Fashioning Horror: Dressing to Kill on Screen and in Literature 9781350036185, 9781350036215, 9781350036192

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Introduction: Fashion and Fear
1. “Death Dress You Anew”: Fashion as Transience and Limit of Human Life in Christian Literature and Iconographies between the Twelfth and Nineteenth Centuries
2. “Their Tattered Mortal Costumes Will Afford Them None of the Answers They Seek”: Clothing Immortals in the Work of Anne Rice, Tanith Lee, and Angela Carter
3. Fashioning Frankenstein in Film: Brides of Frankenstein
4. Wayward Wedding Dresses: Fabricating Horror in Dressing Rituals of Femininity
5. Fashioning Revenge: Costume, Crime, and Contamination in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s La Vengeance d’une femme
6. Fashions from Hell: The Enduring Influence of Jack the Ripper on Dress
7. Slasher Consciousness: Class, Killer Clothes, and Heterogeneity
8. Fashioning Frankenstein in Film: Monsters and Men
9. Horrific Transformations: Costume, Gender, and the Halloween Franchise
10. Faces of Rage: Masks, Murderers, and Motives in the Canadian Slasher Film
11. Massacres and Masquerades: The Costume in the American Slasher Film and the Cultural Myth of the “Foolkiller”
Index

Citation preview

i

FASHIONING HORROR

ii

iii

FASHIONING HORROR Dressing to Kill on Screen and in Literature Edited by

JULIA PETROV AND GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 by Bloomsbury Academic Paperback edition published 2019 by Bloomsbury Visual Arts Copyright © Julia Petrov and Gudrun D. Whitehead, 2018 Individual chapters © the contributors, 2018 Julia Petrov and Gudrun D. Whitehead have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image: The silhouetted figure of the vampire Count Dracula, raising his cape in batlike fashion, circa 1970 (© Hulton Archive/Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3618-5 PB: 978-1-3501-3327-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3619-2 eBook: 978-1-3500-3620-8 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

v

Dedicated to the well-dressed things that go bump in the night.

vi

vii

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix List of Contributors xiii

Introduction: Fashion and Fear

1

Gudrun D. Whitehead and Julia Petrov

1 “Death Dress You Anew”: Fashion as Transience and Limit of Human Life in Christian Literature and Iconographies between the Twelfth and Nineteenth Centuries 25 Sara Piccolo Paci

2 “Their Tattered Mortal Costumes Will Afford Them None of the Answers They Seek”: Clothing Immortals in the Work of Anne Rice, Tanith Lee, and Angela Carter 45 Stephanie Bowry

3 Fashioning Frankenstein in Film: Brides of Frankenstein

65

Rafael Jaen and Robert I. Lublin

4 Wayward Wedding Dresses: Fabricating Horror in Dressing Rituals of Femininity 83 Sarah Heaton

5 Fashioning Revenge: Costume, Crime, and Contamination in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s La Vengeance d’une femme 101 Kasia Stempniak

6 Fashions from Hell: The Enduring Influence of Jack the Ripper on Dress 121 Alanna McKnight

viii

viii

CONTENTS

7 Slasher Consciousness: Class, Killer Clothes, and Heterogeneity 139 Nigel Lezama

8 Fashioning Frankenstein in Film: Monsters and Men

159

Rafael Jaen and Robert I. Lublin

9 Horrific Transformations: Costume, Gender, and the Halloween Franchise 179 Nadia Buick and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

10 Faces of Rage: Masks, Murderers, and Motives in the Canadian Slasher Film 197 Rose Butler

11 Massacres and Masquerades: The Costume in the American Slasher Film and the Cultural Myth of the “Foolkiller” 215 Florent Christol

Index 233

ix

ILLUSTRATIONS

The editors, authors, and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. I.1

Hans Lützelburger after a drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger, The Countess, from the Dance of Death, ca. 1526, published 1538, woodcut, 6.5 x 4.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1919, http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/365207. 3

I.2

“Toquet Djémée (5962),” 1895, Art and Picture Collection, New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections, http:// digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-21ba-a3d9-e040e00a18064a99; M. O’Flaherty, “A Brooklyn Woman Whose Bonnet Is a Skull,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, October 11, 1896, p. 28. 7

I.3

Frame grabs from Bride of Chucky (dir. Ronny Yu), 1988, Universal Pictures; from geek to gorgeous goth: makeover scene. 9

I.4

Frame grab from The Addams Family, season 1, episode 7, “Halloween with the Addams Family” (dir. Sidney Lanfield), 1964, Twentieth Century Fox: Do not be alarmed, these are only little children—namely, Pugsley and Wednesday Addams; frame grab from The Munsters, season 1, episode 33, “Lily Munster, Girl Model” (dir. Earl Bellamy), 1965, NBC Universal: “Another Brastoff triumph! ‘Sheer Magic,’ as worn by one of our top models, Lily Munster.” 11

I.5

Matthew Darly, A Speedy and Effectual Preparation for the Next World, 1777, engraving, British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC; James Phillips, A Pig in a Poke, 1786, engraving, British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. 18

1.1

Prince of the World (the Tempter), jamb statue from the south portal of Strasbourg Cathedral, ca. 1280–90, stone, Musée de l’Oeuvre de Notre Dame, Strasbourg, France. Drawing by the author. 33

x

x

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.2

Transi tomb of Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk, 1475, alabaster, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Ewelme, Oxfordshire. Drawing by the author. 34

1.3

“Dance of Death, at Basle,” from Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), plate XIII, Wellcome Library, London. 36

1.4

The Tailor, 1750–80, oil on canvas, Museo Bernareggi, Bergamo. Photo by the author. 38

2.1

Ensemble, probably French, ca. 1730, wool, silk, and metallic thread, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Isabel Shults Fund, 2004, http://www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/107375. 53

2.2

Wedding dress, English, 1864–65, white satin and Honiton lace, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Bequeathed by Miss H. G. Bright. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 56

3.1

Elsa Lanchester as the Bride in Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale), 1935, Universal Pictures. Universal Clips™ Business to Business Broadcast Film Clip and Still Licensing. 68

3.2

Madeline Kahn as Elizabeth in Young Frankenstein (dir. Mel Brooks), 1974, Twentieth Century Fox. Gruskoff Venture Films/Crossbow Productions/Jouer Ltd/Ronald Grant Archive/Mary Evans/Alamy. 72

3.3

Publicity image for Frankenstein Created Woman (dir. Terence Fisher), 1967, Twentieth Century Fox. Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy. 74

3.4

Kenneth Branagh and Helena Bonham Carter in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (dir. Kenneth Branagh), 1994, TriStar Pictures. United Archives GmbH/Alamy. 78

4.1

Frederick Henry Townsend, “It removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and, flinging both on the floor, trampled on them.” Illustration from Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (London: Service and Paton, 1897), 303. © British Library Board. 90

5.1

“Bat” fancy dress costume, La Mode illustrée, January 9, 1887, FIDM Library Special Collections. 102

5.2

Fashion plate, “Robe en barège gris; corsage ouvert par devant, ayant des plis depuis l’épaule jusqu’en bas, manches larges jusqu’en bas; chapeau en crêpe rose garni dessous la passe d’une ruche en tulle illusion et de roses à gauche. Il y a un magnifique saule pleureur nuancé en rose; cheveux en bandeaux lisses; ombrelle couleur groseille,” Le Follet, June 1, 1842. Reprinted in Court Magazine and Monthly Critic, IX, 1842. Google Books. 108

xi

ILLUSTRATIONS

xi

5.3

Félicien Rops, La Vengeance d’une femme, 1884, héliogravure retouchée, 24 x 16.7 cm. Coll. musée Félicien Rops, Province de Namur, inv. PER E878.1.P. © Musée Rops. 113

6.1

Eddie Campbell, Scene from Inspector Abberline’s Office, in From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, vol. 6 (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 1989–96), p. 13. 130

6.2

Frame grab from From Hell (dir. Albert and Allen Hughes), 2001, Twentieth Century Fox. 130

6.3

“Two More Whitechapel Murders,” Illustrated Police News, October 6, 1888. © British Library Board. 132

7.1

Frame grab from The Walking Dead, season 1, episode 1 (dir. Frank Darabont), 2010. © AMC Studios. 143

7.2

Frame grab from The Walking Dead, season 3, episode 6 (dir. Dan Attias), 2012. © AMC Studios. 147

7.3

Morning Vest 1850–59. © Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009. Gift of E. McGreevey, 1948, http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ 157605; Vivienne Westwood, Wool Tartan Jacket, 1993. Accession 2001.79.1. © Museum at FIT; frame grab, Hannibal, season 2, episode 3 (dir. Peter Medak), 2014. © NBC Studios. 150

7.4

Frame grab from Hannibal, season 1, episode 1 (dir. David Slade), 2013. © NBC Studios. 152

8.1

N. Whittock after Wageman, “Mr. T. P. Cooke, of the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, in the character of the monster in the dramatic romance of Frankenstein,” 1823, lithograph, 37 x 29.5 cm, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ 78abffff-24da-1e46-e040-e00a18064970; W. Chevalier after Th. von Holst, “Frankenstein,” 1831, engraving, 9.3 x 7.1 cm, Wellcome Library, London. 162

8.2

Boris Karloff as the Monster in Frankenstein (dir. James Whale), 1931, Universal Pictures. Universal Clips™ Business to Business Broadcast Film Clip and Still Licensing. 164

8.3

Peter Boyle as the Monster and Gene Wilder as Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein (dir. Mel Brooks), 1974, Twentieth Century Fox; Charles Ogle in Frankenstein (dir. J. Searle Dawley), 1910, Edison Studios, Ronald Grant Archive/Alamy. 166

xii

xii

8.4

ILLUSTRATIONS

Christopher Lee in Curse of Frankenstein (dir. Terence Fisher), 1957, Warner Brothers. Zuma Press, Inc. and Alamy; Robert De Niro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (dir. Kenneth Branagh), 1994, TriStar Pictures. Columbia Pictures/Ronald Grant Archive/Alamy. 172

10.1 The killer becomes the class clown: Kenny’s “Groucho Marx” mask in Terror Train (dir. Roger Spottiswoode), frame grab, 1980, Twentieth Century Fox. 203 10.2 The killer wears a mask that evokes his working-class culture in My Bloody Valentine (dir. George Mihalka), frame grab, 1981, Paramount Pictures. 205 10.3 The hideous Crone mask used in Curtains (dir. Richard Ciupka), frame grab, 1983, Jensen Farley Pictures. 209 Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the this list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Editors Julia Petrov is Curator of Western Canadian History at the Royal Alberta Museum. Her research interests include the tensions between liveliness and deathliness in museum displays of fashion, the representation of dress in texts and images in the long nineteenth century, and gendered dress norms. She coedited the volumes, The Thing About Museums (2011) and Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories (2012), and edited a special issue of Clothing Cultures (3 [1]: 2016). Gudrun D. Whitehead is Assistant Professor in Museum Studies at the University of Iceland. Her research topics include cultural stereotypes (in particular the Vikings) in national and personal identities, historical narratives, and cultural norms. Dr. Whitehead has coedited and contributed to several publications, including a book chapter, “We Come from the Land of the Ice and Snow: Icelandic Heritage and Its Usage in Present Day Society,” in Heritage: A Museum Studies Approach, edited by S. Watson, A. Barnes and K. Bunning (forthcoming).

Authors Stephanie Bowry is an historian and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, with a particular specialism in the early modern period. Her current research project investigates the physical, conceptual, and experiential relationship between the art gallery and the garden from 1500 to 1750. She is broadly interested in how past forms, concepts, and strategies of visual representation and cultural practice influence those of later periods in history. Nadia Buick is an independent fashion curator, writer, and editor. She codirects publishing and curatorial project The Fashion Archives. She is coauthor of Remotely Fashionable: A Story of Subtropical Style (2015) and holds a PhD in fashion curatorial practice and theory from the Queensland University of

xiv

xiv

CONTRIBUTORS

Technology. Recent coauthored publications include 200 Years of Australian Fashion (2016) and Costumes from the Golden Age of Hollywood (2014). Rose Butler is Associate Lecturer and a doctoral candidate in film studies at Sheffield Hallam University, where she is completing a thesis titled “Mass Culture/ Mass Murder: A Cultural History of the German Crime Film.” She is currently researching several chapters on popular television shows, including American Horror Story, Game of Thrones, and Stranger Things. Her wider academic interest is in the cultural study of genre cinema and television with a particular emphasis on horror. Florent Christol received his PhD in American cinema and history from the University of Poitiers. His research on carnivalesque representations and the aesthetics and politics of the grotesque in American culture has been published in several journals and book chapters. He is currently writing a monograph on Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” (1849) and the cultural myth of the Foolkiller in American horror cinema (under contract with Rouge Profond editions) and on Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (under contract with Vendémiaire editions). Sarah Heaton is Head of English at the University of Chester. Her research focuses on fashion and clothing in literature. She is currently working on a monograph, Fashioning the Transatlantic, and an edited collection, A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Empire (1800–1920). She has published essays in The Human Vampire, Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic, Catwalk, and Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is a film critic, academic, and broadcaster who has written four monographs on horror and exploitation cinema:  RapeRevenge Films:  A  Critical Study (2011), Found Footage Horror Films:  Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014), Devil’s Advocates: Suspiria (2015), and Cultographies Ms. 45 (2017). She is an editor at the journal Senses of Cinema and a researcher at the Victorian College of the Arts and the University of Melbourne. Rafael Jaen is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is a professional costume designer with theatre, TV, and film credits. He is the author of SHOWCASE (USITT Golden Pen 2012 nomination) and Digital Costume Design (forthcoming 2017). He received a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award 2016 from Salem State University, Salem, Massachusetts, and he made The Most Stylish Bostonians list in 2014. Nigel Lezama is Assistant Professor in the Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures department at Brock University in Canada. His research focuses on

xv

CONTRIBUTORS

xv

critical fashion and luxury studies. He is currently working and publishing on the intersection of luxury and hip-hop, drag, and transvestism’s use of luxury from the nineteenth century onward and fashion in literature and film. Robert I. Lublin is Professor and Head of Theatre Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. In addition to publishing articles on theatre, film, and fashion history, he is the author of Costuming the Shakespearean Stage and coeditor of Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance. Alanna McKnight is a PhD candidate at Ryerson University in Communications and Culture. She specializes in Canadian labor and fashion production in the nineteenth century, utilizing material culture research of historic fashion artifacts. As a trained costumer, she has recreated historic fashions for film and theatre. Though her research usually focuses on corsets and dressmakers, her background in history and a love of the macabre has resulted in a lifelong fascination with Ripper Lore. Sara Piccolo Paci refers to herself as a “fashion anthropologist.” She studies costume and fashion as expressions of human needs at different stages. She teaches for institutions including Fashion Institute of Technology and Istituto Europeo di Design and Polimoda, and writes about the interaction between the body and society over the centuries. Some of her publications on costume history, art history, and liturgical garments include Storia delle Vesti Liturgiche, Forma Immagine, Funzione (2008) and Rosa Sine Spina, i Fiori nell’iconografia mariana (2015). Kasia Stempniak is a PhD candidate in romance studies at Duke University where she works on the intersection between literature and fashion in nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century French culture. She holds a BA (2012) in both French language and International Affairs from the George Washington University.

xvi

1

INTRODUCTION Fashion and Fear Gudrun D. Whitehead and Julia Petrov

This anthology explores the connections between dress and horror as they have been depicted in literature, film, and television. In these media, articles of clothing are variously used to establish a foreboding mood, develop the characterization of victims and villains, advance a suspenseful narrative, or add to verisimilitude to heighten audience engagement. The chapters seek to define the fundamental characteristics that make dress such a potent vessel and trigger for a horror response. Clothing, it is argued, is haunted by horror. Recently, academic attention has turned to exploring the link between popular culture and dress (Hancock, Johnson-Woods, and Karaminas 2013). The role of media in fashion dissemination and reception has been widely discussed (Sheridan 2010; Bartlett, Cole, and Rocamora 2014), and scholars have noted fashion’s obsession with subversion (Steele and Park 2008) as well as the dark side of fashion production and consumption (David 2015). It is clear that there is an appetite for exploring the darker side of human nature to reveal what ought to be concealed. This trend is also evident in horror that, as a genre, has been gaining an ever wider audience than before, moving from subculture into mainstream culture, evident, for example, by the multiple original television series as well as series based on cultclassic horror films. A defining feature of any horror genre is the costumes, which easily define the character roles within the narrative. This book brings these two academic trends together and aims to explore what is horrific about dress. The communicative power of dress is not always straightforward, and this has narrative possibilities for fashion’s role in the carnivalesque inversion of social norms, threatening the comforts of an accepted social order. Clothing can be uncanny (Freud 1919), an intimate second skin that follows the contours of a vulnerable mortal body. It can also be duplicitous, concealing the true identity of the wearer, or permitting a new identity to be worn. It can even be shocking, as, for example, a low décolletage or high hem might attract undue attention. Historically, these aspects of dress have resulted in fashion falling under moral suspicion (Johnson, Torntore, and Eicher 2003; Ribeiro 2003; Purdy 2004). More

2

2

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

recently, fashion has come to play a key role in expressing the darker potential of humanity (Evans 2003), and it is this tension between beauty and ugliness, construction and deconstruction, life and death, that we aim to explore in this book. Dress in horror is not a coincidental element; instead, we argue, it is fundamental to the understanding of characterization and setting of horror. Yet horror dress is not limited to costuming victims and villains: all dress possesses, within its very material, the potential to subvert, conceal, or reveal, giving it a metaphorical power often deployed to great effect within the horror genre. The simultaneous mundanity and spectacularity of clothing is the key to its symbolic power. Beyond being a mere instrument of gore, horror fashion is a significant element in popular culture and a powerful symbol of prevailing social mores.

Fashion, fabric and phantasmagoria: Speculations on terminology In his comprehensive essay on literary horror, Lovecraft writes: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is fear of the unknown” (Lovecraft [1927] 1973:  11). This description serves well for the purposes of defining the term “horror” as used in this publication. According to Robin Wood’s seminal Marxist-Freudian study of the genre, “the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that civilization represses or oppresses” (Wood 1979: 10). Derry suggests that horror, like comedy, refers “more to a particular audience response than a particular content” (Derry 1988: 6). Horror may cause fear, shock, or disgust, but is simultaneously alluring, macabre, and provocative; this feeling creeps off the page and screen and into the fabric of daily life. This book places these effects of horror in relation to dress and costume. Gothic horror, in particular, is a widely popular element in contemporary culture. For most, the word “gothic” relates to “chills and thrills inspired by Morticia Addams and Bela Lugosi and aligned with morose dark garb” (Roberts 2014: 8). Yet, the term has come to mean various diverse things through history. As Valerie Steele has noted, “ ‘Gothic’ is an epithet with a strange history, evoking images of death, destruction, and decay. It is not just a word that describes something (such as a Gothic cathedral), it is also almost inevitably a term of abuse, implying that something is dark, barbarous, gloomy, and macabre” (Steele and Park 2008: 3). The Gothic Revival movement in Europe, which began in the eighteenth century, saw historical references included in literature and the visual arts as devices for setting mood and character. The gothic novel’s integration into mainstream fiction started with Horace Walpole, whose 1764 work served as a prototype for a complex, inspired gothic school of writers, including Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley. Walpole’s story marked a significant shift in how the term “gothic” was used, changing from

3

INTRODUCTION

3

Figure I.1 Hans Lützelburger after a drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger, The Countess, from the Dance of Death, ca. 1526, published 1538, woodcut, 6.5 x 4.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1919, http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ 365207.

meaning something “crude,” “barbarous,” and “in bad taste” to meaning “ancient,” “romantic,” and “charming” (Bleiler 1966: ix), often with traces of the supernatural and human nature at its most extreme. This new literary genre fashioned a compelling vision of attractive abjection, updating the ambiguous image of beauty haunted by death as had been expressed in Vanitas, Dance of Death, and Death and the Maiden artworks since the Middle Ages (see Figure I.1).

4

4

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

It is useful, therefore, to consider the very old association between fashion and moral decline or doom, arising as it did out of a European society broken by the Black Death (Breward 1995: 8) and tainted by its morbid effects: Since men were few, and since, by hereditary succession, they abounded in earthly goods, they forgot the past as though it had never been, and gave themselves up to a more shameful and disordered life than they had led before . . . inventing strange and unaccustomed fashions and indecent manners in their garments, and changing all their household stuff into new forms. (Villani [1350] 1929: 67) For these historical reasons, studies of costume and horror in literature and popular culture have been almost exclusively limited to the Gothic. In this book, however, we focus on the wider application and uses of dress within Western (Euro-North American) horror. We follow Cherry’s definition of “gothic” as one of the categories of horror typologies:  gothic; supernatural, occult, and ghost films; psychological horror; monster movies; slashers; body horror, splatter, and gore films (including postmodern zombies); exploitation cinema, video nasties, or other forms of explicitly violent films (Cherry 2009: 5–6). Defining the dress elements in horror films and literature marks a shift from previous academic writings on this theme. As this book argues, action, character, and plot development present in horror books, films, and television series are expressed through masks, dresses, and costumes. While some of the case studies in this book refer to costume (an intentional alteration of appearance for performative purposes) and others may reference fashion (garments produced within the fashion system of goods exchange and consumed in accordance with its changeable aesthetic), both can be subsumed under the term “dress,” which, as defined by Eicher, Evenson, and Lutz (2008: 4), includes all body modifications and body accessories, making it the most inclusive word to describe the types of clothing, accessories, and dressing behaviors discussed by the authors.

Who’s afraid of fashion? When one considers them from an intellectual position removed from quotidian habit, the adornment rituals we all practice are simply horrifying. In contemporary Western society, it is considered normal practice to use cosmetics of which the ingredients are known to be toxic, pierce the flesh, inject indelible inks under the surface of the skin, and physically distort the body with clothing and accessories, all in the name of fashion. These mutilations might appear to be brutal, yet they also provide opportunities for self-expression, which is often valued above comfort and safety. The real-life horrors of the environmental and labor exploitation of the fashion industry have been documented since at least the nineteenth

5

INTRODUCTION

5

century, and the result of our insatiable appetite for fashion has led to a catalog of other horrors, many of which have been ably summarized by Alison Matthews David in her excellent book, Fashion Victims (2015). Yet there are also less tangible horrors hiding in the folds of clothing. As Caroline Evans has noted, fashion is haunted by its own obsolescence (2003: 20). Valerie Steele wrote, “The destructive impulse in fashion centers on change: what was in yesterday is out today. . . . Like the vampire, fashion is undead” (Steele and Park 2008: 65). The doom of irrelevance and decay, which defines the fashion cycle, mirrors humanity’s own fears of inevitable mortality. Relatedly, worn clothing carries with it a frisson of the uncanny (Wilson 1985): like a reptile’s shed skin, it echoes too closely the passing of its inhabitant. To the bereaved, the clothes of the dead, as described by Juliet Ash (1996), can be a powerful and unsettling memento. It is little wonder that in literature and folktales, the attire of ghosts seems more important than the specter itself: the white lady is defined by her dress, and many ghost stories feature entirely disembodied, but animated garments, mimicking the motions of their long-deceased wearer. Our fears about clothing are reflective of much deeper anxieties around the vulnerability of our bodies. The folk dress of Eastern Europe, for example, is characterized by embroideries around the garment openings; the designs are said to have magical powers to protect against evil spirits from entering into these vulnerable spots at the throat, wrists, and belly (Welters 1999: 103). A very real threat of disease or injury may be thus explained as a metaphysical contagion in instances where clothing or accessories are given an apotropaic function. Relatedly, the medieval church was said to have objected to the fashion for the sideless surcote during the plague epidemic, its openings dubbed “the gates of hell” (Webb 1907: 346) or “windows of the devil” (von Heyden 1889: 98). Grooming rituals also leave us vulnerable. In the news, one might read about botched plastic surgeries (Melendez and Alizadeh 2011). The plot of the 1846 penny dreadful Sweeney Todd shows how our very lives might be threatened by a barber with a grudge; a man might present his bare throat to be shaved clean, but be thus deprived of his head instead. Even merely taking a shower or a bath has frequently been the downfall (or near such) for an unsuspecting victim in horror, including Marion Crane’s famous shower death scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). A lack of clothes can also open up the human body to vulnerability and shame. Most people have experienced a variation of the nightmare in which the dreamer appears naked among their fully dressed peers at work or at school. But clothing inspires anxiety for reasons that go far beyond the possibility of social ridicule (von Busch and Bjereld 2016). Indeed, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate, dress in horror rarely involves outright nudity. Instead, the psychological tension comes from a fear of

6

6

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

the disruption of boundaries—the social and physical categories we shore up against chaos. Robin Wood wrote of the genre: The definition of normality in horror films is in general boringly constant: the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them. The Monster is, of course, much more protean, changing from period to period as society’s basic fears clothes themselves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments—rather as dreams use material from recent memory to express conflicts or desires that may go back to early childhood. (1979: 14) Dress in horror can be understood as the guise of society’s norms and fears, displaced, symbolized, and condensed in horror as they might be in a dream. The fears inherent in horror are coded visibly through the dress of characters: foreignness, decadence (sexual and material), hegemony, anonymity, disability, criminality, ageing, and so on. Any disruption of “normal,” accepted, and ordered boundaries, through dress or otherwise, might presage even worse things to come—the greatest fear of all being the oblivion of death. As fashion, accessories, and cosmetics are accepted in common discourse as being part of a “beauty” regimen, grotesque elements might inspire horror. For example, in 1896, American newspapers reported on the eccentric millinery choices of a Brooklyn woman, who appropriated a skull from her physician husband and used it to trim her hat. According to the reports, the woman’s “taste for peculiar things has been well developed,” and so, “full of a new idea, [she] had the skull carefully cleaned and polished, and, with a deftness known only to the hands of woman, fashioned an affair of skull, feathers, and ribbons which, when completed, was as original an arrangement as one could imagine” (“A Bonnet Made of a Human Skull” 1896:  6). One newspaper commissioned an illustration of what this novel hat might have looked like; the result was similar to fashion plates of the time, only the lady’s headdress was crowned by a human skull. Indeed, when compared with the then current fashion of including entire taxidermied birds on hats, a skull does not seem to be so outrageous (see Figure I.2). The horrifying nature of the skull hat, therefore, had to do with its provocatively toying with accepted ideas of beauty, as well as alluding to taboo notions of death. Similar themes of horror have also been explored by contemporary fashion designers. The “predatory glamour” of vampires depicted in films such as The Hunger (1983) was noted by the New York Times to have been referenced in the visual style of fashion photography (La Ferla 2009:  2)  The New  York designer duo, The Blonds, showed outfits inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in their fall 2013 runway collection. Valerie Steele’s book Gothic: Dark Glamour (2008) explores other fashionable engagements with

7

INTRODUCTION

7

Figure I.2 “Toquet Djémée (5962),” 1895, Art and Picture Collection, New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ 510d47e1-21ba-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99; M. O’Flaherty, “A Brooklyn Woman Whose Bonnet Is a Skull,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, October 11, 1896, p. 28.

horror themes. She highlights designers like Ann Demeulemeester, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Rick Owens, Anna Sui, Olivier Theyskens, Ricardo Tischi, and Yohji Yamamoto as being particularly influenced by decay and the macabre and being dark in their work, but also points out other connections, such as how the Fall/Winter 2008–9 Rodarte collection was inspired by Japanese horror films (Steele and Park 2008: 100). Perhaps because prominent designers brought these dark themes to the fore, television series have become unlikely fashion icons; the FX drama series American Horror Story (2011– ongoing) was profiled by the leading fashion periodical, Vogue, which identified its occult-inspired styles as a real-life fashion trend: “Besides its gratuitous violence and oft-unsettling subject matter, the show has come to be known for another sort of spectacle:  That of sartorial, dare we say, reverence. Who’d have thought a tale of bloodthirsty sorceresses and necromancer voodoo priestesses would be so engaged in fashion?” (Remsen 2014). Perhaps not so surprising after all, considering the ways in which pop culture horror, especially teen horror such as the iconic television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), was preoccupied with fashion on and off the screen. This has been fruitfully examined in other publications, including work written by Speed (1995), Williamson (2005), and Stenger (2006).

8

8

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

The fashion of horror The horror genre has not only been the inspiration for fashion; films and television have also actively engaged with it themselves. For example, Metro-GoldwynMayer sponsored two national beauty contests in connection with the release of films in its Gothic-themed Dark Shadows (1966–71) franchise in the early 1970s. Contestants for the 1970 Miss American Vampire pageant were given suggestions in the press for their outfits: “the white, diaphanous shroud, for the newly initiated vampire, or a slinky black for the more sophisticated ghoul. A touch of red here or there would not be amiss, and accessories, such as necklaces of teeth, would certainly be in order” (Themal 1970: 14). In 1971, MGM crowned a Miss Ghost America. Contestants were encouraged to “let their imaginations run wild as to the ghostly attire and makeup they feel appropriate for their appearance in the contest” (Rockwood, 1971: 3), and the publicity poster featured a female shape draped in a sheet, with glowing green eyes—a somewhat improbable outfit for a beauty contest. Overall, the importance of costume to horror is widely understood. Clothing is the mechanism, or driving force of horror, creating meaningful connections within and outside the narrative. The teen-slashing mass murderer is recognized from his mask, the jock from his football jersey, and the monster from his attire. Each one has a role to play, readily understood by authors, readers, viewers, and artists. How the creators play with these preconceived notions is one of the things that continue to make horror interesting and relevant. When dress is used in horror literature and film as a plot device, it is used knowingly. It reflects the properties and characteristics of dress, but these are often twisted in unexpected ways for narrative effect. The ability of dress to be a marker of the wearer’s personality or social status may turn out to be misleading, with dangerous consequences (Lezama, Chapter 7, this volume). Its beauty can hide grotesqueness (Paci, Chapter 1, this volume). Its protective function may fail to contain the mortal flesh underneath (McKnight, Chapter 6, this volume). It becomes an untrustworthy signifier, as well as an effective narrative element. We are all familiar with dress; we all intuitively know how it should function. Therefore, to disturb that “nature” is to add to the disturbing effect of horror. The 1988 film Bride of Chucky, a sequel to the tale of the killer doll, toyed with conventional depictions of beauty, by featuring an extensive makeover sequence (see Figure I.3). As frequently seen in romantic comedies, it features an unattractive female who gets a makeover, effectively turning her into the ultimate dream girl, who is finally fit for the film’s male lead character. Yet in Tiffany’s case, the innocence is only “skin deep,” as it veils a deadly personality beneath the plastic surface. Furthermore, in the realm of horror, where the makeover is in favor of an evil villain, the makeover here is subverted. Tiffany’s doll body transforms from being the epitome of innocence, in a white dress, bridal veil, and black, silken

9

INTRODUCTION

9

straight hair into a blond, metal, goth bride ready to kill those who cross her path. This recalls the classic horror trope of Dracula’s “devil brides” in which innocent but sexually curious females are transformed into deadly sirens in revealing clothing, using their sensuality to lure male victims to their deaths. Tiffany’s makeover serves to transform her new body to better fit her deadly personality and skills. The makeover scene in Bride of Chucky is remarkably reflective of the “from geek to gorgeous” scenes of romance films. After several sequences showing the paraphernalia needed for the transformation, the oddly sensual, doll-dressup scene ends with the camera slowly panning up the doll’s body. Her wedding dress has now become a skirt, with an open slit up the length of it, showing the black stockings up the upper thigh. As the camera moves up to her open leather jacket, Tiffany opens a silver lighter and lights up a cigarette, slowly exhales the smoke, turns her head slightly, and exclaims “Barbie, eat your heart out.” Indeed, this homicidal horror bride is a far cry from the iconic fashion doll beloved by children and collectors.

Figure I.3 Frame grabs from Bride of Chucky (dir. Ronny Yu), 1988, Universal Pictures; from geek to gorgeous goth: makeover scene.

10

10

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

This inversion of typical fashion norms is not uncommon in the horror genre. In a 1964 episode of The Addams Family (1964–6), Wednesday and Pugsley Addams go out trick or treating wearing normal, fashionable clothing (see figure I.4). The adults, hesitant to let them leave should they scare people too badly, instruct the kids to say: “Do not be alarmed, we are only little children.” Similarly, a 1965 episode of the satirical horror television series The Munsters (1964–6)1 saw the family’s matriarch, Lily Munster (nee Dracula), get a job as an exotic fashion model. In a line that echoes many of the concerns about the transience of fashion, the designer claims that he is “trying to bring back an era that is gone and trying to revive the dead, if you like.”2 The two series were subversive parodies of the wholesome family sitcoms and among a number of similar programs that featured monsters, witches, and other supernatural creatures in the mid1960s period, living otherwise ordinary middle-class American lives. As the plots of all of these programs relied on inversion of social norms for their humor, it is easy to see how having a female vampire in a fashion show serves to highlight the norms of the fashion system itself: conventional beauty is played against the mysterious aura of the undead; the new and modern are contrasted with the old and the dead.3 According to Robin Wood’s seminal study of the genre, the basic formula for horror can be simply summarized as “normality is threatened by the Monster” (1979: 14), and in this gentle satire, the true nature of fashion is revealed through dark contrasts. The cultural status of the horror film can also be fruitfully compared to fashion. As Wood points out, horror films “are dismissed with contempt by the majority of reviewer-critics, or simply ignored” (1979: 13), a fact, which until recently, applied also to the business of fashion. Equally, audiences “who go regularly to horror films profess to ridicule them and go in order to laugh” (13); this self-consciously ironic attitude can also be seen in popular attitudes to dress, where the line between love and hate becomes so thin as to be almost indistinguishable (as, for example, in the film Zoolander 2: Tschorn 2016: E1). Angie Chau (2011) has noted the mutual dependence of films and fashion on economic ideologies in her examination of fashion in the young adult book and film franchise Twilight, suggesting that the ambivalence of the characters toward dress has been capitalized on by the fashion industry. She connects the “perpetuation of consumer desire” (180) in fashion marketing to the vampiric lust for blood. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the toy company Mattel (perhaps best known for its iconic fashion doll Barbie) has a multimedia franchise that centers around the children of famous film and literary monsters. The animated series Monster High exists solely to sell a wide range of fashion dolls. Like Barbies, these dolls are marketed with expansion packs of clothes and accessories and come in a similar packaging size and format. The characters engage with fashion—the official Mattel biography for Clawdeen Wolf, one of the main cast of teenage monsters, has a section on her “Killer Style,” which states:  “I’m a

11

INTRODUCTION

11

Figure I.4 Frame grab from The Addams Family, season 1, episode 7, “Halloween with the Addams Family” (dir. Sidney Lanfield), 1964, Twentieth Century Fox: Do not be alarmed, these are only little children—namely, Pugsley and Wednesday Addams; frame grab from The Munsters, season 1, episode 33, “Lily Munster, Girl Model” (dir. Earl Bellamy), 1965, NBC Universal: “Another Brastoff triumph! ‘Sheer Magic,’ as worn by one of our top models, Lily Munster.”

12

12

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

fierce fashionista and was born to design. I love to sink my claws into the latest trends and put my own spin on them . . . of my outfits as well as my ghoulfriends [sic]” (“Clawdeen Wolf”). This characterization is a fascinating conflation of monstrosity and fashionability. Another Monster High main character, Frankie Stein, is said to be the daughter of Frankenstein’s Monster and his Bride (“Frankie Stein”: web): her appearance clearly references the costume choices made in the 1931 and 1935 Universal films, as she “inherited” her father’s green skin, and her mother’s black- and white-streaked hair. This kind of intertextual (or, more accurately, intervisual) referencing demonstrates the enduring visual appeal of horror costuming as well as the commercial potential of fashionable interventions in horror franchises. As the Monster High merchandise is targeted at children ages six and up, it serves to introduce a young generation to consumer culture forces.

Methodological approaches to dress in horror It is clear from even these few examples, then, that dress is an important part of horror; however, authors on the genre have rarely examined its uses in constructing mood and narrative. In her discussion of the technological and production factors of horror film, Brigid Cherry characterizes the aesthetics of horror as an aesthetics of the sublime, which is also a useful fashion category, opening up a discourse of “awe, dread, and horror” (2009: 89) different than the usual pleasures of fashion (Barnard 1996: 68–70). This is a theme that has been wellexplored for the Gothic by Spooner (2004) and Steele and Park (2008). Abjection, another important aspect of horror, can also be usefully connected to fashion. In horror, the boundaries of the body, including death or life, as well as its powers of attraction and/or repulsion, are defined by clothing and accessories. As Cherry says, “abjection is closely linked to femininity” (2009: 115) and gives rise to rituals protecting and delineating the proper social body. The disturbance of norms of femininity and cleanliness are a common feature of horror narratives and are signified through costume and dress, for instance, most famously, Stephen King’s Carrie (1974, films produced in 1976 and 2013), where blood takes various forms: menstrual blood, pig’s blood, birth blood, the blood of sin, and the blood of death (Creed 1993: 78). In an iconic scene in the girls’ showers, Carrie cowers, terror stricken, fearing death due to the blood oozing out of her private parts, while the other girls throw tampons and sanitary napkins at her, shouting, “plug it up!” The connection between female monstrosity and menstrual blood is further underlined when, Carrie, living her ultimate dream of normality, is crowned prom queen. A bucket of pig’s blood is thrown over her from the rafters of the building as she stands on stage. Carrie’s blood-soaked

13

INTRODUCTION

13

dress is a clear symbol of the common social dread of having menstrual blood seep through clothes at moments of high visibility. Furthermore, it is also central to the film’s discourse on the abject, where Carrie (and women in general) are monstrous because they bleed “like a stuck pig” (80). Carrie becomes the monster society has made of her, transforming her into an “avenging female fury” (78). Equally, the gendering of horror films (both in the filmic construction of the gaze and the coding of the fear reaction as feminine; see Cherry 2009: 49) parallels the fashion system’s construction of the female subject as an object of the male gaze and the desire to participate as feminine and irrational (Barnard 1996). Indeed, the construction of gender (as well as broader social identities) in terms of display, viewing, and the uses of props such as mirrors (Cherry 2009: 149–50) in horror films has also been identified in fashion systems (Craik 1993). The grand narratives of horror, then, including social alienation, and the articulation of human existential imperatives in an “appropriate aesthetic” (Cherry 2009: 168) are only possible because of the expressive and communicative characteristics of dress. Through costume, audiences are told who to fear, who to root for, and which (and even in which order) teenagers will be slashed by the serial killer. That there have been no published studies on the mutually inspirational relationship between fashion and horror narratives is therefore surprising. Studies of horror films have considered dress as a minor aspect of costume design. For Sipos (2010), for example, costume is part of a film’s mise-en-scene. Because dress is personal, costume renders characters’ personalities: their interests and history. Sipos also discusses the symbolism of costume, although in this respect, he discusses only color with its cultural associations of purity or passion, and not texture, style, or condition (2010: 32–5). Similarly, Cherry defines costumes as part of the iconography of the film, separate from narrative and style (2009: 14–15). In contrast, Nakahara’s essay considers costume as one part of the larger industry of film design, as “an independent artistic contribution” (2010: 150), and not only as a narrative element. This opens up an aesthetic avenue of investigation of dress and fashion in horror. Furthermore, it demonstrates the need for research focusing exclusively on the role of costume in horror, such as is presented in this volume.

Book aims and scope This book examines the role of dress in the communication and subversion of horror narratives and aesthetics. The overarching argument of the collection as a whole is that dress possesses characteristics that enable its easy application in horror contexts. Its aesthetic functions permit its narrative role: to reveal or conceal the shocking body, to attract or repulse the viewer, to identify the villain or the victim. All these functions, in turn, have psychological effects: Mood may be

14

14

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

set, morality or immorality may be conveyed, and innocence may be corrupted. Dress in horror fashions abjection and disguise. Horror in this sense, therefore, is not limited to sensationalistic cinema; contributions address social understandings of threat, literary descriptions of monstrosity, and true crime, as well as the filmic representation of terror. This book is an exploratory volume, beginning a selective discussion of some of the many themes that relate to fashioning horror. Horror, in this book, is defined largely by white Anglo-Saxon norms. The transgression inherent in the genre is a transgression of Euro-American heteronormative social hegemony. While many of the works used as case studies in this volume have been written about in other contexts, this marks the first time they are being explored in terms of their relation to dress. However, as tropes vary widely by culture, this leaves an opportunity for further research, exploring such themes as Asian horror (including anime), the Italian giallo, Afro-Caribbean voodoo, and horror Westerns. While some of these are signposted by authors in this volume, they deserve more specialized consideration. Subgenres of horror, such as the works created by the Hammer Production Company, have been more widely analyzed, but are far from fully explored in relation to costume. Classic Hollywood horror, so influential on the wider genre, would make for an interesting volume in itself. Horror cinema has its own subcultures, such as categories of films that are feared for their violent content: torture, splatter, video nasties, revenge films, and body horror. Films within these subcultural genres are grotesque not merely because of their violent settings but also because of their raw realism, for example, in the dress and costume choices. This volume therefore ventures cautiously into the dark corners of the human imagination, the bloodstained dress and the expensive tuxedo, the leather mask, and the ghostly white dress. It is the first academic volume specifically about fashion and the horror genre; furthermore, it addresses costume and dress simultaneously. This book engages in serious examination of two topics frequently dismissed as lighthearted and entertaining, or derided as negative moral influences. Horror dress is here considered a primary academic subject in its own right and given close attention. The first chapter in this book provides historical context with an examination of the traditional association of fashion with mortality in Western culture, marking the beginnings of a link between clothing and the dread of death in the Middle Ages. The author argues that in medieval religious dogma and ritual, death and the possibility of redemption were raised as the specters that haunted the worldly appearance of dress. Worldly dress carried the threat of moral contagion, therefore, and the connection between the fashion victim, the threat of doom, and fashion’s potential for a gruesome resolution are established as recurring themes for this volume. The following chapter by Bowry uses a historical approach to trace the melancholy themes of time and mortality in the dress of literary vampires. The author

15

INTRODUCTION

15

proposes that fashion itself is a revenant and that it marks transitions through stages of life and death. The following two chapters examine the horrifying possibilities of dress for a particular rite of passage: the wedding. Heaton examines the literary brides who inspired horror through their rejections of the patriarchy, a theme that Jaen and Lublin also discuss in relation to the Bride of Frankenstein’s filmic appearances. Demonstrating the prevailing significance of the Frankenstein “myth,” this chapter focuses on the female fashioned presence and thus redresses the existing gender imbalance in the analysis of this story. The deadly struggle of the sexes is further explored by McKnight’s chapter on the torn dresses of Jack the Ripper’s victims and Stempniak’s exploration of the femme fatale’s bloodstained dress. Both, it is argued, are expressions of male violence toward women, which continues the centuries-old connection between gender, clothing, and death. Next, the book moves to addressing the transformative powers of male dress. Lezama’s chapter considers the fashioning of working-class and aristocratic monsters. The existence of monster dress typology is also addressed in Jaen and Lublin’s following paper, on the various guises of Frankenstein’s monster, as well as his creator. The authors contend that the oppositions set up by the genre are not actually so clearly defined and that the monster’s true appearance is often camouflaged by a dandy-like disguise. Masks and masquerade are the themes of the final three chapters by Buick and Heller-Nicholas, Butler, and Christol. Transformations from the mundane to the carnivalesque, the female to the male, and the victim to the villain are enabled through costume. In effect, the films analyzed in these chapters feature costume-within-a-costume, where the characters take on a disguise that erases their individual personas. The mask motif so characteristic of “slasher” films is reevaluated as a complex form of identity play. A number of related concerns interconnect the chapters in this volume. The medieval symbolic understanding of clothing as being laden with the presence and terror of death is key to the understanding of costume in the literature and film of succeeding centuries. Several chapters focus on the cultural and historical origin of the use and associations of certain types of clothing and fashion with villains and victims, identifying character archetypes through costume, such as masks and bloodstained garments. Others examine the transmission and hybridization of horror costume tropes across time, locating horror not within the body of the killer or the seams of their clothes, but within the audience’s recognition of what they represent. Ritual is another recurring theme in this volume. The role of dress in enacting and subverting social expectations around weddings, funerals, masquerades, and holidays such as Halloween is explored by the majority of authors. All contributing authors address how terror and threat are fashioned, visually, symbolically, and materially, within the horror genre.

