This brings me to another concern with the choices made around the depiction of Charles’s intersexuality. “As the novel continues, it becomes clear that an incredibly intricate and disturbing web of lies has been spun to conceal the nature of Charles’s sex from them.” While the references to the work of famous British writers that are intricately woven into this novel enrich it, the choice to link Charlotte’s intersex identity to the supernauturally tinged moor, risks fetishizing intersexuality as magical and otherworldly. The magical element of Charles’s non-normative gender is one of the many parallels between MacDonald’s protagonist and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, along with ties to nobility, a haughty personality and a passion for reading.
It’s suggested that Charlotte being intersex is related to their connection to Fayne and possibly the result of their mother eating magical moor mud during her pregnancy.
Many of the numerous plot twists that follow hinge on the people who surround Charlotte (who later uses the names Charles and Charlotte interchangeably) misunderstanding and/or attempting to control Charlotte’s gender presentation, in part because of how it will impact the title of the estate, which must be passed on to a male heir. However, in a departure from the genre, Fayne’s protagonist, to whom we are introduced as Charlotte, is revealed to the reader to be intersex roughly a hundred pages into the novel. This unique setting, thanks to MacDonald’s rich description, feels deeply peaceful in moments and terrifyingly, starkly empty in others.Īs in many of the Victorian gothic classics the novel references, the fate of the protagonist’s family’s status and retention of their property is central to the plot and depends on strategic marriage and the birth of an appropriately gendered heir. The mud of the moor that surrounds Fayne has special healing qualities however, it is also dangerous to people who do not know how to navigate it the porous earth releases noxious gasses and collapses into sinkholes that can swallow and drown people who aren’t familiar with the terrain. The descriptions of the subtle ways the landscape changes with the seasons are some of the most immersive in the book. For example, the protagonist’s friend urges them to read Jane Eyre between repeated appearances of a ghostly face in the window overlooking the Wuthering Heights-esque moor where Fayne is situated. Direct references as well as allusions to these novels are scattered throughout Fayne. Like many proto-feminist Victorian gothic classics, the story follows a feisty, precocious protagonist born into a world of crumbling aristocracy. Fayne revolves around the inhabitants of the titular fictional estate, which straddles the border between England and Scotland.
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