Monstrous Women in Horror Films - Assignment Example

Monstrous Women in Horror Films Q: Critically discuss the view that Horror raises the abject nature of the female body. Draw on at least two theorists in your answer and give examples from films. Abjection can be defined as the process with which an individual or society goes through the ritualistic motion of stamping out or casting off a thing which is perceived to be jeopardizing social order. Filth, waste, disease, and decay are examples of things that one associate on a daily basis with impurity which merits revulsion or disgust. An illustrative case on a large scale are cases of epidemics in which society responds to by enacting measures to quarantine the diseased from the rest of society (Roth & Hogan 1998 36-37). According to some theorists, abjections, especially of the female body, have psychoanalytical underpinnings. These notions have their origin to the Freudian theory of oedipal complex and woman as the castrated male – a male without a penis. Joseph Campbell, another theorist, referred to an ancient myth in his book The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology related to the myth of the vagina dentata or the toothed vagina (Creed 1993 p 1). Horror movies, as can be seen in the likes of Carrie, The Exorcist, Psycho, Aliens and the recent movie Teeth, by the manner of their presentation of the monstrous-feminine convey the so-called abject nature of the female body. Some Hollywood movies of the horror genre showcased the monstrous-feminine or women as terrifying monsters, witches or horrific objects. The concept of abjection of the female body underpins these films, as posited by various feminine theorists. Movies like the 1976 Carrie which portrayed its lead female as a hapless ridiculed character but who developed later the horrific power of telekinesis, The Exorcist in 1973, in which a young Linda Blair portrayed a youth on the verge of maturity but came to be possessed by the devil, Aliens in 1986 in which the anti-hero comes in the form of an alien life-form who relentlessly takes her biological role of reproduction to the horrifying extreme, 1960’s Psycho which was about a hotel owner who killed his guests as he was driven to psychotic madness by a castrating mother who haunted him even in death, and the recent Teeth which tackled the story of a young woman gifted with the mythical vagina dentate, - all horror films which portrayed women as “monsters,” reinforcing the abject nature of a woman’s body. The semiotics involved in the presentation of the monster-feminine in recent horror films certainly point to the abject nature of the female body. Feminist theorists, in addition to the likes of Freud, held that the female body is itself a site of various conflicts. As earlier stated, Freud had pointed that women, specifically mothers, are the source of the inner conflicts of their sons because of her image as the castrated version of the male and as an object of sexual desire in what he termed as oedipal complex. Many contemporary psychoanalysts and theorists, like Julia Kristeva and Melanie Klein, have added their own share of hypotheses about the horrifying and abject underpinnings of the female body. Films which showcased at this abjection by portraying women in various monster shapes and sizes not only reinforce the existence of this view but raise the abject nature of the female body. I Julia Kristeva Julia Kristeva posits in her book Powers of Horror, that abjection is the human reaction caused by the inability of self to distinguish itself from another. For example, humans react to a corpse with revulsion or even vomiting because it reminds him of his materiality. Kristeva explored the different ways by which abjection is practised in society to distinguish the human from the non-human and how this process, a ritualistic one, is repeated over and over again to reinforce that difference between the self and the other (Gelder 2000 64). Abjection, according to her, can be characterized by fear of women in general particularly the female body because of menstruation, lactation, sexuality and reproduction (Kauffman 1996 p 56). There are three areas in which Kristeva’s concept of abjection of the female body supports the theory that horror films raise the abject nature of the female body: the border; the mother-child relationship, and; the feminine body. Kristeva points to the mother-child relationship as an underpinning conflict that originates from childhood. The concept of bordering or the crossing of that border which differentiates the abject from the rest is the fundamental theme of horror films. The line which delineates the social order from the abject and the possibility of its blurring and erasing that distinction constitutes the horrifying nature of the genre. In the films Carrie, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Omen, the borderline between the natural and the supernatural constitutes the monstrous. In the movies Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and King Kong, the borderline between the human and the non-human constitute the monstrous and in the movies Psycho, Dressed to Kill and A Reflection of Fear, it is the line which separates the taking up of proper gender from those which are not. On the other hand, the monstrous can be located in the border that separates the normal and abnormal sexual desire in the films The Hunger and Cat People. Kristeva, and other psychoanalysts like Freud, sees an inherent conflict in the mother-child relationship especially from the child’s perspectives as a defense mechanism