The Duchess at the centre of John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13) acquires a lot of her edginess in the original play from the fact that her husband has died before the action begins. She is a young – and according to her brother Ferdinand, “lusty” – widow, whose combination of financial independence and sexual experience makes many in her vicinity nervous.

The equivalent man would be called “eligible”, and receive a lot of invitations from women with marriageable daughters. But a woman in the same situation becomes the subject of a campaign of surveillance and torture which ends in her death.

The more I worked on Webster’s play, the more I noticed that the Duchess was part of a much larger cultural anxiety around the figure of the widow in English literature. She’s an extreme case, admittedly: few other fictional widows end up eating apricots grown in horse dung, kissing the severed hand of their husband or being strangled on the orders of their lycanthropic and potentially incestuous twin brother.

But a continual low charge hums around widows, from the comic grotesque of Widow Twankey to the alluringly threatening Black Widows of gangster novels. Via the Wife of Bath, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham and Aouda from Eighty Days Around The World, to take a handful nearly at random.

Of course it alters across the eras, but time and time again, the figure of the widow acts as a focus for drama.

Sometimes the charge seems to derive from the fact that she is no longer dependent upon any man, or socially “explained” via her relationship to a father or husband. Sometimes it comes instead from the way a widow is seen as over-defining herself in relation to a man no longer present.

Either way, widows in literature often hold the potential to disrupt social order in a variety of ways.

Widows and Pseudowidows

This article, however, is not about widows. It is about women who are not widows. Or rather, women who aren’t widows whilst still looking, sounding, or acting like them.

When considering famous widows in literature, it struck me that two of the names that sprang to mind – Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations and Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – don’t technically fit the criteria.

Miss Havisham’s veil is worn to mourn the marriage that never happened, whilst Olivia’s is to remind her of her dead brother, whose memory stops her from wanting to receive suitors. Nonetheless, they both look to me as if they’re trying to take on the role, adopting some of the characteristics associated with grieving spouses.

They wear specific clothes to mark their separation from other people (and from their previous selves), withdraw from normal social life, and refuse to put themselves under the jurisdiction of men. Neither are exactly successful in their attempt to construct themselves positively within the role of a widow.

Miss Havisham has become an icon of “frustrated” and “twisted” womanhood, unsuccessful within the novel’s plot and the butt of jokes in subsequent culture. She becomes a “tragic” figure in both the classical and slang senses of the word: an image of wronged heroism in her own mind, and a sad bitter spinster to the world outside.

Her veil, usually a temporary garment to mark her passing between two states, becomes a fixture, blending with the cobwebs which now cover her wedding cake. In Miss Havisham, Dickens created a figure who memorably combines the revulsion and anxiety felt by Victorian (and later) society towards women who refuse to play out the social roles ascribed to them.

Olivia from Twelfth Night is similarly associated with a veil, at least at the beginning of the play. The first thing we hear about her is that for seven years the world “Shall not behold her face at ample view/ But, like a cloistress, she will veiled walk…all this to season/ A brother’s dead love, which she would keep fresh/ And lasting in her memory”.

When Viola (dressed as the male Cesario) manages to speak to her, Olivia prepares by putting her veil back on, setting up the comedy by-play in which Viola claims not to know who the lady of the house is, and the moment when Olivia pulls it back and demands “Look you, sir, such a one I was this present. Is’t not well done?”

Within the first act the grieving Olivia’s attempt to seclude herself is defeated by a combination of plot and Viola’s rhetorical skills. The play treats her mourning as one of the restrictive, self-imposed roles which so many of the characters are trapped in as the action begins. Orsino is locked into his schtick as self-obsessed Petrarchan lover, Sir Toby as the party knight who slinks home in the early hours of every morning, Malvolio as the image of Puritan rectitude and Olivia as the grieving veiled figure wandering inconsolably around her rooms as if her husband had just died.

These roles are all disrupted for the audience’s amusement and the characters’ correction during the ensuing scenes, with the play particularly conspiring to trick Olivia out of her image of herself as a grand widow. There’s an echo here of Miss Havisham, though in a very different key: women are not permitted to adopt the role of widow simply because they want to.

Both characters are diverted away from a successful performance as “pseudowidows” by the narratives in which they appear: Olivia to happy marriage and Miss Havisham to pathological bitterness and mockery.

‘A veil of wickedness’

In fact we don’t have to rely on my close-reading of these fictional texts to find anxiety around women “playing” at being widows. That harping on Olivia wearing a veil and walking secluded from men “like a cloistress” brings another group of women into play, whose apparent freedom from male jurisdiction has produced anger and revulsion in various eras.

I don’t have space to examine the way in which nuns in the Middle Ages navigated the rhetoric of “brides of Christ” alongside the reality that many entered the community after the death of a husband, or their social position. But one particular case stands out amongst the criticism of female religious orders: the bishop of Olmüt’s attack on the Beguines.

These women, who lived together in small self-governing groups, taking few vows and following the Rule of no specific order, were the subject of a lot of criticism in the later thirteenth century. Bruno, the bishop in question, wrote to the pope in 1273 to demand they be suppressed.

In R.W. Southern’s words:

he complained that…the women used their liberty as a veil of wickedness in order to escape the yoke of obedience to their priests and ‘the coercion of marital bonds’. Above all, he was indignant that young women should assume the status of widowhood against the authority of the Apostle who approved no widows under the age of sixty.