16

16

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

Dressing the part: Disguise, performance, and monstrosity Jonathan Faiers (2013) provides an alternative reading of iconic fashion in horror. His formulation of dysfunctional fashion includes articles of dress that instead of being invisible, or straightforward signifiers of characterization, refuse to function as expected. For example, Faiers devotes a chapter to dysfunctional accessories, whose liminal fashion status “is translated as a symbolic latency, where articles such as shoes, hats, and scarves are able to display their potential to become something else, whether that be evidence, a weapon, or a motive” (108). Following this logic, a mask in horror does not act as a disguise, but instead, identifies the killer. Furthermore, Faiers notes fashion’s innate connection to crime and deviance (108). Far from being dysfunctional, these garments actually highlight fashion’s important role in social control, with all its concomitant Foucauldian notions of discipline, surveillance, and punishment. Dress in horror plays out cultural myths and fears around vestimentary authority. Marketa Uhlirova writes: “Fashion seems an ideal environment for crime because it has an excessive preoccupation with dress and grooming—an insistence on the surface—which often signals something sinister lurking underneath” (2008: 12). These issues of clothing as a symbol of crime are illustrated by McKnight, Stempniak, and Lezama in this volume. The symbolic performance of horror is a key consideration throughout the chapters in this book. Following Faiers, for example, we can rephrase Roland Barthes’s famous statement on photography to refer to dress: costume “cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask . . . The mask is the meaning insofar as it is absolutely pure (as it was in the ancient theatre)” (Barthes 1982: 34). Although the mask is only one part of the costume of the monster, it makes up its entire meaning. Nakahara notes the concentration of symbolic power in the fetishized accessories worn as villainous costumes (2010:149). The performative aspect of dressed identity has been noted in the mundane world by Irving Goffman (1959) as well. Therefore, the element of masquerade has an added frisson, in that the audience cannot know how deep the usual disguise goes. Spooner suggests that clothing not only is performative but also disrupts the boundaries of self and the external environment; according to her, this is seen most clearly in the uses of the mask and the veil in Gothic literature: “The metaphors of masking and disguise seem to indicate an “authentic” self hidden beneath, but in Gothic texts they consistently work to problematise that authenticity” (2004: 5) Yet the mask is an important horror film trope as well, as can be seen in Buick and Heller-Nicholas, Butler, and Christol’s chapters in this volume.

17

INTRODUCTION

17

In horror, then, questions of identity are entangled with how dress facilitates role enactment. Dress is part of the expectation for behavior that define a person’s role within the social structure (Miller, Jasper, and Hill 1991: 807). Costume, in contrast, defines a departure from a normative identity. Sometimes, the true horror is when the mask hides something even more horrible. Sometimes the terror is the disguise itself. Stella Bruzzi critiques that clothes are meant to signify the body or character that wears them (1997: xiv). She characterizes this as a kind of fetishization of particular elements of costume, which “fail to conform to the idea of costumes as functionaries of the narrative, rather they are spectacular interventions that interfere with the scenes in which they appear and impose themselves onto the character they adorn” (xv). This is a notable theoretical standpoint that helps explain the horror stories in which elements of costume overtake the character themselves:  masks shared by anonymous serial killers or vampire’s cloaks (notwithstanding the actual persona of the individual killer or vampire) being good examples. The final chapter in this volume, by Christol, theorizes one of these archetypes—the “Foolkiller”—in relation to a killer performing an ancient masquerade. Authors in this volume also examine the nature of the horror being performed, defining the nature of the monstrosity lurking under the costume. In the Middle Ages, as Piccolo Paci argues (Chapter 1), it was monstrous to be in fashion—to deny the poverty that led to the true glory of eternal life through Christ’s Resurrection. The horrifying images of decaying skeletons seen in medieval art were not understood in the same way as they are now—the horror was not just within the decay of the body, but in how outward beauty could conceal the lurking horror of mortality itself. While some of this understanding of fashion as a vain revocation of mortality continued through the centuries, a more modern horror of the ugliness of the mortal body underneath the disguise of fine fashions began to appear in late eighteenth-century depictions (see Figure I.5). When the mask or veil do not hide greater horrors, the true horror is that of the void thus revealed by the unmasking (see Sedgwick 1981). The monstrous here is the fashionable disguise, and this is similar to the popular abhorrence of fashion as a soulless surface (see Klepp and Laitala 2015: 121–2). In the nineteenth century, “fashion victims” were commonly referred to in the press as slaves to a despotic fashion system (“Fashion” 1836), or as blind and sheeplike (Merrifield 1861), in their devotion to following its vagaries. Yet in their unthinking consumption, they can also be understood as zombies; elsewhere, Harper (2002) has made an interesting case for this in his examination of the seminal zombie film Dawn of the Dead, and in Chapter 7, that examination of the Marxist lumpenproletariat is continued by Lezama. Relatedly, Bowry (Chapter 2) suggests that the fashion system is itself vampiric in the way in which it feeds off the past in an endless cycle of revenance.

18

18

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

Figure I.5 Matthew Darly, A Speedy and Effectual Preparation for the Next World, 1777, engraving, British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC; James Phillips, A Pig in a Poke, 1786, engraving, British Cartoon Prints Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

19

INTRODUCTION

19

Dressing the part: Intertextuality, class, and gender The recurrence of particular tropes in horror plots is often highlighted by the manner in which authors, directors, and designers knowingly reference iconic horror moments or archetypes. Costume itself can be intertextual:  Buick and Heller-Nicholas (Chapter 9), for example, note how the Halloween film franchise assumes in its mise-en-scene that the iconic mask worn by its killer protagonist is also a commercially available costume in the real world. In her study of costume in film, Sarah Street notes the intertextual elements of clothing in film, where costumes reference not only a period or a character but also previous representations (2001: 10). An example of this in the present volume are Jaen and Lublin’s chapters on the representations of Frankenstein’s Monster and his Bride, which tend to copy the sutured conventions established by the 1935 film; yet the connections go beyond the examples the authors provide, as can be seen from the previous discussions of The Munsters and Monster High. The costuming for Frankenstein’s monster is also fertile ground for an investigation of class, another thread that runs through several chapters in this book. As Wood points out, “Frankenstein could have dressed his creature in top hat, white tie and tails, but in fact chose labourer’s clothes” (1979: 11). In this Marxist reading, the cruelties of class divisions are made material through costuming choices. As Paci documents in her chapter, fashion was first identified as a system that sinfully propagated social inequality in the Middle Ages, so that the wealthy and successful were careful to demonstrate their understanding that all mortals are equal in death through the iconography of Transi Tombs. Paci’s analysis applies modern concepts of horror and fashion retroactively to historical fact, yet in the mythology of horror, the undead may continue to enjoy fashion, and vampires are particularly associated with sartorial elegance, as Bowry notes. Leisured, decadent fashionability comes at the cost of the labor of the lower classes, and so it is appropriate that the vampire has been clothed in the uniform of the dandy (Steele and Park 2008: 19–30). If vampiric maleness is painted black, then the female in vampire lore is often white (23). In Chapter 4, Heaton discusses the vampiric symbolism of Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife, Bertha, in the struggle over the white wedding veil in Jane Eyre. Heaton also contrasts the different uses of the color in the characterizations of the female characters in Wilkie Collins’s sensational novel Woman in White as they relate to the threat that female power represents to the patriarchy. Feminist readings of clothing are therefore useful in decoding the symbolism of the dress of female horror characters. The classic statement on fashion by Simone de Beauvoir is especially fitting for analyzing the way that female victims, in particular, are coded through dress: “Woman is even required by society

20

20

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

to make herself an erotic object. The purpose of the fashions to which she is enslaved is not to reveal her as an independent individual, but rather to offer her as prey to male desires; thus society is not seeking to further her projects but to thwart them” (de Beauvoir [1949] 2009: 529, emphasis added) The chapters on female sexual crime and revenge by Stempniak and McKnight illustrate this perfectly. Analyses of horror from a gender perspective have tended to focus on the heteronormative positioning of a male monster and a female victim (Clover 1992; Dika 1990). This coding relies on dress, as the female actress is clad in garments that emphasize her sexual vulnerability, such as nightgowns or wedding dresses (Grant 1996: 5). The authors in the present volume, however, expand this analysis beyond a strict dichotomy of male policing the female body to discussions of class and male relationships to their own bodies and wider social body norms.

Toward a theory of fashioned horror Fashion and horror have both been derided for being populist and therefore unworthy of critical attention. However, the grotesque (a category to which both fashion and horror have frequently been relegated) was celebrated by Victor Hugo as early as 1827 for being both democratic and resolutely modern. For Hugo, ugliness was the defining characteristic of contemporary life, an indispensable part of creative output. It was, in fact, superior to beauty because it existed in myriad forms ([1827] 2004: 28–9). Nevertheless, grotesqueness is hard to get right. The writings of the master of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft, for example, constitute an entire lore of monsters terrifying on paper, yet sedate on film. One of the reasons for this is that they do not possess a shred of humanity. They are so completely alien in their looks that they are visually comical when produced on film. What is filled out by the imagination looks ragged in the flesh. Then there are the monsters laid out in this volume, whose cruelty is not a choice, but an inevitability and a necessity in order to break through the wall of constant repression (Dühren 1922: 432). With crime, sexual liberation, and even murder, we serve the whims of Nature, our creator:  “Nature’s mastery lies precisely in the perfect balance which she maintains between virtue and crime. But can we be guilty if we move in the direction in which she pushes us? No more than the wasp which punctures you skin with its sting” (Sade [1782] 1992: 159). The true horror is the one we can relate to. It is humanity at its weakest, at its most vulnerable and vicious. And it is through costuming that these vices are revealed to us, the audience. What makes dress in horror unique is that it allows the audience to experience our own depth and range. As stated earlier, clothing is supposed to protect us, but instead, it exposes us to the ravages of time, to the threat of death, to the inequalities of gender and class hierarchies, and to the hidden monsters, and all our mortal, moral

21

INTRODUCTION

21

shortcomings, laid bare. The revelation of the grotesque may, in the words of Victor Hugo, “act as a pause, a contrast, a point of departure from which we can approach what is beautiful with fresher and keener powers of perception.” ([1827] 2004:  27)  This is the danse macabre of clothing and horror:  life and death, beauty and ugliness, the grotesque and the sublime, stitched together in wickedly attractive seams.

Notes 1 The series was produced by Universal, and so the costume designs for the family were derived from that studio’s other properties: Herman Munster looks like Boris Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein (1931), his son Eddie is a werewolf like Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman (1941), and Grandpa echoes Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931); the white streak in Lily Munster’s hair is derived from the Bride of Frankenstein (1935). See also the following discussion of Monster High and Jaen and Lublin, Chapter 3, this volume.

2 The idea of dress having the ability to turn back time was also exploited in Dark Shadows episodes 278–81 (1967), where the storyline is progressed by a costume party, wherein a character is transported back in time during a séance. See also Bowry, Chapter 2, this volume.

3 See also the recent 100 Years of Zombie Evolution in Pop Culture video produced by Top Trending, which imitated the popular 100 Years of Beauty international fashion transformation time-lapse series produced by Cut Video.

References “A Bonnet Made of a Human Skull” (1896), Chanute Daily Tribune, November 28: 6. Ash, J. (1996), “The Tie: Presence and Absence,” in P. Kirkham (ed.), The Gendered Object, 162–71, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barnard, M. (1996), Fashion as Communication, 2nd edn., London: Routledge. Barthes, R. (1982), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Bartlett D., S. Cole, and A. Rocamora (eds.) (2014), Fashion Media: Past and Present, London: Bloomsbury. Bleiler, E. F. (1966), “Introduction,” in E. F. Bleier (ed.), Three Gothic Novels, vii–xxxviii, New York: Dover. Breward, C. (1995), The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bruzzi, S. (1997), Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies, London: Routledge. Chau, A. (2011), “Fashion Sucks . . . Blood: Clothes and Covens in Twilight and Hollywood Culture,” in G. A. Anatol (ed.), Bringing Light to Twilight, 179–89, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cherry, B. (2009), Horror, New York: Routledge.

22

22

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

Chibnall, S., and J. Petley (eds.) (2001), British Horror Cinema, London: Routledge. “Clawdeen Wolf,” Monster High. Available online: http://play.monsterhigh.com/en-ca/ characters/clawdeen-wolf (accessed September 6, 2016). Clover, C. (1992), Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton University Press. Craik, J. (1993), Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, London: Routledge. Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Cut Video (2014–16), 100 Years of Beauty [video]. Available online: https://www.youtube. com/playlist?list=PLJic7bfGlo3qlgmccaaNAXTChp_Ny8CE4 (accessed October 5, 2016). David, A. M. (2015), Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present, London: Bloomsbury. De Beauvoir, S. ([1949] 2009), The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, New York: Vintage Books. Derry, C. (1988), The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadows of Alfred Hitchcock, London: McFarland. Dika, V. (1990), Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle, Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Dühren, E. (1922), Der Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit: En Beitrag zur Kultur- und Sittengeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Mit besonderer Beiziehung auf die Lehre von der Psychopathia Sexualis, Berlin: Verlag von H. Barsdorf. Eicher, J. B., S. L. Evenson, and H. A. Lutz (2008), The Visible Self: Global Perspectives on Dress, Culture, and Society, 3rd edn., New York: Fairchild. Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Faiers, J. (2013), Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. “Fashion,” (1836), in Jefferson Saunders (ed.), The Tin Trumpet, or Heads and Tales for the Wise and Waggish, Vol. 1, 163–4, Philadelphia, PA: E. L. Carey and A. Hart. “Frankie Stein,” Monster High. Available online: http://play.monsterhigh.com/en-ca/ characters/frankie-stein (accessed September 6, 2016). Freud, S. ([1919] 1955), “The ‘Uncanny,’” in S. Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. XVII, trans. J. Strachey, 217–56, London: Hogarth Press. Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor Books. Grant, B. K. (1996), “Introduction,” in B. K. Grant (ed.), Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, 1–12, Austin: University of Texas Press. Hancock, J., T. Johnson-Woods, and V. Karaminas (eds.) (2013), Fashion in Popular Culture: Literature, Media and Contemporary Studies, Bristol: Intellect. Harper, S. (2002), “Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead,” Americana: Journal of American Popular Culture, 1900 to Present 1 (2). Available online: http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/ articles/fall_2002/harper (accessed August 25, 2016). Hugo, V. ([1827] 2004), “Preface to Cromwell,” in E. H. and A. M. Blackmore (eds.), The Essential Victor Hugo, 16–53, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, R. D. (1969), “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” Modern Language Association 84 (2): 282–90. Johnson, K. K. P., S. J. Torntore, and J. B. Eicher (2003), Fashion Foundations: Early Writings on Dress, Oxford: Berg.

23

INTRODUCTION

23

Klepp, I. G., and K. Laitala (2015), “Consumption Studies: The Force of the Ordinary,” in K. Fletcher and M. Tham (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion, 121–30, London: Routledge. La Ferla, R. (2009), “A Trend with Teeth,” New York Times, July 2: 2. Lovecraft, H. P. ([1927] 1973), “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in E. F. Bleiler (ed.), Supernatural Horror in Literature, 11–106, New York: Dover. Melendez, M. M., and K. Alizadeh (2011), “Complications from International Surgery Tourism,” Aesthetic Surgery 31 (6): 694–7. Merrifield, M. (1861), “The Use and Abuse of Colours in Dress,” St. James Magazine 1: 289–95. Miller, K., C. R. Jasper, and D. R. Hill (1991), “Costume and the Perception of Identity and Role,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 72: 807–13. Nakahara, T. (2010), “Making Up Monsters: Set and Costume Design in Horror Films,” in I. Conrich (ed.), Horror Zone, 139–51, New York: IB Tauris. Pirie, D. (2007), A New Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, London: I. B. Tauris. Purdy D. L. (ed.) (2004), The Rise of Fashion: A Reader, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Remsen, N. (2014), “American Horror Story: Coven—An Unexpected Fashion Hit,” Vogue, January 29. Available online: http://www.vogue.com/866766/emamericanhorror-story-coveneman-unexpected-fashion-hit/ (accessed August 15, 2016). Ribeiro, A. (2003), Dress and Morality, Oxford: Berg. Roberts, C. (2014), “Introduction: Pretty Chills,” in C. Roberts, H. Livingstone, and E. Baxter-Wright, Gothic: The Evolution of a Dark Subculture, 8–12, London: Goodman. Rockwood, A. (1971), “Playground Chatter,” Bennington Banner, August 20: 3. Sade, Marquis de ([1782] 1992), “Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man,” in Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales, trans. David Coward, 149–60, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1981), “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96 (2): 255–70. Sheridan, J. (2010), Fashion Media Promotion: The New Black Magic, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Sipos, T. M. (2010), Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear, London: McFarland. Speed, L. (1995), “Good Fun and Bad Hair Days: Girls in Teen Film,” Metro, 101: 24–30. Spooner, C. (2004), Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spooner, C. (2014), “Twenty-first Century Gothic,” in D. Townshend (ed.), Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, 180–207, London: British Library. Steele, V., and J. Park (2008), Gothic: Dark Glamour, New York: Yale University Press and Fashion Institute of Technology. Stenger, J. (2006), “The Clothes Make the Fan: Fashion and Online Fandom When ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Goes to eBay,” Cinema 45 (4): 26–44. Street, S. (2001), Costume and Cinema: Dress Codes in Popular Film, New York: Wallflower. Themal, H. F. (1970), “If not Miss Venus, Try for Vampire?” News Journal, August 31: 14. Top Trending (2016), 100 Years of Zombie Evolution in Pop Culture [video]. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SdACMZwaaw (accessed October 5, 2016).

24

24

GUDRUN D. WHITEHEAD AND JULIA PETROV

Tschorn, A. (2016), “At the Movies; A Perfect Fit; ‘Zoolander 2’ Borrows the Fashion World’s Tricks to Build Buzz,” Los Angeles Times, February 12: E.1. Uhlirova, M. (ed.) (2008), If Looks Could Kill: Cinema’s Images of Fashion, Crime, and Violence, London: Koenig Books. Villani, M. ([1350] 1927), “God’s Hand Was Unstrung,” in G. G. Coulton (ed.), The Black Death, 67, London: Ernest Benn. von Busch, O., and Y. Bjereld (2016), “A Typology of Fashion Violence,” Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 7 (1): 89–107. von Heyden, A. (1889), Die tracht der kulturvölker Europas, Leipzig: E. A. Seemann. Webb, W. M. (1907), The Heritage of Dress, London: E. Grant Richards. Welters, L. (1999), Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia, London: Bloomsbury. Williamson, M. (2005), The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy, London: Wallflower Press. Wilson, E. (1985), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Oakland: University of California Press. Wood, R. (1979), “Introduction,” in A. Britton, R. Lippe, T. Williams, and R. Wood, American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, 7–28, Toronto: Festival of Festivals. Wood, R. (1986), Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York: Columbia University Press.

25

1 “DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW” Fashion as Transience and Limit of Human Life in Christian Literature and Iconographies between the Twelfth and Nineteenth Centuries Sara Piccolo Paci

Death is one of the key instruments for meditating on our existence: comparing our life with the final destiny that each of us will experience may give the measure of the real significance of our earthly journey. Today’s society, founded on looks, on the image, and on the search for eternal youth, attempting to refuse—at least in the popular media—suffering and death, often does not allow a natural and personal reflection on its meaning.1 Nonetheless, movies, books, TV series, music, and even cartoons look at death and to the irrational as protagonists. Modern zombies and vampires go together with anatomical corpse dissection and psychological criminal’s analyses: technological and rational beliefs in parallel with a ghostly side that takes strength from past imagery.2 Macabre themes, which in modern society are simultaneously frightening and attractive, were in past times an integral part of everyday life, conferring depth and substance to it,

26

26

SARA PICCOLO PACI

allowing people to accept their transient nature. In the past, death was imagined as a transition, not as a definitive end, and people believed in a realistic afterlife, often imagined in every detail.3 Death was a change of status for both the body and the soul. Today, personal suffering and the moment of death are often experienced in solitude, in hospitals and care homes. Talking about illnesses and decay is perceived as socially inappropriate (Pennington 2001: 13–14; Ohler 2006: 11), and the search for eternal youth, seen as the “true” expression of beauty, characterizes the lives of many, sometimes descending into obsessions with plastic surgery, extreme body fitness, or diet abuse. There was a specific moment in Western culture when Death and dress were first philosophically connected; between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, texts and iconographies were developed, where Death dressed mortals with her shining mantle: “Death dress you anew” was a popular proverb4 that pointed out the close relationship between life, fashion, and death. The concept of death/ dress saw an evolution that was parallel with the process that brought, during the same period, the evolution of theories about the afterlife, “one of the obscurer processes of human imagination” (Boase 1972: 19). If dying was “just” a change of status, it was only logical that it may have been represented with a change of dress, which is one of the most common markers for any social rite of passage. But, what looks important during life—like dress and appearance—loses its prominence if it is considered with an eye toward eternity and expresses the link between clothing and mortality, depicting its powerful characteristic of liminality. This was first done in a medieval sermon by Elinandus de Froidmont (1160–1229),5 which reveals these new meanings given to dress and to death. Fashion and death results to be much more interwoven then we may apparently imagine: connected by the evolution of Christian theology, the relationship between the two expresses our deepest concern about the real significance of human life. Beginning with the Biblical episode of Adam and Eve “dressing up” after their sins, through medieval lyrics, poems, and sermons that deal with Death and dress, to the morbid iconography of the Meeting of the Three Dead and Three Living, the Transi Tombs, and the Prince of the World, up to lyrics that illustrate and inspire famous fresco cycles like the Danse Macabre, and finally ending with the short poem by Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837),6 On Death and Fashion (1824), this chapter explores the roots and the meanings of such a lasting interest in fashionable deaths.

The Christian view of mortality Death is one of the most ancient topics of discussion among philosophers and theologians: Western representations of death are not rare, but if the sensibility of the Roman world saw in this presence a memento vivere (remember that

27

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

27

you have to live—before you die)7 with Christianity, it became a memento mori (remember you will die).8 This reflects the different ideas of the afterlife in classical antiquity and in the Christian world, where a pessimistic view about life and death was slowly replaced by another vision, which provided a reward for one’s actions with the promise of spiritual survival.9 In the Bible and in the writings of the Fathers of the Church,10 dress is an ambiguous tool (Piccolo Paci 2008: 87–93, 122–3) and it usually has two main meanings: on one hand it is a sign of a change of status—that’s why it may represent the moment of death. On the other hand, it is a clear symbol of artificiality and illusion—the human condition as a whole. References to dress—and to death—are present in the story of the very first two protagonists of sacred Christian history:  Adam and Eve. The consciousness that they acquired thanks to the fruit of the “tree of knowledge,” after sinning, made them aware of their own existence, of their physical aspect, and of their individuality and mortality (Gen. 3:6–7). Immediately afterward, God made clothes for them—God being the first “tailor” of history (Gen. 3:21). During the Middle Ages, God was often being addressed as the Great Architect, the Carpenter, and the Tailor, all occupations that point to Him being the “measurer” and the “planner” of human existence.11 The Biblical episode also helps us better understand what dress is for. Metaphorically speaking, dress is the flesh itself, or the human condition that has its limits in the body. As per the story of Adam and Eve, nakedness can be understood as corresponding to God’s will and to the “natural” existence: “everything that comes into existence is the work of God, everything that has been changed is the work of the devil,” says St. Ciprianus (Migne 1844–55: IV, 467, “On the Dress of Virgins”). The naked and the simply dressed body corresponds to the “natural” being, but changing and manipulating the dress can be deceiving, giving different shapes and value to the body itself, creating an artificial image not corresponding to the inner truth. If Adam and Eve felt the need to dress after the sin, dress and sin are connected; thus, dress may become a symbol of counterfeit, a malicious expression of the sinful soul of mankind, and of its final destination in eternal death. The boundary between death and fashion lies in the idea that both are somehow perceived as fleeting illusions—in Christian theology death is “temporary,” or better, it doesn’t even exist, because the final goal of each believer is the resurrection: life forever. Christianity takes strength from its faith in Jesus being the Christ, providing the concept of God’s incarnation into a human. The concept was elaborated and carefully discussed over several centuries. The teaching of the Gospels made clear that a second life was to be lived after death, but also left space for mortal imaginations through the use of metaphors and comparisons. Between the second and seventh centuries ad, a theological awareness of Christ in his dual nature arose—that is, divine and human—which began a journey that led to

28

28

SARA PICCOLO PACI

some major changes in the common perception of the individual, of mortality, of the appreciation of the body and its beauty, and, finally, of the desire to ornament it in an appropriate way, which was perceived as both a physical and spiritual endeavor, similar to the dual nature of Jesus. Because of the potential for salvation given by the Christ—the hope in the Resurrection—death was not be feared, but death in sin meant eternal damnation.

Medieval sermons on death and dress During the twelfth century, the medieval world began to pay new attention to concepts such as the body and the dress, power and status, appearance, substance, and the afterlife, which are all present in sermons and images that refer to death. Friar Domenico Cavalca in Lives of the Holy Fathers (before 1342) expresses the many facets clothing may represent, in a both positive and negative way: At the end of this story I would like to ask the rich and powerful men of this world, that don’t know how to use their own goods properly: what did this poor man, Paolo ever lack? You, o rich men, You dress in beautiful clothes, decorated and gilded; and Paolo never had such a simple robe as has one of the poorest among soldiers. But consider that to this poor man heaven is open, and to you hell. He, loving nakedness, honors the dress of Christ. Paolo, buried with no honor in the naked earth, will be resurrected in glory: you, with your marble sepulcher exquisite and gilded, you will be resurrected to pain. Don’t the bodies of the rich decay if they are not wrapped in silk?12 (s.d.: 21) This example foreshadows the emergence of macabre themes like the one of the Three Living and the Three Dead, which will be further explored later in this chapter, but there is a previous example that will shed a clearer light on the important Christian connection between fashion and death. This is the account of the trusted servant’s death in a sermon of the late twelfth century, by Elinandus de Froidmont (Migne 1844–55: CCXII, 731–3). Natale, the servant of Elinandus, died after an accident during a trip when he had been very angry with his supervisor and fellow traveler, the Archdeacon Burchardo. That same night, he appeared to Elinandus in a vision-like dream. Natale seemed to be suffering: he was dressed in a traveling cloak of dark color but pulcherrima (of extreme beauty) and, so as not to end up in hell for his sudden death in anger, he begged for help from Elinandus’s prayers. Elinandus was impressed: “Why, if you are tormented, are you so handsomely dressed in this shining cape?”. The poor man answered: “Sir, he said, this cape that looks so beautiful, it is heavier than the Parma tower. Its beauty is in the hope with which I came to you for confession and help” (Migne 1844–55: CCXII, 732).13 Death

29

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

29

is here represented by the robe, which is leaden but apparently beautiful: heavy and dark if you die in sin, but shining and bright if you are granted forgiveness for your sins. Here is what seems to be the first conscious expression of the link between appearance and the substance of existence. According to Natale, what appears beautiful may not hold up to reality; handsome clothes do not always correspond to a clean soul. The moral is: be aware, you who are still alive, that the shining brightness of silk and gold may hide the heaviest of the sins. In his vision, Elinandus makes a clear statement on the ambiguity of clothing, not only because what looks beautiful might, actually, hide a terrible truth but also because the “shining” cloth of Natale is also a symbol of the possibility of redemption: “its beauty is in hope” (Migne 1844–55: CCXII, 732), says Natale. Jesus’s “radiant” clothes during the Transfiguration (Mk. 9:3; Mt. 28:3; Lk. 9:29) gave the Apostles an idea of the glory of the Heavens and certainly supported them in their path of faith:14 Natale’s dress is heavy, because he died in sin, but it is shining, because he hoped for the help of friends’ prayers. The story of Natale makes clear that Elinandus is well aware of the risks of appearance and how beautiful clothes may be only a symbol of the emptiness of life, if virtue is lacking. Between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, therefore, we see the birth of sermons and iconographies dealing simultaneously with death and with worldly appearance,15 including the consciousness of the fugacity of life and vanity of looks.

Painted sermons and vanitas In Quando t’aliegre, omo de altura (Contrast between the Dead and the Living), Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) seems to take Elinandus’s meditation further. For a long time, Jacopone, like Elinandus, lived a merry life, until a tragedy struck. During a party in 1268, the floor of the room collapsed and his wife died. Much to his surprise and regret, Jacopone discovered that his wife wore a hair shirt—a tool of penitence—under her beautiful clothes, and he understood that she wanted to punish herself—without telling him—for a lifestyle she did not agree with. The event resolved in the sincere conversion of Jacopone who later become a Franciscan friar. Many of Jacopone’s dramatic and poignant poems are meditations on the contradictions between soul and body, virtue and sin, and real life and real death. The Contrast is one of his most famous lyrics, where a man meets a corpse and they have a debate and a very deep meditation on vanity and on the meaning of death: Now, answer to me, you that have been buried / and that so suddenly left this world / Where are your beautiful clothes, of which you used to dress / now I see you ornate of great dirtiness?16 (Jacopone da Todi, 1974, XII, v. 7–14)

30

30

SARA PICCOLO PACI

Here, beautiful clothes are used as a cruel reference to a past life and to the dramatic condition after death, when the body loses all its beauty and is covered with every ugliness. Death can be beautiful, pitiful, merciful, even like a “sister” in the words of San Francis,17 but also horrible if in sin, like clothes and the body that will eventually rot, revealing the putrefying of the sinful soul. Between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, the presence of the dead and the theme of vanitas increased in sermons and pamphlets, particularly by Franciscans. The dead try to have the living understand the futility of useless preoccupations like beauty and fashion, and they often become violent and sarcastic. We may imagine that the dead are not envious of life in itself, but of its potential. Their violence is especially against those who are perceived as wasting their chances while alive and represented not only the condition of everyone facing death (Quod nunc es, fuimus; es, quod sumus, ipse futurus [what are you now, we were, and you will be what we are now], as on the epitaph of S. Pier Damiani [1072]; Migne 1844–55:  CXL, 968)  but also as representatives of a social class that lived off injustice—the rich and nobles. A similar perception can be seen even today in the modern imagery concerning the dead, as for example in the movie Dawn of the Dead (G. Romero, 1978),18 where an American shopping mall is the site of confrontation between zombies and humans. Thus, today as in the Middle Ages, the colloquium with the dead reminds everyone that, in spite of access to consumerism and luxury, all of us have to submit to a superior justice (Harper 2002: 5–6). Around the same time, between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century, four short poems19 were written in France dealing with a related macabre theme: the Meeting between the Three Dead Men and the Three Living (Frugoni 1967). Soon the theme spread between France, Germany, and Italy, giving birth to numerous representations, in manuscripts as well as in frescoes and paintings (Townsend 2009: 44). The story refers that, one day on a hunting trip, a merry company of three noble friends stumbles onto the horrible vision of three open sepulchres from which three rotting corpses or skeletons warn them about life and death. As Kenneth Rooney observes, the three “derelict corpses stand before the living, not simply to speak of the end of life but to show it” (Rooney 2011: 8), thus underlining how much the value of the visual had grown in the Western world. Both images and poems underline the beauty of the living:  their faces are handsome, their dress is gorgeous, and their bodies are strong. The contrast with the dead corpses is striking, and what makes the message even stronger is the fact that the dead are also represented as kings and nobles. We must underline that the poems do not pursue the identification between the three living and the three dead: it is not a case of three persons meeting with their future selves. Here, again, the event is only an effective warning to the vanity and the pride of the living.

31

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

31

The Prince of the World, transi tombs, and Danse Macabre Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, theological relevance given to the humanity of God paved the way to theologians’, philosophers’, and artists’ considerations about the importance of the individual, the dress, the image, and the self, which came to characterize Western culture as a whole and resulted in the evolution of culture and art reflecting the importance of human beings in God’s creation. The peak of this thought was reached between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when humanists and artists developed the concept that humankind should be at the center of the search for knowledge, because Man is made in the likeness of God. The ever-rising social importance of the individual gave new fuel to the increasing importance given to fashionable attire and therefore an increase in its possible spiritual risks. Indeed, it cannot be a coincidence that the Western world developed such a deep interest for dress and fashion in the fourteenth century (Breward 1995: 8), with what some have identified as the birth of the fashion system coming after an important phase of religious debate on the incarnation of God took place, and particularly after the birth of the Orders of Franciscans and Dominicans (12th-13th centuries). The emphasis on Christ’s humanity also brought with it a new interpretation of his mortality and so the mysteries of death were once more investigated with new strength. The importance of the Franciscans and Dominicans preaching in terms of the spread of the human side of God and His death as a sacrifice that redeems the sin of mankind20 underlines also the representation of the self as well as the importance of the individual’s action in the society to whom one belongs, and thus is not to be underestimated. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries finally saw the rise of a society of selfmade men—the merchant, the banker, and the artist—who believed in their ability to change their own destiny on their own merits and not predestined birthrights. They gave great importance to their earthly appearance21 but, at the same time, were also conscious of the risk of falling into sin and therefore dedicated a great amount of their possessions to the purpose of saving their souls, building churches, and patronizing spiritual art (Fremantle 1992). This was a society that emphasized individuality and hope in the resurrection but feared oblivion:  the construction of churches, the patronage of works of art, and the representation of the self at the peak of its earthly career—in prestigious and elegant clothes— become ways to be remembered forever, at least by those who remained. At the same time, all this could also have been perceived as not enough: if there is no real spiritual self-offering, any donation or self-representation can be interpreted as vainglory and pride, opening up to deeper reflections on the spiritual risks of appearances.

32

32

SARA PICCOLO PACI

Many preachers railed against vanity of clothes and their high costs in sermons. In 1427, San Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444),22 an Italian Franciscan friar, preached in his town every day for forty days: an entire sermon23 was dedicated to the sin one may commit with a wrong attitude on dresses and adornments. He made frequent warnings on contemporary fashion and the spiritual risks that may be connected with them, including the following: “God made man and woman without a tail. The devil desired man and woman with a tail: ‘cause to men he gave the sword, and to women he allowed to drag clothes behind her . . . so does the woman with her tail, here and there as the snake does.”24 San Bernardino often talks about the high cost of garments, in money, fatigue, and sin, like when he says: Many times, and most of the time, clothes are made of robbery, and peasant’s sweat, and widow’s blood, and orphan’s marrow. If one would take one of these dresses and would press and twist it, you would see the blood of creatures coming out.25 Similar ideas were expressed by a group of statues that ornamented some Gothic churches in the area between Germany and Switzerland. These statues are characterized by a double aspect: the front side shows handsome features and fashionable and expensive clothes, sometimes enriched with specific attributes telling about their wealth and status, like gloves, crowns of roses, or long rows of buttons26—a newly fashionable item in fourteenth-century dress. On the back, they are splendidly carved with worms, frogs, snakes, and other loathsome critters. They are called the Prince of the World27 or the Tempter (Figure 1.1): unethical conduct has moral repercussions for the soul and these sculptures evoke the spiritual risks that face those who give too much importance to material goods, like fashion or any kind of immoral reality. The Tempter— the Devil—underlines the ambiguity of dresses:  what may look beautiful may hide a horrific side. The statues express a warning: being too satisfied with any earthly achievement is dangerous because it causes sin. Two short poems dated to the fifteenth century express this similar idea in a literary way. The first one is from England—Disputacioun Betwyx the Body and Wormes28 (ca. 1435–40)—and the other one is from France—Une fois sur toute femme belle (Huizinga 1997: 166), which was once on a painting in the Celestine convent at Avignon and attributed to king Renée d’Anjoux (1409–80). Both poems deal with the sharp contrast between a once beautiful woman, her fair skin, her hair, and silk clothes and her disgusting look after death, after worms devoured her. Again they evoke a strong bond between beauty and death, worldly attire, and the transcendental warning on vanity, the useless of earthly pride.29 These poems—and others of the same kind—seem to mirror in literary form the meditation on theological moral writings, expressed through art by the

33

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

33

Figure  1.1 Prince of the World (the Tempter), jamb statue from the south portal of Strasbourg Cathedral, ca. 1280–90, stone, Musée de l’Oeuvre de Notre Dame, Strasbourg, France. Drawing by the author.

double aspect of the Prince of the World and echoed by the contemporary transi tombs. With the birth of individual awareness, developing, as we have seen, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, a different perception of memory arose, and consequently the way people wished to be remembered after death. Around the twelfth century funerary inscriptions and epigraphs, which had disappeared since late antiquity, returned (Ariès 1985: 46), and with them, images surmounting the tomb also returned. The transi tomb is a particular type of tomb, which presents a double image of the deceased: a representation of the kneeling—or lying—dead on his sepulcher, dressed of his most lavish clothes, in a living attitude and often praying, and the representation of the same dead but as a rotten corpse, or skeleton, lying under the first one. Like with the Prince of the World, here fashion is important: it represents the reality of mortal life, as well as postmortem fate if too much attention is given to it. Among the first of its kind, a remarkable tomb

34

34

SARA PICCOLO PACI

Figure 1.2 Transi tomb of Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk, 1475, alabaster, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Ewelme, Oxfordshire. Drawing by the author.

is the transi of Alice Pole (1404–75), duchess of Suffolk and Geoffrey Chaucer’s granddaughter, which is in the Church of Ewelme, Oxfordshire (Figure 1.2). In the upper part, Alice is depicted lying as if she has just fallen asleep; underneath is a sculpture of her corpse. Interestingly, the corpse, with its right hand, holds her mantle modestly across her intimate parts in a graceful—yet grotesque— imitation of fashionable garb. The artistic image of decay is used as a tool to drive the attention of the viewer toward rhetorical strategies of communication between the dead and the living, conveying the sense of fear and anxiety around death but with the hope to affirm “an identity that transcends the dissolution of his frail flesh” (Kinch 2013:180–1). Appearing from the late fourteenth century until the seventeenth century, transi tombs were the result of many factors (Cohen 1973), including the influence of moral literature as it had developed, contemporary funerary customs, the impact of the Black Plague, the growing anxiety created by the important changes experienced during the previous decades, and the rising number of those worried by the great accumulation of wealth and the consequent fear of damnation, as well as the new interests in the

35

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

35

representation of nature and reality as it was spread by the humanistic thought and soon by Renaissance artists. Kathleen Cohen (1973: 7) argues that one of the main reasons for the development of such iconography was the attempt to alleviate some of the anxiety felt by the men who first commissioned these kind of tombs—rich, proud, powerful, and religious, often ecclesiastics who made their careers in the shadow of kings—resulting from the conflict between their worldly pride and the need for humility that a traditional moral and religious education asked of them. But the richness and attention to detail that these tombs show on the living side is another example of how much dress—and the representation of the body—was held to be important within society. This was so powerful that the meaning of “transi tomb” actually changed during the following centuries, coming to be both a religious and moral memento as well as a worldly commemoration of the past deeds of the deceased (9). If at the beginning, the transi tomb was a moral reminder to the viewer of what really was under the shining clothes of worldly attire—a disgusting condition of decay and moral lapse, represented by the corpse—with the passing of time, the monumental presence of the “living” on the deceased’s own tomb—richly dressed, elegant, represented at the height of the deceased dignity and beauty—forced the presence of death into a corner, often represented only as a little skull with bones just under the bust of the deceased, as we can see on tombs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The presence of the dead and its corpse near to it recalls another important iconography that developed at the beginning of the fifteenth century: the Danse Macabre30 (Totentanz, Dance of Death) (Relazioni 1987; La Danza Macabra e il Trionfo della Morte 1995; Tenenti 2002). The theme is characterized in images and verses by the presence of a living person dancing with a skeleton (Figure 1.3). Looking at the images, we understand that the scene shows the characters meeting with their own death, often with an ironic twist. The dead follow a hierarchical distribution, from the most important—emperor, pope, king, queen— down to the lower orders, like the poor, the beggar, passing from the merchant and his wife. Finally, a child closes the carousel—often pictured last, not only because the child is the most innocent but also because the child represents the potential of mankind. Dresses are always carefully represented, because the society that produced these images was very complex and everyone had their own role, fitting their profession, position, gender, and age and therefore appropriate clothes; but the dance reminded viewers that all this will not last and death will equal everyone. The explanations proposed for this theme, whose popularity lasted at least into the eighteenth century, are various:  obviously there is a moral and theological justification as well as a psychological attempt to dominate the intuitive fear for death. But the images combined with lyrics served as warnings,

36

36

SARA PICCOLO PACI

Figure 1.3 “Dance of Death, at Basle,” from Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd, Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), plate XIII, Wellcome Library, London.

underlining the distance and separation between the life of the world and the true life of the afterworld, with a strong focus on social satire and critique: fashion and death, at the end, became synonymous. At the same time, the alternation between the dead and the living, in a never-ending sequence of dance, expresses the consciousness of continuity between the two worlds (Gordon and Marshall 2000: 7).

A dialogue between death and fashion The Baroque period saw even more macabre themes and horrifying memento mori, in literature, painting, funerary art, and even jewelry. The vanitas tradition, becoming more sarcastic than ever due to the social tensions of the time, represented many types of death, including fashionable deaths, through pamphlets and prints. With the Enlightenment, the Dance of the Death, due to its moral and religious concerns—now considered excessive—becomes less interesting; soon after, with Romanticism, horror literature—an autonomous genre with many links to the Dance of the Death—found its affirmation. The following centuries found new ways to express and perceive death, as well as to represent it.

37

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

37

Death can have philosophical, moral, historical, scientific, or sentimental explanations: art and literature imagined new expressions to deal with it. Works like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1816–17), The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe (1842), the title chosen by Charles Baudelaire for his poem Dance Macabre (1857), or even the collection of poetry by Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1914–15) may evoke the dancing parade of the living and the dead voices. The themes of death and the macabre glint, here and there, from moralizing, or sarcastic, paintings and writings. Giacomo Leopardi’s 1824 poem entitled Dialogue between Death and Fashion (1951: 29–33) shows the enduring links between the two themes.31 The Dialogue, full of humor, presents Fashion asking Death to listen, explaining that they are to be considered sisters—both immortal and powerful and having men and women obeying their desires and wishes. After a long dissertation on her own merits, Fashion concludes that, for the love she has for her sister Death, she wants to always stay with her, “because if we always stay together, we will consult each other in any occasion, and thus we will be able to make the best decisions, as well as acting on them.”32 The link between Fashion and Death thus survived also in the ephemeral decorations for funerals. Especially in those areas where there had been a strong tradition of Danse Macabre art, such as in Italy and central Europe, the tradition to hang images of skeletons around the church—each one holding accessories or attributes that specify who they represented in life—survived for use during funerals or on November 1 (All Hallow’s Day), sometime into the mid-twentieth century. These series always feature the Pope, the emperor, and the king carrying for the moral lesson that Death will equal everyone, even the representatives of the highest earthly power. But we also find others, like the priest, the noblewoman—who often can easily be read also as the Maiden, beauty, and vanity itself—and the farmer, as well as those characters more closely related with regional occupations. Many still survive, such as the one now housed at the Bernareggi Museum in Bergamo33 (1750–80). The image of The Tailor (Figure 1.4), pertaining to the series, shows a skeleton-tailor at work (the area of Bergamo was, for centuries, famous for the production and commerce of fine wool clothes). Heir to the ancient workers of the Dance of the Death—and maybe a distant reminder of God having been the first Tailor, as we read in Genesis—the skeleton tailor is fashionably dressed, with a red vest and a dark cloak with many buttons, wearing an elegant cap of the same color as his suit. He is represented measuring carefully a length of textile with a cane:34 an obvious activity for his profession, but also well apt to represent something different: Death takes your measure—in every sense—and it is always ready to dress you anew. Our modern attraction to “fashionable deaths” is therefore understandable, if we consider this long relationship between the two concepts that this chapter has traced so far. Although today we are less frightened by eternal damnation,

38

38

SARA PICCOLO PACI

Figure 1.4 The Tailor, 1750–80, oil on canvas, Museo Bernareggi, Bergamo. Photo by the author.