from autoeroticism and incest taboo. This conflict becomes more compounded because maternal instinct compels the mother hold on to her relationship with her child that makes her an abject to the child as the child tries to break away from her hold in the process of his separation as a distinct individual. As with other forms of abjection, rituals are engaged in to acknowledge that abjection, in this case the universal rites of defilement which comes in two forms: excremental and menstrual (Creed 1993 12). These are the so-called polluting objects. The excremental is linked to the mother because of her role in the toilet training of the child. Thus, urine, excrement, bile and other putrid substances excreted from the body are held in revulsion and are related to the maternal figure. The menstrual fluid also can be linked only to women and mothers. These bodily fluids identified with the mother become the symbols through which the individual creates an identity separate from the mother by acknowledging them and distinguishing the self from them through their repugnance. Thus, Excrements and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse etc.) stand for the danger ; to identify that which comes from without; the ego threatened by the non-ego, the society threatened by its outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, on the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual); it threatens the re- lationship between the sexes within a social aggregate, and through intern- alzation , the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference (qtd. Young 2005 p 109). That films of the horror genre are abjection especially of the female body are obvious in light of the fact that horror movies intentionally incite repulsion in the audience by graphic images of spurting blood, the corpse, rotting flesh, gross vomit, sweat, tears and dripping saliva. As earlier stated, Kristeva sees these bodily wastes and excrements as symbols of the maternal figure and part of the semiotics of differentiation from the maternal figure and female gender in general. This is the ‘bordering’ referred to by Kristeva in her book Powers of Horrors in which the individual or society confronts the sickening or the perverse, wallows in that perversion or sickening imagery and then emphatically expels and rejects that perversion and sickening images with remarks like “it’s sickening” or “it scared the hell out of me” (Creed 1993 10). In the movie The Exorcist, for example, Regan, the possessed child (played by Linda Blair) is shown spewing out nauseating greenish vomit at people’s faces and bleeds profusely from her menstrual period. Likewise in Carrie, a story about a girl with telekinesis powers but ridiculed by her schoolmates, bucketful of disgusting bright red pig blood disgustingly splatters the screen and screenshots likewise of menses profusely dripping down the thighs and legs of the lead character is graphically shown on screen. Finally, the frequent presentation and implicit reference of the maternal figure as a terrifying and horrific being in horror films evinces that this movie genre raise the abject of the female body. The movie Alien, for example, illustrates the female as the horrifying figure of the archaic mother from the patriarchal perspective. The archaic maternal figure refers to the female reproductive side. In the movie Alien, this reproductive capacity is brought to the extreme by an alien-life form which kills anyone who will get in the way of realizing and performing her functions of reproducing and generating which makes her the more horrifying aside from possessing an equally terrifying physical looks. To emphasize the perspective of the archaic generative figure, the movie shows different shots of the primal scene in implicit imagery, according to Barbara Creed in her book The Monstrous-Feminine. These scenes consist of the initial scene aboard the spaceship where the ship’s computer, metaphorically called “Mother”, stirs to life the crewmembers from their hibernation as she received an SOS call from another spaceship. This scene represents painless birth as the crewmembers are stirred to life. The second primal scene is the entry of three of the crews to the ship they were saving whose horseshoe shape entrance reminds one of the vaginal orifice. As the crew enters the interior of the ship they see a dead alien form and one of them is lowered into its center or womb to examine it and saw therein rows of eggs, possibly that of the dead alien. One of the eggs hatches and latched onto the offender’s mouth and penetrates his internal body in a scene which sees parallelism to the Freudian fantasy of returning to the womb and watching the sexual intercourse of the parents from there. From the union of man and alien, another alien is born but the mother is not a female but a male member of the crew who died as the alien life form grows in his body. The mother’s presence permeates all these scenes as the primary origin and cause of the deaths and horrors of the crew members, an unstoppable and relentless generative force which makes her the more horrifying (Creed 1993 p 16). The archaic mother as represented in horror films is depicted into two: first, as a phantasmagoric figure in films like the Aliens, The Thing and Poltergeist where she is the horrific relentless figure dedicated to the giving of birth to similarly horrifying life forms, and; as death which threatens to swallow back what she has given birth to, to prevent the differentiation and separation of her offspring from her own identity (Grant 1996 p 