Forms of Boredom Advertised as Poetry

XXV

Author: Grace (page 10 of 13)

Psychologies of Childhood in the Works of George Eliot

November 16, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The theme of childhood occupies an evocative position in both Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede: the nuanced and remarkably perceptive psychological elements of George Eliot’s writing are evident in her narrative treatment of children and their relation to the larger social world of the novels. Eliot’s literary insights on childhood incorporate the relevance of memory, temporality, and the notion of the self, and function as thematic signifiers for the respective characterizations of multiple protagonists in both novels. The narrative treatment of children and childhood in The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede has a particular impact upon the psychological representation of characters in each respective text, but the form of this impact differs significantly in relation to each novel. In The Mill on the Floss, a rich psychological portrayal of the complexity and passions of childhood provides the foundation upon which Maggie’s troubling but sympathetic character is formed. In contrast, Adam Bede achieves a sinister psychological impact through its striking representational absence of children, but evokes a disappointingly shallow depiction of youth in the characterization of Hetty Sorrel. This notion of childhood, whether as a temporal vacuum of spiritual harmony or as a site for base selfishness, emerges as a primary recurring theme in both novels, but is used to a far greater effect in The Mill on the Floss.

Early in the narrative of The Mill on the Floss, the narrator intones, “There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs” (Eliot, MF, 160). Evoking an image of harmony between the self and the outside world, these ruminations upon childhood in The Mill on the Floss illustrate a precedent to the psychological state later described in the works of psychoanalyst such as Jacques Lacan. In Lacan’s paper The Mirror Stage as Formative to the Function of the ‘I,’ identified by Alison Bechdel in the autobiographical Are You My Mother?, a peculiar compromising of the notion of the self occurs when one first encounters a mirror. The conception of the self essentially begins to form in response to the visible world around it: for upon seeing one’s own reflection, Bechdel explains, “…you can see that you’re separate from everything else” (Bechdel, 232).

This dissonance between the private self and outside world, specifically in terms of the conflict between Maggie’s private yearnings and social consciousness, occurs repeatedly throughout The Mill on the Floss, but becomes increasingly relevant as Maggie matures. For as Sally Shuttleworth observes in George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science, neither the past nor the self is unified in The Mill on the Floss: the narrative structure of the novel echoes this sense of fragmentation as it operates between the discursive meditations of the narrator and the linear cohesion of the story (Shuttleworth, 52). This style of narration correlates to Maggie’s own ever-developing psychology: caught between the compulsions of her social conscience and the allure of her own longings, “…Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done” (Eliot, MF, 70). In a story riddled with desire and decision, the protagonist’s perpetual awareness of the immutable past is particularly significant. Maggie’s prismatic worldview underscores a conception of memory and time that deeply informs and complicates her character—it is precisely this sense of retrospect and self-awareness that will fold back upon itself in the “One supreme moment” (Eliot, MF, 542) wherein Maggie’s death creates a tragic but thrillingly cathartic final respite from the ambivalence and fragmentation of her social existence.

Childhood in Adam Bede, on the other hand, is symbolized most often through its own absence. Josephine McDonagh discusses the macabre thematic significance of child murder in Adam Bede, writing, “In a covert way the text is preoccupied with the very processes of forgetting. Hence the novel’s dominant motif—burial—specifically child murder-by-burial. Paradoxically, the figure of forgetting is also the bearer of those memories that must be forgotten, so that to forget means also to remember” (McDonagh, 145). In accordance with this notion, representational absences in Adam Bede (‘forgetting’) are as important as representational presences (‘remembering’), with neither providing a complete depiction of the narrative reality, but both providing valuable insight into the psychological nature of the text. In other words, the general lack of (living) children within Adam Bede carries is own thematic relevance. Largely as a result of this, Hetty Sorrel’s murdered child is never described or named: it is formless, selfless, and genderless, and yet its murder propels forms the primary narrative catalyst in the novel. The violent absence of the child dramatically alters the manner of the narrative—the specter of its death haunts the text as a whole, and comes to symbolize not the idyllic past of The Mill on the Floss, but a precarious and terrifying future.

While the representational absence of children in Adam Bede has its own keen psychological impact, however, its representational presence is far more simplistic, and at times even underdeveloped. This is most evident in the character of Hetty who, despite her age, is described as being “almost a child herself” (Eliot, AB, 167). In this context, the notion of a child indicates something simple, vulnerable, and foolish: starkly juxtaposing the psychologically complex child character of Maggie in The Mill on the Floss. When the trauma of the death of her own child is projected outwards through Hetty’s arrest and trial, the event deeply impacts the more multidimensional characters, such as Adam, within the broader community of the novel, but manifests in Hetty as a calculated sense of self-preservation. Indeed, the character of Hetty appears to be nearly devoid of all maternal love: using the term “it” to describe her child, she does not name or even take note of its sex (Eliot, AB, 491). By viewing the child as as a symbol of shame rather than a person worthy of a name or even a gender pronoun, Hetty demonstrates—even in light of her dire circumstances—a profound lack of empathy for a vulnerable human life.

In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot’s rich, nuanced treatment of the psychology of children allows Maggie’s history to provide a necessary foundation for literary transcendence of the controversial decisions that characterize her adult narrative: Maggie’s passionate, though not always sensible tendencies are knitted together in the many facets of an imperfect and deeply engaging psyche. Adam Bede ultimately emerges as the weaker of the two texts, demonstrating characterizations that further the conception of a childlike, psychologically one-dimensional woman who is near irredeemable not only in the selfishness of her actions, but also in the sheer uselessness of her narrative presence. Ultimately, the text of Adam Bede seems to hold too much in common with the androcentric realm of human psychology, with its extensive academic history of presupposing the simplistic, dimensionless natures of its female subjects. In both novels, however, the literary treatment of children manifests as a primary force behind the trajectory of each respective narrative, underscoring the relevance of the complex psychologies of childhood upon which Eliot’s successful conception of sympathetic and engaging protagonists is largely contingent.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print.

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Ed. A. S. Byatt. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Eliot, George, and Margaret Reynolds. Adam Bede. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

McDonagh, Josephine. “A Nation of Infanticides: Child Murder and the National Forgetting in Adam Bede.” Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2003. 123- 53. Google Scholar. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.

Shuttleworth, Sally. “The Mill on the Floss: The Shadowy Armies of the Unconscious.” George Eliot and Nineteenth-century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 51-77. Google Scholar. Web. 9 Nov. 2015.

The Gendered Discourse of “Middlemarch”

November 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

In the vibrant world of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, an intimate web of social relations dictates the trajectory of the narrative. Fragmented interpretations of the relationships between men and women pass frequently between the characters of the novel: gossip infuses every margin and gap in the social world of the text. In Theories of Discourse as Theories of Gender, Mary Bucholtz identifies gossip as “a site of political struggle in which ideologies of gender are cross-cut by faultlines based on age, tradition, and political power”(Bucholtz, 60). In accordance with this notion, the fervent circulation of rumors throughout Middlemarch contains a particular gendered significance: in both its overt and allegorical forms, gossip in Middlemarch informs the plot by generating tensions within the romantic lives of the protagonists, and functions as a primary thematic site upon which the impact, merits, and detriments of the Victorian gender hierarchy can be observed. This in turn lends insight into a number of political elements within Eliot’s novel: discourse between the genders in Middlemarch becomes a discourse on gender itself, ultimately exposing the broader feminist ethos of the text.

