Session 14: Mars vs. Venus

Session 14: Mars vs. Venus
Chair: Chris Bell

Bring Your Home Back to Life! The Malevolent House in Shirley
Jackson and Stephen King
Dara Patricia Downey
Department of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Stephen King’s novels, especially Salem’s Lot and The Shining, as well as the non-fictional Danse Macabre, are littered with direct and indirect allusions to Shirley Jackson, the now much-neglected author of some of the most famous works of the uncanny of the 1950s. Her novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle are classics of the genre. However, although King sees himself as following in Jackson’s footsteps, and uses these allusions as a means of situating himself within a larger context of popular culture and horror writers, King and Jackson take very different, indeed diametrically opposed, approaches to the motif of the haunted, personified, and actively malignant house.
Jackson was clearly influenced by the writings of the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and the anthropologist Mircea Eliade, both of whom were her contemporaries. Using their ideas of sacred and intimate space, of pollution and taboo, in Hill House, Jackson posits an excessive and inhuman cleanliness, both literal and figurative, as responsible for creating ‘evil in the face of a house’. Conversely, King’s evil houses tend to be the result of the presence of the abject, of actual and moral filthiness, of the memories of evil deeds which are mirrored by the defilement and disorder of their interiors. Jackson’s conception of evil is based thus on absence, and depicts evil as a pre-existing force that is ‘without concession to humanity’, indeed, that bears no relation to human actions whatsoever, but simply takes up residence in a house for its own inscrutable reasons. For King, on the other hand, evil is only ever the result of human actions, which leave their trace on the places which people have inhabited. This is further complicated by the way in which, in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson comes to see the evil of an evil house as a relative quality, dependent upon whether one is an inhabitant or an outsider. Thus, I hope to show that the points of contact between the two authors constitute a dialogue on the nature and source of evil.

Boys Will be Boys, Girls Will be Girls: Language and Subcultures of Violence
Richard Bryan
University of Tennessee, USA

One conception of social violence holds that there are “violent subcultures,” localized communities within the larger culture wherein violence is more acceptable and prevalent. While some aspects of this traditional view have been exploded, linguistically reinforced codes of behaviour within certain subgroups still appear to create or increase violence. However disheartening it is to acknowledge the many ways human beings harm one another by means of language, more disturbing is the extent to which patterns of language, aggression, and violence become circumscribing and self-perpetuating.
The playwrights known collectively as the New Brutalists or the New Nihilists—a group that includes Anthony Neilson, Judy Upton, Rebecca Prichard, and Martin McDonagh—write plays wherein violence is foregrounded and often graphic. To audiences, this violence may seem unpredictable and unprovoked because its genesis and development are generally obscured. However, the contemporary social sciences, in particular ideas introduced by Hans Toch in his ground-breaking work Violent Men and by the pioneering work of Anne Campbell regarding violence among women, provide ways of accounting for and better understanding that language plays a key role in the formation of both cycles and subcultures of violence. When applied to Neilson’s Penetrator, to Upton’s Bruises, to Prichard’s Yard Gal, and to McDonagh’s canon in general, these sociological theories allow audiences to see the violence in these plays as the result of specific linguistic practices and, therefore, to interpret this violence as predictable, delimiting, and communicable.

Wicked Women: The Menace Lurking Behind Female Independence
Margarita Carretero-Gonzalez and Maria Elena Rodriguez-Martin
Departamento de Filologías Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Campus Universitario de Cartuja, Granada, Spain

Witches, spinsters, rich widows who decide not to remarry or unloving stepmothers in control of the power of an absent father, independent women have traditionally been portrayed as a menace for the order established by patriarchal society. “An abominable sort of conceited independence”, are the words used by Miss Bingley in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to abuse Elizabeth Bennet’s decision to walk around alone in the country in order to see her ill sister, whereas still nowadays, a woman who decides not to adapt herself to the traditional roles established for her – freely rejecting, for instance, marriage or maternity – is seen in some quarters as a weird specimen going against what nature has intended for her.
This female independence has very often taken the form in popular representations of the collective imagination – from traditional folk tales to contemporary Hollywood movies – of wicked, evil women who sometimes are the worst enemies to their own sex. The aim of this paper is to have a look at the ways these female stereotypes have been portrayed in literature and films. Cinderella’s stepmother or the Marquise of Merteuil in Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, are some of a multitude of instances found in discourses taken from different media portraying women abused for refusing to yield submissively to the image of virtue dictated by the established social order.