Notes on Diana Wynne Jone's "Black Maria"

[x_los]

- Black Maria should maybe be read like The Power, in that Female Man line. This book is both obsessed with gender, and very good at it at a micro-level, and fucking terrible at it at a macrolevel. I didn’t expect Jones, with her mother issues and occasional flashes of odd loathing of young girls once they stop being children, to be ‘uwu WOMEN POWER’, but even coming in knowing that, Black Maria is an uncertain, uncomfortable read in patches. Gender is a strange line to draw, when Naomi’s mother, Lavinia and even Naomi Mark 1 are among Maria’s chief victims—the only man we see directly harmed by her machinations rather than the social malaise of the town being Antony. The idea that like Mig is ‘on the grandmother’s side’ by virtue of sex is contested in the text, but a bizarre assertion in the first place given how little the women associated with Maria seem to get out of that vassalage, and how dubiously-willing it is.

At some level, is some of the gender shit in Black Maria about frustration with this old woman for needing care? Or old people more generally I guess, as this one doesn’t actually. Is this a frustration with disability, a belief that people who need help are often ‘faking it’ or disgusting for not taking help? See also Miss Phelps’ vaunted independence—with the strange counterpoint of the anecdote of Mig’s father abandoning her mother to fend for her (pregnant) self after a bad fall. Is part of what Jones finds contemptible here the social position of middle aged women like Mig’s mother, wherein they inconvenience people like Mig by having to provide care for people like Maria? I’m thinking about the eternal child quality of Jones, where she never finds herself able to write a compelling, sympathetic mom. And yet this is perhaps Jones’ best mother (along with perhaps the mother-cum-grandmother in Fire and Hemlock), who shows the most growth and receives the most focus. As an adult and mother, even poor Millie becomes a relative nonentity.

Maybe part of the problem is that this book is set in, and written around 1990, with Blairite ‘end of history’, post-feminist nonsense seeping in at the corners. We have a book about small towns and domestic abuse and gender relations that does not acknowledge, in any way, the overweening financial dominance of men, domestic abuse and femicide. I’m not that surprised that Jones wrote a book about gender wherein the sociological force of patriarchy is sort of irritably side-stepped as a material concern: it’s not v admissible compared to the psychodrama of ‘bitches can guilt you’. My friend Mari makes a fair point that our Final Couple, Antony and Unmemorably Named Mig’s Mom, side-step gender-essentialism, but Jones’ gesture there feels rather twee to me. ‘Maybe if we didn’t make such a big deal about gender, race, etc., it’d all go away? Why did no one think of that before me??’ is an answer to social awkwardness, not the pay gap. And it’s fine for Jones to chiefly be concerned with the former rather than the latter, but you know, don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining/that ‘but sometimes, women are also mean!’ is the material Substance of sexism. The UN figure for homicides has 90% committed by men, and 82% of intimate partner homicide victims are women. That’s not some level playing-field to ‘can’t we all just get along’ your way through, it’s—in another shape, we’d call that a long, ongoing genocide.

It’s kind of shocking because there’s great writing as well about the psychological power men can exert in domestic space (I’m thinking about the Murdstone section of David Copperfield), but Jones figures them as sort of Awh Shucks hapless—even the visceral quality of their glee at the hunt that kills Naomi I gets forgotten about, and Mr Phelps rendered safe. ‘Old she-wolf’ and ‘bitch’ are deployed here almost sneakily, technically allowable due to Naomi I’s transformation, but mobilised with a kind of vicious glee. The men who hound and kill Naomi do not know what she's done to Antony when they do it, or even that she's done anything but be brutally punished by Maria for decades: the crime Naomi I is executed for is having been born a girl. Pressured by her mother, young Naomi I fucked up. Her attempt to wrest control from Maria was hardly going to lead to some utopian reversal. But she then spent her life trapped like Antony did, suffering in parallel. And the thing is, isn’t every girl the Janus-faced, double-lived Naomi, when the hunt’s on? Isn’t that scene of predation—one of the realest things in the novel?

- Mig references a Chesterton poem, "Lepanto", which surprised me as Chesterton is so deeply not popular now. I wonder how unusual this was at the time? I mean this is written in 1990, but clearly Jones is drawing from her own, easier experience as a writer.

- I would not have guessed that ‘Baghdads’ was a type of underwear.

- Reading this as an ebook was frustrating because I couldn’t flip back and find out who Naomi was named for, and it was mentioned. I had to rely on the text to reveal that to me as it became important, rather than being able to go back and chase up the clue. (It was Aunt Maria’s daughter.)

- The orphans pushing biscuits under the door whenever one of them is locked in without food is really touching. I do not think this black orphan girl should be given to the hateful Elaine, who doesn’t want children, just because her husband wants to have a kid. What kind of life is Elaine going to lead her?

- It does make absolute sense that the last Queen isn’t even slightly guilty and feels she’s done nothing reprehensible. I also really like the futility of Antony’s trying to make people feel guilt.

- What two deaths does Antony charge Aunt Maria with—the first Naomi Laker and his own mother? I don’t know that he knew of his mother’s death at the time of the confrontation.

- What does Jones mean by ‘pyjama-case cat’? (Also I don’t know how comfortable I’d be knowing my cat was a human I didn’t know well or necessarily like as a human, choosing to live as a cat.)

- Wow this is—a normal ending? This is the way a normal human might end a book. Is this really Diana Wynne Jones?

- Jones remains pretty uninterested in romance, but this works to the degree it needs to.