| Author |
Comment |
Karen
Unregistered
(6/22/00 7:49:40 pm)
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fee
fi fo fum
I want to talk about child-eating!
I've been rather taken by the subject lately. Specifically I want to
talk about the figure of the Ogre/Ogress in relation to gender (which
is something I've been working on lately). Are we dealing with an entirely
different kettle of fish when the ogre is female? Are male ogres feminised
through the act of eating and regurgitation? Are the figures of the
female ogre and the wicked step-mother entirely disempowering? And how
does this relate to post-colonial theories of the way cannibalism has
been used as a tool for demonising the Other, shifting the emphasis
from the violence perpetrated by the colonisers themselves? Any thoughts?
Karen.
|
Stephen
R
Registered
(6/22/00 10:21:17 pm)
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Re: fee fi fo fum
Ummm -- I'm a little lost. I haven't seen any of those elements. Can you give some examples?
Your title made me think of Chilcotin and a Bella Bella myth from the Pacific Northwest. It was written about by Claude Levi-Strauss, and commented upon by Marvin Harris (who doesn't like Lev-Strauss' nterpetation) in his book "Cultural Materialism" (1980, pp. 202-215). In this story a being named Kawaka kidnaps a boy or girl, who escapes by trickery, killing Kawaka. The story seems sex-neutral, since versions with male and female kidnapees occur, and in different variations Kawaka or Owl (another version) is male or female. It also doesn't seem to have any colonial connections -- I'd never heard of it before reading Harris, and I don't think this myth is well known outside the trbes, and hasn't been used to demonize anyone.
I'm not disagreeing with your idea, I just don't know of an example.
| Terri
Unregistered
(6/22/00 11:37:56 pm)
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The Ogre's Wife
Hmmm...One thought that comes immediately to mind is the ogre-mother in the longer, older versions of Sleeping Beauty. If you go back to the oldest known European versions, the Italian, the prince is married when he comes across Sleeping Beauty (Talia) in the tower in the woods, but his wife is barren. He has sex with her sleeping body, then goes away and forgets about her. She gives birth to twins, who suckle on her fingers, thereby pulling out the splinter and waking her. He stumbles upon the tower again sometime later, has an "oh yeah!" moment of remembering the sleeping princess, and is delighted to discover that he has children--a boy and a girl. It is this that makes him want to bring Talia home with him, the fact that she is mother to his children, and by the logic of the story we are supposed to cheer him on, and agree that the barren wife needs to be replaced. The jealous wife (who wouldn't be jealous in her place?) then tries to destroy Talia and the children, fails, and is destroyed herself.
Now what's interesting here is that the figure of the jealous wife becomes a jealous mother (ad mother-in-law) in later versions--Perraults, etc.--and a flesh-eating ogress at that. Midori has some thoughts about this in her article on Sleeping Beauty (posted on the Endicott Studio site. She'll be back on-line soon, by the way--she's deep in the middle of a killer Shakespeare class), but Karen's right, we haven't really looked at the ogress figure before. I'm reminded also of Snow White's mother/step-mother and Carrie's comment: "It seems as though some women feel they 'own' their child--that it is nothing but an extention of them. This theme is beautifully wrought in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. The consumption of the apple by Snow White seems to mirror the step-mother's desire to consume her daughter--to take Snow White's very essence into herself."
Karen, in this context you *have* to read a brilliant story by the French writer Pierette Fleutiaux called "The Ogre's Wife," which was published in an English translation by Leigh Hafrey in Grand Street magazine, #37, 1991 -- and also reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Vol. 5. If you can't track it down, then send me your address again by e-mail (I know I have it somewhere...) and I'll send it to you. It's amazing. Here's a taste, the beginning two lines:
"The Ogre's wife doesn't like preparing flesh, although she doesn't know it. Something comes over her when the smell fills the house and there isn't a pure breath of air to be had..."
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Carrie
Registered
(6/23/00 8:28:30 am)
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eating babies
Karen,
I've explored the idea of eating children myself -- but not by an outside source, by the mother herself. I have twin boys that are now four and a half. But shortly after they were born I had a dream that absolutely mortified me. I dreamt that I consumed my first-born. He was the one I had bonded with as he was the only one of the two that was able to breast feed. My mother was caring for my other son. Now I couldn't help but wonder if I was completely losing my mind or if this was something experienced by other women. It's not something one would shout from the rooftop after all. It seems to make sense to me. Often new mothers feel as though they own their children. After all they can be percieved as an extension of the mother, not an individual in their own right. Perhaps the fact the mother nourishes the infant in her womb and then feeds the infant from her own body after birth leads to dreams and surpressed feeling of wanting to take that part back into herself. I remember the night I came home. I was in pain from the delivery and I had never felt so empty in my life. It didn't matter that I had two beautiful babies sleeping it the other room -- I felt as if I had lost a part of myself. It was a terrifying experience. I don't know if any of this helps in what you were looking for, but I thought I'd share just in case.
Carrie
| karen
Unregistered
(6/23/00 3:53:54 pm)
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child eating
Carrie,
Thankyou for sharing such a personal experience with me. Friends who
have children have told me about similar experiences- so you are not
alone. I've had dreams along these lines too- foetuses as fish, would
you believe! Mary eating her son for breakfast! I think any intense
relationship inevitably has a tinge of consumption about it...
I was reading an article by Marina Warner in a book called 'Cannibalism and the Colonial World' (Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen ed.) which considers the figure of the ogre in this light. (Stephen, she relates it to the myth of Cronus eating his children). Warner writes:
'[The] cannibal motif conveys a threefold incorporation: sexual union by which a form of reciprocal devouring takes place, pregnancy, by which the womb encloses the growing child, and paternity, which takes over the infant after birth in one way or another' (p.165).
Paternity is uncertain, which has the potential to limit patriarchal power, and so the male ogre takes the children into his body, appropriating their identities and, in Warner's interpretation of the Cronus myth, giving birth through his mouth.
I was thinking of the idea in relation to older versions of Sleeping beauty by Basile and Perrault. To Warner's list, I'd add that the child eats at the womb from the inside- I was wondering, if in turn, female ogres don't eat at the text from the inside. Basile's Sleeping Beauty in particular seems to me to be a contest of two plots- the jealous wife poses just as grave a danger to the AUTHORity of the narrator as she does to the king and Talia -because she threatens to undo the story, to make the text digest itself... This is what I've been writing on lately.
Terri, I must have that story- my appetite is well and truly wetted.
I should be able to get my hands on Year's Best. Many thanks for the
reccomendation.
Karen.
| Terri
Unregistered
(6/23/00 9:51:39 pm)
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ogres
Karen, I *love* that image (and turn of phrase) of the orgress "eating the text from the inside" ... which has given me some rich ideas to think about.... Thank you.
| Midori
Unregistered
(6/24/00 10:12:15 am)
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inside out
Karen I agree with Terri about the image of eatingthe text of the inside out....though it gives me bizarre images because I have been on a Peter Greenaway kick lately (Prospero's Book...) and it's just something he'd make happen on film.
