The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill: A Review by Ethel Rohan

I’m the girl who faithfully raced home from school to watch BBC’s historical drama, Upstairs Downstairs; the teen who reread Wuthering Heights obsessively; and the young adult who attempted to write a novel set in a mansion in nineteenth century Dublin, its young protagonist the butler’s daughter and her dead mother haunting the mansion. As an adult, my literary obsessions are grounded in loss and its hauntings. I brought these preoccupations and preferences to McGill’s first novel, The Butterfly Cabinet, and I wasn’t disappointed. I was captivated.

The Butterfly Cabinet was sparked by an actual nineteenth century child-murder, the girl killed by her mother, a member of the English aristocracy. Much as in the real-life events, Harriet Ormond, the fictional mistress of Oranmore estate in Northern Ireland, locks her four-year-old daughter, Charlotte, in a “wardrobe room” with her hands tied-up as a punishment for soiling herself. When Harriet returns to the wardrobe room three hours later, Charlotte is dead, strangled by the ties that bound her hands. Harriet is imprisoned, tried, and charged with manslaughter. Threaded throughout the novel is Harriet Ormond’s obsession with butterflies. It’s ironic and ultimately heartbreaking that Harriet Ormond kills the very creatures she loves. The recurring image of the beautiful butterflies killed and lifeless inside the glass cabinet is a fitting metaphor for the entrapment felt by so many, if not all, of the characters in this novel. The backdrop to this harrowing domestic story is the political and socio tensions of the time around class, culture, England’s occupation of Ireland, Protestants versus Catholics, and landowners pitted against the displaced. The tropes of ‘oppression,’ ‘soiling ourselves’ and ‘the ties that constrict and strangle’ haunt this novel.

Fast-forward seventy years to the nineteen-sixties and Oranmore estate is now a nursing home where Maddie, a former servant to the Ormond family, is a resident. The novel opens with Harriet Ormond’s granddaughter, Annie’s, visit to Maddie. Maddie confesses to a pregnant Annie her knowledge of the Ormond family and the events surrounding young Charlotte’s horrific death. Over the course of the novel, Maddie will reveal a startling string of secrets she’s kept hidden for seventy years. Maddie also gives Annie the diary Harriet wrote during her one-year prison term. The diary further illuminates the events surrounding the terrible tragedy. More importantly, the diary fleshes out Harriet Ormond and further portrays her as an overwhelmed, ill-equipped mother of nine in charge of an estate in a foreign country. Thanks to McGill’s compassion and skill, the diary also allows us to empathize and even sympathize with Harriet Ormond and was for me the crux and true brilliance of this novel. Through the diary, we see that while many of Harriet Ormond’s actions and attitudes are deplorable, she’s impulsive, reckless and desperate. Harriet reacts to life’s events on an instinctual and sensual level while shushing her inconstant better judgment. Interestingly, despite Maddie’s contempt, even hatred, for her mistress, both women’s struggles and conflicts are very similar. I love that there are no easy judgments or conclusions to be drawn in this novel.

The novel alternates chapter-by-chapter between Maddie and Harriet’s point of view, a craft choice that avoids constriction and claustrophobia, two other themes powerfully weaved throughout the novel. However, I sometimes rushed through Maddie’s oral narration to get back to Harriet’s gripping diary entries. Harriet Ormond is a compelling, complex and skillfully drawn character, Maddie is less so. I also worry Annie’s unremarkable letter at the novel’s feels contrived and unnecessary, and belies the wonderful read that follows. For The Butterfly Cabinet is a rich work, lush with imagery, suspense, lyrical language, haunting and telling details, and the remarkable characterization of Harriet Ormond, all of which propelled me through the pages.

Bernie McGill lives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland. Her first novel, The Butterfly Cabinet was published in the UK and Ireland in August 2010 by Headline Review and will be published in the US by Free Press in July 2011.