The bishop was referring to verses in the New Testament book of 1 Timothy, in which instructions are given for the way the “order of widows” should be run and who should be admitted. These women, who worked for the church and were provided with support, should all be over the age of sixty, have a good reputation and previously carried out pious works.

Obviously “widow” has a technical significance in this Biblical passage, but I was fascinated by Bruno’s line of attack: that the young women of the Beguines were setting themselves up as if they were widows, and thus escaping male authority.

His metaphor of a “veil of wickedness” once again acts as a focus for male anxiety over women who won’t accept their assigned role.

In part two of this post, I’ll delve into widow imagery in modern TV and film, including The Gilmore Girls and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

One of the most amazing things I saw was, without question, the screening of the Wonder Women! : the Untold Story of American Heroines documentary.

I’d never heard of it before to be honest, which is hardly surprising as it’s an independent release (no screening near you? Organise one – there’s a link at the bottom of this post!). It’s basically a visual look at the intersections of Women Woman iconography and certain aspects of Second Wave American feminism.

Did you know that Wonder Woman was regarded by quite a few feminists as the ‘face’of Second Wave American feminism? Neither did I. Quite frankly, being a Marvel girl rather than DC, I’d always thought of Wonder Woman as one of the more tame, conservative superheroes. Didn’t she spend most of her time being tied up?

Image from Flickr.com user bbaltimore, used under Creative Commons.

I’m now going to recount my new and shiny understanding of Wonder Woman, as gleaned from the documentary through a vague haze of alcohol. Bear with me.

The iconography of Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman, it turns out, is fairly awesome. She was developed during World War II, and was therefore off fighting the Nazis (alongside Captain America? That bit wasn’t very clear) after realising that she had to go off and save America. Because that’s what awesome heroes did. She even had to win some sort of Olympiad before she was able to do it! And then she fought some Nazis, and some criminals, and in the 50s this was deemed to be DREADFUL. So she was rewritten as having given up her powers. During this period she found she wanted to make cakes, and opened a beauty parlour. OF COURSE. Because nothing says ‘superhero’ like CUPCAKES!

Anyway, along came Second Wave feminism, looking for a face for the recently-launched Ms magazine. And there was poor Wonder Woman, an icon in need of reclaiming. Off came the apron and on went on the magic bracelets!

SURELY IT IS TIME FOR THE 70S?

I won’t recount the entire documentary. Suffice to say that when the 1970s and 1980s kicked off, along with them came a whole slew of female heroines, from Cagney and Lacey, Charlie’s Angels and Bionic Woman, straight through to the live-action Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter.

Here, have a photo of her being awesome:

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. Photo from Flicker user shaunwong.

Here are some other 1970s (& 1980s) heroines.

Cagney & Lacey. Image from kaksplus.fi.

Charlie’s Angels, 1977. Image from Wikimedia Commons .

Notice anything?

Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley. Image from sabotagetimes.com.

Ripley vs Van Damme

The 1980s also gave us hyper-masculinity along the lines of Van Damme, Schwarzenegger and Stallone. It also gave us Ellen Ripley and (in 1991 admittedly, therefore just in the 1990s) Sarah Connor. There are a bunch of others. The 1980s were pretty awesome for strong female heroines, which is a sentence I never thought I’d be writing. When I first saw Terminator 2 as a little girl, I didn’t even know that women could do chin-ups!

Grrrl Power dominoes

As well as the iconography of Wonder Woman herself, the documentary looked at the development of Grrrl Power. We are taken through the original use of the term through interviews with Kathleen Hanna, starting back with Riot Grrrl, and its appropriation by the Spice Girls into something commercial.

I’m not going to depress you by taking you through the deaths of all the ‘strong female characters’ on television in 2001. I think those of us in the UK were somewhat sheltered through the impact of that, having our reception of those shows delayed by several weeks or even months. We therefore did not experience their deaths as the American viewers would have: one after the other, falling down like dominoes in 2001.

Back to Wonder Woman…

Like this, only AWESOME.

… and to her fans, ages 2–99. In the documentary, there are interviews with small children and the role Wonder Woman has played in their lives. There are interviews with activists – up to and including Gloria Steinem – and their perspectives on how Wonder Woman influenced Second Wave (and in some case Third Wave) feminism – and vice versa. There are perspectives on women-saving-women and the creation of Wonder Woman Day. There’s even a Wonder-Woman-on-a-string-with-motor, making her fly around and around on a child’s ceiling. How awesome is that? I want one!

Not your grandmother’s feminism

Now let’s talk about what wasn’t there. The film isn’t marketed as a history of Second Wave Feminism, nor even the (entire) history of Wonder Woman. That’s important, because the intersections the film is talking about are intersections with white, heterosexual, cis feminism. It therefore falls down significantly on the feminism movement outside of that pretty narrowly defined range.

It was also a bit dispiriting to not have at least a mention that the original name for Ms. magazine was Sojourner. There is also little mention of the subversion of the Wonder Woman image and iconography outside of radfem activism.

That said, the film doesn’t pretend that it is in any way comprehensive, or representative of all feminism movements. And, as a look at the history of Wonder Woman and how she was reclaimed in the radfem part of Second (and Third) Wave American feminism… well, it’s pretty awesome.

Frankly, it’s worth watching for the interviews with her tiny modern-day fans alone. There is something deeply heartening about hearing a child draw strength from a feminist icon, however corrupted and reinterpreted that image has been over the years.