39

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

39

we are nevertheless beginning to realize that our consumeristic society is too lacking in ethics, and, today as yesterday, it hides horrible realities under its “shining dress.”

Notes 1 The vast literature on the theme of death registers this perception. Patrick J. Geary says: “For all its fascination with violence and killing, death and dying, modern society is uneasy with death . . . Death seems unnatural, a failure of our technological society, of our medical system, of our quest for personal fulfilment” (1994: 1). Cf. Ariès 1980; Pennington 2001; Ohler 2006.

2 Think only to the escalation of video, movies, and TV serials that deals with death and horror in recent years: as an amazing Dance of the Dead we could start with the cult video Thriller (Michael Jackson, 1982), the cult movie Dracula by Bram Stoker (F. F. Coppola, 1992); the new millennium saw the beginning of cult TV series like CSI Crime Scene Investigation (2000– 15), NCIS Naval Criminal Investigative Service (2003–present.), Bones (2005–present), the Twilight books and movies serial (2005– 12), till the most horrific—and successful—Japanese manga and anime High School of the Dead (Daisuke Sato, Shoji Sato, 2010–16), and The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–present) TV serial, also based on a very successful manga by Robert Kirkman (Image Comics).

3 The process of formulation of imagery that could explain the afterlife to the people of the Middle Ages has been studied by Jacques Le Goff in his La Naissance du Purgatoire (1981). The process saw an acceleration between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with a peak with Dante Alighieri’s Comedy. After Dante, the imagery concerning the afterlife became more complicated and, at the same time, more mystical than ever.

4 The proverb might have been inspired by 2 Corinthians 5, where St. Paul considers the importance of the body in our earthly journey “We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be naked,” 2 Cor. 5:2–3, New Living Translation, www.biblegateway.com

5 Elinandus de Froidmont was born around 1160–70 in France to a wealthy family, and he died as a holy man in 1229 (Helinandi 1969; Porter and Lind 1999). In his youth he lived a life of success as a well-known poet at the court of Philippe-Auguste. But after discovering his true vocation, he decided to enter the monastery at Froidmont in Beauvaisis, where he devoted himself to study and meditation. He is author of the popular poem Vers de la Mort (1194–97), where he states that neither beauty, nor richness, nor glory are to be counted as important, because to die is a common fate and death is the true leveling of existence.

6 Despite fragile health, which led to his death at only the age of thirty-nine, Giacomo Leopardi has been one of the most influential and deep minds of the nineteenth century. His writings, poems, and essays convey the strength of his spirit that neither psychological nor physical torments could destroy. Between his most famous lyrics we may find L’Infinito, the Infinite, which focus his thought on the very last meaning of human existence.

40

40

SARA PICCOLO PACI

7 Author’s translation. 8 Author’s translation. 9 Boase 1972: 122: “A good life made possible (though it did not guarantee) a pious death.” See also Pennington (2001) and Townsend (2009: 47).

10 In the encyclopedic collection of Patristic text (Migne 1844) an entire index is dedicated to clothing and its symbolical meanings (Piccolo Paci 2008: 83–129), making clear how dress was considered—even by those Holy Fathers—an essential aspect of human life.

11 12 13 14

All of them underline the mathematical and yet creative skill of the Creator. Author’s translation. Author’s translation. “Heaven is always glowing and white, bright—often so bright that one cannot see for the brightness . . . There are often beautiful clothes and gems . . . the description of it reflected the reality of the noble life” (Gardiner 1993: XXIX).

15 See the discussion of this theme in Cohen (1973: 12–47), “Worldly Power and Food for Worms.” The topic was widely explored during the Middle Ages, converging in a group of treatises known as Contemptus Mundi: the most famous among these are those by Bernard of Cluny (twelfth century) and Innocent III (Lotario di Segni, twelfth century), up to Fra Bartolomeo da Pisa (1397).

16 “Or me respundi, tu, om seppellito / Che cusì ratto d’esto monno èi scito / O’ so’ li bei panni, de que eri vestito / Cà ornato te veio de multa bruttura?”

17 “Praised be’ my Lord for our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape. Woe to those who die in mortal sin” (Laudato si’ mi’ Signore per sora nostra morte corporale, da la quale nullu homo vivente pò skappare: guai a quelli ke morrano ne le peccata mortali) (San Francis of Assisi, Cantico delle Creature, 1224).

18 For an interesting analyses of the movie and its sociocultural landscape, see Harper (2002).

19 The first of these seems to be a little poem written in 1275 by Baudouin de Condé, a troubadour of Valenciennes at the court of Marguerite II (1244–80). A second one is by Nicole de Mergival, who lived at the end of the thirteenth century. The other two are by anonymous authors. Three of the four short poems are preserved in Paris, Bibliotheque National, MS fr. 378 and MS fr. 25566, and Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, MS 3142; another version is in London at the British Museum, Arundel, MS 83.

20 “For ye are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s” (1 Cor. 6:20).

21 From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, a debate around these topics took the shape of manuals and treatises on different aspects of communal life, each of them with the intent of generating new cultural references and new patterns of behavior. Between them the Prince by Machiavelli (1513), the Courtier by Baldassar Castiglione (1513–18), and the later Galateo by Giovanni Della Casa (1551–55).

22 Fra Bernardino of Siena was a Franciscan missionary known for his vehement preaching style, which helped define a more modern, popular, and rich imagery way to communicate with people.

23 Sermon XXXVII, On Vanity. 24 “Iddio fece l’uomo e la donna senza coda. Il diavolo l’ha volute fare colla coda: che all’uomo ha posto la spade e alla donna ha posto l’attrascinare de’ panni dietro . . .

41

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

41

così fa la donna con la sua coda, ora qua ora là come fa il serpente della sua” (Bernardino da Siena, 1880: vol. 3, 211).

25 “Però che molte volte, e il più delle volte, (la roba) è fatta di robbaria, d’usura e del sudore de’ contadini e del sangue delle vedove, e de le mirolla de’ pupilli e degli orfani. Chi pigliasse una di quelle cioppe e premessela e torcessela, ne vedresti uscire sangue di criature” (Bernardino da Siena, 1880: vol. 3, 193–4).

26 Buttons were known even before the fourteenth century, but from this period on they fully developed their potentialities, becoming one of the most personal elements of decoration and expression of richness and style.

27 Statues of the Prince of the World (thirteenth, fourteenth centuries) are known from the Cathedral of Strasbourg, where he beguiles the Foolish Virgins; from the Cathedral of Freiburg and the Cathedral of Basel, where he is crowned with roses; from the Church of Saint Sebaldus at Nuremberg.

28 In Cohen (1973: 29–30), London, British Museum, add. MS 37049, f. 33ff. See also Rooney (2011: 253–69).

29 This theme endured well into the nineteenth century, through ballads, moral poems, and images of many kinds. See, for instance, http://digital.nls.uk/english-ballads/ pageturner.cfm?id=74892691.

30 The oldest Danse Macabre is believed to have been the one painted around 1425 in the Cloister of the Holy Innocent in Paris, destroyed in 1786 (Dujakovic 2007; Fleury and Leproux 1990).

31 Around 1830–33, Leopardi wrote other poems related with death and beauty. In particular, in Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna scolpito nel monumento seplocrale della medesima (On the portrait of a beautiful woman sculpted in her sepulchral monument), Leopardi added his modern voice to the long-lasting tradition on beauty, vanity and death, leaving us in doubt whether the protagonist’s fate—which echoes mankind’s—is merely sad or reveals the deep desperation of the human soul.

32 “Perché stando sempre in compagnia, potremo consultare insieme secondo i casi, e prendere i migliori partiti che altrimenti, come anche mandargli meglio in esecuzione” (Leopardi 1951: 33).

33 The paintings represent a Pope, a king, a doge, an ecclesiastic, a noble woman, a peasant woman, and the tailor. Anonymous painter, Bergamo area, second half of the eighteenth century.

34 In a long sermon (XVII) by San Bernardino, the “cane” is the virtue of humility that especially men of power need to have while administering justice. “This empty cane (humility) is made to measure, even the soul, and also the glory of your life. That, if you don’t have this cane to measure, you’ll fall behind” (Questa canna vuota [cioè l’umiltà] è buona a misurare l’anima. Anco si può misurare la fama della tua vita. Che se non hai la canna da misurare queste cose, tu vai indietro) (1880: vol. 2, 26–7).

References Ariès, P. (1985), L’uomo e la morte dal medioevo a oggi, Roma-Bari: Laterza. Bernard de Cluny (1991), De Contemptu Mundi, ed. and trans. R. E. Pepin, East Lansing: Colleaugues.

42

42

SARA PICCOLO PACI

Bernardino da Siena (San) (1880), Le Prediche Volgari di S. Bernardino da Siena dette nella Piazza del Campo l’anno 1427, ed. Luciano Banchi, Siena: All’Insegna di S.Bernardino. Available online: http://www.iltesorodisiena.net/2015/08/le-predichevolgari-di-san-bernardino.html (accessed October 21, 2016 ). Boase, T. S. R. (1972), Death in the Middle Ages, Mortality, Judgment and Remembrance, London: Thames and Hudson. Breward, C. (1995), The Culture of Fashion, Glasgow: Manchester University Press. Carletti, L. (2014), Transition between Life and Afterlife: Analyzing the Triumph of Death in the Camposanto of Pisa, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cavalca, D. (s.d.), Vite dei Santi Padri, Milano: F. Costoro. Ciprianus (1844–55), “On the Dress of Virgins,” in J. P. Migne (ed.), Patrologiae Cursus Completus, series latina (PL), IV: 467, Paris: Garnier Cohen, K. (1973), Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol, the Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Berkeley, University of California Press. Dujakovic, M. (2007), “The Dance of Death, the Dance of Life, Cemetery of the Innocents and the Danse Macabre,” in L. Urbano Afonso and V. Serrao (eds.), Out of the Stream, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Effros, B. (2002), Caring for the Body and Soul, Burial and Afterlife in the Merovingian World, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Fleury, M., and G. M. Leproux (1990), Les Saints-Innocents, Paris: Delegation a l’Acton Artistique de la Ville de Paris. Fremantle, R. (1992), God and Money, Florence and the Medici in Renaissance, Firenze: Olschki. Frugoni, Settis C. (1967), Il tema dell’Incontro dei tre vivi e dei tre morti nella tradizione medievale italiana, Lincei, Mem. Scienze morali, series VIII, XIII (3): 145–251. Gardiner, E. (1993), Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell, a Source Book, Garland Medieval Bibliographies, 11, New York Garland. Geary, P. J. (1994), Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, London: Cornell University Press. Gordon, B., and P. Marshall (eds.) (2000), The Place of the Dead, Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harper, S. (2002), “Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead,” Americana, Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present) 1 (2). Available at: http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/ harper (accessed July 12, 2017). Helinandi Frigidi Montis monachi opera omnia, in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, series latina (PL), 212, Garnier: Paris Huizinga, J. (1997), L’Autunno del Medioevo, Roma: GTE Compton Newton. Jacopone da Todi (1974), Laude, ed. F. Mancini, Roma-Bari: Laterza. Kinch, A. (2013), Imago Mortis, Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture, Leiden : Brill. Kurtz, L. P. (1975), The Dance of Death and the Macabre Spirit in European Literature, Geneve: Slatkine. La Danza Macabra e il Trionfo della Morte (1995), 6° Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Clusone, 19–21 agosto 1994, Bergamo: S. Macioce. Landes, R. (2000), The Fear of an Apocalyptic Year 1000: Augustinian Historiography, Medieval and Modern, Speculum, 75.1, 97–145, Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America.

43

“DEATH DRESS YOU ANEW”

43

Le Goff, J. (1981), La Naissance du purgatoire, Gallimard: Einaudi. Leopardi, G. (1951), “Dialogo tra la Moda e la Morte,” in O. Besomi (ed.), Operette morali, Milano: Rizzoli. Lotario dei Segni (Pope Innocent III) (1978), De miseria condicionis humane, ed. and trans. R. E. Lewis, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Migne, J. P. (ed.) (1844–55), Patrologiae Cursus Completus, series latina (PL), Paris: Garnier. Newton, S. M. (1980), Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince, Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Ohler, N. (2006), Sterben und Tod i m Mittelalter, Dusseldorf: Patmos. Pennington, M. (2001), Memento Mori, eine Kulturgeschichte des Todes, Stuttgart: Kreuz. Piccolo Paci, S. (2008), Storia delle Vesti Liturgiche, Forma, Immagine e Funzione, Milano: Ancora. Porter, J., and J. Lind (1999), Hèlinand of Froidmont: Verses on Death, Kalamazoo: Cistercian. Relazioni (1987), 2° Convegno Internazionale di Studi sulla Danza Macabra, Clusone, 21–23 agosto 1987, Bergamo: Comune di Clusone. Rooney, K. (2011), Mortality and Imagination, the Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature, Turnhout: Brepols. Tenenti, A. (1957), Il senso della morte e l’amore della vita nel Rinascimento, Torino: Einaudi. Tenenti, A. (ed.) (2002), Humana Fragilitas, the Themes of Death in Europe from the 13th Century to the 18th, Ferrari: Clusone. Townsend, E. (2009), Death and Art, Europe 1200–1530, London: V&A.

44

45

2 “THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES WILL AFFORD THEM NONE OF THE ANSWERS THEY SEEK” Clothing Immortals in the Work of Anne Rice, Tanith Lee, and Angela Carter Stephanie Bowry

If a vampire leaves out details like clothes, the story doesn’t make sense. LESTAT DE LIONCOURT, MEMNOCH THE DEVIL (RICE [1995] 1996: 368)

Immortal characters in late twentieth-century horror literature often function as the barometers of an historical epoch. Some ostentatiously cleave to the fashions of their mortal heyday, such as Anne Rice’s gentleman vampire Lestat de Lioncourt; others, such as Tanith Lee’s enigmatic Uncle Camillo, reject it utterly, reflecting only contemporaneity. As such, the clothing they wear forms an essential part of their identity, role, and significance. As Rice ([1995] 1996: 368) observes through the words of Lestat in Memnoch the Devil, clothing is also an integral component of the narrative as it unfolds. This chapter examines the representation of clothing worn by immortal beings in the work of American author Anne Rice (1941–),

46

46

STEPHANIE BOWRY

in comparison to the work of British authors Tanith Lee (1947–2015) and Angela Carter (1940–1992).1 While Carter is not conventionally understood as a “horror writer,” her work engages with many of the subjects, icons, themes, and tropes of the horror genre in her retellings of fairy tales,2 an interest she shared with Rice and particularly Lee, who was greatly influenced by Carter’s work (Lee 2012). In particular, I focus on the “written clothing” (Barthes [1967] 2011) of three characters:  Rice’s Lestat, an eighteenth-century French aristocrat made a vampire against his will; Lee’s Ruth Day/ Scarabae, a blood-drinking reincarnation of an ancient member of the Scarabae family terrorizing late twentieth-century London; and Carter’s unnamed vampire countess, who haunts a moldering castle in turnof-the-century Romania. Considering each author’s use of symbolism, metaphor, and literary tropes, I argue that the representation of fashion and clothing are critical elements in the construction of each character’s identity and relationship to the world they inhabit, which are deployed as complex metaphors for the human relationship with the past, and particularly with identity, loss, and death in each work, underscoring an existential horror that is starkly grounded in reality. This chapter takes its title from the 2000 edition of the storytellers’ handbook for the role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade (Baugh et al.: 31), in which participants assume the identity of a vampire character. Part of the game’s appeal is that players may “wear” an immortal guise for a time, discarding it when they choose. Following an introduction to the vampires of Rice, Lee, and Carter, I propose that the true horror of the literary vampire lies in true immortality, which is not so easily set aside. I then explore how fashion can be usefully conceptualized as a revenant, and how this concept can be applied to the representation of clothing in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles in particular. Next, I examine how Rice, Lee, and Carter address the symbolism of the color red and the trope of the (white) wedding dress before offering some reflections on the broader use of clothing as a vehicle for meditating on mortality.

The vampires of Rice, Lee, and Carter Rice’s vampires are frequently young mortals chosen for their physical beauty, which is heightened and intensified by the process of becoming a vampire. Many of them, such as Louis de Ponte du Lac, the central character of Interview with a Vampire (IV), retain a mortal conscience and struggle with the necessity of taking life. They must feed on living human blood to survive, unless they are extremely ancient, and do not age, which means that a vampire created at the age of five years, such as the doomed Claudia in IV, retains the body of a five-year-old child forever. They do, however, undergo a slow metamorphosis. Over time the vampire’s skin hardens until, after several millennia, it petrifies. Indeed, Lestat mistakes Akasha and Enkil, the ancient Egyptian sires of his kind, for statues in The Vampire Lestat (VL) (Rice [1985] 1994: 422). Thus, although they can only

47

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

47

be destroyed with difficulty, Rice’s vampires are gradually entombed in the very flesh that sustains them. The vampires of Lee are not, properly, vampires. All are members of a single family—the Scarabae—whose name recalls the scarab, an ancient Egyptian symbol of life everlasting, but also the insectile and its association with physical corruption and entropy.3 However, the vampiric tendencies of the Scarabae are often left implicit, rather than overt. Even Ruth, the character who most obviously displays them, drinks the blood of her victims not from necessity or pleasure, but because she is performing a perceived role: “she knew she was Scarabae, a vampire. . . . It was a sort of duty” (Lee 1993: 105). Unlike Rice’s vampires, the Scarabae have the ability to rapidly age, or become youthful again at will, as Uncle Camillo, who recalls his boyhood in eighteenth-century Russia, does in Personal Darkness. They can be killed by conventional means and, after death, may return in another human form, as Ruth does in Darkness, I. As Lee has explained, it is not the characters who are immortal, but rather their genetic components, which permit “copies” of individual family members to persist throughout history (Lee cited in Haut 2001: 183). Carter draws on the vampire in a different manner and through a different literary form. While she does not develop a single character over a series of novels as Rice and Lee do, her engagement with the myth and symbol of the immortal vampire is no less deep. In her feminist retelling of the tale of Sleeping Beauty in “The Lady of the House of Love,” she conceives of Beauty as a descendant of Nosferatu, who, like Rice’s vampires, and to some extent, Lee’s, is reluctant but compelled to assume the role of a monster. Although Carter evokes the “flatness” of the fairy-tale character through vague and minimal descriptions of motive and intent, she often has them perform acts not in keeping with their traditional roles.4 However, unlike the fairy tale, which typically takes place in an unknown (but always distant) time and place, by setting the action in a specific, known temporal and geographical setting, Carter dismantles the seemingly outworn symbol of the revenant only to rebuild it as a sinister metaphor for the failure of modern rationalism, as I discuss later.

The curse of immortality: The literary vampire as an icon of existential horror These be they, that haue put of [sic] the mortall clothinge and put on the immortall. Bible (Coverdale), 2 Esd. ii. 45 (1535)

The etymology of the word “immortal,” from the Latin immorta ̄lis, is often translated literally as “not mortal,” but was also used to refer to the gods of

48

48

STEPHANIE BOWRY

Greek and Roman antiquity. Thus, immortal beings are forever mantled in the eternal, the divine, and the incorruptible (see Long 2015: 51). Yet as Brian Stableford (2007: 310) observes, immortality in both classical and JudaeoChristian mythology has more sinister connotations and was often conferred on mortals as a form of punishment, as it was on the Biblical Cain for murdering his brother. In the works examined in this chapter, all three authors deploy vampirism—a form of “rejuvenative,” or conditional immortality “for which a price must be paid” (320)—as a lens for examining identity, loss, and death in both historical and contemporary settings. Related to these, I propose that the existential horror embodied by the vampire is founded on three elements. First, the vampire is a revenant. From the French revenir—literally, “to come back” (Soanes and Stevenson 2005: 1507)—the revenant is a corpse returned to a state of animation and is thus an unnatural being, which exists in the interstices between the realms of the living and the dead. The corpse, Julia Kristeva (1982: 4) argues, “is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.” The vampiric body takes this notion one step further as it emerges directly from the human corpse. Furthermore, the vampire does not only contaminate life; it also feeds on it, by draining human victims of their lifeblood. Yet this physical threat only partly constitutes the horror of the vampire as a literary creation. Paul Santilli (2007:  179), drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), suggests that the experience of horror is more than “a specific emotion aroused by the fictionalized possibility of . . . a threat’s existence.” Rather, the latter is merely the reflection of a more nebulous, ontological horror that is “an enduring feature of our being in the world” (ibid.). This idea is found in the work of many horror authors, notably Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937), who described the threat posed by “outsideness” (Lovecraft 1927: n.p.)—the fear of unknown forces that have the power to overturn the laws of nature.5 The vampire represents the corruption of such laws, through the transmutation of dead flesh into a semblance of life, but also through its transgression of binary symbolic categories such as life and death, human and nonhuman (175). In his study of the vampire myth, Erik Butler (2010: 1) concludes that “because of its inimical relationship to stability, tradition, and order, the vampire embodies the transformative march of history.” Yet by virtue of its very existence, the vampire-revenant transgresses the laws of time, entropy, and death which constitute part of that march. Second, as an agent of monstrosity, the vampire is an outsider (ibid.). The literary vampire is often an (exotic) stranger—it originates from another world and, frequently, another time. When the “Countess G” (repeatedly) compares the Count of Monte Cristo’s appearance to that of a Byronic vampire in Alexandre Dumas’s eponymous novel of 1846, it is his (and his female companion’s) innate

49

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

49

strangeness and difference—their identity as outsiders—that strikes her heart with fear: Oh, he is the exact personification of what I  have been led to expect! The coal-black hair, large bright, glittering eyes, in which an unearthly fire seems burning—the same ghastly paleness. Then observe, too, that the woman with him is altogether unlike all others of her sex. She is a foreigner—a stranger. Nobody knows who she is, or where she comes from. (Dumas [1846] 2002: 267; my emphasis) For the countess, these physical attributes are markers of Otherness, because they can be identified as sitting outside a cultural framework of established norms, but also Lovecraft’s outsideness because they hint at an unknown (nonhuman) identity. Third, the vampire represents the corruption of the self. It often retains a human form, which proves a useful disguise as it preys on real humans. All vampires were once human, and the loss of their humanity is their tragedy, but it is also ours: the vampire demonstrates that all of us have the capacity for monstrosity (Santilli 2007: 173). Furthermore, the vampire is an irredeemable monster:  it cannot be cured, only exterminated. The vampire, having relinquished its human identity (even unwillingly), can never fully rejoin human society and, despite its supernatural powers, is condemned to a perpetual, stagnant existence, bound to mortal ways of thinking and living that become progressively untenable. It cannot change, or progress, and therein, I  suggest, lies the true horror of the vampire.

Fashion as revenant A specter is always a revenant . . . it begins by coming back. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx ([1993] 1994: 11)

As Anne Rosalind Jones and Richard Stallybrass (2007:  60)  in their study of Renaissance clothing observe, “Clothing is a worn world: a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body.” Represented garments are not exempt from this definition, though as Barthes ([1967] 2011: 132–3) noted, they are founded on a structure that is verbal or iconic, rather than material or technological. More than offering the reader an interesting but superficial visual diversion, descriptions of clothing constitute integral parts of the narrative that are used to reveal or conceal aspects of characters’ identities, beliefs, and allegiances, as well as situating them within a constructed world to which such descriptions lend depth and texture. Jones and Stallybrass’s concept of “deep fashion” demonstrates how clothing is instrumental in constructing sociopolitical identities, for example,

50

50

STEPHANIE BOWRY

in demarcating the (early modern) wearer “as a monarch or a freeman of a guild or a household servant,” which, in turn, lent them “a form, a shape, a social function, a ‘depth’ ” (2007: 59–60). A number of scholars have conceptualized fashion as a type of ghost (Evans 2003 and 2011; Clark 2005; Jones and Stallybrass 2007). Fashion is also Jacques Derrida’s “revenant”: past cultural forms are resurrected in new guise, are worn, and thus “live again” for a time (Derrida [1993] 1994: 11). For Walter Benjamin, this described the tigersprung, the sudden and unpredictable pounce of fashion on traces of the past (Lehmann 2007: 437), breaking historical continuity, while Caroline Evans conceptualizes history itself as a labyrinth, which allows the juxtaposition of historical images with contemporary ones; as the labyrinth doubles back on itself what is most modern is revealed as also having a relation with what is most old. Distant points in time can become proximate at specific moments as their paths run close to each other. . . . These traces of the past surface in the present like the return of the repressed. (2011: 159–60)

Evans’s model implies that the return of old fashions in the contemporary era occurs as the result of trauma through acts of repression as well as revival and that such returns are inevitable. Elizabeth Wilson defined modern fashion in 1987 as “dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion . . . is change” (cited in Jones and Stallybrass 2007: 58). Yet all fashion references the past. Thus, if fashion signifies constant change, it also embodies stagnancy, sameness, and anachronism. Akin to the immortal vampire whose still-mortal memory is rendered imperfect by age, fashion thirsts for and feeds directly on individual motifs from the past, kills (or perhaps, maims) others, revives still others, which return in a new form, and ultimately forgets much. Fashion’s capacity for referencing and returning to earlier moments in history is helpful in explaining why Lestat feels so at home in late twentieth-century New Orleans in VL. Having retired to sleep in the earth in 1926, abandoning a “dark dreary industrial world” of conformism in which men wore a “Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, grey suit, and grey hat” (Rice [1985] 1994: 14), Lestat rises again in 1984, awoken by the strange, yet oddly familiar sound of the rock band Satan’s Night Out rehearsing.6 According to Lestat: People were adventurous and erotic again the way they had been in the old days, before the great middle-class revolutions of the 1700s. They even looked the way they had in those times. The men . . . costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colours if they felt like it. They didn’t have to clip

51

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

51

their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they could wear it any length they desired. (ibid.) The “recycled” (15) fashions of the twentieth century nevertheless represent the societal freedom from conformity that Lestat craves. However, it is not only these revenant traces of eighteenth-century fashion that attract him to this new era, but rather that vampires are now “known” entities of popular culture: a fact that Lestat exploits. Forging himself a new identity as a rock star, Lestat marvels that he is able to publically disclose his vampiric identity to mortals through his songs and, significantly, through his “vampire costumes”—his black velvet cloak, white shirt, and black trousers (Rice [1988] 2008: 130, 229) drawn from early twentiethcentury vampire films—yet his audience fails to grasp his literal monstrosity. The new century has no place—no category—for the monster of ages past. The twentieth century’s proclivity for anachronism both attracts and excludes Lestat. In both VL and The Queen of the Damned (QD), Lestat sometimes requires a more practical disguise. While few mortals would take Lestat’s elaborate stage outfits to be anything more than a costume, when stripped of his symbolic guise, mortals are more likely to notice something subtly amiss. To dissuade any mortal from scrutinizing him too closely, Lestat covers as much of his person as he can: “Collar up, hat down, dark glasses, hands in pockets—it usually does the trick” (4). Nevertheless, Lestat cannot help but return, again and again, to the opulent clothing of his mortal heyday in 1780s France, confiding in the reader: “Occasionally I throw up all the disguises; I just go out the way I am. Hair long, a velvet blazer that makes me think of the olden times, and an emerald ring or two on my right hand” (ibid.: 4). Lestat’s reluctance to slough off the material signs of his own mortal existence reveals a fissure between his mortal and immortal—or human and monstrous—aspects. More than once, Lestat mourns his “outsider” status, as he yearns to be fully a part of the twentieth century that so fascinates him, but is eventually forced to relinquish his rock star career (ibid.: 5). Tragically, as his memory becomes a storehouse of pasts beyond mortal memory, he wears clothing that references the past to anchor himself to a time and place. As Nead observes in her study of mid-nineteenth-century fashion: The dressed body is a “phenomenological entity” that can evoke memories and the past, as much as the constant change of the present. . . . clothes can be the prompts for remembering moments in our past. . . . The sartorial is thus a metaphor not only for the accelerated temporality of modernity, but also its folding of history, memory and time passing. (Nead 2013: 502) Fashion and clothing in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles are thus used to underscore the existential horror of deathlessness.

52

52

STEPHANIE BOWRY

The color red Throw it into the fire, my child, you won’t be needing it any more. Angela Carter, Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (2005: 465)

The symbolic use of color is a marked feature of the representation of clothing in each author’s work. On the night Lestat is made a vampire in 1789, his progenitor, Magnus, destroys himself by leaping into a fire. Entering the tomb of Magnus, Lestat observes: My red velvet fur-lined coat lay over the sarcophagus. And on a rude bench I glimpsed a splendid suit of red velvet worked with gold, and much Italian lace, as well as red silk breeches and white silk hose and red-heeled slippers . . . / Red, dazzling red. . . . They were clothes for the Court at Versailles, with pearls and tiny rubies worked into their embroidery. The lace of the shirt was Valenciennes, which I  had seen on my mother’s wedding gown. (Rice [1985] 1994: 112–13) After removing all his clothes and burning them in the fireplace, Lestat dons these fine garments (Figure 2.1). There are clear echoes of Carter’s retelling and notes on the tale of Red Riding Hood to this gesture. Just as Magnus makes Lestat a vampire by feeding him his own tainted blood, in early versions of the fairy tale, the wolf feeds his unwitting victim the dead flesh of her own grandmother, before instructing her to take off her garments, one by one, and throw them into the fire (Carter 2005: 465). Red signified male power in eighteenth-century Europe and was worn by nobility and (Catholic) clergy (Gage 1993: 89; Sennefelt 2013: 237). Pearls and rubies, long associated with tears and blood, prefigure the suffering of Lestat’s future victims, as well as his own, although their complex symbolism also carries with it the hope of redemption (Apostolos-Cappadona 2005:  219; Bale 2010: 85). However, as John Gage observes in his detailed study of color and culture, it is unwise to attribute a singular meaning to a color in a given era, culture, or institution. Red has been associated with divinity and the supernatural since antiquity (Gage 1993: 58, 75), but it also has Christian associations with both sin and martyrdom (83). Instead, we must look to the literary context in which the descriptions of color are deployed. Crucially, the richness of these new clothes and the respect they command through the symbols they employ—the “deep fashion” of Jones and Stallybrass—allow Lestat to walk the streets as a mortal man, masking his nonhuman identity: on entering an inn, he notes, “Everyone in the place gave me the eye, but not because they knew there was a supernatural being in their midst. They were merely glancing at the richly dressed gentleman!” (Rice [1985]

53

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

53

Figure  2.1 Ensemble, probably French, ca. 1730, wool, silk, and metallic thread, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Isabel Shults Fund, 2004, http://www.metmuseum.org/ art/collection/search/107375.

1994: 128). The bright colors and jewels are described as “dazzling” in the firelight, and, as Ribeiro (1984: 22) reminds us, such attire was indeed designed to be worn “in the evenings when the candlelight caught the diamond buttons and reflected the glitter of gold and silver tissues, gold and silver lace and embroidery.” Lestat’s clothing and the nocturnal setting in which he wears them literally dazzle his onlookers into overlooking his monstrosity. The theatrical concept of the masquerade offers a fruitful means of uncovering and recovering those identities concealed by representations of clothing in horror literature. Efrat Tseëlon (2001: 2), who has considered the commonalities as well as the distinctions between the mask, the disguise, and the masquerade, argues that the masquerade should be understood in relationship to both, for “while the mask represents (it can be symbolic, minimal, token or elaborate), disguise is meant to hide, conceal, pass as something one is not. Masquerade, however, is a statement about the wearer. It is pleasurable, excessive, sometimes subversive.” The word “masquerade” derives from the late sixteenth-century French

54

54

STEPHANIE BOWRY

mascarade, which in turn stems from the Italian mascherata, from maschera, or “mask.” Interestingly, this word may also have its root in the medieval Latin masca, denoting a “witch” or “specter” (Soanes and Stevenson 2005:  1080), associating the mask not only with acts of concealment and deceit, but with the supernatural. Thus, in a sense, Lestat’s mortal costume, as previously described, tells the beholder exactly what he is, thus creating one of the contradictions of disguise that scholars such as Napier and Tseëlon remark on: “The paradox of the masquerade appears to be that it presents truth in the shape of deception” (Tseëlon 2001: 5). Furthermore, A. David Napier (1986: xxiii) has suggested that in many societies masks are a means of negotiating change, from rites of passage to funerals. The most sumptuous (and carmine) descriptions of clothing in the work of Rice, Lee, and Carter are reserved for those moments of transition through which their characters pass. Carter’s child bride in “The Bloody Chamber” is gifted rubies by her murderous husband, which foreshadow the terrible fate he has planned for her. Carter’s unnamed bride is also the narrator of the tale and describes the betrothal gift as “a choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat” (Carter [1979] 1995: 11). Carter draws a direct comparison between the necklace and the late eighteenth-century French fashion among aristocratic women of wearing a red ribbon about the neck in memory of those who were executed during the Reign of Terror (1793–4) (Spooner 2004:  26). Significantly, the Marquis later euphemistically “impales” his bride in the marital bed after kissing these “blazing” gems (Carter [1979] 1995: 17), quoting Charles Baudelaire’s 1857–61 poem The Jewels. Here, the presence of rubies also suggests a hint of corruption—corundum, the mineral from which rubies (and sapphires) derive, is naturally colorless and must be artificially colored red (Morgan 2008: 1). Thus the necklace, however rich, can be read as a metaphor for the staining of the heroine’s character. Lestat’s rich, red ensemble can be usefully juxtaposed with Ruth’s betrothal / wedding gown in Lee’s Dark Dance (1992). Ruth, another child bride at the age of just eleven, although her body is that of an almost-grown woman, is to marry Adamus, her own father and grandfather, and is invited to choose a dress from a room of antique bridal gowns of different styles, all of which are red. Some dresses have components that might anchor them to a particular epoch, such as corsets and crinolines, but Lee lends the dress Ruth chooses more nebulous markers, except for perhaps its sleeves, which suggest a pseudo-medieval inspiration: It was . . . a dress of blood. It came from a period of make-believe. The shoulders of the dummy were bare. The waist of the dress pointed like an arrow, with a line of ruby buttons to the navel. The skirt flowed, embroidered in shiny bloody red thread like grapes and flowers and foliage. The ruched sleeves fell

55

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

55

from the shoulders to the floor, and under them were other sleeves of tight red lace. (Lee [1992] 1993: 351) As Judith Clark (Scaturro 2010) has observed, “We dream and imagine stories that are inhabited by clothed people. The stories are powerful because of their associations, not factual accuracy.” For Lee the color red symbolized “lifeblood,” and the embroidered fruits and flowers are suggestive of fecundity, which in Ruth’s case bears a triple symbolism—of puberty, sexual congress, and the promise of future violence, although this does not come to pass until after the wedding feast. Nevertheless, a bird trapped in the dress, which bursts forth and flies away immediately after Ruth chooses it, is interpreted as an evil omen by onlookers. Moreover, Lee’s ominous prose, in particular the statement, “the dress had been pregnant with the bird” ( [1992] 1993: 352), suggests that Ruth will give birth, not to life, but to horrors. After this, Ruth is reluctant to remove the dress, eventually stealing it, before murdering members of the Scarabae family, beginning with their matriarch, Anna, and subsequently, any who cross her path. Her eventual violent death at the hands of the lover of one of her victims is also prefigured in the sacrificial color of the red dress.

The wedding dress She looked like a bride in Hell, in her dress of blood and the veil like melonheart, wing-spread from its little coronet, and with two scarlet roses in her hand. Tanith Lee, Dark Dance ([1992] 1993: 355)

The wedding dress is a recurring motif in Carter’s fiction, but it also appears in Lee’s work and, more subtly, in Rice’s. For Carter, the wedding dress is a cultural artifact rife with horror, for the oppressive, patriarchal practices it symbolizes, and she compared it in a 1977 interview to “a gift-wrapped girl” (Gamble 2012: 23). Both Carter and Lee subvert the traditional symbolism of the wedding dress in their writing, often by supplanting “the helpless maiden given away to a supernatural male husband” (Lee 2010) in many fairy tales with a monstrous bride. Lee’s description of Ruth’s wedding dress, for example, is used to draw the reader’s attention to the wearer’s bloodthirsty nature and to foreshadow the murders that follow. The wedding dress is also a prominent feature of Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love,” a retelling of Charles Perrault’s The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (1696), which is the focus of this section. Here, Carter dismantles the cultural components of the wedding dress, stripping them of their power, before rebuilding them in a surprising manner. Carter’s tale vividly describes the funereal abode of a vampire countess, a decaying, but seemingly authentic Gothic setting. The walls of the countess’s

56

56

STEPHANIE BOWRY

lair “are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. . . . In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks” (Carter [1979] 1995: 94). The modern world intrudes into this static, lugubrious dwelling in the guise of a young traveler—a soldier who is exploring the country by bicycle, here described as an icon of rationality, “the product of pure reason applied to motion” (97). Carter’s vampire wears “an antique bridal gown” described by her intended victim as “a hoop-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion” (93, 100). As the time of the soldier’s visit coincides with the start of the Great War in the summer of 1914, we can comfortably locate the dress in the mid-nineteenth century (see Figure  2.2). The dress is an ill-fitting one, for the countess’s frame is so slight that the dress “seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dank air . . . a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in the machine” (100). The weight of history, of evil, appears to crush this individual, so that, like Ruth, she can only function as a copy or stereotype.

Figure  2.2 Wedding dress, English, 1864–65, white satin and Honiton lace, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Bequeathed by Miss H.  G. Bright. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

57

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

57

Carter’s deployment of the wedding dress also has strong echoes of its treatment in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations ([1861] 1881:  78), in which the unwed Miss Havisham “had withered like the dress” she wears. Carter inverts the traditional symbolism of the wedding dress:  instead of innocence and purity, it is made to perform as “a carrier for an alternative set of suppressed and antonymic meanings suggestive of death and contamination” (Gamble 2012: 24). The sinister associations of the color white—with death and horror, but also with otherworldliness—have a long history in many cultures, notably in Celtic mythology, as noted by Jenny Butler (2008: 116–17), as well as in Asian cultures (Da Silva 2007: 246). It is the color of bone, the shroud, and the deathly pallor that foreshadows them. To understand the horror evoked by the color white in Carter, we may look to another nineteenth-century author, who would have been a contemporary of Carter’s vampire countess. Herman Melville ([1851] 1994: 189) devoted an entire chapter of Moby Dick to the inherent existential horror of the color white, despite its positive associations with beauty, joy, and “the innocence of brides.” For Melville, it also has the quality of enhancing the terrible, for there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue. . . . This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness . . . to the dumb gloating of their aspect. (190) What Melville describes is the sublimity of the color white. Its power lies not only in its juxtaposition but also in its capacity to conceal from us, as Melville saw it, the true nature of the world. Melville reasoned that if light were white, then all color was an illusion. As a result, “all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within” (196). The young hero later compares the countess’s white dress to that of “a sad Columbine who lost her way in the wood a long time ago and never reached the fair” (Carter [1979] 1995: 102). Here, the countess’s clothing is understood as both antiquated and a costume. Columbina, a character from Italian commedia dell’ arte, a popular form of improvised masked comic theatre with roots in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, was the consort of Harlequin. As Martin Banham (1995: 236) notes, stock characters often possessed “their own half-mask and costume, so that they were instantly recognizable and the actor was freed from the need to establish his character, to concentrate on improvising the action.” Thus, in the commedia dell’arte, “personality disappeared to be

58

58

STEPHANIE BOWRY

replaced by type” (Forti-Lewis 1998: 147). These references to the act of masquerade reveal how the countess has lost her individual identity:  instead, she mechanically performs her monstrous duty. Lee’s Ruth (1993: 100), and Rice’s Lestat (Rice [1988] 2008: 270), though they evince little regret for their actions, are also described as “lost.” This is perhaps also a commentary on the stagnancy of historical symbols that lose their meaning and potency if not revitalized in a new age. The countess’s wedding dress never serves its intended purpose: instead, it becomes her burial gown. At the close of the tale, Carter allows us to feel safe. In the morning, the soldier finds the countess dead, appearing “fully human” at last, and still wearing “her white dress” ([1979] 1995:  107), now shorn of the author’s customary rich description, just as the character’s otherworldliness is dispersed. Instead, Carter draws the reader’s attention to the countess’s gorgeous abode, which is revealed to be a cheap imitation:  “now you could see how tawdry it all was, how thin and cheap the satin, the catafalque not ebony at all but black-painted paper stretched on struts of wood, as in the theatre” (106). The “vampire” is revealed to be a young girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes. But Carter is not finished with us. Although the young man appears to have escaped death at the countess’s hands, he takes with him a single, dying rose as a souvenir, which he later resurrects. His quarters are later filled with the cloying scent of this “monstrous” flower, and the short story closes with the ominous words:  “Next day, his regiment embarked for France” (108). Thus, as Tseëlon (2001:  9–10) suggests, masking one’s identity “is an extension of the notion of performance. Like performance it evokes an idea of an authentic identity . . . only to dismantle the illusion of such identity.” By “exposing” the vampire myth as the childish remnant of a distant age, we are invited to imagine the youthful soldier blithely making his way to the trenches of France, without realizing that a far greater horror awaits him there. It could be argued that the true vampire of Carter’s short story is the twentieth century itself—the “shining century” as Lestat calls it in QD (Rice [1988] 2008: 3), which glutted itself on the blood of so many victims of war and oppression. To conclude this section, it is worth noting that male wedding attire has received less attention from scholars, having never developed into an iconic or special form. Ribeiro (1984:  136–8) notes that during the second half of the eighteenth century, upper-class grooms were less restricted than their brides in their choice of attire, including its hue, but tended to favor light colors such as white, blue, and brown, with deep colors such as red having been traditionally reserved for royalty. However, Rice has Lestat observe that the white lace on the fine shirt reminds him of the lace on his mother’s wedding gown. In a symbolic sense, the red-and-white ensemble does indeed constitute Lestat’s wedding garb, marking the night of his death and rebirth as a vampire at the hands of Magnus in an act of blood drinking that has overt sexual connotations.

59

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

59

Significantly, in the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for a condemned man to wear wedding clothes to his execution (Munns 1999:  276). Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers (1720–60), wore “a Suit of light Clothes, embroidered with Silver” to his hanging at Tyburn—the same suit he had worn on his wedding day (Ribeiro 1984: 138; Munns 1999: 276). Thus, while fashions may be “deep,” their meaning and significance may also be re-inscribed and unmade by the wearer (Jones and Stallybrass 2007: 72), which is a trope that Rice, Carter, and Lee all exploit.

