[Guest Post] Lingerie, Women and Eroticism: A Brief Study of the 21st Century Agent Provocateur Woman (Part 2/2)
- Here’s Part 2 of Rarely Wears Lipstick founder and blogger Lori Smith‘s guest post two-parter (which is possibly mildly NSFW depending on how relaxed your workplace is!) Read Part 1 here.
Part 2: The Myth of the Agent Provocateur Woman
If it is understood that the dominant discourse still pertains to heterosexual and patriarchal ideologies, Agent Provocateur was certainly aiming to challenge this in 2008. The brochure for their Spring/Summer collection that year contains many examples of non-heteronormative behaviour.
A model in a swimming costume and stilettos stands in front of a seated, similarly attired woman, who touches her leg and looks up to her. Two women in satin lingerie and high heels are seen walking together – one has her hand on the other’s buttocks. A woman in animal print lingerie brandishes a spanking paddle and leans over an anonymous prostrate naked woman, whilst holding a rope that is attached to the submissive woman’s neck like a leash. An anonymous red-haired woman straddles a seated gasping woman whose arm is being stroked by a blonde in lingerie, brandishing a riding crop. Another woman, who is standing with her legs apart and her hands on her hips, watches an athletic female pole dancer. A topless woman in a red wig climbs on top of a woman in lingerie who lies, restrained, on a table.
There are also many examples of dominant female behaviour. Two women in bright coloured wigs and lingerie tie up and blindfold a clothed man on his knees. A man in underwear stands, with hands tied behind his back, displaying marks on his chest that suggest he has been struck by the riding crop held by the woman to his left. A handcuffed man is disrobed by a woman, whilst another woman records the scene using a professional video camera. A man lying restrained on a table, has his trousers unzipped by a lingerie-clad woman who is holding a glass of brandy and is staring directly at the viewer.
In this image, the Agent Provocateur woman is powerful yet playful. She is passionate, determined to satisfy her own desires and, from the facial expressions depicted, is clearly enjoying herself. She is active, not passive, and has agency.
However, in the 2012 brochure, the Agent Provocateur woman appears to have little or no agency. She faces the camera as if directed to by the photographer and is entirely the subject of the gaze – continually watching herself. This appears to be a return to the woman John Berger describes in Ways of Seeing:
She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.
There is little or no resistance to dominant discourses in the images contained within this brochure. All of the women appear sexually available, but are inviting sex rather than pursuing it. A woman stands in lingerie and heels next to a similarly attired seated woman, both facing the viewer with their legs apart. A woman kneels on a velvet chair, glancing over her shoulder at the viewer, with her buttocks prominently displayed. A woman in lingerie reclines on a chaise longue. A seated woman with her legs apart, hand on hip, stares at the viewer. There is no interaction between these women, even when more than one appears in the same image. Their only purpose is to invite the viewer’s gaze.
Christian Jantzen and others conducted a series of interviews with white middle class women in Denmark. The results suggested that these women wear delicate lingerie in order to achieve a sensation rather than a look. They wear it for how it makes them feel – confident, sensual, happy and satisfied – not necessarily for how they will be perceived by their partner. Some of the interviewees even admitted that the men in their lives do not understand their desire for exquisite lingerie. For them, the purchase and wearing of beautiful expensive underwear is about much more than just sex. It is about identity, pleasure, knowing how to dress for the right occasion, and, occasionally, projecting a desired alternate self-image:
The importance of lingerie to most of our respondents is due to the fact that this kind of garment enables them to demonstrate that they can manage a modern femininity. By adhering to a certain scheme of classification, they show how they master their performance in different situations. This confirms their social self.
Their research suggests that presenting lingerie as something to be enjoyed by the viewer rather than the wearer would not appeal to women. Even if this is not always true of women outside of their small study sample, I would argue that the current representation of the Agent Provocateur woman would therefore not appeal to the customer the brand originally sought to attract.
To conclude, the Agent Provocateur woman’s identity is, like the identity of every woman, shaped by discourse and the ideologies she is exposed to. If the woman is surrounded by, and part of, discourse which challenges what is currently dominant, she will herself become part of a reverse discourse. Agent Provocateur was originally conceived by Corré and Rees as a celebration of femininity, and the initial representation of the Agent Provocateur woman emphasised the performativity of her gender and her rejection of the patriarchal ideologies so often present in lingerie advertising.
Although the association between Agent Provocateur lingerie and this playfully erotic yet not passive lifestyle is purely arbitrary, it was exceedingly easy for customers to see the brand’s values and decide whether or not they wished to adopt them. Through the act of putting on this particular brand of quality exotic lingerie, a customer would create her sense of self, create her gender and transform her life into that of the Agent Provocateur woman. All of this was successfully conveyed in the promotional images and advertising for the brand up until at least 2008.
In looking at the differences between the images used to promote the Spring/Summer 2008 collection and those of the Autumn/Winter 2012 collection, it could be argued that the sale of the brand to a multinational company had an effect on how the Agent Provocateur woman was represented. The brand’s ideal woman appears to now offer far less resistance to current discourses on gender, sexuality and femininity than she did when Corré and Rees first sought to use lingerie as a way to disrupt and question the fashion status quo.
In expanding the market for the brand, the new owners appear to be attempting to create erotic lingerie that does not offend, thus diluting the original ethos of Agent Provocateur. Perhaps it is the current discourse which has changed, or maybe the Agent Provocateur woman simply works with the current discourse rather than against it? However, it could also be claimed that what is considered to be erotic is entirely subjective.
- Lori Smith is a rant-lite feminist who enjoys turning her thoughts into word form and then throwing them at the internet to see what sticks. She does this on a regular basis over at Rarely Wears Lipstick, and has previously contributed to The F-Word under her Sunday name.
[Guest Post] Lingerie, Women and Eroticism: A Brief Study of the 21st Century Agent Provocateur Woman (Part 1/2)
- Having had an awesome time at the Rarely Wears Lipstick Awards, in which we were nominated for Best Feminist Blog (and congrats to Stavvers, the fabulous winner!) we are very happy to have RWL founder and blogger Lori Smith back to BadRep Towers for a two-parter (which is possibly NSFW depending on how relaxed your workplace is! Maybe skip the vid)…
Part 1: Agent Provocateur, Discourse and Performativity
In 1971, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren set up ‘Let it Rock’, their first King’s Road boutique. Their son Joseph Corré followed in his parents’ footsteps and opened a shop in London with his wife Serena Rees in 1994. Named Agent Provocateur, the unusual boutique bridged a gap between the erotic lingerie sold in Soho’s sex shops and the respectable prettiness of the established quality brands sold in department stores.
Corré and Rees saw the brand as a vehicle for their creativity and their ideas about women and femininity. In 1995, they began a search for a woman who ‘would represent the concepts behind the clothes, model new designs, and be a spokesperson at upcoming events’. They saw the face of their brand as ‘charming, glamorous, curvy, independent and intelligent’ (see Agent Provocateur: A Celebration of Femininity).
