It’s easy, really, to remove a penis. It might even be
luxurious, like taking yourself out to lunch: starched tablecloth,
martini-olive, glint of a diamond on the finger. It’s an act of security and
authority, a statement of ownership, yes, but also elegance, desire – white
linen and clean nails, of long fingers reaching out to take, take, take until
we’re sated, day-drunk, a little giddy. It’s less about the removal of the
penis than it is about how we as the castrators feel about
removing the penis.
The hex for a penis isn’t really all about
the penis
against cream
a glass of just-pink wine
teacups porcelain thrush egg blue
a penis between her legs and the next shucking it off
her big gobstopper eyes and hello kitty backpack
full of dicks.
the penis
against cream
a glass of just-pink wine
teacups porcelain thrush egg blue
a penis between her legs and the next shucking it off
her big gobstopper eyes and hello kitty backpack
full of dicks.
[. . .]
hex with a plate of grilled pears
[. . .]
some woman in a mint silk pantsuit so happy with
‘/penis hex/’, WITCH
As described in WITCH, Rebecca Tamás’
collection released at the very start of 2019, the hex and its aftermath sound
delightful – serene yet powerful. They hover somewhere between the aesthetic
and the phenomenological; like taking a bath in the daytime or scenting your
laundry with lavender. I can hardly wait to hex, convinced it will make me
organised and attentive, a new and different woman, hair in a chignon, tasteful
highlights, new leather. I think of what it must be like to wear those
signifiers of power so easily, the kind I’ve been grasping for my entire life,
to be so unconcerned, so unburdened that you can wear a jacket resting over
your shoulders, arms down by your sides. I long for that newness, that space in
my mind.
There are less joyful reasons to hex, of course. The
kind we’d rather not speak of, because to even think of them destroys our
dreams of power, of beauty, of complete ownership of oneself; the kind that act
as splinters underfoot, shards of glass left in rows to make us hobble. But,
more than silk against the skin or blush-coloured wine, they are why we need to
hex. Often, the hex is less of a choice than it is a survival mechanism – a
necessity – in a world that routinely and thoughtlessly violates, abuses and
traumatises women. Tamás is aware of these, lays them out without fanfare:
hex at a child-wedding [. . .] the child-bride comes
with you
When it was reproduced by the Chicago Review
of Books, ‘/penis hex/’ was tagged with the phrase #MeToo.
‘And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who
in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty
or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a
box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as
has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?’ asks the Malleus
Maleficarum, Heinrich Kramer’s theological and legal treatise on how to find,
torture and murder a witch – published in 1486, the book had as many as
thirty-six reprints in the ensuing years.
WITCH’s answer:
the witches eat your book
then you
then everything.
To be a
woman is to be feared, to know fear. To hold the two simultaneously within
yourself, to know that your body, by the sheer fact of its existence, will be
terrified by the society that claims to be terrorised by it; that the
patriarchy deems women’s bodies so awful, so monstrous, that it seeks to limit
and control their power. These people not only hate women, but are afraid of
them; scared of the capacity for women’s bodies to be unruly, unclean,
unknowable. Despite the sheer and uncommunicable amount of violence enacted
upon the female body throughout history, it’s woman as terroriser, as beast,
that we keep coming back to. What better way to justify the ways in which we
break her?
The female
body has been codified as disgusting, defective – leaking, bleeding, oozing –
from time immemorial. She limps, incomplete and half-finished, across
Aristotle’s theories, a deformed ‘monstrosity’ and a ‘misbegotten man’; stalks
through the Talmud on Lilith’s jackal-feet, flying through the night on her
bird wings to sate her demon’s appetite; drags her heavy body through Greek
mythology, crowned with curls of snakes. She’s simultaneously too-much and
less-than; little more than an underdeveloped man, a foetus too weak to grow
entirely, pale and fragile as an orchid. It’s this that Freud evokes when he
writes ‘Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the
sight of a female genital.’ For Freud, the female body is defined by its
fundamental lack: uncanny, strange, and unfinished. It’s why so many euphemisms
for the vagina focus on the female genitals as a wound: cleft, axe-wound, gash
– the woman is always a site of violence.
In ‘The
Construction of the “Castrated Woman” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema’, theorist
Susan Lurie asserts that it’s not the female-body-as-castrated-man that
inspires such horror in men, but her status as something whole, unknowable.
‘Lurie asserts that the male fears woman because woman is not mutilated like a
man might be if he were castrated; woman is physically whole, intact and in
possession of all her sexual powers,’ Barbara Creed surmises in her
introduction to The Monstrous Feminine, her landmark essay collection that
explored abjection and female horror. Freud’s vision of the castrated woman is
merely ‘a phantasy (sic?) intended to ameliorate man’s real fear of what woman
might do to him. [. . .] Specifically, he fears that woman could castrate him
both psychically and, in a sense, physically.’
If women
are unsupervised, then what might they be doing? What might they be wearing?
What could they become? What if, instead of being powerless and pliable, they
learned that they could fight back? What if the woman who lies next to you at
night, folds your laundry, cooks your meals, is merely hiding her claws and
scales and razor-teeth and licking her lips with her forked tongue, counting
the wrongs you committed against her – against all women – biding her time.
In February
this year, a true-crime documentary series titled Lorena was released. It told
the story of Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband’s penis as he slept, of
how she threw it into the long grass at the side of the road in Manassas,
Virginia. I think of how they sold penis-shaped sweets outside the courthouse
where her trial took place, of how the proceedings made it into a Saturday
Night Live sketch, of how she was shown as crazy, fiery, a scorned wife
mutilating her husband after he threatened to leave. What I think of most,
though, is how Lorena Bobbitt was tortured physically, sexually and emotionally
by her husband for years before she castrated him. How she became a punchline.