Conclusion As Del Lucchese and Toppe (2016: 553) contend, “every period has its own vampires,” which “respond to the anxieties and fears of different epochs.” In the works cited, Carter, Lee, and Rice experiment with the fantastical but symbolically charged condition of vampirism, creating fables that nonetheless draw us into historical and contemporary worlds whose rich descriptions may both reveal and conceal the fact that each author writes about the realities of human existence through the vehicle of fantasy. As Katarzyna Marak (2015: 202) observes, we literally clothe our fears in recognizable guise: “Being rooted in [the] everyday reality of those who create it and those who receive it, horror fiction oftentimes puts a supernatural costume on fears related to the natural, the rational and the commonplace.” The horrors described by Rice, Lee, and Carter are not entirely fictional, and in Carter and Rice are subtly linked to documented historical trauma such as the Reign of Terror and the Great War. If the immortal personifies the spirit of an epoch, the vampire goes further to signify our cultural understanding of historical phenomena such as the march of time, the slaughter of war or the amnesia of fashion. In Lee’s writing, her contemporary characters are frequently at odds with modernity, forced to live in a world to which they do not belong and which they do not understand. The irrecoverable loss of this world, and the mourning for it, lies at the heart of the work of these three authors. In IV, the character Armand, a teenage boy created a vampire in Renaissance Italy, asks of Louis in nineteenth-century Paris: How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? . . . For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be as fixed as they are and incorruptible. . . . One evening perhaps a vampire rises and realizes . . . that he simply wants no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to him has been swept off the face of the earth. (Rice [1976] 1977: 306) In the end, even the most resilient vampire dies at least twice: a physical death, accompanied by a slow, spiritual demise in which they “die more fully” (Kristeva

60

60

STEPHANIE BOWRY

1982:  24)  through a descent into madness or monstrosity. Their “mortal costumes” of fabric and flesh, tattered though they become through being used for far longer than they were intended to last, represent the last shreds of their mortal identities and hence, their humanity, which they must eschew to survive. All three authors use fashion and clothing as a means of acknowledging and mourning the passage of time. Far from a superficial element, clothing in the work of Rice, Lee, and Carter performs a crucial role, inviting us to consider the tensions between change and constancy, as well as what lies beneath the surface of things. They demand, as Clair Hughes asks of us, “How far are the surfaces we live with, contrived as they are to produce certain effects, also false?” (McNeil, Karaminas, and Cole 2009: 6). The choice of the immortal vampire—a creature that occupies the boundaries between life and death, and possessing multiple, sometimes conflicting identities—as the embodiment of these mortal anxieties is also significant. Through the act of masquerade, the characters and their attire are used to suggest that none of us possess a single, authentic persona. Lestat clings to his mortal life and identity, Ruth’s personality is but a single link in a chain of facsimiles of an unknown identity, and the Romanian countess is a puppet controlled by more powerful ancestors. All are monstrous, but not, perhaps, evil. Rice noted that vampires provide a fertile ground for writing about the mysteries of life and death, in large part due to their symbolic “baggage,” stating, “They are fabulous metaphors for the monster in all of us, for the outcast in our midst” (Rice 1993). The presentation of such characters in late twentieth-century horror literature, and their debt to the literary vampire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, therefore offers us a dark mirror of our own struggle with time and decay. In using clothing to emphasize the semblance between humans and vampires—in particular, the exceptionally fine taste exhibited by many vampire characters, such as Lestat and Ruth—Rice, Lee, and Carter imply that we too have the capacity to become monsters, and to give birth to monstrosity. The vampire of the literary imagination is the symptom of our own disease.

Notes 1 This chapter draws on Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, an ongoing series of novels that began with the publication of Interview with the Vampire (IV) in 1976. I primarily focus on the first two Vampire Chronicles, Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat (VL) (1985), although parts of the third volume, The Queen of the Damned (QD) (1988) are also considered here. These works are examined alongside Lee’s unfinished Blood Opera Sequence, comprising three novels: Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994). Finally, this chapter draws on Carter’s collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber (1979), paying particular attention to “The Lady of the House of Love,” although it also considers the eponymous short story “The Bloody Chamber.”

61

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

61

2 For a discussion of Carter’s engagement with the conventions of Gothic horror, see S. Gamble, “ ‘Isn’t It Every Girl’s Dream to be Married in White?’: Angela Carter’s Bridal Gothic,” in S. Andermahr and L. Phillips (2012: 23–32).

3 Egypt’s long association with mummies has also led to the creation of revenants in the Western imagination, which—similar to the vampire—have become “associated with symbols of physical and moral corruption.” Day traces the Western belief in “the mummy’s curse” back to the nineteenth century, but explains how early twentiethcentury cinema “popularized ‘ambulatory mummies’ . . . as the means by which the curse is enacted: animated by magic, a mummy avenges sacrilege by killing the offenders” (2006: 4–5).

4 See V. Joosen (2011: 12–13). 5 See Lovecraft’s essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” ([1927] 2014). A similar idea appears in Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982: 1).

6 To Lestat, the electric piano sounds like a harpsichord (Rice [1985] 1994: 11).

References Apostolos-Cappadona, D. (2005), ‘ “Pray with Tears and Your Request Will Find a Hearing’: On the Iconology of the Magdalene’s Tears,” in K. C. Patton and J. S. Hawley (eds.), Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination, 201–28, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bale, A. (2010), Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages, London: Reaktion. Banham, M. (1995), The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. ([1967] 2011), “Written Clothing,” in L. Welters and A. Lillethun (eds.), The Fashion Reader, 2nd edn., 132–4, Oxford: Berg. Baudelaire, C. [1857–61], The Jewels. Available online: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/119 (accessed September 12, 2016). Baugh, B., A. S. Braidwood, D. Brooks, G. Grabowski, C. Oliver, and S. Skoog (2000), Vampire Storytellers Handbook, Clarkston, CA: White Wolf. Butler, E. (2010), Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Butler, J. (2008), “Symbolic and Social Roles of Women in Death Ritual in Traditional Irish Society,” in E. J. Håland (ed.), Women, Pain and Death: Rituals and Everyday Life on the Margins of Europe and Beyond, 108–21, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Carter, A. ([1979] 1995), “The Bloody Chamber,” in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, 7–41, London: Vintage. Carter, A. ([1979] 1995), “The Lady of the House of Love,” in A. Carter (ed.), The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, 93–108, London: Vintage. Carter, A. (2005), Notes, “Little Red Riding Hood,” in A. Carter (ed.), Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, 464–5, London: Virago. Clark, J. (2005), Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back, London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Da Silva, F. V. (2007), “Red as Blood, White as Snow, Black as Crow: Chromatic Symbolism of Womanhood in Fairy Tales,” Marvels and Tales 21 (2): 240–52.

62

62

STEPHANIE BOWRY

Day, J. (2006), The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World, Oxon: Routledge. Del Lucchese, F., and J. Toppe (2016), “Vampire,” in J. A. Weinstock (ed.), The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, 552–61, London: Routledge. Derrida, J. ([1993] 1994), trans. P. Kamuf, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, London: Routledge. Dickens, C. ([1861] 1881), Great Expectations, Boston: Estes and Lauriat. Dumas, A. ([1846] 2002), trans. anon., The Count of Monte Cristo, Ware: Wordsworth. Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven, CT: Yale. Evans, C. (2011), “Fashion at the Edge,” in L. Welters and A. Lillethun (eds.), The Fashion Reader, 2nd edn., 156–62, Oxford: Berg. Forti-Lewis, A. (1998), “Commedia dell’Arte,” in V. Janik (ed.), Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, 146–54, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Gage, J. (1993), Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, London: Thames and Hudson. Gamble, S. (2012), “ ‘Isn’t it Every Girl’s Dream to be Married in White?’: Angela Carter’s Bridal Gothic,” in S. Andermahr and L. Phillips (eds.), Angela Carter: New Critical Readings, 23–32, New York: Continuum. Haut, M. (2001), The Hidden Library of Tanith Lee: Themes and Subtexts from Dionysos to the Immortal Gene, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Jones, A. R., and P. Stallybrass (2007), “Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory: Introduction,” in M. Barnard (ed.), Fashion Theory: A Reader, 58–75, Oxon: Routledge. Joosen, V. (2011), Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Readings, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Kristeva, J. (1982), trans. L. S. Roudiez, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press. Lee, T. ([1992] 1993), Dark Dance, London: Warner. Lee, T. (1993), Personal Darkness, London: Little, Brown. Lee, T. ([1994] 1995), Darkness, I, London: Warner. Lee, T. (2010, June), interview with Charles Tan, SF Signal, “Tanith Lee on ‘The Puma’s Daughter.’ ” Available online: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/06/exclusive_ interview_tanith_lee_on_the_pumas_daughter/ (accessed July 17, 2017). Lee, T. (2012, May), Interview with SFF Chronicles, “The Object of Desire – Our Interview with Tanith Lee.” Available online: https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/536440/ (accessed August 11, 2016). Lehmann, U. (2007), “Benjamin and the Revolution of Fashion in Modernity,” in M. Barnard (ed.), Fashion Theory: A Reader, 422–43, London: Routledge. Long, A. A. (2015), Greek Models of Mind and Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lovecraft, H. P. ([1927] 2014), Supernatural Horror in Literature, e-book via the University of Adelaide. Available online: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lovecraft/hp/ supernatural/complete.html (accessed October 17, 2016). Marak, K. (2015), Japanese and American Horror: A Comparative Study of Film, Fiction, Graphic Novels and Video Games, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

63

“THEIR TATTERED MORTAL COSTUMES . . .”

63

McNeil, P., V. Karaminas, and C. Cole (2009), “Introduction,” in P. McNeil, V. Karaminas, and C. Cole (eds.), Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, 1–8, Oxford: Berg. Melville, H. ([1851] 1994), “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in Moby Dick, 189–97, London: Penguin. Morgan, D. (2008), Fire and Blood: Rubies in Myth, Magic and History, Westport, CT: Praeger. Munns, J. (1999), “ ‘With nosegays and gloves … / So trim and so gay’: Clothing and Public Execution in the Eighteenth Century,” in J. Munns and P. Richards (eds.), The Clothes that Wear Us: Essays on Dressing and Transgressing in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 271–300, London: Associated University Presses. Napier, A. D. (1986), Masks, Transformation, and Paradox, Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Nead, L. (2013), “The Layering of Pleasure: Women, Fashionable Dress and Visual Culture in the mid-Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35 (5): 489–509. Perrault, C., ([1696] 1921), trans. A. E. Johnson, “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.” Available online: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault01.html (accessed September 12, 2016). Ribeiro, A. (1984), Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715–1789, London: Batsford. Rice, A. ([1976] 1977), Interview with the Vampire, London: Warner. Rice, A. (1993), interview with Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose (TV programme), September 28, https://charlierose.com/videos/4516 (accessed July 16, 2017). Rice, A. ([1985] 1994), The Vampire Lestat, London: Futura. Rice, A. ([1995] 1996), Memnoch the Devil, London: Arrow.Rice, A. ([1988] 2008), The Queen of the Damned, London: Sphere. Santilli, P. (2007 January), “Culture, Evil and Horror,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology: The Challenges of Globalization: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom 66 (1): 173–94. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27739626.pdf (accessed October 14, 2016). Scaturro, S. (2010), Interview with Judith Clark. Available online: http://www. fashionprojects.org/blog/676 (accessed September 9, 2016). Sennefelt, K. (2013), “Runaway Colours: Recognisability and Categorisation in Sweden and Early America, 1750–1820,” in G. Rydén (ed.), Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World: Provincial Cosmopolitans, 225–46, London : Routledge. Soanes, C., and A. Stevenson (eds.), (2005), Oxford English Dictionary of English, 2nd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spooner, C. (2004), Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stableford, B. (2007), “The Immortal,” in S. T. Joshi (ed.), Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, Vol. 1, 307–40, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Tseëlon, E. (2001), “Introduction: Masquerade and Identities,” in E. Tseëlon (ed.), Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality, 1–17, London: Routledge.

64

65

3 FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM Brides of Frankenstein Rafael Jaen and Robert I. Lublin

In Universal Studios’ Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the female monster created by Baron Henry Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius appears on screen for less than five minutes. During that brief time, she has no lines, her vocal expressions limited entirely to hissing and three screams. Yet, since the movie was first released, this character has become “a cultural icon: readable, mythic, and imbued with meaning” (Hawley 2015:  218). She has a vast and devoted following, including both horror fans and film critics, who have labeled Bride of Frankenstein “a masterpiece” and who recognize its eponymous monster as “one of the leading horror icons in cinema history” (Glut 1973: 132; Essman 2010: 3).1 The “Bride of Frankenstein” has entered our cultural imagination most significantly through her visual presentation, with her costume, hair, and makeup, which engage deeply and memorably with cultural assumptions regarding femininity and monstrosity. The origin of the figure of the Bride can be found in the pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Miserable and alone, Frankenstein’s Monster demands that his creator make for him a mate:  “You must create a female for me, with whom I  can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. . . . I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself” (1996: 101–2). Hawley notes that Frankenstein found the creation of a female monster far more horrible than that of a male monster (2015:  220). Frankenstein ruminates that “she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness” (Shelley 1996: 118). With further thought, however, he realizes that the true threat she offers results from her ability as a woman to procreate: “A race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (119). Fearful of the female monster’s potential to reproduce, Frankenstein concludes that, whatever the cost, it must not

66

66

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

be created: “Trembling with passion, [I] tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged” (119). Thus, starting with Shelley’s novel, the figure of the Bride is defined primarily by her sexuality. And yet, because the female monster was never completed, the way she might have looked was never established and the subject has been left completely open to creative interpretation. In this essay, we explore the creative interpretations of filmmakers, examining the costumes, hair, and special effects makeup used to fashion female monsters in several major Frankenstein movies. Our study begins with Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which established the character and character type that has come to be termed the “Bride” and remains perhaps the single most famous female monster in film history (Hutchings 2009: 334). Next, we look at Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), which utilizes many of the costumes and special effects that appear in Bride of Frankenstein but engages them to create comedy through the satirical manipulation of visual semiotics invoked in the earlier film. We then examine Hammer Films’ Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) for a completely different female monster, one that actively pursues a destructive agenda. We conclude with Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) to explore how the film breaks with the novel to include a Bride that was, at the time of the movie’s release, both familiar and strikingly new. Our study of costumes and makeup includes a consideration of the female monsters’ bodies as well, for in Frankenstein movies, limbs, and organs are often chosen and assembled for particular effect in much the same way one picks articles of clothing. Moreover, to fashion the female monster, body parts often must be sewn together and this can be done either beautifully, to hide the seams, or poorly, in a manner that leaves them messy and ragged. Ultimately, we will argue that the costumes, bodies, hair, and special effects used to fashion brides on screen serve to realize Barbara Creed’s notion of the “monstrous-feminine,” which integrates social constructions of gender into notions of monstrosity.

Fashioning an icon: Elsa Lanchester’s bride With its use of costume and special effects, Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1935) provides a nearly perfect example of Creed’s monstrous-feminine. Central to this concept is how it differs from the term “female monster,” which implies a simple reversal of “male monster.” She explains: The reasons why the monstrous-feminine horrifies her audience are quite different from the reasons why the male monster horrifies his audience. A new term is needed to specify these differences. As with all other stereotypes of the feminine from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her sexuality. The

67

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN

67

phrase “monstrous-feminine” emphasizes the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity. (1993: 3) Frankenstein films substantiate Creed’s comparison of male and female monsters. In Chapter 8, we examine the costumes used to fashion male monstrosity in major Frankenstein movies and find that they typically invoke notions of physical strength, danger, incivility, and death. Their clothes are often dusty and distressed, as though the wearers had them on when they emerged from their own graves. Female monsters, on the other hand, do not typically wear clothes that invoke death and danger. Rather, the apparel they wear overwhelmingly engages with and manipulates cultural associations of femininity, specifically their sexuality. As Creed has stated, “all human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject” (1993: 1). The clothing used to costume female monsters in Frankenstein movies unerringly invokes the wearer’s sexuality to incite those aspects of femininity that are culturally shocking, terrifying, horrific, and abject. In Bride of Frankenstein, the Bride wears apparel and makeup that engage deeply with culturally held notions of femininity in such a way as to render the wearer monstrous. And yet, the Bride appears only in the last few minutes of the film (Figure 3.1). Long before, the movie subtly invokes the visual semiotics of femininity that later will be fashioned into monstrosity. Elsa Lanchester, who plays the Bride, also played the part of Mary Shelley at the start of the movie. In the prologue, set on a stormy night in early nineteenth-century England, Mary speaks with her husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, telling them that she has more story to tell than appears in the original Frankenstein. The apparel she wears and her entire visual presentation brilliantly set the tone for the rest of the movie. Even though she sits demurely with her needlepoint in an all-white dress, Mary Shelley wears jet black hair worn up with one side of her bangs left free and the other side held back, suggesting two sides to her personality that cannot easily be reconciled. Like other female stars of the silver screen from the 1930s, she displays smoky eye shadow and dark eyeliner, but Lanchester’s eyebrows are upwardly drawn. Other actresses, such as Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, typically wore softer, droopy eyebrows to appear approachable. Lanchester’s upwardly turned eyebrows lend her face a wicked twist and suggest agency where other female stars tended to relinquish it. Her dress, although it is the color of innocence, is unusually tight for the fashion of the time, exposing the alluring shape of her body, and includes a plunging neckline that reveals ample, even excessive, décolletage. Director James Whale realized the importance of Mary’s outfit in this scene and made specific demands for it, having the studio pay exorbitantly for a dress “with iridescent, sequined butterflies and moons and stars,” even though the camera might not pick up such finery (Horton 2014: 20).

68

68

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Figure  3.1 Elsa Lanchester as the Bride in Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale), 1935, Universal Pictures. Universal Clips™ Business to Business Broadcast Film Clip and Still Licensing.

Coupling white, opulent, innocent apparel with daring black hair and a risqué neckline, Mary simultaneously asserts and subverts the very ideal of chaste, nineteenth-century femininity. The effect is particularly effective in horror, for it lends virtue the undeniable potential to yield to vice and inculcates monstrous possibilities into the most seemingly innocuous of images.2 As the Bride of Frankenstein, Lanchester becomes a monster by realizing the sexualized female potential suggested by Mary in the prologue. She cannot speak (except for hissing and screaming) and therefore only lives on screen materially and visually, which has the effect of heightening the importance of how she looks and presents herself. Alberto Manguel provides a resonant description of the spectacle when the Bride is unveiled for the first time: Standing between Pretorius and Henry, the female creature is clothed in all her splendour, half Nefertiti, half ghost with her long white bridal gown, or death robe, or swaddling cloth, her arms still bandaged . . . her hair unforgettably

69

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN

69

coiffed with streaks of white lightning, she stands halfway between a zombie and a future punk, outlandishly sexy. (2003: 310) Manguel’s description does justice to the fact that the newly animated woman occupies several overlapping cultural categories, including wife, corpse, and baby, and her simple, elegant white gown manages to serve all three.3 The Bride shares the earlier Monster’s affiliation with death and rebirth, but she also visually presents herself as an appropriate partner to a groom. The Bride’s shoulder pads and platform shoes grant her superhuman size and mark her as a monster appropriate to mate with Frankenstein’s original. And yet, subtle alterations in these costume elements indicate that the two are not the same. The male monster’s broad shoulders and excessive height invoke a sense of physical threat in the wearer. The Bride, on the other hand, seems very delicate in her monstrous apparel. Rather than extend outward, her shoulder pads merely go upward, providing height, but no sense of strength. The effect is similar to the wearing of high heels, which grant elevation but also increased fragility. Thus, despite being one of Frankenstein’s monsters, the Bride does not actually inspire a sense of physical danger. Karen Hollinger has noted, “Despite her wild hairdo and the hissing sound she makes when approached, she is, in fact, not at all a very threatening creature: she clings submissively to Henry Frankenstein, [and] is terrified of the male monster” (1996: 300). In a cinematic realization of Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine, the Bride is ultimately a very different monster than her male counterpart—one that is not defined by any physical threat she might represent. To understand the source of the Bride’s monstrosity, we must instead consider Manguel’s final and most important observation regarding the Bride’s visual presentation: she is outlandishly sexy. As Caroline Picart states, “references to Nefertiti are far from accidental. The dominance of her upturned hair, made to resemble the dead queen’s famous headpiece, draws attention to the bride’s animal sexuality” (2002:  51). The renowned bust of Nefertiti was first revealed to the public in 1924 in Germany and became a sexual ideal in Western culture by the time Bride was released.4 Examining the sculpture of the Egyptian queen, Camille Paglia notes the “radiant glamour of this supreme sexual persona” (1990: 67). With her distinctive hairstyle, the Bride invokes Nefertiti’s most distinguishing visual trait and its consonant sexual draw. The white streaks of lightning that adorn the sides of the Bride’s hair signify how she was brought to life but also suggest trauma as well as an animal quality: resembling a skunk’s fur, the Bride’s hair is attractive and distinctive, but suggests people should beware. There is an additional similarity between the Bride and Nefertiti. The bust of the Egyptian queen’s chin is carved in sharp contours that are mirrored in Lanchester’s face and even in the poses she assumes. It is important to note that unlike the male monster, the Bride’s face exhibits virtually no visible consequences

70

70

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

of her violent reanimation. She reveals only delicate scars that etch her jaw line and do nothing to detract from her attractiveness (Adams 2009: 409). Making her sexier still, the Bride wears exaggerated makeup and dark, heart-shaped (seemingly red) femme fatale lipstick as well as extended eyelashes. Finally, the subtly up-drawn eyebrows from the prologue now point at sharp upward angles, audaciously expressing the eroticism merely intimated at the start of the movie. The Bride’s bold presentation of culturally held notions of sexual desirability is impacted significantly by the clothes she wears. As Manguel noted, her white gown most pointedly resembles a wedding dress, and the association is strengthened when she is announced by Pretorius as “the Bride of Frankenstein” to the ringing of wedding bells.5 In Western culture, the color white is “equated with purity, sanctity, and innocence” (Hollander 1993: 189). For weddings, the significance of white is even greater as it stands in as a visual signifier of the wearer’s virginity. Fashion historians are quick to note that the tendency of brides to wear white is a rather recent phenomenon dating only to Queen Victoria’s donning of the color when she married Prince Albert in 1840 (Schwartz 2016: 258). But since then, the connection has become indelible, and today, the white gown stands “as the icon of the sexually untouched bride” (Blank 2007:  100). The Bride of Frankenstein takes the visual signifier of virginity and purity one step further yet. Beyond a wedding gown, the Bride’s white clothing is also a swaddling cloth. The apparel’s invocation of infancy is reified by the Bride’s hesitant first steps, which resemble those of a young child trying to master walking. She is newly born again, bearing a body that paradoxically has both the innocence of a newborn child as well as the sexual purpose of a newly married woman approaching the eve of her wedding day. The movie masks the Bride’s overt sexual purpose by having the male Monster simply say “friend” and try to hold her hand, but the true nature of their power dynamic is quite clear: the Bride is “primarily a living doll, created for the Monster’s pleasure” (Manguel 1997: 55). In the eyes of patriarchy, she is the perfect woman: absolutely pure yet designed to be corrupted, both a virgin and a whore. Furthermore, unlike a “real” woman who might hide the secret of lost innocence under a white wedding gown, we know the Bride is a virgin for she has not escaped the watchful eye of man since the moment of her rebirth. Her white gown truly denotes the wearer’s purity. Although visibly and even verifiably a virgin, the Bride was designed for sex and promised to the Monster by Dr. Pretorius before her creation. She has no greater dimensions. Erin Hawley notes that “she is never allowed to speak, or indeed to live; she is never given a name or form” (2015:  219). Young further clarifies that the narrative of the movie telescopes her life to the only two events deemed essential for women: birth and marriage (1991: 412). She was created and she exists only to mate. The Bride is sex, and the movie’s cinematography acknowledges her sexual purpose by framing the first meeting of the Bride and

71

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN

71

the Monster in an out-of-focus blur, which was a typical technique of the time for silhouetting romantic partners as they moved in for a kiss (Salt 1990: 39). But, of course, they do not kiss. Instead, she screams, refusing the man for whom she was created. With her scream, the Bride aligns herself with Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine as she wrenches control over her own sexuality away from the patriarchy that created her. Rejected, Frankenstein’s Monster destroys the laboratory, killing himself and the Bride. All told, the Bride receives only five minutes of screen time, and yet her wild, sexualized hair, apparel, and special effects makeup remain an unforgettable part of the Frankenstein legend. For his comic masterpiece, Young Frankenstein (1974), director Mel Brooks employed the costumes and special effects makeup of Bride and achieved comedy by blatantly and unabashedly addressing the sexual aspects of the female monster that appear more subtly in the earlier film. Young Frankenstein presents the grandson of Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder), who is engaged to the seemingly frigid socialite Elizabeth (Madeline Kahn). After inheriting his family estate, Frederick discovers his grandfather’s laboratory and experiments assembling a monster (Peter Boyle). As with other Frankenstein movies, the Monster escapes and terrorizes the countryside, eventually finding Elizabeth and forcing himself on her. Rather than suffer a rape, Elizabeth sings out with joy at the sexual pleasure she experiences. Following a successful experiment, the Monster becomes sophisticated, and toward the end of Young Frankenstein, Elizabeth foregoes Frederick Frankenstein and chooses to marry the Monster, won over by his monstrous penis and superhuman sexual stamina. In their final scene together, when Elizabeth comes out of the bathroom to meet the Monster in bed, she inexplicably appears with her hair up in the Bride’s unique, Nefertiti style with the familiar white streaks on the side. Previously, Elizabeth’s hair was worn in attractive short brown curls or hidden under an opulent, stylish turban, suggesting conservative morality and high-class fashion (Figure 3.2). Feeding the comedy in her final scene, Elizabeth’s monstrous hair is actually larger than Lanchester’s was, with broader white streaks. Additionally, Kahn wears a white nightgown for the scene that evokes the gown worn by the Bride, but the fabric looks softer and the design is less austere. The choice of hair and costume makes no sense in terms of the movie’s plot since Elizabeth is not a monster and has no reason to dress as one. But when we recognize the highly sexualized associations that append to the Bride’s apparel, the directorial choice makes sense and perfectly fits the comedy of the character and the moment. Only in a comedy can a woman fully appreciate the pleasure that sex provides free of the stigma of a judgmental patriarchy. By costuming Kahn as a Bride and having her hiss and snort with lust, Brooks repudiates the original movie’s patriarchal regulation of female sexuality and encourages us to laugh at women’s sexual desires, but also to acknowledge it. It is interesting to note

72

72

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Figure  3.2 Madeline Kahn as Elizabeth in Young Frankenstein (dir. Mel Brooks), 1974, Twentieth Century Fox. Gruskoff Venture Films/Crossbow Productions/Jouer Ltd/Ronald Grant Archive/Mary Evans/Alamy.

that both Lanchester’s and Kahn’s female monsters ultimately assert agency. Lanchester’s Bride rejects the sexual purpose promised by her white gown and refuses the male Monster. Contrarily, Kahn’s Bride welcomes all of her apparel’s sexual possibilities, even to the point of literally embracing monstrosity. Their sexually charged apparel links the two, and the choices they make have turned both women into icons, one of horror and the other of comedy.

Fashioning vengeance: Frankenstein Created Woman From the start, Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) sought to build its success on the monstrous potential of female sexuality. The Frankensteinian creation of the film was played by Susan Denberg (born Dietlinde Zechner), a twentytwo-year-old Austrian who had been the Playboy Playmate of the month for August 1966. It was not uncommon for Hammer to choose sex symbols for their films at the time, and publicity for the movie focused directly on Denberg’s sex appeal. One widely published picture presents Baron Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing) carrying Denberg, who wears only a bikini made of bandages and stares seductively at him. Her diminutive clothing is reminiscent of Ursula Andress’s iconic swimsuit in Dr. No (1962) and Raquel Welch’s skin apparel in 1 Million Years BC (1966). Another publicity shot shows Denberg in the same

73

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN

73

apparel, with her hands shackled as she stares into the camera. The sexual suggestiveness of these pictures is quite overt, and movie viewers lured to the theatre by their promise of seeing Denberg nude (Figure 3.3) must have been very disappointed to find that nothing remotely like the publicity shots ever appeared in the film (Hallenbeck 2013: 147). Far from a “skin flick,” Frankenstein Created Woman is a plot-driven film that achieved financial success and has come to be recognized as “one of the most compelling of the Hammer Frankenstein offerings” (Picart 2002:  130). Moreover, the costuming and special effects makeup employed in the film are quite remarkable and tightly connected to the movie’s narrative. The story of the film differs from the typical Frankenstein movie as no actual monster is created. Rather, the movie deals with the transference of souls. The story involves Baron Frankenstein, but he is not the central figure. The movie focuses instead on Christina Kleve (played by Denberg) and Hans Werner, Frankenstein’s lab assistant (Robert Morris). Christina starts the movie with a physical deformity that gives her a limping gait as well as a noticeable scar on the right side of her face, which she regularly hides with her straight brown hair. She and Hans are lovers whose romantic relationship provides the impetus for the movie’s revenge plot. Three wealthy young dandies visit the inn owned by Christina’s father and cause trouble, eventually killing him. They frame Hans for the murder, and he is tried and put to death. Stricken with grief, Christina drowns herself in a river. Frankenstein, utterly dedicated to his research, sees the death of the two as an opportunity to further his scientific experiments. He salvages Hans’s soul after his death and puts it into Christina’s body once he has brought it back to life. The movie ignores the metaphysical aspects of soul transference as well as the question of how a man might experience living in the body of a woman. Instead, it focuses almost entirely on the decadence and immorality of the three dandies in the first half and Christina’s quest for vengeance against them in the second. The movie’s elision of more complex themes has disappointed some viewers, but it does not diminish the film’s importance for us since the way Christina dresses and appears crucially defines her character and contributes importantly to how she achieves revenge. Christina strikes a sentimental figure in the first half of the movie with her visual presentation defined predominantly by her facial scar, physical deformity, and modest, functional German peasant’s attire. She wears an unadorned, yet formflattering dirndl that is black at the top with a green skirt, and she has a clean white blouse underneath. In her humble attire, Christina naturally draws audience sympathy when the overdressed dandies mock her disfigurement. After she drowns herself, Frankenstein says that he can not only resurrect her but also cure her of her physical impairments. The movie makes a significant moment of the reveal after Christina has been brought back to life. She is presented first with

74

74

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Figure 3.3 Publicity image for Frankenstein Created Woman (dir. Terence Fisher), 1967, Twentieth Century Fox. Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy.

75

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN

75

a white plaster mask. Beneath is a layer of gauze. Finally, beneath that, we see Denberg’s porcelain face, completely free of any blemish. Also, her hair is now inexplicably blond. Newly revived, Christina does not remember who she is and exhibits the innocence of a child. Looking at herself in a mirror, she anxiously asks, “Who am I?” Frankenstein’s partner, Dr.  Hertz (Thorley Walters), responds, “You are a very, very lovely girl, my dear.” Christina’s childlike identity manifests visually in the long, clean, white nightgown she wears and her bare feet. Her new hair contributes to her visual presentation of innocence by invoking the broad dichotomies that were accepted at the time between “blond/brunette, innocence/corruption, good/evil” (Armstrong et al. 2007: 331; Benson 1985: 93). As time passes, Christina begins to remember her past, and in a fit of nightmarish sleep, as Picart has noted, “she begins to undo the ribbons of her white nightgown, implying the shedding of her status as a pure child and domesticated daughter” (2002: 135). To Frankenstein and Hertz, Christina continues to be kind and deferential, serving them as a maid and dressing in apparel that openly suggests innocence and even naiveté, but unbeknown to them, she seeks revenge against the three dandies at night. Christina’s means of achieving vengeance fulfills Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine, for she accomplishes it entirely through the power she has an object of sexual desire. She exercises this agency through her choice of clothing, hairstyle, and jewelry. When she serves Frankenstein and Dr. Hertz, Christina wears her blond hair in a pair of simple, hanging braids that make her seem younger; the clothes she wears are attractive but demure. Stalking her victims, she wears her hair up in an elaborate style appropriate to a romantic liaison. She also removes her jacket as well as the white scarf from around her shoulders, revealing abundant décolletage. She draws further attention to her breasts by wearing a blood-red marble necklace along with matching earrings. Her gesture and eye contact are all flirtation and sexual innuendo. The fascinating aspect of Christina’s monstrosity is that she becomes assertive and powerful by achieving precisely what patriarchy would deem to be the ideal passive object of sexual desire. More fascinating still, Christina possesses no other skills to help her achieve revenge. She is unaided by superior strength or any supernatural abilities. Rather, she entices the men directly to their death using only her sexual draw. Nowhere is this more fully realized than in Christina’s first murder, when she kills the leader of the group, Anton. Christina does not attempt to hide or sneak up on him. Quite the contrary, she merely stands across the street from the inn where he is drinking, and when he steps outside, he cannot help but approach the beautiful woman before him. With blond hair and unblemished complexion, Christina is unrecognizable and literally irresistible. In full control of her sexuality, Christina has the upper hand throughout their exchange, and she ultimately convinces

76

76

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Hans to go with her to the abandoned apartment where she used to live. There, Christina lures Anton into the back room where we hear the voice of the dead Hans telling her “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” But we do not see her kill him. He enters the room. His face contorts in horror. Then the scene cuts directly to a guillotine that drops its blade, then raises it slowly, drenched in blood. How does Christina kill Anton? The falling blade coupled with Anton’s state of sexual arousal suggests that he has not merely been killed, but castrated. In psychoanalytic terms, Christina invokes castration anxiety and assumes the role of the “vagina dentata.” Creed writes of the castrating female genitals as a common theme in the myths and legends of many cultures (1993: 105). But in Frankenstein Created Woman, the metaphor is rendered literal. Denied any special means of carrying out murder or even a weapon, Christina accomplishes the deed entirely with her overpowering sexuality. Immediately after, providing a diametrical contrast, Christina appears in her innocent apparel, wearing her hair in braids and smiling demurely as she serves breakfast to Frankenstein and Dr. Hertz. Her choice of clothes and hairstyles mark opposite sides to her identity and invoke the fear of the feminine by demonstrating how an innocent exterior can hide perverse, even murderous intentions. Christina takes revenge against the other two dandies in similar manner, presenting herself as an ideal sexual object (corseted hourglass figure, pushed-up cleavage, shiny pouty lips, and lush blond locks) and then turning the tables on the men when they think they are in control. When Christina commits her third murder, the sexual dimension of the act remains its most defining characteristic. The victim, Johann, after finding that his two companions have been murdered, immediately calls a coach with plans to flee the village and seek safety. On the coach, however, he finds Christina waiting. She sits smartly, wearing her earlier, fine coat with her hair up in an elaborate style. The scarf now absent, she exhibits a revealing neckline and wears the distinctive necklace and earrings whose blood-red color suggests her true purpose. As with the other two dandies, Johann is helpless before her beauty and soon the two are kissing in the coach. When the horse throws a shoe (a strategy Christina devised), the two find themselves walking and then sitting down to have a picnic. The scene shifts momentarily to the Baron who races to catch Christina before she commits another murder. When the scene returns to the couple, we find Johann lying down, content and nearly asleep, resting his head on Christina’s lap. His torpor and obvious pleasure suggest he is in postcoital bliss, and it is in this helpless state that Christina informs him of who she really is. She then repeatedly plunges a knife into his chest. A woman’s use of a knife or sharp weapon to commit murder is a common metaphor for the vagina dentata (Creed 1993: 107). Yet, in Frankenstein Created Woman, it is the least obviously gendered instance in which Christina exacts her revenge. Her other murders are even more directly linked to sexuality. Although

77

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN

77

Christina stabs Johann to death while he lies in her lap, none of his blood soils the attractive, revealing apparel Christina wore to entrance and entrap him. This is the case with all three of her murders. Throughout the movie, Christina’s monstrosity lies in the contradiction presented between her pristine outward appearance and her murderous purpose. Dressed in fine, revealing clothes with blond hair that is worn to excite desire, women are supposed to be seen, not act. This is how women typically appear in movies. As Laura Mulvey explains in her seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (1975:11) The male gaze in cinema objectifies women who are relegated to the role of sexual display. Working directly counter to this expectation, Frankenstein Created Woman creates a compelling monster by presenting Christina as the ideal erotic spectacle only then to invert expectations when she uses her sexual power as the means by which she becomes an agent in pursuit of her own purpose. When Frankenstein sees Christina beside the bloody body of Johann (and the head of Hans, which she has brought with her), he tells her that she is not actually guilty of murder:  “It wasn’t you who killed those young men. You didn’t know what you were doing.” The movie opens the possibility that this is true, suggesting that Hans’s soul motivated the revenge. And yet, Christina refuses to relinquish responsibility for her deeds, and she answers for her crimes by jumping into the river and taking her own life. Irresistible and unstoppable, Christina holds a unique place in the Frankenstein legend, one very different from the typical Bride.

Fashioning a new bride: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, provides one of the most recent and most compelling Bride characters (Figure 3.4). This is rather surprising since the movie, with its very title, claims fidelity to the novel in which the female monster was begun yet never finished. But many have noted that the movie breaks with the novel in significant ways, and the completion of a female monster represents perhaps the most exciting example of Branagh’s creative license (García 2005: 236; Brannon 2012: 18). The creation of the female monster begins similarly in the movie as it does in

78

78

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Figure 3.4 Kenneth Branagh and Helena Bonham Carter in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (dir. Kenneth Branagh), 1994, TriStar Pictures. United Archives GmbH/Alamy.

the novel with Frankenstein’s Creature, played by Robert De Niro, requesting “a friend, a companion, a female,” but he goes so far as to call the new creation his “bride,” specifying the romantic purpose he expects her to serve. Frankenstein agrees to create a woman, but then refuses when the Creature, seeking body parts, brings him the corpse of Justine, Frankenstein’s lifelong friend, who was wrongfully killed due to the Creature’s malice. As in the novel, the Creature vows revenge for being denied a mate, but in the movie, the revenge provides the impetus for the final creation of the Bride. When the Creature appears on Frankenstein’s wedding night and kills Frankenstein’s bride Elizabeth, played by Helena Bonham Carter, the scientist determines to bring her back to life. The manner in which she is killed informs the striking visual appearance of the Bride. Elizabeth’s death is extraordinarily violent, even by Hollywood horror standards. Plunging his hand into her chest, the Creature tears out her heart, still beating, and she falls off the bed, smashing her face into an oil lamp, which sets her hair on fire. And yet, the image of the Bride, pieced together by Frankenstein who stitches Elizabeth’s head onto Justine’s body, suggests even more violence than she was subjected to. The Bride’s head is shaved, and still-wet burn marks appear on the scalp. The forehead and one eye are stitched in the cruel, barbedwire style we have already seen on De Niro’s Creature (Heffernan 1997: 144). The lips are similarly sutured, as is the entire neck, which holds together the pieces

79

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN

79

of the two women. Additionally, the right hand has been removed and replaced. Bringing the Bride to life, Frankenstein dresses her in Elizabeth’s wedding gown, slipping the wedding ring onto the left hand. In Branagh’s movie, the Bride represents the apogee of the film’s visual project, a mesmerizing creation that takes the movie’s notion of monstrosity, presented in the terrible figure of the Creature, and juxtaposes it with culturally held notions of beauty represented by the bridal gown and the devastated but still discernable attractiveness of the actress playing the role. Unfortunately, the arresting nature of the Bride must compete with the scene’s serious deviations from the movie’s established logic. For the moment to work, the audience must accept that in the same night that Elizabeth was killed, Frankenstein chops off her head and attaches it to the body of Justine, connecting all the veins, arteries, nerves, sinews, bones, and muscles. In an essay examining clothing, it also should be noted that Elizabeth’s wedding dress and wedding ring somehow fit Justine’s body perfectly. And yet, the image of the Bride is so compelling that it is possible to overlook such details. As Hawley notes, the Bride “is both familiar and strange, both horrible and beautiful; her scarred, scorched appearance is designed to shock audiences, yet she is an object of desire” (2015: 225). The movie carefully crafts the presentation of the Bride to achieve maximum effect. The wedding gown she wears has been introduced earlier in the movie, but only briefly, tantalizingly. Part of it appears on Elizabeth while it is lovingly altered and stitched by Justine and her mother. Then, Elizabeth wears the gown when she marries Victor, but we are never given a full view of it. The scene, although a seminal moment in the film, is surprisingly brief. Audiences finally get to see the dress worn when the Bride is revealed. For this scene, the camera revolves slowly around her, giving audiences the chance to contemplate the Bride in all her horror and all her beauty. Aspects of the dress contribute to the scene’s effectiveness. The neckline of the wedding gown is very low, granting a substantial view of the fair skin on the Bride’s unblemished chest. The gown is gorgeously patterned, sewn, and adorned. Coupled with the beautiful body that inhabits it, the wedding gown represents the female romantic ideal and contrasts powerfully and terribly with the devastated neck and head of the Bride. It makes sense that both Victor and the Creature desire the Bride. It is less clear why she feels equally drawn to both of them. She has only seen the Creature once before she died, and that was when he brutally murdered her. If she has access to Elizabeth’s memories, she should flee the Creature. Instead, she approaches him, fascinated by his facial disfigurement. The success of this moment lies in the power of the film’s visual presentation. “Movies speak mainly to the eyes,” Heffernan explains (1997: 133). Bearing the same deformities as the Creature, the Bride is visibly his appropriate mate, even if the narrative of the movie suggests otherwise. The wedding gown she wears offers a contrasting

80

80

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

visual argument, linking her to Victor. The Bride’s “true” identity lies in the irreconcilable contradiction that these two visual elements represent. In this contradiction, we also see how the Bride exemplifies the monstrousfeminine. She is terrifying to behold yet undeniably desirable. Dressed in a white wedding gown, the Bride references Lanchester’s female monster in Bride of Frankenstein. And, like the earlier Bride, Carter’s is visually and substantively defined by her sexuality, by her potential to mate. She has no other demonstrable abilities or function in the film and exists solely to choose between these two men. But just as Lanchester’s Bride refused the single option presented to her by patriarchy, so does Carter’s female monster reject both options she is given. Lifting an oil lamp over her head, Carter’s Bride, terrible and tantalizing, sets herself ablaze, burning down Frankenstein’s house in the process of taking her own life. The conflagration serves as a metaphor for the destructive consequences of patriarchy’s attempts to exert total control over women.

Conclusion When the trailer for Bride of Frankenstein was first released, it provocatively presented the Bride wrapped entirely in gauze. Giant letters, superimposed on the image, read, “What will she LOOK like?” Before the movie opened, the Bride was already defined by her appearance. As Hawley succinctly explains, “The female monster does not talk; she is seen” (2015: 222). This is common in film, which has been so profoundly influenced by the male gaze, but it achieves particular significance in Frankenstein movies, which provide seemingly endless possibilities for how a female monster might appear. And yet, as we have seen, brides are consistently presented to engage culturally defined aspects of femininity, specifically their sexuality. In all of the movies, the brides wear clothes, hairstyles, and makeup that express exaggerated notions of sexuality. Lanchester’s Bride is “outlandishly sexy.” Denberg’s Christina is irresistibly alluring. Carter’s Bride is “horrible and beautiful.” But the characters are perhaps most exciting for the ways in which all three engage Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine. Dressed and presented as idealized objects, the female monsters nevertheless manage to reject the roles prescribed for them by their visual appearance and to make their own choices. One could argue that the figure of the Bride offers a feminist statement, but the female monsters pay a high price for their very limited self-determination. As Picart notes, “Within the Frankenstein filmic tradition, female monsters seldom live for very long” (2000: 21). Only in the comedic Young Frankenstein can the Bride survive. The true power of the brides lies in their ability to live beyond the confines of their particular movies. Endless action figures, Halloween costumes, animated

81

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: BRIDES OF FRANKENSTEIN

81

cartoons, and more bear witness to the fact that Lanchester’s Bride continues to live a vibrant existence beyond the end of Bride of Frankenstein. Similarly, Denberg’s Christina is memorable for her revenge, not her suicide. Carter’s Bride is unforgettable in the moment when she takes her own life, the act itself an extreme example of agency. Their movies concluded, Frankenstein’s brides live on in our collective imagination, immortal icons of the monstrous-feminine.

Notes Special thanks to Michael Jaros for his comments and suggestions on this essay.

1 Bride of Frankenstein was an instant hit. Elizabeth Young notes that when the movie opened, “it played eleven times a day in a three-thousand-seat Los Angeles theater” (2008: 173).

2 T. S. Kord notes how effectively horror films superimpose the threat of evil on the expectation of innocence by looking at movies that feature children (2016: 179–80).

3 In her study of wedding dresses, Edwina Ehrman explains: “White garments were associated with spiritual rites of passage long before they became conventional for bridal wear. Babies have been dressed in white robes for the sacrament of baptism when they are initiated into the Christian faith since the eighteenth century. . . and white continued to be associated with the funerals of children and unmarried men and women into the early twentieth century” (2011: 9–10).