56). Examples of this type of films are Carrie and Psycho where the mother is represented as a castrating figure who either emasculates her child by her domination or instills fear in her child’s psyche that the latter is unable to break free from her hold. II Melanie Klein Melanie Klein is a British psychoanalyst born in Austria whose works on child psychology also supports the claim that horror movies are expression of abjection of the female body. Klein’s expertise which is child psychology bore traces of the Freudian brand of psychoanalysis which is unsurprising as Klein is an avowed adherent of Freud. Klein hypothesises that a child nurses dual feelings or emotions towards the mother; love and hate, that the child alternatively projects himself or introjects into himself the maternal figure. Love for the mother is associated with her nurturing and reproductive capabilities and hate is associated with her authority over the child. Moreover, part of Klein’s theory suggests a feeling of envy in the child of the penile role in the sexual act and the fear. This hidden desire to be part of the mother and to make her part of one’s self causes the conflict within the child. As a compromise, the self elevates these conflicting features to a separate realm where the self and the object of conflict are neither subject or object but “part-object.” Eventually the self learns to deal with this realm gradually as part of the process of individuation through abjection. The Kleinian abjection is expressed through aggression and not neuroses unlike Freud (Kennedy 2001 pp 182-183; Humm 1997 pp 76-79). Klein’s hypotheses can be evidenced from David Cronenberg’s movies, according to author Maggie Humm, particularly Dead Ringers released in 1988 and which starred the Jeremy Irons. The movie plot reveals the story of identical twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle, both successful gynecologists. One of the twins has a comparatively confident personality who can easily seduce women and when he tires of them passes them on to the twin brother who has a less confident personality. The conflict starts when a female client comes and wins the attention of the introverted twin (imdb 1988). The profession of gynecology, according to Humm, ties in with the basic male fear of the father’s “bad” penis disappearing into the mother’s genitalia as a way of resolving that fear. This constitutes the abjection of the feared object of the child – “to project the persecutory fear onto the maternal body and onto the father’s penis as a part object within the maternal body” (Humm p 78). In Dead Ringers, the object of desire of one of the twins has a genital abnormality called trifurcation or having three “doorways” and Beverly, the shy twin, reacted with obsession, depressions and delusions (Humm 1997 pp 79-80). Klein’s psychoanalytical theories on abjection can be seen broadly on the totality of the works of Cronenberg whose film credentials consist of movies about monstrous body anatomies, mutants, parasites and creatures with phallic and excretory symbolisms. Cronenberg’s movies therefore express generally the abject nature of women, specifically the maternal figure, through these horrific images, set graphically on screen as a ritualistic way of dealing with the fear attached to the said maternal figure. The abject nature of the female figure had long been the subject of psychoanalyses and theories. Freud’s psychoanalytical views of women and their sons are well known. In contemporary times, Julia Kristeva and Melanie Klein are two of those who see women, especially the maternal figure, as having psychoanalytical underpinnings. These underpinnings have, in the recent times, become evident in various works of art particularly horror movies. Horror movies thrive in the showing of graphic imagery of disgusting excremental, menstrual and other body fluids, the archaic maternal figure, disfigured women genitalia, witches and other horrific women, to an extent confirming and illustrating the existence of this abjection of the female body. According to these theorists, the depiction of these imageries in horror films is a ritualistic way of resolving the fear caused by the female body to the human psyche – that is by emphasizing this fear through their symbols and bringing them to the fore, wallowing in their disgusting appearance and then, emphatically rejecting them with disgust and repulsion. The abjection process is a cathartic process through which the individual resolves the anxiety of becoming one with the object of fear and disgust. Works Cited Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993. Gelder, Ken. The Horror Reader. Routledge, 2000 Grant, Barry Keith. Horror and the Mosntrous-Feminine by Barabra Creed pp 35-The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. University of Texas Press, 1996 Humm, Maggie. Feminism and film. Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Kauffman, Linda. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. University of California Press, 1998 Kennedy, George Alexander and Christa Knellwolf, Hugh Barr Nisbet, Christopher Norris, Jessica Osborn, Raman Selden, and Claude Julien Rawson. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Cambridge University Press, 2001 Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction. Routledge, 2004 Roth, Nancy and Katie Hogan. Gendered Epidemic: Representations of Women in the Age of AIDS. Routledge, 1998. Young, Iris Marion. On female body experience: "Throwing like a girl" and other essays Edition: illustrated. Oxford University Press US, 2005. Read More