Here are odd thoughts on child eating...let's not forget Baba Yaga and her house of chicken legs. In writing a poem, comparing myself at midlife to Baba Yaga, I thought hard about that awful desire we have as mothers to so protect our children that we would eat them, reincorporate them into ourselves so as not to have to deal with the grief or the anxiety about watching them separate and grow. I could just imagine a younger Baba Yaga, trying hard to keep her tusks from showing, feeling a child's plump arms and restraining herself from taking oh, just a little nibble behind the ears. In many ways, I don't think it's really entirely gendered...my father used to refer to my ears as "salad leaves" he wanted to eat and German forms of endearments to women and small children include things like my little "plum cake" and sausage.
Which leads me to another version of cannibals in the south African tradition. Here the fantastic cannibals live in a parallel world to human beings--they do everything opposite to the social norms of human society...they are quiet when they are awake, they shout and yell and knock things about when they sleep, they don't farm but hunt humans. One of the great scary creatures of the cannibals is the guy who was born half sweet and half sour. His parents ate the sweet side, and he travels at great speeds across the veld on one leg looking to eat people so as to complete his partial humanity. There are examples of humans who become cannibals and are usually associated with siding with black/destructive magic, that must be overcome by a young girl engaged in a rite of passage.
Oh my god, I just remembered a wonderfully gruesome Tibetan rabbit trickster tale I learned as a kid from a Tibetan monk. Rabbit was left to babysit a child and after the couple left, the Rabbit leaning into the basket thought the baby smelled good enough to eat. So he nibbled at the toes and then just kept eating until only the head was left...then he drew the blankets up to the chin and took off. Of course when the parents came home, the father went out in a rage and captured rabbit. Rabbit then, in typical fashion, managed to escape (leaving an ice rabbit in his place which as it melts strapped the father's back causes the man to cry out, "rabbit stop pissing on me!"...at that point as kids we were in hysterics! It ends with Rabbit getting clean away....
And wouldn't you know it, for my shakespeare class I just read Montaigne's essay "Of the Cannibal" which is a wonderful little essay for those thinking about the dawn of colonialism. (it was actually a source for Shakespeare "The Tempest" and Shakespeare cribbed a whole utopian passage out of it and put it into the mouths of one of his characters.
speaking of which I have to go an write a paper. This board is waay too much fun.
Ciao
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Karen
Registered
(6/30/00 2:24:02 pm)
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Re: inside out
Midori,
Could you please tell me where I can find your Baba Yaga poem? I'm very
curious!
I am a BIG Greenaway fan. IN relation to this subject, I think of "The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover" in particular. In the last scene the wife points a gun at her husband's head and forces him to eat from the body of his rival, mouthing the word "Cannibal" just before she shoots him. Only the word is spoken into the camera, so there's a nice little ambiguity there- a proliferation of cannibals. The viewer and film makers are implicated- watching and making films is a form of flesh-eating, of glutting the voyeuristic gaze.
I wonder if reading and writing books isn't also a little like this.... Especially when older, oral narratives are utilised, appropriated, absorbed into a contemporary text.
Karen.
| Terri
Unregistered
(6/30/00 9:58:28 pm)
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ogres, etc.
Karen, Midori, what a lot of fascinating ideas to ponder. I love the notion of the storyteller/fairy-tale-reteller as a form of ritual cannibalism...reminds me of certain Celtic and other tribes who believed that eating the organs of a person would be to ingest and be able to make use of their strength and magical essence....
Sorry this is so short. I'm on a tight deadline, but I'll be back more regularly very soon.
| Lizzi
Unregistered
(7/1/00 3:33:35 am)
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Eating one's own
Certainly there is a great deal of eating offspring amongst many animals (and I count humans in this category).
Mothers will often eat their offspring when a threat is perceived. This way the predator will not gain a meal and therefore an advantage and the potential prey will reabsorb the nutrients and so will be able to breed again at a future point, rather than just waste the material.
Also, males of many species are known to kill and eat the offspring of other males, thus ensuring their gene pool is passed on within their society.
Sorry if I'm regurgitating what everyone knows from reading National Geographic etc but it is also studied in behavioural ethology in slightly more depth, which I did do, albeit a while ago.
| J
Unregistered
(7/1/00 11:03:11 pm)
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blar
Hmmm, it's all just a little too precious for me, I think.
First off, you've all left out the most famous, I think, cannibalized child. *In a deep basso voice* "My only son, in whom I am well pleased." After all, people are eating Jesus, who is, after all, the child of the Trinity, on a daily basis the world over.
Beyond that, I think it's stretching it to say that the mouth is a uniquely feminine structure. After all, while it certainly accepts things into it, it also has teeth, which penetrate easily. As for pet names, it's not just Germans. Haven't you ever been called "honey" or "sugar" or "muffin" or something like that? I have, and I'm male. To me it's less to do with some sort of patriarchal sexual dominance and more to do with wordplay, just like small things are considered cute, so we have the expression "cute as a bug's ear," which, if indeed bugs do have ears, prolly ain't too cute.
It could just be that, within the context of a story, eating children is meant to prove dominance, especially the eating of other's children, which seems to me a particularly male behavior. To eat you, I will penetrate your flesh. I will take you, piece by piece, like a piece of ass. It's objectification, I think, dehumanizing that which is eaten.
And, after all, isn't that what people want to do with Christ? Eat the human, leaving only God?
Just some random thoughts.
J
| J
Unregistered
(7/1/00 11:24:30 pm)
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blar
In reading over what I wrote, I fear I may be misunderstood, for I seem to say that it's not male sexual dominance, and then go to saying that it is. Allow me to clarify.
I was strictly talking about the notion of pet names in the one paragraph, which I think Midori brought up, not the whole cannibal motif in general. I just wanted to make that clear.
Now, I'm thinking of something else. Terri wrote about Sleeping Beauty, and how in the original story, the wife is barren. Then, later, she becomes a flesh-eating mother. I have to wonder if those aren't related, perhaps they are, but perhaps not.
What I'm thinking is that originally Terri says the wife is barren.
Well, what's the ultimate defining feminine characteristic but pregnancy?
In such a tale, the wife is masculanized. Then, later, as a mother she
becomes a flesh-eating ogress. I'm wondering just how did this happen.
Surely, tales of mothers who will do anything to protect her children
are legion. Hell, ever tick off a mother? They're vicious! So is this
combination of motherhood and cannabilism a way of men claiming children
as their own, something previously only women could do? If so, I think
it further bolsters the idea that cannabilism is a masculine trait.
By turning a woman into a man, through eating children, penetrating
them, men could then be safe in the knowledge that a woman would react
as a man.
Anyway, just more random thoughts.
J
| Midori
Unregistered
(7/2/00 4:48:29 am)
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lunch
Blar,
Precious? Gee, and I was just trying to be humorous. Actually, it's interesting because English (from which you draw your other examples of food endearments) is despite Latin, Greek and Arabic influences, linguistically germanic. There are many other languages in which food vocabulary is not used as an endearment signifier. It leaves some tantalizing suggestions about the subtext of our culture. (I say this with a smile)
Maria Warner makes an interesting comment about the changes in Sleeping Beauty, from the Italian version by Basile, with the barren cannibal wife, to the French version by Perrault, with the Ogress mother. In her rather wry opinion, the reason for the change was that Perrault believed that French audiences could accept the crime of cannibalism more comfortably than the scandal of adultery.