Howard Stern, one of the most prominent voices in the discussion of the case,
refused to believe the extensive evidence that supported her claims of abuse
because ‘she’s not that great looking’. In the article that coincided with the
documentary’s release, the New York Times ran with the headline ‘You Know the
Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It.’ If Tamás asserts that the penis hex
isn’t really about the penis, the way Lorena’s story was told definitely seemed
to assume that it was: ‘They always just focused on it . . .’ she told one
reporter. Her ex-husband – and his penis – were what attracted sympathy. The
jury found her not guilty ‘by reason of temporary insanity’; she served a
mandated stint in a mental health facility. The article ends with Lorena
reflecting on how people react to her story of unendurable abuse: ‘“They
laugh,” she said several times [. . .] “They always laugh.”’
In ‘Stop
your women’s ears with wax’, from Julia Armfield’s recently published
collection salt slow, an all-women
band go on tour. Their music inspires feverish devotion in their female fans,
with crowds of screaming and crying girls thronging the street outside their
shows. At the venues they play, male employees are found murdered, and the tour
bus is covered in black feathers. Their filmographer, Mona, enters the band’s
dressing room and ‘briefly catches the lead guitarist without her face on [. .
.] The face – the brief glimpse that she has of it – is a curious thing,
familiar yet misplaced with its upturned nose and silvered eyelids, hanging
over the back of a swivel chair.’ The double-meaning of ‘without her face on’
reminds us of the beauty standards women are under pressure to perform – the
image of the unpolished, make-up-free face is heightened until it becomes a
representation of something simultaneously inhuman and too human, the
unforgivably real face of woman. This manifestation of excess – of too much –
is seen in the bandmates’ feathers that litter the scene, spilling out onto the
floor. Uncontainable, these evoke the image of the harpy, which Creed deems
‘another fearful image of the monstrous-feminine in classical mythology’. The
music of Armfield’s band inspires its teenage acolytes to join together in
ripping men limb from limb.
In March
2016, Brock Turner was found guilty of three felonies: assault with intent to
commit rape, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person, and sexually
penetrating an unconscious person. He was sentenced to six months in prison and
served three of them. Judge Aaron Persky said that a longer sentence would have
a ‘severe impact’ on Turner’s life, adding ‘I think that he will not be a
danger to others’.
In
September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary
Committee that the then-nominee and now incumbent Supreme Court Justice Brett
Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in the early eighties. Asked what
she recalled the most about that night, Blasey Ford stated, ‘Indelible in the
hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two and their
having fun at my expense.’
In April
2019, Michael Wysolovski, a thirty-three-year-old man who enslaved and sexually
assaulted a sixteen-year-old girl for over a year, keeping her locked in a dog
cage and starving her, was convicted of first-degree cruelty to children and
interstate interference with custody. He will not serve any jail time.
Etc.
In salt slow’s opener, ‘Mantis’, a boy leads the narrator upstairs, his hands ‘grabby’. ‘I knew you wanted it,’ he says, as the familiar situation washes over the reader: party, alcohol, a tightening grip on the arm. All around us, there are small flashes of violence, so commonplace as to seem mundane – the ‘force’ with which he yanks her, the dancing that she seems to have ‘no option’ but to partake in. We recognise this narrative because we have lived it, have heard and seen it, watched it play out a thousand times on TV and in newspapers and in quiet, hushed conversations between friends. Yet, somehow, it still stings; salt in a wound you thought had healed over. We know what happens next, because it has happened to our mothers and our sisters and our friends and our lovers. It has happened, in some way, small or large, to every woman we know, and to those we don’t.
But at the
moment of the kiss, as if in a fairytale, our protagonist transforms. The
flaking skin and painful, aching limbs, rather than signifiers of her
vulnerability, are revealed to be markers of her strength, as she slips out of
her body into ‘a suddenness of mandibles and curving neck [. . .] the last of
my skin falls down unheeded to the bathroom floor’. She has shed the
vulnerabilities attached to her human shape, and her new, monstrous form has
given her the strength she lacked. ‘I flex my arms and raise myself a little
higher’, she notes, emphasising her physical prowess. ‘It is possible the boy
says something, possible he screams. My mouth is wide with anticipation’. The
power of the boy has dwindled to the extent that he is denied a voice – denied
the power to express even his fear. Earlier in the narrative, his exact words
are related to us, dominating the space on the page. Now he’s an afterthought;
merely a body to use and cast aside. The explicitly sexual overtone of the
‘wide mouth’ underscores the subversion of the societal order: the woman as the
predator and the man as helpless prey. She realises that this was the true form
of her mother, her grandmother; that this is a feminine tradition. Female
praying mantises devour up to a quarter of males during intercourse, with the
number increasing during repeated sessions of mating. Typically, they eat the
head first – this may happen at the start or end of the sexual encounter.
Vagina
dentata is a kind of fairytale: according to Barbara Creed, ‘Yanomamo myths
state that one of the first women on earth possessed a vagina that could
transform into a toothed mouth which ate her lover’s penis.’ The fear of a
woman with the ability to devour a man during sex seems to recur across
cultures, from North America to India to East Asia. There’s something almost
darkly comedic about the fact that, as the overwhelming perpetrators of sexual
violence, men could be terrified of being violated during the act. I find it
unsurprising – often our most acute fears involve being the victims of our own
actions.
‘The vagina
dentata visualizes, for males, the fear of entry into the unknown, of the dark
dangers that must be controlled in the mystery that is woman. The teeth must be
removed!’ writes Jill Rait. She links the fear of vagina dentata to the
widespread and unabated practice of female genital mutilation.
