HORROR AND THE
MONSTROUS-FEMININE: AN
IMAGINARY ABJECTION
44
BY BARBARA CREED
• Joseph Campbell, The
Masks of God:
Primitive Mythology,
New York, Penguin,
1969, p 73.
Sigmund Freud,
'Aledusa's Head', in
James Strachey (ed),
The Standard Edition
of the Complete
Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol 18,
London, Hogarth
Press, 1964, pp
273-274.
4
ibid, p 273.
A L L H U M A N S O C I E T I E S have a conception of the monstrousfeminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific,
abject. 'Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of
threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals,' Freud wrote in
his paper, 'Fetishism' in 1927.' Joseph Campbell, in his book, Primitive
Mythology, noted that:
. . . there is a motif occurring in certain primitive mythologies, as well as in
modern surrealist painting and neurotic dream, which is known to folklore
as 'the toothed vagina'-the vagina that castrates. And a counterpart, the
other way, is the so-called 'phallic mother, 'a motif perfectly illustrated in the
long fingers and nose of the witch.2
Classical mythology also was populated with gendered monsters, many
of which were female. The Medusa, with her 'evil eye', head of writhing
serpents and lolling tongue, was queen of the pantheon of female
monsters; men unfortunate enough to look at her were turned
immediately to stone.
It is not by accident that Freud linked the sight of the Medusa to the
equally horrifying sight of the mother's genitals, for the concept of the
monstrous-feminine, as constructed within/by a patriarchal and phallocentric ideology, is related intimately to the problem of sexual difference
and castration. In 1922 he argued that the 'Medusa's head takes the place
of a representation of the female genitals'3; if we accept Freud's
interpretation, we can see that the Perseus myth is mediated by a
narrative about the difference of female sexuality as a difference which is
grounded in monstrousness and which invokes castration anxiety in the
male spectator. 'The sight of the Medusa's head makes the spectator stiff
with terror, turns him to stone.'4 The irony of this was not lost on Freud,
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Mother's not herself today. - N o r m a n Bates, Psycho
Sigmund Freud,
'Fetishism*, On
Sexuality,
Harmondsworth,
Penguin, Pelican
Freud Library, vol 7,
1981, p 354.
who pointed out that becoming stiff also means having an erection.
'Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is
still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.'5
One wonders if the experience of horror-of viewing the horror film —
causes similar alterations in the body of the male spectator. And what of
other phrases that apply to both male and female viewers-phrases such
as: 'It scared the shit out of me'; 'It made me feel sick'; 'It gave me the
creeps'? What is the relationship between physical states, bodily wastes
(even if metaphoric ones) and the horrific-in particular, the monstrousfeminine?
Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror6 provides us with a preliminary hypothesis for an analysis of these questions. Although this study is
concerned with literature, it nevertheless suggests a way of situating the
monstrous-feminine in the horror film in relation to the maternal figure
and what Kristeva terms 'abjection', that which does not 'respect
borders, positions, rules'... that which 'disturbs identity, system, order'
(p 4). In general terms, Kristeva is attempting to explore the different
ways in which abjection, as a source of horror, works within patriarchal
societies, as a means of separating the human from the non-human and
the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject. Ritual
becomes a means by which societies both renew their initial contact with
the abject element and then exclude that element.
Through ritual, the demarcation lines between human and nonhuman are drawn up anew and presumably made all the stronger for that
process. One of the key figures of abjection is the mother who becomes
an abject at that moment when the child rejects her for the father who
represents the symbolic order. The problem with Kristeva's theory,
particularly for feminists, is that she never makes dear her position on
the oppression of women. Her theory moves uneasily between explanation of, and justification for, the formation of human societies based on
the subordination of women.
Kristeva grounds her theory of the maternal in the abject, tracing its
changing definitions from the period of the pagan or mother-goddess
religions through to the time of Judaic monotheism and to its culmination in Christianity. She deals with abjection in the following forms: as a
rite of defilement in paganism; as a biblical abomination, a taboo, in
Judaism; and as self-defilement, an interiorisation, in Christianity.
Kristeva, however, does not situate abjection solely within a ritual or
religious context. She argues that it is 'rooted historically (in the history
of religions) and subjectively (in the structuration of the subject's
identity), in the cathexis of maternal function-mother, woman, reproduction' (p 91). Kristeva's central interest, however, lies with the
structuring of subjectivity within and by the processes of abjectivity in
which the subject is spoken by the abject through both religious and
ibid.
45
Julia Kristeva, Powers
of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, New York,
Columbia University
Press, 1982. All page
citations will be
included in the text.
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II
1
cultural discourses, that is, through the subject's position within the
practices of the rite as well as within language.
A full examination of this theory is outside the scope of this article; I
propose to draw mainly on Kristeva's discussion of abjection in its
construction in the human subject in relation to her notions of (a) the
'border' and (b) the mother-child relationship. At crucial points, I shall
also refer to her writing on the abject in relation to religious discourses.
This area cannot be ignored, for what becomes apparent in reading her
work is that definitions of the monstrous as constructed in the modern
horror text are grounded in ancient religious and historical notions of
abjection-particularly in relation to the following religious 'abominations': sexual immorality and perversion; corporeal alteration, decay
and death; human sacrifice; murder; the corpse; bodily wastes; the
feminine body and incest.
The place of the abject is 'the place where meaning collapses' (p 2),
the place where T am not. The abject threatens life; it must be 'radically
excluded' (p 2) from the place of the living subject, propelled away from
the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which
separates the self from that which threatens the self. Kristeva quotes
Bataille:
Abjection (. ..)is merely the inability to assume with sufficient strength the
imperative act of excluding abject things (and that act establishes the foundations of collective existence), (p 56)
Although the subject must exclude the abject, it must, nevertheless, be
tolerated, for that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life.
Further, the activity of exclusion is necessary to guarantee that the
subject take up his/her proper place in relation to the symbolic.
To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. It is not the white expanse
or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of
desire that wrench bodies, nights and discourse; rather it is a brutish
suffering that 'I'puts up with, sublime and devastated, for 'I' deposits it to
the father's account (verse an pere — pere-version):
I endure it, for I
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But the question for the analyst-semiologist is to know how far one can
analyze ritual impurity. The historian of religion stops soon: the critically
impure is that which is based on a natural 'loathing.' The anthropologist goes
further: there is nothing 'loathsome' in itself; the loathsome is that which
disobeys classification rules peculiar to the given symbolic system. But as far
as I am concerned, I keep asking questions
Are there no subjective
structurations that, within the organization of each speaking being, correspond to this or that symbolic-social system and represent, if not stages, at
least types of subjectivity and society? Types that would be defined, in the
last analysis, according to the subject's position in language... ? (p 92)
imagine such is the desire of the other
On the edge of non-existence and
hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There,
abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture, (p 2)
Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing
remains in me and my entire bodyfalls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver.
If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and
which permits me to be, the corpse, the tnost sickening of wastes, is a border
that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. 'I' is
expelled, (pp 3-4)
Within the biblical context, the corpse is also utterly abject. It signifies
one of the most basic forms of pollution — the body without a soul. As a
form of waste it represents the opposite of the spiritual, the religious
symbolic.
Corpse fanciers, unconscious worshippers of a soulless body, are thus preeminent representatives of inimical religions, identified by their murderous
cults. The priceless debt to great mother nature, from which the prohibitions
of Yahwistic speech separates us, is concealed in such pagan cults, (p 109)
In relation to the horror film, it is relevant to note that several of the
most popular horrific figures are 'bodies without souls' (the vampire),
the 'living corpse' (the zombie) and corpse-eater (the ghoul). Here, the
horror film constructs and confronts us with the fascinating, seductive
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The abject can be experienced in various ways-one of which relates to
biological bodily functions, the other of which has been inscribed in a
symbolic (religious) economy. For instance, Kristeva claims that food
loathing is 'perhaps the most elementary and archaic form of abjection'
(p 2). Food, however, only becomes abject if it signifies a border
'between two distinct entities or territories' (p 75). Kristeva describes
how, for her, the skin on the top of milk, which is offered to her by her
father and mother, is a 'sign of their desire', a sign separating her world
from their world, a sign which she does not want. 'But since the food is
not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I
spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which
" I " claim to establish myself (p 3). Dietary prohibitions are, of course,
central to Judaism. Kristeva argues that these are directly related to the
prohibition of incest; she argues this not just because this position is
supported by psychoanalytic discourse and structural anthropology but
also because 'the biblical text, as it proceeds, comes back, at the intensive
moments of its demonstration and expansion, to that mytheme of the
archaic relation to the mother' (p 106).
The ultimate in abjection is the corpse. The body protects itself from
bodily wastes such as shit, blood, urine and pus by ejecting these substances just as it expels food that, for whatever reason, the subject finds
loathsome. The body extricates itself from them and from the place
where they fall, so that it might continue to live.
48
aspect of abjection. What is also interesting is that such ancient figures of
abjection as the vampire, the ghoul, the zombie and the witch (one of
whose many crimes was that she used corpses for her rites of magic) continue to provide some of the most compelling images of horror in the
modern cinema. The werewolf, whose body signifies a collapse of the
boundaries between human and animal, also belongs to this category.
Abjection also occurs where the individual fails to respect the law and
where the individual is a hypocrite, a liar, a traitor.
Thus, abject things are those which highlight the 'fragility of the law'
and which exist on the other side of the border which separates out the
living subject from that which threatens its extinction. But abjection is
not something of which the subject can ever feel free-it is always there,
beckoning the self to take up its place, the place where meaning collapses. The subject, constructed in/through language, through a desire for
meaning, is also spoken by the abject, the place of meaninglessnessthus, the subject is constantly beset by abjection which fascinates desire
but which must be repelled for fear of self-annihilation. The crucial
point is that abjection is always ambiguous. Like Bataille, Kristeva
emphasises the attraction, as well as the horror, of the undifFerentiated.
We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while
releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens
it -on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But
also because abjection itself is a composite of judgement and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives. Abjection preserves what
existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship
(pp 9-10)
7
For a discussion of the
way in which the
modern horror film
works upon its
audience see Philip
Brophy, 'Horrality',
reprinted in this issue
ofScreen.
To the extent that abjection works on the socio-cultural arena, the
horror film would appear to be, in at least three ways, an illustration of
the work of abjection. Firstly, the horror film abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed
by an array of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, tears
and putrifying flesh. In terms of Kristeva's notion of the border, when
we say such-and-such a horror film 'made me sick' or 'scared the shit out
of me' 7 we are actually foregrounding that specific horror film as a 'work
of abjection' or 'abjection at work'-in both a literal and metaphoric
sense. Viewing the horror film signifies a desire not only for perverse
pleasure (confronting sickening, horrific images, being filled with terror/
desire for the undifFerentiated) but also a desire, having taken pleasure in
perversity, to throw up, throw out, eject the abject (from the safety of the
spectator's seat).
Secondly, there is, of course, a sense in which the concept of a border is
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Any crime, because it draws attention to thefragility of the law, is abject, but
premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so
because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is
not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality
Abjection, on the other
hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady.... (p 4)
Ill
The third way in which the horror film illustrates the work of abjection
refers to the construction of the maternal figure as abject. Kristeva
argues that all individuals experience abjection at the time of their earliest attempts to break away from the mother. She sees the mother-child
relation as one marked by conflict: the child struggles to break free but
the mother is reluctant to release it. Because of the 'instability of the
symbolic function' in relation to this most crucial area-'the prohibition
placed on the maternal body (as a defense against autoeroticism and
incest taboo)' (p 14)-Kristeva argues that the maternal body becomes a
site of conflicting desires. 'Here, drives hold sway and constitute a
strange space that I shall name, after Plato (Tvneus, 48-53), a chora, a
receptacle' (p 14). The position of the child is rendered even more
unstable because, while the mother retains a close hold over the child, it
can serve to authenticate her existence - an existence which needs validation because of her problematic relation to the symbolic realm.
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central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film; that
which crosses or threatens to cross the 'border' is abject. Although the
specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the function of
the monstrous remains the same-to bring about an encounter between
the symbolic order and that which theatens its stability. In some horror
films the monstrous is produced at the border between human and inhuman, man and beast (Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, Creature from the Black
Lagoon, King Kong); in others the border is between the normal and the
supernatural, good and evil {Carrie, The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary's
Baby); or the monstrous is produced at the border which separates those
who take up their proper gender roles from those who do not (Psycho,
Dressed to Kill, Reflection of Fear); or the border is between normal and
abnormal sexual desire (Cruising, The Hunger, Cat People).
In relation to the construction of the abject within religious discourses,
it is interesting to note that various sub-genres of the horror film seem to
correspond to religious categories of abjection. For instance, blood as a
religious abomination becomes a form of abjection in the 'splatter' movie
(Texas Chainsaw Massacre); cannibalism, another religious abomination,
is central to the 'meat' movie (Night of the Living Dead, The Hills Have
Eyes); the corpse as abomination becomes the abject of ghoul and zombie
movies (The Evil Dead; Zombie Flesheaters); blood as a taboo object
within religion is central to the vampire film (The Hunger) as well as the
horror film in general (Bloodsucking Freaks); human sacrifice as a
religious abomination is constructed as the abject of virtually all horror
films; and bodily disfigurement as a religious abomination is also central
to the slash movie, particularly those in which woman is slashed, the
mark a sign of her 'difference', her impurity (Dressed to Kill, Psycho).
It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk offalling back
under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling. The difficulty the
mother has in acknowledging (or being acknowledged by) the symbolic realm
- in other words, the problem she has with the phallus that her father or
husband stands for — is not such as to help the future subject leave the natural
mansion, (p 13)
This is precisely where we encounter the rituals of defilement and their derivatives, which, based on the feeling of abjection and all converging on the
maternal, attempt to symbolize the other threat to the subject: that of being
swamped by the dual relationship, thereby risking the loss not of apart (castration) but of the totality of his living being. The function of these religious
rituals is to ward off the subject's fear of his very own identity sinking
irretrievably into the mother, (p 64)
How, then, are prohibitions against contact with the mother enacted and
enforced? In answering this question, Kristeva links the universal practices of rituals of defilement to the mother. She argues that within the
practices of all rituals of defilement, polluting objects fall into two categories: excremental, which threatens identity from the outside, and
menstrual, which threatens from within.
Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand
for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the
non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death. Menstrual blood, on
the contrary, stands for the danger issuing from within identity (social or
sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of
sexual difference, (p 71)
Both categories of polluting objects relate to the mother; the relation of
menstrual blood is self-evident, the association of excremental objects
with the maternal figure is brought about because of the mother's role in
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In the child's attempts to break away, the mother becomes an abject;
thus, in this context, where the child struggles to become a separate subject, abjection becomes 'a precondition of narcissism' (p 13). Once again
we can see abjection at work in the horror text where the child struggles
to break away from the mother, representative of the archaic maternal
figure, in a context in which the father is invariably absent (Psycho,
Carrie, The Birds). In these films, the maternal figure is constructed as
the monstrous-feminine. By refusing to relinquish her hold on her child,
she prevents it from taking up its proper place in relation to the
Symbolic. Partly consumed by the desire to remain locked in a blissful
relationship with the mother and partly terrified of separation, the child
finds it easy to succumb to the comforting pleasure of the dyadic relationship. Kristeva argues that a whole area of religion has assumed the
function of tackling this danger:
sphincteral training. Here, Kristeva argues that the subject's first contact with 'authority' is with the maternal authority when the child learns,
through interaction with the mother, about its body: the shape of the
body, the clean and unclean, the proper and improper areas of the body.
Kristeva refers to this process as a 'primal mapping of the body' which
she calls 'semiotic'. She distinguishes between maternal 'authority' and
'paternal laws':
51
Maternal authority is the trustee of that mapping of the self's clean and
proper body; it is distinguished from paternal laws within which, with the
phallic phase and acquisition of language, the destiny of man will take shape.
