Archive | Emergence

Queering Holmes and Watson: How Observation Transforms Friendship into Love

Posted on June 5, 2018November 1, 2022 by

By Casey Coffee

“It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.”

—Dr. John Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs”

I. INTRODUCTION

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson are known by media consumers as friends, partners, and crime solvers. To a smaller group of fans, they are recognized as a pair in love. These fans interpret the relationship between Holmes and Watson as romantic rather than platonic, and they perform both pseudo-academic and truly academic analyses arguing for the validity of their interpretations. Such interpretations represent one manifestation of a history of scholarly and non-scholarly work that reads male friendships as erotic or romantic relationships, as in the case of Star Trek fan magazines of the 1960s and ‘70s that featured stories highlighting the sexual tension between Kirk and Spock.

Readers and viewers who develop such interpretations perceive an extraordinary intimacy in these relationships that goes beyond friendship into romantic love and erotic attachment. I will call these types of interpretations queer readings, although it should be noted that there are many more types of queer readings in literary studies and queer theory whose goals are very different. Here, however, the term queer readings will refer specifically to interpretations that claim that at least one member of a seemingly platonic fictional friendship possesses romantic feelings toward the other. These interpretations may or may not argue that the authors of the texts in question intended for the characters to be in love with each other. In either case, however, the interpretations carry a liberatory tone that revels in reading a classic, traditional, or mainstream work in a modern and unconventional and wonderfully queer light. Such a reading has become increasingly common and increasingly accessible to readers both inside and outside of academic contexts.

Indeed, the most common and numerous of these readings appears in the form of fan fiction. The OED defines fan fiction as “fiction, usually fantasy or science fiction, written by a fan rather than a professional author, esp. that based on already-existing characters from a television series, book, film, etc.” (“fan,” n.2). Per this definition, when I refer to fan fiction, I am not speaking of the film and television adaptations of Doyle’s stories, though these may be thought of as a class of fan fiction. Here, I refer strictly to non-professional adaptation. And one marked inspirer of this adaptation is Sherlock Holmes. Each successive adaptation of Holmes and his companion seems, without fail, to engender its own queer readings.

So, what is it about Holmes and Watson that sparks such an outpouring of these readings? Of course, there are the obvious points, brought about by historical differences. Male friendships in the late 1800s were allowed a degree of intimacy that may seem positively romantic to twenty-first-century readers. Holmes’s practice of calling his companion, “my dear Watson,” and the more openly emotional and admiring language that nineteenth-century men were allowed in their friendships, stand out to modern readers, who see these aspects of friendship through a twenty-first-century lens that may mark them as romantic or erotic. But cultural and language differences cannot be the only reason for queer readings. Holmes, after all, refrains from most expressions of emotion even to Watson, and Watson is so obviously attracted to women that even his admiration of Holmes is easily explained away as mere friendship. And yet, the queer readings continue. Even adaptations set in the twenty-first century, where such language disappears entirely, inspire their own queer readings.

The BBC’s television show Sherlock (2010–present), for example, is set in present-day London, and despite the show’s lack of the language of nineteenth-century male friendship, queer readings of Sherlock run rampant. Fans of the show have not only produced thousands of works of fan fiction featuring Sherlock and John in various stages of romantic and erotic relationships, but have also self-published journals, newsletters, and informal works in the style of academic scholarship that perform complex, well-researched queer readings. For a point of reference, as of this writing the fan fiction website Archive of Our Own features 51,703 works of Sherlock Holmes/John Watson fan fiction in the BBC Sherlock fandom alone. If the search is widened to include Holmes and Watson in other adaptations as well, the count increases to 55,443 works. Each of these works is a queer reading in itself, most of them stemming from a television show that uses the language of contemporary London. The language is unmistakably distinct from Doyle’s nineteenth-century language, with none of the intimacy and openness so clear in the famous epithet, “My dear Watson.” I argue that queer readings of male friendships like Sherlock Holmes and John Watson’s are the result, not of the cultural differences between male friendship in the nineteenth century and contemporary society, but instead, of readers’ sensitivity to the role of observation in these texts. Observation plays a key role in Holmes stories, from Doyle’s original works to the most modern of adaptations like Sherlock. This role goes beyond just searching for clues and solving crimes, extending further into our cultural unconscious, and there is something about Holmes and Watson that has brought the deeper meaning of observation to light.

I argue that the act of observation triggers recognition in readers of an eroticized relationship characterized by a surveyor and a surveyed, a relationship that Western readers and consumers have been unconsciously trained to associate with heterosexual and patriarchal romantic dynamics, not platonic friendship. To understand the implications that the act of observation has in our culture, I must consider what others have theorized about it. For example, to understand what observation means in Western art, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is particularly revealing. Berger claims that social conventions dictate, in art as in life, that “men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” and that in art “women are depicted in a quite different way from men…because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” (Berger 47, 64). Berger also makes the distinction between the “surveyor” and the “surveyed” (Berger 46). In Berger’s mind, the depiction of women in art implies a surveyor—in the form of the painter, who surveyed his subject while painting; in the form of the viewer of the finished painting, who is assumed to be male and surveys the woman depicted; and in the form of the woman, who surveys herself as she is surveyed by others. This relationship between surveyor and surveyed is erotic, and sometimes romantic, and the possibility of a platonic, nonerotic gaze is limited, if not nonexistent. Moreover, since Berger’s writing in 1972, the relationship has become more flexible. Men are now objectified in media with the same intensity, if not the same frequency, as women. Women can now be considered surveyors, while the role of the surveyed has expanded to include men as well.

If Berger is to be believed, the act of observation in Western media, and in the minds of consumers of Western media, is associated with a heterosexual dynamic of a surveyor and a surveyed (of opposite sexes). This dynamic is implicitly erotic or romantic, depending on context, because men and women are rarely depicted in any form of media as platonic friends free from the tension of sex or love. So, what happens when a male surveyor focuses his attention on a male surveyed, as is the case in male friendships like Watson and Holmes’s? I argue that a similar kind of romantic dynamic becomes visible to certain readers. Readers whose conception of romance and eroticism extends beyond male/female dynamics find themselves reacting to this relationship of surveyor and surveyed—which is so weighted with erotic significance—between two men, and reading it as they would a similar relationship between a man and a woman. In these cases, the meaning of observation extends beyond its nineteenth-century bounds and comes to encompass even more. I mean to show the array of effects that observation has on developing intimacy between characters like Holmes and Watson.

Before I claim that it is reasonable for readers to interpret that Watson and Holmes have the markers of an intimate, and potentially romantic relationship, I would like to have a firm definition for intimacy with which to work. In “Defining Intimacy in Romantic Relationships,” Barry Moss and Andrew Schwebel develop a comprehensive definition of intimacy in “enduring romantic relationships” as “determined by the level of commitment and positive affective, cognitive, and physical closeness one experiences with a partner in a reciprocal (although not necessarily symmetrical) relationship” (Moss and Schwebel 33). In order to make classification of relationships possible, Moss and Schwebel organize this definition into five different components: mutuality, cognitive closeness, affective closeness, physical closeness, and commitment (Moss and Schwebel 34–35). Romantic relationships are characterized by high positive levels of each component. Friendship is very similar, but it contains a lower level of physical intimacy. Observation has a peculiar power to intensify many of these types of intimacies in Watson’s relationships with other people, and especially in his relationship with Holmes.

II. QUEERING HOLMES AND WATSON

The detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion and biographer Dr. John Watson may be one of the most famous couples in literary history, their popularity only growing since their creation in the nineteenth century. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887 as a novel called A Study in Scarlet, its first chapter titled “Mr. Sherlock Holmes.” The chapter details Watson’s return to London from the Afghan War, and his first meeting with Sherlock Holmes. Watson and Holmes are both in search of lodgings in London, and Watson is immediately impressed by Holmes’s enthusiasm and intellect but also mystified by Holmes’s deduction that Watson has just returned from Afghanistan. Instead of being repelled by Holmes’s knowing something private about Watson that he has not been told, Watson seems to relish the puzzle, telling his friend Stamford, who introduced him to Holmes, “‘Oh! A mystery is it?’ I cried, rubbing my hands. ‘This is very piquant. I am much obliged to you for bringing us together. ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ you know’” (Doyle 7). These words signal Watson’s priorities to the reader, and color our understanding of Watson’s motivations throughout the story. Watson has not just found an amiable friend and a potential flatmate. He has found a mystery, and from the image of Watson rubbing his hands together, it is clear that he enjoys this. He has encountered a puzzle in Holmes, and he means to subject him to further study.

Study he does. That very evening, Watson agrees to live with Holmes and moves his belongings into No. 221B, Baker Street. Watson soon begins his observation of Holmes in earnest:

As the weeks went by, my interest in him and my curiosity as to his aims in life gradually deepened and increased. His very person and appearance were such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer…The reader may set me down as a hopeless busybody, when I confess how much this man stimulated my curiosity, and how often I endeavored to break through the reticence which he showed on all that concerned himself…I eagerly hailed the little mystery which hung around my companion and spent much of my time in endeavoring to unravel it. (Doyle 8)

Watson’s defensiveness about his interest in Holmes, which he illustrates when he anticipates the reader’s judgment of him as “a hopeless busybody,” only calls attention to the unusual intensity of that interest. His repetition of “curiosity” highlights not only the mystery surrounding Holmes but also its importance to Watson as an object of focus and attention. And his repetition of his “endeavoring to unravel [the mystery]” and the fact of “how often [he] endeavored to break through” lends a sense of activity and purpose to Watson’s curiosity and attention [emphasis added]. He is not simply mystified by Holmes; he is actively “endeavoring” to solve the mystery of him, to understand him. And to understand, Watson must observe.

In the passage above, Watson figures himself explicitly as an “observer.” He attempts to downplay the significance of this by claiming that even “the most casual observer” would be struck by Holmes. However, Watson’s observation is not casual. It is systematic. Watson goes so far as to record his observations in the form of a list, which he titles, “SHERLOCK HOLMES—his limits” (Doyle 9). The list contains twelve points detailing the different types of knowledge and skills Holmes possesses and lacks. Watson is unable to draw a definitive conclusion from this list, eventually giving up and tossing it into the fire. But while it exists, the list stands as a curious testament to the unusual fervor of Watson’s fascination with Holmes. As Watson himself remarks, “no man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so” (Doyle 8). Watson has clearly taken to burdening his mind with the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, but his very good reason for such a detailed study is never explained. This makes it all the more remarkable, and it becomes a puzzle for readers to solve themselves. Some readers’ solutions are queer readings.

Whatever the reason for Watson’s study, the language of these passages portrays Watson’s observation as explicitly active. It is purposeful and action-based, which figures it neatly as a parallel to Berger’s spectator. Watson is a man who acts, even in the relatively passive and stationary process of watching another. However, the dynamic between Watson and Holmes, though similar to the dynamic that Berger examines between the nude women in paintings and the male spectators of those paintings, has some important differences. The most notable of these differences is that Sherlock Holmes, the “surveyed” in this relationship, is neither a woman nor someone who simply appears. Holmes is not a passive object to Watson’s active observation. This is clear even in the passage above describing Watson’s observation. Watson is so fascinated because Holmes “stimulate[s]” his curiosity and “strike[s]” his attention. Holmes is just as active, if not more so, than Watson, and his activity revolves just as much around the act of observation. In fact, the significance of Watson’s observation is only heightened by its parallel relationship to Holmes’s observation in his detective work.

Observation and deduction are important themes in every Sherlock Holmes story. They have a special kind of weight, and that means that when Watson observes Holmes, his observations carry that weight as well. The observation/deduction paradigm so common to detective stories (since Doyle popularized Edgar Allan Poe’s detective formula) even extends into the way that Watson articulates his study of Holmes. The language Watson uses to describe his observation mirrors this paradigm, as he explains that he “pondered over [his and Holmes’s] short conversation…and endeavored to draw [his] deductions from it” (Doyle 9). And as Holmes usually embarks on a step-by-step explanation of his observations and deductions after he solves a problem, so does Watson record his observations of Holmes for the reader to understand.

The fact that Watson’s observations of Holmes must not only be recorded and decoded but also published for the benefit of the reading public, heightens the admiration that Watson shows for Holmes. Though Doyle’s use of Watson as Holmes’s biographer may have emerged simply as a device used to justify Watson’s writings and the narrative form that the stories take, it has a very powerful, if unintended effect. Watson feels compelled to record and publish accounts of Sherlock Holmes’s deductive skills out of pure, unadulterated admiration and awe. This is the first marker of positive affective closeness between Watson and Holmes. Watson’s admiration translates into liking and caring, an essential component of intimacy. And Watson makes it very clear in each of his stories that he likes Sherlock Holmes—that he finds him “extraordinary.” Not only is the word “extraordinary” frequently used to describe Holmes and his actions in more than one of Doyle’s stories, but it is Watson’s admiration of Holmes’s extraordinary deductive prowess in the case he solves in A Study in Scarlet that prompts Watson to record it and publish it. He explains this even before he undertakes the task of writing, as he tells Holmes, “‘It is wonderful!’ I cried. ‘Your merits should be publicly recognized. You should publish an account of the case. If you won’t, I will for you’” (Doyle 70). Clearly, Holmes is a singular experience, one so fascinating and extraordinary to Watson that he feels the urge to present it to the world for further adoration. Watson admires, glorifies, and idealizes Holmes for his exceptional mind, which shines all the brighter in its contrast to Watson’s steady and stable character, which cannot even hope to achieve Holmes’s intellectual power.

This kind of idealization presents itself frequently in cases of love. Sigmund Freud even devotes an analysis to it in his essay, “Being in Love and Hypnosis,” from Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. According to Freud, being in love often results in the following:

the phenomenon of sexual over-estimation—the fact that the loved object enjoys a certain amount of freedom from criticism, and that all its characteristics are valued more highly than those of people who are not loved, or than its own were at a time when it itself was not loved. If the sensual tendencies are somewhat more effectively repressed or set aside, the illusion is produced that the object has come to be sensually loved on account of its spiritual merits, whereas on the contrary these merits may really only have been lent to it by its sensual charm….The tendency which falsifies judgment in this respect is that of idealization. (Freud 73–74) [emphasis in original]

It is impossible to say definitively that Watson sexually over-estimates Holmes. While some of his descriptions of Holmes are physical in nature, most of his observation is aimed at understanding Holmes’s mental processes rather than admiring his looks. The phenomenon of simple over-estimation, manifesting itself in idealization, however, is much easier to prove. Watson’s accounts of the cases that Holmes solves are a testament to that. Holmes himself criticizes Watson’s first chronicle, A Study in Scarlet for its rosy view. He tells Watson, “You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid” (Doyle 76). Holmes is unhappy with Watson’s account, not because Watson tampered with the facts in order to romanticize the story, but because Watson did not make the facts the hero of his story. According to Holmes, “‘the only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unraveling it’” (Doyle 76). However, Watson is not fascinated simply by the extraordinary fact that mysteries may be solved by analytical reasoning. He is fascinated by Holmes. In Watson’s mind, the facts are not the hero of the story; Holmes is.

Though Watson’s first-person narration of Holmes and his adventures makes the presence of observation in Doyle’s texts very obvious, I must acknowledge that first-person narration is not a guarantor of queer readings of literary texts. There exists a plethora of literature written in the first person that does not inspire queer readings. And first person narration has many other important effects on stories that have nothing to do with amorous intimacy or romantic relationships. However, most of these novels distribute their attention widely to encompass a series of events, more than they do a particular person. Watson’s attention, in contrast, is disproportionately focused upon Holmes. Holmes is not the only object of Watson’s observation. After all, Watson records descriptions of the appearances, words, and actions of a variety of characters in addition to the detective. But his observation of Holmes is unique.

While Holmes’s cases are certainly interesting and take up a large part of Watson’s narration, the ways that he records events and the ways that he records Holmes are very different. It is not the cases themselves that so fascinate Watson. After all, he never exerts any real effort to learn Holmes’s craft of observation and deduction or to try to solve a case himself. He is consistently astounded by Holmes’s deductions, despite his intimate knowledge of Holmes’s methods. But his disinterest in honing his own skills and his preference for continuing to watch Holmes shows where his fascination truly lies. Holmes is the only puzzle that he ever exerts any effort to solve, and the only puzzle with which he meets any success. He is unable to deduce Holmes’s occupation, true, but Watson knows Holmes better than anyone else.

The best way to characterize Watson’s observational method—in contrast to Holmes’s—is mind-reading. This is not a magical or supernatural kind of telepathy, but a concerted effort through Theory of Mind to read Holmes’s body language, facial expressions, and sub-textual meanings in conversation. Ágnes Melinda Kovács defines Theory of Mind as “being able to take into account that people are guided by intentional mental states,” which allows us “to predict and interpret others’ behavior” (Kovács). It is Theory of Mind that allows Watson to interpret Holmes’s behavior and the mental states behind it. And Watson’s skill at this kind of mind-reading strengthens quickly. At first, his deductions are tentative, and he hedges when Holmes tries to shrug off Watson’s flattery, saying “I thought from his expression that [Holmes] was pleased” (Doyle 14) [emphasis added]. Five pages later, however, he has gained more confidence, and he can claim, “Gregson and Lestrade…evidently failed to appreciate the fact, which I had begun to realize, that Sherlock Holmes’s smallest actions were all directed towards some definite and practical end” (Doyle 19). Watson begins to understand things about Holmes that even Holmes’s long-term acquaintances cannot conceive of. Three pages after that, Watson brags, “I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty” (Doyle 21). At this point, he has gained full confidence, reading past the façade Holmes tries to convey and well aware of the effect his flattering words will have on the detective.

In a remarkably short amount of time, Watson comes to know Holmes. He knows him so well that he can deduce Holmes’s thoughts and emotions from his facial expressions and physical mannerisms. Even when Holmes tries to hide his emotions from others, Watson can tell that he is pleased or flattered. This kind of mind-reading lends intimacy to Watson’s attention. Watson does not just want to record Holmes, he wants to read him, to enter his mind and understand it fully. Though he does not frame it as such himself, he wants to achieve an intersubjective state with Holmes. Indeed, despite his inability to perform his own deductions and solve cases, Watson meets with relative success in his observations and deductions about Holmes. He provides the warmth of his own interpersonal skills to offset the cold logic of Holmes’s analytical reasoning. With this skill, Watson gains positive cognitive closeness, another component of Moss and Schwebel’s definition of intimacy, which they define as “the depth of awareness individuals have of their partner’s cognitive world and the exchanges of cognitions they share” (Moss and Schwebel 33). This cognitive closeness might also be thought of as something like intersubjectivity—something achieved through what Daniel N. Stern calls “the intersubjective matrix,” a “continuous cocreative dialogue with other minds” that emerges from mutual mind-reading and attunement to the minds of others (Stern 77).

While observation, idealization, or mind-reading alone could simply be the marker of a particularly strong friendship, when the phenomena combine, the romantic connotations that each carry come together into a particularly powerful suggestion of an amorous relationship. The power of this suggestion is notable in A Study in Scarlet, but it becomes almost impossible to ignore when it is placed in an explicitly romantic context in Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes story. In The Sign of the Four, Dr. Watson meets his future wife, Mary Morstan, and his reaction to her bears striking similarities to his reaction to Holmes. The moment he first sees Miss Morstan, Watson’s unique powers of observation and mind-reading come to the fore, as he notes her “outward composure of manner,” but deduces from her trembling lip and hand that she shows “every sign of intense inward agitation” (Doyle 80). Watson replicates his ability to see past outward appearances to the inward emotions of Miss Morstan, a skill he first demonstrated upon Holmes. And before she even speaks, he goes so far as to say, “I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature” (Doyle 19). This is when Watson first begins to show idealization for Miss Morstan. Watson appears to have written The Sign of the Four at some point after the events he recounts, at which time he is already married to Mary. Writing after the fact may bias Watson’s objectivity, because it is unlikely that he would be able to deduce a woman’s nature, not from the expression on her face, but from the set of her face itself. This is either a projection from a later version of Watson who is familiar with his wife’s “refined and sensitive nature,” or it is yet another manifestation of over-estimation, but in this case, an over-estimation that is explicitly physical, and likely sexual.

Watson’s over-estimation of Holmes differs obviously from his sexual over-estimation of Mary. When Watson first meets Holmes, he provides no physical description of Holmes at all, impressed as he is instead by Holmes’s extraordinary intellect and enthusiasm over his looks. For this reason, there is little if any evidence in the first two stories to show how Watson feels about Holmes’s physical appearance. The opposite is true for Mary Morstan. Watson describes Miss Morstan most often with physical descriptors, though he does venture to mind-read Mary in the same way he reads Holmes. He sums up his first impression of her, however, when he exclaims to Holmes, “What a very attractive woman!” (Doyle 82). As a result, Watson’s feelings for Mary fit neatly into Freud’s concept of being in love, “idealization” leading to “sexual over-estimation.” Though he comes to admire Mary for her bravery, humility, and kindness, Watson’s liking for her clearly begins on their first meeting, when all he truly knows about her is what he can see in her appearance. After she leaves this first meeting, he muses:

My mind ran upon our late visitor—her smiles, the deep rich tones of her voice, the strange mystery which overhung her life….What was I, an army surgeon with a weak leg and a weaker banking-account, that I should dare to think of such things. (Doyle 82)

Though Watson only knows what he can see of Miss Morstan, he holds what little he knows of her in his mind, and she preoccupies him, as Holmes does. He berates himself for even thinking about her, deeming himself unworthy before he can know her true worth. Just as Watson raises Holmes’s deductive skills in comparison to his own inability to solve crimes, so does he raise Mary in comparison to himself.

Indeed, much of Watson’s relationship to Mary Morstan can be read as a more explicit, eroticized version of the way that he relates to Sherlock Holmes. The explicit romantic relationship between Watson and Mary functions as a useful control in studying the relationship between Watson and Holmes. The first relationship is explicitly romantic, the second plainly platonic, and yet the similarities between them are striking. In the male/female relationship, Watson marks his romantic interest by paying close attention to Mary, admiring her physical appearance and personality, and attempting to understand her thoughts and feelings through mind-reading. He idealizes her and debases himself, holds her in his mind throughout the story, and records his knowledge of her in The Sign of the Four. Similarly, Watson watches Holmes closely, admires his intellectual abilities, and embarks on a close study of his mind. He devalues his own deductive competence, and records and publishes Holmes’s doings as his biographer. The intent behind each of these relationships differs greatly, but for many readers, the effect is the same. And the power of this effect stems from its foundation in observation. Attention, mind-reading, admiration, and idealization are all made possible by the paradigm of the surveyor and the surveyed that Doyle built into Watson’s narrative perspective.

I must point out that the dynamic that Berger articulates between the surveyor and the surveyed is not a positive one. The fact that “men act and women appear” in Western art is a problem (Berger 47). It is a result of oppression that consistently silences and objectifies women while giving men agency and subjectivity. But the queer readings of the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson do not highlight an oppressive relationship wherein Watson objectifies Holmes in order to flatter himself. In many ways, he does the opposite, debasing his own deductive powers in favor of idealizing Holmes’s, in the mode of Freud’s conception of idealization in love. But, even though Watson is consistently incompetent when it comes to using observation and deduction to solve crimes, he shows his competence elsewhere, in observing and deducing Holmes. And there is a promising mutuality to the observation in the Watson and Holmes relationship.

Holmes is a master of observation and deduction, and while he does direct most of his attention to solving crimes, he shows his awareness of Watson in small but significant ways. This is clear in Watson’s description of Holmes’s curious violin practices:

Of an evening, [Holmes] would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle…I might have rebelled against these exasperating solos had it not been that he usually terminated them by playing in quick succession a whole series of my favorite airs as a slight compensation for the trial upon my patience. (Doyle 10)

On another night, Holmes plays Watson off to sleep with a particularly soothing violin melody of his own creation. These moments stand out to readers because of their contrast to Holmes’s normal behavior. Holmes makes a point of only retaining information that will be useful to his work (Doyle 9). However, in these moments of consideration, Holmes takes the time to hold Watson in his mind. He remembers his favorite songs, and he notices when Watson is exhausted and in need of sleep. Holmes attends to Watson’s well-being, even when it has no bearing on a case. Holmes’s attention is also a sign of positive affective closeness, which Moss and Schwebel define as “the depth of awareness individual have about their partner’s emotional world” (Moss and Schwebel 33). By meeting Watson’s demonstration of affective and cognitive closeness with a demonstration of his own, Holmes shows that the depth of attention that Watson pays to Holmes is mutual.

This mutuality of attention holds great significance because it softens the oppressive connotations that Berger’s surveyor and surveyed relationship would otherwise have for Holmes and Watson. In the eroticized gender binaries of the nude paintings in Berger’s study, the surveyor’s relationship to the surveyed is unequal and unhealthy. In the intellectualized, mutual paradigm of same-sex surveyor and surveyed that appears in Sherlock Holmes stories, that inequality is balanced in a variety of ways. The mutuality of attention complicates the power imbalance, placing them both in positions of surveyor and surveyed. Watson’s admiration and over-estimation of Holmes also function to soften the inequality of the surveyor/surveyed relationship. Watson sees Holmes as an agent worthy of admiration, not an object whose purpose is to flatter his own self-image. Notably, this mutuality and attribution of agency are largely absent from Watson’s relationship to Mary. This may be the reason why queer readings of same-sex friendships revel so much in a feeling of transgression. Heterosexual romance in the late nineteenth century was mandatory, conformist, and loaded with legal, social, political, and economic inequality. Same-sex romance was transgressive, illegal, and liberatory, in the sense that it held the potential for a truly equal romantic partnership. A reading of Watson and Mary with the same kind of transgressive properties would require an overhaul of the whole of Victorian society.

Moss and Schwebel’s definition of intimacy complicates the surface-level simplicity of Watson’s two relationships. They distinguish intimacy between romantic partners and friend this way:

Whereas romantic relationships involve high levels of all five intimacy components…the intimacy exchanged between friends differs from romantic intimacy, primarily in the depth of Physical Intimacy and possibly Commitment…as well as in the capacity to tolerate shifts in Mutuality. (Moss and Schwebel 34)

According to these definitions, Watson should share high levels of each component with Mary Morstan, and high levels of every component except physical intimacy (and potentially commitment and mutuality) with Sherlock Holmes. Because of the text’s setting in the Victorian era, however, physical closeness has a limited presence in both relationships. Watson takes Mary’s hand as he proposes to her, and Holmes sometimes takes Watson’s arm. That is as far as Doyle takes physical intimacy. As far as the other components are concerned, Holmes and Mary seem to share high levels of each with Watson. Watson’s commitment to Holmes appears to wane somewhat every time he marries, but it never disappears, emerging in full force in between his marriages. And mutuality of affection and attention is much more obvious with Holmes than with Mary, due to the imbalance of gender. Holmes and Watson achieve their cognitive closeness through observation and deduction, or mind-reading, of each other. And their affective closeness develops from positive first impressions to deep caring after years of living in close quarters and adventuring together.

III. CONCLUSION

By Moss and Schwebel’s comprehensive definition, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson share an intimate relationship. While Doyle likely meant that intimacy to be platonic, his stories have taken on a life of their own, transformed and recast by the changing cultural contexts in which they are read. The intimacy that is so essential to the relationship of this detective and his biographer, in combination with the erotic dynamic of Watson’s observation of and attention to Holmes, can be all the more easily interpreted as amorous rather than platonic. This is the result of a radically altered social consciousness in which same-sex desire has become a love that can speak its name. But it is also the product of a world in which attention means much more than it once did. In a culture inundated by technology, entertainment, and endless distractions, attention has become a precious commodity, more meaningful and more suggestive than it could ever have been in the nineteenth century.

Contemporary readers come to Doyle with a different toolbox of cultural norms and assumptions. This signals a crucial shift in the way that we read and demonstrates the radically different readings that can emerge from a single text over time. The technique of queer reading is certainly not perfect, and it often brings its own biases into interpretation. But queer reading may point to a path of revitalizing contemporary readings of classic works of literature. Queer readings of Sherlock Holmes can transform the place of observation in traditional intimacy from one of imbalance and inequality to one of potential reciprocity. Through readings like this, the dramatic changes that technology and social movements visit upon our social consciousness can refresh literature and make it more accessible, more transgressive, and more rich than ever before. After all, for John Watson to observe Sherlock Holmes might not have meant much to Doyle’s readers in 1887. But to twenty-first-century readers, Watson’s focused attention has the power to transform friendship into love.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 2008.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2015.

“Fan, n. 2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, January 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/68000. Accessed 20 March 2018.

Freud, Sigmund. “Being in Love and Hypnosis.” Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James Strachey, The Hogarth Press, 1949, pp. 71–80.

Kovács, Ágnes Melinda. “Belief Files in Theory of Mind Reasoning.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. 7, no. 2, 2016, pp. 509–527.

Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, creators. Sherlock. Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, and Masterpiece Theater, 2010–present.

Moss, Barry F., and Andrew I. Schwebel. “Defining Intimacy in Romantic Relationships.” Family Relations, vol. 42, no. 1, 1993, pp. 31–337. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/584918.

Stern, Daniel N. The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. W.W. Norton, 2004.

Art by Kelley Fesmire, on Patreon at www.patreon.com/anotherwellkeptsecret/posts and Tumblr at anotherwellkeptsecret.tumblr.com.

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Feeling Forests and Talking Trees: Discovering an Animate Environment through Fantasy

Posted on June 5, 2018November 1, 2022 by

By Brandi Bushman

Fundamental to fantasy literature is the production of new worlds, a process J.R.R. Tolkien describes as “subcreation” in which readers are both familiar and unfamiliar, comforted and unsettled; these spaces are made to test the bounds of imagination while we analyze our own world, and our place in it, in relation to the imagined (Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories 12). Tolkien’s Middle-earth exists today as the foundational fantasy world due to its rich liveliness, depth of characters and landscapes, and status as familiar but also decidedly unfamiliar. The power of not just Tolkien’s work, but fantasy as a genre, rests in what he describes as the three central “faces” of fantasy stories: “The Mystical towards the Supernatural, the Magical towards Nature, and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man” (Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” 9). According to Tolkien, at the core of fantasy is an attempt to reveal the magic of nature, making nature animate and vibrant while simultaneously casting “man,” or humanity, into a role as other, or outsider. Tolkien’s “mirror of scorn and pity” functions as a means to break down anthropocentric modes of thinking, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the “primary or exclusive focus on humanity; the view or belief that humanity is the central or most important element of existence, especially as opposed to God or the natural world” (“anthropocentrism”). Ursula K. Le Guin discusses fantasy’s work at breaking down anthropocentrism in line with Tolkien in the essay “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists,” where she states that “realistic fiction is drawn towards anthropocentrism, fantasy away from it” (87). Studying Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings through the lens of ecocriticism—specifically, works advocating for the vibrancy and animacy of oft-considered “insensate” material such as Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter and Mel Chen’s Animacies—alongside criticism on fantasy made by Le Guin and Tolkien reveals the tensions between nature, the environment, and humans. Here, I argue that Tolkien makes fantasy literature a ground to rework hierarchies and understandings of nature and humanity, as fantasy ultimately reveals the power and vibrancy of nature as a force in and of itself.

Lively Natures: Revealing the Animacy and Vibrancy of Individual Environmental Forces

In thinking through the dichotomy between man and nature, rather than perceiving nature as “magical,” like Tolkien does, I aim to advocate the power of nature by revealing the vitality and animacy of specific environments described in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The environments and forces of forests, trees, and mountains in these texts function as characters with importance akin to the various human-like characters (elves, hobbits, men, and dwarves) found in the texts, as they each have histories, personalities, liveliness, and, at times, even emotions. Such rich characteristics make these environments and forces animate, following Mel Chen’s definition of animacy as “a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, and liveliness” (2). In tandem with thinking through the environment’s animacy, fantasy also establishes the vitality of environmental forces; Jane Bennett defines “vitality” in her book Vibrant Matter as “the capacity of things…not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii). Bennett affirms the close relationship between “things” typically considered inanimate and humans; this relationship is found in Tolkien’s work as the “things” of the environment that have the ability to affect humans and be affected by them. Yet, these forces are simultaneously individual agents with motives and personalities that are not shaped by interactions with humans. Specific examples such as the Old Forest, the mines of Moria, and the Ents reveal the animacy and vitality of the environment as Tolkien fantasizes mobile, lively, at times even talking and feeling environmental entities. In this way, the identities and perceptions of the environment are broken down and transformed by fantasy.

As the hobbits begin their journey, they enter environments that are new, uncomfortable, and even unpleasant; the first of these environments that they encounter is the Old Forest which is described as “queer” due to its sense of liveliness and agency. Merry states “the forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you…I thought all the trees were whispering to each other” (108). According to Mel Chen, “queer” can refer to “animacy’s veering-away from dominant ontologies and the normativities they promulgate” (11). Merry confirms that the forest feels “alive,” and thus establishes the environment as an animate one, with the trees as individual animate beings. Therefore, the forest deviates from the cultural understanding of trees, and nature, as inanimate, which leads to the environment’s description as “queer.” Its deviation is further solidified as Merry personifies the forest: by describing the trees’ awareness, ability to watch intruders, talk to one another, and their dislike for strangers, Tolkien suggests that the trees have physical capabilities akin to people, as well as personalities and a history. This personification is further confirmed when Pippin talks to the trees, telling them “I am not going to do anything. Just let me pass through, will you!” treating the forest as a fellow person, thus acting on Merry’s earlier feeling of the trees’ liveliness (109). The Old Forest is a decidedly animate environment and creating this environment this way shows how fantasy authors break down our conceptualizations of nature to rethink environmental forces as living beings.

Because of the forest’s liveliness and personality, the hobbits find themselves working against the forest, which has oppositional desires and goals to the hobbits; such opposition upholds Bennet’s definition of vitality as the ability to have individual agency (viii). The forest’s agency is understood once the hobbits become aware of its history and personality: “hearts of trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, and filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers” (127). The Old Forest’s history makes it a character with as much depth as any human-like character in the text, as it is shaped by its past and holds propensities and tendencies which shape their personalities, upholding Bennett’s criterion for vitality. The forest’s “hatred” suggests a capacity for feeling, Tolkien’s way of describing animacy and vitality. Although the forest’s feeling of hatred suggests a reactionary response, and thus lack of individual agency, the fact that the forest can feel at all, regardless of the reason, upholds Bennet’s concept of vitality. In establishing the forest as a feeling character, Tolkien uses fantasy to force readers into thinking about the environment as being just as animate and vibrant as ourselves.

As the Old Forest’s hatred fuels a desire to block the hobbits’ passing, the hobbits grow fearful of the environment and the forest’s animacy and vitality. Tolkien writes “as they went forward, it seemed that the trees became taller, darker, and thicker…they all got an uncomfortable feeling that they were being watched, with disapproval, deepening to dislike and even enmity” (109). As the trees seem to grow in length and size, they assert their dominance over the hobbits, claiming their home, and solidifying the hobbits’ presence as intruders. The darkness creates a sense of foreboding as it impairs the hobbits’ ability to see while they become the objects of the trees’ sight. The forest eventually impedes the hobbits’ journey physically as Tolkien writes “the trees began to close in again, just where they had appeared from a distance to be thinner and less tangled” until they eventually swallow Pippin and Merry: “Pippin had vanished. The crack by which he had laid himself had closed together, so that not a chink could be seen. Merry was trapped: another crack had closed about his waist (112, 115). In this way, the vitality of the trees works against human conceptualization of matter as “passive stuff…raw, brute, or inert,” instead showing their capacity as active beings (Bennet vii). Bennett continues to state that humans often have “the habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)” a concept that is conflated here as the “matter” of the environment and the bodies of the hobbits become intertwined, showing that each has vitality and agency (vii).

With Merry and Pippin held captive inside the trees, Tolkien breaks down the divide between the environment and the human to show that each has individual power that can work against the other; in this way, the environment is made out to be equal to the human, which rethinks Chen’s conceptualization of our society’s animacy hierarchy: “an ordered hierarchy from inanimate object to plant to nonhuman animal to human” (40). The animacy hierarchy is broken down entirely due to the forest’s imprisonment of the hobbits, an action that reflects a reversal of the forest’s victimization from oppressive human actions of “gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning” (127). Here, the forest appropriates the dominating role of humans by impeding the hobbits’ journey. This action further solidifies the similarities between the hobbits and the forest as each works toward enacting a desired goal based off of their feelings and the world they live in; such a similarity is reinforced by Eduardo Kohn in How Forests Think as he states “We humans…are not the only ones who interpret the world. ‘Aboutness’—representation, intention, and purpose in their most basic forms—is an intrinsic structuring feature of living dynamics in the biological world. Life is inherently semiotic” (74). As both are beings with intention and purpose, Tolkien destroys the animacy hierarchy by depicting the hobbits and the Old Forest as similar forces and agents in the world who each reflects Kohn’s conceptualization of “aboutness.” In this way, Tolkien imbues the forest with emotion and desire to illustrate the forest as an environment with purpose and intention.

Because the Old Forest breaks down the animacy hierarchy—and therefore deconstructs the division between nonhuman and human—the hobbits dislike the forest, which they show in their perception of it as a dark and hateful environment in the text. However, Tolkien affirms the vitality, importance, and value of negatively perceived environments when Elrond reminisces about his time spent in the Old Forest. He states that the forest has been dilapidated and appropriated by humans as “all that now remains is but an outlier of its northern march,” effectively justifying the forest’s antagonism and darkness (258). He continues, “time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew” (258). Elrond is nostalgic for a past when animals were free and natural environments still possessed their integrity; this past also reflects a kinship between animal, human, and the environment, a kinship that can only exist when the nonhuman is not appropriated or oppressed by the human. Matthew Dickerson describes this storytelling as important in Ents, Elves, and Eriador since it suggests that “these things ‘wild and strange’ are worth knowing and that tales about them are worth telling—in short, that wilderness is valuable” (134). Here, Tolkien shows that humans should not be selective in admiring only “good” environments, but a variety of environments, as they each affirm nature’s vibrancy, animacy, and similarity to humanity.

While Tolkien begins his commentary on the appropriation and destruction of the environment with his description of the Old Forest, he acknowledges this problem most clearly in his depiction of the dwarves and their proclivity for mining resources from mountains. Dickerson describes the dwarves as valuing “the environment primarily as a source of fuel, building materials, and precious gems and metals” (101). However, the dwarves have a much more complex relationship with the environment. Although they indeed engage in resource extraction, the dwarves have mixed feelings of ownership over the mountains as well as reverence for them. This is seen as Gimli laments over the dwarves’ lost home, Moria: “Moria! Moria! Wonder of the Northern world! Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear” (234). Here, Gimli shows that he believes Moria possesses a mystique, making the mountain a place that he can never entirely know or understand. He simultaneously admits to the hubris of the dwarves by claiming they mined “too deep,” a description that displays the dwarves as dominant, masculine oppressors of a feminized environment which they penetrate for their own goals and pleasures. A similar argument is made by Ursula Heise who critiques the human “presumption to know the natural world scientifically, to manipulate it technologically and exploit it economically, and thereby ultimately to create a human sphere apart from it in a historical process that is usually labeled ‘progress’” (507). Tolkien imbues his text with a moral imperative as Gimli states they “woke the nameless fear,” that caused their desertion of Moria (234). In this way, Tolkien’s work is a cautionary tale against resource exploitation and appropriation of the environment.

Although the dwarves consider the mountains to be their home, they follow Heise in creating a sphere apart from nature as they position themselves as rulers over the environment. This is seen in The Hobbit when Thorin states, “my grandfather was King under the Mountain,” a title which shows a feeling of ownership and dominion over the environment (22). As Richard Matthews states that “Moria, the name of the great pit, means ‘given without love’” in Tolkien’s Elvish tongue, it’s clear that Tolkien situates the dwarves’ relationship with the mountains as an example of human hubris and exceptionalism (71). “Given without love” also implies a feeling of resentment held toward the dwarves by the mountain, a feeling which asserts this environmental space as not only animate and vibrant but emotive and affective. However, the dwarves ascribe their own definitions of meaning and value to the environmental materials they mine, which Gandalf shows when he says, “The wealth of Moria was not in gold and jewels, the toys of the dwarves; nor in iron, their servant” (309). As Gandalf describes certain resources as “toys,” and others as “servants,” Tolkien establishes that the dwarves view the natural resources as insensate matter, matter whose purpose resides in merely fulfilling the wishes and desires of the dwarves. Tolkien again projects a moral lesson onto his readers for this way of thinking in The Hobbit as the dragon Smaug usurps the dwarves’ dominion over their mountain, after which Thorin states “we went away” (23). Here, Tolkien exiles the dwarves from their “home,” because they could not appreciate the environment, and its vitality, in and of itself. In this way, Tolkien not only establishes the fact that the environment is animate and vibrant but also cautions readers to recognize the value in such qualities by showing that if the environment is not valued, humanity will be punished.

