Power, Powerlessness, and Perhaps, Womanhood (in Horror Books)

Though I’m unsure what exactly I will write about yet, I’d like to take a moment to experiment with writing about a pattern I notice in many of my favorite horror stories: helplessness, or more specifically, powerlessness. It may seem straightforward that being powerless is a form of horror for many people, fictional characters included, but what is interesting to me is that it can be experienced both by oppressed characters as well as oppressive characters in different ways. I’ll start with Uzumaki by Junji Ito which translates simply to “spiral,” a horror manga about a town that slowly spirals into an ancient curse, cut off from the outside world. The main character and her boyfriend, spoiler alert, are the final survivors, quite literally trekking across a sea of warped and tangled bodies of their former neighbors with no way out—Ito makes it abundantly clear that the two main characters are completely powerless to escape, and that their only option is to embrace death together. The satisfaction that the reader gets by finishing this work is not that of success, it’s finally knowing what is happening to the town and knowing that the lovers have one another for comfort. The powerlessness here is that of pure victims of the situation, and the satisfaction comes from that small reclamation of power: companionship. 

 

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the powerlessness is that of the oppressor, the murderer, and the beating of the heart beneath the floor is a form of protest that the killer is entirely powerless to stop. Readers still feel the horror of being unable to stop something from happening, with the caveat that they might feel the killer “deserves” it. It also turns the power dynamic on its head: you might imagine that the killer exercised power by ending the victim’s life, but the victim reclaims a voice regardless.

 

In Junji Ito’s Tomie, powerlessness and power can go hand-in-hand as well. The character of Tomie is a seductress who can woo any man to do her bidding, and she takes pleasure in doing so. However, it comes at a cost of extreme violence towards her by these same men as they become more jealous. In this way, she is both taking some of the free will of these men, but also experiencing gendered violence from them, and is powerless against her eventual, repeated death despite her looks and influence. Tomie is especially interesting due to the gendered aspect of this violence, where Tomie is simultaneously morally corrupt and a victim of misogynistic violence against her will. The horror of being powerless for her victims is the fact that their life is ultimately consumed by thoughts of this woman, Tomie. But the aspect of powerlessness for Tomie is an inevitable, brutal, physical death—something that readers never feel is “deserved,” no matter her seduction. It begs the unsettling question of whether Tomie’s manipulation came first, or whether it is a coping mechanism for her repeated trauma. Readers experience unease both from her power, and her powerlessness. 

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has a similar duality in terms of powerlessness and power: and womanhood. The speaker of the story, due to the highly gendered affliction of “hysteria,” is isolated, rendering her powerless. However, she finds a form of power in companionship with a “woman” in the wallpaper of her room, believing she can free her. In this way, what makes the story tense is both the character’s isolation, as well as the frantic nature of her pushback and coping mechanisms. 

 

In each of these examples, the dynamic between powerlessness and a reclamation of power plays on the human fears of isolation, oppression, and mortality simultaneously. It suggests that these three fears are intimately connected. Thinking of feminist theory, and its use in interpreting sets of horror texts, it lends itself well to the connection between these three fears. For example, Judith Butler’s concept of gender as “performance” lends itself well to Tomie’s character. Additionally, how does the terror in all of these woman-centered stories compare to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” in which the speaker is a man? To what extent is it a different kind of fear: the beating heart of an old man, versus how the resistance of a woman victim would feel? How do I experience this second-hand desperation differently as a woman reader? Does feminist horror produced in Japan differ from feminist horror in the United States? These are all questions raised by this pattern, leading me into a feminist, queer, tentatively Western interpretation of popular horror literature. How I might expand my understanding may depend on what other stories I pull from. Will I pull from Japanese analyses of Ito’s manga as well as American, and see what differences there are? Will other cultural horror tropes make an appearance?

 

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