The finalists of their competition were used as part of a publicity stunt at London Fashion Week, staging a demonstration against bland passionless fashion that drew the attention of the assembled press. After a decadent Miss Agent Provocateur Party had been held, where the winner was announced, Corré and Rees realised that a single woman couldn’t represent their brand’s values as the concept was too diverse. Every woman has the potential to become an agent provocateur.
Corré and Rees have since divorced, and in 2007, Agent Provocateur was purchased by 3i Group. This gradually led to a significant change in how the Agent Provocateur woman was represented in the brand’s advertising campaigns. The brochure to showcase the Spring/Summer 2008 collection retained a lot of the ethos of Corré and Rees’ original vision. It has a cover designed to look like an invitation to an exclusive party, featuring the text ‘you are cordially invited to attend a very private affair […] Bring a blindfold and an open mind!’. Each image inside forms part of a digitally-created montage, with the pages containing small parts of the panoramic whole, unfolding to reveal one uninterrupted tableau.
The models are depicted as attendees of the party and are engaging in activities of a sexual nature. Nothing pornographic is depicted, merely hints of erotic and light BDSM play. Most of the party guests are women, clothed in Agent Provocateur lingerie and swimwear, but there are also a number of men in the image. The women take both dominant and submissive roles, whilst the men are purely submissive.
Product information about the lingerie sets featured, such as name and price, is listed on the back of the image. With this choice of layout, it could be argued that the images are designed to be enjoyed first, and to be informative second.
By contrast, the Autumn/Winter 2012 collection is presented in a brochure containing separate images for each named set of lingerie, with the product details directly underneath each photograph. The theme of the collection is ‘Wilhelmina: Show Your True Self’ and the associated campaign focuses on a woman in Victorian London whose inner sensuality is revealed by a backstreet photographer’s magical camera.
Each image contains between one and three female models, with little or no interaction between them. The women are not engaged in any activity other than modelling the clothing for the viewer, and are, as such, passive subjects of the gaze. Hair and make up is consistent throughout and maintains the look of a catwalk show, where the models are presented as a homogenous entity – a representation of how the brand’s woman should physically embody that season’s look.
Each model’s ‘true self’ appears to be no different from the others. This presents us with a single type of Agent Provocateur woman, as opposed to the idea that she is present in all women, as Corré envisioned seventeen years previously.
It has often been suggested that the female body in lingerie is more erotic than the nude female body. Roland Barthes touches on this in his essay on striptease, published in Mythologies:
Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.
At the very heart of the original concept of the Agent Provocateur brand, when it was founded by Corré and Rees, was the idea of lingerie as a ritual sign which evoked the idea of sex. Although they sought to design underwear which referenced socially acceptable quality French lingerie, eroticism was very much a part of Agent Provocateur’s core values. They made the brand accessible to women who would not normally venture into sex shops to purchase erotic lingerie.
It could be argued that Corré and Rees were also responding to dominant discourse on sexuality and gender when they set up Agent Provocateur in the 1990s. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Michel Foucault analyses changes in discourse on sexuality and argues that discourse is a productive force; for example, leading to definitions of “normal” and “other”. He also looks at the concept of docile bodies versus active agency, discussing reverse discourse as an empowering method of countering the dominant discourse.
There is little doubt that Agent Provocateur – whose name refers to an undercover agent employed to provoke suspects to commit illegal punishable acts – originally sought to engage in a reverse discourse on female sexuality. In The History of Sexuality Volume 2, Foucault delves further and discusses what he calls ‘techniques of the self’, emphasising the role of practices and instruments in generating a sense of self.
Clothing is very much a ‘technique of the self’. People use their clothes to transform, change and project a chosen image on a daily basis. Although society still often restricts the individual’s choice of outerwear, unseen underwear offers the wearer a sense of agency. Lingerie is considered by many to be an instrument in generating a sense of self, and it is worth considering here that the self is also shaped by gender.
It is widely understood that gender is a cultural construction that is shaped by discursive forces. One of the main issues considered by Judith Butler is the performativity of gender. Gender is not a performance – as that suggests the performer returns to a more genuine self once they leave the stage – but it is performative, as we are all constantly putting on an act. Lingerie is but one aspect of the act of femininity.
Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.
– Judith Butler
Therefore, what could possibly be more “womanly” than dressing oneself up in Agent Provocateur lingerie? In Gender Trouble, Butler explores the spaces of resistance to dominant discourses. Like Foucault, and with reference to his work, she asks how we can go beyond the boundaries imposed on us by discourse, and explores the concept of agency. Gender and identity are more of a “doing” than a “becoming”, and are constantly shaped by discourse. Like any woman, the Agent Provocateur woman’s identity is fluid. She is constantly made and remade by the forces around her.
- Lori Smith is a rant-lite feminist who enjoys turning her thoughts into word form and then throwing them at the internet to see what sticks. She does this on a regular basis over at Rarely Wears Lipstick, and has previously contributed to The F-Word under her Sunday name.
- Pop back tomorrow for Part 2 of Lori’s reflections.
The shower scene in Silver Linings Playbook
When Hitchcock’s Psycho came out in 1960, its shower scene was instantly a sensation. Three minutes and fifty cuts, it broke rules previously sacrosanct: for starters, coming about forty minutes into the film, it killed off Janet Leigh, the film’s protagonist – with whom the audience had been invited to identify from those first opening shots of her carefully nondescript underwear. Not only this, its fifty cuts served the purpose of (in the director’s own words) ‘transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience’. Viewers were no longer the blonde; they were the psycho. An uncomfortable shift.
In Silver Linings Playbook, the menace is all in in the mind – it’s a film about mental illness. It is presumably for this reason that director David O. Russell has chosen to reproduce that shower scene in it – though, represented via a series of individual flashbacks, he’s added some more visceral cuts into it, as well as a middle-aged professor who’s having an affair with this Norman Bates’s wife.
The film follows Pat (Bradley Cooper), who is bipolar, and his quest to get his marriage back together after returning home from a psychiatric hospital. We learn that his most recent breakdown was precipitated on discovering his wife Nikki in the aforementioned shower with a colleague; he attacked the man, which brought him up against assault charges and eventually landed him in the institution. Back home at the beginning of the film, Pat wants to get Nikki, and his marriage, back – despite his continuing mood swings, refusal to take medication and restraining order.
Then he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a young woman whose husband has recently died in traumatic circumstances. She is similarly Troubled (she’s been fired for sleeping with all her co-workers) and they hit it off, in a vague way. She agrees to take a letter to Nikki if Pat will partner her in a dance competition.
The inevitable happens.
If you listen to Hollywood, there are dance competitions happening in every small town, every three minutes, just waiting for someone to do some self-actualisation through dance – as in dance movie stalwarts such as Strictly Ballroom, Flashdance or, its British equivalent, the Arts Council-funded Billy Elliot. This one brings plenty of opportunities for personal development, which – though not so pronounced as the ur-dance movies – is actually why Pat agrees to do it: he wants to prove to Nikki that he has changed, and grown, since the shower incident. Cinematic history tells him this is the way to do it.