In 2007,
the founders of the Rape-aXe female condom announced that it would go on sale
in South Africa. It boasted a number of ‘teeth’ which would fasten around an
attacker’s penis. The device was never manufactured.
Why do
things float back to the top of cultural consciousness? Why don’t they remain
submerged? In the last few years we’ve seen the resurgence of the
monstrous-feminine wholesale. Not only in WITCH and salt, slow, but in the eldritch
nude women of Dorothea Tanning, recently exhibited to much acclaim in a major
show at Tate Modern; in Luca Guadagnino’s murderous witches in his remake of
Suspiria, in the bored vampires and eel-women of Daisy Johnson’s Fen. Why now?
The answers feel oppressive in their frequency. Is it the sexual predator as
the President of the United States, and the ‘nasty women’ he tweets to his 61
million followers each day? Or the headlines about casting couches and
under-desk door locks and penises exposed beside potted plants? Or the six-week
abortion limit in Ohio, whose architect termed women who exercise their
reproductive rights ‘heartless’? There will always be more answers, because
there will always be more ways in which women are demonised, abused, destroyed.
At my most
optimistic I think: there’s something happening, the slow cracking of an ice
sheet out from the centre. At my most pessimistic I think: we retreat to
fantasy when we want escape from that which we cannot change. At my most
measured I think: these things tend to be circular.
The
protagonist of Camilla Grudova’s ‘The Mouse Queen’, from her collection The
Doll’s Alphabet, is not particularly sentimental about the fact that she has
devoured her children. Having begun to transform into a werewolf, she finds
that ‘The next morning, when I woke up, the twins were nowhere to be found. [.
. .] They were gone. I must have eaten them in the late hours of being a wolf.’
She checks her excrement, in which she finds a single white bone, and then buys
herself books and a too-tight skirt with the proceedings from selling the
infants’ clothes and toys. The Malleus Maleficarum doesn’t take kindly to this,
stating that ‘certain witches, against the instinct of human nature, and indeed
against the nature of all beasts, with the possible exception of wolves, are in
the habit of devouring and eating infant children’. Eating her children seems
to come as somewhat of a relief to the narrator of ‘The Mouse Queen’, who has
been abandoned by her Latin-scholar partner to deal with them alone. By the end
of the story our protagonist’s friend also appears to have unburdened herself
as a result of her transformation – ‘Sometimes Susan arrived at work with a few
stray brown hairs around her mouth, or a spot of blood, but I didn’t say
anything and neither did she, and we stopped asking each other about our
children’, she concludes. The werewolf is within all the women in the story,
and eating your child is an unfortunate, yet necessary, side effect of freedom.
And
although she does not – yet – devour children, the central character of
Armfield’s ‘Formally Feral’ sees first-hand the advantages of manifesting the
wolf. Supporting Walter Evans’ assertion that ‘the werewolf’s bloody attacks –
which occur regularly every month – are certainly related to the menstrual
cycle which suddenly and mysteriously commands the body of every adolescent
girl’, it’s tampons that provoke the violence and transformation of the
protagonist. Having been regularly stalked by the (aptly named) Peter, she
discovers that he is responsible for stealing her tampons out of her locker,
leaving her walking home ‘bleeding unchecked’. As Leviticus 14 reminds us,
‘When a woman has a discharge, her discharge being blood from her body, she
shall remain in her impurity seven days; whoever touches her shall be unclean
until evening . . .’ Barbara Creed notes that ‘Menstruation was also linked to
the witch’s curse [. . .] Historically, the curse of a woman, particularly if
she were pregnant or menstruating, was considered far more potent than a man’s
curse.’ It’s apt, then, that she and her sister/wolf, Helen, attack the boy,
leading to his hand going septic and being removed. At the story’s close, the
narrator has become identical to Helen in mannerisms, neglecting her personal
grooming and ‘join[ing] her in dragging my teeth across the floor’ – the howl
of the wolf becomes a cry of freedom.
Sometimes,
when I’m walking home on my own at night, I think about what it would be like
to stalk silently behind men, my feet soft and easy on the pavement, quick
flash of my shadow under the street lights. How I’d watch the whites of their
eyes shine as they turned to look behind them – softly, quietly, can’t be too
obvious – see the glisten of sweat on the back of their necks. I’d watch them
quicken their pace with fear, recognise the measured gait – not wanting to run
so as not to inspire a chase, keep calm, breathe deeply, act self-possessed but
do not linger. I’d like to test it; to not be five-foot-four, soft-fleshed,
short-sighted, to not think about the keys slotted between my fingers, the
correct way to escape a chokehold. To not think, even in passing, of defence.
Just once I’d like to think about attack: scaled wings, glinting incisors,
long, yellowed claws. A pact with the devil that let me split concrete, burn
with the touch of my finger.
The resurgence of the monstrous feminine. By Hannah
Williams. Granta
, June 24, 2019.
This film
essay Puncture, by Rachel Frances Sharpe, and accompanying paper, by Sophie
Sexon, examine the abject qualities of blood and breastmilk. The film and paper
make comparisons between late medieval imagery of Christ’s wounds and feminine
tropes found recurrently in horror movies such as Suspiria (1977) and
Possession (1981). The application of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical notion of
the abject and Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine will
demonstrate how blood and milk inspire a particular horror of the female body
that renders the body monstrous. This can be seen trans-historically by
comparing medieval to modern conceptions of abject maternity. The analysis will
look at the fungible quality of milk and blood in historical contexts and their
ability to create feelings of fear and repulsion towards maternal icons and
women’s bodies. This paper has been adapted from the original, presented at the
Fluid Physicalities symposium at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2017.