Relationships between the characters of Middlemarch are distinguished by a convoluted allocation of knowledge: Eliot’s description of the world as “…a huge whispering-gallery” (Eliot, 412) evokes a space wherein information is characterized by the covert or misled nature of its distribution. The men and women of Middlemarch rarely communicate directly with the opposite gender: both parties rely instead on gossip, receiving much of their information secondhand. The concentrated effect of gossip upon the community of Middlemarch is observable in James Chettam’s misguided conviction that Dorothea Brooks will accept his marriage proposal. Upon learning of the rumor, Dorothea denies any romantic inclination towards Chettam and chides her sister for listening to “such gossip” (Eliot, 36). Even so, the damage has been done: in the earliest chapters of the text, the socially ingrained tendency to gossip almost exclusively with members of one’s own sex has already resulted in a serious misunderstanding between Dorothea and Chettam. In this manner, gossip in Middlemarch is portrayed as a detrimental force that convolutes truths and misinterprets the romantic desires of Middlemarch’s inhabitants, resulting in a fractured social discourse between the men and women of the community.

But despite repeatedly emphasizing its tendency to complicate and even impede the romantic interpersonal relationships of Middlemarch, Eliot also identifies the necessity of gossip in maintaining the social fabric of the community. In chapter 71 of the novel, Eliot describes a scene in which “…there was no material object to feed upon, but the eye of reason saw a probability of mental sustenance in the shape of gossip” (Eliot, 715). The language of this passage underscores gossip’s function as a form of “mental sustenance” within Middlemarch, providing nourishment and gratification to the close-knit community. Similarly, although gossip can prove detrimental to romantic relationships in the text, it can also prove vital to their contentment and longevity. For instance, Lydgate’s reluctance to engage fully with the community of Middlemarch, which is necessarily a culture of gossip, draws the ire of both the citizens of Middlemarch and his wife, and ultimately emerges as a primary destructive force in his marriage. Despite its multitude of interpersonal consequences, gossip in Middlemarch remains a socially compulsory act; and in this manner, certain gendered connotations of gossip become apparent as well. The ongoing replication of gender norms within the community of Middlemarch, though stifling and toxic to various romantic pairings throughout the text, remains a necessary part of maintaining a given social structure. In this instance, the culture surrounding gossip functions as an overt reflection of the culture surrounding gender in Middlemarch: in some ways its norms are neither practical nor desirable, but they nevertheless become necessary by virtue of their own incessant repetition.

In addition to its complex and evident thematic presence, gossip is represented in Middlemarch through two primary recurring symbols. The first of these, the notion of echoes, occurs repeatedly throughout the text. In chapter 16, while describing one of the scenes of courtship between Lydgate and Rosamund, Eliot writes, “…And so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter” (Eliot, 161). In this passage, echoes are represented as forms of sound that become increasingly dissociated from their point of origin; in other words, although an echo may begin as a precise replication of an “originating activity,” an interpreter can distort or obscure its meaning. Eliot’s description of the link between echoes and the human soul draws parallels to the nature of indirect social discourse as it is depicted throughout the text: although reliable pieces of information circulate amidst the rumors and gossip of Middlemarch, their value is most often compromised by the variety of interpretation. The second symbolic manifestation of gossip within Middlemarch, the theme of the web, is the more prolific of the two: in chapter 15 Eliot ruminates, “I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” (Eliot, 141). This metaphor of the web within Middlemarch is multifaceted and profound: in its simplest form, the web of Middlemarch often seems to represent the basic social connections that bind members of the community to each another. But the web, like an echo, later becomes inextricably linked to the romantic engagement of human souls, as Eliot writes,

“Young love-making—that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust” (Elliot, 346).

Of course, the image of the web contains a multitude of potential interpretations throughout Middlemarch, but its interpersonal connotations in this passage are explicit. Just as echoes symbolize the fractured sense of discourse that resonates through the novel, Eliot’s web becomes a strikingly similar visual allegory for the role of gossip within the text: each time a string is impacted, reverberations move, like echoes in a whispering- gallery, across the web.

Whether or not Middlemarch as a whole constitutes a “feminist text” is, perhaps, too ambitious a question for one essay—as Anne E. Patrick discusses, George Eliot did not necessarily have access to the type of vocabulary through which we might identify a work as “feminist discourse” in contemporary analysis (Patrick, 224). Nevertheless, a feminist reading of Middlemarch is not only possible, but also of considerable merit. In the conception and publication of Middlemarch, Eliot presents a vivid world that is starkly divided along gendered lines. Gossip serves as the primary lens through which Eliot’s treatment of gender can be analyzed; it is therefore unsurprising that the politics of discourse and gossip in Middlemarch would parallel the broader observations upon gender that appear throughout the text. Just as gossip provides vital, informative, and conversational links between the characters of the text, it also proves deeply divisive: impeding efforts to negotiate satisfactory romantic relationships in the lives of multiple characters. Just as echoes can entail precision and connection, they also become distorted as their interpretation strays further from its point of origin. Just as the social web entails the various points of intersection and human intimacy between the inhabitants of Middlemarch, it can also symbolize a terrifying potential for captivity. In other words, in none of her allegories does Eliot discredit the merit of gender in maintaining social order in Victorian communities; nevertheless, she examines the considerable limitations and shortcomings of gendered roles and stereotypes through a deeply critical lens.

Eliot begins the 69th chapter of Middlemarch with the Biblical excerpt: “If thou hast heard a word, let it die with thee” (Eliot, 693). The line itself, in the context of the novel, seems to refer quite explicitly to the town’s culture of gossip and rumor, expressing cautionary opposition to the community’s reckless and misguided distribution of information. Considering gossip’s status as an overt symbol of gender division within Middlemarch, Eliot’s narrative decisions and inclusion of the aforementioned quote can therefore be read not only as a critique of capricious or misguided social opinions, but also as an observation of the manner in which rigid gender stereotypes impede the capacity for intimate relationships and personal fulfillment within a social world. Nowhere is this sentiment more evident than in the final pages of the text, wherein Eliot asserts, “But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know” (Eliot, 838). As the reader nears the final lines of the text, Eliot refers directly to the “daily words,” or strategies of discourse, through which communities such as Middlemarch destroy the potential for romantic and personal fulfillment in women like Dorothea. It stands to reason then, that Eliot’s narrative treatment of gossip, though circumspect, is ultimately an indictment upon a society that willingly partakes in the free and reckless distribution of rumors. Furthermore, considering gossip’s thematic relationship to the broader political notions of gender, Eliot’s Middlemarch can be read as a criticism of the rigid stereotypes and hierarchies between men and women in Victorian England; thereby allowing the novel to function as a feminist text in its critical examination of the relevance of gender within its narrative.

Works Cited

Bucholtz, Mary. “Theories of Discourse as Theories of Gender.” The Handbook of Language and Gender. By Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003. 43-68. Web.

Eliot, George, and Rosemary Ashton. Middlemarch. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Patrick, Anne E. “Rosamond Rescued: George Eliot’s Critique of Sexism in “Middlemarch””. The Journal of Religion 67.2 (1987):220–238. Web.

Moments of Joining

October 27, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Grief takes on many forms, including the absence of grief.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

I was fifteen when my father left my family—and in my search for an artifact of memory, I came across a 1996 photograph of him holding me in the hospital room where I was born (Fig. 1). The second artifact, a photograph taken by a friend during my freshman year, shows me looking up from reading Dante’s Inferno in my high school dining hall (Fig. 2). The longer I compare the photographs of my father and I, the prouder and more sickened I am by how similar we look: the same small mouths turning down at the corners, the same wary brown eyes, the same thick, dark eyebrows, the same straight noses with an indent on the bridge, the same oddly precise curve to our chins. But most striking of all is the similarity of countenance as I glance up from my reading and he glances up from my face—the identical, slightly bemused expressions as the camera draws our attention away from something that we had been fascinated by.