4 Photos from the era reveal the widespread interest people had in the bust. In 1935, the year Bride was released, a replica of the bust appears in a photo with a fashion model. Pictured together, the two visually represent the ideal of beauty. The image is available online: http://www.artres.com/C.aspx?VP3=ViewBox_VPage&VBID=2UN36 52HKWJ6R&IT=ZoomImageTemplate01_VForm&IID=2UNTWARUDCVQ&PN=36&CT =Search&SF=0 (accessed July 2017).

5 Pretorius’s proclamation is puzzling since Frankenstein’s actual bride is Elizabeth. This issue has been addressed in Norden (1986: 143–47).

References Adams, A. M. (2009), “What’s in a Frame?: The Authorizing Presence in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein,” Journal of Popular Culture 42 (3): 403–18. Armstrong, R., T. Charity, L. Hughes, and J. Winter (2007), The Rough Guide to Film, London: Rough Guides. Benson, M. (1985), Vintage Science Fiction Films, 1896–1949, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Blank, H. (2007), Virgin: The Untouched History, New York: Bloomsbury. Brannon, J. S. (2012), “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? Kenneth Branagh and Keeping Promises,” Studies in Popular Culture 35 (1): 1–23. Bride of Frankenstein (1935), directed by James Whale, University City, CA: Universal Studios.

82

82

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Ehrman, E. (2011), The Wedding Dress: 300 Years of Bridal Fashions, London: V & A Publishing. Essman, S. (2010), The Bride of Frankenstein: 75th Anniversary, New York: Visionary Media. Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), directed by Terence Fisher, UK: Hammer Film. García, P. J. P. (2005), “Beyond Adaptation: Frankenstein’s Postmodern Progeny,” in M. Aragay (ed.), Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship, 223–42, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Glut, D. F. (1973), The Frankenstein Legend, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Hallenbeck, B. G. (2013), The Hammer Frankenstein: British Cult Cinema, Bristol, England: Hemlock Books. Hawley, E. (2015), “The Bride and Her Afterlife: Female Frankenstein Monsters on Page and Screen,” Literature Film Quarterly 43 (3): 218–31. Heffernan, J. A. W. (1997), “Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1): 133–58. Hollander, A. (1993), Seeing Through Clothes, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hollinger, K. (1996), “The Monster as Woman: Two Generations of Cat People,” in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, 296–308, Austin: University of Texas Press. Horton, R. (2014), Frankenstein, New York: Wallflower Press. Hutchings, P. (2009), The A to Z of Horror Cinema, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Kord, T. S. (2016), How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Manguel, A. (1997), Bride of Frankenstein, London: British Film Institute. Manguel, A. (2003), “Bride of Frankenstein,” in B. White and E. Buscombe, British Film Institute Film Classics, Vol. 1, 297–317, New York: Fitzroy Dearborn. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), dir. Kenneth Branagh, Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures. Mulvey, L. (1975), “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (Autumn): 6–18. Norden, M. F. (1986), “Sexual References in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein,” in D. Palumbo, Eros in the Mind’s Eye, 141–50, New York: Greenwood Press. Paglia, C. (1990), Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Picart, C. S. (2000), “Visualizing the Monstrous in Frankenstein Films,” Pacific Coast Philology 35 (1): 17–34. Picart, C. S. (2002), The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein: Universal, Hammer, and Beyond, Westport, CT: Praeger. Salt, B. (1990), “Film Form 1800–1906,” in T. Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, 31–44, London: BFI Publishing. Schwartz, J. (2016), “Queen Victoria,” in J. Blanco F. and H. P. K Hunt-Hurst, Clothing and Fashion: American Fashion Head to Toe, Vol. 1, 258–9, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Shelley, M. (1996), Frankenstein, 2nd edn., ed. J. P. Hunter, New York: W. W. Norton. Young Frankenstein (1974), dir. Mel Brooks, Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox. Young, E. (1991), “Here Comes the Bride: Wedding Gender and Race in Bride of Frankenstein,” Feminist Studies 17 (3): 403–37. Young, E. (2008), Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor, New York: New York University Press.

83

4 WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES Fabricating Horror in Dressing Rituals of Femininity Sarah Heaton

Culturally, the white wedding dress occupies a peculiar position. It is a dress that is all about display. It appears everywhere in visual culture from the finale of the catwalk show, to the fairy-tale endings of Hollywood movies, to the many society magazine articles. On the wedding day, it is endlessly scrutinized and discussed, yet it is worn for only a few hours, then put away to be stored. This uneasy juxtaposition of display and the hidden, the moment of perfection and its later silent decay goes some way toward suggesting the horror at the heart of the wedding dress. The very visibility of the wedding dress reinforces its well-rehearsed symbolism of purity. Yet there is a waywardness, a refusal to remain fixed by its ascribed symbolism, to the literary wedding dress and its doppelgänger, the white dress, which suggests a complexity of meaning often ignored in contemporary mainstream cultural consumption of wedding apparel. The literary critic Bill Brown, in A Sense of Things, exhorts us to look again at things in literature to explore “why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies” (2003: 4). The wedding dress is all about the making and remaking of ourselves in a fantasy of “perfection,” an ideal that simultaneously suppresses and expresses many feminine anxieties concerning the body and sexuality.1 It also suggests masculine anxieties concerning femininity in its symbolic promise of innocence juxtaposed with the suggestion of sexual availability on the wedding night. The wedding dress is peculiarly mobile in meaning but fixed in traditional symbolism. It is both in this fixing of ideas in the thing, in the wedding

84

84

SARAH HEATON

apparel, and in the mobile meanings surrounding it that contain the horror of the white dress. This chapter will consider the layers of meaning in the fabric(ating) of the white wedding dress and its associated white doppelgängers in the sewing together of ritualized expressions of femininity. A look back to three of the most important literary Gothic white dresses in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) will question the ideologies sewn in to the fabric of the Victorian white wedding dress. None of these texts are classic horror novels, but they all employ the tropes of the Gothic to expose the horror in patriarchal psychosexual repression. The chapter will then look at how the fashion designer Alexander McQueen has put further pressure on the folds of fabric in a revisionist move that uses the tropes of the Gothic to release the white dress from the stranglehold of the past.

The white wedding dress: Rituals of femininity draped in white The white wedding dress is a symbol of hetero-normative society and became culturally embedded in the Victorian period (1837–1901) when the ideology of the separate spheres, in which women belonged to the private sphere of domesticity and should be concerned with child-rearing, housekeeping, education, and religious activity, predominated. Femininity was regarded as innate and the “true woman” was pious, pure, and submissive. The dress is the symbolic assertion of Victorian patriarchal ideals of femininity. It also represents ideas of purity on Christian terms: the need to obey men, as written in Christian marriage rites.2 The Victorian sense that female sexual activity is for procreation reasons only as well as the dress being symbolic of women’s loss of property rights also haunts the fabric. It was, however, Queen Victoria’s endorsement that fixed the white dress in the cultural consciousness. Her choice of dress suggested her feminine identity rather than her state identity. She wore a “creamy-white silk satin court dress embellished with lace . . . a white satin court train bordered with sprays of orange blossom . . . a deep wreath of artificial orange-blossom with a Honiton lace veil pinned to the back of her head” (Ehrman 2011: 56) famously depicted in George Hayter’s painting (Royal Collection, Buckingham Palace, 1840) of the royal wedding. In the painting, the white of Queen Victoria’s dress and those of her twelve bridesmaids stand out against the red jackets of the men, the red bodice of the young mother, and the terracotta walls. The white of her dress becomes a symbol of her virginal femininity, visually linked to the innocence of the child’s white dress in the foreground and the spiritual white robes of the clergy looking down on proceedings.

85

WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES

85

It was after the 1840 Royal wedding that the traditional, symbolic meanings of the white wedding dress, which still predominate today, became cultural currency (Ehrman 2011: 41). It became the norm for girls to aspire to wear white for their weddings, to show themselves as fashionable, virginal, and innocent but also as a future, sexually active (for procreative reasons) wife (9). The fact that these symbolic meanings of the white wedding dress continue suggests that the cultural construction of femininity retains a residue of Victorian patriarchal ideals. However, increasingly, contemporary authors and fashion designers are questioning these symbolic meanings. Yet, this pressure can also be found in the Victorian period when it is argued that Queen Victoria’s white wedding dress in 1840 has its doppelgänger in Miss Havisham’s decaying white dress in Great Expectations (1860). During the Victorian period, the literary motifs of the Gothic genre were finding their way into the realist fiction of Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters. In their gloomy mansions, characters are paralyzed by the past, and two of the most important literary white wedding dresses, in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860) and Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), are symbolic of that stranglehold. But to leave these dresses as merely representative of the characters’ own pasts is to ignore the resonance of that symbolism that the white dress continues to have. Importantly, both novels suggest the afterlife that the white dress has: here it is an afterlife that is spectral rather than specter. It is also an “afterlife” that connects it to all the white dresses of ritual:  christening, confirmation, debutante, wedding, shroud, and mourning.3 These dresses are all worn at moments to suggest the passing from one state to another:  while ensconced in the white fabric, one is neither fully in one state or another.4 The wearer is also haunted by the associations the white dress has with the nightgown—a garment that has become increasingly associated with the dream space of sleep,5 the erotic of underwear, and the madness of asylum wear. In Collin’s sensation novel, The Woman in White (1860), it is the unsettling connecting all the white dresses of ritual and everyday stages of femininity that causes the horror.

White decay: The haunting horror of Miss Havisham’s dress The jilted Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860) never takes her dress off, but instead continues wearing it in the “closet” of Satis House. The horror of the iconic character is in her existence as the living dead. By inhabiting the unused white wedding dress she is doubly fixed in a permanent state of the liminal—neither unmarried nor married: She was dressed in rich materials—satins, and lace, and silks—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair,

86

86

SARAH HEATON

and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. (Dickens 1996: 46) Here are all the expected elements of bridal dress. Initially serialized without illustrations, the reader would have had the image of many society weddings in magazines and from carte-postales to evoke the scene. The clothes and the jewelry suggest to the reader that Miss Havisham’s wedding was to be a society wedding of the richest display. Importantly, it is Miss Havisham’s money and her house that she was bringing to the wedding breakfast table; this is a woman who has a pocket in the folds of her wedding dress when not all did (Dickens 1996: 321).6 While she desired the bridegroom, he desired her money. It appears that it is her passion, her sexual desire, that is being punished and suggests her oft-read “madness.”7 The initial richness of Miss Havisham’s white wedding dress gives way to detail that uncovers and explores the horror in the fabric of the wedding dress: I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. (Dickens 1996: 47) The decay of both the dress and her body suggests the decay of her sexual desire. Further, it points to the emptiness that would have been at the heart of a marriage based on a desire for her wealth, not herself, so there is the sense that this decay of sexual passion would have occurred even if she had married and taken off the dress. She would still have been in her dressing room, her sexual desire unsatisfied. The only thing in her pocket is “a yellow set of ivory tablets mounted in tarnished gold” (321). The symbolism links her capital to the vagina dentata.8 When she hands the tablets and the unchained gold pencil with which she has written her name on to Pip, exhorting him to write that he forgives her, she is giving away the last vestiges of her sexuality and sexual power. Furthermore, the yellowing suggests the decay of her barely repressed sexual desire going sour. Dickens refers to the color yellow throughout descriptions of Miss Havisham to suggest decay and neglect: from her dress, to her skin and the suggestion of bruising, through to the weeds in her garden. The apparent horror in the dress is that it is not enacting cultural expectations. It holds within it the resonance of horror of the unworn wedding dress and its ghostly figurations echoing what has not been, but here the horror is amplified: the dress is worn, but Miss Havisham’s body is so reduced it is not being worn as it should. The folds in the dress are deepening as time passes.

87

WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES

87

I have argued elsewhere (Heaton, forthcoming) that, in not removing her dress, Miss Havisham is empowering herself by acting in defiance of social expectations of her returning to the safety of the socially ascribed role of spinster. Here she exists outside society’s demarcations. Miss Havisham understands her empowerment here is through the cipher of the dress when she “looked at the dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in the looking-glass. ‘So new to him . . . so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!’ ” (Dickens 1996: 48). According to Theresa Atchinson, only wearing one shoe hints at the suggestion that she has succumbed to her desires prior to marriage, and the literal “disability” shows her to be a fallen woman (Atchison 2016: 465–6). Yet rather than hiding her “fallen” state she “wears” it openly. It terrorizes Pip and conjures up visions: “I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet” (Dickens 1996: 52). It also disturbs the reader, perhaps because it is the visual acknowledgment of her prior sexual passion. This sense of control is also apparent in Miss Havisham’s training of Estella. Here we do not get the ritual passing of the wedding dress from mother to daughter but rather a sharing of fashion: “To help them marry men, mothers willingly draped daughters in clothes that exposed or accentuated breast, waists, and hips” (Marcus 2007: 117). Estella is trained by Miss Havisham to reject all emotion as false affection for mercenary gain. When the two argue, Pip notes that Estella’s coldness “expressed a self-possessed indifference to the wild heat of the other, that was almost cruel” (Dickens 1996:  246). By not passing on the wedding dress, Miss Havisham is refusing to allow Estella’s sexual desire to develop. Estella remains cold while the passion remains with Miss Havisham, who refuses to take off the dress; but it is a passion that, like the dress, has yellowed. In a horrific doubling of the daughter and the mother, Miss Havisham offers up Estella bodily and sexually to Pip, as her own body is failing her. When she physically engages Estella through the kissing of her hand for Pip’s gaze, it is with a “ravenous intensity that was of its kind quite dreadful” (Dickens 1996: 194), and while chanting to Pip to “love her; love her,” she grabs him around the neck: “Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to the utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck swell with the vehemence that possessed her” (194). Here her swelling arm around his neck might suggest her swelling vagina. Her unconsummated sexual desire is exhorting Pip to satisfy her by taking the cold Estella. Elsewhere Garrison has read the scene as “a male sexual response to match the male sexual role Miss Havisham has usurped” (2011:  130)  but also recognizes the “evocation of the female role in the sexual act.” Because Estella is cold to sexual desire, it will be Miss Havisham’s desire that is satiated. While gripping Pip, she says, “in the same hurried passionate whisper, ‘what is real love. It is blind devotion,

88

88

SARAH HEATON

unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter’ ” (Dickens 1996: 194). Love, for Miss Havisham, is the submission of the body, the self, and sexual desire. We now see her body not just decaying from aging but more from sexual dissipation; the yellowing fabric suggesting a “sickness” from always being at the point of sexual consummation but never achieving it. Here her erotic gripping of Pip does lead to a consummation of sorts in the conflagration. Garrison suggests that Pip’s smothering of the fire is a return of the abuse he has been subjected to by her (2011: 130), putting out the fire before she is consumed, before she is spent; it is another male quelling, putting out or smothering the expression of female desire. At one level there is a sense of empowerment in Miss Havisham’s control over others, in her literal wearing of her sexual desire made manifest by the wedding dress. As Garrison suggests, it is a “threat to male sexual desire” (2011: 130), in that Pip is left with the perfect Victorian wife in Estella who has no sexual desire. Dickens is exposing not only the vacuity of marriage as a tool of society to maintain control but also the horror—both for the Victorian man and for his female victims—in the conflict within male desire for the virginal idealized woman and the sexually desiring woman, and the masculine refusal to accept that a woman can be both. The white wedding dress incorporates and haunts the duality of male desire: the two women, one passionate, and the other cold. That there are no children produced at the end of the novel reasserts that the novel is exploring sexual desire outside the Victorian ideal of procreation. So the dress has to burn; the wedding veil on fire is “soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high” (Dickens 1996: 234), and the dress is replaced by the white shroud, restoring Miss Havisham to her “old ghastly bridal appearance” (325), linking the virgin bride to death.

White passion: Tearing the veil Where Miss Havisham kept her dress on, Jane Eyre resolutely took hers off, and female sexual desire is punished in the symbolic conflagration of the white dress. Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), which is often classified as sensation as well as realist, is full of Gothic language and tropes, but it is not full of the undead and specters. The spectral is entirely of Jane’s imagination. There is a “ghostly shimmer” (Brontë 2006: 315) to her wedding dress, yet it is a material object merely hanging in the wardrobe, suggesting wealth and ownership: the ghostly specter here is that when she wears the dress and gets married she will be owned. Further, the horror in the novel is not the otherworldly, nor is it the entrapping of the female in the institution of marriage, but Rochester’s other world, which is his marriage to Bertha. His previous fleeting desire for the beautiful exoticized

89

WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES

89

feminine in both Bertha and his French mistress, Jane, is a desire for the female untamed on Victorian patriarchal terms. When Jane is preparing for her wedding, she refers to herself as the future Mrs. Rochester (Brontë 2001:  317). The suggestion is that she will become another woman. She is moving from one state to another, but there will be a shift in terms of class and capital as well, and she does not recognize herself in the white wedding dress: That suit of wedding raiment; the pearl-coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau. I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o’clock gave out most certainly a ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment. “I will leave you by yourself, white dream.” (315) Jane does get to wear the “white dream” but she does not get married in it. In the liminal state of the unmarried woman, Jane takes off the dress and resolutely remains sartorially a spinster until she finally marries Rochester at the end of the novel in an undisclosed outfit probably far more befitting a character that does not engage with fashion. She eventually marries Rochester on her terms, not in a dress that he has chosen, and with her passion for him tempered by knowing the man. It is passion that places Bertha in the attic, and it is their passion that links Bertha and Jane via the white dresses. When Jane hangs up her wedding dress and veil the night before the wedding, Bertha appears: I know not what dress she had on:  it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell . . . presently she took my veil from its place: she held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own head, and turned to the mirror.” (Brontë 2006: 326–7) The dresses here merge, and Jane begins to recognize the meanings written in the fabric in the very moment she cannot identify what the figure is wearing. When Jane puts on her wedding dress the next day and looks in the mirror, she “saw a robed and veiled figure so unlike my usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger” (331)—the stranger she saw last night in her veil. While Jane does not recognize herself in the decorative wedding dress, Bertha, when she looks in the mirror, does and tears the expensive London veil Rochester has gifted to Jane in two (Figure  4.1). Bertha sees Jane, the woman betrothed to Rochester in herself, but Jane cannot see Bertha, the “mad” woman in the attic. Bertha burns up metaphorically while trapped in her marriage and literally in the conflagration she later ignites.

90

90

SARAH HEATON

Figure 4.1 Frederick Henry Townsend, “It removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts, and, flinging both on the floor, trampled on them.” Illustration from Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (London: Service and Paton, 1897), 303. © British Library Board.

91

WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES

91

Rochester identifies Bertha as “mad” (Brontë 2006:  337), and he links this “madness” to sexual desire and the sins of the mother:  “Bertha Mason, the true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife once intemperate and unchaste” (353). According to the literary critic Laurie Garrison, “[e]xtreme sexual desire in women was represented in the period as a symptom of insanity” (2011: 118). Hysteria was at its height in the nineteenth century and was when, according to Julia Bosossa, “the metaphorical slippage between symptom and behaviour . . . within a predominantly patriarchal world-view, the hysteric came to embody femininity itself, as problem and enigma” (2001: 5–6) and more specifically as a symptom of untamed sexual desire. Further, Elaine Showalter points out, “women who reject sexuality and marriage . . . are muted or even driven mad by social disapproval” (Showalter: 63). The pathologizing of female sexuality, as an explicitly untamed “illness” that is in conflict to Victorian ideals of femininity, is repeated in vampire fiction. For instance, in Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), the female vampire is subject to “an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love” (Le Fanu, 1872). Carmilla exists outside male desire and is therefore a threat to it, but she is also subject to her body’s desires and to male narrative construction of her identity when it is attested that Vordenburg sought to protect his idol, the Countess. In Brontë’s Jane Eyre, however, Bertha is not impaled by a stake even if Jane sees her as “the foul German spectre—the vampire” (Brontë: 327); Bertha may have enchanted Rochester and expressed sexual desire, but so did Jane. Bertha is Jane’s “dark” double (Gilbert and Gubar:  xxxvi). Jane’s conflation of the “gown, sheet or shroud” suggests the link between marriage, sexual activity, and death. In her nightgown and wearing the veil, Bertha is the vampiric inversion of Jane: the displacement of the wedding dress with the nightgown suggests Jane’s own passion and desires. Further, both are “foreigners” as ladies of the house at Thornfield: Bertha is Creole and Jane is lower class. Both are beyond control: Bertha’s unguarded nature and mental illness have transformed her into a primal beastlike character, her room a “wild beast’s den—a goblin’s cell” (Brontë 2006: 356). Jane struggles to control her desire for Rochester; she is possessed by the archetype of love. Following vampire mythology, they both enchant Rochester and bring about his doom. Bertha traps him in his past. Jane, whom he desires so that she can cleanse his young ward—the very image of frivolity and exoticism that her mother was—traps him physically when he relies on her not just to see but to live again. Throughout the novel, the metaphor of blindness builds up to Rochester’s literal blindness when he loses his sight. Unable to travel, he is trapped in England and his only hope is the love of a good woman who becomes “ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh” (519).

92

92

SARAH HEATON

Throughout the novel it is explicitly suggested that Bertha has vampiric qualities. She has literally sucked her brother Mason’s blood—“She sucked the blood: She said she’d drain my heart” (246)— while she “flew at [Rochester’s] throat this morning” (357) and would “deprive him, Rochester knows, of his energy, his vitality, his manhood” (Moglen 1984: 128). Rochester identifies her as a “hideous demon” (Brontë 2006: 363) who has “allured him” (352). Finally, “the lunatic [Bertha] sprang and grappled his throat and laid her teeth to his cheek” (336). When Jane recognizes herself in Bertha, it is her denial of her sexual desire outside marriage that “saves” her. Bertha represents her desire for Rochester, her passion, and her destructive side. She leaves Thornfield to become an outcast once again. Importantly, she also refuses a marriage that will lead to the Victorian ideal of female sexuality purely for procreation when she does not marry the man of the cloth. Adrienne Rich suggests that she is “a person determined to live, and to choose her life with dignity, integrity, and pride” (Rich 1995: 93). Jane’s own vampire qualities ensure that she does not fade into death as did her childhood friend, Helen, the embodiment of idealized Victorian femininity. Rather, it is Jane who embraces her in death and determines that that is not her fate: she may not actually drink any blood but she is energized after the death of Helen and Bertha as well as the “death” of Rochester when he loses his sight, his potency, and his ability to move in the public masculine sphere. It can be argued that by taking off her white wedding dress, Jane controls, or perhaps refuses to see, her sexual desire, whereas Bertha has been placed in the attic for her sexual desire and ultimately burns as a result of her sexual derangement.

Fabricating “madness” In Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), the wearing of white is initially explicitly linked to patriarchal definitions of female “madness” rather than wedding rites when the men from the asylum stop a policeman to ask if they have seen a “woman in white” (1998:  28). This sensation novel brings the horror of the Gothic into a recognizable middle-class setting. The horror of the novel is that “madness” is used as a patriarchal tool to control women. Further, the doubling of Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie through their shared white palette suggests both characters are equally fixed by the symbolism inherent in the fabric. Here “madness” embodies the male fear of the spectral threat of female desire, as well as the loss of patriarchal economic authority. The tropes of the Gothic may literally entrap the women in the asylum and the gloomy mansion, but they spectrally entrap the men who are haunted by the threat of a female control over property and capital. Both Anne and Laura wear white and are physically pale to the point of transparency. Walter Hartright meets Anne by moonlight on Hampstead Heath: there

93

WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES

93

“stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to toe in white garments . . . bonnet, shawl and gown all of white . . . not composed of very delicate or very expensive material” (Collins 1998: 20–21). According to the literary critic John Harvey, she is “for an instant . . . ghost, angel, moon-goddess, corpse, bride, mourner, virgin” (1995:  206). But perhaps most importantly to the plot, Anne has escaped the asylum and is identified by the two men who seek to return her as “a woman in white” (Collins 1998: 28). Hartright also watches Laura by moonlight and her white dress is similarly un-ostentatious: “Miss Fairlie was unpretendingly and almost poorly dressed in plain white muslin. It was spotlessly pure: it was beautifully put on” (54). Both girls were dressed in white by the late Mrs. Fairlie, but Anne’s wearing of white into adulthood is not normal; it is with a pitying “poor little soul” (59), the suggestion that a stock of white dresses will be made, to be taken out as she grows; she is seen as “strangely dressed, from head to foot, all in white”(59). Anne’s white dress, in its folds, bears witness to the charity of Mrs. Fairlie, which, it is obliquely suggested, is in recognition of her husband’s fathering Anne. Further, the fabric suggests the secret of the “unmarried” Lady Glyde: she has already wed another man. It is also because Anne wants to wear white that leads to her learning that there is a Glyde secret. It is also the marker of madness when Sir Percival Glyde has Anne committed, so that the secret of his mother is silenced. Here there is a symbolic linking in the wearing of white between purity and simplicity, but it is a simplicity that becomes constructed as madness when she is committed. The white dress under patriarchal control fixes and silences the female. The descriptions of Anne’s and Laura’s bodies reinforce the symbolic meanings, the ghost-like associations render them weightless and transparent and suggest a femininity that is passive, silenced, and hidden:  they themselves are layers of tulle and veiling so that no one can fully see them. Anne is actually one of the most mobile characters in the text. She has a level of agency over her movements acquired specifically through her veiling and marginalization. Although she is given a voice, it is one that drifts into transparency in its repetitions, drifting off, and silencing: “What was it I just said now? . . . When your mother is in my mind, everything else goes out of it. What was I saying?” (Collins 1998: 285). This contrasts with the conventional sensation style of accounting, facts, legal papers, diary entries, and written testimony. Her voice has, at one level, little weight; yet, on another, its very drifting into silence maintains a secret power—it is her voice that needs to be stopped and that everyone wants to hear. Laura, by contrast, is less mobile, “trapped” in the house, yet she does have a strong voice. It is Laura who resists Count Fosco’s seductive power; it is Laura who identifies him as a spy. Of course, Anne is placed in an asylum, as is Laura, and both at times are ill and too weak to leave their beds, but these “symptoms” of passive femininity are caused by masculine power, which variously drugs and locks them up. The male authority in the novel associates the white with a

94

94

SARAH HEATON

passivity that legitimizes the male pursuit and control of women. But in the folds of the dress, the veiling and layers of fabric, there is the beginning of a quiet, hidden feminine power emerging in the margins, despite their victimization and despite it being limited: Anne persists in evading her male captors, and Laura stands up to Count Fosco. Further, Laura’s clothing choices maintain a control over her sexuality. Laura is uninterested in the wedding dress that is made for her marriage to Sir Percival Glyde. She is not going to be the sacrificial virginal bride. Rather, her sexuality is tied up in her white day dress and her intimacy with Marion and Walter. With Marion, Laura repeatedly initiates physical intimacy: “She put her arms around my neck, and rested her head quietly on my bosom. . . . She put her lips to mine, and kissed me. ‘My own love’ ” (Collins 1998: 165). She kisses her on the lips and later, to find sanctuary from the forthcoming wedding, “came and crept” into Marion’s bed (189). There is a gentle sensuality here that Marion regards as “innocent” (166) and stands in opposition to the seductive horror of Count Fosco and his excessive flesh. While Marion readily desires and submits to Laura, she is horrified by the seductive power of the Count. Several pages of testimony attempt to understand his seductive control but fail: “Is this because I like him, or because I am afraid of him? Chia sa? . . . Who knows?” (226). Although Marion is depicted as physically masculine and a stronger character, she submits to Laura and the Count, even while the latter repulses her. The overtly feminine Laura, however, has a quiet control and appeal, veiled by her wearing of white.

Fashioning fabric: Unveiling femininity On one hand, the wedding dress has fixed cultural meanings embedded as a result of tradition, yet one of the most important signifiers in wedding apparel is the veil that “epitomizes duplicity and the coexistence of concealment and revelation, presence and absence” (Warwick and Cavallaro 1998:  xxi). The veil points to the erotic allure of uncovering, the promise of the honeymoon, when the man can unwrap his wife. When Bertha rips Jane’s veil, she has torn their passion and desire in two. Miss Havisham’s veil, when initially placed on her head, was there to conceal her sexuality, suggesting her virginal state and restrained passion. But among Miss Havisham’s “bridal wrecks” (Dickens 1996: 248), it is the “long veil so like a shroud” (49), which is presumed to be the wick of the flames that “soar” (324) above her in the final conflagration. She has given the contents of her pocket to Pip, and with her veil alight, they “were on the ground struggling like desperate enemies, and the closer I covered her, the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself” (324). The scene suggests, as with Bertha, the burning up of her passion, which the man tries to cover and control. Like Bertha, her death ultimately does not come from the

95

WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES

95

flames. Rather, it is the consequence of the flames of female sexuality and passion: Bertha’s “madness” causes her to jump and Miss Havisham dies of “nervous shock” (325). The ripping and burning of the white wedding veil suggests the “revealing and concealing” of both male and female desire. The veil embodies the layers of meaning in the wedding dress and it marks the boundary between the seen and the unseen. The veil in Alexander McQueen’s collection The Widows of Culloden (2006) evokes the Gothic image of the veil found in the literary texts. But rather than being torn and discarded or set  alight, his veil captures and retains the powerful evocation of femininity and sexuality. There is an empowering deconstruction of the white dress in his revised and re-visioned history, specifically the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The “wedding” dress is beautifully feminine body-hugging lace with references to the Scottish in the layered frills of the skirt and the resin antlers. While the antlers suggest Scotland, they also insist on the feminine relationship to the land, nature, and psyche. Coming out of the head, they expose the primal, the animal within as a feminine strength. The veil lifting upward powerfully evokes that of Miss Havisham’s, but instead of causing conflagration, it suggests the strength of femininity. By tying the dress to nature and cultural identity, he removes it from the limiting aspirations of society wedding. The literary critics Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro argue for the mobility and permeability of the boundaries of dress: The language of clothes and bodily adornment generally experiments relentlessly with ways of defining and redefining the boundaries between the self and the other, subject and object, inside and out. The boundary never survives these alchemical processes as an intact and inviolable barrier. (1998: xviii) For the conclusion of McQueen’s Widows of Culloden (2006) show in Paris, the white wedding dress of the finale suggests this permeability in the so-called hologram of Kate Moss. The “alchemical” process involved in creating this finale seemingly breaks down all these boundaries and more as it releases the stranglehold that the past has on the ideologies sewn into the wedding dress. In fact, as Bill Sherman points out, the technique used was “Pepper’s Ghost” created by the Victorian chemist John Henry Pepper for a stage adaptation of Dickens’s “The Haunted Man” (Wilcox 2015: 243). The whole installation brings to the fore the layers of meaning in the folds of the white wedding dress from the Victorian period onward. Simultaneously Gothic and sensational, the white dress here is not restricting the woman: she is ephemeral and seemingly transparent, floating free of society’s expectations that have “haunted man.” Yet, the echoes of the patriarchal idea of the “mad woman” are here too, barefooted in her shredding dress, but there is an inversion that takes the mad woman out of the attic and

96

96

SARAH HEATON

the asylum, releasing her from being contained by masculine institutions. Here she is the free-flowing woman of nature as the wind blows and turns her around. The link to the Victorian Gothic wedding dress is here in the design of the dress and also the method of display, but rather than it being a dress that contains the woman, her femininity, her sexuality, and her nature, it instead releases her. The echoes of the liminal and a sense of the otherworldly are here but rather than macabre and full of horror, for McQueen death was part of life . . . I have always been fascinated with Victorian views of death . . . when they used to take pictures of the dead. It is not about brushing under the carpet, like we do today. It’s about celebrating someone’s life. And I don’t think it is a bad thing. It is a very sad thing . . . but I think it’s [also] a very romantic thing because it means the end of a cycle and everything has an end . . . it gives room for new things to come behind you. (Wilcox 2015: 244) There is a powerful revisionist pressure on the ideology of the Victorian wedding dress when McQueen’s white dresses unfold and refold the fabric of the white dress in powerful evocations of the complex symbolism to expose both the horror and the empowerment of wearing white.

Conclusion The white wedding dress holds within its fabric symbolic meanings, which persist in contemporary culture, despite their ideological construction stemming from Victorian patriarchy. Yet even while those meanings were being established, literary texts were picking at the seams of the fabric to expose the horror of such ideological constructions. Further, exhorted by Brown to look again amid the horror and punishment, there emerges, even in the literary Victorian dress, the beginnings of female self-individuation. As a contemporary example, two images of Kate Middleton’s famous wedding dress, designed by Sarah Burton of McQueen, hint at the layered meanings in the fabric to suggest that even the happiest wedding can have a lingering uncanniness. The beauty of the inhabited fabric on her wedding day contrasts with the headless ghostly dress on display afterward, about which even her grandmother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II, is attested to have commented that it was “made to look very creepy” (The Telegraph 2011). Gothic tropes found in the realism of Dickens and Brontë, and the sensation fiction of Collins, expose the entrapping of femininity and sexual desire in patriarchal cultural construction. The use of the Gothic tropes shows how the attempt to control femininity haunts the everyday, and there is a horror of transgression

97

WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES

97

and punishment. In both Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, it is female passion, desire, and sexuality that are taboo, and as such the women’s transgressions are punished. There is a horror in the decaying bride and the unworn dress in their uncanny resonance. But the horror also resides in both Miss Havisham and Jane retaining some sense of agency over their dresses. This duality of meaning when they are simultaneously disenfranchised, trapped in their gloomy mansions, but also determining their fate even while confined, emerges more powerfully in The Woman in White. Here again there is the doubling of characters and the masculine discourse of madness ascribed to expressions of femininity. Both Anne and Laura choose to wear white on their own terms without compromising their femininity, and there is a strong sense of female solidarity. But any expressions of self-individuation or agency remain curtailed when wearing white. Miss Havisham, Bertha, and Anne all die, and both Jane and Laura end up “good wives.” Yet this uncanniness, these Gothic tropes and the stranglehold the ideologies of the past have on the white wedding dress are being used by some recent fashion designers to not only expose the lingering symbolism but also rework it into powerful expressions of femininity, where passion is celebrated. It is in the design of the dress itself, in the fabricating, the unpicking, and the restitching of material that, in a revisionist turn, has created this powerful evocation of liberated femininity and female sexuality. The wearing of white wedding dresses continues to evolve from the beautiful designs by Dóra Hegedüs for men,9 the photography of Sølve Sundsbø,10 the upcycling of the Red Carpet Project,11 to the accents and folds in the fabric of more traditional wedding dress designers such as Reem Acra, Jenny Packham, and Monique Lhuillier, demonstrating that feminine power comes in shades of white.

Notes 1 See Friese (2001: 64). 2 The words from the Book of Common Prayer (1662), which are the wedding rites used during the Victorian period, suggest that sexual activity in marriage is for procreation reasons only: “Therefore is not by any to be enterprised . . . to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites . . . First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name. “Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body. “Also the woman is asked to ‘obey’ and ‘serve.’ ” Available online: https:// churchofengland.org/prayer-worship/worship/book-of-common-prayer/the-form-ofsolemnization-of-matrimony.aspx (accessed August 12, 2016).

98

98

SARAH HEATON

3 See Taylor (2010: 174–81, 248–51) on white mourning clothes. Fashionable women often wore white to mourn the death of a young child or presexual girl. It was also fashionable for children to wear white whatever the age of the mourned, while women wore white as accessories to their more traditional black mourning. See also Cunnington and Lucas (1972: 146–7, 246–8, 270–2) and Erhman (2011:10).

4 For ethnographer van Gennep, these are “rites of passage” (1960: 11), which for social anthropologist Barbara Meyerhoff are “moments of great anxiety” (1982: 109); for the literary critic, Maureen Montgomery debutante coming out rituals, and weddings in particular were a “time of crisis” (1998: 42), which for home economist Susanne Friese is a liminal space (2001: 56). Not all these moments of ritual are exclusively female; boys were also christened in white dresses, and a shroud is equally not gendered.

5 Nightgowns during the Victorian time were garments that were worn in a variety of situations. See Hughes (2005: 159).

6 Barbara Burnham and Seth Denbo, “A History of Pockets.” ’ www.vads.ac.uk/texts/ POCKETS/history_of_tie-on_pockets.pdf (accessed August 12, 2016).

7 See M. Slater (1983), H. Small (1996), or M. Camus (2004). 8 The vagina dentata or the “toothed vagina” is a myth that can be traced across cultures from the Greek mythological figure Scylla through to contemporary popular culture. See B. Creed (1993), C. Pagalia (1990), and J. Raitt (1980). The euphemistic link between pockets, lockets, and the vagina, explicit in the nursery rhyme “Lucy Locket Lost her Pocket” (1842) reinforce the sexual association.

9 “Dóra Hegedüs by Wanda Martin.” Available online: http://fuckingyoung.es/ dora-hegedus-by-wanda-martin/

10 http://www.artandcommerce.com/artists/photographers/Sølve-Sundsbø (accessed August 12, 2016).

11 http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10292/8559/ SS20140Submission_14.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed July 12, 2017).

References Atchinson, T. (2016), “Accessories to the Crime: Mapping Dickensian Trauma in Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities,” Fashion Theory 20 (4): 461–73. Bosossa, J. (2001), Ideas in Psychoanalysis: Hysteria, Cambridge: Icon Books. Brontë, C. (2006), Jane Eyre, London: Penguin. Brown, B. (2003), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, Chicago, IL: University Press of Chicago Press. Burnham, B., and S. Denbo, “A History of Pockets.” Available online: www.vads.ac.uk/ texts/POCKETS/history_of_tie-on_pockets.pdf (accessed August 12, 2016). Camus, M. (2004), Gender and Madness in the Novels of Charles Dickens, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Collins, W. (1998), The Woman in White, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge.

99

WAYWARD WEDDING DRESSES

99

Cunnington, P., and C. Lucas (1972), Costume for Births, Marriages and Death, London: Adam and Charles Black. Dickens, C. (1996) Great Expectations, Ware: Wordsworth. Ehrman, E. (2011), The Wedding Dress: 300 Years of Bridal Fashion, London: V&A Publishing. Friese, S. (2001), “The Wedding Dress,” in A. Guy, E. Green, and M. Banim (eds.), Through the Wardrobe: Women’s Relationships with Their Clothes, 53–69, Oxford: Berg. Garrison, L. (2011) Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Gilbert, S. M. and S. Gubar (2000), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale: University of Yale Press. Harvey, J. (1995), Men in Black, London: Reaktion. Heaton, S. (Forthcoming) “My Dress, My Shoes, My Jewellery: The Weaponry of Wedding Apparel Unveiled,” in L. Petican (ed.), Fashion and Contemporaneity, Boston: Brill. Hughes, C. (2005), Dressed in Fiction, Oxford: Berg. Le Fanu, J. S. (1872), Carmilla, Kindle Edition Marcus, S. (2007), Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moglen, H. (1984), Charlotte Brontë: The Conceived Self, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Montgomery, M. E. (1998), Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York, London: Routledge. Myerhoff, B. (1982), “Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox,” in V. Turner (ed.), Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual, 109–35, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Pagalia, C. (1990), Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rich, A. (1995), On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1866–78, New York and London: W. W. Norton. Sholwater, E. (1987), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, London: Penguin. Slater, M. (1983), Dickens and Women, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Small, H. (1996), Love’s Madness: Medicine, the novel, and Female Insanity, Oxford: Clarendon. Raitt, J. (1980), “The ‘Vagina Dentata’ and the ‘Immaculatus Uterus Divini Fontis,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48 (3): 415–31. Taylor, L. (2010), Mourning Dress, London: Routledge. The Telegraph (2011), “Duchess of Cambridge’s Dress Display Is Horrid, Cries Queen,” July 22. Available online: http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG8655222/ Kate-Middletons-dress-display-is-horrid-cries-Queen.html (accessed July 12, 2017). Van Gennep, A. ([1908] 1960), The Rites of Passage, trans. M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Warwick, A., and D. Cavallaro. (1998), Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body, Oxford: Berg. Wilcox, C. (ed.) (2015), Alexander McQueen, London: V&A Publishing.

100

101

5 FASHIONING REVENGE Costume, Crime, and Contamination in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s La Vengeance d’une femme Kasia Stempniak

An illustration in the popular French fashion journal La Mode illustrée from the year 1877 features a striking fancy dress costume: a woman wears a short, tiered dress with a black cape that resembles wings and is attached at the front with a broach in the shape of a bat, a bat’s head perched atop her hat, and bats decorating the tops of each of her shoes. Although fancy dress costumes, which were worn to masked or costume balls, were sometimes profiled in La Mode illustrée, the inclusion of this outfit lends it a degree of fashionability (Figure 5.1). By evoking the bat, the vampiric creature often depicted in nineteenth-century gothic fiction, the dress channels a type of horror trope.1 There were, however, other nineteenth-century examples of fancy dress costumes inspired by symbols associated with horror fiction; in 1863, for example, Princess Pauline Metternich famously wore a “diable noir” dress made by the preeminent dressmaker Charles Frederick Worth (Metternich 1922: 49). Although fancy dress was a playful way of engaging with fashion, clothing inspired by tropes of horror like the bat or the devil demonstrates the hold that certain “images of fear” had in the nineteenthcentury cultural imaginary.2 An ever-popular genre in the nineteenth century, horror fiction took a more corporeal turn later in the century with its increasing focus on the human (or nonhuman) body (Mighall 2003: 130). Because of the intimate relationship between the body and fashion, the clothed body became a way

102

102

KASIA STEMPNIAK

Figure 5.1 “Bat” fancy dress costume, La Mode illustrée, January 9, 1887, FIDM Library Special Collections.

to express or amplify a text’s fear factor. In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Red Masque of Death” (1842), the murderous haunting figure whose “vesture was dabbled in blood” is frighteningly “shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave” (Poe 2012: 259). Another example of clothing’s visceral potential for evoking horror is Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1885) in which a major character is murdered by her dead sister’s clothing. But as a web of social, economic, political, and aesthetic conventions negotiated through the clothed body, fashion provides more than just a veneer of fear to horror fiction. Like horror stories themselves that “recast into safe and communicable forms” society’s collective fears, fashion can function as a screen through which fears and anxieties are reflected (Tropp 1990: 4). One literary text that foregrounds this relationship between horror and fashion is French writer Barbey d’Aurevilly’s short story “La Vengeance d’une femme” (A Woman’s Vengeance). Published in 1874 as part of d’Aurevilly’s short story collection entitled Les Diaboliques (Diabolical Women), “La Vengeance d’une femme” is

103

FASHIONING REVENGE

103

set in July Monarchy (1830–48), Paris, and centers on a Spanish duchess who witnesses the gruesome murder of her lover Esteban at the hands of her husband, a Spanish duke. The duchess d’Arcos seeks retribution for the murder by hatching a rather creative plan for vengeance: she moves to Paris to become a prostitute to tarnish the aristocratic name of her husband, while at the same time she intentionally contracts and spreads venereal disease. Visceral scenes of horror pepper the text, from Esteban’s murder by knife-wielding slaves and body-shredding dogs to the duchess’s rotting syphilitic face. But there is another unsettling current of horror in the story. As an aristocrat, the main protagonist occupies the top echelon in society, whereas her position as a fille publique relegates her to the filth of the city. This doubleness of the virtuous/venal body of the duchess/prostitute is mediated in the text by clothing to reveal the principal horror of the story: the illusory nature of society’s carefully crafted class distinctions. The contamination the prostitute physically spreads mirrors her metaphorical contamination of class lines. For her plan for vengeance to succeed, the duchess must use clothing to veil and unveil her two paradoxical identities. The inherent tension between veiling and unveiling that manifests throughout “La Vengeance” echoes the very nature of horror itself. At its most basic level, horror fiction must strategically hide or show certain information. Manipulating what the reader knows and does not know makes clothing—a type of veiling—an effective leitmotif for evoking horror. While a rich scholarship exists on Barbey d’Aurevilly and his aesthetics of veiling, there has yet to be a concentrated focus on the way clothing, specifically women’s fashion, informs his fiction.3 Through close analyses of four key sartorial objects in the text, and by foregrounding Barbey’s own close relationship with the world of fashion and his perpetual fascination with the genre of horror, this chapter argues that fashion in “La Vengeance” not only propels the horror plot forward but also foregrounds anxiety over urban modernity and female sexuality.

