Worcester Papers

UNIVERSITY OF WORCESTER

Worcester Papers Issue One

Representation of the Body in Fantasy and Gothic Literature

UNIVERSITY OF WORCESTER

Worcester Papers Worcester Papers is a journal edited by postgraduate students in the Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts at the University of Worcester. Each themed edition is overseen by a Board of senior academics and a subject specialist editor. The journal aims to reflect today’s thought and research in the arts, humanities and contemporary culture. Articles are welcomed from postgraduate students and guest academics.

Worcester Papers Issue One Winter 2014

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Printed in an edition of 500 Published by Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts, University of Worcester

ISSN 2055-2122

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Worcester Papers 2014

Representation of the Body in Fantasy and Gothic Literature

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Worcester Papers

Contents Page 6 | Guest Editors’ Foreword Fateha Aziz, Jane Kubiesa

Page 8 | Abstracts Page 13 | Introduction Mind and Body: A Sort of Teratology Roderick McGillis

Page 27 | Descending into the Black Hole:

Gothic Representations of the Body under Attack in Charles Burns’ Black Hole Maria Verena Peters, Vanessa Gerhards

Page 43 | Indefinite Shadows:

Edgar Allan Poe and the Unspeakable Female Jimmy Packham

Page 59 | Memories of a Dragon:

Le Guinian Flights from Archetypal Patterns Nicholas Emmanuele

Page 75 | From Puppets to Cyborgs:

(Un)Ruly Constructions of the Female Body and Femininity in Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ and Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ Zeynep Z. Atayurt

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Guest Editors’ Foreword Fateha Aziz Jane Kubiesa This issue of the Worcester Papers, themed ‘Representation of the Body in Fantasy and Gothic Literature’, centres on how the physical body is portrayed in a variety of literary works. It was not intended that the articles would deal mostly with the female body, but that is a reflection of the abstracts we received.

The articles have been selected for the writers’ novel perspectives on particular literary works, derived from their explorations of the undeniable influence of the body in fantasy and Gothic genres.

We are grateful for the introductory article by Prof Roderick McGillis, which surveys representation of the body across well-known works in both genres. Maria Verena Peters’and Dr Vanessa Gerhards’ article explores the body under attack in Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole (1995-2005) from the Gothic point of view. Placing it in comparison with the novel’s short film adaptation and several Gothic texts and films, the article takes into consideration, amongst other issues, transforming bodies and boundary transgression. Jimmy Packham’s article examines the textual representation of Edgar Allan Poe’s dead women in Poe’s

series of ‘dead woman’ tales. Packham focuses on the idea of the inadequacy of language to describe the dead women, which results in the dismantling of their bodies.

Nicholas Emmanuele explores how Ursula Le Guin’s dragons in her second Earthsea trilogy are used as a vehicle for the reconstruction of male archetypes in the first trilogy. He argues that the transformation from human to dragon signifies the emancipation from crippling social systems. Dr Zeynep Attayurt examines bodies of women in the forms of puppets and cyborgs in Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ and Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’. Comparing the two forms of women in the stories, Attayurt delves into the themes of the monstrous female and the objectification of women as the sexual and/or the fearful.

We do hope that readers will find this issue intriguing as well as informative.

Last but not least, our heartiest thanks to contributors as well as to Profs Jean Webb and Antonia Payne for their unrelenting support and advice during its production.

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Biographical Note Fateha Aziz and Jane M. Kubiesa are PhD students at the University of Worcester. Fateha Aziz is currently writing her doctoral thesis, ‘A Metamodern Reading of Terry Pratchett’s Children’s Fiction’, while building her own corpus of research on Terry Pratchett’s children’s titles and on the metamodern approach in contemporary children’s literature.

Her research interests include literary representations of the Other, the concept of death, and familial disruption in children’s literature. Jane M. Kubiesa’s research primarily centres on representations of the Gothic body in literature and she has published on the contemporary vampire maiden, the fin de siècle fallen woman and physical fascination in the Victorian period.

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Abstracts Descending into the Black Hole: Gothic Representations of the Body under Attack in Charles Burns’ Black Hole Maria Verena Peters Vanessa Gerhards Charles Burns’ award-winning graphic novel Black Hole confronts us with our darkest fears concerning coming of age, sexuality and the body. Told from a teenage perspective, the story focuses on the otherness and alienation of/among teenagers, which is always displayed through physical mutation; it is noteworthy that the reader is not given an adult perspective on the events and thus the impression is created that the group of teenagers is an almost hermetically cut-off social minority. While insightful readings of the cultural discourses that this story taps into already exist (Vanessa Raney reads the story as discourse on the beginning of the AIDS epidemic; James Zeigler takes this up and adds the ’90s school shootings as a second important contextual discourse), the ways in which the specific imagery of the story connect to the tradition of the literary Gothic and to the horror film are yet to be explored.

In our essay we would like to

elucidate the inter-textual connections between the graphic novel, its short film adaptation (dir. Rupert Sanders, 2011) and the Gothic genre in general.

In order to trace the origins of the visual language used, we will turn to selected Gothic texts (e.g. Dracula; The Island of Doctor Moreau; Frankenstein) and films (e.g. Browning’s Freaks (1932); Coppola’s Dracula (1992); Daniel’s Teen Wolf (1985); Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987); Rodriguez’ The Faculty (1999)).

Topic-wise our focus will lie on images of transforming bodies, boundary transgressions, the abject (Julia Kristeva) and teen Gothic (Catherine Spooner).

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Indefinite Shadows: The Dead Women of Edgar Allan Poe Jimmy Packham

In his ‘Philosophy of Composition’, Edgar Allan Poe made his now-famous statement that “the death [...] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”. Unsurprisingly then, Poe made the dead female a central figure of his poetry and prose, most evident in his series of ‘dead woman’ tales (‘Morella’, ‘Berenice’, and ‘Ligeia’). Yet Poe’s dead women have a habit of returning to life, of being re-bodied.

This paper explores how Poe’s narrators struggle with the living body of femininity and instead resort to a textual variant thereof; additionally, it looks at the denial of death, as the women are brought back to life – or simply denied death – through textual representation. The paper engages closely with ‘Ligeia’ – a text that demonstrates the tensions between the female form and the fixity of text.

‘Ligeia’ is replete with instances of the inadequacy of language to contain Ligeia: the narrator resorts to metaphor and simile

to describe her, effectively dismantling her body, denying her any individuality and disrupting any sense of the unity of her self. The body of the text negates the body of the woman. The narrator denies Ligeia agency and form, while failing to determine what she actually ‘means’.

For Poe, the ideal text deals with the ideal female; yet the ideal female bodies frustrate language itself and will not be contained, and so are done away with.

1. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, in Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed.

G. R. Thompson (New York: The Library of America, 1984) p. 19.

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Memories of a Dragon: Le Guinian Flights from Archetypal Patterns Nicholas Emmanuele

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s second Earthsea trilogy, dragons herald the subversion and transformation of misogynistic worldviews and male archetypes initially propagated and institutionalized in A Wizard of Earthsea. This change challenges and legitimizes the experience of female characters. Emerging from Le Guin’s initial use of male-dominated fantasy patterns in the first trilogy, this study explores how the inspiration and effect of female bodily transformations into dragons present possibilities for new character and story representations within the fantasy genre. The theories of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari illuminate processes that unfold throughout the novels, revealing a “becoming-dragon”, which changes standard fantasy archetypes by initiating a “line of flight” from Earthsea’s Equilibrium to a more dynamic symbiosis between “wild” dragons and “wise” humans. Becomingdragon is more than a corporeal existence:

it is the becoming that characters of all archetypal identities must initiate if they are to free themselves from hierarchical structures and fly outward to as-yetunforeseen potentialities. Thus, Le Guin’s revisionary project here is not meant to ‘signify’ an actual human metamorphosing into an actual dragon, but instead to discover the liberating possibilities of such a continuous becoming. Women – both those who transform into dragons and fly into “the other wind,” and those who remain behind – are Le Guin’s intermediaries who nurture a transformative process of possibility where one does not have to choose between wild or wise, stereotypically male or stereotypically female, dominated or dominating, but strikes out on a line of flight, refusing closure and limitation.

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From Puppets to Cyborgs: (Un)Ruly Constructions of the Female Body and Femininity in Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ and Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ Zeynep Z. Atayurt This essay aims to explore the multifaceted representations of female embodiment and constructions of femininity in two short stories ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ (1974) by Angela Carter, and Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ (1979), and seeks to establish a critical dialogue between the texts by examining the objectifying and subjugating tendencies towards the female body engaged with in both works.

In ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’, a grotesquely constructed puppet comes to life and takes her revenge on her creator, who has been exploitatively using her in performance, casting her in a role highly indicative of the monstrous feminine, and thus creating her as a fetish figure for the male gaze. Carter’s story engages with the notion of representation, and by constructing a heroine, who, arguably, epitomizes the ‘postmodern female gothic’, she challenges the derogatory and oppressive representations of

femininity and the female body found in contemporary Western culture.

Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ is set in a future society, and offers a feminist dystopia constructed under the hegemony of men who exercise control over half-organic, half-technological women, moulding them into ‘technologically perfect’ and loving housewives.

These provocative constructions of female embodiment flirt with the gothic and the fantastic, and by exploring these texts both within the frame of the discourses of Second Wave Feminism and in the light of body/embodiment theories, this essay aims to examine the ways in which these works scrutinize and speak back to the repressive tendency to reduce the female body to an object of desire and/ or fear.

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Introduction Roderick McGillis

Mind and Body: A Sort of Teratology For who can deny but it is repugnant to nature, that the blind shall be appointed to lead and conduct such as do see? That the weak, the sick, and impotent persons shall nourish and keep the whole and strong? And finally, that the foolish, mad, and frenetic shall govern the discreet, and give counsel to such as be sober of mind?

the weak and sick and feeble-minded with the female of the species. Women are unnatural and monstrous. They are even somehow impotent. In other words, he suggests a natural norm that is ablebodied, robust, sober, and male. The monster he identifies would not look out of place in fantasy. I think of the emaciated Lilith in George MacDonald’s late romance (1895) or his Alder Tree Maiden in Phantastes (1858). We have many ‘unnatural’ villains in fantasy, although not all are female: Darth Vader and Palpatine from the Star Wars films, a host of vampires both male and female, Oceaxe and Tydomin in David Lindsey’s The Voyage to Arcturus (1920), and so on. But fantasy is trickery, and as often as not the ostensibly unnatural, whether male, female, or some third alien entity,

(John Knox, ‘The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women’) John Knox offers us the beginning of a teratology. He argues that nature itself finds the disabled, the sick, the weak, and the crazy repugnant, against nature. As the title of his tract indicates, he equates

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proves discreet and sober and whole and strong and thoroughly natural. In fantasy, the body is not necessarily an indicator of either the unnatural or moral worth; the body itself is a reminder of things earthly, material, grounded – in a word ‘natural’.

And monstrous bodies simply make the point about materiality clearer than it is in other genres.

The gothic, despite religious trappings, invests deeply in the body; fantasy, despite themes of transcendence, makes certain the transcendent is firmly grounded. These are genres, or two aspects of one genre,1 that insist on objects: crosses, stakes, armour, the cup, swords, houses, rings. As the last of these indicates, magic derives from objects: cloaks of invisibility, girdles, shields, wands, boots, and so on. Objects, whatever else they may be, are physical, and most of these I list have something to do with the body. And finally, all those muscled and curvaceous figures that adorn fantasy book covers from the likes of Frank Frazetta, Michael Whelan and Barry Windsor Smith testify to the allure of the body. These objectified bodies are monstrous in their excess. Monstrosity has its attractions, even its bodily attractions.

At random I picked up a book I had been meaning to read for some time, and I decided to contemplate the depiction of the characters’ bodies as I began reading. The book, Deborah Ellis’s No Safe Place (2010), is not in

any conventional sense a fantasy or an exercise in the gothic. It does, however, offer the gothic’s enclosed space and impending sense of danger. The characters are vulnerable and feel threatened by unnamable, unseen and unidentified forces. Just as in the gothic, fear threatens to overwhelm the body, and just as in fantasy generally, the mind tries to corner the body’s desires. In other words, what I found in the first page or two of this book was an introduction to the body and its various manifestations. Here I found in no meaningful order, the foul body, the tired body, the furtive body, the sleeping body, the body that sees, hears, moves, and ingests, the inebriated body, the private body, the public body, the body in parts, the working body, and the invaded body. This list is no doubt anything but exhaustive. For example, missing are the healthy body and the diseased body and the disabled body; the other essays herein also discuss the gendered body, the dead body and the post-human body. In short, the body comes in various shapes, sizes and disguises.

The body, then, is a ‘thing’ that receives impressions and communicates with the mind. The mind-body binary proves less a binary than a necessary dualism, if I can make such a distinction. I think of an old science fiction/horror film, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962), in which a crazed scientist keeps the head of his decapitated girlfriend alive while he 14

searches for a body to attach to the head.

Brain and body go together like a horse and carriage. In the case of the head and body, however, the one without the other delivers true horror. When body reigns we have the beast; when brain reigns we have the ruthless controller. Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre films (the first one appeared in 1974) is the body in all its bestiality, and the glowing globes in ‘Return to Tomorrow’ (Star Trek 1968) are brains in all their desirous reach for bodies to complete them. The disembodied brain called ‘It’ in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) is another example of the horror of disembodied life. The bestial body is common in a variety of forms from the werewolf to the troll to the giant and so on.

The gothic is a form of fantasy that places great emphasis on the body, more often than not the monstrous body.

Nineteenth-century examples (Varney the Vampire (1845-47), Frankenstein (1818), Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Carmilla (1872), ‘The Cruel Painter’ (1872), and of course Dracula (1897)) emphasize the foreign nature of the monstrous body, its rapacious desire and animalistic features.

During the same period, fantasies for children often present the monstrous body as the disabled body: The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak (1875), The Light Princess (1864), and The Happy Prince (1888) are examples. And I note in passing that fantasy for children

often contains animals, anthropomorphic or otherwise, and the animal clearly foregrounds the natural body. At the same time, the anthropomorphic animal is, from a human perspective, monstrous.

The monstrous body is invasive, threatening to disrupt the safety of a life ordered and in control. In gothic literature and in fantasy generally, desire manifests as passion, the desire for another’s body. As the gothic has developed, the monstrous other, perhaps taking its cue from Frankenstein’s monster, has become a sympathetic entity. Even the vampire, so foul and dreadful, has become a sympathetic creature in more recent literature and film. The strange body more often than not attracts our sense of tolerance, the liberal-leaning understanding and acceptance of difference. The monster’s curse, once simply a facet of his or her evil, now serves to elicit sympathy. I think, for example, of Arthur Slade’s The Hunchback Assignments (2009) and its sequels. In Slade’s books, the character Modo is, as his name hints, a British version of Quasimodo, only with the power to alter his physiognomy for short periods of time. Slade nicely shows how the unconventional person suffers for his unconventionality while at the same time he shows the special gift that unconventionality can offer. The Hunchback Assignments is not gothic, but rather steampunk. But the point is the 15

attractiveness of that which is unattractive from the perspective of what the general populace takes as normative. Both the gothic and steampunk focus on the body and see the mind’s control of the body as crucial but temporary. Other examples are the volumes in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series (1999-2012). At some point, the body will move beyond the mind’s control; the id will out. To put this another way, I might suggest that the mind connects to the body in at least two ways: through rational and irrational synapses.

The body controlled by the rational mind is the safe body; the body controlled by the irrational mind is the dangerous body.

And we bear in mind that sometimes the irrational mind disguises itself as the rational.

Otherworldly fantasy takes an interest in the working of the psyche. It looks inward, often taking the unconscious as its territory. I am thinking here of works by the likes of George MacDonald or Lewis Carroll, and fantasies they influence. Often the terrain of such fantasies maps the mind.

Think of the strange gothic house in William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderland (1908) in which the house serves as a strange and macabre mandala. Such fantasies are interested in the mind, its sanity and its deviations from sanity. Descent into cellars or caves or mines is a move into the territory of

the id, whereas ascent into towers or attics or mountaintops is a move into the area of control, the superego. George MacDonald’s ‘Princess’ books are clear examples. Exploration above and below ground constitutes a character’s development. MacDonald’s adult fantasy Phantastes (1858) explores the coming of age of a young man whose adventures in fairyland are developmental, taking him through descent and ascent as he moves through the fairy world. He grows up. Even more obvious is the connection between growing up and the body in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). In this book, Alice drops through the rabbit hole into her teeming unconscious where desire takes the form of the child’s eagerness to become an adult. As Alice navigates her wonderland, her body responds to this desire by expanding and contracting at various awkward times. Alice may only be seven years old, but her body is already, in fantasy, experiencing the monstrous changes of puberty. Growing up means learning to grow comfortable with one’s body, and learning to know the difference between sanity and its opposite. A more recent example of the monstrous nature of the pubescent body appears in M. T. Anderson’s Thirsty (1997).

Having implied that body and brain must be in balance, the one nicely behaving for the other to fashion civility, I notice that both fantasy and the gothic 16

delight in reminding us that the monstrous body does not necessarily reveal the beast.

Instead, the monstrous body teaches us that form does not always manifest content; form may indicate just how flawed our sense of the normative may be.

Take for example one of the most famous instances of the gothic, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The monster created

by Victor Frankenstein has a form most unusual; his appearance raises fear in nearly everyone who sees him. Who can deny that the monster’s form is repugnant to those who take convention for reality?

But is his form repugnant to nature? Well the blind man for one might indicate that a sense of sight is necessary for a person to identify something that does not conform to social or cultural standards. Seeing beyond the monster’s form (i.e. not seeing it at all), the blind man welcomes the monster. In the meeting of blind man and monster we have an instance of the blind leading and conducting he who sees; the sick and weak person nourishes the strong.

This encounter confronts us with alterity in all its possible attractions. The ‘other’ may appear to deviate from some norm, but appearance does not make truth. The normative is a moveable feast.

John Knox’s “monstrous regiment” has provided the title for a number of literary works, but I select one: Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment (2003).

This Discworld novel takes for its subject the monstrosity of gender or at least one

aspect of gender. The regiment of the title is a rag tag assortment of young recruits to the army of Borogravia. Our protagonist, a character who provides much of the novel’s focalization, is a female disguised as a male, Polly Perks. She enlists under the name Oliver Perks, taking her name from an old folk song ‘Sweet Polly Oliver’ about a young woman who dresses as a man in order to find her true love. This motif of cross-dressing sets the tone for the story about soldiers whose bodies constitute a grotesque mixture of Mother Nature’s mistakes. Among the enlistees are Maladict the Vampire, Carborundum the Troll, and Igor who is one of a ‘race’ of beings called Igors who derive from the helpers of monster creators such as Victor Frankenstein (in the film versions of the Frankenstein story and its variants).

Vampire, Troll, and Igor are examples of monstrosity.

But Pratchett complicates our notion of monstrosity in several ways.

To enhance her disguise as a male, Polly places a wad of bunched socks where her codpiece might appear; keeping this wad in place proves a test of her ingenuity. She discovers that two members of the group are female lovers, Lofty and Tonker, and another is pregnant, Shufti. Then we have Wazzer, a devout believer whose body, late in the novel, is possessed by the spirit of the fabled Duchess. The now embodied Duchess remarks: “How good to wear a body again” (316). Here the body is a 17

garment, whereas earlier in the book, the body is a thinking thing when Polly finds washing clothes enjoyable because “Her muscles did all the necessary thinking” (260). The regiment’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Blouse, proves adept at cross-dressing and performing as a female. Even as a male, he is weedy, chinless, and unmanly. In fact, dressed as a female he outperforms the rest of his regiment who all happen to be females disguised as males who pretend to be females. And finally there is the corpulent Sergeant Jackrum, grotesque enough as a man, but who is really not a man. We have, in short, a monstrous regiment both in the sense Knox intended (referring to women) and in the sense of a group of misfits. This crew misfits their bodies.

They queer our sense of normality. The fact that these monstrous characters are likeable precisely because they are human in all their foibles, fears and fortunes makes Pratchett’s point that all beings are equally important, valuable and necessary to fashion a human community.

