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Comment
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(4/19/01 9:02:27 am)
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Godfather/Godmother Death
I am not sure how topics get closed. Not enough happening? But I would like to resurrect this one. Which seems appropriate! <g>
The one death figure left out in all the replies, of course, is Lilith who is the classic death bringer from Jewish lore, though only for small children. She works hand in hand with the Angel of Death, a punishment for being Adam's first wife who refused to take him as master but wanting to be co-equal. There is a fine Jewish feminist magazine (Marge Piercy is the poetry editor) of that name.
I want to mention two other stories of mine with Death as female: "Sister Death" which uses Lilith as its main character, and "The Boy Who Sang for Death." And no, I am not death obsessed, but find it fascinating as a topic. Writers and storytellers always wrestle with te Big Stuff.
And a question--is the Angel of Death masculine, feminine or a-sexual?
Jane
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Kate
Unregistered User
(4/19/01 2:40:59 pm)
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Angel of Death
Jane,
I like your question about the gender of the Angel of Death. It's interesting to me too. About your list "masculine, feminine or asexual" I'd like to ask if we could add (to the question) ungendered, which is different from asexual. I reworked a Yiddish tale ("The Penitent and the Rebbe of Tchekhenove") that somewhat relates to the question, in my novel. I won't go into it here, but in that tale the Angel of Death is genderless but not certainly not asexual. I'd also add "adult or child." In the novel I also draw from "The Rosebud," that tiny little German tale about a young daughter who dies; in it, the Angel of Death is a "beautiful child" who "said he would come again when the rosebud opened." When the rosebud opens, the daughter dies.
I might be misinterpreting the direction you'd like to go with this though. Interesting no one mentioned Lilith before . . .
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Heidi
Anne Heiner
ezOP
(4/19/01 11:19:17 pm)
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Closing Topics
Just a quick explanation:
Any string that hasn't been posted to in the last two months has been closed in preparation for archiving the string. I am still working through the details of archiving, but it should be happening soon.
By all means, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be resurrected in a new string!
And concerning the topic here, I haven't really ever considered the Angel of Death to be any gender. But when I think about it, I do usually assign the male gender to death for some reason. Is it my socialization from images of the Grim Reaper which I do perceive as male? And perhaps also my socialization to see more male murderers than females? I also think of the female usually as the giver of life, so it could be I am simply thinking in opposites. Birth vs. Death. Female vs. Male. Hmmm....
Just random thoughtlings late at night...
Heidi
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Midori
Unregistered User
(4/20/01 4:39:22 am)
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gender/death
I agree with Kate that death when personified can not only have either gender but also appear as a child or an adult. What is more interesting to me is when specific ages or gender is used to shape the image of death--does it construct a meaning that is particular to the story as a whole? In other words, when death appears as male, that gender would bring to the story a particular set of corresponding emotional baggage, that would naturally accrete to our reading not only of the image, but how the image functions in the narrative. When the Angel of Death appears as a woman, I think it would combine conflicting images of creativity (and procreativity) and destruction...in a way that a male gendered death doesn't. Death as female has those great swallowing images of a return to the womb--which it gives it a strange ambiguity that a male death figure can't have. So Kate, I am fascinated by the idea of a genderless death...what do you think its intended to evoke about death?
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cianalouise
Registered User
(4/20/01 9:17:26 am)
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Re: gender/death
Midori,
You mentioned that Death as a woman might combine conflicting images of creativity and destruction and that reminded me of Indian mythology…
Kali is the goddess of death and destruction, and yet she is also an aspect of Parvati, the goddess of love and sex and birth. That the myths personified the forces of nature and life - what destroys can also bring about birth, rebirth…
But a male figure of Death, to me, anyway, has a certain finality to it.
Death genderless seems to me to be the ultimate equalizer - impersonal, impartial, taking everyone and everything in time. I was also reminded of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come from "A Christmas Carol" and how it was this ambiguous creature…how it represened death, Scrooge's death both literally and spiritually, if he did not learn to love his fellow human being.
Okay…I have gone on long enough!
Luciana
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Gregor9
Registered User
(4/20/01 10:12:25 am)
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Mr. Death
Jane,
I love this kind of discussion. I've always perceived Death as masculine. Never thought about it before, but it's really a learned assumption, I think. "Death Takes a Holiday", the Twilight Zone episode where Robert Redford is taken in by an elderly woman who's hiding from death...and of course it turns out that he IS death...even that hooded, scythe-wielding figure arising before Scrooge and Baron Munchausen and everyone else is inherently masculine in some manner. Whereas Kali is a destructive aspect of something larger, so I don't perceive her that way, don't think of her as pure death but as something else altogether.
And then I think about the various Sheela-na-gigs, and wonder about societies as terrified of birth and its power as they are of death...and there the sex is clearly female.
So maybe this is all a variety of Chip Delaney's "received language"--images having promoted assumptions in advance of conscious thought.
Greg
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Laura
McCaffrey
Registered User
(4/20/01 10:55:45 am)
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Re: Mr. Death
I too have also thought of death personified as, the Ghost of Christmas Future from the Christmas Carol, which always used to terrify me. So final and cold.
Yet my midwife, who delivered both my two girls, said a few years ago that she had started to do some hospice work. She sits with people as they're dying, just as she sits with women giving birth. She's not very New Age, maybe not what you'd expect from a midwife. When I was in labor for only three hours and the contractions were long and intense, I asked - how much longer will this take? - thinking I can't do this for twelve more hours. She said - Well, till the baby gets here. That's her type of humor. The kind a laboring woman does not appreciate at the time. Anyway she says, to her, the energy at a birth and the death are the same. As if there's a door we walk through - one way to come into the world, one way to go out. This door doesn't scare her, and she will, at any provocation, go into a huge rant about birth and death in our culture and how afraid we are of both.
I guess listening to her has started to change my ideas of death. Less of the Ghost of Christmas Future. More of a doorway with something unimaginable, not male or female or gendered at all, on the other side. I can imagine her sitting at the door, answering any questions by anyone passing through with a lot of smart-mouthed humor.
Laura Mc
Edited by: Laura McCaffrey at: 4/20/01 3:43:39 pm
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Billiam
Registered User
(4/20/01 6:52:34 pm)
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Re: Mr. Death
I looked up the question of the iconography of the "Angel of Death".
Up to the main part of the Middle Ages in Western Europe the gender of Death was not certain. Especially the Romanesque cultures showed Death to be female.
In the Bycantine-Eastern Church regions of Europe Death was always pictured to be male.
The Christian notion of Death personified comes from the Book of Revelation, Chapter 14:
"14
I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one "like a son of man" with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand.
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Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, "Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe."
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So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.
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Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle.
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Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, "Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe."
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The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God's wrath.
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They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses' bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia."
Therefore I'd say for Christians Death would be male.
Due to Medieval progress in agriculture the sickle later turned into the scythe!
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(4/21/01 11:50:09 am)
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Puzzlement
I wish someone who can read Hebrew (or Greek or Aramaic) tell us whether there is an actual pronoun in the Bible for the Angel of Death in Revelations, or if that came in with the English translation.
Jane
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Kate
Unregistered User
(4/21/01 3:38:38 pm)
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Hebrew
I can read Hebrew some--but am swamped today and tomorrow. If you can wait, I'll look into this Monday.
Kate
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Karen
Unregistered User
(4/23/01 2:52:06 am)
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Banshees
What about banshees? I think we forgot to mention them too. Very much a female AOD, but one who is able to blur or traverse the distinctions of age- she may look like a lascivious young woman from a distance, but once you get up close, she's an absolute hag! So in the banshee story the representation of death is bound up with the perception of the protagonist/narrator and shifts with that perception. What's also interesting is that the banshee, at least according to Yeats, is conveyed in an immense black carriage/herse driven by a dullahan and, if you open the door, a basin of blood will be thrown in your face. So all the associations and interplays of wombs and death and birth and cycles are operating here- only the banshee isn't simply a ghoul to be feared. Her cries are a mark of distinction- only the very old families have their own banshee and a group of banshees will appear weeping together only if someone very important is about to die. All of which leads me to posit that maybe the female AOD is more than a cipher of collective fear. Perhaps death is a little less frightening to contemplate if you conceive of it as a human figure- the most familiar, knowable kind of figure- and maybe enscribing that figure with a womb and all the apparatus of regeneration partially cancels out the threat- afterall, passing on your genes and name to your progeny is one kind of immortality. The banshee quite literally assuages the aristocrat's fear that his/her name (and fame) will die with him/her. She proclaims the aristocrat's folkloric immoratlity even as she cries out the aristocrat's death. THe Angel of Death is the hardinger of immortality.
Laura, what you write strikes a chord with me. When I have lost someone close to me, I have always seen death as male (and red!)- as a hangman with a trapdoor- a kind of impish mechanic and friends of mine have had similiar perceptions. It's sort of like that Dickinson poem- "and then a plank in reason broke"....
Karen.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(4/23/01 3:37:05 am)
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Announcers
Karen,
I was thinking about the Banshees also...but then I remembered that on the old thread about Death didn't we start discussing the distinctions between those characters who were death versus those who "announced" the approach of death? I'm wondering about that because the banshees have a more or less stable identity in the tales, but death, as death, comes with a greater range of identities even within a single cultural context. And maybe that is also intentional--death being an equal opportunity kind of creature, it makes it more frightneing, and perhaps closer to our own emotional bewilderment about death when death can come in any guise. Death has that terrifying aspect, when it comes too soon, or too violently, but it also has a sense of mercy and release when we believe it to be appropriate (as in the old age end of a life, the end of suffering). I'm thinking of Beowulf momentarily...Death is implicit in the first battles with Grendel. Beowulf triumphs over that Death-bringer (though he becomes quite brutal as a death bringer himself) but the second half Beowulf meets the Dragon who becomes the opportunity for a Hero's death in old age. Beowulf knows he's meeting his death...and here death is spectacular in the figure of the Dragon.
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Gregor9
Registered User
(4/23/01 7:35:44 am)
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Horsemen
Going into Biblical iconography takes me also to The Four Horsement of the Apocalypse. Death here, in all aspects, is masculine, and that's probably another reason we're saddled with (sorry, couldn't resist) a male death-figure in the West.
That concept, the 4 horsemen, made a much stronger impression upon me than the rest of the Angel of Death material in Revelations. But it's an image that's been represented time and again. It's a very powerful emblem for death.
Greg
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Kate
Unregistered User
(4/23/01 2:32:31 pm)
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Hebrew, and My Usual Inchoate Thoughts
Sorry for the delay, but I had a huge seminar to teach this morning. I just spent a bit of time trying to figure out the answer to your question about the Angel of Death in Revelations. In any case, as you know, Revelations is New Testament--so I believe it was not originally in Hebrew but Aramaic or Greek, as you suggest (I think).
My Hebrew is rudimentary but angel, in Hebrew, is MA-LACH. This is masculine. [The nominative pronoun for he is "HOO." The objective of this pronoun, him, is "O-TO".
In the versions of Revelations I have, you get not "Angel of Death" but "Angel of God" and "Angel of the Lord." In the Talmud, the Angel of Death appears as MA LACH HA-MA-VET; it's masculine.
Looks like for a better answer about Revelations, you'd have to get an Aramaic or Greek scholar. Hope some of this helps, Jane, if you're still curious. Maybe someone else can do the next step!
Sometime I'm going to come back and weigh in on the gender question more generally. I haven't studied much language theory in the last four years--the last I've read are Lacan, Cixous, and I suppose I'll include Freud on the structure of language as well--so I don't know where the cutting-edge theorists are these days on the relationship between gendered language and gender more generally. At the very least it is of course difficult to equate "male" (sex) with "masculine" (gender) in literature and grammar, both syntactic forms, in a way. I assume we're all aware of the conversation between those who see language as a symptom and those who see language as a cause (for myself, I don't see it as an either/or, but it's not my field). In any case, I'd like to maybe bring that up into the conversation as well. But it will take a clearer mind and some caffeine. On the other hand this direction may interest no one but me, so please say so if that's the case. I have tendencies away from writing my little tales toward being a theory-head.
Also, lurking in this discussion without participating too much, I've had some ideas rumbling about the oh-so-obvious sex/death relationship in literature, not to mention in language ("dying" also meaning orgasming, though I can't quote a particular poem this second, being exhausted). Clearly death is often a sexualized moment, one whose particular gender(edness) is multiple. And there's Foucault on the sex-death thing (ah, the "sex-death thing," what elegant language, Kate.) But, for now, I only have anything concrete to say on that original question about the Angel of Death.
Kate
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Karen
Unregistered User
(4/23/01 5:12:33 pm)
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Death-heads
Midori,
I guess I would be inclined to argue that the distinction between an actual figure of death and a crier or announcer of death isn't quite so clearcut for the dying protagonist- (s)he only really knows death *through* the banshee- it's impossible to gain a knowledge of death without her mediation because to do so you'd have to actually be dead. I think it's interesting to consider a figure like the banshee in terms of the representation of the demonic body. THe demon substitutes the appearance of a body for the body it doesn't actually have - so you have all these layers of appearance in between you and something solid- veils between you and knowledge. Even if the figure is introduced as death itself, it's still a veil of metaphor- perhaps the anticipation of what's beneath the veil is more frightening than actually getting a peek- as you write, death's ability to assume an infinite variety of forms is terrifying. But once a story chooses one of those forms the terror is necessarily limited.
Kate,
Are you familiar with the work of Georges Bataille? It might be an interesting reference for the ideas you discuss above.
Karen.
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Kate
Unregistered User
(4/23/01 6:17:53 pm)
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Bataille
Karen,
Yes, I've read loads of Bataille but not this year . . . This year I mostly have been reading Deleuze and Guitarri, and Gadamer, when it comes to theory.
Any Bataille you are thinking of in particular?
Kate
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Kate
Unregistered User
(4/23/01 6:35:50 pm)
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L'Erotisme
Karen,
Is that the one you're thinking of, maybe, in this regard? An interesting--totally flawed and totally compelling work--to me. Like so much doctrinaire surrealist writing. Haven't read it in a while, but one idea stands out in memory as representative of the beautiful mess contained therein--that asexual creatures don't die, they simply divide; so sex and death entwined to the end, so to speak. Someone correct me if that wasn't Bataille. I am not a Bataille scholar, needless to say!
Kate
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Midori
Unregistered User
(4/24/01 7:06:22 am)
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theory heads
Kate and Karen,
Karen: you make a really compelling insight about the relationship between the announcer and the death itself. It's fascinating and I want to reply. I just need a bit of time to think (which is impossible these days because paradoxically its all I'm doing trying desperately to distill a reading list of theorists in preparation for my defense next week!)
Perhaps it might be intersting to start a thread on theory and death/gender question? In thinking about the gender issue of death I have been going back through Butler's ideas on gender (do you know "Gender Trouble"). Say Jane...it might be kind of interesting to use your two stories as proof texts? Something for us theory heads to deconstruct from all sorts of angles? It seems strangely fitting because I have also been rereading Barthes, "Death of the Author" (which adds new meaning to the expression ghost writing.) All these lovely tangents...and I for one am always grateful for the opportunity to exercise theorical muscles...since I generally feel like a ninety-pound weakling and the ideas are fascinating.
wow, I got this in before the board went down.
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(4/25/01 9:26:08 am)
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Out of My Depths
All you theorists out there--I feel I am out of my depths here. I love reading what you are talking about, but must fall back on my poor-me-storyteller pose.
Jane
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Kate
Unregistered User
(4/26/01 10:25:35 am)
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theory
Jane--I tried (buried in there w/theory) to at least try to answer your question about Hebrew for Angel of Death--hope you saw that too. Not that I gave too much of an answer, but it's a start for someone else to go on from . . .
kb
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(4/26/01 12:13:28 pm)
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angel gender
Oops--missed that, Kate. thanks for pointing it out.
So the Angel of Death is masculine (as I supposed) but there is still Lilith who takes the soul of dead babies. Is she Death's assistant? Co-conspirator? or just a Talmudic late bloomer?
Jane
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