When the
eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as
a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging
sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all
the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat,
cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness,
nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and
father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I”
do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the
food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I
spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim
to establish myself.
This paper
explores the role of milk and blood in both medieval art and contemporary film
with a response to the film essay Puncture, as featured above. The paper
applies Julia Kristeva’s theoretical concept of abjection and Barbara Creed’s
definition of the monstrous-feminine to both historical periods in order to
show how the female body is conceived of as abject in distinct cultural moments
that have recognisable overlap.
The female body
has a cultural and critical history of being conceived of as monstrous owing to
certain maternal associations in critical and theoretical discourses. The
conceptual notion of the female body as that which is monstrous is conceived
via its fluid outpourings. The appearance of milk and blood remind us of the
figure of the mother and her role in relation to us as distinct subjects. As
Julia Kristeva has argued, the maternal female body threatens social order and
semantic cleanliness in that it produces fluids which transgress the bodily
boundaries of the flesh (Kristeva, 1980). The symbolic associations of mother’s
milk and menstrual blood induce a reaction of horror from the observing
subject, who associates these fluids with a monstrous form of maternity.
The female body
collapses the boundaries between self and other via reproduction. The
reproductive capacity produces substances that bring the internal to the external;
birthing, bleeding and breastfeeding. In socio-cultural terms, these traits
cast the mother figure as an abject monster: that which dissolves the borders
between the flesh and the world.
The abject refers
to a subject’s first distinction between self and other that is precipitated by
certain fluids relating to the mother figure. I use Julia Kristeva’s
psychoanalytic theory of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980) as it touches on
both psychic and social states of self-awareness and identity formation. The
abject is that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
border, positions, rules’ (Kristeva, p. 2). For instance, a wound disturbs
bodily order by rupturing boundaries, aligning it with the other ‘corporeal
orifices…constituting the body’s territory’ (Kristeva, p. 71). Certain abject
substances including urine, tears, faeces, blood, semen and milk must be cast
off, literally abjected, as they threaten social and bodily order. Abject
reactions to such substances in later life include horror, disgust, vomiting
and gagging, however, they also evoke some feelings of enjoyment which
elucidate our strange attraction to horror films and gore. Kristeva posits that
abjection is a crucial stage in psychosexual development, associating the
abject with the Lacanian notion of jouissance that pre-dates the infantile
mirror-stage, noting that jouissance in itself engenders violent, painful, yet
pleasurable passion. As Georges Bataille notes in Visions of Excess, ‘extreme
seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror’, which is inextricably
bound up with the obsessive act of looking at that which horrifies us.
Historical comparisons of how abject substances relating to motherhood elicit a
sexual response in the visual terrain of the modern horror film and medieval
imagery help us to understand the sexualisation and objectification of the
female body at this boundary of horror, which edges insistently towards
pleasure.
Barbara
Creed writes in Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Monstrous Feminine
(1993) that ‘all human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine,
of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject’. This
paper interrogates this claim by comparing late medieval paintings and
metaphorical imagery concerning Christ’s wounds to the monstrous feminine as
identified in two horror films: Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Andrzej
Zİuławski’s Possession (1981). Images of abject bodily fluids placed together
frame by frame in Puncture (2017) with shots of medieval art and contemporary
horror films show how such images inscribe a universalising historical idea of
the monstrous-feminine, substantiating Creed’s argument.
Utilizing a
theory of Kristevan abjection has the potential to be problematic. Feminist discourses relating to feminine
‘otherness’ have moved away from the conceptual abject in order to critique the
negative and immobile values ascribed to the maternal through such a regimented
essentialist biological focus. This
analysis and video essay are not constructed as feminist critiques of
abjection, monstrosity, and their relation to the maternal body. Rather, they
signal the cultural moments where theoretical notions of abject maternity in
the twentieth century may have had similar aestheticising resonances with
creative works from the medieval period, both fraught with their own
misogynistic structuring. To make such aesthetic comparison is more in line
with queer theoretical works on time and affect that demonstrate where
contemporary literature, film, and art meet medieval materials than
contemporary feminist discourses that challenge the notions of abjection and
monstrosity.
I use the
concept of abjection to historically contextualise a moment in theoretical
discourse that has subsequent resonances in the horror films of the late
seventies and early eighties. Kristeva’s theory aligns with the rough time of
production of these horror films, the film Suspiria being released in 1977,
Kristeva’s Powers of Horror having appeared in 1980, and the film Possession in
1981. I use this theoretical approach to support Imogen Tyler’s argument that
‘employing a Kristevan abject paradigm risks reproducing, rather than
challenging, histories of violent disgust towards maternal bodies’ (Tyler, p.
77). The use of the abject in this article demarcates, but does not critically
challenge, a particular theoretical historical moment where the maternal body
is characterised by a number of negative physical attributes. This has a direct
relation to a late medieval history of the maternal body, where disgust
typifies a reaction to the aspects of abject femininity that are imbued in
representations of Christ.
Barbara
Creed’s theory of ‘the monstrous feminine’ appears somewhat later than the
theory of abjection, in 1993, but distinctly exemplifies how maternal bodies
are particularised within the horror genre, and imbued with historically
negative notions of abjection. At the beginning of the 1990s various discourses
were emerging around the notion of the female ‘other’ in anglophone feminist
literatures. Feminist theoretical discourses sought to move away from the
biological essentialism of the monstrous in order to reconceive of the female
body in materialist terms, for example in the concept of the female other as
cyborg. Cyborg theory emerges around the same time as Creed’s publication, with
Donna Haraway publishing Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
in 1991. However, I focus here on the concept of the feminine monstrous as it
aligns maternity with a fixed set of abject values that are concurrently
symbolic, psychosexual, and in many cases, physical. I use this theory not as a
tool of feminist critique, but to underscore a language of negativity
surrounding discourses of maternity in the twentieth century that are
historically congruent with medieval values and modes of representation. The
hope is to demonstrate how these theories can be applied across time and across
discipline, choosing to use theoretical frameworks that are roughly
contemporary to the production of abject imagery in the horror films discussed
here. Puncture bears the echoes, in other words, of the cultural moment where
maternal abjection was at the peak of its monstrous manifestation, produced by
male film makers that reified a biologically essentialist and abject feminine
other.