In the first photograph, the 1996 one of my father and I in the hospital, he holds me to his chest more closely and tenderly than I can recall in any of my conscious memories. Perhaps it was as early as the hours following my birth, then, that the history of my love for my father became joined with the history of my body. Bechdel’s memory of her father bathing her—the “…suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me…the sudden unbearable cold of its absence” (Fun Home, 22)—is a memory of mine as well. I can recall, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the sensation of lying on my back as water filled each crevice in my body. When he read to me in bed after my bath, it was in these gaps and margins of my still-breathing flesh that I began to imagine droplets of ink and little pools of Times New Roman font; it must have been during one of these instances that I decided to become a writer. My father’s specter haunts each scar and bruise upon my body, although they were inflicted not by his hands, but by mine. I learned that the reason that I would never be called beautiful was because I looked too masculine, too much like him. And he was even there, in person, when I underwent the agonizing experience of tattooing the right side of my head. He was the only one I would allow to accompany me: at times it felt though we were both seeking some sort of clarity in the searing reverberations of a needle against my skull.

But the physical intimacy in the 1996 photograph is not only emergent in the way my father presses me to his chest. My mother once told me that my father had always wanted a little girl: maybe no one ever told him that little girls become women, or maybe he just never listened. At any rate, in the four-page, anguished letter that I sent in the weeks following his departure, I wrote, “You are missing the years of my life when I need you the most—the years when I start to become like you.” This sentiment has never seemed more evident than in the uncanny resemblance between the 1996 photograph of my father and the 2011 photograph of me—a visual transmutation that merges fifteen years, two dueling identities, and a single shared history in the identical expression on both of our faces. When I happened across these two artifacts of my memory, I stared at them for what felt like hours, searching for answers I felt sure they would never be able to give. More than anything, I wanted some kind of explanation for the interchangeable expressions of the man who made and unmade me, and of the daughter who loved and hated him as she could only have loved and hated herself.

To my own surprise, my artifacts of memory posed a tentative resolution to this question. The 2011 photograph, taken in Lower Right of Commons, is the image of someone whose father has already told her he hated her. She has already opened her skin with the edge of a razor, already sought solace in cigarettes, substances, and the bodies of others. The inherent sameness of my expression and my father’s is therefore paradoxically augmented and juxtaposed by the dramatically differing impacts of our shared history: this endless range of contextual differences between each photograph redefines what it means for us to be joined. I am indeed my father—not only what he is, but also that which he never was and could never be. The simultaneous equity and differentiation between the two photographs has compelled me to believe that the imposition of experience upon a subject by an object necessarily distinguishes one from the other—that the subject emerges not merely as the object’s double, but also as an autonomous result of the actions inflicted upon it. I therefore owe vast magnitudes of my selfhood to the influence of my father: but my selfhood is ultimately my own.

It has taken me an uncharacteristically long time to write this piece: perhaps because, while I have written about my body, my sexuality, my depression, my addiction, and myself, I have never truly stricken the untested heart of my own vulnerability. I have never before written about the childhood hatred and adoration that formed the burning core of who I am. The 1996 photograph of my father and I was the most difficult “text” I have ever had to analyze; ultimately, though, it has proven worthwhile. I have always wanted to know if there was any time before all of our symbiotic resentment, any period of life wherein my love for my father was not rendered injurious by the pain he inflicted upon my body and spirit. I wanted to know if we were ever happy, if his love for me had ever even vaguely mirrored my love for him. The tenderness of the 1996 image facilitates the construction of such a memory—one that predates the years of verbal and emotional dissonance. The photograph’s existence, and my discovery of it, creates the visual reality wherein our conflict is neither existent nor foreshadowed, and where I will always be one with my father. It provides me with a history that distances my love for him from the extent and impact of what I experienced.

I chose the photograph not only for its intimacy, its sense of physical merging, but also for the scarcity of detail and the sense of ambiguity. If I could have written something confident, definitive, or self-assured about that image, then the entire piece would have been a lie. When the photograph was taken in 1996, just as in every moment and memory we share between us, my father did not give me much to work with. But this time, he might have given me enough.

Figure 1. My father holds me in the hospital room (1996)

and me

Figure 2. Me, fifteen years old, reading in Commons (2011)

where were you last weekend?

October 25, 2015 / / 0 Comments

This is not a goodbye. It is a confession, and hopefully a catharsis. I promised myself that I would never let this happen. I promised that I would be different, and better, and stronger than I used to be. That I would not get attached to anybody this time around, because it is never safe for me. Then I broke like that promise; I always, inevitably do.

There are parts of how I feel about you that I will never show you, that I do not understand. I think it is because I may never know what I was to you. I will never really know how you regarded me: if you loved me, if you will remember me. I wanted you to see me differently. I wanted you to want me around, not only as a lover but also as a friend. And maybe you did, maybe I’ll never really know—but even in the best of our days, it just never felt that way to me.

But these are not things that you “should” have given me. These are simply things that I needed—perhaps irrationally, perhaps unfairly, but that I needed all the same. And there is, as it was once written, a world elsewhere, where I can and will find these things. You were never obligated to be the one to give them to me.

There are days when I don’t know if you are lying, or if you are even real. But there was one night when I was certain that you weren’t, and that you were. There was light on the water, and your skin—everything glistened. And I knew you so well: every crevice and contour of your body, all the chaos and radiance of your prismatic, engaging mind. You told me that you loved me, and in doing so you gave me a glimpse of my own resurrected potential to love, to endure. It has been a long time since I have known, however dimly, what that felt like.

I will not soon find your equal. No one can make me laugh the way you do: you made me feel like I was worth something. I am afraid that when I am drunk, or dissociating, I will want you more than I want to, or should. I am afraid that if you asked me now for another chance, I would still say yes. I have to be better, more stable, than that. Sometimes all I want is to be close to you, and you do not want the same, and I simply cannot get my head around that.

You gave me some of the best days of this uncertain life: learning to read the language of your body, the inflections of your voice, the subtleties of your temperament. And I am eternally grateful for that alone—you were the clandestine wonder of this long and trying year. Consequently, I also have one final night to thank you for: a half-drunk, silent taxi ride, a kaleidoscope of city lights, New York’s sleep-dimmed skyline. I felt as close to you then as ever I have.

There is no right way to read this. It is, for me, as much of an artistic endeavor, as it is an effort towards communicative empathy. As you painted me, so I hope to write you: all of the indecisive beauty and subtle conflictions. If I had the skill and the perseverance and the pretension, I think I would want this piece to read like poetry. But I only managed these pages.

A day will never pass when I will not love you in my own confused and confusing way. But I am realizing now that I have a lot left to learn about myself, and that much of it will have to be on my own. But I feel good about that, almost confident, because I am starting to let go of this horrible fear of isolation that I have been harboring for so long. I will love again, because I can love, and I know that now. And I have you to thank for that.

In That Quiet Earth

October 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Navigation of Physical Space Within “Wuthering Heights”

While paranormal hauntings and an enigmatic landscape lend Wuthering Heights its sense of gothic terror, the actions of characters such as Heathcliff extend beyond the merely horrific: their total disregard for convention and civility render elements of Brontë’s text virtually inaccessible to the socialized being. Thematically and symbolically, Wuthering Heights is riddled with margins: images of windows, doorways, thresholds, and gateways heavily inform the text. Traditionally, these symbols entail division, restriction, and change, both in the literal sense and as allegories for the socially constructed parameters of civilization. But the narrative power of Wuthering Heights is largely contingent upon the ways in which Brontë’s characters navigate these physical and metaphorical boundaries: the volatile landscapes and complex architecture within the novel are repeatedly linked to the human body, and can often be read in coded sexual terms. So as the characters of Wuthering Heights engage with the physical spaces they occupy, and specifically with liminal areas such as windows and doorways, they encounter an observable nexus of social and sexual taboos: the characters of Heathcliff and Lockwood respectively embody two opposite responses to this half- civilized world.

