Part 2 - Something Quite Close to Hell: The Monstrous Female in Darkchylde

Part 2 of 'Something Quite Close to Hell: The Monstrous Female in Darkchylde' investigates representations of the archaic mother and pre-oedipal in Darkchylde.

Read Part 1

Having argued as to why Ariel has become monstrous, now I would like to turn to what purpose she serves by taking up the position of ‘the monstrous feminine’. Ariel in her human form is the ‘acceptable’ form and shape of woman. When she transforms into a demon from the nightmare realm she becomes monstrous. Therefore the ‘pleasurable’ and ‘acceptable’ Ariel is needed to offset the visually horrifying aspects of her monstrousness. As a representation of the ‘monstrous-feminine’, Ariel exhibits characteristics that can be aligned with the feminine archetype of the archaic mother.

At this point it must be stated that there is some confusion over the figures of the pre-Oedipal and archaic mothers. Elizabeth Grosz in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (1992) and Mike Davis in his essay "'What’s the Story Mother?’: Abjection and Anti-feminism in Alien and Aliens" (1995) both refer to the pre-Oedipal mother as analogous to the phallic and archaic mothers. Barbara Creed however makes a distinction between these figures. She states that the pre-Oedipal mother is the mother of infancy, who is responsible for the early socialization of the child, while the archaic mother is the generative, parthenogenetic mother who gives birth to all living things and exists in all human cultures as the Mother-Goddess (Creed 24). Creed’s theorisation, I believe, is more useful as the pre-Oedipal mother, although a genderless ‘fantasy’ (the imaginary ‘paradise’ of the mother-child dyad), has a corporeal nature in the form of a person, whereas the archaic mother is a concept whose figure permeates the imagery of birth, primal scenes and the womb (Creed 19). The figure of the archaic mother is explored through the monsters into which Ariel transforms. When Ariel transforms she becomes a fetish object of the archaic mother carrying out the archaic mother’s wishes of reincorporating all to which she has given birth to through death and destruction.

The archaic mother is the parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end. She is the generative mother; the pre-phallic mother who exists prior to knowledge of the phallus (Creed 17-20). More importantly, the concept of the archaic mother does not depend on a concept of the masculine against which to define itself (Creed 27-8). This is because she exists before gender differentiation and does not need a masculine counterpart to exist. As the archaic mother exists only as a concept, Creed argues that the re-incorporating and destructive powers of the archaic mother are concretised in the figure of her offspring, the creature(s) whose mission is to tear apart and reincorporate all life (22). These offspring are represented in Darkchylde as the monsters into which Ariel transforms. These monsters are fetish objects of the archaic mother.

Freud defines the fetish as ‘a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and… does not want to give up’ (Freud 1961, Vol. XXIII, 152-3). According to Freud’s narrative, this takes place when the little boy sees, or simply realises, his mother or another close female figure, has no penis. He assumes that she has been castrated. He will deny this castration by replacing the penis his mother should have with the closest or first thing that he sees at the moment of realisation so as to deny that he can also be castrated. I use ‘he’ in this explanation because this is generally how the fetish is formed in the male child. Fetishism for the female child is quite different.

When the female child realises that her mother is castrated, she (eventually) recognises that she is also castrated. Comprehending that she can never have a penis of her own, and recognising that she cannot ‘own’ her father’s, she succumbs to the idea that her destiny is to have a child (preferably by her own father) as a replacement for the penis. Therefore a baby is what is deemed as her fetish object, her replacement penis. Hence the offspring of the archaic mother are referred to as fetish objects. But the offspring of the archaic mother are special because the archaic mother has no male counterpart, and therefore procreates without the aid of a male.

In the final battle of Darkchylde, Ariel transforms into a dragon where she kills the villain Kauldron and a host of other demons emerging from the nightmare realm. During this rampage Ariel also kills Perry’s father, Jack. Perry is Ariel’s love interest and he employs his father to help Ariel escape the authorities of the government agency SENTRY, for whom Jack works.