Creed lists a
number of monstrous tropes that define women in film:
The horror film
is populated by female monsters […] The female monster, or monstrous-feminine,
wears many faces […] woman as monstrous womb (The Brood, 1979); woman as
bleeding wound (Dressed to Kill, 1980); woman as possessed body (The Exorcist,
1973) […] the monstrous girl-boy (A Reflection of Fear, 1973) […] Although a
great deal has been written about the horror film, very little of that work has
discussed the representation of woman-as-monster (Creed, p. 1).
Creed’s analysis
shows how women are commonly presumed to be constructed as the diametric
opposite of the monster within the horror film genre when, antithetically, they
themselves are constructed as monsters through this series of tropes. By
historical comparison, the figure of Christ was commonly constructed as
feminine in European late medieval devotional text and imagery. This female
Christ was, by virtue of symbolic association with motherhood, also conceived
of as monstrous. Looking specifically at the tropes of woman as bleeding wound
and woman as monstrous girl-boy, I will compare and contrast the role of the
abject in constructing these tropes, while discussing the imagery in Puncture
that illustrates clear visual parallels between medieval and the modern images
of the monstrous-feminine.
Kristeva
notes that abjection is a crucial moment in terms of self-identification and
identity formation, recognising that materials such as blood and breastmilk are
those which transgress the boundaries of the flesh. The abject stage is
characterised by the destabilising of known boundaries; a horror of insides becoming
outsides and the shock of knowing the self to be separate from the previous
bounds of the maternal. Many of the excretory functions, or symbolic icons
linked to the abject, relate to the symbolic icons of motherhood. Blood and the
open wound refer back to the moment of birth where subject-object relations are
still ill-defined, and a pre-social infantile self cannot distinguish the
boundaries between their own flesh and the mother’s womb. Abject fluids must be
expelled in order for the infant to make sense of its world and establish
subject-object boundaries, which exist primarily in relation to the mother, and
then, by extension, to the clean and proper self within society. The sight of
maternal fluids such as blood and breastmilk create an abject reaction by
threatening a return to disordered subject-object relationships and a loss of
self-identity.
In some
cases, the symbolic impact of abject fluids renders them interchangeable within
the psyche. Kristeva lists and discusses the metaphorical import of many abject
substances in Powers of Horror, and a large range of them recurrently appear in
horror films intermingled with one another. The interchangeable abject quality
of semen, milk, blood and tears was likewise a prominent feature in the
iconography of the Middle Ages. The late medieval female body bore aspects of
monstrosity as it was believed to be the inverted or imperfect version of the
male body. According to Aristotle and Galen, women were considered to be the
cold, wet and incomplete counterparts to the heat-generative dry male,
therefore constantly seeking the heat of male bodies in a frenzied state of
perpetual lust. The female body was characterised by this abject moistness
which was inextricably bound up with moral judgements and impositions on female
sexuality. Liz Herbert McAvoy recognises how the female body was a ‘primary
conceptual sign. In her capacity as misconceived or ‘deformed’ male, woman occupied
a highly problematic cultural space and frequently became translated into an
expression of cultural monstrosity’. Her moist qualities rendered her
culturally inferior to her male counterpart.
Elizabeth
Robertson describes how physicians believed the female ovaries to be an
inverted form of the male testes and identifies that many physicians of the
period believed in the Galenic theory of dealbation; a belief that breastmilk
was created from blood transformed from within the body. Robertson identifies
that this medical belief in the fungible quality of fluids bore out in the
culture of the period as ‘in religious texts the interchangeability of blood,
milk, tears, and semen is often stressed’. This chimes with Creed’s notion of
woman as monstrous girl-boy, as the ‘inverted’ monstrous female was imbued with
a number of negative attributes linked to abject fluids. It was believed that
women were capable of purging their excessive moistness, and therefore purging
their inappropriate lustfulness, through menstruation. Therefore blood was both
a generative substance and a fluid that had to be abjected in order to accord
with certain moral impositions; a fluid that acted as a controlling mechanism
depending on whether it was being produced internally or being expelled. Upon
its expulsion from the body it gained symbolic transitional qualities that
signified its monstrosity; the appearance of breastmilk reminding one that the
female body had converted this substance from blood, and blood being a
substance that signified the excessive lustful aspects of femininity. The
property of creating transitional fluids is a particular quality of the monster
that is evidenced in gendered terms in representations of the abject in both
medieval imagery and modern horror films.
This
particularly feminised form of monstrosity can be seen in artistic and literary
iconography depicting Christ in the late medieval period, and it relates to a
conception of the monstrous feminine that can be seen in modern cinema. Barbara
Creed defines the monstrous feminine in film in saying that, ‘the monstrous is
produced at the border which separates those who take up their proper gender
roles from those who do not; or the border is between normal and abnormal
sexual desire’ (Creed, p. 11). Christ’s body inhabits this monstrosity by
deconstructing proper gender roles in artistic representation. A common
artistic trope in Europe from the twelfth century onwards was that of ‘Jesus as
mother’, where Christ’s body was imbued with a range of maternal qualities to
associate his body with the capacity to physically and spiritually nourish
Christian devotees. In an assessment of visual piety in the Late Middle Ages,
Suzannah Biernoff writes that ‘Christ’s body is semantically unstable. It
signifies excessively. And it is literally fluid in its outpourings of
redemptive blood: an attribute often associated with the ‘maternal Jesus’. Christ’s semantic instability varies in a
number of ways, but the feminisation of the body seems inherently wrapped up in
the production of fluids. Christ’s body assimilates femininity by manner of its
bleeding, which mimics both lactation and menstruation, constructing Christ as
an icon simultaneously capable of being a mother and a lover.
