How I Should Feel – Fetishism and Feminine Power in Witchblade

What it says -
the Witchblade

Psychoanalytically fetishism is the substitution of an object (or objects) for the penis that the mother is found to be lacking, thereby allaying the young boy’s shock of this realisation. Jean Baudrillard theorises that the fetishised female body is produced as a phallic body, a phallic effigy (substituting the body or body parts of the female for the penis) that reflects a male narcissistic desire to revel in what he knows to be true – that he is possessor of the phallus, of power. Baudrillard theorises that the body has become a representation, a sign that is constructed via a structuralist mode that posits the phallic effigy/body fragment as signifier and sexuality as signified. In this system, the phallus becomes the general equivalent against which everything is defined –‘everything is resolved into a phallic equivalent, even the female genitals, or any gaping organ or object traditionally listed as a symbol of the feminine’ (Baudrillard 102). This theory leaves little room for female bodies to have any other meaning than phallic, however Sara in Witchblade and her union with the Witchblade itself, I believe actually subverts this phallic model and phallocentric ideology by forming a positive, distinctive model of feminine power that does not rely on a concept of the masculine to define itself.

Witchblade (Vol. 1 #1-8, 1998) is the story of New York detective Sara Pezzini, who through fateful coincidence becomes the wielder of the Witchblade. Ken resolves to befriend Sara and then erode her confidence and spirit so she will transfer the Witchblade’s power to him. The Witchblade is a sentient symbiote that bonds to the wearer’s body, mind, and soul. Its primary form is a gauntlet, but can reduce in size to a bracelet or expand to armour the body in a spiky exoskeleton. At times it has an organic, plant-like appearance. When ‘activated’ by the wielder (or of its own accord) the Witchblade can create deadly whip-like tendrils, and fire blasts of energy. The Witchblade is a source of feminine power because it can only ever be wielded by a woman. Anyone who tries to don the Witchblade, but is not the rightful recipient, receives terrible injuries from the Witchblade itself. Sara is pursued by Ken Irons, a wealthy businessman who has researched the history of the Witchblade and wants its power for himself.

Ken Irons as a totality
(and looking quite grumpy)

Witchblade’s opening pages provide a stark contrast between representations of men and women. Ken Irons is shown from a distance in his high-rise apartment, then in a medium shot (head to knees), and finally in a close-up of his face. This sequence of images presents him as a totality, a "whole" person. Our introduction to Sara is quite different. Sara is shown dressing–putting on lipstick, a tight, short dress that fixes around her neck, knee high stiletto boots, elbow length gloves, and G-string underwear with the accompanying display of buttocks, legs, breast, arms, and lips. This attire makes Sara’s body parts closed and smooth, a pre-requisite in Baudrillardian theory for them to be produced as phallic effigies (1993:104). In contrast to Ken, who is shown as a totality, Sara is presented as dismembered, a “cut-up” of highly sexualised body parts exhibiting all the attire – ‘Ankle boots and thigh boots… over the elbow gloves and stocking top on the thigh, hair over the eyes or the stripper’s G-string’ (1993:101) –which Baudrillard cites in Symbolic Exchange and Death that demarcate the body, establishing the foot, leg, arm, neck, and waist as erectile parts. This imagery is what Naomi Wolf describes as the pornography of beauty where the most sexually central parts of women, breasts, thighs, buttocks, bellies are fetishised (Wolf 1990:119). As many comic readers would agree, depictions of females in comics often employ imagery that borders on the pornographic.

Sara as dismembered body parts

Sara thus begins Witchblade embedded in the Symbolic Order, conforming to a stereotypical image of a woman in order to achieve results in her job. The Symbolic Order (or simply the Symbolic) designates the ‘objective order of language, law, morality, religion, and all social existence which is held to constitute the identity of any human subject who enters it’ (Baldick 327). It is in opposition to the Imaginary. 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). Elisabeth 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. What this means for Sara is that she has taken on the wider set of social and sexual roles that are designated “female”. This is how Sara (and indeed women in general) is “forced” to conform to a feminine ideal. Indeed as a police officer Sara enforces the law and is also an agent of the Law-of-the-Father. From an early age Sara conditioned herself to be an agent of the Law knowing that she wanted to be a cop and imitating the male cops on the 1970s television show, Starsky & Hutch. Thus she has for along identified with male roles and ideals.