The death of Jack is seen to be an accident. However if we see Ariel in relation to the archaic mother, the situation can be better explained. Jack is in a position of authority at Sentry, a government agency interested in paranormal phenomena, and is also a father (reminding Ariel of her own father). Both aspects position him as a representative of the Law of the symbolic order. Killing Jack institutes a two-fold elimination of male dominance and power, first, by directly eliminating his paternal power. Second, with his father dead, Perry recognises the danger that Ariel poses to himself and sends her away, which eliminates him as a future representative of the Law. Ariel’s rampage of annihilation ensures that Ariel can never take up a position in the symbolic order, and as fetish object of the archaic mother, she doesn’t want to, which is in direct opposition to her ‘human’ desire to ‘fit in’. As a fetish object of the archaic mother, Ariel becomes a weapon which eliminates male, phallic dominance by reincorporating through destruction and death everything to which she has given birth.

Like the archaic mother, Ariel is constructed in opposition to, not separate from, the symbolic order. She is relegated to the margins to ensure the constitution of subjectivity and the law (Creed 26). Ariel states during the final battle of the comic:

I’ve invited all this rage that’s racing through me like a dark cancer, eating away at anything that remains of Ariel Chylde, and leaving in its place only the monster…and I feel my very essence threatened to be irreversibly consumed by the dragon…I almost welcome it… (Queen 129).

The invited rage that threatens Ariel’s essence is a veiled desire for oneness. This is best explained when Barbara Creed argues:

The desire to return to the original oneness of things, to return to the mother/womb, is primarily a desire for non-differentiation. If as George Bataille argues in Death and Sensuality, life signifies discontinuity and separateness, and death signifies continuity and non-differentiation, then the desire for and attraction of death suggests also a desire to return to the state of original oneness with the mother. As this desire to merge occurs after differentiation that is after the subject has developed as separate, autonomous self, it is experienced as a form of psychic death (28).

Consummation by the dragon, for Ariel, translates into a loss of self or ego, a ‘psychic death’ that is a desire for continuity and the loss of boundaries (Creed 30) where her desire to be one with the archaic mother would be realised. However Ariel is not allowed to ‘lose herself’, for to return to a oneness with the archaic mother would be to transgress the rigid ego boundaries of self and other which define phallocentric culture and patriarchal law. Instead Sage, the representation of Ariel’s pre-Oedipal mother, who as I have argued, exists in relation to the family and the symbolic order and is responsible for the socialisation of the child, scolds Ariel: ‘Ariel, no! You must relinquish this form at once or it will destroy you! And without your influence it will destroy us all!!’ (Queen 129). The tone of this quote is what distinguishes it as a socialising mother’s voice. She is not asking Ariel to relinquish her monstrous form, she is telling her – ‘you must relinquish this form at once…!’

Ariel has two desires. In her monstrous form as fetish object of the archaic mother she desires to return to a oneness with the archaic mother, not the body of the pre-Oedipal mother, because the monstrous form that Ariel occupies is a result of her unbroken link with the pre-Oedipal mother. When Ariel is in her human form she yearns for a return to the Imaginary where she recognises nothing other than herself and the body of her mother: ‘…lost in the amber glow of your eyes as you cradled me… I wish I could feel the gentle thrum of your heart as you held me to your warm breast’ (Queen 98).

What comes to pass is a power struggle between the archaic mother and the pre-Oedipal mother for control of Ariel. The archaic mother wants to overthrow the symbolic order, and as a fetish object of the archaic mother, Ariel will carry out her wishes of reabsorbing what she once birthed through a rampage of destruction. The pre-Oedipal mother, on the other hand, wants to uphold the Law of the symbolic order. Ariel is thus in a bind–to return to a oneness with the archaic mother where the psychic death of the self represents continuity and non-differentiation, or adhere to her pre-Oedipal mother and try to ‘fit in’ to a symbolic order that rejects her, and live a life that signifies a constant and seemingly endless time of discontinuity, marginalisation, separateness and lack.

While Ariel does return to her human form signifying the pre-Oedipal mother’s stronger hold, nothing is resolved. Ariel has killed and destroyed ensuring her no place in the symbolic order. Perry tells her ‘They’re going to hold you accountable. They’ll kill you Ariel…You’ve got to get out of here. Leave Salem forever!’, and that she has to ‘…find somewhere.’ (Queen 133).

