You’re My Inspiration with R.J. Joseph

One of the most common questions authors face is a deceptively difficult one to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Yet, the answers to that common question can be almost as interesting as the resulting story. Welcome to You’re My Inspiration, a column dedicated to discovering what inspires a particular author and their work. Whether it be a lifelong love of mythical creatures, a fascinating bit of history, or a trip to a new and exciting place, You’re My Inspiration is all about those special and sometimes dark things that spark ideas and result in great stories.

This week, we bring you author, essayist, professor, and Speculative Chic contributor R.J. Joseph, whose essay, “The Beloved Haunting of Hill House: An Examination of Monstrous Motherhood,” is published in The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation, available now from McFarland Press!

Mothers in the Margins

My most recent essay, “The Beloved Haunting of Hill House: An Examination of Monstrous Motherhood” appears in the essay collection edited by Kevin Wetmore, Jr., The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaption. This foray into the monstrous mother designations of Sethe Suggs (Beloved, by Toni Morrison) and Olivia Crain (“The Haunting of Hill House” on Netflix) is of course primarily rooted in my fascination with monsters and monstrosity, how they’re labeled, and who gets to do the naming. I’ve often determined that many monsters are created by forces outside their control. Sethe and Olivia are no different.

Besides my love affair with monsters and monstrosity, the following also shaped my essay:

Beloved

This is one of my beloved copies of Beloved. I had a previous print version that was lost in one of the moves in my early adulthood and an electronic copy that I can read just fine but find difficult to annotate. Toni Morrison’s fictionalized iteration of the Margaret Garner case has fascinated me for most of my life. Garner, an enslaved woman who attempted to escape the terrors of slavery, killed her two-year old daughter rather than allow the baby to be taken back into slavery. Many stories of enslaved peoples, outside of what I learned through my own reading, were foreign to me until I took my first African American history class in undergrad. After reading Garner’s story, I realized I understood her motivations and probably would have even considered the same had I been in her situation. This realization didn’t cause me the dismay it might have caused for someone else. I sat with my lack of hesitation in embracing the murder of a child rather than have them live in cruel bondage and wondered what it said about me.

Afterwards, reading Beloved for the first time solidified my feelings. Slavery was something no humans should have endured and the near impossibility of ever escaping (dare I say ever, ever, with the negative effects that still reverberate today?) provided the enslaved with very few chances to exert agency over their circumstances. Choosing matricide and lifelong punishment over eternal bondage was absolutely an option. Morrison’s introduction of supernatural elements in her story was an additional avenue of introspection. If there is a spiritual realm beyond death, wouldn’t a choice to relegate a soul to freedom in that space be better than the inability to do so in the corporeal world?

Marginalized Mothers

In 1976, feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich gave us what is considered a seminal work in studying modern motherhood, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. I posit that the two most striking ideas in her book are 1) motherhood can be oppressive and 2) marginalized mothers are often overlooked when focusing on the experiences of motherhood. Rich admitted her book didn’t focus on the motherhood experiences of women outside the white experience and as a fellow academic, I understand that. The most important thing is that Rich acknowledged the limitations of her work and also referenced the relevant efforts of Black feminists towards these understandings.

Women on the fringes of society are composed of various identities and characteristics, such as mothers of different races and ethnicities, disabled mothers, mothers who suffer from mental illness, and poor mothers. I represent a mother on the fringes of society and my experiences mirror those of so many other mothers I’ve known and observed. Sethe Suggs and Olivia Crain are my sisters on this path, and I saw so much of my own life in theirs. Sethe Suggs was a Black mother who loved her children but had a difficult time navigating the societal ills of slavery and respectability politics. Olivia Crain suffered from migraines and mental illness and those demons can heavily inhibit even the most valiant efforts towards being an attentive mother. I also have a hard time explaining myself to my children when my overwhelming fear for their safety in a society that doesn’t always value their lives results in me keeping them as close as I possibly can. As a lifelong migraine sufferer, there are still days when it’s all I can do to text my babies from my darkened, cooled bedroom and give them mealtime instructions throughout the day.

Haunted Houses

The most maddening and yet, intriguing, trope in the horror genre is haunted houses. People are supposed to be safe inside their homes in a way they can’t be in most other spaces. Yet we see time and time again that sometimes evil entities can permeate even those safe havens. In assigning the domestic sphere as one that has traditionally been the feminine domain, the insidious nature of the haunted house trope comes to light: feminine controlled spaces can be penetrated and defiled, causing the destruction of revered societal institutions, such as motherhood and family. The parallel disintegration of Sethe and Olivia (physically and mentally) as their homes also crumble and neglect to provide protection for them and their families paint a vivid image of defiled femininity.

I enjoy haunted house stories and have even written a few. I would, however, be neglectful in not coming to the defense of Sethe and Olivia. Even if the domestic sphere is the domain of the feminine, neither woman had much help against the supernatural and societal forces that converged to destroy them. Paul D, Sethe’s partner, abandoned her at one point in Beloved, leaving her to fight the ghost and the rest of the world on her own. Hugh Crain was representative of many spouses who stay so wrapped up their own goals and issues that they neglect to see or help prevent the deterioration of their partners, who are often taking on a heavier role in domestic management and child rearing.

Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House

I’ve seen every film iteration of Shirley Jackson’s truly haunting story, The Haunting of Hill House, and this one by Netflix was my absolute favorite. Framing the Crains as a family created the opportunity to insert innumerable conflicts related to family dynamics. The household had five children, and in any large household, some personalities tend to get more visibility than others. Some are completely ignored until they start to make a lot of noise. Marriages where there are quite a few children tend to struggle at times when the needs of the children overtake the needs of the couple. Adding in a mentally absent dad and a mentally ill mother is a definite recipe for familial strife.

The household management of a large household is also fraught with conflicts such as what to feed everyone or what room should each person occupy. These seemingly small issues are magnified to reflect the size of the family. That the Crains were living in Hill House while they remodeled it created even more problems. I’ve been through small remodels in our house and barely made it through them living in the house with the kids while they were completed. Keeping everyone safe is immensely difficult when carpentry tools are hanging around everywhere. I can only imagine it to be three times as hard when some people in the house are seeing and hearing the ghosts the project has awakened, on top of the remodeling.

Comparative Literary Analysis

Kevin Wetmore is the most amazing editor I’ve ever worked with because he understands my crazy and has this uncanny ability to take my huge and nebulous ideas and make them sound like they make absolute sense. When I read or view stories, I see them in comparisons and can often find similarities in things that aren’t typically deemed to be alike or differences where they aren’t obvious. It’s the main way my brain works and how I interpret the world around me. What this means is that a conversation with me is often an exercise in comparative analysis and since I’m always reading and watching movies, there’s always quite a bit of literary analysis thrown in. Wetmore recognizes that this is a writing strength I have, and I truly appreciate him allowing me the space to do these comparative analyses and also his guidance in shaping them.

Making comparisons between works helps to magnify their importance to their genres, their mediums, the writing and filmmaking disciplines, and to society as a whole. Writers and other artists are often maligned as occupying non-essential roles and as bringing very little value to our communities. And yet, every form of entertainment is dependent on writers/artists resisting this framing of what we do and still producing art for the masses.

R.J. Joseph is a Texas-based writer and professor who must exorcise the demons of her imagination so they don’t haunt her being. A lifelong horror fan and writer of many things, she has recently discovered the joys of writing in the academic arena about two important aspects of her life: horror and Black femininity.

When R. J. isn’t writing, teaching, or reading voraciously, she can usually be found wrangling one or five of various sprouts and sproutlings from her blended family of 11…which also includes one husband and one furry baby.

R.J. can be found lurking (and occasionally even peeking out) on social media:

Twitter || Facebook || Facebook Official || Instagram || Blog || Email || Amazon Author Page

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