The body as it performs in the gothic and in fantasy, then, is something of a monstrous thing. The monster reminds us of otherness, of fear and desire, of nature and civility, of fairness and foreignness, of the strange and the uncanny. The gothic’s monsters tend to prey upon and threaten normalcy, whereas the monsters of fantasy demonstrate the depths of human fear and desire. Of

course, such a generalization smacks of idiocy. Fantasy sports several kinds of bodies. We have the athletic or heroic body of the hero (heroes all the way from Achilles or Odysseus to Harry Potter), the various types of supernatural and chthonic bodies (creatures all the way from fairies and goblins to dwarves and trolls), gigantic bodies and miniature bodies (from Gargantua to the Borrowers), ghostly bodies and animal bodies (from the graveyard denizens of Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008) to the likes of Iorek Byrnison in Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ Trilogy (1995-2000), canny and uncanny bodies (I think, for example, of the parents and anti-parents in Coraline (2002). If we turn our attention to graphic works, comic books, we have an orgy of monstrous bodies from lumbering types such as Ben Grimm and The Hulk to the lithe forms of Rex Reed and Plastic Man to the shape changing bodies of Johnny Storm and more than one of the X-Men. As a collective, what all these monstrous bodies have in common is humanity. Even when the body is that of an alien, and I think of Superman, it houses a mind that is discernibly human. This is, I suspect, the point. Fantasy houses a variety of monsters, all who serve to remind us of human connection through the body. In a strange way, fantasy reminds us of human connectedness, and human equality.

A fantasy that folds the gothic into the generically fantastic, into the 18

realm of inward-looking fantasy, is George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895). In an extended scene, the protagonist, Mr. Vane, comes across the emaciated body of a woman lying beside a hot stream. At first he thinks the woman is dead, but before long he senses a feeble ember of life in her. He spends many days tending to the woman and bathing her in the stream and feeding her peeled grapes after he has removed the seeds. The body of the woman, as Vane initially finds it, is a husk and a singularly unattractive husk at that.

As she slowly begins to transform, to put on healthier flesh, to fill out and take on colour, Vane sees that she is beautiful.

He begins to relate to her not only from a mental perspective, simply feeling the human urge to help someone in dire straits, but also from a bodily perspective.

In other words, he begins to desire her.

As his desire gains strength, so does the woman he tends. As time goes by, he begins to wake in the morning with a pain in the back of his hand, and later he finds bites on his arm or his neck. He continues to nurse the woman; she continues to grow stronger and more beautiful. Then one night he rises to find her mobile. He has restored her to life, but she is anything but grateful. She disdains him; she scorns him; and she hits him with something icecold. When he regains consciousness, she is gone.

While she is still with him, the woman asks Vane why he cared for her,

and he replies because she is “of my own kind.” Vane is both wrong and correct. She may look human, but she is a vampire; in MacDonald’s fantasyland she is one of the undead who has yet to die. She is both human and a mythic monster. MacDonald loves paradox. This vampire/human is the eponymous Lilith, she who preys on children and young virginal men. She is a monster. This book contains several monsters, but Lilith is the pre-eminent one. She is monstrous because she desires power and material control. She is monstrous even in her startling beauty.

She is the villain of the piece who must receive her comeuppance. But she is also necessary for Vane’s maturation. While he nurses her back to health, he learns that human beings need the company of other human beings. He is frantic to keep her alive not only out of altruistic motives, but also because her life ensures his in the sense that it is only through others that we gain a sense of identity and purpose. In a lengthy meditation, Vane puts it this way: Now first I knew what solitude meant – now that I gazed on one who neither saw nor heard, neither moved nor spoke. I saw now that a man alone is but a being that may become a man – that he is but a need, and therefore a possibility. To be enough for himself, a being must be an eternal, self-existent worm! So superbly constituted, so simply complicate is man; he rises from and stands upon 19

such a pedestal of lower physical organisms and spiritual structures, that no atmosphere will comfort or nourish his life, less divine than that offered by other souls; nowhere but in other lives can he breathe. Only by the reflex of other lives can he ripen his specialty, develop the idea of himself, the individuality that distinguishes him from every other. Were all men alike, each would still have an individuality, secured by his personal consciousness, but there would be small reason why there should be more than two or three such; while, for the development of the differences which make a large and lofty unity possible, and which alone can make millions into a church, an endless and measureless influence and reaction are indispensable. A man to be perfect – complete, that is, in having reached the spiritual condition of persistent and universal growth, which is the mode wherein he inherits the infinitude of his Father – must have the education of a world of fellow-men.

Save for the hope of the dawn of life in the form beside me, I should have fled for fellowship to the beasts that grazed and did not speak. Better to go about with them – infinitely better – than to live alone! But with the faintest prospect of a woman to my friend, I, poorest of creatures, was yet a possible man! (98)

For all the talk of soul and spiritual structures and the divine and church and the Father, what Vane outlines here is the unavoidable bodily existence of human beings. As Terry Eagleton puts it: “Human consciousness … is corporeal – which is not to say that it is nothing more than the body” (131). In tending the emaciated woman, Vane has direct evidence of the unfinished body (see Eagleton 131).

Indeed, this is what Lilith is all about: the continuing development of bodily existence.

Another sequence in the book makes this clear. I refer to the apparent aside that deals with Lord and Lady Cokayne, two characters who have died in a coach accident. When we first meet them, they have decayed until they are nothing more than skeletons who bicker and chafe at each other. Later in the book, we once again come across the two of them and they have begun to put on flesh.

Even after death, MacDonald argues, the body continues to develop. We are nothing if not bodily creatures, and this body changes constantly.

Lilith is a fantasy in which the protagonist goes on an adventure to the land of the seven dimensions, but it turns out that this strange land is nothing like and yet completely like the three dimensional land in which most of us live. While land is before us, I might note in passing that the land itself in fantasy suggests the body. I think of Pauline 20

Bayne’s drawing of the Narnian landscape in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) or the land’s seeming bodily existence in Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters (1988). Much fantasy rests on fairy tales as source material, and here too we have landscapes that suggest the body. Perhaps the most famous of such landscapes is that which we have in the Brothers Grimm version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’. This version of the famous story is short and direct in its equation of Beauty with the kingdom in which she lives. Her ineffectual father has allowed the kingdom to grow weary and overgrown. When his daughter Rosamund falls asleep, so too does everything else in the kingdom. She is the kingdom, the land that requires replenishing and fertilizing.

Fertilization arrives in the form of a Prince whose kiss restores the Princess and the land. Prince and Princess are married and the kingdom sets off on another history.

Even in fantasies such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lilith, The House on the Borderland and Coraline where the setting represents the interior workings of the mind, it also suggests the body in its materiality. In the case of The House on the Borderland and Coraline, the house is the mind, but at the same time it is that which houses the mind – the body. If I may switch to film for a moment, we have the stunning bodily images of spaceships in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). The setting in this film famously, or perhaps infamously,

depicts the body by focusing on apertures and canal-like ways. The tactile and even sensuous setting forcefully reminds us of the body’s importance even in outer space.

My argument is simply that fantasy cannot help but contemplate the body. Because it takes for its subject strangeness and difference, it cannot avoid raising notions of familiarity and deviations from the familiar. Colin Manlove, in his seminal work Modern Fantasy (1975), defined fantasy as: “A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms” (original emphasis). The paradox is that the ‘supernatural and impossible’ content of fantasy relates to the body. This means that no matter what the politics of the author, whether the conservatism of C. S. Lewis or the liberalism of George MacDonald, the form of fantasy delivers a narrative that must take up material existence. And if material existence is at the core of fantasy, then the bodies that inhabit fantasy worlds inevitably take part in history. In a meaningful way, the monsters of fantasy have a life that moves through history.

Take the vampire, for example.

The vampire begins its literary existence in the eighteenth century and by the end of the following century it has become a 21

and weak (Gulliver’s Travels (1726)).

Nowadays the body that refuses to die is either a vampire or more commonly a zombie. Development in the zombie story is not pretty or positive as it is in the work of George MacDonald. In the zombie story, the body decays but does not stop moving or desiring. Everything is reduced to the oral stage. The body in these fantasies, whether original stories or mash-ups such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), is eminently disposable; it is a wasted and diseased and decaying body that provides cannon fodder for the non-zombie members of society.

We have at least two zombie films that manage to incorporate the zombie body into a love story: Fido (2006) and Warm Bodies (2013). The former fantasizes about the possibility of finding a helpmate in a zombie, whereas the latter cleverly resituates Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in a post-apocalyptic world in which zombies are humanity’s adversaries.

And so the body dominates fantasy. Fantasy exploits the body in its various guises. The body in motion, the body politic, the body of evidence, the body of water, the body of knowledge.

The body, in whatever manifestation, reminds us of materiality. The body beautiful is what fantasy is all about, even when the beauty comes disguised as a beast. The monstrous body, after all is said and done, surprises us with its strangeness, but its strangeness becomes familiar

fixture of the gothic. Mostly, the vampire has been emblematic of villainy, the threatening and dangerous other that we encounter at our peril. But even in the nineteenth century, we have indications of a less than purely evil vampire. Think of the work of George MacDonald. By the time we reach our own day, we have distinctly sympathetic and even good vampires. Think of the work of Stephenie Meyer or M. T. Anderson or Buffy’s ally Angel in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series and its spinoffs in both television and print. In terms of history, the vampire rises in the nineteenth century just when capitalism finds its full force (Marx makes the connection between the vampire and the capitalist in chapter 10 of Capital, 1867). In these early days of the twentyfirst century, it seems suitable that the vampire has become a sympathetic figure.

The body, then, is such an obsessive theme in fantasy and the gothic that recently we have books and films that contemplate the burdensome nature of the body itself, its persistence, and the horror of its refusal to die. Way back in the eighteenth century, in an early and famous example of fantasy literature, Jonathan Swift invented people he called “struldbrugs,” seemingly normal people in the land of Luggnagg who are immortal. They may be immortal, but this does not free them from the aging process and as age presses on they become living horrors, toothless, sightless, sick 22

with time. I mentioned the film Alien a paragraph or so back, and this film with its sequels contains a monster that is meant to be grotesque and ugly and fearsome and as far away from the human as possible. But even here, we discover that this monstrous body contains discernibly human characteristics. In James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), the protagonist Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has a believe-it-or-not experience when she discovers that her adversary is not only an alien, but also a female and a mother who wants to protect her children just as avidly as any human mother would want to protect her children.

The monster here is an alien mother, repugnant to nature as we humans know it. In a sleight of hand, this film shows us a monstrous birth mother pitted against a sort of step-mother, and the audience roots for the stepmother.

And so we come back to John Knox who expresses a conventional fear of that which deviates from some perceived norm. Knox’s concern is with the female as a threat to the hegemony of the male. The fear he expresses surfaces in the gothic and fantasy literature when we have monsters that threaten the heroes, but that fear also finds solace when we have monsters who are humane and protective and fully understandable as suffering and desiring human beings.

Notes 1. Fantasy is a protean genre. Many have set out definitions, perhaps most recently Farah Mendlesohn in Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008).

Mendlesohn sets out a taxonomy of fantasy, but I do not consider her taxonomy or definitions generally here. In fact, I collect pretty much all non-realistic fiction and film into the fantasy category. We can, of course, separate the gothic from fantasy, but we can also see both as examples of the fantastic at work in narrative.

What catches my attention in Mendlesohn’s title is the word “rhetorics.” This word directs our attention to language and reminds me that fantasy often takes language itself as its subject. From George MacDonald to Terry Pratchett, we have fantasists who explore language, its origins, its communicative ambiguity, its connection to reality, and its sad incompetence. And language, whether spoken, written, or signed, is an aspect of the body.

Words, as Coleridge remarked, are “living powers, not merely articulated air” (249). Like the body, language has heft and shape, and it is in continuous transformation.

Primary Works Cited Alien. Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century Fox. Dir. Ridley Scott, 1979. DVD. Aliens. Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century Fox. Dir. James Cameron, 1986. DVD. Anderson, M. T. Thirsty. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1997. Print.

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Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan, 1865. Print.

Le Fanu, Sheridan. ‘Carmilla.’ In a Glass Darkly. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1872.

Print.

Craik, Dinah Maria Mulock. The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak. New York, Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1983 (1875). Print.

Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Illus. Pauline Baynes. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950. Print.

Ellis, Deborah. No Safe Place. Toronto: Groundwood, 2010. Print.

Lindsey, David. The Voyage to Arcturus.

London: Methuen, 1920. Print.

Fido. Lions Gate Films. Dir. Andrew Currie, 2006. DVD.

MacDonald, George. ‘The Cruel Painter.’

Adela Cathcart. 1864. Whitethorn: Johannesen, 1994, 379-416. Print.

Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. Print.

---. The Light Princess. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1977 (1864). Print.

---. The Graveyard Book. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. Print.

---. Lilith. London: Chatto & Windus, 1895.

Print.

Grahame-Smith, Seth. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2009.

Print.

---. Phantastes. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858. Print.

Maturin, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer.

Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1820. Print.

Grimm Brothers. ‘The Sleeping Beauty’.

Household Stories. Trans. Lucy Crane. New York: Cosimo, 2009 (1888). 204-207. Print.

Moore, Alan and Kevin O’Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. New York: ABC/ Wildstorm/DC Comics, 1999-2007. Print.

Hodgson, William Hope. The House on the Borderland. London: Chapman and Hall, 1908.

Print.

---. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

New York: Top Shelf and Knockabout Comics, 2009-2012. Print.

L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1962.

Print.

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Pratchett, Terry. Monstrous Regiment. London, New York: Doubleday, 2003. Print.

---. Wyrd Sisters. London: Victor Gollancz, 1988. Print.

Warm Bodies. Summit Entertainment. Dir. Jonathan Levine, 2013. DVD. Wilde, Oscar. The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales. New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, n.d. (1888). Print.

Pullman, Philip. ‘His Dark Materials’. 3 volumes. London: Scholastic, 1995-2000.

Print.

Secondary Works Cited Coleridge, S. T. Essays on His Times, ed.

David Erdman, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor - Coleridge 3. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1978. Print.

‘Return to Tomorrow’. Star Trek. Dir. Ralph Senensky. February 9, 1968.

Rymer, James Malcolm (or Thomas Preskett Prest). Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood. London: E. Lloyd, 1845-1847. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2011. Print.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818. Print.

Knox, John. ‘The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women.’

Still Waters Revival Books. 1995. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.

Slade, Arthur. The Hunchback Assignments.

Toronto: Harper Collins, 2009. Print.

Star Wars films. 1977-2005. DVD.

Manlove, Colin. Modern Fantasy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. Print.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1897. Print.

Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2008. Print.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. Edited by Allan Ingram. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2012 (1726). Print.

Biographical Note Roderick McGillis is Emeritus Professor of English, the University of Calgary. He is the author of He Was Some Kind of a Man (2009) and Les Pieds Devant (2007). Recent publications include essays on Terry Pratchett and Alan Moore, and the short story, ‘Le locataire revisité’.

The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. Rex Carlton Productions. Dir. Joseph Green, 1962. Print.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Vortex. Dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974. DVD.

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Maria Verena Peters Vanessa Gerhards

Descending into the Black Hole: Gothic Representations of the Body under Attack in Charles Burns’ Black Hole Introduction “The graphic novel is great for stories of spookiness and paranoia” writes Charles McGrath of The New York Times and names Charles Burns’ Black Hole (published as a serial in 1995-2004 and as a graphic novel in 2005) as one example verifying that statement. Burns’ awardwinning graphic novel confronts us with our darkest fears concerning coming of age, sexuality and the body. Told from a teenage perspective, the story focuses on the otherness and alienation of/among teenagers, which is always displayed through physical mutation. The novel tells the story of a teenage plague spreading in a Seattle suburb in the 1970s from the perspective of several teenagers. It is noteworthy that the reader is not given an adult perspective on the events. Thus the

impression is created that the group of teenagers is an almost hermetically cut off social minority.

There have already been insightful readings of Black Hole which form the basis for our analysis. For instance, Vanessa Raney reads the story as discourse on the beginning of the AIDS epidemic; James Zeigler takes this up and adds the ’90s school shootings as a second important contextual discourse. However, the ways in which the specific imagery of the story connect to the tradition of the literary Gothic and to the horror film are yet to be explored.

In our essay we would like to elucidate the intertextual connections between the graphic novel and the Gothic genre in general. In order to trace the origins of the visual language used, we

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will turn to selected literary Gothic texts (e.g. Dracula (1897); The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896); Frankenstein (1818)) and films (e.g. Rod Daniel’s Teen Wolf (1985); Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987); Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty (1999)). Topic-wise our focus will be on images of transforming bodies, boundary transgressions, the abject and the teenager as spectacle. However, we are not seeking to validate a theory of influence; instead, our aim is to explore possible readings of Burns’ polysemic work through a comparative approach.

be influences upon Burns’ novel. The themes of Gothic literature are certainly still of interest today. Catherine Spooner identifies them as “[…] the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present; the radically provisional or divided nature of the self; the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or ‘other’; the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased” (8).

These are the very principles at work in both Burns’ graphic novel and the classic Gothic novels mentioned above.

The focus of this first section of our essay will be on the parallels between Burns’ novel and the classic ones regarding both plot elements and imagery.

There are four aspects which we would like to discuss: Victorian Gothic elements, the role of disease, the outsider as threat, and the impact of the changing body.

To establish a connection between Black Hole and the Gothic genre, one has to go back to the beginnings of Gothic literature in the 18th century and Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. For instance, Walpole establishes the forest as a Gothic setting, and darkness, loneliness and the dangers lurking in the depths of the wood threaten not only the characters in Otranto, but also the ones in Black Hole.

In the second section of Black Hole called ‘Planet Xeno’, Keith and his friends smoke weed in a clearing in the woods.

They find strange things such as a doll tied to a tree and a tent. When Keith wanders

Connections to Gothic Literature To begin with it is necessary to point out that, here, we use the term Gothic in the literary context. The first influential Gothic novel was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) in which the ground rules for Gothic fiction were laid. By the time that Victorian Gothic fiction emerged, the focus of the stories had shifted towards science, diseases and the possibilities of medicine. As these aspects are important for the reading of Black Hole, both the very early and the late Victorian Gothic fiction are used as reference points for our analysis.

The connections between Charles Burns’ Black Hole and late Victorian Gothic literature are manifold. In particular, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau seem to 28

off, he finds a girl’s skin and this sight makes him sick. At that point the reader does not know exactly what is going on in the forest. An eerie atmosphere is thus created as neither reader nor characters know what is going on.

The overall visualisation of the forest in Black Hole certainly stands in the tradition of Gothic texts, with Burns’ stylistic use of black-and-white being decisive. The outlines of the trees and their detailed features are not framed black against white, but white against black.

Thus the emphasis is clearly on darkness instead of light, which contributes to the eeriness of the place and the danger lurking within. Apart from that, the forest appears to be quite impenetrable as we do not know what lurks in the darkness between the trees.

Another element introduced by Walpole which we can also find here is the concept of (family) secrets. In Walpole’s novel, Manfred’s secret kills his son and eventually destroys his family. In Black Hole, the secret mainly refers to “the bug”, the disease that mutates the teenagers. As some of the mutations are unobtrusive, the respective teens are able to cover them up and pass as “normal”. There is for example Rob, who has a second mouth at the lower part of his throat. He covers it with turtleneck pullovers and scarves.

That is why Chris does not know about his infection and carelessly sleeps with him.

Keith’s mutation starts with dark bumps

around his ribs which then grow bigger until they look like tadpoles (section ‘A Dream Girl’). He binds them off so that he can hide them more easily. In Gothic fiction, secrets are usually dangerous if revealed. In Black Hole, the disclosure of the mutation leads to social exclusion.

Therefore, some of the infected teenagers choose to cover up their mutations if possible.

Visions and Dreams Another parallel to the Victorian Gothic tradition can be found in the recurring visions and dreams of the characters in the graphic novel and its predecessors.

In the first section of the graphic novel (section 1 ‘Biology 101’), Keith experiences a dark premonition of bodies opening up and melting into a chaotic swirl of images triggered by the sight of a dissected frog. The four distinct images that he sees will recur throughout the novel: the slit open frog, a human foot with a wound at the sole, a human back with the skin torn open and genitals covered by a hand. Keith states that he was looking at a black hole which opened to engulf him. Additionally, he also sees a broken glass bottle, a gun, a joint, bones and snakes in this final image.

