Female subjectivity as primal sisterhood: from feminist film theory to feminine horror in Ginger Snaps and The Descent

September24

A new piece from now-serial contributor, Aiyesha McInerney:

Part I

Introduction

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory had many implications for the study of cinema, and this essay aims to first delineate the way in which these implications have influenced and challenged feminist film theory. Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” raised several issues which have been taken up by feminist film theorists since; as primary examples in relation to horror cinema I use Barbara Creed and Carol Clover, whose works on the monstrous-feminine and the slasher film (respectively) are both seminal and deeply indebted to Mulvey’s theory. The examination of those sources in relation to Mulvey’s theory concludes Part I of this essay.

Part II will analyse two modern horror films which, I argue, take as their subject woman and the feminine in ways which challenge and oppose what Mulvey calls “the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (Mulvey 485). This essay will argue that it is now possible to attempt an analysis of some – by no means all – modern horror cinema, which occupies a position outside of traditional or mainstream patriarchal codification, a position referred to (and henceforth described) as primal sisterhood. ¹

Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory and its implications.

In her paper “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Mulvey posits that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form,” but that “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (Mulvey 483). She goes on to describe woman’s central place in the ordering of the patriarchal, and her constitution as signifier of phallic lack; symbolically, woman “as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat” (Ibid. 493).

It was this idea of woman not only as signifier of castration, but as deadly castrator herself, that Barbara Creed theorised in The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), taking as her starting point a lack of discussion of “the representation of woman-as-monster. Instead,” Creed states, “emphasis has been on woman as victim of the (mainly male) monster” (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 1). But Creed’s analysis by no means suggests that the presence of the monstrous-feminine in cinema indicates a break from the structures of patriarchal language which Mulvey aimed to attack (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 7, Mulvey 484 respectively). Instead, the monstrous-feminine “speaks more to us about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (Creed Ibid.). In effect, whilst theorising the monstrous-feminine gives us access to images of woman previously repressed, it does not constitute a theory of the “female unconscious” independent of phallocentric theory. Nonetheless, to challenge the phallocentric ordering of the unconscious as represented in film is what Mulvey sought.

Carol Clover took Mulvey’s theory (among others) and used the slasher film to demonstrate how the gaze has changed in modern horror – and not just the gaze, but the modes of gender identification at work in cinema. Sue Thornham states in Feminist Film Theory: a reader that Clover argues for an “ambiguous and oscillating gender identity of the slasher film’s Final Girl (which) allows its male spectator, too, to oscillate between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ viewing positions” (230-231).

But in Clover’s own words it is more than that; in relation to Mulvey’s theory (here quoting Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”):

“The classic split between ‘spectacle and narrative, which ‘supposes the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen’, is at least unsettled in the slasher film. When the Final Girl…assumes the ‘active investigating gaze’, she exactly reverses the look, making a spectacle of the killer and a spectator of herself.

(…)The gaze becomes, at least for awhile, female. More to the point, the female exercise of scopic control results not in her annihilation, in the manner of classic cinema, but in her triumph; indeed, her triumph depends on her assumption of the gaze.” (Clover 245)

What Clover argues the slasher film does, and I argue, what the following films attempt, is what Mulvey called for in her article; a breaking down of dominating, structuring convention, and a constitution of the feminine which does not depend solely on the codes of the patriarchal unconscious in order to be made intelligible. ²

Part II

Primal Sisterhood versus Female Solidarity in Ginger Snaps.

“Woman, animal, death,” Barbara Creed argues, “they are inextricably linked” (Creed Phallic Panic 25). For Creed, they form the essential features of what she calls the primal uncanny (Ibid. 24). In Ginger Snaps, we are clearly in the realm of the primal uncanny; it is the accompanying idea of “sisterhood” which gives us trouble here. ³

In Sue Short’s analysis of Ginger Snaps she quotes Molly Haskell, “framed very much as a lament”, asking the question “where…is the camaraderie, the much vaunted mutual support among women?” (Short 88-89). One of Short’s concerns is “the difficulties of establishing female solidarity, and the greater tendency to depict women in competition with one another” (Ibid.88). The idea that there should be any kind of female solidarity at all is something Ginger Snaps toys with; the sisters Ginger and Brigitte, despite a blood pact which appears twice in the film – and at the end, its import is magnified and transformed by the transference of the lycanthropic virus from one sister to the other – are still divided in the realm of sex, puberty and identity, to the extent that one sister must kill the other, but not before becoming her. For Haskell, this undermines “feminist” notions of unity; but for critical feminism, and by extension I argue the female unconscious (because when we are in the realm of the primal as we are in Ginger Snaps, I argue that we are dealing with issues of the female unconscious) this is the issue of the female subject – within feminism, within society – described perfectly.

