The Abject Female – Lilith, Pandora, Darkchylde

The she-monster's hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female, untamed nature which must be leashed, or else will wreak havoc, closely reflects anthropocentric and mythological encounters with monsters (Warner, 1994, p4)

Darkchylde, Lilith, and Pandora are three examples of the abject female. The abject disturbs identity, system, order; does not respect borders, positions, rules' (Kristeva, 1982, p4). The 'possessed or invaded' monstrous body is inherently tied to abjection because, as Creed succinctly argues, it transgresses the boundary between self and other (1993, p32) and therefore does not respect borders or identity. The figure of the 'uncontrollable' female has been propagated through such mythological figures as Lilith and Pandora. The character of Ariel in the comic Darkchylde is just one representation which this mythical female archetype has metamorphosed. The mythological female figures of Lilith and Pandora also provide a co-existent site of abjection and the monstrous.


Lilith

In Jewish mythology Lilith is Adam's first wife before Eve. Her only appearance in the Christian Bible of today is in Isiah 34:14, where she is referred to as 'the night creature' who meets with 'the howling creature'. There are varying accounts of Lilith's history but most concur that she wouldn't lie beneath Adam due to her belief that they were created equally from the dust of the earth. Lilith and Adam argued about this equality, with Lilith finally retreating to the Red Sea. God sent three angels to return Lilith to Adam, however when they found her, she would not return, stating that death would be preferable to submission. The consequence of her defiance was that one hundred of her demon offspring would be killed each day. Lilith then proclaimed that she would kill newborns – boys up to eight days after birth, girls up to twenty – except those that were protected by the names of the three angels.

Eliezer Segal (1995) posits Lilith's story as originating in a medieval book called The Alphabet of Ben-Sira which seems designed to upset the sensibilities of traditional Jews. In particular the heroes of the Bible and the Talmud are frequently portrayed in the most perverse colours. Segal writes he cannot rule out that, along with an 'impious digest of risqué folk tales' or a 'polemical broadside aimed at Christians', The Alphabet of Ben-Sira may have been an anti-Jewish satire. He claims that through bad scholarly studies, Lilith ended up in the Jewish Midrash (the canon of works that are written to elucidate and explain Bible stories) without her origin being questioned. Even as a story Lilith becomes abject in transgressing storylines and not staying in her place. Angelo Rappoport in his Ancient Israel: Myths and Legends describes Lilith as 'long haired and winged' (1990). A further interesting complication posits Lilith as the Queen of Sheba who is beautiful from the waist up but from the waist down is ugly and hairy, and possibly also male! (Khephera,1997). This simple gender reversal harks back to the idea that for a female to hold any sort of power or agency, she must be either be hiding something ugly or be a male in disguise.


Pandora

Pandora is the first woman of Greek mythology and, like Lilith, is a woman whose desire for freedom and autonomy positions her as transgressing the boundaries of patriarchal law. Created by the Greek gods from earth and water as the price paid for Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus directed the gods to give Pandora the face of the eternal goddesses; the skills of weaving; a desire that wears out the body; a mind of a treacherous nature; and lies, flattery and disloyalty in place of a heart. As she is made of many parts, Pandora can be described as 'the ambiguous, the composite' (Kristeva, 1982, p4). She is 'the bane of men, a destroyer of civilization as powerful as fire' (Young-Eisendrath, 1995, p4). Pandora's greatest 'gift' to the earth was her discovery and subsequent opening of a jar (later to become a box) which unleashed death, disease, evils and all the troubles of mankind. Hope is the only spirit that remained on closure of the jar. Before Pandora there was no evil, laborious work, or sickness. Thus with the opening of the jar Pandora divides the Gods and man with mortality bringing to mankind 'the ultimate defeat, death itself' (Young-Eisendrath, 1995, p5). Her beauty is powerful as fire but based on lies and deceit (Young-Eisendrath, 1995, p5) exemplifying Kristeva's theory of abjection beautifully, being 'immoral, sinister, scheming and shady' (1982, p4).


Darkchylde

Pandora and Lilith are the progenitors of a genetic line of abjection that leads to Ariel. 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. 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. As it happens, Sage is the spiritual representation of Ariel's dead mother, and as her name suggests, is 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.

