The Magic of Wallpaper

Fantasy based in real-world history has become something of a trend in recent years. From Shadow and Bone on Netflix, loosely based in Eastern Europe in the 19th century, to Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun, which reimagines the founding of the Ming Dynasty of 14th century China, there seems to be quite an appetite for magic and myth woven into the aesthetics and ideals that have come before our own. The draw is obvious when you begin reading and watching these books and shows: by inserting magic and thus relieving ourselves of “historical accuracy,” writers can create characters who express their race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in anachronistic ways. Often, historians will tell us that it’s difficult to say how many people of color may or may not have been in Western Europe before the 19th century, or they’ll caution against inserting labels of gender and sexuality on real people who might not have considered their identities in the same way people in the 21st century do. It’s difficult to look back and see ourselves in cultures and identities that have shifted dramatically over time, just as those people, were they to look forward and see our smartphones and electric cars, might have trouble relating to us. Thus, by creating fantasy novels based in history, writers and readers can play in aesthetic and political spaces that haven’t always been safe for marginalized identities, and reimagine history as a place rife with fresh possibilities.

In particular, I want to talk about a recent novel written by Freya Marske, entitled A Marvelous Light. In her debut novel, Marske does a masterful job creating a London that anyone who has watched Downton Abbey will recognize immediately. However, she also imbues her England with a magic system that is at once exciting and also depressingly familiar: at one point in the novel, it is explained that magic is only something that men really practice, since women are of course too emotionally and physically fragile for it. This is England in 1908 as we recognize it - imperialist, sexist, and repressed, but also an England where a murder can happen in a busy park and no one notices it, where a man can be cursed in an alleyway and shrubbery can come to life and attack people it doesn’t like. Marske deftly navigates the expectations of turn-of-the-century England, and weaves her politics and subversions directly into the world our heroes move through, subtly enough that a casual observer need not even notice her doing it, but incredibly powerful to anyone who might. It is, quite simple, wallpaper politics. On entering, one might not notice the wallpaper at all, or merely think it decoration, when really, the wallpaper itself is an entire narrative and history unto itself, referencing us back to the England we know, and the England we get to discover with Robin and Edwin throughout A Marvelous Light. So, let’s talk about some wallpaper, shall we?

Freya Marske’s A Marvelous Light opens with a murder in the middle of a sunlit park, and quite literally gets darker from there. People are lounging about, picnicking and having fun. But they feel far away from the action: like a painting or an old recording (I am reminded of Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte) because all the reader can really focus on is a man getting tortured and then killed. It’s a startling beginning to a book that otherwise takes place in the living rooms of the wealthy, but looking back, I enjoyed the sense of wrongness, of apartness, that the reader is immediately thrust into. Real life is happening all around, but we’ve already stepped through into a darker, scarier, more magical England living right alongside the toddlers in bonnets laughing just across the grass. The wealthy whose living rooms we will inhabit for most of the rest of the book are the ones picnicking, but readers are fortunate enough to see behind the sunny facade, and immerse ourselves in a London that looks quite like our own, and with just as many secrets.

Thus, we meet our hero: Robin Blythe, a down-on-his-luck aristocrat, who has just accepted a desk position he is neither qualified for nor desires. In the grand tradition of English heroes, he has taken this job because he is horribly broke: he needs to pay off his recently deceased parents’ extravagant debt. Within his first hour on the job, he’s ambushed by a cranky, rude colleague who is just as shocked by Robin’s sudden employment as Robin is. The last person who worked at Robin’s desk has gone missing, and Robin is quickly shocked to learn that he’s even less qualified for the job than he’d initially thought. Robin is told in no uncertain terms by his rude colleague that he is now an intermediary between the England he has always known and another, magical England that lives just alongside his own. Magic is in fact real, and anyone he knows could be a practicing magician - they live right alongside him. Robin is of course stunned by this news, and heads off back to his home, only to get ambushed again.

This time, he gets cursed. (Robin is having a terrible day.)

With nowhere else to turn to, Robin finds himself asking for help from his rude colleague, who we’re introduced to as Edwin Courcey. Edwin is just as baffled by Robin’s predicament as Robin is, and begrudgingly decides to take Robin with him to his magical family's estate out in the country, if at the very least so that he can access the vast magical library his wealthy parents have accrued. And that's where the book really gets good.

When Robin and Edwin arrive at the Courcey estate, it isn’t long before Robin, who we’ve already been told is a lover of the arts, recognizes, of all things, the wallpaper. The house is done up in “the new style,” as one character refers to it, with intricately designed motifs of greenery, flowers and other natural ephemera. “In the room assigned to him, Robin ignored the bustling of the upstairs maid who was clearly doing her best to prepare a room on five minutes’ notice, and went to run his hands over the wallpaper. ‘This is William Morris.’” William Morris was a leader of what we think of today as the “Arts and Crafts” movement, or in England, the “Modern Style.” Heralded as a return to nature and traditional crafting, the Arts and Crafts movement looked back at medieval and folklore inspired motifs, considering the Middle Ages to be a simpler, more spiritually engaged time from which to draw inspiration. Furniture design, architecture, painting and weaving all brought a lush, homey atmosphere into the lives of those who followed the style, which emphasized integrity and workmanship in everything that was created. While Morris's wallpaper and textile designs took inspiration from intricate tapestries of the Middle Ages, he was also – as the Arts and Craft Movement's name would suggest – deeply invested in the actual production of the textiles he created. Preferring to dye the threads he used from natural sources, much like his forebears hundreds of years earlier, he also became deeply interested in the welfare of the craftsmen working for him. Eventually, this interest turned into a fierce support of worker's rights, leading him to join with socialist organizations in the late 1880's. He also started his own printing press and wrote several socialist documents, leaning on his anger and frustrations of the British government's continued imperial practices abroad and disappointing support for workers at home. Morris was a contemporary of Marx, and both of them helped grow the idea of worker's rights in Europe. Morris probably didn't expect to be as politically active as he became in his later career, but by harkening back to an earlier age, not only aesthetically but practically, he was not only turning old things new, but envisioning a world where more people could share in the beauty and promise of the new century and opportunities opening before them. The wallpaper in A Marvelous Light is already, quite literally, deeply politically motivated, and Robin and Edwin have only just walked into the house.