In working to teach his readers to acknowledge the environment’s animacy and vitality, Tolkien constructs the walking, talking ents in order to give the environment a voice with which to speak directly to the characters of the text and, by extension, the readers. As Merry and Pippin meet the ent Treebeard, he states, “my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very, very long time; so my name is like a story” (454). Treebeard is an example of the hobbits’ insignificance and transience in the history of Middle-earth as Treebeard transcends generation, has lived before the hobbits, and will continue living after them. Describing his name as always “growing” affirms his liveliness and his own status as constantly growing and learning about the world. Richard Matthews suggests that the tree “is a complex symbol for Tolkien, as it has definite Christian echoes of both the tree of knowledge and the tree of sacrifice” (68). Treebeard solidifies his representation of knowledge due to his age, which is suggestive of wisdom. The ents represent wisdom and age for the environment as a whole, as the environment exists throughout generations of people, a constantly growing site of stories.

The ents are simultaneously symbolic of the tree of sacrifice as their land has been constantly destroyed and damaged by the human-like characters of the text. Treebeard states “Down on the border they are felling trees—good trees. Some of these trees they just leave to rot” (462). Because of the way his home has been destroyed, Treebeard has grown ambivalent to the struggles between different races in Middle-earth as he states “I have not troubled about the Great Wars…they mostly concern men and elves…I am not altogether on anybody’s side because nobody is altogether on my side” (461). Here, Treebeard expresses sadness, even resentment, for how his environment has been devalued. In this way, Treebeard becomes more than a symbol, rather a living, animate character, following Patrick Curry’s idea that in Tolkien’s work “trees are never just symbols, and in their individuality convey the uniqueness and vulnerability of ‘real’ trees” (70). Treebeard’s vulnerability shows that despite the environment’s power, its devastation can lead to a mournfulness, and a justification for the environment’s animosity towards people, such as the Old Forest’s negative feelings in relation to the hobbits. Although highly symbolic, Tolkien shows that environmental forces are always more than mere symbols, as individual forces of the environment are vibrant and feeling.

By revealing the vibrancy and animacy of the environment, fantasy works to break down not just anthropocentrism, but human exceptionalism, which Eduardo Kohn describes in How Forests Think as the mode of thinking through which “we have treated humans as exceptional—and thus fundamentally separate from the rest of the world” (7). Throughout his work, Tolkien breaks down and reconfigures the animacy hierarchy to force readers into rethinking our own value and animacy, and the animacy of other natural forces. Forces such as the ents and the Old Forest affect not only the characters in the text, but readers as well, as they force us readers to inhabit the place of the environment and feel sadness, resentment, and hatred over human devaluation of the environment.

The Body’s End: A Return to Nature Upon Mental & Physical Trauma

Devalued environments are vividly expressed in Tolkien’s Dead Marshes, an abject environment devastated by human intervention. The devastating personal and ecological effects of war have often been analyzed in comparison to Tolkien’s work due to his experience as a soldier during the Great War and subsequent work in writing The Lord of the Rings as a war story. In response to questions about the influence of war on his writing of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien is quoted in the compilation The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien as having said “Personally I do not think either war…had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes…owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme” (303). Rather than writing an allegory of the events that transpired during the war, Tolkien instead used the various wartime environments as inspiration for crafting not only the setting of The Lord of the Rings but also the psychological states of his various characters. In this way, Tolkien’s rich memory of the wartime environmental landscape suggests that the environment has the power to drastically affect the human psyche, revealing the strong affinity between humans and the environment; this affinity can result in human emotional and psychological devastation that occurs in tandem with environmental destruction. Such effects are best seen during Frodo and Sam’s journey from the peaceful Shire to their eventual crossing through the Dead Marshes, an area suggestive of the negative impact that trench warfare had on the western environment. The Dead Marshes are similar to the trenches in that they both function as abject wetland spaces, eventually losing material integrity as they become “neither strictly land nor water” (Giblett 3). Reading the Dead Marshes in The Two Towers and trenches as wetland spaces through a lens of Rod Giblett’s Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology, and tracking the emotional response to such spaces using Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory ultimately shows that when environmental landscapes are made abject and destroyed, this devastates not only the environment itself but also the human psyche.

Frodo and Sam’s emotional response to the Dead Marshes is drastic since the area’s nature as abject, destroyed wetland space starkly contrasts with their home in the Shire, an idealized natural environment. Frodo is “in love with the Shire” a diverse and thriving environment containing “woods and fields and little rivers” (32). The Shire is constantly represented as a flourishing and vibrant environment, such as when it is described as “fresh…the new green of Spring was shimmering in the fields and on the tips of the tree’s fingers” (45). Tolkien’s imagery of the Shire in springtime evokes a sense of renewal and rebirth, with the description of “new green” implying the Shire is an innocent, young, and safe environment for the hobbits. The Shire’s innocence and the color green effectively establish its function within the text as pastoral, a term defined in Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard as “the idea of nature as a stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies” (63). Tolkien creates the Shire as not only a stable environment but an alive one, as his description of the space as “shimmering” suggests a bright vitality while his personification of the trees makes them lively, individual agents in the text. The Shire’s environment thus holds a dual function in the text, as it represents a safe space with an unchanging nature that Frodo can rely on, while simultaneously establishing the environment as composed of a multitude of vibrant, lively characters, rather than passive matter.

Although the Shire is a vibrant space regardless of human intervention, its “green” innocence and function as pastoral lead the hobbits to preside over it as owners of an environment they perceive to be stagnant and passive. Since the hobbits think of the Shire as a place that can never be corrupted, they consider it an environment that can be relied on to remain unchanging in the future. Upon hearing of the danger encroaching upon the boundaries of the Shire, Frodo tells the elf Gildor, “I knew that danger lay ahead, of course; but I did not expect to meet it in our own Shire” (82). Here, Frodo claims ownership of the Shire as he refers to it as his “own,” and is fearful over the environment becoming corrupted, because this would conflict with not only the Shire’s innocence but also with Frodo’s continued dominion over the space. A loss of the Shire’s innocence would reflect a failure of Frodo’s role as owner and conservator, as he tells Gandalf before their journey, “I should like to save the Shire, if I could,” characterizing the Shire as a helpless, passive space that he must preserve (61). Frodo’s statement here reflects issues concerning the pastoral and “green,” which Jeffrey Jerome Cohen states in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green as having “become our synonym for sustainability” (xx). According to Cohen, “green” “too frequently signifies a return, however belatedly, to the verdancy of an unspoiled world, to whatever remnants of a lost paradise might be reclaimed” (xxi). Much like the pastoral, the Shire’s “green” innocence results in a perception of the environment needing protection; this helplessness leaves the environment open for humanity to “reclaim” an idealized state of the environment and find pleasure in both the aesthetics and nostalgia of a “green” space.

While thinking of the Shire as a passive environment, Frodo cannot fully acknowledge the independent vitality of the Shire, or its history and identity outside of those who currently preside in it—the hobbits. As much as Frodo loves the Shire, and wishes to remain close to it physically and emotionally, his self-identification as conservator and savior of the Shire fulfills Cohen’s explanation of the problematic relationship that “green” thinking creates between humans and the environment: “green readings have a tendency to reproduce…a split between nature and culture that can lead to analyses stressing anthropocentric and detached concepts like stewardship, preservation, and prescriptive modes of environmental management” (xx). By wanting to save the Shire, Frodo actually creates a division between himself and the space because he idealizes the environment rather than acknowledging its independence. This is affirmed by Gildor, who tells Frodo, “But it is not your own Shire…others have dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more” (82). Gildor’s description of the Shire’s history, it’s identity before the hobbits, and the environment’s longevity as it will outlive the hobbits reaffirms the liveliness of the Shire by showing the environment can never truly be understood by the hobbits. The Shire’s agency is thus muted by Frodo, who is not forcibly made aware of environmental agency until his journey, especially so during his time traversing the Dead Marshes.

While the hobbits still remain in the Shire, Tolkien establishes the ability of the environment to intensely affect the emotions of people, as Frodo’s emotions are transformed when he is positively affected by the perceived innocence of the Shire. Upon learning of his role in the war “Frodo was a good deal disturbed…but his uneasiness wore off and in the fine weather he forgot his troubles…The Shire had seldom seen so fair a summer, or so rich an autumn: the trees were laden with apples, honey was dripping in the combs, and the corn was tall and full” (66). Tolkien again uses imagery of the seasons to present the Shire as an idealized environment, as the farming seasons of summer and autumn suggest growth and prosperity. However, autumn amplifies the idealized state of the Shire, as the “fair” and “rich” seasons are to quickly transform into winter, a season opposing the qualities that make summer and autumn so idyllic. Time and the transience of the seasons lead Tolkien to not only solidify the capability of the Shire to positively affect Frodo but also to over-emphasize this positivity through the abundance of crops. The use of terms such as “laden,” “dripping,” and “full” suggest an overwhelming, almost excessive nature in the environment, while the crops themselves symbolize the consumption of food and the pleasure derived from such consumption, making the autumn season in the Shire a time of gratification and happiness. This gratification is idealized with the sweet crops of apples and honey as Tolkien stresses the importance of Frodo’s finding pleasure in the Shire at this specific moment, as the approaching winter would not see such prosperity of crops. The excessive nature of the crops suggests that the land of the Shire is incredibly fertile, reinforcing the environment’s health, which positively impacts Frodo’s mood; the scenery heals his uneasiness, translating the Shire’s identity as comforting, healthy, and innocent onto Frodo’s feelings. The Shire’s identity ultimately functions as a source of optimism for Frodo, as he justifies his eventual departure by stating “I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again” (61). His statement evokes Garrards description of the pastoral function as “a harmonious vision of rural independence and fortitude that hides a harsh world” since Frodo believes the Shire’s innocence and the positive affect he receives from it will shield him from the experiences that may be unbearable in his travels (45). However, as Frodo is confronted with the Dead Marshes, he experiences an erasure of the positivity created by the Shire, and an ironic loss of firm, healthy land.

Frodo and Sam face the opposite of the Shire’s healthy, stable land when they arrive before the Dead Marshes, as they see a muddied environment that is not ideal, living, or prosperous; rather, the marshes represent a hellish opposition to the innocent and thriving Shire as they are described by Sam as “evil-smelling fens” (611). Sam’s association of the marshes with a malicious nature conforms to the tradition of associating wetlands with “death and disease, the monstrous and the melancholy” (Giblett 3). The association of wetlands with an evil, monstrous nature imbues the Dead Marshes with an active agency in opposition to the hobbits and their goal. This same antagonistic environmental agency is described by Alysson Booth in Postcards from the Trenches, where she states that in the trenches “land was treacherous; dirt was liable to become mud or quicksand or water into which you could be sucked or trapped; it represented potential drowning, suffocation, immobilization” (61). In her description of the trenches as treacherous, Booth personifies the land, suggesting that environments consisting of mud and water actively work to inhibit the human body. The association of water with drowning shows a fear of uncontrollable natural spaces and affirms Giblett’s association of wetlands with death, as these spaces have the capability to end human life. While the Dead Marshes act as a hellish environment with personified, individual agency, their animacy results in a heightened ability to affect the hobbits psychologically and physically.

Describing the Dead Marshes as diseased suggests a poisoned atmosphere, a characteristic implicit in the physicality of the land; however, the diseased state of the land also begins to poison Frodo’s mindset, as he is negatively affected by the decay around him. When the hobbits first look out toward the marshes, Tolkien describes the scene by writing “Night was gathering over the shapeless lands before them; the sickly green of them was fading to a sullen brown” (589). Tolkien uses vague terminology with the words “gathering,” “shapeless,” and “fading,” which each reiterate the formlessness of the Dead Marshes while highlighting their vibrancy as these terms show the environment’s capacity for transformation. Rather than the colorful imagery of the crops, fields, and trees of the Shire, the marshes are cast into darkness, both due to the time of night and because of the dead surrounding greenery; this darkness contrasts with the Shire (where Frodo felt safe and held a powerful role in relation to the environment) and makes the marshes an area over which Frodo cannot have control due to the environment’s individuality and lively, changing state. As Frodo cannot fully see the environment, he cannot entirely understand it either, which suggests that the antagonism represented by the marshes is not due to the environment itself, but due to the inability of the hobbits to control it. The land is devoid of any individual growths of nature until the hobbits come across “a few gnarled and stunted trees,” but even these growths are described as diseased and unappealing, lacking the fertility of the Shire (591). This negative atmosphere quickly affects Frodo as he comes to think of crossing through the marshes as his “doom” and he admits “I am tired, Sam. I don’t know what is to be done” (590). Just as he adopted the positive feelings evoked from the Shire’s environment, Frodo similarly translates the shapelessness of the marshes’ environment into his own emotional state, as he begins to feel aimless, lacking energy, motivation, and purpose. The power of the environment’s hold on Frodo’s emotions speaks to what Giblett describes as “the low poisonous, decidedly unhealthy wetland” in that, the marshes are both actually poisonous in their state as diseased, leading to an absence of growth in the land, but are figuratively (and affectively) poisonous as well, as they corrupt Frodo’s positive mindset (3).

Frodo is similarly affected by the smell of the Dead Marshes, which drastically affects and alters his senses, similar to the effects of the trenches on the senses of soldiers. Fussell describes the trenches as having “The stench of rotten flesh…over everything…you could smell the front line miles before you could see it” (49). Just as the sense of smell became a hindrance and source of disgust for the soldier, the hobbits are also disgusted by the stench issued from the Dead Marshes. Tolkien writes: “The reek of them came to their nostrils, heavy and foul, even in the cool night air” (606). Tolkien reinforces the totality with which the soldiers were overwhelmed by the stench of bodies rotting in the mud of trenches as the hobbits never receive a reprieve from the stench. Fussell continues to state that “To be in the trenches was to experience an unreal, unforgettable enclosure and constraint, as well as a sense of being unoriented and lost” (51). Fussell’s description of feelings such as constraint, disorientation, and disgust over smell show the soldier’s lack of control over their bodily faculties and over the environment, illustrating the totality with which the atmosphere consumed human body and mind. The hobbits’ description of the stench as foul is similar to Fussell’s description of the trenches smell as rotten: both represent a decayed environment, eventually leading to similarly damaged psyches.

Such constraint due to environmental factors makes the hobbits’ experiences similar to the physical hardships of soldiers; the atmosphere is described by Gollum as being comprised of “mists, nice thick mists” that enclose the hobbits within an environment that limits their sight and movement (611). The marshes come to be perceived as an antagonistic space to the hobbits, as they work against their health when “The air, as it seemed to them, grew harsh, and filled with a bitter reek that caught their breath and parched their mouths” (617). In this subtle manner, the atmosphere prohibits the function of the hobbits’ basic physical necessities and leaves them craving water, the very substance working against them. The degeneration of his health leaves Frodo feeling “weary, weary to the point of exhaustion…he walked like one who carries a load, the weight of which is ever increasing; and he dragged along slower and slower” (616). Frodo’s physical weakness reaffirms the environment’s diseased state, as the ingestion of the air negatively manipulates the interiority of Frodo’s body. While trudging through the wetland, Frodo’s agency and abilities are slowed and constrained, showing that, although the marshes represent an antagonistic environment to the hobbits, all environments—those considered innocent and peaceful like the Shire and those perceived as negative such as the Marshes— possess agency and the ability to affect.

Frodo feels emotionally weighed down due to the effect the environment has on his health, but also due to the physically oppressive nature of the mud in the marshes; these effects break down the integrity of the hobbits’ identities as they find themselves becoming similar to Gollum, who is perceived as abject throughout the text. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines abject as “that which is opposed to I” (1). Gollum represents an opposition to the hobbits, because, while he is described by Gandalf as originally being “of hobbit-kind,” he is different from the hobbits as his physicality is one of degeneration caused by his possession by the Ring (51). Initially, Gollum is the only one who becomes overwhelmed with mud, seen as “his fingers and face were soiled with black mud” (610). Since he is soiled with mud, Gollum becomes tainted, an impure figure, adopting the evil characteristics of the marshes. Due to his impurity, Sam calls him a “nasty creature” and “poor wretch” (610). The term “nasty” suggests Sam is disgusted by Gollum while “poor” suggests a sympathy, even tenderness, toward him; this complex understanding of Gollum reflects the complexity of the marshes as they are simultaneously abject and lively (610). Gollum is quick to lose his physical integrity and status as person due to the mud, an action descriptive of Santanu Das’s understanding of the “aggressive agency of trench mud…blurring the boundaries of the body and confusing the categories of subject and object” (45). Sam begins to objectify and dehumanize Gollum due to his close proximity to the mud.

Gollum’s abject state is amplified as Frodo and Sam perceive him as having a close affinity with the mud, and thus sharing the mud’s negative characteristics as evil and malicious. However, the hobbits themselves lose their own bodily integrity as they too become covered by the mud: “Often they floundered, stepping or falling hands first into waters as noisome as a cesspool, til they were slimed and fouled almost up to their necks and stank in one another’s nostrils (614). The hobbits must rethink their personal and physical identity as the agency of the malicious environment overwhelms them physically and makes them abject like Gollum. Just as Gollum is aligned with the negative characteristics of the marshes, the hobbits too adopt the stench of the mud and are imbued with the aspects of the environment that created their feelings of disgust toward it. Sam specifically is described as falling in the marshes, during which he “came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled” (613). Describing the marshes as hissing with lights reflects the liveliness of the marshes, despite its abjection and the hobbit’s perception of it as unpleasant. Such liveliness reflects Mel Chen’s description of animacy: “Matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly or otherwise ‘wrong’ animates cultural life in important ways” (2). The deathly and “wrong” environment of the marshes breaks down the divide between the hobbits and Gollum, as they are confronted with the fragility of their own bodies and understanding of the environment.

Just as Chen describes the importance of acknowledging the animacy of matter, not only in pleasing environments like the Shire but also in environments such as the Dead Marshes that are perceived as negative or “wrong,” the liveliness of both environments in The Lord of The Rings shows the vibrancy of all environments, as they all have the capability to affect humans, and be affected by them. The Dead Marshes are eventually described by Gollum as being the burial sites for many corpses that are “All dead. All rotten” from a “great battle many years ago” (614). In this way, the destruction of the environment that created the Dead Marshes is explained as being due to human intervention, showing the way humans also affect the environment. This cycle of effects affirms the close relationship between the environment and the human, who each have the ability to change and transform one another.

Discovering Wonder: Deconstructing Anthropocentrism and Rebuilding Human Relationships with the Environment through Storytelling

After completing his journey, Frodo returns to the formerly perceived innocent, safe Shire and realizes that the events of his journey—and the war in Middle Earth—have altered his psyche and the Shire’s environment irreversibly. As Frodo describes in The Return of the King, “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me,” Tolkien effectively breaks down the pastoral as Frodo admits that he has changed; he no longer feels ownership over the Shire or that he has a place in it, as he acknowledges that the Shire will exist without him after he leaves it (1006). In breaking down the pastoral, Tolkien forces Frodo, and us readers, to similarly reconsider our knowledge of the environment, and our place within it. Frodo’s altered relationship with the Shire speaks to the way in which the genre of fantasy creates a space for breaking down anthropocentric ideas of having knowledge of and control over the environment, because works of fantasy depend on the construction of new worlds, ones in which the readers are unfamiliar, and thus, must adopt a new position as a learner and outsider. Repositioning the readers allows for a reexamination of nature as these texts reveal the impossibility of having total control over, and knowledge of, the environment. Tolkien’s fantasy ultimately shows the power of storytelling in deconstructing harmful attitudes of hubris towards the environment as the texts instead instate a reverence for nature to show that an appreciation for the environment is a key source of hope for improving human relationships with nature.

Readers of fantasy are forced to imagine a new world, one they cannot control or entirely know. Such uneasiness reflects an issue with anthropocentrism, as this same lack of knowledge exists toward our own environment, yet human hubris assumes knowledge in order to justify control. Tolkien forces his readers to entirely relinquish knowing an environment when Frodo enters Lothlórien, as he and the fellowship must walk through the forest blindfolded. The loss of sight impairs the fellowship’s awareness of the environment, as they are forced to rely on their other senses and are thus unable to describe the environment as it physically appears to them. Rather, they depend on the way the environment feels and the way it affects them in order to understand it: “They felt the ground beneath their feet smooth and soft, and after a while they walked more freely, without fear of hurt or fall. Being deprived of sight, Frodo found his hearing and other senses sharpened” (340). The fellowship realizes the close proximity humans always have with the environment as they touch the “smooth and soft” ground, and soon develop a balance of trust with the environment as, although blindfolded, they walk freely. This freedom suggests that pleasure can be derived in experiencing nature, a thought that Ursula K. LeGuin reaffirms when she states, “Fantasy’s green country is one that most enter with ease and pleasure” (65). Rather than feeling uneasy over his loss of sight, and thus control, Frodo and the reader are imbued with similar feelings of comfort, learning to trust the environment as he walks freely through Lothlórien without fear —such freedom speaks to a need for relinquishing human hubris and knowledge. Matthew Dickerson cites poet Robert Siegel’s idea that “Tolkien finds that looking closely at nature can help one climb outside of himself and gain a sharp, contemplative awareness of the world” and, more specifically, of the environment (108). In Tolkien’s text, Frodo and the fellowship are able to affirm a close bond with nature and eventually realize its agency and liveliness by not looking closely, but being close to it. Here, fantasy shows its work as a subversive genre as the text ultimately reveals that human nature must relinquish control and knowledge—as Siegel states, climb “outside of himself” so as to better understand oneself and nature.

By depending on the senses of touch, smell, and sound to discover a world and the environment, Tolkien establishes the importance of having a “sense of wonder” over nature by forcing the fellowship, and readers, to relinquish control and knowledge over the entire space of the environment and instead feel the vibrancy of individual aspects of it (Brawley 293). Chris Brawley posits that “The sense of wonder at the world Tolkien describes as enchantment…can help us revise our ways of viewing the world around us” (293). Tolkien creates a sense of wonder for readers in Lothlórien as Frodo initiates a relationship with this environment from a role stripped of power by experiencing and basking in the sensory experience of walking through the forest: “He could smell the trees and the trodden grass. He could hear many different notes in the rustle of the leaves overhead, the river murmuring away on his right, and the thin clear voices of birds in the sky. He felt the sun upon his face and hands when they passed through an open glade” (340). By depending on hearing, smelling, and touching, Frodo becomes more intimate with nature while in Lothlórien, and readers are similarly invited into this intimacy as Frodo reveals the all-consuming presence of the environment as he is physically surrounded by its various lively parts. The spatiality of birds and leaves overhead places Frodo beneath the environment, showing his minuteness compared to the natural processes of the world. Describing the leaves and birds speaks to the multiplicity and liveliness of the environment, multiplicity Frodo can only realize through this sensory experience as he becomes aware of the minutia which comprise the environment. Tolkien’s description of feeling sun on one’s body suggests a sense of warmth and pleasure, one that is reinforced by Lothlórien’s abundance of glimmering “golden flowers” (341). Warmth and gold suggest that abandoning a desire for control over the environment can lead to deriving pleasure from the environment. Ultimately, Frodo’s sensory experience reveals a physical state of insignificance compared to the environment, which reflects humanity’s shared insignificance. However, by relinquishing assumed knowledge about the environment, one can find pleasure in it.

Tolkien further reveals the insignificance of humanity in comparison to nature by deconstructing human exceptionalism and human feelings of having control over nature during moments in the text when nature imbues characters with fear and dread. At these times, Tolkien employs Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger…whatever is in any sort terrible…is the source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (33-34). Oftentimes, environments perceived by characters as negative affect characters the most as they strip away human conceptualizations of control over the environment, forcing the characters and readers to reconfigure previously conceived notions of nature. Merry performs such a reconfiguration as he travels through the mountains of Gondor in The Return of the King. During this journey, Merry “looked out in wonder upon this strange country…It was a skyless world, in which his eye, through dim gulfs of shadowy air, saw only ever-mounting slopes, great walls of stone behind great walls, and frowning precipices wreathed with mist” (774). The overwhelming vastness of nature is illustrated through Tolkien’s description of the mountains as “ever-mounting,” and “great,” which make Merry small and insignificant in comparison. The lost sky reflects a loss of light and descent into darkness, which is revealed when Merry describes the mountains as covered in mist; this mist acts as a barrier between Merry and the mountains, so he cannot fully see, and therefore, understand them—much like Frodo in Lothlórien.

Overwhelmed by the darkness and vastness of the mountains, Merry begins to feel weighed down by the sublime of nature; here, fantasy works as subversive by forcing Merry and the reader to reconsider idealized and often inaccurate conceptualizations of nature. Tolkien writes that Merry “loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by the fire” (774). Here, Merry’s conceptualization of mountains on the “edge” of stories suggests the passivity of mountains, and nature in general; in such stories, mountains are not described as overwhelming and are thus sidelined as mere pleasurable descriptions of landscape. Sidelining the mountains in stories presents mountains and nature as existing on the periphery of human life. Tolkien deconstructs this by making Merry feel “borne down” or oppressed by Middle-earth due to the mountains: nature moves from the periphery to the central focus of humanity, forcing readers to confront the omnipresence of nature. Merry’s desire to “shut out the immensity” of the mountains in a room suggests that, unless one actively isolates oneself from nature entirely, nature can be overwhelming, unpleasant, and frightening entity.

Describing nature as a presence to be afraid of contrasts against the overwhelming yet pleasurable state of Lothlórien; in this way, Tolkien shows the duality of nature, illustrating fantasy’s value in representing such duality. Conflicting representations of, and feelings about, nature in fantasy are described by Richard Matthews who states “Fantasy enables us to enter worlds of infinite possibility. The maps and contours of fantasy are circumscribed only by imagination itself. The breathtaking sweep of its scope can be awesome and even frightening” (1). Matthews accurately describes Merry’s reaction to the mountains: it is fearful and, therefore, reflective of the sublime. According to Burke,“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature…is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (47). Tolkien reflects this suspension of motion when he describes Merry as follows: “He sat for a moment half dreaming, listening to the noise of water, the whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound” (774). Merry enters a dream-like state of suspension after becoming fearful of the mountains, astonished over the difference between how he had previously considered mountains and the way they actually are. While Tolkien created Lothlórien in order to reveal how humanity can derive pleasure from the environment if human exceptionalism is relinquished, Tolkien conversely uses fear and awe to show readers the mastery of nature, and the ability for nature to transform human emotion and understanding.

Tolkien uses similar feelings of awe in describing Lothlórien, although this awe is positive as he attempts to make this environment a state of peaceful nature that once existed in our own world but has become corrupted over time. Lothlórien’s state of wonder incites positive affects for both Frodo and the readers and reveals the pleasure to be found in reconsidering relationships with the environment. Frodo ponders, “It seemed to him that he had stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more” (340). Here, Frodo mourns the loss of a time in which the world in its entirety was similar to that of Lothlórien, a time in which people and nature had closer relations. Le Guin describes this mourning and nostalgia by saying that natural environments of fantasy “imply that modern humanity is in exile, shut out from a community, an intimacy it once knew. They do not so much lament, perhaps, as remind…us of what we have denied, what we have exiled ourselves from” (86). Tolkien reveals that “Frodo stood still, hearing far off great seas upon beaches that had long ago been washed away, and sea-birds crying whose race had perished from the earth” to remind readers of the way nature has been lost and reshaped due to human intervention over time (342). In this way, fantasy works to remind readers of the way our world and nature have been manipulated and transformed due to human hubris. As Le Guin states, “withdrawing from the Industrial Revolution and Modern Times, the fantasy story is often set in a green, underpopulated world of towns and cities surrounded by wilderness” (86). She shows that fantasy actively works to strip away feelings of human hubris and knowledge by removing modernity and technology from these worlds and instead focusing on nature. Tolkien upholds Le Guin’s notions about fantasy by reestablishing the pleasure and wonder to be found in nature, which are then later mourned by the readers when modern society’s loss of kinship with and appreciation for the environment reflects itself in the text.

As Tolkien works to enchant the environment, reveal its wondrous state to readers, and lead readers to lament the way nature has changed—or been lost—over time, he implores readers to cultivate the ability to appreciate the environment in and of itself, rather than as a means of human industrialization and progress. The issue of progress is cited by Jane Bennett who claims that “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (ix). To combat thinking of nature as matter, Tolkien describes the materiality of trees in Lothlórien as animate and lively. He writes:

[Frodo] laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and the texture of the tree’s skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester or carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself (342).

The intimacy here between Frodo and the tree allows Frodo to acknowledge the life within the tree. Since Frodo touches the tree while on the ladder, Tolkien creates a visual in which Frodo has risen from the ground (a position in which the trees’ vastness emphasizes his insignificance) to place him and the tree side by side as equals. In this scene, Tolkien achieves his concept of recovery:“Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a regaining—regaining of a clear view… “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness” (19). Tolkien achieves recovery in Lothlórien, as Frodo realizes that establishing a relationship of equality with nature is pleasurable. Rather than appropriating and using the tree for his own means (such as a forester or carpenter would), Frodo takes pleasure in the tree’s simple existence, it’s unique materiality, and liveliness. Through Lothlórien, Tolkien uses fantasy to show readers how possessiveness is unnecessary, and futile, for understanding nature. As Frodo lays “his hand upon the tree,” a passive, gentle action, he signifies the trees independence. Feeling the tree’s bark leads readers to rethink our own familiarity with trees and nature; in this way, Tolkien and fantasy effectively ask readers to clean our own windows, and strive for recovering relationships with nature, in which relinquishing possessiveness and acknowledging liveliness and independence of the environment is essential.

Tolkien’s work of fantasy is riddled with complexity in depicting nature and our relationship with the environment. Tolkien depicts nature as both pleasurable and fearful, each forcing humanity to question our preconceived understandings of nature. Le Guin states, “Fantasy is construction of meaning,” and, as such, Tolkien’s fantasy works to deconstruct and rebuild meaning for nature and our perceptions of the environment (85). As Haldir tells the fellowship in Lothlórien, “the world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater” (339). This statement describes the complexity of nature, which consists of “good” and “bad” environments that each hold a multitude of entities and imbue people with a variety of contrasting feelings. Haldir’s words reflect the hope that can be found for the environment in fantasy as a variety of places both light and dark comprise the environment; this duality is essential to the vibrancy of the environment, and fantasy works to help humanity recover an appreciation for such vibrancy. As Treebeard states at the end of the series after planting new trees in the destructed landscape of Isengard, “The world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air” (959). Just as the environment is always transformative and constantly changing, so does fantasy work to transform meaning and change human perceptions of nature and the environment.

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Works Cited

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Queering Satan: The Politics of Sex, Gender, Visibility, and Fear in Paradise Lost

Posted on June 5, 2018November 1, 2022 by

By Jennifer Kaplan

For millennia, Satan has been a popular model for representing transgressive forces. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan is a dynamic character—at once visible and invisible, manifest and ephemeral, masculine and feminine. By analyzing competing Protestant and folkloric interpretations of the Devil’s relationship to invisibility and visibility, interpreting the changing views of both gender roles and biological sex in the seventeenth century, and examining the relationship between demonology and gender, I establish that Milton’s Satan is “queered” through his subversion of socially enforced binaries. Throughout the text, Milton both plays off of and against contemporary satanic cultural motifs. Ultimately, his radical reinterpretation creates a Satan who exists as a transgressor against contemporary notions of gender and sexuality.

Satanic tropes and caricatures that have existed in England for centuries focus primarily on visibility and the grotesque, with later interpretations retaining Satan’s deformity while freeing him from the restraints of corporality. Milton reinterprets these historical depictions to render his Satan as a transgressive, inherently gendered and sexualized force in Paradise Lost. The pre-Miltonic Satan of sixteenth century and medieval folklore existed as a chaotic bricolage of repressed and actualized social anxieties. In both artwork and literature, Satan possessed “both human and animal traits” and had the ability to appear as either “a young man or woman,” thus manifesting in a naturally transgressive form that challenged the contemporary gender dichotomy and was further striking for its deviance from conventionally appealing standards of appearance (Oldridge 232). For example, Satan could “transform” himself from an aesthetically acceptable form, such as that of a “handsome man,” into something grotesque, such as “a hideous beast” (Oldridge 243). It is the visible that distinguishes Satan as a force of evil, and more specifically an embodied visibility: alternately gendered, sexualized, humanized, and animalized, and sometimes all at once. Through these transformations, Satan is defined by his visibility and its consequential grotesqueness. By contrast, the Protestant Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century saw Satan radically reconceptualized as an invisible, disembodied force—notions with which Milton would have also been familiar, and which freed his Satan from the restrictions of physical form (Oldridge 236).

Within Paradise Lost, there is a distinctive tension between Satan’s visible and invisible nature: as Milton phrases it, a tension between his linkage to the solid “Earth” and to the amorphous “Air,” a curiosity regarding physical form that plays off of the premodern idea of the Devil as being able to possess “the mind of the faithful through manifold appearance” coupled with a power for endless machinations via formlessness (Milton 4.940; qtd. in Dendle 30). In Puritanical narratives discussing Satan’s prowess for invisible machinations, Satan has moved beyond the restrictions of being “bodied” and into the realm of the invisible and omnipresent, in what may be deemed an antipodal, evil subversion of God’s omnipotence (Oldridge 235). Yet, even when the Puritanical Satan works in the shadows, he is still inherently linked with the visible realm, projecting visions of himself as an “agent of personal temptation” to sin in every possible way—including temptations into adultery (Oldridge 235). For the notion of Satan as “tempter” links him with the age-old idea of the “temptress.” In the scene where Satan first tempts Eve in a dream, she has “dream’d” his “gentle voice,” which is disembodied from Satan and in her mind associated with Adam (Milton 5.32, 5.37). When he does appear to her, he takes the form of an angel, “One shap’d and wing’d like one of those from Heav’n / By us oft seen; his dewy locks distill’d Ambrosia.” (Milton 5.55). Yet, here he is not physically manifest, but “a dream,” mere ephemera existing between the physical and the imagined (Milton 5.57). Whether he chooses to take this form within Eve’s mind or Eve conjures this image herself is left ambiguous.If it is his choice, it reveals Satan’s longing for an alternate body that, in comparison to his present grotesque form as a damned “Leviathan,” is simultaneously more sexualized and more appealing for epitomizing a specific gender ideal (Milton 1.201).

In incorporating both folkloric notions of a “visible” Satan and newer, Protestant notions of an “invisible” Satan, Milton creates a radical new characterization that both unites the two views and recombines them into something completely new. But even when Milton’s Satan works through “invisible” mechanisms, he is still inherently associated with visual descriptors. As Peter Dendle explains, ,medieval folklore and emerging Protestant ideologies created a paradox of the Devil as both embodied and disembodied: “On the one hand, Satan is personal, subject to spatiotemporal laws and thus confined to a single place at a given time; on the other, he is a spiritual entity of such inconceivable scope and power that he may be said to inhere in all sinners, and in all sins, throughout the world” (Dendle 24). This is a paradox that Milton seemingly resolves by combining these two abilities in his characterization of Satan—a reinterpretation of canon which is in and of itself a transgressive act.

Satan’s inherent visibility renders him “queer,” or “othered,” in juxtaposition with God, whose omnipresent invisibility defines him. God’s creations celebrate “th’invisible / Glory of him,” a divine being whose power resides in a lack of manifestation and an inability to be captured in words or images (Milton 1.369). By contrast, Milton’s Satan exists not only exclusively within variations of imagery, but in an imagery already warped—“transform[ed]” by his Fall, and transforming still, across binaries (Milton 1.370). Not given the luxury of passive invisibility, he exists purely in “Image”: that of “a Brute,” monstrous, manipulative, deceptive, due to the permeability of that image and its relational gender and sexuality (Milton 1.371–72). Satan exists as a representation of the “visible” while God is the true definition of invisibility—a masculine force, certainly, but neutrally masculine, at once disembodied and innately nonsexual, despite his characterization as a force of creation. As Lorraine Daston argues in her essay “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” the gendered notions of the “female sex” imply explicit visibility—through inevitable sexualization, objectification, and the performative act of childbirth—while maleness is associated with a certain flexible “invisibility,” or “neutral” masculinity (219). As Rousseau once famously stated, every aspect of femininity—but especially its visual aspects—“reminds woman of her sex” in the same way Satan’s refusal to conform to a single gendered form reminds Satan of his otherness, or queerness (qtd. in Daston 218). Thus, Satan becomes simultaneously feminized and queered in his association with visibility, especially when measured against God’s neutrally masculine invisibility. Satan is image. But for all the tension between Satan’s invisible and visible natures, aspects of Satan’s visibility contain a distinctive tension of their own—that between his bestial and idealized forms.

When he is acting in the “visible” realm, Satan often assumes a bestial appearance, which Milton implies is his natural form after his Fall from heaven; his bestial nature places him in a liminal space between sexuality and sexual dysfunction. With his first appearance in the text, he is known as “th’infernal Serpent,” far from human and further still from his ideal, “transcendent” form in heaven (Milton 1.34; Milton 1.86). He is now “in bulk as huge / As whom the Fables name of monstrous size, / Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr’d on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den / by ancient Tarsus held, or that Sea-beast / Leviathan, which God of all his works / Created hugest,” monstrous and existing outside of the animal kingdom that God will soon so carefully craft in heaven (Milton 1.196–202) But even in his subhuman form, he is simultaneously associated with an exaggerated male sexuality: the description of “His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast of some great Ammiral” imbues him with male virility; yet at the same time, Satan’s Fall from grace has damaged his sexuality, as his “Spear”—a distinctively phallic symbol—is now shrunken, flaccid, weak, “but a wand / He walkt with to support uneasy steps,” and is in “drooping” form, thus implying the Fall as a castration that in turn renders him impotent and androgynous, both via his weakened “Spear” and his current savage, sexually unappealing appearance (Milton 2.292–95, 2.328). Furthermore, it is while in this grotesque form that God uses Satan’s appearance to hold him prisoner under heaven’s patriarchal gaze. Satan speaks of how God and heaven “Transfix us at the bottom of this Gulf,” turning “transfix” into a double entendre that implies it is the act of being looked at by God that keeps him and the other demons trapped in Hell (Milton 1.329). Made too monstrous for heaven, Satan is trapped in Hell not only by his subhuman form, but also by the threat of God’s omnipresent gaze observing his every move.

Imbued with the power to shift his appearance at will, Satan sheds his bestial figure for a human form when he first enters the Garden of Eden, playing into the trope of the beautiful, evil tempter—or temptress. Yet he refuses to conform to a single appearance, instead existing at an intersection between human, bestial, and divine form—a transgressive act that threatens the careful set of binaries between male and female, animal and beast that God has heretofore established. We first see him in a partially animal state, “Squat like a toad” (Milton 4.800). Though it is ambiguous as to whether this implies his entire body has been transformed into that of a toad or he is merely in human form but crouching in a grotesque, inhuman position, either way the resulting visual is uncanny and monstrous. Yet, it is in this form that he is more explicitly sexualized than ever. “By his Devilish art,” he creeps near Eve and reaches towards “the Organs of her Fancy,” the latter an ambiguous phrase that implies both a nonconsensual entrance into Eve’s mind and her genitals (Milton 4.801–802). Here, Satan’s violation of Eve—one of God’s two ideal prototypes for the human race—challenges God’s authority on two counts: one, Satan has managed to corrupt Eve, despite her ideally feminine, innately human status and his ambiguously gendered, shiftingly monstrous existence, and two, this corruption calls into question God’s ability to enforce the (gendered, bestial) hierarchies that He has established.

In this same passage, Satan is both perpetrator and recipient of sexual violence, as the Angel Ithuriel brutalizes him in turn; however, it is Satan’s surprising reaction to this act that once again highlights his opposition to societal norms, particularly regarding sexual relations. “Touch’d lightly” by the angel’s ambiguously phallic “spear” as an admonishing act for trespassing in the Garden, Satan is symbolically sodomized. Yet, even during an act that in other contexts would be perceived as a violation, Satan becomes immediately aroused, ignited with a violent “spark” such as occurs when one “light[s] nitrous powder…Smutty grain / with sudden blaze diffus’d,” explosive imagery which implies an orgasm of rage (Milton 4.819, 4.810–17). The “Smutty” grain is sullied in both the literal and sexual sense; the emotional blast is at once paroxysm and a fiery surge of pleasure. Though it may be tempting to read this passage as an association between homosexuality and personal evil, one must understand that seventeenth-century English people regarded homosexuality much differently from their twenty-first-century counterparts. At that time, society viewed sodomy as a personal failing to which men from a variety of backgrounds might succumb. Sodomy was considered an isolated instance of vice, purely physical in nature, rather than linked to an inherent “flaw” in nature or character; such views wouldn’t emerge until a distinctive homosexual, or “Molly,” culture began in the early eighteenth century, well after the publication of Paradise Lost (Oldridge 307). However, the act of sodomy was still illegal during Milton’s time, so any implication of Satan as desiring acts of sodomy would still have been repulsive to English society at large.