These items play a role in the story as it unfolds to both reader and characters. The obvious connection to the Bible (snake as seducer) is not lost on the reader; it can be understood as a direct warning for Keith 29

and for the reader not to sin, as this might have terrible consequences.

Furthermore, Keith’s vision includes a sequence of images which revolves around the theme of ‘black hole’. The four images mentioned above are representations of the vaginal orifice.

Be it the cut in the frog’s flesh or the torn skin, the holes show a progression from metaphor to actual item and are an extension of the graphic novel’s title Black Hole. We can conclude from this that the sexual element as presented here is dangerous rather than pleasant. As all the images in Keith’s vision are negative, they focus on the grim future he and his schoolmates have to face. Thus, both Keith and the reader are introduced to the source of danger and potential death, but also to the source of pleasure. This dyad of pleasure and pain is evoked by the look into the black hole which, if read as vagina, signifies the return into the womb.

By returning to the very place we/he came from, Keith disbands his own identity as the black hole engulfs him. Therefore, he exemplifies what Kristeva described as the abject – he is both inside and outside of the maternal body; he is both part of it and divided from it.1

This particular imagery used in Black Hole can also be found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when Victor has a telling dream at a pivotal point of the story. He has just succeeded in reanimating a corpse, but he abandons

his creature. In his dream, Victor sees his fiancée Elizabeth “in the bloom of her health” but when he approaches and embraces her, she becomes “livid with the hue of death” (56). Interestingly, Victor’s love interest then turns into his dead mother with “grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel”. This image then gives way to a vision of the creature.

David Punter and Glennis Byron have analysed this passage as follows: In juxtaposing the dream with the vision of the creature, the text prophetically suggests that bringing the monster to life is equivalent to killing Elizabeth. Furthermore, as Elizabeth changes into the corpse of the mother, the dream emphasizes Frankenstein’s circumvention of the normal channels of procreation: giving life to the creature has effectively eliminated the mother. (199) This interpretation gives us an insight into Victor’s mind and his motives for making the creature in the first place. Furthermore, we can deduce from the dream that Victor’s actual motives are not as purely scientific, noble and selfless as he claims them to be. The re-animation of the dead body can be seen as a surrogate for the longing to re-animate his dead mother.

Unconsciously, Victor links his bride-tobe with his mother and with the creature.

Jerrold E. Hogle comments on the dream as follows: 30

Its immediate effect, though, is to undermine Victor’s lofty daydream by revealing a preconscious disposition towards a sort of necrophilia with his mother as what is more truly symbolized in the sewn-together features of the being he has created.

Is this the real dream – the actual dark urges – at the foundation of Frankestein’s [sic] project, a deeper motivation that is covered over and obscured by his conscious ambitions? (para. 3)

nor will have a ‘normal’ life due to their mutations; adulthood does not hold any promises for them but only more pain and more seclusion. As they cannot develop wholesome identities – their monstrosity destroying any chance of doing so – they will not find their ‘proper’ place in society, because they are monsters in the eyes of the other citizens.

For instance, Chris’ dream in section three (‘SSSSSSSS’) conflates the images we have already seen in Keith’s vision with her reality. Chris relives her injury (a cut in the foot) again, but she finds a scroll in the wound; it shows an island in a lake as well as a snake. Here, the phallic imagery of the snake/penis not only functions as a dangerous object but also as source for ridicule as Keith’s penis is transformed into a pigtail. Keith then transforms into a big snake which wraps itself around her, dragging her under water. When she wakes up, Chris tears the skin from her body in a desperate attempt to free herself – from the bug, or from Keith’s grip. Her fears regarding her future become obvious; she is afraid of her outsider status in which simple actions like procuring food (the mutants in her dream eat garbage) or having a relationship become impossible.

Diseases Then and Now The bug which befalls the teenagers in Black Hole is not fatal, but it cannot be cured; in fact a cure is not mentioned at

Hogle employs the Freudian reading and establishes a connection to the baser urges of Victor, namely the reunion with his dead mother. By creating a living being ‘from scratch’ so to speak, he circumvents sexual intercourse and birth. Hogle goes on to argue that Victor’s “unconscious desire for and a resistance to a reunion with the body of his deceased mother” are embodied by this dream (para. 4; emphasis by Hogle). Thus, the dream uncovers Victor’s repressed fears.

In Burns’ narrative, the visions and dreams of the protagonists also show us what they fear. As the text focuses on the mutated teenagers, their nightmares reveal their fears as connected to the process of physical change. For them, the coming of age is made more difficult, even made impossible, by the bug; we could even say that it is out of control, as signified by the random mutations. None of them has 31

all. Not even the possibility of a medical treatment is discussed. The disease is omnipresent for the teenagers and it cannot be stopped; the only way to avoid it is to refrain from sex. The trope of diseases and illnesses is quite common in Gothic literature and often associated with vampirism.

In Dracula, we can find a few instances in which vampirism is denoted as a disease. After the first meeting with Lucy Westenra, Van Helsing – the physician and scientist – calls her condition a disease (140) and later elaborates on this theory to the rest of the Crew of Light. To cure her, he suggests a treatment with “clean” blood, which, however, fails. When, later on, Mina is attacked by the Count, another exchange of blood takes place: he offers her his blood and she drinks it from a wound in his chest. This particular scene has been the subject of extensive academic research considering the psychoanalytical dimension of it (Ernest Jones 1971, Maurice Richardson 1991, et al.). At this point, however, we would like to focus on the fact that vampirism is transmitted by an action similar to sexual intercourse, that is the exchange of body fluids. Here we have a direct connection between the two texts albeit they are more than a hundred years apart. It is important to note that only the exchange of blood leads to the infection. If blood is not exchanged, as with Jonathan and the three female

vampires, the victim is not transformed into a vampire. Body fluids are the common denominator for the infections in both Dracula and Black Hole. In both cases, an inappropriate action is punished by an illness. Here, the vice is lust.

Although no one in Dracula actually has sex – or at least the text does not depict it as such – some characters are presented in a rather un-Victorian way. At the beginning of the novel, Lucy Westenra openly admits that she would like to marry all three of her suitors instead of picking only one: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (76). As pure and virginal as Lucy is, there is a certain attractiveness to her that draws all the members of the Crew of Light to her – including Mina who cannot stop pointing out how gorgeous Lucy is. In the end, she is punished for her impure thought. In contrast, the motherly Mina survives the infection as she is sexually faithful to her husband Jonathan. She helps to destroy Dracula and does not succumb to the vampire’s will. This is in line with Victorian perceptions: the mother survives, the slut dies.

Also in Black Hole, the danger emanates from unprotected, uncontrolled sexual drives. Those teenagers who are not able to restrain their hormones are affected by the disease and end up being shunned by their community due to their mutations. Sexuality is the issue in Black 32

Hole that connects the plotlines, the visual images and the entire theme of the graphic novel. When the primordial takes over, the teenagers seem to be helpless. Although Keith knows that Eliza is infected (he has seen her tail), he sleeps with her.

In contrast, Chris is not aware of Rob’s infection and carelessly sleeps with him without checking first. The result for both is the same: they become outcasts and are stigmatized by their mutations. In this context, it is interesting that we cannot find in the narrative the virtuous maiden who is saved in the end. Thus, both reader and characters are denied a positive ending with a moral message.

Castle Dracula, he is found by nuns who take care of him at their convent. Even in The Island of Doctor Moreau there is an institutionalised entity: the creatures all act according to the “Law” set up by Moreau.

He thus represents a governmental institution which cares for its subjects.

After Edward’s return to England, he is re-assimilated into Victorian society.

Black Hole thus opposes the system of reestablishing order via institutions present in these earlier examples. It represents a bleaker perspective on society and the state as it points out the disillusionment with social and state structures.

There are other similarities regarding the status as outsiders. At the beginning of Black Hole, Keith meets the mutants in a clearing in the woods. He stands outside of the circle of mutants sitting around a campfire. The fire serves as a meeting place for them where they eat together and share their fate.

This particular scene is reminiscent of Edward’s encounter with the creatures in Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau.

He sees Moreau’s creatures as a threat at first, but then he learns more about their community in the jungle. Edward is the outsider, but he is accepted although he is ‘normal’ and not surgically altered.

The role of the outsider is, of course, a topic taken up in Frankenstein as well. The creature is unnatural and monstrous. Therefore it cannot be part of society no matter how much it tries.

Lack of Institutionalised Support Anyone who is infected and has mutated in Black Hole is not part of ‘normal’ society anymore. The aforementioned absence of adult support is important here. The teenagers are left alone; neither families, nor teachers, nor other grownups support them in their struggle with the infection and the ensuing mutations.

The teenagers’ community is secluded from the other people in the town; they are completely on their own.

In contrast, the victims in Dracula and Doctor Moreau are helped by respected social institutions. Renfield, Dracula’s first victim, is put in an asylum to be treated by Dr Seward. Van Helsing, a representative of the medical profession, helps Lucy and Mina. After Jonathan has escaped 33

Its physical appearance turns it into something the ‘normal’ people dread and loathe. Similarly, the teenagers in Black Hole are treated as outcasts, as the pariahs of the community. Their own bodies turn against them in their mutations and force them into their exile in the woods.

Although they are tolerated to a certain degree – Dave is shown buying fast food (section 16 ‘Rick the Dick’) – they are certainly not treated as human beings, but as freaks of nature.

will be on how, in particular, bodies are transformed through the epidemic dubbed “the bug” in Black Hole and how the transformation of the teenage characters ties in with a general Gothic discourse on youth.

The physical transformations triggered by the infection are too diverse to give a clear profile of the affliction, and that is why Burns’ fictional disease is open to many readings. Williams therefore suggests that while the reading of the “the bug” as a metonym for AIDS (as suggested by Raney and Zeigler) is a possible interpretation, “the bug could also be said to represent any endemic condition which has a prescribed cultural meaning” (10). However, as wide and varied as the symptoms of the bug are, there are still discernible clusters of symptoms and these are worthy of a more detailed analysis.

Thus, in the following, some examples of the infection’s origins, symptoms and social consequences will be isolated to develop possible readings of the disease beyond the AIDS metonymy.

Often, the affliction triggers a physical mutation that appears to blur the human/animal boundary. This is one possible reading of the illness’ colloquial label used by the teens in the story – while “the bug” can denote a flaw or damage in a system, it can also denote an insect and thus “having caught the bug” would trigger associations of being host to a parasite. The bug’s possible symptoms are

Conclusion I In sum we can say that the Victorian Gothic tradition certainly has been, and still is, an influential part of literature.

Modern writers turn to it for inspiration to reassess their own cultures and times.

Otherness (the abject), and visions/ dreams and diseases, especially, are recurring motifs no matter which century is concerned. These tropes are represented by the mutated teenagers in Black Hole and, as a contemporary text, it exemplifies the impact of the Gothic tradition on today’s literature. Such tropes are not only present in writing however but have also influenced the imagery of horror films, as we shall see in the following section.

Black Hole, the Horror Film and the Representation of Youth In the following section the focus will be on body transformations and other sources of fear in teen horror films. Our focus 34

diverse: Eliza, for instance, grows a tail, Chris starts regularly to shed her skin like a snake and Dave’s face develops feline features.

Transgression of seemingly discrete boundaries, as here of the human/ animal boundary, is not only a traditional motif in Gothic literature (Hogle 2002: 9) such as Dracula or The Island of Doctor Moreau but also, of course, of central importance to body horror in contemporary movies – think, for instance, of teen horror movies such as Near Dark (1987), The Lost Boys (1987), Teen Wolf (1985), Ginger Snaps (2000), Jennifer’s Body (2009) and many more. In the latter three movies, the protagonists mutate into werewolves or werewolf-like creatures so that the monstrously transforming body of the teenaged protagonists functions as a fear-inspiring metaphor for the physical transformations triggered by puberty (Miller 288f). The teenagers are depicted as helpless victims of their rampant hormones, their uncontrollable sexual desire and the new physical strength of their maturing bodies. They are confronted with their animal nature, or Freud’s id, and struggle to gain control over it. While, as pointed out in the preceding subchapters, sexuality plays a major part in the depiction of monstrous teenagers in Black Hole, it would be too reductive to base a reading of the novel along exactly the same lines as the body horror in teen horror movies focussing on werewolves.

The two other movies cited (both teen vampire movies), Near Dark (1987) and The Lost Boys (1987), offer a layer of meaning in addition to the puberty/ sexuality metaphor. Both address the purely social dangers of coming of age specific to that cultural moment. In these cases, the transformation into a monster is also a metaphor for turning from innocent child into a gang member or drug addict (Waltje 99). Similarly, Black Hole does not only address the budding sexuality of its protagonists as a source of fear, but also sheds light on the construction of youth in a particular social context. In the following, we thus turn away from seemingly timeless Gothic features in Black Hole to the culturally specific ones, as “[t]he monster is born […] as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place.” (Cohen 4) We have mentioned before that infected teenagers have no one to turn to in the face of an unknown killer murdering them one by one. Neither police nor parents seem options; instead the afflicted teens are dependent upon the charity of a peer for shelter – but even in their new shelter, they are not safe. This trope of paranoia is a recurrent topic in teen horror films of the ’90s (e.g. The Faculty (1998)) and TV shows (e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)). While in ’80s teen vampire movies like The Lost Boys and Near Dark, the parent generation 35

eventually realizes the danger that its children are in and rushes to save the day, parents are, to the very end, oblivious to the problems of their children in the movies and the TV shows of the ’90s and, thus, are no good at saving them. In these stories, whether teens are confronted with the killer from the woods, vampires from the graveyard, parasites from outer space, or threat by a psychopathic killer, the focus is always on their having to deal with the threat on their own – without help from parents, teachers, police or other institutions which either turn a blind eye or are not even present within the narrative framework (the latter being the case in Black Hole). That the teen protagonists are helplessly exposed to these threats can be read as a metaphor for feelings of isolation and alienation from the parent generation – a feeling which seems, on the representational level, sharply to have increased with the beginning of the ’90s.

While in the ’80s the influence of conservative pro-family politics was reflected in the horror film, where the happy ending translated into a reconciliation of parents and children and a reforming of a quasi-nuclear family, the ’90s offered a more disillusioned depiction of the American family and the coming of age experience.

Both of the aforementioned examples, The Faculty and Buffy, also have in common with Black Hole their being set in middle-class suburbia

which turns into a Gothic space (Craig 89). While suburban America has often featured as Gothic setting in horror (e.g.

Pet Sematary (dir. Mary Lambert, 1989)), its association with teen horror becomes most significant during the ’90s, as school shootings befall white small town America. What was perceived as a series of killing sprees committed by hitherto inconspicuous white American schoolboys transformed the public’s perception of what were once thought of as the safe havens of the country (Herda-Rapp 546) to become the breeding ground of unthinkable evil.

James Zeigler draws attention to the fact that Black Hole is not only set in a suburban space but also remarks explicitly on the “school shootings in the United States”. The bug lends itself to being read as a metaphor for youth violence in small town America in the ’90s, as the series of school shootings was constructed in the mass media as “a cultural virus” (Brooke np) spreading uncontrollably among teenagers. Black Hole explicitly draws attention to the discourse of youngsters running amok through the character of Dave, who is one of the teenagers with an obvious facial mutation. He eventually goes on a killing spree, killing a jock in a KFC outlet and his fellow bug victims in their new shelter.

Black Hole, however, also addresses the discourse of the ’90s school shootings on a more subtle level, 36

through its iconography. One of the most condensed images created by the media in an attempt to render the school shootings of the’ 90s a comprehendible narrative was Time Magazine’s cover image on the Columbine school shooting. This reiterated the central fear that emanated from school shootings all throughout that decade: in its centre were two colour photographs of the perpetrators, in which we see them as harmless, smiling, allAmerican young boys; arranged around these images were black and white yearbook photos of their victims that turn into an obituary. The white and red caption rendered this cover a gothic story: “The monsters next door. What made them do it?”. The caption gives voice to the fear of the other inside the self (Hogle 2002: 11). Klebold and Harris are the ‘boys next door’, indistinguishable from the other teens; only the format of the pictures (outdoor shots, in colour and bigger than the rest) tells us that their role is different from those of the others on the cover. And yet, at the same time they are monsters, in blood red capitals. Hiding somewhere in the midst of the happy, healthy youth of the nation, bloodthirsty killers are growing up, and there is no way to spot them before it is too late. This is the fear that the image transmits. The white suburban middle class, the hegemonic centre of the nation, is destroyed from within. The threat is thus everywhere.

Charles Burns’ graphic novel

is framed by images similar to those on the cover of Time magazine. On the first two pages, we find drawn photos of a couple of smiling teens, arranged as in a yearbook. These are repeated on the last two pages, only now these very same young, smiling faces have mutated in various ways. Again, white suburban youth – the kids next door – transform into monsters; yet this time, there is no way to discern between perpetrators and victims, between monsters and innocent children. All of them are both or none. Burns uses visible monstrosity to confront the reader with teenaged faces that “resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” and therefore, fear-inspiringly threaten “to smash distinctions” (Cohen 6). All of these teenagers in the yearbook pages of Black Hole are fear-inspiring, and yet all of them ask for our pity as their formerly apparently innocent smiles now seem forced, bespeaking tragedy. Burns shows us teenagers who have suddenly been rendered monsters without knowing how or why. This may be the novel’s commentary on the discourse of youth violence; it shows us the demonization of youth from an inside perspective, trying to communicate what it feels like to become branded as a potential monster on the grounds of being a teenager. Their fate and their identity are not only out of their control, but also incomprehensible to them. There is no way of structuring what 37

is happening to them into a meaningful narrative, just as there is no way for the reader to tell all those images of dream, vision, memory and present experience apart, to form them into a narrative that gives answers to the questions they raise. As Zeigler points out, Black Hole depicts white male violence, but what it seeks to expose may be another kind of violence. The novel’s ending focuses on three characters: Chris, Keith and Eliza. Chris is at the beach and after recalling the tragic events of the recent past, she swims out into the lake, as far as she can. Her last panels show how the hair surrounding her face and the water become indistinguishable as she stares into a clear night’s sky full of stars. She seems to be at peace.

At the same time, Keith and Eliza, who have become lovers, are depicted on a remote meadow, both of them sitting stark-naked next to a tree. When Keith stands up, he is in an awkward position, as if he were making his first baby steps, and Eliza is wearing girlish pigtails. The scenario connotes innocence, a new beginning. Like Chris, they do remember their gruesome past, but likewise the recalled images serve to highlight the peacefulness of the present scene.

The main characters thus, in the end, seem to find peace (however shortlived) in their total retreat from society.

They have fled from the violence that

society does to teenagers by inscribing them as monsters. The settings have a primeval quality with Chris bathing in a natural lake, returning to the element from which all life springs and cleansing herself from her past, and Keith and Eliza becoming a new Adam and Eve, the biblical first humans walking the earth.

Their exit strategy is an impossible one, a return to the beginnings, a teenage utopia. It draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the role of the teenager in society is always already inscribed as deviant other: “At the point of virtually every measure of social crisis – race relations, drugs, censorship, pornography, gender, sexuality, families, poverty, waning tradition, sits the loosely defined, yet rhetorically forceful, youth” argues Charles Acland (10), who explores how the politics of the spectacle function within the discourse of “youth in crisis” in the ’80s and ’90s. Acland elucidates how the concept of a crisis is used to render youth violence productive within hegemony. Burns seems to try to envision what youth would be like outside of these cultural mechanisms and power relations for Black Hole’s more or less happy ending. The novel, thus, can be read as a critique of the demonization of youth and the conclusive primeval images of rebirth as a utopian attempt to erase all cultural inscriptions of youth and to start with a clean slate. The aesthetic hyperbole and clarity of these last images stand out so 38

much from the rest of Burns’ dark and convoluted visual style that they appear to be more unreal than all of his other fantastic imagery and thus give the novel an uneasy and eerie ending for the reader.

or a fantasy; thus we are lost equally in the flood of images and in the difficulties of coping with them.

Despite connections to the Gothic novels discussed, Burns’ graphic novel reinterprets them in an innovative way.

