Session 8: Evil Pre- and Post- Modern
Session 8: Evil Pre- and Post- Modern
Chair: Joel Westerdale
Tall, Dark, and Deadly: Fairytale Bluebeard as Icon Of Evil in the Modern Story
Amy Lee Bell
Department of English, Belmont University. Nashville, TN, USA
First published in Tales of Mother Goose in 1697, the chilling fairytale Bluebeard was removed from the canon of children’s stories by the early 20th century and has since become “culturally invisible.” Considered too “realistically violent” for children, the Bluebeard tales mutated and reemerged in the adults-only genres of modern Gothic, horror and suspense. The key elements of the original Bluebeard stories—a patriarchal, predatory man with skeletons (literally) in his closet v. a courageous female victim who triumphs through resourcefulness—are deeply rooted in cultural memory and flourish in modern story. While avatars of Bluebeard rarely share his name, they are identifiable through shared personality traits and pathologies, known as the “Bluebeard Syndrome.”
The Bluebeard figure is a mysterious, obsessive/compulsive collector/consumer and serial murderer whose victims always suffer. He is coldly vicious, prone to kidnapping and an occasional cannibal, but can also be suave, charming, and darkly alluring—like Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. The masters of story noir wielded Bluebeard’s skeleton key in novels like Rebecca and films such as Notorious and Secrets Beyond the Door. More recent modernizations of Bluebeard-as-misogynist-husband include Margaret Atwood’s Bluebeard’s Egg and films like Sleeping with the Enemy. The creepy, compulsive kidnapper Bluebeard can be found in John Fowles’ The Collector and Frank Miller’s SinCity. In pitting psychotic villains Hannibal Lector and Jame Gumb (and his “girl suit of real girls”) against plucky Clarice Starling, Thomas Harris tapped into the latent memory—and fear—of Bluebeard and his mutilated female victims. Unlike ghost stories and beast fables, Bluebeard tales are substantiated by real-life events. Actual kidnappers and deranged serial killers make fictional Bluebeards all the more terrifying.
Since the success of Silence of the Lambs, the Bluebeard figure has been an icon of evil in pop-culture. Names change, but the wickedness remains.
Postmodern Approach to Evil and Human Wickedness in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’
Atousa Ebrahimi
English Literature Department, Islamic Azad University, Ghaemshahr Branch, Iran
Toni Morrison, (Chloe Anthony Wofford), (1931- ), the contemporary African-American novelist is undoubtedly one of the extremely outstanding figures in the realm of postmodern literature. She achieved this position through her masterpiece, “Beloved” which brought her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize and the 1998 Nobel Prize for fiction.
Centering on the theme of slavery, the novel is the story of an emancipated slave woman named “Seth” who killed one of her children and attempted at killing the others rather than allow them to be taken back into slavery.
Greatly influenced by Garcia Marquez, Morrison created a great postmodern work in which she explores themes of love, family, self possession and the most significant of all, slavery and cruelty. Her work is a brilliant postmodern work in terms of the powerful language which shapes its architecture, unique symbols, constant and sometimes very quick shifts between past and present, multi-perspective narration, fragmentary and different narrative voices extremely close to the consciousness of the characters and finally, realistic settings and characters and unrealistic events.
The slavery of the blacks and the brutality and wickedness of the whites and sometimes of the blacks come to the center of attention. Though they are not new subject matters to handle in fiction, they are given a fresh and unique touch by Morison. The mentioned themes respectfully appear in Beloved’s cruelty towards Seth , both as a ghost and later as a young girl (symbolizing the legacy of slavery), and the relationship between Seth and the school teacher and the black community. Human evil is further referred to in the memories of “Paul D.” of the “Sweet Home”.
Through an effective use of unconventional symbols, a powerful language and a strongly built narration, Morrison proves her mastery over the postmodern features of the novel which results in a unique and everlasting masterpiece.
The Leverage Effect of Evil
Briony Kapoor
Poet, Part of the Positive Psychology Movement and a Moral Philosopher, United Kingdom
Viewed as a continuum, human behaviour is widely classified as better or worse with only the greater extremes at either end very clearly recognised and identified as either good or evil. At these ends there is a reluctance to even allow that actions may be mixed. At the centre of the continuum, however, where most behaviour falls, there is so much of a mix of good and bad in both motives and outcomes that generally no attempt is made to form a determined classification. Allowances are made and by and large judgements are not made.
A way of looking at the sort of things that happen to ordinary people in every day situations is to consider a good action, give it an ascribed value and then to deduct a value, similarly ascribed, to the bad or reducing aspects. Reduction in the overall value of the good act may be caused by the motive being mixed. Alternatively an outcome could be of reduced effectiveness because the recipient of the good action is unsuitable in a variety of ways. The recipient might also be unable to benefit because of deliberate obstruction. The value of a good action will therefore be qualified, neutralised or made bad by the total of the overall situation.
In describing a number of such every day occasions an attempt will be made to discover the value of the good action and the amount by which this action is reduced by the bad aspects within the situation. A particular point will be the emotional intensity of the participants in the perspective of the ethics of care where care is closely related to meaning. Higher values are given subjectively where emotional intensity is greater. The sort of negative value that reduces goodness will be divided into several broad categories for which a human has more or less responsibility. The need for recognition of a continual intuitive consciousness of one’s position within a moral dynamic will be suggested.
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