“Dear holy sister”: Narrating madness, bodily horror and religious ecstasy in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

Abstract

This chapter examines the layers of anxiety and insanity in both Michael Faber’s novel, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) and Lucinda Coxon’s BBC adaptation (directed by Marc Munden, 2011) navigated by the irrevocably sexed female body, and the tension over seizing and stabilising the narratives over those bodies. The chapter focuses primarily on Agnes Rackham, an embattled upper-class matriarch driven to denial of her motherhood through the religiously informed paradox of the procreative and incarcerated female body. The many intertextual references woven into the book and also its television adaptation (The Exorcist, Jane Eyre and The Woman in White) provide a context for the contemporary reader to grasp the horrific dilemmas of Victorian femininity. Though each of the women are destined for some kind of narrative oblivion (through desertion, watery graves or the threat of the asylum), each must first travel through madness to escape.