It’s easy to get lost among the characters of Blackwater, the publishing phenomenon that has arrived in Spain thanks to Blackie Books this spring. First published in the United States in 1983, the six novels by Michael McDowell—writer and screenwriter of films such as Beetlejuice— have had readers in suspense for months. Between one delivery and the next it has become more than necessary to review the family tree kindly offered at the beginning of each volume. A courtesy that the many readers of García Márquez—one of the many references who have been compared to McDowell by critics, along with Stephen King, Alejandro Dumas or HP Lovecraft—often miss.
In fact, to understand the world of Blackwaterit is enough to look at the women of the Caskey family, as the narrator says in the fourth installment of the saga, War: “In the case of the Caskeys, not only were there many women, but they were the ones who ruled the family. Billy had never seen anything like it and was fascinated by it.”
From the first volume, The flood, it becomes clear to readers that they are not facing just any family saga, but rather a true matriarchy, led by the fearsome Mary-Love. A highly detestable character who exercises absolute control not only over her family, but also over all of Perdido, the fictional town in Alabama where the story is set in the 20th century. The matriarch controls the family business, the social dynamics of the entire town and the people who, arriving from outside, try to alter them.
Thus, it is not surprising that other women are the only “threats” to this family balance. The greatest of all is Elinor, the mysterious young woman that Oscar, Mary-Love’s son, rescues in a hotel submerged by the flood at the beginning of the story. The enmity between the two and how it ends up affecting the lives of the Caskeys is another of the central themes of McDowell’s story, who considered the family a true monster: “Families seem violent, oppressive, manipulative… and therefore That is also especially interesting to me. I don’t have close family, only friends. And when you have friends for so many years, they become horizontal relationships.”
And monstrous, surely, is the relationship that Mary-Love has with her children. “Mary-Love liked to consider herself the benefactor of the family, lavishing wealth and generosity at all hours. She considered herself amply rewarded by the gratitude of her children; but if she did not seem enough to him, she could become very cruel.” Elinor’s marriage to Oscar in the first book breaks this dynamic and begins the power struggle between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.
The war between the two women almost completely monopolizes the first three books, and leaves the other half orphaned of the most captivating plot thread of the saga. As McDowall said: “By the time you have imagined and carried out your revenge, everything has changed and no longer brings any satisfaction.”
Feminist novel?
Around Mary-Love and Elinor moves a group of equally strong and independent women. Starting with Grace, who at the beginning of the story is a girl who finds in Elinor a better mother than the one who abandoned her. In the third book, Her House, she leaves her father to go to college, although every summer she returns to town in the company of her friends, “Grace’s girls,” until she is there. leaves to dedicate himself to married life. She, who since she was a child swore that she would never have married, ends up living on a family farm with her cousin, with whom she has a love relationship.
In fact, it is not the first time that McDowell – liberal, democrat and openly gay – included the fight for civil rights and the rights of the LGTBIQ+ collective in his works. He also wrote the mystery series Valentine and Lovelace: in which a gay bartender and his straight friend solve murders together in Boston in the tumultuous 1980s, amid homophobic rhetoric and the AIDS crisis. His other books, although not focused on the LGBTQ+ community, often contain positive representation of this group.
“Of course, it is not enough that they are women, but that they are women who hold a position of authority over the rest of the characters,” says Maravillas Moreno, a researcher in Hispanic literature at the University of Murcia. “It is not enough that they are in places of power, but that they really exercise it.” Mary-Love, once again, is the perfect example of this dynamic. In addition to her control over her family, she also has full authority in the sawmill business. Her son Oscar and her brother-in-law James are the ones who occupy the factory offices daily, but she is the one who manages the money and decides how to spend it.
In fact, the men are secondary characters, whose only purpose is to get married and expand the family with more women. Like Frances and Miriam, the two daughters of Elinor and Óscar. Or Queenie, James’ sister-in-law who comes to Perdido to escape a violent husband. When he tries to kill her a second time, she is not a man who comes to her aid. Because everything in Lostfrom war to peace, through solidarity to revenge, happens only through women.
When Mary-Lobe stops exercising this control over the Caskeys, economic power passes into the hands of Miriam, her first granddaughter and daughter of Óscar and Elinor, who the daughter-in-law gave to Mary-Love in exchange for the freedom to leave her house. . This exchange is one of the most controversial outcomes in history, and the one that calls into question the label of matriarchy and feminist empowerment that the community of readers and editors has given to the saga.
However, the fact that Elinor or Mary-Love are not “good mothers” in the oldest and most stereotypical sense of the term—one because she abandons her daughter, the other because she exerts constant psychological violence on her family—does not make her the story is less feminist. “If the main characters are women, and the story revolves around them, of course it is a matriarchy. And they don’t have to be normative women. They can break the canon, all the stereotypes and even have flaws and be bad people. It doesn’t make it any less feminist, on the contrary. He makes it ahead of its time,” acknowledges Mariam Martínez Bascuñán, who cites Margaret Atwood as an example.
In the prologue of the latest edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwoood argues that her most famous work—a dystopia in which women are abused by a totalitarian regime—is feminist. Even when they are the same women who commit violence: “If you mean a novel in which women are human beings – with all the variety of personalities and behaviors that this implies – and they are also interesting and important and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book… So yes. In that sense, many books are feminist.”
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