The Housemaid India
release this year in the month of January, had created quite a buzz; new on
Bookstagram (a portmanteau term for books and Instagram), I hadn’t really heard
of it until then.
Stuck with the academic syllabus,
only recently have I ventured out of the syllabus into reading the bestsellers
and popular reads.
Digitally watching the best-selling
psychological thriller before reading it was a bit of a let-down for me because
I felt reading could have been a much better experience than the adaptation.
I think I am the only one who
would be driven to read the book after watching it.
Honestly, I felt bad for Frieda
McFadden. Rebecca Sonnenshine’s screenplay and Paul Feig’s direction could
have done more justice to Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried’s starrer release.
The plot follows Mille (Sweeny),
Nina (Seyfried) and Andrew (Sklenar) into dangerous and shocking secrets. In
fact, each character carries a secret of their own. Sweeny, out on parole, sets
herself up for an interview with the Winchesters. Only the onlooker garden tender
knows the ins and outs of the house of secrets and kind of cautions Sweeny, the
new live-in housemaid, to steer clear of the Winchesters.
A fairytale on the outside, the movie in parts
is a crude retelling of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, only the beast isn’t a charming
prince but a control freak psychopath holding young women in the attic for
minor transgressions.
This brings me to the actual
argument of this article. Have you heard of ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ by
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar? If you haven’t, then let me give you a logline-
a fancy word for summary. Having drawn the title from Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Jane
Eyre’, these two writers analyse Victorian literature from a feminist point of
view. Why Jane Eyre, though? Why not any other novel? In Jane Eyre,
Rochester’s wife, Bertha Mason, is secretly locked in the attic. Gilbert and
Gubar, taking other Victorian women writers into account, point out a strange
contradiction where women are either portrayed as an ’angel’ or a ‘monster’. This
is problematic because neither is a correct depiction of women. This is what
the attic scene in the movie reminded me of! We are insufficiently aware of Bertha’s
madness, like Nina’s.
Moreover, Andrew being locked in the attic by Mille was what Gilbert and Gubar strived for: an autonomous, not subservient image of woman beyond the dichotomy of an angel and a monster. This particular scene is so powerful in throwing away the reductionist patriarchal image of women that it really kind of mixes the image of angelic as well as rebellious. It shows the power of women's camaraderie. It also explores the depiction of women as protagonists in the 21st century, the kind of roles that were absent in Victorian times. As Virginia Woolf once said that woman writers must 'kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been ‘killed’ into art.” McFadden definitely killed ‘the aesthetic ideal’ of woman to awaken the role of women in her novel. The novel is certainly a reversal of the madwoman in the attic. McFadden single-handedly upended the attic scene written by men.