When Satan enters the Garden a second time, it is through radical transformation that implies a different kind of disruptive sexuality rooted in performative gender expression. He adopts the form of a “serpent”—an obvious phallic image meant to tempt Eve (Milton 9.529). Satan further associates himself with male sexuality when he moves from being a “Serpent sleeping” to one “erect” once he is aware of Eve’s presence, thus both simulating and stimulating sexual arousal (Milton 9.162, 9.501). When he perceives Eve for the first time, he sees “Virtue in her shape how lovely” and “pin’d / His loss” when he cannot corrupt her (Milton 4.847–48). Whereas earlier he envies angels’ “Godlike,” masculine “forms” and bemoans the loss of his own “transcendent brightness,” he now yearns for the feminine ideal while still flaunting his virility, transforming both his gender and sexual appeal as an exercise in power and as a form of devilish “trickery” that mocks the strict gender binary that God has attempted to enforce in creating Adam and Eve (Milton 1.358, 1.86). Moreover, Satan not only desires Eve sexually; he also desires her very existence as his polar opposite: a creature of virtue and “Sanctitude,” in whom “the image of [her] glorious maker shon,” feminine in her physical “softness” and personal “Grace” (Milton 4.292–98). This is something that he himself—despite his transformative powers—longs to become but finds he cannot, either from self-restraint or a newfound limit to his transformative powers that traps him in a monstrous, bestial body, so he can only appear as idealized or divinely gendered forms in others’ dreams, but never in reality. Satan’s striking visibility is used to emphasize his evil nature—specifically, Milton’s Satan exists through a form of visibility that is both intrinsically gendered and made grotesque because of his refusal to conform to any specific morphology. This cautions readers that either engaging in lascivious sexuality or exploring beyond assigned gender roles within God’s carefully constructed gender binary would be socially and personally condemnable for its violation of God’s design.

The gender binary was of primary concern in seventeenth-century English culture, and Satan’s refusal to conform to its strict mandates reveals emerging social discord. In the years leading up to Paradise Lost’s publication, social and political forces intersected to create radical new notions of gender roles that solidified patriarchal oppression within English society, thus making Satan’s ambiguous relationship with gender all the more transgressive. Even within the social sphere, which had thus far seen radical reinterpretations of gender roles, the notion of sex stubbornly persisted as monolithic. As McKeon argues, in seventeenth-century England, “there [was] only one sex, and sex [was] a sociological rather than an ontological category,” and a more complex discourse on human sexuality wouldn’t emerge until the eighteenth century (301). Contemporary belief held that a given individual could become more feminine or more masculine depending on how they acted, rendering gender a performative act and the threat of aberrant behavior severe. Thus, Satan’s ability to transform across genders manifests the anxieties surrounding gender roles in Puritanical England.

On an even deeper level, divisiveness over gender difference in seventeenth-century England may be linked back to “internal affect and external enterprise, between the private and the public spheres,” which in turn relates back to the concepts of “maleness” and “femaleness” as a tension between the invisible and the visible, thus paralleling Satan’s own struggle in conforming to these spheres throughout Paradise Lost (McKeon 307). Because of the belief in gender fluidity, there was an underlying societal anxiety that anyone’s physical gender might shift at any given time; this process was reviled, a form of natural punishment for acting outside of gender norms, and thus something to be feared. These anxieties over gender performance and the threat of transformation are never more evident in Paradise Lost than when Milton’s narrator describes the androgynous nature of spirits:

For Spirits when they please

Can either Sex assume, or both; So soft

And uncompounded is their Essence pure,

Not ti’d or mannacl’d with joint or limb,

Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,

Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose,

Dilated or condens’t, bright or obscure,

Can execute their airy purposes,

And works of love or enmity fulfill. (Milton 1.421–430)

It is evident that “Spirits”—including Satan—are not restricted to exhibiting solely male or female characteristics. Unlike earthy, “cumbrous” humans (such as Adam and Eve), “Spirits” are not trapped within the primitive form of the gender binary that existed during the seventeenth century. They not only have the capability to “assume” the form of “either Sex,” but also the ability to completely transform outside any gendered form, instead existing as “pure” “Essence” that cannot be defined in physical terms. Most significantly, “Spirits” are not only able to transcend physical and gender expression; they also possess the power to choose to do so, implying a sense of agency that no other of God’s creations possess. Once more, however, this transformative ability is based on a heightened visibility. It is the spirits’ forms, not their nature, that are transformed, as they can only be described through their visible presences—as new forms “condens’t, bright or obscure,” defined by the degree to which they are perceivable rather than their ability to be or not be perceived—and thus they never exist completely outside of perception.

Finally, as Satan visibly transgresses the gender roles that God establishes, he defies societal expectations of patriarchal authority. While Satan’s exact relationship to God is never made explicit, in heaven he “didst outshine / Myriads” and was expelled for attempting to show he’d “equall’d the most High,” thereafter identifying himself as “The Adversary of God,” a purely relational epithet that challenges God’s omnipotence (Milton 1.86–87, 1.40, 2.629). In order to understand why this epithet is transgressive, one must consider seventeenth-century English society’s hierarchical structure. Milton’s time saw the rediscovery of Aristotle, and with it a new discourse on natural differences between men and women (Daston 213). Aristotelian philosophy emphasizes relational hierarchies, particularly within families wherein the male head of household—“the father, the husband, and the master”—is the natural superior; this is not unlike God’s assumed supremacy through His intertwined roles as “Father” of humanity and “Monarch” of heaven (McKeon 296; Milton 1.41–42). Satan, then, commits a transgressive act in subverting this hierarchy. He is deemed “rebellious” against “the will of Heav’n,” and is punitively transformed into the monstrous leviathan we encounter in Paradise Lost’s opening passages, his body made grotesque to visibly reflect his transgression, his physical appearance an aberration in the same way women’s bodies were viewed as “aberrations” of the male body within seventeenth-century biological hierarchy (Milton 1.71, 2.1025; McKeon 301).

In establishing himself as God’s “Adversary” and natural antithesis, Satan appears to create a binary of his own; but upon further analysis, it is evident that in Satan’s view he has not established a binary between “good” and “evil,” but rather one between servitude and freedom. Through establishing Hell outside of Heaven and its tyrannical and “all-powerful king,” despite the pain and suffering Satan endures for his transgression, he proclaims that “Here at last / We shall be free”—free from the “command[ing]” force of God and the strict control (and strict binaries) He enforces on Earth and heaven alike (Milton 1.258–260, 2.851). It is not God’s benevolence that repels Satan, but rather His insistence upon hierarchies establishing Himself as the supreme master. Thus, patriarchal authority is the true fount of Satan’s ire, and he is punished for defying it in the same way a woman or other person inferior to a male head-of-household would have been punished: through social exclusion.

Milton’s Satan exists at the intersection of a variety of transgressive historical and societal forces. The ambiguous nature of both his sexuality and his gender conflate him with the specific, omnipresent threat of “nonconformity” that haunted Protestant religious circles. In combining both folkloric and Protestant interpretations of satanic imagery, Milton presents a radical new version of Satan that both exists within and subverts established narratives on visibility, evil, sexuality and gender—a Satan whose primary challenge to God’s authority is his refusal to conform to the binaries that God establishes. Satan is image, image is sex, sex is power, and power is to be feared when in the possession of anyone outside of God and His patriarchal authority.

Works Cited

Daston, Lorraine. “The Naturalized Female Intellect.” Science in Context, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992, pp. 209–235. Cambridge.Org, doi:10.1017/S0269889700001162. Accessed 27 Apr. 2016.

Dendle, Peter. Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature. University of Toronto Press, 2001.

McKeon, Michael. “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760. Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, Spring 1995, pp. 295–322. Accessed 4 Apr. 2016.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Signet Classics, 1968.

Oldridge, Darren. “Protestant Conceptions of the Devil in Early Stuart England.” History, vol. 85, no. 278, April 2000, pp. 232–246. Accessed 4 Apr. 2016.

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Natural Selection to Neo-Darwinism: Societal Confrontations of Evolutionary Biology

Posted on November 25, 2017November 1, 2022 by

By Chris La Placa

The theory of natural selection first broke ground in the mid-Victorian era, describing the process by which individuals grapple with environmental selection pressures that will ultimately predict the taxonomic composition of the following generation. It was not until the “Modern Synthesis” of the 1930s and 1940s that these theories were adequately supplemented with Mendelian and population genetics, enriching their validity and popular reception in the academic realm. However, the implications of these research advancements were not always greeted with equal societal enthusiasm. Examination of primary and secondary sources from both the Victorian and the “Neo-Darwinism” eras seems to suggest that while the two eras endured reasonably similar amounts of scrutiny, the sources of these responses were not always consistent. This is to say that the public concern with evolutionary biology was initially rooted largely in scientific skepticism and defense of religious traditions, not immediately concerned with the social implications of science until the crude interpretation of the “Modern Synthesis” made an explicit attack on racial minority groups.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), despite its eventual contributions to evolutionary biology, is characterized by a speculative, theoretical voice that was widely considered unsound and provisional due to its absence of a reliable scientific framework. Its proposal of a non-Creationist emergence of modern humans nonetheless shocked the public both scientifically and religiously, warranting fervid objections on the grounds of genetics, geology, and creed. In an 1867 review of Origin, Fleeming Jenkin introduced the “swamping” argument, a view of adaptation and inheritance discounting the potential of genes in lower frequencies to be expressed in large populations where such phenotypes are absent; this idea neglected to account for the slow and gradual process of evolution proposed by Darwin (himself influenced by Lyell). Unchallenged by research in population genetics, which would later disprove Jenkin, this claim’s logical deficiencies fueled the popular skepticism of the theory of natural selection on a genetic basis (Aronova).

Similarly, in 1862, William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) employed thermal gradients in attempting to establish the age of the earth, argued in Origin to be conducive to billions of years of organismal adaptations — Thompson’s estimation of a maximum age of 100 million years deemed natural selection’s production of anatomically modern Homo sapiens impossible. However, this rebuttal was also flawed in its ignorance of the mechanics of solar convection, yielding a much younger age of the earth than truly accurate (Aronova). Finally, religious discordance grew abundant due to challenges to Creationism. Several responses archived by the Darwin Correspondence Project represent an overarching public disapproval of late-Victorian scientific publications, all of which undermined previous conceptions that human origins were divine rather than evolved from a lineage of nonhuman ancestors. While this discourse was productive in integrating evolutionary science into the public sphere, the era’s religious tradition prevented science from persuading preconceived theories pertaining to taxonomic variance. Scientific and religious objections to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection were rampant in the late 19th century and beyond; however, these arguments were primarily those of members of majority groups not targeted by the social implications of natural selection’s most contentious question: man’s place in nature.

Darwin’s Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) addresses this inquisition — the origins of human nature and behavioral ecology — through its elaboration on the theory of sexual selection, previously described as depending “not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring” (Origin 88). Sexual selection attempts to differentiate between opposing characteristics of the sexes that may be advantageous in ensuring maximum reproductive success, raising offspring to their own “alpha,” or age at first reproductive event. This theory describes men as releasers of physical and intellectual energy, physiologically katabolic, large-brained, intelligent, independent, eager, courageous, and passionate beings. Contrarily, women are cast as storers/conservers of energy, physiologically anabolic, nurturing, altruistic, constant, stable, commonsensical, and intuitive creatures. This bipolar model of gender roles, while accepted in the scientific realm, was socially detrimental and sizably criticized by members of a growing feminist community emerging not until the early 20th century.

The vanguard of this liberal sentiment was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, niece of abolition novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and author of The Man-Made World and Our Androcentric Culture (1911). Warranted by the socially-ignorant conclusions of sexual selection theorists, Gilman’s work confronted the dyadic gender roles and natural order proposed by Darwin, arguing that by seeking economic independence from men, women would be successful in restoring a sense of balance between the sexes. This attention to the negative consequences of scientific theory pertinent to human nature was scarcely, if at all, publicized until over five decades after Charles Darwin’s first major literary contribution. Dissimilarly, challenges to the scientific merit and ecclesiastical implications of the theory of natural selection surfaced nearly instantly. While it is true that the explicit controversy incited by Darwin’s work was the scientific origin of species, the biological parameters of gender inequality in society were not confronted with adequate zeal. This was a prominent characteristic of evolutionary science in the late-Victorian era — its implicit societal shortcomings were condoned while false scientific skepticism penetrated and permeated the public dialogue.

While his earliest literature transformed Darwin into a public figure nearly overnight, his esteemed scientific reputation was not void of social defamation. The 1930s and 1940s witnessed the genesis of the “Modern Synthesis,” unifying Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian and population genetics, and birthing a Neo-Darwinist view on human origins which accounted for heritability and adaptation. The genetic basis of so-called “new biology” was scientifically sound, yet grossly abused in its vast applications to non-hereditary organismal features. This ignorance can be attributed to research in eugenics, a genetic concept rooted in selective sheep breeding at Robert Bakewell’s farm in 18th century Leicestershire. His striking results inspired works such as Francis Galton’s influential Hereditary Genius (1868), which presented evidence for inheritance of mental traits among a human population. This research spiraled into a dark form of social control in Victorian England, in which it was believed that artificial selection should be used as a method for preservation of the status quo and hierarchy, breeding human beings like cattle based on physical and mental capability. Eugenics was further justified by the popular desire to remedy the perceived collapse of human society as a result of industrialization. Darwin’s ignorant claims regarding the laws governing heredity and variation did nothing to ameliorate the calamity of eugenics. Furthermore, a unanimous public displeasure with eugenics was invisible due to its benefits to a majority of individuals affected by its processes. This sentiment does not parallel that of those reacting to speculative biology of the 19th century, presumably due to the implementation of convincing genetic research into 20th century science, despite its misuse.

The credibility of eugenics did decline as a result of several factors, including the disadvantages of human subjects research, increasing knowledge and recognition of the multidimensionality of heredity, and the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. However, the crude interpretation of Mendelian theory in its application to non-hereditary characteristics persisted with the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975), a well-intentioned text seeking to unify social sciences with the physical sciences. Wilson and many others saw the application of biological principles in explaining social phenomena to be the logical continuation of the Neo-Darwinist trajectory, himself writing that “sociology should be reshaped in the same way that taxonomy and ecology…have been reshaped entirely during the past forty years by integration into the ‘Modern Synthesis’” (Wilson 4). While this movement optimistically aimed to synthesize scholarship from interdisciplinary origins, undertones of biological and genetic determinism ultimately tainted this goal. Wilson expresses that “the individual organism is only the ‘vehicle of the genes,’ part of an elaborate device to preserve and spread them[selves]” (Wilson 3). Similarly, Richard Dawkins wrote in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene that “we are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” (Dawkins). The unavoidably oppressive tones of these works seem to rob humans of their individuality and agency, assigning importance only to the perpetuation of genotypes and respective lineages. Regardless of its liberal intentions, the concept of sociobiology is inherently racist as it assigns normalcy to the primary population or culture in question, effectively othering all those who do not conform to this standard; like to eugenics, it employs Mendelian and population genetics in considering learned, rather than inherited qualities. Lacking a holistic view of sociality, sociobiology’s attempt to amalgamate biological and social sciences was a failure.

Unlike the delayed and relatively mild public response to the social implications of sexual selection, eugenics and sociobiology were confronted by ardent activism originating in the 1960s, characterized by the second wave of feminism, the rise of environmental agencies, anti-Vietnam war protests, and civil rights movements. Organizations such as the Union of Concerned Scientists assembled to protest the negative direction of science in the mid-late 20th century. This group exemplified liberal scientific activism, criticizing neither science nor government, but aiming to apply the vast aptitude of researchers in addressing societal epidemics such as poverty, malnourishment, urban decay, and environmental pollution (Francis Low, UCS Member). The Science for the People’s sociobiology study group, emerging in 1968, sought to combat the conservative politics of biological reductionism with the liberal ideal of “universalism” — this concept implies that individuals are afforded the same basic rights and have national and global responsibilities, rather than ethnic, political, or otherwise stratigraphic obligations. An increasingly multiculturalist agenda in the humanities was instrumental in ensuring the inclusion and representation of diverse and disenfranchised groups previously invisible in the racially-charged atmosphere produced by the works of Francis Galton and E.O. Wilson.

This underlying commitment to rejecting racism conjured up by advancements in evolutionary biology was a unique characteristic of the Neo-Darwinist era, unseen during past episodes of turmoil between society and the sciences. As understandings of the politics of human nature increased, so did the unifying climate of the Western world. Reliable scientific research emerged, describing that very few genetic nuances differentiate members of the same family; however, these individuals remain behaviorally and socially unique from one another. Similar ideas successfully denounced notions that behavior is heritable, that race has cognitive distinctions, and that certain cultures cannot escape imminent domination. The public response to the “Modern Synthesis” resulted in several fruitful modifications to previously acute tensions in society. This outcome is the product of criticism more focused on the subtle implications of biology and genetics, rather than the merit of the science itself.

Speculative 19th century evolutionary theory and Neo-Darwinism were similar iterations of biology in their ignition of societal retaliation in response to their use and misuse of scientific information. However, the foundations and magnitude of these retaliations were what characterized these periods. The response to Darwin’s early publications was largely critical of the absent scientific framework of his theories, and secondarily protective of the authenticity of divine origins of human beings. Not until half a century later did the public address gender inequality associated with the theory of sexual selection through the genesis of early feminist thought. Inversely, the “Modern Synthesis” saw itself under attack as early as the 1930s, as people began to discontinue their beliefs in eugenics. The analytical sentiment towards the notion of biological determinism holds momentum to this day, 2017 being a year in which eugenic thought has certainly resurfaced in the United States. The issues raised by scientific thought in the Victorian era certainly reemerged with the advent of Neo-Darwinism, and will likely persist due to an ever-changing concept of “human nature.”

Works Cited

Aronova, Elena. “Darwinian Revolution.” Fall 2016. Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or, the preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. J. Murray, 1859.

Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex. J. Murray, 1871.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1989.

Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. Watts & Co, 1892.

Gilman, Charlotte P. The Man-Made World: Or, Our Androcentric Culture. Source Book Press, 1970.

Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.

A World I Never Made: Dualism, Violence, and Sexuality in the Novels George Washington Goméz and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Posted on November 24, 2017November 1, 2022 by

By Francisco Olvera

Racial identity (and its formation) within the United States is an ongoing conversational theme, and given our recent election, a crucial one. If one looks at the history of the United States, it is apparent that its culture and society, at large, produces feelings of inferiority within people of color and other marginalized groups. In contribution to this conversation about the role U.S. society plays in the formation of racial identity, this paper conducts a close reading of two novels, written by Chicano authors, and structured as first-person narratives: George Washington Gomez by Américo Paredes and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta. In doing so, it seeks to answer the following questions: How do fictional Chicano males imagine their identity within a hegemonic white society? Furthermore, how does this hegemonic white society, built on years of racial hierarchy and division predicated on policies and practices of exclusion, shape and form Chicano masculinity? And finally, to bring it all together, how do these Chicano novelists portray the complexity of Chicano masculinity as reflective of a society and culture that denies their sense of identity and citizenship? The answer to these questions can be seen in the actions and reactions of the fictional characters within the novels. Although fictional, these characters are still able to illustrate, through their lives, the effects of a racist society. This is seen in intimate ways through questions of identity that revolve around fragmented episodes of sexual intimacy and tension, as well as acts of violence. Identity for the Chicano male thus becomes a place of fluid complexity. It is in this space where one comes to realize that we are not all just human beings attempting to survive the toils of daily life. Rather, some of us have histories stained by oppression; histories that still haunt and affect us today. So, while current reactionary critics on the political right make cases about the “vile” and “regressive” role that identity politics play in the United States, they lack a complex view of history that puts the onus of “identity politics” on policies and practices orchestrated by a white hegemonic state.

Practices of alienation and exclusion implemented by the United States directly affect people of color by limiting their social and economic opportunities. Furthermore, these practices construct visible and invisible divides in society which in turn create a racial hierarchy that privileges some at the expense of others. The effects of these divides appear in the areas of education, health, and freedom from imprisonment. The study of these specific areas, however, fails to expose and reveal the unique and individual psychological turmoil within racial subjects who inhabit and exist in a society of exclusion. Fiction allows for a more thorough examination into the turmoil experienced by these individuals. Through the close reading of George Washington Goméz by Américo Paredes, and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo by Oscar Zeta Acosta, this study will examine how these novels expose fragmented identities created by a culture of racial hierarchy and division, and how this fragmentation reflects itself through a complex Chicano masculinity in the central characters. This complex negotiation of masculinity appears in these novels in the areas of violence and sexuality.

One way to understand the relationship between a culture of racial hierarchy and masculinity is by understanding that this culture, through its very structure, renders Chicano identity inferior. Masculinity is an area in which fragmentation occurs if coupled with structural racial hierarchy. A fragmented Chicano masculinity can be defined as a reactionary way of being due to feelings of inferiority, and these reactions manifest in the treatment of women as inferiors in order to create within a façade of strength and power. Gloria Anzaldúa, writing about being a “macho” (a man), states, “for men like my father, being a ‘macho’ meant being strong enough to protect and support my mother and us, yet being able to show love” (Anzaldúa 105). Here Anzaldúa provides a positive account of what being a “macho” can mean and presents a figure of both strength and love. However, she later goes on to juxtapose this figure with her modern conception of a “macho,” one whose “machismo [masculine pride] is an adaptation to oppression and poverty and low self-esteem” and later adds that “in the Gringo world [which is to say the American world], the Chicano suffers from excessive humility and self-effacement, shame of self and self-deprecation” [emphasis added] (Anzaldúa 105). These factors fragment the sense and performance of masculinity in Chicanos, and thus, for Anzaldúa, “the loss of a sense of dignity and respect in the macho breeds a false sense of machismo which leads him to put down women and even to brutalize them” (105). This “false sense of machismo” creates a complex Chicano masculinity under the much larger Chicano identity.

A better way to understand this complex masculinity is to apply the term “double-consciousness” to the Chicano male experience. W.E.B. Du Bois states, “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (5). Like Anzaldúa, Du Bois understands the power the “American world” holds over shaping and defining the identity (a “consciousness”) of racial subjects. The other world, the “American world” only allows the Chicano male subject to see himself in the light of inferiority. This application of “double-consciousness” to the Chicano experience is helpful in order to understand the dichotomy between “normative” American identity (whiteness) and that of racial subjects, and how this dichotomy plays an important role in the shaping of racial identity and its subparts.

George Washington Goméz, a bildungsroman, begins with the birth of George Washington Goméz (also referred to as Guálinto), “born a foreigner on his native land…fated to a life controlled by others,” and follows him as he navigates the hostile early 20^th century in the border state of Texas. Symbolically, this location places Guálinto between two worlds which will collide throughout his life: the American and the Mexican. Masculinity, as a component of Chicano identity, appears and manifests itself in complex and fragmented ways. One way in which it does so is through violence. Violence in the novel is either absorbed by Guálinto and shapes him, or appears in the ways Guálinto expresses himself as a racial subject with a history of neglect. In the novel’s beginning Guálinto’s father is murdered by Texas Rangers, and on his deathbed asks his brother Feliciano (Guálinto’s uncle) not to tell Guálinto how he died for he does not want his son to feel hate (21). Feliciano, troubled by this, remarks how “it [will] be very hard to keep such a terrible truth from this male child” (Paredes 31). The early death of his father overshadows Guálinto as he grows up; for his father, a figure of masculinity, has been taken away by the same dominant force that years before took his native land (the proto-threat to Chicano identity). By denying Guálinto an important symbol of masculinity, the racial system of hierarchy and division which he inhabits begins to split and fragment his personal evolving identity.

Although Guálinto does not learn about his father’s death until much later in the novel, the hyper-violent ways in which he expresses himself in his youth reveal a subconscious understanding of the event which denied him a masculine figure crucial to his identity. An example of this appears when Guálinto begins to ask his uncle questions about what his father was like and what killed him. Feliciano lies and tells him he died of a heart attack, but he also informs him that his father was a gentleman (Paredes 101). Eventually, the talk leads to Feliciano revealing his personal antagonisms towards the “gringos” and he gives Guálinto a brief history of his people’s disenfranchisement in the hands of the “gringo” (Paredes 102). To all of this Guálinto responds, “‘Just wait till I grow up! Just wait till I’m a man! I’ll get our land back. I’ll be like Gregorio Cortez and Cheno Cortinas and all of them.’ He pulled out an imaginary gun. ‘Shoot them down like dogs. Ping, ping…I’ll kill all the Gringos and the rinches too, and drive them away from here” [emphasis added] (Paredes 103). Guálinto conflates manhood, and thus masculinity, with murder. He believes that one’s manhood grows through violence intended to affirm an illusionary sense of strength and power. Of course, one could argue that this is just a child with a big imagination, but to do so would undermine the violent state within which Guálinto lives and exists. His hyper-violent thoughts do not reflect a childhood imagination; rather, they reflect the world that has taken away his father and thus they affirm a brokenness which finds expression in false and vile conceptions of masculinity. They are simultaneously expressions of vulnerability and aggression. Double-consciousness returns here as an indication of what the U.S. dominant white world has placed upon Guálinto’s subjectivity: a history of violence which he then uses as his own vile defense.

The imposition of a racialized consciousness also affects Guálinto’s masculinity in the complexity of sexual tensions and desires. The heteronormative sexuality presented in these novels implies sexual relations and thus sexual reproduction. Matters of sexual reproduction become important when one considers how people are categorized as racial subjects, which is in part through their physical appearance. This is evident in an event that occurs towards the beginning of the novel where Gualinto is perceived as a white child due to his appearance. A Texas Ranger (a rinche) is aggressive towards Guálinto’s uncle and mother, asking them “Where’d [they got] that white child?…chico americano” (Paredes 32). Here, racial features are associated with national identity.

Questions surrounding sexual reproduction become more prominent as Guálinto grows up. After being involved in a knife fight in which he comes out victorious, people at a party who witnessed his fight invite him over. What follows is a hyperbolic celebration of his affirmed “masculinity.” The party he enters is a quinceañera, an important festivity in Mexican culture marking the passage from childhood to womanhood. In a way, this celebration acts as a mirror to his own passage into manhood. These events meld together and represent a larger rite of passage into adulthood for both the girl and boy, but this melding together also acts as an affirmation of Mexican-ness. Later Guálinto is taken care of by the birthday girl, dances with her and drinks alcohol (Paredes 246). It is in this setting, symbolic of Mexican culture, in which Guálinto appears to find himself. He embraces that his name “[is] and Indian name” and when an old man asks if it is Aztec, Guálinto affirms, stating, “you’re right” (Paredes 246). Guálinto perceives this old man as “an image in water,” which is to say, he sees a mirror in the old man (Paredes 246). As he leaves, Guálinto appears to have truly found himself, claiming that, “these were his people, the real people he belonged with. His place was among them, not the ‘Spaniards’ like the Osunas. He would marry Mercedes [the birthday girl] and live on the farm. He would go back. Tomorrow night he would go back” (Paredes 247). This scene ends, however, with “he never did [go back]” (Paredes 247).

Guálinto’s decision to select Mercedes is an undeniable sexual choice to affirm his identity as a Mexican subject. The role of women here is that of a pathway to a cultural self. Their potential unity holds the possibility of relieving Guálinto’s fragmentation. But the fact that he does not follow through is reflective of a struggle to confront women of his own race, and, in essence, a struggle to confront his Mexican side because of the imposition of inferiority the society he inhabits has placed upon it.

If this scene depicts the complex negotiation of masculinity regarding the sexual partners of a racial subject, then the ending of the novel depicts the complete split of the racial subject. Ironically, the final part of the book is titled, “Leader of His People” and is set years after the coming of age of Guálinto. In this final part, it is revealed that Guálinto chooses a white woman as his sexual partner. On the surface level, this choice of a sexual partner seems inoffensive, but how Guálinto makes this decision and the motives behind it reveal a much deeper problem. Guálinto himself sees this choice as an erasure of identity. Remembering their wedding night, he states that “he was somewhat surprised to discover [that Ellen, his wife] was a virgin. Getting the Mexican out of himself was not an easy job, he thought” [emphasis added] (Paredes 283). By having sex with Ellen, herself a representation of what the surrounding world has denied him—an American way of life and comfort—he plans to erase the Mexican identity within him. Not only do the motives behind his choice reveal a fragmented identity, but what he is willing to do to maintain his new status also reveals a deep split within. Ellen’s father, a retired Texas Ranger, insults Guálinto and the name given to him by his father, and instead of defending the memory of his father, Guálinto decides to “change his name to George G. Gómez…” (Paredes 284). In a scene which explicitly depicts the weight of inferiority placed upon the Chicano racial subject by the white dominant force (represented by the retired Texas Ranger), Guálinto chooses to see the Mexican side of his identity (given to him by his father) as inferior. This, in essence, reveals that since his birth, Guálinto “was fated to a life controlled by others” (Paredes 15). The culture of racial division and hierarchy in which Guálinto lives forces him to see the Mexican side of his identity as inferior, and instead of continuing the constant struggle and clash of self, Guálinto chooses to accept the narrative of inferiority that surrounds his racial identity, and thus chooses to erase and betray it.

The setting and time of Goméz situate the central character in a world shaped by legal racial segregation. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo situates the main character in the political climate/era of the Chicano movement, a time and period of resistance defined by the celebration of “Chicano” as a cultural and national identity (Pulido 113-114). Still, a similar fragmentation of Chicano masculine identity that Goméz exposes and explores also appears in Buffalo. Although at first, this appears as a traditional form of masculinity in the events in the novel, it is, in reality, a unique portrayal of the fragmentation of masculinity. The main character, Oscar, goes on a “hero’s journey” throughout the United States, symbolic and representative of the Chicano racial subject’s search for identity. Like Goméz, Buffalo raises questions surrounding masculinity and its relationship with violence and sexuality, and how these aspects reflect a society of racial hierarchy and division. In Buffalo, masculinity is affirmed through hyper-violence and acts simultaneously as a form of defense. This is not to say, however, that violence as a defense is appropriate for the situation in which characters find themselves; rather, it is a response to a racially tense climate. This response must be viewed as reflective of a society which seeks to demean Chicano identity. One scene in the novel illustrates this when Oscar, in his youth, is taunted by Junior Ellis, an “Okie,” who keeps calling him a “nigger” (Acosta 93). This offensive slur is used by Junior Ellis to demean Oscar based on his darker skin color. Furthermore, the usage of this slur represents a culture of racial division and reveals how the white dominant force attempts to erase individual unique identities by defining racial subjects as they see them, not as they see themselves. Oscar fights Junior Ellis and triumphs (Acosta 94). As Oscar walks away he passes and ignores Jane Addison, who, like Ellen in Goméz, represents a white sexual partner of desire for the Chicano male subject, one which embodies a sense of American identity which has been denied to him. The sexual obtainment of white women in these two novels represents a passage into the American world. Traditional forms of masculinity emphasize sexual prowess as a characteristic of masculinity. Still, the sexual desire for other women in these novels does not reveal traditional forms of masculinity at play. These desires are predicated on the need to survive within a structurally racist society and thus are revelations of a fragmented sense of masculinity. This, alongside the way in which violence is used to affirm masculinity in response to racial feelings of inferiority, reveals the fragmented negotiation of identity. Later in class, instead of Jane admiring Oscar for his “masculine” triumph through violence, she asks the teacher to ask Oscar to put his shirt back on because “he stinks” (Acosta 94). It is not clear that Jane does this because of Oscar’s race, but that does not matter. What matters is the way in which Oscar sees himself after this, and how his response reveals feelings of inferiority. Oscar, in response to this rejection, claims “I am the nigger, after all… I am nothing but an Indian with sweating body and faltering tits that sag at the sight of a young girl’s blue eyes” (Acosta 95). Oscar thus sees himself through the eyes of the white dominant American world, the double-consciousness thus emerges. He sees himself as inferior in front of the “blue eyes” representative of that from which he is denied and excluded because of his race.

Questions surrounding race in regards to a sexual partner later appear in the novel when Oscar is older. Like Guálinto in Goméz, Oscar displays a complex negotiation of masculine identity when he chooses to reject his Mexican background through the rejection of a Mexican sexual partner. He states that he “never went out with the few Mexican girls in school because they always stuck to themselves and refused to participate in the various activities” (Acosta 112). Oscar ignores the fact that these Mexican girls, as racial subjects, also exist in a society which views them as inferior. Their lack of participation is not by choice but by the restrictions placed upon them by a society which denies them a self. Oscar later goes on to add that, “I did not know one Mexican girl that aroused the beast within me” (Acosta 113). His sexual attractions represent a culture which glorifies whiteness as beautiful at the expense of nonwhite racial subjects. As a racial subject seeking recognition, Oscar subjects himself to internal splitting and fragmentation erasing his Mexican identity through his intentional rejection of Mexican women. The inferiority he imposes upon his female kin acts as a mirror reflective of his personal fragmentation. He, too, idealizes white as beautiful. In the beginning of the novel, his sexual attractiveness is predicated on his racial appearance. What he sees in the mirror is “a brown belly” and “two large hunks of brown tit,” his brownness never separated from his identity (Acosta 11). Following this, he goes on to reveal that his three favorite men are Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson, all white actors (Acosta 12). The choice of actors demonstrates the culture that Oscar grew up in: a culture which idealizes and favors whiteness. This, inherently, subjects nonwhite racial subjects to feelings of inferiority.

Unlike Guálinto in Goméz, whose subjectivity ends in a tragic form through the rejection of Mexican identity, Oscar in Buffalo grows to admire and accept a side of his Mexican identity through his sexual desires for a Mexican female partner. This is seen towards the end of the novel in his culturally symbolic travel into Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Oscar describes the setting in which he finds himself, surrounded by Mexican women, his “head in a quagmire, twisted with the delights of the most beautiful women [he’s] ever seen in [his] life” and comes to the realization that “whatever Alice Joy or Jane Addison meant to [him] as a kid, now they were only grade school memories of a time gone by” (Acosta 188). Alice and Jane, as white women, represented a pathway to American life, but the chase for them, and the possible notion of their obtainment, also meant a rejection of Mexican identity. His rejection of this past mode of thinking is an acknowledgment of his own racially complex identity and a rejection of further fragmentation. Thus the struggles of his masculinity, in the beginning, cease to exist as he accepts and learns to love himself despite the dominant culture he inhabits. Mexico, for him, is the land where he realizes this, but it does not encompass him. He is later harassed and hurt by a Mexico which also denies him a sense of identity. He returns to the United States, reborn a Chicano. As Oscar states, his “single mistake has been to seek an identity with any one person or nation…what is clear to [him] after [his] sojourn is that [he] is neither a Mexican nor an American…[he is] a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice” (Acosta 199).

The ending of Buffalo reflects the era of nationalist pride and acceptance exhibited by the Chicano movement, while the ending of Goméz reflects an era of racial exclusion and segregation which offers no alternative to identity like the one the Chicano movement provided for Oscar. Nevertheless, both of these novels reveal the complex negotiation of masculinity within Chicano male subjectivity. The study of these novels is crucial to our understanding that the United States is a space in which identity formation is fragmented and complex for racial subjects; that its historical laws and practices of exclusion inherently create within these racial subjects feelings of inferiority. These texts allow for new ways of thinking about what it means to grapple with racism and oppression. They invite us to see this battle in the intimate settings of sex and violence. Racism and oppression do not only affect material well-being, they also affect one’s psycho-emotional well-being. Understanding this opens up a much-needed conversation about feelings of alienation and inferiority within people of color, and fiction serves as a powerful medium to do so.

Works Cited

Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. Vintage Books, 1989.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 2007.

Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Homosexuality and the Chicano Novel.” Confluencia, vol. 2, no. 1, 1986, pp. 69-77, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/27921700.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Penguin Books, 1996.

Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Duke University Press, 2001.

Gutiérrez, David G. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. University of California Press, 1995.

Harris, Cheryl I. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. The New Press, 1995, pp. 276-290.

Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Temple University Press, 2006.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Omi, Michael & Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1980’s. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.

Padilla, Genaro M. “The Self as Cultural Metaphor in Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 35, no. 4, 1984, pp. 242-258, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/27796969.

Paredes, Américo. George Washington Goméz. Arte Publico Press, 1990.

Pérez, Héctor. “Voicing Resistance on the Border: A Reading of Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez.” MELUS, vol. 23, no. 1, 1998, pp. 27-48. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/467761.

Pulido, Laura. Black, Brown, Yellow & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. University of California Press, 2005.

Seliger, Mary A. “Colonialism, Contract and Community in Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez and…and the Earth did Not Devour Him by Tomás Rivera.” Latino Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, 2009, pp. 435-456, Ethnic NewsWatch; International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS); Sociological Abstracts, search.proquest.com/docview/222595174?accountid=14522,doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/lst.2009.32.

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The Modern Zombie and Islamophobia: A Closer Look at Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead

Posted on November 24, 2017November 1, 2022 by

By Jordan Laub

The title sequence for Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) opens with a short clip of a Muslim mosque during prayer followed by a series of still images, short clips and segmented audio that depicts the back-story of the film through fragments of the zombie contagion’s genesis. With journalists reporting in poor quality from a foreign desert and American soldiers in beige fatigues, the imagery of the title sequence is curiously strange for the remake of a film set entirely in a suburban strip mall in the heart of America. But, why would a remake of George A. Romero’s cult classic, Dawn of the Dead (1978), which is widely accepted as a metaphor for the mindless consumerism of American culture, open with a clip of a Muslim mosque during prayer? What does a back-story portraying elements of the ‘War on Terror’ have in common with a zombie contagion set entirely in an American strip mall? Although a generation of mindless shoppers trapped in vicious cycles of over-consumption still plagues American society, it is not at the forefront of its subconscious, nor is it what gives Snyder’s remake its terrifying appeal. By reinventing Romero’s zombie as a fast-moving, highly dangerous and contagious organism, Snyder has embodied the media’s portrayal of fanatical Islamic terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS in the zombie. When re-analyzing Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) with its socio-political backdrop firmly in the mind of its audience, the relevance of the film’s bizarre title sequence becomes disconcertingly clear: Snyder’s zombie is a manifestation of radical Islam.

Dawn of the Dead debuted in American theatres in 2004, just three years after the official dawn of the ‘War on Terror.’ Its debut was part of an explosion in popularity of zombie films that occurred immediately after 9/11 and still continues today. In the 2000s, zombies appeared in 10% of theatrical releases, and in the 2010s, that number increased to 13% (IMDB 2015). This boost in popularity of zombie films coincides with the emergence of a new sect of radical Islamic insurgents, ISIS. One explanation for this boost in popularity coinciding with the growth of ISIS is that the zombie contagion is rather effective at portraying America’s real-world enemy. As explained by Andrew Schopp, author of The War on Terror and American Popular Culture: “The label of terrorist possesses an ontological blankness strikingly similar to that of the zombie, as they are both outward physical threats to western civilization whose inner motivations remain hidden from view. They are both also sufficiently Othered as Monstrous” (Schopp 35). According to mainstream media, America is at war with a radically dangerous, and extremely contagious superbug. Although the disease itself is invisible, the infected are immediately discernible from the healthy and the number of infected is exponentially increasing. The name of this contagion is radical Islam.

Midway through the title sequence of Dawn of the Dead (2004), after a brief glimpse of American soldiers equipped with gasmasks, an audio recording from a CDC press conference regarding the zombie contagion begins and is audible for the remainder of the title sequence. The dialogue between the reporters and the CDC commissioner is equally fitting for that of a press conference on the spread of religious extremism and ensuing threat of terrorism, as it is for the film’s zombie contagion: “Is it a virus? We don’t know. How does it spread, is it airborne? Airborne is a possibility, we don’t know. Is this a national health hazard, or a military concern? Both. Are these people alive, or dead? We don’t know” (Snyder 2004). Interrupting the video feed to this conference are brief sequences of cell division and other bimolecular processes. American politicians, and news and media sources alike, all explain the military expansion of Islamic radical insurgents in terms of a viral contagion. During his speech at the Reagan Library, 2016 Presidential candidate, Jeb Bush stated, “Radical Islamic terrorists are one of the gravest threats facing our country,“ and he then described the influence of ISIS as “spreading like a pandemic” (Bush 2015). This pandemic first spread to the American homeland on February 5, 2002, when American citizen and notorious traitor, John Walker Lindh, was indicted for conspiracy to murder US citizens and conspiracy to contribute services to Al Qaeda. Described by President George W. Bush as “the first American Al Qaeda fighter” (Bush 2001), Lindh became patient zero for the contagion outbreak. With Lindh declared guilty in 2003, the threat of domestic terrorism perpetrated by those infected with a dangerous ideology became very real, a theme most evident in the likeness of Snyder’s zombie to a suicide bomber.