Barbey d’Aurevilly: From “Prince of Darkness” to fashion columnist Novelist, critic, and journalist, Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–89) was known for his literary exploration of demonism, sorcery, and debauchery that would send chills down the spines of even a modern reading public.4 In the preface to Les Diaboliques, he bluntly affirms his fascination with Satan, writing that he “believes in the Devil and in his influence in the world.”5 A perplexing figure, Barbey was a staunch Catholic and royalist with a penchant for incorporating violent and Sadean-inspired scenes in his writing to such an extent that, in 1874, he was put on trial for “contempt of public morality” (Petit 1974a: 7) for the publication of Les Diaboliques.6 Barbey’s particular brand of horror drew from

104

104

KASIA STEMPNIAK

romanticism’s obsession with evil and symbolism’s cult of macabre eroticism. Two strains of romanticism echo in particular throughout Barbey’s oeuvre: the genre of the fantastique of the 1820s and 1830s that explored the supernatural and occult and its offshoot the frénétique, or “frenetic,” genre that featured intense violence (Araujo 2004: 813). Alongside these strong romanticist overtones, Barbey’s admiration for Honoré de Balzac reverberates throughout his writing. Both writers illuminated the fractures of bourgeois society and Barbey’s “La Vengeance” shares several striking similarities with Balzac’s novella “La Fille aux yeux d’or” (The Girl with Golden Eyes).7 Symbolism, with its fascination with death and decay, also informs Barbey’s writing.8 The satanical women and crime-ridden short stories in Les Diaboliques are examples of the “conte cruel,” a type of short story pioneered by both Barbey and the symbolist writer Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (Petit 1974b: 9). Barbey’s fascination with the chthonic elements of bourgeois life emerges perhaps most noticeably in “La Vengeance” where the figure of the prostitute becomes a nexus of sexuality, crime, and urban modernity. Barbey’s provocative explorations of evil are often intensified through precise sartorial details. Les Diaboliques is filled with characters who wear or possess macabre sartorial objects, from an emerald gold bracelet with a clasp full of human hair, to a long black satin “panther” dress, to a belt made of small human skulls. The same writer who would sign letters to his friends with the name “Prince des ténèbres,” meaning “Prince of Darkness” (Buet 1891: 48) also wrote regular fashion columns. As a fashion journalist, Barbey was particularly well equipped to bring attention to clothing in his novels. He wrote his first article on fashion in Moniteur de la Mode in 1843 and wrote a regular fashion column “Modes” for the newspaper Le Constitutionnel under the assumed feminine name Maximiliènne de Syrène (Lehmann 2000: 85). His columns chronicle seasonal fashion changes in Paris, including the specific garments, hairstyles, milliners, and dressmakers in style, as well as stray philosophical musings on fashion, like this statement from 1845:  “Imagination, of which Fashion is the expression in the exterior details of life, comes from Beauty and must always remember its origin” (Barbey 1845: 5).9 Some of his fictional works also appeared in fashion journals, including one of the Les Diaboliques stories, “Les dessous de cartes d’une partie de whist” (The Underside of a Game of Whist), which was published in La Mode in 1850. Barbey himself was known for wearing flamboyant and eccentric clothing. Unlike Baudelaire, who famously wore the male uniform of the nineteenth century, the habit noir, Barbey preferred to follow his own fashion trends.10 His wardrobe included corsets, capes, and pants of vibrant colors and patterns including “zebra-striped or scaled like the skin of a tiger or serpent” (Silvestre 1861:1).11 Barbey’s fashion journalism along with his unique clothing choices demonstrates not only his interest in culturally accepted sartorial norms but also a resistance to them. This paradoxical approach to fashion calls to mind the nineteenth-century

105

FASHIONING REVENGE

105

dandy’s approach to fashion. It is perhaps unsurprising that Barbey wrote widely on dandyism and, in 1845, even published a biography of the legendary English dandy Beau Brummel, entitled Du dandysme et de George Brummell, the first text in French to define dandyism (Lehmann 2000: 358). Barbey stresses that dandyism is not simply about “a suit of clothes walking around by itself,” but rather about “the particular manner of wearing these clothes” (1887: 25). The dandy, according to Barbey, carefully cultivates a unique and refined sense of style that goes beyond the materiality of clothing to encompass an embodied approach to fashion. In “La Vengeance,” the principal narrator of the text is Robert de Tressignies, whose sartorial elegance and blasé attitude make him the embodiment of the dandy. He is described as “a strongly intellectualized libertine” and more specifically un gant jaune, or “yellow glove”—a popular term used during the 1830s and 1840s for dandies.12 In the beginning of “La Vengeance,” we find Robert engaging in the typical nocturnal activities of the July Monarchy-era dandy: dining at the Café de Paris and people watching from café Tortoni. In Du dandysme, Barbey conceived of dandyism as a “way of existing” (25) as an ontological and embodied phenomenon that brings to the fore the social and intellectual aspects of dress, and indeed, Robert’s polished appearance and his attention to the details of the duchess’s clothing evinces this type of sartorial awareness.13 With his roving flâneur eye looking out from the Café de Paris balustrade, Robert catches sight of another archetypal figure of the nineteenth century—the prostitute.

The great (contaminating) “social evil” In the beginning of “La Vengeance d’une femme,” the narrator implicitly connects prostitution with modern crime. He bemoans what he considers a lack of literary depictions of modern era crimes, specifically crimes of “extreme civilization that are, certainly, more awful than those of extreme barbarism by their refinement, the corruption they imply, and by their superior degree of intellectualism.”14 With this prefatory remark, the narrator recounts the tale of “a vengeance of the most horrifying originality” and what he calls a “civilized crime”: vengeance through prostitution.15 The setting of “La Vengeance” during the July Monarchy is particularly appropriate, considering that prostitution came under increasing administrative scrutiny during this period (Clayson 2003: 1). Spurred by discourses on public hygiene in the 1830s and 1840s, hygienists like Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet sought ways of pathologizing and regulating prostitution.16 Initially focused on the spread of disease in Paris’s sewers, Parent-Duchâtelet would go on to conduct a lengthy study on prostitution, which was published in 1836 under the title De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris. As Charles Bernheimer observes, ParentDuchâtelet’s work was interconnected in that he saw prostitution as “another

106

106

KASIA STEMPNIAK

kind of sewer, a place of biological decomposition and morbid decay” (1997: 15). But Parent-Duchâtelet did not advocate the eradication of prostitution; rather, he argued for containing its spread of disease and vice. The threat of contamination from syphilis, described in the nineteenth century as the “ ‘new plague’ of Europe” (Harsin 1985: 251) undergirded these regulatory measures.17 The image of the prostitute as a vessel of vice and disease became so pervasive that literary productions of the time, like “La Vengeance,” often used the nineteenth-century prostitute as a cipher for the malaise and decay of urban modernity.18 In the preface to his text on crime and debauchery in late nineteenth-century Paris, the French writer Charles Desmaze gives the following report: “Today in Paris, it [prostitution] has spread everywhere, inhabits all streets, dresses up in all sorts of costumes, dictating their cut and fashion” (1881: iv–v).19 Writing in 1881, Desmaze conceived prostitution as an omnipotent, contagious force that had spread both geographically and sartorially. Desmaze’s play on words with the French expression revêtir un costume, meaning “to dress up,” reveals his unease with the (sartorial) spread of prostitution: not only had prostitutes come to function as trendsetters of the latest fashions but also they now appeared under the guise of different types of “costumes,” that is, classes. Indeed, distinguishing between prostitutes and the femme honnêtes became an increasingly difficult problem, and, since clothing mediated the prostitute’s visibility, fashion was subject to increased scrutiny. The rise of department stores and the fashion press during the second half of the nineteenth century rendered less evident sartorial distinctions between different classes of women. Caricatures and plays parodied the ambiguity between the regular woman and the streetwalker.20 Morality, then, became a central preoccupation in discourses on fashion in the nineteenth century. The subject even preoccupied Parent-Duchâtelet who devoted a chapter in his text on prostitution to discussing whether or not prostitutes should wear uniforms to better identify them. He cites various historical practices, from antiquity to the Middle Ages, wherein costumes were required for courtesans. In the end, he argues against any sartorial distinctions and frames his argument in terms of contagion: “It is now known that giving prostitutes a distinctive mark would mean infecting public places with signs of mobile vice” (1836: 362).21 For ParentDuchâtelet, clothing has the power to “infect;” he sees the prostitute’s body and her clothing as agents of contamination.

Outfitting vice In “La Vengeance,” Barbey pays close attention to the politics of dressing the prostitute. He underscores the importance of appearance for prostitutes, describing their dresses as “the tool of these women workers.”22 The first time the duchess appears, she strolls down the boulevard wearing a dress “of saffron satin with shades of gold,” resplendent with pleats and folds that “cry and gleam”

107

FASHIONING REVENGE

107

as she walks.23 By evoking the color of gold coins, the dress reinforces the link between body and commerce, that is, prostitution. The commodified body of the prostitute is made explicit later in the text when the narrator describes the duchess’s home as a “boutique of flesh.”24 The striking color of her gown is repeated throughout the text, sometimes as gold and other times as “the yellow dress.”25 The yellow color detail is doubly important for its historical associations with prostitution. The narrator tells us that the dress was of a color “adored by young Roman women.”26 In his history on the legislation of prostitution, nineteenthcentury French lawyer Sabatier recounts how ancient Roman officials ordered prostitutes to wear yellow (1830:  3). Historically associated with the figure of the prostitute, the yellow dress unveils her status as fille publique and links her to a network of vice. Furthermore, the duchess’s outfit is fully accessorized: she wears a “magnificent Turkish shawl with large white, scarlet, and gold stripes” and a white hat with a long red feather hanging down the side of it.27 The shawl, fashionable among middle-class women during the period, adds an exotic and erotic element to her ensemble through its association with Turkey (Hiner 2010: 79).28 But the particular hat style worn by the duchess draws the narrator into a digression on its fashionability. We see Barbey’s keen fashion chronicler’s eye emerge here, as he explains that hats worn with a single feather descending from the top were called saule pleureur, or “weeping willow” and were popular during the July Monarchy.29 Indeed, a fashion plate from the June 1842 issue of Le Follet confirms the style’s popularity.30 In the illustration, the figure on the left wears a hat of pink crêpe with “a magnificent weeping willow tinged with pink” (1842: 539; Figure 5.2).31 Robert observes that on the duchess, this hat style is stripped of its Romanticist charm and “expressed something other than melancholy.”32 Robert goes as far to say that the red feather in her “saule pleureur” was “splendid in its bad taste.”33 The way the duchess interprets the style demonstrates the shifting signals inherent to fashion. Although it was not uncommon for prostitutes to imitate middle-class fashion (Walkowitz 1980:  26), Barbey underscores the importance of nineteenth-century discourses on fashionability while at the same time alluding to their manipulability. Robert notes the incongruity of her “luxurious finery” on this particularly seedy stretch of the boulevard.34 As a narrative mechanism, the gold dress piques Robert and successfully lures him to her brothel. Her garish display of clothing marks her as a prostitute and veils her aristocratic social status. The duchess’s spatial positioning in the city emphasizes the veiling motif that is woven throughout the story. The duchess, after all, specifically chose Paris as the location for her plan. Casting her vengeance in performative terms, she notes that Paris “was the better stage for showcasing my infamy and vengeance.”35 She leads Robert from the boulevard to the rue Basse-du-Rempart, a poorly lit back alley that existed during the July Monarchy but was demolished

108

108

KASIA STEMPNIAK

Figure 5.2 Fashion plate, “Robe en barège gris; corsage ouvert par devant, ayant des plis depuis l’épaule jusqu’en bas, manches larges jusqu’en bas; chapeau en crêpe rose garni dessous la passe d’une ruche en tulle illusion et de roses à gauche. Il y a un magnifique saule pleureur nuancé en rose; cheveux en bandeaux lisses; ombrelle couleur groseille,” Le Follet, June 1, 1842. Reprinted in Court Magazine and Monthly Critic, IX, 1842. Google Books.

109

FASHIONING REVENGE

109

under Baron Haussmann’s renovations in the 1850s. Barbey takes advantage of the pre-Haussmann Paris setting, with its back alleys and crime-ridden narrow streets. The labyrinthine city emerges as the text threads the gold of the dress with the black of the night, creating a tension between concealment (shadows, night) and exhibition (street lights, the gold dress). When the duchess first turns into the back street, described in the text as “the Devil’s principality,” Robert loses sight of her only to discover that her golden dress has become a sort of beacon light, “the dress of gold, lost for a moment in the shadows of that black hole, shined again as she passed under the light of the only lamppost.”36 The Parisian topography that wraps around the duchess acts as a type of architectural veiling that echoes one particular reality of the modern city, that of concealing prostitution. The duchess is not necessarily a clandestine prostitute; after all, the plaque outside her home/brothel states her full aristocratic name above the word for her “ignoble profession.”37 But despite her ambiguous position, the manner in which she carries out her work requires a certain level of subterfuge.38 Like the insoumise, or clandestine prostitute, the duchess/prostitute uses clothing to deceive and elude. Charles Bernheimer elaborates on the importance of sartorial strategies for the clandestine prostitute: “Through strategies of camouflage, role playing, and fictionalizing, the clothed body of the insoumise becomes a means to deceive the policing authority that attempts to translate it into knowledge” (1997: 26–27). Although there is no police presence in the short story, Robert must still decipher the duchess through her clothing and geographic positioning. As a narrative device, her gold dress unveils the duchess’s association with vice. The urban streets and shadows underscore the text’s chief leitmotif of suspense in the text—that of veiling.

Infecting fashions: Revenge and contamination This tension between concealing and revealing is at the heart of the notion of revenge. Revenge must remain secret for a period of time before it can be revealed; it also depends on the spread of information or actions. The duchess not only contaminates through her venal body but also “contaminates” the sanctity of the nobility. Outside of her home/brothel, she places a plaque with her full name written on it, the Duchess d’Arcos de Sierra Leone, so that all may know and see that this wife of the illustrious duke of Spain now participates in “prostitution of the lowest level.”39 Images of mud proliferate in the text to evoke how the duchess drags her husband’s name through the literal and metaphorical mud of Paris. During a climactic scene when the duchess unveils her plan to Robert, she confirms the connection between prostitution, contamination, and

110

110

KASIA STEMPNIAK

hygiene: “I swore to myself that I would plunge this name into the most infected mud, that I would transform it into shame, filth, into excrement.”40 By fashioning her husband’s name into “excrement,” the duchess makes explicit the contaminating power of revenge. French philosopher René Girard frames vengeance as an agent of contamination: “every time it [vengeance] turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social body” (1995: 14–15). But to execute the moral and physical contamination of the social body, the duchess must engage in a game of (un)veiling. As Kris Vassilev explains, the one who avenges must occupy two positions, victim and avenger, both of which must be reconciled through a metaphorical masking (2005: 469). Two sartorial objects illuminate the infectious nature of revenge. The first, an accessory, is an important narrative device in “La Vengeance.” While Robert and the duchess are in the throes of intercourse, he notices that she is wearing a bracelet on her arm with a portrait of a man on it and demands to know whom she wears on her arm. The duchess then unveils her entire plan and explains how the bracelet functions as an agent of revenge and contamination. She describes the bracelet as her “resource,” her “circle of fire that burns me to the marrow” and fuels her thirst for vengeance.41 By having her husband imprinted on the accessory, the duchess carries a portable reminder of the murder. At the narrative level, it is the duchess’s brandishing of the bracelet that leads her to unveil her plan for vengeance. Before, she explains, she would try to tell her story to her customers but they would silence her: “I wanted to tell it to all who came here! I wanted to tell it to the whole world . . . they interrupted me or they left.”42 The bracelet also reinforces the duchess’s binary quality by revealing the oxymoron of “obscenity-purity” in “La Vengeance” (Crouzet 1988: 91). We learn that before the murder, the duchess exhibited an almost “monastic piety” and would wear a crucifix.43 But now her portrait bracelet or “circle of fire” has replaced her crucifix.44 According to Michel Crouzet, there is no middle ground for the duchess: “The absolute love of the duchess can only convert itself into absolute hate” (86).45 By focusing on these two binaries—duchess and prostitute—Barbey seizes on the “inherent doubleness of nineteenth-century society” (Kohlke and Gutleben 2010: 7). The second sartorial object the duchess uses to fashion her vengeance is a dress literally contaminated by crime and vice. To prove the veracity of her account of Esteban’s death, the duchess shows Robert the dress she wore the day of the murder. The dress “in pieces, stained with blood in several places” bears scars, like a human body.46 Clinging to the torn dress, the duchess describes how the dress becomes the site of mediation between her two identities: When the former duchess comes back and the prostitute disgusts me, I twist myself in this dress, my soiled body wallows in its red folds that still burn me, and my vengeance revives.47

111

FASHIONING REVENGE

111

Using igneous imagery, she describes the embodied experience of wearing the dress as if it were a cloak of revenge. By touching and wrapping herself in the dress, the duchess evokes the tactile nature of fashion and its potential for unleashing memories. Materially contaminated by vice, the dress memorializes the murder. The torn dress is pivotal both in propelling the story’s horror plot and by articulating the contamination of class divisions. In Fashioning the Frame, Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick posit the relationship between the clothing and body in terms of contamination: Whilst it [dress] regulates corporeality, dress cannot claim to transcend the body but is ineluctably attached to it, carries the taint of an alliance with the material and is indeed literally soiled by the body’s leaky surfaces. (1998: 138) If we recall the gold outfit the duchess wore that historically and geographically associated her with vice and the portrait-bracelet with the imprinted face of her murdering husband, we see that all these objects are linked to vice. The torn dress is the only garment materially tainted by crime that is also in a state of disintegration. The dress is evocative of the term used by conservators, “inherent vice” wherein a garment whose inherent qualities, either its fabric or dyes, cause it to disintegrate (Scaturro and Peterson 2014: 235). That the dress falls apart, corrupted by its association with vice, mirrors the duchess’s own corrupting inherent morality. At the end of the story, the duchess putrefies as she is devoured by syphilis: “her body rotted to the bone” and “one of her eyes had jumped out brusquely from her eye socket one day, like an old coin that has fallen . . . the other liquefied.”48 Curiously, it is not the blood-stained dress that provokes a visceral reaction from Robert; as we will see, it is a simple shawl the duchess veils herself in that horrifies him.

Veiling ambiguity An epigraph to another short story in Les Diaboliques, “Les dessous de cartes d’une partie de whist” (Beneath the Cards of a Game of Whist), highlights the sartorial dimension of veiling and narrative. A woman asks a storyteller whether he has been mocking her and her friends with his story, to which the man responds, “Is there not, Madame, a type of tulle we call tulle illusion?”49 The storyteller’s sartorial metaphor homes in on the veiling inherent to storytelling. Susan Rossbach rightly points out that Barbey frequently used the leitmotif of veiling, including in another short story in Les Diaboliques entitled “Bonheur dans le crime” (The Happiness of Crime) (2009: 276–277). The tulle illusion metaphor evokes the tension between not seeing/knowing and creating illusions at the surface. This epistemological uncertainty creates a sense of suspense and fear

112

112

KASIA STEMPNIAK

central to horror fiction. Robert thinks he will spend the night with a ravishingly dressed prostitute, but in reality he ends up taking part in a “crime civilisé.” The veiling motif threaded through the text creates tension around the story’s insidious source of horror: the threat posed by the inherent duality of its female character whose body is both (pious) duchess and (venal) prostitute. Once inside her home, the duchess takes off her fully accessorized outfit and slips into an assortment of veils that both reveal and conceal her body. Perhaps invoking Salome’s dance of the veils that preceded her beheading of John the Baptist, the duchess’s veils shock Robert. He describes them as “insidious” and “monstrously provoking.”50 He finds her partially clothed body scandalous and muses that it would have been less shocking had she been naked since “nudity is chaste.”51 Robert makes the traditional art historical link between “nudity with purity and the garbed body with earthly knowledge or vanity” (Cavallaro and Warwick 1998: 128). While the unclothed body is one of virtue, representing an Edenic ideal, clothes contaminate the body with vice. Rather than simply equating nakedness with virtue and clothing with that of vice, Barbey introduces ambiguity into the relationship between body and clothing. As the duchess explains her story, wrapped in her shawl, Robert begins to think that “she has reassumed her nobility” and that wrapped in the shawl, “the prostitute of the boulevard was now completely erased.”52 He goes on to directly evoke the mask saying, “the mask had fallen, and the true face, the real person reappeared.”53 That a simple shawl transforms the duchess from prostitute to aristocrat and makes apparent the contamination of classes evinces the power of clothing to signal identity shifts. Seeing this ambiguity, Robert cannot make sense of the duality of the duchess/prostitute and asks if it is not an “illusion.” At thirty years of age, he has traveled around the Orient, where we are told he “had bought the most beautiful girls in the markets of Andrinople.”54 These exotic details about Robert’s Turkish adventures suggest that he has witnessed his fair share of vice and debauchery and would thus find little to shock him in Paris. But when he discovers that the woman he espied on the boulevard is a duchess willingly working as a prostitute for pure vengeance purposes, he is stunned by “the horrible sublime” of her capacity for vengeance, which he also describes as the “sublime of hell.”55 The duchess’s shawl provides a vivid example of how clothing in horror fiction does more than just provide visceral details of blood or violence; it can reveal fears and anxieties. In Belgian artist Félicien Rops’s illustration for “La Vengeance,” he conserves this trope of veiling by showing the duchess veil part of her body with her raised skirts. Commissioned to provide engravings in 1884 for a second edition of Les Diaboliques, Rops took on the challenge by depicting a series of images of women representative of the femme fatale in each story in Les Diaboliques. Rops illustrates the moment when the duchess enters her “boutique of flesh,” where her body and clothing have a dominating and sensory presence:  “She filled

113

FASHIONING REVENGE

113

Figure  5.3 Félicien Rops, La Vengeance d’une femme, 1884, héliogravure retouchée, 24 x 16.7 cm. Coll. musée Félicien Rops, Province de Namur, inv. PER E878.1.P. © Musée Rops.

the entryway with her broad shoulders and the ample, rustling of her dress”56 (Figure 5.3). In the image, the duchess appears on the threshold between the exterior and interior of her home; her body Amazon-like. Her broad shoulders and sinewy arm muscles emerge from her corseted bodice. Unlike Barbey’s duchess who wears a shawl and a hat, Rops shows her bare-shouldered, perhaps underlining the fact that she is a prostitute. In the foreground, fabric drapes over a coffin, perhaps referencing the tattered and bloodied dress the duchess shows to Robert. The coffin, of course, alludes to the certain death the duchess/prostitute will meet. Although in the illustration the duchess does not wear a yellow dress, Rops does preserve the contrast between light and dark that emerges in the text with the bright bronze lampposts and the black of her dress. Not only does he play with veiling in his illustration, but he also alludes to the duchess/prostitute doubling. The inclusion of the four coats of arms that adorn the interior of her home/brothel are vestiges of the noble and aristocratic heritage of the duchess.

114

114

KASIA STEMPNIAK

Like “La Vengeance,” Rops’s illustration uses clothing to reference the text’s central leitmotifs of veiling and opposing binaries.

Fashion and horror: Haunting presences The duchess/prostitute binary that manifests in “La Vengeance” through its discourse on clothing and contamination hints at the frail and ailing structures of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society. But the binary also presents a temporal disjunction. The prostitute—the nineteenth-century figure of urban modernity par excellence—seems opposed to the ancien régime vision that the figure of the duchess inspires. In the text, the duchess is also described as being “not a woman of the current time.”57 Although the duchess belongs to a past order of Spanish aristocracy, her courtesan life in the streets of Paris situate her as a cipher of Parisian modernity. Her attachment to the past gives her a spectral quality, as if she were from a previous century, haunting the contemporary boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris. Barbey pushes the relationship between the modern and the past even further by situating the duchess within an intertextual genealogy of historical and mythological sexually transgressive femme fatales. Through Barbey’s referential language, which Alain Toumayan points out acts as a mechanism of “concealment and revealment” (1994: 40), the duchess emerges as a palimpsestic figure. He compares her, in several ekphrastic passages, to Horace Vernet’s painting of Judith who famously beheaded Holofernes and to the courtesan in Paolo Veronese’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. Barbey’s use of visual references were not uncommon in the symbolist aesthetic where, according to scholar John Welchman, “commutivity between visuality and textuality” was a defining characteristic (1997:83). The duchess is also compared to mythological and historical femme fatales, including the Gorgon, Messalina, and Agrippina. These last two women, the former famous for her promiscuity and the latter for violence, reinforce the duchess’s double position of nobility and a prostitute. By connecting the duchess to this layered network of femme fatales, the text creates a type of “museum of woman-monsters” (Carter 1979: 25). The notion of the palimpsest, a surface that both shows and hides text, brings to bear the tensions between past and present in “La Vengeance.” This gesturing toward the past, while still being rooted in the present, echoes the inherent spectral quality of both horror fiction and fashion. Cavarello and Warwick envision fashion as a text that contains different temporal layers: Fashion capitalizes at all times on this interaction of presence and absence, by grafting each of its novel texts upon prior narratives, in such a way that none of these is either left unadulterated or utterly canceled. Fashion’s text, then, is essentially a palimpsest. (1998: 153)

115

FASHIONING REVENGE

115

The “presence and absence” of fashion referenced here evokes the idea of veiling and unveiling that structures “La Vengeance.” By positing fashion as a palimpsest, as a constant “grafting” of temporal layers, we see how fashion is in a perpetual state of haunting. This spectral quality also characterizes horror fiction. Literary critic Ken Gelder locates horror at the intersection of the “modern” and the “archaic” (2000: 3). This formulation of horror emerges in “La Vengeance,” where references to past and present are constantly articulated in a way that echoes Charles Baudelaire’s definition of “modernity” as both the transitory and eternal. Whether in the form of fashion (the Turkish shawl and weeping willow hat) or in the urban landscape (Paris before and after Haussmann), Barbey draws attention to the constantly shifting temporality of modernity. These temporal tensions also play out in a more emotive sense in “La Vengeance.” After leaving the duchess, Robert is haunted by the sight of yellow dresses. Despite his shock over the “sublime of hell” that he witnessed, the duchess still exerts a hold on him: “If I saw that blasted yellow dress again . . . I would perhaps be fool enough to follow it again.”58 The duchess/prostitute binary has collapsed for Robert into one metonymic designation—fashion. Robert continues to fetishize her yellow dress: “All yellow dresses that he saw made him dream . . . he now loved yellow dresses, which he had previously always hated.”59 For Robert, fashion produces sensations. This affective quality was a key component of Barbey’s brand of horror. Indeed, the “conte cruel” genre that Barbey developed was meant “to produce a sensation of horror through the depiction of human or natural atrocities” (Cummiskey 1992: 109). It is important to note that the word “horror” derives from the Latin word horrere meaning “to shudder,” an etymologic fact that privileges the role of affect (Stevenson 2010: 846). It is fitting, then, that horror, a genre that depends on provoking sensations, so often incorporates fashion, itself a sensory phenomenon. Fashion’s visual, aural, and tactile nature renders it an appropriate and effective barometer of horror. From playful and explicit allusions to horror like the Mode illustrée bat costume or the subtle yet disturbing interaction between clothing and narrative in “La Vengeance,” fashion and horror merge in myriad ways. That fashion and horror continue to fuse in novel ways into the twenty-first century is hardly surprising.

Notes 1

See Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) for the association between horror, bats, and vampires, but bats appeared in earlier horror fiction including William Beckford’s 1782 Gothic novel Vathek and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1814 novella “The Golden Pot.” In Dante’s Inferno (1320), the devil famously wears bat wings in hell.

2

Tropp uses the term “images of fear” to refer to tropes of horror from Victorian fiction that have become ingrained in popular culture.

116

116

KASIA STEMPNIAK

3 Ulrich Lehmann’s Tigersprung (2000) does address some of Barbey’s writings on fashion, see pp. 82–6. Barbey’s own personal approach to fashion is discussed in Marie-Christine Natta’s chapter “Le vieil or et l’habit noir (Barbey d’Aurevilly et Baudelaire)” (2010).

4 Jacques Petit and Philippe Berthier revitalized scholarship on Barbey in the 1960s and 1970s and contributed several formidable volumes on his writing. Since the 1990s, “La Vengeance” has been analyzed by several scholars including in Kris Vassilev’s essays, Susanne Rossbach’s essay on veiling and the dandy, and Charles Bernheimer, who devotes an entire chapter to a psychoanalytical reading of the text in Figures of Ill Repute.

5 “L’auteur de ceci qui croit au Diable et à ses influences dans le monde,” 49. All quotations from “La Vengeance” come from Barbey d’Aurevilly (1999). All translations in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted.

6 Barbey was accused of “l’outrage à la morale publique et aux bonnes moeurs” but would later be acquitted.

7 Alain Toumayan outlines these similarities in his article “Barbey D’Aurevilly, Balzac, and ‘La Vengeance d’une femme.’ ”

8 Barbey influenced Octave Mirbeau and Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel A rebours features a highly prized copy of Les Diaboliques.

9 “la Fantaisie dont la Mode est l’expression dans les détails extérieurs de la vie, procède encore de la Beauté et doit rappeler son origine.”

10 11 12 13 14

Baudelaire dedicated his poem “L’Imprévu” to Barbey. “zébré ou écaillé comme une peau de tigre ou de serpent.” “un libertin fortement intellectualisé,” 313–14. “C’est une manière d’être.” “les crimes de l’extrême civilisation sont, certainement, plus atroces que ceux de l’extrême barbarie par le fait de leur raffinement, de la corruption qu’il supposent, et de leur degré supérieur d’intellectualité,” 312.

15 “un crime civilisé,” 312. 16 For more on prostitution and the nineteenth century, see Corbin (1978) and Clayson (2003).

17 Regulative measures usually took the form of police registration and regular medical examinations. Bernheimer notes that syphilis was considered “the cornerstone of the entire regulatory edifice” (1997: 25).

18 The trope of syphilitic contamination pervades nineteenth-century French literature, from Émile Zola’s Nana (1880) or Alphonsine in Adolphe Tabarant’s Virus d’amour (1886) or Guy de Maupassant’s Le Lit 29 (1884).

19 “Aujourd’hui, à Paris, elle se répand partout, peuple toutes les rues, revêt tous les costumes, dont elle règle la coupe et la mode.”

20 Many caricatures, like C. J. Culliford’s 1865 illustration of a clergyman mistaking a middle-class woman for a prostitute, emerged. See Nead (2000: 63).

21 “Il est maintenant reconnu qu’en donnant aux prostituées une marque distinctive, ce serait infecter les lieux publics d’enseignes ambulantes du vice.”

22 “l’outil de ces travailleuses,” 321.

117

FASHIONING REVENGE

117

23 “sa robe de satin safran, aux tons d’or,” “miroiter et crier les plis glacés et luisants,” 315.

24 25 26 27 28

“cette boutique de chair,” 344. “sa robe jaune,” 319. “cette couleur aimée des jeunes Romaines,” 315. “un magnifique châle turc à larges raies blanches, écarlate et or,” 315. In Accessories to Modernity, Susan Hiner traces the rise and fall of the cashmere shawl in nineteenth-century France, especially its role in the 1830s and 1840s as an exotic sartorial item initially imported from countries like Turkey and North Africa.

29 “à cette époque les femmes portaient des plumes penchées sur leurs chapeaux, qu’elles appelaient des plumes en saule pleureur,” 315.

30 My thanks to Julia Petrov for bringing this fashion plate to my attention. 31 “un magnifique saule pleureur nuancé en rose.” 32 “mais rien ne pleurait en cette femme; et la sienne exprimait bien autre chose que la mélancolie,”315.

33 34 35 36

“splendide de mauvais goût,” 315. “vit avec surprise tout ce luxe piaffant,” 316. “une meilleure scène pour l’étalage de mon infamie et de ma vengeance,” 342. “La robe d’or, perdue un instant dans les ténèbres de ce trou noir, après avoir dépassé l’unique réverbère qui les tatouait d’un point lumineux, reluisit au loin,” 316.

37 Barbey does not explicitly say “prostitute” here. 38 Although “La Vengeance” takes place in the July Monarchy, Barbey published the story in the 1870s, when clandestine prostitution was much more pervasive in Parisian society, in comparison to the 1830s and 1840s. See Harsin (1985: 242).

39 “de la prostitution la plus basse,” 327. 40 “je me jurai que, ce nom, je le tremperais dans la plus infecte des boues, que je le changerais en honte, en immondice, en excrément,” 338.

41 “cercle de feu, qui me brûle jusqu’à la moelle,” 339. 42 “Je voudrais la dire à tous ceux qui viennent ici! Je voudrais la raconter à toute la terre . . . ils m’interrompaient ou ils s’en allaient,” 328–29.

43 “elle était pieuse, pieuse d’une piété quasi monastique,” 348. 44 “j’ai ce cercle de feu,” 339. 45 My translation, “l’amour absolu de la duchesse ne peut que se convertir en haine absolue.”

46 “une robe en lambeaux, teinte de sang à plusieurs places,” 337. 47 “l’ancienne duchesse revient et que la fille m’épouvante, je m’entortille dans cette robe, je vautre mon corps souillé dans ses plis rouges, toujours brûlants pour moi, et j’y réchauffe ma vengeance,” 337.

48 “cariée jusqu’aux os . . . Un de ses yeux avait sauté un jour brusquement de son orbite et était tombé à ses pieds comme un gros sou . . . L’autre s’était liquéfié et fondu,” 350.

49 “Est-ce qu’il n’y a pas, madame, une espèce de tulle qu’on appelle du tulle illusion?” 191. The term tulle illusion refers to a light, airy, and somewhat transparent silk.

118

118

KASIA STEMPNIAK

50 “la transparence insidieuse des voiles et l’osé de la chair;” “monstrueusement provocante,” 322.

51 “la nudité est chaste,” 321. 52 “elle avait repris sa noblesse,” “la fille du boulevard était alors entièrement effacée,” 332.

53 “on eût juré d’un masque tombé, et que la vraie figure, la vraie personne, reparaissait,” 332.

54 “[il] avait marchandé les plus belles filles sur le marché d’Andrinople,” 320. 55 “c’est le sublime de l’enfer,” 339. 56 “elle emplit de la largeur de ses épaules et de l’ampleur foisonnante et frissonnate de sa robe,” 317.

57 “n’était pas une femme de ce temps-ci,” 348. 58 “Si je revoyais flotter sa diable de robe jaune . . . je serais peut-être encore assez bête pour la suivre,” 346.

59 “Toutes les robes jaunes qu’il rencontrait le faisaient rêver . . . Il aimait à présent les robes jaunes, qu’il avaient toujours détestées,” 346.

References Araujo, N. (2004), “Nodier, Charles 1780–1844,” in C. J. Murray (ed.), Encyclopedia of Romantic Era, vol. 2, 812–13, New York: Fitzroy Dearborn. Barbey d’Aurevilly, J. (1845), “Critique de la mode,” Le Constitutionnel (September 1): 5. Available online: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k667195w.r=18450109 (accessed June 22, 2016). Barbey d’Aurevilly, J. (1887), Du Dandysme et de G. Brummell, Paris: Alphonse Lemerre. Barbey d’Aurevilly, J. ([1874] 1999), Les Diaboliques, Paris: Livre de Poche. Bernheimer, C. (1997), Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in NineteenthCentury France, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Buet, C. (1891), Barbey d’Aurevilly: impressions et souvenirs, Paris: Albert Savine. Carter, A. (1979), The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, London: Virago. Cavallaro, D., and A. Warwick (eds.) (1998), Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body, Oxford: Berg. Clayson, H. (2003), Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute. Corbin, A. (1978), Les Filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution, Paris: Aubier Montaigne. Crouzet, M. (1988), “Barbey d’Aurevilly et l’oxymore: ou la rhétorique du diable,” in M. Crouzet (ed.), Barbey d’Aurevilly, L’Ensorcelée, Les Diaboliques. La Chose sans nom, 83–98, Paris: SEDES. Cummiskey, G. (1992), The Changing Face of Horror: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century French Fantastic Short Story, New York: Peter Lang Publishing. “Descriptions des planches” (1842), Le Follet June 1. Available online: https://books. google.ca/books?id=IkAFAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&vq=saule%2520pleu reur%2520chapeau&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed July 9, 2016). Desmaze, C. (1881), Le Crime et la débauche à Paris: Le divorce, Paris: Charpentier.

119

FASHIONING REVENGE

119

Gelder, K. (2000), “Introduction: The Field of Horror,” in K. Gelder (ed.), The Horror Reader, 1–8, London: Routledge. Girard, R. (1995), Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory, London: Athlone Press. Harsin, J. (1985), Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hiner, S. (2010), Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in NineteenthCentury France, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kohlke, M.-L., and C. Gutleben (2010), “The (Mis)Shapes of Neo-Victorian Gothic: Continuations, Adaptations, Transformations,” in M.-L. Kohlke and C. Gutleben (eds.), Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the ReImagined Nineteenth Century, 1–48, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lehmann, U. (2000), Tigersprung: Fashions in Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Metternich-Sándor, P. (1922). Eclairs du passé (1859–1870), Zurich: Amalthea-Verlag. Mighall, R. (2003), A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Natta, M.-A. (2010), “Le vieil or et l’habit noir (Barbey d’Aurevilly et Baudelaire)” in P. Berthier (ed.), Barbey d’Aurevilly et la modernité (Actes du colloque du bicentenaire (1808–2008), Paris: Honoré Champion. Nead, L. (2000), Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London, London: Yale University Press. Parent-Duchâtelet, A. (1836), De la prostitution de la ville de Paris, vol. 1, Paris: Baillière. Petit, J. (ed.) (1974a), “Barbey d’Aurevilly: L’histoire des Diaboliques,” Revue des lettres modernes, 1–174. Petit, J. (ed.) (1974b), Essais de lectures des Diaboliques de Barbey d’Aurevilly, Paris: Menard. Poe, E. A. (2012), The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, New York: Knopf Doubleday. Rossbach, S. (2009), “(Un)Veiling the Self and the Story: Dandyism, Desire, and Narrative Duplicity in Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 37 (3–4): 276–90. Sabatier (1830), Histoire de la législation sur les femmes publiques et les lieux de débauche, Paris: Gagniard. Scaturro, S., and G. Peterson (2014), “Inherent Vice: Challenges and Conservation,” in H. Koda (ed.), Charles James: Beyond Fashion, 233–50, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Silvestre, T. (1861), “Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly,” Le Figaro (July 25): 1–4. Available online: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k270016p.item (accessed June 22, 2016). Stevenson, A. (ed.) (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Toumayan, A. (1994), “Barbey D’Aurevilly, Balzac, and ‘La Vengeance d’une femme.’ ” French Forum 19 (1): 35–43. Tropp, M. (1990), Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture (1818–1918), Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Vassilev, K. (2005), “Actions et récit dans La Vengeance d’une femme de Barbey d’Aurevilly,” French Studies 59 (4): 467–80. Walkowitz, J. (1980), Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State, New York: Cambridge University Press. Welchman, J. (1997), Invisible Colors: A Visual History of Titles, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

120

121

6 FASHIONS FROM HELL The Enduring Influence of Jack the Ripper on Dress Alanna McKnight For Polly, Annie, Liz, Catherine, and Mary

The sensational nature of his atrocities, and the fact that the mystery remains unsolved, has ensured the almost mythological status of Jack the Ripper in popular culture. Countless theories about the identity of the Ripper exist, including a Polish immigrant (Edwards 2014) and the royal physician (Knight 1976). Although wild and fantastical, many possibilities are plausible.1 The Ripper crimes occurred in the Whitechapel district of London, then a lower-class slum, where five women were murdered and mutilated. The year was 1888, a time at the crux of modernity, when women were more visible in the public sphere through their roles as consumers and by their participation in the economy through paid employment outside of domestic service. Women’s bodies were adorned with signs of modernity:  elaborate fashions, bustles and corsets made from steel, brightly colored fabrics from aniline dyes, and artificial hairpieces piled high on their heads (Wilson 2013: 13). Their bodies were places to display the wealth of their husbands through vicarious consumption (Veblen [1899] 1994: 43), to express their political leanings through sashes and rational dress, or in the case of many lower-class women, a site to earn wages (Walkowitz 1992: 552). One of many theories about Jack the Ripper’s motives for his crimes was that he was reacting against the visibility of women, making his point by eviscerating his victims’ womanhood (Cornwell 2002). This chapter will examine four representations of the Ripper story through an exploration of the role of clothing. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel, From Hell, is a thoroughly researched re-imagining of the story. Their work

122

122

ALANNA MCKNIGHT

points to Dr.  William Gull, royal physician, as the Ripper, who sets about the task of eliminating five prostitutes at the behest of Queen Victoria, because the women were blackmailing the royal family. Campbell’s black and white illustrations are stark, but the graphic representations of women’s bodies, both dressed and undressed, play an important role in the narrative. The 2001 film of the same name (From Hell, Albert and Allen Hughes), starring Johnny Depp, is loosely based on Moore’s graphic novel. The costume choices in the film conjure a fantasy of nineteenth-century prostitutes, rather than a realistic rendering of the clothing options available at the time. Even though the victims’ clothes were well documented, the directors’ choices demonstrate the problem of the depiction of women’s bodies and the male gaze in movies. While the male gaze is problematic, spectacle and spectacularization have always played a role in representations of the Ripper. The late fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s graduate runway show in 1992 from Central St. Martin’s was entitled Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims. The spectacle of runway performance, and later the stillness of a retrospective exhibit of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, mimicked the media sensationalism that surrounded the Ripper murders in 1888. At a time when journalism was already sensationalist, his crimes forced the victims onto the front pages and caused the proliferation of their postmortem photographs. This chapter will conclude with the most recent example of media spectacle, clothing, and Jack. In 2014, an amateur Ripperologist2 became enamored with Jack after seeing From Hell and procured a shawl that was allegedly owned by the penultimate victim, Catherine Eddowes, which he claimed contained DNA that would conclusively prove the identity of the Ripper. Through a simple article of clothing, Eddowes was once again paraded by the media, 126 years after her death. By examining Jack the Ripper in popular culture, this chapter will expose the problems of gaze, spectacle, modernity, and the sensationalization of the degradation of women’s bodies through the clothing of his victims and the cultural activities they inspired, both in terms of popular culture and the specters that stalked the streets of Victorian London.