Not convinced? Have a look at the trailer:

See? Awesome.

• In the highly likely event that there are no screenings near you, you can contact the Outreach Coordinator at Wonder Women to arrange one.

BadRep: Tell us a little bit about the series in your own words.

Kathrynne Wolf: The Scarlet Line is an action-drama about a secret lineage of female bodyguards who are, when on active duty, code-named “Scarlet”.

Our premise is that the Line started with the famous “Jujitsuffragette” bodyguard team in Edwardian London. In the world of our story, after the First World War the organisation – ‘The Scarlet Line’ – went international and Scarlets have operated ever since then, protecting people who need their help.

“We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.”

Our main character, Amanda, is a retired Scarlet whose very ordinary life is suddenly thrown into chaos. Details of the reasons for this disruption, the purpose, history and future of the line get revealed throughout the season.

BR: What gave you the idea to do this?

KW: I was literally falling asleep one night when I had the idea for a secret lineage of female bodyguards, quietly going about the business of making the streets safer.

This is the sort of story I wanted to see on screen. It’s an old adage that you should write the story you want to read, be the change you want to see, and so on. I had been distressed by the narrow representation of women – and the UNDERrepresentation of interesting roles and stories for women in media – for a long time.

Two issues I find particularly insidious are the tendency for any female protagonist driving the story to be called a “Strong Female Character”, where this adjective seems unnecessary for a male protagonist, and the tendency for “Strong Female Characters” either to a) be somehow supernaturally or technologically augmented, or b) have a tendency to cry, even when on the job.

I wanted to see a story of a woman who kicks butt and takes names as a matter of course. It’s her job. She does her job, she does it well. The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story – there’s a crisis that needs solving, there are obstacles, stakes get raised, we wrestle with issues of morality, trust, crime, betrayal…

“The fact that she’s female is not excused, it’s not augmented, it’s not commented on; it is not, in fact, the point. The point is the story.”

The other major factor that made me want to tackle this project is that I come from a background of what is generally referred to as ‘Chicago Storefront Theatre’. We have over 150 small theatre companies in Chicago, producing shows in all kinds of spaces that weren’t originally intended to hold a theatre, because they have stories they want to tell. It’s very much a ‘do it yourself’ mindset.

That’s why I produced the web-series myself, rather than writing a screenplay and then sending it off to Hollywood, hoping it would catch someone’s eye and that it wouldn’t get lost in ‘option-land’… I wanted to see it happen.

BR: What made you decide to set the series in the US rather than Britain?

KW: The main factor is that I live in Chicago, and this is where I have connections, know the locations, and where it was, in fact, possible to produce the series.

That said, the ‘mythology’ of the Scarlet Line definitely lends itself to satellite stories. It would make a great CSI-style franchise. I would love to see The Scarlet Line: London, The Scarlet Line: Seattle, The Scarlet Line: Barcelona – I’d just need to figure out how to go about licensing the sucker.

BR: The lead Scarlet’s wig and makeup are very striking, and call to mind vigilante superheroes such as Catwoman, Silk Spectre from ‘Watchmen’ and Hit Girl from ‘Kick-Ass’. In other press, you’ve previously mentioned Wonder Woman in connection with the unusual ‘web’ weapon used by the Scarlets – are you inspired at all by comics, as well as martial arts and action cinema?

KW: I was raised on Wonder Woman and Kitty Pryde was my favourite X-Man. Like all storytellers, I can’t help but draw from everything I’ve studied, read and seen.

I would say the Scarlet character was drawn as much from The Equalizer and the Guardian Angels as from comic books and movies.

The lack of a current TV show like Wonder Woman is part of what goaded me into this. One of my oldest friends in the world had a baby daughter, and I had a “what will she WATCH???” moment of panic, as I considered the statistics that show that women’s representation in media has actually shrunk in the last few years.

I wanted to contribute to the ongoing development of a wider range of roles available to actresses and, therefore, role models available to young girls.

I don’t only mean morally upright ‘ideals’, I mean characters that represent the spectrum – that model all kinds of ways of being and behaving, living in the world, experiencing victories and consequences. The wider the spectrum presented, the more agency is given to young girls to figure out how they want to live for themselves.

The other major factor involved in the Scarlet wig and makeup is modern surveillance technology. The Scarlets have to keep their true identities secret, and research on the advances in facial recognition software led me to take the disguise angle to more extreme lengths than I’d originally planned.

It turns out that software has gotten scarily good at working around minor augmentations. Diana Prince’s glasses were NOT going to cut it.

BR: You perform quite a bit of realistic fighting in the episodes, as well as very kinetic movement with the Web weapons. Is it difficult to find film or theatre roles for women which showcase more realistic techniques?

KW: It is maddeningly difficult. For 13 years, I belonged to Babes With Blades Theatre Company, which is a Chicago company whose mission is to ‘place women and their stories centre stage’ using combat as a major part of their expressive vocabulary.

To do this, they’ve focused on developing new work, and they include an all-female-cast Shakespeare in every other season, as there simply are not many plays out there where women get to explore this range of human expression.

Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.

Again, it’s ridiculously rare in Western cinema, TV, and theatre that a female character is allowed to simply be proficient at combat without being superhuman, having a ‘super suit’, or being the ‘chosen one’.

Don’t get me wrong – I love superhero stories, and am always happy for any opportunity actresses get to be that kind of hero. I just wanted to help open up the field so that they didn’t have to be somehow ‘other’ in order to do so.

