Category: 2024 Blog Posts

I want to talk about the motif of shadows that are used in Beloved. The main chapter where shadows are seen is when Paul D, Sethe, and Denver all go to the fair and Sethe sees all three of their shadows “holding hands” (56-58). I found this interesting because Sethe viewed the shadows as a good omen for the future even though shadows are often seen as something from the past and usually something dark. The two times Sethe noticed their shadows, they are not situated behind them but rather to the left of them and in front of them (56, 58).

 

The shadows also call back to the time when Sethe was an enslaved woman running away from not only her enslavers but the people who had raped her. As a runaway slave, she was forced to be like a shadow; silent and creeping in the night. Her position as a shadow was what helped lead her to her freedom. Her own shadow though had to be hidden during the day because if it was seen, it would mean that she either would be forced back into enslavement or, even worse, killed. 

 

Sethe being able to not only look at her shadow and the shadows of her daughter and her partner as a good omen and to also be able to have it out in the open during the day is significant because it signifies her freedom from enslavement and the joy and the family that she is finally allowed to have. She is able to see her shadow as a positive sign and not as a threat to her possible capture and she is allowed to be a person and not a shadow, seen and heard, rather than hidden and silent. Their shadows also only are seen to their side and in front of them which means that they are not just seen by the people around them, but also the creators of those shadows.

After a night out last weekend with my roommates, we decided to ‘post-game’ by watching something on TV before the Domino’s we had ordered had gotten too stale to really eat anymore and we all went to bed. We looked through a couple of shows- then stumbled across a perfect mix of casual viewing, nostalgia, and low-stakes entertainment: SpongeBob SquarePants.

The show was my favorite as a kid, and it’s one of those rare exceptions where re-watching it at an older age doesn’t really change your understanding of it much- with a few exceptions. Ironically enough, these exceptions would hit me soon into watching a couple of random episodes: episodes that all maintained an interesting pattern of gender and gender roles.

More specifically, throughout the show, Spongebob, is constantly put in situations that not only diminish any sort of masculinity he has but work to feminize the character. He is rarely depicted as a masculine figure, and often when paired with other characters resembles a more feminine version. For example, in the episode, “Rock-A-Bye Bivalve”, Spongebob and Patrick play a married couple that raise a baby clam. Patrick plays a stereotypical working man, coming home from his ‘job’ in a shirt and a tie, barely helping raise the child and clean the house- jobs that have typically not been assigned to men under the patriarchy. Spongebob, on the other hand, plays a woman who takes on these roles of raising the child and working at the house. At the surface, this looks like a funny gaff put into a children’s show to put Spongebob in a dress and get a laugh, and to this, I encourage the classic question: “so what?”

To explore an answer to this question, I’d like to go back to our class discussion regarding phallocentrism in film and media. As a class, we came to the consensus that it is difficult to find examples of films/tv shows that are not phallocentric. This scenario provides a unique response to this consensus, given that as we know it, Spongebob is a male character depicting a woman, so for me this begs the question whether it reduces any sort of phallocentrism, or rather, exacerbates it.

To this, we must understand why Spongebob is put in these situations himself. Why is Spongebob the one character whose masculinity is constantly disregarded. There are plenty of other examples of Spongebob ‘playing’ a woman by wearing feminine clothes. In fact, it’s quite often. So, why does this happen so often compared to other characters?

These questions have complicated answers, but a key concept in understanding Spongebob’s gender agency resides in a major recurring motif of the show: youth. He is the youngest of the main characters, and his youth is preserved by several factors. One of which, and ultimately the most important, is that he does not have his boating or (drivers) license. For most of us in the real world, this is a freedom that comes with aging and adulthood. To own or drive a car is a symbol of freedom resembling our maturity/ respect gained from the law due to our age and knowledge. For Spongebob, he cannot enjoy these freedoms, and given that he never passes his driver’s test, he is forever a boy. Because of this, Spongebob’s masculinity is severly limited. After all, he is just a boy, and so his masculinity can only go so far.

This motif of youth ultimately serves as a way to justify Spongebob’s femininity throughout the show, and the recurring pattern we see of him dressing up as a woman or even playing a spouse.

 

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?

 

Citations:

Carol J. Clover first introduced her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film back in 1992, followed by a second edition in 2015. During the 23 years that have passed between these publications, the landscape of horror films have undergone significant changes which complicated and thoroughly reworked her famous concept of the “final girl”. As new horror films emerge and older ones are revived through sequels, prequels, and remakes, the meaning of this trope continues to evolve and reflects both cultural shifts and the commercial reworking of the genre. And so, I decided to make my keyword “deconstruct” which was found and discussed in Rob Pope’s work Creativity: Theory, History, Practice. 

