" right wing people of their time. The Anyone can see this, it's so obvious to anyone with any sense - that we don't need any wild changes to society — let the guiding hand of old whitey remain on the till to keep things even keeled.

• “& now I must dose myself with Pinkham’s & Oil of Tartar (that mix so sickeningly together) & hope for sleep.”
• “I think it is my southern roots that binds me to the Negro race, our sense of rapport in the minds of foolish Northerners(!)”

August 16, 2024

So many important occurences since I last updated. The most important is that Mrs. Burr was murdered by her devoted husband Horace. With an electric fan. She had discovered that Horace and Wilhelmina were carrying on together (for who knows what reason). And her final burst of revelations were contained in what, I guess, will be her final chapter of the novel "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass ..." This was my favorite chapter of the novel so far. Emily Dickinson gets a feat. Puss's dabbling in White Witchcraft is discussed, her hope to see The Count, who shows up at the chapter's end, and is implicated in her death. The unsent letter to Winslow Slade - beautiful stream of consciousness burst of Mrs Burr as a prisoner and spy around her house. 

Could all of this actually have been written by her? She feels like a proxy for the writer herself - stranded in the middle of the action, left to observe what swirls around - to be chronicled in code.

Quatre Face

• Perspective turns toward the van Dyck’s, the descendents of the historian writing the novel, who have retreated to the countryside, for fear of The Curse.
• Josiah comes to visit.
• Pierce v D is the departed father of the historian writing the novel
• SHERLOCK HOLMES shows up at the end of the chapter

This is why Carol Oates won't win the Nobel: because Sherlock Holmes shows up in this novel. Along with Upton Sinclair and Jack London and Mark Twain. The historical figures are defensible ... but Holmes?

Aug 19

• Turns out it wasn’t Holmes himself, but only the actual person upon whom Holmes is based. Weird turn. Is she mocking Pearce?
• “Holmes” is trying to get Pearce to do in his infant son, who Pearce labels “it,” who Holmes claims is demon spawn. And I’m beginning to wonder if Holmes himself is actually the demon. Or A demon.
• it’s a good thing Josiah was there. Prevented another death from The Curse - which actually must be some kind of illicit sex thing - adultery - something.

Aug 21

Part IV: The Curse Exorcised

Cold Spring

• we are back to Todd Slade, whose sister has recently died, after attempting to fly from the roof of their house.
• Josiah is on a collision course with Upton Sinclair (who I don’t yet know why he’s in this story, except for novelty effect, and to shine a light on the excesses of the upper class)
• “…and Wilhelmina Burr had stayed away, for a private reason.” Yes … I’m sure it’s private. And that the narrator is also privy to it.
• “The Thornhurst water cure” in the note on p. 436 sounds like waterboarding
• Winslow Slade is about to make some kind of graveside confession. in a plea to save his remaining grandsons.
• “It was not that God failed to give Winslow Slade the clear knowledge of what he should do, but rather, God withheld from him the strength with which to do it.”
• it’s just like “a man of the cloth” to blame himself for the “curse” unleashed upon the west-end Princeton families.

8/23/24, 6:10:00 AM

Since Mrs Burr's murder, I'm losing interest in this book. She was what kept me coming back, her lively journal.

The Nordic Soul

• Jack London enters the stage. He and Upton are like the slapstick comic duo of the novel.
• U.S. is embarrassing, and he is a cuckholded man right out of Joyce
• Meta hides in the bushes where U cannot follow. HA
• LONDON doesn’t even notice U raising an objection to his racial superiority arguments

This is why London is here? For comic relief and to further skewer the upper classes? To reveal the idealist as naive? This is a funny chapter, still. 

• London is just more of the same horror. And now Josiah has killed him, defending himself. My pulse quickened at that scene, it was disgusting.

Terra Incognita I

At this point I'm confused about the Count and Axson Mayte. Intimated to be one and the same. But Axson was so sharply drawn in the opening scene with Anabelle. The Count is mostly a vapor, showing up here and there. But isn't threatening.

8/31/24, 5:53:59 AM

a lot of things happened. i skipped some chapters in notes, which is fine and dandy and doesn't matter in the least. the novel sort of petered out and ceased to be frightening or mysterious. now we are wrapping things up. Somehow Josiah wound up on an expedition to Antarctica and tossed himself overboard & died frozen in an ice block. ridiculous. now, somehow, Todd Slade is going to be the hero who takes out the Bog Kingdom folks. also ridiculous

“For is not a child a being that will alter by degrees, not quite before our eyes, yet in our presence … and is not a child an early version, or mockery, of ourselves? — an image of our despoiled innocence and our blasted hopes? Most intolerably, is a child not one who will replace us?”

Epilogue

• there is a retelling of original sin contained in this novel. Winslow Slade is Adam, the progenitor - except it wasn’t his fault, of course. It was hers.
• confessions of a preacher; behind the scenes tea

FOR KNOW THAT WE WHO ARE HIS AGENTS ARE MOST PRIZED WHERE WE PREACH DISCORD WHILE EMPLOYING A VOCABULARY OF LOVE; AND WE PLEASE HIM, IN SPEAKING OF ARMAGEDDON, AND LAS THINGS, AND THE LAYING WASTE OF THE SINFUL CITIES OF MANKIND … WE URGE THE DOWNTRODDEN TO REJOICE IN WE URGE THE DOWNTRODDEN TO REJOICE IN THE LITTLE THAT IS THEIRS, OUT OF FEAR OF HELL; TO STAY THE HAND OF THE REBEL, IN A FALSE PEACE.