In honor of Black History Month, Atwood Magazine has invited artists to participate in a series of essays reflecting on identity, music, culture, inclusion, and more.

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Today, recording artist and producer virgogabrielle (aka Gabrielle Reid) talks production in her essay, ‘Havisham: How the Charles Dickens Character Inspired a Track,’ as a part of Atwood Magazine’s Black History Month series!

virgogabrielle’s producer alias “beatsbyvirgo” transmutes inner moods into instrumentation, often integrating themes from literature and philosophy into her creations. She takes heavy inspiration from house, drum & bass, and hip hop. When she isn’t creating for herself, she enjoys making beats for others with the intention of fostering collaboration.

Read virgogabrielle’s essay below, and find her song “HAVISHAM” and more wherever you stream music!

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HAVISHAM

How the Charles Dickens Character Inspired a Track

by virgogabrielle (aka Gabrielle Reid)

I remember reading Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in school, and immediately becoming infatuated with the character of Miss Havisham.

She is the epitome of a jilted woman – after her fiancé walks out on their wedding day, she stays frozen in time, keeping everything as is. She wears the same wedding dress into her old age, sitting day by day with a rotting cake and the withering decor once meant to represent a sacred union.

The fact that she never moved on has always haunted me deeply, as it reminds me of everything I don’t want for myself. She never found love again and adopted bitterness instead of grace.

Sometimes I look at my own patterns and attachments and see Miss Havisham in myself. I find it difficult to let go, and realize that if I don’t work to detach, we could very well become one in the same.

So, I decided to make a track about it.

Around the time I made “Havisham,” I had just started expressing my sentiments instrumentally rather than lyrically. I had recently been inspired by drum & bass, and wanted to experiment in that realm. One night, I had been working on musical ideas with the Great Expectations film playing in the background and thought- why don’t I sample this? I took key quotes from my favorite scene and chopped and arranged them to convey a message more catered to my own thoughts:

“You see I’m tired. Of men and women. Sometimes I have sick fantasies about what I want. Look at what remains of me.”

As everything was coming together, I decided to do a beat switch mid-track, but use the same vocal phrases.

To me, this represents a shift from victim to villain – the same situation could keep me trapped in eternal bitterness or I could use it as more of a reason to make something happen for myself in this lifetime. I conveyed this through a wardrobe switch in the visual shot by @baegod (who did an AMAZING job capturing the energy with her creative eye) from a white to black dress. I may be a villain at times, but at least I accept that rather than basing my identity around what is no longer. And that is how Miss Havisham and I will always be different.

Putting out “Havisham” has propelled me into my producer era, and I look forward to blending the worlds of literature, film and music into more of my work.

You can find the Havisham visual here, and the track on all streaming platforms. – Farrah Fawx

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