Mysteriously orphaned as a child, and described by Brontë as “A dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” the character of Heathcliff is socially and racially divided from his childhood community of Wuthering Heights. The resulting sense of financial and ethnic separation from the communal masses is reflected clearly in the voyeuristic physical spaces that Heathcliff often occupies. In Chapter VI of Volume I, when the Linton’s dog bites Cathy at Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff later explains to Nelly: “I refused to go without Cathy…. The curtains were still looped up at one corner, and I resumed my station as spy; because, if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million of fragments, unless they let her out” (Brontë, 51). The “great glass panes” in this scene clearly represent a degree of physical separation between Heathcliff and the object of his desire, with the glass creating a tangible but transparent boundary between himself and the world of Thrushcross Grange. But perhaps more notably, the scene demonstrates the way in which physical and social othering can manifest specifically as the realized sense of voyeurism that is routinely experienced by Heathcliff. Identifying himself as a “spy” in the scene, Heathcliff, rather than Nelly narrates this passage: from his isolated positioning behind the window, Cathy is reduced to an object of his gaze, and even when Nelly recounts the story to Lockwood, the language and visual perspective of the scene belong to Heathcliff. The passage is also one of Heathcliff’s earliest experiences with what Pauline Nestor refers to as an “endless deferral of satisfaction” (Brontë, Introduction, XXV), a characteristic of his voyeuristic social positioning with several physical and social consequences. Although he considers shattering the glass, and thereby breaching both the physical and moral boundaries in Thrushcross Grange that separate him from Catherine, Heathcliff ultimately remains passive. In what will prove to be a formative moment in his life (as Cathy meets Edgar Linton, the man who eventually marries her) he remains a perpetual outlier both physically and symbolically, yet clings to this position in order to experience a limited, one-sided satiation of his fixation upon Cathy. Heathcliff, as spectator, retains the ability in this chapter to covertly view an object of his desire, thereby satisfying an emotional need for closeness without ever directly experiencing physical satisfaction or intimacy of any form: a circumstance later echoed in Chapter XX of Volume II when he notes, “My Soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself” (Brontë, 333).

Of course, Heathcliff’s status as voyeur cannot naturally grant him access to the desired physical spaces that Cathy and Edgar occupy: when he enters these spaces at last, he does so in acts of physical and social transgression. In Chapter XV of Volume 2, after acquiring possession of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff “…made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he was master, and availed himself of the master’s privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word” (Brontë, 285). Heathcliff is depicted frequently throughout Wuthering Heights as a bestial, even devilish figure: in accordance with this Gothic imagery, there may be an underlying vampiric, and therefore rape-like, element to such casual and unwanted invasion of feminine- occupied spaces. It is unsurprising, then, that these psychologically violent infringements upon a physical space within Wuthering Heights are routinely accompanied by grotesque disfigurations of the body: of course, this is first hinted at much earlier in the text, when the Changeling representing Cathy’s ghost attempts to breach Lockwood’s bedroom window, but the even more frightening scene occurs in Chapter XV, when Heathcliff violates Cathy’s grave. Heathcliff’s actions, which are fueled by dissonant and perverse bodily desire, are explained in full as he tells Nelly:

“…In the evening I went to the churchyard…. Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—“I’ll have her in my arms again!” …I got a spade from the tool-house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down” (Brontë, 289).

In this scene, the effort of opening the coffin, and especially the action of actually breaking the wood with his bare hands, demonstrates Heathcliff’s efforts towards total physical destruction of a barrier between his body and Catherine’s. Furthermore, the act of breaching the coffin is socially as well as physically transgressive: in addition to violating the clear separation that cemeteries establish between living bodies and corpses in human civilization, Heathcliff’s language may even indicate an ongoing sexual desire for Cathy. In other words, Heathcliff may not only harbor desire for Cathy as he remembers her, but also for her present state in the novel, as a corpse: his use of the term “my object” can be read as referencing Cathy’s corpse as an object of affection, or of desire, while his desperation to “have her in my arms again” is an unsettlingly physical and even romantic sentiment to demonstrate towards a lifeless and decaying body. In this scene, Brontë’s diction and Heathcliff’s stated desires both contain a borderline implication of necrophilia: among the most appalling of social taboos. Thus, as Heathcliff begins to engage more aggressively with the physical space around him, he abandons more carelessly the norms and standards of the society that constrained him: the anticlimactic frustration of his voyeurism gives way to a tendency towards transgression, and his bodily desires grow increasingly perverse.

A novel of lingering tensions and oftentimes of profound horror, Wuthering Heights functions, in some ways, as a haunted text. The human tragedy and supernatural horror of the narrative besets the audience—but some of its poison is released through the telling. One of the great paradoxes of Wuthering Heights is the simultaneous necessity and limitations of both physical social boundaries: while Catherine’s strict adherence to societal convention arguably destroys both Heathcliff’s life and her own, the total lack of regard for the parameters of civilized society that Heathcliff demonstrates has horrific consequences of its own. Lockwood, on the other hand, hovers on the threshold between the conventional and the primitive: although a civilized man, he is repeatedly drawn to the seclusion and enigmatic wilderness of Wuthering Heights. Neither rejecting nor wholly embracing conventional society, Lockwood’s consolation in the face of Wuthering Heights’ tragic history is achieved through acts of communication with the character of Nelly. Lockwood often misinterprets what he sees at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly occasionally embellishes or omits information in order to fit her internalized opinion of each character; nevertheless, through lengthy narration the two characters are ultimately able to piece together an imperfect but nuanced understanding of the occupants of Wuthering Heights. In this way, they begin to exorcise the fraught history of the landscape from their own souls. These acts of healing are reflected by the newfound ability of the characters to navigate the physical thresholds of the house: in the first scene of the novel, Lockwood attempts to enter through the gateway of Wuthering Heights, but is apprehended (Brontë, 3). By the end of the novel, having fully recounted the place’s history to the reader, Lockwood is able to enter easily, stating, “I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock, it yielded to my hand” (Brontë, 307). The ability to navigate the physical thresholds of the landscape seems to parallel the redemptive and cleansing quality of verbalizing and communicating the tragic history of Wuthering Heights; thus, in the souls of both Nelly and Lockwood, the terrors of a haunted past are comprehended, and ultimately mitigated through mutual acts of translation.

Through its characters’ engagements with the literal and metaphorical boundaries of their social spaces, Wuthering Heights demonstrates the ambiguous line between civilized and animalistic, the dissatisfaction of forced and othered voyeurism, the terrifying distortions of the transgressive body, and the catharsis of narrative. Interestingly, though, the reader is placed in a peculiar position by the end of the novel. For while Nelly tells the story to Lockwood, and Lockwood to the audience, the story is not ours to tell—we have no such purgative ability. The audience then becomes the perpetual voyeur, experiencing the novel in a profoundly visceral fashion, while never quite entering the novel’s inaccessible world. The story then lingers with a strange and almost supernatural beauty that the reader consumes, yet struggles to translate. This is perhaps the most extraordinary literary achievement of Emily Brontë’s narration within Wuthering Heights. She creates a world whose history must be told over and over again—leaving our souls affected, our slumbers unquiet.