Cannibalism as it appears in most folk tales has a particularly destructive edge. I haven't seen any collections of narratives from societies that practice cannibalism--though I would expect that one would find the image of the cannibal and the act of flesh eating to be very different in those stories. But of the tales I know, cannibalism has a gender neutrality about it. It is the taboo of the act that gives it emotional impact and function in the story, not the particular sex of the diner. In the South African tales, the cannibals are a parallel society--both sexes equally hunt and eat human flesh. It is the human world turned upside down, the negative image of a productive, humane community. Though trickster often outwits the cannibals into eating *their* own ("strange, this looks like my grandmother's foot!") where upon it becomes taboo again as the cannibals eat their own. The cannibal whose sweet side has been consuemed by his parents, leaving him half a man (and sour at that) has a weird kind of pathos in the tales--the audience recognizes his maimed state and there is an ambiguious sympathy for his voracious appetite as he hunts humans to regain full humanity. Made more existential by the fact that no matter how many he eats, he will never achieve humanity.
Tibetan "Lhamo" a form of folk opera has a wonderful tale about a Prince seeking a bride. He is waylaid by a court of cannibals and eaten. The Khandroma, ("rainbow clad-sky going goddesses" --sort of female weather tricksters who usually look after lovers) make the cannibal court sick so they vomit him up again and the Khandroma piece the hero back together again (usually improved upon!) Here the cannibalism is both the negative and positive part of the rite of passage--the destruction of the old identity through consumption, and the return, a disgoring from the mouth of the fantastic (the return of the hero from the gullet of the swallowing monster).
I didn't mention the eucharist on purpose, since not every one would agree that transubstantiation is analogous to cannibalism. Such a suggestion might even be offensive to some on the board.
Karen, my Baba Yaga poem is still in my computer. I am trying to talk my daughter into writing a companion poem to go with it. In the meantime, I did write a poem based on Donkeyskin, which I think Terri was planning to put up on the Endicott studio site--but I am not sure when. Peter Greenaway's work fascinates me...though I confess, leaves me exhausted and wishing that he could exercise a little more restraint in his brillance. His ideas are fascinating to me as a writer--I loved parts of the Pillow Book, and Prospero's Books--but there are times when he seems not to trust the story and allows the visuals to cannibalize the text (you know I had to find a way to work that in!)and then vomit them in an orgy of images--which always strikes me as so odd because he is so passionate about the physical presence of the text, the words, the paper, the intimacy between the reader and the word. Have you seen the new film, a take off on Fellini's 81/2? It's getting horribly trashed I'm afraid....actually, after Prospero's Books I was thinking a good deal about Fellini-- who to my mind does manage that modicum of restraint that allows Satyricon to be wonderfully visual and bizarre and yet faithful to the energy of the original text.
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Karen
Registered
(7/2/00 3:50:17 pm)
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Re: lunch
Midori,
No, I haven't seen the new Greenaway- has it only just been released
in the states? There's usually a delay of at least a week before we
get first release films. I also haven't seen Satyricon, but I'll make
sure I check it out! I do agree with you about Greenaway's orgy of
images- especially in Prospero's Books (not The Pillow Book so much,
I think). The text may be palpably present but it's difficult to make
much sense out of the film unless you're familiar with the text beforehand-
but isn't this a risk most "modern" performances and adaptations
of old texts run? An audience won't be able to respond to the comment
actors and directors are making upon a text and its performance history
unless it is aware of those things- the audience will interpret the
costumes, design, etc in an entirely different way, which may be richer
and more relevant to the present- so it isn't necessarily to the detriment
of the play or film. I've got to go and reread an essay about Prospero's
Books I have in a book about performing Shakespeare- I think it might
have some relevance to this discussion.
Have you seen Greenaway's "Drowning by Numbers" ? I think
Greenaway's very idiosyncratic visual language is especially eloquent
in this film- it's very playful and doesn't have "serious high
art" stamped all over it. Please let us know when the Donkeyskin
poem is up
Now, cannibalism. I didn't want
to talk about the Eucharist either- it's very shaky ground and one
can easily offend, but ] does have a point- any discussion of cannibalism
is potentially incomplete if we don't mention the great sacrifice
at the heart of much Western culture. At the Catholic church I went
to as a child, the eucharist was not a symbol- it was *the* body of
Christ. One had to be very careful about how one swallowed it- I was
always plagued by a tremendous surge of guilt if I inadvertently bit
into the eucharist or if it got stuck to the roof of my mouth. And,
of course, you take on some of the strength of the person you swallow-
"Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and
I shall be healed". At school we were given these books which
told us all the things we would be filled with when the Holy Spirit
"entered" us (wonder and awe, etc, etc). Of course the ritual
was not the same thing as eating human flesh- I believed that the
eucharist was Christ's body on an entirely different strata of perception.
IT was imbued with an essence rather than with physical charcteristics.
I was swallowing Christ's body but I was not swallowing his flesh-
I know that doesn't make much sense but that was how I thought of
it- so, for me, the eucharist paradoxically both resembles a cannibalistic
ritual and is removed from that ritual. I could say more but I am
really quite nervous about causing offense here.
I also agree with ] that the mouth is not an exclusively female image-
but in a lot of texts it is used in that way. The Cannibalism motif
is not always gendered but I think it is often implicitly associated
with sex in Western culture- just look at Bosch's "The Garden
of Earthly Delights". The imagery is utterly grotesque but you
can be sure that everyone is having a really good time! Or vampires...
Freud wrote that a man has three inevitable relations with women-
there is the woman who gives birth to him, the woman who is his lover
and the woman who destroys him (the swallowing mouth of the earth).
Mother-lover-earth. All these relations are centred around some kind
of mouth and the logical chain they proceed along exposes the classic
association of sex and death.
Also, I should clarify a point about Sleeping Beauty. In Basile's
and Perrault's texts Beauty is not barren. There are two women in
the story. The prince has a wife and it is she who is barren and she,
not the mother, who exhibits the cannibal urges. The ogress tangles
with the mother and she gets her comeuppance!
Karen.
| Midori
Unregistered
(7/3/00 5:40:31 am)
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beauty's ogress?
Karen,
Wait a minute I am a wee bit confused by your last paragraph about Sleeping Beauty: In Basile, the Prince is married to a barren wife--when he brings home Talia(Beauty) and her two kids the Barren wife tries to have the children cooked and served to the husband, (forcing the husband into being a cannibal). Perrault's version transform the barren wife into an ogress mother with a sweet tooth for human flesh (served typically in France with a little sauce and wine). Now...is that what you meant in your post?
