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