On the Endless Parade of Literary Dead Girls

There’s a poem that troubles me. It’s by a celebrated contemporary white male poet, and it’s called “Above Sunset,” and it’s about a girl who is beautiful, who is or seems dead, dating the speaker of the poem. That’s it.

Here’s how the poet introduces the girl: “she’s the loveliest dead girl in sight her skin powdered blank.” And here is how the poem ends: “she’s still the dead-/ loveliest dead girl in sight.” In between the first and last line, the poem—which barely takes up half a page, which I can’t even find anywhere online—calls her a lovely dead girl two more times.

I realize that in this poem, deadness is a metaphor for, maybe, the girl being goth. That was what the celebrated poet told me when I asked him about the poem, and he quickly changed the subject. “Dead,” he said, was repeated because poems repeat things; that is one of the ways they slide onto new subjects or catch upon the tongue.

But the poem itself caught on more than my tongue—I felt snagged by it, scraped by its fingers on my skin. I felt tricked by the poem into a little box.

I have been told I am too sensitive, but throughout my life, I’ve seen dead girls, and dead girl poems, everywhere.

*

Perhaps some family background is necessary. When my mother was very, very young, she had a child. She married the man. She left the man. She married my father. Her daughter grew up, depending on the photos you’re looking at, looking either just like her, just like me, or like neither of us at all. Then the daughter died in a car crash, and my mother and father left the island they were living on to bury her, in Virginia. When they returned two years later, I was born. I was never told I was a replacement child, but my mother would talk about my sister often, and my sister’s art was still hanging everywhere in our small house.

Maybe other background is necessary: when I was young we moved off the island again, settled into swampland in northeast North Carolina. One of our new town’s claims to fame was that many white women had died there. There was a book that a university press put out on the most famous dead white woman in our town. She was famous because she was rich and her death was never solved; we studied the book for a whole half of the year in eighth grade. The biggest event in this town, for several years, was a ghost walk where all of the white women who lived in crumbling mansions across the waterfront would dress up as their house’s dead former owners, and sometimes they would reenact the deaths of their ancestors.

Or perhaps I should talk about my identity instead: trans suicide rates are, of course, incredibly high. One of my closest friends in high school, femme and disabled and probably on the verge of coming out, killed themself. Entire industries have been built on sharing trans deaths, garnishing sympathy for trans death, gaining social capital from trans death.

Which is to say that whenever a girl dies, I feel a whole rotten society is to blame. I am writing about my dead girls with the understanding that it may disqualify what I’m trying to say—that I run the risk of being too personal, too close to the subject, too hot when I should be cool. I’ve been told again and again by men to pretend to be more objective, but I’m not interested in living unshadowed by my experiences, the biases incumbent in them. These are the reasons why I was bothered by the poem.

I have, pardon the expression, skin in the game.

*

In her 2018 essay collection Dead Girls, Alice Bolin defines dead girl as a genre—monied  and white and overwhelmingly cis, though perhaps with an undercurrent of queerness or transgression. By crafting her own canon out of dead girls, Bolin argues she’s reclaiming narratives from all these male auteurs, making a resistance out of her citations: in her words, crafting a thing “about women from stories that were always and only about men.”

She focuses on poetry some, but throughout the book mainly talks about the enormous weight of dead girls accumulating in popular culture. Dead Girls on television (Twin Peaks, True Dectective, if you’re lucky Veronica Mars). Dead Girls in song. Dead Girls in books (Gone Girl, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, any other sort of girl in the sort of book that has GIRL in large letters on its front). Hovering over it all are the men who keep killing these girls—real men, but also creative types: the showrunner, the author, the Swedish songwriter.

It’s not in the book, but I can’t read any of these men’s words without thinking of Edgar Allen Poe’s (in)famous quote from “The Philosophy of Composition,” which I read back in high school initially: “The death of a beautiful woman,” he wrote, “is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”

At the time, I tried to dismiss this, but now it fills me with a queasy familiarity. How many men have said this to me. How it keeps going, even in the communities I’ve found. “Dead”/ “lovely” / “Dead.”

Oh, all us girls. Beautiful, beautiful, gone.

*

The most haunting thing about dead girls is that they were alive at some point. To be dead is to have that absence inside of you, or perhaps around you. Bolin talks about this generically—how dead girl stories are predicated by something not being in a space where it should— but this absence is one of poetry’s most enticing features, as well. How you can say something in a poem, but also take it away. If absence becomes conspicuous enough, it turns into its own presence.

In Alice Notley’s feminist epic, The Descent of Alette, absence itself talks—a woman with her head cut off, trapped underground, speaks again and again. Words come from her mouth, but also, sometimes, from others’ mouths as well. In one of the book’s most striking moments, the titular character enters a cave and hears her own voice, saying, ominously, “‘Any woman” “may already” “be dead.’”

When you stop remembering your own past or power, Notley is saying, you die, again and again and again. If these deaths keep happening generationally—as they do, in the book and in life— any woman becomes “‘born dead.’”