But nonetheless, in Silver Linings Playbook, development through dance is not really the point: the dancing pops up towards the second half of the film, and while the rehearsals do force the characters to spend a lot of time doing semi-erotic stuff together, it’s not the primary impetus behind their falling in love.
Indeed, if you accept that dance in golden-era Hollywood is usually implied sex1, often in the context of romantic relationships between show-people who dance as part of their job (here, Fred Astaire tries to win Ann Miller back as his g/f by getting her to do the dance they perform on stage), you could say that Silver Linings is less about sex than it is about Feelings.
Feelings (that’s a capital F), are by contrast the preserve of the classic romcom, which – a true product of the Eighties – features extended, over-analytical examinations of the Self. It’s Hugh Grant and Woody Allen being neurotic and too self-aware; it’s realising you’re in love just in time to run down an aeroplane. It’s the power of the mind – its hopes, fears and wants – to overcome practical obstacles. And in Silver Linings Playbook, as I say, it’s all about the mind. It’s a romcom for the post-Hugh Grant generation, if you will.
Now, personally, I didn’t find the treatment of mental health as offensive as I know some did – David O. Russell has commented in interviews that he drew a lot from the experience of having a son with bipolar disorder, which does help. One thing that did bug me, though, was its pairing of a bipolar man with longstanding mental health issues with a hypersexual woman recovering from a traumatic bereavement. Pat’s problems are longstanding, but Tiffany’s troubles clearly have their origin in grief, and they happen to manifest themselves in a pattern of sexual behaviour that, as recounted, elicits visible salivation from her male companion. We might say, in fact, that in this film, there is Serious Mental Illness, and there is Sexy Mental Illness. That Pat’s initial crime puts him in the cinematic shoes of Norman Bates, whose murder is at root sexually motivated – though it is repeated here as a grotesque husband-on-lover attack – underscores this, though admittedly at one remove.
This is why the Psycho crib, for me, was a key moment – and partly because its appearance in the film is so downright weird. It parallels the dance competition trope as an interjection of popular film history, but I suppose it also draws together some of the film’s key themes: notably, though arguably ironically, psychosis (Hitchcock’s film played a major part in popularising the slang word psycho) and what you might very crudely call Hollywood ‘monster-cam’.
I suppose one reason for including the scene (something I spent a long time puzzling over) was that, by putting the audience in the eye-view of a man mid-breakdown unleashing his rage upon two people who happen to be naked (and one of them a woman) shows the terrible power of the mental threats the film explores: we see their vulnerability, and we are invited to consider the gender issues the attack brings to the surface. Within the context of the plot, it makes sense of Nikki’s need for a restraining order and perhaps even makes an ironic comment on the thigh-rubbing Hitchcock is widely accepted to have been doing throughout his own shower scene. It certainly makes you think back to the portrayal of mental illness in the deeply exploitative Psycho. In that sense, Silver Linings Playbook actually comes out reasonably well.
So, should you go and see it? I’d imagine if you were going to, you’ll have done so by now. But I think it’s worth seeing – despite those dodgy gender politics, it certainly makes you think.
- Considerably less ‘implied’ in the 1980s, as with the eponymous moves of Dirty Dancing. [↩]
Majority World Riot Grrrl
Inspired by those plucky Pussy Riot gals and their ‘being sent to a penal colony for a peaceful protest’ hi-jinks in Russia last year, I set out to find tracks from riot grrrl bands around the world. And just to shift the focus for once, I’ve ignored the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, Europe and other super wealthy places.
‘Are there grrrls in the majority world?’ I wondered. The answer is yes, and they rock. In fact I’ve made a Majority World Riot Grrrl playlist which can be found for your delectation. Big shout out to Riot Grrrl Berlin and their fantastic compilations, on which lots of these bands feature.
Nepal
The first band I found was an anarchafeminist outfit from Nepal called Tank Girl. Nepal has a deeply traditional patriarchal society; marital rape was outlawed only in 2006 and still carries just a six month sentence. Rape survivors are often ostracised, having ‘brought shame’ to their family and wider community. Dalit (or ‘low-caste’) women face additional discrimination and extremely high levels of violence.
One of Tank Girl’s members, Sareena Rai, is involved in two other feminist DIY punk bands, Rai Ko Ris and Naya Faya, and works to help Dalit women to protect themselves from gender-based violence, delivering self-defence training in her house. Which is pretty awesome.
Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia
I found a few more Asia-Pacific riot grrrl bands, including the adorable Fatal Posporos from the Philippines and Pretty Riot from Indonesia. As well as bands Hellsister and Dance On Your Grave, the scene in Malaysia was (and hopefully still is) large enough to support a zine distro called Grrrl:Rebel. “Through zines, people in the scene are much more exposed to stuffs that were somewhat limited to them and the public before” founder Carol told GrrrlZines.net in 2001. “In countries like Malaysia and Singapore, you would get arrested if you write any articles that can be considered as threats to the government.”
It’s comments like that which I find so remarkable, dropped into interviews about the role of girls in the punk scene and the best local bands which could kind of be about anywhere.
Africa and the Middle East
While I couldn’t find any trace of a riot grrrl scene in Africa, I did happen upon a 2011 documentary called Punk In Africa which sounds good. And in the Middle East, grrrls are thin on the ground, but judging from the cracking MidEastTunes website there are plenty of women active in dark metal and goth, including Bahrain’s first all-girl metal band Scarlet Tear.
Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil
South America does seem to have a sizeable riot grrrl base – my cursory search turned up bands in Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Colombia and Argentina. Le Butcherettes from Mexico are definitely worth a listen, and I’d like to find more by a Venezuelan skapunk outfit called 7 Potencias who have a song called ‘Feminista de Bolsillo’, which I’m led to believe translates as ‘Pocket Feminist’.
The biggest scene seems to be in Brazil, which boasts a huge list of bands and artists, including Dominatrix, Siete Armas and Bertha Lutz, with her irresistibly-titled track ‘Feminism? Yes Please!’.
Bit of context: while Brazil is the world’s sixth largest economy, there is still vast inequality. And although it currently has a female President for the first time in Dilma Rouseff, women make up just 8.6% of the seats in Parliament. Abortion is legal only to save a woman’s life or in cases of rape, and in 2010, it was reported that 200,000 women a year are hospitalized for complications of illegal abortion.
The reasons behind riot grrrl’s popularity in Brazil are even the subject of an academic paper by Calla Hummel, who recognises the political significance and adaptability of this particular bit of shouty youth culture:
Brazilian riot grrrl is one of the sites where Western cultural hegemony is being called into question… As it moves across borders, riot grrrl becomes a form of transnational feminism – and grrrls must address how ideas and material originating in a given locale may resonate, change, or delegitimize ideas and work in another.