For an upperclass man in the early 20th century, noticing the wallpaper of a country home is remarkable, even for one who has an eye for artistic details. In this same exchange with the maid, she responds to Robin’s acknowledgment of Morris with: “Most of the rooms here are done up with it. Mrs. Courcey wouldn’t hear of anything else.” The maid doesn’t mention The Courceys as a couple, even though we know that Mr. Courcey is the checkbook behind all the decorations. Here, the maid specifically says that Edwin’s mother was the one to make all the aesthetic decisions for the house. It’s an innocuous line, but an important one, especially as we learn that Edwin is estranged from most of his family, but still has a strong connection to his mother. Throughout the book, Edwin is deeply uncomfortable in his parents’ house, unable to allow himself to emerge from under the looming shadow of an aggressive older brother that hangs over Edwin even when his brother is absent. In addition, while at the house, Robin and Edwin are surrounded by Edwin’s sister Belinda and a troupe of her gregarious friends, which sets the quiet studious Edwin and nervous, overwhelmed Robin off. Neither of them fit at the house, but in Edwin’s case, the dissimilarity between himself and the rest of his family is striking. Edwin’s loneliness, even surrounded by family, runs deeply in a current all the way back to his childhood. However, as uncomfortable as Edwin feels in his family house, around his sister’s loud, informal friends, he is still surrounded by his mother’s vision of what she wanted her domestic life to look like, one of the few areas in her life where Victorian women had some level of control and power. It’s a subtle way of acknowledging that, as uncomfortable as Edwin might feel in the family home, he is, in some ways, still being embraced. And that embrace - that welcome - extends to Robin, his guest. Both the informality of the houseguests and the new, fresh wallpaper on the walls are underlining the fact that although they might not feel it, both of these young men have been accepted and are safe within the house’s walls.

This acceptance is especially important given that Robin and Edwin share a secret that, in the early 20th century, could have both of them stripped of titles, land, employment and rights if found out: they’re both gay. For two queer men in 1908, the spector of Wilde’s trial, which occured less than a decade previous, would still hang heavily over them. In England, homosexuality won’t be decriminalized for another 50 years, and for two upper middle-class men, losing everything to an accusation they can’t fight is a real threat to their livlihoods and well-being. In fact, Robin’s instantly knowing and having opinions on the wallpaper in his guest bedroom might even be a soft nod to him being homosexual, not because he’s interested in “women’s work,” or because Marske is trying to undercut his masculinity, but because wallpaper had already entered the gendered politics discussion by the time the book begins. In 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was published, written by a woman named Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman’s story is written in the form of journal entries by an upper-class woman who has recently been told by her physician husband to restrain herself from any physical or mental strain after the birth of their child. Trusting his advice, she sits in the room and does nothing except write in her journal. Day by day, she stays in the room, papered in yellow, and begins hallucinating malevolent creatures and figures in the patterns. She even tries to suggest that maybe a walk outside might do her good, but her husband gently reprimands her, and she stays quite literally locked away as her health deteriorates further and she eventually loses her mind entirely. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Robin has read, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and perhaps shares some fellow feeling with the narrator. Robin knows, as a gay man, that he is only safe in certain places, entirely at the mercy of anyone who knows his secret, just as women of the time were entirely dependent on the whims and desires of their husbands. While Robin, as a white upper-class man, seems to have just as much power in his life as these husbands, quite literally - in the bedroom, with his proverbial wallpaper - he finds himself just as powerless. There are very few places that queer men can feel safe in England in the early 1900’s, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Marske writes the Courcey’s social and aesthetic progressivism as a way to gently suggest that the family could in time learn to accept Edwin and Robin’s sexual leanings, or possibly do so already.

It is easy to think about civil and workers’ rights as hot modern topics, but books like A Marvelous Light deftly take us back into the past to show us versions of ourselves tangled up in very similar circumstances. The wallpaper of the Courcey home reflects to Robin, Edwin and the reader the hope of a more equitable future, not only for white upper-middle class queer men, but for everyone. Marske’s heroes are deeply privileged within the world they live in, which shows how much space there is for greater representation in the future, but it was still refreshing to see the way Edwin and Robin’s sexualities and politics were reflected in the world they inhabit. Of course, A Marvelous Light is fantasy, but in some ways, so are any historical books with queer characters in them – many historians will tell us that it's impossible to look back and slap a label onto people who had entirely different ideas of sex and gender than we do today. But even when the words are different, history (even an altered, slightly-more-sparkly one) shows us that feelings are still true, and remain so, regardless of how they’re perceived.