Alette is stuffed with women and men who are born dead—“simple ghouls” who do not show decay, awful deaths on the subway where Alette is trapped, an entire mythic narrative of descent into death and more death. Yet I keep returning to this framing of female death specifically. How it surprises, even though it shouldn’t. How Notley turns deadness from something that women become to something that they are born with, death within them like a seed.

How the dead women talk all throughout.

This happens most literally in Danielle Pafunda’s The Dead Girls Speak in Unison, where dead girls speak in unison for 80 pages as a meditation on violence, assault, and the joy of abjection  (“It’s happy death day,” Pafunda’s girls crow at one point, “It’s the day on which / every dead thing / becomes a girl”). It happens all throughout Chase Berggrun’s R E D, a text made by erasing down to the bones Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a book filled with dead girls’ bodies drowning in dead girls’ bodies. (“I am thin,” Berggrun rewrites, “An errant swarm of bees.”) It’s there in every Ai poem that ever meant something to me—including the luminous, complex “Cuba, 1962.” (“what I take from the earth, I give back”).

There are so many other books of poetry that come to mind that reinterpret or complicate depictions of women’s death. Claudia Cortese’s Wasp Queen. Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti. Vievee Francis’ Forest Primeval. A lot of Joyelle McSweeney’s work. Sylvia Plath, of course.

It doesn’t change the circumstances of their deaths, but if you look close enough, the dead girls are speaking everywhere.

*

In the last sentence, I meant to say look, but I first typed love.

Perhaps that’s what bothers me so much about “Above Sunset.” For a poem that keeps emphasizing the narrator’s possession of the dead girl—“fuck it,” he says, “she’s mine”— there is no love in his portrayal. It’s just a man lusting over a woman he thinks is hot, who he wants to keep his hold on.

I know that I’m risking being too sensitive again about this poem. But as many dead girls have been in or around my life, I can’t see any of them in a light that’s not loving. This is what I find the most bothersome. In “Above Sunset,” the famous poet is next to a dead girl, deadening her further with his words, and doing so just because he wants to fuck.

Which isn’t to say that death isn’t, or can’t ever be, erotic. When I was eighteen, I dated a girl who wanted to fuck in a cemetery. We found each other, in part, because we were both young with squiggly genders; the relationship, especially its end, was a complete mess. But I’m interested in messes. When I was younger I wanted to get closest to the (other) people who seemed like they weren’t living, either.

Back when I was dating my cemetery girlfriend, my mantra was “kill the self that wants to kill yourself,” and I’d scrawl it under my clothes in thick Sharpie. When I was on the phone with her once, I started crying so hard I dropped the phone and the battery pack shattered across the room. I’d disassociate over gravestones. We had fights all the time and survived—not because we were trying to survive, but because white girls become dead less often than the narratives would suggest.

A dead girl, it bears saying, is also a way of neutralizing women, reducing their femaleness and turning them into an empty body. It’s a questioning of subjecthood that becomes an imposition.

I am deeply familiar with having one’s womanhood questioned, neutralized. I see it happen every day around me, even in death. Even in the shadowy recesses of a swamp, walking into a rich neighbor’s house as they descend the staircase in an old, old, dress.

To write about dead girls is, of course, to pick a side—to either write for or against the death of girls. The cemetery stones, glistening in the moonlight. The whiteness of it all.

*

There’s so much more I’ve left out here, all the girls and death and my life. I’m a poet, which is why I’m interested in poetry, but I also hunger for a representation that realizes words matter, even if they aren’t inherently good.

Dead girls in our media, Bolin argues, are a pattern that’s not seen as a pattern, an anomaly without any factors that make them anomalous. I realize some of the poets I’ve brought up may have been responsible for horrible things that I’m not fully aware of. I realize, even if we’re marginalized in one way, that doesn’t prevent violence from finding its way into our hearts at the same time. I realize that this whole miserable canon, both claiming and reclaiming dead women, is, like most things, most visible when its white.

When I noticed other people around me starting to call me a woman, it was exciting, but also led to a mounting dread, the sense that their assimilation of me wasn’t it, either. Feeling seen but mis-seen was what drew me to my cemetery girlfriend. It’s what I found in poetry. It’s how I came to understand being a white Southerner. It’s what I wonder if my dead sister, tawny-haired, butch and sad-looking in photos, had some experience with as well.

When the famous poet sat down or went out to write, how easily did the dead girl come? Did the girl ever find herself in the poem? Stumble across a book in the airport and recognize her dead body? Who else fucks me and thinks of a corpse at the same time?

In death, my mother told me once, you become responsible for everything you’ve ever loved. In life, though, I mainly feel tired. I’m tired of seeing the same bodies, again and again and again. I’m tired of every man who’s ever undressed me with his eyes, every white woman and white man who’ve thrown another fictional girl into a pile against the wall.

I want to say to all of these bodies: are you even listening to anything we’re doing here? I feel too sensitive all the time. We owe the dead everything.