(p72)
This tnay be because the setting up of the rite of defilement takes on the function of the hyphen, the virgule, allowing the two universes of filth and
prohibition to brush lightly against each other without necessarily being
identified as such, as object and as law. (p 74)
Images of blood, vomit, pus, shit, etc, are central to our culturally/
socially constructed notions of the horrific. They signify a split between
two orders: the maternal authority and the law of the father. On the one
hand, these images of bodily wastes threaten a subject that is already constituted, in relation to the symbolic, as 'whole and proper'. Consequently, they fill the subject - both the protagonist in the text and the spectator
in the cinema-with disgust and loathing. On the other hand, they also
point back to a time when a 'fusion between mother and nature' existed;
when bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as
objects of embarrassment and shame. Their presence in the horror film
may invoke a response of disgust from the audience situated as it is
within the symbolic but at a more archaic level the representation of
bodily wastes may invoke pleasure in breaking the taboo on filth- sometimes described as a pleasure in perversity-and a pleasure in returning
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In her discussion of rituals of defilement in relation to the Indian caste
system, Kristeva draws a distinction between the maternal authority and
paternal law. She argues that the period of the 'mapping of the selPs
clean and proper body' is characterised by the exercise of 'authority
without guilt', a time when there is a 'fusion between mother and
nature'. However, the symbolic ushers in a 'totally different universe of
socially signifying performances where embarrassment, shame, guilt,
desire etc. come into play-the order of the phallus'. In the Indian context, these two worlds exist harmoniously side by side because of the
working of defilement rites. Here, Kristeva is referring to the practice of
public defecation in India. She quotes V S Naipaul who says that no one
ever mentions 'in speech or in books, those squatting figures, because,
quite simply, no one sees them'. Kristeva argues that this split between
the world of the mother (a universe without shame) and the world of the
father (a universe of shame), would in other social contexts produce psychosis; in India it finds a 'perfect socialization':
52
Through language and within highly hierarchical religious institutions, man
hallucinates partial 'objects'-witnesses to an archaic differentiation of the
body on its way toward ego identity, which is also sexual identity. The
defilement from which ritual protects us is neither sign nor matter. Within
the rite that extracts it from repression and depraved desire, defilement is the
transUnguistic spoor of the most archaic boundaries of the self's clean and
proper body. In that sense, if it is a jettisoned object, it is so from the
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to that time when the mother-child relationship was marked by an
untrammelled pleasure in 'playing' with the body and its wastes.
The modern horror film often 'plays' with its audience, saturating it
with scenes of blood and gore, deliberately pointing to the fragility of the
symbolic order in the domain of the body which never ceases to signal
the repressed world of the mother. This is particularly evident in The
Exorcist, where the world of the symbolic, represented by the priest-asfather, and the world of the pre-symbolic, represented by woman aligned
with the devil, clashes head-on in scenes where the foulness of woman is
signified by her putrid, filthy body covered in blood, urine, excrement
and bile. Significantly, a pubescent girl about to menstruate played the
woman who is possessed - in one scene blood from her wounded genitals
mingles with menstrual blood to provide one of the film's key images of
horror. In Carrie, the film's most monstrous act occurs when the couple
are drenched in pig's blood which symbolises menstrual blood—women
are referred to in the film as 'pigs', women 'bleed like pigs', and the pig's
blood runs down Carrie's body at a moment of intense pleasure, just as
her own menstrual blood runs down her legs during a similar pleasurable moment when she enjoys her body in the shower.1 Here, women's
blood and pig's blood flow together, signifying horror, shame and
humiliation. In this film, however, the mother speaks for the symbolic,
identifying with an order which has defined women's sexuality as the
source of all evil and menstruation as the sign of sin. The horror film's
obsession with blood, particularly the bleeding body of woman, where
her body is transformed into the 'gaping wound', suggests that castration
anxiety is a central concern of the horror film -particularly the slasher
sub-genre. Woman's body is slashed and mutilated, not only to signify
her own castrated state, but also the possibility of castration for the male.
In the guise of a 'madman' he enacts on her body the one act he most
fears for himself, transforming her entire body into a bleeding wound.
Kristeva's semiotic posits a pre-verbal dimension of language which
relates to sounds and tone and to direct expression of the drives and physical contact with the maternal figure; 'it is dependent upon meaning,
but in a way that is not that of linguistic signs nor of the symbolic order
they found' (p 72). With the subject's entry into the symbolic, which
separates the child from the mother, the maternal figure and the authority she signifies are repressed. Kristeva argues that it is the function of
defilement rites, particularly those relating to menstrual and excremental objects, to point to the 'boundary' between the maternal semiotic
authority and the paternal symbolic law.
mother. ...By means of the symbolic institution of ritual, that is to say, by
means of a system of ritual exclusions, the partial-object consequently becomes scription-an
inscription of limits, an emphasis placed not on the
(paternal) Law but on (maternal) Authority through the very signifying
order, (p 73)
53
Kristeva argues that, historically, it has been the function of religion to
purify the abject but with the disintegration of these 'historical forms' of
religion, the work of purification now rests solely with 'that catharsis par
excellence called art' (p 17).
(pl8)
This, I would argue, is also the central ideological project of the popular
horror film-purification of the abject through a 'descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct'. In this way, the horror film brings
about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the
monstrous-feminine) in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the
boundaries between the human and non-human. As a form of modern
defilement rite, the horror film works to separate out the symbolic order
from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that
her universe signifies. In Kristeva's terms, this means separating out the
maternal authority from paternal law.
As mentioned earlier, the central problem with Kristeva's theory is
that it can be read in a prescriptive rather than a descriptive sense. This
problem is rendered more acute by the fact that, although Kristeva distinguishes between the maternal and paternal figures, when she speaks
of the subject who is being constituted, she never distinguishes between
the child as male or female. Obviously, the female child's experience of
the semiotic chora must be different from that of the male's experience
in relation to the way it is spoken to, handled, etc. For the mother is
already constituted as a gendered subject living within a patriarchal
order and thus aware of the differences between the 'masculine' and the
'feminine' in relation to questions of desire. Thus, the mother might
relate to a male child with a more acute sense of pride and pleasure. It is
also possible that the child, depending on its gender, might find it more
or less difficult to reject the mother for the father. Kristeva does not consider any of these issues. Nor does she distinguish between the relation
of the adult male and female subject to rituals of defilement-for
instance, menstruation taboos, where one imagines notions of the gendered subject would be of crucial importance. How, for instance, do
women relate to rites of defilement, such as menstruation rites which
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In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task—a descent
into the foundations of the symbolic construct -amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless 'primacy' constituted by primal repression. Through that experience, which is
nevertheless managed by the Other, 'subject' and 'object' push each other
away, confront each other, collapse, and start again—inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject.
54
8
9
For a critique of
Powers of Horror see
Jennifer Stone, 'The
Horrors of Power: A
Critique of
"Kristeva"', in F
Barker, P Hulme, Ai
Iversen, D Loxley
• (eds), The Politics of
Theory, Colchester,
University of Essex,
1983, pp 38-48.
10
Sigmund Freud, 'On
the Sexual Theories
of Children', On
Sexuality,
Harmondsworth,
Penguin, Pelican
Freud Library, vol 7,
1981, p 198.
IV
The science-fiction horror film Alien is a complex representation of the
monstrous-feminine in terms of the maternal figure as perceived within a
patriarchal ideology. She is there in the text's scenarios of the primal
scene, of birth and death; she is there in her many guises as the treacherous mother, the oral sadistic mother, the mother as primordial abyss;
and she is there in the film's images of blood, of the all-devouring vagina,
the toothed vagina, the vagina as Pandora's box; and finally she is there
in the chameleon figure of the alien, the monster as fetish-object of and
for the mother. But it is the archaic mother, the reproductive/generative
mother, who haunts the mise-en-scene of the film's first section, with its
emphasis on different representations of the primal scene.
According to Freud, every child either watches its parents in the act of
sexual intercourse or has phantasies about that act-phantasies which
relate to the problem of origins. Freud left open the question of the cause
of the phantasy but suggested that it may initially be aroused by 'an
observation of the sexual intercourse of animals'9. In his stud} of 'the
Wolf Man', Freud argued that the child did not initially observe his
parents in the act of sexual intercourse but that he witnessed thei'.npulation of animals whose behaviour he then displaced onto his part
*1
situations where the child actually witnesses sexual intercourse between
its parents, Freud argued that all children arrive at the same conclusion:
'They adopt what may be called a sadistic view of coition'™ If the child
perceives the primal scene as a monstrous act-whether in reality or
phantasy-it may phantasise animals or mythical creatures as taking part
in the scenario. Possibly the many mythological stories in which humans
copulate with animals and other creatures (Huropa and Zeus, Leda and
the Swan) are reworkings of the primal scene narrative. The Sphinx,
with her lion's body and woman's face, is an interesting figure in this
context. Freud suggested that the Riddle of the Sphinx was probably a
distorted version of the great riddle that faces all children-Where do
babies come from? An extreme form of the primal phantasy is that of
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Sigmund Freud,
'From the History of
an Infantile Neurosis',
Case Histories II,
Harmondswonh,
Penguin,
Harmondsworth,
Pelican Freud
Library, vol 9, 1981,
p294.
reflect so negatively on them? How do women within a specific cultural
group see themselves in relation to taboos which construct their procreative functions as abject? Is it possible to intervene in the social construction of woman as abject? Or is the subject's relationship to the processes
of abjectivity, as they are constructed within subjectivity and language,
completely unchangeable? Is the abjection of women a precondition for
the continuation of sociality? Kristeva never asks questions of this order.
Consequently her theory of abjection could be interpreted as an apology
for the establishment of sociality at the cost of women's equality. If, however, we read it as descriptive, as one which is attempting to explain the
origins of patriarchal culture, then it provides us with an extremely
useful hypothesis for an investigation of the representation of women in
the horror film.8
55
'observing parental intercourse while one is still an unborn baby in the
womb'11.
One of the major concerns of the sci-fi horror film (Alien, The Thing,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Altered States) is the reworking of the
primal scene in relation to the representation of other forms of copulation and procreation. Alien presents various representations of the
primal scene. Behind each of these lurks the figure of the archaic mother,
that is, the image of the mother in her generative function-the mother
as the origin of all life. This archaic figure is somewhat different from
the mother of the semiotic chora, posed by Kristeva, in that the latter is
the pre-Oedipal mother who exists in relation to the family and the symbolic order. The concept of the parthenogenic, archaic mother adds
another dimension to the maternal figure and presents us with a new way
of understanding how patriarchal ideology works to deny the 'difference'
of woman in her cinematic representation.
The first birth scene occurs in Alien at the beginning, where the
caiw ^spectator explores the inner space of the mother-ship whose life
support system is a computer aptly named-'Mother'. This exploratory
seqt.jnce of the inner body of the 'Mother' culminates with a long tracking, shot down one of the corridors which leads to a womb-like chamber
where the crew of seven are woken up from their protracted sleep by
Mother's voice monitoring a call for help from a nearby planet. The
seven astronauts emerge slowly from their sleep pods in what amounts to
a re-birthing scene which is marked by a fresh, antiseptic atmosphere. In
outer space, birth is a well controlled, clean, painless affair. There is no
blood, trauma or terror. This scene could be interpreted as a primal
fantasy in which the human subject is born fully developed - even copulation is redundant.
The second representation of the primal scene takes place when three
Sigmund Freuci, 'The
Paths to the
Formation of
Symptoms',
Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis,
Harmondswonh,
Penguin, Pelican
Freud Library, vol 1,
1981, p 417.
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Alien: the first birth
scene, in which the
astronauts emerge
from their sleep pods
in an antiseptic
atmosphere.
56
of the crew enter the body of the unknown space-ship through a 'vaginal'
opening: the ship is shaped like a horseshoe, its curved sides like two
long legs spread apart at the entrance. They travel along a corridor which
seems to be made of a combination of inorganic and organic material as if the inner space of this ship were alive. Compared to the atmosphere
of the Nostromo, however, this ship is dark, dank and mysterious. A
ghostly light glimmers and the sounds of their movements echo throughout the caverns. In the first chamber, the three explorers find a huge
alien life form which appears to have been dead for a long time. Its bones
are bent outward as if it exploded from the inside. One of the trio, Kane,
Alien: crew members
enter the ship
through a 'vaginal'
opening.
f
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Alien: the open 'legs'
of the unknown
space-ship.
i
1
57
Alien: Kane
approaches the rows
of eggs in the womblike chamber.
Kane is violated in an act of phallic penetration-by the father or phallic
mother? Kane himself is guilty of the strongest transgression; he actually
peers into the egg/womb in order to investigate its mysteries. In so
doing, he becomes a 'part' of the primal scene, taking up the place of the
mother, the one who is penetrated, the one who bears the offspring of the
union. The primal scene is represented as violent, monstrous (the union
is between human and alien), and is mediated by the question of incestuous desire. All re-stagings of the primal scene raise the question of
incest, as the beloved parent (usually the mother) is with a rival. T h e first
birth scene, where the astronauts emerge from their sleep pods, could be
viewed as a representation of incestuous desire par excellence: the father is
completely absent; here, the mother is sole parent and sole life-support.
From this forbidden union, the monstrous creature is born. But man,
not woman, is the 'mother' and Kane dies in agony as the alien gnaws its
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is lowered down a shaft into the gigantic womb-like chamber in which
rows of eggs are hatching. Kane approaches one of the eggs; as he
touches it with his gloved hand it opens out, revealing a mass of pulsating flesh. Suddenly, the monstrous thing inside leaps up and attaches
itself to Kane's helmet, its tail penetrating Kane's mouth in order to fertilise itself inside his stomach. Despite the warnings of Ripley, Kane is
taken back on board the Nostromo where the alien rapidly completes its
gestation processes inside Kane.
This representation of the primal scene recalls Freud's reference to an
extreme primal scene fantasy where the subject imagines travelling back
inside the womb to watch her/his parents having sexual intercouse, perhaps to watch her/himself being conceived. Here, three astronauts explore the gigantic, cavernous, malevolent womb of the mother. Two
members of the group watch the enactment of the primal scene in which
58
12
Sigmund Freud,
'Female Sexuality',
On Sexuality, Penguin,
Harmondsworth,
Pelican
Freud Library, vol 7,
1981, p 373.
14
For a discussion of
the relation between
'the semiotic' and the
Lacanian 'imaginary'
see Jane Gallop,
Feminism and
Psychoanalysis: The
Daughter's Seduction,
London, Macmillan
Press, 1983, pp
124-5.
way through his stomach. The birth of the alien from Kane's stomach
plays on what Freud described as a common misunderstanding that
many children have about birth, that is, that the mother is somehow impregnated through the mouth-she may eat a special food-and the baby
grows in her stomach from which it is also born. Here, we have a third
version of the primal scene.
A further version of the primal scene-almost a convention12 of the
science fiction film-occurs when smaller crafts or bodies are ejected
from the mother-ship into outer space; although sometimes the ejected
body remains attached to the mother-ship by a long life-line or umbilical
chord. This scene is presented in two separate ways: one when Kane's
body, wrapped in a white shroud, is ejected from the mother-ship; and
the second, when the small space capsule, in which Ripley is trying to
escape from the alien, is expelled from the underbelly of the mothership. In the former, the 'mother's' body has become hostile; it contains
the alien whose one purpose is to kill and devour all of Mother's children. In the latter birth scene the living infant is ejected from the malevolent body of the 'mother' to avoid destruction; in this scenario, the
'mother's' body explodes at the moment of giving birth.*
Although the 'mother' as a figure does not appear in these sequences nor indeed in the entire film - her presence forms a vast backdrop for the
enactment of all the events. She is there in the images of birth, the representations of the primal scene, the womb-like imagery, the long winding
tunnels leading to inner chambers, the rows of hatching eggs, the body of
the mother-ship, the voice of the life-support system, and the birth of the
alien. She is the generative mother, the pre-phallic mother, the being
who exists prior to knowledge of the phallus.
In explaining the difficulty he had in uncovering the role of the mother
in the early development of infants, Freud complained of the almost
'prehistoric' remoteness of this 'Minoan-Mycenaean' stage:
Everything in the sphere of this first attachment to the mother seemed to me
so difficult to grasp in analysis-so grey with age and shadowy arid almost
impossible to revivify -that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression.11
Just as the Oedipus complex tends to hide the pre-Oedipal phase in
Freudian theory, the figure of the father, in the Lacanian re-writing of
Freud, obscures the mother-child relationship of the imaginary. In contrast to the maternal figure of the Lacanian imaginary, Kristeva posits
another dimension to the mother-she is associated with the pre-verbal
or the semiotic and as such tends to disrupt the symbolic order.14
I think it is possible to open up the mother-question still further and
posit an even more archaic maternal figure, to go back to mythological
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Daniel Dervin argues
that this structure
does deserve the
status of a
convention. For a
detailed discussion of
the primal scene
phantasy in various
• film genres, see his
'Primal Conditions
and Conventions:
The Genres of
Comedy and Science
Fiction', Film/
Psychology Review,
Winter-Spring 1980,
pp 115-147.
narratives of the generative, parthenogenetic mother—that ancient
archaic figure who gives birth to all living things. She exists in the mythology of all human cultures as the Mother-Goddess who alone created
the heavens and earth. In China she was known as Nu Kwa, in Mexico as
Coatlicue, in Greece as Gaia (literally meaning 'earth') and in Sumer as
Nammu. In 'Moses and Monotheism', Freud attempted to account for
the historical existence of the great mother-goddesses.
15
Freud proposed that human society developed through stages from
patriarchy to matriarchy and finally back to patriarchy. During the first,
primitive people lived in small hordes, each one dominated by a jealous,
powerful father who possessed all the females of the group. One day the
sons, who had been banished to the outskirts of the group, overthrew the
father—whose body they devoured —in order to secure his power and to
take his women for themselves. Overcome by guilt, they later attempted
to revoke the deed by setting up a totem as a substitute for the father and
by renouncing the women whom they had liberated. The sons were
forced to give up the women, whom they all wanted to possess, in order
to preserve the group which otherwise would have been destroyed as the
sons fought amongst themselves. In 'Totem and Taboo', Freud suggests
that here 'the germ of the institution of matriarchy'16 may have originated. Eventually, however, this new form of social organisation, constructed upon the taboo against murder and incest, was replaced by the
re-establishment of a patriarchal order. He pointed out that the sons had:
. . . thus created out of their filial sense ofguilt the two fundamental taboos of
totemism, which for that very reason inevitably corresponded to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex."
Freud's account of the origins of patriarchal civilisation is generally
regarded as mythical. Levi-Strauss points out that it is 'a fair account not
of the beginnings of civilisation, but of its present state' in that it expresses 'in symbolical form an inveterate fantasy'-the desire to murder the
father and possess the mother.18 In her discussion of'Totem and Taboo',
Kristeva argues that a 'strange slippage' (p 56) has taken place in that
although Freud points out that morality is founded on the taboos of
murder and incest his argument concentrates on the first to the virtual
exclusion of the latter. Yet, Kristeva argues, the 'woman-or mother image haunts a large part of that book and keeps shaping its background', (p 57). She poses the question:
Sigmund Freud,
'Totem and Taboo',
The Origins of
Religion,
Harmondsworth,
Penguin, Pelican
Freud Library, vol
13, 1985, p 206.
ibid, p 205.
18
Le"vi-Strauss, quoted
in Georges Bataille,
Death and Sensuality:
A Study of Eroticism
and the Taboo, New
York, Walker and
Company, 1962, p
200.
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It is likely that the mother-goddesses originated at the time of the curtailment
of the matriarchy, as a compensation for the slight upon the mothers. The
male deities appear first as sons beside the great mothers and only later clearly assume the features of father-figures. These male gods ofpolytheism reflect
the conditions during the patriarchal age.15
59
Sigmund Freud,
'Moses and
Monotheism', in
James Strachey (ed),
The Standard Edition
of the Complete
Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol
23, op cit, p 83.
60
19
Jacques Lacan,in
Anthony Wilden (ed),
The Language of The
Self, Baltimore,
Johns Hopkins, 1970,
pl26.
20
Jacques Lacan, Le
Seminaire XX, p 34,
translated in Stephen
Heath, 'DifFerence',
Screen, Autumn 1978,
vol 19 no 3, p 59.
From the above, it is clear that the figure of the mother in both the
history of human sociality and in the history of the individual subject
poses immense problems. Freud attempts to account for the existence of
the mother-goddess figure by posing a matriarchal period in historical
times while admitting that everything to do with the 'first attachment to
the mother' is deeply repressed — 'grey with age and shadowy and almost
impossible to revivify'. Nowhere does he attempt to specify the nature of
this 'matriarchal period' and the implications of this for his own psychoanalytical theory, specifically his theory of the Oedipus complex which,
as Lacan points out, 'can only appear in a patriarchal form in the
institution of the family'19. Kristeva criticises Freud fo'r failing to deal
adequately with incest and the mother-question while using the same
mystifying language to refer to the mother; the other aspect of the sacred
is 'like a lining', 'secret and invisible', 'non-representable'. In his rereading of Freud, Lacan mystifies the figure of woman even further:
' . . . the woman is not-all, there is always something with her which
eludes discourse'20. Further, all three writers conflate the archaic mother
with the mother of the dyadic and triadic relationship. They refer to her
as a 'shadowy' figure (Freud); as 'non-representable' (Kristeva); as the
'abyss of the female organ from which all life comes forth' (Lacan21),
then make no clear attempt to distinguish this aspect of the maternal
imago from the protective/suffocating mother of the pre-Oedipal or the
mother as object of sexual jealousy and desire as she is represented in the
Oedipal configuration.
The maternal figure constructed within/by the writings of Freud,
Lacan and Kristeva is inevitably the mother of the dyadic or triadic relationship-although the latter figure is more prominent. Even when she
is represented as the mother of the imaginary, of the dyadic relationship,
she is still constructed as the, pre-Oedipal mother, that is, as a figure about
to 'take up a place' in the symbolic-as a figure always in relation to the
father, the representative of the phallus. Without her 'lack', he cannot
signify its opposite-lack of a lack or presence. But if we posit a more
archaic dimension to the mother-the mother as originating wombwe can at least begin to talk about the maternal figure as outside the patriarchal family constellation. In this context, the mother-goddess narratives can be read as primal-scene narratives in which the mother is the
sole parent. She is also the subject, not the object, of narrativity.
For instance in the 'Spider Woman' myth of the North American
Indians, there was only the Spider Woman, who spun the universe into
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Jacques Lacan, Le
Seminaire H, p 196,
translated in Stephen
Heath, op cit, p 54.
Could the sacred be, whatever its variants, a two-sided formation? One
aspect founded by murder and the social bond made up of a murderer's guiltridden atonement, with all the projective mechanisms and obsessive rituals
that accompany it; and another aspect, like a lining, more seem and invisible, non-representable, oriented toward those uncertain spaces of unstable
identity, toward the fragility-both threatening andfusional—of the archaic
dyad, toward the non-separation of subject/object, on which language has no
hold but one woven offright and repulsion? (pp 57-8)
existence and then created two daughters from whom all life flowed. She
is also the Thought Woman or Wise Woman who knows the secrets of
the universe. Within the Oedipus nmarrative, however, she becomes the
Sphinx, who also knows the answers to the secret of life but here her
situation has been changed. She is no longer the subject of the narrative;
she has become the object of the narrative of the male hero. After he has
solved her riddle, she will destroy herself. The Sphinx is an ambiguous
figure; she knows the secret of life and is thereby linked to the mothergoddess but her name, which is derived from 'sphincter', suggests she is
the mother of toilet training, the pre-Oedipal mother who must be
repudiated by the son so that he can take up his proper place in the symbolic. It is interesting that Oedipus has always been seen to have committed two horrific crimes: patricide and incest. But his encounter with the
Sphinx, which leads to her death, suggests he is also responsible for
another horrific crime—that of matricide. For the Sphinx, like the
Medusa, is a mother-goddess figure; they are both variants of the same
mythological mother who gave birth to all life. Levi-Strauss has argued
that a major issue in the Oedipus myth is the problem of whether or not
man is born from woman. This myth is also central to Alien:
61
The Medusa, whose head, according to Freud, signifies the female genitals in their terrifying aspect, also represents the procreative function of
woman. The blood which flows from her severed head gives birth to
Pegasus and Chrysaor. Although Neptune is supposed to be the father,
the nature of the birth once again suggests the parthenogenetic mother.
In Alice Doesn't, Teresa de Lauretis argues that:
...to say that narrative is the production of Oedipus is to say that each
reader—male or female—is constrained and defined within the two positions
of a sexual difference thus conceived: male-hero-human, on the side of the
subject; and female-obstacle-boundary-space, on the other."
If we apply her definition to narratives which deal specifically with the
archaic mother-such as the Oedipus and Perseus myths-we can see
that the 'obstacle1 relates specifically to the question of origins and is an
attempt to repudiate the idea of woman as the source of life, woman as
sole parent, woman as archaic mother.
In his article, Fetishism in the Horror Film, Roger Dadoun also refers to
this archaic maternal figure. He describes her as:
' Claude Levi-Strauss,
Structural
Anthropology (trans C
Jacobson and BG
Schoepf), New York,
Doubleday, 1976, p
212.
23
. . . a maternal thing situated on this side of good and evil, on this side of all
organized form, on this side of all events-a totalizing, oceanic mother, a
'mysterious and profound unity', arousing in the subject the anguish of
fusion and of dissolution; the mother prior to the uncovering of the essential
Teresa de Lauretis,
Alice Doesn't:
Feminism, Semiotics,
Cinema, Indiana
University Press,
1984, p 121.
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Although the problem obviously cannot be solved, the Oedipus myth provides
a kind of logical tool which relates the original problem -born from one or
born from two?-to the derivative problem: born from different or born from
same?22
62
Roger Dadoun,
'Fetishism in the
Horror Film',
Enclitic, vol 1 no 2,
1977, pp 55-56.
25
Sigmund Freud, 'The
Uncanny', in James
Strachey (ed), The
Standard Edition of
the Complete
Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol
17, opcit, p 245.
Dadoun places emphasis on her 'totalizing, oceanic' presence. I would
stress her archaism in relation to her generative powers - the mother who
gives birth all by herself, the original parent, the godhead of all fertility
and the origin of procreation. What is most interesting about the mythological figure of woman as the source of all life (a role taken over by the
male god of monotheistic religions) is that, within patriarchal signifying
practices, particularly the horror film, she is reconstructed and represented as a negative figure, one associated with the dread of the generative mother seen only as the abyss, the monstrous vagina, the origin of
all life threatening to re-absorb what it once birthed. Kristeva also
represents her in this negative light:
Fear of the uncontrollable generative mother repels me from the body; I give
up cannibalism because abjection (of the mother) leads me toward respect for
the body of the other, my fellow man, my brother, (pp 78-79)
In this context it is interesting to note that Freud linked the womb to the
unheimlich, the uncanny:
It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel that there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place,
however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to
the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.
There is a joke saying that 'Love is home-sicknesses'; and whenever a man
dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming:
'this place is familiar to me, I've been here before', we may interpret the place
as being his mother's genitals or her body.25
Freud also supported, and elaborated upon, Schelling's definition of the
uncanny as 'something which ought to have remained hidden but has
come to light'26. In horror films such as Alien, we are given a representation of the female genitals and the womb as uncanny-horrific objects of
dread and fascination. Unlike the mythological mother-narratives, here
the archaic mother, like the Sphinx and the Medusa, is seen only in a
negative light. But the central characteristic of the archaic mother is her
total dedication to the generative, procreative principle. She is outside
morality and the law. Ash's eulogy to the alien is a description of this
mother:
/ admire its purity; a survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions
of morality.
Clearly, it is difficult to separate out completely the figure of the archaic
mother, as defined above, from other aspects of the maternal figure -
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ibid, p 225.
beance [gap], ofthe pas-de-phallus,
the mother who is pure fantasm, in
the sense that she is posed as an omnipresent and all-powerful totality, an
absolute being, only in the intuition—she does not have a phallus—which
deposes her....24
.
,
,. .
/-j
i
%M
«
•
encompassing -because of the constant presence of death. 1 he desire to
return to the original oneness of things, to return to the mother/womb, is
,
_
.
primarily a desire for non-differentiation. If, as Georges Bataille27
63
Georges Bataille,
Death and Sensuality.
y °!E'°tici™
A Smd
and the Taboo, op cit.
_ _ ^ _ _ _ _
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the maternal authority of Kristeva's semiotic, the mother of Lacan's
imaginary, the phallic woman, the castrated woman. While the different
figures signify quite separate things about the monstrous-feminine, as
constructed in the horror film, each one is also only part of the whole - a
different aspect of the maternal figure. At times the horrific nature of the
monstrous-feminine is totally dependent on the merging together of all
aspects of the maternal figure into one-the horrifying image of woman
as archaic mother, phallic woman and castrated body represented as a
single figure within the horror film. However, the archaic mother is
clearly present in two distinct ways in the horror film.
(i) The archaic mother - constructed as a negative force - is represented in her phantasmagoric aspects in many horror texts, particularly the
sci-fi horror film. We see her as the gaping, cannibalistic bird's mouth in
The Giant Claw, the terrifying spider of The Incredible Shrinking Man;
the toothed vagina/womb of Jaws; and the fleshy, pulsating, womb of
The Thing and the Poltergeist. What is common to all of these images of
horror is the voracious maw, the mysterious black hole which signifies
female genitalia as a monstrous sign which threatens to give birth to
equally horrific offspring as well as threatening to incorporate
everything in its path. This is the generative archaic mother, constructed
within patriarchal ideology as the primeval 'black hole'. This, of course,
is also the hole which is opened up by the absence of the penis; the
horrifying sight of the mother's genitals-proof that castration can
occur.
However, in the texts cited above, the emphasis is not on castration;
rather it is the gestating, all-devouring womb of the archaic mother
which generates the horror. Nor are these images of the womb constructed in relation to the penis of the father. Unlike the female genitalia, the
womb cannot be constructed as a 'lack' in relation to the penis. The
womb is not the site of castration anxiety. Rather, the womb signifies
'fullness' or 'emptiness' but always it is its own point of reference. This is
why we need to posit a more archaic dimension to the mother. For the
concept of the archaic mother allows for a notion of the feminine which
does not depend for its definition on a concept of the masculine. The
term 'archaic mother' signifies woman as sexual difference. In contrast
the maternal figure of the pre-Oedipal is always represented in relation
to the penis - the phallic mother who later becomes the castrated mother.
Significantly, there is an attempt in Alien to appropriate the procreative
function of the mother, to represent a man giving birth, to deny the
mother as signifier of sexual difference-but here birth can exist only as
the other face of death.
(ii) The archaic mother is present in all horror films as the blackness of
extinction-death. The desires and fears invoked by the image of the
archaic mother, as a force that threatens to re-incorporate what it once
^ _ _ ^ _ ^ _ ^
gave birth to, are always there in the horror text-all pervasive, all , 7
64
29
For a discussion of
cinema and the
structures of the
'look' see Paul
Willemen, 'Letter To
John', Screen,
Summer 1980, voI21
no 2, pp 53-66.
Jacques Lacan, 'Some
Reflections on the
Ego', The
International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, vol
24,1953, p 15.
Here we see the ego, in its essential resistance to the elusive process of
Becoming, to the variations of Desire. This illusion of unity, in which a
human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant
danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs
over the abyss of a dizzy Assent in which one can perhaps see the very essence
of Anxiety.2*
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28
argues, life signifies discontinuity and separateness, and death signifies
continuity and non-differentiation, then the desire for and attraction of
death suggests also a desire to return to the state of original oneness with
the mother. As this desire to merge occurs after differentiation, that is
after the subject has developed as separate, autonomous self, then it is
experienced as a form of psychic death. In this sense, the confrontation
with death as represented in the horror film, gives rise to a terror of selfdisintegration, of losing one's self or ego-often represented cinematically by a screen which becomes black, signifying the obliteration of self,
the self of the protagonist in the film and the spectator in the cinema.
This has important consequences for the positioning of the spectator in
the cinema.