Perhaps the most terrifying moment in all of zombie cinema occurs at 16:37 of the unrated director’s cut for Dawn of the Dead, a scene that was omitted from theatrical, and standard DVD release. While the group of survivors struggles to escape from a passing horde of undead by forcing entry into the mall, one of the infected suddenly breaks from his zombie horde and charges towards the group. Despite being shot a total of six times, the zombie remains at a full sprint, unphased by the bullets. Arriving at the door just before it is sealed, the zombie blocks the door from closing with a heavily bleeding severed arm, waving it in the face of the survivors, splashing its highly-infectious blood into the faces of its victims. More disturbing than the scene’s gut-wrenching tension is its striking similarity to a suicide bombing. Brandishing a black tank top, the infected man wears a form of a suicide vest, only without the explosives. Instead of a detonator in his right hand, the zombie uses its severed right arm as the tool for his zombie jihad. Charging towards the group at full-speed, and splashing blood in the face of its victims, the jihad zombie similarly relies upon physical proximity to deliver its lethal payload. Snyder’s zombie manifests the subconscious attributes of a radicalized ‘terrorist’: ruthless, unwavering, and utterly terrifying. According to Stephen King, “that’s exactly what Snyder’s zombies are, it seems to me: fast-moving terrorists who never quit” (King xxi). The only cure to Snyder’s jihad zombies and their unwavering reign of terror is a bullet to the head–the physical destruction of the mind.

Throughout the film, there is a constant reiteration of the necessity to shoot the zombie in the head. At 27:02 of the unrated director’s cut, the survivors gather around a TV in the mall that displays an interview between a reporter and the county sheriff discussing how to kill a zombie. “I understand you’re having a difficult time killing these things. Just shoot em’ in the head. They seem to go down permanently when you shoot em’ in the head… It’s gotta’ be done” (Snyder 2004). After hearing the last line of the interview, CJ points to the TV with a smile and states, “What did I tell you boys? America always sorts its shit out” (Snyder 2004). This is the first time in the film America is referenced in connection with the contagion. CJ’s statement connotes the sheriff’s indiscriminate execution of the infected as the American solution, and thus, the only solution. By shooting the victim in the head the threat is eliminated by removing the infected body’s ability to think as well as its ability to spread infection. This exchange also probes the audience to consider the survivors as American and the zombie as a foreign invader. This concept of the survivors as America’s defenders vs. the foreign hordes is most evident in the ‘identify and execute’ game.

The reading of Dawn of the Dead (2004) as a manifestation of the ‘War on Terror’ would be wholly incomplete without a segment of the film dedicated to the idolization of the American military sniper; fortunately, a significant portion of the film concerns Andy, a blond-haired Caucasian, who sits atop his perch above the gun store adjacent from the mall armed with a sniper rifle. Sporting shaggy-hair, combat boots, and a tan-green undershirt reminiscent of the kind warn beneath the armor of American soldiers in Afghanistan, Andy certainly matches the military sniper stereotype. On the command of Kenneth (the police officer who acts as Andy’s spotter), Andy locates the zombie with the characteristics corresponding to the name written on Kenneth’s whiteboard and shoots the target in the head–a simplification of the process used by the American military to order the assassination of an enemy combatant. When reading the mall as a symbol for America and Andy as its heroic defender, the walls of the mall become America’s geographical borders and Andy as its American sniper. Needing only one shot per kill, Andy’s excellent marksmanship evokes awe in and praise from the group. After watching his art through binoculars, Tucker states, “wow, he’s good” (Snyder 2004). This idolization of Andy’s marksmanship can be attributed to his manifestation as the model agent for the American solution. Methodically taking headshot after headshot in defense of the homeland, and eventually losing his life in the line of duty, Andy symbolizes the perfect patriot; a hero dedicated to eradicating the growing pandemic, one bullet at a time.

The subversion of reason and morality is a common theme throughout the film as humane treatment of sick persons is eschewed and the persona of the callous executioner becomes necessary for survival. The audience is probed to perceive the characters that defend the lives of the infected as weak and whose actions compromise the group’s probability of survival. After learning that the contagion is transmitted through oral contact with an infected individual, Ana, the voice of morality and reason, advocates for the bitten to be quarantined; however, to the approval of the other survivors, Michael decides those who have been infected must be immediately exterminated, stating, “it is too dangerous to keep them around here” (Snyder 2004). As the body begins to show symptoms of infection, physical touch becomes taboo, and scenes depicting a proximity to the flesh of the infected body become utterly repulsive. Just before the transformation is complete, the infected ‘die’ and are reborn as a zombie terrorist. This process of reanimation graphically materializes the conversion of a healthy mind into that of the enemy—an irreversible transformation of the American into the monstrous ‘other;’ a transformation that warrants immediate extermination in the name of self-preservation. When perceiving empathy as detrimental to survival and the persona of the callous executioner as necessary, self-preservation becomes the characters’ unilateral justification for unspeakable acts of violence. This is the very same rationale used to justify the ‘War on Terror.’

Perhaps it is for this reason the remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) coincides with the dawn of the ‘War on Terror’–the concept of a group of survivors defending an American mall from a horde of terrorists is again relevant. It is not difficult to view the mall as a symbol for America and the zombie as the Islamic terrorist threatening its culture; after all, shopping is America’s favorite past time and its second is the over-consumption of media that relies on terrorism to sell the ‘news.’ The irony of a nation openly at war with terrorism, yet whose media constantly uses fear mongering to portray its enemy is not lost on Andrew Schopp, “it proves rather ironic that we are fighting a war on terror outside our national borders since the real terror seems to be occurring within them” (Schopp 2009). What makes Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead such a terrifying film is that it is an accurate manifestation of the monster haunting the post 9/11 American psyche. Snyder’s zombie contagion is the symptom of a subconscious utterly paranoid of infection with a fast-spreading, borderless contagion that threatens the very existence of the American consumer, and thus, American culture itself.

Works Cited

Dawn of the Dead: Unrated Director’s Cut. Dir. Zach Snyder. Perf. Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames and Jake Weber. Universal Pictures, 2004.

“Jeb Bush: ISIS is ‘spreading like a Pandemic'” CBS News. CBS Interactive, 2015, cbsnews.com/news/jeb-bush-isis-is-spreading-like-a-pandemic/. Accessed 10 Mar. 2016.

Lindh, Frank. “How John Walker Lindh Became ‘Detainee 001″ The Nation. N.p., 29 Aug. 2014, thenation.com/article/how-john-walker-lindh-became-detainee-001/. Accessed 10 Mar. 2016.

“Movie Monsters that Ruled the Big Screen By Decade.” Imgur. IMDB, 2015, imgur.com/FaizPa6. Accessed 10 Mar. 2016.

King, Stephen. Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. Everest House, 2010.

Schopp, Andrew, and Matthew B. Hill. The War on Terror and American Popular Culture: September 11 and Beyond. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.

TechnOphelia: Performance, Patriarchy, and Cyborg Feminism in Science Fiction

Posted on November 24, 2017November 1, 2022 by

By Amy Chase

If you are reading this thesis on a computer screen, you are already posthuman. The words you see here are ideas and representational patterns of intelligence separated from my body. For all you know, I could be a robot.

In her book How We Became Posthuman (1999), Katherine Hayles addresses the emerging distinction between corporeality and the more abstract reality of information in the age of technology. Society has already begun its transition to the age of the posthuman as culture, science, and even our understanding of self have moved beyond the state of human existence. According to Hayles, the posthuman view, “privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment…is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (Hayles 2). Posthumanism separates the mind and body and translates both into products of the informational age- body as the physical prosthesis that is manipulated by the mind, a mind which becomes a series of codes and informational patterns existing both with and without tangible form. In an age where technology is such an integral part of human life, there remains an inherent fear about losing oneself to the progressive creep of the digital, disembodied reality. If the patterns and codes of information and intelligence can exist without the body, then human form becomes less exceptional and more expendable.

In 1950, when computer technologies were just beginning to become more widely known to the public, computer scientist Alan Turing devised a test to see if machines could think and imitate human speech patterns through text in a way indistinguishable from a real person, all without the physical presence of another being. This “imitation game” became a paradigm for detecting whether the posthuman could flawlessly reproduce human intelligence through, “the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns” (Hayles xi). In the Turing test, a human tester is situated apart from their subject, and must have a series of natural language conversations to determine if the subject is human or machine, and sometimes then if they are male or female. This test relies on the tester being unable to see the subjects, who may or may not exist on the other end of a computer terminal. An artificially intelligent entity should be able to replicate human vocal performance, even including facets of gender presentation, well enough to fool the tester, proving that machines can think. Internet users participate in their own form of Turing test via the CAPTCHA system on most websites, which ask users to prove their humanity by solving a letter puzzle or identify imagery that the typical bot program would fail to complete. CAPTCHA in this case stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” where the computer learns from the human answers, and adjusts its intelligence accordingly to appropriately act more human. For example, the program may ask users to identify a set of distorted words or correctly distinguish colors in a gridded photograph that the typical computer program cannot solve through an algorithm. Your answer teaches the computer how to respond, and its intelligence evolves. Eventually, even bots can fool bots by adapting their performance to the information garnered from human labor.

For science fiction literature, the figure of the robot, with its mechanical body and encoded consciousness, becomes the perfect metaphor for man seamlessly integrated with the machine. These androids are constructed in man’s own image, imbued with a replicated humanity in the form of codified patterns and programming that enables the appearance of consciousness. The term ‘robot’ first appeared in Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920), which imagines the roboti as manufactured, artificial people made of synthetic organic matter. While they are not depicted as the same circuit-driven cyborgs often seen in modern science fiction, since their inception robots have been wrapped in identity politics. In Čapek’s writing, the robots are a servant class, but recognize humanity in themselves despite being mass-produced by artificial means. In fact, the word roboti in the original Czech language comes from robota, meaning slave labor. From inception, these creations have been viewed as subhuman, rather than posthuman, and performance and labor are encoded in robots from their origin. Their bodies are modeled on human figures, and much of the human notion of self is based on binary gender presentation- anything else is other and foreign. These cyborgs are then restricted by societal conventions, their interactions with the human dictated by hierarchical and patriarchal relationships between master and slave, tester and subject, and man and woman. Science fiction literature imagines technology so advanced that these robots fulfill a variant of humanity and femininity that allows machines to replace marriages, cyborgs to satisfy sexual urges, and androids to perfectly reproduce art.

The following analyses examine the power of performative humanity as demonstrated by the artificial female figures of posthuman imagination in literature from 1938 through 2015, observing the traditions of gender roles juxtaposed with imagined visions of the future of technology. In a field so defined by Turing’s examination of gender performance, posthuman artificial intelligence reflects its human creators, revealing through discussions of sexuality, domesticity, and creativity exactly what it means to be a human in an increasingly technological era. Furthermore, by representing what it means to be human, cyborgs provide feminist scholars a lens through which to imagine the postgender future in which individuals can overcome the traditional binaries. Ultimately, by demonstrating human fetishization of embodiment and the prestige of disembodied intelligence, the female robots of science fiction reveal both the future potential and the present shortcomings of what it means to truly be a human in the posthuman world.

Deus Sex Machina- Humans and the Cyborgasmic

“You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being.”

– Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)

The above quote from Frankenstein comes from the creature himself, who is a manufactured man committing himself to the pursuit of a very human desire for sexual companionship. The monster was made by Victor Frankenstein to be a human, and whether subconsciously or not, the being feels compelled here to make a request for his equal, a woman, in order to attain that humanity within him. This female creature is never fully realized, but in her partial construction begins to fulfill the human desires of her monstrous partner. Reflecting on the state of technology’s purpose in Sex and the Posthuman Condition (2014), Michael Hauskeller notes that the machine “is always something that has been constructed to serve a certain purpose, which is not primarily [its] own purpose, but the constructor’s” (Hauskeller 16). Even the most highly advanced robot is an object with a programmed or otherwise intended directive, performing based on its internal code. Science fiction imagines the cyborg figure to be devoted to fulfilling their man-given purpose while also appearing as natural as possible, leading to a host of circumstances in which the robot technology replaces human ability in strength, precision, or durability. Robots are also increasingly being considered for their sexual purposes beyond those fantastical situations of space exploration and alien encounters in science fiction.

Hauskeller suggests that sexual cyborgs, or sexbots, ideally are, “always available to serve all our sexual needs…better and more reliably than any human lover could” (Hauskeller 18). Nonliving, they are touted as hygienic alternatives to innately human problems such as sexually transmitted infections, physical deficiencies, and even psychological responses regarding intimacy and issues of consent. In this way, the sexbot becomes a highly functioning object which consistently and tirelessly projects the “appearance of consciousness,” which is the closest that human inventors can achieve in replicating the artificial mind (Hauskeller 16). This reproduction of human interaction soothes our anxieties about interacting with the machine in such a manner that usually connotes expressions of love, partnership, or desire.

The carnal synthesis of man and the machine creates an experience that is both cybernetic and organic, but decidedly one-sided despite artificial insistence of arousal or interest in human pleasure. Sex fulfills no biological requirements for the cyborg, only mechanical obligations to satisfy the human partner and achieve their programmed ends. It is possible to consider the act of copulation with a robot to be a form of parasitism, where the human achieves sexual pleasure by feeding off of the mechanical agent. In contrast, feminist Jincey Lumpkin believes that humans should consider “that robots should have a choice too and not be treated as mere things… because constructing them without the choice to say no would cause duress,” suggesting that the artificial mind should have the same decision-making capacity as a human rather than simply responding to a constructed directive (Hauskeller 16). This element of human-cyborg relations prompts an interesting examination of human desire and the treatment of objects versus conscious beings, because if these robots are built to imitate humans, then moral reasoning processes, as well as the exercising of choice and preference, could be inbuilt in the artificially intelligent mind.

Considering this, science fiction literature opens the discussion into ideas of consensual sex with robots, treating them as if their humanity will become indistinguishable with our own. The robots will eventually deceive humans into believing in their own consciousness and life, but in creating these robotic partners, people relinquish their own understanding of the dichotomy between human consciousness and robotic simulation. When this becomes the case, the robots fall into the same constraints of gender performance and sexual roles as there are in current society. Sexual female robots, such as the following examples, represent the typically desired female body while projecting a woman’s consciousness, fulfilling male romantic desire in a heteronormative reconstruction of idealized human intimacy. It does not matter if the robot can or cannot feel, as at the core of these instances lies a test of the human capacity and even perhaps the human fear of coupling with the cyborg.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), it takes a confrontation with a particularly amoral human male for Rick Deckard to qualify his romantic and sexual urges towards the Nexus-6 model Rachael Rosen: “Love toward a woman or an android imitation, it’s sex. Wake up and face yourself, Deckard. You wanted to go to bed with a female type of android- nothing more, nothing less” (Dick 143). To face himself, Deckard must confront his personal human wants versus those necessitated by his job as a bounty hunter. Throughout the novel, humans distinguish themselves from their android opponents through the innate emotional concept of empathy, which the robots supposedly lack. Phil Resch, a ruthless bounty hunter, even warns Deckard, “Don’t kill her- or be present when she’s killed- and then feel physically attracted. Do it the other way” (Dick 143). Deckard must act on his urge before the robot is retired, or else risk failing to fulfill both his hunting assignment and his human desire for sex. Falling in love with robots, Hauskeller claims, “proves we are easily duped,” and, “we will find it very difficult not to attribute consciousness,” to an advanced enough robot based on its design and presentation of human behaviors (Hauskeller 20). Deckard finds himself in the position of attributing consciousness to Rachael Rosen, “because she- it- was physically attractive,” and with that he projects his own sexual desires onto her, his judgment sufficiently clouded by the advanced design of the Rosen Corporation’s artificial humans (Dick 143).

When he and Rachael have an intimate encounter in a hotel, Rick Deckard continues to, “wonder what it’s like to kiss an android,” and then acts on his curiosity: “Leaning forward an inch, he kissed her dry lips. No reaction followed; Rachael remained impassive. As if unaffected. And yet he sensed otherwise. Or perhaps it was wishful thinking” (Dick 189). Rachael Rosen does not project the behavioral output of arousal or stimulation, and yet Deckard still considers her sexually appealing, though he comments on her figure as being “neutral, nonsexual” (Dick 187). Her unaffected nature almost mirrors that of a disinterested woman playing hard to get, which some men consider more attractive and desirous than a woman who is too wholly interested. Mechanical indifference translates to human curiosity, and Deckard’s wishful thinking of Rachael’s reaction contributes to his sexual satisfaction. Hauskeller suggests that in the future, “the pleasures of the body may eventually be completely disconnected from the actual body as its (necessary) source” as anatomical robots who can recreate those sexual experiences become increasingly virtual (6). Rachael’s lack of physical output incites Deckard’s arousal even without the integration of her body into a sexual encounter with the bounty hunter.

Hauskeller cites a historical precedent for male erotic desire towards nonliving female bodies when Ovid’s Pygmalion character finds himself attracted to his own statue because, “she is supposedly a living woman, but without the flaws… she is perfect and pure, and perfectly usable” (28). The word “usable” suggests the servitude of the robot body, relegating the artificial woman to the status of an object meant for consumption by the male owner. This relates to the robot’s origins as a slave figure, and in the context of Dick’s novel, recalls the status of the escaped Nexus-6 androids as servants for the emigrants of Mars. Rachael suggests “it’s an illusion that I- I personally- really exist; I’m just a representative of a type” and uses diction of purity to describe the “clean, noble, virgin” bed she plans to seduce Deckard on (Dick 193). Because she is synthetic, Rachael does not adhere to the socially-constructed idea of a biological virginity but rather a purity of herself because flesh and its pleasures represent inherent flaws of humanity. Interestingly, she has seduced other bounty hunters before Deckard and so does not represent a sexual naivety typically associated with a virginal state. Rachael assures Deckard he is “not going to bed with a woman,” which is, “convincing if you don’t think too much about it. But if you think too much, if you reflect on what you’re doing- you can’t go on,” in a similar manner to how Hauskeller suggests humans can allow ourselves to be fooled by the robots’ programming into believing their consciousness and consent (Dick 194). Contrary to the ideal imagination of the sexbot figure, Rachael behaves in a sexual manner mostly to her benefit, although the experience also simultaneously satisfies Deckard’s innate desires.

When deeply confused by his own sexual urges towards Ava in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), Caleb confronts the man who programmed the cyborg and enquires about her capacity to act autonomously on her desires. Nathan insists that Ava behaves freely due to the advanced coding in her mind. He suggests he “programmed her to be heterosexual just like,” anyone else, putting the exact nature of robot’s sexuality in line with the young man’s own innate desires (Garland). Caleb rejects the idea that he has been programmed to be heterosexual by any external factors, believing his sexuality to be an innate part of his humanity. The film plays with the debate of nature versus nurture, suggesting that humans are programmed by their experience with information coded by some outside source to call into question the ultimate end of our sexual desires. Either sex is something a human is designed to do, like an android has a purpose, or it naturally occurs as an instinctive human behavior. “Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it is behavior,” according to Hauskeller, and Caleb’s anxiety over Ava’s programming calls his own human exceptionalism into question (23). If humans, and more specifically human sexuality can be programmed, then Caleb has the potential to be manipulated based on his own purpose given by the force behind his desires. This raises the anxiety surrounding Caleb’s perception of himself and his own autonomy.

Visually, Ava has been designed to appear like an attractive human woman, although some of her circuitry is exposed in order to reinforce that she is, indeed, a robot. Nathan even confirms that he programmed her to receive sensory feedback, “so if you want to screw her, mechanically speaking, you can” (Garland). He uses the word “mechanically,” which here has double meaning relating to the mechanics of sexual intercourse and also the act of copulating with an inorganic, mechanical being. Ava’s hands and face resemble human flesh, while the rest of her is more explicitly transparent mesh and wires. Existing between the mechanical and the organic, however, are her breasts and hips, which are constructed of grey material that does not allow the viewer to see through her structure. Rather, these areas function like a bra and underwear, suggesting that perhaps there is some bit of womanhood behind her exterior shell, including the, “cavity between her legs with a concentration of sensors,” Nathan has included in her design (Garland). Ava’s sexual potential becomes a key part of the Turing test exercise because of this emphasis, as Caleb fears her flirting will cloud his judgment because again, “we will find it very difficult not to attribute consciousness,” to intelligent, sexual robots with whom humans may eventually engage (Hauskeller 20). In the case of Ava, Nathan has devised sensors that will effectively provide positive feedback to her programmed mind, allowing her to react to a phallic stimulus with pleasure to encourage her proper participation in transhuman intercourse. While she and Caleb never reach this point in the film, this suggests that her creator, Nathan, has tested this programmed feature to ensure her appropriate execution of her sexual simulations.

Caleb eventually realizes that the inventor has designed, “her face based on my pornography profile,” with data scraped from his search engine inputs (Garland). The young man’s digital footprint has provided all the code that Nathan needed to construct Ava on the theory that, “a real human lover can be replaced by a robot without loss if and only if other people can already never be more than a means for us,” (Hauskeller 14). By “a means,” Hauskeller refers to a means to sexual arousal- while Ava is not explicitly presented as a sexual partner for Caleb, he inevitably finds himself attracted to her because she occupies the same space as a pornographic performer who he observes as a means to pleasure himself. In the film, Ava and Caleb most often interact from opposite sides of a glass enclosure, adding an element of removal to Caleb’s viewing of the Turing test subject. While in a true Turing test the examiner would be unable to see the test subject, the added visual dimension allows Nathan’s design to play on the man’s personal tastes in women, which the inventor describes as, “a consequence of accumulated external stimulus, that you probably didn’t even register as they registered with you” (Garland). These stimuli provide the “programming” of Caleb’s heterosexuality that the inventor alludes to, and result in his potential to be manipulated by these desires. The glass walls of the enclosure are arranged to recreate the experience of viewing pornography, where Caleb looks into an enclosed “screen” that displays the object of his desire. The layers of separation in the Turing test environment further the distance of the isolated tester gazing in on his fetishized subject. Ava’s features optimize those stimuli which have, whether unconsciously or not, contributed to Caleb’s self-pleasuring interactions within the digital sphere. As he views Ava from a removed position, she subtly fulfills those innate voyeuristic urges that led the man to watch porn in the first place. While he may not believe that his sexuality has been programmed into him, Ex Machina suggests that his data may then be used in turn to program the exact object of his desire, allowing sexuality to be exploited by the resultant robot.

In the humorous and frightening case of Ira Levin’s satire The Stepford Wives (1972), the robotic replicas that replace the working women of the sleepy Connecticut suburb are augmented physically to fulfill the needs of their previously unsatisfied husbands, in accordance with Hauskeller’s definition of the ideal sexbot. Joanna Eberhart takes constant notice of the buxom figures of her neighbors, like Carol with her, “profile of too-big bosom…her big purpled breasts,” which, “bobbed with her scrubbing” (Levin 9). After her closest ally Bobbie Markowe has been replaced with a lobotomized, robotic double, Joanna finds her, “wearing some kind of padded high-uplift bra under her green sweater, and a hip-whittling girdle under the brown pleated skirt,” as if being a proper Stepford wife necessitates having enhanced breasts (Levin 81-2). Built as a reflection of their husbands’ desires, these wives have their intellectual substance reduced, replaced with artificial augmentation of phenotypic features that make women alluring to men. While Hauskeller states that the perfect sexbots will, “make it far easier to forget that they are just machines who do not really think or feel anything,” the men of Stepford find their wives’ lack of thought even more attractive, as it makes them less likely to disagree with their chores and sexual responsibilities in the marriage (Hauskeller 13).

Joanna asks “the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands,” curious to know the true cost of turning the women into domestic slaves (Levin 105). With another reference to the women’s breasts, the sexual allure of the robot women is highlighted again as one of the few defining features of these automatons. Along with the physically attractive figure, the Stepford sexbots have “no demands,” as mindless, happy slaves to their husbands’ whims. Hauskeller suggests that one psychological reason that sexual robots appeal to human sensibilities is that they allow “us to only ever confront ourselves without ever having to confront ourselves,” due to the nature of displacing our own identity into the robotic other (Hauskeller 77). Cyborg sex partners allow us to avoid rejection by taking out the conscious person on the other side of the act; the person who has “demands” and has the ability to refuse the sexual encounter. One evening, Walter Eberhart returns home late following a meeting at the Men’s Association and wakes Joanna by pleasuring himself in bed:

“The bed was shaking…each shake was accompanied by a faint spring-squeak, again and again and again. It was Walter who was shaking… Had he been- masturbating?

He lay still. ‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he said. ‘It’s after two.’

‘You could have,’ she said. ‘Woke me. I wouldn’t have minded.’

He didn’t say anything” (Levin 15).

By now, Joanna’s husband Walter has been exposed to the Men’s Association and its operation of replacing the wives of Stepford with docile robot doubles. This initially one-sided sexual encounter illustrates an instance of that fear of sexual rejection Hauskeller believes that robots allow us to avoid. Walter must take to stimulating himself while his wife is asleep, believing that she will not consent to joining him in intercourse if he interrupts her rest. Joanna, once woken, eventually decides to have sex with him in what, “turned out to be one of their best times ever- for her, at least” (Levin 17). However, while she was asleep and therefore unable to consent, Walter resorted to instead taking care of his own urges through masturbation, the ultimate sexual self-encounter. The Stepford wives manufactured by the Men’s Association overcome this problem as they are perpetually preoccupied with pleasing their husbands in both the domestic and sexual realms.

In the Marvel Comics serial The Vision (2015), the synthetic android Vision constructs a wife for himself when he can no longer associate with the human woman he loves, a hero named Wanda. From his wife Virginia’s mental structure combined with his, he generates two children with whom they form a nuclear family unit and attempt to pass as normal in their suburban neighborhood. This series presents the idea of a robot creating his own robotic partner, done with a “certain purpose, which is…the constructor’s” intent to have an artificial but equal sexual companion to replace what he lost with Wanda, a human woman (Hauskeller 16). In a full page flashback sequence depicting Wanda and Vision in bed together, visual signs of passion surround the couple. With Bellaire’s coloring tinting the page with red and pinks, the sense of organic heat and sexual arousal saturate the page. Behind them is the caption “I Too Shall Be Saved By Love”, which is the title of the single issue as well as a reference to a quote spoken by the android in a 1963 issue of the Avengers series. The syntax reflects Vision’s own complex speech mannerisms, and suggests that love in whatever form he achieves it will make him redeemable, in this case more organic than synthetic. Artist Michael Walsh includes the sight of tousled garments to demonstrate the haste and visceral nature of Vision and Wanda’s sexual encounter. The curvature of the headboard and the pillows behind the resting couple further attest to a certain natural softness involved in tender intimacy (King 3).

The issue’s conclusion loops back to the opening scene recast on the last page with the two synthetic androids, Vision and his wife Virginia, sitting upright in a shared bed, cold and aloof. Here, Virginia represents “a ‘soulless’ lover” which is one type of what Hauskeller identifies as “unsatisfying women,” and Walsh’s distinct alterations to the environment of the opening scene as well as Bellaire’s appropriate coloration of the page reveal the loss of life and soul in Vision’s romantic relations following Wanda’s departure (Hauskeller 23). The couple’s headboard is now square and the bed lacks any pillows, revealing that the eroticism and intimacy have been removed and replaced with distance and mechanism. Bellaire’s color palette switches here to blues and greys, recreating the sense of the mechanical bodies not producing any heat. This physical coldness can also indicate an emotional coldness, and again there can be sexual desire found in being somewhat disinterested. Here, though, the coldness is mutual, with the androids’ red tones dimmed by the darkness of the bedroom. Folded clothes and shadows cast over their faces complete this uncomfortable scene of mechanical marital disconnect, which emphasizes the loss of soul in this relationship (King 22).

While her name is meant to be alliterative, as all of Vision’s family have names beginning with ‘V’, his wife’s name Virginia suggests a virginal quality and the removal of the messy human intimacy he once experienced with Wanda in exchange for a new, pure form. In this way, she does not exactly function like a sex robot, but is still constructed to replace a lack of human intimacy in a sterile manner. Hauskeller suggests that sexbots, “behave in all respects exactly like we would expect someone to behave who really loved us…they have been designed that way” (21). If these sexbots behave exactly as humans expect, then perhaps human reactions to these robots are also predictable behavior, acting to elicit a certain response from the machine. While Vision is not human, he represents the more autonomous side of their mechanical marriage. Virginia exhibits the appearance of consciousness and romantic partnership through her programming designed to imitate Wanda, and Vision behaves formulaically, hoping to revive that lost experience through vocal performative testing. As Vision trots out the same “talking toaster” joke to his wife as he had Wanda at the start of the issue, it becomes clear that he created his wife Virginia to exactly replace what he lost as he tries to reconstruct everything from memories. Her “certain purpose” in life should position her as an equal to her husband because they are both androids, but her artificiality and programmed directive fill a void in Vision’s life and service his egoism and desire for “normalcy” (Hauskeller 16).

Vision represents the human and creator in the relationship, perhaps due to the fact that although he is an android, he has had more life experience than any of his artificial family. By retelling the joke, he is testing his wife, hoping she will react with the same humor as his human lover had once done. While it remains unseen exactly how Virginia reacts to the punchline, there is a sense of unease as the joke implies an examination of the android couple’s own sentience and capacity to express emotion. Vision has not been “saved by love” as he had hoped initially, but rather becomes trapped by it, deluding himself with a wife “designed to behave as if” she loves him while he is simultaneously obligated to behave as if he loves her in the same way (Hauskeller 21). Pairing oneself with a robot in each of these cases serves to replace a lost intimacy and eliminate the element of consent from the coupling of a human male and a robotic female. This occurs at the expense of humanity, effectively sterilizing the relationship and isolating it, trading longevity for constant instant gratification from the idealized sexbot figure, suggesting that humans too may be concerned with satisfying their internal, preprogrammed compulsions.

Majordomo Arigato, Mrs. Roboto- Programming the Domestic

“I saw it all now. That beautiful, lady-like girl that had ushered me into the room, whom I had taken for his wife, was an automaton! That doll-like expression was due to the fact that she was a doll.”

–The Lady Automaton, E. E. Kellett (1901)

Even before 1901 when Kellett wrote the short story The Lady Automaton, popular imagination has been fascinated with the idea of having a doll, statue, or other artificial being for a companion, slave, or even a spouse. These beings appear human, but lack fundamental aspects of being biologically alive, which is a state of conflict that can be unsettling. In Freud’s theory of The Uncanny (1919), he cites the German word unheimlich, which is the opposite of heimlich meaning “familiar, belonging to the home” as the origin for his explanation of this upsetting psychological sensation (Freud 2). Unheimlich, and from that the uncanny, represents “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us”, a frightening liminal experience that simultaneously appears to be familiar but lacks the elements of truth that humans can understand (Freud 1). The concept of uncanniness describes alter-humans and states of existence, such as a dead corpse that once lived or a humanoid robot exposing circuits where flesh and blood should be. Masahiro Mori described “this type of unsettling experience as ‘the uncanny valley’- that psychic place when someone discovers that what looks animate is not really alive” (Wosk 7). For example, Mori details the experience of touching “a realistic-looking prosthetic hand” that “when touched, lacks the temperature of the human body and creates a sense of strangeness, unfamiliarity, or alienation, as though touching the hand of a corpse” (Wosk 155). When asked if she could experience empathy for other robots, Rachael Rosen feels “something like that. Identification; there goes I… If I die…maybe I’ll be born again when the Rosen Association stamps out its next unit of my subtype” (Dick 189). She recognizes other versions of her own robotic model type to be familiar, but frightening in their difference from her: she observes a self that is not herself. Based on appearances, humans have an expectation of how interaction with these uncanny bodies should occur, but confrontation with a discordant or unusual sensation or experience causes terror of the irregular but somehow familiar.

For as ‘un-homelike’ as the female robot is, science fiction literature and media posits her as the perfect domestic caretaker and homemaker. To reduce the fear of the uncanny robot woman, she must be made completely known and familiar. In My Fair Ladies, Julie Wosk catalogues varieties of simulated women and notes that “robots…will have future caretaking roles, but it is largely men who have created ultrarealistic female interactive robots”. These cyborgs embody “the perfect woman: a fusion of happy domesticity and sexy playmate,” and the idea of programming prescribed gender performance somehow eases the terror of the alter-human in the home (Wosk 3). Her appearance is familiar, and her requisite motherly warmth and spousal affection is expected. However, the robot lacks temperature, consciousness, and life, becoming a cold specter of perceptions of the feminine and domestic within the home. This lack of warmth both emotionally and physically betrays the expected comfort of a mother’s love, or a lover’s touch. Machine metals are cold to the touch, but artificial kindness is cold to the soul, playing into the uncanny home life of these robots. These automata reinforce a traditional nuclear family structure, replacing wives and mothers with a doting droid figure with a preprogrammed willingness to keep house, effectively preventing the figure from moving into the outside world.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) plays a key role in the insidiousness of the cyborg conspiracy plaguing The Stepford Wives. Often credited with sparking the movement of second-wave feminism, Friedan’s work highlights what she called the “problem that has no name,” a general sense of unhappiness and lack of fulfillment in American housewives (Friedan 15). Where first-wave feminism worked towards advances in women’s suffrage, second-wave feminism as a movement focused on women’s reproductive rights as well as sexuality, domestic abuse, and women in the workplace. The Stepford Wives reacts to this shift in attention, using The Feminine Mystique not as a catalyst for positive change within the novel, but as the beginning of the husbands’ reactionary scrambling to control their free-thinking wives and rejecting the idea of unhappy housewives. Joanna Eberhart discovers that a Stepford Women’s Association used to exist before the women supposedly lost interest. In this organization, the women discussed Friedan’s text and engaged with civic issues before, “some of the women moved away… and the rest of us just lost interest in it,” according to former president Kit Sundersen (Levin 42). The organization was over fifty members strong, but their gatherings led to fear on the part of their husbands, who worried that this intellectual discussion would move the women away from their roles as housewives and caretakers, rather making them what Friedan describes as, “high-dominance women… free to choose rather than be bound by convention” (Friedan 320). The disbanding of the Women’s Association coincides with the introduction of Stepford’s own animatronic replacements for these women, which also led to the decline of the Stepford League of Women Voters. While the housewives are revealed to be automata at the conclusion of the novel, the Stepford wives stand for women brainwashed by the pressures of maintaining appearances and conforming in 70’s suburbia. These robots represent politically-minded women removed from the public sphere and replaced with artificially cheerful housewives who perform slavish work for the men of Stepford, becoming bound by the same convention that Friedan encourages women to overcome.

Having “never found a woman who fitted that ‘happy housewife’ image”, Friedan explains that business and the sheer amount of time that domestic housework takes upholds the damaging image that the housewives feel a great sense of purpose in their roles (Friedan 237). Maintaining the illusion of dedication stems from a sense of insecurity that should they stop cleaning, these housewives will have no other power in the home. Throughout her brief time in Stepford, Joanna Eberhart notices the “steady mechanical movements” of the other women who polish trophies and wax the floors of their homes tirelessly (Levin 64). Before suspecting them of being robots, she considers her neighbors to be “compulsive [hausfraus]” and “asking-to-be-exploited” patsies, lacking any ability to stand up against their husbands (Levin 9). “The old mystique of feminine inferiority” gave way to making women’s roles “in the home equal to man’s role in society” in order to keep women complacent in cooking and cleaning for the household (Friedan 239). Joanna fears that by becoming too engaged in household maintenance over her photography profession, she will relinquish her autonomy to a husband who will expect her to perform all of the domestic chores as the other wives in town do.

In order to ensure the women of Stepford adhere to their responsibilities, the Men’s Association of Stepford takes the concept of this mystique one step further in actually manufacturing robot spouses who uphold the virtues of housewifery in the very same way that Friedan asserts that women are oppressed. After “the author of The Feminine Mystique addressed members of the Stepford Women’s Club,” Stepford Library records indicate the quick decline of the association that encouraged the women to seek fulfillment and community beyond the home (Levin 37). Joanna tries to speak with the former club president about the experience, but finds the other woman to be “like an actress in a commercial…pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers and shampoos, and deodorants…playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real” (Levin 42-3). Joanna’s assessment of the woman’s artifice recalls Friedan’s notion of the “sexual sell” in which “the manufacturer of a certain cleaning device…let the housewife have the illusion that she has become a professional, an expert in determining which cleaning tools to use for specific jobs,” reinforcing the subjugation of women within the domestic sphere (Friedan 215). The Stepford wives make banal choices of which detergent to wash clothes with, or which wax to clean the floor with, and while it gives a semblance of control to the woman, her control in the domestic sphere keeps her subservient to the others in the household.

This illusion of choosing power upholds the mystique that keeps women unhappy in their homes as the role of housewife becomes an all-encompassing “career” that absorbs time and energy. Joanna suggests the buxom, cheerful women are “playing…unconvincingly” and too “nicey-nice to be real,” because the happiness exerted by the Stepford housewives conflicts with her notions of femininity and independence. It also challenges Friedan’s theories which inspired second-wave feminists to seek new opportunities for women beyond the cloyingly domestic. This cognitive dissonance, as well as Wosk’s assertion that man’s perfect robot fuses “happy domesticity” with a “sexy playmate,” creates the sense of uncanniness that leads Joanna to further investigate the truth behind the relentlessly robotic housewives. The Stepford simulations silence opposition to the Men’s Association by removing woman’s consciousness from the equation entirely, relying on the gender performance of machines and antiquated ideals of the woman’s role in the home to keep the illusion alive.

The eponymous Helen in Lester Del Rey’s short story Helen O’Loy (1938) functions so well as a constructed woman that she even fools her husband into forgetting that he built her out of metal as an experiment with a friend (Foley 371). Fresh from her packaging, Helen “was designed to express emotions…ready to simulate every human action” with more advanced technology than the previous robot built by Dave and Phil (Del Rey 52). Her name is an allusion to the famed Helen of Troy, whose beauty started a war, although the men call their own creation O’Loy as a shortened form of “alloy”, to reinforce that she “was… a dream in spun plastics and metals” (Del Rey 49). While Helen embodies a new technology as a robot, she also represents classical beauty, femininity, and sensitivity in accordance with conventions of the perfect housewife. The men consider her the ideal female form, not unlike the idea of the girl-next-door type in this era, and this success thrives on gender performance as well as her physical allure and comparison to classic beauty in name and structure.

As a robot, Helen can only simulate human action and not truly live it, unlike Phil, the endocrinologist, who has “performed plenty of delicate operations on living tissues,” before working with Dave to construct Helen (Del Rey 52). In Anatomy of a Robot (2014), Despina Kakoudaki notes:

“Because of the unusual romantic tone of the story, ‘Helen O’Loy’ also presents an early version of a performative approach to humanity, in Helen’s actions, her recognition of the encoded nature of femininity, and her adherence to normative gender roles ensure her ability to pass as a woman” (Kakoudaki 187).

Helen’s performance as a human successfully allows her husband to forget that he built her from disparate robotic parts. At first, Dave grows increasingly upset with Helen’s infatuation with him, and Phil even informs her that “a man wants flesh and blood, not rubber and metal,” but Helen insists that in her mind, “I am a woman. And you know how perfectly I’m made to imitate a real woman…in all ways” (Del Rey 61). She primarily concerns herself with notions of romantic love, accommodating Dave in all the ways that she knows a woman should behave towards a man. While Phil insists that a real man does not want, “rubber and metal,” they call her a “dream in… metals,” which conflicts with their desire of her perfect femininity. Helen finds herself imitating living behaviors, although her sense of identity is one of being a woman, causing brief cognitive dissonance between her understanding of self and of her motivations. In accordance with Betty Friedan’s assessments of women’s psychological states where the high-dominance woman breaks free of gender conventions, “the low-dominance woman was not free to be herself, she was other-directed. The more her self-depreciation, self-distrust, the more likely she was to…wish she were more like someone else” (Friedan 320). Helen O’Loy yearns to be a woman that can please Dave’s sensibilities, and so reads a series of romantic books to help her better understand how to imitate that person. Friedan’s language of “other-directed” recalls the robotic, programmed nature of Helen, as well as the other domestic housewife robots, whose directive comes from the creator or husband figure.

