The Madwoman in the Dollhouse

by June Pulliam

11/01/2005

Reiss, Kathryn. Sweet Miss Honeywell’s Revenge. New York: Harcourt Paperbacks, 2005. 444 p.

Sweet Miss Honeywell’s Revenge is typical of Kathryn Reiss’s novels in that it is a ghost story where the past and present are intermingled by the author, in part to help readers analyze the passage into adulthood of modern adolescent girls. Reiss’s ghosts themselves are midwives to these girls’ newfound adult identities. Her revenants are bent on either reproducing through their haunting the repressive conditions that warped their own adult development, or (more positively) on ensuring that what happened to them won’t be perpetrated on the next generation of girls. Both of these types of ghosts are present in Sweet Miss Honeywell’s Revenge, a convoluted tale of haunting—populated with as many revenants as living characters.

Similar to Stephen King’s novel Carrie, Sweet Miss Honeywell’s Revenge explores female anger, specifically about how it can warp the woman who harbors it in her breast, and ultimately cause suffering to those around her. Unfortunately, unlike King, Reiss does not adequately examine the source of this anger in order to demonstrate that it is not so much a monstrous aberration, but a justified, or at least understandable, if extreme response to external stimuli.  

Sweet Miss Honeywell is the stereotypical bitter Victorian spinster. Angular and unyielding, Miss Honeywell is the governess to the spirited Primrose Parson, a poor little rich girl with eternally globe-trotting parents who leave to servants the task of molding children into adults. These children are then expected to grow up and occupy a position in society far more lofty than that of their teachers. In order to shape the adolescent Primrose into a future wife and mother, Miss Honeywell deprives her charge of all childish enjoyments, such as trips to the park and free time to play, instead demanding she spend her days immersed in dry intellectual pursuits. And when Primrose’s attention inevitably wanders, Miss Honeywell is quick to discipline her with a ruler, a strap, or a lengthy stay in the closet. The spirited Primrose rapidly grows rebellious and plays nasty pranks on her governess. She for example pinches her nose shut with a clothes pin as she sleeps, which only earns her more punishments.

During one of their infrequent visits home, Primrose’s parents bring her an elaborate dollhouse, with dolls representing everyone in the household, including Primrose and Miss Honeywell. When Primrose complains to her parents that her governess is overly strict, they mandate that their daughter be given some daily free time to at least play with her dollhouse. One of Primrose’s favorite games is pretending that the other dolls exact a sadistic vengeance on the Miss Honeywell figurine.

Meanwhile, Primrose witnesses the complete humiliation of her governess: Miss Honeywell is enamored of Primrose’s math tutor Mr. Pope, and the two often take afternoon tea together, ostensibly to discuss pedagogy. During one of these sessions, Miss Honeywell confesses her love and begs Mr. Pope to make her his bride. Mr. Pope, unfortunately, doesn’t share Miss Honeywell’s sentiments, and spurns the governess’s advances. Primrose spies on the two, and her resulting laughter gives her away.  Miss Honeywell’s wrath is swift and strong—Primrose is locked in the punishment closet overnight.

Infuriated and with much time to kill, Primrose picks the lock to the closet door and steals away to play a nasty prank on Miss Honeywell—she positions her governess’s water pitcher above the frame to her bedroom door so she’ll receive a soaking when she enters. Miss Honeywell will be unable to blame Primrose, since she retreats back to the closet after setting up the prank. But the joke goes horribly wrong: the falling pitcher fractures Miss Honeywell’s skull, killing her instantly. Primrose conceals her crime by cleaning up the evidence and again retreating to the closet, leading everyone to believe that Miss Honeywell took an unfortunate and inexplicable spill. Of course, Miss Honeywell becomes a vengeful ghost, and inhabits the governess doll in Primrose’s dollhouse.

Flash forward 90 years. Zibby, a tomboy who only wants to spend her birthday money on new in-line skates, is stuck at a miniatures convention with her mother. Suddenly, Zibby is inexplicably drawn to an antique dollhouse being sold by a strange old woman. The price for the house is $186.73, the exact amount of cash Zibby has in her pocket. Almost as if she is not controlling her own actions, Zibby quickly makes the transaction, although doing so also requires her to sign a document acknowledging that she is now the rightful owner of the house, and that there are no exchanges or refunds. Later Zibby doesn’t know what possessed her to buy the dollhouse, a toy she would never in her wildest dreams want to have.

When she gets home, Zibby decides that she doesn’t want the dollhouse in her room, so her mother moves it across the hall. This is when Zibby discovers that she has purchased no ordinary toy. Upon awaking the next morning, she finds the dollhouse returned to her own room. Zibby accuses her mother of moving the house in the night, but her mother denies doing soon. Over the course of several days, the dollhouse is moved to several different locations throughout the house, but it keeps returning to Zibby’s room, with the malicious looking governess doll perched on its roof. Soon Zibby’s friends see the house, and discover that whatever scenario they enact with the dolls comes true, but always with unforeseen, negative consequences. For example, her friends next door are currently living with their grandparents while their own mother and father do missionary work in Africa. They use the dolls to enact a scenario in which their parents return for Christmas. The next day, they get news that indeed their parents will be home for the holidays, but only because one of them has been terribly injured. So when Zibby’s soon to be step-sister pretends that her mother will be beheaded on her wedding day, she must unravel the mystery of the dollhouse to prevent worse things from happening. 

To understand the mystery of the house, it is necessary to discover the history of its owner, Primrose, and all of the people involved in her life, who are all now contained within the antique dollhouse.

Sweet Miss Honeywell’s Revenge is an extremely complex ghost story with multiple revenants, some who haunt one another, in addition to haunting the living. Also, the novel jumps through time in a way typical of Reiss’s ghost stories, shifting between the perspective of the haunted living and the dead as they were in life. Like many young adult novels, Sweet is extremely well crafted, and appeals to an adolescent audience not by talking down to the readers, but rather by centering the story on characters their age.

However, while I enjoyed this novel a good deal, I still have a bone to pick with it. I am deeply troubled by Reiss’s representation of the wraith of the title, Sweet Miss Honeywell herself. She is portrayed as a bitter and frustrated spinster whose obsessive need to control those around her makes everyone miserable, eternally so. And now I am returning to the point I started in the beginning of this review: the representation of female anger. All too often female anger is viewed not as a justifiable response to external stimuli, but rather as a personal problem, a bad joke, something attributable to PMS. Take your pick, dear reader. But the point is, such representations serve to keep women locked in the same old battles with one another–young vs. old, comely vs. plain, virgin vs. whore, etc–without every examining that such "contests" are contrived to divide women rather than allow them to unite and experience fully their collective strength.

While Miss Honeywell is not a likeable character, and really probably couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be made into one, I was saddened that Reiss didn’t do more to at least represent her as a product of her time, one where opportunities for women were severely limited, and where women with some education—women such as Miss Honeywell—might be pushed into a relatively unrewarding life as a governess as the only way to share their talents and to make a living. Reiss does something similar to this in her 1993 novel Dreadful Sorry, where the contemporary protagonist is haunted by the ghost of a girl who is thought of as selfish by her peers, if not by people 80 years later, because of her desperate attempt to continue her education, rather than become an unpaid governess for her aunt and uncle. Failing to make Miss Honeywell similarly sympathetic in some way only perpetuates sexist ideas about certain types of women.

A better writer—or a better tale by this writer—might question these ideas.