1888—The devil comes to Whitechapel The story of Jack the Ripper is one that has been thoroughly reproduced to the point of cliché. Countless films, novels, and songs have been inspired by him (Coville and Luciano 1999), from the 1904 German play Die Büchse der Pandora (Wedekind) to the 1927 Hitchcock film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, to the 1979 film Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer), wherein Jack steals H.  G. Wells’s time machine and travels to 1970s San Francisco. He has been pitted against Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes versus Jack the Ripper, Frogwares

123

FASHIONS FROM HELL

123

Games, 2009), been featured in numerous other video games (Jack the Ripper, 1987; Master of Darkness, 1992; Ripper, 1996; Shadow Man, 1999; Jack the Ripper, 2003; Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, 2015), and was even sung about in the mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (1984), where the band sings a song about “Saucy Jack.” For a man whose identity was never known, he has been represented in the media so often and gained such notoriety that in 2006 he was voted the worst Briton of the last 5,000 years (“Jack the Ripper” 2006). The fascination with the man dubbed Jack began in the early morning of August 31, 1888, when the body of forty-two-year-old Polly (Mary Ann) Nichols was discovered on Buck’s Row, her skirt hoisted to her waist and a new black straw hat found on the ground nearby (Rumbelow 1975:  54). She was seen staggering drunk near her lodgings less than an hour earlier on her way to earn enough money to pay for a bed for another night (Walkowitz 1992:  552). Her body was discovered by two porters on their way to work. When they realized she was dead, they straightened out her clothes “to make her a little more decent” (Rumbelow 1975: 52). Nichols’s throat had been slashed, from ear to ear, severed almost to the spinal cord. The police noted that there was little arterial blood at the site, which they discovered had mostly soaked into her clothing. Two paupers were hired to remove Polly’s clothing before she was moved to the mortuary. A  police inspector took note of them and stated that they were “a reddish-brown Ulster,3 somewhat worse for wear, a brown linsey4 frock, and black ribbed stockings. The woman was wearing two petticoats, one grey flannel and the other of wool and brown stays” (Rumbelow 1975:  53). Stenciled on the bands of the petticoats was the mark of Lambeth Workhouse, where Nichols had stayed for a period of time, which aided in her identification (Knight 1976: 51). They also discovered that her abdomen had been cut open and disemboweled, and her genitals had been stabbed (50). Police were unable to find any motivation for murder, though theories were surfacing. The second victim was found in Hanbury Street on the morning of September 8 in the backyard of a lodging house. From this event the first possible description of Jack was recorded. While he is often depicted wearing a top hat and cape, a witness who last saw the victim alive at 5:30 a.m. saw her with a man “of a shabby, genteel appearance and wearing a deerstalker hat, probably brown” (Knight 1976: 59). Half an hour later, the victim, Annie “Dark Annie” Chapman/ Siffey, was found dead in the yard. She was in a position of struggle, with palms facing up, feet on the ground, and knees turned outward (55). She was wearing a long black coat, brown bodice, black skirt, lace-up boots that all worn and dirty (55), and a kerchief around her neck. Her skirt and coat were pushed up. Like Nichols, her throat had been slashed so viciously that her head was hardly attached. She had also been disemboweled. Her intestines, still attached, were resting by her right shoulder (60). Upon examining the scene, police found the pocket she wore under her skirt.5 It had been cut open and the contents—a

124

124

ALANNA MCKNIGHT

piece of muslin, a comb, and a case of paper—were lying near the body. At her feet were rings she had been wearing and coins. It was this crime scene that led many to believe that the Ripper had previous knowledge and skill in anatomy. After a hiatus of two weeks the Ripper struck twice in one day. On September 30 around 1:00 a.m., in a dark courtyard off a street filled with varied residences including sweatshop tailors, a body was found by a traveling seller of costume jewelry. The victim, Elizabeth “Long Liz” Stride, was dressed in “musty” black clothes and wore red and white flowers on her black fur-trimmed jacket and her throat was slashed (Knight 1976:  76). Within four hours, a second body was discovered in Mitre Square. Catherine Eddowes’s throat had also been cut. Her face had been slashed, severing her nose, and her abdomen had been mutilated and a kidney removed (62). She was wearing a dress with a pattern of Michaelmas daisies and golden lilies, a drab linsey skirt, dark green alpaca petticoat, white chemise, brown ribbed knee stockings that had been darned with mismatched yarn, men’s laced boots, and a black cloth jacket with an artificial fur collar (78). Her skirts had been pushed up to her waist. A black straw bonnet with black beads, trimmed in velvet, was still on her head. The final victim was Mary Jane (Mary Anne) Kelly, who was found dead in her room mid-morning on November 9. She was seen the previous evening bringing a well-dressed gentleman back to her lodgings in Miller’s Court (Walkowitz 1992: 217). Her body was discovered by the landlord’s assistant who was collecting rent that was three months in arrears (Rumbelow 1975: 102). Kelly was found lying on the bed, with her clothes neatly folded on one of the chairs in the sparsely furnished room. Her body was thoroughly mutilated, legs slashed to the bone, breasts severed from the body, and kidneys removed and placed on the table (103). These were the five murders attributed to Jack the Ripper. Some Ripperologists theorize that two murders before Polly Nichols were also his doing, as well as several others in London, other British cities (Gordon 2001), and even as far as America and Australia (Evans and Skinner 2001). These women all had certain characteristics in common. They were down on their luck and earned money where they could (though are commonly remembered as prostitutes), but drank their incomes away and were estranged from husbands and children (Walkowitz 1992: 552). These murders alone were horrific enough to strike fear in the hearts of London’s citizens, but soon after Annie Chapman’s murder, the police began receiving letters from persons claiming to be the Ripper, escalating the fervor. The first letter was received on September 25, the day after the inquest into Chapman’s murder. It was addressed to “Sir Charles Warren, commissioner of police, Scotland Yard” (Evans and Skinner 2001: 6). This letter claimed responsibility for three murders, including the two that preceded Chapman’s (6). This was the first of hundreds of letters police and newspapers would receive claiming responsibility. There is much debate over their legitimacy. The name Jack the

125

FASHIONS FROM HELL

125

Ripper came from one such letter, written in red ink, which claimed to contain blood from the victims. This letter opens “Dear Boss” and ends with the salutation “yours truly / Jack the Ripper / Dont mind me giving the trade name” (17). Though many of these letters are dismissed as hoaxes, the first of the eightythree “Dear Boss” letters, and a letter that began with the words “From Hell,” which included a package containing a portion of a kidney, were considered legitimate by the police—a theory subsequently agreed on by many Ripperologists (201). These communiqués were often published in newspapers that proliferated instances of hoax letters and became part of the media spectacle surrounding the Ripper murders.

From hell to Hollywood and back In 1989, graphic novelist Alan Moore and illustrator Eddie Campbell issued the first of ten installments of their serial graphic novel From Hell. It told the Ripper tale from the vantage points of key players, including the Ripper himself, who, for the sake of narrative, is played by Dr. William Gull, Royal Physician. The plot follows four women who owe money to a notorious gang and decide to blackmail the Royal Family to pay their debt. Their friend, Annie, who worked in a sweet shop, had secretly married Prince Edward Albert, Queen Victoria’s grandson, and bore his child. Upon discovery of this scandal, Annie is taken away, lobotomized, and institutionalized. Dr. Gull is ordered by the Queen to dispose of the four women. The murders are carried out in Gull’s post-stroke dementia and take the form of ritualistic murders inspired by Masonic visions. The involvement of the fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, is an unfortunate case of mistaken identity, as she is uninvolved in the royal blackmail. Upon receiving his orders from the Queen, Gull embarks on a tour of London with his driver, Netley, during which he points out sites of importance to freemasonry and examples of masculine history snuffing out the powerful women’s history that those sites had once represented. Gull’s task is partly to symbolically restore London to its “rightful masculine ownership” (Ho 2006: 114). A foreshadowing image shows the women walking beneath a church steeple, which Gull would later describe to Netley as being purposefully phallic. The frame depicts the women standing before the steeple in its full erect glory, as Mary Kelly announces, “We are the four Whores of the Apocalypse” (Moore and Campbell 1989–96:  3:15). Though Kelly believes that they were bringing chaos to the royal family, instead she was predicting their own judgment days. Due to their bonding secret involvement in the Brotherhood of Masonry, many players in the story are aware of Gull’s actions and orders. These include police commissioner, Sir Charles, among other officers and high-ranking officials. They are compelled to cover up Gull’s work and allow Inspector Abberline, the lead investigator of the Ripper case, to pursue false leads and become traumatized by the crimes. The complete edition of the graphic novel includes a detailed

126

126

ALANNA MCKNIGHT

appendix, which explains the history behind the fictional narrative. This graphic novel is an “historical fragment- quotations of history- that surface from particular urban spaces” (Ali 2005: 610) in the same way that all representations of the Ripper are in this chapter. The research and care that Moore put into the stories of the women and the circumstances of their deaths were clear in the panels of the graphic novel, accompanied by Campbell’s illustrations of the murders, crime scenes, and reproductions from newspapers. Though the drawings are fairly simple and rendered in black and white, they are still evocative in their depiction of the mutilations, particularly the climax of Gull’s “Great Work”: the murder of Mary Kelly. Due to Moore and Campbell’s rigorous historical research, the images of the victims were accurate, including details of their clothing. As mentioned, Polly Nichols’s body was found with a new black bonnet. In From Hell, Gull gives the bonnet to his driver to bestow on Polly so that he could easily recognize her at a later time, when he was ready to do his work (Moore and Campbell, 1889–1996: 5:17). Polly is so proud of her new bonnet that as she sets out to earn enough doss6 money for the night. She says, “Oh well, never mind. I’ll soon ‘ave me doss money: See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now. I’ll be back in a short while” (5:21). She was confident that her new hat would be an effective lure for men, and in a sense, she was correct. Gull’s carriage approaches her, and she is offered a ride, grapes, and pleasant conversation—a journey that ends with her corpse discovered dumped in the street. She is transported to the morgue fully clothed, and it is the cataloging and removal of her ulster, linsey frock, stockings, and petticoats that lead the mortician to discover the extent of her mutilations (5:37). At the inquest into Polly’s death, her clothing is once again mentioned, as the pathologist was questioned about undressing the body and the presence of stays and reminded of his comments on their short length (6:8). After the inquest, Inspector Abberline, depressed by being reassigned to Whitechapel, and faced with such a grisly mystery, is depicted sitting in his office, head in his hands, with Polly’s clothing laid out on his office floor as though they were on a body, and her bonnet on his desk, like a bloodstained specter begging Abberline to find her killer. This act demonstrates that due to its personal nature, clothing acts as a surrogate, a means of recognizing and identifying a person (Cornwell 2002: 137). One witness to the actual events before the murder of Annie Chapman claimed to have seen the victim with a man in a deerstalker hat, well dressed but shabby (Knight 1976: 59). Here, Moore and Campbell insert Netley, Gull’s driver, dressed in a deerstalker cap, arranging the meeting between Chapman and his employer (1989–96:  7:  23). Mere seconds after the witness passes, Netley leaves and is replaced by Gull, smartly dressed in his top hat and cape. In the actual case files, a kerchief is included in the inventory of Chapman’s clothing, which was allegedly the only thing holding her head on (Evans and Skinner

127

FASHIONS FROM HELL

127

2013: 85). Moore uses this article for Gull to first strangle Chapman from behind as a means of subduing her (Moore and Campbell 1989–96: 7:25), which also explains why there were no screams heard from the yard in which she was killed. Events leading to the third murder in the graphic novel show a fight between “Long” Liz and the man with whom she boarded: they are arguing over her drinking. Exasperated by her habits, he kicks her out of their accommodation and throws her clothing into the street after her (Moore and Campbell 1989–96: 8:7). The clothing lands with sleeves splayed out to either side and the skirt appearing as though it were bent at the knee, foreshadowing the fact that Liz herself would be soon be lying in the gutter in a similar fashion; clothes devoid of a soul. Chapter ten begins with Gull entering Mary Kelly’s room, shrouded by darkness, the first panel a silhouette of a top-hatted, cloaked man in the doorway. Appropriately, the chapter is titled “The Best of All Tailors,” a reference to a poem on the facing page, which was allegedly a favorite of William Gull’s. It began, “If I were a tailor I’d make it my pride the best of all tailors to be.” This quotation refers to the fact that chapter ten culminates in Gull’s great works, works that allowed him to believe that he transcended time and space and become one with the Great Architect, who is God, according to Masons. It is fascinating that this imagery of clothing creation, a tailor sewing together cloth to create a well-fitting suit for a man, would be juxtaposed to the systemic dismantling of Mary Kelly’s body, which took place in her room over a couple of hours. Both tailors and Gull made precise cuts using knowledge of the human form and specific measurements, though as one provided an outer layer of protection and an image of a polished man, the other flayed the body’s natural outer layer, removing the identifiers of womanhood (breasts, womb, face). In completing his task of destroying women, likening himself to a tailor, Gull emulated civilized society of nineteenth-century England, a masculine land of progress (Brigley 2012: 77). The representations of clothing in the graphic novel From Hell are embedded in graphic scenes of nudity, sexual encounters, and images of the sex trade. Yet the most visually prominent clothing items are not those of the women who lived in London’s East End, but rather those of the few upper- and middle-class women represented on the pages. Gull’s victims, according to the hegemony of nineteenth-century England, were disruptive “others,” a threat to the established order, a threat made tangible through their attempted extortion of the Royal Family. They roamed the streets at night and enjoyed sex. They drank in pubs to a point of public drunkenness; their addictions lost them the respect of their children and their partners, and despite other viable means of wage earning, led them to sell sex to pay for lodging, and the next round. The middle-class women, on the other hand, are never depicted outside, and do not enjoy sex or are depicted as chaste. They are never drawn close-up, not even Queen Victoria; Mervi Mietinen notes that they are rendered lifeless, mirroring the murders and reasserting male hegemony (2012:  92). Though their faces lack detail, their

128

128

ALANNA MCKNIGHT

clothing is elaborately drawn, exhibiting richness. This demonstration of affluence is what Thorstein Veblen calls “vicarious consumption” ([1899] 1994: 43), a term that explains how women’s bodies were used as a site for the display of their husbands’ wealth through their clothing and jewelry. Dressing elaborately and richly also makes clear that these women did not need to earn a wage, which Veblen calls “conspicuous leisure” (23). Moore and Campbell’s graphic novel was translated to a film, starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham in 2001 by the Hughes Brothers, with costumes designed by award-winning designer Kym Barrett. Even though the graphic novel provides a template, the premise of the film departs from the graphic novel in fundamental ways, and only hints at themes of free-masonry and the involvement of the Royal Family. Whereas the graphic novel had an equal amount of male and female nudity, and male and female homoerotica, the film only shows female nudes and female homoerotic relations. Through developing the graphic novel into a film, the male gaze is amplified, especially through the costume choices. The women’s dresses create a fetishized, fictional ideal7 of a nineteenthcentury prostitute, in spite of the documented detail of the clothing in which all five women were murdered. The five women in the film wear beautiful dresses, although they were, in reality, dirty and shabby. The dresses are all low-cut, displaying their breasts, which are supported by corsets. The first Ripper victim, Polly, wears a green-striped dress in a polonaise style and net lace gloves, beautiful and elegant, though dirty. When she is killed by the Ripper and her body left in the street, the long camera shot is directed toward her feet, and though she is small compared to her surroundings, her body is lit so that light reflects off her legs, which are slightly parted, drawing the audience’s gaze to the darkness between them, where they soon discover she was mutilated. Annie Chapman is dressed in an orange plaid dress with a hat made from birds’ wings and feathers. Designers saw fit to include a recreation of the actual scarf worn by Annie Chapman, since, as previously mentioned, in the real murder it appeared to be the only thing keeping her head attached. Even though the costume choices are fictionalized, the depiction of the murder scenes is accurate, even down to Annie’s scarf. Midway through the film, as Inspector Abberline begins to solve the mystery, and the romance between he and Mary Kelly blossoms; he takes her to the National Gallery to identify a painting of Prince Edward. Her blue satin, floral dress is contrasted against the clothing of the other women in the gallery in obvious ways. Her skirt hits mid-calf, although the style of the day was floor-length. Her breasts are clearly on display, while all of the other women are dressed modestly, buttoned up to the chin. Furthermore, every single woman in these scenes is wearing white, or a light color. Civilized women possessed an innocence that the “unfortunate” Mary Kelly did not. These aesthetic choices reinforce the idea of Mary Kelly as a fallen woman against the other women of London. This binary is what Judith Walkowitz explains as the “polarization of

129

FASHIONS FROM HELL

129

womanhood into two categories, the fallen and the virtuous,” which relies on visual differences between the two (1992: 50). Liz Stride is depicted in a fictive red outfit, but did wear the flowers on her lapel as the real Liz did. Catherine Eddowes was dressed in an overtly erotic fishnet top and black bodice. As the film nears its conclusion with the final murder, Mary Kelly is shown lying on her bed in her underpinnings, a bright red corset and petticoat, mimicking the flayed, bloody corpse that would soon be in the same place. Beyond the costumes being designed for the benefit of the male gaze, the film included other elements that were not in the graphic novel, rendering the film unnecessarily misogynist. For example, in the film, Dr. Gull was treating Prince Edward for syphilis, which he discusses with Queen Victoria as a motivation for the murders. This conversation frames women as a contagion vector, blaming the prince’s low-class wife for the fragile future of the empire. In another conversation between Inspector Abberline and Sgt. Godley about the relationship between Abberline and Mary Kelly, Godley exclaims, “She’s a whore, a woman,” as reasons why they find her to be untrustworthy and a liar, working under the assumption that this is the natural state of women. Later, as Abberline and Mary Kelly are arranging her safety, Abberline gives her money. She leans in for a kiss, which he leans away from. She gets angry that he assumes she is paying him back and says, “I’m still a woman, they haven’t taken that away from me,” to which Abberline responds by pushing her against a wall and kissing her. This interaction implies that it is only appropriate for men to initiate physical contact. And finally, Abberline has a vision while under the influence of opium (another addition to the film absent from the source material) that shows a close-up of a woman’s mouth eating grapes, which transitions to a bunch of grapes beating like hearts. While this could be a symbolic depiction of how the Ripper lured his victims, it also implies that women are predatory, devouring hearts and cause the downfall of logical men. In the graphic novel, Abberline gently lays Polly’s clothing out on his office floor to contemplate it (Figure 6.1), whereas in the film, he pins the victims’ clothing to a corkboard, beside their autopsy photos (Figure  6.2). This more violent gesture mimics the act of stabbing or penetration through their clothing, and exposes their empty representations to the view of all the men in the police station. In adapting Moore and Campbell’s graphic novel From Hell, the Hughes Brothers reinforce the tradition of male gaze in cinema. According to Laura Mulvey, Hollywood’s style arose from the manipulation of visual pleasure (1989: 16) for the default viewer, who is presumed to be male as a result of patriarchal norms. The male gaze explains why actresses were chosen who uphold stereotypical Hollywood beauty standards and don dresses that display their breasts and other feminine attributes. The viewers, both the audience and Inspector Abberline through his visions, watching these women and the acts of mutilation

130

130

ALANNA MCKNIGHT

Figure 6.1 Eddie Campbell, Scene from Inspector Abberline’s Office, in From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, vol. 6 (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 1989–96), p. 13.

Figure  6.2 Frame grab from From Hell (dir. Albert and Allen Hughes), 2001, Twentieth Century Fox.

that happen are enacting scopophilia—the pleasure of looking—on two separate levels. Abberline experiences visions induced by opium and performs fetishistic scopophilia that exists outside a linear timeline, seeing the murders happen out of temporal order. The audience of the film perform sadistic scopophilia, which demands a story and a linear timeline, imposed on them through the medium of film (Mulvey 1989: 22).

The spectacle of horror In 1992, a mere thirty minutes away from Whitechapel, an up-and-coming designer showed his thesis collection at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. Alexander McQueen would go on to become one of the most

131

FASHIONS FROM HELL

131

innovative fashion designers of the turn of the twenty-first century. His cuttingedge fashion shows and transgressive collection themes included Highland Rape (1995) and Widows of Culloden (2006), which dealt with themes of Scottish Nationalism, and Plato’s Atlantis (2010), which predicted an environmentally devastated future. McQueen’s thesis collection, titled Jack the Ripper Stalks his Victims, featured Victorian-inspired tailored garments. The collection included a black wool jacket, with sharp lines ending in points at the front, evocative of a knife blade, and lined in blood red. Another jacket was silk printed with thorny vines, mottled in blood-like dye. Each piece had a lock of hair sewn in as a label. In McQueen’s words, “The inspiration behind the hair came from Victorian times when prostitutes would sell theirs for kits of hair locks, which were bought by people to give to their loves. I  used it as my signature label with locks of hair in Perspex” (Bolton 2011:  35). This reference to Victorian prostitutes and a collection inspired by a man who preyed on them came from a family connection to the murders. McQueen grew up in London’s East End, in the same streets that Jack stalked. Furthermore, one of McQueen’s ancestors allegedly owned a rooming house where one of Jack’s victims rented a room (Gleason 2012: 9). Though McQueen spoke of designing clothing for women as a means to empower them and create armor (Bolton 2011: 60), the runway show mimics the spectacle created in the 1888 media surrounding the Ripper murders. The goal of a runway show is to showcase a collection for potential buyers and attract press coverage (Evans 2003:  63), and the goal of sensationalism in newspapers is to sell copies. In discussing Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Caroline Evans compares the fashion show to the culture of commodity and spectacle described by Debord. Evans calls the fashion show a “self-absorbed, or narcissistic” spectacle that “spatialises time and destroys memory” (2003: 63). Through creating a collection based on the Ripper murders, the memory of the victims was destroyed while glorifying the memory of a murderer. Even the title of the collection names the murderer, but abstractly combines the women who died as the one group: “victims.” After the runway show concludes we are left with mere images of models, or mannequins, wearing the garments, further destroying memories. However, according to Debord, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (1995: 12). Evans compares the idea of the spectacle as capital becoming an image (Evans 2003: 74 ) as the contrast between the fashion show itself and the images that are produced from it, as the images are what are used to sell the products to consumers not present at the show. Similarly, social relationships including murder and the journalistic reporting thereof were also mediated by images. Illustrated newspapers of the nineteenth century provided renderings of murders and murder scenes (Figure 6.3), without close-ups of actual injuries, and featured dramatic sketches of crime scenes, victims, and villains (Curtis 2001:  69), sensational

132

132

ALANNA MCKNIGHT

Figure 6.3 “Two More Whitechapel Murders,” Illustrated Police News, October 6, 1888. © British Library Board.

stories and images used to sell copies. This is the mass media that Debord refers to as the most superficial manifestation of spectacle (1995: 19). Alexander McQueen died by his own hand in February 2010 (Bolton 2011: 27). In the summer of 2011, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New  York held a retrospective exhibition of his collections. This exhibition would later show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2015, far from the streets of the East End. The first room of the exhibition held pieces from the Jack the Ripper collection. The well-tailored garments reflected McQueen’s training on Savile Row, a street in London known for its bespoke tailoring establishments. The mannequins that displayed the garments were headless, painted white and purposefully scuffed, damaged, and lacking any identity. It evoked Elizabeth Wilson’s remark that in viewing fashion in museums, “the living observer moves, with a sense of mounting panic, through a world of the dead” (2013:  1). Much of McQueen’s

133

FASHIONS FROM HELL

133

work featured themes of sex, death, and commodity (Evans 2003: 239), a rhetoric apparent in his Jack the Ripper-inspired collection. It evoked Gerry Coulter’s observation of how Baudrillard understood fashion: “the recycling of the desire for death . . . a radical liquidation of values” (2013: 1). McQueen was inspired by the murder of Victorian women, perpetuating the spectacle as commodity, which results in the ghosts of Jack’s victims haunting the runway as models and mannequins with the designer on display.

Shrouded in mystery One of the reasons that the Ripper story has stayed so popular is that his crimes remain unsolved. For over a century, Ripperologists have been attempting to assemble clues to reveal his identity. Some devote their lives to investigation:  some comparing handwriting in the letters to handwriting of suspects or analyzing language as a means of uncovering his social class (Evans and Skinner 2001: 200). Many Ripperologists believe none of the letters were written by the killer. As the letters were the strongest evidence the police had to go on, Evans and Skinner ask, “what are we left with as a means to identify the character or motives of the killer” (201) if not the alleged words of the killer himself? Many people (Cornwell 2002; Whittington-Egan 1973; Edwards 2014; Knight 1976; among many others) have believed that they have uncovered the identity of the Ripper, though, unlike From Hell, which is fictitious theorizing, these individuals claim to have discovered the true identity. One of the many police suspects at the time was Aaron Kosminski, a Jewish Polish immigrant who had spent time in an asylum. The archetypal scapegoat for Victorian era, many believe he was Jack, despite the lack of tangible evidence. He represented the trifecta of fears for the xenophobic, Protestant, medically ignorant world of Victorian London where citizens refused to believe that someone of Anglo-Saxon descent could commit such atrocities (Curtis 2001: 245). Russell Edwards is one Ripperologist who believes that Kosminski “definitely, categorically and absolutely” (Walters 2014) was the Ripper. Edwards first developed an interest in the Ripper case after watching the film adaption of From Hell (Izadi 2014). In spite of the fact that Kosminski was never identified as an author of any Ripper letters, due to the lack of extant hand-writing samples from him (Evans and Skinner 2001: 201), Edwards concluded through his own deduction that Kosminski was the Ripper. In 2007, Edwards purchased a shawl at auction that was allegedly found with the fourth Ripper victim, Catherine Eddowes. The shawl, which had never been washed, was passed down through generations of the family of a Ripper detective. Edwards subjected the shawl to DNA testing, confirming the presence of both blood and semen allegedly belonging to Eddowes and Kosminski respectively, as indicated by UV light (Izadi 2014). Soon after Edwards made his

134

134

ALANNA MCKNIGHT

findings public and released his DNA testing results, scientists began to question the validity of his claim. International news agency Agence France Presse noted that the findings had not been subjected to the methodology required for peer-reviewed scientific journals (ibid.). Even Alec Jeffrets, who invented the DNA fingerprinting technique, questioned the validity of the DNA testing, saying it was “an interesting but remarkable claim that needs to be subjected to peer review, with detailed analysis of the provenance of the shawl and the nature of the claimed DNA match with the perpetrator’s descendants and its power of discrimination; no actual evidence has yet been provided” (ibid.). These must have been crushing words for someone who had spent more than a decade obsessed with proving once and for all the true identity of Jack the Ripper. Edwards’s naming Kosminski as the Ripper is not unfounded. He was named by the police as a suspect in 1888 and was for a time in the top three suspects (Cornwell 2002: 149). Kosminski moved to London in 1882 at age seventeen, when he first started exhibiting signs of dementia. He never married and had a strong hatred of women, with an incident on record of threatening his sister’s life, a sentiment of male dominance that is mirrored in the representations of this case since. He worked as a barber in the Whitechapel district, which meant he knew the area, its residents, and how to wield a blade. He was committed to an asylum for two years in 1888 after the final murder, where his diagnosis read that “he declared that he is guided by an instinct that informs his mind, he says that he knows the movements of all mankind” (Lekh 1992: 787). This psychosis, combined with his alleged hatred of women, the cessation of the murders after his commitment to an asylum, and his inclusion in the top of the police list of suspects make him an appealing choice for a committed Ripperologist. However, there are also problems with Edwards’s claims of Kosminski as the Ripper, including the fact that a shawl was not listed among the articles of clothing found with the body of Catherine Eddowes. If a shawl had been found, her blood would be on it, considering the nature of her death. Even if the DNA evidence had not been questionable, all that it proved was that Kosminski had intercourse with Eddowes, which is not surprising considering she earned a wage through selling sex. The presence of blood and semen do not create an absolute case for Kosminski as the Ripper. There are greater problems within the publicization of Edwards’s claim as well. The claim that a Polish Jewish immigrant who spent time in an asylum was the Ripper propagates negative stereotypes about immigrants that are still strong within the United Kingdom, particularly considering the recent influx of immigration from Eastern Europe (Burrel 2012). The story of Edwards and his shawl have been largely circulated in newspapers, cast as short articles of niche interest. Despite the wide circulation of this story, little has been said about the victim to whom the shawl allegedly belonged. Like Polly’s clothes laid out on the floor by Abberline in the panels of From Hell, this

135

FASHIONS FROM HELL

135

is a garment acting as a mere ghost of the victim, carrying her blood, yet hardly acting as a sufficient surrogate to her memory.

Conclusion: “Those women really died” By examining the lore of Jack the Ripper through the garments the victims wore, and how various media have represented them since, hopefully the focus of the future studies of the investigation will shift from Jack to his victims. Most renderings and retellings of the crimes focus on a man whose identity is to this day a mystery, and one which will likely never be solved in spite of the effort of Ripperologists. Despite all of the theories regarding his identity, we may never know if he was a doctor, barber, or butcher, if he was an aristocrat or resident of the East End, if he was suffering from a psychosis, or if he had deliberate reasons for his work. We can, however, assume that he hated women. He targeted them and mutilated their sexual organs, stabbing Polly Nichol’s vagina, removing Annie Chapman’s uterus, and severing Mary Kelly’s breasts. He purposefully sought out and stalked women and desecrated their womanhood. Apart from the details of his crimes, the other known fact is the identity of his victims. In the closing pages of From Hell, Mr. Lees, Royal Psychic, says to Inspector Abberline, “Those women really died” (Moore and Campbell 1989–96:  epilogue:  5). The framing of these women as prostitutes in media representations shows a lack of understanding of how many poor women in the nineteenth century were forced to earn a wage by whatever means they could and situates them as commodity (Mulvey 1996: 80),to be further sold through the years, as identity-less objects. This rhetoric of women’s bodies as commodity, as told through dress,8 demonstrates that in a phallocentric world, the myth of an unknown man remains more famous than the names of the women whose lives he took.

Notes 1 There are numerous books that outline myriad theories, however, a comprehensive layperson’s guide is Jack the Ripper A–Z (Begg, Fido, and Skinner 1996).

2 3 4 5

“Ripperologist” is a person who has expertise on Jack the Ripper and the case. An overcoat. Linsey is a coarse twill of linen and wool. Prior to being sewn into seams, pockets were worn under women’s skirts, tied around the waist (Burman 2002).

6 A doss was a crude bed, often just a bench with a rope set across it to lean against during sleep. This was popular lodging in London’s East End in the nineteenth century.

136

136

ALANNA MCKNIGHT

7 The representations of prostitutes in From Hell appear inspired by paintings of Impressionist painters such as Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec, who showed them in various states of dress, and were vastly different than portraits of “respectable” women. The Impressionists portrayed prostitutes with a sense of humanity and compassion, whereas the women in From Hell are products of Hollywood gaze (Clayson 2003).

8 Authors and journalists in the nineteenth century often wrote about women earning wage in needle-trades, who supplemented their low incomes through occasional prostitution. Henry Mayhew published a series of letters in the Morning Chronicle between 1849 and 1850, later the book London Labour and the London Poor (1851). He interviewed the poor of London to expose their squalid living and working conditions. Mayhew wrote compassionately about women in the needle-trades who turned to prostitution, explaining that often their wages had been cut, and that this means of income was out of desperation (Taithe 1996: 90). The women interviewed by Mayhew are reflected in the victims of Jack the Ripper, remediating the traumas of the modern city through their bodies.

References Ali, B. (2005), “The Violence of Criticism: The Mutilation and Exhibition of History in From Hell,” Journal of Popular Culture 38 (4): 605–31. Anwar, M. (2014), “Murder in Black and White: Victorian Crime Scenes and the Ripper Photographs,” Victorian Studies 56 (3): 433–41. Beard, M. (2006), “Jack the Ripper Is ‘Worst Briton’ ”. BBC News, January 31. Available online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4663280.stm (accessed February 29, 2016). Begg, P., M. Fido, and K. Skinner (1996), Jack the Ripper A-Z, London: Headline Press. Bolton, A. (2011), Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Brigley, Z. (2012), “Theorizing Sexual Domination in From Hell and Lost Girls: Jack the Ripper versus Wonderlands of Desire,” in T. A. Comer and J. M. Sommers (eds.), Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels, 74–87. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Burman, B. (2002), “Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Gender and History 14(3): 447–69. Burrell, K. (2012), Polish Migration to the UK in the “New” European Union after 2004, London: Ashgate. Clayson, H. (2003), Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, Los Angeles, CA: Getty. Cornwell, P. (2002), Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, New York: GP Putnam’s Sons. Coulter, G. (2013), “Alexander McQueen and Jean Baudrillard: ‘The Pleasure of Fashion,’ ” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 10 (1): 1–2. Coville, G., and P. Luciano (1999), Jack the Ripper: His Life and Crimes in Popular Entertainment, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Curtis, L. P. Jr. (2001), Jack the Ripper and the London Press, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

137

FASHIONS FROM HELL

137

Debord, G. (1995), Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books. Edwards, R. (2014), Naming Jack the Ripper: New Crime Scene Evidence, A Stunning Forensic Breakthrough, The Killer Revealed, London: Pan MacMillan. Evans, C. (2003), Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, New York: Yale University Press. Evans, S., and K. Skinner (2001), Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, London: Sutton. Evans, S., and K. Skinner (2013), The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook, London: Constable & Robinson. From Hell (2001), [Film] dir. Albert and Allen Hughes, Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. Gleason, K. (2012), Alexander McQueen: Evolution, New York: Race Point. Gordon, R. M. (2001), Alias Jack the Ripper: Beyond the Usual Whitechapel Suspects, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Ho, E. (2006), “Postimperial Landscapes: ‘Psychogeography’ and Englishness in Alan Moore’s Graphic Novel From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts,” Cultural Critique 63: 99–121. Izadi, E. (2014), “Author Claims to Have Identified Jack the Ripper via DAN of a Shawl,” Washington Post, September 9. Lekh, S. K. (1992), “The Case of Aaron Kosminski: Was He Jack the Ripper?” Psychiatric Bulletin 16: 786–8. Knight, S. (1976), Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, London: Harrap Press. Miettinen, M. (2012), “Do You Understand How I Have Loved You?: Terrible Loves and Divine Visions in From Hell,” in T. A. Comer and J. M. Sommers (eds.), Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels, 88–102. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Moore, A., and E. Campbell (1989–96), From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts, Mariette, GA: Top Shelf. Mulvey, L. (1989), Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd edn., New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Mulvey, L. (1996), Fetishism and Curiosity, London: British Film Institute. Pietrzak-Franger, M. (2009/2010), “Adapting Myth in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell,” Neo-Victorian Studies 2(2): 157–85. Rumbelow, D. (1975), The Complete Jack the Ripper, Boston, MA: New York Graphic Society. Taithe, B. (1996), The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor, London: Rovers Oram Press. Veblan, T. ([1899] 1994), The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Dover. Walkowitz, J. (1992), City of Dreadful Delights: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Walters, G. (2014), “Armchair Detective Claims Jack the Ripper Was a Polish Immigrant,” Daily Telegraph (September 8): 10. Wilson, E. ([1985] 2013), Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: IB Taurus.

138

139

7 SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS Class, Killer Clothes, and Heterogeneity Nigel Lezama

The Walking Dead (2010–) and Hannibal (2013–15) series use different, if not opposing, aesthetics. The former invites viewers into a spectacle of abject bodily degeneration; the latter is a pageant of exquisite beauty and refinement. Other than perhaps a predilection for violence, blood, and horror, there seems to be very little common ground between these two shows. Rick Grimes and his band of zombie apocalypse survivors scratch out a precarious existence that demands degeneration and a return to aggressive drives. Dr. Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, presents a sophisticated and cultured surface that belies his anthropophagite proclivities. Nevertheless, both series use a vestimentary semiotics that grounds the social and aesthetic discourse and feeds the horror narrative. While both shows depict antithetical horror plots, there is, surprisingly, a common bridge to nineteenth-century political thought. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ([1852] 2010), Marx examines the transformed political landscape in the aftermath of Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état. For Marx, Napoleon III’s reign introduced a systemic devolution of political enfranchisement, culminating in an authoritarian state run by an empty vessel: the farcical nephew, a reduced copy of the heroic uncle. Marx focuses his attention on the social upheavals that lead to the ascendency of a dangerous social collective that he names the lumpenproletariat. This heterogeneous mass of the marginalized inspired a fear of political and social degeneration, much like a zombie horde in a contemporary horror movie acts as a regressive and contagious infection on the living, reducing all difference to an abject

140

140

NIGEL LEZAMA

sameness. The lumpenproletariat form an ever-growing mass that obliterates all difference: Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème. (38) Marx groups high and low, dominant and criminal classes, the idle rich, and the unproductive and dangerous classes in the lumpenproletariat, who, because of the instability they engendered, function as a socially destructive force. In his meticulous study “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Peter Stallybrass (1990) deconstructs Marx’s neologism. “ ‘Lumpen means ‘rags and tatters’; lumpig means ‘shabby, paltry’; and then there are derivatives like lumpen-gesindel, ‘rabble,’ and lumpen-wolle, ‘shabby’ ” (70). The growth of industrialization and urban centers in the nineteenth century led to important demographic shifts in France and England. Throughout the century cities like Paris, Lyon, London, and Manchester experienced waves of immigration from rural regions by those in search of employment. These immigrants found precarious work in the textile and other industries. Population growth remained in the lowest classes, which led to an elite fear of contagion (social and biological). In the neologism lumpenproletariat, Marx finds a discursive means of containing the terror of degeneracy inspired by this band of indigents. Stallybrass remarks on the vestimentary significance behind Marx’s categorization. “The name lumpenproletariat thus suggests less the political emergence of a class than a sartorial category” (ibid.). In this light, it is possible to read zombie narratives, with their dirty and raggedly dressed monsters, as a staging of the bourgeois fear of social degeneration in the codes of modern horror. But where does the elegant and murderous Dr. Lecter fit in the sociopolitical terror of vestimentary contamination? Following Marx, the poor and the criminal do not solely constitute the lumpenproletariat. In The Class Struggles in France (1850), Marx asserts that members of the dominant class also constitute this horde: Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society—lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode

141

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

141

of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society. (16; italics in original) Because of unproductive economic practices, those “at the top of bourgeois society” work against society and therefore fall in among the thieves and the debauched that form the lumpenproletariat. Despite being an authority on elegant living, it is Hannibal’s antisocial and murderous proclivities that set him in the ranks of the rabble where “money, filth, and blood commingle” (ibid.).

Fashion’s horror story Both shows stage horror in the stark light of a sartorial class struggle, a battle between an abject and unproductive “Other” who threatens to “infect” (in the case of the zombie, literally, and in the case of Hannibal, figuratively) the social order. While the threat of violent death structures the horror plot in these two series, there is also a political terror that feeds the narratives. The zombies of The Walking Dead and the murderous doctor of Hannibal represent opposite extremes of the class system. Both zombies and Hannibal look to the center to build their ranks. The zombie’s insatiable hunger quickens the pace of infection. One of the narrative arcs of Hannibal is a seduction story. Like the vampire, Hannibal is a glamorous killer who also proselytizes. Importantly, the social narrative that supports the horror plot is figured through dress. The “Other” is also determined through vestimentary practices. The viewer understands the zombies’ and Hannibal’s alterity by the clothing they wear. A significant part of the zombie’s abjection lies in the absence of agency. Once turned, the human victim’s vestimentary choices no longer exist; the living dead wear whatever clothing they last chose as social agents. In this light, the marks of lost agency and of lost belonging remain materially present on the body of the monster. In The Walking Dead, the dirty, torn, and bloodstained clothes that adorn the zombie body signify monstrosity, in much the same way that nineteenth-century social discourse used vestimentary descriptions to overdetermine the marginal status of the poor. For instance, in his treatise on the dangerous urban classes, H.-A. Frégier focuses on the worker’s vestimentary destitution as a key sign of his degeneracy. He gives the example of the typical worker, a diligent employee who finds himself with only the ragged clothes on his back because he squanders his earnings at the cabaret: You see this man at work in his miserable room, he wear a jacket in tatters and a filthy pair of pants that barely hide his nudity. In his state he is unable, without shame, to go out and get the bread needed to sate his daily hunger. . . . How is it that, at the prime of his life, this diligent worker is bereft

142

142

NIGEL LEZAMA

of life’s necessities? It is that he has squandered the fruits of his labour in the orgies of the cabaret; it is that having only the clothes on his back, he exchanged them for scraps, the livery of the indigent, for a bit of money to quench his thirst for wine. (1840: 82–3) For Frégier, as for many nineteenth-century thinkers, there was a direct link between the internal and the external, between the moral and the physical.1 On the other hand, Hannibal is the freest of agents. Like the nineteenth-century dandy, he wields elegance as a way of setting himself apart; Hannibal’s clothing also materializes his eccentricity. “Bodies that do not conform, bodies that flout the conventions of their culture and go without the appropriate clothes are subversive of the most basic codes, and risk exclusion, scorn or ridicule” (Entwistle 2000a:  324). In the context of horror, vestimentary nonconformity becomes a sign of deadly subversion.

Contagious fashion In The Walking Dead, the plot centers on a group of survivors attempting to establish a haven to rebuild human civilization away from the zombie horde. Mirroring ideology, the zombie “Other” is both discursively and categorically opposed to the homogenous group. In nineteenth-century ethnographic discourse, poverty was inscribed in the bodies and the clothing of the poor as a means of essentializing its existence in the working classes. It is in this vein that the sociologist Eugène Buret, writing in 1840 on poverty in the working classes, falls back on the trope of Gothic horror in his study. Like in the urban Gothic novel, the sociologist prefaces his depiction of the poor with the caveat: I ask the reader’s permission to represent two scenes of misery I have witnessed. The location is well known, a repository of all horrors, and one must expect beforehand to find the local population at the lowest rung of selfabasement where human creatures can descend; however, it is impossible for the imagination, so unfavourably forewarned, to represent a similar situation to that in which the tragic inhabitants of this realm live and die. (1840: 369) Buret’s forewarning binds poverty to horror. The indigence of the laboring classes becomes a Gothic tale that occludes humanity. As in Marx’s depiction of the lumpenproletariat, the abjection Buret depicts also centers on the threadbare clothing of these “human creatures.” He paints this horror scene of the London poor for a hypochondriac bourgeoisie by focusing on the state of the clothing of the indigent. Abject men, women, and children— evident in their filthy and threadbare clothing—flow into the city like a contaminated body of water poisoning a spring. They “penetrate” the “respectable city

143

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

143

streets” (ibid.), he writes, insisting that this is a nightly scourge on the properly socialized streets. In spite of the goal of the treatise to highlight the causes of and remedy for urban misery, Buret’s discourse is swept up in the tide of insalubrious poor as much as the bourgeoisie’s shock he imagines. In much the same way that nineteenth-century social discourse naturalized poverty in the body and clothing of the worker, the zombie’s body is a text of his abject alterity. In The Walking Dead, the zombies display remnants of their lost humanity, which gives them an uncanny status at the frontier of the human. Otherness is apparent through sallow complexion, sunken-in eye sockets, disheveled appearance, and torn-away flesh. However, in the early days, the zombie’s clothing is not excessively ragged. In the opening scene of the first episode, “Days Gone Bye,” Sheriff Rick Grimes, the show’s protagonist, has escaped from a hospital where he lay unconscious during the initial months of the apocalypse. Wandering the streets of his small town, he comes across the first zombie introduced in the narrative, whom he mistakes for a lost girl. The zombie is first seen from underneath an abandoned car. She wears white bunny slippers and bends over to pick up a teddy bear. Both the viewer and Rick imagine that this “girl” may need help. Rick runs around the car to get her attention. The “girl” is wearing a dirty pink bathrobe; her hair is long and stringy and hangs down her back. Rick calls out to her. She stops and turns around, and finally both the viewer and Rick see the girl from the front. She is pallid with dark circles under her eyes, part of her lip has been torn away, and the lower half of her face is necrotic. The front of her bathrobe and pink pajamas is bloodstained (Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Frame grab from The Walking Dead, season 1, episode 1 (dir. Frank Darabont), 2010. © AMC Studios.

144

144

NIGEL LEZAMA

Blood and gore alone do not constitute the codes of horror; it is the union of the human and the inhuman2 that create the uncanny, which Freud defines, in The Uncanny (1919), as a sentiment not unrelated to fear, inspired by a uniting of the familiar and the unfamiliar. He proposes that the figure of the double, once a reassuring symbol of immortality in primary narcissism, shifts into the uncanny once primary narcissism is overcome. “The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the ‘double’ being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect” (236), Freud posits. In the co-occurrence of the social and antisocial in the figure of the zombie girl, Rick is faced with a form of doubling. The bunny slippers and the pink bathrobe function to foreground the wearer’s belonging. However, once she turns around, Rick no longer faces a little girl; rather, she becomes an unknown, yet familiar, thing, less than human, signified by the abject exposure of blood and viscera. Much like in nineteenth-century discourse on the poor, the abjection of the undead is constructed through a degradation of the social message normally coded in clothing. In Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection ([1980] 1982), for instance, Kristeva asserts that it is the breaching of the surface by the normally hidden that inspires revulsion:  “As in true theatre, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death” (3). The bloodstained clothing and the torn-away flesh reveal what the self-perceiving whole subject has to hide to keep living. Clothing acts as a support to the myth of the impenetrable subject. Entwistle (2000a: 327) asserts, “Dress lies at the margins of the body and marks the boundaries between self and other, individual and society.” While clean and properly social clothing reinforces the boundaries of plenitude, in The Walking Dead, the zombie proffers a spectacle of collapsed and fractured subjectivity. Facing the zombie, the individual perceives the futility of clothing’s function and comes face to face with the tenuousness of (social) life.