Gender inequality is a global problem which varies in its expression across different cultural contexts. It’s not an ‘over there’ issue, but in some places it’s more severe than in others. Similarly, riot grrrl anywhere is awesome, but the courage and kickassness of the grrrls in these bands is pretty inspiring.
As a band member called Isabella quoted by Hummel says:
As long as we keep getting letters from the middle of the jungle, from a tiny, three person town in the Amazon, from some girl saying, ‘Feminism saved my life, thank you,’ we will keep doing it.
- This article originally appeared in a zine put together for Sara and James‘ club night Grrrls Just Wanna Have Fun.
- Tiny Note From The Ed: Happy International Women’s Day from everybody at BadRep Towers! Please consider donating to WomanKind Worldwide today.
It’s only fair to tell you that there’s spoilers in here, but guys, the musical’s been out for literally decades! I mean, I hadn’t seen it and didn’t know the plot or anything, but I think I was the only person left on earth.
Oh, readers. I’ve done that thing again. I’ve gone and seen Les Miserables without having seen the musical or read the book and now I’m writing about it without the massive burning swollen bladder of fandom that everyone else seems to have about it, and as such, will probably sound a bit naive. I had literally no idea what it was about. Well, apart from “France” and “revolution” and some presumably rather miserable people and – something that was used to successfully sell the whole thing to me – pretty young men draped attractively about the place in military uniform, covered in blood. Oh, and Hugh Jackman singing. He apparently does lots of musicals in Australia, and I was curious to know what that was like, since I know him primarily as the not-very-musical-ready Wolverine.
Maybe I should just hand in my human card at the desk.
Did I like it? Well… yes. I think? Sort of. There was a lot that I found either directly unappealing or straight-up baffling, but overall, there was sufficient stuff in there to make me want to see it onstage. And, well, I’m a sucker for musicals.
The main thing about this film is that it suffers from being a film. There are things that you can only do in the magical reality of the stage, and this particular production (directed by Tom Hooper) tries on the whole gritty reality thing (except with people singing all the time) and therefore can’t get away with similar tricks and tactics. This is most glaringly obvious in how they depict (or not) the passage of time. There were some bits that were completely confusing because I just couldn’t tell whether or not time was meant to have passed or not. For example, on stage, as my stage-show-fan friend tells me, Fantine (Anne Hathaway) can waft in and out of the set to show many days passing between her selling her hair and her teeth before eventually being forced by circumstance into becoming a sex worker. In the film, it looked like she’d lost her job, and then immediately sold everything in her face and became a sex worker.
I was like, wow that’s a terrible afternoon.
It happened again after Cosette’s (Amanda Seyfried) wedding. “I can never tell my adopted daughter that I’m an ex-con!,” Valjean howls, sheathing his Adamantium talons and fleeing for the hills, where he staggers into a convent and casually dies in the corner. I assumed he’d had an ill-publicised heart attack in the carriage on the way over.
The next problem I had with Les Mis was the way Valjean was so suffused with his role as apparently French Ex-Con Jesus that for me he ended up being completely impossible to identify with. I found his motives and decisions inexplicable to the point of being hilarious. I wanted to have the film retitled “Jean Valjean’s Baffling Sequence Of Life Choices” because in this rendition at least, he comes off as too saintly, too self-righteous and too… incongruously self-sacrificial for me to see him as a real person and empathise with him. Ever.
“Also I have to dive out of this window now lol bye” “YOU BAFFLING SCOUNDREL”
And what on earth was going on with the cinematography when anyone was having a solo? With a stage show, if someone has a solo, you’ve got them as a figure in context with the set, the extras, all embalmed in live music. So you can empathise with them properly because there’s this whole holistic musical experience going on. Not so with the film, where the director has decided that the best way to make you empathise with the solo singer is to have a VERY TIGHT CLOSE-UP of the singer’s face, slightly off-centre, while they cry and sing at the same time. This is not how you make your audience empathise with anyone or anything. I found myself wondering how they’d done Anne Hathaway’s makeup while the rest of the cinema sobbed around me.
Has now sported this look in about 32,412 films, but is working it
Right, time to talk about Javert. As my more long-term readers will know, I’m a villainsexual creep, and my darling friend who kindly dragged me from my Doom Fortress to see this flick accurately predicted that I’d have the hots for Javert. She was not wrong. I have never before fancied Russell Crowe in anything ever (in fact, quite the opposite) but I honestly found Javert the only character that I empathised with and found engaging and explicable. Plus, he’s got an attractive array of uniforms and shiny boots. In fact, that was a great way to tell – in the absence of any bloody thing else – the passage of time. It had to be later on: Javert had MOAR BRAID. I’m okay with that. Time-keeping through the medium of men in uniform? I’m deleting my phone’s clock app this afternoon.
I actually quite enjoyed the fatalistic pointlessness of barricade-building rich white boys1 harping on about no longer being slaves and changing the world and then being run over with cannons. That was grand. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a structures-of-oppression-ruining bloody revolution, but this is a film, and I’m a bloodthirsty little boy with the need for something hard and horrible to counteract Valjean’s large-overcoated saintliness, so I was overwhelmed with the beauty of their cataclysmic failure. So beautiful. So horrible. So… uh.
Deserves better than Marius, period. In fact, deserves own, better-orchestrated revolution not being led by Marius & co.
Now, Eponine (Samantha Barks). Eponine is meant to be an empathic, sadface-inducing character, and she’s sweet and earnest and I rather liked her. But Marius, the guy she’s in love with, is so boring. I just wanted her to get over it and find someone interesting who doesn’t apparently fall madly in love with people when he glimpses their hats from a distance through a crowd.
It’s always nice to see Helena Bonham-Carter reprising her timeless role of “Cackling Woman With Hair” (I don’t think they even give her a costume, do they? That’s all just her wardrobe), too. And I sincerely hope that after playing Signor Pirelli in Sweeney Todd, Sasha Baron-Cohen is typecast as Musical Skeevy Comic Relief for the rest of his life and never plays another vaguely-veiled bigoted stereotype ever again.
Overall, it really wasn’t as miserable as I was expecting. Valjean lives a long and successful life, Cosette and the boring Marius (the gorgeous Eddie Redmayne) get married, Fantine’s wishes are vindicated, all that stuff, and everyone dies happily ever after with a rousing song about sticking it to the man. All this talk about how much sobbing it elicits from people generally makes me wonder if someone’s snuck into my room at night and glued my tearducts shut. It struck me as generally rather uplifting and “Oh well! Songs and Christian Love!” rather than “DESPAIR AND CHIPS FOR EVERYONE”.
To summarise! YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- The music is genuinely brilliant. Believe the hype.