Eventually, Dave’s resistance to Helen’s advances wears down and the two become happily married after realizing that, “no man acts the way Dave had been acting because he hates a girl; only because he thinks he does- and thinks wrong” (Del Rey 64). She makes a perfect bride and homemaker, and the couple grow up happy, even without having children. In his age, Dave begins to forget that he built his wife many years prior. Eventually, Helen enlists the help of Phil to physically alter her face as Dave grows older so that she may properly maintain the illusion of her womanhood for her husband, as she is unable to age due to her synthetic nature. Like a woman with her makeup Helen, “put lines in her face and grayed her hair without letting Dave know she wasn’t growing old with him” (Del Rey 64). In this sense, her uncanny nature lends itself to a sense of timelessness, not unlike her classical beauty for which she was named. Helen exists outside of human aging, being a machine, and must therefore manually alter herself to appear as something she is not, eventually fooling even the men who created her from repurposed parts.

In The Vision, Vision and Virginia execute functions of normal marital love, but recognizing her artifice leads Vision to have anxieties over his wife’s uncanny nature and the deceptive appearances of his own family life. Waking in the middle of the night, Vision finds “himself in a state of dread, his thoughts caught on a repeating image of the day he first saw his wife open her eyes” (King 1.17). Her eyes seem “like a camera lens adjusting to the light” as her “pupils grow and recede” in this memory, and the mechanism of her awakening frightens Vision (King 1.17). Onto her he places anxieties and hopes for a normal family life, but among their human neighbors in the suburb, the illusion of a happy household begins to fade. She is the uncanny body, corpse-like although she functions as if she is alive. Virginia provides Vision with a perfect partner, but in doing so simultaneously removes his hope to regain the love he lost. Interestingly enough, Vision himself is an android built of the same materials as his wife, yet she inspires feelings of uncanny dread in him. In his theory of the uncanny, Freud asserts that “a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes” sometimes represents “a substitute for the dread of castration” (Freud 7). While Vision’s fright comes from the memory of his wife’s eyes, the day she awoke from slumber to mechanical life represents a loss of Vision’s human love. He programs Virginia’s mind to imitate the thought patterns of Wanda, the human woman who used to be romantically engaged with the android man. Virginia’s body, however, reminds her husband that she is artifice. Still, Vision repeats to himself the demand that “I must love her…this is my wife. I must love her,” in order to maintain the image of mechanical marital bliss (King 1.17). He “must” love her because he lacks a reasonable alternative- he is her creator and her husband, the reason for her life. She sustains that notion of “happy domesticity” that men seek when they create cyborg counterparts, where Vision increasingly fails to perpetuate the idea of normalcy he hoped the family would bring to him.

In contrast to the feminine mystique of upholding the sanitation and tidiness of the home, Virginia suggests to a neighbor that “to get to clean you are required to introduce substantive turmoil” to the order of the house (King 6.10). In her case, the substantive turmoil occurs when she destroys the furniture while malfunctioning, asserting that “everything is normal” after the family has come under great scrutiny by their neighbors (King 5.12). Friedan assesses that the only way “the young housewife was supposed to express herself, and not feel guilty about it, was in buying products for the home-and-family” (Friedan 222). As the series progresses, Virginia becomes increasingly volatile while the family comes under scrutiny for the strange events that transpire after they join the suburban neighborhood, expressing herself not through purchases but through rage directed at her own residence. This results in her breaking furniture and destroying the walls such that the home nearly becomes uninhabitable. She struggles to maintain appearances based on human standards of normalcy, and the more the family tries, “to get to clean,” the further they cause discomfort not only in their own residence but also in their neighborhood.

Her domesticity is not happy, nor is it built on choosing the best products with which to maintain her home. Rather, Virginia’s household disarray reflects the biblical fear that, “women would destroy the home and make slaves of men,” which was used as a justification for making women subservient in the family (Friedan 87). Virginia’s rage does destroy the home not due to the fact that she is a woman, but due to her uncanny nature in an unnatural, domestic setting. Her uncanniness is what keeps her husband enslaved to thinking that he “must love her,” because of the purpose that he built her for, or else lose the illusion of peaceful and happy domesticity. In their struggle to uphold the standards of a conventional, suburban existence, their physical home transforms into unhospitable space that becomes as unhomelike as they themselves, an android and his constructed facsimile of a family performing humanity. While these robots are asked to keep house, slowly they unmake the traditional structure of patriarchy and domesticity within the home.

Art-Official Intelligence- Testing Creative Capacity

“She’s a triumph of your art and of her dressmaker’s; but if you suppose for a moment that she doesn’t give herself away in every sentence she utters, you must be perfectly cracked about her.”

–Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw (1913)

The importance of vocal performance in Shaw’s Pygmalion, so named after Ovid’s fictional sculptor, reveals an important aspect of science fiction’s obsession with humanoid robots. There is a distinction between the outward, beautiful embodiment of a woman and the thoughts she voices, which expose her intelligence and true nature. As Megan Foley assesses in “Prove You’re Human” (2014), her article about interactions and fetishization of material embodiment, “the voice, and the fantasy of bodily presence it sustains, have become a function of informational patterns themselves” (Foley 369). The Turing test serves as a real-world paradigm for much of the imagination of science fiction, whose robots are advanced beyond the capabilities of the technology Turing worked with. In the age of the posthuman, intelligence “becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols,” leading to new fictional representations of how humans will test a robot’s humanity (Foley 369). When the machine mind can outsmart a human in code manipulation, humanity must turn to other sorts of performative examinations that are supposedly more difficult to replicate.

In the case of science fiction narratives that move beyond the parameters established by Turing, it is the creative capacity of the android figure which becomes the new determining factor when assessing that being’s humanity. This act demonstrates “a pervasive desire to recover the lost guarantee of a corporeally present human subject on the other side of the computer screen” and in the case of science fiction, uncover the humanity inside the mind of the present android figure (Foley 372). Art and empathy, as is the case with Dick’s Voigt-Kampff test or the visually-oriented Turing variant in Ex Machina, present opportunities for the disembodied creativity to become corporeal in order to prove whether the robot has a soul, a concept elusive even to many humans. This results in the idolization of embodiment and performative labor as humans simultaneously hope to interact with something indelibly alive and embodied, and fear the robot’s ability to fully recreate something thought to be intrinsically human. Speech patterns and other human thought processes can be replicated by algorithms written into computer programs but ideas of talent and creative impulse are thought to be unique to civilization. When a CAPTCHA program asks a user to indicate which segments of an image contain flowers or street signs, the formulaic robot mind appropriates the labor of the human by incorporating the visual information into its database and ascribing the appropriate meaning to the image. Robots can be instructed to reproduce works of music and art already in circulation, but whether they can produce original artistic content seems to be the standard by which human testers measure true consciousness- this is to say nothing of whether humans can truly create new original content. Creativity serves as an indicator for humanity in science fiction, whose androids are advanced enough already to evade detection of more basic Turing tests, and reinforces valuation of those robots whose qualitative labor can remind us of what it means to be innately human.

While undergoing Turing test applications to assess whether she has true consciousness, Ava from Ex Machina produces several pieces of artwork, the first of which is a series of geometric lines in black ink that she claims mean nothing to her. Ava’s first drawing bears resemblance to the surrealist practice of automatism, her paper covered in abstract markings. This practice arose when 20th century artists let their unconscious minds come forth onto the canvas in drawings composed of patterns and unspecific figures. Automatic art hoped to make sense of a war-torn world and allow artists to cope with confusion and trauma. Ava’s art signifies her attempt to access her unconscious mind and produce work representing her cognitive abilities, whether or not the artwork has a defined subject. Ava makes, “drawings every day. But I never know what they’re of,” which does not deter her from creation, although she seeks answers and hopes that Caleb will tell her what the art represents (Garland). Caleb, the human, asks her, “to sketch something specific…like an object or a person,” rather than the formless shapes that neither can ascribe direct meaning to (Garland).

Although Caleb believes that Ava’s artwork would be more beautiful depicting a particular subject, Nathan’s décor brings him to the realization that constant cognizance would never result in artwork being created. Standing in front of a Jackson Pollock painting, Nathan explains that the artist, “let his mind go blank, and his hand go where it wanted. Not deliberate, not random. Someplace in between. They called it automatic art” (Garland). While there is no doubt that Pollock stands among the more famous American artists, his process of drip painting mirrors that of Ava’s ink drawings, wherein she produces work without a specific intent, instead letting her artificial mind access its more unconscious functions. By employing this process in her artwork, Ava does not merely recreate a specific work, as most robots are prone to simply imitate behaviors that have been programmed into them. Here, the “challenge is not to act automatically. It’s to find an action that is not automatic,” and access that unconscious self which allows the artist to produce new work free from constraints of guided intention (Garland).

When Caleb challenges her to draw something more recognizable, he changes her automatic artwork into something purposeful, at which point she can use that intent of meaning to manipulate her observer. Foley suggests that, “cybernetic circuits expand their capacities by appropriating the labor of human bodies,” as Ava appropriates Caleb’s suggestions for art and presents them to him in order to win his sympathies; first, with a drawing of her own enclosure and then with a portrait of him, after which he finds himself devoted to helping Ava escape (Garland). After being shown the portrait Ava has drawn of him, which was torn to pieces by Nathan just prior to this meeting, Caleb becomes resolute in his attempt to outwit their observer and liberate the robot from her confines. In this way, while it seems that Ava produces labor for her tester by creating drawings with his specific subjects in mind, she as the robot actually benefits from his human labor, incorporating his requests into a drawing that wins his allegiance and causes him to work to her benefit, similar to the aforementioned CAPTCHA program. Rather than recognizing the implications of an artificial intelligence creating automatic artwork, Caleb focuses on the embodiment of her drawings and what they represent about her clear and present thoughts, and seeing himself as the subject of her guided drawing proves the final distraction in understanding the processes of her consciousness.

When considering his assignment to eliminate her in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Rick Deckard judges android opera singer Luba Luft mainly by the cultural value of her creative output. Upon discovering the renegade android performing Mozart’s The Magic Flute opera, “he found himself surprised at the quality of her voice; it rated with that of the best, even that of notables in collection of historic tapes” (Dick 99). Deckard’s context for the beauty of her voice consists of these historic tapes which are auditory reproductions such as cassettes or records which invoke Foley’s idea of the vocal performative act. As far as he knows, the recordings capture the voices of singers from humanity’s past before World War Terminus, but without absolute certainty, they represent “the erasure of embodiment” by reproducing only the vocal performance of whoever composed the musical tracks (Foley 369). By holding the “historic tapes” in esteem while simultaneously attributing Luba’s talent to her programmed functions, Deckard devalues the opera singer because he can observe her visual presence and knows that she is a product constructed by the Rosen Association, whereas he seems to be certain that his musical recordings comprise human voices of the past.

Considering that his mission involves retiring, or killing, Luba, Rick Deckard wonders what loss of cultural value will occur upon her death because, “she was really a superb singer… how can a talent like that be a liability to our society? But it wasn’t the talent, he told himself; it was she herself” (Dick 137). As a bounty hunter, “he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates and I unmake,” positing Luba Luft as a created entity which Deckard must destroy because her very embodiment represents the danger of android bodies integrating indistinguishably with humans (Dick 98). Her talent, which is in this case her voice, is more valuable to the world than her body which, being a Nexus-6 type, poses a danger to human society. The escaped Nexus-6 models were a former source of labor for the emigrants of Mars, having killed several humans to escape their slavery and hide on Earth. Deckard’s specific purpose in killing these robots unmakes those embodied androids that the Rosen Association produces, and while he may succeed in destroying the form, the corporation retains the intangible code and information with which the robots are constructed.

After being tracked to an art museum, Luba Luft contemplates an Edvard Munch painting, Puberty (1895), which symbolically encapsulates the transitory state that the android body occupies as an embodiment of human form whose intelligence is an intangible pattern of programming. The painting itself is “a drawing of a young girl, hands clasped together, seated on the edge of a bed, an expression of bewildered wonder and new, groping awe imprinted on the face,” and the title of the painting adds context to the moment of human transition from childhood to adulthood (Dick 131). The painted female body captures this state of progression while also leaving it static and unable to develop beyond the depicted moment just like the transitory bodies of the Nexus-6 models who exist fully formed although merely a few years old. When Luba spots the pursuing bounty hunters at the museum, “the color dimmed from her face, leaving it cadaverous as if already starting to decay. As if life had in an instant retreated to some point far inside her, leaving the body to its automatic ruin” (Dick 131-2). Deckard notes the duality of her embodied mechanical self and the life and personality of her programmed performance as, “the bracketing of material flesh from those simulated speech acts installs a mind/body binary in their place” (Foley 367). Luba’s mind is the immaterial coding that allows her to be as prodigious an opera singer as she is, while her physical form is what disguises her among human company, allowing her to take work as a performer and not just an intelligent computer.

In Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine DeLandro’s Bitch Planet (2014), the deceased inmate Meiko Maki must be digitally recreated when her father, a prestigious engineer, comes to visit the prison facility and see his daughter. Having unwittingly let a guard kill Meiko, the prison directors choose to display a hologram for her father Makoto, claiming the cloyingly pink projection is his daughter, speaking from another part of the facility that does not allow for visitors. This incident relies “on fetishization of the live voice in interaction patterns to fool human users… [becoming] a repeated, real-world Turing test” in order to keep Makoto ignorant of the abuses of the prison (Foley 370). The pink holograms, called “models,” represent the idealized or ‘model’ form of the non-compliant prisoners. She carries the image and voice of his daughter, but not the physical presence or rebellious spirit- she is more calculated and demure. Series letterer Clayton Cowles even indicates the artificiality of her presence by tailing the facsimile Meiko’s speech bubbles with an electric jolt tail, representing hologram’s vocal performance. This suggests a hollow, almost lifeless sound quality to the voice of the imitation woman, and complicates her attempt to recreate Meiko’s consciousness.

Makoto, upon realizing the projection is not, “my Meiko,” prompts her with a test of music. He requests she play Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s variations on the Celtic folk song “The Last Rose of Summer” on the violin (DeConnick, 8.17-18). Demonstrated through the visual of her eyes appearing to buffer the request as a loading video would, the simulation of Meiko processes the request in order to comply with Makoto’s wishes. Here, her body has, “become the phantom limbs of informational networks,” where her physical, deceased form is no longer needed to access and replicate the Meiko’s virtual presence, though the model Meiko lacks the memories and personality of her living self (Foley 375). She becomes an algorithm presenting itself as a woman whose only directive is to comply with the input commands of a male superior, making herself a ‘model’ of submission in this patriarchal prison system. This facsimile cannot reproduce the mnemonic nuance of the real Meiko Maki, and so Makoto exploits this with his request for a violin performance. His daughter was taught to play folk songs, and the Ernst variation on “The Last Rose of Summer” is a much more musically complex piece. Foley suggests that,, “fetishization of bodily performance by information technologies has turned into…commodity fetishism,” which, first described by Karl Marx, “disavows the performance of labor and substitutes of the product of labor in its place” (Foley 376). The programming of Meiko’s compliant counterpart concerns itself only with fulfilling Makoto’s request for a specific violin performance and eschews the personal relationship between the father and daughter. A silent, three panel segment focusing on Makoto’s face demonstrates his realization that there is, in fact, no sentient person beyond the pink apparition bearing resemblance to his daughter (DeConnick 8.19). Her bodily absence and the technically perfect performance of the difficult violin piece expose the artifice of the model hologram.

Meiko’s hologram appears smiling in the reflection of Makoto’s teardrops on the floor, and as she asks if she did well, her father asserts that she played, “so well you broke my heart” (DeConnick 8.19). The image of Meiko’s smiling reflection directly mirrors a panel from the sixth issue of the series, in which the conditions of her imprisonment are explained. Meiko’s reflection smiles up from a puddle of blood which is draining from a man she has strangled with her violin string (DeConnick 6.26). She explains the anatomy of her instrument, the violin, as being compared to:

“a woman’s body. It has a back, a neck, a nose, a belly… even ribs. But the parts that interest me most are the bridge and the sound post, also called the heart and soul. The bridge holds the strings, and transfers vibrations to the belly, where they pass through the soul post. The soul supports the structure. It keeps the body from collapsing under the pressure created by the tension of the wires on the bridge… the heart strings.” (DeConnick 6.5).

This comparison between the body and the instrument introduces the idea that Meiko’s violin playing manipulates heart strings both in the literal sense, on her instrument, and in the figurative sense, upsetting her father and making him emotional. While the violin has a technical aspect of soul, the hologram of the dead woman lacks this same soul, and her very image plays on the heartstrings of her visiting father as her perfect talent reveals that the Meiko he knew has died. Her musical performance was flawless, but it lacked the heart and soul of Makoto’s flawed, and very loved, daughter. While the living Meiko Maki killed a man with her violin strings, the projection of her has, in a metaphorical sense, killed her father when he realizes with a broken heart that his imperfect daughter has been replaced with a flawless simulation. In differentiating between the human and the artificial, the test of creativity has its limits at perfection. These tests of the musical and visual creative capacity of robots reveals the human fetishization of the body, marked by an insistence on imperfection- human flaws reveal the highly functioning artifice of the mechanical being.

Automatonomy- Cyborg Feminism and the Future

“Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

–Hamlet, William Shakespeare (1603)

The previously examined texts largely deal with gendered robots performing the role of traditional femininity as imparted on them by their male creators. Even in the case of the satires Bitch Planet and The Stepford Wives, the robots are presented through the lens of patriarchal control, which helps to expose the constraints of gender performance as demonstrated through the sexbots, happy homemakers, and artificial artists. In the quote taken from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia remarks on the woman’s potential to transform into another state of being. While meant to be taken in the context of her madness, this statement lends the female figure possibility for change, and so lends the TechnOphelia, the robotic woman, a transformative power as well. Feminist theorist Donna Haraway offers a divergent analysis on how cyborg technology can better serve and shape human, and particularly female, interactions with the machine in her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991). Haraway proposes that, “the cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century” (Haraway 291). Representative of a post-gender world, the figure of the cyborg integrates the individual with technology, allowing access to, “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. According to Haraway, “this is the self feminists must code,” in order to operate in society, unconstrained by what the author calls the elusive “concept of woman” (Haraway 302). Womanhood as a singular concept does not exist, definitions of femininity varying from person to person. Because robotic technology is not inherently gendered but exists between the human and nonhuman, Haraway examines the way in which women can utilize the “integrated circuit” of humanity merged with technology to exist apart from constraints of society, effacing traditional gender binaries through liminality (Haraway 304).

While Turing’s imitation game focused on the performative differences between the male and female genders, the concept of the integrated circuit, first coined by Rachel Grossman, allows “fresh sources of analysis and political action” in “a world so intimately restructured through social relations of science and technology” (Haraway 304). Despite the large number of these science fiction texts dealing with men’s interactions with the cyborg, there are those that offer a vision of technology existing beyond the definition of gender, utilized by women in ways other than the performative sexual or domestic tradition. When women interface directly with the machine in these texts, they are able to overcome the “exploitation into a world of production/reproduction and communication called the informatics of domination,” a series of “simultaneously material and ideological” dichotomies that constrain women to specific roles in society (Haraway 300, 302). Furthermore, “high-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine,” (Haraway 313). Women in the integrated circuit work in tandem with technology to better exist in information-driven society while stepping outside constraints like the gender binary, and relationships defined by patriarchy.

In William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic (1981), individuals directly integrate technology into their own bodies, using their cybernetic enhancements to navigate a society built on data exchange. These enhanced citizens, referred to as “technical” people, inhabit “…an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information” (Gibson 9).

Humans recode their bodies through surgical means, and for women this means the integration into that technological circuit which governs their society. Molly Millions, an enhanced Razorgirl, uses her cyborg body to become a skilled assassin after being implanted with “ten blades…beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double-edged scalpel in pale blue steel” (Gibson 4). Having also had her eyes replaced with, “surgical inlays…sealing her eyes in their sockets,” Molly navigates between the technical and Lo Tek societies, taking hit jobs and protecting herself against the Yakuza gangs. Her technological enhancements do not compose her entire being, but rather she willingly has “Chiba City circuitry traced along her thin arms,” in her eyes, and in her hands in order to make herself a capable assassin and strong bodyguard to the eponymous Johnny who transports information through his brain in the form of code (Gibson 11). This can be considered in light of Haraway’s theory that, “the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body and tool are on very intimate terms,” as a result of combining the technological and the organic (Haraway 303).

Utilizing this blurring of boundaries, the Magnetic Dog Sisters are another example of women working within the circuits of society, not defined by gender roles. In a passing mention, Johnny notes: “the Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night…One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were nearly as identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They’d been lovers for years and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male” (Gibson 1).

While the two are not sisters in biology, these two women share identity both in physical appearance and association. They represent some of the aforementioned dualisms of the body, such as racial divisions between black and white, but also transcend traditional limitations as posthuman figures, one transgender and both cyborg in their modifications. Their individual identities become confused in Johnny’s memory, but they are considered equals in appearance, strength, and romantic partnership. Haraway asserts that cyborgs in science fiction “make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity, or body,” and by confusing identities, they allow women to exist as something other than within the prescribed notions of traditional female gender roles (Haraway 314). They are sisters, lovers, and identical although distinct, integrated into the cyberpunk society through technological means.

Julie Wosk includes a chapter on “Dancing with Robots” in My Fair Ladies, stating that “men in literature, film, and art have long been pictured dancing with robots and dolls- beautiful artificial women who gaze at them lovingly and fill them with wonder and bliss” (Wosk 152). Gibson undermines the expectations of this trope in the climax of Johnny Mnemonic as Molly Millions dances not with, but against a Yakuza killer in a battle to the death on the Lo Tek Killing Floor. Not an artificial woman, Molly utilizes her enhancements and protects herself against another trained assassin. The room beats with music “electronic, like an amplified heart, steady as a metronome,” as the woman becomes a part of the roiling floorboards and shrieking coils in a “mad-dog dance” (Gibson 11). Instead of being a creation designed to dance at the man’s pleasure, Molly lives and thinks for herself, controlling her own identity through her cybernetic enhancements. To Haraway, “the machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment,” and the cyborg figure melds the machine with the human body, creating parts of identity and ability that make up a new whole (Haraway 315). Molly’s strength and technological enhancements are a part of her embodiment and allow her to exist as a bodyguard, a fighter, and a partner to Johnny. Between the dancers there is no “wonder and bliss” but concentrated fervor and violence until ultimately Molly’s victory leads the shamed man to leap to his death (Wosk 152). To dance with this cyborg invites danger and intrigue because her eyes do not gaze lovingly, but look from behind silver screens that calculate her next movements.

For women to become a part of the integrated circuit, they do not need to literally graft technology into their skin, but the machine can become an extension of the woman’s sense of self. Haraway asks, “Why should bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (Haraway 314). In Rolin Jones’s stage play The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow (2006), agoraphobic Jennifer Marcus constructs a cyborg double that learns from her maker’s personality while simultaneously developing an identity of her own. Unable to leave the home because of her obsessive-compulsive disorder and severe phobia of the outside world, Jennifer Marcus uses her creation Jenny Chow in order to interface with her biological mother in Dongtai, China. The robot serves as Jennifer’s integration into society, giving her a new body to overcome physical restraints as well as patriarchal policy of Chinese family structure that forced her mother to abandon her in the first place. Jenny Chow helps a mother and daughter reconnect despite the, “world system of production/reproduction and communication,” that keeps women oppressed, and in this way represents the cyborg “tools [which] embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide” (Haraway 302). Despite their physical and emotional distance, cyborg technology allows women to transcend boundaries

While Jennifer imbues the robot with information from her own identity, Jenny Chow begins “taking on her own personality… curious, excitable, poor sportsmanship… the big thing was when I wasn’t looking, she was beginning to make her own decisions. With guidance she was becoming beautiful” (Jones 45). Jennifer sees her creation in the manner of not only a scientist making observations but also in a way like a mother watching her daughter grow up into adulthood. Being a prodigious engineer and self-described mechanics whiz, her “intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment,” as her robot counterpart inherits her aspirations for maternal love and an awareness of her own cultural identity, and incorporates them into its own personality (Haraway 315). Jenny is her own original design, and while built for the purpose of standing in for Jennifer, she begins to inhabit her own behaviors and feelings similar to how a child learns from their parents but ultimately becomes a unique person. For Haraway, “in imagination, and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves” (Haraway 314). Developed with instinctual programming provided by Dr. Yakunin, Jenny physically embodies Jennifer’s desires to meet her estranged biological mother and overcomes physical limitations set by Jennifer’s crippling agoraphobia, which keeps her unable to leave her home.

During the first act of the play, Jennifer’s adoptive mother arrives drunk and scolds her daughter with a harsh reality check: “ADELE: I live in the real world, Jennifer. I’m real. And in the real world, women get screwed out there and if you’re not prepared they will squash you… I’m real. This house is real, Jennifer. And you can hide in your room and log on if you want to. But that’s not real! That’s a dream!” (Jones 31).

A stern businesswoman, Adele rejects her daughter’s desires to engage with digital technologies, thinking them a waste of the girl’s intelligence. She views Jennifer’s time talking with others on the internet as frivolous and immaterial, but these “tech-facilitated social relations,” enable Jennifer to integrate herself with the outside world while she works on her robotics (Haraway 304). While Adele does not consider the Internet realm to be “the real world,” which in her mind represents material labor and physical embodiment, these technologies allow Jennifer to exist in spaces outside of her own home and her own body, imparting her own consciousness to Jenny Chow as well as speaking with her estranged biological mother on another continent.

In order to accomplish these feats, Jennifer takes a job repurposing missile parts for the United States government, using spare parts she acquires to build her robotic double. Haraway traces the genesis of cyborgs, calling them, “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism… but illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins,” and while this is seen as troubling, Jennifer exploits the military’s dependence on their own robotic technologies, helping them to improve missile function while she gathers their spare parts for her own work (Haraway 293). As cyborgs can be considered illegitimate children, “their fathers… are inessential,” lending a maternal narrative to the manifestation of these new beings especially in the case of Jenny Chow (Haraway 293). While Jennifer has an adoptive father who cares deeply for her, her biological father plays no role in her desires to build her robot. Rather, Jenny Chow becomes the next woman in a lineage of mothers and daughters estranged by the patriarchy and reunited through technology.

Because of Chinese restrictions on family sizes, Jennifer’s mother gives her up so that the female infant, a gender seen as less desirable due to inheritance rights, can have a better life in America. Somewhat mirroring her mother giving her away as a baby, an upset Jennifer sends Jenny out into the world alone in an emotional exchange;

JENNIFER M.: You are flawed. You have to go.

JENNY C.: I am sorry. I am so very sorry.

JM: (pause) You have to go.

JC: I am very beautiful. (Jenny Chow climbs out the window) (Jones 68).

While Jennifer hopes that banishing her robotic counterpart will dispel her own personal shortcomings, she realizes that losing Jenny means losing a vital part of her life. Jenny represents the “intimate components, friendly selves” that Haraway recognizes of cyborgs in relation with humans. Speaking to the audience at the conclusion of the play, Jennifer regrets her choice to detach herself from Jenny and from her participation in the integrated circuit her creation allowed: “JENNIFER: I made a lot of mistakes. But she’s not one of them. She’s my…perfect girl…She’s infinitely more complex than anything out there. And she’s very afraid. I can feel her. I can feel her” (Jones 69).

The language used to refer to Jenny takes both ownership and responsibility for her being, indicating her status as a companion, a counterpart, and also offspring. Jennifer calls her “my perfect girl”, as a mother might call her own child, but also as a creator referring to her product. Jenny was what Jennifer imagined to be the “perfect girl”, a better version of herself, without the emotional baggage accompanying her agoraphobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Despite having pushed her out of her home, Jennifer can still feel a connection to Jenny, whose very existence helps her to engage even more with others in the integrated circuit than simply through the Internet. Their bond transcends physical limitations, connecting human to machine and woman to woman as they interact with one another and the world at large, enabled by technology and at the very core, the desire to connect with others.

Rust in Peace- A Conclusion on Robot Suicides

“I’ll be back.”

–The Terminator (1984), dir. James Cameron

Perhaps one of the more compelling and frightening aspects of the robot body is its longevity. The Terminator says it best in his famous quote, “I’ll be back,” indicating the persistence and endurance of the android’s life thanks to enhanced technology and intelligence made of code. A figure of the posthuman age, the synthetic humans of science fiction comprise much more durable materials, more permanent information networks, and an existence beyond current civilization. As a part of the human fetish of embodiment, there is a great deal of preoccupation with material form and the preservation of physical presence. This preoccupation leads to the intrigue of such figures as the sexbots, whose bodies can be fashioned to suit our sexual urges, while in other instances the focus is on what creative labor the robot can perform for us. As humans create what they desire to be a new life, patterns of societal gender norms are applied to these cyborgs, restricting them into patterns of domesticity and subservience for those built as recreations of femininity in culture.

In certain cases of science fiction, we see the robot body used as a metaphor for the figurative death of a woman which leads to her removal from the integrated circuit. The death of the living Meiko Maki enables the creation of her artificial self, already removed from society through her incarceration by the patriarchy of Earth. Joanna Eberhart is assumed to be killed and replaced with a brainwashed reproduction trapped in a suburban purgatory along with dozens of other housewives. Luba Luft has to be killed because, “the servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master” (Dick 30). With cyborgs comes the human fear of being rendered obsolete by the mechanical offspring of our own creation. Robots are built in the image of humanity, imbued with its strengths and shortcomings, and while they do not carry our biological genes forwards into survival, they do represent another sort of hope for the persistence of human intelligence and culture.

While in some narratives a woman must die in order for an android to replace her, other stories see the cyborg’s final act of agency in deactivating or otherwise ending the life of its body. In the French short film Lost Memories 2.0, a cyborg call girl formerly programmed to assist surgeons in a hospital asks her customer to deactivate her body, although her artificial intelligence exists within the Cloud. Unhappy with the way she has been sold and managed by a pimp, the android woman wishes to end her material existence so that she might be at rest. This can also be seen in The Vision when Virginia, to escape the turmoil of their suburban misery, drinks a glass of water and spends her final moments resting in the arms of her android husband as the liquid corrodes her internal systems. Vision’s thoughts narrate those final moments, saying, “Virginia did the right thing. Or she did the wrong thing. Or she just did what everyone does,” and after his heartbreak he vows to bring back her consciousness in a new form (King 12.17). While doing so would deny Virginia her wish to die and once more make her his object, it does suggest something about the permanence of the posthuman self. Because the mind and body are separated in posthuman existence, the intangible code of intelligence remains even after the death of physical form. To deactivate the physical body does not destroy the posthuman mind, whose information exists without material form.

The mortality of the physical self often causes anxiety to those who contemplate what will become of their thoughts, memories, and lived experience upon death. Human creators bestow their own knowledge of life onto these android offspring, who then preserve it and proliferate it. When humans take the attitude of cooperation with the cyborg rather than competition for survival, advancement will naturally result from the integration and experience as imagined in Haraway’s theories of cyborg feminism and those texts which see the machine as an extension of that prosthesis Hayles called the posthuman body. When the robot’s mechanical form is fetishized and considered closer to its slave origins, as a laborer or object for consumption, the figure becomes confined by humanity’s need for immediate gratification and fear of its own extinction. However, it is in collaboration with human knowledge that the cyborg can take its fullest form, allowing civilization to benefit from the progress it enables. The posthuman mechanism effaces traditional binaries and empowers women connected through technologies across the world. To code consciousness into machines does not condemn humanity to irrelevance, but may in fact prove to sustain the intelligence and information of the modern age well into posterity and posthumanity.

A Senior Honors Thesis

For the Terms: Fall 2016 and Winter 2017

University of California, Santa Barbara

Student: Amy L. Chase

Advisor: Professor Brian Donnelly

Works Cited

Cameron, James, dir. The Terminator. Orion Pictures, 1984.

DeConnick, Kelly Sue (w), Valentine DeLandro (a), Taki Soma (a), Clayton Cowles (l), and Kelly Fitzpatrick (c). Bitch Planet- v.2, President Bitch. Image Comics, 2014.

Del Rey, Lester. “Helen O’Loy”. Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, 1938. PDF article.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Random House, 1968.

Ferracci, Francois, dir. Lost Memories 2.0. Short Film.

Foley, Megan. “‘Prove You’re Human’: Fetishizing Material Embodiment and Immaterial Labor in Information Networks”. Critical Studies in Media Communication. Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. 1919. PDF article.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1963.

Garland, Alex, dir. Ex Machina. Universal Pictures, 2015.

Gibson, William. Johnny Mnemonic. Originally published in Omni Magazine, 1981. PDF article.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto”. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books, 1991. PDF article.

Hauskeller, Michael. Sex and the Posthuman Condition. Palgrave Pivot, 2014. 10.1057/9781137393500.

Hayles, Katharine. How We Became Posthuman. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Jones, Rolin. The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc, 2006.

Kakoudaki, Despina. Anatomy of a Robot. Rutgers University Press, 2014.

Kellet, E.E. The Lady Automaton. Originally published in Pearson’s Magazine, 1901. PDF article.

King, Tom (w), Gabriel Hernandez Walta (a), Michael Walsh (a), and Jordie Bellaire (c). The Vision- v.2, Little Better than a Beast. Marvel Comics, 2015.

Levin, Ira. The Stepford Wives. Harper Collins, 2002.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Simon & Schuster, 2009.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Signet Classics, 1998.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

Wosk, Julie. My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Artificial Eves. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Decolonizing the Mestizo: Postcolonial Approaches to Latino Identity in Chicano Literature

Posted on November 24, 2017November 1, 2022 by

By Rodolfo Centeno

Introduction

In March of 1969, during the First National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, Chicano poet and activist Alurista drafted what is perhaps the foundational manifesto of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Drawing inspiration from the Black Nationalist Movement which had culminated a little less than a year prior with the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and disconcerted with the then still developing Delano Grape Strike, lead by Chicano labor activist Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers Union, Alurista resolutely declaimed in “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán”,

In the Spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal ‘gringo’ invasions of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun…declare the Independence of our Mestizo Nation…before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán.

That this radical proclamation of Chicano nationhood represented a preeminent threat to national security was clearly the position of the United States federal government, which subsequently initiated an extensive campaign of surveillance and suppression against the Chicano Nationalists. Indeed, as Ernesto Vigil recounts in his seminal work of historical criticism, The Crusade for Justice, Alurista’s declamation of the Plan de Aztlán at the First National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference “proved to be of special interest to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which had monitored the conference’s progress since Gonzales first proposed a national Latino gathering in Chicago in 1967” (92), and “resulted in a separate, ongoing FBI Internal Security file on that and subsequent Denver youth conferences” that was part of a larger agenda (related by the FBI headquarters in a report to a field office in Albany, Georgia) “to expose, disrupt, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of…nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, memberships, and supporters” (93). This sustained effort by the FBI to suppress the literature and activities of Chicano Nationalists throughout the sixties and seventies is a clear indicator that the conventional precepts of North American historiography and epistemology are not sufficient to comprehend the full scope of what Alurista’s Plan de Aztlán intends to signify, as the ultimate agenda of Chicano nationalism, as expressed in its literature, was not to depose the U.S. government, as was the conviction of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, but was rather, as Alurista contends in his essay “Cultural Nationalism and Chicano Literature during the Decade of 1965-1975,” to “search for the historical self which had predated the onslaught of the European colonizers of this continent,” which would function to “unify the heterogeneous Xicano population in the United States” (23).

This mandate to search for a pre-colonial and simultaneously prelapsarian historical identity through cultural nationalism adds an overlooked layer of complexity to Alurista’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán by placing its discourse squarely in the tradition of Postcolonialism by espousing the establishment of a new awareness and consciousness among U.S. Chicano as a colonized people, and seemingly circumventing any notions of inciting insurrection. Nonetheless, Alurista’s call for the mobilization of the New Chicano Nation christened as “Aztlán” requires in its insistence of the postcolonial character of the United States Southwest not only a wholesale reevaluation of the most fundamental axioms of historiography and epistemology inherent in Western socio-historical thought, but also a challenge to the most deep-seated and longstanding historical narratives surrounding the U.S. acquisition and settlement of the American Southwest; both epistemological and historical precepts must be reconsidered in order to deconstruct and comprehend the essential meaning of Alurista’s radical declamation.

Nevertheless, the entirety of the Chicano Movement and its literature would be beset by controversies over the implementation of the ideology of ethnic nationalism and its relation to Chicano identity and subjectivity. That such controversies over nationalism’s relationship to identity beleaguered the Chicano Movement are unsurprising as a critical examination of the political prose and poetry of Alurista, Rodolfo Gonzales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherrie Moraga reveals that at the heart of radical Chicano literature is a preeminent concern for the nature of Chicano identity and subjectivity. However, Alurista and Gonzales would espouse conceptualizations of the Chicano Nation distinct from those of Anzaldúa and Moraga. Drawing inspiration from Post-Revolution Mexican Nationalism which sought to consolidate a new Mexican-nation state by promoting a mythohistorical national narrative of mestizaje, a postracial political ideology originating in revolutionary Mexico which “promoted racial and cultural intermixture as the only way to create homogeneity out of heterogeneity,”, Alurista and Gonzales similarly constructed alternative epistemologies in historical discourse as a way to consolidate a unified Chicano Nation from a heterogeneous Chicano populace through the construction of a common ethnic and historical mission (Alonso 462). The key figures for achieving this Chicano unification were embodied in the mythohistoric construction of Aztlán, the mythic homeland of the Aztecs whose prototypical citizen was encapsulated in the Mestizo, once a member of the lowly interracial caste in colonial Spanish America transformed into a hybridized postcolonial figure that envisioned a new teleology of American history that progressed history to an ultimate surmounting of the colonial condition.

However, third wave feminist Chicanas Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga were not satisfied with the Chicano status quo which aimed to achieve “homogeneity out of heterogeneity,” and instead posited alternative queer significations for both “Aztlán” and the mestizo which allowed for multiple Chicano subjectivities to emerge and challenged “the myth of the autonomous, coherent, and stable subject—a subject who is able to occupy fully a single unproblematic category” (Beltran 597).

Part I: Myth, History, and Nationalism in the Works of Alurista and Rodolfo Gonzales

The Chicano Nation, as formulated and imagined by Alurista in his Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and later reaffirmed by Gonzales in his political prose and poetry, is a nation that arises from a historical narrative rooted in preconceptions of history antithetical to western conceptions of time and historical development as a progressive teleological process. Specifically, when considering what is signified by the terms “mestizo nation,” “bronze continent,” and the term “Aztlán” (the mythic homeland of the Aztec Nation) itself, Alurista’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán represents a sacred historical narrative, that is, a historical narrative that conflates elements of myth and history to formulate an “intentional history” which contains “elements of subjective and conscious self-categorization” and reveals a “past told as a particular groups’ understanding of its place and importance in the known world” (Dillery 507). This conflation of myth and history, or perhaps more saliently put, this strategically constructed mythohistory is the distinguishing feature of Alurista’s call for political unity among U.S. Chicanos. More importantly, it represents an alternative epistemology in historiography, that is, an alternative way of knowing and understanding historical phenomena distinct from traditional precepts of objectivity and empiricism characteristic of North American historiography. Alurista’s sacred historical narrative centered on the concept of “Aztlán” and the “mestizo nation” would inspire the political literature of numerous Chicano writers thereafter and would define the cultural character of the Chicano Movement itself, becoming the prevailing narrative that sustained its political actions. However, before the full implications of the alternative epistemology represented in Alurista’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán for Chicano Literature can be assessed, its origins in the political literature of post-Revolution Mexico, specifically Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’ seminal work of revolutionary political theory The Cosmic Race is in order, as its conceptions of historiography, and its culturally specific formulations of the meaning of the “mestizo nation” and “bronze continent” that are fundamental to Alurista’s conception of the Chicano Nation find their origin in this literature, which represent its greatest textual informant.

