Sisters of Dorley and the Rise of Basement Fiction

There is the you that remains that remains and remains.

Spoilers for Welcome to Dorley Hall1, Severance season 1, and up to chapter 5 of 1000xRESIST

There is a star and a star and a dangerous gravity.

There's a seductive appeal to masculinity. It promises power, respect, love - all you have to do is follow the rules. Enforce the structure of the patriarchy both within and without. However, like many seductive forces, it seeks to corrupt the user. When it is allowed to, masculinity will curdle. Rot. Eat away at them and anyone unlucky enough to be nearby. What can be done about it?

There is a you and an us and a means to us.

Enter the Basement. Physically and/or socially violent young men are brought to it against their will. Stripped of outside influences that reinforce masculinity and punish deviations from it. They are faced with what they have done, how they have harmed themselves and others around them, often the very people they claim to love. And they are (eventually) given a choice - rid themselves of masculinity or wash out. The details of washing out, of failing to complete the program, are never explicitly stated, but the path to graduation is - become a woman. What's more, the women running the program were once boys in the same position, now graduated and continuing the cycle.

But there is a nothing and it is not you and nothing lasts forever.

Understandably, this is difficult for the boys to learn. They cling to their masculinity like a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean. The sponsors have the job of prying their fingers off, one by one, until they learn to swim. Of surgically cutting it out of their psyche bit by bit. But the goal isn't to torture, or punish, or even redeem.

There is a decoupling of substance and a dangerous gravity.

The goal is to make people out of bastards, to remove the excuses and justifications for hurting people, and the official stance of the program is that reform can't happen without removing the masculinity that is the source of the problem in the first place. Even if you accept that as true though, you're forced to grapple with that questionable-at-best morality while faced with the undeniable truth - that the program works.2 All of the graduates of Dorley Hall that we see in the book end up as better and happier people. And so the cycle continues.

Dorley Hall hosts the prime example, but once I started looking I saw the Basement in many of my favorite works from recent years. Let's lay out some parameters for what qualifies a work as a piece of Basement Fiction. First and foremost, the basement is underground. Characters are stuck inside the basement, wanting to escape. Finally, it seems that the basement is cyclical in nature.

In Severance, people's brains are split in two, with the "innie" only existing at work and the "outie" inhabiting the body during the rest of the day. Neither half has memories of the other, meaning that innies know nothing of their past or the world outside their labyrinthine basement office. One memorable scene in an early episode shows Helly, a new innie, repeatedly try to leave the office only for her outie to walk right back in. She (as with all new employees) is guided through coming into existence by another innie, then quickly put to work. At the end of the day they all pack up and leave, only to regain consciousness at the start of the next workday.

1000xRESIST depicts a society of clones living deep below the surface in the Orchard (our metaphorical basement). The clones (referred to as sisters) are birthed, work, and pass on. 1000 years of this have gone by, clones raising clones raising clones, all watched over by their leader named Principal in the name of Iris, the ALLMOTHER (their immortal progenitor). Over the course of the first half of the game we learn how Principal has lied to and manipulated their entire society, culminating in the discovery that Principal is part of the first generation of clones and was controlled and traumatized directly by Iris. In turn, we witness memories of Iris being judged and controlled by her mother, and her mother being controlled by hers. The cycles of abuse have built up, trapped in a pressure cooker underground for a millennia.

What is it about the current moment that has our culture fixated on the Basement? My best guess is that it's a reaction to the early days of COVID. For a few months many people were afraid to leave their homes, with every day feeling much like the last. They may not have literally been trapped in a basement, but in some ways that would be a more comforting explanation for their isolation and confinement. I'm curious whether this trend will continue, and I'm sure that there are other works that I've missed.3 Either way it's produced great art across multiple different mediums, so I'm hopeful that we'll continue exploring the Basement for while yet.

Footnotes

  1. The Sisters of Dorley is also serially published online: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35394595/chapters/88223581 ↩

  2. Mandatory disclaimer: The program works within the story. I am not proposing the construction of forcefem torture basements. ↩

  3. Honorable mention to Silo, which was written well before COVID but was since made into a TV series. I enjoy the show but couldn't make it work for my argument. ↩