In That Quiet Earth

October 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Navigation of Physical Space Within “Wuthering Heights”

While paranormal hauntings and an enigmatic landscape lend Wuthering Heights its sense of gothic terror, the actions of characters such as Heathcliff extend beyond the merely horrific: their total disregard for convention and civility render elements of Brontë’s text virtually inaccessible to the socialized being. Thematically and symbolically, Wuthering Heights is riddled with margins: images of windows, doorways, thresholds, and gateways heavily inform the text. Traditionally, these symbols entail division, restriction, and change, both in the literal sense and as allegories for the socially constructed parameters of civilization. But the narrative power of Wuthering Heights is largely contingent upon the ways in which Brontë’s characters navigate these physical and metaphorical boundaries: the volatile landscapes and complex architecture within the novel are repeatedly linked to the human body, and can often be read in coded sexual terms. So as the characters of Wuthering Heights engage with the physical spaces they occupy, and specifically with liminal areas such as windows and doorways, they encounter an observable nexus of social and sexual taboos: the characters of Heathcliff and Lockwood respectively embody two opposite responses to this half- civilized world.

Mysteriously orphaned as a child, and described by Brontë as “A dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” the character of Heathcliff is socially and racially divided from his childhood community of Wuthering Heights. The resulting sense of financial and ethnic separation from the communal masses is reflected clearly in the voyeuristic physical spaces that Heathcliff often occupies. In Chapter VI of Volume I, when the Linton’s dog bites Cathy at Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff later explains to Nelly: “I refused to go without Cathy…. The curtains were still looped up at one corner, and I resumed my station as spy; because, if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million of fragments, unless they let her out” (Brontë, 51). The “great glass panes” in this scene clearly represent a degree of physical separation between Heathcliff and the object of his desire, with the glass creating a tangible but transparent boundary between himself and the world of Thrushcross Grange. But perhaps more notably, the scene demonstrates the way in which physical and social othering can manifest specifically as the realized sense of voyeurism that is routinely experienced by Heathcliff. Identifying himself as a “spy” in the scene, Heathcliff, rather than Nelly narrates this passage: from his isolated positioning behind the window, Cathy is reduced to an object of his gaze, and even when Nelly recounts the story to Lockwood, the language and visual perspective of the scene belong to Heathcliff. The passage is also one of Heathcliff’s earliest experiences with what Pauline Nestor refers to as an “endless deferral of satisfaction” (Brontë, Introduction, XXV), a characteristic of his voyeuristic social positioning with several physical and social consequences. Although he considers shattering the glass, and thereby breaching both the physical and moral boundaries in Thrushcross Grange that separate him from Catherine, Heathcliff ultimately remains passive. In what will prove to be a formative moment in his life (as Cathy meets Edgar Linton, the man who eventually marries her) he remains a perpetual outlier both physically and symbolically, yet clings to this position in order to experience a limited, one-sided satiation of his fixation upon Cathy. Heathcliff, as spectator, retains the ability in this chapter to covertly view an object of his desire, thereby satisfying an emotional need for closeness without ever directly experiencing physical satisfaction or intimacy of any form: a circumstance later echoed in Chapter XX of Volume II when he notes, “My Soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself” (Brontë, 333).

Of course, Heathcliff’s status as voyeur cannot naturally grant him access to the desired physical spaces that Cathy and Edgar occupy: when he enters these spaces at last, he does so in acts of physical and social transgression. In Chapter XV of Volume 2, after acquiring possession of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff “…made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he was master, and availed himself of the master’s privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word” (Brontë, 285). Heathcliff is depicted frequently throughout Wuthering Heights as a bestial, even devilish figure: in accordance with this Gothic imagery, there may be an underlying vampiric, and therefore rape-like, element to such casual and unwanted invasion of feminine- occupied spaces. It is unsurprising, then, that these psychologically violent infringements upon a physical space within Wuthering Heights are routinely accompanied by grotesque disfigurations of the body: of course, this is first hinted at much earlier in the text, when the Changeling representing Cathy’s ghost attempts to breach Lockwood’s bedroom window, but the even more frightening scene occurs in Chapter XV, when Heathcliff violates Cathy’s grave. Heathcliff’s actions, which are fueled by dissonant and perverse bodily desire, are explained in full as he tells Nelly:

“…In the evening I went to the churchyard…. Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—“I’ll have her in my arms again!” …I got a spade from the tool-house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down” (Brontë, 289).

In this scene, the effort of opening the coffin, and especially the action of actually breaking the wood with his bare hands, demonstrates Heathcliff’s efforts towards total physical destruction of a barrier between his body and Catherine’s. Furthermore, the act of breaching the coffin is socially as well as physically transgressive: in addition to violating the clear separation that cemeteries establish between living bodies and corpses in human civilization, Heathcliff’s language may even indicate an ongoing sexual desire for Cathy. In other words, Heathcliff may not only harbor desire for Cathy as he remembers her, but also for her present state in the novel, as a corpse: his use of the term “my object” can be read as referencing Cathy’s corpse as an object of affection, or of desire, while his desperation to “have her in my arms again” is an unsettlingly physical and even romantic sentiment to demonstrate towards a lifeless and decaying body. In this scene, Brontë’s diction and Heathcliff’s stated desires both contain a borderline implication of necrophilia: among the most appalling of social taboos. Thus, as Heathcliff begins to engage more aggressively with the physical space around him, he abandons more carelessly the norms and standards of the society that constrained him: the anticlimactic frustration of his voyeurism gives way to a tendency towards transgression, and his bodily desires grow increasingly perverse.

A novel of lingering tensions and oftentimes of profound horror, Wuthering Heights functions, in some ways, as a haunted text. The human tragedy and supernatural horror of the narrative besets the audience—but some of its poison is released through the telling. One of the great paradoxes of Wuthering Heights is the simultaneous necessity and limitations of both physical social boundaries: while Catherine’s strict adherence to societal convention arguably destroys both Heathcliff’s life and her own, the total lack of regard for the parameters of civilized society that Heathcliff demonstrates has horrific consequences of its own. Lockwood, on the other hand, hovers on the threshold between the conventional and the primitive: although a civilized man, he is repeatedly drawn to the seclusion and enigmatic wilderness of Wuthering Heights. Neither rejecting nor wholly embracing conventional society, Lockwood’s consolation in the face of Wuthering Heights’ tragic history is achieved through acts of communication with the character of Nelly. Lockwood often misinterprets what he sees at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly occasionally embellishes or omits information in order to fit her internalized opinion of each character; nevertheless, through lengthy narration the two characters are ultimately able to piece together an imperfect but nuanced understanding of the occupants of Wuthering Heights. In this way, they begin to exorcise the fraught history of the landscape from their own souls. These acts of healing are reflected by the newfound ability of the characters to navigate the physical thresholds of the house: in the first scene of the novel, Lockwood attempts to enter through the gateway of Wuthering Heights, but is apprehended (Brontë, 3). By the end of the novel, having fully recounted the place’s history to the reader, Lockwood is able to enter easily, stating, “I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock, it yielded to my hand” (Brontë, 307). The ability to navigate the physical thresholds of the landscape seems to parallel the redemptive and cleansing quality of verbalizing and communicating the tragic history of Wuthering Heights; thus, in the souls of both Nelly and Lockwood, the terrors of a haunted past are comprehended, and ultimately mitigated through mutual acts of translation.

Through its characters’ engagements with the literal and metaphorical boundaries of their social spaces, Wuthering Heights demonstrates the ambiguous line between civilized and animalistic, the dissatisfaction of forced and othered voyeurism, the terrifying distortions of the transgressive body, and the catharsis of narrative. Interestingly, though, the reader is placed in a peculiar position by the end of the novel. For while Nelly tells the story to Lockwood, and Lockwood to the audience, the story is not ours to tell—we have no such purgative ability. The audience then becomes the perpetual voyeur, experiencing the novel in a profoundly visceral fashion, while never quite entering the novel’s inaccessible world. The story then lingers with a strange and almost supernatural beauty that the reader consumes, yet struggles to translate. This is perhaps the most extraordinary literary achievement of Emily Brontë’s narration within Wuthering Heights. She creates a world whose history must be told over and over again—leaving our souls affected, our slumbers unquiet.