Sue Short points to the depiction of women in competition with one another in order to draw this link with Haskell’s lament, essentially arguing that female characters such as Ginger and Brigitte represent the disintegration of the female subject, pointing to rivalry, jealousy and aggression as things which attack female kinship and ultimately destroy it – “Brigitte holds her dead sister…more wolf than human…‘not even related any more’” (Short 98). According to Short, “Brigitte is ultimately forced to make a separation, exclaiming… ‘I’m not dying in this room with you’” – a separation which I do not believe exists, as Brigitte, infected voluntarily with lycanthropy, holds her sister in her arms as she dies. The phrase “I’m not dying in this room with you” can be read to emphasise Brigitte’s wish for Ginger to survive, breaking not only the curse of lycanthropy but the suicide pact the sisters have made and renewed with lycanthropy. Here, it is the “camaraderie” and “solidarity” of the female – expressed by blood pact – which must be broken in order for the feminine to survive, suggesting that the survival of the feminine is more than just a matter of keeping the female subject “solid”.

Ginger Snaps is more than a cautionary tale; it is a complex rendering of the fight to define the female subject against a flattened, “universal” image, regardless of whether any of the females concerned achieve success. It is this fight which Short labels “competition” and “rivalry”, setting the struggle against an unfortunately sexist background which dictates that women should stick together, and that competitive, aggressive behaviour towards other females is “masculine”, a stance Creed criticises and which I refer to above in Part I.

The cautionary aspect of such a reading is further undermined by the “accidental kill” – of all the murder and mayhem executed by Ginger, it is the off-hand, accidental death of Trina which threatens the sisters the most. This is a motif found in both Ginger Snaps and The Descent, but its wider significance is beyond the scope of this essay.

Instead, if we can view the overriding themes of Ginger Snaps as the unifying factors of a kind of primal femininity – blood/fluids/death, woman/sexuality/violence, animal/nature/the pre-patriarchal – then we can examine Ginger (who represents almost all these aspects) and Brigitte (seemingly a pre-patriarchal, pre-sexual girl who nonetheless gets her hands dirty, assuming Ginger’s “identity” as a werewolf in order to find a cure for her sister by engaging in a tense relationship with an overtly mature male figure and eventually killing her sister in a bloody battle), and the other significant female figures of the film (Pamela, the mother who takes responsibility for Trina’s death against all logic, and Trina, the school bitch who Ginger accidentally kills with little aggression and less sympathy), as signifying not aspects of a divided self but aspects of a female subject which, by nature, is in competition with itself and which is constituted (not deconstituted) in the violence of such exchanges. If this is not an obviously “empowering” view of the emergence of a female unconscious order to rival the patriarchal, then we must question the assumption that such an emergence should be “empowering” at all.

Feminism, Cannibalism, and the Female Subject in The Descent.

Here too we are clearly in the realm of the primal – six women descend into the twisting bowels of the earth, muck about in a lot of mud, blood and guts, and finally die there – though it is more the abjection of Creed’s theory (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 8-14) than the primal uncanny itself. However, abjection in relation to the feminine face of the monstrous does not adequately describe the horror delineated by The Descent – of which the abject constitutes only a third of the film’s horrific or monstrous content. Before the six women encounter the deformed, evolved/devolved humanoids which pursue them through pools and caverns full of human and animal remains in all stages of decomposition and eventually eat them, they first voluntarily elect to descend, and in the final sequence each of their deaths (and Sarah’s entombment in her own madness, both physical and symbolic) is in fact a result of each woman’s transgressions against one (or more) of her sisters. It is this painful exercise in subtle horror – the horror of the female subject essentially eating itself, without the use of teeth – that we find compelling in the first two thirds of the film, and which bears fruit in the overt form of the abject in the last third.

Of no small import is the fact that, with the exception of Juno’s accidental butchery of Beth, and Sarah’s subsequent butchering of Juno, all these transgressions are forgiven – or rather, dismissed. Even when it is only us, as an audience, who can comment on the transgression – as when Sarah first enters the cave, finds a bloody fingerprint, but neglects to say anything about it and thereby allows the entire group to descend unwitting into a trap full of cannibals. We forgive her, because she – and we – are then distracted by a flock of bats bursting out of the darkness to frighten Sarah – and us.