- Everyone plays really, really well. Flawless performances from Anne Hathaway (in particular), Wolverine, and even Russell “Are You Not Entertained?” Crowe, who has a spectacularly grizzly, stoic turn as Javert
- It really does look exceedingly good
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- I’m not sure how many of the characters feel like real people, honestly
- It suffers from its own medium in a few glaringly obvious and immersion-breaking ways
- It feels pretty obnoxiously long, but that might just have been me and my bladder having a disagreement
- People do sing pretty much all the time and you might be allergic to musicals, but if you’re allergic to musicals WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO SEE LES MISERABLES
- Ed’s Tiny Note: are they meant to be an underclass? Despite Eddie Redmayne being a Rather Cut-Glass Etonian ;). Anyone read Hugo/able to verify how they’re meant to come across?! [↩]
- Today we’re honoured to welcome Lydia Harris of feminist DJing duo Girl Germs and other awesomeness back to BadRep Towers. Wanna join the party? Send your pitch to [email protected]!
Everybody has an opinion about Quentin Tarantino. Is he racist for using the ‘N’ word so often in his scripts? Is he a genius, or a copycat? Is he some sort of sicko, in love with violence for its own sake? Can he act? (No, he can’t.)
But underneath the gore, profanity, and wooden cameos, is there anything for feminists to celebrate? As unlikely as it sounds, I think there is.
Tarantino has written some pretty amazing parts for women. He puts them on screen, not just as eye candy or the girlfriends of the heroes, but as people with stories of their own to tell. They know how to defend themselves and their friends, and they do their own stunts. They fight (and dance) barefoot, and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.
This isn’t to say that the man himself is a feminist icon, or that his films are entirely unproblematic. Some of the violence perpetrated against the women characters has an uncomfortably voyeuristic feel to it, and every now and again his films feel more like depictions of his own sexual fantasies rather than true fiction. He professes a love for ‘strong women’ (he grew up with a single mother), but this sexualisation of women characters does call his motives into question.
It’s worth bearing in mind though, that these characters haven’t sprung new and fully formed from Tarantino’s imagination – they’re loving reimaginations of the deadly but beautiful women of the B-movies and exploitation flicks Tarantino watched as a youngster. These women were usually a bit too ‘empowered’ for their own good, and often ended up getting their comeuppance. Dodgy source material, sure, but Tarantino regularly flips this trope on its head. The rapists, murderers and crooks in his movies rarely escape without feeling the wrath of their female ‘victims’.
Try watching Zoe Bell playing ‘Ship’s Mast’ at 100mph without feeling a heart-swelling sense of sisterly pride. And I don’t know a woman who has seen Pulp Fiction and not thought Mia Wallace would be a pretty sassy best friend (if it weren’t for the cocaine abuse).
As feminists, we sometimes have to dig about in the mud of misogyny to find some empowering gold dust. In honour of that, here’s a rundown of the baddest, sassiest women in QT’s weird world.
Mia Wallace (Pulp Fiction)
Oh, Mia Wallace. The woman who spawned a million copycat hairstyles. She doesn’t kick any ass, except in a twist contest, but she’s a seriously cool customer.
Did her husband Marsellus really throw a man over a balcony for giving her a foot-rub? Maybe not, but it’s easy to see why he might. Everybody in the movie is afraid of him, and perhaps so is Mia (she asks Vincent not to tell him about the overdose), but she seems to do pretty much what she wants anyway.
She flirts with Vincent over dinner, and we never find out what might have happened between them had she not mistaken his heroin for cocaine. Something of an enigma, she’s a sassy, straight-talking woman with a preference for silence over chatter (“That’s when you know you’ve found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.”) This combination of beauty and brains seems to have a profound effect on the men who meet her, and enables her to survive in her world populated by crooks and murderers.
Jackie Brown (Jackie Brown)
Jackie Brown is a black woman in her forties, and the star of the movie that bears her name as its title. In the youth-obsessed, whitewashed culture of Hollywood, this is exciting and unusual in itself (depressing, huh?).
The legendary Pam Grier plays a flight attendant, who works for a crappy airline. She makes some extra bucks on the side by smuggling in ill-gotten cash for a gun-dealer named Ordell, until she gets busted.
As she says: “Well, I’ve flown seven million miles. And I’ve been waiting on people almost 20 years. The best job I could get after my bust was Cabo Air, which is the worst job you can get in this industry. I make about sixteen thousand, with retirement benefits that ain’t worth a damn. And now with this arrest hanging over my head, I’m scared. If I lose my job I gotta start all over again, but I got nothing to start over with. I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get. And that shit is scarier than Ordell.”
But Jackie is a survivor in the truest sense of the word. When things look bad for her, she takes matters into her own hands, using her brains and courage to rip off the gangsters and escape a jail sentence in one outrageously brave scheme.
She plans everything herself, knows who she can trust, and isn’t afraid to turn a gun on a man who she knows to be a killer. She’s a smart, older, black woman who, despite being a total fox (Foxy Brown, geddit?), doesn’t use her sexuality to get ahead. With media portrayal of black women usually relying heavily on sexualized stereotypes, Jackie Brown is a breath of fresh air.
The Bride / Beatrix Kiddo (Kill Bill)
When people talk about ‘empowered’ female characters in Tarantino movies, Beatrix Kiddo is who they’re usually thinking of. The woman is dragged through hell backwards, and still manages to exact bloody revenge on everybody who hurt her, or kept her from her child.
The trope of the vengeful woman is not a particularly progressive one. But Beatrix Kiddo is no ‘bunny boiler’. She was shot in the head and left for dead, raped whilst in a coma, and led to believe that her unborn child had died. As much as we might find the gore and violence hard to stomach, it’s hard to argue with her motives. From Beatrix herself: “It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.”
She’s a woman who knows how to protect herself, and believes her life is worth fighting for. Even when she’s been buried alive, it’s still impossible to see her as a victim. And she’s not the only strong woman in the film (although she’s the only one you’re rooting for).
The women in Kill Bill are scrappy. The fights between The Bride and other female ex-members of the Deadly Viper Assasination Squad aren’t sexy ‘girl fights’. They fight with skill, knocking seven shades of shit out of each other with terrifying ferocity. They’re fighting for their lives, and it isn’t pretty.
But The Bride isn’t just violent and vengeful. She’s a mother who longs to be reunited with her child. Somehow, this duality doesn’t cause the dissonance you would expect. She’s a three-dimensional character, more than capable of being many different things at once. The shock of that highlights just how rare it is in a Hollywood film.
Zoe Bell, Kim and Abernathy (Death Proof)
Death Proof is a film of two halves, linked by one gross, murderous ex-stunt driver. In the first half, he stalks and kills a group of beautiful friends with his car. But we know that in Tarantino’s world, creeps don’t get away with things like that. When he attempts to do the same thing with another group of women, he makes a fatal error by messing with a stuntwoman, stunt driver, and their super-cool make-up artist friend.
I have some serious qualms about the first half, as the violence perpetrated against the victims is fetishised to an almost ludicrous degree. But things take a turn for the better when Zoe Bell and her pals (played by Tracie Thorns and Rosario Dawson) arrive on screen.
Zoe Bell is a real-life stuntwoman, who plays herself in this movie. When you see her perched on the bonnet of a car being driven at 100 mph, that’s really her, and she’s really doing that. Which is wicked cool.
Stuntman Mike grows tired of chasing these women who refuse to be victims, but they haven’t finished with him. Instead of letting him get away, they go after him. And their intentions are clear, with Abernathy declaring “Let’s kill this bastard.”
In the real world, women rarely receive justice for the violence they experience. Although this vigilante-style justice is probably not what we want for our own society (however satisfying it might be), watching it on screen is incredibly cathartic. When Abernathy puts the final boot into Stuntman Mike, the urge to cheer is almost overwhelming.
Shoshanna (Inglourious Basterds)
Shoshanna is the self-styled “face of Jewish vengeance” in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s ‘creative’ re-imagining of World War Two. She escapes the ‘Jew Hunter’, who kills her whole family whilst they are in hiding. When we next see her, she’s running a cinema in occupied Paris, where the Nazis want to screen their latest propaganda film.
As painful as this is to her, she sees it as an opportunity to exact revenge for what was done to her family, and other Jewish families across Europe. Her single-minded resolve, and calm in the face of extraordinary pressure, is the perfect foil to the disastrous exploits of the Basterds.
Women in war films are usually relegated to the roles of tearful wife or showgirl. In Inglourious Basterds, it is a woman who changes the course of the war, and thus history. This epitomises one of the key attributes of Tarantino’s women: agency. They make decisions for themselves that change their lives, and the lives of others around them.
Of course, we know that women made a huge and valuable contribution to the war effort, in many different ways. It’s just a shame that it took a film with a fictionalised version of history to depict a woman having any sort of meaningful involvement in the conflict.
So, there you have it. Those are my own favourite Tarantino women. Broomhilda from Django Unchained didn’t quite make it in, as I’ve only seen it once. But I think she should get an honourable mention here, if only for surviving.
Obviously, Tarantino’s movies are far from perfect feminism-wise, and the man himself doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to saying sexist douchebag things. But with so few interesting or positive representations of women on-screen, we should celebrate the few characters who break the mould. Especially if they make us leave the cinema feeling a little cooler, a little braver and a little more willing to stand up for ourselves.
- Lydia Harris likes to think of herself as a grownup Wednesday Addams. Her pasty complexion is the result of watching movies and snacking during the day with the curtains closed, instead of going out to enjoy ‘fresh air’. She tweets as @lydiasquidia, and blogs (infrequently) about pop culture and feminism at myswimsuitissues.blogspot.com.
[Guest Post] The Countess Is Waiting For You: Daughters of Darkness
- Emily McQuade takes the guest post slot now as part of our February Women in Horror Recognition Month blogfest. Do you have a pitch? Pitch that pitch to [email protected]!
Vampires have appeared in various incarnations throughout the history of cinema. From lonely Nosferatu, to Dracula, to vampire cowboys, vampire teenagers1 and, erm, vampire motorcycles.2
For a stylish, slinky and subversive depiction of a bloodsucker, Daughters of Darkness (directed by Harry Kümel, 1971) is well worth a look. It’s a hypnotic cocktail of horror and arthouse. The DVD has a campy Hammer-style cover and the tag line, ‘An erotic nightmare of vampire lust!’ Subtle. For some reason, there were a lot of lesbian vampire movies released in the 70s. However anyone looking for straight-up naughtiness will be disappointed with Daughters of Darkness. The vampires are beautiful women, but it’s not about titillation. It’s a lot weirder than that.
The story: a pair of newlyweds arrive at an out-of-season hotel in chilly Ostend. The bride – Valerie – is dressed all in white and appears to be the picture of naïve innocence. The groom – Stefan – has a handsome face, but there’s something not quite right about his smile. It almost looks like a sneer.
Their relationship appears to be a bit, well, peculiar. She’s concerned that he hasn’t told his mother about their marriage. He seems to be in no hurry to do so. Prior to their unscheduled stop-in at this beautiful but lonely place, they have both confessed that they don’t love one another and both seem okay with this. And then, during dinner, the sapphic vampire aristocrat arrives with her assistant/lover.
The Countess Bathory, played with otherworldly grace and just a hint of vulnerability by Delphine Seyrig, tells the couple that she is a descendant of the infamously murderous Hungarian countess. (A real historical character and template for the ‘glamorous female vampire’ archetype, Elizabeth Bathory was supposed to have been a serial killer but apparently wasn’t really into drinking virgins’ blood. That was a rumour that came about years after her death. The real Countess was never a vampire, just as Catherine the Great probably never even got to first base with any horses.)
Her loving description of the horrors her ancestor inflicted on young ladies gets Stefan a bit excited. Valerie is horrified. At first. And then the couple are drawn into the vampire’s world. In which the notions of victim and monster get turned sideways. And then the film briefly shows us Stefan’s ‘Mother’. (As the the none-more-seventies voiceover man enthuses in the film’s trailer, ‘She’s something else!’).
And there are some deaths. Including death by bowl.
Yes, bowl. And a lovely crystal bowl it is too. And someone knocks an entire lobster on the floor in the act. Such decadence! The film could be read as a mediation on power and relationships. (In their own ways, Countess Bathory and Stefan are both bullies.) Or an exercise in playing around with genre tropes. Or a daft-but-enjoyable confection of crazy featuring some splendid outfits (sequins, feathers, PVC capes!).
Actually, it’s probably a bit of all of these. It’s a strange and beautiful work. Even the bits that make you snigger might crop up in your dreams a long time after you’ve seen it.
- Emily McQuade is the co-author of Film Burble, where she likes to discuss all things cinematic. She’d like to live in a world where action figures are manufactured for all Mike Leigh characters. When not thinking about films, she likes to skulk around London in search of books, comedy and mandrills. She can also be founding loafing about on Twitter: @missmcq.
- I once had to walk through a cinema foyer full of Twilight fans and had to restrain myself from bellowing, ‘It’s not as good as The Lost Boys.’ In a couple of decades hence, they’ll probably have to resist the urge to be similarly snarky about some future vampire boy-fest. [↩]
- Yes really. I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle is a British horror/comedy from the late 80s. I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing it, so can’t comment on its quality. [↩]
[Guest Post] Lisa Tuttle: Women in the Clubhouse of Horror
- Next up in our Women in Horror Recognition Month series, we’re super stoked to welcome award-winning author Lisa Tuttle to the guest slot. (Wanna join the guest blogging fun? Send your pitches to [email protected].)
In the dim and distant past, I edited an original anthology of horror stories called Skin of the Soul. Most of the stories were new (there were two reprints) and all of the contributors were women. What sparked my decision to do it was an all-male horror anthology published a couple of years earlier to much acclaim: Prime Evil, edited by Douglas E. Winter, was a showcase for “the masters of modern horror”, and Winter’s introduction was dedicated to the argument that horror is not a genre but an emotion, to be found throughout all literature,from high to low.