Perhaps the most influential feature of José Vasconcelos’ The Cosmic Race, in relation to Alurista’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and other radical Chicano literature, are its conceptions of history and time. Critical of the scientifically objective approach to socio-historic analysis in the Western tradition, Vasconcelos decisively asserts,

Empirical history, suffering from myopia, loses itself in details, but it cannot determine a single antecedent for historical times. It flees from general conclusions, from transcendental hypothesis to fall into puerility of the descriptions of…minutiae that lack importance when seen apart from a vast and comprehensive theory. Only a leap of spirit, nourished with facts, can give us a vision that will lift us above the micro-ideology of the specialist. Then we can dive deeply into the mass of events in order to discover a direction, a rhythm, and a purpose. (8)

By condemning empirical analyses of socio-historical phenomena as ultimately myopic in scope, and by proposing a historiography with a “vast and comprehensive theory” akin to a “vision” as its end-goal, Vasconcelos propounds a historiography that operates through prophetic revelation in which past events reveal “ a direction, a rhythm, and a purpose,” for the future. This prophetic approach to history, which epistemologically privileges the imaginative capacities of human consciousness to interpret the significance of past events over the production of an objective account of the past, and is temporally oriented to the advent of a predestined and ultimate eschatological event, is completely at odds with Western conceptions of history and time, which emphasize an empirical approach to the analysis of past events and proffer a teleological historical narrative which culminates with the eventual surmounting of the human condition. The prophetic qualities of Vasconcelos’ historiography are largely dismissed as myth by establishment historians, and consequently deemed not to constitute a legitimate history because, as history theorist Peter Heehs observes in his essay “Myth, History, and Theory,” the word “myth” signifies for many historians “an interpretation that is considered blatantly false” (2).

That history is “true” and that myths are “false,” and furthermore that history is based in “reason” and myth based in “imagination” and represent fundamentally oppositional mental activities, have for centuries been the prevailing epistemological attitude of most historians. But now, many contemporary theorists of history are beginning to reconsider the utility of truth-value in historical analysis. Phenomenologist Hisashi Nasu deconstructs the epistemologically hegemonic notion of the imaginative capacities of consciousness as being in fundamental opposition to the capacity of reason by reaffirming the value of imagination in both the empirical and social sciences. Although imagination and myth are “assumed to refer not to reality but to fiction,” nonetheless,

The scientific process does not consist only of observing objects, collecting data, and deducing theory from them. One can observe the objects seriously, in detail, and for years without producing any insights of scientific interest…scientific insights cannot be drawn from the data without interpretation of them, and the data, in turn, can be interpreted not by observing the literalized data strictly and precisely as ‘figures of ink on the sheet, ‘not by scrutinizing them as ‘letters or numerals written,” but by considering them through imagination as something transcending themselves and referring to other terms. (Nasu 51)

Nasu’s observations that the formulations of scientific theories are fundamentally dependent on the imaginative capacities of consciousness, and furthermore, that both the empirical and social sciences involve subjective interpretation provides the groundwork for which history and myth can be assessed as mutually constructive rather than oppositional discourses as conventionally understood. Specifically, that history and myth both involve acts of subjective interpretation to produce a narrative, whose objectivity is now being questioned by many theorists of history, has generated a postmodern approach to myth and history that seeks to “dissolve the distinction between realistic and fictional discourses on the presumption of an ontological difference between their referents, real or imaginary, in favor of stressing their common aspect as semiological apparatuses” (Heehs 5).

Understanding myth and history as more fundamentally connected than opposed is key to understanding the cultural, political, and aesthetic value of Vasconcelos’ mythohistorical narrative, especially considering that myth and history’s mutual function as a community’s self-affirming narrative, as well as the culturally conditioned filters which are inherent in all historical analysis and narratives that make it so that “there is no way for a scholar to demonstrate a ‘historical’ explanation of events generally taken to be factual is any better than a fictional (mythical) explanation” (Heehs 15). This methodology of privileging rather than eschewing the imaginative capacities of consciousness when interpreting past events is central not only to Vasconcelos’ historiography but is also an essential feature of radical Chicano literature and creative political prose that has enhanced Vasconcelos’ work. By supplementing Vasconcelos’ mythohistory through “rhetorical devices such as metaphor, symbolism, and allegory” that create a distinct historic aesthetic and narrative surrounding the concept of the “mestizo” and “Aztlán” “that is more meaningful to many people than a critical assemblage of facts,” Chicano Literature inspired contemporary political action through the development of a radical postcolonial consciousness rooted in the mythic past and driven by prophetic impetus (Heehs 18).

Before delving into a discussion of how Chicano writers and poets supplement and aestheticize Vasconcelos’ historical narrative to create a distinct postcolonial political consciousness, a delineation and critical understanding of that narrative is necessary and within reach now that Vasconcelos’ historiographical methodologies have been explicated. Perhaps the distinctive feature of the mythohistorical narrative of Vasconcelos is the prediction of the advent of a “cosmic race” that will lead humanity into a utopian era. Specifically, Vasconcelos prophesies,

In Spanish America, Nature will no longer repeat one of her partial attempts. This time, the race that will come out of the forgotten Atlantis will no longer be a race of a single color or of particular features. The future race will not be a fifth, or a sixth race, destined to prevail over its ancestors. What is going to emerge out there is the definitive race, the synthetical race, the integral race, made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples and, for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision. (20)

Vasconcelos’ primary concern with race, particularly the advent of the predominance of racial mixture as the central catalyst of the teleological progression of history, may strike many scholars of the North American tradition as ostensibly racist or, at the very least, rather disquieting. To be sure, as Vasconcelos’ narrative of the Cosmic Race develops, one may observe various racially problematic details and assumptions. However, understanding the text in the political climate of post-Revolution Mexico reveals the salient postcolonial and anti-imperialist qualities of Vasconcelos’ mythohistorical vision for the development of the new Mexican nation that emerged from the conflict. As Ana María Alonso notes in “Conforming Disconformity,” directly before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz the “belief in the presumed superiority of the European impacted Liberal and Porfirian projects of nation-state formation, resulting in efforts to ‘whiten’ Mexico’s population through immigration and to incorporate the Indian into the nation through a model of development that resulted in the agrarian dispossession of rural communities” (461). The sustained marginalization of both indigenous and mestizo, (a term from the Spanish colonial period signifying mixed Amerindian and European ancestry), people by the Mexican national government prior to the revolution informs Vasconcelos’ mythohistorical narrative. His prophetic vision of the advent of a mixed-blood, or mestizo Cosmic Race that will initiate the teleological end of history not only undermines Anglo-American and eugenic notions of the degeneracy of racial mixture but also reflects Vasconcelos’ postcolonial vision for the newly emerging post-revolution Mexican nation. In this nation, the revaluing of racial and cultural mixture in positive terms would unify the racially and culturally heterogeneous and fragmented population under a singular national culture, with the mestizo emerging as a national symbol of Mexico’s hybrid cultural identity.

This mystique of the mestizo as a symbol of postcolonial hybridity in the cultural politics of post-Revolution Mexico also signified a staunchly anti-colonial national mission to overcome the injustices of Mexico’s Spanish colonial past from within and to resist the encroachment of U.S. imperialism from without. Consider for example Vasconcelos’ lamentation that,

Ideologically, the Anglos continue to conquer us. The greatest battle was lost on the day that each one of the Iberian republics went forth alone, to live her own life apart from her sisters, concerting treaties and receiving false benefits, without tending to the common interest of the race…The unfurling of our twenty banners at the Pan American Union in Washington, should be seen as a joke played by skillful enemies. (11)

Vasconcelos’ disdain for “the unfurling of our twenty banners at the Pan American Union in Washington” alludes to a sustained history of U.S. intervention in Latin America which often resulted in divisive civil conflict. But more revealing, perhaps, is Vasconcelos’ condemnation of the multitudinous Latin American nations for overlooking “the common interest of the race.” By this point, it should be clear that “the race” signifies the aestheticized postcolonial ideal of the mestizo as a messianic figure destined to initiate the end of teleological history. Thus, Vasconcelos’ vexation with the shortsightedness of the Latin American republics to not recognize a common national and ethnic mission, or “the common interest of the race,” is tantamount to a disaffection with the maintenance of the contradictions of coloniality in which culturally and racially heterogeneous populations within the nation remain alienated from one another, an alienation which post-revolutionary and postracial politics attempted to resolve under the banner of a common ethnic mission through the figure of the mestizo. Although ostensibly problematic in several ways, both Vasconcelos’ conception of the mestizo as a postcolonial symbol of cultural hybridity that would initiate the advent of a new teleology as well as the trope of Aztlán, the mythic homeland of the Aztec Nation proposed to be located in the U.S. southwest, would become the two most fundamental mythohistorical narratives of the Chicano Nationalist Movement in the U.S. that aestheticized these two prominent mythohistoric tropes in its prose, poetry, and fictions to produce a literature that challenged structural inequality through the development of a postcolonial consciousness rooted in a mythic and aestheticized ancient past.

With an improved sense of how a mythic engagement with historiography informs the writings of radical Chicano writers, the ways in which Alurista’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán represents a complete re-orientation of American history and utilizes the aestheticized political motifs of the cosmic Mestizo and the mythic land of Aztlán to create a Chicano nation through the establishment of an imagined community based on mythohistoric tropes can be properly delineated. Anyone reading Alurista’s radical declamation can get a sense that Alurista appreciated the fact that national consciousness is fundamentally a mythic construction, and furthermore “imagination and myth play in the development of the self-image that precedes nation-creation” (Fernandez 24). The theory that all nations are essentially imagined communities was perhaps most saliently developed by political scientist Benedict Anderson who claimed all nations are imagined communities since “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of the community” (qtd. In Fernandez 24). Not surprisingly, Anderson posits that the collective image of the nation is the most salient feature of the imagined nation and its principle cohesive force. Furthermore, Anderson argues that this collective image of the nation is inevitably aestheticized through cultural precepts and as a result fundamentally “depends for its existence on an apparatus in which literature plays a decisive role” (qtd. in Fernandez 24). Thus, aesthetic constructions of the nation reinforce it. But what the aestheticized collective image of the Chicano nation exactly is, remains an open question. As noted earlier, Alurista begins El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán by proclaiming “we the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, our inevitable destiny.” In this instance, the motif of Aztlán as the mythohistoric origin place in the north from whence the Aztecs set out on a two hundred year long pilgrimage to eventually establish their nation in the valley of Mexico is key. Not only does the reconfiguration of the U.S. Southwest as Aztlán undermine hegemonic notion of Chicanos as “aliens,” but the Aztec’s plight to establish a nation reflects Alurista’s own concern with establishing a Chicano nation, and thus also acts as “a contemporary metaphor for a nation in the making” (Fernandez 25). In addition, the project of building a nation that restores a mythic Aztec past which is described as “our inevitable destiny,” establishes a reconception of the teleology of history rooted in an ancient indigenous past and culminating in the surmounting of the colonial condition represented by the “gringo invasion of our territories.” This much is reaffirmed by the Plan’s conclusion which declares “the independence of our mestizo nation.” This “mestizo nation” that Alurista establishes is ostensibly an extension of Vasconcelos’ vision, and consequently signifies a revaluing of cultural hybridity as the foundational tenant of the postcolonial Chicano nation. Thus, Alurista’s Chicano nation is a nation rooted in an ancient indigenous past, endowed with a prophetic and providentially driven sense of history.

Perhaps no other poet in the early Chicano nationalist movement embodied the sense of sacred history and postcolonial identity rooted in the mystique of the cosmic mestizo quite like Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales. Anyone can appreciate this fact given the sweeping historical scope of Gonzales’ seminal epic poem “I am Joaquín,” which ambitiously attempts to delineate the totality of the Chicano historic experience from ancient Mesoamerica to the barrios of the contemporary Southwestern United States. However, the Chicano historical narrative delineated in “ I am Joaquín” is highly aestheticized. As opposed to the traditional textbook, which recounts an historic event through a chronological relation, one reads and interprets history in “I am Joaquín” by piecing together fragmentary imagery that evokes popular tropes and symbols of Post-Revolutionary Mexican nationalism. This collage of nationalist imagery that constitutes the aestheticized Chicano historical narrative in the poem recalls in its fragmented and visually rich artistic style, as well as in its overwhelming historic scope, works of post-revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera who is mentioned in the epic poem.

The stylistic similarities between Diego Rivera’s seminal mural The History of Mexico and Gonzales’ “I am Joaquín” are unmistakable, so much so that “I am Joaquín” can be assessed as a textual translation of Rivera’s nationalist murals. Consider for example Gonzales’ declamation in the poem, “ I am Cuauhtémoc, / Proud and Noble, / Leader of men, / King of an empire, / Civilized beyond the dreams/ of the Gachupín Cortez. / Who is also the blood/ the image of myself. / I am the Maya Prince. / I am Nezahualcóyotl, / Great leader of the Chichimecas. / I am the sword and flame of Cortez/ the despot. / And/ I am the Eagle and Serpent of/ the Aztec civilization” (17), and compare it to Leonard Folgarait’s description of a portion of The History of Mexico in his book of artistic criticism Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico relating, “Cortés is the major figure on horseback in the center of the bottom level…Above Cortés, in an eagle costume and about to swing a stone from a leather thong is Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, disbeliever of the Quetzalcóatl/Cortés myth and leader of the final armed resistance” (90-91). Both Rivera’s The History of Mexico and Gonzales’ “I am Joaquín” utilize the same nationalist tropes and images of post-revolutionary Mexico to create an aestheticized historic narrative, particularly the image of Cuauhtémoc, the last emperor of the Aztecs who is transformed into the symbol of the first defender of Mexican nationhood against foreign invasion within both works, as well as the image of Conquistador Hernán Cortés who is vilified in both works as the embodiment of colonial despotism and political tyranny. These symbolic transformations undergone by both historic figures are expressed directly by Gonzales who explicitly refers to Cortés as a “despot” and Cuauhtémoc as “Proud and Noble,” and is implied in Rivera’s mural through Cuauhtémoc’s superior and antagonistic position to Cortés in the space of the mural.

To delineate all the imagistic similarities between Rivera’s The History of Mexico and Gonzales’ “I am Joaquín” would be a considerable project that goes beyond the scope of this essay given that the imagistic complexity of both works replete with nationalistic Mexican symbols merits a study all of its own. However, the common thematic concerns of both works of art reveal a common ideological impetus. Ostensibly, Rivera’s The History of Mexico, like much of the cultural production in Mexico in the decade following the revolution, had at its core a concern for the consolidation of the new Mexican nation-state through the construction of a common national identity. As Horacio Legrás argues in “Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution”, Diego Rivera seemed to understand that “the political legitimacy of the post-revolutionary government was not backed by any consistent narrative” and furthermore that “the solution to this predicament came from the most unlikely place: culture” (79). Rivera’s response to the vacuum of a legitimizing historical narrative for the Mexican revolution was to construct an aestheticized mythohistorical narrative in The History of Mexico, which conflates Indigenous and Iberian iconography to promote “cultural mixture as the only way to create homogeneity out of heterogeneity…a strong nation that could withstand the internal menace of its own failure to overcome the injustices of its colonial past” (Alonso 462), as well as to create a new teleology of Mexican history that located the beginning of Mexican history in its ancient indigenous past rather than its Spanish colonial past, thus orienting the end of Mexican history in the populist triumph over imperialism and capitalism. The trope of a hybridized figure advancing the progress of history once again recalls the ever-present postcolonial motif of the cosmic mestizo. Thus, Rivera’s The History of Mexico not only re-orients the directionality of Mexican history but also promotes Vasconcelos’ ethnic mission of surmounting the legacies of colonialism through racial and cultural hybridization.

Like Rivera, Corky Gonzales is also concerned with the consolidation of a Chicano nation, but perhaps even more pressing is Gonzales’ concern with the creation of the essential identity of this Chicano nation first articulated in Alurista’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. Indeed, once his poem had gained national notoriety Gonzales himself noted in the introduction of the 1972 Bantam edition of “I am Joaquín” that “writing I am Joaquín was a journey back through history, a painful self-evaluation, and wandering search for my peoples and, most of all, for my own identity;” in addition, he claimed that “I am Joaquín became a historical essay, a social statement, a conclusion of our mestisaje, a welding of the oppressor (Spaniard) and the oppressed (Indian)” (1). For Gonzales, at the core of the Chicano experience is a crisis of identity arising from the mixed racial and cultural legacy of Spanish colonialism in which the cultural contradictions of Spanish and Indigenous worldviews precariously exist synchronously in a fragmented Chicano psyche in a state of constant tension.

This much is evident in Gonzales’ identification with both the colonizer and the colonized, for he states, “I owned the land as far as the eye/ could see under the Crown of Spain, / and I toiled on my earth/ and gave my Indian sweat and blood/ for the Spanish master” (17). The implications of this dual identification on both sides of the axis of colonial power relations are just as contradictory as Gonzales relates in regards to the expulsion of the Peninsular Spaniards from Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican War for Independence “I sentenced him/ who was me. / I excommunicated him my blood. /I drove him from the pulpit to lead/ a bloody revolution for him and me…/I killed him. /His head, /which is mine and all of those/ who have come this way, /I placed on the fortress wall/ to wait for independence” (18). Within this excerpt in particular, there is an unresolved crisis of identity emerging from a colonial ambiguity. By asserting “ I sentenced him/ who was me,” and “I excommunicated him my blood” Gonzales blurs the distinction between colonizer and colonized by assuming the identity of both. This identification with both the colonizer and the colonized is particularly problematic for conventional Postcolonial theory, which often constructs a fundamental binary of power and identity between the colonizer and the colonized. This premise of the oppositional relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Postcolonial theory is meticulously articulated by Postcolonial theorist Albert Memmi who asserts in his foundation work of Postcolonialism The Colonizer and the Colonized that the colonizer,

… finds himself on one side of the scale, the other side of which bears the colonized man. If his living standards are high, it is because those of the colonized are low; if he can benefit from plentiful and undemanding labor and servants, it is because the colonized can be exploited at will and are not protected by the laws of the colony…the more freely he breathes, the more the colonized are choked. (52)

For Memmi, the axis of power between the colonizer and the colonized must be fundamentally diametric in order to maintain the privilege of the colonizer. This diametrical axis of power between the colonizer and the colonized however is dissolved in “I am Joaquín” as the protagonist, in a crisis of identity, cannot determine whether he is the colonizer or the colonized. Ultimately, this liminal zone of power and identification emerging from the contradictions of embodying both the colonizer and the colonized is the crux of the Chicano experience for Corky Gonzales. This crisis of identity must be resolved in order to facilitate the construction of a cohesive Chicano nation united against American oppression, and Gonzales achieves this new national identity through the mythohistorical narrative of the cosmic mestizo. Through this mythohistorical narrative, the contradictions of power within this liminal zone of identity between colonizer and colonized, embodied in the mestizo, become transformed into a source of radical political transformation and unity with the advent of postraciality. Consider for examples Gonzales’ declamation “The priests/ both good and bad/ took. / But/ gave a lasting truth that/ Spaniard, / Indian, /Mestizo/Were all God’s children/ And/ From these words grew men/ who prayed and fought/ for/ their own worth as human beings, / for/that/GOLDEN MOMENT/of/ FREEDOM” (18). For Gonzales, postracial politics initiates the primary impetus toward social justice as the dissolution of the racial caste system which stratified Spanish colonial society into unequal castes of “Spaniard, /Indian, /Mestizo” gives way to “a lasting truth” of the equality of all human beings, with this new postracial consciousness catalyzing Mexico’s independence movement described as a “GOLDEN MOMENT/of/ FREEDOM.”

The implications of this revolutionary postracial consciousness for mestizo consciousness in the poem are ostensibly paradigm shifting when Gonzales relates, “Part of the blood that runs deep in me/ Could not be vanquished by the Moors. / I defeated them after five hundred years, / and I endured. / The part of blood that is mine/ has labored endlessly five-hundred/ years under the heel of lustful/ Europeans/ I am still here!” (28). This excerpt stands in stark contrast to the aforementioned fragment, “I excommunicated him my blood,” as the confluence of Iberian and Indigenous historic experiences embodied in the Gonzales’ mestizo no longer represent opposing forces on an unequal colonial axis of power as articulated by Memmi. Rather, the shared experience of colonization between the two becomes a source of resilience, resolving the identity crisis of the mestizo from moving away from psychic fragmentation toward psychic synchronization. This postracial synchronization transforms the image of the mestizo from a symbol of colonial contradiction to a symbol of postcolonial hybridity. Ultimately, Gonzales concludes his mythohistoric epic of the Chicano by proclaiming,

And now the trumpet sounds, / the music of the people stirs the/Revolution, / Like a sleeping giant it slowly/ rears its head/ to the sound of/ Tramping feet/ Clamoring voices/ Mariachi strains/ Fiery tequila explosions…I am the masses of my people and/ I refuse to be absorbed. / I am Joaquín/ the odds are great/ but my spirit is strong/ my faith unbreakable/My blood is pure/I am Aztec Prince and Christian Christ/ I SHALL ENDURE! / I WILL ENDURE! (28-29)

Unsurprisingly, the figure of the mestizo who embodies the synchronization of “Aztec Prince and Christian Christ” progresses the rhythm of history away from colonialism toward an ultimate eschatological moment of social revolution culminating in the popular clamor of “Mariachi strains/ Fiery tequila explosions.” Thus, Gonzales constructs the Chicano nation within the parameters of Vasconcelos’ mythohistorical vision of the advent of the cosmic mestizo, circumscribing the Chicano nation within a specific historical narrative that roots contemporary political activism which an aestheticized ancient indigenous past whose prophetic historic drive is oriented toward the surmounting of the colonial condition.

Part II: The Epistemological Challenge: Chicanas Respond to History and Chicano Nationalism

Politically and socially, the mythohistorical narratives of Aztlán and the Cosmic Mestizo established by Chicano poets and activists such as Alurista and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales proved to be a powerful metaphor and tool for Chicano unity during the seminal decades of the Chicano movement. Within the narrative of an ancient and promised Indigenous homeland in the Southwest destined to be returned to its Mestizo inhabitants who embodied a postcolonial historical consciousness oriented toward a final eschatological moment of revolution, U.S. Chicanos found the two most essential features requisite of any nation—“an ancestral territory and a common destiny” (Beltran 601). However, this mythohistorical narrative of the Chicano nation, while particularly successful at consolidating a heterogeneous Chicano population in the U.S. oriented toward political action under the guise of a common ethnic and historical mission, was not without its problematic elements. As cultural analyst Cristina Beltran argues in her essay “Patrolling Borders,” the figure of a cosmic mestizo who is imagined as the archetypal citizen of the Chicano Nation through the embodiment of a hybrid identity that contests the imposed colonial identities of both Spanish Imperialism and U.S. hegemony, is ultimately unsuccessful at challenging racial essentialism and the belief in an unified subjectivity as, “Hybridity becomes a kind of foundational or ‘fixed’ identity that forecloses more creative and productively defiant approaches to identity and subjectivity. Rather than risking a radical reconception of subjectivity that calls existing categories into questions, theorists of mestizaje too often reproduce already existing narratives of romantic identification and exclusion” (596). Thus, for Beltran, the figure of the cosmic mestizo reproduces the very racial essentialism and exclusionary politics it aims to challenge by circumscribing the figure of the mestizo in a fixed racialized narrative of colonial miscegenation consummating the inception of a postcolonial consciousness.

Furthermore, the historiography of the Chicano Nation inherited by Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, which engaged in a teleological analysis of socio-historical phenomena that prophesied the advent of a final mestizo race that would catalyze history to its inevitable postcolonial stage, was found equally problematic in an ostensibly empirical discourse such as history, as many scholars of history argued “Teleological statements and explanations imply the endorsement of unverifiable theological or metaphysical doctrines in science” (Mayr 122). The exclusion of metaphysical considerations from socio-historic analysis due to a lack of empiricism is a hotly contested issue in the field of historiography. In his essay “Teleology Beyond Metaphysics,” phenomenologist and philosopher Timo Miettinen argues that teleological historical thinking has played an essential role in the theorizing of the modern world, stating, “From Kant’s cosmopolitanism to Hegel’s philosophy of history and Marxist views of ‘historical stages,’ … the historical thinking of modernity is still haunted by the idea of an end, which would bring historical progress to its completion” (276). Furthermore, in response to teleology’s invalidation by establishment historians as ultimately counterintuitive to the empirical methodologies of historical analysis due to its unverifiable theses, Miettinen contends that historians’ interpretations of teleology as merely denoting historical determinism is limited, pointing out that Edmund Husserl’s philosophical approach to teleology reveals that,

The teleological horizon of the past was not called upon in order to reconcile empirical history with the ‘transcendental’ idea of world-historical teleology—to see the present as a result of a necessary development—but, instead, the very notion of teleology was employed in order to demand a creative transformation of the present state of affairs. For Husserl, teleology became ultimately a critical requisite of thinking—both philosophical and societal—that does not merely confine itself to the present moment…but aims at showing their necessary finitude and incompleteness in regard to infinite horizons of ideas. (281)

By viewing teleology not as strict historical determinism in the most literal sense, but rather as a tool for “creative transformation of the present state of affairs’” as Miettinen suggests, the ways in which Chicana writers and activists Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga utilize teleology in their own mythohistorical narratives to continue to challenge not only the dominant Anglo-nationalist narrative of Manifest Destiny in North American historical discourse but also the limited racially exclusive Nationalism of the early Chicano movement, become clear. In their genre-busting works of creative political prose, both Anzaldúa and Moraga delineate an alternative teleological historical narrative to both Chicano Nationalism’s cosmic mestizo and North American historiography’s progressivism in order “to demand a creative transformation of the present state of affairs” from both ideological institutions. Alienated from the racially exclusive politics of both Chicano Nationalism and North American historiography, Anzaldúa and Moraga utilize teleology in their creative political prose as an apparatus of critique of both Anglo historiography and Chicano mythohistory, thereby creating an alternative epistemology in American historiography, that is, an alternative way of knowing and understanding socio-historical phenomena that contests the imposed identities of both radical Chicanismo and Anglo-American historiography.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s teleological vision of Chicano history is perhaps best expressed in her magnum opus of Chicano/a theory Borderlands/La Frontera. Much like Gonzales’ “I am Joaquín,” the first chapter of Borderlands attempts another ambitious delineation of Chicano history from an ancient indigenous past to the contemporary barrios of the Southwest, but unlike Gonzales, Anzaldúa’s epic historical narrative is not presented in the aestheticized form of poetry, but rather is constructed as an academic relation. Although seemingly trivial, this distinction of format proves to be critical to the respective objectives of the two writers. By conflating elements of myth and history and incorporating both to her academic relation of Chicano history, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands represents a much more direct challenge to the legitimized establishments of North American academia than Gonzales’ “I am Joaquin.” Anzaldúa contests what counts as “history” through a conscious defiance of one of the most fundamental precepts of North American historiography—namely, the fundamental separation between the discourses of myth and history in the critical analysis of socio-historical phenomena.

Anzaldúa begins her ambitious mythohistorical delineation of Chicano history with a quote from Native American historian and anthropologist Jack D. Forbes which states “The Aztecas del norte…compose the largest single tribe or nation of Anishinabeg (Indians) found in the United States today…Some call themselves Chicanos and see themselves as people whose true homeland is Aztlán (the U.S. Southwest)” (23). Through an evocation of the image of Aztlán as an ancient Aztec and Chicano homeland, the reader already gets the sense of the ways in which the text is attempting not only to posit mythic tropes for serious historical consideration, but also to reorient the history of the Southwest itself by locating its historical inception not in thirteen colonies, Plymouth rock, or even the Mexican-American war, but rather in an indigenous past looking south toward Mexico and the rest of the American continent for its point of origin as opposed to the eastern seaboard. Anzaldúa continues her mythohistorical narrative of the Chicano nation by relating that after the Spanish conquest,

Our Spanish, Indian, and Mestizo ancestors explored and settled parts of the U.S. southwest as early as the sixteenth century. For every gold-hungry conquistador and soul-hungry missionary who came north from Mexico, ten to twenty Indians and mestizos went along as porters or in other capacities. For Indians, this constituted the place of origin, Aztlán, thus making Chicanos originally and secondarily indigenous to the Southwest,

and that subsequently “In the 1800s, Anglos migrated illegally into Texas, which was then part of Mexico…Their illegal invasion forced Mexico to fight a war to keep its Texas territory” (27-28). This relation of the Mexican settlement and loss of the Southwest completely reverses the conventional perceptions of the historic roles played by both Mexicans and Americans in the formation of what is currently the U.S. southwest by framing Mexicans as its original settlers and portraying Anglo-American expansion into the Southwest as an illegal migration, directly challenging the notion of Chicano inhabitants of the Southwest as “alien.”

Anzaldúa then begins to conclude her epic mythohistorical narrative of the Chicano nation by continuing the theme of Chicano migration, resolutely asserting

We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks. Today we are witnessing la migración de los pueblos mexicanos, the return odyssey to the historical/mythological Aztlán… El retorno to the promised land first began with the Indians from the interior of Mexico and the mestizos that came with the conquistadores in the 1500s. Immigration continued in the next three centuries, and, in this century, it continued with braceros who helped to build our railroads and who picked our fruit…ten million people without documents have returned to the southwest” (33).

The concept of a Chicano return from Latin America to the U.S. Southwest in the guise of Aztlán is the crux of Anzaldúa’s teleological historic vision. By attributing the U.S. Southwest to Aztlán, the mythological homeland of the Aztecs, (and by extension the mythological homeland of Chicanos who identify with an indigenous past), Anzaldúa constructs a sacred historical narrative in which U.S. Chicanos originate in the Southwest as Indians who later migrate south to establish Tenochtitlán as the center of their empire only to return to the Southwest as mestizos, transformed both by Spanish colonialism and Anglo-American capitalism.

This sacred historical narrative of the Chicano return to Aztlán represents a fundamental challenge to dominant Anglo-American institutions and historiographies in several ways. First off, by consistently emphasizing that Chicanos “have returned to the southwest” as opposed to having immigrated to the Southwest, Anzaldúa subverts the dominant historical narrative of Chicanos being the product of relatively recent immigration by stressing their indigeneity, providing an alternative epistemology for understanding the Chicano experience in the Southwest. In addition, in Anzaldúa’s narrative of the Chicano return to the Southwest, the image of the mestizo as a historical force remains prominent, consequently reproducing the trope of the cosmic mestizo as a catalyst of history that originated in the philosophical writings of José Vasconcelos. As Anzaldúa has clearly delineated, it is the mestizo who originally settled the southwest, and it is the mestizo who has returned to initiate the Chicano return to Aztlán. She implies that the same hybridized figure initiates the progress of the history of the Southwest to its inevitable destiny, which for Anzaldúa is the return of the Southwest to a prelapsarian indigenous state. This imagined transformation of the U.S. Southwest back into an indigenous nation-state is the endpoint which concludes the progress of Chicano history in Anzaldúa’s teleological historic vision, which is reaffirmed when Anzaldúa concludes the book itself stating “This land was Mexican once/ was Indian always/ and is/ And will be again” (113). Anzaldúa’s Chicano teleology which envisions the endpoint of the progress of the history of the Southwest as a return to indigeneity initiated by cosmic mestizo migrants acts as a direct challenge to the dominant narrative of manifest destiny which resolutely stipulated “The Anglo-American race are destined to be forever the proprietors of this land of promise and fulfillment, ” and characterized the Mexican southwest as “a howling wilderness trod only by savages…benighted by the ignorance and superstition…of Mexican misrule” (Anzaldúa 29). Thus, Anzaldúa’s mythohistorical teleology of Chicano history acts as a mode of Chicano liberation from dominant North American institutions and historiography by contesting its most fundamental historical narratives by re-orienting the position of Chicano people in the history of the American Southwest from “aliens” to proactive catalysts of its historical progression toward an inevitable return to indigeneity and triumph over colonialism.

However, Anzaldúa’s Chicano teleology which envisions a restoration of the Indigenous Southwest initiated by a Chicano peregrination back to a mythohistoric point of origin seems to uncritically reproduce the narrative of the Chicano Nation posited by both Alurista and Corky Gonzales, particularly in its insistence of a postcolonial hybridized figure that triggers the end of history. As such, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera shares many of the same criticisms of both Alurista’s El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán and Rodolfo Gonzales’ “I Am Joaquín” by postcolonial scholars, namely that the imagined prototypical citizen of the Chicano Nation embodied in the figure of the cosmic mestizo who catalyzes history to an inevitable postcoloniality through hybridization does not, in fact, challenge the racial essentialism inherent to colonialism, but rather reproduces it. As Chicana cultural scholar Cristina Beltran argues in her essay “Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies, and the Challenge of Mestizaje,” the ideology of mestizaje that represents a central motif in radical Chicano literature which “has been hailed as an anti-essentialist approach to identity…that takes experience into account but celebrates multiplicity and fluidity over stability and singularity” fails to truly challenge racial essentialism as “Hybridity become as kind of foundational ‘fixed’ identity,” and furthermore, “Instead of highlighting the contradictory and incomplete nature of subjectivity, contemporary theorists of hybridity continue to evoke the category of experience as a fundamental precondition for political agency and knowledge” (596). Thus, for Beltran, that a shared experience of postcolonial hybridity becomes the definitive feature of citizenship of the Chicano Nation evokes a dangerous essentialist impulse in that “it treats some citizens as inherently incapable of the shared understanding necessary for turning strangers into democratic interlocutors” (595), leading to exclusionary politics in which those without a prescribed set of experiences as determined by the cultural establishment are relegated to a subjectivity that is fundamentally outside the nation. Beltran’s critique of Chicano Nationalism’s construction of its prototypical cosmic mestizo citizen as reproducing essentialist and exclusionary politics surely is not without cause as Alurista’s aforementioned foundational declamation of the Chicano Nation El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán concludes with the adage “Por la Raza todo. Fuera de la Raza nada,” or “Everything for the race. Nothing outside the race,” which circumscribes the figure of the mestizo, (although perceived as a hybridized figure with postcolonial consciousness), within the limited and essentialist parameters of an unambiguous Chicano race, interpellating a hybrid figure into a homogenous racial framework.

Although Beltran rightly notes the racially essentialist impulses of early Chicano literature, there are several fundamental reconceptualizations of the motifs of “Aztlán” and the “mestizo” present in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera that distinguish her Chicano teleology from that of both Alurista and Rodolfo Gonzales and eschew the racially essentialist impulse of early Chicanismo. Perhaps most notable is Anzaldúa’s reconceptualization of Aztlán not as a Chicano homeland, but rather, as the borderlands of liminal and multitudinous subjectivities. In Alurista’s Plan Espiritual de Aztlán in which the poet resolutely proclaims “we declare the independence of our mestizo nation…before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán,”—Aztlán is unambiguously the birthright of the cosmic mestizo whose “struggles against the foreigner ‘gabacho’ who exploits our riches and destroys our culture” delineates him within a postcolonial consciousness and teleology oriented toward the advent of the surmounting of the colonial condition. In contrast, for Anzaldúa, Aztlán is not an independent Chicano Nation, but rather the borderlands, a place where there are “two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture,” that constitutes,

…a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal. (25)

Anzaldúa’s resignification of Aztlán as a “place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary…in a state of constant transition,” inhabited by “those who cross over…the confines of the normal,” transforms Aztlán from a utopian Chicano homeland whose inhabitants are characterized by postcolonial hybridity, into a liminal zone of identity where the contradictions of straddling an “unnatural boundary” produce an ambivalent and ambiguous ontological experience whose “constant state of transition” challenges the notion of singular or stable subjectivity, and whose inhabitants are characterized by their queerness, or deviation from normalcy.

This resignification of Aztlán as a liminal zone of subjectivity is further reaffirmed by the poetry that supplements the political prose of the text of Borderlands/La Frontera. Consider for example the poem “To live on the Borderlands means you” in which Anzaldúa constructs the fundamental character of Chicano borderlands ontology asserting “To live in the Borderlands means to/ put chile in the borscht, / eat whole wheat tortillas/ speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent; / be stopped by la migra at the border checkpoints” (216). Clearly, for Anzaldúa the borderlands signify a place of gaudy cultural hybridity marked by intercultural transactions embodied by the linguistic and culinary synchronizations of speaking “Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent” and putting “chile in the borscht.” As such the border itself becomes an arbitrary and porous delineation which cuts through an aggregation of culturally consistent communities characterized by cultural hybridization and transnational movement.

But perhaps more importantly, although the borderlands represent a space of cultural hybridization and synchronization, they also represent a space in which the contradictions of hybridity are a source of internal tension. In Anzaldúa’s words “To live on the borderlands means you/ are neither hispana india negra española / ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed/ caught in the crossfire between camps / while carrying all five races on your back / not knowing which side to turn to, run from.” And furthermore “Cuando vives en la frontera/ people walk through you, the wind steals your voice, / you’re a burra, buey, scapegoat,/ forerunner of a new race, / half and half” (216). Unlike Gonzales’ cosmic mestizo figure in his epic poem “I am Joaquín,” who resolves the tension arising from the mixed racial and cultural legacy of Spanish colonialism through a dual identification with both colonizer and colonized, creating psychic synchronization out of fragmentation, Anzaldúa does not readily resolve the tensions of cultural hybridization by moving toward synchronization. Rather, Anzaldúa’s mestiza cannot easily identify with any of “the five races on your back” and as a result, her racial loyalties are “caught in the crossfire between camps,” emphasizing “the contradictory and incomplete nature of subjectivity” (Beltran 596). In addition, Anzaldúa’s assertion that to live in the borderlands means you are “…a new race, / half and half—both woman and man, neither—a new gender,” in its ambiguous and fluid racial and gender identification represents a radical pluralism in racial and gender identity which “challenges the myth of the autonomous, coherent, and stable subject—a subject who is able to occupy fully a single, unproblematic category” (Beltran 597). As such, Anzaldúa reconceptualizes Aztlán from a Chicano Nation inhabited by hybridized yet homogenous figure into a liminal zone of identity in which a multiplicity of contradictory and ambivalent subject positions can emerge.

Anzaldúa’s challenge to the limiting and essentialized notions of racial and gender identity of early Chicano Nationalism and North American epistemology is further compounded by her reconceptualization of the figure of the mestizo itself. At the core of Anzaldúa’s reconfiguration of the mestizo is the construction of her “new mestiza” consciousness, which is fundamentally engaged with a deconstruction of ontological duality. For Anzaldúa, a fundamental ontological separation between the mental faculties of reason and imagination in western thought represents limiting dichotomous view of consciousness as she bemoans,

White anthropologists claim the Indians have ‘primitive’ and therefore deficient minds, that we cannot think in the higher mode of consciousness—rationality. They are fascinated by what they call the ‘magical ‘ mind, and the ‘savage’ mind, the participation mystique of the mind that says the world of the imagination—the world of the soul—and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality. In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence. Not only was the brain split into two functions but so was reality. Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to interface between the two. (59)

According to Anzaldúa ontological duality becomes the “root of all violence” by alienating two mutually constructive mental faculties from one another and by perpetuating an epistemological imperialism in which the faculties of consciousness itself are circumscribed into a dichotomous relationship in which imagination is aligned with primitiveness, and rationality is aligned with civilization.

Correspondingly, Anzaldúa asserts that mestiza consciousness necessarily contests the ontological duality characteristic of North American epistemology, contending,

The work of mestiza consciousness is to break-down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in flesh and through the images of her work how duality is transcended…A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. (102)

This deconstruction of a fundamental ontological separation between “subject-object,” creates a Chicano subjectivity in which the ambivalence and contradictions of hybridizing Chicano and Western epistemologies allow for a complex multiplicity of identity since by converging “analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality toward a single goal (a western mode),” with “divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective,” creates a consciousness by which “the new mestiza copes by developing tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity,” and consequently, “She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode” (Anzaldúa 101). Thus, Anzaldúa’s mestiza contests dominant Western ontology by positing a relational way of being that works against notions of duality, and simultaneously challenges the unitary subjectivity of early Chicanismo’s cosmic mestizo by developing a Chicano consciousness in which multitudinous subject positions materialize.

Similarly to Anzaldúa, Chicana activist and writer Cherrie Moraga develops an alternative teleology of the Chicano Nation in her seminal anthology of radical political prose and essays The Last Generation in order to contest both the ideological institutions of Western Historiography and Radical Chicano Nationalism. In the creative essay “Codex Xerí: El Momento Histórico,” Moraga utilizes Mayan eschatological prophecies as the locus theologicus of sacred Chicano history as opposed to the myth of Aztlán. Through her unconventional adoption of the Mesoamerican codex as the primary mode to engage with Chicano history, Moraga constructs a Chicano historical consciousness in which cycles of destruction and regeneration culminate in the advent of a revealed eschatological event that subverts the hegemony and impositions of Western civilization via a mystical participation in its destruction. By analyzing historical phenomena through Mesoamerican standards in which “a date is not a beginning but the culmination of history in all its totality” (Moraga 185), Moraga makes her rejection of normative Western conceptions of historiography in which time and history progress through a linear series of teleological conflicts which culminates in ultimate rationalization clear by proffering a new teleology of Chicano history based in Mesoamerican conceptions of history, in which time progresses through an eternal cycle of cosmological and eschatological events.