Feminism: Not “For Everybody” Anymore

August 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Feminism is for white women. Feminism is for cisgender women. Feminism is for straight women. Neurotypical women. Bourgeois women. Able-bodied women. Western women. Feminism was always this way. Feminism never tried to be anything else.

When intersectionality was gradually introduced into the broader feminist vocabulary, I like to believe that this became less fully the case. As a queer, not-quite-cis, differently abled, neurodivergent woman, feminist spaces are more accessible to me now than ever before in the history of the movement. But this formative period of social intersection, transnational discourse, and identity politics has brought about its own host of problems. Foremost among them, at least in my mind, is the casual treatment of feminism as something amorphous: an identity to which all women are universally entitled.

But unlike so many feminists before me (hi, Betty Friedan!), I am not arguing that feminism is not for queer people, people of color, trans and nonbinary people, working class people, differently abled people, or First Nation people. Instead, I am arguing the opposite: that feminism is no longer a movement for the women whose opinions and language dehumanize and disenfranchise the aforementioned groups, and that the label of “feminist” should no longer be so easily accessible for racist, transphobic, homophobic, classist, and ableist women.

This line of thinking is a tedious one, though: in an effort to help make the movement as inclusive and supportive as possible, privileged feminists run the risk of worsening the problem through logical and dialectic fallacy. In 1975, British philosopher Antony Flew wrote:

“Imagine [a Scotsman], sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton (England) Sex Maniac Strikes Again.” [He] is shocked and declares that, “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen (Scotland) man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that the Scotsman was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.”

This type of inconsistency, casually known as a “No true Scotsman” fallacy, is a vital one for feminists to keep in mind. In the rising tides of feminism’s third wave, it is all too easy for people like myself—relatively privileged feminists who often oppose transphobic, homophobic, racist, classist, and ableist views without directly experiencing the dehumanization that these views entail—to dismiss the women who hold these views as something other than “real” feminists. But in doing so, we fail to address the deeply rooted flaws within the feminist movement. We disregard the fact that if people with racist, transphobic, classist, or ableist views still consider their opinions acceptable or even welcomed within the broader sphere of feminist thought, then the movement has not done enough to publicly challenge and renounce these views. It goes without saying that we are nowhere near where we should be in our efforts to make feminist spaces safe and supportive environments for trans* and nonbinary people, queer people, people of color, First Nation people, differently abled and neurodivergent people, stateless people, and people of the working class. The “No true Scotsman” fallacy is what allows us to maintain the delusion that the copious levels of bigotry, oppression, and supremacy within modern feminism are anybody’s fault but our own.

This is, in fact, another one of the most pervasive flaws in contemporary feminist thought. For far too many women with genuine intentions of allyship (myself included, many times over), the notion of “intersectional feminism” has, instead of promoting actual growth and discourse, caused us to dismiss the racists, homophobes, transphobes, classists, ableists, nationalists, and Eurocentrists within our spheres as anomalous problems—as “not true feminists.” For me, this has always presented quite a paradox. How can we address both the interpersonal and broadly political? How does feminism denounce racism and bigotry, and create an environment of support and solidarity for people with marginalized identities, while simultaneously remaining always cognizant of our own history as a deeply racist, classist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and Eurocentric movement?

This is not an easy piece for me to write. Mostly because I do not have many answers, however deeply I wish I did. But as a feminist and a person, I do know this: I am no longer willing to help empower the women who disempower me and the people I love. Please understand that I am all too aware of how imperfect I am, especially in terms of my feminism. I am constantly guarding my own humanity, preserving my own physical and mental well-being, and generally just doing what I can to carve out a healthy and worthwhile existence in a world that does not seem to have been built for people like me. I make a lot of mistakes, but I am always growing, learning, changing, and I do hope to stay that way.

So I want to say that feminism is for everybody, because that sounds so damn appealing. And let’s make one thing very clear: if by saying “feminism is for everybody” you mean that feminism helps everybody, then still I believe that you are correct. Because in this sense feminism is, and always will be, for everybody. Until the day I die, I will believe that feminism can help everybody, including (or perhaps especially) the white, cisgender men who feel so deeply victimized by it. In some ways, then, my title was misleading, and feminism is still for everybody: for men, for women, for trans and nonbinary people, for people of color, for queer people, for straight people, for white people, for all classes, genders, ethnicities, cultures. I  sincerely believe that we can create a better world than the one we live in now, and that feminism can help us all get there.

But if you are a feminist who silences women of color, who believes that trans women are not “really women,” who opposes a woman’s right to choose, who does not respect gender pronouns, who regards queerness in women as a sexy trend to be appropriated at will, or who votes against legislation that supports working class women, protects stateless people, or defends the remaining territories of First Nation peoples (and yes, I am looking at you, American “Republican feminists”), then I am sorry, but feminism is not for you. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. Not my feminism. Not anymore.

Because if your “empowerment” does not include educating yourself and admitting your own bigotries, then you are doing a disservice to the very notions of solidarity and sisterhood. Because I will not prioritize your feelings or opinions over the people and groups whose humanity you are invalidating—including, quite often, my own. Because whatever quality allowed me to do so in the past (whether it was ignorance or resilience I genuinely am not sure) has clearly been beaten out of me. Because if this is what it means for feminism to be “for everybody,” then feminism (or at least, feminists) might not always be for me.

Works Cited

Flew, Antony (1975), Thinking About Thinking: Do I Sincerely Want to Be Right?, London: Collins Fontana, p. 47

Where Is My Mind?

July 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

where is my

charcoal. july, 2015. (unfinished).

The Gendered Art of Death

May 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

 Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“Death is your art—” Spike says, gazing up at the camera as the shot interlaces between the alleyway where he kneels at Buffy’s feet, and the New York City subway car where he straddles the body of the Slayer he has killed. “You make it with your hands every day” (Fool For Love, 05.07). In just one interpretation of this phrase, Spike’s words can be read as Joss Whedon’s self-referential humor at its finest: an indicated awareness of the fact that many of his finest artistic moments as a writer and director have occurred during his dealings with loss and dying. Death is art in Buffy The Vampire Slayer: the most powerful aesthetic and narrative achievements of the show routinely exploit and explore the audience’s fear of it, wish for it, and reactions to it. But death also has a gendered significance, particularly in its thematic relationship with the body, and the various representations of death through music in Buffy reveal a recurring tendency to aestheticize the corpses of women. In the course of the show’s progression, the interactions between gender, aesthetics, and the body become increasingly nuanced, as male bodies are repeatedly re-coded as feminine, and one-dimensional objectification of the female corpse gives way to more complex visual and auditory portrayals of women’s bodies. Nevertheless, despite substantial developments in the nature of bodily aestheticizing over the course Seasons 3 through 5, the medium of sound remains a primary site for observing the gendered implications of death in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In “Passion” (02.17), the narrative trajectory of Buffy is altered irreversibly with the murder of Janna Kalderash (better known throughout the series by her alias, Jenny Calendar). In contrast to the campier camerawork that characterizes early Buffy episodes like “Witch” (01.03) or “Prophecy Girl” (01.22), “Passion” is a highly stylized 40 minutes of television: the power of a villainous narrative voiceover is used in the series for the first time, and scenes are often filmed through windows or at a distance, evoking voyeurism and representing, through Angelus, the objectifying force of the male gaze. This precision of the camerawork, as well as the distinctive and (heretofore) unique use of the voiceover, allow the episode to establish a more sophisticated and consciously aesthetic tone. In other words, while many episodes of Buffy, and especially many early episodes, are wry, self-referential, and humorously aware of the horror genre clichés that they alternately rely upon and subvert, “Passion” is one of the first to treat both Buffy’s storyline and the horror genre with a graver sense of respect, focusing specifically on the very real emotional consequences that supernatural tropes like vampires can impose upon the lives of the characters. These artistic decisions are reflected in the episode’s construction: the heightened sense of aesthetic precision that characterizes “Passion” not only reflects an ongoing shift in the storyline that began around “Innocence” (02.14), when the writers began to engage more seriously with the conflicts of the characters rather than merely satirizing the trials of later adolescence, but also foreshadows a central theme of this episode: the artistry with which Angelus regards death and dying.