It is telling that Ariel’s first metamorphosis into a monster occurs when she kills her father. Through her metamorphosis, Ariel decentres and reproduces herself. Decentralisation is the process of breaking away from the Western cultural habit of referring all experience to centres, beginnings, or origins of truth and being (Bersani 196). Bersani states it is in ‘parents and in brothers and sisters, the child finds himself by finding himself repeated’ (202) and it is only by smashing self reflections that one can decentralize themselves (216). Ariel kills her father in a pure and final act of anger and self preservation, destroying his paternal hold and power over her. In her father Ariel sees a repetition of herself, a centre, an origin. Killing her father is also an effort to break the cycle of abuse and the constant re-locations to different towns and schools. While moving from town to town finds Ariel always somewhere new, always ‘somewhere else’, it is really only a change of setting with the same script. Ariel’s decentralisation and transformation into monstrousness is different. It allows her to be ‘somewhere else’ within herself, signifying that she is not the origin or centre of what is happening to her, that she is not a killer, nor is she associated with her repetitive life, or her father. Put simply, she becomes an outsider looking in on herself.

The villain Kauldron is also a repetition and doubling of her father, of patriarchal law. In finally killing Kauldron, Ariel eliminates another repetition of her father and therefore herself (remembering in family members we find ourselves repeated). Each kill allows further decentralisation to that outside position but from which she must always return. This cycle is the attempt to eradicate the imprinted identity of the Law, something that must be done over and over. Ariel is thus caught in a cycle of endless repetition, from which she continually strives for release. This cycle involves men in positions of power trying to use or hurt her, who are, like Kauldron, repetitions of her father, and herself, who she will have to kill over and over again in an endless attempt to completely decentre herself, to be ‘somewhere else’.

Without going into the complexity of death and repetition too deeply, we can say that Ariel’s repetitive compulsion is a desire to restore an earlier state of things (Freud 1961 Vol. XVIII 36). Ellie Ragland argues, that this earlier state of things is the earliest state–that of being one, in the Imaginary, with the mother. She writes:

although the goal of repetition is to re-experience a prior […] satisfaction, the effort to recapture such lost moments depends on the fixations put in place to compensate for the loss of the primary object: that is, the illusion of a primordial oneness between child and mother (Ragland 89).

Ariel’s repetitive compulsion does three distinct things. First, her killing of patriarchal male figures becomes an attempt to eradicate the ‘Law-of-the-Father’ (and its imprinted identity) that intrudes upon the mother-child dyad. Second, Ariel also kills repetitions of herself when she kills these males, in the attempt to decentre herself. This action, we can also say, is an effort to be one with the mother, a return to the blissful state of the Imaginary.

Ariel’s initial loss of her mother becomes a ‘palpable void’ (Ragland 87) and it is this loss that drives her life. Her murderous actions against patriarchal male figures become Lacan’s object a, that which is used to try and fill this void. Ragland’s argument can again be applied to Ariel as she is:

repeating relations to objects whose crucial function of semblance is that of filling up an actual void. Thus human beings pursue objects that sustain fantasies, even though attaining an object of fantasy can never completely close the void (Ragland 87).

Ariel’s fantasy is that she will one day ‘fit in’ and this is most readily achievable in the Imaginary where she could never be an outsider, but again Ariel’s (unavoidable) actions only push this fantasy further away.

Ariel’s repetitive gothic storyline positions her as both sadist (one who inflicts pain on others) and masochist (one who inflicts pain on themselves), both dominated and dominator, at once submissive and assertive (Day 19). In short, a masochistic/sadistic catch-22. Her efforts to eliminate the repetition of herself that she sees in others leads only to situations that will induce her to kill more repetitions of herself in an endless cycle. Her life is the archetypal “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. Wherever Ariel goes she can never be free from patriarchal Law which she threatens, and which will always threaten her. Ariel remains, both inside and outside male society; romantically idealised and a victimised outcast (Eagleton 190) literally always relegated to ‘somewhere else’, decentralised, never able to just ‘fit in’.

References

Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax. Columbia University Press, 1984.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Davis, Mike. “What’s the Story Mother?: Abjection and Anti-Feminism in Alien and Aliens.” 1995 http://www.ac.uk/fac/arts/English/wip/dav3ii.html(Please Note: this link is no longer active. The essay can be found here in Gothic Studies 2 (2000): 245-56.)

Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vols. Vol. XXIII (1937-39). London: The Hogarth Press., 1961.

—. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vols. Vol. XVIII (1937-39). London: The Hogarth Press, 1961.

Queen, Randy. Darkchylde: The Descent. La Jolla: Wildstorm Productions (DC Comics), 1999.

Ragland, Ellie. Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan. Routledge, 1995.