He uses the setting of the 1970s to create a distance between the contemporary reader and the subject (a technique also frequently used in Gothic fiction), but the threat from infectious diseases remains present for us, as AIDS has not yet been cured. That is just the starting point for Black Hole however. Our reading of its “bug” goes beyond this, as the bug turns the teenagers into the abject.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, they stand outside society and they are the source of both fear and violence. Burns’ fictional world is much bleaker than those of the Victorian Gothic in that his protagonists can no longer fall back on social structures or institutions (which enabled even Frankenstein’s monster to plead to its creator). The teenagers in Black Hole are all out on their own.

The three major motifs from teen horror used in Black Hole are body transformation, suburbia as a Gothic setting, and alienation from the parent generation. However, Black Hole must be differentiated from the more simple mechanisms of the genre. Body transformation does not simply translate into the physical changes of puberty or the awakening of sexual desire as in

Conclusion II As we have seen in the analysis above, Charles Burns’ graphic novel draws its imagery from late Victorian Gothic staples and more modern sources like the teen horror film. The main themes of Burns’ text – disease, monstrosity, otherness – can be traced back to Dracula, Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau. The change of medium is decisive in establishing Black Hole as a Gothic text, which is reinforced by its basic black-and-white pattern.

In Black Hole, the anxieties and fears of the teenagers are expressed by their visions and dreams and thus they are articulated in a way that they cannot do verbally. Burns’ narrative thereby reflects the element of Gothic novels (particularly present in Frankenstein), which reveals hidden emotions and repressed urges.

In these novels, however, the difference between dream and reality is clear cut (Victor’s dreams are introduced by clear textual markers). By contrast, in Black Hole, reality and imagination are not as clearly defined. The boundaries are blurred by the proximity of the images.

Both the reader and the characters are uncertain of whether the images are real 39

Teen Wolf, Ginger Snaps and Jennifer’s Body, and there is no moral message, no warning against a promiscuous lifestyle as is detectable in Stoker’s depiction of Lucy and Mina or in teen horror (and particularly slasher) films, where only the girl who does not have sex survives.

Black Hole, instead, addresses the cultural work of ‘teenager’ as a social category and criticizes the violence inflicted upon the single subject by the discursive demonization of youth. This is achieved by telling the story of the ‘cultural virus’ of youth violence from the subjective perspective of teenagers whom western culture has turned into monsters.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes of monsters that they are “our children” and, like Frankenstein’s monster, “they ask us why we have created them” (20).

The mutated faces of Black Hole’s teens stare back at the reader from its last page and seem to pose this silent question, inviting us to dwell upon why western culture needs to demonize youth in order to function.

Notes For a detailed analysis of the abject in Black Hole, see: Man, Pui-guan. Monstrous Bodies: Sexuality and Body Horror in Charles Burns’ ‘Black Hole’ and George Saunders’ ‘Sea Oak’.

Works Cited Acland, Charles. Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of “Youth in Crisis”. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. Print.

Brooke, James. ‘Terror in Littleton: The Overview; 2 Students in Colorado School Said to Gun Down as Many as 23 and Kill Themselves in a Siege’. New York Times. 21 April. 1999. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Warner Bros.

Television Network, 1997-2001. United Paramount Network, 2001-2003. DVD. Burns, Charles. Black Hole. New York: Pantheon Books, 2005. Print.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Monster Theory: Reading Culture.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 3-25. Print.

Craig, Pamela and Martin Fradley. ‘Youth, Affective Politics and Contemporary American Horror Film’. Ed. Steffen Hantke. American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 77-102. Print.

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Ginger Snaps. Dir. John Fawcett. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000. DVD.

Near Dark. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Studio Starz/Anchorbay, 1987. DVD.

Herda-Rapp, Ann. ‘The Social Construction of Local School Violence Threats by the News Media and Professional Organizations’.

Sociological Inquiry 73.4 (2003): 545-574.

Print.

‘The Monsters Next Door. What Made Them Do It?’. Time Magazine. 3 May, 1999. Web. 27 Oct, 2013.

Perna, Laura. ‘‘There Was Something Screwy Going On…’: The Uncanny in Charles Burns’s Graphic Novel Black Hole’. The Birmingham Journal of Literature and Language 2 (2009): 7-16. Print.

Hogle, Jerold E. ‘Introduction: the Gothic in western culture’. Ed. Jerold E. Hogle . The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

1-20. Print.

Pet Sematary. Dir. Mary Lambert. Warner Bros., 1989. DVD. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. 1818. London: Penguin, 1994.

Print.

---. ‘Frankenstein’s Dream: An Introduction’.

Romantic Circles Praxis Series. Washington: University of Maryland Press. Web. 31 Oct. 2013.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. London: Penguin, 1994. Print.

Jennifer’s Body. Dir. Karyn Kusama.

Twentieth Century Fox, 2009. DVD.

Teen Wolf. Dir. Rod Daniel. MGM, 1985.

DVD. The Faculty. Dir. Robert Rodriguez. Lion’s Gate, 1998. DVD.

Man, Pui-guan. ‘Monstrous Bodies: Sexuality and Body Horror in Charles Burns’ Black Hole and George Saunders’ Sea Oak’. Constellations 1 (2012). 8 Oct. 2012. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.

The Lost Boys. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Warner Bros., 1987. DVD.

McGrath, Charles. ‘Not Funnies’. The New York Times. 11 July 2004. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Waltje, Jörg. Blood Obsession: Vampires, Serial Murder, and the Popular Imagination.

Peter Lang: New York, 2005. Print.

Miller, April. ‘“The Hair that Wasn’t There Before”: Demystifying Monstrosity and Menstruation in Ginger Snaps and Ginger Snaps Unleashed’. Western Folklore 64: 3-4 (2005): 2821-303. Print.

Wells, H.G. The Island of Doctor Moreau.

1896. London: Penguin, 1996. Print.

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Zeigler, James. ‘The Diseased Teens and Mean Bodies of Charles Burns’ Black Hole’. SCAN Journal of Media Arts Culture 5.2 (2008).Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

Biographical Notes Maria Verena Peters wrote her MA thesis on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and teen Gothic. She has been teaching Cultural Studies at RuhrUniversity Bochum and is currently teaching British and American literature and culture at the University of Siegen. Her research interests include gothic fiction, gender studies, transmediality and crossover literature. She has published papers on Twilight, Harry Potter, British reality TV and on religion in the TV show Lost. She is currently writing her PhD thesis on Harry Potter and Twilight as case studies of crossover literature.

Vanessa Gerhards holds an MA (2004) and a PhD (2011) from the University of Siegen, where she is currently working as a lecturer. Her dissertation Shakespeare Reloaded: The Shakespeare Renaissance 1989-2004 was published in 2011. Her essay ‘Multicultural Macbeths: Maqbool and Makibefo’ was published in the collection Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century in 2012. Her research interests are adaptation studies (mainly Shakespeare adaptations) as well as Gothic literature and culture.

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Jimmy Packham

Indefinite Shadows: Edgar Allan Poe and the Unspeakable Female Dead women, whose minds have something of the preternatural about them, yet whose bodies are in a constant struggle with life and death, who die to return, sometimes in their original skin, sometimes in the bodies of other women, abound throughout the gothic landscapes of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and prose. As individuals, the women often have little control over their own bodies, which are generally broken down or otherwise excised from the narrative by the male narrators; conversely, they appear to enact a kind of possession over the female form more generally, as they return to life, or are re-bodied, in, for example, the figure of the husband’s new bride or in their very own daughter. As a consequence of its apparent otherness, the specific body is ignored in preference

to the ideal. Yet the individual female is continually reasserting herself, living beyond the death of her physical form and finding new expression in a second form. The reality of the resurrection of Ligeia, Morella, Madeline Usher and Berenice (Poe, 1984b) is, however, rarely unambiguous. The narratives of their return are told by male writers who evince a repeated problem of embodying the women, of reliably replicating them as a textual construct; there is a problem in the effort to depict the female as truly alive in these texts, which consequently and repeatedly align her with death.

Simultaneously, with her bodily presence denied by, or incomprehensible to, the narrators, her existence is largely predicated on her place in their textual reconstructions of her existence. This

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paper explores Poe’s depiction of the relationship between the feminine body and the text, arguing that these two concepts reflect each other endlessly such that neither can hope to contain nor be contained by the other; the majority of the paper will be constituted by a close reading of the most accomplished of Poe’s narratives about the ideal female, ‘Ligeia’ (1845), which demonstrates clearly the troubles attendant on an accurate representation of the female figure, wherein Ligeia is displaced by the text, which is itself disturbed by the presence of Ligeia.

Through the act of writing the male narrators deconstruct the female form. They deny her an agency that she would otherwise have, and, as Arthur A. Brown argues, they deny the female a death by suspending her in writing, in the fixity and distance of textual representation, where the signifier is foregrounded over the signified. In relation to the ambiguity of Berenice’s presence in ‘Berenice’, where her replication within the text of the tale precludes the possibility of her truly dying, Brown writes: “Undying death is real in its incarnation as writing […] encounters with undying death [are] represented in the narratives and in our awareness – and our awareness of Poe’s awareness – of the acts of writing and reading” (Brown 449-450). By repeatedly articulating the female, she cannot die.

Additionally, Poe’s narrators attempt a textual representation that always selfconsciously struggles fully to articulate the exact character or nature of the female they profess to describe. Consequently, the female is at once lifeless and deathless, transient and eternal, present but always distorted, always deferred, and thus always an uncanny figure. Like the lost Lenore, whose absence is inscribed throughout the landscape of ‘The Raven’ (1845), the women in Poe’s prose tales are similarly dispersed and repeatedly re-spoken after their deaths; Lenore exists only as recollection, as an attempt at embodiment, and only the echo of her name is ever perceived by the narrator, as it manifests itself in the outer darkness around his library and provides only a signifier cut loose from its signified (just as the echo is a word repeated, but disconnected from the original source, which has already vanished at the moment the echo emerges). Denied a coherent, unified existence in one form, then, the female returns in another, as the repressed returns to reassert the presence it was previously refused, or which was simply ignored in favour of bestowing on the women an idealised ethereality, forcing them to embody the perceived spiritual and poetical nature of femininity through the authority of the textual representation.

The woman, made a figure of text by the male writer, returns to remind him of her very real physicality.

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Equally, however, it might be said that the male authors in Poe’s texts fail to truly comprehend the women they encounter, that their femininity cannot be accurately articulated, that they exceed the power of language to contain or express them. Consequently these writers continually re-inscribe the women they have lost in other forms; that is, having failed to comprehend Ligeia or Morella in their physicality, they re-present her in new forms in other figures, as in the body of Rowena, the second wife of ‘Ligeia’’s narrator, or in the child to which Morella gives birth as she dies. The problem, therefore, becomes twofold. On the one hand, Poe’s narrators do away with the female body in favour of its uncanny textual double as a way to control and comprehend what seems strange and other to them. On the other, the incessant repetition of the female form in these texts of Poe’s suggests a desire (though unfulfilled) to reach the final signified of the female, a constant revisiting of a space of linguistic disruption: a repetition compulsion of sorts, through which the narrators continually re-live the mysterious female figures they failed (and continually fail) to grasp, unable to reach beyond this act of expressing them, at which point the female would be truly known.

Poe explores the relationship between women, writing and death most explicitly in his essay, and possible hoax,

‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846), a text that ostensibly details his process of composing ‘The Raven’. In ‘Philosophy’, Poe declares what he considers to be the most suitable topic for poetry and proceeds step by step in delineating the painstaking reasoning and logic behind his statements concerning the optimum length and necessary tone of an effective piece of poetry. Settling on “Beauty” as the “sole legitimate province of the poem” and from here identifying sadness – specifically melancholy – as the most powerful form of Beauty, Poe exclaims that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe, 1984a 16-19). It is a declaration that haunts so much of Poe’s scholarship, a declaration akin to a literary mission statement, whose very quotation, though often elucidating, is a cliché. The statement does not simply, as Elisabeth Bronfen rightly notes, “provoke the absurd impossibility of a ‘superlative of the superlative’ […] an aesthetic moment of excess” (Bronfen 61-62). It also posits the moment of death as the most aesthetically pleasing province of poetical writing, a moment that, like all thresholds, does not really exist or at the very least: cannot be observed; it is the imperceptible moment that precedes death but follows life, the transition between two distinct states. It recalls the paradoxical condition of Poe’s M. Valdemar, hypnotised at the moment of his death, who cannot die yet who does 45

not live and who utters, as Roland Barthes notes, the impossible sentence, “I am dead,” a sentence that collapses upon itself as soon as it is spoken, breaking down a fundamental barrier between the speaking subject and the mute object (Barthes 189190). If the moment of the death of the female body is indeed the basis for “the most poetical topic” then we see in Poe’s ‘dead woman’ tales – a term which, in varying formulations, is used to refer to the core texts in which the narrative focus is on the dying and death of a woman (principally ‘Berenice’, ‘Morella’, ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Elonora’) – an attempt to inscribe this moment in a language that cannot express it.

Moreover, the women are written into a textual existence that denies them a proper life and – more importantly – denies them a death; the texts do not simply describe the women, they become representative of, an emblem standing in for, the women, and by doing so place them into M. Valdemar’s position, wherein they may repeatedly utter “I am dead,” though we do not believe them. That these women are displaced by the written word is clear from the titles of Poe’s ‘dead woman’ tales. Poe’s titles both name the subject of the tale and make that tale the subject itself. As Michael J. Williams argues, ‘Ligeia’ “names both the tale and ‘the lady,’ [and] emphasizes that she is his creation in the process of narration and that her existence prior to that given her

by the text is indeterminable” (Williams 91). Thus, ‘Berenice’, ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Morella’ all announce that what follows will be about the women Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella while simultaneously declaring that what follows is Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella; as a result the women are doubled and displaced by the tales. In each instance, the narrator unsuccessfully attempts to contain the female within the boundaries of the text and thereby wholly replicates her within the realm of language, specifically writing. Before the body of the woman is encountered, the reader encounters the woman-as-text.

Additionally, and perhaps also conversely, Poe’s choice of names emphasises the position of the women in the domain of the signifier, where sound alone takes precedence over a stable or identifiable signified. Separating the sound from its significance, in order to retain simply its phonic effects, Poe bestows on the women in his literature names such as Ligeia, Ulalume and Eulalie – names Daniel Hoffman terms “the most euphonious and original cognomens” (Hoffman 231). Their importance lies foremost in the effect the utterance has on the male auditor through the combination of the names’ sonorous syllables, rather than any culturally accrued meaning. Such an act emphasises the primacy of the moment of articulation. Just as the optimum time to write about a woman is at the threshold between life and death, so is the signifier 46

of each female most powerfully felt at the moment of its utterance, at the point during which sound has dominance over language, where it hovers between indeterminate articulation and assuming a final significance. As will be seen, this trait is also commonly ascribed to the voice of the women themselves, as they appear to negate the signified attached to the signifying word – a quality originating most obviously in the perception of the male writers who struggle to comprehend the speaking female subject. It is another failure of the male author to comprehend the thinking or speaking female.

The text of ‘Ligeia’ is foremost an act of over-determining. Ligeia is a figure who exceeds language, she overflows, her being cannot be contained within it as it constantly eludes the grasp of the narrator who would articulate her. Consequently, Ligeia as a physical presence is rendered somewhat ethereal, though not, as Jack L. and June H. Davis would have it, because she is a nonexistent, opium-induced hallucination (Davis and Davis), but because she is forced to exist in a semantic limbo, as a purely superlative creature, a composite of euphuistic comparisons. Composed of a wealth of similes and metaphors, and compared with objects that (rather counteractingly) pale in comparison with the figure of Ligeia, she appears before readers, or more accurately fails to appear, as an impossible person, a person whose

body is figuratively buried beneath the referents the narrator is forced to amass in his attempt to describe her. At the beginning of the narrative, the narrator admits he cannot recall the circumstances surrounding his first memories of Ligeia, and fails satisfactorily to express in words the exquisite beauty of Ligeia.

This inability to describe Ligeia results in her deferral, as she is lost behind objects with which she is somehow comparable but which are never quite her. Her skin “rival[s] the purest ivory”; her hair is described with recourse to stock-phrases from antiquity, as it “set[s] forth the full force of the Homeric epithet ‘hyacinthine!’”; her chin has the “contour which the God Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes” (Poe, 1984b 263264). She is an uncanny figure, like but unlike, and more frequently like but more than.

The deferral of her person is matched by the narrator’s professed inability to reach the final, “full knowledge” of her eyes: “we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember” (264-265). Already deferred, Ligeia is also forced to become a divided subject, scattered throughout metaphors and similes that depend upon other objects, each of which is used in an effort to describe an individual aspect of Ligeia’s person (her forehead, her skin, her smile, or her voice, for example), 47

but which in turn denies her any sort of coherence. This leads Williams to assert that the description “replace[s] the lost context [of Ligeia] with one that is culturally encoded—one in which any ‘original’ is lost beneath layers of cultural accretion, displacement from model to model” (Williams 97). Thus, not only does Ligeia exist as an excess of language, but she does not exist within language at all, whose preloaded connotations obscure the figure of Ligeia; the narrator can take us to “the very verge” of revealing Ligeia, but no further. With a narrator that is concerned with the effort of expressing the character of Ligeia, who cannot readily be expressed through language, the narrative itself then becomes concerned with the attempt at utterance; that is, the narrative of ‘Ligeia’ becomes a depiction of the attempt towards utterance, wherein a successful articulation becomes the single word ‘Ligeia’, as the truest and most appropriate expression of the figure of Ligeia – a feat that Ronald Bieganowski recognises as a text “call[ing] attention to itself as narration, as an action going on in the present time of its being read”, though the restoration of Ligeia is achieved “only for a moment” (Bieganowski 181, 179).

To restore her permanently, would be to fix her again in death, in the final signified of a dead text.

And if the opening of the narrative demonstrates the inability of the narrator to place within the realm

of language the figure of Ligeia, in the last words (indeed, in the last word) of the tale there is a moment of recognition that finally allows the narrator to name Ligeia, to place her in the present. His first efforts to articulate her name place her irrecoverably in the past and enshrine her in death: “it is by that sweet word alone—

by Ligeia—that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more” (Poe, 1984b 262). This act of recalling and remembrance clearly associates the name with the dead: the name brings to mind “her who is no more.” Indeed, for Poe, the name is almost indissolubly bound up with the body, travelling as it so often does to the grave with the dead subject.

In ‘Morella’, the narrator describes how “Morella’s name died with her at her death” (238). In ‘The Raven’, the speaker laments the loss of “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—/ Nameless here for evermore” (82). In each instance, by drawing on the name of the women, the speakers conjure up only her dead body, concretising her absence. The final lines of ‘Ligeia’, however, represent what appears to be a successful attempt to reinstate Ligeia in person, in the present.

Apparently possessing the body, or corpse, of Rowena, the resurrected Ligeia rises from the bed and by the familiar look of her black eyes, the narrator is able to exclaim, “‘Here, then, at least […] can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild 48

eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the LADY LIGEIA!’” (277). The narrator builds up gradually in his declaration, constructing the utterance cautiously as he first assures himself of her presence, then characterises the eyes, then names the figure as the “lost love,” then “the lady,” before finally declaring her to be “the LADY LIGEIA!” Though the qualifying “at least” suggests Ligeia is not fully returned, and only in her eyes does she stand before the narrator. The eyes thereby perform as metonyms for the totality of Ligeia, where her bodily return is reduced to the reappearance of one aspect of her body, and significantly that aspect which the narrator has most struggled to define; the certainty of the return of Ligeia’s body is delayed by the knowledge that the eyes he identifies as hers are those same unfathomable eyes that were so difficult to characterise.

For Beverly Voloshin, the “deep truth” of Ligeia’s eyes is “clearly transcendental truth,” obliterative and unobtainable (Voloshin, 1988 24-25); for Ortwin de Graef, the eyes connote a “bewildering and ineffable presence,” a strangeness the narrator “desperately struggles to (re)articulate […] but fails to move beyond ascribing it to the ‘expression’” (de Graef 1100-1101).