Near the end of “Passion,” death, gender, and sound intersect in one of the most horrifying and well-composed moments of the series, when Giles finds Janna’s body placed carefully amidst rose petals in his bedroom as “O Soave Fanciulla” from Puccini’s La Bohème plays on in the background. The calculated beauty of this scene is largely contingent upon the auditory decisions made by Angelus in the narrative, and by director Michael Gershman in the writing process. The rising operatic score formulates an image of tragedy deliberately characterized by artifice: the audience is already aware that Angelus has murdered Janna, and so the music indicates that this rose-strewn setting has been created specifically for Giles. This conscious sense of constructionism, in addition to heightening the audience’s sense of dramatic irony, also reinforces the artistic nature of Janna’s death. Angelus places Janna among the rose petals for Giles’ to look upon, revealing through music that he has manufactured this scene, and hoping to incite rage, grief, and fear in those who knew and loved her. Similarly, Gershman places actress Robia LaMorte in the scene for the emotional purposes of the audience: the music causes us to feel intense sorrow and, in all likelihood, a heightened sense of respect for the aesthetic talent that Gershman demonstrates in this beautifully constructed scene. Together, the director and the vampire create a simultaneous narrative and directorial aestheticizing of a woman’s corpse: Janna’s agency is lost not only in the philosophical sense discussed by academics such as Thomas W. Laqueur (who outlines the socially driven subject-to-object transition that accompanies the shift from “person” to “corpse”), but also in her corpses’s status as an object of the male gaze. She has become a set piece in a much larger scene, her dead body reduced to just another one of Angelus’s (or perhaps Gershman’s) masterpieces. Through its evocative beauty and its implications of artifice, “O Soave Faniciulla” sets the scene for both Angelus and Gershman’s aestheticizing of Janna’s death, becoming a primary device by which the objectification of her body is made possible.

Interestingly, though, the aestheticized corpses of Buffy are not always anatomically female, and by the end of Season 2, it becomes clear that the death of any body that has been coded as “feminine” through its relationship with conventional gender roles is susceptible to objectification in the series. The character of Angel presents one such example of a feminized male body, and “Close Your Eyes,” Buffy and Angel’s love theme for the first two seasons of the show, is one of the primary means through which Angel’s death is aestheticized. The only point in the series that this song achieves crescendo occurs in “Becoming” (02.22) when, caught frequently between her obligations as Slayer and her desires as a woman, Buffy makes the first of the many terrible decisions that will come to shape her later adolescence, and puts a sword through her lover’s heart “because [she] had to” (Selfless, 07.05). Musically representing this crucial rite of passage, “Close Your Eyes” operates as an auditory representation of the emotional and physical decisions that Buffy must make at the expense of Angel’s life and body. Even the song’s title, which echoes Buffy’s final words to Angel, reinforces this dynamic: she performs the actions that shape the narrative, while Angel, the subject, is acted upon.

“Close Your Eyes” therefore seems to negotiate an entirely new relationship between music, gender, and the body: it emphasizes rather than subverts Buffy’s narrative agency, suggesting a reversal of the musical treatment of gender that “Passion” demonstrated just five episodes earlier. But this reading of Season 2’s love theme is complicated by the fact that Angel’s body is consistently coded as feminine; the aestheticized nature of this death, therefore, is not very different from Janna’s after all. In “Surprise/Innocence” (02.13/14), Angel—rather than Buffy—experiences the “death by sex” trope: a gendered horror cliché wherein the woman dies as either a direct or indirect consequence of having sex. While Buffy certainly suffers as a result of her sexual decisions, her grief is reactionary. She does not die, but instead mourns for Angel, whose loss of his soul constitutes a sort of death of the self. In addition to representing this typically female trope, Angel is also re-gendered through his fulfilling of the virgin/whore dichotomy, wherein he once again performs a conventionally feminine role. His abstinence allows him to retain his soul, any expression of sexuality may cause him to revert to the evil Angelus. Angel’s agency and narrative complexity are both greatly compromised by this binary characterization: while he is generally permitted to function only as either a gentle love interest or a misogynistic villain, and his status as either, like that of the virgin or the whore, is determined through his acts of physicality. In his unconventional fulfillment of these two traditionally female tropes, Angel is clearly and repeatedly coded as female throughout the season. But the feminization of his body is demonstrated most physically through music: most notably during the crescendo of “Close Your Eyes,” when he is stabbed as the song reaches its climax. Angel’s body serves a site of penetration in this scene, and evokes a visceral inversion of our conventional understandings of gendered and sexual roles. It is consistent with the show’s treatment of gender, then, that Angel’s death is musically aestheticized in a manner similar to Janna’s in “Passion.” Anatomically male but thematically feminine, he becomes a symbol of beauty and a source of emotional evocation: as the haunting, fragile strains of “Close Your Eyes” intensify, forming a beautiful auditory climax, Angel’s dying body forms the aesthetic centerpiece of one of Whedon’s earliest moments of significant artistic achievement in the series.

“Hush” (04.10) features a similar re-gendering of a male body, and the episode’s musical score once again aestheticizes the death of this female-coded body. “Hush” features a distinctive examination of the communicative limits of language: in the first 17 minutes of the show, characters frequently encounter the frustrations of verbal socialization, but the remainder of the episode is entirely devoid of speech, and a sinister language of music and bodies informs the narrative instead. When the Gentlemen carve out their first victim’s heart, nature of their actions—penetrative, physical, violent, and precise— allows this action to be easily read as rape. It is a surprising shift in traditional media representation, then, that the subject upon whom such an act is performed is a young man. But the male body here is once again coded feminine: it functions as a subject to be acted upon, and a site for the Gentleman’s penetration. As is the case with Angel, the feminine physical coding of the victim is reinforced through the musical score, which reaches a screeching climax as his body is violated.

While the music of “Hush” genders this victim’s body, recoding it as feminine by creating an auditory climax that parallels the visual implications of rape that the Gentlemen suggest, it is the absence of dialogue that aestheticizes this death scene. The only audible sounds that accompany the gruesome procedure are those of the musical score, and the Gentlemen’s actions are made all the more invasive by their victim’s inability to scream. The death of the victim is thereby devalued through a singularity of sound: the music becomes increasingly more chaotic, but without any of the accompanying verbal expressions of pain that the victim, through his body language, is clearly attempting to emit, the auditory nature of the scene feels incomplete and disturbing. The victim’s body of is no longer able to verbally respond to the act of its own dying, producing a distinctly uncanny effect (especially considering that the music in Buffy very often augments dialogue between characters). Once again, dead or dying bodies in Buffy the Vampire Slayer are both gendered and aestheticized through the show’s use of sound. The score re-genders the male body by reinforcing the notions of sexual climax and penetration through its grating crescendo, while the absence of any noise other than music in this scene provides a vivid artistic depiction of the horror of the death of a body that has been denied the opportunity for verbal expression.