Review: Nancy in Hell #1 (of 4) by El Torres (writer) and Juan Hose Ryp (artist), Image Comics.

Nancy introduces herself as the "nice girl" who was supposed to kill the bad guy at the end of the horror picture. Instead she got killed and ended up in Hell. After an initial, very short, period of distress, Nancy takes to the Hell lifestyle quite well.

After setting up a nice relationship between Nancy and "the Philosopher", the bar they're in (yes, a bar in Hell) is attacked by a fellow called Mr Macabre. The Philosopher is unceremoniously whacked and Nancy takes up a chainsaw as her weapon of choice (wonder where that idea came from) to lop off some demon heads. As I said, she seems to take to the Hell lifestyle quite well.

And of course it being Hell, we have an appearance of a brooding, blonde, and buff, Beelzebub who needs Nancy's help.

Rather than the good girl gone bad, we've got the good girl gone to a bad place. Although 'good girl' is arguable as Nancy is into "Hell's Angels parties" and is dressed, ahem, provocatively. This comic reminds me of another girl gone to Hell, that being good ol' Lady Death. Seems like we're back to the bad girls of the 90s (and it's Image too!).

The Hell that Nancy's landed in though happens to look a lot like a male heterosexual fantasy. There's enough gratuitous crotch shots (starting with the cover) and implied lesbianism to fill a teenage boy's dreams for weeks. Apparently Hell doesn't cater for gays, females, or anybody else.

Why did I pick this up? Well, with a title like Nancy in Hell I was expecting something a little more tongue in cheek, but the only tongues in cheeks here are those involving girl-on-girl, action (or demon-on-girl or.. you get the picture...)

There's little on plot, but a lot of demon killing and corpse dismembering. Juan Jose Ryp's artwork is over the top, excessive, and excessively specular. 

I'm over this sort of stuff having seen a lot of it before (girl gone to Hell - Lady Death; brooding Lucifer - Linsner's Dawn, Gaiman's The Sandman, but I'm sure there's a host of 16 year-old boys who haven't and they'll no doubt have a ball with it.

This: Seen it before

Forthcoming: Not for me, thanks all the same.

Something Quite Close to Hell - The Monstrous Female in Darkchylde

Randy Queen's drawings of his scantily clad and vulnerable heroine, Ariel Chylde coupled with outrageous demons and monstrous violence made Darkchylde a massive seller. With the release of a new Darkchylde comic (albeit a joint Darkness issue) at this year's San Diego Comic-con it's seems appropriate to revisit the 1990s incarnation of Darkchylde in an academic format.

Part 1 positions how monstrosity is produced when, psychoanalytically, separation of mother and daughter fails.

Part 2 investigates representations of the archaic mother and pre-oedipal mother in Darkchylde.

Something Quite Close to Hell – The Monstrous Female in Darkchylde (Part 1)

The female body shares with the monster the privilege of bringing out a unique blend of fascination and horror (Braidotti 81)

In the 1990s superhero comics were beset by a plague of ‘bad girl’ titles. Fathom, Witchblade, Danger Girl, Painkiller Jane, Chastity, Glory, Avengelyne, Allegra, Lady Death, Pandora, Webwitch, Shotgun Mary, and Allura were but a few which clogged comic shop shelves. Some have kicked on, while most have mercifully been sent to the remainder bin. These characters were generally young and attractive, sexy, sexually vulnerable, but ultimately packed a mean array of weapons, powers and skills. Maybe they were ‘bad’ because they transgressed patriarchal boundaries, or because they were powerful and seductive at the same time.

Or maybe as Jessica Rabbit says, they weren’t really bad, they were just drawn that way.

Randy Queen’s Darkchylde (Wildstorm/DC) was one of the more popular ‘bad girl’ titles at the time. This essay uses Darkchylde to explore representations of the monstrous female, specifically the pre-Oedipal and archaic mothers. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a point of departure it investigates how the concepts of the Law-of-the-Father and the symbolic order are pivotal in the production of the monstrous woman in Darkchylde. Drawing from Barbara Creed’s (1993) work on the monstrous feminine, I will argue that Darkchylde’s main character, Ariel Chylde, represents a female body in rebellion against the symbolic order’s oppressive and marginalising structures.