Ironically enough, the deconstruction of Clover’s arguments reflect the approach I am taking in my own thesis. Iconic horror films from the late 1970s, such as Alien (1979) and Halloween (1978), have seen a resurgence in popularity, particularly through their modern reboots and continuations. These recent adaptations reveal how filmmakers are “deconstructing” the narratives of the past as well as reflecting changes in gender dynamics, audience expectations, and genre conventions. Even more, classic films like Beetlejuice (1988), which originally sat outside the traditional horror category, have also been transformed. They have gained renewed attention, not just through film but through other mediums such as the Beetlejuice musical, which has gained popularity through social media.

The trajectory of horror (trajectory is one of the words I was thinking of using), from its fear-inducing roots to its current re-workings and revivals suggests an ongoing negotiation between nostalgia and innovation. This shift illuminates how cultural plasticity, an idea found in Pope’s Creativity: Theory, History, Practice-is at play, particularly within capitalist consumerism, where familiar narratives are rehashed and adapted for new audiences. “Here, by ‘deconstruction’ Bordo means that not only can we remove, replace or add on parts (as in a machine), we can also transform and develop the material itself (as in an organism). This new materiality she calls ‘cultural plasticity’; and the capacity – or claim – to mould it she attributes to ‘an ideology fuelled by fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, an ideology of limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed the very materiality of the body’ (p. 142). This ideology, as the rest of the essay makes explicit, is based on an economics of capitalist consumerism and is articulated through a notionally democratic politics of individual freedom.” (Pope, 48). Through their cyclical remakes and revisions, horror films offer a clear lens to explore how older ideologies are reworked to fit modern sensibilities, especially when it comes to the “final girl” and her symbolic resonance across generations. 

Works Cited

Pope, Rob. Creativity: Theory, History, Practice. Routledge, 2005. 

Though the primary conflict of Hitchcock’s film “Rear Window” is the murder of a neighborhood woman, the primary source of personal conflict the protagonist Jeffries faces is marriage. Throughout the film, serving as a backdrop to the murder plot, Jeffries struggles with his relationship with his girlfriend Lisa, who is eager to get married. Jeffries believes Lisa is “too perfect” to marry; more significantly, he is convinced he will become trapped by marrying her and will no longer be able to work his dangerous job as a photojournalist.  

Jeffries’s anxieties about marriage are reflected in the lives of the neighbors he observes. There is the young newlywed couple that moves into an apartment at the beginning of the film. Though their initial happiness is clear, Jeffries begins to see the husband wearily smoke out their window, and notices his annoyed expression when his wife beseechingly calls him inside. The tension of this relationship grows, culminating in a spat between the couple at the end of the film, and shattering the illusion of marital bliss.  

Representing the alternative to this couple is a lonely single woman, who hosts pantomime dinners with imaginary dates. Jeffries is surprised to see her have an actual date one night, then watches as the man storms out following an uncomfortable exchange. He later notices the unhappy woman appearing to contemplate suicide. Similarly, an outwardly content young woman is revealed to only be truly happy once her husband, a soldier, returns to her at the end of the film. These two women, in contrast to the newlywed couple, seemingly represent the importance of companionship and the fear of being alone. 

Finally, the most central figures are the Thorwalds, around which the murder mystery revolves. Mrs. Thorwald is exactly the sort of nagging, controlling wife Jeffries fears. When Jeffries explains to his editor over a phone call his reluctance to marry Lisa, he is shown looking out at the Thorwald’s apartment. Through this framing decision, the film reveals how the Thorwald’s dynamic reflects Jeffries’s own relationship concerns. The extreme animosity of the Thorwald’s relationship seems to represent the potential outcome of the newlyweds’ marriage, as well as Jeffries’s fears for his own union with Lisa. However, the single woman and the wife of the soldier also reveal the importance of companionship, which complicates the issue. By observing his neighbors’ lives, Jeffries is able to consider his own relationship concerns while also having the uncomplicated notion of a traditional marriage tested.

In prepping to write a thesis on postcolonial literature, I keep encountering the word “subaltern.” Writing Analytically and “The Method” tell us to pay attention to repetition, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a solid definition of the term, so this is as good a keyword as any to begin.

Culler credits keywords to Raymond Williams, a scholar I first encountered in Professor Seiler’s course “The Generational.” This is coincidentally also the class that inspired this thesis project (I’ve been a bit of a Williams fangirl ever since). As part of the final project, we were tasked with assembling a generational anthology; I chose to try and chronicle “the Partitioned generation” in novels. When it comes to the historical record of Partition, and specifically that of chronicling violence, women’s’ voices are largely absent from the archives. Fiction seems to play a significant role in bridging this gap, leading one to ask where real-life women fit into the narrative. This is where the subaltern fits in.

