The White Room by Stephanie Carroll Review and Tour

A White Room by Stephanie Carroll
Published by Unhinged Books on May 22, 2013
Genres: Gothic, Historical Fiction
Format: eARC
Source: Netgalley
Goodreads

At the close of the Victorian Era, society still expected middle-class women to be “the angels of the house,” even as a select few strived to become something more. In this time of change, Emeline Evans dreamed of becoming a nurse. But when her father dies unexpectedly, Emeline sacrifices her ambitions and rescues her family from destitution by marrying John Dorr, a reserved lawyer who can provide for her family.

John moves Emeline to the remote Missouri town of Labellum and into an unusual house where her sorrow and uneasiness edge toward madness. Furniture twists and turns before her eyes, people stare out at her from empty rooms, and the house itself conspires against her. The doctor diagnoses hysteria, but the treatment merely reinforces the house’s grip on her mind. 

Emeline only finds solace after pursuing an opportunity to serve the poor as an unlicensed nurse. Yet in order to bring comfort to the needy she must secretly defy her husband, whose employer viciously hunts down and prosecutes unlicensed practitioners. Although women are no longer burned at the stake in 1900, disobedience is a symptom of psychological defect, and hysterical women must be controlled. 

A novel of madness and secrets, A White Room presents a fantastical glimpse into the forgotten cult of domesticity, where one’s own home could become a prison and a woman has to be willing to risk everything to be free.

A White Room is a Gothic historical story that touches on topics of depression and mental illness as well assisted suicide and abortion. It starts out with an arranged marriage requested by our girl Emeline to help her Mother and sisters out after her father’s death. Upon their marriage, John and Emeline move far away for John to pursue his legal career, and that is where the issues begin. John all but ignores Emeline, and no matter how hard she works to please him, he never seems happy. Emeline struggles so hard and just can’t seem to fit in. She falls into depression and the house comes alive for her. For a while there it was sort of like Beauty and the Beast’s house, except the house was mean to her, and she was the only one to see all the creepy things the furniture would do. Honestly though, I haven’t been able to figure out whether the house really was acting that way, or if Emeline was really crazy. That was really the only paranormal aspect to this book, so I’m not sure what I was expecting.

Emeline is miserable, until one night she can’t take it anymore and just runs outside, to encounter her maid having a difficult labor. The maid couldn’t afford a doctor, and Emeline helps her deliver the baby safely. Emeline realizes her passion and agrees to help others who cannot afford medical care. Meanwhile, her husband John is working for attorneys who prosecute unlicensed medical practitioners, especially those performing abortions that end up in the patient’s death. You can kind of see where this is going, and I won’t spoil the major conflict in the story so I will leave it at that.

Emeline’s character develops in this story from a timid girl who is suffering and wants to run away to a woman who is sure of herself and her ability to help others. I absolutely loved that bombshell dropped about the conversation Emeline had with her father before he died. I really liked her in this story. Unfortunately, I didn’t really get that feeling from other characters. There was only a little bit of development for her husband John. He did start paying attention to his wife when she started acting more confident and stopped caring what he thought about her. They had this one conversation where they finally told each other the truth and discussed their feelings and he does support her when she gets in trouble.  So I guess he was a decent guy, but sure didn’t show it for the longest time. I can’t say John really redeems himself because there wasn’t much romance in this book so I felt like the ending could have had a little more in that department.

Guest Post:

Victorian Gothic: Why Victorians had a Mourning Culture

By Stephanie Carroll

 The Victorian Gothic is a common theme during Halloween because 19^th century society was obsessed with death. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, people had dramatic displays and etiquette to respond to a death in what is often called the Victorian Cult of the Dead. This culture and etiquette included black clothing, photos of the deceased, hair jewelry, séances, and preventative measures in case someone was buried alive! Much of this etiquette is described in detail all over the internet, so today I want to focus more on why the Victorians developed this culture.

 

Fashion

The United Kingdom monarch, Queen Victoria, sparked the creation of mourning culture after her beloved husband Prince Albert died at the age of 42 in 1861. For the next 40 years, the queen wore black and froze her house in time, having servants continue to lay out her husband’s clothing daily. Just as fashion from Paris is in vogue in America, so too was a queen’s mourning practices, which became the popular etiquette all over the world.

