Butterfly Cabinet's Victorian view of parenting

New novel tells a bleak, 19th-Century tale of infant death.

The Butterfly Cabinet Bernie McGill Headline Dh85

The playwright Bernie McGill's debut novel takes a Victorian view of parenting - that children should be seen but not heard - to frame a dark 19th-Century tale of infant death. In these pages, self-control and discipline are virtues, while children and high spirits are there to be broken, the sooner the better. McGill uses twin narrators to unravel the story of Charlotte, the smallest child in a large, privileged country household in Ireland, whose life ends in tragic circumstances.

Tied up by her mother and left to stew in the wardrobe room as "apt punishment" for failing to master toilet training, Charlotte later chokes when she tries to free herself from the stocking and twine that bind her to the wall. Harriet, the little girl's mother, and Maddie, one of the servants of the house, share the narration, switching between upstairs and downstairs perspectives and presenting, inevitably, contrasting accounts. Meanwhile, McGill's images of dead butterflies mounted in cases serve as a metaphor both for the children of the house and for their mother, the parent turned prisoner, pinned and displayed for judgement.