For the goodlady, contrastingly, the act of eating foreign flesh is a violent obliteration of racial and ethnic “outsiders,” a way to participate in “white consumption of the Other that has served as a catalyst for the resurgence of essentialist based racial and ethnic nationalism” (hooks 30). In an attempt to frighten Miranda into relinquishing control of her own agency, the House/goodlady creates a nightmarish episode that echoes an earlier moment in time when the Silver House escaped the effects of a bomb during World War Two. Miranda, disoriented, runs towards the house as she smells burning, hears mechanical screaming and feels the ground violently shaking beneath her. The house opens up providing a “shelter” from the outside threat (Oyeyemi 147). Inside, Miranda sees her three matriarchs sitting around a table laid for four. The table, so white it could be made “of pearl, or very clean bone” is replete with …show more content…
Her mother, Lily, is clothed in her typical combat trousers, but Jennifer and Anna Good are ghostly distortions of themselves. The women: were naked except for corsets laced so tightly that their desiccated bodies dipped in and out like parchment scrolls bound around the middle. They stared at Miranda in numb agony. Padlocks were placed over their parted mouths, boring through the top lip and closing at the bottom (Oyeyemi 147). Through Victorian imagery of femininity and sickness, the vampiric goodlady simultaneously fetishizes Miranda’s ancestors via their nudity and “tightly-laced corsets” while victimizing their confinement as they stare at Miranda with “numb agony.” Miranda, seeing their desiccated bodies (an apt word, Satkunanthan