THE WOMAN AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

“Women have always been monsters… But a monster is not something to dismiss, or look down on.”

To mark the anniversary of Jude Ellison S. Doyle’s 2019 book DEAD BLONDES AND BAD MOTHERS: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power [originally published as Sady Doyle, book available here], BPAL is proud to present a new collection of perfume blends inspired by this brilliant work of nonfiction.

DEAD BLONDES digs into the meaty places where pop-culture, history, and folklore overlap, presenting a series of monstrous feminine archetypes which perpetually recur in storytelling – including the stories we construct around current events, or events in our own lives.

Each archetype comments differently on the roles that women and femmes have been relegated to throughout society; many of these have been reclaimed and turned inside out over time, evolving from punishments into sources of power.

“This is a dark book, but some things are clearer in the darkness. This is a violent book, but an unsparing confrontation with violence can bring us to what lies beneath and beyond it.”

From The Woman at the Edge of the Woods:

“This is the primal threat in our earliest stories: a woman who lives on the outskirts of civilization, rejected by her community; a woman who is old, ugly, asexual; a woman who is, alternately, too beautiful, too sexual, too self-possessed; a woman who knows things others don’t know, and can do things others can’t do. When the loop of patriarchy closes, it can feel inescapable. Yet the way to freedom has been here, in our monster stories, all along. From the beginning, we’ve known that a woman who leaves society as we know it, who heads out to the dark and threatening spaces beyond the world we’ve built, will find not her death but her power.”

A scent of power and wisdom, resilience and rage: a patchouli bramble embraced by creeping ivy and rose thorns, protecting a glade populated with mandrake root, yarrow and nettle, Roman chamomile, purple sage, elderberries, sweet myrrh, smoky vanilla husk, and willow branches.