Session 10(b): Evil Masculine

Concurrent Session 10b: Evil Masculine
Chair: Lauren Gallow

Deconstucted Masculine Evil in Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber Stories
Aytül Özüm, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

Fairy-tales are thought to form the major segment of the literature of consolation, but what if these stories resist re-presenting the consoling demarcation of the fairy-tale and fabricate a subverted form of the monstrous and the evil? In some of the stories of The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter is concerned not only with the shortcomings of conventional representations of gender, but also with different models of deconstructed masculine evil which take various shapes in evil and wicked female format. In the stories, the image of the female which is mostly associated with the good, the decent, the innocent and naive in most of the traditional fairy-tales is rendered either to have inclinations towards pervert sexual practices or to be violently harmful for the opposite sex. In re-telling such well-known fairy-tales as “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty” respectively in the stories entitled “Bloody Chamber,” “Puss in Boots,” “Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love,” Carter, in an interview, claims to have used “the latent content of those traditional stories” and “that latent content is violently sexual.” It is impossible to evaluate these stories in The Bloody Chamber independently from Carter’s The Sadeian Woman which was published in the same year, in 1979. The latter work received antithetical criticism from two feminist critics of pornography, Susanne Kappeler and Linda Williams accusing Carter of valuing the pornographic – in the name of equal rights and opportunities – by employing the literary. However, what Carter depicts in The Sadeian Woman is not the mere objectification of the female to the pervert male world, but reinforcing the idea of separation of women’s sexuality from their reproductive function. In The Bloody Chamber stories, Carter also acknowledges Marquise de Sade’s belief that “it would only be through the medium of sexual violence that women might heal themselves of their socially inflicted scars, in a praxis of destruction and sacrilege.” She also asserts that Sade “put pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women …” In the stories selected from The Bloody Chamber, Carter not only deconstructs but also discloses the fixity of the frame that encloses the motif of the masculine evil to one single referent by playing with the slippery ground where content and form of the fairy tales are fabricated. Hence, in the stories the representation of the female evil in the reappropriation of the fairy tales saves the woman subject from being victimized in the traditionally acknowledged frameworks

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Patriliny and Wickedness in the Sanskrit Mahabharata
Simon Brodbeck
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom

This paper will share some results of a publicly-funded research project pursued over the past three years in London.
The paper will first introduce the Sanskrit Mahabharata, a large Indian narrative text from the early centuries of the Common Era, which describes many generations in the royal family of Hastinapura (a genealogy will be provided), dwelling particularly upon those generations which feature great wars.
The paper will then explore four related issues:
(1) The extent to which the text’s royal patrilineal model necessitates the alienation of women from their natal families and their (imposed or voluntary) loyalty to their spouse’s family, with a corresponding characterisation of women as inherently wicked.
(2) The reverse process for men, and the tendency of junior and senior lines to compete for the patriline. There is often conflict between cousins, which can be seen in terms of friction between different understandings of ‘natal family’: is one loyal to one’s father, or to one’s patriline as a whole? Attention will be paid to the tendency retrospectively to portray the losers in such conflicts as wicked.
(3) The text’s transcendental understanding of its great intra-patrilineal war as a cosmic conflict between gods and demons temporarily embodied as human beings. It will be argued that this interpretive dimension duplicates the aforementioned competition between junior and senior lines; but by doing so at a cosmic level, it normalises it.
(4) The patrilineal inheritance of enmities between patrilines, and the escalation of feuds through the generations in ‘tit for tat’ violence. Here the text’s approach seems to resist taking sides (despite tracing many such feuds to a point of origin); genocidal solutions are shown as unworkable, and alternative solutions are presented.
In conclusion, the paper will suggest some implications of this patrilineal model for our understandings of the modern world.

Sympathy for the Devil: The Hero is a Terrorist in ‘V For Vendetta’
Margarita Carretero-Gonzelez
University of Granada, Spain

Based on the comic book series published in the early 80s, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, V for Vendetta did not go unnoticed when it was finally released on spring 2006. Originally intended to be screened on 4th November 2005, the London bombings of almost four months before were too fresh for readers to confront one of the last scenes of the film, in which the Houses of Parliament are blown up in the same way as the one chosen to carry out the attacks in London. Whether we take the view that the film constitutes an apology for terrorism or, instead, offers a warning about the shape of things to come, V for Vendetta certainly does not leave the post- 9/11, 3/11, 7/7 viewer indifferent, even if the central theme of the story revolves around the old tale of sheer, coldly served revenge.
In this paper I will be looking at the way V for Vendetta problematizes such a sensitive issue as terrorism in a dystopian setting that, however exaggerated, bears striking similarities with our world at the beginning of the 21st century, where fear of terror is actually impelling governments to take drastic measures to increase safety, while jeopardizing freedom and, on some occasions, even trespassing basic human rights. The story is not new: Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell are among those who warned us about the dangers of totalitarian regimes, even those based on originally honest intentions. Their heroes, however, were victims of the system, not terrorists who actively fought against it. V’s intentions are good, even honourable, directed to give the power back to the people, but he is moved by a personal vendetta that prevents us from agreeing with some of his methods, especially when they involve the deaths of people who, like him, are just victims of the system. And yet, if we find our rational mind questioning the protagonist’s methods, why do we feel the urge to see him triumph? Why, when Evey hesitates to pull the lever to start the train which will blow up Parliament, do we mentally encourage her to do it? Why do we rejoice with the firework display? Are we really sympathising with the devil or is it simply that, again, it’s not easy to point who the devil is?