AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Being a governess during the Victorian age could be a real drag. There's abuse from spoiled children and their egomaniac rich parents, plus all the misogyny and dehumanizing classism. So what happens when a put-upon governess with a touch of psychopathy bites back, often, literally (laughter)?
VIRGINIA FEITO: (Reading) I reenter the house through the kitchen, where the cook confronts me with a dramatically bloodied nightdress she has found stuffed behind the boiler door. Mrs. Able says thou didn't give us a nightdress to wash this week, she says. So this one must be thine. Yes, I say, taking the night dress, heavy and crusted in my hands. Thank you. The cook looks at me, surprised at my accepting the soiled items so readily. But the blood - natural occurrence. You know, a woman's ailment. But it is all over the neckline. Yes, I say brightly, as if that settles it. Miss Notty, the cook begins, her face setting into alarm. I feign a fainting spell. I find fainting spells the most rewarding of performances.
RASCOE: That's from the new novel "Victorian Psycho." It's a darkly funny, ultraviolent gothic tale about a woman who's just not bound by little things like empathy, sympathy, the milk of human kindness. Author Virginia Feito joins us now. Welcome.
FEITO: Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
RASCOE: (Laughter) Were you reading Jane Eyre and watching "American Psycho" at the same time and just...
FEITO: Mixing medications - no, I'm kidding. Actually, the first thing that came to me was one of the lines that's still in the novel at the very beginning. It says something about how her breasts are jiggling in her corset. And that voice - I just couldn't get sort of rid of it. I understood immediately who this character was, and I understood that it was a time period thing. But it was also anachronistic, and it was irreverent, and it was sarcastic. And there was a lot of anger in that voice, and I just gave her a job as a governess, and then I gave her a condition as a psychopath.
RASCOE: (Laughter) Yes. Miss Notty or Winifred Notty - she's not hiding anything from the reader. Like...
FEITO: Right.
RASCOE: ...At the beginning, she lays it all out saying, it is early fall. The cold is beginning to descend. And in three months, everyone in this house will be dead.
FEITO: Yeah, Winifred is very self-aware, although she's also being very playful. I think she's using this humor to sort of manipulate us into justifying maybe her actions or empathizing with her. But so Winifred Notty comes to this house - this big, noble, sort of English country house - Ensor House, named after James Ensor, by the way, just because his paintings are totally grotesque and weird.
And when I was investigating the Victorian era, I kept coming across these insane sort of stories of abuse and misogyny and cruelty. And evidently, servants were not in a great position to fend for themselves, and they were essentially possessions basically. The children weren't doing great either, working really long hours at the factories. There were, like, infanticide epidemics. When I was doing the reading and the research, I just kept getting increasingly angry. It was so much that it was kind of funny in a weird way. So that's kind of the voice that is in the pages of this novel.
RASCOE: Can you read one other passage? This is the one where Winifred is in the stables.
FEITO: Yeah.
(Reading) On the floor next to me lies scattered a pair of wrought iron sugar nips engraved with a Pounds family crest. There's something sweet lodged between my teeth at the back of my mouth. I presume it is a sugar lump at first, but when I pluck it out, it turns out to be a loose carious molar - mine or somebody else's. It is sticky. Did I extract a tooth with the sugar nips? I really shouldn't drink Port after dinner.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
FEITO: This is just Winifred doing stand-up comedy...
RASCOE: Yeah (laughter).
FEITO: ...Essentially. The whole novel is just, like, welcome to my show. I'll be here till Monday.
RASCOE: One of the strange things about - one of the many strange things (laughter) about Winifred is that she does seem to have some sort of, like, oral fixation. She's always putting things in her mouth, like, biting things...
FEITO: Absolutely.
RASCOE: ...People, horses. What is that about? Babies often have a oral fixation, right?
FEITO: Well, that's interesting. I was thinking more of like animals, I think. I remember a note from my editor on one of the early manuscripts. She was, like, my girl is always sniffing. She's always sniffing everything, licking everything, sort of touching everything, you know. And especially, I think she's very much drawn to things that we would ordinarily find kind of gross, you know, like somebody's - I don't know, gross, like, mole with, like, hair sticking out of it. And I think she's just - she's kind of, like, visceral and animalistic.
RASCOE: Winifred does find, like, a kindred spirit in one of her charges, teenage Drusilla Pounds. What do you think that Winifred and Drusilla see in each other?
FEITO: Winifred, I think, dismisses Drusilla at first immediately. And I think many readers will because honestly, as a writer, I did, too. Like, oh, just another, like, rich, teenage girl. Whatever. And then suddenly, I was like, wait, there's something to tap here. Like, she probably has an incredibly insane, like, inner life, this girl. She's living in these walls. Her brother is the heir. Her parents don't care about her education because why bother? You know, she just has to, like, marry off eventually. Obviously, nobody cares about her personality or her hobbies. What hobbies?
Servants obviously had awful lives, but, like, I'm not sure that rich people were any better off, especially women. They couldn't exercise because they thought, you know, their wombs would drop out or whatever. Creative things were frowned upon for them. You know, they just had to, like, sit down and be obedient.
So I think Drusilla and Winifred have something in common. There's a certain darkness growing inside of them. It's different in each of them - right? - because they come from different backgrounds. And I think we all do carry a darkness inside of us, whatever that may look like. You know, it could be something that we're trying to control, something that we don't like, something like greed or envy or...
RASCOE: ...Or anger, rage...
FEITO: (Laughter.)
RASCOE: ...Speaking personally.
FEITO: Let's talk more about that.
(LAUGHTER)
FEITO: But yeah, they're kindred spirits in a surprising way, I think, eventually, in the end, as I guess maybe we all are.
RASCOE: Thinking about the story, there really is no redemption. There's no one, as we have said, to really root for. Is there a larger meaning to the story, or is it just kind of a bloody romp for people like me who love this sort of thing?
FEITO: I mean, that's a great reading as well, but I did layer it a lot with a lot of, like, abstract, big concepts like evil, for example, and the nature of it - where it comes from, you know, the motivations of different people for committing different evil acts. And there's also a bit of, like, questioning on how we're doing the feminist take that is sort of in fashion. But then I wonder sometimes whether we're making women just cool all the time without wondering if maybe they're just evil, or they're, like, not worth us justifying their actions. Or if they are killers in a lot of, like, popular culture, they're usually portrayed as very sexy, talented killers instead of just like brutes, basically.
And I wanted to touch on the way that women don't often kill the same way men do, you know, and explore that. What would happen if a woman essentially started murdering in a way that is very bloody? Like usually, women throughout history have murdered with poison. It's different. It's more intimate. It's more psychological. So I think I wanted to see a woman just murder for no reason just other than pleasure. So either or. It's all good. And each reader can decide out how seriously they take it. But I did want to layer it in with some kind of complex questions as well.
RASCOE: That's Virginia Feito. Her new book is "Victorian Psycho." Thank you so much for talking with us about it.
FEITO: Thank you so much. It's been such a joy. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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