This much is clear when considering Moraga’s reflection of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, as she states, “It is 1992 and Los Angeles is on fire. Half a millennium ago after the arrival of Columbus, the Mesoamerican prophecies are being fulfilled. The enslaved have taken the streets, burning down the conqueror’s golden cities” (185). For Moraga, the 1992 L.A. riots represent an eschatological event in which history and time are beginning to progress into their predetermined cycle of destruction that reaffirms the legitimacy of “the Mesoamerican prophecies” that have already divined that “this era—El Quinto Sol—will be destroyed” (186). Thus the myth of the destruction of El Quinto Sol functions as the primary myth through which Moraga constructs an eschatological Chicano consciousness that contests the normative teleologically progressive vision of Western history. As the essay develops, Moraga observes “Urban warriors emerge on L.A. streetscapes. ‘Every empire falls,’ says the homeboy. ‘ The Romans fell, The Egyptians fell. (The Aztecs fell). This empire’s gonna go too” (191). It is clear through the clairvoyance with which “the homeboy” divines the apocalyptic end of the American Empire that Moraga reinforces the idea propounded by both Vasconcelos and Anzaldúa that the Chicano, in the aspect of the cosmic mestizo, will initiate the end of history and inaugurate a postcolonial historical era.

Although Cherrie Moraga may share a similar ideological impulse in her Chicano mythohistory with the Chicanismo of Alurista and Rodolfo Gonzales who similarly posit a postcolonial teleology for the Chicano Nation, Moraga nevertheless challenges some of the most fundamental ideological precepts of Chicano nationalism in her essay “Queer Aztlán: The Reformation of the Chicano Tribe,” in which Moraga conducts a complete resignification of the image of Aztlán essential to Chicano Nationalism. Moraga begins the essay by commenting on the mixed ideological legacies of Chicano Nationalism, noting,

What was right about Chicano Nationalism was its commitment to preserving the integrity of the Chicano people. A generation ago, there were cultural economic, and political programs to develop Chicano consciousness, autonomy, and self-determination. What was wrong about Chicano Nationalism was its institutionalized heterosexism, its inbred machismo, and its lack of cohesive national political strategy. (148-149)

For Moraga, not only must the homophobia and heterosexism of Chicano Nationalism be resolved, but indeed nationalism as a political ideology itself proves to be problematic by reproducing exclusionary and racially essentialist politics, as Moraga affirms, “I recognize the dangers of nationalism as a strategy for political change. Its tendency toward separatism can run dangerously close to biological determinism and a kind of fascism” (149). For Moraga, the clear solution to resolving the problematically essentialist politics of Chicano Nationalism is to “queer” Aztlán, to open it to unstable and contradictory subjectivities that deviate from normalcy and “insist that identity is plural, multiple, shifting, and fluid” (Accomando 116). At the heart of the project of “queering” Aztlán is the reconfiguration of Aztlán from “nation” to “tribe.” Although Moraga concedes the complexity of Native American tribal structures she derives inspiration from, she nonetheless argues that “the tribal model is a form of community building that can accommodate socialism, feminism, and environmental protection…’Familia’ is not dependent upon male-dominance or heterosexual coupling. Elders are respected, and women’s leadership is fostered, not feared” (166-167). For Moraga, the transition from Chicano Nation to Chicano Tribe not only eschews the essentialist impulse of Nationalism which “requires an unambiguous allegiance to singular identity,” but also authentically addresses the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality (Accomando 116). The image of the Chicano tribe represents for Moraga the ideal model for a new queer Chicano nationalism as it “decolonizes the brown and female earth. It is a new nationalism in which la Chicana Indígena stands at center, and heterosexism and homophobia are no longer the cultural order of the day” (Moraga 150). Ultimately, by “queering” Aztlán and reconfiguring it from “nation” to “tribe,’ Moraga resignifies Aztlán as a space of ambiguity and ambivalence where multiple Chicano subjectivities unproblematically emerge.

Conclusion

As has been delineated thus far, the fundamental nature of Chicano subjectivity has been a matter of the most preeminent contestation within Chicano literature. Emerging from the Chicano Movement’s inception in the tumultuous sixties, Alurista and Gonzales constructed a postcolonial Chicano Nation which circumscribed Chicano history in an alternative teleology of historic development, which demarcated the beginnings of Chicano history in an aestheticized indigenous past and prophesied the advent of a hybridized mestizo figure that would progress Chicano history toward a foretold and inevitable surmounting of imperialism. Although third wave feminists Anzaldúa and Moraga espoused similarly Chicano historical teleologies that located the end of Chicano historical development with the surmounting of the colonial condition, both Anzaldúa and Moraga resented the limitations of Alurista and Gonzales’ historical mediator—the cosmic mestizo, which aimed to create a hybridized yet homogenous Chicano Nation under the auspices of postcolonial consciousness. Rather, Anzaldúa and Moraga conducted a queer resignification of both the notions of Aztlán and the mestizo as developed by Alurista and Gonzales in order to transform Aztlán into a zone of fluid and liminal identity, allowing for multiple and diverse Chicano subjectivities to emerge. However, despite their fundamental differences on the nature of Chicano subjectivity and history, all of these Chicano writers utilized literature as a way to create alternative epistemologies of American historiography that conflated elements of both myth and history to challenge hegemonic historical narratives that marginalized Chicano people.

The value of these Chicano writers’ alternative socio-historical epistemologies cannot be underappreciated. These Chicano writers’ approach to history which considers both factual and mythic elements in the analysis of socio-historical phenomena is at the forefront of propagating a postmodern approach to history in which history and myth are no longer antithetical modes of discourse that base themselves in the oppositional terms of fact and fiction respectively, but rather are discourses that are mutually constructive since “the best historians can do is to try to attain a better historiographical balance between truths and myth,” as “facts that can be established beyond all reasonable doubt remain trivial in the sense that they do not, in and of themselves, give meaning or intelligibility to the record of the past” (Heehs 4). By pointing out that history is ultimately a matter of perspective open to interpretation, this postmodern sense of history, espoused by the alternative epistemologies of radical Chicano literature, is an indispensable contribution to the field of historiography

The necessity to re-approach history from a postmodern sensibility in which multitudinous perspectives mediate and contest hegemonic narratives couldn’t be more evident given the contemporary controversies regarding Latino history and identity in American public schools. Most notable is the case of Arizona House Bill 2281, which banned Chicano studies from all Arizona public high schools and dismantled Tucson Unified School District’s much acclaimed Mexican-American studies program. Arizona House Bill 2281 argued that Chicano Studies would promote the overthrow of the United States government, and as a result discontinued the teaching of Chicano studies in the state’s public schools and banned major works by Chicano intellectuals from the classroom such as Occupied America: A History of Chicanos by Rodolfo Acuña, and even an anthology of the works of Gonzales titled Message to Aztlán which included his seminal epic poem “I am Joaquín.” The Arizona legislature’s suspicion and suppression of Chicano literature villainized as seditious disconcertingly echoing the FBI’s concern in 1969 that the Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in its espousal of the new Chicano Nation of Aztlán represented a threat to national security, and the FBI’s efforts “to expose, disrupt, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities …nationalist, hate-type organizations” (Vigil 93) is once again reflected in the Arizona legislature’s war against Chicano literature. Of course, the preeminent purpose of Chicano studies in Arizona’s public schools was not to disseminate sedition, but rather, as J. Weston Phippen of the Atlantic argues, to teach students “to view history not just through the lens of Manifest Destiny and the nation’s conquering heroes, but also through the eyes of the displaced and conquered.” This approach to history which allows for diverse and multitudinous perspectives not only maintains the postmodern conviction that history is ultimately “an historiographical balance between truths and myths,” but also decreases the alienation of Chicano students who felt that their perspectives were systematically eradicated by the public school system (Heehs 4). Indeed, according to a study conducted by the University of Arizona and published in the article “How One Law Banning Ethnic Studies Led to its Rise” by J Weston Phippen “Mexican-American studies increased graduation rates, grades, and college enrollment” among Chicano students. However, with the 2010 ban on Chicano studies in Arizona public schools still in effect, it is clear that Chicano identity and liberation will continue to be stunted by a conservative status quo in the Southwest that insists on maintaining its epistemological hegemony over the interpretation of history itself through force of law if necessary.

Works Cited

Accomando, Christina. “All its people, including its jotería: Rewriting Nationalism in Cherrie Moraga’s Queer Aztlán.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, vol. 31, no.1, 2008, pp.111-124. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/23262809. Accessed 23 November

Alonso, Ana Maria. “Conforming Disconformity: Mestizaje, Hybridity, and the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 19, no.4, 2004, pp.459-490. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/3651588. Accessed 4 November 2016.

Alurista. “Cultural Nationalism and Xicano Literature during the Decade of 1965-1975.” MELUS, vol. 8, no.2, 1981, pp. 22-34. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/467145. Accessed 3 November 2016.

Alurista. “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán.” MEChA, umich.edu/~mechaum/Aztlan.html. Accessed 3 November 2016.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera. Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

Beltran, Cristina. “Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies, and the Challenge of Mestizaje.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 57, no.4, 2004, pp.595-607. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/3219821. Accessed 23 November 2016.

Dillery, John. “Greek Sacred History.” The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 126, no.4, 2005, pp.505-526. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/3804873. Accessed 14 March

Fernandez, Roberta. “Abriendo caminos in the Brotherland: Chicana Writers Respond to the Ideology of Literary Nationalism.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, vol.14, no.2, 1994, pp.23-50. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/3346623. Accessed 15 November 2016.

Folgarait, Leonard. Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Gonzales, Rodolfo. “I am Joaquín.” Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings, edited by Antonio Esquibel, Arte Público Press, 2001, pp. 16-29.

Gonzales, Rodolfo. “Introduction.” I am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín. Bantam Books, 1972.

Heehs, Peter. “Myth, History, and Theory.” History and Theory, vol. 33, no.1, 1994, pp.1-19. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/2505649. Accessed 3 November 2016.

Legrás, Horacio. “Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution: A Meditation on the ‘Theses of History ‘and Diego Rivera’s Murals.” Discourse, vol. 32, no.1, 2010, pp.66. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/41389831. Accessed 4 November 2016.

Mayr, Ernst. “The Idea of Teleology.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 53, no.1, 1992, pp.117-135. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/2709913. Accessed 25 November 2016.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Earthscan Publications, 2003.

Miettinen, Timo. “Teleology Beyond Metaphysics: Husserlian Phenomenology and the Historical Consciousness of Modernity.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 28, no.3, 2014, pp.273-283. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/jspecphil.28.3.0273. Accessed 25 November 2016.

Moraga, Cherrie. The Last Generation. South End Press, 1993.

Nasu, Hisashi. “Imagination and the Social Sciences.” The Interrelation of Phenomenology, Social Sciences, and the Arts, edited by Michael Barber and Jochen Dreher, Springer, 2014, pp. 51-66.

Phippen, J. Weston. “How One Law Banning Ethnic Studies Led to its Rise.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 19 July 2015, theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/07/how-one-law-banning-ethnicstudies-led-to-rise/398885/. Accessed 13 December 2017.

Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race. Translated by Didier T. Jaén, Johns Hopkins Press, 1997.

Vigil, Ernesto. The Crusade for Justice: Chicano Militancy and the Government’s war on Dissent. University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

La Petit Mort: Female Vampirism, the Abject, and Sexuality

Posted on August 10, 2017November 1, 2022 by

By Nadia Saleh

While the origins of the vampire in literature can be found in early Biblical texts on Lilith, the outpouring of literature on the vampire during the 19^th century reflects a renewed interest in the vampire’s link with sex, power, and death. Especially prominent in these texts are female vampires, often portrayed using major female archetypes: the female predator; the mother of evil; and the fallen woman. But why do these tropes persist even now, into the 21^st century? Where did these depictions come from? And what is it about the female vampire that strikes fear into the hearts especially of men, a fear that seems tied to confrontation with abjection? The link between this fear and the female vampire seems to be female sexuality, and fear of its overt expression. Female vampires are portrayed as lustful, defiling creatures, in a far more sexualized manner than their male counterparts. This portrayal uncovers fear of that shadowy world just outside the boundaries of society where the female body is powerful, women have agency, and they continually violate the boundaries that are crucial to civilized existence.

Monstrosity, and monster theory itself, deals with the idea of boundaries and the us/them dichotomy that they work to uphold. As Barbara Creed writes in her book The Monstrous Feminine, definitions of the monstrous are grounded in “ancient religious and historical notions of abjection” with a specific emphasis on religious “abominations”: sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay, and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the feminine body and incest” (Creed 8-9). These various practices often deal with things that humans find repulsive and unsavory, or things that counter religious and societal ideals. The monster serves to “demarcate the bonds that hold together that system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot–must not–be crossed” (Cohen 13). These strict borders are primarily in place to control the traffic in women and to maintain the ties between heterosexual men that keep a patriarchal society together (Cohen 14). As the boundary marker for society, the monster cordons off the “social space through which cultural bodies may move”; for example, the culturally acceptable expressions of female sexuality. Under this logic, monstrosity and sexuality go hand in hand, as many of the rejected societal practices (incest, sexual perversion, homosexuality) reflect the fear of deviant sexuality. The monster “embodies those sexual practices that must not be committed, or that may be committed only through the body of the monster” (Cohen 14). The monster’s deviant sexuality is linked to its “outlaw” status, the out-group shunned by proper society. The fact that these unacceptable practices are embodied by monsters makes them obvious targets and examples of how not to behave.

Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection, The Powers of Horror, defines abjection as having “only one quality of the object: that of being opposed to I” (Kristeva 1). The abject is something that a person does not recognize either as a subject or an object, an in-between condition linked to both thingness and nothingness. The term literally means “the state of being cast off.” What is being cast off is anything that repulses a human: blood, pus, or even simple things like the skin on top of milk (Kristeva 3). The abject signifies that which humans “permanently thrust aside in order to live,” the ultimate form of the abject being the human corpse (Kristeva 3). The human corpse, “the most sickening of wastes,” is a border that has “encroached upon everything” (Kristeva 5). To see a human corpse is to see mortality and accept it for what it is.

The vampire takes the already abjected human corpse to another level. Dead, but not dead, the vampire marks an even further encroachment upon the borders between life and death. Coupled then with the insatiable need for blood, abjection is intensified. Human blood, something carefully kept internal, must be made external for the vampire to survive. The externality of blood causes fear amongst humans because blood is supposed to remain inside the body. Any sign of blood outside the body is typically a warning of grievous injury or menstrual blood; the former is perceived as alarming, the latter as disgusting. Thus, the extraction of blood and externalization of blood by the not-living, not-dead body of the vampire crosses multiple borders, causing the vampire to be the ultimate abjection. At the core of the vampire lies an affinity for “rupture, change, and mutation,” because all vampires share one trait: the power to move between and undo borders otherwise holding identities in place (Butler 1). The female vampire, however, further increases this abjection. She is abject because she disrupts “identity and order”; her blood lust drives her and thus she does not respect “the dictates of the law which set down the rules of proper sexual conduct” (Creed 61).

The original female vampire, Lilith, appears in several ancient traditions, from the Talmud to ancient Babylonian bowls inscribed with magic texts. The version of Lilith that is most important in the context of the female vampire comes from the Talmud. In this tradition, Lilith is Adam’s first wife, created out of dust by God. Their marriage was not happy; when Adam tried to have sex with her, Lilith refused to lie beneath him: “Why should I lie beneath you, when I am your equal, since both of us were created from dust?” (Patai 296). Adam did not respect her wishes and when Lilith saw that he was determined to “overpower her,” she spoke the magical name of God and flew away to the Red Sea, a “place of ill repute, full of lascivious demons” (Patai 296). It is important to note the choice of words in “overpower.” Adam, Lilith’s male counterpart, wanted power over Lilith. When she refused to acknowledge this power, she flew away to a place full of demons, where she engaged in “unbridled promiscuity” and birthed more than one hundred demons a day (Patai 296).

The legend then continues that three angels, sent by God to retrieve her, were unable to get her to come back with them. Met with Lilith’s disobedience, the angels threatened to drown her in the sea. She argued that she was “created in order to weaken the babes,” and ordered the angels to leave her alone (Patai 296-297). In claiming her identity and worth in injuring babies, Lilith rejects the identity given to her by God and Adam as the submissive wife and forms the archetype for the female vampire. She is a female predator, seeking out babies to feed her blood lust. She is the mother of evil, birthing hundreds of demons a day. And she is the fallen woman, having descended into “unbridled promiscuity” by lying with demons. The fear of Lilith, the archaic mother, turns out to be “essentially fear of her generative power” (Kristeva 77). As Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu puts it in Carmilla, “it is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply” (95). Lilith’s power and influence stretch throughout the literary tradition, coloring the way female vampires are portrayed by other authors.

My study seeks to explore the variety and persistence of Lilith’s traits through focus on vampire texts produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on literary, filmic, and televisual texts, namely, Charles Baudelaire’s “Sed Non Satatia” and “The Vampire” (1857); Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872); Angela Carter’s short story, “The Lady of the House of Love,” (1979); Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992); and the HBO series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016). All of these works explore the crossing of the boundaries of life and death and of good and evil, and some deal specifically with the boundaries of the body, of virginity, and even of marriage vows. Penny Dreadful gives a name to this shadowy place of blurred boundaries, what Vanessa Ives calls the demimonde, “a half world between what we know and what we fear…a place in the shadows, rarely seen, but deeply felt” (“Night Work”). This place between what is known and what is feared, also called a borderland and a no-man’s-land, is where monsters walk and female agency takes command. In what follows I trace how this expression of female power is portrayed, managed, enjoyed, and punished so that social life can continue to proceed.

Girls Just Wanna Have Blood: The Female Predator

The female predator is a particularly terrifying figure for patriarchal society: the woman who stalks through the night and lures in her prey with her sexual wiles. The vampire, unlike a monster such as a werewolf or a zombie, enfolds the victim in an apparent, or real, erotic embrace. The idea of a woman not only crossing the boundaries of proper sexual conduct but also penetrating the boundaries of blood and the body is terrifying, and yet it continually appears in literature. So is the idea that she feeds on rather than nourishes other persons. As Bram Dijkstra suggests in Idols of Perversity, “woman, having been consumed in the marriage market, then having become consumptive as a wife through lack of respect, exercise, and freedom, took her revenge by becoming a voracious consumer” (Stephanou 74). Her voracious consumption of blood is a revenge against the voracious consumption of her body and crosses the boundary of proper behavior. Every female predator that exists in the literary canon is a reaction against women’s objectification and commodification in the marriage market. But why is she always so sexualized? And what purpose does it serve to keep telling these stories of female predators over and over again?

Charles Baudelaire touched on the theme of the female predator multiple times in his poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal, first published in 1857. In the first poem, “Sed Non Satatia,” or “but never satisfied,” the speaker is enslaved to a “daughter of darkness, slattern deity” (Baudelaire 32). The object of his affections is a female predator, a prostitute goddess, a daughter of “filthy covens” of witches. The speaker claims that “to wine, to opium even, I prefer the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself” (Baudelaire 32). With the reference to lips, the reader is reminded of the comparison between a woman’s mouth and the sexually aroused female genitals. The woman is drawing him in with both an addictive kiss and the sexual wiles that are present even in her facial features. The speaker then makes comparisons about being trapped in the wasteland of her eyes, where hellfire rains from her soul and he is trapped forever (Baudelaire 33). The speaker is “no Styx, to cradle you nine times”; the river Styx is one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld, known as the river of hate. The number nine refers to completion and fulfillment (Bruce-Mitford and Wilkinson 295). The speaker cannot find fulfillment and completion with her, perhaps reflecting a pseudo-sexual relationship where the speaker wants to have sex with the woman, but can never reach completion despite her sucking the life out of him. “Sed Non Satatia” has one final lamentation: “Alas, and cannot with some Fury’s lust/to break your spirit and your heart, become/in your bed’s inferno…Persephone” (Baudelaire 33). Without some supernatural power, the speaker cannot break the woman’s spirit and, in doing so, turn her hellish bed into the bed of Persephone, the goddess of flowers. It is worth noting that in the myth of Persephone and Hades, Persephone was unwillingly kidnapped, as the woman in this poem would be unwillingly made into something other than she is.

The second poem in Les Fleurs Du Mal to speak about female predators is aptly named “The Vampire.” In this poem, the speaker has been enslaved to a woman, who has made in his corrupted mind “your bed and bedlam there/Beast who bind me to you close/As convict to his chains” (Baudelaire 37). The Devil has given the woman the power to hold the speaker to her, where she will “make her bed,” which can be interpreted either as a form of sexual slavery, or as the place where she can rest and drink what she needs to survive. The speaker curses her, “as a gambler to his winning streak/As drunkard to his wine” (Baudelaire 37). He, too, is suffering from an addiction to the vampiric woman; as much as he hates her and curses her, he cannot leave her behind. There appears to be no release for the speaker, as he begs “both poison and steel” to set him free, but both “as with one voice/contemptuously refused/”You are not worthy to be free/Of your enslavement, fool!” (Baudelaire 37). The reasoning is simple: the speaker is so addicted to the woman that even if she was killed, the speaker’s kisses “would resuscitate/Your vampire’s waiting corpse” (Baudelaire 38). The speaker would be so desperate to regain his lost tormentor that he would immediately resurrect her, continuing the cycle of addiction and degradation.

Both poems deal with themes of addiction and dependency on women, and both reflect societal fears of the demimonde, the shadowy world beyond the edge of society. The woman to whom each speaker is addicted is, at least to them, obviously demonic and sucking the very life out of them, and yet they cannot escape from her charms. Even success in killing the vampress, as the poison and sword in “The Vampire” suggest, would be pointless, because the speaker would only resuscitate her, desperate to have her back. There are other poems in Les Fleurs du Mal that deal with similar themes, even if they are not explicitly on female vampires. Baudelaire seems to be making a comment on the addictive properties of women, using the familiar image of the vampire to further illustrate his point. After all, what is more dangerous to a mortal man than a demonically powerful, sexually powerful vampire? If even opium, a highly addictive substance and a drug that was commonly looked down upon in 19^th century society, is said to be preferable to the woman, then something must be very wrong with her. In this case, it is not so much the woman who is breeching boundaries, as she is forcing the man to do so. A man should not be subservient to a woman in patriarchal society, and he certainly should not be so addicted to her that he cannot live without her.

Carmilla, written in 1871 by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, is another example of the female predator. Predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 28 years, the novella articulates anxieties surrounding female sexuality, with its female predator, Carmilla, and its virginal protagonist, Laura, by showing not only woman’s capacity to captivate but also her possible erotic disinterest in men. Not only is she a predator, but specifically of women. The lesbian vampire is an especially frightening instance of boundary crossing, not only because of the taboo against homosexuality but also because essentially she is invisible to general society until she strikes. In the nineteenth century, close female relationships were societally acceptable, even necessary if one was to move easily among high society (Weiss 87). Wealthy women had governesses, handmaids, and close friends of similar status. All of these relationships potentially could disguise a homosexual relationship. The lesbian woman is already a crossing of the boundary of societally accepted sexuality; that is, any sex that is non-procreative is deviant and abhorred, in order for Christian-organized society to continue. The lesbian vampire, a creature that cannot procreate in general and seeks to feed on virginal, innocent women, is a doubly frightening figure.

The lesbian vampire merges two kinds of “sexual outlaws,” because she is not simply a negative stereotype, but a figure that is at once “an image of death and an object of desire,” drawing on subconscious fears of the living toward the dead, and of men toward women (Weiss 84). In an era where women were encouraged to “lie back and think of England” during intercourse, any interest in sex that a woman might show was considered dangerous and disruptive. A female vampire interested in female victims essentially operates in the sexual rather than the supernatural realm, because her feeding is hypersexualized. The physical closeness of the vampire and her victim becomes inherently sexual, an embrace of love and passion alongside the felt necessity to suck another’s blood. The specter of this possibility makes a female friendship something to be avoided and further draws the boundary between societally accepted sexuality (i.e. married, procreative heterosexual sexuality) and deviant sexuality (non-procreative, unmarried, homosexual).

Carmilla is set in Styria, a small state in Austria, in a Gothic mansion in the heart of a forest. Laura’s father is English, but Laura has lived all her life in this borderland between the civilized West and the uncivilized East. Despite this obviously sinister location, Laura claims to be “one of those happy children who are studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy tales, and of all such lore as makes us cover up our heads when the door cracks suddenly” (Le Fanu 4). Because she has not been taught to fear darkness and the things that come in it, Laura is not alarmed one evening to see a “solemn, but very pretty face” looking at her from the side of her bed. Nor is she frightened when the pretty stranger lies down in bed with her and caresses her. It is not until Laura is awakened by “a sensation as if two needles ran into [her] breast very deep at the same time” that she is at all scared (Le Fanu 4). The phantom girl disappears and all is dismissed as a nightmare, because there are no marks on Laura’s chest. The initial bite on her breast is significant, because it codes the vampire’s attacks on Laura as homosexual, even from a young age.

This phantom girl is none other than Carmilla, the girl who suddenly arrives at the family mansion in an unexplained carriage crash. One of Laura’s governesses claims that when the “moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity” (10). It is no surprise that the mysterious Carmilla and her mother, who requires Laura’s father to take in Carmilla for three months in order to handle some urgent business, arrive under the light of such a moon. When Carmilla and Laura come face to face that night, Laura recognizes her as the face that had visited her, which she had “for so many years so often ruminated [on] with horror” (Le Fanu 19). This horror swiftly disappears, as Laura finds gone whatever she had “fancied strange” in Carmilla’s face, and her “dimpling cheeks” were now “delightfully pretty and intelligent” (Le Fanu 20). Laura welcomes her with open arms, happy to have a companion close to her own age after the sudden and mysterious death of Bertha Rheinfoldt, a friend who was supposed to have joined Laura at the estate.

Carmilla immediately expresses a sexual interest in Laura. The strange girl claims that it was Laura’s looks that won her, and Laura feels “rather accountably towards the beautiful stranger,” drawn to her, but also feeling “something of repulsion” towards Carmilla (Le Fanu 21). This repulsion suggests that Laura finds something abject in Carmilla and her attraction to her, as such feelings disrupt Laura’s identity as a virtuous, heterosexual maiden. While she is drawn to Carmilla, her repulsion may lay not only in Carmilla’s secrecy but also in her homosexual overtures. Laura is unable to learn anything about her house guest, except that Carmilla’s family was “very ancient and noble, and her home lay in the direction of the west” (Le Fanu 25). The direction of the west, the orientation of the setting sun, is also a typical site for mortuaries and cemeteries, the first clue into Carmilla’s deathly nature (Rickels 161). Laura constantly pesters Carmilla for information on her background and family, because the secrecy between the two of them angers her. Her idea of a close female relationship involves a blurring of boundaries where all things are open between the two. Carmilla’s thwarting of friendship is one of the first occasions where she is both “attracted to the vampire and also . . . quite turned off by her” (Rickels 161). Carmilla’s responses to these repeated interrogations use romantic and morbid language, an unfamiliar language in the context of friends:

If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others and learn the rapture that is cruelty, which is yet love; so, for a while, seek to no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit. (Le Fanu 26)

The beginning of this passage, where Carmilla professes her pain at hurting Laura, is the only part of this speech that seems like a normal interaction between two friends. Carmilla is living in Laura’s “warm life,” her living world, but intends to have Laura “sweetly die” into her own, a world of walking death. Carmilla appears to be obsessed with Laura and wants to kill her before Laura can fall in love with someone else.

Immediately following this speech, Laura is pressed closely into Carmilla’s “trembling embrace” and Carmilla kisses her several times on the cheek (Le Fanu 26). Laura dislikes these embraces, and suffers them only because Carmilla seems to be hypnotizing her: “her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms” (Le Fanu 26). Laura experiences “a strange tumultuous excitement,” reflecting her “love growing into adoration,” but these feelings are mingled with “a vague sense of fear and disgust,” stemming from her abhorrence of these homosexual embraces (Le Fanu 26). In another episode, Laura is trapped in an embrace and kissed by Carmilla as the other girl whispers “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever” (Le Fanu 27). The desire for companionship of one’s equal is not strange; the desire to kill one’s friend in order to keep them forever and prevent them from ever loving someone else is. It crosses the boundary of acceptable female friendship and moves into obsessive, all-consuming homosexual love. The desire to destroy the boundary between Carmilla and Laura is to destroy both of their identities as separate people, and bring them together as one, single object in the ultimate form of consumption.

At the end of the novella, the reader is informed of certain facts about vampires, collected by an unknown narrator. The first is that the vampire is “prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons” (Le Fanu 94). This fits with the depiction of Carmilla’s growing obsession over Laura, feeling a kind of love towards her that could only be satiated when she had “drained the very life of her coveted victim” (Le Fanu 94). Strangely enough, when it comes to these victims of the vampire’s passion, the vampire desires “something like sympathy and consent” (Le Fanu 94). Carmilla could not kill Laura without being loved by her, without gaining her consent to drain her blood. This point is stressed in the text when Carmilla kills without courting other victims, like the swineherd’s wife and various village women, who are killed “often at a single feast,” overpowered by violence (Le Fanu 95). Carmilla, despite her mesmeric powers, perverts the act of human love by hoping for consent, rather than outright controlling her partner. However, as Carmilla tells Laura, she does not require that consent: “You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me and hating me through death and after” (Le Fanu 42). No matter what Laura decides, Carmilla owns her and controls her, and she will be killed whether or not she accepts it.

Debating whether or not Carmilla truly loved Laura is unnecessary, and unknowable, because the point of the novel does not hinge on that particular fact. What does matter is the various levels at which this novel operates. On the most obvious level, Carmilla is about the dangers posed by unnatural creatures to virginal heroines, a typical Gothic plot. But beneath the obvious plot line are other themes, interconnecting like strands in a spider web. Carmilla does not seek out male victims; every recorded death attributed to her is of a young woman. Her conflicting impulses “towards narcissistic love and annihilation compel her to seek out victims of her own age and sex, reflections of herself” (Silver, Ursini 103). In other words, Carmilla is a self-fetishizing predator; by killing reflections of herself, she acts out her own murder, over and over, while feeding her lust for blood. As a distant relation of the Karnsteins, Laura is an obvious victim for Carmilla, given that she resembles her by age, appearance, and blood. They share a bloodline, adding another dimension to Carmilla’s consumption of Laura. While she drinks Laura’s blood and consumes her life force, Carmilla also consumes herself, her own bloodline and ancestry.

The question remains why Carmilla, an obviously powerful and ancient vampire, has to be depicted as a lesbian. She could simply seek out those who are her mirrors without seducing them first; after all, she exhibits a mesmeric power that would pacify any victim, allowing her to feed without much fuss, and she does kill several women this way in the village. But Bertha Rheinfoldt and Laura both are given special treatment, an extended hunt that utilizes the mesmeric power but does not rely solely on it. Le Fanu purposefully characterizes Carmilla as a hunter whose favorite prey is women of her own age and likeness. By depicting her as such, as a “vampire rapist who violates and destroys her victim,” the male readers of the novella are soothed of their fear that “lesbian love could create an alternate model” to heterosexuality (Creed 61). If the female vampire, the female predator, only preys on unwilling victims who actively dislike her attentions, and would resist them if they were physically capable, then readers are assured that the female vampire is a true monster. She preys on virginal, pure victims who are violated by her mere presence. In a society that values virginity and chastity, the story serves as a warning towards women to beware of homosexuality and its deadly consequences, and as a way to alleviate male fears that homosexuality could become an alternative model of love that would detract from heterosexual relationships. This hypothesis is sanctioned by the end of the novella, in a scene that can only be described as revenge pornography:

The body, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head was next placed upon a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away. (Le Fanu 92)

Carmilla’s death scene involves gratuitous violence. The descriptions of her death and the state of her body are unnecessarily violent and graphic. In vampire lore, the burning of the body and the scattering of the ashes are not a requirement. If anything, this scene appears to be Laura’s father and General Spielsdorf’s revenge on Carmilla for her attacks on their daughters. By acting out this male fantasy of vengeance, Le Fanu gives a not-so-subtle warning as to what happens to women who cross the boundaries of accepted sexuality: complete and utter destruction by the patriarchal structure.

While the other female vampires of this archetype appear willing and hungry for blood, the female predator of Angela Carter’s short story, “The Lady of the House of Love,” is an unwilling one. Described as “the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler,” Countess Nosferatu is the last in a long line of vampires occupying her ancestral chateau. The village below is abandoned, as “all shun the village…in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes” (Carter 93). Carter portrays the Countess as someone who cannot help but feed, someone who is bound by her ancestry to feed on the blood of humans. The Countess is “a system of repetitions…a closed circuit” (Carter 93). She perpetually lays out the Tarot to predict her future “as if the random fall of the cards…could obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden” (Carter 93). No matter how many times she deals the Tarot, which by all accounts should be a random combination of cards drawn from the stack, she receives the same three, over and over: La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie (Carter 95). The High Priestess represents either wisdom, or the inability to make good judgement. The card of Death represents transformation and change, or lethargy and an inability to move on. Finally, the Tower, a card typically depicted as a tower being struck by lightning, is a sign of radical change, or a resistance to that change (Bruce-Mitford and Wilkinson 199-198). In a literal rut of continually drawing the same Tarot cards, the Countess’s fate as foretold by those cards reflects her inability to change and move on from her condition.

That she is an unwilling predator is made apparent in an early comment that the Countess loathes the food that she eats: “she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them on lettuce….but hunger always overcomes her” (Carter 96). Even the small creatures she ate as a young girl disturb her, but she has no other means of feeding herself. And now that she is a woman, she must have men. Any man who ventures to the fountain in the village will be led to the Countess’s chateau by her mute keeper. The men “can scarcely believe their luck” when the Countess leads them to her bedroom, where they will be consumed and then buried in the garden. The Countess is a perpetual virgin, dressed in her mother’s wedding gown. Every night would be her wedding night, where she would like to stroke her victim’s “lean brown cheeks and their ragged hair,” but she must eat. Every wedding night ends only in blood and the continuing of her miserable, repetitive existence, as she “only knows one kind of consummation” (Carter 103). Rather than allow herself to be consumed in the marriage bed, the Countess must constantly consume and reject the possibility of change.

The unnamed hero of the story is described thusly: English, virginal, and rational. He is “a being rooted in change and time,” riding a bicycle on a collision course with “the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires” (Carter 97). The night he arrives in her village, the Countess pulls a card she has never turned before: Les Amoureux (Carter 97). The Lovers card is symbolic of affairs of the heart, inner harmony, and temptation or separation. Already the cycle has been broken. The Countess has always desired a fate that involved love. Patricia Duncker argues that the Countess longs for the finale of a snuff film, in which she is sexually used and then ritually killed. By doing so, “she can abandon her predatory sexuality, the unnatural force, as her own blood flows, the symbolic breaking of the virgin hymen, the initiation into sexual maturity and then into death” (Duncker 9). Her cyclical, repetitive life hinges on the one thing she cannot rid herself of: her virginity. And when the unnamed hero arrives, he rescues her like a maiden from a tower, a knight in an old fairy tale. The rational young man takes pity on her, thinking she needs psychiatric help, and in doing so, breaks the cycle forever. He refuses to be a victim or a meal, and thus “denies the complicity essential to the maintenance of a vampiric relationship” (Sceats 11). The Countess does not take unwilling prey, it seems. Every man on whom she has fed has walked willingly to his doom. By refusing to submit to her desires and treating her with compassion, the unnamed hero provides her with a cure: he renders her human, adult, but mortal and then dead.

By “completing” the Countess, by showing her compassion and a kind of love, the unnamed hero releases her from her condemnation to “solitude and dark” (Carter 97). He plans to “cure her of all her nightmares,” a heroic notion, if a slightly misogynistic one that assumes she needs him to save her. But his compassion, rationality, and unwillingness to follow the well-trodden path to her bed and to destruction releases her from the cycle of predation and consumption. The hero then takes his bicycle and pedals off, sad to see her gone, but none the more affected. The defining moment of the Countess’s life is nothing more than a blip for a man with “the special glamour of that generation for whom history has already prepared a special, exemplary fate in the trenches of France” (Carter 97). The unnamed hero has a fate far beyond the Countess and her dilapidated mansion.

“The Lady of the House of Love” is a retelling of “The Sleeping Beauty of the Wood,” and twists the fairytale trope of the power of the prince’s kiss as well as the hedge of roses that surrounds the princess. As the virginal hero approaches the mansion, he is immediately struck by a “blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough, almost, to fell him” (Carter 98). The roses that surround the mansion strike him immediately as something wrong, something repulsive:

Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorls, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications (Carter 98).

The roses that seem repulsive, extravagant, and excessive, resemble the engorged, sexually aroused female genitals. With the addition of the “bristling thorns,” the roses become a symbol of the vagina dentata, one of man’s greatest fears. The myth of woman as castrator clearly points to male fears about the female genitals as a trap, or a black hole. Combining the already frightening female genitals with teeth creates the mouth of hell, a terrifying symbol of women as the devil’s gateway (Creed 71). The Countess’s roses are a manifestation of her sexuality, which is outrageous in its flamboyancy, but also threatening to the man who dares to have sex with her.

The unnamed hero makes a connection between the roses outside, and the Countess’s lips almost immediately. He describes it as an “extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full prominent lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson” (Carter 101). Once again, her engorged lips are a metaphor for the female genitals with their red color and swollen appearance. The hero even goes so far as to think of her mouth as a “morbid mouth, even a whore’s mouth” (Carter 101). Her sexuality is so strong that it manifests itself physically in her face and mouth, the very mouth that contains her sharp teeth. The roses have developed their appearance from a different source; when the Countess finishes with her victims, her keeper buries their bodies under the rose hedges. This man-fertilizer gives the roses “their rich color, their swooning odor that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures” (Carter 105). As such, the roses have become a part of the Countess’s closed circuit. The roses entice the men entering the mansion, filling their heads with the scent of forbidden pleasures. Their bodies feed the roses, giving them more power and allowing them to lure more men to feed the Countess.

The final rose of the piece is the rose that the hero takes back with him to his regiment. In the Countess’s narration, she says that she leaves him the “dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave” (Carter 107). She has given him the gift of her virginity as a souvenir. Trapped in her virginal state, she could not give that rose to anyone, except the man who set her free and allowed her to die. The rose he takes appears to be an extraordinary one, as it survives the journey from Romania to Bucharest, and then seemingly revives itself when the hero places it in water. The “heavy fragrance” of the rose fills the barracks and he sees it as a “glowing, velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendor” (Carter 108). The Countess’s roses, fed on the lifeblood of young men, are repulsive even in their beauty, and can survive long trips and spread their powerful, lustful scent even when separated from the rest of the bush. The rose also serves as an omen of consequences that the hero has not considered: he consumed the Countess’s blood when he kissed her cut finger. He, like the rose, may bear some attributes of the Countess that he does not know yet.

As a tale of a female predator, “The Lady of the House of Love” invokes sympathy for the Countess, who does not want to be a killer and seducer of men. She wishes only for love and humanity, but cannot fight the primal state she inherited from her ancestors. The rational hero, protected by his “power in potentia” of virginity, is the wild card in the Tarot deck that can set her free (Carter 97). Carter is probably not making a commentary on the power of virgins, but rather on the rationality of the hero. He does not believe in vampires, does not believe that she is anything other than an anorexic, nearly-blind noble lady who needs his help. It is his rationality and desire to help that frees her. By not believing in her power, the hero renders the Countess powerless, mortal, and dead. But her power is greater than even he knows; her dark, fanged rose lives on with him, and her blood is in his veins. He may not believe in the power, but a dark cloud hangs on his horizon, from the trenches and from the bloodline of the Nosferatu.

The female predator is a voracious consumer, a woman who feasts on blood and enslaves her victims, and reflects a deep-seated fear of boundary crossings in society. These female vampires ignore social convention and reject values of female purity and chastity in favor of feeding their own lust for blood. Their unbridled sexual powers draw in unsuspecting victims, male and female alike, and drain them of their blood, or enslave them and keep them as food sources. The lesbian vampire is the mirror that society holds up to its members as a warning of what sexual deviancy leads to: destruction. The female predator cannot survive in a society that needs her dead in order to continue. Carmilla is brutally murdered in a scene of violence; Countess Nosferatu dies to allow for the future to roll forward. Baudelaire’s vampires exist to decimate the male population, enslaving them and addicting them to their feminine wiles. Their victims are painted as weak, deviant addicts whom society must cull from the herd in order for society to grow stronger. In the end, it comes down to a very simple choice: predatory women, or patriarchal society. And in the literary canon, the predatory woman loses every time.