Darkchylde is the story of seventeen year old Ariel Chylde who lives with her abusive father, Robert. Of her mother we only know that she “left” when Ariel was very young, although the assumption is that she’s dead. Ariel is the possessor of the Darkchylde giving her the ability to transform into demons from the Nightmare Realm. These generally manifest when she or people close to her are threatened with harm. When the threat has been neutralised, Ariel and the demon separate. Ariel regains her human form and the demon scarpers back to the nightmare realm via a portal. To complicate matters, Kauldron, a human exile from the nightmare realm, has taken control of several demons before they have had a chance to return to the Nightmare Realm. Ariel must then save herself and her town from Kauldron and the demons under his control.

Ariel’s first transformation into a monster occurs during an incestuous attack by her father which ends when Ariel kills him. She is then helped by Perry, a male love interest, and his father Jack, a bigwig in the government agency SENTRY that deals with strange phenomena.

After Ariel’s second transformation she’s taken to SENTRY headquarters and subjected to experiments and tests (for her own good, of course). However, Ariel escapes with the help of Jack, Perry and three sympathetic demons from the nightmare realm – Sage, War and Piece. We find out that Sage is the spiritual representation of Ariel’s dead mother, and as her name suggests, she is very much a voice of wisdom and guidance. By the end of the comic Ariel has wreaked bloody carnage on most of the characters and the town of Salem; actions that lead to her exile.

Investigating the monstrous females in this simple narrative begins by examining the pre-Oedipal phase. In Lacanian psychoanalysis the pre-Oedipal (as Freud describes it) or Imaginary phase of development consists basically of two terms: the child and the image of the other, which is usually the mother (Eagleton 165). Elizabeth Grosz states that as the child develops, this dyadic structure is disrupted by the father who represents ‘law, order and authority for the child’(1990 68). The father is a ‘Symbolic or imaginary father’, a representative of the Name-of-the-Father that stands for patriarchal ownership. Taking on the Name-of-the-Father positions the child beyond the structure of dual imaginary relations (Grosz 1990 47). Recognition of this ‘paternal metaphor’ charts the child’s entry into the symbolic order and the social world beyond the family structure (Grosz 1990 104). Therefore, the Name-of-the-Father signifies the ‘Law’ or Law-of-the-Father that is the wider set of social and sexual roles rules upon which the symbolic order rests and relies. Keeping this in mind, let’s examine Ariel’s relationship with her “father”, Robert.

Ariel is sexually abused by Robert who represents the ‘Law’ of the symbolic order. However Ariel has a deeper feeling that Robert isn’t her father at all. She says –

I usually just call him Robert. He hates it but “Dad” just doesn’t feel comfortable. It’s funny, sometimes I feel like he isn’t my real father at all, just a man with the title (Queen 23).

In relation to paternal authority, Jane Gallop writes:

What if in making love the father still remained the law, and the daughter were just passive, denied? The father’s law has so restructured the daughter and her desires that it is hard, well nigh impossible, to differentiate the Father (that is to say the Law) from the male sexed body. What if making love with the father were merely a ruse to get the impertinent daughter to give up her resistance to the law? (Gallop 78).

This quote presents an excellent explanation of Ariel’s incestuous relationship with her father. Her use of Robert instead of “father” or “dad” is a resistance to the Law. She sees past Robert’s ‘male sexed body’ denying him the recognition, the ‘patriarchal right’, he ‘deserves’ as an embodiment of the Law. Robert’s sexual abuse of Ariel is his attempt to quell her impertinent resistance to the Law.

At the end of the comic we find out that indeed Robert is not Ariel’s father at all, he is simply an agent of the Law. Thus the Law itself is positioned as Ariel’s “father”, which is embodied by the many different male characters in the comic. This also explains why there are so many male figures (Robert, Perry, Jack, Kauldron) in Darkchylde compared to the solitary Ariel. Each male is another representative of the Law trying to quell her resistance. As Gallop states precisely for our purposes:

the law of the father gives her an identity, even if it is not her own, even if it blots out her feminine specificity. To give it up is not a ‘simple’ matter. It must be done over and over (Gallop 78).

As Robert is not Ariel’s father, she eludes the Name-of-the-Father that is patriarchal ownership (the identity he has given her is not her own). However she is still imprinted with the identity of the Law (i.e.: she is ‘imprinted’ with the ideals of woman that phallocentric culture positions as ‘feminine’), and as will be shown, trying to ‘give up’ this imprinted identity, by eliminating repetitions of her father (and herself), is something that must be done ‘over and over’.