BR: There are more women in TV and film who are action heroines these days, but they’re still often lone figures. Already in the trailers for early episodes we’re seeing that relationships (such as the one between Amanda and Marcus) are a big part of the story – are the relationships between female characters also focused on, alongside the ass-kicking?

KW: Most of the major characters in the series are women. We blow the Bechdel test straight out of the water.

The relationships are very important, and they’re explored much more deeply in Season 2. Season 1 is very much the set-up – it’s where the ball gets rolling. We introduce the major players, the major conflicts, the major themes, and some things get resolved by the final episode, but not all.

BR: What were the challenges of creating a web-series? Did the format give you more freedom to pursue feminist themes?

KW: The fact that we’re doing it all ourselves means we have no one to answer to. There’s no studio executive or marketing department saying ‘You have to include a male authority figure! She has to cry or it’s not believable!’ or any such nonsense.

The challenge, of course, is that we do not have studio resources. The good side of that is that no one is working on this project for any reason other than that they want to.

BR: What do you hope the series will achieve?

KW: I would love to inspire other folks with good stories to stop waiting for permission and MAKE THEM. I think the online short-form potential is evolving rapidly. The democratization of access to technical production capability is an amazingly wonderful thing, if you’ve got a story to tell.

I’d also like to help raise some awareness of some of the ass-kicking women of history – in fact, that is the subject of a panel I am doing at GeekGirlCon in Seattle in October – drawing from history to find inspirational stories of “non-super” superheroines.

If the series reaches some young (or not so young) folks who hadn’t yet realised that they’re allowed to take charge of their own stories and get them out there, and maybe some who hadn’t considered that there might be more roles for women than eye candy, damsel in distress or obstacle, even better.

The Scarlet Line Trailer 1 from Wolf Point Media on Vimeo.

• Huge thanks to Kathrynne Wolf for the interview, and we wish her all the best with the series! There’s a kickass trailer for Season 1 over here, and more info on the Facebook group and Scarlet Line website.
• Thanks also to Kathrynne’s husband Tony Wolf who wrote the book about the life of Edith Garrud, which prompted the original piece in our 2011 ‘Revolting Women’ series. Tony is currently working on a three-part graphic novel series inspired by the Ju-jutsuffragettes titled Mrs Pankhurst’s Amazons, due in 2014.

I’ve read and seen far too much already over the past few days, from endless eulogies in the papers through to angry words on the street and in the House of Commons. The truth is I am genuinely shaken by it. Like the Queen Mother, she was one of those figures we all suspected might go on forever, and her shadow was long. With it gone, one of the touchpoints for my personal politics is gone.

I started to think about how I might even begin to parse what has happened: I’m not sad, but I’ll admit I didn’t crack open the champagne personally; I merely drank someone else’s.So in a similar vein, I wanted to write not about her, but about representations of her.

Maggie’s Farm

I’m going to start with one of my favourite political cartoonists. Alongside his later portrayal of her puppeteering Tony Blair, comic artist Steve Bell also focuses on her controlling authority. He wrote a series called Maggie’s Farm which depicted her as completely insane – with trademark wonky eye and multiple exclamation points in her speech.

The comics, which reference Dylan’s song of the same title (which was in itself used as a protest song against Thatcher) were originally published in Time Out from 1979, and, to my eye, probably heavily influenced later depictions.

Spitting Image

The first time I saw Spitting Image I was hooked, probably helped by the fact my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to watch it, and to this day I regret that it has gone off the air. Perhaps it’s because no satire is strong enough to be distinguished from the ridiculous facts of today’s government? Anyway, back to Thatcher.

The depiction of her was grotesque, but no more so than that of any other puppet on the show. That said, it was the nature of the grotesque that interested me.

She was ridiculed for her strength and controlling nature in the form of a horrific headmistress. It’s interesting to note that later John Major was ridiculed for his lack of strength.

But rather than this being portrayed as an essential part of her it was represented in reference to Thatcher as a woman  (note the ongoing references to her as “sir”). Her strength was ridiculed, in part, by presenting it as “unfeminine” and therefore funny or dangerous: a stereotype of women in politics that will no doubt take many years to overturn. As the series moved on she became less and less human, eventually turning into an alien monster.

The Old Iron Woman

Raymond Briggs delivers a rendition of the Falklands War in a way that is moving, vitriolic, frightening and humbling in his 1984 piece The Tin Pot Foreign General and The Old Iron Woman.

What I find particularly interesting here is how her depiction contrasts with that of Spitting Image. Both use the “non-human” references, but whereas the Spitting Image Thatcher is usually either asexual or very masculine, here she is quite the opposite. Guns and victory explosions fire from her breasts as she squats (in high heels, with rounded buttocks and suspenders, no less) over her land and nation in a parody of birth. The conflation of female and war-machine gives rise to a gross, highly sexualised fembot.

The Iron Lady

I returned from holiday just over a year ago to find London distressingly covered in images of Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, with her icy blue eyes following me all over the place. It haunted me, in much the same way as it did our Rhian Jones (I’ll admit it, I couldn’t bring myself to see the film).

It was the glossiness of the whole thing that threw me, the vogue-ish fashion magazine stylings that worked their hardest to reunite those twin features of “female” and “powerful” which had created such horrors through both Spitting Image and at the pencil of Raymond Briggs. And they succeeded in being very flattering, through a combination of make-up and airbrushing.