However the clothes Sara is wearing are for an undercover police operation in order to right an injustice perpetrated in an earlier case. She comments ‘Starsky never had to do this to make a bust’ (Wohl et at 1998:5). Later, after being told she is ‘dressed like a slut’ she retorts, ‘Hey! You think I like wearing this?’ (Wohl et al 1998:10). That Sara doesn’t actually like wearing this apparel is an indication that something is “wrong” (because don’t all women like dressing this way?). It is a semi-conscious realisation of her knowing she is conforming to a male ideal of a woman and that she’d rather resist than accept this ideal.

The first time Sara wears the Witchblade, when it crawls and attaches itself to her and in the process saves her life, she unleashes the Witchblade’s power and suddenly feels ecstatic: I am power. This is freedom. I am... insane!’ (Wohl et al 1998:22-3). In accessing the Witchblade’s purely feminine power Sara becomes free from the Symbolic Order, yet this freedom seemingly comes (at least for a moment) at the cost of her sanity. The insane feeling is her experiencing a new paradigm of real power, one that grants her control, which is so overwhelming it feels like insanity. Later when she tries to take the Witchblade off it resists, cognisant of Sara opting to, and trying to stop her, returning to her “safe” and “sane” position in the Symbolic Order. All indications point to the Witchblade trying to wrench Sara from the Name-of-the-Father.

The second time Sara dons the Witchblade she has similar feelings of freedom, feeling ‘Unbound... she should be afraid, now she’s never been more confident’ (Wohl et al 1998: 66). This time she chooses to accept the feeling, the insanity – ‘That was the trouble while she was fighting it. But now... she’s strangely at peace with it. Connected to it’ (Wohl et al 1998: 67). The Witchblade’s power brings Sara peace, becoming more comfortable with feminine power free from patriarchal constraints. The Witchblade facilitates her realising what she already seems to unconsciously recognise–which is why the Witchblade chooses her.

Sara covered by the organic-looking Witchblade
while she sleeps

Sara takes the Witchblade off to sleep but while sleeping it sentiently reattaches to her body and covers her completely. In the morning in a full page illustration she lies asleep in a foetal position which is at once an image of rebirth and a voyeuristic tour de force, she recounts ‘I felt it on me, like some protective shell... it felt right on me. And I didn’t want to wake up because it felt so good... so safe’ (Wohl et al 1998: 98). This is in contrast to a coat Ken had loaned her the night before, which she wished would make her feel safe but doesn’t. This is another indication that Sara recognises something is “wrong” and acknowledges (albeit unconsciously) the protection of the Symbolic Order of which Ken’s coat is a sign is simply a ruse. The idea of safety and comfort is paramount for Sara but this male/patriarchal safety is a false consciousness. True safety and comfort for Sara can only come from embracing the Witchblade’s feminine power which enables real freedom. When fellow cop Jake intrudes into Sara and the Witchblade’s privacy the Witchblade suddenly feels ‘bulky. Alien’ (Wohl et al 1998:99). Jake’s intrusion breaks Sara and the Witchblade’s utopic bond. Female power suddenly becomes alien and discomforting as Jake’s male presence reminds Sara of her place in the Symbolic Order.