Caroline
Walker Bynum’s landmark text Jesus as Mother (1982) collates a wealth of
textual and artistic sources from the medieval period which were intended to
encourage a religious devotee to think of Christ’s body in explicitly maternal
terms. Note that this text was also produced in a period coterminous with the
publication of Kristeva’s text and the release of the films analysed here;
exemplifying a distinct theoretical-cultural moment in time in which scholars
were thinking about the role of abject maternity. Images such as The Man of
Sorrows by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen demonstrate how bodily fluids
intermingle and exchange in late medieval imagery. The tears from Christ’s eyes
seem to run down to become the blood upon his breast, and the blood from his
wounds flows into the holy chalice to nourish and provide sustenance for the
devoted, much like a lactating breast. The English abbot Aelred of Rievaulx
uses a number of metaphorical images concerning Christ that resemble this; ‘his
outspread arms will invite you to embrace him, his naked breasts will feed you
with the milk of sweetness to console you’ (Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 123).
Many of these
metaphors emphasise Christ’s capability as a consoling mother, however, there
are passages where the substances issuing from Christ’s wounds are fungible
and, arguably, would inspire an erotic response:
Then one of the
soldiers opened his side with a lance and there came forth blood and water.
Hasten, linger not, eat the honeycomb with your honey, drink your wine with
your milk. The blood is changed into wine to gladden you, the water into milk
to nourish you. From the rock streams have flowed for you, wounds have been
made in his limbs, holes in the wall of his body, in which, like a dove, you
may hide while you kiss them one by one. Your lips, stained with blood, will
become like a scarlet ribbon and your word sweet. (Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p.
123)
This union with
Christ portrays how a bloody and goring act – the repeated spearing of Christ’s
flesh – creates holes which the lover can enter and kiss. In a metaphorical
gesture, the horror of the bleeding wounds is transported into an image of
tenderness. There were, however, prohibitive cautions regarding wound imagery
as it was recognised that sucking at these wounds which pour forth blood and
milk might inspire an erotic response. Bernard of Clairvaux urges devotees
that, ‘if you feel the stings of temptation […] suck not so much the wounds as
the breasts of the Crucified [suge non tam vulnera quam ubera Crucifixi] He
will be your mother, and you will be his son’ (Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 117).
These wounds break down the barriers between appropriate and inappropriate
sexualised responses to the body. Christ’s body is entered by the protruding
fingers and tongues of devotees, his penetrated wound encapsulating the
monstrous aspects of motherhood by bleeding like a menstruating vagina or lactating
like a mother’s breast. Puncture shows comparisons between a shot of a finger
pushing into the hardened skin of rotting milk and the finger that pushed into
Christ’s wound in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c.1601). Both
acts have an air of the horrific and the erotic by penetrating the whiteness of
the flesh to signal an encounter with the dark and mysterious interior.
In Puncture we
see a range of medieval paintings and manuscript illuminations which focus
specifically on Christ’s wounds. In medieval contexts, Christ fits Creed’s
filmic trope of woman as bleeding wound via metonym, whereby his whole body is
translated into one powerful devotional image of a bleeding wound. There is
symbolic proximity of the wound to the female labia and vagina in late medieval
imagery. Michael Camille writes:
'Medievalists,
recently freed from a tyrannous propriety that for so long obfuscated the body
as a site of cultural meaning, are at last able to describe and trace this
verbal and visual gender-bending, where parts of Christ’s body, such as his
wound, as depicted in fourteenth-century Books of Hours, becomes a vast
vagina-like object of desire, a transference of the dangerously open body of
woman in all her horrifying ‘difference.’
It would have
been appropriate for late medieval devotees to adore the Christ wound as part
of Christ’s male body. Wound images show signs of having been touched, kissed
or rubbed in medieval manuscripts. However, the capacity to induce both horror
and erotic response arises from its feminine symbolic association with the
vagina. Kissing the manuscript but could render erotic abject reaction to
Christ’s feminised body.
Looking at
the Loftie prayerbook shown below, the five wounds of Christ show evidence of
having been touched by the lips or fingers of the devotee, noting in particular
the abrasion of the pigment in the lower two wounds. These images are painted
on parchment made of dead animal skin. This material use circumvents any moral
sense of medieval social transgression. Touching animal skin would not have
presented the same threat as scandalously touching human skin, and as it is not
living flesh it would not have verisimilitude to a human body. However, the
devotee could have traced hairs and folds in the vellum to imaginatively bring
this skin to life, this monstrous skin which is imbued with abject erotic
significance. Mark Amlser writes that:
A reader
wouldn’t actually have to read the book or even the words on the page to
affectively respond to the image […] The reader’s hand or lips search the image
on the page, the dark space ambiguously depicting the wound (vulna) as vagina
(vulva), with a reading gesture at once sacred, erotic, scandalous, and transgressive.
In this
private devotional gesture, readers could animate the red pigment of their
prayer books by mixing it with their own fluids such as saliva and sweat;
animating the blood of Christ on the page and arousing feelings of abjection by
kissing dead animal skin.