Streep is noticeably less wrinkled and more attractively-styled than Thatcher, looking eerily like a better-looking sister. The situation was enhanced by Streep’s own acting ability, and a script which included scenes of feminine domesticity.

What next?

I never knew her. Never met her. I only understood her as a series of images and icons, on the television as a politician and in other representations of her, which are more numerous than I can contain in one article. Buzzfeed, for example, collected a list of songs about her. Like many other dead, famous people, over time she will fade from a real person, who nonetheless was one of the bogeymen of my childhood (alongside the boggle-faced baddie animals in Orm and Cheep) to being almost imaginary, an icon.

To me, she will always be the figurehead for all that is wrong with right wing thinking and the sort of “feminism” that claims it must be feminist if a woman is doing it. Those with opposing politics have put her on a pedestal. Other people will make her into other things.

I doubt we’ve seen the last representation, but I’ll be interested which version of Margaret Thatcher will stand the test of time, and which version we will be faced with next.

I love the clichés of twee British TV murder mysteries – the village fete, the teacup switch, the gunshot in the dark room – but what I like best is the presence of lots of fantastic old ladies, a group which are underrepresented in nearly every other type of television genre.

In 1999, people over 60 made up 21 percent of the UK population, but just 7 percent of the television population (source) and in 2012 a BBC report (PDF) flagged the absence of older women on TV as a major problem.

I’ve said in another post that for the most part in popular culture, old women are given one of just two identities: dear old biddy or evil crone. In Twee British Murder there is a greater range of stereotypes to be found, although the biddy/crone dichotomy is still there. Through by no means a comprehensive list, I’ve identified five overlapping Twee British Murder character options for older women.

1) The Help

Rosalie Williams as Mrs Hudson. Image: Granada

An army of elderly female housekeepers, cooks, nurses, cleaners and secretaries form a vital part of the machinery of Twee British Murder.

Although they are rarely the killer, and tend to be only incidental victims (when they Know Too Much, for example) they have a vital dramatic function, especially as witnesses.

The cook remembers that someone different from usual offered to take the breakfast tray up to her mistress, the former nanny recalls a crucial detail from a suspect’s past…

It’s these long-suffering souls that make up the bulk of body-finders too, although they’re almost always questioned and dismissed with no further contribution except looking anxious.

But why are the servants and employees so swiftly ruled out? This 1928 article, 20 Rules for Writing Detective Fiction, states that:

A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.

Of course! Servants are a bunch of crims already: making one of them the murderer would be TOO OBVIOUS.

Moving on. An atypical member of this category is Sherlock Holmes’ tolerant landlady, Mrs Hudson. This is from The Adventure of the Dying Detective:

The landlady stood in the deepest awe of him and never dared to interfere with him, however outrageous his proceedings might seem. She was fond of him, too, for he had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women.

I am a little obsessed with the 1980s Granada series starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. In this series, Mrs Hudson (played by Rosalie Williams) is an important part of the small ‘family’ which surrounds the detective. Here’s one of my favourite Mrs Hudson moments, from The Cardboard Box, at 4:40mins in:

2) Frail Rich Lady

Often bedridden, with elaborate medical care requirements, and generally found in a spooky old house surrounded by squabbling, grasping relatives, these women are often trying to make a last minute change to their will when they meet their demise.

Frail Rich Ladies tend to be victims, but can occasionally turns out to be killers. Letitia Blacklock in A Murder is Announced, Laura Welman in Sad Cypress, and Amelia Barrowby in How Does Your Garden Grow? are classic examples from the Christie canon, as is Emily Arundell from Dumb Witness.

Bearing in mind the underlying biddy/crone stereotype binary, most of the above examples are on the biddy side of things. But there’s a fabulous Frail Rich Lady getting her crone on in one of Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly stories, The Woman in the Big Hat (PDF). She’s 12mins in:

3) Eccentric Spinster

Eccentric Spinsters are also occasionally widows. The important thing is that they have been manless long enough for their eccentricity to flourish.

This is my very favourite old lady character type, and one that I aspire to. One of the best examples is the three sisters in Agatha Christie’s Nemesis. Here they are having tea with Miss Marple, at 7:09 mins in:

I love how there’s a bit of a maiden, mother and crone thing going on, with Clothilde, the more bookish, stereotypable-as-mannish, serious one (crone), Anthea the ‘girly’, immature one (maiden) and their more well-adjusted sister Lavinia, who tries to keep everything under control (mother). Lavinia’s the one who had been married, of course, so she’s coded as noticeably more ‘normal’ than the other two.

The Bradbury-Scott sisters above are at the biddy end of the spinster spectrum, but there’s a fantastic crone version called Honoria Lyddiard in the Midsomer Murders episode Written In Blood. She’s at 5:28 mins in:

Eccentric Spinsters can be victims, witnesses or killers, and can often be found providing another dramatic function: introducing a supernatural, prophetic red herring.

This provides a contrast with the detective’s rational method and cheap thrills for the viewer, as well as obfuscating the sequence of events for both. Prunella Scales turns in a scene-stealing performance as psychic Eleanor Bunsall in another Midsomer Murders episode, Beyond the Grave, and in Dumb Witness one of the two Miss Tripps receives a message for Poirot, at 15:13mins in:

4) Village Busybody

A provincial murder mystery staple. Like the servants and staff, this character provides vital information and misinformation, clues and red herrings for viewers. Without this character, there might be no mystery at all. She is a key witness, frequently a victim because she’s seen or heard something she shouldn’t have, but never the killer.

Although she’s only middle-aged in the TV adaption, Caroline Sheppard is worth a mention because of Agatha Christie’s comment in her autobiography that:

It is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home.

My New Year’s resolution this year was to get the word ‘acidulated’ into every tenth conversation.

While Caroline Sheppard is relatively harmless, her crone counterpart uses her knowledge to manipulate others. Mrs Rainbird is an extremely camp example of this in the Midsomer Murders pilot The Killings at Badger’s Drift at 22mins:

5) Wise Woman

Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Image: BBC

*Puts on What Would Miss Marple Do? t-shirt*

There’s not enough space here to do her justice, and I haven’t managed to find the perfect clip, but I wanted to share this: in her autobiography Agatha Christie likens Miss Marple to her grandmother in that “though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.”

That “frightening accuracy” is the hallmark of the Wise Woman, and Marple isn’t the only one in this role solving murders – I’d also put forward Gladys Mitchell’s creation Mrs Bradley.

The glamorous TV version of Mrs Bradley played by Diana Rigg departs pretty drastically from the description of her appearance in the books (she is emphatically witch-like: “She possessed nasty, dry, claw-like hands, and her arms, yellow and curiously repulsive, suggested the plucked wings of a fowl”). Nonetheless, she still provides a worthy crone counterpart to Miss Marple’s biddiness. In this clip, she’s driving away from her ex-husband’s funeral at 3:40mins:

Zoe Brennan, in her book The Older Woman in Recent Fiction, links both Miss Marple and Mrs Bradley (as well as other older women detectives such as Miss Silver and Miss Pym) with feminine archetypes, from fairytale witches to the Furies. This is a connection which Agatha Christie clearly had in mind when one character gives Marple the nickname ‘Nemesis’.

Postscript

For some more info about why this all matters, have a look at Understanding Age Stereotypes and Ageism (PDF). It’s also worth noting that while Twee British Murder is good on age diversity and features a lot of women characters, it fails dismally across other diversity strands.

In February 2010, Hannah Forman (under the pen name Hannah Neurotica) began Women in Horror Recognition Month as a way to celebrate women’s contribution to the horror industry.

She began the campaign out of frustration at the lack of coverage of women working in horror media, and received a terrific response to the initiative. People used social media and blogging platforms to discuss their favourite women creators throughout the month of February, and aided the conversation about horror and women’s participation in it. It’s a fine example of how online communities can be harnessed to a positive effect. It’s become an annual event since then.

In the past four years there’s been a discernable increase of attention given to women’s contributions across the creative spectrum. This has not been given freely. It’s come about because women and men have asked to see a more equal representation of work by creators they enjoy. It’s because of campaigns liked Women in Horror Recognition Month that some media sources have finally noticed there are women in the industry, and that many of them have been around for a long time.

Hopefully there will come a time when such an initiative is redundant, but since the Vida statistics on the participation and coverage of women’s work in many media sources remains low, that time is not upon us yet.

Two years ago, Bad Reputation asked me to write an article called Women in Horror: Five Recommended Writers, and this year I’m singling out the work of women who create across horror media.

1. Livia Llwellyn – Short Story Writer

Livia Llwellyn was born in Anchorage, Alaska, and raised in Tacoma, before moving to live on the East Coast. She’s been making a reputation for herself in horror circles since her stories began to be published, from 2005 onwards. Her work has been printed and reprinted in many prestigious anthologies.

She writes difficult, fascinating characters coping with disturbing situations. Some of her stories are unashamedly erotic in a way that honestly reflects the terrible fixations of desire.

Her first short story collection, Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors, was published by Lethe Press in 2011 and contains ten of her stories. It received rave reviews, and was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. It announced the arrival of an original talent, and one fans of horror fiction should watch.

2. Jen and Sylvia Soska – Screenwriters, Directors, Actors, Producers

Jen & Slyvia Soska are Canadian identical twins, long fans of horror, and have trained in martial arts and stunt work. Their first short film was a trailer for a movie, Dead Hooker in a Trunk, which they then made as their début film. They wrote, produced, directed, and acted in the movie, and it gained a lot of attention on the horror film festival circuit.

They created their own production company, Twisted Twins Productions, and made other short films, such as The Hornet, Together We’re Heavy, and Bad Girls.

It was last year’s movie, American Mary, which showed the development of the sisters’ work. Once again they wrote, directed, and appeared in it. It stars Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps) as Mary Mason, a broke medical student who changes her career after a traumatic experience, and puts her knowledge of physiology to use by doing extreme body modifications.

The film won five awards at Screamfest last year, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Over the years they’ve demonstrated determination, creative progression, and ambition, and I’m looking forward to what they will do next.

3. Hannah Berry – Comic Book Writer and Artist

Hannah Berry began drawing from a young age, inspired by comics like Calvin and Hobbs, and French bande dessinée. She completed a Degree in Illustration at the University of Brighton, and during that time began work on her first graphic novel, Britten and Brülightly.

Her noir detective story featuring ‘Private Researcher’ Fernández Britten was picked up by publisher Jonathan Cape, and hit the shelves in 2008. It was universally lauded, and was translated into many languages.

The French edition was chosen for the Official Selection of the prestigious Angoulême International Comics Festival in France in 2010. While not overtly a horror story, the dark, noir atmosphere is resonant with supernatural mystery tales.