For Ariel, the first appearance of the Law-of-the-Father, embodied by her (symbolic) father Robert, necessarily coincides with the death of her mother. Ariel is quite literally divided from her mother’s body and wrenched from the Imaginary (the realm where there exists only the child and the body of the mother) into the Oedipal drama (where the child must recognise the Law-of-the-Father). Therefore Ariel’s recognition of the Law equates with death, and more importantly, the death of her mother. As happens in the Oedipal phase, after recognition of the Law, Ariel acquires a guilty desire to return to the Imaginary (to be one again with her mother). This desire that cannot be realised is unconscious and is compounded by coinciding with her mother’s death. Thus her Oedipal drama remains unresolved because once she has realised that she cannot be her father’s lover (complicated by his sexual abuse of her) she has no mother figure to turn to or with which to identify. Without a mother as role model she will find it hard to take up a female position in the symbolic order, which is compounded by the incestuous abusive relationship with her father, her shyness, and her constant relocation from town to town. These factors position Ariel as an outsider who stands out from the crowd. But despite this, she still longs to fit in, to be part of the symbolic order. 

To complicate matters further, Ariel’s monstrous and murderous rebellion against her father, where she refuses to be a passive subject to his abuse, positions her as a possessed female subject who refuses to take up her role in the symbolic order (Creed 38). Thus Ariel presents an interesting dichotomy – the passive victim who wants to be part of the symbolic order versus the aggressive monster ensnared within the passive victim who threatens the symbolic order from her marginalised position. To draw an analogy, Ariel is similar to the main character of the film Carrie (1976). Barbara Creed writes of Carrie: ‘on the one hand she is a painfully shy, withdrawn, child-like girl who just wants to be ‘normal’ like every other teenager, while on the other hand she has the power… to transform into an avenging female fury’ (78). Like Carrie, that which Ariel outwardly desires (to fit in) can never be attained due to her monstrous, ‘uncontrollable’, capabilities which threaten the symbolic order. But from where does Ariel’s monstrousness originate? To explain we must return to the site of the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal phases.

Freud states that the pre-Oedipal phase is far more important in women than in men. This is because the mother-child relation is a site for both the transmission and subversion of patriarchal values, where the archaic force of the pre-Oedipal, which although repressed, is also permanently preserved (Grosz 1990 149). But how can this be so? How is this mother-child relation preserved? Elisabeth Grosz again explains:

As Freud himself noted, the girl remains in contiguity with the pre-Oedipal period in ways that are barred for boys […] In the case of the girl, there is no clear-cut division between the pre-Oedipal and the oedipal; she occupies an oedipalised position only gradually and unsurely. Her oedipal complex may persist indefinitely or fade because of disappointments, rather than end through a dramatic repression. She thus remains in touch with the pre-Oedipal maternal continent (Grosz 1989 115).

Ariel’s mother died when Ariel was only an infant, as is denoted by her memories:

being lost in the amber glow of your eyes as you cradled me… as you held me to your warm breast, as I listened to stories of dark forest and houses made of gingerbread… I try to recall your face but no images come. Only feelings. Feelings of love and joy… (Queen 98).

This mother figure that Ariel speaks of is the pre-Oedipal mother, who exists in relation to the family and the symbolic order (Creed 20), and as is responsible for the early socialisation of the child.

Ariel’s mother dying may have been her way of refusing to submit to the symbolic order. Thus she also becomes monstrous, as both the monster and death signify a monstrous obliteration of the self, and both are linked to the demonic (Creed 30). This is significant as Ariel’s mother resides with the demons in the nightmare realm. Ariel in her monstrous rebellion follows her mother’s lead by refusing to recognise the paternal order and thus is also produced as monstrous (Creed 38).

Even though the link between Ariel and her mother should be completely severed through death, they remain linked shown through the appearance of the bird, Sage, Ariel’s “guardian angel”; the representation of her pre-Oedipal mother. This is made explicitly clear when Ariel says:

Little bird. Always appearing and disappearing at your leisure… with your cryptic warnings… the bird of light who always seems to know right when I need her… right when I need… her. M-mom? Mommy? (Queen 129).

Thus the source of Ariel’s monstrosity is, as Creed argues, the failure of the paternal order to ensure the separation of mother and child (Creed 38).