In A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonialism by Robert J. C. Young, Young reiterates the views of Gayatri Spivak in regard to the subaltern, stating that “particularly in the case of women, especially working-class women or women of color, they are just absent: we do not find their voice because they were never able to be in a position to speak” (Young 24). The subaltern refers to those pushed to the margins of society because they do not have a platform or the ability to speak in the colonizer’s language. This explanation of “the subaltern” by Young echoes Culler’s description of keywords. According to Culler, Williams “sought to recover and explore a popular working-class culture that had been lost sight of as culture was identified with high literature” (Culler 45). Working class culture was lost in the creation of a literary canon, just as women’s voices were lost in the creation of a historical canon.

In the context of my own research, there is no equivalent word for rape in Urdu; works translated from Urdu into English (an attempt to translate the subaltern) are forced to use figurative language or visual representations of silence—things along the lines of ellipses and em dashes. To answer Spivak’s question in the context of women and Partition narratives, the subaltern definitely cannot speak on sexual violence if a word for rape does not exist.

Works Cited
Young, Robert J. C. A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonialism. Oxford University Press, 2020.

The word “culture” is used in Jonathan Culler’s third chapter in “Literary Theory A Very Short Introduction” in several different contexts. As this chapter is about cultural studies, the word “culture” itself is used both within and apart from the context of cultural studies. Culler’s use of the word “culture” differs with every sentence he uses it in. Often, the word “culture” is used to describe both a body of people and the social ecosystem that they exist in. It’s a term that looks at a greater shared understanding of how things work, like on page 45 when Culler describes the slight differences in violent sports. He compares wrestling and boxing and explains how the audiences and reactions of the performers in both of these fields are very different, despite having many similarities in their activities. He then states, “Investigating cultural practices from high literature to fashion and food, Barthes example encouraged the reading of the connotations of cultural images and analysis of the social functioning of the strange constructions of culture.” In this, he is understanding something that drives the sport, something that makes the sport what it is– its “construction”. Culler examines how even minor cultural differences, such as mannerisms or audience reactions, shape the experience of similar activities, like wrestling and boxing. These differences are so significant that they make them culturally distinct despite their shared nature of being violence-based sports.
Separately, Culler describes culture as something similar to a system, rather than just being the characteristics of a group of people. He states, “Barthes is especially interested in demystifying what in culture comes to seem natural by showing that it is based on contingent, historical constructions. In analysing cultural practices, he identifies the underlying conventions and their social implications.” Specifically, the word “in” before culture labels it as something that can be entered or participated in, but is not necessarily something you can exit. Culler’s word choices also enforced this by explaining “culture” as a system. He states, “But what is the relation between literary studies and cultural studies? In its broadest conception, the project of cultural studies to understand the functioning of culture, particularly in the moden fury.” Culler talks about how culture is something that needs to ”function” on its own because it is so intricate that it needs to feed itself to expand itself. He suggests that culture functions like a self-sustaining system. It continuously expands through participation and social interaction. Since culture is present in all aspects of life, one cant necessarily “exit” it either. It is an ongoing experience that evolves with time.
However, what is also important to note is Culler’s reuse of the word “construction.” Although “culture” is being looked at in a different light in this passage, there are still notes of previous perceptions of it previously. I think that this emphasizes how every way that “culture” can be looked at comes back to the same fundamental properties of being a build-up of what makes a group of people. So, Culler’s keyword, “culture” has various meanings that point to similar ideas. The way he describes culture expands on how even the idea of culture is always growing and changing, similar to how his perception and definition of it kept evolving and changing throughout the text.

For this blog post, I want to focus on a keyword that was central to Laura Mulvey’s essay—scopophilia. Once defined, it is easy to see why the concept comes up in an essay discussing women’s role in film as a passive object to be viewed and the broader theme of voyeurism in Rear Window. Though Jeff’s tendency to be a Peeping Tom doesn’t seem to derive from any sense of sexual pleasure, his voyeurism does open up conversations about the roles that men and women play in film and how they’re tied to sexual and gender-based binaries, even if there’s no sex involved. Mulvey discusses the image of women in cinema as an icon, but a passive one, to be looked at by their male love interest. But, she contends, once the leading lady becomes committed to the leading man, she “becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalized sexuality…”