 

Economics

The more elaborate each step of the funeral and burial, the more it showed the family loved and adored the deceased, so people were encouraged to purchase the most expensive coffins, elaborate head stones, mausoleums, and family plots, in addition to flowers, special clothing, and memorabilia including post mortem photography known as Memento Mori and specially made hair jewelry with locks of hair from the dead.

 

The funeral business was a huge industry. Many historians believe much of the encouragement to mourn excessively came from the industry’s desire to make money off of the grieving. These historians believe the industry found ways to guilt people into the expensive practices. However, other historians argue that the crossover of mourning to different cultural signposts, such as literature, suggests the practice went deeper than an economic and fashionable trend.

 

Psychology: Coping with Death

Without modern medicine, the average lifespan was much shorter than it is today, and hospitals could be dangerous due to a lack of knowledge about infection. Thus, people died regularly and died in the home where loved ones witnessed each step. Today, we have removed death from our homes and from our minds in many ways. For the Victorians, death was right in front of them all the time.

 

Family members cared for the ill and experienced all the messy and disturbing aspects of a loved one’s deterioration. Further, the byproducts of the human body ceasing to function were then cleaned and removed by either family members or by servants in an upper class home. The elaborate mourning spectacles could be interpreted as a way for people to deal with and overcome the overwhelming realities of death.

 

Anxiety also developed because death was still misunderstood. It wasn’t clear if death occurred when the heart stopped beating or when the brain stopped functioning. There were documented cases of people coming back to life even after their hearts had stopped or after they had stopped breathing. Being buried or autopsied alive became a huge public fear.

 

In response, Victorians increased the time prior to burial making sure the corpse did in fact begin to decay, something confirmed by either family or friends of the family. They also buried the dead with a string attached to a bell above ground and assigned a death watch, so that if a person woke up in a coffin, he or she could ring the bell for help. Historical records show no bell having ever rung.

 

Progressive Era & Religious Angst

The Victorian Era was also a major time of industrialization and modernization with new knowledge being discovered in every realm challenging religion and philosophy.

 

The advancements in medicine not only created concern regarding live burial, but also created uncertainty regarding the existence of the soul. People believed the soul resided within the heart or chest cavity, so many took the idea that death occurred when the heart stopped as evidence of the soul. They feared brain death disproved the afterlife.

 

Additionally, Charles Darwin published his revolutionary On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, sparking a huge backlash from the church and Christian religions as it challenged the doctrine that God created all life in seven days. These ideas challenged the religious beliefs that supported the existence of the soul.

 

With the amount of death occurring in the Victorian Era, one can only imagine how difficult it was to consider that the soul and afterlife did not exist. For many people, the idea that they might never see their loved ones again was far too devastating. The popularity of Spiritualism may have been in response to the desire to prove life after death.

 

Spiritualism was a movement that lasted well into the 1920s. People would use séances, mediums, spirit writing, and photography in order to communicate with or capture proof of ghosts. It was used to communicate with relatives, friends, and lovers who had passed on. For some, it was simply a parlor trick, but for others, it was a very serious practice that has been compared to a religion. The idea of spirits remaining in the world of the living is in contrast to traditional religious beliefs, so it could be said this was an attempt to incorporate and accept scientific discovery while continuing to believe in the afterlife.

 

A Society Obsessed

The Victorian death culture and obsession with death goes much deeper than most realize when they learn about mourning etiquette. Although fashion and economics played a role, it seems far more likely that the Victorian people were trying to cope with a tremendous amount of trauma in their lives. Further, they were trying to cling to their religious beliefs as scientific discovery continued to challenge those doctrines. Their outward expressions of death were their only way to take back a sense of control and channel their anxiety through a dramatic outlet.

 

 About the Author:

Stephanie Carroll is the author of Gothic Victorian novel A White Room, on sale for $0.99 cents for a limited time! As a reporter and community editor, Stephanie Carroll earned first place awards from the National Newspaper Association and from the Nevada Press Association. She holds degrees in history and social science and graduated summa cum laude. Her Gothic and magical writing style is inspired by the classic authors Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper), Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden), and Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights).

Find Stephanie Carroll on Facebook – Twitter – Goodreads or on her website at www.stephaniecarroll.net

10-Day Halloween Celebration!!!

A White Room eBook Edition is Now Available for $0.99 cents on Amazon US or Amazon UK !

October 21^st through October 31^st!

 

Halloween Giveaway

Win one of two $25 Amazon gift cards or an autographed copy of A White Room.

 *CLICK HERE* to go to the Author’s web site to enter.

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