She was the Booktrust Writer in Residence in 2012, and has been an instructor on the Arvon Foundation’s Graphic Novel Writing course several times.

Her latest graphic novel is Adamtine, an eerie story about a late night train journey that stalls and brings its passengers on an altogether unexpected journey. Its atmospheric art and complicated narrative prove that Hannah has the chops for slow-burn supernatural stories.

A free preview of Adamtine can be downloaded from her website.

4. Alice Lowe – Screenwriter and Actor

Alice Lowe attended Cambridge, and started her career co-devising and performing in small fringe shows. She appeared in Garth Marenghi’s Fright Knight in 2000 at the Edinburgh Festival. The show was nominated for the Perrier Award, and Alice won it the following year for her performance in the sequel, Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead. The show was then turned into a Channel 4 comedy, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Alice has also appeared in such television shows as The Mighty Boosh, Little Britain, and The IT Crowd.

She went back to Edinburgh Festival in 2005 with her own Kate-Bush inspired prog-rock spoof, Moonjourney, co-wrote and starred in Channel 4’s Orcadia, and was part of E4’s sketch show Beehive.

In 2010 she and director Jacqueline Wright set up Jackal Films to challenge themselves to create a short film every month, which they did. She also created Alice’s Wunderland, a
comedy sketch show for BBC Radio 4.

Alice’s work focuses on comedy, but there are often dark veins of horror threaded throughout her material. A case in point is the film Sightseers, which was released in November 2012. She co-wrote it with Steve Oram, with some material by Amy Jump, and co-stars in the film with Oram. The film is a black comedy about a couple who go on holiday in a caravan and get up to a bit of murder along the way.

If you’re not familiar with these women’s work, I encourage you to seek it out. I should note that this is a personal pick: there are many other talented women horror creators out there.

• Maura McHugh is a writer living in Ireland. She’s written the comic books Róisín Dubh and Jennifer Wilde, and her first collection Twisted Fairy Tales is on sale in America now. She’s loved all things spooky and supernatural since she read her first fairy tale.
• More from Maura McHugh on BadRep: our interview with her about Róisín Dubh is in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2, and you can also check out her previous guest post, ‘Women In Horror: Five Recommended Writers’.

Before we go further, have you seen the advert? If not, here you go:

Opinions vary as to whether this is offensively sexist or whether such labels are merely the result of ‘political correctness gone mad.’ However, what is being depicted is pretty unambiguous, especially thanks to the “behind every Great Christmas, there’s mum” tagline at the end: Christmas is the result of Mum working very hard and (by inference) Dad being generally useless, not up to scratch and oblivious of her efforts. It falls squarely into what The Mary Sue terms Dumb Man Commercials, whereby in order to appeal to the (presumed) female audience, the advertisers present men as foolish when compared to the power of womankind – if the power of womankind is limited to, say, cleaning an oven.

Now, lookit, there’s quite enough sexism going on at this time of year what with the pink aisle full of plastic dolls and retailers emblazoned with gender-segregated gifts without the whole of Christmas being laid firmly and squarely on the shoulders of women and negating the role of anyone else in the fulfilment of annual joy. No pressure, love.

This isn’t really a post about lambasting the ASDA advert – many people have done that, and more eloquently too. What it is about is advertisers’ perception of who we are as people, and whether that matches up to how we really are and how we think of ourselves.

Given the results of the recent census, we know that households such as the one depicted in the advert are not in the majority in the UK – far more people either live alone or are lone parents. So the assumption of “Mum” being the lynch pin for the “average” Christmas in the UK is not a reflection of reality.

There will be many families who rely on Dad, or another relative. There will be many Christmases spent amongst friends, or as a couple without children (like my own Yuletide will be). There will also be many Christmases in the UK that people spend alone – either through positive choice or sad circumstances. Lots of people don’t celebrate Christmas at all, of course. But I am absolutely not going to get into a discussion of religion as well as politics.

Well, not for this post.

In my previous post yesterday, I talked about the first season of American Horror Story and its reliance on two female archetypes – the femme fatale and the overbearing mother – in its construction of the monstrous.

The spoiler warning, again, goes here!

Today, I’m going to talk about reproduction, so if you want to sing that song from Grease 2, you better get it out of your system now. Ready?

Mothers are, in the world of AHS, a danger not only to their children, but also to the others that touch their lives. Pregnancy, with its easy symbolism and suitably melodramatic and gory end bit, lends itself to Horror. But it is not just the obvious that is made an object of fear.

Vivien, the walking womb-ded

As I said in part one, Vivien and Ben are a married couple facing difficulties. She’s had a miscarriage, he’s had an affair, and their relationship is in tatters. I think, I think, that we’re meant to be engaged with this crumbling marriage.

But while Ben is a rounded character – full of hope and regret, sweetness and cruelty, passion and inertia – his wife is driven only by her desire to save her marriage, which in turn is driven by her maternal desire.

Like Nora, the basement abortionist’s wife, Hayden (Ben’s deeply sexual and manipulative mistress), and Constance, the terminally abusive and neglectful mother next door, Vivien simply has uterus, will procreate.¹

Vivien is little more than a vessel, a womb with bouncy hair. She is Shroedinger’s Uterus, forever pregnant or not pregnant, host to a foetus that is alive or not alive, evil or not evil depending on the requirements of the plot in any given episode. Viven’s role as incubator is underlined when she dies in childbirth – her role is complete, so we need nothing more from her.