Finally, in the Season 5’s “The Body” (05.16), a female corpse once again forms the primary thematic intersection between death and sound. The most distinctive element of the “The Body” is the episode’s complete lack of score, which, in conjunction with the natural cause of Joyce’s death, creates a sense of realism that distinguishes the episode from many of the series’ more openly supernatural representations of death. Rhonda V. Wilcox argues compellingly that this sense of realism is precisely what enabled so many critics laude this episode above other similarly well-composed episodes of the show, citing specifically many the general critical consensus that the appearance of a vampire—the only overtly supernatural element of the episode—was the single flaw in an otherwise excellent episode.

Following Wilcox’s theory that realism is synonymous with “quality television” in the realm of popular aesthetics, and considering that the realism of “The Body” is in large part determined by its absence of music, female death in Buffy has once again become aestheticized through sound—but this time, to a very different effect. Rather than using rising music gloss over the gruesomely physical connotations of a corpse, or a jarring dissonance to drive home the horror of a voiceless death, “The Body” uses its absence of a score to emphasize the sounds surrounding Joyce’s body: the crack of her rib, the sound of the zipper on the body bag, and clipping of scissors cutting through her blouse. These sounds elicit a very different understanding of death from the audience: while the beautiful climaxes of “O Soave Fanciulla” and “Close Your Eyes” allowed us to distance ourselves from the narrative by treating the deaths of Janna and Angel as moments of beauty, the scoreless nature of “The Body” refuses to reduce Joyce’s corpse to an aesthetic achievement. Unable to find an emotional catharsis in the constructed beauty of music, the grief that accompanies death is imposed instead upon the natural sounds of the body, and the tragedy of Joyce’s loss becomes rooted in the mundane and unsettlingly visceral noises that surround the act of dying. Although deliberately selected by Whedon (and therefore undeniably furthering a carefully constructed artistic vision of death), the absence of music in “The Body” demonstrates a treatment of the female corpse that is far more nuanced and humanizing than many of its predecessors. In all of the scenes that emphasize everyday sounds over a carefully constructed score, Joyce’s corpse functions not as a prop or a set piece, but as the central focus of an episode that thoughtfully considers the emotional and psychological consequences of physical death through the body of a beloved female character.

Sound is just one of the many aesthetic forces used to construct representations of death (a theme upon which this show about vampires demonstrates an unsurprising fixation), but Whedon’s heavy reliance on wit and dialogue make musical, silent, and scoreless episodes of Buffy all the more daring. The episodes that use the aesthetics of sound in the riskiest and most unconventional ways are all placed in crucial points in each season’s respective narrative arc. “Passion,” in addition to showing the first death of a major character on Buffy, pushes Angel past the threshold of forgiveness in the eyes of the Scoobies, thereby necessitating his eventual death. “Becoming” similarly propels Buffy beyond the bliss of adolescence, drawing her into the post-traumatic territory of young adulthood, where she arguably remains for the duration of the series. “Hush” is the episode wherein Buffy and Riley begin their romance and learn truths about one another, and features the first interactions between Willow and Tara. “The Body” marks the major turning point in Buffy’s family life that arguably leads directly to her sacrifice in “The Gift” (05.22).

By positioning these daring “sound” episodes at the site of narrative catalysts, Whedon himself has emphasized the importance of music and silence in Buffy. Rather than compromising precarious instances of artistic and auditory experimentation by inserting them into inconsequential points in the seasonal arcs, he has consistently used their narrative positioning to compel audiences to engage with themes of death, gender, and physicality through the medium of sound. And of course, as these various forms of music, sound, and silence all act alternately as both facilitators for and impediments of communication in Buffy—paralleling the show’s representations of death in their simultaneous fragmentation and unification of communities—it is unsurprising that their respective instances of heightened relevance all find a particular site of observation in the body. The first five seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer demonstrate a complex and always- evolving treatment of women’s bodies: although music in earlier episodes such as “Passion” provided a singularly aestheticized set of representations, the scores of episodes like “Becoming” and “Hush” both complicated the series’ treatment of gender by re-coding male bodies as feminine. By the time “The Body” was aired, the writers of Buffy had used both the presence of “ordinary” sounds and the absence of musical score to negotiate a fragile truce between the show’s feminism and its representation of female corpses. In each of these instances, the use of sound in Buffy the Vampire Slayer acts as a primary lens through which these aesthetic and bodily shifts can be observed, and provides detailed insight into the show’s treatment of gender and death.

Works Cited

Kociemba, David. ““Over-identify Much?’ Passion, “Passion,” and the Author-Audience Feedback Loop in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage. Accessed May 9, 2015.

Wilcox, Rhonda. Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. London: I.B. Tauris :, 2005.

Child. Grandmother. Nurse. Murderer?

May 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Rough feel of the carpet against her legs. Grandma behind, hand on shoulder, gentle, ready to clench so tight at any movement too close to the red-gold flicker. Sound, color, shadows, warmth; uncomfortable heat, wishing for outside. Subtleties, nonverbal, interpersonal, flashing across and above and around her—too young. Smiling dimly at the shadowed face of Layla: beautiful, lithe, graceful, large. Will be like you, someday. A Woman. Ignoring Nurse standing just paces away—don’t like Nurse. Nurse is naptimes and lullabies and nothing grown, but here am I beside the fire, staying awake into the morning with sister, with Layla, like grown up—this night excites, Nurse should not ruin it.

Frail bones, papery skin, bleeding heart. She should not care anymore, why should she care anymore? The blood is freezing in her veins. Is this grief? Is it dying? Hips and eyes and a bladder like hers, every day feels like dying. And she had tried, she had tried to love that beautiful dark-eyed girl, to care for her, shadowed mirror-image of her mother—and what agony, now that she should not care, to learn that she always has. And the memories are rushing back, those recollections that cling to her like deadened autumn leaves, that will not fade until life itself has ceased—the screams, the sobs, the cruel male voice and hands—these memories are not her own, but perhaps she took them on, inherited this pain brighter than steel when she watched as her only daughter was lowered in the ground, threw a wedding ring into those ashes: no burning, no heat. Oh, Layla—could she blame her? Was it really so wrong?

Twitching mouth, sharp eyes darting across the room with keen, perplexing bite. This was insanity, the police should be called—oh, please, let them come and take the dark-eyed woman and wash that blood off of her hands and neck and breasts and return the world to bright sterile perfection as it had been only this morning. She took care of the little girl because the money was good, and should she just call the police herself, she was so far from sure. Is betrayal rooted in apathy, in love, or in loathing, and which of them had she started to feel? She looked at the dark-haired woman behind her and thought of what that woman had done, and as she turned towards the young one, the loved one, her own hand moved slowly, protectively, towards her.

All right, so maybe I meant it. So maybe two women dead is too much for one bloodline—maybe one pretty kitchen knife isn’t any less deliberate than that handsome fist coming down upon me again and again and fucking again, splitting my lip wide with the gleaming wedding band. Pain as bright as burnished gold. And fire burns and burns and then it’s gone—like him, like me—I thought I loved him, my god I really did—and you don’t know what it’s like with the fighting and the fucking and the burning and the dying and if you felt steel split flesh, that sensuous rush, that ecstasy as I cut away at him, at it, at everything I could no longer bear—you would understand. And that twitchy blonde bitch of a nurse, all caught up in her conscience—she wants to turn me in; I’ll turn her innards out if she tries. Two steps forward, fingers extended towards flame: Grandma can protect little Cassie from pain she shouldn’t have to feel, but I know agony, yes, and what of it? This fire will burn me clean. If not of the blood, then of bruises and of skin, and I can’t let them find me here I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—and my poor little sister alone now and what would my mother have said?

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