One of the most interesting structures operating in the screenspectator relationship relates to the sight/site of the monstrous within the
horror text. In contrast to the conventional viewing structures working
within other variants of the classic text, the horror film does not constantly work to suture the spectator into the viewing processes. Instead,
an unusual phenomenon arises whereby the suturing processes are
momentarily undone while the horrific image on the screen challenges
the viewer to run the risk of continuing to look. Here, I refer to those
moments in the horror film when the spectator, unable to stand the
images of horror unfolding before his/her eyes, is forced to look away, to
not-look, to look anywhere but at the screen. Strategies of identification
are temporarily broken, as the spectator is constructed in the place of
horror, the place where the sight/site can no longer be endured, the place
where pleasure in looking is transformed into pain and the spectator is
punished for his/her voyeuristic desires. Perhaps, this should be referred
to as a fifth look operating alongside the other 'looks' which have been
theorised in relation to the screen-spectator relationship.28
Confronted by the sight of the monstrous, the viewing subject is put
into crisis-boundaries, designed to keep the abject at bay, threaten to
disintegrate, collapse. According to Lacan, the self is constituted in a
process which he called the 'mirror phase', in which the child perceives
its own body as a unified whole in an image it receives from outside
itself. Thus, the concept of identity is a structure which depends on
identification with another. Identity is an imaginary construct, formed
in a state of alienation, grounded in mis-recognition. Because the self is
constructed on an illusion, Lacan argues that it is always in danger of
regressing:
65
What is the demoniacal - an inescapable, repulsive, and yet nurtured
abomination? The fantasy of an archaic force, on the near side of separation,
unconscious, tempting us to the point of losing our differences, our speech,
our life; to the point of aphasia, decay, opprobrium, and death? (p 107)
Alien collapses the image of the threatening archaic mother, signifying
woman as 'difference', into the more recognised figure of the preOedipal mother31; this occurs in relation to two images of the monstrousfeminine: the oral-sadistic mother and the phallic mother. Kane's transgressive disturbance of the egg/womb initiates a transformation of its
latent aggressivity into an active, phallic enemy. The horror then played
out can be read in relation to Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora. As
discussed earlier, Kristeva argues that the maternal body becomes the
site of conflicting desires (the semiotic chora). These desires are
constantly staged and re-staged in the workings of the horror narrative
where the subject is left alone, usually in a strange hostile place, and
forced to confront an unnameable terror, the monster. The monster
represents both the subject's fears of being alone, of being separate from
the mother, and the threat of annihilation-often through re-incorporation. As oral-sadistic mother, the monster threatens to re-absorb the
child she once nurtured. Thus, the monster, like the abject, is ambiguous; it both repels and attracts.
In Alien, each of the crew members comes face to face with the alien in
a scene whose mise-en-scene is coded to suggest a monstrous, malevolent
maternal figure. They watch with fascinated horror as the baby alien
gnaws its way through Kane's stomach; Dallas, the captain, encounters
the alien after he has crawled along the ship's enclosed, womb-like air
30
For a discussion of
the relationship
between the female
spectator, structures
of looking and the
horror film see Linda
Williams, 'When The
Woman Looks', in
Mary Anne Doane,
Patricia Mellencamp
and Linda Williams
(eds), Re~Vision,
American Film
Institute Alonograph
Series, vol 3,
University
Publications of
America, 1984.
31
Dadoun refers to a
similar process when
he speaks of the
displacement of the
large 'omnipresent
mother* into the
small 'occulted
mother', op cit, p 55.
Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Rutgers University on September 4, 2012
The horror film puts the viewing subject's sense of a unified self into
crisis, specifically in those moments when the image on the screen
becomes too threatening or horrific to watch, when the abject threatens
to draw the viewing subject to the place 'where meaning collapses', the
place of death. By not-looking, the spectator is able momentarily to withdraw identification from the image on the screen in order to reconstruct
the boundary between self and screen and reconstitute the 'self which is
threatened with disintegration. This process of reconstitution of the self
is reaffirmed by the conventional ending of the horror narrative in which
the monster is usually 'named' and destroyed.30
Fear of losing oneself and one's boundaries is made more acute in a
society which values boundaries over continuity and separateness over
sameness. Given that death is represented in the horror film as a threat to
the selPs boundaries, symbolised by the threat of the monster, death
images are most likely to cause the spectator to look away, to not-look.
Because the archaic mother is closely associated with death in its
negative aspects, her presence is marked negatively within the project of
the horror film. Both signify a monstrous obliteration of the self and
both are linked to the demonic. Again, Kristeva presents a negative
image of the maternal figure in her relationship to death:
65
The hair upon the Medusa's head is frequently represented in works of art in
the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration
complex. It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in
themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of horror, for
they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of horror.12
___^^^__^
„
"
32
Freud noted that a display of the female genitals makes a woman 'unapproachable and repels all sexual desires'. He refers to the section in
Rabelais which relates 'how the Devil took flight when the woman
showed him her vulva' 33 . Perseus' solution is to look only at a reflection,
a mirror-image of her genitals. As with patriarchal ideology, his shield
reflects an 'altered' representation, a vision robbed of its threatening
Sigmund Freud,
•Medusa's Head', op
cit, p 105.
~~^~—~~-—"-"
33
ibid, P 106.
^^^"~^^~"^~
34
For a fascinating
discussion of the
place of woman as
monster in the
Oedipal njrrative see
Teresa de Lauretis,
op cit, chapter 5.
ri°S"4(f d°Un> °P
'
f
,._
V
r
u
u
-
j
-
j
u
-
j
aspects. 1 he lull ditlerence ot the mother is denied; she is constructed as
other, displayed before the gaze of the conquering male hero, then
destroyed. 34 The price paid is the destruction of sexual heterogeneity
anc j repression of the maternal signifier. The fetishisation of the
mother's genitals could occur in those texts where the maternal figure is
represented in her phantasmagoric aspects as the gaping, voracious
.
,
TN -
r
,
.
,
.
.
.
,
,
vagina/womb. Do aspects of these images work to mitigate the horror by
offering a substitute for the penis?
.
Roger Dadoun argues very convincingly that the Dracula variant of
35
t n e vampire movie is 'an illustration of the work of the fetish function' :
•"" aSamst tne primitive identification with the mother, a phallus; against
the anguish of psychotic break-down, sexuality; against spatio-temporal
Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Rutgers University on September 4, 2012
ducts; and the other three members are cannibalised in a frenzy of blood
in scenes which emphasise the alien's huge razor-sharp teeth, signifying
the monstrous oral-sadistic mother. Apart from the scene of Kane's
death, all the death sequences occur in dimly-lit, enclosed, .threatening
spaces reminiscent of the giant hatchery where Kane first encounters the
pulsating egg. In these death sequences the terror of being abandoned is
matched only by the fear of re-incorporation. This scenario, which
enacts the conflicting desires at play in the semiotic chora, is staged
within the body of the mother-ship, the vessel which the space-travellers
initially trust, until 'Mother' herself is revealed as a treacherous figure
programmed to sacrifice the lives of the crew in the interests of the
Company.
The other face of the monstrous-feminine in Alien is the phallic
mother. Freud argued that the male child could either accept the threat
of castration, thus ending the Oedipus complex, or disavow it. The latter
response requires the (male) child to mitigate his horror at the sight of
the mother's genitals-proof that castration can occur-with a fetish
object which substitutes for her missing penis. For him, she is still the
phallic mother, the penis-woman. In 'Medusa's Head' Freud argued
that the head with its hair of writhing snakes represented the terrifying
genitals of the mother, but that this head also functioned as a fetish
object.
disorganization, a ritual-and this is what is fabricated, we could say, on the3 6
positive slopes of fetishism, a sexualized phallic object, it is as rigid and
impressive as it is fragile and threatened, where we will perhaps have the
pleasure of recognizing one of the familiar figures of horror film, Count
Dracula.16
ibid, p 53.
38
ibid, p 64.
39
ibid, p 57.
40
ibid, p 56.
41
ibid, pp 59-60.
• ibid, p 60.
43
It is clear, nevertheless, since the threat comes from the absent maternal
phallus, that the principal defense is sex. The vampire, markedly fascinated
by the maternal pas-de-phallus and identifying himself with the archaic
mother for lack of having a phallus, becomes phallus; he transfers a default
of having to the plan of an illusory being.41
As he emerges in Dadoun's argument, the Dracula figure is very much
acting on behalf of the mother-he desires to be the phallus for the
mother. When he is finally penetrated by the stake, his heart is 'revealed
as hollow, a gash, or a gaping wound-it is castration made flesh, blood
and be'ance...>42. However, it is possible that we could theorise fetishism
differently by asking: Who is the fetish-object a fetish for? The male or
female subject? In general, the fetishist is usually assumed to be male,
although Freud did allow that female fetishism was a possibility.43 The
notion of female fetishism is much neglected although it is present in
various patriarchal discourses.