I agree; I don’t care much for generic “horror”, even if I prefer it to generic “romance”, and although I’ve written a lot of horror stories, and most of my novels have some element of horror in them (one, Lost Futures, published as horror in the US, was nominated for a science fiction award in Britain) I’m not that comfortable identifying myself as a “horror writer”.
The writers Winter invited to contribute to his anthology included nearly all the big names of the time (Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker) but also lesser-known writers (Jack Cady and Paul Hazel). Even the introduction, pointing to the many sources of horror in the mainstream, gave a name-check to just one woman writer throughout literary history.
Who was this paragon? You might guess Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, Edith Wharton, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Joyce Carol Oates… but no, the solitary example the editor chose was “…the best-selling novels of V.C. Andrews.” (I did wonder if he knew her first name was Virginia rather than, say, Victor.)
So I was horrified – not in a good way – by this compilation of horrors, and daydreamed about selling my own anthology, inviting a list of excellent writers to contribute, writing my own erudite introduction about great horror fiction of the past. If anyone pointed out that all of those writers were women, I’d act surprised, pretend it was just the luck of the draw, these were the best stories submitted and naturally the examples I chose were my personal favourites.
I certainly did not set out to deliberately exclude men; there were lots of good male writers, but now that I came to think about it, not many of them wrote horror. I mean real horror, genuinely well-written and original, not that childish gross-out stuff, not those tired generic clichés, not dreary old male fantasies, but the kind of thing I wanted to read, because, after all, it only counts as horror in my book if it fits my definition… and I reserve the right to change the rules whenever I like.
Over years of going to conventions, and reading and writing and reviewing (even teaching classes) in the fields of science fiction, fantasy and horror, I’ve noticed how much time is devoted to definitions of genre. Any genre. Once you start putting labels on books, you must justify the inclusion of one and the exclusion of another. This is science fiction, of which I approve, while that is merely fantasy. (I remember Charles Platt defending his choice of interviewees for his first Who Writes Science Fiction? – Kate Wilhelm was the only woman, and she was interviewed in tandem with her husband – but, he explained, Ursula LeGuin had refused his request, and he couldn’t think of any other woman who wrote what he considered to be proper science fiction.)
“Literary” authors are given a pass time and again, not tarred with the genre brush (it’s “magic realism” or “speculative fiction”) and it pops up in discussions and reader reviews all the time: “I don’t call this horror.” “This is all about atmosphere and character and not scary at all.” “Maybe works as literature, but not as horror fiction.” “Vampires wouldn’t do that.” Etc.
Critics may praise authors who “push the boundaries” or subvert expectations, but these are the very actions that can make the dedicated genre fan feel cheated, and respond angrily, as if when they ordered chocolate ice cream, they’d been served a bowl of extra-hot chilli.
When, more than twenty years after the publication of Skin of the Soul (“which proves indisputably that horror fiction is not a male preserve”, or so said Clive Barker in 1990) , I find that women are still fighting that old battle, still having their contributions to horror ignored or forgotten, I wonder if this isn’t – at least partly – something to do with definitions and expectations of genre. And with who is defining it, and why.
Myself, I’ve never limited my reading to one type of fiction, and I don’t write novels that fall neatly into a narrowly defined slot, either. (Maybe this is my problem!) There are some readers for whom genre fiction is comfort food, and they don’t want any nasty surprises when they’ve snuggled down to read – even in a genre celebrated as the purveyor of nasty surprises. Maybe, for some readers, it doesn’t count as horror unless the author plays by certain rules, unless the story is purveyed via the male gaze, and the name on the title page does nothing to break the illusion that we’re all boys together in this clubhouse.
- Lisa Tuttle is an acclaimed author whose achievements include winning the International Horror Guild Award, a BSFA Award, and most recently the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
- The novel The Silver Bough is just out in a new paperback edition from Jo Fletcher Books.
- www.lisatuttle.co.uk
[Women In Horror Month] Modernism, feminism and fear: The Uncanny Stories of May Sinclair
In honour of Women In Horror Recognition Month I thought I’d take the chance to put British Edwardian writer May Sinclair in the spotlight for once.
May Sinclair in about 1916
Born in 1863 and a celebrated author in her lifetime, Sinclair has, like so many women writers, been largely forgotten, despite her close friendships with some of modernism’s poster boys: Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, and others. She was an early champion of T.S. Eliot and the first critic to use the term “stream of consciousness” to describe a literary technique.
Rather brilliantly, Sinclair also campaigned for women to get the vote, and in 1912 wrote a pamphlet called ‘Feminism’ which argued for women’s equal potential for intellectual endeavour and political engagement. Her feminism seems to have been rather essentialist, but she was still a powerful voice for equality at a time when women were routinely denied the vote, an education, economic independence or sexual agency.
Sinclair had no formal education, although she read widely and developed an interest in psychoanalysis, philosophy and mysticism in particular. She attended Cheltenham Ladies College for a year before leaving to care for her four brothers who all had a hereditary heart defect. In spite of this, she wrote a dozen novels including bleak bildungsroman The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, essays, poems and short stories before the onset of Parkinson’s disease prevented her from writing.
She died in 1946, having already drifted into obscurity. However, her literary significance as a pioneer of feminism and modernism is starting to be recognised, as this great post points out: “Her work is good, even great, and it covers all the stops. It fits quite neatly in between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and she can serve well as a missing link.”
I stumbled upon Sinclair entirely by accident when I picked up her 1923 collection Uncanny Stories, which is where the horror connection comes in. There’s a near-complete copy available on Google Books if you want to check it out, although it’s missing one of my favourites.
Sinclair’s letters show that her idea for the title predates the publication of Freud’s essay The Uncanny by nearly a decade, but she seems to have welcomed the coincidence and it’s certainly fitting. Her stories are intensely psychological; there is no gore or ghouls, but instead a creeping horror and eerie imagery, and a sense of claustrophobia which lingers long after you’ve finished reading.
Some of the stories are intensely sad, such as ‘If The Dead Knew’, in which a son realises his dead mother has heard him tell others how he had secretly hated her:
Something compelled him to turn round and look towards his mother’s chair.
Then he saw her.
She stood between him and the chair, straight and thin, dressed in the clothes she had died in, the yellowish flannel nightgown and bed jacket.
The apparition maintained itself with difficulty. Already its hair had grown indistinct, a cap of white mist. Its face was an insubstantial framework for its mouth and eyes, and for the tears that fell in two shining tracks between. It was less a form than a visible emotion, an anguish.
Hollyer stood and stared at it. Through the glasses of its tears it gazed back at him with an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow.
Then, slowly and stiffly, it began to recede from him, drawn back and back, without any movement of its feet, in an unearthly stillness, keeping up, to the last minute, its look of indestructible reproach.
And now it was a formless mass that drifted to the window and hung there a second, and passed, shrinking like a breath on the pane.
But other tales are comic. In ‘The Victim’, a ghostly visitation to a murderer isn’t full of reproach, but thanks – for freeing the victim from his debts.