Read Part 2

Reference

Braidotti, Rosi. (1994). Nomadic Subjects. New York. Columbia University Press.

Creed, Barbara. (1993). The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London and New York. Routledge.

Gallop, Jane. (1982). Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction. Macmillan Press.

Grosz, Elizabeth. (1986). 'Language and the Limits of the Body: Kristeva and Abjection' in Grosz, E. (ed.) Futur*fall: Excursions into Post-modernity. University of Sydney.

Grosz, Elizabeth. (1989). Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Allen and Unwin.

Grosz, Elizabeth. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London and New York. Routledge.

Queen, Randy. (1999). Darkchylde Collected Edition: The Descent. DC Comics.

Review: Scarlet #1, by Brian Michael Bendis (writer) and Alex Maleev (art), Icon (Marvel) Comics

Hot off the presses from Marvel's burgeoning Icon line of creator-owned comics comes Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev's Scarlet. 

Bendis again joins with his Daredevil artist to produce a character that he says will 'spark a modern day American Revolution'.

Scarlet is a twentysomething redhead who's decided to fight back. and do something about corruption and criminals. If she sees something wrong, she intervenes. Usually with brute force.

At base Scarlet #1 is basically an origin story. Like most origins it's based on loss, this one specifically building on the pure senselessness of an individual's actions. The incident, which is both poignant and heartbreaking, propels Scarlet into her new life as a vigilante.

While Scarlet may move a bit slow for some, if you're familiar with Bendis' work (if you aren't go out and do so now... No, really, I'm serious... NOW!) then you've come to expect that something big is going to happen later on in the series. Bendis weaves small stories into great interlocking narratives which build into something big and then rushes into something bigger.

Bendis' forte (for me) is his dialogue and he again produces true to life conversations. That's not to say he can't tell one hell of a story. When the first thing you see in a comic is a full page illustration of a woman garotting a man you know this story isn't going to pull any punches.

The most interesting part though is Scarlet 'breaking the fourth wall'. She talks directly to us. The way Bendis does it is something which I haven't come across in comics. The closest would be Grant Morrison when for example his characters in Seven Soldiers of Victory (and to some extent in Animal Man) look out at the reader. Morrison is more about a comic characters recognising themsleves as characters; that they're trapped inside a story. Scarlet addresses the reader directly and therefore  situates both as existing in the same world. But Bendis is also doing more. He (via Scarlet) is asking us to be involved in the story, a collaborator, an accomplice. A difficult task, but if anybody can pull it off, it's Bendis.

Maleev's art is I think, an acquired taste. Like many of my favourite artists he has an individual style that's recognisable as Maleev and that's what you want. Not surprisingly Maleev's art strikes me as a cross-between two other Bendis collaborators - Michael Gaydos (Alias) and David Mack (Kabuki, Daredevil, Alias covers).

Scarlet looks like Bendis has got another hit on his hands and should propel him further into the comic writing stratosphere.

This: Highly Recommended. Forthcoming: Can't Wait.

Review: Bullet to the Head #1, by Matz (writer) and Colin Wilson (art and letters), Dynamite Entertainment.

Bullet to the Head presents itself as a hard-hitting crime noir thriller.

 

As most first issues do this one sets up the principal players and their motivations. This involves contract killers executing a politician and his possibly underage sex partner. Then in come the dogged cops to examine the crime scene and start putting clues together. And that's about it.

Colin Wilson's art is crisp and detailed with good facial expressions. Matz's dialogue is cool and specific to each character. The story is executed well with a steady pace. However...

I don't want to be overly critical but we've seen 'politician-getting-caught-doing-something-he-shouldn't-and-killed' scenario a hundred times before, which means that it needs to be presented in a really creative way to stand out. As well, the opening sequence where the contract killers exchange witty dialogue over the price of shoes come straight from 'Pulp Fiction' land. Put these two things together and we're starting to move into a place called 'derivative' which is a killer itself.

The straight crime comic isn't one I usually get in to but that didn't stop me liking Miller's Sin City or the Brian Michael Bendis' crime noir inflected Powers. If it's good, it's good.

No doubt further developments and twists will ensue in later issues but I'm not sure this issue does enough to warrant further monetary outlay. Who are we supposed to get involved with here? The witty killers or the weary cops?

This: Decent enough, but didn't really get me in. Forthcoming: Only if it looks really good.