Session 7: Symbolic Monsters
1st Global Conference
Friday 1st May 2009 – Sunday 3rd May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
The Demonization of Melusine: ‘Dame de tout le monde disoit bien’ or ‘tresfaulse serpente’?
Eva-Maria Broomer
Manchester University, Manchester, United Kingdom
With her weekly sprouting of a serpent tail and her eventual transformation into a dragon-like monster, the late-medieval figure of Melusine epitomizes the demonization of women in European culture who do not adhere to misogynist conceptions of meek and submissive femininity. Far from being a sign of power and healing originally associated with the serpent, these monstrous features are interpreted as an affliction and cruel punishment. Jean d’Arras’s romance Mélusine ou La Noble Histoire de Lusignan (1393), however, establishes Melusine as the founding mother of the Lusignan dynasty, a purpose that appears to be in direct contradiction to her monstrous status and that of her offspring. Despite these inconsistencies, the story was so effective that it did not only inspire two verse-versions of the tale, Coudrette’s Le Roman de Mélusine (1401) and Thüring von Ringoltingen’s German adaptation entitled Die Historie von der schönen Melusina (1456), but also appeared as one of the first illustrated books to be printed in French in 1478. Since then, she has continued to resurface in literary production across Europe. This paper traces the demonic associations that afflict the Melusine figures in the late-medieval texts as well as in examples of nineteenth century German literature, such as Theodor Fontane’s late novel Der Stechlin (1898) and Fouqué’s novella Undine (1814). Whilst the medieval Melusine’s monstrous nature is expressed physically, the dragons and snakes of the nineteenth century have been relegated to dreams and in figurative speech, without loosing any of their defamatory and oppressive impact.
The demonization of Melusine presents, despite but also because of her status as an object and function of male desire, not a straightforward victimization. This paper discusses how terming Melusine a ‘monster’ or, in later culture, a ‘femme fatale’, is revelatory of fundamental weaknesses and inconsistencies in misogynistic constructions of desire. The resulting contradictions between desire or admiration on one hand and fear or defamation one the other are particularly obvious in the medieval Melusine texts where they contribute to their ‘hermeneutical strangeness’ that lead to fissures in the narrative logic. Whilst appearing less inconsistent on the surface, the fundamental rifts of desire that turns against itself by creating a fatal ‘monster’ also apply to later Melusines. Undine falls much into the same pattern of the wronged yet fatal woman. In Der Stechlin, however, one encounters an additional narrative layer that allows the figure to withdraw from this mechanism: Although all Melusines are demonized to a certain extend not only by the narrator’s description of her monstrous features, but also by individual characters’, and particularly by the male protagonist’s, reactions, in Fontane’s novel all demonization is carried out through characters. This creates a space for alternative constructions of Melusine beyond the subject-object relationship presupposed by misogynist desire. Freud’s fierce condemnation of such a withdrawal, as it is apparent in his essay On Narcissism, reveals the unease this possibility presents for misogyny, turning the ‘hermeneutical challenge’ presented by the demonized Melusine into an ‘epistemological challenge’ presented by the difficulties of theorizing the ‘femme fatale’.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
What Do Women Want
Fiona Peters
Department of Cultural Studies and Film and Screen Studies, Bath Spa University, United Kingdom
According to the psychoanalytic discourses of both Freud and Lacan, sexuality is based on difference, rather than some pre linguistic, essentialist and biologically ordered presence. Lacanian psychoanalysis has been both embraced and critiqued by feminists and other writers on femininity, as failing to successfully account for the lingering notion of femininity as ‘other’, either mystical in content, or in some way evil and threatening. Kristeva develops her conception of the ‘abject’ and its threatening and anxiety-inducing nature, as something inherently feminine She examines the pre-symbolic, ‘semiotic’ domain which she argues is both unnameable within a sexed discourse yet is at the same time part of a vocabulary. Following Lacan’s argument that the Symbolic is signified by the Name-of-the-father, and thus remains complicit with patriarchy, she concentrates specifically on the maternal and its relationship to abjection. In Krisetva’s work the threatening and anxiety-inducing nature of the abject is, however, inexorably linked with pleasure.
In this paper I intend to draw on this theoretical work but step into the contemporary world of ‘post feminism’ and think through some of the ways in which Freud’s question ‘what do women want’ has been submerged under the dubious delights of ‘raunch culture’ celebrity culture, cosmetic surgery and the like. I will consider whether the seemingly ‘free’ and ‘open’ attitudes to women’s sexuality and their sex lives forms part of a liberatory discourse or whether it forms a backlash – a way to neutralise and displace the threatening and ‘evil’ forces of femininity. According to Ariel Levy (in Female Chauvinist Pigs) , raunch culture has adopted the previously peripheral attributes of pornography: ‘A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression we now view as sexual expression.’ In the paper I will question whether this seemingly liberatory post-feminist display of female sexuality and sexual freedom is in fact a reactionary move – a way of neutralising and undermining the power of femininity – negating the strong, ‘evil’ and perverse woman and replacing it with the powerless Barbie doll who poses no risk to patriarchal order whatsoever.
Women: Madness, Witchcraft and the Evil Subjective
June L Leishman & Cathy Di Domenico
School of Social & Health Sciences, University of Abertay, Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom
In the past 25 years feminist theory has opened up the debate about the relationship between gender, mental disorder and the mental health services in ways that have never been examined before. Historically mental disorder has had a gendered bias and authors, such as Phyllis Chesler (2001), Jane Ussher (1991) and Susie Orbach (2009) among others, have enlightened our views on women and mental disorder. In framing women’s madness, consideration has to be given to the discourses of madness which have a long history and in framing women as evil consideration has to be given to ways of managing ‘mad’ women over the centuries where ‘witchcraft’ and ‘lewd’ have been replaced by terms like ‘mad’ or ‘disordered’. Social norms are culturally orientated and madness and evil as signifiers position women within the social order in whichever culture they are from.
The portrait of predominance of female madness is viewed in the historical trajectory of ways of managing ‘mad’ women over the centuries, 16th century madhouses, through the 17th century special wards reserved for prostitutes, unmarried pregnant women and poor women to the modern view of the help-seeking role of women where the uptake of mental health services and people admitted to psychiatric hospitals is predominantly female gendered.
“The general theory that guided doctors’ practice as well as their public pronouncements was that women were by nature weak, dependent and diseased. Thus, women were portrayed as not strong, not competent help-givers but patients.” (Ehrenreich and English , 1979).
This paper seeks to explore the woman as the ‘other’ through the deconstruction of madness and evil from a historical and cultural lens. It also compares and contrasts belief systems and their imprint on existing and diaspora settler communities in terms of current trends and events. This is important as such views concerning magic and witchcraft are not static but vary across cultures and communities, and are subject to modifications and even intensification in new contexts and over time as illustrated by amalgamations of both religion and witchcraft regarded as compatible in many societies. In so doing, the paper explores how the notion of normality varies across different societies and cultures. It traces the impact of multicultural communities in terms of the transfer of attitudes, beliefs and norms to Western societies from countries of origin. It also leads to disturbing questions not only of the labelling and mistreatment of women, in both settler communities in the West and their countries of origin, but also the extent to which certain beliefs become normalised and indoctrinated. Thus, they can be imbibed and even perpetuated by women themselves against other women behind the veil of community and culture, and the belief in occult forces as deeply held, in spite of the education, religion and social class of the individuals (Kohnert, 1996). The argument is made that the continued use of these beliefs in magic, witchcraft and madness, and their explicit and often negative association with women, is symptomatic of exertions of power in the subjugation of women in ensuring a preservation of generally patriarchal structures of social control and dominance
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