Obvious comparisons can be drawn between the three characters', long hair, wings and beautiful outward appearance, but the theme of woman as harbinger of death, and the abject nature of their creation, are much more striking parallels. Ariel's outwardly shy and 'beautiful' appearance serves to hide the devouring monster who is 'out of place', an 'impossibility', and a somatic symptom of cultural ideals of women. She is a 'monster' who brings pain, suffering and destruction to patriarchy and phallocentric society. Kristeva's description of abjection illustrates Ariel's metamorphosis into monstrousness beautifully:

A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome (1982, p2).

The emergence of the monstrous in Darkchylde draws heavily on violent, birthing images. In fact as Ariel and demon separate, Ariel actually gives 'birth' to demons (like Lilith). Ariel describes her own metamorphosis into a monster:

it's something quite close to hell having your bones twist, snap and change shape. Having your skin stretch until it feels like it's going to rip, right as your blood reaches its boiling point. In many ways it isn't like dying and being born again… it is dying and being born again (Queen, 1999, p120).

Ariel monstrous birth of herself as demon is a violent act of expulsion through which her nascent body tears itself away from the matter of her maternal insides (Kristeva, 1982, p101). The above passage is Ariel's description of her final transformation in the comic, where we actually see Ariel give violent birth to herself as monster. This scene is pivotal as Ariel instigates the change to monster herself, a symbolic transformation from victim to aggressor and therefore in a second and more personal way, is imbricated in the process of 'becoming', as Kristeva explains:

it is thus that […] "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion (Kristeva, 1982, p3).

The monstrous body in Darkchylde exhibits the abject qualities of border transgression and violent birth (the maternal body as it transgresses bodily boundaries), occupying the site of the threatening abyss, marking the subject's place of birth and obliteration, and which continually threatens to draw them back in (Grosz, 1986, p110). This concept is made tangible in the descriptive narration of Ariel's transformation:

Inside her soul Ariel feels a deep and terrible abyss yawn wide… and something wicked in the darkness smiles and reaches out to her (Queen, 1999, p53).

Ariel experiences abjection at its height when she finds the impossible within; when she finds that the impossible – the ability to summon demons from inside herself – constitutes her very being (Kristeva, 1982, p5), exhibiting that at her centre she is abject. Ariel acknowledges this impossibility as something very evil lying beneath her skin, feasting on her soul for seventeen years (Queen, 1999, p88). This impossibility, this abjection, is what Kristeva identifies as 'not at all an otherness with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be' (1982, p10). This possession results in abjection of the self, which is defined as:

the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded (Kristeva, 1982, p5).

Ariel's loss of her mother is of course her inaugural loss. The subsequent desire to be with her mother produces Ariel as abject, and as what Kristeva relates as a somatic symptom: 'in the symptom, the abject permeates me. I become abject' (1982, p11). The symptom can be expressed as 'a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster' (1982, p11). Ariel's portrayal as a monster is thus a somatic symptom of the abject nature that underlies cultural and societal ideals of women.

After Ariel's first transformation, where she kills her father by 'spewing' fire from her mouth, Perry finds Ariel 'sick and vomiting… confusion and pain leaking from her eyes… she's beautiful and I couldn't be more terrified' (Queen, 1999, p38). This foregrounds Ariel's 'leaky' abject, (and therefore frightening) female nature, where body fluids refuse to stay in their place. When she's not a monster, Ariel is constantly crying, the first sign of her transforming is energy emitting from her eyes. She flows between forms, not respecting corporeal boundaries. Even the abstract emotions of confusion and pain become fluid, leaking out of her body. Her body is presented as 'out of control' in both human and monstrous forms. Grosz argues:

Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as lack or absence but with more complexity […] as lacking not so much […] the phallus, but self-containment […] a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order? (1986, p203).

Ariel is unable to control herself when transforming, unable to contain her insides 'seeping' out into monstrous forms that threaten all order, specifically the symbolic order. Ariel's imprisonment by SENTRY is indicative of the symbolic orders attempt to contain the feminine and the abjection it exudes. This 'uncontrollable force' must be locked up and tested to see what happens, how boundaries are transgressed, to see how the abject woman can be controlled.

