Fairytale Girl

"Her name was Dee Dee, though she insisted on being called Desdemona. She thought it sounded better. No one understood her. She had a few friends, but none were as fair or as gothic as she. She’d spend hours staring in a mirror, inspecting the smoothness of her face, before climbing out of her bedroom window, over the wall, tiptoeing across the lawn, and slipping quietly into a car waiting halfway down the block, its lights turned off until they’d rolled away into the night. They’d sing loudly along to the radio on their way into the city."

"Weston examines those settings that evoke a sense of mystery (she makes a number of telling comparisons between Welty and Hawthorne); she then focuses on "the theme of enclosure and escape of the `female Gothic'--a generic misnomer," she asserts, "since all forms of the Gothic offer 'deep revelations about gender, ego, and power.'" This comment suggests the tenor of Weston's approach: she draws liberally but carefully from the critics who have theorized about the gothic impulse in both British and American literature. The result is the broadest and most illuminating contextualization of Welty's large body of writing to appear since Peter Schmidt's 7be Heart of the Story (1992)."