Sara in her 'wedding' dress
(and with impossibly long legs)

Bonding with the Witchblade however doesn’t stop Sara from further interpellation into the Symbolic Order, invoked in a scene reminiscent of a marriage. To garner the Witchblade, Ken romances Sara and she eventually falls for his extravagant lifestyle (he’s a Fortune 500 member), culminating with them attending a charity function at the ‘Prosperite Church’. Sara arrives in what could easily be mistaken for a wedding dress. Harking back to Sara’s dislike of her undercover clothes, she reflects on this dress:

This is how I should look… how I should feel. It just seems so right to be wearing something so soft… so caressing to my skin. It makes me feel… so beautiful. It doesn't confine my body like the Witchblade does. It’s not bruising me. Nor do I believe that when I take it off, will it resist like the Witchblade did… I feel safe. I feel good (Wohl et al 1998:155).

Marriage, especially for women, is invariably linked to the Name-of-the-Father (being renamed, becoming the “property” of the husband) and the submission with which it is traditionally associated. Sara is bowing to gender stereotypes, believing that soft, caressing things are feminine; that a woman’s appearance being the centre of attention is what being a woman is all about. She positions herself in the comforting symbolic. This is the final gambit to keep Sara in her “place” and prevent her accessing the full feminine power of the Witchblade, indeed acknowledging the genuine threat that the Witchblade represents. After the function, Ken and Sara argue, and Ken reveals his diabolical plans. In response the Witchblade activates, tearing Sara’s dress to shreds. After some hesitation and self-doubt, Sara rediscovers her willpower and realises she doesn’t want to be annexed to a phallic order that condemns her to a non-existence (Baudrillard 104). Sara finally accepts the legacy of the Witchblade and defeats Ken in battle. She has rejected the things that the Symbolic Order and gender stereotypes position as feminine in favour of the Witchblade’s true feminine power.

Sara and the Witchblade triumphant

Sara’s evolution from Baudrillard’s phallic fetish, a body in parts, to her (symbolic) rejection of the Name-of-the-Father, to her final acceptance as wielder of the symbiotic Witchblade, something that cannot (at least in Baudrillard’s terms) be classified as phallic is indeed a remarkable one even for comics. Most indicative of her transformation is her representation in the final pages. In two splash pages Sara is covered by the Witchblade resisting phallic fetishism. On the final page Sara is shown as a totality. The Witchblade’s spiky, organic, bony appearance resists closure making Sara’s body neither smooth nor closed off (it doesn’t completely cover her like armour). The exoskeleton could not in any way be construed as bracelets, necklaces, rings or a belt that would establish the accompanying body parts as erectile. The Witchblade is also labile, never assuming the same form twice, and are thus not contained by any fixed category. Sara becomes:

not the oppositional other safely fenced off within […] boundaries, but the otherness of possible worlds, or possible versions of ourselves, not yet realized (Shildrick 8).

Sara’s “other” version of herself, one with the Witchblade as a part of her being, enables her to evolve as an autonomous owner of feminine power and resist and transgress patriarchal phallocentric society. The Witchblade enables Sara to operate outside the boundaries of phallocentric culture, while not deforming or transforming her natural body, i.e.: becoming a monster. It is an extension of herself specifically highlighted by the fact that the Witchblade has been, and can only ever be, wielded by a woman. Sara with the Witchblade embodies a mode of difference that isn’t produced through a concept of oppositional otherness. Nor can it be co-opted back by being based on the concept of the phallus. Sara Pezzini and the Witchblade entity in the comic Witchblade provide a model of feminine power that is positive, distinctive, original and does not define itself against any masculine concepts. This is not to say that the actual narrative that surrounds and involves Sara, and the way she is portrayed at certain stages when compared with men, is not without its problems, but it does to a large extent overshadow these problems by concluding with a positive definition and direction for Sara. Metaphorically the Witchblade coincides with the feminist belief of women in general–their power may be thought to be “owned” by men but it can never be possessed.


Reference

Baldick, Chris. Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 1993.

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

Grosz, Elisabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Shildrick, Margaret. “Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body.” Body & Society 2.1, 1996.

Wohl, David. & Z, Christina. (w), Turner, Michael. (p), and D-Tron (i). Witchblade Deluxe Collected Edition. Fullerton: Image Comics (Top Cow), 1998. [Collecting Witchblade v1 #1-8, 1995-6].

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. Routledge, 1990.