The Blood is the Wife: The Fallen Woman in Dracula

The concept of the “fallen woman” reigns supreme in many works of 19^th century literature. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word “fallen” “ascribes a moral connotation to the verb, fall, meaning that the fallen person has lost their purity or innocence. A fallen woman is one who has surrendered her chastity; whether this occurs through prostitution, rape, or a sexual encounter, the term still applies. While Lilith is the most obvious candidate for the first fallen woman, Eve seems to be the more common choice for embodying the archetype. While admittedly Eve did not surrender her chastity, she lost her purity and innocence by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. She was the one to cause humanity’s fall from grace, an act that still reverberates in the collective psyche of society. The long line of neo-Eves who appear in literature reflect the “neurosis of a culture that feared female sexuality and aggression”; why else recycle the character of the fallen woman over and over? (Auerbach 31) By doing so, society enshrines a “respectably sadistic cautionary tale,” punishing female sexuality as a constant reminder of the constraints of appropriate female sexuality and chastity (Auerbach 31).

The novel Dracula was originally published in 1897 and has been remade into a film an estimated 217 times. Some feature only the character Dracula in otherwise unrelated stories; others, like the 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula directed by Francis Ford Coppola, reshape the original story for their own purposes. In the case of the Coppola film, Dracula gains an origin story, a quest, and something that could pass for a redemption story. We learn that although Dracula defeats the Turks in a battle, his beloved wife commits suicide after getting false news of his death. Upon learning that she is damned for killing herself, Dracula desecrates his chapel, renounces God, and stabs the cross with his sword. By then drinking the blood leaking from the cross, he becomes a vampire. While giving the Count a three-dimensional character, Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart also expanded upon the five female characters that appear in the film: Lucy Westenra, Mina Murray, and the three brides. For our purposes, it is significant that each of these women fall or has already fallen in the film, and that each woman takes a separate path to her loss of innocence.

Dracula’s brides, referred to as “the sisters” in the novel but as “the devils of the pit” in the film, have already experienced their fall. When Jonathan Harker first encounters them in the bowels of Dracula’s castle, they appear as specters. Feminine laughter, the tinkling of bells, and then a voice that sounds eerily like Mina’s calls to Jonathan to “lay back into my arms”. Behind him, but visible to the viewer, the bed is moving from underneath the covers. A bride suddenly appears between his legs and the other two appear as if birthed from the bed itself. Because of the way the camera is angled and the positions of the brides, the cavity from which they emerge resembles a vagina, or perhaps even a mouth. If a mouth, it mirrors both the mouth of the vampire, and the mouth of hell. As Aspasia Stephanou states in her book Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood, “it is not accidental that “mors” (death) is derived from bite (morsus)” (116). Thus, the vampire is not only a fanged death, but an embodiment of the mouth of hell. If the shape is viewed as a vagina, then these fanged women are birthed out of the mouth of hell and a vagina dentata, reflecting the male fear of the castrating female.

Their costumes make it quickly apparent that these are no ordinary women: one bride is wearing an Oriental or Russian style headdress; another has live snakes coiled in her hair. All of them are bare-breasted, their lower halves swathed in loose, sheer cloth. With bells around their ankles, they seem more at home in a harem or belly-dancing in a brothel. Such costuming exoticizes them while it eroticizes them, distancing them from Western civilization. By doing so, the brides become more monstrous and less humanized. The encounter seems like a fever dream, the camera moving too quickly to really get a sense of the action besides its erotic nature, which is intense. The brides are moaning as they kiss and stroke the prone Jonathan Harker, until they bare their fangs and sink their teeth into him in a cannibalistic frenzy. One bride bites from the pulse point at his wrist, an easy source of blood. Another cuts his nipple, allowing the blood to pour out like milk and making the act of drinking blood into a perversion of breast-feeding. The third bride drinks from between Jonathan’s legs, close to his genitals, making the feeding into a sexual act. It is probable that they would have consumed Jonathan completely had Dracula not entered and given them a baby to eat instead. That an infant is their chosen meal further codes them as monstrous women; because they eat the baby instead of breast-feeding it, they pervert the association of women with nurturance.

Highly seductive and barely clothed, the brides essentially are presented as prostitutes, one of the more common depictions of fallen women in the literary canon. But other features go beyond this characterization, as when they kiss each other’s bloody mouths over Jonathan’s prone body. Here the fallen woman converges with the monstrous woman, who combines features of cannibalism with lesbianism. That the brides express sexual desire for each other intensifies their fallenness. They are meant to be seen as villains, first for making Jonathan unfaithful to Mina (as Van Helsing later puts it) and secondly for nearly killing him. But beyond their obvious role as villain-antagonists, the brides serve another, deeper purpose. They show where the “fall” ends. It does not end simply with being thrown out of Eden, or out of the family home, as other fallen women narratives end. Instead, they become “the whores of Satan,” their bodies available for use by the Devil, feeding on the blood of the living in a perversion of “normal” female behaviors like marital sex or breastfeeding. If the question is whether the brides take after Lilith or Eve, the answer is Lilith.

Lucy Westenra, on the other hand, takes after Eve. From the beginning of the film, Lucy is portrayed as a rather spoiled, rich young woman interested primarily in fashion and flirtation. Her costumes typically are off-the-shoulder, flowing dresses framed by the loose tendrils of her red hair. The dress she wears the night that her three suitors are introduced is referred to as her “snake dress”: indeed, it is tight, green, and decorated with embroidered snakes. The allusion to the serpent, coupled with her red hair, which was often associated with Mary Magdalene and viewed as a sign of her sexual impropriety, clues in the viewer about the role that Lucy is going to play: that of the sexually loose woman (Bruce-Mitford and Wilkinson 108). Mina claims that “Lucy is a pure and virtuous girl,” even though her actions seem to suggest the opposite. Lucy claims to know what men desire and proceeds to make a sexually explicit joke to Quincey Morris about the size of his Bowie knife: “Please, Quincey, let me touch it. It’s so big.” This, coupled with Lucy’s dreams about sex, show that she thinks about sex quite a bit more than would be appropriate for a woman of her age and class, and is willing to openly express it without fear of the consequences. Her aristocratic status probably offers her more leeway and protects her from bourgeois judgments, but she is expected to get married and give up this sexual agency soon.

Nothing in the film implies that Dracula is aware of Lucy’s flirtatious nature when he chooses her for his first victim after he lands in England. But for some reason, Lucy is drawn by Dracula’s call out in her garden and leaves her room during a violent storm caused by the Demeter’s arrival at port. Perhaps her sexualized nature makes her more susceptible to his call, or perhaps Dracula did not want to feed on Mina until he had begun to woo her. In any case, Lucy’s “nightgown” resembles red lingerie more than anything else, and is made up mainly of red gauze and a reddish scarf that mixes with her hair in the wind. The use of red in Lucy’s costumes has sexual implications; red, of course, being the color of love, passion, and blood-lust (Bruce-Mitford and Wilkinson 280). Dracula rapes and feeds from Lucy on top of a stone bench; when he vanishes, she is left on top of it like a used sacrifice. As Mina brings her back inside, Lucy describes the encounter, believing it to be a nightmare, and reveals that Dracula had also fed her his blood.

The arrival of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, “the metaphysician philosopher,” sheds light on Lucy’s predicament. Her regular doctor, Dr. Seward, calls in Van Helsing because Lucy had been complaining of nightmares and other “changes,” like being able to hear the maids whispering from across the house. Ultimately, Van Helsing is able to diagnose Lucy’s attacker as the “vampyre”:

We are dealing with forces beyond all human experience and enormous power. Guard her well, or your beloved Lucy will become a bitch of the Devil. A whore of darkness. Lucy is not a random victim attacked by mere accident. No, she is a willing recruit, a breathless follower, a wanton follower, I dare say a devoted disciple. She is the devil’s concubine.

Van Helsing’s words, although cautioning, also imply that Lucy has drawn Dracula to herself with her perceived promiscuity. In the doctor’s understanding, Lucy is not innocent, but instead is responsible for drawing Dracula to her and desires to be turned into a vampire as well, and thus must be protected from her desires by the men around her. Lucy’s sexual agency is frightening and must be curbed in order to save her soul. It is no wonder that Van Helsing makes the connection between her illness and sexual desire; when the telegraph calling him to London arrives, he is lecturing on sexuality: “The very name venereal diseases, the diseases of Venus, imputes to them divine origin. And they are involved in that sex problem that which the ethics and ideals of Christian civilization [sic] are concerned”. The idea of sexually transmitted diseases being the diseases of Venus gives them not only a divine origin, but also a feminine origin. In this, Van Helsing places the blame for venereal diseases on women, which ties in with his belief that Lucy’s illness is her own fault. The feminine origin of these venereal diseases has caused the “sex problem” that Christian society is focused on: in order to keep society safe, men must curb the sexual desires of women to prevent the spread of these diseases.

The night that Mina leaves the Count to marry Jonathan in Romania, Dracula kills Lucy in a fit of rage. Just before ripping out her throat, he exclaims, “Your impotent men and their foolish spells cannot protect you from my power. I condemn you to living death, to eternal hunger for living blood”. In calling the three suitors and Van Helsing “impotent,” Dracula not only asserts his power over mortal men, but conflates power with sexual prowess. In a way, if mortal men were not impotent, they would be able to protect Lucy from unlawful desire by keeping her sexuality within the bounds of societal norms. Because they cannot, Lucy is buried in her wedding gown. This dress signifies that Lucy was about to perform femininity “properly” by getting married, but was diverted from that path by her vampiric death.

Despite the film’s emphasis on her sexuality, Lucy, it turns out, does not seek out men on which to feed, but instead prefers babies. Whereas in the novel, multiple reports of a “bloofer lady” signal Lucy’s change into a vampire, the film presents the transition differently. The night of her funeral is when Lucy “makes her big comeback” and kidnaps a child to eat; the men refer to her as a “nightmare of Lucy,” although she is still recognizably Lucy, and also a vampire (Rickels 33). Once again, her costuming accentuates her characterization. Her wedding gown is pure white with a ruff so wide that Lucy resembles a frill-necked lizard. This was a deliberate choice by the film’s costume designer, Eiko Ishioka, who wanted Lucy to look like a predatory reptile. As with the brides, the costume choices link vampirism with predation, in which women use sexual wiles and vampiric mesmerism to catch their prey. This notion of being captivated is illustrated when Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur Holmwood, falls under her spell as she calls for him, and refers to him as her husband. This implies that Lucy has received the holy sacrament of marriage, along with the unholy sacrament of baptism of the blood. By attempting to seduce her “husband” so that she can drink his blood, Lucy perverts “normal” female sexuality. Her desire to indulge in “lawful” sex is not for procreation, but rather to satisfy her own bloodlust. In the event, Van Helsing saves Holmwood from this fate and they kill Lucy’s vampiric self. Lucy’s bloody mouth and “wildly contorted body under Holmwood’s vigorous thrusts form a terrible parody of a wedding night,” and marks an ending of her fall (Butler 116). She returns to her marital bed and is freed from her fate as a “concubine of the Devil.”

Out of the female characters, Mina appears to participate most willingly in her fall, and yet she is the one who achieves redemption. At the beginning of the film, Mina identifies herself as “only a school-mistress” and seems repulsed by sexuality, even as she peeks at Richard F. Burton’s A Thousand Nights and a Night, considered a work of pornography in the 19^th century. Her costumes are typically sage green, green being the color of nature, harmony, and freshness, and having a strong emotional correspondence with safety (Bruce-Mitford and Wilkinson 282). In fact, Ishioka stated that Mina’s costumes were to be “very strict, tight, conservative costume [sic]…really like virginity, or modesty.” This costuming establishes Mina as the paragon of virtue. However, when she becomes the reincarnation of Dracula’s lost wife, Elisabeta, she embodies the prey in Dracula’s hunt in London. In her first meeting with Dracula, Mina is sharp with him, and calls upon the laws that protect virtuous women to get rid of him: “Do I know you sir? Are you acquainted with my husband? Shall I call the police?” By invoking the safety of marriage, Mina discourages Dracula’s advances and stays well within societal bounds. Still, she accompanies Dracula to the cinematograph, where Dracula attempts to bite her but is unable to go through with it. Whether his restraint is out of vestigial love for Elisabeta preventing him from harming her, or a realization that the time isn’t right, Dracula lets Mina go and pursues a more gentle approach in wooing her. Despite his ability to overpower Mina, Dracula seems to want Mina’s consent to change her, as if he wants her to remember him first. Mina’s recognition of Dracula as her husband would also prevent her from “falling”; after all, then she would only be performing her duties as a good wife by being with him.

Mina is drawn to Dracula from the beginning, and manifests her memories of life as Elisabeta more than once. But Dracula is able to carry on his courtship of Mina only so long as Jonathan is trapped in the castle with the brides. Once Jonathan escapes, Mina rejects Dracula and goes to Romania to marry Jonathan. On the ship to Romania, Mina destroys her diary that describes her infidelity with Dracula, and muses upon her own nature: “perhaps though I try to be good, I am bad. A bad, inconstant woman”. With the fallen woman appearing often in Victorian literature and art, Mina would have been familiar with the whore/virgin anxiety surrounding female sexuality. Despite her best efforts, something in her is wrong, the original sin of Eve coming to the forefront. Now that she is married, and has presumably consummated her marriage to Jonathan, Mina “understands the nature” of her feelings for Dracula, recognizing them as desire and love. Dominant views make female sexuality black and white, proper behavior separated from improper by clear boundaries. Mina would prefer to be firmly in the “white” area, in love and faithful to her husband, but is unable to keep herself from wavering towards wanting an extramarital affair with Dracula.

When offered the choice, Mina does not fall so much as jump. While the men consecrate Carfax Abbey, Mina retreats to the asylum, where Dracula appears first as green mist, and then as his young self. Dracula is dressed in blue, the color of emptiness; Mina, in white, the color of purity (Bruce-Mitford and Wilkinson 282). During this encounter, Dracula admits to his true nature as a vampire, and to killing Lucy. Although Mina is obviously upset by the murder of her friend, she weeps, “I love you! Oh, God, forgive me, I do.” Despite her wedding vows, despite the terrifying nature of the man she loves, Mina makes an active choice to be with Dracula: “I want to be what you are, see what you see, love what you love.” In order to make her a vampire, Dracula drinks from her neck in an erotic embrace, and then perverts the act of breastfeeding by cutting open his chest and feeding her his blood. Even when he tries to back out of the conversion, not wanting to curse Mina to “walk in the shadow of death for all eternity,” Mina begs him to take her away from death. At this moment, Elisabeta seems to have taken control, and Dracula and his bride are reunited, four hundred years after Elisabeta leapt into the river.

However, when the men burst in and frighten Dracula away, Mina’s first words are “unclean,” signaling the struggle within her between her love for Dracula and her need to be a good wife to Jonathan. She mourns for what she has done to Jonathan on the train back to Romania; yet once at the Borgo Pass, she calls up a storm to protect Dracula. Her double nature as Mina and Elisabeta keeps her in a constant tug-of-war. Despite her best efforts, Jonathan slits Dracula’s throat, and Quincey stabs him through the heart with a Bowie knife. Mina then takes the dying Dracula into the chapel he desecrated, bringing the story full circle. As Mina professes her love for Dracula, the candles light and the cross heals itself. Her narration says simply, “There in the presence of God, I realized how my love could release all of us from the powers of darkness. Our love is stronger than death.” In some way, Mina’s love, as a proxy for Elisabeta’s, repairs the damage done to Dracula’s soul and to the chapel itself, and redeems both of them. The burn from the communion wafer on Mina’s forehead vanishes as Dracula dies, signaling her cleansing from the unholy baptism of Dracula’s blood. The ending of the film implies that Dracula and Elisabeta both ascend to Heaven, freed not by God but by Mina’s love.

Mina is the only woman who is seen to choose vampirism on screen, and yet she is the only one to find any redemption. The brides and Lucy are beheaded and freed from vampirism, but the fate of their souls is unknown. It can be assumed that Mina, despite eating the apple, is allowed to return to Eden with Jonathan rather than be cast out like the other fallen women of the film. The question is, why is Mina different? In the film, it seems that because Mina received the sacrament of marriage, the unholy communion she has taken is rendered void with the death of Dracula, and she is capable of giving salvation even as she receives her own. Without Jonathan’s continuing love for her, Mina would have been cast out as one of many fallen women, discarded for their infidelity. Jonathan seems capable of understanding Mina’s duality as both Elisabeta and Mina, and her honesty about her attraction to Dracula contributes to her salvation. Her lack of monstrosity also seems to protect her. Unlike the brides or Lucy, Mina had never ingested blood besides Dracula’s, and lacks the foreign object inside her that would have sealed her fate. She becomes the monster, but never monstrous.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is not intentionally about the concept of the fallen woman, or Victorian ideals for feminine chastity. But as a text set in the Victorian era, when the fallen woman was appearing frequently in literature and art, the historical context is important in reading the film. The film presents a spectrum of falls: the brides, their fall unknown; Lucy, the fall of assumed choice; and Mina, the chosen fall. The brides are the end point, the final piece of the triptych that shows the degradation of the woman who chooses sexuality over societal values. Their callous, vengeful beheading by Van Helsing is their punishment. Lucy, who is flirtatious and woos three men at once, is the symbol of overt female sexuality. Her fiancé’s role in her murder reflects man’s position in keeping female sexuality contained: by killing her vampiric self, Holmwood protects society at large from her. Finally, Mina is the “saved” woman. Her loving, benevolent husband takes her back, saving her from the fate of the fallen woman. In this sense, Jonathan is able to decide Mina’s fate, reflecting the patriarchal power of the husband in Victorian society. As much as Mina’s narrative reshapes the fallen woman archetype, reflecting a new understanding between husband and wife, the film itself is still troubling. The brides, Lucy, and Mina are set up as a continuum. Mina’s narrative is advanced, but the other women in the film are still sexualized and murdered horribly. Every fallen woman’s punishment is delivered by a man; their vampirism is what makes their punishment a physical death, rather than a societal death.

Queen of the Damned: Penny Dreadful and the New Lilith

As discussed previously in this work, the Mother of Evil archetype originates with Lilith, Adam’s first disobedient wife. It is important to note why Lilith argues for her freedom, and how she does it. In a different translation of the text, she uses Biblical jurisdiction, calling on Deuteronomy 24:4: “Her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife; after that she is defiled” (Patai and Bar-Itzhak 333). Twice, Lilith called upon God to free her from her subservience to Adam: first, when she used His name to flee Eden, and second when she used His law to protect herself. The next part of this translation is phrased in an interesting manner: “Lilith accepts her punishment, in return for her freedom, and agrees that 100 of her children will die every day” (333). Lilith preferred the death of her children over having to return to and obey Adam; her freedom meant more to her. The folklorist Haya Bar-Itzhak construes this story as a myth that serves a narrative purpose:

It does so in a sophisticated manner and rules out any possible challenge to that order. The first woman’s equal status in creation bodes disaster because it leads her to demand equal status. When this is denied, she rebels against man. Her rebellion leads her to betray man and couple with a demon. But this is not the end of the chain that leads from equality and satisfaction of erotic needs to rebellion and betrayal. The culmination is when she is made into the archetypal anti-mother. (Patai and Bar-Itzhak 333)

The patriarchal narrative requires that rebellious women not be allowed to take part in any normal feminine behaviors, especially not motherhood. To be a mother is to have power over one’s children; a rebellious woman cannot be a mother, because children were meant to be the property of the father. So women cannot be created equal, or they follow Lilith’s path straight to rebellion and damnation. This reading of the myth creates a false equivalence, however. Because Lilith is a woman, and a mother, it is assumed that she has maternal feelings for her children and is suffering as a result of their daily deaths. Nothing in the myth suggests that she feels anything about her demonic children, which are not birthed as much as spawned.

Showtime’s three-season long series, Penny Dreadful, constructs its narrative around the Lilith myth and follows in the tradition of the penny dreadful, a sensationalist comic or magazine much like our contemporary National Enquirer. These pamphlets often contained Gothic thrillers, like Sweeney Todd, or Varney the Vampire. The series itself is not cheap or sensationalist, but combines the supernatural and Gothic elements of the penny dreadful with the myth of Lilith, incarnated in its main protagonist, Vanessa Ives. Penny Dreadful traces the path of a woman who struggles to be good, despite the duality of her nature and the fierce struggle she wages to keep her dark side at bay rather than become the new Mother of Evil. From early life, Vanessa has been haunted by the other side, “things not of this world” (“Night Work”). She has been marked and tormented by demons and supernatural abilities, which constantly war against her own moral code and her devout Catholicism.

It is not until the episode that Vanessa encounters the Night Comers, dark witches who appear naked, bald, and scarred with the Devil’s claws, that she truly understands why she has been marked. The Night Comers speak the Verbis Diablo, the language of the Devil, which is a corruption of angelic speech (“Verbis Diablo”). Vanessa and her hunter companions considered it to be a dead language, or a made up one at least, but Ferdinand Lyle, an Egyptologist at the British Museum, proves otherwise, producing a collection of odds and ends with the Verbis Diablo written across them. He explains how a Carthusian monk named Brother Gregory began to lose his mind and believed he was possessed “by a demon or the Demon” (“Verbis Diablo”). He wrote down everything he heard on anything that he had on hand: shards of pottery, a chest, even a dead bird. After careful arrangement of the different puzzle pieces, the group is able to decipher the Verbis Diablo, and the story it tells:

At the Great War for the heavenly throne we were vanquished. So God looked down on his defeated Angels and found us to be evil angels so he cast us out. He took us by our winged backs and raised us over his head. Thence did he fling us from his heavenly throne and cast us down to Earth and to hell. So we were cleaved apart, two brothers cast out two realms. One brother to earth and the other brother to hell. And thus were we set in eternal enmity, my brother on Earth to feed on the blood of the living by night, and myself in Hell to feed on the souls of the dead. Both in an eternal quest for the Mother of Evil who will release us from our bondage and allow one of us to reconquer Heaven and topple God from his bloody throne. And so will Darkness reign on Earth, in Heaven, everlasting, and so comes the Apocalypse. (“Memento Mori”)

The Verbis Diablo tells of Lucifer and Dracula, two brothers cast to different realms, one to the realm of spirit (Hell) and the other to the realm of flesh (Earth) and held captive there, waiting for the Mother of Evil to release them. The Mother of Evil, of course, directly correlates to the myth of Lilith and her demonic spawn. Earlier in the series, Vanessa was identified as Amunet, an Egyptian goddess known as “The Hidden One” who could never be shown with her consort because their union would cause the Apocalypse (“Séance”). Comparing the two stories reveals several similarities: Vanessa, as a powerful female, must not copulate with a powerful male figure, or they will cause the destruction of the world. Not only does this associate her femininity with inherent danger, but also it stipulates that she must be carefully policed or else risk her starting the Apocalypse through having sexual intercourse.

It is no accident that Vanessa is the only woman in her group of hunters: the other members are her adoptive father, Sir Malcolm Murray; her love interest, Ethan Chandler; Ferdinand Lyle, the Egyptologist; and Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Although the constant presence of the men would assumedly give her opportunities galore to have sex, Vanessa and Ethan never do, because it could prompt a possession, as it did when she slept with Dorian Gray (“Possession”). When asked why Vanessa is the particular target of the fallen angels, Lyle comments on the various “chosen ministers of evil”: “Amunet from Egyptian religion, Lilith from the Talmud, Nordic Hella, the Celtic Macha, Mara from the Hindus, all variations of deities or demigods who are destined to unleash annihilation on the world” (“Memento Mori”). All of these deities are female, because there was “something thought unholy [sic] in the erotic power they held over men” (“Memento Mori”). Female sexuality, unconstrained by societal norms and proper behavior, could be so powerful that it could cause the Apocalypse, simply because of the sexual power they held over men. After all, it was Lilith’s demand for sexual equality that robbed Adam of his wife, and caused a proliferation of demons on earth.

The viewer learns that Vanessa has met both Lucifer and Dracula, in “the white room, just you and he and that other” (“Good and Evil Braided Be”). The white room refers to the institution that Vanessa spent months in, the Banning Clinic, where she was taken after an “inexplicable illness” (“Closer than Sisters”). After committing a sexual transgression by having sex with her best friend’s fiancé, Vanessa falls into a nearly-comatose spell broken up by seizures. At a loss for any natural explanation, she is taken to a women’s clinic where she is treated with hydrotherapy and an experimental brain surgery for “hysteria of a psychosexual nature” (“Closer than Sisters”). Vanessa’s demonic possession (she speaks in tongues and attempts to tear out her treating physician’s throat with her teeth) is mistaken for female hysteria, a word the root of which comes from the Greek word for uterus, hystera. This dismal dismissal of her condition as a “woman’s disease” prevents Vanessa from seeking appropriate treatment and part of her memory is erased as a result of the trephining. With the help of her alienist, Dr. Seward, Vanessa undergoes hypnotism and retrieves her memories of the Banning Clinic.

During this time Vanessa manifests the pull she feels toward the two brothers that she experiences as the Mother of Evil. She cannot resist either Dracula or Lucifer, but responds to each in kind as they try to seduce her. Lucifer appears first, taking the form of her guard in a hallucination. He calls to Vanessa, saying “let us be as we were. Before there was time, there was thee and me” (“A Blade of Grass”). Lucifer wants Vanessa’s soul, and wants it to be freely given, so that she can be what she is and always was: the Mother of Evil, and his bride. Once Lucifer has taken possession of her, he states that they will “turn their eyes heavenward” and “smite the Heavenly Father from his Heavenly Throne” (“A Blade of Grass”). During this speech, Vanessa and Lucifer slide across the floor of her padded cell on their bellies like snakes, eyes fixed on each other. Despite the animalistic actions, Lucifer is calling for Vanessa to give up her earthly form, the flesh that she has inhabited.

But for the appearance of Dracula, Vanessa may have given in at that exact moment. The other brother appears first as a shadow, and then manifests physically, also taking the form of Vanessa’s guard. The physical doubling of the brothers makes them seem almost identical, which makes sense given that the outcome for the world (Apocalypse) is the same whether Vanessa chooses Dracula or Lucifer. Their methods of seduction draw the contrast between their personalities that their illusory appearances do not give. Dracula does not want Vanessa’s soul, but her blood, because she is not “a thing of the spirit,” like Lucifer, but “a thing of the flesh,” like Dracula himself (“A Blade of Grass”). Dracula calls upon Vanessa’s power, telling her to feel it “coiling” within her, giving it a serpentine quality. While Lucifer focuses on destroying God and Heaven, Dracula is more concerned with the earth: “be my bride and then all light will end and the world will live in darkness…the very air will be pestilence to mankind” (“Blade of Grass”). In this context, pestilence has something of a generative quality, as if Vanessa herself will spawn the disease that rids the world of humanity. It follows the Lilith myth of the ever-generative mother; as Lilith sets her demonic children on the world, Vanessa will spread an epidemic to kill mankind.

Dracula concludes his speech by reminding Vanessa of where she is, and how she got there: “in this mortal world you’ll always be shunned for your uniqueness, but not with me. They will lock you away in rooms like this. They’ll brand you a freak and a sorceress but I won’t” (“Blade of Grass”). Dracula references the constraints of society, the very boundaries that forced Vanessa into the clinic where she is tormented daily, to draw on Vanessa’s hatred of “normal” society. It seems as if Vanessa has chosen the brother she wants, until she rejects them both, saying that she sees them clearly, for who they are, “the spirit and the animal” (“A Blade of Grass”). Both assert their claim on her, but Vanessa has already promised herself to another: “He who vanquished you, He who is my protector and even now stands with me” (“A Blade of Grass”). God, not Dracula or Lucifer, is her choice, as she casts aside her identity as the Mother of Evil, exercising her free will.

Vanessa finds herself balancing carefully between the divine and the animal; a tip in either direction could deliver her into the hands of one of the brothers. If humanity is conceived as flesh, then flesh dictates earthly needs, lusts, and desires, more animal-like than human. The question of the flesh also draws upon the Lilith myth: Lilith was made from the same earth as Adam, but after her flight from Eden, claims arose that she had been made of tainted earth. Adam’s second wife was made of his body as an attempt to avoid that same mistake. Eve’s role as the originator of sin raises the question whether it was the earth that was tainted or Adam was simply a bad husband, but also whether flesh can ever truly be “clean.” If humanity is spirit, then the human soul is the most powerful object in the world, a splintered piece of God and the divine, and can be used as a weapon. Lucifer, the brother who feeds upon human souls to gain his power, wants to use Vanessa’s soul as his sword to remove God from Heaven. Both brothers threaten to unleash unholy terror upon Vanessa when she rejects them, but in the end, it is Dracula who wins.

Dracula initially appears as Dr. Alexander Sweet, the head of the Natural History Museum. He is a tall, tanned man of unknown age and unknown nationality, with no discernable accent to indicate where he came from or when (“The Day Tennyson Died”). He arrives when Vanessa is at her weakest, when Malcolm Murray and Ethan Chandler both have seemingly abandoned her, and her faith in God is the most tenuous. As Dr. Sweet, Dracula seduces her, but Vanessa soon learns of his true identity, and goes to the House of the Night Creatures, his lair, to kill him (“Ebb Tide”). He convinces her otherwise with simple words: “I don’t want to make you good, I don’t want to make you normal. I don’t need you to be anything but who you truly are” (“Ebb Tide”). Dracula, the Beast, king of the animals, does not require a perfect wife bound by the confines of society. He does not need her to be anything but who she is, Amunet, flesh and blood and animal. This same choice was one that Lilith faced: to choose God, and return to Eden, in this case the Murray mansion; or to turn toward flesh, toward the dark, and choose freedom. Dracula then asks if she accepts him; as he takes her into his arms, she says, “I accept myself” (“Ebb Tide”). After spending so much time fighting evil and trying to deny her dual nature, Vanessa has decided to accept herself the way she was made, and accept the pull she feels toward Dracula. And thus, she becomes the Mother of Evil, the Lilith who walks in the 19^th century.

Even in her new role as the Mother of Evil, Vanessa does not eschew the boundary between good and evil. A devout Catholic for most of her life and a strong, independent spirit, she quickly grows to hate the plague that she unleashed upon London. Whereas Lilith made an agreement to allow 100 of her children to die each day, Vanessa made no such agreement for her freedom, and the plague that is claiming thousands of Londoners a day troubles the spirit that clings to the flesh. When Ethan Chandler finally makes his way to her, Vanessa pleads with him to kill her. “They will hunt me till the end of days. My battle must end, or there will never be peace on earth. Let it end” (“The Blessed Dark”). Ethan, revealed to be a werewolf earlier in the series, is Dracula and Lucifer’s only natural foe: Lupus Dei, the Wolf of God. His role in the divine play depicted in the Verbis Diablo was unclear, given that “Lupus Dei” appeared only as a refrain with no other context. As he and Vanessa recite the Lord’s Prayer together, his role becomes clear: to kill the Mother of Evil. With a kiss, he shoots Vanessa in the abdomen and kills her. The plague disappears almost as soon as Vanessa dies, and Dracula vanishes upon seeing her body. Lupus Dei, God’s chosen warrior, was victorious, reflecting the need for a male, religious figure to save the world.

Placing a moral judgment on Vanessa’s decision is not the point of the series. Vanessa is not evil; Vanessa was formed in a certain way that dictated her decision even before she was Vanessa Ives. Nowhere in the Verbis Diablo does it say that the Mother of Evil is anything other than that, or that she has any other option besides Lucifer and Dracula. Vanessa made the choice to die rather than allow the plague on earth to continue, a fairly noble choice for someone who had only been searching for peace and freedom. In a way, this is her Lilith punishment. For choosing evil, Vanessa has to die, in the same way that Lilith had to give up 100 of her children a day for her freedom. While Lilith appears not to suffer as a result of this choice, Vanessa must suffer, a return to typical endings of stories that deal with female agency and vampires. On the surface level, this series deals with supernatural entities and a battle between good and evil. On a deeper level, Penny Dreadful is about the search for freedom in a society that does not celebrate female sexuality or choice, and the double-bind that women find themselves in. They yearn for freedom, for choice, but in seeking it out, they become evil and hunted. Rather than kill Dracula, the series writers chose to kill Vanessa, a move that reinforces conventional heteronormativity. As much as the series allowed for Vanessa to be strong and independent and an equally fierce warrior as her male counterparts, in the end she is the sacrificial lamb. Feminine evil must be killed off, or the world will end.

The Re-Vamp: Why Vampires?

With so many vampires in the literary canon, and so many continuing to rise from the grave and join their undead brethren, the question remains: why vampires? Why are we so fascinated by their narratives? First, as my study shows, they embody horror, making them frightening to the reader, which is often a source of pleasure, but this horror retains a seductive quality. The abject is at play in the consumption of vampire narratives, with the push-pull of desire and repulsion keeping the reader interested. Second, an author can kill off a vampire woman in various graphic and gratuitous ways without that murder being overly-upsetting, because the vampire woman is not a human, or a good woman in most contexts. Finally, the vampire allows the author to explore various forms of boundary crossing without the work being flagged as controversial or subversive. Because the monstrous body by definition embodies boundary crossing, authors can examine homosexuality or voracious female sexuality from a safe distance, a safety usually maintained by killing off that character.

Authors and readers enjoy vampire characters because the surreal aspects of the vampire allow them to say things about human women that make for good entertainment, but must be policed in reality. This policing keeps the consumer and the creator safe from the abject. At the core of the abject is humanity’s need to reject lust, or bloodlust. Facing those aspects head-on requires us to accept ourselves as creatures that bleed and die. As a society, we must open the coffin and see how deviance and unreality go together, and how we ingest different archetypes about women without thinking about them too deeply. For instance, the vampire bite, typically portrayed as two small, neat holes, defies all reality. Long canine teeth would rend flesh and leave a gaping wound, not the tiny pinpricks popular in film and television. Instead, the feared teeth of the vampire resemble a snakebite, injecting poison into the victim’s neck. Adam’s second wife, Eve, the woman who was supposed to replace Lilith and be obedient, was tricked out of Eden by a serpent. Perhaps the depiction of the neat, snake-like bites is a commentary on the fall from Eden, and the fall that women take when they become vampires, intentionally crossing the boundaries that society depends on to survive.

The line of neo-Liliths in the literary canon is more extensive than this work has covered, but their sheer number and formulaic stories are what prompts further study of female vampirism, and why their stories are so compelling to us. And that is what lies at the heart of monster theory:

These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression. They ask us why we have created them. (Cohen 20)

The vampire holds up a mirror and shows us everything we want to deny and thrust aside. We become abject when we deny ourselves the full range of emotion that we are capable of, and we abject women when we deny them the full scope of motivation that they are capable of.

Some important steps forward are evident in current media representations of female vampires. For example, there is no longer such a strict division between human and monster, and the vampire has begun to inhabit regular society rather than stay in the borderlands. This is most obvious in True Blood, the HBO series based on Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries. The series takes place two years after vampires “came out of the coffin” and revealed their presence to the world at large. While the vampires become less monstrous as they begin to “mainstream,” Pamela Swynford De Beaufort, one of the main characters, is still portrayed as a lusty, voracious bisexual. As a former brothel owner, her vampiric change stems from her desire to not die as a pariah and a whore, even though being a vampire would make her a different kind of pariah. Her sexuality comes into play in the series more than once, with different characters offering her sexual favors in return for her help. Sophie-Anne, the vampire queen of Louisiana, is also a bisexual vampire, but she is portrayed as a spoiled child with little to no power, and is forced into an arranged marriage and used as a pawn by a stronger, male vampire. Lorena Krasiki epitomizes the female predator, pretending to be a lonely widow to lure men into her bed so she can feed on them. Even in a contemporary setting, and in a world where vampires are commonly accepted, the same tropes still appear; the women are weaker than their male counterparts, they are hyper-sexualized, and they tend to end up dead.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer did not deal with vampires being a part of open society, but because of the content of the show, vampire characters were a constant fixture. The two most prominent female vampires were Drusilla and Darla. Drusilla was insane and almost completely dependent on her lover Spike, but her sexuality has an uncomfortable quality for the viewer. The discomfort stems from her childishness, as she spends most of her time playing with her dolls. Her insanity may contribute to her ruthlessness, but it may have had more to do with her lack of a soul. She is also offered up as a mere token of Spike’s love for Buffy when he offers to kill Drusilla to prove himself, marking Drusilla as disposable. Drusilla then disappears from the series, no longer useful in her role as Spike’s lover. As for Darla, she was another former prostitute-turned-vampire that used her sexual wiles to lure her prey, even going so far as to dress in a schoolgirl’s uniform to project innocence. Both characters are villains and follow in the footsteps of their Victorian counterparts. They are sexual, they are dangerous, and they do not live to the end of the narrative. Their narratives are a contrast to Spike’s, who begins as a villain and later, through his love for Buffy, redeems himself and gains a soul by going through the demon trials. There is no analogous redemption arc for any other Buffy character, and such redemption arcs rarely exist for women.

Twilight seems to be the outlier of the vampire narratives in the 21^st century. Most of the vampires central to the series are “vegetarian,” meaning that they only feed on animal blood. This may be because the author, Stephenie Meyer, is a Mormon, and some of her religious beliefs made their way into the novels. In an interview with The Times, Meyer says that she does not consciously intend her novels to be Mormon-influenced, or to promote the virtues of sexual abstinence and spiritual purity, but admits that her writing is shaped by her values (Mills). This seems to have saved the female vampires in the novel from being overly sexual and killed off at the end. At the same time, this apparent restraint creates an atmosphere in which Bella’s sexuality is controlled by Edward’s refusal to have sex with her until they are married, and then not again until she is made into a vampire. Meyer is not the only author to project her religious beliefs into her works, but while others have used their religious beliefs to portray the vampire negatively, Meyer uses her beliefs to “keep it light” (Mills). The damsel in distress is always rescued by her prince, and every danger is quickly vanquished.

Penny Dreadful, one of the works discussed in this thesis, is a contemporary series, but does not have the same ”progressive” features of vampire assimilation and trendiness as these others. This is because while the show was written in 2014, it is set in the Victorian era. The series stays true to other Victorian depictions of vampires, which treat the vampire as monstrous and abject. In today’s culture, we seem to have made friends with the monsters in the shadows, even as we hobble them with the same archetypes that have always existed. While some steps were made to re-vamp the female vampire narrative in the earlier texts that this thesis examines, for example, Mina’s rescue at the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Vanessa’s agency in Penny Dreadful, the problems remain. Too often, the female vampire is depicted as sexy, bloodthirsty, and disposable. My point is not that writers should stop portraying female vampires as villainous characters altogether, since erasing acknowledgment of women’s capacity for evil is more regressive than progressive. But portraying all female vampires as evil is reductive and destroys the complexity of desire and motivation that exists in any viable characterization. My exploration perhaps should not be read as a call for gender equality on behalf of female vampires but for better endings. Rather than relying on cheap devices and turning women into bloodthirsty harem girls into whom the male hero can thrust his stake without remorse or a second thought, it would be refreshing to see more tales of redemption or even tales where the vampire wins. Better storytelling and better endings might lead to better acceptance of female sexuality and less phobic treatment of the things that society wants to sanitize. The formulaic retellings of Lilith’s “sins” have haunted the literary canon as much as Eve’s: the predatory woman, the archaic mother, the fallen woman. We arm them with teeth and then defang them by cutting off their heads in the end. Give them a fighting chance to show their so-called deviance, their homosexuality, their lustfulness, to let the reader examine them for what they really are: women exhibiting behaviors that society must thrust aside to maintain order.

Acknowledgements:

This thesis could not have happened without so many important people in my life. I’d like to take the time to thank some of them for their love, support, and advice, and dedicate this work to them.

To Professor Julie Carlson, my beloved thesis advisor. Without your advice, direction, and enthusiasm, I could never have finished this. Thank you for giving me a love of the Romantics and for embarking on this journey with me.

To Alanna Bartolini, for taking the time to tear apart my thesis with me, word by word, until I was able to give it blood and life. Thank you for all of your encouragement and support, and for pushing me to be better.

To my parents, for not batting a lash when I told them I wanted to write a thesis on vampires, and for supporting me throughout the writing process.

To James McFeely and Danielle Greer, for your unending love and support.

To Amy Chase and Matthew Santos; thanks for coming on this crazy journey with me. We’re officially thesis writers, and I wouldn’t have picked anyone else to do this with me.

To Professor Christopher Newfield and Baron Haber, for brow-beating me into the thesis program and helping me make one of the best decisions of my college career.

To Brian Ernst, John Arnhold, Scott Kneece, and the rest of the English department, for their support of the Honors Program and the Arnhold Research Fellowship.

To Libba Bray, for being the novelist you are and inspiring young women to write, and to Laurence Rickels, for showing that humor and high academia can mix.

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