Troubled Vampires behind Racist Walls: "White is for Witching" by Helen Oyeyemi

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Helen Oyeyemi's 2009 novel White is for Witching makes frequent references to older and better-known Gothic texts. "He's awful," says one character, in response to the collected works of Edgar Alan Poe. "These pages are just bursting with his longing for women to suffer." This same character later turns a college interview into a "semi-aggressive debate over her assertion that Thackeray's Becky Sharp would easily beat Brontë's Cathy in a fistfight. The only criticism she would have accepted was that she was giving patriarchy precedence over the female consciousness explored in the Gothic. But since that criticism wasn't offered, she stood her ground".

Yet even as she brings into conversation both the misogynistic and female-driven qualities of the 19th century Gothic, Oyeyemi is quick to find her own thematic ground. She builds an atmosphere as bleak and emotionally driven as some of these earlier installments of the genre, but layers on a more current exploration of racial and sexual politics, all swathed in a fog of magical realism. Though born in Nigeria, Oyeyemi grew up in England, and White is for Witching, like her other works, explores this increasingly common identity of multiculturalism. Miranda Silver, protagonist of White is for Witching, is white, even excessively so--she is described as "an ivory wand", and so pale that she "fade[s] into the air". Yet her family's live-in help, her girlfriend, and many of her classmates are refugees, immigrants, or the children of both. In the the novel it is not only the real world, but the realm of the supernatural, which seems pitted against these "foreigners".

Though in many ways the novel centers around Miranda, she is not one of its three narrators. Those include Miranda's twin brother Eliot, her girlfriend Ore, and the house she grows up in--though Miranda identifies so closely with this home that its perspective often contains her own. Unquestionably, it is this house's narrative voice which is the most beguiling, if also deeply frightening and malicious. Cavernous, mazelike, and very haunted, in a way, the "Silver House" satisfies the classic Gothic mansion trope. Though always filled with people (it's also a bed-and-breakfast), it seems engulfed in solitude, particularly for Miranda, who can never seem to leave the Silver House behind, but is never entirely happy when home, either.

Yet in response to the recent influx of refugees in the UK, the house is also blatantly racist. Its winding corridors and stairways, so reliable and even protective toward Miranda and her brother, contort and rearrange themselves for the Silvers' Kurdish employees, trapping one of their daughters in an elevator one night and ultimately driving the family out of Dover--a town just as hostile to outsiders as the house itself. Yet the Silver House radiates its own peculiar, poisonous energy, turning those it considers "outsiders" into shallow husks of themselves, even as it acts as a kind of protective fortress for Miranda, who as the book progresses, is increasingly pulled into the house's thrall. Her girlfriend Ore, a Nigerian adopted by white English parents, asks the housekeeper Sade, also Nigerian, if there is "something wrong with this house". "It is a monster," Sade responds.

It's a word that pops up frequently, often in reference not only to Gothic homes or mythical figures but to Miranda herself. "I think I am a monster," she writes at one point, disturbed by her own unnatural appetites. Indeed, appetite, and the lack thereof, might be the strongest forces ultimately driving Miranda to destruction. Though it begins as a mere eating disorder--"pica", an appetite for things that are not nourishing, e.g. chalk and plastic--it grows clear that what Miranda really hungers for is something else, something "she knew, but couldn't say". The novel is subtle in its references to vampirism, another staple of the 19th century Gothic and horror novel, limiting the motif to brief, ephemeral moments over which the reader briefly hesitates, noticing something a bit off, before moving on. Two of the most specific examples of Miranda's unusual appetites involve her preying on "outsiders", an urge she clearly hates, yet seems unable rid herself of. She's troubled by her desire to "taste" her girlfriend Ore in a way that surpasses her hunger for anything edible, "turning the beginning of a bite into a kiss whenever Ore stirred". "Ore is not food", she sternly tells herself. Yet her appetite remains unconvinced.

Oyeyemi's novels tend to come with unresolved, abrupt endings. Though White is for Witching concludes with a clarity unusual for its author, Miranda and her whereabouts remain something of a mystery at the story's end. Very early on in the novel, we learn that Miranda will vanish; by the time we close the book, we still don't know exactly what happened to her, though we're given some clues. Oyeyemi's novel is less a detective story than a study of characters, none scarier or more contradictory than the Silver House itself. Beautiful yet rotting from the inside, insidious yet protective, all-powerful yet easily threatened, it's an empire in itself. The racism and xenophobia at its heart are not easily defeated, and the book's ending is pretty bleak. Rather than recovering from her mental and physical illness, Miranda has, if anything, weakened the psychological state of everyone else around her. By the time her twin Eliot narrates the book's final passage, he has been changed from a "simpler", more grounded version of Miranda into someone who spends his days watching his sister's shoes perpetually filling with red liquid, as they have done ever since her disappearance. "I am chained to the shoes," he states. He stubbornly continues calling "the phone she lost months ago" and slips letters under the door of her empty room.

Yet amid all this hopelessness and uncertainty, Oyeyemi adds a coming-of-age spin to her take on the Neo-Gothic novel, as Miranda begins to better understand the Silver House and everything it stands for. Even as it changes her, she tries harder to consider herself a being separate from it. Though ultimately she sacrifices herself in order to "go down against" her ancestral home, she might still save herself.