Sinclair’s themes and imagery chime with many of the ideas popularised by Freud. Earlier in ‘If the Dead Knew’ the central character Hollyer is alarmed to discover he wishes his mother would die:
In the dark, secret places of the mind your thoughts ran loose beyond your knowing: they burrowed under the walls that shut off one self from another; they got through. It was as if his secret self had broken loose.
You are the unconscious mind and I claim my five pounds.
Founding a literary tradition which would later include Elizabeth Bowen and Margaret Atwood, Sinclair’s uncanny stories feature divided and dislocated selves, the dance of impulse and resistance and the hidden tracks and traces of memory and unspoken desire. And as Philippa Martindale explains, these stories are particularly concerned with feminine and feminist experience:
Sinclair’s uncanny fiction is a subtle tool for feminist expression, deconstructing patriarchal paradigms of power… Her uncanny stories serve as a forum for ‘deviant’ subjects, addressing cultural issues such as female desire, sexuality, and gender roles.
When I first read the collection, it reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, and especially ‘The Apple Tree‘ – in part because most of the stories concern relationships between men and women. Martindale highlights the “sense of struggle for mastery between Sinclair’s male and female protagonists, typically played out in the sexual arena.” One of the best examples is ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’, which deals at once with the fantastic and the horrifically mundane as a former couple are compelled to eternally repeat their loveless affair in a shabby hotel room in the afterlife.
On the subject of ghost stories, Sinclair herself said:
Ghosts have their own atmospheres and their own reality, they also have their setting in the everyday reality we know; the story-teller is handling two realities at the same time.
For me it is this touching of two worlds which makes ghost stories so thrilling. The idea of something surfacing or reaching through, reaching back is unsettling and deeply uncanny. Sinclair’s protagonists find themselves at points where the membrane between the natural and supernatural, life and afterlife, the conscious and unconscious has grown thin.
[Guest Post] Five Women in Horror from Alison Littlewood
- Next up in our Women in Horror Recognition Month series, we’re thrilled to welcome author Alison Littlewood to the guest slot. Alison’s debut novel, A Cold Season, is out now. (Wanna join the guest blogging fun? Send your pitches to [email protected].)
I was delighted when Bad Reputation asked me to recommend the work of five women working in horror, to coincide with Women in Horror Recognition Month. It’s the perfect time to celebrate each other’s work and shout about what women have achieved in the field. So here are five personal picks…
1. Thana Niveau, short story writer
I first came across Thana’s work in various anthologies, including several editions of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, where her work had rightfully been selected as among the most outstanding of the year.
Most recently though, I read her first collection of short stories, From Hell to Eternity (published by Gray Friar Press, with an introduction penned by none other than Ramsey Campbell).
From Hell to Eternity is a wonderful read. I particularly loved the opening story, ‘The Curtain’, with its eerie underwater world, and ‘Stolen to Time’, with a photography session that captures more than is bargained for. This is a strong debut, and definitely marks Thana out as one to watch.
Furthermore… this is a lady who really lives the life. As her bio says, she ‘lives in a crumbling gothic tower in Wicker Man country. She shares her life with fellow horror scribe John Llewellyn Probert, in a Victorian library filled with arcane books and curiosities.’
Her online home (‘a little dusty, little dark, a little strange,’) is at thananiveau.com.
2. Marie O’Regan, anthologist
Marie is another talented short story writer as well as a top-flight anthologist. She has also worked behind the scenes of the FantasyCon gathering, putting programming together and bringing some fantastic guests of honour to the event.
One of her latest titles is The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (published by Robinson), a project aimed at showcasing the work of women writers in the field. It includes stories dating back to the nineteenth century through to contemporary ghostly tales. I have a story in there too, and can vouch that Marie is a pleasure to work with.
With husband Paul Kane, Marie also edited Hellbound Hearts (Pocket Books), a Clive Barker tribute anthology that includes stories by Neil Gaiman, Sarah Pinborough, Conrad Williams, Tim Lebbon, Barbie Wilde, Kelley Armstrong and many more, and features a foreword by Clive Barker.
Next up on my ‘to be read’ pile is The Mammoth Book of Body Horror (Robinson), which includes more big names and potentially more visceral fare…
Find Marie at www.marieoregan.net.
3. Sarah Pinborough, novelist
Sarah Pinborough has published a number of novels, including The Hidden, Tower Hill, The Reckoning and Breeding Ground, a wonderfully chilling book that reimagines motherhood and birth in an entirely different way.
Her novella, The Language of Dying (PS Publishing) is an intimate and harrowing account of a father’s terminal illness. The fantasy elements are interwoven with the lightest touch – this is more akin to true-life horror, and brought me to tears. It won the 2010 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella.
The Dog-Faced Gods series (Gollancz) is a widely acclaimed trilogy combining crime with the supernatural. Coming up is a duology of historical novels that again combine crime with horror: Mayhem and Murder (Jo Fletcher Books). Sarah also has a movie, Cracked, in development, and is making inroads into writing for television, with an episode of New Tricks under her belt. Her short story ‘The Confessor’s Tale’ was among my favourites in the Marie O’Regan/Paul Kane anthology, Hellbound Hearts.
See more from her at sarahpinborough.com.
4. Angela Slatter, short story writer
Winner of a British Fantasy Award and two Aurealis Awards, Angela Slatter is an Australian writer of dark fantasy and horror. She has a Masters (Research) in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative Writing.
2010 saw not one but two short story collections published – Sourdough and Other Stories (Tartarus Press) and The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales (Ticonderoga).
Sourdough is full of dark fairy tales, where babies are fashioned from bread and dolls are given souls. The Girl with No Hands has retold stories, including The Little Match Girl and Bluebeard.
I tend to think of fairy tales as the original horror stories, and Angela’s work is ideal for anyone who likes their dark fiction with a good measure of the magical and folkloric.
It’s good to hear that she is currently working on an urban fantasy novel, Brisneyland by Night.
5. Muriel Gray, novelist and TV presenter
Muriel Gray was a special guest at FantasyCon last year, where she brought boundless enthusiasm to the role (and the biggest grin that I’ve ever seen!). She originally hails from East Kilbride, Scotland. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art, played in a punk band and went on to be a successful TV presenter as well as an author. She also founded one of the UK’s leading independent television production companies.
Her writing career began in 1995 with the bestselling horror novel The Trickster, which was followed by Furnace and The Ancient (all HarperCollins), which Stephen King described as “scary and unputdownable”.
She has also contributed many short stories to anthologies and magazines, the most recent including The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women and A Carnivàle of Horror: Dark Tales from the Fairground (PS Publishing).
Apparently Muriel was a horror fan from childhood, when she hid The Pan Book of Horror Stories under her bed covers and read it with a torch.
- Alison Littlewood’s latest novel, Path of Needles, will be out in June 2013. Her first novel, A Cold Season (Jo Fletcher Books) was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club, where it was described as “perfect reading for a dark winter’s night.” Her short stories have been picked for the Best Horror of the Year and Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies, as well as The Best British Fantasy 2013 and The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10.
- www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk