The Unseeing is now out in the U.S.
I know something about the perception and treatment of women in previous centuries, having written a novel about a late-19th century English embroiderer who survives a disreputable childhood only to become embroiled in a brutal crime. Documents, photographs, and sewing samples have helped me understand the relationship between society and the women who must navigate society’s gender and class-based rules. Thus, it was without surprise that I found myself faced with a portrait of the ultimate social pariah—a “fallen woman”— in Anna Mazzola’s debut novel The Unseeing. Well-documented, unsettling, and impressively written, The Unseeing tells the embellished true story of a seamstress named Sarah Gale who is cast as a whore and accused of being a murderess.
Mazzola is also a London attorney, and she has meticulously organized a myriad of factual details into this tightly mapped story of deception and violence, as well as providing a scathing portrayal of the treatment of working-class women in the bridge year between Georgian and Victorian London. Smartly, Mazzola has created Edmund Fleetwood, a fictional criminal barrister hired by the Home Secretary to leave no stone unturned as Sarah Gale awaits execution for the murder of Hannah Brown. The conversations between the condemned and her solicitor raise questions of what evidence is based on truth, and what is fabricated, and they are, as Sarah says, “a long chess game,” with each player anticipating the other’s moves.
Sarah and her sister Rosina have fallen from their middle-class status through no fault of their own. They are fiercely loyal to each other and to Sarah’s little boy, born out of wedlock. Each woman takes up employment that is indicative of their era, sex and status: Rosina is a housemaid who becomes a poorly paid daily when Sarah is imprisoned so she can care for her nephew; Sarah sews for a living, but she also beds James Greenacre (among other unnamed men), a charming if abusive sociopath who promises her the moon and then dumps her for the homely but wealthier Hannah.
Hannah Brown is one of those rare anomalies of her time: she owns her own business and has never been married. But even she falls for a promise of marital bliss, only to end up cut to pieces, each of her limbs found in a different corner of London by strangers who happen upon them. It is a lonely, chilling tale, made increasingly problematic by Greenacre’s bizarre admittance that he cut Hannah up, but did not murder her, and Sarah’s refusal to implicate anyone other than herself.
At one point Sarah tells Edmund about her childhood and like Edmund, I as reader am rapt, hanging on her every word. There is the intimation of religious fanaticism in Sarah and Rosina’s household, of abuse, and intense grief over the death of their brother. But almost as soon as this narrative is done, Sarah implies she may not have been entirely truthful. My hope for her, and my newfound sympathy, is quickly tarnished by this admittance. Before long, Edmund, his wife and colleagues, the Newgate prison wardens and inmates, are increasingly convinced that Sarah is not innocent so much as she is merely good at manipulating.
From Cleopatra to the Marquisse de Merteuil, from Salem “witches,” to campus date-rape accusers, the portrayal of women as adept at twisting the truth for their own advantage is persistent, in particular with regards to women of power and women whose power has been stripped from them. Somewhere in the middle ground supposedly lives among us the contented elementary school teacher, the patient mother, the caring nurse, the woman everyone is comfortable with. It is a stereotype that runs so deep, women and men alike are willing to vote into the highest office a male perpetrator of female abuse rather than experience the manufactured terror of this hackneyed female image.
Sarah, whether she is acting as a mother, a sister, a suspect, or a mistress, does not make anyone comfortable. Like Charlotte Rogan’s Grace Winter in The Lifeboat, Hilary Mantel’s Anne Boleyn in Bring Up the Bodies, and Hannah Kent’s Agnes Magnusdottir in Burial Rites, Sarah Gale is brought to life through her strange choices and actions, and the author’s vividly-imagined world. Grace, Anne, Agnes, Sarah—three of whom have actually lived outside of fiction—are embroiled in dilemmas as powerful and terrifying as any man in their era faced. Yet because they are women, they are forced to employ a uniquely intricate strategy to survive the calamities that beset them—disasters involving men, caused in large part by men—because they are without the same support systems and assistance that men enjoy.
As The Unseeing progresses, and Sarah’s story becomes more layered, suspense is built by raising questions of whether Sarah isn’t actively lying so much as doubting herself—another thread running through the female psyche being our inconsistent self-esteems. Sarah doubts that her own childhood is harrowing enough to make anyone feel sympathetic toward her. She doubts that revealing the father of her son will help him. She doubts that the true story of Hannah’s murder will actually prove her innocence (did Agnes Magnusdottir’s confession help her, in Burial Rites?).
As a reader, though not as a novelist, I occasionally find myself wanting to throttle these defenseless but perhaps guilty perpetrators of their own demise. I think: if only she hadn’t made him angry, fallen in love with him, betrayed him, made this one jealous, made that one cry, or used her power badly. Yet even as we readers fervently tell ourselves she would never be me, we recognize that we still find ourselves in less dangerous but no less prickly situations, rebuking accusations that decry: if only we were less bitchy, less bossy, less intellectually superior. And wondering, despondently, if only we could convince our doctors our pain was not imaginary, convince our employers we should be paid the same wage for the same job our male co-workers hold.
In the past, women have often let other women flail in the metaphorical lifeboat, and occasionally pushed them overboard (see Lady Rochford in Bring Up the Bodies). This was true in the era of The Unseeing, when a woman’s power could only be used against other women, as the warden, Miss Sowerton, uses her power against Sarah. Rather frighteningly, we have been reminded that this can happen today. There may not be a scaffold waiting for us, but we are forced to defend feminism as if the word itself connotes horrors to make a Victorian faint; we are made to feel as if it is better to vote for a narcissistic male sociopathic rather than “a Lady Macbeth,” a term still used to describe powerful or power-hungry women. In a sense, we are asked to bend our truths to make them more palatable, or understandable, to others.
As Claire Ableton, the female protagonist in my novel The Crewel Wing notes, “The truth is not always what people think they want to hear.” In The Unseeing, Edmund sets out to garner the truth of what happened to Hannah Brown. But he begins to realize, the more he hears the truth, that he was actually hoping for a different version of it. This is the centerpiece of manipulation: it is based on truth, but it is an adaptation of it, a version that the deliverer imparts on the listener in a way that will be acceptable to them in order to shift their response to it. The response Sarah so desperately tries to draw out of everyone around her will lead to her exoneration or her execution… or perhaps something in between.
Erica-Lynn Huberty is the author of the prize-winning Gothic short story collection Dog Boy and Other Harrowing Tales, and the upcoming historical novel, The Crewel Wing. www.elhuberty.com
‘The Unseeing’ (Sourcebooks Landmark), by Anna Mazzola is available in the U.S. next week, and was released in paperback n the U.K. in January, 2017.