I shall go and see if I can find Drowning by the Numbers. Even though he irritates me sometimes, I am always fascinated by Greenaways vision. Because of work I was doing on Shakespeare over four weeks I must have watched about ten different filmed productions of Shakespeare's plays. My kids renamed Greenaway's offering as "the clothing optional Shakespeare."
As I am an adult convert to Catholicism and not a cradle Catholic, I missed (or was spared some might say!) the great mythology of faith-tales proffered by well meaning nuns. I think the late forties was a hey day for the urban/catholic myth of the guy who stole the host, took it to a bar and plopped it with irreligious fanfare into a beer and drank it. The nun who told my friend this story would then glare and ask, "and do you know children what happened to him?" dramatic pause, "his stomach blew up!" Oh my....a far cry from the careful theological tracts liberally sprinkled with Latin and history that I have been sloughing through trying to get at the "heart" of this issue. Ultimately I think religious ritual language is deceptively simple and flat as a way of allowing the mystery to penetrate through the limitations of words. This language floats on the surface like the iceberg's tip, but there is a great deal of thought and argument beneath.
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Carrie
Registered
(7/3/00 7:24:25 am)
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mouths
Just a quick note. I realize that the mouth may not be distinctly thought of as feminine but the earlier post made me think of some old Irish tales of a mthological people (fir bolg?). If I recall correctly the women had teeth in their vagina, which seems to me to have some parallel imagery to what we've been discussing here. (Midori -- I think you brought this up earlier this year -- vagina dentata)
Another thought -- I've always been tremendously interested in the idea of taking another's essence in by the flesh. I once read that Montezuma would eat the choicest parts of young boys each morning as a way of remaining youthful himself. And in many cannabalistic societies, consuming the dead was a high ritual. Part of me thinks that it is rather beautiful -- not letting a loved one rot or be torn apart by wild animals. I can see as to where it would be considered an act of love and honor.
Carrie
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Karen
Registered
(7/3/00 3:02:48 pm)
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Re: mouths
First of all, thankyou for correcting me Midori- I was a little tired so I elided Basile and Perrault in that last paragraph. The wife eats the children in Perrault and tricks the king into eating his own kiddies in Basile. Sorry about the error!
I think we did indeed talk about the vagina dentata earlier this year- toothed vagina. It's supposed to represent the male fear of sex, of being swallowed (castrated)in the act. I associate it with Victorian theories of the sexual economy- thou must be careful how thou spends thy vital energies!
Now, do we all know about Countess Elisabeth Bathory? What Carrie writes about Montezuma reminds me of her. One day the aging Bathory slapped a servant girl, the blood splashed onto her face and she noticed that, once she had cleaned up, the area of skin the blood had covered seemed whiter than the rest. So she began taking daily baths in virgin's blood! The myths about Bathory are rife- there are stories about her keeping a herd of young women in the dungeons of her castle and milking them for their blood, of her sending out scouting parties in search of new victims. One story claims that she would extract the blood via an Iron Maiden at the foot of her bath tub, the pins pressing gradually further into the flesh until the victim was completely drained. Finally she became a little cocky and invited the daughters of minor nobles to her castle, ostensibly to teach them the finer points of good manners (common pratice at the time). The game was up when she carelessly tossed the body of one victim over the side of the battlements. She was imprisoned in a tiny chamber with only a small slot in the door for the rest of her life. A particularly perverse locked up lady!
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MLB
Registered User
(7/8/00 4:51:17 am)
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Re: mouths
I've gone through the entire thread, hoping somebody would connect the concept of cannibalizing one's own children to the Greek myth of Olympian theogeny. Kronos, the king and last-born of the Titans, devoured his offspring at birth, in order to preserve his powers, and avoid the prophecy that one of them would bring about his end. Kronos' wife Rhea was able to save one of the children (Zeus) from their father's terrible hunger by offering a swaddled stone in its place, which Kronos gobbled down in a single gulp, and the child grewsin secrecy until it was able to confront and conquer Kronos, thus ending the reign of the Titans.
I believe the eating of the young is symbolic of denial of parental mortality, and a desire to forestall the future. Without the children, there can be no future -- there's nobody to seize power and life from the parent. The cannibalism represents a static system, in which the goal is preservation, rather than growth.
Whether it's a father, mother, or ogre doing the eating, the fact remains we're discussing existing power as the enemy of the future.
Regards,
Marsha
mbrowne@ziplink.net (et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?)
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Karen
Registered User
(7/9/00 2:45:48 pm)
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Re: mouths
Marsha,
I think I mentioned Kronos early on, but the topic didn't really take off. Warner bases much of her article around the Kronos myth, giving an interpretation similiar to the one you outline above.
Ta,
Karen.
| Ellen
Unregistered User
(7/19/00 7:18:17 am)
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Fee, fi, fo, fum
Karen:
This won't add anything to your academic research, but if you want a delightful fictional view of ogres, try *Ella Enchanted* by Gail Carson Levine, which is a take on the Cinderella story for the middle-grade set. Ogres, play a small part in it, but they're actually wonderfully creepy, not only cannibals but creatures capable of reading your thoughts and then simulating whatever it is you desire. And the book is delightful.
E.
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Karen
Registered User
(7/20/00 1:38:42 pm)
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ogres
Ellen,
Thanks for the recomendation- I'll check it out- sounds fun!
K.
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Kate
Registered User
(7/21/00
10:29:13 am)
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Devouring
This may be too facile a suggestion,
but have you read "The Juniper Tree" (a German tale). It contains
the repeated lilting birdsong "My mother killed me/My father ate
me/My sister Meleenken/Gathered up my bones..." and is really quite
chilling.
There is also Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" which ends
in the famous last line "And I eat men like air." It's in
ARIEL, and there's also a BBC recording of it that is very good. (Not
child-eating but man-eating.) The desire to devour/bite human flesh
(usually her children's or husband's) runs through her work.
Kate
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Karen
Registered User
(7/23/00
2:18:51 am)
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clutching
lips
Hello Kate!
"The Juniper tree" is indeed very chilling- one of my favourite
Grimms' tales- and I love the lines from Plath you're refering to: "Out
of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air." There's
quite a charge there- the words "dare" and lare" are
lurking in the sounds-it's quite a dangerous, seething little game.
A profane annunciation.
I agree with you about Plath- images of eating are explicitly tied to
sex, childbirth/ child-raising and death in much of her work. In "You're"
she conjures up her child ("my little loaf") as if she were
following a recipe, throwing in her own assortment of spices along the
way. The Bell Jar opens with the executed Rosenbergs, a cadaver and
the peanut butter smell of the subway- an acrid brew. Her "Mirror"
has "no preconceptions./ Whatever I see I swallow immediately/
Just as it is, unmisted by like or dislike." I think Plath taps
into an unconscious association of eating and sex/love which is very
collective. Freud: "The kiss between the mucous membrane of the
lips of two people is held in high esteem among many nations, in spite
of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of
the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract"
(!) WE kiss, bite suck, taste, lick- children and adults alike instinctually
try to absorb into their bodies items they find desirable- you try to
assimilate the other into yourself. But that very attempt at assimilation
only highlights the irrevocable separation flesh engenders, even as
it connects you. You can never absorb your lover, you can never communicate
precisely what you would like to communicate- in touch or words. There's
always something you can't quite grasp.
