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).
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment