Week 6: Lud in the Mist, by Hope Mirrlees (6)

This book is almost like the antithesis of gothic literature while still containing many of the beats there of. It's kind of strange - the time period is ambiguous but obviously antiquated, there is a great social change happening behind the scenes of the otherwise placid Lud-in-the-Mist, the supernatural is for all intents and purposes kicking in the door of the Ludites' 'pious' culture, and there is an extreme emphasis on the splendor of the natural world. However, while these are typical beats indicative of gothic literature, they are played in the exact opposite way. Nature is glorious and golden and even the suspicious darkness of night is portrayed as mischievous and playful; the people of Lud learn to understand and then embrace the supernatural fairy fruit rather than spurn it; and the past is the benefit of the present and future, and not a deadweight preventing progress.

And that's just the framing for allegorical tale within Lud-in-the-Mist. The characters and their reactions within their circumstances are reasonable to even today's standards, and meaning behind their actions are something we can understand on an instinctive level. Even the commentary on complacent, elitist upper-castes and the frivolities of their pedantic luxuries still holds up to this day. What's most interesting to me though was probably not something Hope Mirrlees was aware of while writing her lovely fair story, and that is the historical connection between fae and neurodivergency. 

To say we have a more thorough understanding of mental health today compared even fifty, sixty years ago is like saying the sun is kind of hot. But it's not like those kinds of ailments didn't exist in people until some psychologist decided to write it down - people just called them different things. 'Curses of the bloodline' like what Nathaniel suspects is the Chanticleer sensitivity to things like the Note are more equivalent to genetic predispositions to things like OCD, Anxiety, schizophrenia, Drepression, etc., etc. Personally, I think that Ranulph's behavior early in the book, when he crashes his father's dinner party before confiding in his father how he at times feels the need to get away from existence itself, makes Ranulph coded on the Autism spectrum. And since Mirrless's intention was likely more in line of referencing the changeling mythos, in which the faeries switch out 'sweet children' for 'unmanageable abominations', that only really affirms my belief.

A great modern media that actually centers around this idea is Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, the story of a disturbed Pictish woman traveling to the Norse underworld to avenge her lover, who was killed by Viking raiders. In actuality, the game developers revealed that all the supernatural horror Senua endures is a product of the mental illness she inherited from her mother, slotted into practices with the cultures of the time. The behind the scenes interview is definitely worth a watch.

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