There's a very beautiful poem by Mallarme called "The Windows"
("Les Fenetres"). An old man, dying in a hospital, (in the
translation I have) "fevered, greedy for the deep azure, the mouth,/
As youthful, it would breathe its wealth away,/ A virgin skin of long
ago! befouls/ With a long, bitter kiss the warm golden panes."
An utterly hopeless and pathetic gesture but quite unnerving in its
grotesque beauty. We vainly grasp at life with our mouths, clutch at
the slipping air with our lips. The ogre seeks in vain to retain his/her
power by eating the younger, usurping generation.
And I think its especially interesting if you consider all this in the
light of the reverberations which have attached themselves to the idea
of consumption over the course of the last fifty years (though it goes
back further than that)- we can't help but think of the passive receptacle
of consumer society, blindly absorbing goods- another kind of desperation,
another clutching at life
K.
|
The
Blar Witch
Unregistered User
(7/24/00
9:07:49 pm)
|
peanuts,
eminems, heroin
Karen was right that Blar was not
my name, but Midori used it as such and I found it very fetching, so
there 'tis.
Karen,
Interesting post. I have to wonder about "my little loaf,"
though, as being edible. To me, it sounds more like a loaf that she
baked in her womb. Although, perhaps this is where mothers get the idea
of eating their children. I don't know.
"Whatever I see I swallow immediately/ Just as it is, unmisted
by like or dislike"
Sounds like a drunkard to me, actually. A man who becomes a sponge.
I don't think that this is a particularly feminine phenomenon. It sounds
more like despair to me.
"Freud: "The kiss between the mucous membrane of the lips
of two people is held in high esteem among many nations, in spite of
the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the
sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract"
(!)"
Yes, but the lips also contain more nerve endings than the finger tips.
I don't know if Freud knew that or not. Seems to fit well with the notion
of the ever-needy id. "Feed me pleasure," it commands, and
we do.
"WE kiss, bite suck, taste, lick- children and adults alike instinctually
try to absorb into their bodies items they find desirable- "
Well, no. Children put everything into their mouths whether it's pleasurable
or not. "Get that out or your mouth" is a constant refrain
of haried mothers.
"you try to assimilate the other into yourself. But that very attempt
at assimilation only highlights the irrevocable separation flesh engenders,
even as it connects you. You can never absorb your lover, you can never
communicate precisely what you would like to communicate- in touch or
words. There's always something you can't quite grasp."
Ooooooooooh, I like that very, very much.
"We vainly grasp at life with our mouths, clutch at the slipping
air with our lips."
Mother's milk, anyone?
"we can't help but think of the passive receptacle of consumer
society, blindly absorbing goods- another kind of desperation, another
clutching at life"
Hmm, yeah, I think I can.
Thing is, I don't for a second believe that consumer society is passive,
any more than I think a chewing, cutting, tooth-filled mouth is passive.
The question becomes, I think, do consumers know the role of imperialist
society any more than teeth know the role of the tongue?
|
Midori
Unregistered User
(7/25/00
6:25:35 am)
|
J. Blar
How funny, I just realized my mistake.
The J just sort of slipped past me. Blar was easier to read I guess.
Karen, I need a day to "digest" (groan) your fascinating ideas...also
I am going to hunt up my Plath and do a little rereading!
|
Kate
Registered User
(7/25/00
11:11:20 am)
|
Plath
I've done a lot of work with Plath
and the question of desire/devour, so I'll jump in again. Sorry if my
comments are a bit inchoate here.
The loaf reference is clearly related to "eating" (one's children)
as well as to pregnancy and to sex -- and it is difficult to conceive
that Plath would have been unaware of this multiplicity. Motherhood,
death, sex, eating -- these all hinge on questions of femininity and
desire that were quite important to Plath. The usual cliches ("a
bun in the oven") would have been despicable to her, and she turns
them over in her poems violently. In any case, she left little bowls
of milk for her children outside their bedroom, when she finally killed
herself -- in the oven. The layers of meaning in her poetry are not
accidents (though it is possible her death was).
"The Rabbit Catcher" is a more graphic and strange poem that
relates to this conversation -- there's a controversial discussion of
it in Ann Stevenson's biography, and an excellent analysis of the controversy
in Janet Malcolm's book The Silent Woman. Malcolm's book is a good guide
for any Plathian interpretation, actually. It is important to phrase
a discussion of images in her poetry within a particular interpretive
scheme, I think. But I won't go too far into mine here, for risk of
boring.
Midori: you may want to look at Plath's journals, where you will find
copious references to the relationship between desiring and devouring,
from her initial meeting with Ted Hughes (the apocryphal story of biting
his cheek when he kissed her at the St. Botolph's party) to her description
of nose-picking, from an earlier time. One of my little favorite entries.
Plenty of other references to food and sex, too, the relationship between
desiring and and being consumed.
(As you all probably know, she had a deep interest in fairy tales as
well.)
Kate
|
Karen
Registered User
(7/25/00
3:57:54 pm)
|
swallowing
without question and taste-testing.
Kate,
Since you've done so much work on Plath I'm curious as to what you
think of Ted Hughes "The Birthday Letters" and, also, your
opinion on the recent publication of previously unavailable portions
of Plath's journals (which I haven't had the opportunity to look at
yet). I don't remember "the Rabbit Catcher" distinctly,
so I'll have to go and reread it. Of course there's also "The
fifty-ninth bear"... . And do you think it was siginificant that
Hughes was such a great animal poet? I saw a production of Hughes'
adaptation of Seneca's Oedipus the other week and I noticed the almost
obsessive references to the mouth of the sphinx, the choked earth
and Jocasta's "polluted" womb ("a morass"), which
are not nearly as extreme in Seneca's original text... What about
the bees?
Blar Witch,
I should be careful not to argue myself into a corner... (I was a
little disappointed with that film and yet I couldn't sleep after
I saw it!) Blar is indeed a most fetching name!
Now, as Kate points out above, it would be difficult to believe that
Plath would be unaware of the implications of a phrase like "my
little loaf". Further, some women do literally eat the "fruits"
of their wombs- the placenta. Indeed there has been much research
in recent years into using materials from the placenta in the treatment
of several diseases. Then there's that infamous passage from "The
Female Eunuch" about how one can not be a truly liberated woman
until one has tasted one's own menstrual blood....
It's interesting if you compare Plath's "devouring" project
to Anne Sexton's poetry. In "Little girl, my string bean, my
lovely woman" (a poem for her eleven year old daughter) Sexton
writes: "Oh, little girl,/my stringbean,/how do you grow?/You
grow this way./You are too many to eat." When two writers marry
"the children leave in disgust./There is too much food and no
one left over/to eat up all the weird abundance" ("The Black
Art"). In Sexton's work (her earlier work anyway) there's a clutting,
a limit to appetite. She recognises what I was talking about earlier-
the impossibility of ever completely assimilating another human being
into yourself- and that that irrevocable separation/difference is
something you can play around, one of the most *excruciating* pleasures
of (heterosexual) sex.
(Blar, I'm glad you liked that bit. It's nice to please some of the
people some of the time!).
"Whatever I see I swallow immediately...."
Yes, I can see your point. I didn't mean to imply that this is a particularly
feminine phenomenon, although I can see how I inadvertently did so.
"That white sustenance- Despair"- are you sure it's merely
a matter of absorption? Isn't there also a little reflection and a
little refraction going on? Even if you don't realise it at the time.
Sponges don't swallow, don't act (however self-destructive action
might sometimes be).
Yes, there are more nerve endings in the lips. As for obeying the
id's commands, well that all depends on how repressed one is!
Yes, a child will put *anything* into her/his mouth, but isn't that
an attempt to absorb the world? Besides, when my father painted this
vile yellow substance on my finger nails it kept them out of my mouth
alright- never been a nail biter since! I think it's a matter of exploring.
Sure, the child does that with her/his hands and feet (I jammed my
leg inside a bucket filled with bees just to see what would happen
and it was swollen for weeks), but when (s)he wants to take a closer
"look" at something (s)he puts it in her/his mouth! AS do
adults in certain situations!
Kissing may or may not be inspired
by a desire to absorb or assimilate but when you are kissing another
person is it possible not to think of those associations? The sensation
is not just tactile, but olfactory and gustatory as well. People become
connoisseurs of their lovers' distinctive tastes- "Thy lips,
O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb honey and milk are under thy tongue"
(Song of Songs). I think we agree on this point, yes?
Now "the passive receptacle of consumer society". Yes, you
are right. It's not essentially passive-it just appears to be. I fell
into the iconographical trap. Indeed there is a very real sense in
which you will be consumed unless you are willing to consume yourself-
it's all a matter of knowing how to manoeuvre one's mouth!
I'm not so sure consumers know the role of imperialist society any
more than teeth know the role of the tongue. Are we talking about
a tongue from without or a tongue from within? Maybe a consumer is
like that mirror- swallowing immediately, assuming that (s)he is engaged
in some kind of sponge-like absorption and not realising that the
very act of swallowing radically alters the shape of his/her world,
that (s)he is involved in a social contract.
K.
|
Captain
Blar
Unregistered User
(7/25/00
6:28:49 pm)
|
A pirate
on a sea of menstrual blood
"Then there's that infamous passage
from "The Female Eunuch" about how one can not be a truly
liberated woman until one has tasted one's own menstrual blood...."
I've not read it, so I'm not sure I understand. Liberated from what,
exactly, and how is the function of tasting menstrual blood liberating
to begin with? I just don't get it....
I know that takes this discussion wildy off course, but it rather leaped
out at me and I had to ask about it.
I'm curious, actually, about all this feminism going on here. I know
a bit of theory on the subject, but not much, and I'm aware of the feminist
influence on fairy tale literature in the past, what, maybe thirty years
or so where it's been pronounced, maybe longer, but I'm not sure I see
any sort of overarching theme, any sort of paradigm. Sometimes in looking
over feminist writing on the subject, it seems as if it's a rather catch-as-catch-can
proposition whereby whatever element is needed is inserted as a pillar
to support a contention. At least, that's the way it seems at times,
though I know I need to read more on the subject.
Even further off-topic, I notice that the patriarchy is explicit or
implicit in a lot of this talk, and I just read an article yesterday
that I got from a mailing list I've recently rejoined that argued that
patriarchy (and post(?) structuralism) lacks any notion of historicity,
and it was a rather compelling piece. Any thoughts? I've not deleted
the article yet, so I can forward it to anyone if they like. Actually
a nice feature of the ezboard is that you can, if registered, accept
messages from people without giving out your email address. Nifty, huh?
I still maintain my position that calling children, or anyone, really,
by food-related names is a genderless concept that, I think, has more
to do with the idea of ownership, or possibly imperialism would be a
better word for it. Speaking of, I've just recently become aware of
the idea of women as the "last colony," which I find quite
intriguing.
Since I'm here and kind of bouncing all over the place tonight, which
I'm wont to do under the best of circumstances, I'm also wondering about
class-related interpretations of fairy tales, and further, women in
relationship to class, that is, were poor girls consistently represented
differently than well-off ones? Did the relationships in fairy tales
reflect the definite class structure of the day, and do the retellings
of them currently recast class relationships to reflect the capitalist
mode of production, and if so, are women represented as being the source
of reproduction of the proletariat with its, likely, I would imagine,
stress on domestic labor?
Hmmm, now my head hurts. I don't really expect answers to all these
questions, but if someone know of a book or a journal, or an author
who concentrates on this area, please pass it along.
Walking the plank,
Captain Blar
|
Midori
Unregistered User
(7/26/00
5:12:30 am)
|
interpretations
Blar: It is a tricky thing to force
folk tales into leftist theoretical models, or feminist ones at that.
The results are often simplistic, didactic and leave out a lot of images
inorder to fit the design imposed on it (like Cinderella's ugly sisters
cutting their feet to fit into glass slippers). I have seen contemporary
feminists argue that because a narrative has a strong female protagonist
it is an example of traditional "feminist" thinking. Except
that when taken altogether, the narrative is also about a young woman,
engaged in a rite of passage from adolesence to adulthood and then into
marriage which is the expected journey of a woman in the traditional
society. It is an example of where the orthodoxy of traditional life
is celebrated and affirmed by powerful images (magnificent, clever and
fantastic brides). It is also difficult to wrestle pre-industrial narratives
into a strict Marxist model. There are different narratives that deal
with elevated classes, the hapless prince, the declassed Princess who
becomes a goosegirl and then returns to her class status, the millers
daughter who become royalty, the clever fool, the scores of fantastic
artisans who help the peasant kid succeed. But I think again, given
that these tales have such old preindustrial origins, and that the characters
themselves can change their class origin from story to story (and country
to country) without changing the structural heart and meaning of the
story, makes the use of such rigid models a little too limiting.
But...having said that, there is some fabulous work on how the narratives
have been reinterpreted during different periods of social change and
used as a reflection and a commentary on those changes. Patricia Hannon
has a lovely book called "Fantastic Identities" about the
literate fairy tales of the aristocratic women of the French revolutionary
period. Seeing their world changing, recognizing that the old roles
for aristocratic women were crumbling, they used the stories to invent
identities of what they might become in the future, imagined in a way
their own transformation out of the rigid society they were part of--a
decidedly feminist activity. It's a great study of the tales in the
Contes de fees. Another book is Michael Taussig's "The Devil and
Commodity Fetishism" (wait, I'm not sure if that's the exact title...I'll
fix that if it isn't) It is a fabulous study of how workers in Latin
America (Bolivian miners especially) used the images of traditional
narratives to construct a powerful critique of imperialism on their
lives. Because it happen so violently and quickly, for those workers
wrenched from a traditional society into proletariats, they adapted
their traditional tales to reflect on their emerging consciousness as
alienated workers.
Kate: many thanks for the Plath references. I am neck deep in trying
to finish two manuscripts before classes start in August so I am more
than a little frustrated that I can't leap into the stacks and blow
off some writing days just catching up reading! (yeah, I'll wait until
classes start for that! Hah) I am thinking off hand that both poets
Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were such desperately unhappy women. Can
you think of a woman poet, a contemporary of theirs whose life was not
so miserable but who also wrote about these issues of children, husbands,
sex and work? (is there a paradisio to their inferno?)
|
Kate
Registered User
(7/26/00
10:50:13 am)
|
Poets
Midori,
I have a deadline to meet today, but after that I will definitely compile
a list of poets for you. I have some in mind right away (Hejinian, Scalapino...others...will
give titles and descriptions of their less suicidal approach -- though
it is not pastoral by any means). Sounds like you are busy right now
so this can wait a bit.
Also, yes, I do have thoughts about Hughes' book -- would like to discuss
later too. I thought it contained much weaker poems than his earlier
work, but was interesting after such long personal silence on Plath.
Didn't Hughes write a children's book once, which he called a fable?
I am going to scour my shelves for it.
Just writing to say I saw your last couple of notes and am very interested
in continuing -- when I get my past this vexing deadline.
Kate
|
Karen
Registered User
(7/26/00
4:32:29 pm)
|
swimming
among the sharks
Sir Blar,
I would agree with you that it's quite ridiculous to see drinking one's
menstrual blood as a particularly liberating act in the general scheme
of things. I'm not a fan of much of Greer's work- I think she has a
tendency to reach for the easy shock tactics... (please feel free to
sledge me anyone!). However, although much of it is out-dated now, "The
Female Eunuch" did cause a few tidal waves in its time- beneficial
tidal waves! The point of the menstrual blood reference, I think, was
that women should be more comfortable and familiar with their bodies-
part of this "Love yourself,lady, love your c---" notion.
Girls are taught to be so clean and neat, but there's no escaping the
fact that the female body is all blood and guts! There's a wonderful
play by the British playwright Caryl Churchill called "Top Girls"
which was actually set as a highschool text here (Australia) until the
moral majority got its mits on a copy. In one scene a girl licks another
girl's menstrual blood off her finger- a scene which was considered
to be a particularly dangerous pollutant for fragile young minds. I
can't help but think that there would not have been nearly as much controversy
if it had been any other kind of blood. Menstrual blood is no different
from any other kind of blood when it's all said and done and yet, at
the girls' school I attended, we were all honour-bound to voice our
respectable disgust. Menstruation, even more so than masturbation I
think, is the last taboo. It's no accident that sex with a menstruating
woman was the only "perversion" the Marquis de Sade found
horrifying....
Now, back on course...
I agree with what Midori said- it is true that a lot of feminist criticism
has tended to take the "Active, strong female character= feminist
tale" line. I think your assessment is justified in many respects.
As with any branch of criticism, there is exceptional work and quite
poor work. Indeed, snipping out of a text the elements that support
your theory and ignoring all others is an inherent danger of any kind
of critical practice. Criticism, after all, is a creative process in
its own right.
I would be very interested to see the article about patriarchy and historicity.
Not knowing the argument used, I can't really comment. IT's an interesting
notion though...
I agree with you that food-related terms of endearment stem from a desire
to possess, to own- doesn't the idea of ownership/ lover as property
have some very weighty feminist ramifications? Isn't it a staple of
feminist theory that women and children have been largely comprehended
as property in the dominant capitalist discourse?
Some retellings of fairy tales reflect the broader social framework
and others do not- as Midori says, it would be difficult to give a general
answer to your question without over-simplifying. Critics have argued
that a number of Victorian fairy tales and the writings of Lewis Carroll
and George MacDonald in particular, do implicitly criticise their society's
modes of production- the fact that the quality of life for the general
populace was diminished rather than enhanced by the industrial revolution.
In France fairy tales were co-opted into the parlours of the aristocracy,
while in England they were derided by the middle and upper classes until
well into the nineteenth century. So I do think that class relationships
and capitalist modes of production have a great bearing on the way tales
are disseminated and received, even if those considerations are not
always reflected in the texts themselves.
Kate,
I would be very interested in seeing your list of poets too! I believe
Hughes' children fable was called either "the Iron Man" or
"the Iron Giant" (I can't remember which at the moment). I
actually liked Birthday Letters *A LOT*- I think that, along with Tales
from Ovid, it contains some of Hughes' strongest work.
K.
|
Tony
Blar
Unregistered User
(7/26/00
6:03:49 pm)
|
Of Marx
and Other Demons
Midori,
Absolutely, I think you're right that pre-industrial tales can't be
twisted into a post-industrial theory of class relations. Marx and Engels
wrote, somewhat famously, though, "The ruling ideas of each age
have ever been the ideas of its ruling class." I was wondering
if the tales would conform to that notion. I know it's a fool's task
to try to establish exact dates for these things, for aren't many fairy
tales also folk tales as well? However, we can date the time when the
are codified, and that's where I think it would be interesting to see
if, say, feudal ideas of class relations were enforced. Also, a cross-cultural
look at the mode of production and the translation of tales, or similar
tales in distinct cultures, could be very interesting, I think.
The books you mention sound fascinating, and also like they're the two
sides of the same coin. Especially, though, I have to say that I'm very
intrigued by the idea of "The Devil and Commodity Fetishism,"
as the workers themselves seem to be the ones who recast the tales,
and there's much argument on what's loosely called the Left as to whether
the working class is capable of such a feat or if a vanguard (read Leninist,
of course) party needs to lead the way.
Karen,
Ahhh, I see. I suppose one of the first steps would have to be getting
rid of the notion that the body itself is a thing to be loathed. It's
true, I suppose, that the factory-setting for a body in Western culture
is male, at least I think Herr Freud would have it so. Victorians were
so much fun! By the way, I seem to recall a passage by de Sade in "Justine"
where a particularly vigorous episode of sodomy resulted in accidental
penetration of the more traditional opening and the man recoiled in
disgust from that. I think that de Sade, and I don't think that there's
any way to read him other than as fantasies of a disturbed and conflicted
man, was very, very gay and had no use for women, and so took out his
dissatisfaction by not only treating them as if they were male but by
hurting them, as if to punish them for his condition, so menstrual blood,
which has no male counterpart, must have been anathema to him. Of course,
that's just my reading of it.
"Isn't it a staple of feminist theory that women and children have
been largely comprehended as property in the dominant capitalist discourse?"
Yes, I think that's true, but also we must remember that women were
property, in a very real sense, way before capitalism. A question was
recently asked on a mailing list, a kind of a poll, really, about whether
the women there felt more oppressed as workers or as women. The author
answered that she felt more oppressed as a women. The general response
seemed to be, however, that it can't be dissected like that. One example
was of a working-class Haitian immigrant woman. Where is her greatest
oppression? Race? Gender? Class? How would she decide? And should theory
even attempt to broach such a thing, which is entirely empirical? Good
questions, all. After all, aren't working-class women oppressed not
seperately as workers on the one hand and women on the other, but simply
as working-class women? In fact, I think that there's a contradiction
between working-class and bourgeois feminism, at least, from what I've
seen. Still, women in general, it may be said, have been oppressed by
gender since pre-industrial times.
"So I do think that class relationships and capitalist modes of
production have a great bearing on the way tales are disseminated and
received, even if those considerations are not always reflected in the
texts themselves."
Now that, to me, is fascinating, especially since France was playing
catch up with England. How bizarre. What would cause that kind of separation
along class lines, one way or the other, of fairy tales?
I feel I should apologize to you, Karen, for turning your poor subject
away from itself, or, given the blood conversation, of turning it on
its head! (Sorry, I'm very weak and can't control these impulses. Pity
me.)
Tony Blar
|
Karen
Registered User
(7/27/00
4:03:29 pm)
|
burning
de Sade
Mister Blar,
Never mind about turning my topic on its head- I'm sure it makes more
sense upside down anyway! Thankyou for posting that article- I will
read it and get back to you later with my opinion. I'm sorry about
the email- I didn't even realise! I'll see if I can change it....
Now I will mix blood and politics and try to produce some kind of
lead...
You seem to have enjoyed a far more extensive exploration of de Sade's
writings than I have! My method for reading de Sade is drawn from
this Mike Leigh movie called "Career Girls". In "Career
Girls", whenever a character wants to know something about her
future, she takes out a weathered copy of Wuthering Heights, asks
the question, opens the book at a random page and the sentence her
finger falls on is the answer. So my friend and I, when plagued by
such anxieties, ask The Monkey (The complete works of de Sade). The
answers are quite... enlightening!
So I don't take de Sade very seriously-
I find it quite amusing actually... I agree with you that he was a
misogynist, although I don't think that misogyny stems from his homosexuality,
from his "having no use for women". In my experience, misogyny
( or misandrny!) doesn't have anything to do with sexual preference,
even though it is intricately linked to sexual desire and sexual fear.
I think there's a great danger of falling into all the usual stereotypes
when forging an argument along such lines.
Vladimir Propp find feudal class relations encoded in many folk tales,
but his argument, at times,is rather reductive. I agree with you that
a cross- cultural look at the modes of production and the translation
of tales would be very interesting indeed, although it would be quite
a massive project! I think a cross-temporal study would probably be
equally revealing...
Now I have to say that I cringe when I hear a theorist arguing that
the working-class needs the guidance of a "vanguard party"
(usually led by white, middle-class men, no?). It reminds me of Goldstein's
book in 1984- the way it conceptualises history as a constant cycle
of the upper and middle classes shifting positions while nothing essentially
changes for the proletariat, duped again and again into believing
that their middle-class leaders have their best interests at heart.
I also cringe when people discuss/argue about "who is the most
oppressed". I think that's so insulting! And an evasion of the
real issues. You are right that feminism, at leat in the past, has
tended to assume a white, middle-class face. The exclusion of working
class and black women from the debate is one of the most burning issues
of contemporary femininst theory- so I think that short-coming is
at least beginning to be addressed.
Ta,
K.
|
Terri
Unregistered User
(8/3/00
11:51:52 pm)
|
The Ogre's
Wife
Karen, did you ever manage to track
down that Pierette Fleutiaux story, The Ogre's Wife (Year's Best Fantasy
& Horror, Vol. 5)? I'm curious to know what you think of it. I thought
it was amazing. Has anyone else here read it?
|
Midori
Unregistered User
(8/5/00
6:13:17 am)
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ogre's
wife
Terri,
I've read it and it is a most fabulous and dark little tale. (this from
the culture that has brought us Steak Tartar!) The combination of sex,
consumption, beastiality and blood is really amazing. I love too the
way the fantastic through its relative size (huge in the ogre, tiny
in Thumbkin) constantly shifts the couple dynamic of the narrative--what
is out of balance gradually coming to shape as two people heal themselves.
Extraordinary piece of writing. And not for the faint of heart.
The ogrettes are as terrifying an image of parent gnawing children as
one could imagine.
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Kate
Registered User
(8/8/00
11:17:21 am)
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Poetry
Midori and Karen:
I didn't forget about posting some (less ruinous) poetry suggestions;
I've just been swamped with work. But it is on my mind and I am taking
notes to put up soon. It's good to have this little side project.
I know you're both busy too and probably not keening after this, but
I did want to apologize for the delay.
Kate
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Midori
Unregistered User
(8/9/00
7:20:29 am)
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not to
worry
Kate,
I am away from home, stealing time on a borrowed computer as it is...don't
worry!! Whenever you have the time, just set it up as a new post so
it doesn't get lost! And thanks a lot!
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Karen
Registered User
(8/10/00
3:21:42 pm)
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Pierette
Fleutiaux
Terri,
I'm afraid I haven't been able to track down a copy of the Fleutiaux
story yet (Volume 5 seems to be harder to find thatn the others, fo
some strange reason...). I will probably get it shortly though and I'll
let you know what I think.
On the biting subject, I found a *fascinating* passage in Havelock Ellis'
"Love and Pain" (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol.3)
about love-bites. Unfortuantely, I can't seem to find the blasted thing
at the moment (grrr!), but there were some wonderful passages about
Victorian women trying to eat their husbands (wearing them out in fact!),
village women chasing around small children and a 30 year old man who
was tried in the 1890s for biting his step-child "because he loved
her".
Kate, I am keen to see your list too.
Midori, I haven't had the chance to get my hands on a copy of The Innamorati
yet, but the letters make me mad to read it.
Karen.
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Ellen
Unregistered User
(8/12/00
9:30:52 am)
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Another
poet on cannibalism
Last week's Sunday Times reviewed
a volume of poetry, *Boss Cupid* by Thom Gunn (FS&G). I've never
read Gunn, but the reviewer, William Deresiewicz, describes him as a
formalist, "one of the great elegists of the age of AIDS. . . .The
volume concludes with Gunn's most remarkable act of imaginative sympathy,
a five-part dramatic monologue by that hungriest of lovers, Jeffrey
Dahmer. Cannibalism becomes a multidimensional metaphor for what loves
makes us want to do: penetrate to the organs and secrets that lie beneath
the skin, fill our empty-seeming selves with a lover's vitality, make
our lovers stay forever, even if we have to kill them. There's grotesque
fun here--'love must be ensnared while on the run,/For later it will
spoil' -- but it gets at the heart of what Gunn finds universal about
Dahmer's predicament: love's perishability. . . ."
I don't know. While I agree with the penetrating beneath the skin bit,
I've always loved that line by Confucius (or was it Lao-Tse?): "To
love a thing is to want it to live," though of course, it's an
oversimplification of that most complex state. Still, the Gunn poems
sound quite extraordinary.
Cheers,
E.
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Karen
Registered User
(8/12/00
7:41:41 pm)
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Thom Gunn
Ellen,
Many thanks for mentioning this! I like Gunn's work *VERY MUCH*, but
I hadn't heard about the new book. I must check it out, especially since
it delves into a topic so close to my heart!
Karen.
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