Even Juno’s betrayal of Beth, and Beth’s dying message to Sarah, has this element of forgiveness/dismissal – Juno “kills” Beth by stabbing her in the neck with an ice-pick, but Beth’s response is to plead, “don’t leave me”. When Sarah later finds Beth, dying but not yet dead, Beth’s words again are “she did this to me – she left me”, not “she killed me”, or “she stabbed me in the bloody neck”. For Beth, the transgression is not in the accident, but in the emotional betrayal that proceeds it – both hers, when Juno leaves her, and Sarah’s, when Beth rips the necklace from Juno as she falls and discovers Juno’s affair with Sarah’s now-dead husband. It is not the killing female which Beth (and the spectator) finds monstrous, but the idea of the female abandoning itself. This notion is repeated in the final exchange between Sarah and Juno – even though we have followed Sarah’s parallel descent into the primal, animalistic, pre-patriarchal state closer perhaps than we have followed Juno’s, it is still with Juno that our sympathies lie when Sarah butchers her, exacting revenge and leaving her for the monsters. All of this is Juno’s fault – it was her “ego” and misguided wish which trapped the women in the uncharted cave in the first place – yet we sympathise with her because she has been betrayed by her sister.

We can view this interplay between females – females who take on “masculine” roles without recourse to the presence of the male order within the film, females who continuously affect each other with each decision, good or bad, that they make – as describing the problematisation of the female unconscious. Drawing from Creed and Clover, these women are not merely “phallicised” protagonists; they operate in a world which is too female, too abject, too primal – marked as it is by nature, the animal or non-human, by blood, fluids, death, and the pre-patriarchal “cave” or womb of genesis without recourse to sex, where Sarah and Juno are reborn as their primal selves without recourse to the male – to allow them full expression as mere stand-ins for male counterparts. What is described is a spectrum of the female subject, a map of transgression and forgiveness in relation to the self, where the path home is never discovered. But it is a path charted without necessary recourse to the phallic; that there is no clear way out speaks deeply of the feminist nature of the journey.

Conclusion

If Carol Clover was “deeply reluctant to make progressive claims for a body of cinema as spectacularly nasty towards women as the slasher film is,” despite the fact that it does “in its own perverse way and for better or worse, constitute a visible adjustment” (Clover 247), then this essay can profess no such reluctance towards a brand of horror which is uniquely feminine, if no less nasty to its subject.

The Descent and Ginger Snaps may both be purchased on DVD from our online store.

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As a metaphor for the problematised feminine subject, this term and the concepts which I argue it invokes represents an attempt to describe and theorise the female subject and the female unconscious without recourse to a strictly phallocentric theory. This is a possibility which, in the climate of theory in which Mulvey was working at the time of writing “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, did not readily exist, but which I argue does so today. ↩
Whilst it is possible to argue that such a reversal of the “look” coupled with flexible gender identification tendencies in the slasher film merely represents a female “standing in” for a male, in Creed’s words “one response is to argue that she is…a phallicised heroine…reconstituted as masculine” (Creed Monstrous-Feminine 155). But this “does not do justice to the sense of her character as a whole” (Clover 247), and is based as Creed states on “the argument that only phallic masculinity is violent and that femininity is never violent” (Creed Ibid.).

Above all else, states Clover, “in the Final Girl sequence his (the male spectator’s) empathy with what the films define as the female posture is fully engaged…the viewing experience hinges on the emotional assumption of the feminine posture.” (246) ↩
Primal sisterhood here is a metaphor for the problematised female subject. Primal, in that it refers to ideas which ideologically sit outside of or prior to society as ordered symbolically by the patriarchal and the cultured; notions relating to what Creed calls the “primal uncanny” – “woman, animal, death” (Phallic Panic 25) – and sisterhood, to refer to a notion of the feminine or the female relating to itself which is not primarily defined either by maternity or sexual difference, but which is instead defined as constituting the way in which the female subject herself is problematised both in feminist discourse and the female unconscious.

These notions do not necessarily relate to or rely upon a dominant conception of the masculine or the patriarchal in order to function; they are, I argue, the things which Mulvey refers to when she speaks of “important issues for the female unconscious that are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory” (484). The idea of a “female unconscious” is touched upon also by Creed, who refutes the idea that horror film (an industry, like all film, dominated by men) speaks only to the male unconscious – “I do not believe the unconscious is subject to the strictures of gender socialization and it is to the unconscious that the horror film speaks” (Creed Monstrous-Feminine 156). Certainly the proliferate gender cross-identification that Clover maps in her work would suggest even the male unconscious is in no way strictly “masculine”, and I argue that in the past ten years (the period of time in which Ginger Snaps and The Descent were made and released) this shift has had implications across all realms of popular culture. It is no longer unproblematic to speak of a solely “male” unconscious order, at least in an area of culture so popular as horror film; consequently, we must examine this possibility that without a strictly male patriarchal order, there is room for a female unconscious order as well. ↩