In the dim, cramped attic of a crumbling house in late Victorian London, a young woman wastes away under her mother’s watchful eye, her body mutating into something both grotesque and defiant. Heather Parry’s Carrion Crow resurrects the madwoman archetype with brutal clarity in a tale of hunger, blood, suppuration and the terrible intimacy of family.
Once socially ambitious, Cécile Périgord has fallen on hard times. When her daughter Marguerite announces she wants to marry George Lewis, a much older solicitor of lower-middle-class background, Cécile refuses. The match, she believes, would destroy years of work to move her family up the social ladder. Instead of forbidding the marriage outright, she insists Marguerite must first be “refined” into a proper bride.
She locks her in the attic with a sewing machine, strict rations of food and letters from Lewis, a carrion crow in the rafters, and a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, “a history of the origin, properties, and uses of all things connected with the home life and comfort”.
With each passing day, Cécile inflicts on her new and unspeakable acts of cruelty, depriving Marguerite of her freedom, her social standing, her sexuality, even her ability to speak. At the same time, Cécile’s own past comes to light. Born Cecilia Hargreaves, the daughter of a soap maker, she fought her way into higher society, making compromises that left her full of resentment as she discovered that the demands of respectability can be as confining as the walls of a prison. Those scars show themselves in the way she treats her daughter. The story is one of inheritance, where class, reputation, suffering and questions of bodily authority are passed from mother to child.
As time drags on, the narrative turns visceral and hallucinatory. Marguerite’s body begins to decay. She loses weight, her periods become irregular, her filthy hair falls out in clumps. She fixates on the insides of her ears and her tonsils, as if trying to map a body that’s wasting away.
“For me you can’t really extricate the thrillingly sexual possibilities of the body from the possibilities that elicit disgust in us more often,” Parry has said. “Every wet, warm orifice or organ is teeming with bacteria and microlife; every part that is sexualised can become infected, full of tumours, afflicted by open sores.”
Like the crow, she too is a scavenger, feeding on whatever she can and surviving on scraps.
Food is one of the novel’s strongest motifs. To feed or to starve is a weapon. Appetite itself becomes shameful. As her mother feeds her increasingly meagre portions or often neglects to feed her at all, Marguerite’s hunger becomes unbearable and she’s forced to eat an egg she finds in the crow’s nest: “She bit it into two wet halves, chewing it into a cud. It was orange jelly, it was veal cake, it was fricasseed turkey. A banquet for one.” Like the crow, she too is a scavenger, feeding on whatever she can and surviving on scraps.
In this reimagining of the locked-up madwoman, Marguerite suffers but refuses to submit; her self-destruction, however disturbing, becomes her way of fighting back.
Parry draws on earlier stories of imprisonment. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is an obvious comparison, with its account of a woman breaking down under enforced bed rest. In Carrion Crow the confinement is domestic rather than medical, but just as destructive. Virginia Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic is another, but where Andrews relied on melodrama, Parry goes further into darker, bloodier territory, describing bodily excretions in blunt, excruciating detail.
Parry’s main concern is agency and constraint, particularly for women whose bodies are treated as sites of control. As she has said, the novel tries to “draw a scaffolding around such almost unreal acts of violence and oppression, to draw real truths out of a fictional history”. She examines class and capitalism through the demands placed on women to perform respectability and service. The Mrs Beeton manual, quoted throughout, becomes a symbol of that domination and a reminder of how domestic ideals are used to keep women obedient.
Be warned, Carrion Crow is not for the weak stomached. As befits a gothic body horror, the writing is graphic and unsparing. Yet the revulsion is allowed to speak for itself, and Parry never tips into sensationalism or gratuitousness. It may leave you feeling queasy, but you won’t easily forget it.
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