The narrator’s admission that “For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique” (Poe, 1984b 264) suggests that the trouble lies in the

absence of comparison, of the inability to draw a simile or metaphor. There is no prior model through whose description Ligeia’s eyes could be depicted, which in turn becomes an admission of the inefficiency of language itself, as a system reliant on a referent that is always absent, and of a certain necessary abstract quality inhering to the signified, an abstractness whose flexibility to mean more than one thing undermines the specificities of the individual, as it is linked foremost to an ideal referent to which all subsequent referents have recourse but which does not actually exist – it is as intangible as Ligeia is forced to be. The narrator would make Ligeia that ideal to which language is always reaching back, but this ideal cannot be grasped linguistically, troubled as it is by subsequent iterations. Stressing the idea that Ligeia is a figure constructed in language (that Ligeia is, above all, a figure of speech) is the narrator’s effort to speak of “The ‘strangeness’ […] which I found in the eyes” (264). Placed in quotation marks the narrator draws attention not only to his reliance on those objects and concepts of which his readers have prior knowledge – just as her skin rivals “the purest ivory” – but to his reliance on previous texts too. In this instance the quotation refers readers back to an earlier quotation in the narrative, attributed to Francis Bacon, which reads: “‘There is no exquisite beauty […] without some strangeness in the proportion’” (263). The 49

narrator even suggests that, such was their character, Ligeia’s eyes may well have served as the inspiration for Bacon: “It may have been, too, that in these eyes of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Verulam alludes.” (264). Through the female body, language begins to collapse upon itself, as the narrator implies that the “strangeness” of Ligeia’s eyes recalls the strangeness inherent in the Baconian conception of beauty, which itself recalls the strangeness of Ligeia’s eyes.

Moreover, of her general beauty, the narrator admits “there was much of ‘strangeness’ pervading it, yet I have tried in vain […] to trace home my own perception of ‘the strange’” (263). The narrator admits that there is a strangeness to her beauty that augments it, that differentiates her from others, but it cannot be placed. Ultimately, it may simply be that the strangeness of Ligeia’s features, which are difficult to articulate, originates in this difficulty of articulation; the indefinable strangeness of her features is that they are strangely indefinable – not least because of the wealth of cultural signifiers the narrator uses to describe Ligeia, rendering her invisible behind this linguistic barrier. But, of course, the eyes themselves have “no models”. The strangeness of Ligeia’s eyes is related to their apparent uniqueness, disrupting language by demanding a new kind of articulation, for which the eyes would be the ideal and only possible referent,

a signifier that cannot get away from its signified. The only way to describe Ligeia’s eyes is to describe Ligeia’s eyes, which, because the language of the narrator is one preloaded with an array of cultural connotations, becomes an impossible task, triggering what Williams defines as “a potentially endless series of displacements” (Williams 98): the possibility of originality in form upsets the possibility of meaningful and reliable representation, because representation and language rely on preconceptions that thereby thwart the attempt at describing how remarkable Ligeia is, thereby making her literally un-remarkable, impossible to locate and impossible to say.

Indeed, the struggle to articulate Ligeia’s strangeness becomes yet another sequence in which the problem is traced back to the inadequacy of words. Failing to find the strangeness of the eyes in “the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features”, the narrator says it “must, after all, be referred to the expression.

Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose vast latitude of mere sound, we intrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual.

The expression of the eyes of Ligeia!”

(264). Again, as the original utterance fails to truly express that which he would express, the narrator simply ends up repeating himself: the strangeness “must […] be referred to the expression […]

The expression of the eyes of Ligeia!”

This act, de Graef notes, is committed by 50

the narrator once again when he becomes “incapable of more than a vociferous repetition” of Ligeia’s strange eyes when she re-emerges in Rowena at the tale’s climax (de Graef 1101). There is a double sense in this “expression.” Not only do the eyes themselves have a peculiarity of appearance, but the narrator implies that the only way to define this peculiarity is in the act of expression – the act of speaking – which, by implication, is itself rendered strange. The expression of Ligeia’s inexpressible eyes makes strange the speech act, while Ligeia herself has become increasingly estranged as a consequence of the inevitable inadequacies in the attempt to express her.

In these phrases the narrator also points to the necessity of the articulation of Ligeia, as a woman whose existence is tied up with hyperbolic utterances.

Recognising that “expression” is a “word of no meaning,” the narrator relies simply on a power inherent in language itself, separate from its role as signifier for the signified. The word as pure expression becomes a receptacle in which to place Ligeia, within which she may be contained, as the word is emptied of its meaning to accommodate her. But the removal of the meaning from the word destabilises language, rendering it impotent, such that it loses the power to adequately describe. Without meaning, the word itself becomes something detached, unlimited, depthless even. It is not

surprising, then, that the narrator despairs at fathoming Ligeia’s eyes: they seem to express something “more profound than the well of Democritus” (Poe, 1984b 264), an allusion to an abyss at whose depth Democritus placed truth (Levine 103), thereby ensuring the mystery of Ligeia remains inaccessible. Even if Democritus’ abyss were fathomed, there is still something “more” to Ligeia’s meaningyet-meaningless eyes.

Forcing Ligeia into an emptiedout language, it is indeed as expression, as voice alone, that her presence is made known to the narrator. Yet this peculiarly intangible presence serves also to conflate the representation of the living Ligeia with death, the presence that is only ever perceived as an absence; this, in addition to Bronfen’s observation that “she traces the figure of death […] because her body is treated like an inanimate substance which [the narrator’s] gaze fragments” (Bronfen 331), makes Ligeia doubly death-like, once in body, once more linguistically. Like the attempt to describe the character of Ligeia in a conflation of cultural signs, which results only in her becoming ever more removed, the conflation of language with Ligeia (who is an impossible expression) and of Ligeia with death (which cannot be expressed) displaces representation of each onto the other. Three times the narrator alludes to the effect of Ligeia’s voice. First, he describes how “She came and departed 51

as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder” (Poe, 1984b 263).

The emphasis on the “dear music” of her voice, itself emphasising the slightness of her corporeal presence, points yet again to the absence of signifiers in the language of ‘Ligeia’; like music it is an aural phenomenon that does not refer to any other thing. The second occurrence of her voice draws together the fathomless eyes, the voice and the power of her language – all, of course, conveyed in hyperbolic terms.

Ligeia was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion. And of such passion could I form no estimate, save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so delighted and appalled me—by the almost magical melody, modulation, distinctness and placidity of her very low voice—and by the fierce energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner of utterance) of the wild words which she habitually uttered. (265-266)

her struggles with death, as she recites a poem: Her voice grew more gentle—grew more low—yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened, entranced, to a melody more than mortal—to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known. (267) As Ligeia moves closer towards that which she has always represented – death – comparative is loaded onto superlative, and her gentle and low voice becomes even “more gentle […] more low.” Again, language, upon which Ligeia’s existence hangs and which serves only to express Ligeia, whose “wild meaning” is not to be “dwel[t] upon,” is impressive in its “melody,” as a vehicle for voice. Above all, it is the sound of Ligeia’s voice that makes it so distinctive, rather than any meaning its words might convey. So musical and melodious is her voice represented to be, and such is the narrator’s inability to grasp her meaning, that it appears absent of the usual quality of human language, as a vehicle for signification. Moreover, it is a denial by the narrator of Ligeia as a meaning thing; instead, she is abstract voice, whose sound alone is important.

Where language, as signifier, serves as an immaterial repetition of a thing, positing that thing in its absence, Ligeia as a figure in language alone becomes, like

With a “fierce energy” in her “wild words” exercising such power over the narrator, Ligeia seems to be capable of the kind of articulation that the narrator longs for and struggles with throughout ‘Ligeia’. Finally, her voice is described in 52

Echo, the articulation of an absence; and the narrator, who attempts to chase her origins, is forced to return only to himself and his first utterance of ‘Ligeia’: “it is by that sweet word alone—by Ligeia— that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more.” Such vocal qualities also point to the reason why the narrator admits that he cannot recall anything of Ligeia’s origins, despite that “Of her family—I have surely heard her speak” (262). With its failure to convey meaning, the narrator is certain she has spoken but this is all he can be certain of.

He has heard her speak, but in that speech he cannot recollect significance. Indeed, as he “would not wish to dwell upon” Ligeia’s meaning, he actively shuns its significance.

Doubling the ethereality of language in ‘Ligeia’ is the symbolism of the shadow, another sign of Ligeia’s parallels with death. Ligeia “came and departed as a shadow” in the narrator’s study. The death with which she wrestles is “the Shadow,” in a phrasing that hints towards Ligeia’s effort to resist her transformation into a purely spiritual, because lingual, being: it is the shadow tormenting and replacing Ligeia with the idea of Ligeia. Through this conflation, Ligeia is at once like death and death itself – as becomes clearer towards the end of the narrative. Once Ligeia has died, the narrator too is forced into an existence signifying only death. For where

his language was a means of expressing Ligeia, and Ligeia was an expression of language, her death is also a death in and of language, as she is now absent from the language that accommodated only her. The narrator subsequently performs a series of acts whereby he appears to be enshrining himself with death. As David Ketterer notes, Rowena’s “bridal chamber resembles a death chamber” (Ketterer 191); whilst Williams also identifies how it is “structurally parallel” to Ligeia and so associated “with [her] lost presence” (Williams 100). Thus, Rowena’s deterioration within this chamber is less a violation of the wedding chamber, than it is her adaptation to the room’s signified function, a charnel house. When the shadow-image reappears to torment the narrator’s second wife, the presence it signifies cannot be distinguished between Ligeia and death: “I had felt that some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my person […] a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect – such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade” (Poe, 1984b 273). Death itself is perhaps the ultimate shade, while Ligeia is shade-like not only in her death but her dissolution into language. It may only be linguistically that she is linked with death, but both Ligeia and death only exist on a linguistic level.

It is the actions of this “shade,” or so the narrator implies, that hasten the death of Rowena, bringing about the 53

apparent return of Ligeia in an ultra-gothic sequence as hyperbolic as anything uttered about Ligeia. Rowena appears, finally, to have died, when The thing that was enshrouded advanced bodily and palpably into the middle of the apartment […] she let fall from her head the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth […] huge masses of long and dishevelled hair, it was blacker than the wings of the midnight!

And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me.

“Here then, at least,” I shrieked aloud, “can I never – can I never be mistaken – these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the LADY LIGEIA!” (277) In these final moments Ligeia returns in Rowena as a symbol of the death of Rowena; death has come to Rowena, and so Ligeia, as a shadow and an expression of death, is glimpsed once more. Moreover, this final moment allows the narrator to utter that which he has been attempting to utter since the narrative began. At the beginning of the narrative he says that only by “that sweet word […] Ligeia” can he bring to mind the figure of Ligeia. In a moment of direct speech, then, it is a simple articulation of the subject the narrator has always denied because Ligeia has always been “like,” or “more than,” something else. Her name is the final word of the narrative, and the

only word that has any real meaning and power, and in this final utterance she is placed “‘Here,’” as a presence. Like the eyes that signify themselves, and like Morella before her, who is reborn in her daughter when her husband impulsively names the daughter “Morella” during her baptism, the eventual articulation of the name is a restoration of identity, indeed even of the physical body itself. If in death a name follows its body to the grave, by placing it “‘Here’” the body and name must, conversely, have been restored. The resurrection “is a linguistic event […] writing or telling or reading brings Ligeia to life again” (Bieganowski 182); she is briefly spoken back into the narrative, but the moment of “‘Here’” is fleeting and, like her Democritean eyes, endlessly recedes, ungraspable.

The ending that affirms Ligeia’s presence is a deferral of another ending, and a substitution for that other ending.

Not only does the final utterance of “the LADY LIGEIA” delay knowledge of the death of Rowena, but it brings the dead back into the narrative: the ending of ‘Ligeia’ is the re-beginning of Ligeia. It is a sign of the inability of language to bring something to an end. As Poe repeatedly demonstrates in his fiction, the only sure way to conclude a narrative is through a lapse into silence. Similarly, the veil that drops away to reveal the body of Rowena/ Ligeia also enacts a deferral, as the final objects seen by the narrator, “the full, and 54

the black, and the wild eyes,” are those same eyes whose more-than-Democritean depths cannot be fathomed and whose truth cannot be reached. They are the bodily objects of Ligeia that, more than anything, have been a source of anxiety for the narrator, and it is only when they reappear before him that he can be sure the body in the room is that of Ligeia rather than Rowena: once more confronted with the eyes that defy representation, the narrator knows that the body before him, because he cannot ever truly know this body, is that of Ligeia.

Finally, it is worth turning to the speech act itself in ‘Ligeia’. As discussed above, it occurs most dramatically in the final paragraph of the text, when the narrator “shriek[s] aloud” at the apparent return of Ligeia. Ligeia’s only speech act is slightly more troubling, as perhaps is only appropriate for a figure inextricably bound up with the language by which she is constituted (and later reconstituted), and where language is understood as a repetition of a thing that precedes it and that it signifies. Ligeia’s only speech is a repetition of a remark made earlier by the narrator, which repeats the tale’s epigraph.

Ligeia’s speech follows the recitation of her poem (a repetition of Poe’s own poem, ‘The Conqueror Worm’, published in 1843 and edited into the 1845 edition of ‘Ligeia’) by the narrator: “O God!” half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms

aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines—“O God! O Divine Father!—shall these things be undeviatingly so?—shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who— who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” (269) Here, more than anywhere else in the narrative, is the force of the act of repetition, of bringing something back, most profound. The sequence begins with a poem that Ligeia bids the narrator “repeat” (268), causing a repetition of Poe’s poem, causing a repetition of the narrator’s repetition of the epigraph’s repetition of a phrase allegedly from Glanvill (though it appears to originate with Poe, see: Voloshin 24, 28; Hoffman 247), the final sentence of which is spoken twice by Ligeia. Yet this gives a deceptive view of the order in which the utterances originated. In correct chronological sequence, the order is as follows: Ligeia’s composition and the narrator’s recitation of ‘The Conqueror Worm’; Ligeia’s utterance of a phrase that does not belong to Glanvill; the narrator’s repetition of this phrase when he narrates the tale; and the placement of the utterance as an epigraph to ‘Ligeia’ and its attribution to Glanvill.

The phrase originates with Ligeia before it is repeated through the act of narration; 55

it is yet another failure on the narrator’s behalf to give Ligeia any agency of her own. By inducing readers to believe it originates with Glanvill, the narrator denies Ligeia her only true creative speech act before she has even said it. Not only, then, is Ligeia’s body dissected and devoured by the narrator, but her power as a thinking and speaking subject is also destroyed by a narrator whose sequencing of events forces Ligeia simply to echo a (narratively, though not temporally) previous statement; she is denied the creative impulse that is otherwise evidenced by her creation of the poem.

To conclude, I return briefly to Poe’s infamous aesthetic statement. If “the death of a beautiful woman” is “the most poetical topic,” then there is in this the implication that the creation of text negates the female subject; to write a great piece of literature, one must first find a female to kill. This idea is put forward most boldly in ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1845), a text in which the female subject sitting for a painting dies during the process, but which results in an uncannily life-like replication of her body on the canvas: “the painter […] crying with a loud voice ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved: – She was dead” (Poe, 1984b 484). Indeed, this may be Poe’s only story in which the woman is successfully transferred to the blank page.

If the text negates the body, then it is little wonder that in the act of composition,

the titular women are effectively killed off; but, in the inability to satisfactorily compose them, they are thrown back and forth between literal corpus and textual corpus, between signified and signifier.

Only the sitter of ‘The Oval Portrait’ dies because of the success of the work of art.

As ideal objects for textual representation, the female body represents the cominginto-being of a piece of writing: to place Ligeia finally “‘Here’” before us would be to complete the text, to reclaim the dead body for art. Instead, however, the constant fluctuation between states repeatedly enacts that transitional moment Poe advocates in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’, the moment where what is living becomes dead.

And, of course, Ligeia is never actually ‘here’. She is “‘Here’” for the narrator, which is ‘there’ for the reader, and what is “there” are those depthless eyes, things without end. Ultimately, the ideal disturbs articulation at the same moment articulation disturbs the ideal; and located within this sequence are the disturbing bodies of Poe’s dead women, engendering and being engendered by the text. They are never quite complete, always (re)emerging, defeating the final signified of a fixed signifying system with a femininity which will not be contained.

They prevent both the death of the text, by denying a final signified that would posit an end to the text, and their own death: their bodily return to the narrative ensures 56

the text remains a place of indeterminate meaning and so also a place encouraging endless re-readings.

Hoffman, Daniel. Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe. London: Robson Books, 1973. Print.

Ketterer, David. The Rationale of Deception in Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979.

Print.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. ‘Textual Analysis: Poe’s ‘Valdemar’’. Trans. Geoff Bennington.

Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988. 172195. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Essays and Reviews. Ed. G. R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984a. Print.

---. Poetry and Tales. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn.

New York. Library of America, 1984b. Print.

Bieganowski, Ronald. ‘The Self-Consuming Narrator in Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and ‘Usher’’.

American Literature. 60.2 (1988) 175-187.

JSTOR. Web. 14 November 2013.

---. The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Stuart Levine and Susan Levine. Champaign, IL: Illinois UP, 1976. Print.

Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic.

Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996. Print.

Voloshin, Beverly. ‘Transcendence Downward: An Essay on ‘Usher’ and ‘Ligeia’’. Modern Language Studies. 18.3 (1988) 18-29. JSTOR. Web. 20 November 2013.

Brown, Arthur A. ‘Literature and the Impossibility of Death: Poe’s ‘Berenice’.’

Nineteenth-Century Literature. 50.4 (1996) 448-463. JSTOR. Web. 14 November 2013.

Williams, Michael J. A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1988. Print.

Davis, Jack L. and June H. Davis. ‘Poe’s Ethereal Ligeia’. The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.

24.4 (1970): 170-176. JSTOR. Web. 18 November 2013.

Biographical Note Jimmy Packham is a research student at the University of Bristol. His thesis studies the problems of communication and the inadequacies of language in the work of American Romanticism, with particular focus on Poe and Melville, with a chapter focused particularly on

de Graef, Ortwin. ‘The Eye of the Text: Two Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe’. MLN. 104.5 Comparative Literature (1989) 10991123. JSTOR. Web. 20 November 2013.

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the consumption of bodies through tattooing, cannibalism and the act of writing. He also retains a strong interest in literary depictions of the sea and polar landscapes. He has recently had two entries (‘Franz Kafka’ and ‘Voodoo’) published in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gothic.

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Nicholas Emmanuele

Memories of a Dragon: Le Guinian Flights from Archetypal Patterns Venturing into Earthsea: An Introduction In Ursula K. Le Guin’s second Earthsea trilogy, dragons herald the subversion and transformation of misogynistic worldviews and male archetypal patterns initially propagated and institutionalized in her first three books of Earthsea. This change challenges and legitimatizes the experience of female characters, while opening up new possibilities for all characters, relationships and situations. By tracing the emergence of unique fantasy elements in the second trilogy out of the traditional, male-dominated archetypes that inspired the first, I will explore how the inspiration and effect of female bodily transformations into dragons – coupled with the concept of “becoming” as explored by Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari – present possibilities for new character and story representations within the fantasy genre.

The first Earthsea trilogy – A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970) and The Farthest Shore (1972) – presents archetypal patterns and tropes familiar to readers of fantasy literature. Utilizing expectations of the genre, Le Guin follows standard storytelling archetypes, which infused Earthsea in – and bound it to – standard American gender stereotypes. Because they function to codify certain symbols, archetypal patterns have long been viewed, following Carl G. Jung’s The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, as universal, “primordial types […] that have existed since the remotest times” (5). Some writers,

59

including Le Guin herself, point out the danger inherent in the attempt to universalize human experience, which is never quite as representative as archetypes suggest. In her introduction to Tales from Earthsea, Le Guin admits that “[a]rchetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think” (xv). Le Guin, in her original construction of Earthsea, was not immune to the assumptions and allure of traditional archetypes, and her first trilogy is replete with them: the epic, the map, Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, the animal donor, the Jungian shadow, the seductress and witch, the female sexual awakening narrative, the wicked stepmother, the magical object of power, and the wise old man all ground the first three novels in the masculine fantasy genre tradition.

Returning to Earthsea nearly two decades after the publication of The Farthest Shore, Le Guin ultimately perceived the restrictions of gender and genre with which she originally, and subconsciously, engaged. Beginning with Tehanu (1990), Le Guin later added Tales from Earthsea (2001) and The Other Wind (2001) to the Earthsea corpus. In her revelatory ‘Earthsea Revisioned’, Le Guin unmasks the fantasy genre’s masculine expectations and limitations, while exploring the in(ter)dependence of

women and the mysterious, emancipatory nature of her dragons in unseating male hegemony. Thus, Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘becomings’ present a new entrance to Earthsea, as “[o]nly the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier” (3). Thus, our exploration here is not meant to ‘signify’ an actual human turning into an actual dragon but instead to discover the liberating possibilities of such a continuous becoming. Through the physical metamorphoses of Irian and Tehanu in the second trilogy, the unbalancing of archetypes and expectations continually reproduced throughout the first trilogy allows for a transformative process of possibility where characters will not have to choose to be one thing or another – wild or wise, stereotypically male or female – but will be able to strike out on a line of flight.

On the Hero’s Quest: Fantasy Archetypes in the First Earthsea Trilogy Epic and history have traditionally been told through the male gaze, so Le Guin’s choice of following epic conventions incites the use of other archetypes in the first three novels. As enumerated by John R. Pfeiffer in ‘“But Dragons Have Keen Ears”: On Hearing ‘Earthsea’ with Recollections of Beowulf’ and explored

by Mike Cadden in Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and 60

Adults, Earthsea is situated within an epic world which opens with a song and is narrated by a storyteller relating an ‘inworld’ experience to his readers. Within the archetypal pattern of the epic, Le Guin utilizes the journey motif and the fantasy world’s map to assist in the creation of a ‘secondary world’, where the hero’s inner journey mirrors his outward quest.

Utilization of these simultaneous journeys allows for the development of the Jungian shadow and Campbellian hero’s journey archetypes. Joseph Campbell’s work in detailing the monomyth is a common archetype in fantasy literature, and Le Guin twice employs the hero’s journey in the first trilogy – once with Ged, and again with Lebannen.

Amidst their initiation into the world of men, Ged and Lebannen re-inscribe the dominating masculine hegemony within and onto the fantasy genre. Ged’s journey across Earthsea – which involves confronting his own (Jungian) shadow – has often been read through a psychoanalytic lens, as exemplified in Margaret Esmonde’s ‘The Master Pattern: The Psychological Journey in the Earthsea Trilogy’. Ged is guided by Archmage Nemmerle, Archmage Gensher, and his own Master Ogion in The Wizard of Earthsea, but later serves as the archetypal wise old man for Lebannen’s quest in The Farthest Shore. Additionally, Ged is served by his traditional animal familiar – a permutation of Vladimir

Propp’s animal donor of folktale – in the first novel; however, Lebannen will have only himself, his own shadow of fear, and Ged in his journey to the dry land of death to face the evil wizard Cob, who has torn a breach between the realms of life and death. Thus, a second journey is completed, with Lebannen – as John H. Crow and Richard D. Erlich attest in ‘Words of Binding: Patterns of Integration in the Earthsea Trilogy’ – as “both the culmination and the continuation of Ged’s function as culture-bearer” (216).

At the completion of the third novel, two men have come of age, rooted in the masculinist discourse of Earthsea through archetypal patterns, cyclically reinstating male dominance throughout the text and within Earthsea itself.

Le Guin’s application of standard fantasy archetypal patterns strengthens men, but limits women to narratives involving the seductress, wicked stepmother, and sexual awakening tropes. If men work to establish order and equilibrium in Earthsea, the female sex – whose magic is “weak” and “wicked” – brings temptation and danger. First, at the Court of the Terrenon in A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged comes face-to-face with Serret, the dangerous, archetypal wicked temptress who threatens male rule. Serret tempts Ged with power, luring him to make “a Faustian alliance with the Terrenon Stone” (Esmonde 19). The Old Powers of the Earth that 61

saves himself in A Wizard of Earthsea, Tenar could be perceived only as being saved by a man (57): it is Ged who holds agency, integrates with the shadow that is Atuan/Tenar, and continues the hero’s journey begun earlier. By concentrating the narration on Tenar, Le Guin moves Tenar beyond a personified anima; but by doing so, Le Guin only locates the young priestess in an archetypal story of female maturation that is just as limiting to girls as the male hero’s journey is to boys.

Together, Ged and Tenar escape the Place of the Tombs of Atuan and bring the legendary Ring of Erreth-Akbe – with its Rune of Peace – to the great city of Havnor. This archetypal object of power is common in fantasy, and serves as the object that the hero quests after and which provides the story with closure when the object is finally attained. We first see Ged receive a mysterious ring when chasing the shadow, and the Priestesses Thar and Kossil later provide a lengthy and legitimatizing history of the Ring to Tenar.

Both Ged and Tenar must trust one another and work together to find the second half of the Ring, unite it, and escape the Old Powers of the Earth and the crumbling Tombs. The peace that the Ring of Erreth-Akbe brings to the community, however, is masculine peace of mind that the status quo remains unquestioned. Not only is this situation detrimental to the women of Earthsea and female readers, but it inhibits the men as well. Standard

are found within the magical object will eventually be connected with women’s power in the second trilogy. In the first trilogy, however, the Old Powers are only represented in The Tombs of Atuan where the patterns of the wicked stepmother and female sexual awakening narrative work within a masculine world order. With Kossil, High Priestess of the Godking – representative of Tenar’s wicked stepmother – the young female protagonist herself can be read as a Snow White character type in connection with apples, Eve, Eden, Ariadne, and the stepmother figure, as explicated by Esmonde (21-23).

Sneja Gunew, in ‘Mythic Reversals: The Evolution of the Shadow Motif’, posits that, “[i]n the macrocosmic sense, Atuan is, indeed, the shadow of Earthsea” (189), the world’s Jungian “anima,” which Ged seeks to absorb as he did his own shadow (195). Rather than continue the second novel with a focalization on Ged, Le Guin shifts her storytelling to Tenar, suggesting perhaps a feminine comingof-age story, but providing instead a traditional feminine sexual awakening, where a girl undergoes menstruation.

This forced, internal shift into female adulthood differs from the outward male hero quest where a man must choose to prove himself. Further, J’annine Jobling avers in Fantastic Spiritualities: Monsters, Heroes, and the Contemporary Religious Imagination that while Ged 62

male fantasy archetypes refuse character choices beyond the established tropes and gendered expectations, and so new ways out – Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘lines of flight’ – are necessary to transform the series.

were taught to own and dominate and women were taught to collude with them: the order of oppression. It is the wildness of the spirit and of the earth, uprising against misrule. And it rejects gender” (‘Earthsea Revisioned’ 178). My reading of dragons in the trilogy finds less of a ‘rejection’ of gender than a deconstruction of the human male hegemony in service of individuals trapped in institutionalized roles. Beyond the Yevaud and Orm Embar of the first trilogy, Le Guin no longer seems interested in classical fantasy serpents. In her call for the uses of enchantment and fantasy in literature, she utilizes the mythical creatures in ‘Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?’ to champion imagination, as adults “are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom” (40). These dragons can be “a vital potentiality, [as they become] a guide into mystery. Fullness is a fine thing, but emptiness is the secret of it […]. The dragons of Earthsea remain mysterious to me” (‘Revisioned’ 177). This openness to possibility is more a concept than a creature. Engaging with freedom, the Le Guinian dragon is “a wild spirit, dangerous, winged, which escapes and destroys the artificial order of oppression” (180). These revisioned dragons do more than hoard treasure and terrorize humans, yet Le Guin is vague in regards to what they are or can become. Instead of ruminating on dragons, however, she closes ‘Earthsea Revisioned’ with “[t]

Among Those Both Wild and Wise: Memories of a Dragon The body of masculine hegemony which maintains the “Equilibrium” in Earthsea is shaken by the actions, voices, and corporeal transformations of women and dragons in the second trilogy. Le Guin illustrates the ‘molecular multiplicities’ of life and avenues of power that women can engage with beginning with the publication of Tehanu. Moving beyond the male point of view of the first trilogy, this novel introduces the titular character – a girl ravaged and ruined by men. Thus, Le Guin’s transformation of Earthsea indicates both a desire to counteract the effects of male domination and emphasize the power of women to create lines of flight away from the silence, signification, and objectification of the male gaze. This transformation involves the connection made between dragons and women, especially Irian in Tales from Earthsea and Tehanu in both her eponymous novel and The Other Wind. Women reclaim their agency through their associations with dragons.

Le Guin insists that a “dragon is a subversion, revolution, change – a going beyond the old order in which men 63

he child who is our care […] [who] leads us to the dragon” (180), as manifested in Irian and Tehanu. The animal familiars and donors of the first trilogy are replaced

by Deleuzo-Guattarian becomingdragon processes that allow for further potentialities and freedoms, as it is now people who will serve as guides for one another and their global community.

The newly-expanded history of the dragons of Earthsea in the second trilogy provides some key entry-points into a becoming-dragon project. In The Other Wind, Princess Seserakh fears that she is dangerously walking on the ‘Dragon’s Way’, and Azver the Patterner concurs, noting that “all taboos may well be shaken or broken” (185) – and not only taboos, but archetypes and other fixed identities. On this ‘dangerous’ path, however, Le Guin guides her characters into a liberating subjectivity of becoming.

Seserakh connects the Kargish people – truly represented only by women in the novels – to the dragons, since they all are reborn, unlike the Hardic people of the Archipelago. The princess then shares the story of the ‘Vedurnan’, revealing that humans and dragons were once one people who split – the humans were those who chose to learn magic, never die (as opposed to being reborn), and live in the Archipelago, while the dragons enjoyed complete freedom and wildness on “the other wind.” The Woman of Kemay on Gont – who Ogion once saw as “a blaze of

glory and fire, and a glitter of gold scales and talons, and the great eyes of a dragon” (Tehanu 13) – reported that the two races had to make a “choice, a separation” (The Other Wind 106). The dragon Kalessin decrees that Tehanu will be the last to make that choice, as “[a]fter her there will be no choosing” (129). The world of Earthsea is divided in two, split between two opposing binary constructs that both humans and dragons must navigate.

Whereas the reality of the Vedurnan precipitates this dichotomous system from which a becomingdragon must develop and then escape, the necessity of choosing begins to approximate Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘molar’ systems, where rigid expectations and institutions maintain power and control.

The newly-revealed shared history of humans and dragons will instead establish a change of ‘flows’ within Earthsea, introducing movement against institutionalized or archetypal patterns.

This divide is not a gender divide, but one of will and desire, choosing rebirth or eternal life. The Other Wind discloses that the dry land is the Western, Archipelagan attempt at eternal life – and it is miserable and barren. Rebirth is the more preferred approach as the characters tear down the wall of the dry land so that they may enter into a cycle with the Old Powers and nature. Le Guin suggests a freedom in rebirth, whereas the dry land prevents the dead from truly dying; in seeking 64

knowledge, the Archipelagans have denied freedom and wildness. “Nothing can be without becoming”, Tenar says (Tehanu 12). This becoming turns into a becoming-dragon – a return and an escape – throughout Le Guin’s second trilogy. Here, the ‘wild’ dragon suggests a subversion of hierarchy and dominance beyond patriarchy, as proffered by Kalessin. However, through the actions of the other characters in the second trilogy, being ‘wise’ allows for alliances and connections, a transformative understanding of the world and the generation of communities that inspire becomings. It is not fully the physical dragon that one must become, but the being both wild and wise.

A brief consideration of other interpretations of Le Guinian dragons illuminates the process of becomingdragon that Le Guin eventually embarks upon. Crow and Erlich, speaking only of the early dragons of the first trilogy, liken them to Jungian archetypes as “an ‘irreducible symbol’ of the spirit” that is “not bounded by the limits of man’s life,” wielding “all the old powers of the unconscious” (207). The unboundedness of the dragon is an aspect that Le Guin appropriates to her mythical creatures, but the rootedness in the collective unconscious is where the dragons of the second trilogy divert from Crow and Erlich’s analysis. Dragons as the spirit of the collective (male) unconscious too

heavily grounds a becoming-dragon into rigid, ‘molar’ blocks rather than opening into potentialities and becomings. Instead, Jobling more aptly considers Le Guin’s new, evolving concept of the dragon. She cites Tehanu’s dragon-like appearance, which is linked with fire from the start, beginning with how Handy and the others left her, having “breathed in fire” (Tehanu 80), and being “claw-handed” (109).

Thus, Jobling asserts, [t]he otherness, wildness and potentiality of dragons are inscribed on the body of a woman. Her flights on the ‘Other Winds’ open up gulfs of glimpsed possibilities, of spaces only yet imagined but not actualized.

The symbolism of dragons resists closure, and it is precisely this wild interruption of possibility into the surfaces of patriarchy that is Tehanu’s gift. She, and her dragon-sister Irian: the messengers, the bringers of choice.

(102) This consideration suggests the beginnings of a Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming-dragon. However, after an exploration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming’, we will find that the ‘symbolism of dragons’ as beings separate from humans actually encourages ‘closures’ in a binary system of wild versus wise, rather than precipitating an emancipatory project.

Such ‘wild interruptions’ 65

revealing ‘glimpsed possibilities’ turns our attention to Deleuze and Guattari who, in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, discuss the concept of becoming-animal to “find a way out, to trace a line of escape” (34) from Oedipal triangulations. Just as Le Guin utilizes animals – dragons – to transform both women and archetypal male patterns in fantasy, Deleuze and Guattari admit that, in Kafka’s works, the animals, as they are or become in the stories, are caught in this alternative: either they are beaten down, caught in an impasse, and the story ends; or, on the contrary, they open up and multiply, digging new ways out all over the place but giving way to ‘molecular multiplicities’ and to machinic assemblages that are no longer animal and can only be given proper treatment in the novels. (37-38)

and Irian’s ability literally to shift into dragons. In Earthsea, the poles of ‘wild’ and ‘wise’, dragon and human, begin to become noticeable as the sequence progresses. It is between these poles that a becoming-dragon provides potentialities of subverting masculinist archetypal patterns – and even the possibilities of finding limitless new stories, rather than merely supplanting ‘masculine’ patterns with ‘feminine’ ones. By emphasizing ‘becomings’ rather than ‘molar’ essences, Deleuze and Guattari provide an ideal grounding for a fantasy narrative more transformative and liberating: here, where desiring machines and virtualities provide the kind of freedom that is too often lacking in the traditionally maledominated fantasy world of archetypes, Le Guin seems to have found the fluid territory for her revisioned Earthsea.

Although Deleuze and Guattari do not address dragons or other beings that are staples in fantasy literature, A Thousand Plateaus contains three segments on “memories of a sorcerer”, where the theorists posit that “becomingwoman, more than any other becomings, possesses a special introductory power” (248), so that “a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities” (249). Becoming-woman and becoming-animal – even becomingchild – are all options that Deleuze and Guattari present as means of achieving a liberated subjectivity, and these

Darko Suvin, in ‘On U. K. Le Guin’s ‘Second Earthsea Trilogy’ and Its Cognitions: A Commentary’, reflects on Tehanu’s “escape into dragonhood” (502), and in an interesting comparison with Kafka and virtuality, Suvin suggests that we have “a not-yet named and thus unrecognized genre of estranged fiction, possibly nearer to Kafka but turned into an epic story after Tolkien, for which new parameters are to be found” (502). Perhaps transmuting a short story into the fantasy epic tradition may preserve transformative animal movements beyond Tehanu 66

becomings present an opportunity to enter a multiplicity beyond a molar male hegemony. Le Guin seeks a becomingminoritarian in her second trilogy as she faces patriarchal forces that silence women. However, as women appear trapped in their given situations, Le Guin calls in the mythic, winged serpents to initiate a becoming-dragon, where any model for discovering possibilities between being wild and wise are first explored by the female characters.

Just as the Woman of Kemay and Seserakh remember the human/dragon past in Tehanu and The Other Wind, Deleuze and Guattari reflect on the idea of memory in the penultimate section of Chapter 10 in A Thousand Plateaus: The line-system (or block-system) of becoming is opposed to the pointsystem of memory. Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible: the rhizome, the opposite of arborescence; break away from aborescence. Becoming is an antimemory. […] Memories always have a reterritorialization function […] and the more deterritorialized [a vector of deterritorialization] is, the stronger the contact: it is deterritorialization that makes the aggregate of the molecular components ‘hold together.’ […] Wherever we used the word ‘memories’ in the preceding pages, we were wrong to do so; we meant to say

‘becoming,’ we were saying becoming.

(294, original emphasis) Likewise, Le Guin presents to us a molecular becoming-dragon in her female characters’ memories of dragons. To best understand what an escape from the points of wildness and wisdom in a becoming-dragon is, we must look to the overturnings and transformations – the revisionings – of fantasy archetypes in the second trilogy. We must walk on the Dragons’ Way with Seserakh, Tenar, Tehanu, and the others in community (not solitary freedom), where there may “be no public triumph of good over evil, for in this new world what’s good or bad, important or unimportant, hasn’t been decided yet, if ever” (‘Revisioned’ 170). The corporeal transformations of women into dragons open new lines of flight from a dichotomous ‘wild’ and ‘wise’ formulation into emancipatory possibilities beyond standard masculine archetypal patterns.

Becoming-Dragon: Transformations in the Second Earthsea Trilogy The epic tradition presented in the first Earthsea trilogy becomes novelized and personalized in the second. The storyteller no longer entices the reader with known tales, but instead embarks on a new one, leaving more questions than answers. In her foreword to Tales from Earthsea, Le Guin admits how “[she] didn’t know what 67

would happen next” (xiii), and that she “needed to do some historical research, to spend some time in the Archives of the Archipelago” (xiii). Thus, the epic conventions shift to a novelization of Earthsea as it is history, not legend, that unfolds; as history is arguably a subjective discourse, focalized through the teller, history becomes subject to revision – Le Guin’s project. The becoming-dragon of the series exists in the shift from the first to the second trilogy, and the characters can only enter into their own becomingdragon because the genre has undergone a change. The movements initiated by a becoming-dragon open up the epic to embrace the everyday.

The localized, everyday experiences are a drastic change from the focus on journeying in the first trilogy.

Although Le Guin reintroduces her readers to the historical artefact of the Earthsea map at the start of Tales from Earthsea, travel becomes much less prominent. Tehanu is set mostly in and around Ogion’s cottage on Gont, and The Other Wind is set in the same cottage, the palace at Havnor, and later on Roke.

With two exceptions, the five stories and novellas in The Other Wind do not involve island-hopping. Jobling asserts that “[b] y turning her fictional historiographical eye onto the ‘local’ and domestic level of affairs in Earthsea, Le Guin is indicting patriarchal systems and refusing to accept that only ‘public’ spaces are of importance

and worthy of narrative” (102). Thus, the Deleuzo-Guattarian line-of-flight – the becoming-dragon – is initiated within the local experience on Gont, where the wide world of epic undertakes its own becoming in small communities where people live interconnected lives.

Not only are maps and journeying absent from the stories beginning with Tehanu, but the familiar objects of power and the Art Magic have strikingly vanished. Instead, concurrent with the relocation to the home and an end to questing, we see everyday objects take greater significance. Tantamount, here, is the titular item of the first chapter in The Other Wind: the green pitcher.

Using his magic to mend the mundane piece of broken pottery, this action brings calm to Alder, who acts as a “guide” since “[h]e could rejoin […] without joint or seam or weakness” (13). The magical, omnipotent objects of the first trilogy were not sufficient in addressing Earthsea’s conundrums, so Le Guin returns us to the home and practical objects. The fragments of royal and peasant, Western Archipelagan and Eastern Karg, man and woman, human and dragon, lovers and celibates, young and old, mage and commoner, Roke wizard and Pelnish sorcerer, and the living and the dead are all brought together in Alder’s quest for quiet and peace. The mended pitcher is Le Guin’s metaphor for the entire second Earthsea trilogy – it was not the Rune of 68

Peace and Ring of Erreth-Akbe that made all things whole, but the gathering together of all of Earthsea’s constituents. This mediation is made possible in Tenar and Tehanu’s becoming-dragon, where lines of flight reveal renewed cycles of maturation that differ wildly from the archetypal feminine sexual awakening narratives in the first trilogy. The point-system of the ‘wild’ and ‘wise’ is explored throughout the second trilogy, most forcefully in Tehanu, yet most successfully in Tenar.