Puncture draws
our attention to the affinities between eyes, mouths, and wounds, foregrounding
the symbolic vaginal potentialities of all three, and relating to Georges
Bataille’s comment that ‘it seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using
any word other than seductive’ (Bataille, p. 17). The eye, the open mouth, the
open wound and the vagina merge with one another and overlap in Puncture.
Images from medieval manuscript illuminations are placed comparatively next to
images of bleeding wounds.
The most explicit
comparison between the two in Puncture is between an image of Christ’s
vertically orientated side wound in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg
(c.1348), and the following shot of scored and bloodied flesh which echoes an
early scene in Dario Argento’s Suspiria. At the opening of Suspiria a young
woman named Pat Hingle is stabbed in the heart repeatedly. The film lingers on
an intense close up of Hingle’s stabbed heart which lies open in the wounded
whiteness of the flesh of her chest, resembling the interior of the vagina and
cervix. It is impossible to ignore the vaginal and erotic connotations of such
imagery, particularly in horror films invoking the trope of woman as bleeding
wound.
The horror film
offers apt visual terrain to examine the effect of abject fluids in proximity
to the female body. Creed notes that the horror film abounds with images of
abjection when it addresses sweat, vomit, blood and gore (Creed, 1993). Noting
how this relates to theoretical abjection, she writes that, ‘in terms of
Kristeva’s notion of the border, when we say such-and-such a horror film ‘made
me sick’ or ‘scared the shit out of me’, we are actually foregrounding that
specific horror film as a ‘work of abjection’ or ‘abjection at work’ – almost
in a literal sense’ (Creed, p. 10). I wish here to focus specifically on the
abject qualities of a film that is referenced in Puncture: Andrzej Zıuławski’s
Possession (1981).
Possession
focuses on the breakdown of a marriage between a woman called Anna and her
absented husband, Mark. Mark uncovers an affair that Anna is having with her
lover Heinreich. However, it transpires that Anna is also having an affair with
a horrific creature composed of pulsating and oiled flesh that appears to
excrete milk and blood. Anna repeatedly comments that she has made love to the
creature, and in doing so, the creature has not only entered her, but it has
bodily possessed her, bidding her to do its murderous will and to neglect her
husband and her son.
To return to
Creed’s remark on how the border is central to our construction of what is
monstrous, this idea can be applied to the monster in the film. It transgresses
borders by portraying mixed gendered characteristics and by inspiring unnatural
sexual desire. Creed writes that ‘most horror films also construct a border
between what Kristeva refers to as ‘the clean and proper body’ and the abject
body, or the body which has lost its form and integrity’ (Creed, p. 11). The
monster in Possession is a perfect example of this, as it presents as a
male-female hybrid in its formlessness. It nestles within the folds of a bed or
a wall resembling a vagina, yet has a protruding phallic head that can elongate
at will. It resembles living, pulsating flesh as it appears to breathe and
lactate with virulent life force, but also resembles mottled dead skin in its
pale coloration and rotting appearance. It simultaneously looks like a baby
being born as it is covered in natal fluids, yet it also resembles the fleshly
interior of the womb turned out to the viewer’s eye. Anna’s possession by the
monster causes her to replicate some of these features, thus transferring
monstrous qualities to the female body. However, this visual effect reinstates
how certain abject qualities of femininity and maternity are ‘naturally’
monstrous by layering the functions of bleeding and lactating onto the
horrifying creature. Creed notes that because of the relation between the
feminine and the menstrual, women have an insuperable relation to the abject,
and this is borne out by Anna’s body which bleeds and lactates profusely.
Anna’s sexual
attraction to the monster seems incomprehensible given its horrific and hybrid
nature. However, this sexual union is important in order to ensure that Anna is
invested in the destruction of anything that threatens reproductive capability
within the narrative. The monster commands her to eliminate any threats to the nuclear
family model and in doing so, replaces not only the husband and father, but
also engenders itself as a protective mother that instils heteronormative order
within the plot. The first two characters that Anna murders by the monster’s
command are the detective who uncovers Anna’s affair with the creature and his
male partner Zimmermann; those whom threaten the heterosocial order by virtue
of their homosexuality. The next is the Anna’s previous adulterous lover
Heinreich, thus eliminating the threat to the homogenous family unit. Anna then
slits the throat of her friend Margie, who originally attempted to help Anna
cover up her affair with Heinreich, and who has threatened the social order of
the family unit by sleeping with her husband. The murders all feature abject
fluids, for instance, Zimmermann is beaten to death with a jar of milk, and
Margie dramatically bleeds to death. The film relies heavily on the use of
abject fluids to inspire horror and fear, which is then focused back on Anna’s
maternal body. The way Anna excretes these fluids throughout the film
constructs a clear image of the monstrous-feminine by associating her body with
death, destruction and lust.
The colours
associated with Anna’s clothing throughout Possession are mirrored in the
fabrics and lighting of Puncture. Whiteness symbolises innocence and virginity,
blue symbolises motherhood and Marian imagery, and red symbolises blood and the
disorder that ensues when the female body transitions from virginity into
motherhood. In Puncture we are unable to ascertain what is blood and what is
milk on blue and red-lit fabric. Images of blood, milk and tears mix with one
another and excrete from female eyes and mouths in a variety of film clips,
bringing with them their own red, white and blue fluid associations. The films
clips are juxtaposed with images from Rogier Van Der Weyden’s Descent from the
Cross (c.1435) portraying the open vaginal wound in Christ’s hand and the
Virgin Mary weeping in her blue dress. The comparisons show how colour
associations from late medieval paintings retain their meanings when
transferred to contemporary contexts.