The monstrous body, the excessive and leaky body, a treacherous nature, a possessed body, a maternal/birthing body – all are somatic symptoms of the abject. This is an absolutely startling array of representations of the feminine in the one book and of the one female! The question needs to be asked, why is there so many symptoms displayed in the one woman? What is it about Ariel that commands such an array of abject representations? In contradistinction to her progenitors Lilith and Pandora, Ariel has the ability to generate life on her own without a male, making her all the more deadly. Ariel as monstrous woman is a signifier which effaces the father as signified (Shildrick, 1996, p5) disrupting the 'proper' the paternal origin, that is seen from as early as Aristotle as the single source of life. Ariel's ability to produce without a male is such an astounding and threatening feat (from a patriarchal, phallocentric point of view), that she must be offset with abject qualities. These representations also exhibit patriarchy's denial of real motherhood, and a real maternal ideal, as a positive role.

Ariel's abject nature reinforces her as 'other', in flux and unstable, which consequently reinforces the male as whole, clean, and stable. Ariel's frightening otherness undermines phallocentric ideals that position the male as a producer and active. Subsequently, Ariel is denied the right to exist in patriarchal phallocentric society, even in her 'pleasurable form', and must be sent away to 'somewhere'. When Ariel returns to her 'pleasurable form' she is instantly returned to her passive human state seeking Perry for direction and recognition. Agency is thus instantly transferred to the male and the symbolic order; a disappointing end to the hope that Ariel would actually benefit from her decision to give the villain Kauldron 'more than he could handle' (Queen, 1999, p118).

Ariel also has an interesting parallel with Ripley of the Alien movies. Mike Davis argues that when cheering on Ripley in Aliens, we're also unconsciously valorizing the symbolic [r]ejection of feminism because it has been so powerfully distorted in the figure of patriarchy's castration anxiety: the alien (2000). So too the narrative of Darkchylde has quite cleverly drawn us into its web where we have to agree that it's in Ariel's best interests to leave town, to be sent into exile. Like the figure of the Alien, Ariel as monster presents a twisted spectacle of feminine power that cannot be allowed to exist inside patriarchal boundaries. As Marina Warner argues all 'she-monsters must in one way or another be dispatched by the plot–or by the hero–as securely as any mythological dragon or monster of classical myth–preferably before they've perpetuated themselves' (1994, p3). As Warner so clearly shows, Ariel must be, and is dispatched by Perry, who is the hero only because he is the only male left who hasn't been killed! Produced as monster and as abject, Ariel is symptomatic of the fear that the symbolic order has of the feminine which must be 'kept in place'. Like Ripley, Ariel is the acceptable signifier of woman and the reassuring face of femininity; conceived from within patriarchal and phallocentric ideology (Davis, 2000).

Ariel is as a descendent of a long line of mythological abject females who unleash pain, suffering, and death onto the world, which is 'a curious reversal of the fact that women bring life into the world' (Young-Eisendrath, 1995, p4). These females are portrayed with qualities that are 'out of place' and that transgress their 'proper' boundaries. In short, at their centre they are abject. Ariel's abject nature is derived from her leaky, fluid body, her changing, maternal/birthing body, and her ability to transform into a monster. These qualities are used to offset her 'threatening' ability to generate life on her own. However this ability does not empower Ariel. As a figure who threatens patriarchal, phallocentric stability she must be dispatched, by any means possible. Ariel is thus relegated to the margins of society, exiled. The relentless attachment of the abject to the feminine in Darkchylde exposes patriarchal fear of an asymmetrical, irrational, wily, uncontrollable feminine power.


Reference

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

Davis, M. (2000). 'What's the Story Mother?': Abjection and Anti-Feminism in Alien and Aliens.' Gothic Studies 2.

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

Khephera. (1997). Lilith. http://www.lilitu.com/lilith/khephframes.html

Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.

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

Rappoport, A. S. (1990). 'The Story of Lilith' in Ancient Israel: Myths and Legends.  http://www.lilitu.com/lilith/rappoport.html

Segal, E. (1995). 'Looking for Lilith' in Why didn't I learn this in Hebrew School? http://people.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Shokel/950206_Lilith.html

Shildrick, M. (1996). 'Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body' in Body and Society. Vol. 2 (1). London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi. SAGE.

Warner, M. (1994). Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. The Reith Lectures. Vintage.

Young-Eisendrath, P. (1995). 'Myth and Body: Pandora's Legacy in a Post-Modern World'.
http://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2004/PSY467/Young_Eisendrath_Myth_and_Body_Pandora_s_Legacy_in_a_Post_Modern_World.htm