Rather than rely on standard masculine fantasy patterns to propel the second trilogy, Le Guin brings together the epic and the mundane to mend the damages and repair the injustice inflicted by the male hegemony.

Utilizing Jung’s initial, dynamic concept of archetypes, Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction can be applied to illuminate Tenar’s development in the second trilogy. In her categorization of the “novel of rebirth and transformation”, Pratt considers female characters over the age of thirty who “have experienced a transformation of the personality, a centering upon personal, rather than patriarchal, space” (135), integrating “her self with herself and not with a society she has found inimical to her desire” (136). While Le Guin warned of fantasy archetypes as a male-generated and male-dominated discourse, Pratt calls upon the more universal aspects of Jung’s assertions. Le Guin’s Earthsea

sequence wonderfully joins with Pratt’s project, transforming the standard fantasy archetypes of women into new possibilities of becoming-dragon.

By embarking on a new, more mature journey in the fourth book of Earthsea, Tenar is placed in a position to lead others in a becoming-dragon where she brings a new family into focus – herself, Ged, and Tehanu: three individuals who have faced the terrors of the world. Through child/dragon Tehanu, they learn to initiate a Deleuzo-Guattarian line of flight from their confinements and limitations imposed by society. As Tenar faces the misogynistic oppression of the wizard Aspin and his humiliating curse, she is reborn into a becoming-dragon mediator through the saving fire of the dragon Kalessin. Alternately in The Other Wind, Tehanu physically transforms into and joins the dragons on the other wind: [Tehanu] reached up her arms. Fire ran along her hands, her arms, into her hair, into her face and body, flamed up into great wings above her head, and lifted her into the air, a creature all fire, blazing, beautiful.

She cried out aloud, a clear, wordless cry. She flew high, headlong, fast, up into the sky where the light was growing and a white wind had erased the unmeaning stars. (204) Similarly, Irian’s transformation is lyrically rendered in Tales from Earthsea: She towered above [the Summoner 69

Thorion] impossibly, fire breaking forth between them, a flare of red flame in the dusk air, a gleam of redgold scales, of vast wings – then that was gone, and there was nothing there but the woman standing on the hill path and the tall man bowing down before her. (245)

only yet imagined but not actualized.

The symbolism of dragons resists closure, and it is precisely this wild interruption of possibility into the surfaces of patriarchy that is Tehanu’s gift. She, and her dragon-sister Irian: the messengers, the bringers of choice.

(102) It does indeed seem that dragons, as we have explored, represent wild freedom.

However, in representing freedom as dragons, they must be contrasted with the ‘wise’ life of the humans, especially male wizards. Thus, in contrast to Jobling’s assertion, perhaps a symbolism based on the singular, wild, unchanging body of a dragon does not ‘resist closure’.

Tehanu chooses to leave her adoptive mother and join the dragons. The division between the two races is maintained at the end of the Earthsea sequence, in an uncanny reminiscence of the Equilibrium maintained in the first trilogy. For all the ‘change’ that Ogion foresees, the Vedurnan remains. Tehanu’s flight results in her turning into a dragon – as trapped as are Kafka’s becomings-animal – not continuing on a line of becoming-dragon.

Perhaps Tehanu had little choice of fully transforming into a dragon given her situation – but as a guide, she has taught Tenar what it means to escape from the institutions of the wild and the wise. To be ‘fully human’ in Earthsea is to be wise only: to be both free and wise, we must become-dragon and never cease in our

These depictions of transformation in elegant, fluid sentences show the possibilities of becoming-dragon, pursuing freedom, seeking wisdom, finding a way to gather people and construct alliances so the future can continue. By the close of the Earthsea series, Tenar is reunited with Ged, Lebannen marries Seserakh, and Alder joins his wife Lily. The world continues, with people supporting one another, projecting their influence onto future generations.

These transformations are the outward show of becoming-dragon, though they are concurrently problematic due to their apparent closure: Tehanu and Irian choose one of two dichotomous poles, blocking themselves in the molar systems. Jobling concludes her discussion on Tehanu’s transformation with the assertion that Tehanu represents radical transcendence. The otherness, wildness and potentiality of dragons are inscribed on the body of a woman. Her flights on the ‘Other Winds’ open up gulfs of glimpsed possibilities, of spaces 70

becomings.

Tenar moves forward into The Other Wind on a line of becoming-dragon where she has discovered her powers to bring people together as a family, in an alliance: “Tenar must play nursemaid, tutor, and companion now to both [Tehanu and Seserakh], two scared girls who didn’t know how to take hold of their power, while she wanted no power on earth except the freedom to go home where she belonged and help Ged with the garden” (73). This role comes to replace the wise old man of fantasy archetypes, where the woman no longer is the seductress or wicked stepmother, but the mediator amongst peoples, the maternal supporter of a larger, interconnected family. While Serret fills the role of the seductress and Kossil plays the stepmother, these negative female characters are wholly absent from the second trilogy. Instead, they have been replaced most notably by Tenar as a ‘good mother’. The witches Ivy and Auntie Moss are both welcoming to Tenar and Tehanu, and Tales from Earthsea is filled with women, like those of the Hand, who are active, protective, and regenerative. As Tenar and others launch into a becoming-dragon, refusing both the wild and the wise, they are able to create experiences other than those prescribed for them by gender or genre.

In Tehanu, Tenar considers that “[i] f it weren’t all these arrangements – one above the other—kings and masters and

mages and owners […] real freedom, would lie in trust, not force” (247).

While initially essentialist, Le Guin’s feminism does provide an opposition to traditional articulations of male power and dominance, and not by placing women in masculine roles. Just as Tenar constructs a new family with Ged and Tehanu, Tenar also brings together the whole of Earthsea with the assistance of Tehanu and Sesarakh. As Auntie Moss insists in Tehanu, “[a] man gives out, dearie. A woman takes in” (122). Here, Tenar has taken in all the disparate pieces to create something new, potentially mending a broken world by finding a line of flight beyond the dichotomous pairings gathered together.

Becoming-dragon disrupts the Equilibrium established in the first trilogy, and women begin to act as the bridges necessary in navigating the space between wild and wise. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write that “[s]orcerers have always held the anomalous position […]. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages” (246, original emphasis). Further, they note that “[a] becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border” (293). While they do not write about sorcerers of fantasy worlds, Deleuze and Guattari insist on molecular multiplicities that cannot stop and become an end-point. Earthsea’s women are 71

greater than either of their dichotomous choices; once on a line of flight, they may act as intermediaries.

Becoming-dragon exponentially transforms people and places when conflicts at borders of identity must be negotiated. As a ‘good mother’, Tenar shows Ged, according to Amy M. Clarke in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Journey to Post-Feminism, “how to live without power – a skill at which, as a woman, she is adept” (117). Further, on the topic of alliances, Clarke notices that “[i]n Tehanu there are dialogues rather than lectures; characters share their understandings without arriving at definitive answers” (117). If conversations occur, an increased number of individuals are given voice and presented with new possibilities. Jobling contests that this dialogue and “partnership model” (61) begins in The Tombs of Atuan where “we see a radical reorientation towards the world […] based on care, community, and networks of relations” (102).

Arguably, Le Guin reveals the effects of this community relationship in the final marriage of Lebannen and Seserakh. As Ged is not present for Lebannen’s crowning, Tenar is not present for Seserakh’s wedding: she has served as a catalyst, helping to create the alliances of the novels, inspiring a becoming-dragon in others as she continues in her own becoming.

The community Tenar assists in creating (and partakes in) is one of individuals who are molecular, not molar – individuals

who are different from one another but connected in that they seek to live beyond hegemonic forces: let “your sons”, Seserakh tells Lebannen, “be dragons and kings of dragons” (Other Wind 174). If their sons are to be(come) dragons, perhaps the seemingly-archetypal marriage has some transformative potential. Yet if Lebannen, Seserakh, and their children hold the potential to become-dragon, we know that Earthsea can never be safe, as Hollindale concludes in ‘The Last Dragon of Earthsea’ (193); all is change, and change is neither safe nor effortless. These dynamic, molecular flows create a global community of individuals on lines of flight, not seeking a shared identity – or even the same path of escape – but bolstering one another’s becomings.

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Works Cited Cadden, Mike. Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults. NY: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Hollindale, Peter. ‘The Last Dragon of Earthsea’. Children’s Literature in Education 34(3), 2003. 183-193. Print.

Jobling, J’annine. Fantastic Spiritualities: Monsters, Heroes, and the Contemporary Religious Imagination. New York: T&T Clark, 2010. Print.

Clarke, Amy M. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Journey to Post-Feminism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010. Print.

Crow, John H., and Richard D. Erlich. ‘Words of Binding: Patterns of Integration in the Earthsea Trilogy’. Ursula K. Le Guin. Eds. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1979. 200-224. Print.

Jung, Carl. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R.F.C. Hull.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990. Print.

Le Guin, Ursula K. ‘Earthsea Revisioned’.

Origins of Story: On Writing for Children. Eds. Harrison, Barbara and Gregory Maguire. New York: McElderry, 1999. 163-180. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari.

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.

---. Farthest Shore, The. New York: Simon Pulse, 2001. Print.

---. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans.

Dana Polan. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota, 2006. Print.

---. Other Wind, The. New York: Ace, 2003.

Print.

Esmonde, Margaret P. “The Master Pattern: The Psychological Journey in the Earthsea Trilogy.” Ursula K. Le Guin. Eds. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1979. 15-35. Print.

---. Tales from Earthsea. New York: Ace, 2003.

Print.

---. Tehanu. New York: Aladdin, 2001. Print.

---. Tombs of Atuan, The. New York: Aladdin, 2001. Print.

Gunew, Sneja. ‘Mythic Reversals: The Evolution of the Shadow Motif’. Ursula K. Le Guin. Eds. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1979.

178-199. Print.

---. Wizard of Earthsea, A. New York: Bantam, 2004. Print.

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Biographical Note Nicholas Emmanuele teaches high school English, Drama, and Popular Literature and Film at McDowell Intermediate High School in Erie, Pennsylvania. While concurrently a graduate student in the Masters of Education in Curriculum and Instruction program through Penn State, he also holds a Masters of Arts in English (Gannon University) and a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education and Special Education (Gannon University). Research interests include fantasy literature for children, secondary formative assessment pedagogy, postmodern literary and identity theories, and adaptation practices of Shakespearean drama.

---. ‘Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?’.

The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 34-40. Print.

Pfeiffer, John R. “‘But Dragons Have Keen Ears”: On Hearing ‘Earthsea’ with Recollections of ‘Beowulf’’. Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space. Ed. Joe DeBolt. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1979. 115-127. Print.

Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1981.

Print.

Suvin, Darko. ‘On U. K. Le Guin’s ‘Second Earthsea Trilogy’ and Its Cognitions: A Commentary’. Extrapolation 47(3), 2006.

488-504. Print

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Zeynep Z. Atayurt

From Puppets to Cyborgs: (Un)Ruly Constructions of the Female Body and Femininity in Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ and Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ In her 1970 book Natural Symbols, the anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that the body is “always treated as an image of society” where “the bodily control is an expression of social control” (71).

Drawing upon Douglas’ insights, it might be argued that, through an imposition of certain regulations of femininity, women’s bodies have often been exposed to control via an expectation to conform to a set of ideals which are publicized as a means by which women may maintain a ‘safe’ and satisfactory position in public and private spheres1. Against this backdrop, the Women’s Liberation Movement sought to emancipate women from various patriarchal tendencies to mould women

into an image befitting the male fantasy and to challenge the barely concealed assumptions that underpinned this outlook – an outlook that tends to reduce women’s bodies into objects of desire and/or fear.

Thus, this essay will principally engage with and challenge the ways in which the female body has been constructed as a fearful object in the male psyche, and therein considered a territory that should be constantly controlled and kept under surveillance – an idea against which the selected short stories offer a fictional satirical challenge.

In her seminal essay ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine – An Imaginary Abjection’, Barbara Creed has discussed 75

the ways in which women’s bodies have been situated within the realms of the “shocking, terrifying, horrific and abject” (44) in classical mythology and Western folklore. In her work, Creed has explored the psychoanalytic mechanisms lurking beneath the patriarchal construction of the female body as a site of horror, a construct that has been interpreted as a way of the female body’s desire to exercise power and control, a hypothetical tendency to compensate for, as Freud amongst others have argued, the lack of the phallus. Creed has concluded that “the feminine is not a monstrous sign per se; rather, it is constructed as such within a patriarchal discourse that reveals a great deal about male desires and fears but tells us nothing about the feminine desire in relation to the horrific” (70). Within the framework of Creed’s argument, this study explores the ways in which Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ and Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ speak back to the patriarchal tendencies that construct women as fearful objects, and exercise control over them by symbolically turning them into automatons – in the case of the selected stories, puppets and cyborgs respectively. Given this, the focus will not solely be limited to the reception of the protagonists’ monstrosities and/ or (un)ruliness but also the mechanisms underlying the protagonists’ delight in performing acts of violence or rebellion.

Examining the ways in which the

protagonist of each story activates and incarnates the diabolical implications written on her body, this study will seek to find a critical dialogue between these texts in relation to the authors’ conflicting and competing literary representations of “the fascination with and fear of female sexuality”1, an idea which ultimately provides a discursive space for a brief examination of the gothic and the fantastic.

The gothic is a wide and intriguing category in the arts that puts emphasis on a stimulating and sometimes playful engagement with fear through an array of images that are conducive to the creation of horror. While the gothic narratives present primordial and familiar fears in an unfamiliar context (and thus engage with the uncanny), fantastic narratives tend to exploit, as in Todorov’s words, the “boundaries between real and imaginary” (24-25), and are caught between “the marvellous and the uncanny” (44). That is to say, fantastic texts create in the reader a sense of “hesitation” and “uncertainty” by oscillating between the uncanny and the supernatural. In his lengthy discussion of the fantastic, Todorov has pointed out various subcategories or sub-genres of the fantastic: uncanny, fantastic-uncanny, fantasticmarvellous, marvellous. Christine BrookeRose, in her essay ‘Historical Genres/ Theoretical Genres: A Discussion of Todorov on the Fantastic’, has explained 76

these distinctions in the following terms: If the supernatural eventually receives a natural explanation, we are in the Fantastic-Uncanny; if the events are not supernatural but strange, horrific, incredible, we are in the Uncanny (with the accent on the reader’s fear, not on his hesitation). On the other side of the line, if the supernatural has to be eventually accepted as supernatural, we are in the Fantastic-Marvellous; if it is accepted as supernatural at once, we are in the Marvellous (with the accent on wonder). Presumably, then, on the left of the line, in the Fantastic-Uncanny, not only is the reader’s hesitation resolved but his fear is purged; whereas on the right of the line, in the Fantastic-Marvellous, this fear is turned to wonder. (152)

in the fantastic, to what extent then is the fantastic different from the gothic?

Perhaps it would not be wrong to state that these two genres are different in terms of their engagement with and representations of fear – the gothic has often been studied within the frame of ghost narratives and the uncanny, whilst the fantastic shows affinities mostly with the marvellous, and arguably is the “[mutation] of the earlier ghost narratives into the newer narrative modes of cyberpunk” (Armitt 189). However, despite their differences some points of intersection can be found between them: when viewed from the perspective of the manipulation of the fear factor, both genres share common ground, for they both embody the Freudian uncanny, a psychological attribute which finds a satirical resonance in the selected short stories which both depict and destroy the content of the uncanny, and in particular the archaic fears ascribed to female sexuality. As Mary Russo has argued, the female body has already been positioned in terms of “otherness”4, and placed in a certain relationship to abnormality and deviance, and the selected stories depict the ways in which the sense of displacement ascribed to women’s bodies are amplified by patriarchal tendencies.

Published in 1974, Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ is one of a group of stories that Carter wrote while travelling in Japan in the

Drawing on Brooke-Rose’s critical articulation of Todorov’s theorization of the fantastic, it might be inferred that the fantastic operates across a spectrum, oscillating between the uncanny and the marvellous, yet as Brooke-Rose has suggested these categories tend to restrict other interpretations, since in the case of some texts3 drawing the line between the uncanny and fantastic-uncanny could prove to be an arduous effort, for the text might show tendencies towards both sides. A farther complication emerges out of these categories: given that the uncanny element is considerably prevalent 77

early 1970s. The traditions of a longestablished nation such as Japan seem to have intrigued and stimulated Carter’s literary imagination, influencing her plots and character-constructions, and thus becoming a critical site for both her fictional and non-fictional writings. In her short introduction to a series of essays published under the category of “Oriental Romances- Japan”, Carter stated that “In Japan, I learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalized” (Nothing Sacred 28). She explains this further within the context of the underprivileged position of Japanese women in her essay ‘Poor Butterfly’, saying “true femininity is denied an expression and women, in general, have the choice of either slaves or toys” (Shaking a Leg 249). In another essay, ‘People as Pictures’, again inspired

by Japan, Carter pointed to the “lack of interest […] at the naked human body” (Shaking a Leg 236) in Japanese culture, extending this tendency onto men’s complex relationship with “the female nude” as a site which accommodates aspects of fear and fascination towards female sexuality. Regarding the Japanese culture, the traditional Japanese puppet theatre, Bunraku, in which a stringless puppet is manipulated by the puppeteer, seems to have fascinated the author. In ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’, Carter draws upon these cultural threads in that her story not only brings a playful engagement with the repressive and oppressive

implications attributed to female sexuality, but also locates female sexuality within the grotesque and gothic frame of the Japanese puppetry and, in doing so, the dark, unsettling, and mysterious atmosphere of the puppet theatre functions as a medium through which the perceived frightening aspects of female sexuality are made manifest.

‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ has been described as a “Gothic fable” (Gamble 104), and concerns a grotesquely constructed marionette’s revenge on her manipulative and misogynistic puppeteer. The story offers a playful and critical engagement with certain mainstream theories and ideas, such as the discourses on power, feminist criticism, and psychoanalytic theories; in doing so it challenges these systems of thought.

Interestingly, in her interview with Kerryn Goldsworthy, Carter regarded her own writing as “a kind of elaborate form of literary criticism” (5). Although she talked about the “immense” influence of the Women’s Movement on her and considered herself as “a feminist writer” (Shaking a Leg 37), she was never fully integrated within mainstream movements, criticizing all forms of idealism and, as in Lorna Sage’s words, “she refused to draw the boundaries that would allow her to be comfortably classified as either ‘fantastic’ or ‘mainstream’” (188). Carter is evidently reluctant to be pigeonholed as a writer – her works present a medley 78

of competing and conflicting voices that often defy easy categorization. ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ for instance, has often been examined within the frames of magic realist, postmodernist, psychoanalytic and feminist literary criticisms, and frequently situated in a comparative dialogue with her other stories5 inspired by her time in Japan. Considered as one of the “darkest” (Gamble 104) of the stories from her Japan period, ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ offers a narrative that oscillates between the gothic and the fantastic, propounding a playful relationship between the uncanny and the marvellous. The text presents some difficulties when attempting a categorization since the work, arguably, tends to challenge Todorov’s set boundaries regarding the fantastic by presenting a narrative that flirts with the gothic, the uncanny and the fantastic.

The gothic flavour of the text is made apparent from the first paragraph, as Carter’s story opens with a general insight into the complex and transgressive position held by the puppet-master as she introduces the Asiatic professor, the master of the eponymous puppet of the story: Inside the pink-striped booth of the Asiatic Professor only the marvellous existed and there was no such thing as daylight.

The puppet-master is always dusted with a little darkness. […], he (the puppet-master) propagates the most

bewildering enigmas for, the more life-like his marionettes, the more godlike his manipulations and the more radical symbiosis between inarticulate doll and articulating fingers. The puppeteer speculates in a no-man’s limbo between the real and that which, although we know very well it is not, nevertheless seems to be real. (254) It is thus the boundary between what is real and the seemingly unreal that the story operates upon, in this way producing the effect of the uncanny with the returning of the repressed fear in a supernatural form, that is the moment when the Asiatic professor’s grotesque puppet – Lady Purple – comes to life and enacts the precise image of monstrosity formerly ascribed to her by the puppetmaster during the performances. The image of Lady Purple in full flesh can be regarded as the Asiatic Professor’s confrontation with his repressed fears.

On another level, the story critiques the notions of power and control exercised on women by a process of moulding them into images of desire or fear. This tendency can be seen in the Asiatic Professor’s treatment of the puppet both during and after the play: the performance is based on the “notorious” (257) loves of Lady Purple who is introduced in performances as “the Shameless Oriental Venus” (257), and sometimes the Professor would, for the purposes of advertisement, print leaflets containing a 79

flavour of the play – “Come and see all that remains of Lady Purple, the famous prostitute and wonder of the East!” (258).

Physically, Lady Purple is a grotesque figure that arouses a certain disorientation of feelings: whilst she “could have acted as the model for the most beautiful of women, the image of that woman whom only memory and imagination can devise,” (264) with her “ferocious teeth,” “long nails,” and “monumental chevelure” (256) her formidability as a threatening form is emphasized. The performance, fully created by the Professor, thus situates the alluring and the frightening aspects of Lady Purple side by side from the beginning of the show to the end. The show opens with a portrayal of Lady Purple’s childhood and adolescence, highlighting her capacity for allure and ruthless violence: abandoned by her mother, and then fostered by a wealthy merchant and his wife, Lady Purple seduces her foster-father who, ensnared by her allure, is unable to resist giving her the key to his safe, after which she robs and stabs him, then sets his house on fire. This part of the show depicts how Lady Purple “like a corrupt phoenix from the pyre of her crime [rises] again in the pleasure quarters, where she at once hired herself out to the madame of the most imposing brothel” (259). Throughout the performance Lady Purple is constructed as the “image of irresistible evil” (261),

an image which in fact speaks more to the ways in which female sexuality is conceptualized by the Professor than the monstrous acts of Lady Purple, since the puppeteer is the hand behind the strings.

The performance of Lady Purple thus could be interpreted as an agent that unveils the Professor’s fear of women on both public and private levels. From a social perspective, the portrayal of Lady Purple as a vile woman could be linked to the reception of female power as “horrific” (Smith and Wallace 5). Viewed within the realm of the private, however, Lady Purple could, in Freudian terms, be considered to represent the Professor’s fear of castration, whose interpretation of Lady Purple’s monstrosity tends to correlate with the idea of monstrosity as an act of compensation for the lack of the phallus, thus forefronting the idea of the uncanny in Freudian terms as “something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it” (245). Perhaps, if Lady Purple had not been controlled by the Professor, and had wilfully become horrific, then her acts could have opened up another exploratory area, but because she is directly manipulated by the Professor and in fact a figment of his imagination, it is not Lady Purple’s but rather the Professor’s horrific motives lying behind this construction, a construction which becomes alternately violent and alluring, respectively corresponding to the notions 80

of fear and desire.

Whilst the Lady Purple of the performances becomes the ultimate epitome of monstrosity, when the show is over, the Professor would carry Lady Purple with great care, “look after her costumes and jewellery,” and he “could not sleep unless she lay beside him” (257).

The Professor takes great delight in the company of Lady Purple, with whom he often speaks in his native language.

His care for his life-size marionette is an obsession, and to him she is “precious” (257) – he would not let anybody touch her, or ever leave her “in the flimsy theatre” (257). During the show, her hands “seemed more like weapons” (256) because of her long nails – “five inches of pointed tin enameled scarlet” (256) – but at night they looked “as harmless as ten fallen petals” (264). The imagery of long nails could be interpreted within the frame of Creed’s critical take on the monstrousfeminine, in which she argues against the Freudian analysis that women’s bodily features such as long nails, teeth, breasts and hair are representative of a feminine desire to compensate for the lack of the phallus. The fact that Lady Purple’s nails look horrifying in the show but as soft as petals after, yet again represents an exploration of the boundary between fear and desire – the nails may symbolise glamour and allure, or call to mind imagery of witches’ hands in different settings. For Creed, Freud’s argument that

“woman terrifies because she is castrated” (The Monstrous Feminine 7) tends to victimize and subjugate women, an idea which “serves to reinforce patriarchal definitions of woman, which represent and reinforce the essential view that woman, by nature, is a victim” (6). In Carter’s story this idea is overturned, since Lady Purple resists being victimized, and by coming to life at the end of the story, she comes to epitomize the very characteristics that have been ascribed to her in puppet form: […] returning to life or becoming alive, awakening from a dream or coalescing into the form of a fantasy generated in her wooden skull by the mere repetition so many times of the same invariable actions, the brain beneath the reviving hair contained only the scantiest notion of the possibilities now open to it. (266) The precise mechanism by which Lady Purple transforms into a living being is left deliberately obscure by the author, but in a scene reminiscent of the fairy tale sleeping beauty, she appears to draw life from her master during a kiss. Now that she is in full human form, the only real possibility open to her is thus to enact the only skill she knows, and that is monstrosity, and on her awakening, her first act is to kill the Professor, the very agent who “filled her with necromantic vigour” (257). Since she is “the shameless Oriental Venus” 81

whose “unappeasable appetites turned her into the very puppet […], pulled only by the strings of lust” (258), she, “animated solely by demonic will”, feels the urge to act in a similar fashion by “making her way to the single brothel” (266).

The ending of the story thus re-emphasizes Lady Purple’s operating on the border between the uncanny and the fantastic, as she embodies the elements of both the horrific and the supernatural in this late phase of the work.

Returning to Brooke-Rose’s articulation of Todorov’s conceptualization of the fantastic, Carter’s work has overtones of the fantastic-uncanny as well as the gothic – tendencies which can be attributed to various viewpoints. Carter was against her works being classified into rigid categories, and the author’s boundary-breaking stance may explain the oscillation between the gothic and the fantastic in this work. When viewed in terms of its content, the text showcases the characteristics of the “fantasticuncanny”, since with this sub-category not only, as in Brooke-Rose’s words, “is the reader’s hesitation resolved but his fear is purged” (“hesitation” is characterized

by Todorov as “confusion about what is real and what is imaginary”). ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ thus exploits the border between the real and the fabulous, in that throughout the story Lady Purple’s monstrosity is graphically represented to her audience present at her performances

and by extension to the reader, leading to a suspension of disbelief: […] At its conclusion, as the audience stumbled from the darkened booth, it had almost suspended disbelief and was more than half convinced as the Professor assured them so eloquently, that the bizarre figure who had dominated the stage was indeed the petrification of a universal whore […].

(258) For the audience of the show, Lady Purple with her life-size and grotesque appearance blurs the distinction between the real and imagined, since the image that she is imposed on to represent is not an image that is totally unfamiliar to the reader – Western mythology and folklore are laden with images of female monstrosity (i.e. the text itself alludes to the Sirens, and Circe), images that have long been ingrained in the collective unconscious. Viewed from a different angle, Lady Purple’s coming alive is suggestive of the return of the repressed, and that is the uncanny.

The uncanny is thus coupled with the cathartic effect of the purging of fear, in that the familiar fear ascribed to Lady Purple, “the sole perpetrator of desire” (260-61), as a representative of femme fatale “[executing] boudoir masterpieces of destruction [on her lovers]” (261) is already brought to the level of consciousness during the performance, 82

functioning as a way to release the element of fear in the audience. In that respect, Lady Purple’s coming alive could be regarded as a gothic parody of this fear since she is initially merely the Professor’s derogatory representation of femininity, and Carter, by giving actual life to this formerly inanimate object, opens up a space to critique and satirize the limitations and oppressions embedded in the image of the femme fatale.

The image of horror attributed to the puppet reiterates the gothic motifs in ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ in relation to the representation of various fears such as the fear of the unknown, fear of pain, fear of encountering the repressed. The Gothic motifs are well-established right from the beginning: the setting is “a dark, superstitious Transylvania where they wreathed suicides with garlic, pierced them through the heart with stakes” (255).

Within this vampiric setting, the Professor as a character with incomprehensible speech, and with his excessive and deviant obsession with Lady Purple, evokes the mysterious flavour of the gothic. Lady Purple, at the crossroads of desire and fear, per se embodies the gothic: her grotesque appearance with her extravagant hair, long nails, and clothes in “deep, dark, slumberous colours – profound pinks, crimson and the vibrating purple […] with which she was synonymous, a purple the colour of blood in a love suicide” (257), are used to amplify the

way she is constructed as “a monstrous goddess” (257) – “the quintessence of eroticism” (257), “the mistress of the whip” (260). Coming to life, she retains her “young and extravagantly beautiful” form, whilst “the leprous whiteness of her face [gives] the appearance of a corpse” (266). This image of Lady Purple returning to life again juxtaposes the beautiful with the fearful, satirically pinpointing the idea that she is, in fact, the image that the puppeteer imposed on her. It is interesting to note that, unlike a traditional gothic heroine who is usually in danger, and saved, in the course of the story by a handsome, wealthy man, in this story Carter constructs a feisty, wilful and strong woman who requires no man for her survival – on the contrary, she is a woman who breaks free from the patriarchal strings that formerly manipulated her in the direction of their desire. In the traditional Gothic plot, the heroine is often constructed as a motherless (and often fatherless) passive and helpless young woman who, as Tania Modleski describes, “suspects her lover or her husband of trying to drive her insane, or trying to murder her or both” (60). Carter’s story, however, offers a re-envisioning of the gothic plot, as in her story, the traditional roles are reversed, with the heroine exercising extreme power over men. This theme is reinforced as Lady Purple herself, without the help of a male figure, cold-bloodedly kills the 83

Professor by “[sinking] her teeth into his throat and [draining] him” (265), an act of killing which nevertheless complies with the Gothic setting of the tale.

Creed has argued that “women’s bodies represent a fearful and threatening form of sexuality” (The Monstrous Feminine 6). Carter’s story, within the framework of her own re-envisioning of the gothic, offers a satirical engagement with this representation with her construction of Lady Purple as a woman whose vengeful act on her creator speaks back to the repressive implications inscribed on women’s bodies, reducing the female body either to the object of fear or desire.

Published only five years after Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’, the American science-fiction and fantasy writer Lisa Tuttle’s short story ‘Wives’ is a work that deals in a similar manner with the objectification of women’s bodies. However, in Tuttle’s work the theme is projected into a future society in which half-organic, half-technological women, under the hegemony of men, are moulded into ‘technologically perfect’ and loving housewives though they are not permitted to reproduce. In her work, Tuttle uses the medium of fantasy and the defamiliarisation of science fiction to critique the tendency to relate monstrosity to women’s reproductive functions. Thus, by constructing an alternative universe, Tuttle offers a feminist dystopia dealing

with the oppression of women on various levels – social, political, physical, and economical – within an unfamiliar environment in an imagined future. In doing so, her work reads as a political statement about the repressed position of women that operates in parallel with the concerns of the Women’s Liberation Movement – concerns which Tuttle herself was aware of as evidenced in her involvement in “organizing for feminist causes” (Hawkins 204).

Tuttle’s work, as Cathy Hawkins suggests “counteracts the fiction of a childless transplanted suburbia and replaces it with complex social and gender problems” (203). The ultimate problem that the alien women encounter is the way in which they are turned into the figures of male desire physically, enacting the feminine mystique as obedient wives always at their husband’s disposal. In the story this heavenly and safe environment, for the men at least, is disrupted when Susie, one of the wives, begins to protest against the fascistic regime exercised by men on their planet: the men in the story have not only captured the extraterrestrial women’s planet, turning it into a stifling and unnatural environment for the wives, but also, in return for sparing their lives, they have demanded changes to the women’s appearance and mode of living.

The story opens with the alien women enjoying a respite when the men are absent: “A smell of sulphur in the air 84

on a morning when the men had gone and the wives, in their beds, smiled in their sleep, breathed more easily, and burrowed deeper into dreams” (267). The opening sentence gestures at some form of restriction that the men’s presence imposes upon the wives such as their ability to breathe easily. However, this vision of peace brings only a temporary state of liberation, and the wives are able to enjoy only a short period of unrestricted existence, since when the men return, they are again asked to perform the duties assigned to them.

Susie, the protagonist of the story, is an alien who begins to question these restrictions, and the first thing that she does following her husband Jack’s departure is to cut her “skintight apart” (267). The skintight is a physically restrictive suit, which she, along with the other wives, is forced to wear for the purpose of restricting the movements of her extremities, keeping her non-human body in the desired shape imposed by the male colonizers, and locking in the “disgusting” (269) sulphurous body odour that her body naturally exudes. Looking at her “dead-white body” in the mirror, Susie feels “distaste” (268) since the tightness of the garment has caused her body to lose its original form, yet set loose from the skintight, Susie “felt terrifyingly free, naked and rather dangerous” (268).

Thus, the skintight represents the captive and enslaved position of the wives, a

reminder of their subservient position to their colonizers. Hence, the removal of the skintight is associated with a sense of freedom, and in the case of Susie it stimulates her state of mind and body with the smell of the sulphur in the air, but it is the sight of Jack’s pet spider, which Susie randomly notices during this brief interlude of freedom, that paves the way to her destruction: the spider reminds her of a past in which she was free to reproduce, a stimulus which ultimately drives Susie to “mate with” (269) Doris, another of the wives. Despite Doris’ fear of being seen mating, Susie convinces Doris, and their union proves to be “an orgy of life after a season of death”, unlike the “brutishly painful and brief” (270) sexual act with the men; yet the prospect of an offspring should be ruled out, as they are not allowed to procreate. Intoxicated by the experience Susie feels that she is “on the verge of remembering something very important” (271), an insight which leads her to remember her past habits such as catching and eating lizards, and thus she begins to develop a nostalgia for the past, saying: But the old days were gone, and with them the old knowledge and the old abilities.

I’m not what I used to be. […] I’m something else now – a “wife,” created by man in the image of something I have never seen, something called “woman”. (271) 85

Susie’s outcry thus echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s much quoted phrase “one is not born a woman, but becomes one”, in that her predicament as an alien learning to act like a woman becomes a symbolic representation of various means of oppression imposed on a woman, particularly relevant at the time that the story came out: to look glamorous, cook exquisitely and be a skilful housewife (prescribed roles for women prevalent during that period). Tuttle, through her protagonist, critiques the patriarchal tendencies that regulate women’s lives and bodies. For instance, the description of Doris exemplifies the image of a woman entirely concordant with the established physical stereotypes of ideal femininity: Doris wore a low-cut dress, her three breasts carefully bound and positioned to achieve the proper, double-breasted effect. Gaily patterned and textured stockings covered her silicone-injected legs, and she tottered on heels three centimeters high. Her face carefully painted, and she wore gold bands on neck, wrists and fingers. (268)

a skintight, selecting the proper dress and shoes, [making] a good impression on the returning [husband], […] boiling and burning good food to turn it into the unappetizing messes” (271). In addition to these rules, they are expected to transform their natural physical form into an unlikely image for the satisfaction of men, and are deprived of mating with each other and reproducing. The imposed need to create from their naturally three-breasted state the “double-breasted effect” is particularly interesting, as it calls to mind the irrational attribution of female body parts to the notion of male fear of castration – a fear which could be extended to women’s reproductive functions, in a Freudian sense, situating “woman as castrator” (Creed, The Monstrous Feminine 7).

In the case of Tuttle’s story, the wives’ anatomically different physique, arguably, arouses the husbands’ fear and fascination; that is to say, by moulding them into a form that is familiar to them (as humanlike wives), they eliminate the possible danger of the unfamiliar (though, interestingly, they nevertheless enjoy the idea of three breasts in sexual terms).

Viewed from another perspective, exploiting the boundary between human and non-human, the wives call to mind the image of a cyborg, a concept which according to Haraway, functions as a paradigm for “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (154). Perhaps, the potent

This image imposed on the wives by their husbands is thus a way of exercising power on their bodies. Not only are the wives supposed to conform to an image which is completely unfamiliar to them, but they are also required to act in a manner that is alien to their natures such as “wrapping [themselves] […] in 86

danger inherent in the cyborg wives triggers the men to act to suppress the wives’ power by humanizing them according to their own values, and thus keeping them under discipline and control.

Against this policy, Susie is constructed as the only warrior, who feels the courage and desire to protest against the colonizers and who, with the hope of “[living] [their] own lives again” (272), tries to spark a similar flame of rebellion in the other wives and, thus united together, implement a strategy against their husbands, saying: They’ve already killed our culture and our past. […] All we are now is imitations, creatures moulded by the men. And when the men leave – if the men leave – it will be the end for us.

We’ll have nothing left, and it will be too late to try to remember who we were. (273)

psychology of the oppressed, in that the other wives, exposed to oppression on multifarious levels, assume the role of the oppressor in their destruction of Susie – the unruly wife. Furthermore, the new wife’s disposing of the spider’s “gigantic egg-case”, a sight which formerly triggered Susie’s yearning for her old self, is a symbolic manifestation of the wives’ collusion with their colonizers, signalling that they will be obedient as is expected of them. Viewed from another perspective, constructing a feminist dystopia in which women are subjugated and objectified, Tuttle, through the medium of the fantastic and the unfamiliar, thus critiques a society that is preoccupied with surface values.

To conclude, although Angela Carter’s ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ and Lisa Tuttle’s ‘Wives’ are widely different stories engaging with separate representations of femininity in different literary categories, there are several points of intersection between these two works.

Both texts – either in the form of the gothic, uncanny, or the fantastic – offer a satirical engagement with the sociocultural and psychoanalytic mechanisms that inscribe derogatory implications on women (i.e. objects of fear and desire).

Whilst Carter’s story, within the frame of a re-envisioned gothic plot, explores and parodies the primordial fears projected on women with her “blatantly seductive” (257) puppet coming to life and animating the image of both the feared and the

Despite Susie’s best efforts to start a unified action to gain back their subjectivities, the other wives, fearing that a fight against the men will cost them their lives, oppose Susie’s plan. In an act of self-preservation, as her destabilizing efforts pose a threat to their established lives, they destroy her. The story ends with one of the extra wives replacing Susie and moving into her house where one of her first acts is to “[get] rid of the spider’s gigantic egg-case” (275). Hence, the ending of the story epitomizes the 87

desired which has been ascribed to her, Tuttle’s cyborg wife comes to represent the fears associated with women’s reproductive skills. In their critiquing of these misogynistic outlooks, the traces of the influential beams of Second Wave Feminism can be discerned in both authors’ works. Late on in ‘Wives’, Susie declares “all we are now is imitations, creatures moulded by men” (273), and this rather pessimistic assessment could apply equally to Lady Purple; yet, although both stories might be said to end on a bleak note with regard to the lack of alternative solutions or opportunities for emancipation for both protagonists (with the possible exception of Lady Purple, though her ending up in a brothel might pose a question as to the true extent of her emancipation), the stories nonetheless offer a satirical sideswipe at the tendency to objectify and subjugate women through the manipulation of the female body.

Thus, the gothic and the fantastic within the frame of the uncanny serve, in these texts, as stimulating categories for an exploration of the extension of fear and desire ascribed to women’s bodies in the literary imagination.

Notes 1. For instance, the wonderbra advert in 1975 equated the idea of looking good with feeling great, with the jingle “when I am looking good, I feel good […] and great is how I want to look”.

2. An idea which Creed borrowed from Stephen Deale’s exploration of female sexuality in his book Genre (1980). Creed alludes to Deale’s argument in her introduction to The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.

3. Brooke-Rose gives the example of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’.

4. See Mary J. Russo, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed.

by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 318-36.

5. Such as ‘A Souvenir of Japan’, ‘The Smile of Winter’ and ‘Flesh and the Mirror’.

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Biographical Note Zeynep Z. Atayurt received her BA and MA degrees in English from the University of Ankara in Turkey. In 2002 she was awarded a scholarship by the Turkish government for postgraduate study abroad. She earned a second MA degree in Twentieth Century Literature in 2003 at the University of Leeds where she went on to do a PhD in English Literature, finishing in 2008. Having returned to Turkey, she is currently working as an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Ankara. She has written various reviews and essays on contemporary Anglophone literature and cultures, with a specific focus on the representations of gender and embodiment. She is the author of Excess and Embodiment in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2011), and is a member of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association.

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Worcester Papers 2014