The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Popular Fictions Series)

The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Popular Fictions Series)

Barbara Creed

Language: English

Pages: 216

ISBN: 0415052599

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In almost all critical writings on the horror film, woman is conceptualised only as victim. In The Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed challenges this patriarchal view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body.
With close reference to a number of classic horror films including the Alien trilogy, The Exorcist and Psycho, Creed analyses the seven `faces' of the monstrous-feminine: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator. Her argument that man fears woman as castrator, rather than as castrated, questions not only Freudian theories of sexual difference but existing theories of spectatorship and fetishism, providing a provocative re-reading of classical and contemporary film and theoretical texts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

substances can never be successfully obliterated but lie in wait at the thresbold of the subject's identity, threatening it with possible breakdown. What is most interesting about Regan's journey is the way in which it is represented as a struggle between tbe subject and the abject. It is Regan's body which becomes the site of this struggle - a struggle which literally takes place within the interior of and across the body. Slime, bile, pus, vomit, urine, blood - all of these abject forms of

wakes from a nightmare in which she watches in horror as an infant alien births itself from her stomach by tearing its way through flesh and bone to the surface. In the final sequence of Alien3 , the dream becomes reality. While in hypersleep on the space craft, Ripley has been raped and impregnated by the alien. She is now a vessel of Mother Alien's seed, her body/womb contaminated by what the neuroscanner describes as 'foreign tissue'. While it rips apart the men, the alien will not touch

barred and dangerous entrance has many variants: 107 THE MONSTROUS-FEMININE the door of the girl's house may kill all those who enter; it may be a door that quickly opens and closes of its own accord, comparable to the terrifying rocks, the Symplegades, through which the Argonauts had to pass, and which, whenever a ship attempted to pass between them, drove together and crushed it; it may be guarded by dangerous animals; or again, the symbolism may be that of gigantic bivalves which crush

slasher's body reads like a passage from an ancient myth or legend about the fate of the wandering hero who was foolish enough to arouse the anger of the female monster the Bacchae, Furies, Sirens, Gorgons or Kali herself. Using a Freudian psychoanalytic framework, Clover, however, does not allow the heroine whom she calls 'the Final Girl' - to be defined as castrating. She argues that the slasher film phallicizes the heroine. For instance, the heroine'S usually boyish name (Laurie/Halloween,

is to be understood in a double sense ยท...:the child both \, desires the mother and desires to be the object of the mother's desire, the , pballus. According to Jacqueline Rose: 'Castration means first of all thisthat the child's desire for tbe motber does not refer to ber but beyond ber, to an object, tbe pballus, whose status is first imaginary (tbe object presumed to satisfy ber desire) and tben symbolic (recognition tbat desire cannot be satisfied), (Rose, 1982,38). As a signifier no one bas

Download sample

Download