When I read this, it was impossible not to immediately think of Lisa and her wardrobe. Throughout the film, Lisa dons a variety of stunning outfits which are both expensive and highly fashionable. It’s a part of who she is and how she presents herself. Jeff may not understand why she pays so much money for her clothes, but he certainly appreciates how beautiful she looks in them. But at the end of the film, we see Lisa in a blouse and jeans, a much more dressed down outfit compared to everything else she’s worn (even her pajamas are glamorous). I initially considered it to be a sign of her showing she was willing to change in order to be with Jeff since he viewed their lifestyles as too different, but Mulvey’s argument made me see differently, even though she wasn’t writing specifically about Rear Window. Of women in film, she says, “her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone.” Lisa’s casual attire can be attributed to her trying to show Jeff she can live in his world, but it can also be part of the larger trend that Mulvey discusses that forces female characters to make themselves smaller and less sexy once they’re in a relationship. In reality, it’s likely both. Part of what convinces Jeff that he cannot marry Lisa is how glamorous and refined she is. He enjoys her beauty and her fine outfits, but he cannot picture a life where she fits into his exactly as she is. Mulvey’s argument would suggest that Jeff cannot handle the thought of other people perceiving Lisa the way he does and getting to see her in those same outfits. His scopophilia makes it so that he needs to know that no one else sees the version of Lisa that he does. She can only be sexy and desirable with him, hence her need to change her way of dressing. Lisa is the subject of Jeff’s scopophilia, which is why she is the only one who makes any concessions in the relationship.

            The goal of this blog post is to continue with my previous work with regards to gender roles and masculinity within Rear Window and create a connection to one of the sources I am interested in writing about for my thesis, Giovanni’s Room. Last time I argued that Jefferies is subservient to Lisa. He is less wealthy that she is, and physically less able, thus the position of power, on the surface, seems to lie with Lisa.

            Yet, as Belton argues, Jefferies still holds an incredible amount of power in the relationship. He is in charge, in large part because he has an absolutely beautiful woman falling over herself to try to win him over. The reason that Jefferies is opposed to entering into a relationship with Lisa is because he is scared of commitment, and instead finds he would prefer to continue his life as a bachelor. In Rear Window Jefferies is the central masculine figure. As Belton points out, he is the only competent man in the entire movie. The detective is bumbling and slow, and the other male character who has dialogue is a murder who buried part of his wife in his flower beds. Thus, Jefferies cements himself as the main masculine figure in the movie.

            Part of my interest in writing the Senior Thesis is on the role of masculinity in the plot and decision making in male main characters. This stems mainly from my interest in the novel Giovanni’s Room. The novel and Rear Window are similar in that the narrator of the novel, David, and Jefferies are opposed to entering into a relationship with their main love interest. David’s reasoning is very different from Jefferies’. David’s main concern is that he does not believe it is possible to achieve happiness in a homosexual relationship, and two he is terrified by the potential social stigma he would face. For David living a life with Giovanni is an impossibility. While Jefferies’ main concerned is with a loss of independence.

            Yet, the central concern for both main characters is a loss of a part of themselves. Jefferies believes once he’s married, he will no longer be able to be the exciting and risk-taking photographer. While, for David, entering into a relationship with Giovanni would mean the death of the version of himself that he has believed to exist for his entire life. It means completely reinventing himself as a new man.

While watching Rear Window one pattern I noticed was that of women serving as the caretakers of the men in their lives. Take Stella for instance; the first time we see her, Stella is there to take care of Jefferies in his injured state. Even when Stella isn’t acting as Jefferies’ nurse while they spy on Mr. Thorwald towards the end of the film, she is still taking care of Jefferies. Stella does this by checking for evidence in Mr. Thorwald’s garden for Jefferies and going to bail Lisa out of jail since Jefferies is unable to do so himself.

We see this pattern continue in Lisa’s interactions with Jefferies throughout the film. Like Stella, in the sequence where we’re introduced to Lisa, she is taking care of Jefferies by turning on the lights, setting the table and getting dinner together for him. She also tries to cheer him up from his bored and miserable state by chatting and trying to get him to look on the bright side by toasting to the start of his last week in a cast. As the film continues, Lisa continues to visit Jefferies and keep him company while he sits in his apartment. At the climax of the film, Lisa even helps Jefferies with his “investigation” of Mr. Thorwald by checking both his garden and apartment for evidence. As the film ends, Lisa is shown reading a book about the Himalayas in Jefferies’ apartment in jeans and a plain button-up shirt, her most casual outfit in the whole film. As she notices that Jefferies is asleep, she switches from her book to a fashion magazine. This scene shows how Lisa changed her lifestyle to fit into Jefferies’ life by giving up her fancy clothes and suppressing her interest in the fashion industry. While some of these acts just seem like her helping Jefferies, they still put Lisa in the role of caretaker because she does these things to make Jefferies happy.

This being said, there is one important break from this pattern: the Thorwalds. In this relationship, the roles are reversed since Mrs. Thorwald is sick and Mr. Thorwald must take care of her. However, this relationship is shown to be an “unsuccessful” one when Mr. Thorwald murders his wife in the middle of the night. In the cases with women as the caretakers, both Stella and Lisa appear to get happy endings by the film’s end, unlike the Thorwalds. By presenting a pattern like this and depicting violence when the pattern is reversed, it’s difficult to ignore how the film seems to push certain gender roles. By providing the female caretakers with happy endings while punishing the male caretaker and the woman receiving care, the film seems to caution women to be the caretakers in their relationships.