In her article, 'Woman-Desire-Image', Mary Kelly argues that 'it
would be a mistake to confine women to the realm of repression,
excluding the possibility, for example, of female fetishism':
44
Sigmund Freud, 'An
Outline of
Psychoanalysis', in
James Strachey (ed),
The Standard Edition
of the Complete
Psychvanalylic Works
of Sigmund Freud, vol
23, op cit, p 202:
'This abnormality,
which may be
counted as one of the
perversions, is, as is
well known, based on
the patient (who is
almost always male)
not recognizing the
fact that females have
no penis..." (my
emphasis).
Mary Kelly,
'Woman-DesireImage*, Desire,
London, Institute of
Contemporary Arts
1984, p 31.
Sigmund Freud,
Interpretation of
Dreams,
Harmondsworth,
Penguin, Pelican
Freud Library, vol 4,
the1982.
When Freud describes castration fears for the woman, this imaginary
scenario takes the form of losing her loved objects, especially her children;
child is going to grow up, leave her, reject her, perhaps die. In order to delay,
disavow, that separation she has already in a way acknowledged, the woman
tends tofetishise the child: by dressing him up, by continuing to feed him no
matter how old he gets, or simply by having another 'little one'.**
In The Interpretation of Dreams*5, Freud discusses' the way in which
the doubling of a penis-symbol indicates an attempt to stave off castration anxieties. Juliet Mitchell refers to doubling as a sign of a female
castration complex: 'We can see the significance of this for women, as
67
Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Rutgers University on September 4, 2012
Dadoun argues that the archaic mother exists as a 'non-presence...
signifying an extremely archaic mode of presence'37. Signs of the archaic
mother in the Dracula film are: the small, enclosed village; the pathway
through the forest that leads like an umbilical chord to the castle; the
central place of enclosure with its winding stairways, spider webs, dark
vaults, worm-eaten staircases, dust and damp earth - 'all elements which
come back to the imago of the bad archaic mother'38. At the centre of this,
Dracula himself materialises. With his black cape, pointed teeth, rigid
body-carried 'like an erect phallus'-piercing eyes and 'penetrating
look'39, he is the fetish form, 'a substitute of the maternal phallus'40.
ibid, p 42.
68
^H'anJ
Feminism,
" e n ^ i w f p 84.
^-^^^-^^^—
dreams of repeated number of children - "little ones"-are given the
import.>4S In this context, female fetishism represents an attempt
by the female subject to continue to 'have' the phallus, to take up a
'positive' place in relation to the symbolic.
Female fetishism is clearly represented within many horror texts-as
instances of patriarchal signifying practices-but only in relation to male
fears and anxieties about women and the question: What do women
want? (The Birds, Cat People, Alien, The Thing.) Women as yet do not
speak their own 'fetishistic' desires within the popular cinema—if,
indeed, women have such desires. The notion of female fetishism is
represented in Alien in the figure of the monster. The creature is the
mother's phallus, attributed to the maternal figure by a phallocentric
ideology terrified at the thought that women might desire to have the
phallus. The monster as fetish object is not there to meet the desires of
the male fetishist, but rather to signify the monstrousness of woman's
desire to have the phallus.
In Alien, the monstrous creature is constructed as the phallus of the
negative mother. The image of the archaic mother-threatening because
it signifies woman as difference rather than constructed as opposition—is, once again, collapsed into the figure of the pre-Oedipal
mother. By re-locating the figure of woman within an Oedipal scenario,
her image can be recuperated and controlled. The womb, even if represented negatively, is a greater threat than the mother's phallus. As
phallic mother, woman is again represented as monstrous. What is
horrific is her desire to cling to her offspring in order to continue to 'have
the phallus'. Her monstrous desire is concretised in the figure of the
alien; the creature whose deadly mission is represented as the same as
that of the archaic mother-to reincorporate and destroy all life.
If we consider Alien in the light of a theory of female fetishism, then
the chameleon nature of the alien begins to make sense. Its changing
appearance represents a form of doubling or multiplication of the
phallus, pointing to the mother's desire to stave off her castration. The
alien is the mother's phallus, a fact which is made perfectly clear in the
birth scene where the infant alien rises from Kane's stomach and holds
itself erect, glaring angrily around the room, before screeching off into
the depths of the ship. But the alien is more than a phallus; it is also
coded as a toothed vagina, the monstrous-feminine as the cannibalistic
mother. A large part of the ideological project of Alien is the
representation of the maternal fetish object as an 'alien' or foreign shape.
This is why the body of the heroine becomes so important at the end of
the film.
Much has been written about the final scene, in which Ripley/
Sigourney Weaver undresses before the camera, on the grounds that its
voyeurism undermines her role as successful heroine. A great deal has
also been written about the cat. Why does she rescue the cat and thereby
risk her life, and the lives of Parker and Lambert, when she has
previously been so careful about quarantine regulations? Again, satis-
same
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69
•if
k>^
vfactory answers to these questions are provided by a phallocentric
concept of female fetishism. Compared to the horrific sight of the alien
as fetish object of the monstrous feminine, Ripley's body is pleasurable
and reassuring to look at. She signifies the 'acceptable' form and shape of
woman. In a sense the monstrousness of woman, represented by Mother
as betrayer (the computer/life support system), and Mother as the uncontrollable, generative, cannibalistic mother (the alien), is controlled
through the display of woman as reassuring and pleasurable sign. The
image of the cat functions in the same way; it signifies an acceptable, and
in this context, a reassuring, fetish object for the 'normal' woman.47
Thus, Ripley holds the cat to her, stroking it as if it were her 'baby', her
'little one'. Finally, Ripley enters her sleep pod, assuming a virginal
repose. The nightmare is over and we are returned to the opening
sequence of the film where birth was a pristine affair. The final sequence
works, not only to dispose of the alien, but also to repress the nightmare
image of the monstrous-feminine, constructed as a sign of abjection,
within the text's patriarchal discourses.
Kristeva's theory of abjection, if viewed as description rather than pre-
Alien: Ripley as the
reassuring mother
with her 'little one'.
The double bird
images of Hitchcock's
The Birds function in
the same way: the
love birds signify an
'acceptable' fetish,
the death birds a
fetish of the
monstrous woman.
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f
70
For an analysis of the
horror film as a
'return of the
repressed' see Robin
Wood's articles:
'Return of the
Repressed', Film
Comment, JulyAugust, 1978; and
'Neglected
Nightmares', Film
Comment, MarchApril, 1980.
IRELAND'S ONLY
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scription, provides a productive hypothesis for an analysis of the
monstrous-feminine in the horror film.48 If we posit a more archaic
dimension to the mother, we can see how this figure, as well as
Kristeva's maternal authority of the semiotic, are both constructed as
figures of abjection within the signifying practices of the horror film. We
can see its ideological project as an attempt to shore up the symbolic
order by constructing the feminine as an imaginary 'other' which must
be repressed and controlled in order to secure and protect the social
order. Thus, the horror film stages and re-stages a constant repudiation
of the maternal figure.
But the feminine is not per se a monstrous sign; rather, it is constructed
as such within a patriarchal discourse which reveals a great deal about
male desires and fears but tells us nothing about feminine desire in
relation to the horrific. When Norman Bates remarked to Marion Crane
in Psycho that: 'Mother is not herself today', he was dead right. Mother
wasn't herself. She was someone else. Her son-Norman.
A WEEKEND ABOUT SCIENCE
FICTION IN FILM AND TELEVISION
1ST AND 2ND MARCH 1986
Future iense
MEDWAY ADULT EDUCATION.
CENTRE, ROCHESTER, KENT
Through screenings, presentation and
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future and science in Film and
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The Conference fee is £37.00-for food,
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Participants will share common
presentations and study options
entitled "Conceptions of Science", "The
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"Images of the City". Speakers include
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