Vivien’s pregnancy is unusual. Hers is a product of heteropaternal superfecundation – she’s carrying twins with different fathers. One is her husband’s, the other is the result of her rape by a psychopathic ghost.² Let’s not even go into the fact that her husband doesn’t believe she’s been raped – there’s something much worse than that on the horizon.The show’s mythology tells us that a child born of a ghost and a human will be the antichrist, and we all know what that means: apocalypse.

Just in case the implication of that isn’t clear, let me put it in slightly different terms: Vivien’s vagina is the muggletuppin’ Hellmouth.

Here’s where we get into the really juicy feminist theory

Much of what I’ve said so far owes a debt to Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine, and in particular the abject body; the demonisation, defilement and objectification of the female body in Horror.

Vivien’s labour and delivery is presented as particularly sanguinary; a festival of blood and sweat. It’s a burlesque of the natural; a grotesque, pantomimic affair attended entirely by a gorily deceased medical staff provided by the house.

With neither the clinical intervention of the modern birthing experience nor the cleanliness of the body innocent, the birth plays on both classically Freudian and modern germophobic fears. It is, from both perspectives, unclean.

The point of Horror, if there must be one, is to walk the line between desirable and undesirable; to cross or threaten the boundaries that separate stability and chaos. Childbirth, as a triumph of the primal over the civilised and the inner over the outer, is a natural exemplar of this. It’s naturally yukky and generally unstoppable, and that makes it pretty frightening. Here we’re treated to close ups of Vivien’s sweat covered forehead, wide overhead shots that emphasise the claustrophobic urgency of the scene, and heavy blood-loss.

Horror films that depict monstrous births play on the inside/outside distinction in order to point to the inherently monstrous nature of the womb as well as the impossibility of ever completely banishing the abject from the human domain. […] The womb represents the utmost in abjection for it contains a new life form which will pass from inside to outside bringing with it traces of contamination – blood, afterbirth, faeces.

– Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993)

Childbirth places us on the side of nature, outside of patriarchal order. Flesh is torn, blood is spilled, the sexual organs begin to resemble a wound. The imagery is graphic, base: abject. Vivien’s affinity with uncivilised, feral nature invoked, her threat to patriarchal law is cemented. The birth of Vivien’s twins is a threat fulfilled, a boundary crossed. From the abject comes the ruin of the world.

Vivien is threatened not just by the hell-spawn she’s carrying, but also by three of the ghosts that share her home. Nora and Hayden, who have lost their own children, and Chad, who has never had children, each desire ownership of Vivien’s child and conspire to steal the baby once it is born.

Baby-snatching is a common, well rooted trope in fantasy and horror, which usually points to the degeneracy of a group or being – a sign that they’re beyond redemption, truly inhuman. Infants are stolen for ingestion (as in Torchwood: Children of Earth), as revenge (like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn) or a sacrificial offering (the Buffy episode Band Candy) and occasionally, though rarely, to be raised as the kidnapper’s own. It is this which motivates the childless ghosts of AHS.

Each conspirator represents a different level of threat. Deceased interior designer Chad, constantly arguing with his (also dead) partner Patrick, is no threat at all. More concerned as he is with decorating than mending his broken relationship, he seems to think the baby will simply be handed to him. Nora, left to her own devices, is an unlikely threat – she’s narcissistic enough but ethereal and clueless.

But with Hayden, the picture is quite different. Hayden is wicked, determined and operating without fear of consequence – she’s dead, after all – and that’s precisely why she’s so dangerous.

The feminine is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby.

– Freud, “Femininity”, New Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis (1933)

The problem here is one of motivation. Now, I’m not saying there’s something wrong with wanting children. But there’s something wrong with wanting children to the exclusion of everything else. Hayden is a formidable woman brimming with agency and audacity, and, in a stunning display of the roles women play in our diverse society, she’s pregnant too.

When she dies, she’s contributing all her energy to winning Ben back, and then, bam! One blunt-force trauma later, her whole reason for being has changed. Now, I get that dying is the sort of thing that might emotionally scar a person, but COME ON. The child in her belly, previously presented only as a tool of emotional blackmail, will never appear, so she’s obsessed with replacing it.

And that’s the key to understanding both Hayden and Nora. They both want to replace children they’ve lost. It is a narcissistic craving; a desire merely to possess. The possibility of motherhood has stripped them of rationality, maybe even sanity, and turned them into objects of dread. Here motherhood truly is ‘the most powerful feminine wish’ (Freud again, in 1933), and it is dangerous.

In the eyes of AHS, women are to be feared. Female sexuality is aberrant if not abhorrent, and represented by crude Freudian symbolism (if you aren’t yet convinced, check out the suckling infant literally devouring his mother’s breast).

I’m with Simone de Beauvoir when it comes to Freud, but not so Messrs. Murphy and Falchuck; it’s like they’ve tried to dramatise Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

The second season of American Horror Story recently began its run on UK television (on FX, new episodes Tuesday evening). So far it’s really pushing the boat out to hate women in a variety of new and exciting ways under the guise of a critical look at the pathologising of sexuality and historic attitudes to poor mental health.

It’s terrible. You’re going to love it.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

1. In a worrying conflation of hetero femininity and queer masculinity, one half of the gay couple who also haunt the house is also constantly yapping about having a child.
2. Who, by the way, IS WEARING A LATEX FETISH SUIT because that isn’t sex negative, kink-shaming douchery AT ALL.