The colour scheme
of Anna’s clothing within Possession demonstrates the monstrous contradictions
that exist within the mother, particularly in the figure of the Virgin Mary. In
Possession Anna always wears a blue dress which contrasts with her pale white
skin and bright red blood. Anna’s blue dress produces Marian echoes, signifying
her status as primary maternal figure. Her character struggles between the
polar extremes of being the Virgin Mary and the monstrous female. The mixture
of red, white and blue perfectly expresses the contradictions in this Marian
representation; if Anna is a mother and a virgin and a lover, the fluids her
body produces are at odds. She must menstruate and produce milk while still
maintaining virginity and purity against this fluid disorder.
Puncture
foregrounds the virgin-lover contradiction by focusing on film stills taken
from Argento’s Suspiria. Early in the film, a young girl, Pat Hingle, is
stabbed to death while wearing a white gown; her white flesh punctured by shards
of blue glass that contrast starkly with her flowing red blood. The colour
contrasts symbolically associate whiteness with innocence and virginity.
Hingle’s murder symbolically changes her representational role from that of
being a virgin into a monstrous object of unspeakable feminine horror. The
violent stabbing scene is metaphorically reminiscent of the loss of virginity.
The intense focus on the opening of her chest reveals a bloodied wound and a
pulsating heart which looks not only like a vagina, but also like the pulsating
monster in Possession. For both Anna and Pat, what makes them monstrous is a
proximity to a pulsating dark interior wound, and to a metaphorical loss of
virginity which threatens the boundaries of social order. Hingle is penetrated
by blue shards of glass; the institution of motherhood visually penetrating her
white flesh in symbolic association with the colour blue. These colour schemes
recur repeatedly across time and show how feminine monstrosity is depicted as
an awkward juxtaposition of roles; it is impossible to be a virgin, a lover and
a mother simultaneously in one body. The horror of this plays out in the mixing
of the abject fluids of breastmilk and blood staining Anna’s blue gown in
Possession.
In
Possession, one of the expressions of Anna’s bodily transgression of gendered
boundaries occurs in relation to Christ’s iconography. In a church scene, there
are explicit visual links drawn between Anna and a carved wooden figure of
Christ. The composition of the film depicts her with the same flowing hair as
the Christ figure in a shot-reverse-shot sequence. Standing beneath the
carving, Anna makes near animalistic sounds. In this moment she resembles the
male Christ depicted on the cross. However, her animalistic sounds also
resemble the grieving virgin Mary who is unable to annunciate pain and
suffering. This scene of gender transgression where Christ’s male body is
layered over Anna’s female body precedes a scene of complete psychological and
symbolic collapse in the passenger tunnel beneath a subway station. Anna breaks
down in a screaming miscarriage of milk and blood moments after she has left
the church. This horrific scene resulted in a ban on the film’s screening in
many European cities and in the UK.15 It was rendered so disturbing not only by
virtue of Isabelle Adjani’s striking improvised performance, but by the extreme
use of fluids. Anna screams and writhes, beating her body against the walls of
the subway tunnel. There is a veritable effluence of blood and milk that seeps
from concealed bags attached to Anna’s body which burst all over her blue gown
and flood from between her legs. The sheer excess of the scene confronts
misogynistic fears concerning maternal bodies; that there is something truly
and horrifyingly abject about a body that can produce such a volume of fluid.
Kristeva
argues that the abject is necessary to establish order in the subject’s world
as it embeds a fear of collapsed subject-object boundaries and, ultimately, of
death. Abjection provides a crucial moment of dis-identification with the
mother that signals an entry into the symbolic order for the subject. However,
the abject repels using the same gesture by which it attracts. Childhood abject
associations are relics left in the psyche that later invite eroticised horror
at any of the symbols associated with motherhood and femininity. As Creed
writes, ‘although the subject must exclude the abject, the abject must,
nevertheless, be tolerated for that which threatens to destroy life also helps
to define life.’ (Creed, p. 9) This is an attempt to explain our fascination
with and attraction to scenes of maternal abjection; a fascination that has
symbolically played out for hundreds of years in terms of visual art and
metaphorical language. Abject fluids feature often in the symbolism of
theological imagery as Christ’s blood is shed, flowing like mother’s milk to
cleanse all sins. The abject plays a role in medieval Christian imagery and
narratives as much as it does in contemporary horror movies where the bleeding,
lactating body is both a reminder of our maternal origins and a depiction of a
body that is imbued with eroticism by means of pushing the boundary limits
between the internal and external.
The
associations between vomit, blood, bile, faeces, urine, sweat, tears and semen
point to one another as fungible materials, and they highlight the exchangeable
orifices of the body, particularly in terms of the feminine-monstrous. The
representational appearance of these substances makes monstrous the body
issuing them. The film essay Puncture provides clear visual comparison between
medieval images and images from modern horror films to support Barbara Creed’s
claim that ‘all human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine’
(Creed, 1993, p. 1). In the case of mother’s milk and menstrual blood, the
mother’s body is historically inscribed with the features of the monstrous
feminine by production of abject fluids. The images in Puncture aestheticise a
particular moment in film history where the disembodied and suppurating parts
of the female body were intently focused upon to evoke a particularly horrific
construction of maternity. This moment had historical precedent in the
medieval. The theoretical application of abjection to medieval materials and
comparative visual analysis demonstrates that this misogynous monstrosity is by
no means an isolated creation of modernity but has far farther reaches in the
historical imaginary concerning maternity that can be brought to light by
creative means.
Mother’s
Milk and Menstrual Blood in Puncture: The Monstrous Feminine in Contemporary
Horror Films and Late Medieval Imagery . By Rachel Frances Sharpe, (video) Sophie Sexon (essay). Studies in the Maternal , August 1, 2018.