Wearing clothes inside out The Walking Dead repeats the trope of abject permeability because, logically, in the early days of the apocalypse, neither bodies nor clothes would have decomposed sufficiently to completely eclipse the social. As time progresses, the show transforms the trope by playing with the psychosocial anxiety of porous boundaries of the human/inhuman-social/antisocial. In season 3, episode 1 (“Seed”), for example, Rick and his group of survivors decide to take over an abandoned prison. By this point, zombies have lost much of their fear factor as survivors have learned how to “kill” them efficiently. Rick and his group clear the prison

145

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

145

yard with capitalistic productivity and arrive at an inner yard where the system breaks down briefly when they encounter a horde of former SWAT team officers, whose uniforms, replete with helmet and face shield, make these zombies more difficult to kill. Paradoxically, horror is heightened in this scene, despite the fact that the zombies’ clothing impedes them from eating living victims. The sharpened uncanniness of the uniformed zombies can be attributed to the fact that, as former officers, these zombies are adorned with the clothing of institutional power. Similarly to the nineteenth-century indigent worker’s aporetic embodiment of society and savagery and to the zombie girl’s paradoxical incarnation of the internal and the external, the zombie SWAT officers materially represent the collapsed social order. Because of their former social function, the degeneration to the zombie state is all the more destabilizing; the uniform of social order that the zombies wear has shifted functions and now protects the “savage” to the detriment of civilization: the former vestimentary system now buttresses the zombie’s abjection. The inherent fragility of the zombie “essence” (a fragility directly related to their porous nature and the facility in “killing” them) finds reinforcement in the protective wear. The fear of social contamination is doubled by this symbolic reversal of the vestimentary sign. A return to Marx’s lumpenproletariat can shore up the social fear inspired by the SWAT zombies. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx ([1852] 2010) characterizes Napoleon III’s reign as a carnival of inversions: An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus his expedition to Strasbourg, where the trained Swiss vulture played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his irruption into Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms. They represent the army. (38) In the new social order where a fool plays the part of ruler, the carnivalesque has taken over: high now means low, noble ignoble, and the dominated become the dominant. The zombie apocalypse represents an analogous semiotic reversal, in which the living are preyed on by the dead, a world in which those dressed in the clothing of the helpless, like a little lost girl, or as protectors, like an elite police officer, are now the source of danger and ambulant signs of social instability and degeneration. In the new zombie world order, the inversion not only occurs from low to high. To stay alive, Rick and his fellow survivors must at times use “zombie dress” to pass freely in the post-apocalyptic world. In season 1, episode 2 (“Guts”), Rick has been saved by a band of survivors who very quickly fall under his command.

146

146

NIGEL LEZAMA

Trapped in an Atlanta department store, the survivors explain to Rick that zombies have a sense of smell that allows them to distinguish living from zombie flesh. Rick decides to use the entrails of a fallen zombie as “clothing” during their escape from the overrun city. While the zombie materializes the fragility of the border separating in from outside, the living in The Walking Dead are often obliged to reinforce the fragility of biology by camouflaging themselves with zombie abjection. This use of zombie gore as clothing is an inversion of the zombie-in-combat-gear trope, or the fortifying of the antisocial with the social; the antisocial functions for the social when the abject is used as masquerade. There are moments in the show, however, when masquerade risks becoming genuine dress practice. “Dress in everyday life is always more than a shell, it is an intimate aspect of the experience and presentation of the self and is so closely linked to the identity that these three—dress, the body and the self—are not perceived separately but simultaneously, as a totality” (Entwistle 2000b: 10). Being covered in the monstrous “Other’s” entrails as masquerade buttresses the boundary of self; however, the individual runs the risk of an excessive identification with the zombie. In her psychoanalytic study of dress, La Robe, Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni (1983) affirms the protective function of clothing to act as a carapace against the alienating effects of the “Other:” But above all, clothing is useful so that the subject can occupy more space than the body does, and a certain space; a certain surface that is vitally needed because the Other is there, the Other in whom the body would be lost, were it not for the imaginary contour that the subject gives themselves, and who would attack at the most intimate aspect of their being if clothing did not form the boundary beyond the body, their territory. (41) Lemoine-Luccione surely does not have the threat of death at the hands (and mouth) of zombies in mind, but the danger is the same. Dress provides a psychological bulwark for the individual who must confront the plethora of subjectivities encountered in the public sphere. In the case of the zombie apocalypse, the threat is to life itself, so that the zombie viscera smeared on overcoats, pants, blankets, face, and hands create a very real barrier that protects the human underneath. Clothing can, however, have the obverse effect and impact the clotheswearing subject. Umberto Eco finds his thought restricted by a too-tight pair of jeans,3 and while Hercules heroically performed all his tasks, wearing the shirt of Nessus led to his suicide (cf. Rose 1958: 179). This loss of self to dress is also represented in The Walking Dead. Often, survivors, covered in the blood and viscera of the undead, find it difficult to distinguish themselves from the invading zombies. In season 3, episode 6 (“Hounded”), Michonne is inadvertently covered in zombie entrails while defending herself. She realizes, to her surprise, that her

147

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

147

Figure  7.2 Frame grab from The Walking Dead, season 3, episode 6 (dir. Dan Attias), 2012. © AMC Studios.

“zombie overcoat” allows her to walk freely among the undead. At the end of the episode, the show evokes this ambiguity of status when Michonne walks up to the prison fence where Rick and his group have just recently settled. Recognition of her status as human is difficult for Rick and the viewer until the camera pans to her face (Figure 7.2). The show stages this alienation from the perspective of the subject as well. After a devastating attack by a rival faction, Rick, Michonne, and their group are separated. Michonne, once again alone, “tames” two zombies, which she keeps on a leash and whose presence camouflages her difference from the undead. Wandering in a wooded area, she falls into a heard of zombies where she meets her doppelganger. While the zombie double lurches forward, Michonne staggers beside her; she contemplates the zombie, as if studying her degraded reflection in a mirror. She hesitates and continues to walk along with the herd, as if taking her rightful place among her kind. Proximity, devastation, and despair surround Michonne, so much so that she no longer requires zombie clothes; alienation has seeped into her skin. She has momentarily fallen into the lumpenproletariat. The sight of her zombie double has dissolved the boundary between the living and the undead. The fear of contamination seems founded, as the individual no longer has to be bitten to join the zombie ranks. What The Walking Dead stages is the collapse of all categories, a fear that motivated and inspired the voyeuristic fascination with the heterogeneous masses in the nineteenth century. Marx describes the alienation of the people during Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état in a manner that evokes Michonne’s own alienation:  “Men and events appear as reverse Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost their bodies” (Marx [1852]

148

148

NIGEL LEZAMA

2010:  20). In contemplating her zombie double, Michonne loses herself and becomes her own shadow. However, after a moment, Michonne fights off alienation and beheads, first, her double, and then the entire herd. In effect, she finds her body, once again. Similarly to the nineteenth-century attempt to reinforce the bourgeois subject’s belonging through the spectacle of abject heterogeneity, Michonne is able to overcome her identification with the hordes and reassert her own subjectivity by asserting her agency through the zombies’ easy decimation.

Killer elegance The impeccable Dr.  Hannibal Lecter, like the zombie, seeks to build an antisocial army and, like the zombie, Hannibal’s heterogeneous status is embodied (albeit more elegantly). Hannibal’s Otherness appears in his perfectly impermeable exterior, materialized by refined vestimentary taste. Whereas his clothing is elegant, Hannibal is not fashionable. To be fashionable is to assimilate oneself to a generalized vestimentary norm. Hannibal’s clothing practice, with spread collars and Windsor knotted ties, hints at the early nineteenth-century practice of dandyism through his meticulous manipulation of vestimentary details; his taste leans toward the superlative, but not enough to make those around him uncomfortable. Dandyism’s founding father, George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840), invested his clothing with a number of discreet details that subtly distinguished him from the urban masses, both high and low, during the Regency period in London, England. His well-known aphorisms became gospel for all aspiring dandies. “If John Bull turns around to look at you,” Brummell is said to have intoned, “you are not well dressed; but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable” (Kelly 2006: 5). One can easily imagine Hannibal uttering a similar dictum.4 While Hannibal’s exterior must be seductive in order to pass, he remains primus inter pares. Hannibal uses his elegant clothing and urbane manner to distinguish himself, but only enough so that his fine taste is admired and does not become a barrier to social engagement. It is behind the elegant façade, however, that lurks the monster. Dr. Lecter’s seduction is in fact twofold. He seduces to divert attention from his murderous proclivities and to convert those in whom he finds affinity. In this, this series also stages the fear of social contamination that characterizes nineteenth-century social thinking and discourse. It is Hannibal’s vestimentary praxis of elegance conjugated with an acute underlying sociopathy that signals his lineage to the dandy, the sophisticated nineteenth-century model of urban and urbane taste. In the same way that the criminal elements of Marx’s lumpenproletariat slip outside of class determination, the dandy is a déclassé. When the dandy arrived on the London scene, at the end of the eighteenth century, his clothing, grooming habits, and wit were tools used to separate him from the effete and increasingly obsolete aristocracy, the

149

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

149

indigent and filthy working poor, and a burgeoning and uniform middle class.5 The dandy’s fastidious manner and assumption of innate and unimpeachable sartorial authority represent the equivalent of a coup d’état. “In the new urban dandy mode, a man’s heroism consisted only in being thoroughly himself; Brummell proved that the essential superior being was no longer a hereditary nobleman” (Breward 2000:  224, citing Hollander). Brummell and his ilk used clothing to materialize both distinction and classlessness. In her fascinating look at the history of the Gothic aesthetic, Gothic: Dark Glamour, Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park (2008) focus on the dandy’s genealogy from the English Regency period to the French Second Empire and determine that the dandy is a precursor to another dark and dangerous figure, the vampire, for similar reasons: “The image of the dandy as a cold and blasé foreign gentleman with a basilisk stare and an ambiguous sexual orientation gradually merged with the popular image of the vampire” (30), Steele asserts. Like the vampire, Hannibal is elegant, above the fray, seductive, and deadly. By now, Hannibal Lecter is an extremely well-known fictional villain; the character has featured in a tetralogy of books by Thomas Harris as well as in numerous movie adaptations. However, his depiction in the television series is particularly enthralling for its detailed art direction and production value, evident in the very brief first encounter with the dapper murderer. The first time Hannibal is presented on screen in season 1, episode 1 (“Apéritif”), he is alone at the table. His signature Baroque aria plays as the camera pans up from a reflection of a plate of luscious fruit on a glass table to a dish of medium-rare cooked meat, from which manicured hands remove a slice and place it on a plate next to a mixed greens salad. The camera continues to pan upward as the elegant hand raises a silver fork bearing a piece of the meat. Hannibal is first seen in dim overhead lighting; the viewer can make out the shoulders of his taupe glen plaid suit jacket. The scene ends with a shadowed close-up of his face. This initial depiction subtly introduces the doctor’s counternormative status. The plaid suit that Hannibal wears announces his predilection for the pattern. In historical dress terms, plaid (or tartan) maintains a storied history that adds depth to its connotations and to those who adorn themselves with the textile. In his extraordinary history, Tartan, Jonathan Faiers proposes that tartan’s use as a fashionable pattern starts with its proscription after the Jacobite Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century. From a traditional motif of Highland clan dress, tartan transformed into a symbol of power and domination once the British government banned its use, except for soldiers and officers in the Royal Army in the Dress Act of 1746 (Faiers 2008: 157). Tartan’s proscription “freed [the textile] from its original signification” (ibid.). Moreover, according to Faiers, since its proscription, tartan’s message became aporetic, having both its original culturally based meaning tied to varying messages of both power and subversion: the textile “has

150

150

NIGEL LEZAMA

amassed a host of secondary [meanings], allowing it to act as an indeterminate textile sign” (ibid.). Like the sett itself, tartan’s intended meaning is overlaid with an opposite, dominant, and new signified (not dissimilar to the semiotic degradation of the message of social order of the zombie’s police uniform). In this light, it is possible to consider tartan a sign of subversion, a notion buttressed by its continued and varied use since the ratification of the Dress Act. In later nineteenth-century London, the dandy’s heirs, the “swell” and the “gent” liberally adopted the textile as part if their counterdiscursive sartorial practice: under an ideology of sobriety and black clothes, tartan’s bold pattern put these young men in the social spotlight thanks to a “heightened conspicuousness aided and abetted by the many distractions and entertainments that the nineteenth century’s increased mechanization and commercialization offered” (Faiers 2008:  162). While plaid and checks have become a central component of the establishment’s aesthetics since the Dress Act, exemplified, for instance, by the late Duke of Windsor’s penchant for glen plaid, in the late twentieth century, tartan, as a sign of ideological protest, was firmly cemented by Vivienne Westwood and the punk movement’s adoption, further confirming the pattern’s palimpsestic message. In Hannibal, the majority of antisocial, if not homicidal, characters make liberal use of the fabric. The arrogant Dr. Frederick Chilton, director of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, often wears bold checks, double-breasted tartan suits, and striped shirts. The lethal musician Tobias Budge also demonstrates a predilection for tartan suits and check waistcoats, until Hannibal murders him (Figure 7.3).6

Figure  7.3 Morning Vest 1850–59. © Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009. Gift of E. McGreevey, 1948, http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/157605; Vivienne Westwood, Wool Tartan Jacket, 1993. Accession 2001.79.1. © Museum at FIT; frame grab, Hannibal, season 2, episode 3 (dir. Peter Medak), 2014. © NBC Studios.

151

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

151

Killing to fit in On first blush, Hannibal’s use highlights tartan’s historical message of establishment ideology; his vestimentary refinement seemingly buttresses his social role as a psychological specialist supporting the work of the FBI, on the hunt for an elusive serial killer. Hannibal is not the only character who displays a taste for plaid. Both Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences, and Will Graham, the profiler whose “pure empathy” allows him to profoundly identify with killers the FBI is hunting, also appear regularly in plaid; in this sense, the vestimentary affiliation between the three characters seemingly materializes their common interests. In “Apéritif,” when all three characters meet for the first time, vestimentary complicity is highlighted (albeit, in this case, in solid neutral colors). Crawford has asked Dr. Lecter’s to “profile” the fragile Will. The three meet in Crawford’s office, ostensibly, to discuss a serial killer at large. In contrast to the first time the viewer meets either Hannibal or Will, who both wore plaids in either their first or second scenes, and along with Crawford, they all wear mixed neutrals, which visually hints at collaboration and common interests through the harmony of the color combination. Jack, in a single-breasted dark grey pinstriped suit, brown shirt, and blue and purple patterned tie, demonstrates his official status in the uniform of the socialized worker; however, the contrasting colors of shirt and tie and heavy-handed color palette symbolize his autocratic style. Will is casually dressed in a light green shirt with flat-felled seams and darker green flat-front trousers. Hannibal wears a beige single-breasted suede sport coat over a white shirt and light khaki green sweater with grey trousers. His color palette suggests not only clothing’s function of camouflage (like Michonne in her “zombie overcoat”), as he blends in with Jack’s neutral toned office, but also his ostensible support for the FBI’s mission. The viewer, however, is already aware of the doctor’s murderous tendencies. In this scene, Hannibal’s dress functions more as masquerade than as personal expression and signals the underlying social aspect of the horror narrative. It is possible to unearth a vestimentary class struggle that underscores the horror plot. Jack and Hannibal symbolize opposite extremes of the dominant class materialized in their dress practice: Jack represents the bourgeoisie, with garish but sensible uniform; Hannibal, with his softer tones and animal skins, hints at an unproductive elite who need not submit to the bourgeois fashion ethos. In the struggle that pits elite against elite, it is the side that can harness the power of the dominated (or the marginalized) that will gain the upper hand. Will, with his casually cut clothes and the intermediate color palette, is the force that Jack and Hannibal fight to win over. As Marx notes in The Eighteenth Brumaire, it is by harnessing the power of the lower orders of society that the old elite are

152

152

NIGEL LEZAMA

Figure  7.4 Frame grab from Hannibal, season 1, episode 1 (dir. David Slade), 2013. © NBC Studios.

able to maintain dominance in turbulent times. Writing about the Revolution of 1848, Marx finds that while the Paris proletariat still revelled in the vision of the wide prospects that had opened before it and indulged in seriously meant discussions of social problems, the old powers of society had grouped themselves, assembled, reflected, and found unexpected support in the mass of the nation, the peasants and petty bourgeois, who all at once stormed onto the political stage after the barriers of the July Monarchy had fallen. ([1852] 2010: 8) Following Marx, the social transformation of the proletarian revolution, promised by the tumultuous last days of February 1848, were stymied once the “old powers,” what Marx also calls “the aristocracy of finance” (ibid.), were paradoxically able to marshal the dominated to their cause. In Hannibal, underneath the traditional serial killer horror plot, there is a seduction story that pits Jack (bourgeoisie) against Hannibal (aristocracy) for Will’s (peasantry or the petty bourgeoisie) power (Figure 7.4).

Dressing for excess Will’s clothing also hints at his potential for disorder and materializes the class seduction plot that buttresses Hannibal’s horror narrative. Tartan’s political history and aporetic symbolism have already been evoked to highlight the symbolism of

153

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

153

Hannibal’s sartorial predilections. Will also demonstrates a taste for the pattern. However, he most often limits his use of the fabric to casual shirts that are worn under a sweater or a jacket. In this sense, his potential for disorder, as symbolized by this disorderly textile, is contained, or at least Will attempts to contain it with a less polyvalent outer garment. On the other hand, Hannibal opts for pedigreed tartans, worn from top to bottom and as an outer layer; his tartans, like his murderous proclivities, are neither contained nor restrained. Hannibal demonstrates a breakdown of clothing’s function of supporting social order and the integrity of the subject7 analogous to the zombie’s dissolution of borders in The Walking Dead. However, in the elegant horror of Hannibal, the fear of contamination is not staged as a sundering of biological borders; the horror of contamination is represented sartorially. The second season of the show introduces a twist in the Hannibal-Will seduction plot. Now that everyone suspects Hannibal’s murderous proclivities, Will uses himself as bait to corner the doctor. However, Will’s particular affinity with Hannibal (demonstrated through their similar taste for tartan) makes his motivations unclear. As he gets closer to Hannibal, Will’s dress practice shifts, becomes bolder, more closely tied to dominant tastes. In the last few episodes of the second season, Will begins wearing stronger patterns in more subdued colors, as if camouflaging himself in the colors of his prey. In season 2, episode 10 (“NakaChoko”), Will changes his clothing style to more closely match Hannibal’s by contrasting the colors of his shirt and jacket (green for the shirt and charcoal grey for the jacket); for both, he chooses a herringbone weave that adds a heretofore unseen flair. More than camouflage, Will’s contrasting yet complimentary colors and pattern hint at transgression:  Will’s crossing over from a working-class vestimentary aesthetic to a more refined use of cloth and color supports his character’s narrative ambivalence. Is he baiting or seducing Hannibal? Has Hannibal successfully enlisted Will in his murderous army or will the doctor be duped? The questions remain, even as the season reaches its bloody dénouement. Nevertheless, Will’s vestimentary metamorphosis from rough to refined stokes the fire of the social narrative at the heart of this horror plot. Stallybrass remarks on the paradoxical nature of this nineteenth-century horror story: The homogeneity of the bourgeois subject is here constituted through the spectacle of heterogeneity. Yet the relation of subject to spectacle remains problematic. To emphasize the subject’s “integrity,” nineteenth-century writers emphasized the socioeconomic fissures of the city, the irreducible gap of class. And that was to acknowledge a social and political threat, the possibility that what were sometimes called “the dangerous classes” might abolish the distance between subject and spectacle through revolutionary action. (1990: 79)

154

154

NIGEL LEZAMA

In the case of Hannibal, Will focuses on Hannibal’s heterogeneous status, both morally and sartorially, during the second season. While his less sophisticated (like Hannibal) or institutional (like Jack) clothing sets him outside of the bourgeois world, Will’s force, his “pure empathy,” have the potential of working for or against the bourgeois ethos, which is what both Jack and Hannibal attempt to harness. As Will is pulled closer to Hannibal in the later episodes of season 2, he transforms, through bolder and more sophisticated fabrics, which he now wears at the outermost layer, without attempting to contain the potential for disorder with more decorous solid outerwear. The fear of “abolish[ment of] the distance between subject and spectacle” is a fear of the porousness of frontiers, both somatic and social. Hannibal uses this dual fear to stage the horror of the elegant killer. Because of its proximity to the body, dress is a fortification for the self against the other; Will’s fashion shift symbolizes the dissolution of this boundary, as he seemingly loses himself to Hannibal. As an expression of the social self, dress also reassures by suggesting that class is an impassable difference that maintains social order; Will’s new sartorial taste demonstrates that the distance between subject and spectacle is not, in fact, irreducible.

Conclusion Horror in The Walking Dead and Hannibal is coded through the blood and gore that flow freely. However, for these plots to really unnerve, there needs be a broader social aspect to the fear that allows the viewer to feel the full frisson of the abject. This social narrative is a long-standing penny dreadful of class instability and the permeability of borders that the display of bloodstained clothes and viscera point at. In the modern capitalist world, dress is a tool to reassure the bourgeois subject of their integrity as well as their place in the class structure. Both the zombie and the elegant killer, working at the margins of society in modern horror, counter clothing’s social meaning and replay the nineteenthcentury fear of disorder and collapsed boundaries. Despite a dress practice that situates each of the horror figures at opposite extremes, the fear they inspire is isomorphic. Facing the ragged and gory zombie or the elegant and cultured anthropophagic psychiatrist, our visceral fear does not stem from the realization of the fragility of life, but rather, from the consciousness of the fragility of our social constructs and the flimsiness of the symbols with which we reassure ourselves of our own somatic and social integrity. In The Walking Dead, the zombie’s fear factor reached back beyond the codes of modern horror to the social terror of France’s postrevolutionary years.8 Like the heterogeneous masses that seemed to invade the public space and threaten society by pointing to the gaps in ideology, the zombie’s uncanny abjection disturbs because it materializes the incapacity of clothing

155

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

155

to reinforce the boundaries of the human. The Walking Dead’s true horror is not the decrepit blood and viscera that seep and ooze from the thin zombie vessels, but the fragility of the human and the social that must fight to maintain integrity and not fall into the heterogeneous herd, like “shadows that have lost their bodies.” Hannibal unnerves by restaging class conflict in vestimentary terms. Whereas The Walking Dead focused on the threat from underneath (in social and biological terms), Hannibal represents the conflict that takes place “at the top of bourgeois society.” In vestimentary terms, the show’s preference for tartans and plaids is a staging of this conflict through the fabric’s storied history. Dr. Lecter’s bold use of the pattern points to its aporetic nature, as both the vestment of the establishment and the sign of cultural subversion, and hypostasizes his dual nature. Like the vampire (another dashing foreign gentleman), Hannibal seduces and enlists to his cause. Will Graham also demonstrates a taste for tartan. In early episodes, his use of the fabric remained resolutely popular. As the series progresses and Will’s motivations become unclear both to himself and the viewer, he adopts a bolder, more aristocratic use of the pattern, demonstrating his shift and placing him under the doctor’s thrall. In this light, Hannibal is also a horror story about weakened social barriers and the power of clothing to both materialize and act as a catalyst for the instability of identity.

Notes 1 The philosopher and medical doctor P.-J.-G. Cabanis exemplifies the nineteenthcentury belief in the direct link between the internal and the external, which he elaborates in his 1802 treatise, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme.

2 The profusion of nineteenth-century ethnographic writing that focuses on the shifting demographics of European society often focus on the degenerative correlation between vestimentary impoverishment and evolutionary status. In his treatise, Buret (1840) uses the example of the savage man (“l’homme barbare,” 113) to illuminate the state of the indigent. This “savage man,” that is to say a man devoid of humanity, is characterized by being “badly housed, badly dressed” (113). In the nineteenth century, clothing was a key aspect of the individual’s status, so that deviation from the norm became a sign of deviation from full, civilized human status.

3 Umberto Eco “Lumbar Thought” ([1986] 1976). 4 See my article “The nineteenth-century dandy’s heroic renunciation through fashion” (2012) for my discussion on the literary and historical dandy’s sartorial counternormative stance.

5 For an excellent presentation of the dandy’s singular stance against all classes, cf. Brent Shannon (2006: ch. 4).

6 It is worth remarking that many antisocial characters in contemporary television series adorn themselves in plaid; in Gotham (2014–), for instance, both Edward Nygma and Penguin choose plaid suiting as they attain their villainous apotheosis.

156

156

NIGEL LEZAMA

7 Hollander ([1975] 1980) remarks on the contradictory essence of fashion to both represent and obscure the wearer’s social reality: “Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie. . . . Thus changes in mode have rightly been sensed as subversive. Blame could be and continually was attached to people for seeming to try to be other than they were: richer, higher born, younger, or of another sex, busy if they were idle, idle if they were really workers – and, of course, beautiful if they were really ugly, according to prevailing standards, or ugly if they were beautiful when the mode was bizarre” (355).

8 It is interesting to note that, while much analysis of the zombie has engaged with Marxist thought (cf. Sugg 2015 and Williams 2011), as the product or sign of alienating labor, or the trope of the zombie as social and cultural sacrifice (cf. Nuckolls 2014), this chapter has examined the zombie as a vestimentary figuration of social instability, with a direct lineage to Marx’s theorization of the lumpenproletariat. In this light, this study adds new perspective to zombie studies.

References Bakhtin, M. (1982), François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance, Paris: Gallimard. Breward, C. (2000), “The Dandy Laid Bare: Embodying Practices and Fashion for Men,” in S. Bruzzi and P. Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Culture, Theories, Explorations and Analysis, 221–38, London: Routledge. Buret, E. (1840), De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France; De la nature de la misère, de son existence, de ses effets, de ses causes, et de l’insuffisance des remèdes qu’on lui a opposés jusqu’ici; avec l’indication des moyens propres à en affranchir les societies, tome 2, Paris: Paulin Libraire. Eco, U. ([1986] 1976), “Lumbar Thought,” in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. London : Minerva. Available online: http://fields.eca.ac.uk/digitalspaces1/wp-content/ uploads/2009/04/lumbarthought.pdf (accessed May 6, 2016). Entwistle, J. (2000a), “Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice,” Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 4 (3): 323–48. Entwistle, J. (2000b), The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Faiers, J. (2008), Tartan, New York: Berg Publishers. Frégier, H.-A. (1840), Des Classes dangereuses de la population des grandes villes et des moyens de les rendre meilleurs, Paris: J. Baillières, Librairie de l’Académie Royale de Médecine. Freud, S. (1919), The “Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII (1917–19): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217–56. Available online: http://complit.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/FreudTheUncannyPDF.pdf (accessed May 16, 2016). Hollander, A. ([1975] 1980), Seeing Through Clothes: Fashioning Ourselves, New York: Avon Books. Kelly, I. (2006), Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style, New York: Free Press. Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Lemoine-Luccione, E. (1983), La Robe: Essai Psychanalytique sur le Vêtement, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

157

SLASHER CONSCIOUSNESS

157

Marx, K. ([1850] 2010), “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” in Matthew Carmody (ed.) (2009) and Mark Harris (ed.) (2010), Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm (accessed April 29, 2016). Marx, K. ([1852] 2010), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/ pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf (accessed April 29, 2016). Nuckolls, C. (2014), “The Walking Dead as Cultural Critique,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 13 (2): 102–10. Rose, H. J. (1958), A Handbook of Greek Mythology, Including Its Extension to Rome, 6th edn., London: Methuen. Shannon, B. (2006), The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914, Athens: Ohio University Press. Stallybrass, P. (1990), “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations: The Margins of Identity in Nineteenth-Century England 31: 69–95. Steele, V., and J. Park (2008), Gothic: Dark Glamour, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and FIT. Sugg, K. (2015), “The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions,” Journal of American Studies 49 (4): 793–811. Williams, E. (2011), Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Winchester: Zero Books.

158

159

8 FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM Monsters and Men Rafael Jaen and Robert I. Lublin

Among horror films, Frankenstein holds a place of distinction for its cultural ubiquity and enduring popularity. When one envisions Frankenstein’s creation, the iconic image that invariably comes to mind first is the tall, flat-headed monster Boris Karloff made famous in Universal Studios’ Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939). The special effects makeup choices employed to create the Monster’s famous visage have drawn considerable attention since the movies first appeared (Kehoe 1991: ix; Lewis 2014: 66). It was a completely original concept and bore no resemblance to previous stage or film versions of Frankenstein. The clothes he wore, however, have drawn virtually no mention at all. This is an unfortunate oversight, for his apparel served to construct visually and materially the most famous monster in film history. Moreover, the distinctive clothing Karloff wore to personate the Monster engaged with the movie’s deeper themes, constructing meaning that worked both generally and specifically to establish a new notion of monstrosity and its relation to humanity. This chapter examines the clothing, special effects makeup, and visual worlds of the most popular movie presentations of the Frankenstein myth. A comprehensive survey would be impossible since no fewer than 200 Frankenstein movies have been produced worldwide, and if we include ones that are merely based on the Frankenstein myth, there are literally thousands of films (Heffernan 1997:  136; Fraistat and Jones 2009). We begin with what has come to be popularly recognized as the most famous horror movie of all time, the Universal Studios’ Frankenstein that starred Karloff, and its sequels (Clarens 2004: 60). We will then highlight the enduring and groundbreaking design aspects of these movies by comparing them to the stylistic choices presented in the earliest cinematic version of the myth, the 1910 Frankenstein, produced by the Edison Company.

160

160

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Next we will address the first color version, Hammer Film Productions’ Curse of Frankenstein (1957), which introduced an altogether new notion of monstrosity into Frankenstein cinema. Finally, we will look at Kenneth Brannagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) for its attempt to engage anew Shelley’s classic and its inclusion of innovative special effects makeup.1 Our examination of the movies’ depictions of monstrosity seeks to do justice to the critical importance in the horror film genre of clothing and apparel in addition to special effects makeup. And, because our chapter focuses on Frankenstein, our study of costuming will include a consideration of the Monster’s body, for Frankenstein’s creation exhibits limbs and organs that, like articles of clothing, have been carefully chosen for specific effect.

Fashioning an icon: Karloff’s Monster When we consider the overwhelming popularity of Frankenstein movies and the great range of scholarly and popular attention they have drawn, it is surprising to note the paucity of attention devoted to the Monster’s clothing. And yet, Boris Karloff’s visage as the Monster is so distinctive that it draws our focus and warrants the attention it has received. The image was constructed collectively by the director James Whale; the actor, Karloff; and the makeup artist, Jack Pierce. Albert Lavalley provides an insightful description of the Monster’s head and face: The head was shaped like a lid, since Pierce had read that it was the simplest way to open and recap the brain; surgical scars would attest to the brain operation that the movie would not show. A Neanderthal slope over the eyes, done with putty, suggested the desired lower intelligence. The painted mouth contrasted with the pallor of the death-like flesh in the manner of Cesare in Caligari.2 A tin forehead covered with putty accented the length and gauntness of the face to which Karloff’s removal of some false teeth gave an even more sunken appearance. The famous electrodes in the neck were for the purpose of electrically animating the Monster. (1974: 263) Karloff’s forehead had to be broadened and elongated to accommodate Pierce’s design, providing the Monster with an oversized head that was imposing when he was angry, and revealing in more sympathetic scenes. While we invariably envision green skin when we imagine Frankenstein’s Monster, the original color of the makeup was a shadowy blue-green, for Pierce found that it best resembled dead flesh on black and white motion picture film (Hitchcock 2007: 152). The great devotee of all things Frankenstein, Donald Glut, explains that the use of green originally resulted from a mask-maker manufacturing a 1948 rubber mask of the character for retail sale (2002:  128). In fact, it is not Karloff, but Glenn Strange who remains the most recognizable movie Frankenstein Monster.

161

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

161

It was his face, with Bud Westmore’s makeup for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which became the template for the endless masks, games, model kits, iron-ons, and more (Glut 2002: 35). Karloff’s Monster was the inspiration, but not the actual model for the image. As popular as the Universal Monster’s face may be, equally popular is the black apparel in which he appears, including boots with five-inch soles, a musty black suit, and a distressed black shirt underneath. All subsequent representations of the Karloff-inspired Monster include the distinctive clothing that appends to the image. This apparel did more than support the Monster’s horrifying visage. It presented meaning in its own right and warrants extended consideration. The heels that Karloff wore were required to create a being of extraordinary size that seemed dangerous to others, who naturally feared his imposing stature. The decision to make the Monster appear larger was a creative one that broke with all previous versions of Frankenstein in film and theatre, but followed the prescription of Mary Shelley’s novel, which provides a practical explanation for the increased size. Victor Frankenstein states: “I began the creation of a human being. As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large” (Shelley 1996: 33) (Figure 8.1). The movie provides no practical explanation for following this aspect of the novel or any reason why Victor might choose to create a being that was physically threatening, but the Monster’s size is a crucial aspect of the danger it represents. To enhance the effect provided by the elevated shoes, Karloff was filmed from below in a manner that increased the sense of his towering height (Nestrick 1974: 296). Karloff’s entirely black ensemble also has no precedent in previous stage or screen versions of Frankenstein and does not follow any suggestion from Shelley. The most resonant image of the creature in early Victorian illustrations features the actor T. P. Cooke performing in Richard Brinsley Peake’s adaptation Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. The emphasis in the performance and in the illustration was on the actor’s impressive physique rather than his apparel (Raub 2012: 451). The creature wore light garments similar to a Roman tunic and a toga. The original novel provides very little to suggest how the Monster might have been dressed. Frankenstein’s creation states that upon leaving Victor’s apartment, “on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes; but these were insufficient to secure me from the dews of night” (Shelley 1996: 70). Later, he says: “under one of the trees I found a huge cloak, with which I covered myself” (70–1). Lacking reference to color, cut, or style, these lines provide no guidance for a costumer creating a film, and they are the only references to the Monster’s apparel in the novel. The third edition of the novel, however, published in 1831, includes a frontispiece that depicts Frankenstein and the first stirrings of his creation. In this picture, the creature appears as an oversized naked man with

162

162

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Figure 8.1 N. Whittock after Wageman, “Mr. T. P. Cooke, of the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, in the character of the monster in the dramatic romance of Frankenstein,” 1823, lithograph, 37 x 29.5 cm, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections. nypl.org/items/78abffff-24da-1e46-e040-e00a18064970; W. Chevalier after Th. von Holst, “Frankenstein,” 1831, engraving, 9.3 x 7.1 cm, Wellcome Library, London.

his head protruding from his right shoulder and an elongated hand (Heffernan 1997: 142–3). Breaking with these earlier models, the 1931 movie Frankenstein presented a very new notion of how a monster looks and dresses. Whale, Karloff, and Pierce designed a costume that remains indelibly connected in our imagination with the Monster. The choice of black clothing, as costume historian Anne Hollander notes, has significant consequences. While black can serve many purposes, it “appears as the color suitable to delicious forbidden practice and belief—the courting of death, not the mourning of it—in a great deal of Romantic literature” (Hollander 1993: 376). The movie invokes this specific meaning by opening with a funeral scene in which the mourners surround a grave site, dressed entirely in black. The opening scenes of movies and plays are particularly important for the establishment of meaning, for they provide the broad framework within which audiences understand later information. By opening with a funeral, the movie disconnects black from other associations (fashionable apparel, fancy dress for special occasions, etc.) and connects it directly with death.

163

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

163

Moreover, the black clothes that the Monster wears are well-worn and dusty. Practically speaking, this makes no sense. In the movie, Henry Frankenstein is a Baron with a considerable fortune and dresses in clean, expensive, brightly colored clothing.3 There is no reason he would lack new or at least clean clothing for his creation. But Whale’s Frankenstein does not attempt to establish a realistic cinematic world. Rather, the movie and its Universal successors employ the visual language of German expressionism, which Whale studied while preparing to direct Frankenstein (Picart 2000: 24). Black clothing invokes death and forbidden practice generally, but the Monster’s apparel is dusty and distressed, which further suggests that the wearer has only recently walked out of the grave onto the screen—an ambling, mumbling corpse, newly drawn from the ground. Julia Kristeva explains the power of this evocation in her extended essay on horror and abjection: Refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver. (1982: 3) With skin the color of dead flesh and dirty, worn, black clothing, the Monster is death—the cinematic embodiment of Kristeva’s notion of abjection. This explains why the camera pauses at length on the image when the Monster first appears, providing audiences a long, slow introduction (Figure  8.2). Viewers need time to engage with precisely what we typically and studiously avoid: the reality and, indeed, the certainty of our own impending deaths. The size and fitting of the Monster’s iconic black sport jacket support the movie’s expressionistic approach. It is easy to see that the jacket’s sleeves are too short, which suggests the Monster’s enormous size in support of the physical threat he represents. But the jacket is not merely too small for the wearer. If it were simply a small jacket, chosen for the Monster because he was too big for other clothes, the shoulders would not fit and the jacket would be too short to reach the wearer’s waist. Stuffed into a diminutive jacket, the Monster would appear ridiculous in clothes that pinched at the shoulders and failed to reach the waist. The jacket Karloff wears, however, easily fits over his shoulders and includes padding to accentuate their size and make the wearer appear more imposing. Additionally, the jacket reaches appropriately below the waist, as a sport jacket should. On the other hand, the body of the jacket is not formfitting but sack shaped so as to reject any visible sense of refinement in the wearer. In this manner, the Monster’s clothing was carefully constructed to invoke enormous size, physical danger, crudity, uncouthness, and death. The dimensions

164

164

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Figure 8.2 Boris Karloff as the Monster in Frankenstein (dir. James Whale), 1931, Universal Pictures. Universal Clips™ Business to Business Broadcast Film Clip and Still Licensing.

165

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

165

and shape of the Monster’s clothes have no place in a realistic cinematic world but are poignantly effective in furthering the movie’s expressionistic vision. The particular associations of the Monster’s apparel are established and heightened by appearing in contrast to the clothes worn by Baron Henry Frankenstein. From the start, Frankenstein wears tailored suits that finely fit his thin, attractive frame. He additionally wears ties and fancy cravats that demonstrate wealth coupled with refinement. When he pursues his experiments, he appears in a clean, formfitting white lab coat that reaches from his neck to his knees. Wearing it, Frankenstein offers a diametrical visual contrast to the Monster. His face is vibrant with life and his white, scientific apparel suggests intelligence and sophistication. Contrarily, the Monster’s face appears even paler, and his black apparel darker and more worn by the disparity. When Frankenstein struggles with the Monster, he takes off his sport jacket to reveal a bright, white, button-down shirt underneath that provides the same color contrast as his lab coat. Grappling together, each wearing clothes that signify his core identity, the Baron and the Monster visually contrast sophistication and unruliness, intelligence and mindlessness, civility and violence, life and death. When Mel Brooks wanted to make the Universal Studios’ Monster comically ridiculous for Young Frankenstein, he made minor, but significant, changes to the visual presentation. Since the comedy was filmed in black and white, makeup artist William Tuttle kept the pale skin that worked so well in Frankenstein, but he simplified the makeup for Peter Boyle’s Monster. Gone were the obvious scars and stitches that directly connected the wearer with death and a more violent reanimation. Instead, Tuttle includes a metal zipper on the right side of Boyle’s neck that mocks the visible signs of piecing together life that appear on earlier Frankenstein monsters. Brooks’s Monster is still large, wearing elevated shoes and padded shoulders, but offers a softer silhouette and shape. The shades of his costume, designed by Dorothy Jeakins, combined with Boyle’s expressions, are that of a big innocent child in the wilderness. By replacing the rigid squares with a cushion-like mass, Tuttle and Jeakins invite lightheartedness and humor. Late in the movie, the Monster’s distinctive black jacket, with its dark, expressionistic associations, is discarded for a white tie, top hat, and tails—the height of sophistication. The emphasis of this garment is in the stiffness of the square and padded bodice. The long front, extra wide shoulders, and exaggerated lapels make the arms seem shorter, which results in an awkwardly slapstick, rather than horrific, silhouette. Intrinsic to the Monster’s comedy is the stark visual break from what we know to be his proper apparel. In our collective imagination, Frankenstein’s creation lives beyond the grave in his unique, somber, black ensemble and can be understood visually in Brooks’s movie according to how he wears and then discards that attire (Figure 8.3). The Universal Studios’ distinctive costume and makeup for the Monster was used again in the 1935 sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, but his sport jacket revealed

166

166

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Figure  8.3 Peter Boyle as the Monster and Gene Wilder as Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein (dir. Mel Brooks), 1974, Twentieth Century Fox; Charles Ogle in Frankenstein (dir. J. Searle Dawley), 1910, Edison Studios, Ronald Grant Archive/Alamy.

a few additional tears and bit more wear so that the clothes recorded the traumatic events of the first movie that the Monster, surprisingly, survived. The overall visual effect of the second movie was not quite so imposing because Karloff was required to speak and therefore could not remove the bridge in his teeth, which had made his face look more hollow in the previous movie. In the third movie in the Universal series, the 1939 Son of Frankenstein (Karloff’s last playing the role), the Monster has a new piece of apparel, a fur vest, with the arms of his black jacket visible underneath. Fur can evince a variety of associations in modern culture and may even represent the height of urbanity and respectability, such as a mink coat (Faiers 2013: 62). The fur vest the Monster wears, however, appears rough, worn, and matted, with small, bare patches, and exhibits a ragged hem that makes it look as if it was torn from the animal that originally wore it. The

167

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

167

costume change gives the Monster a feral quality and limits his ability to invoke sympathy. The fur vest is appropriate to Son of Frankenstein, for in this movie the Monster serves primarily as the villainous Ygor’s agent of vengeance and does not engage the broad range of emotions that makes the first two movies classics. For the next Frankenstein movie, The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), the Monster (played by Lon Chaney Jr.) once again wears his iconic black apparel, and he undergoes no change in costume in the four additional films that constitute the Universal Studios’ Frankenstein series, indelibly locking his visage and distinctive apparel in our collective imagination.

Fashioning the first cinematic Frankenstein: Ogle’s Monster The Universal movies were not the first attempt to render Mary Shelley’s novel into film. More than two decades before Karloff donned his special effects makeup and black suit, the first Frankenstein movie was produced, presenting a less well-known Monster—one that the authors of this chapter find far more terrifying to behold. The Edison Company produced the silent film Frankenstein in 1910, starring Charles Ogle as the Monster, Augustus Phillips as Frankenstein, and Mary Fuller as the fiancée. Thirteen minutes in length, the movie was long believed lost, but a single copy resurfaced in the 1970s and, out of copyright, it is available to be viewed online.4 Like the early nineteenth-century theatrical versions of the novel, the characters in the movie clearly fit melodramatic stereotypes. Steven Forry summarizes:  “Elizabeth is the victimized heroine; Frankenstein plays the mad alchemist whose evil ambition is conquered by love; the Creature appears as the antagonistic opposite of Elizabeth” (1984: 185). The Creature thus serves as the complicating third figure that must be eradicated to restore balance to the disrupted heterosexual dyad. Ogle’s Monster is an extraordinary creation of makeup and costuming, visually achieving Peter Brooks’s notion of monstrosity (Figure 8.3): A monster is that which cannot be placed in any of the taxonomic schemes devised by the human mind to understand and to order nature. It exceeds the very basis of classification, language itself: it is an excess of signification, a strange byproduct or leftover of the process of making meaning. (1993: 218) Brooks was writing about Shelley’s novel, considering how Frankenstein’s creation comes to life in language, but it is equally true for Ogle’s Monster, who proves extraordinarily difficult to describe or classify in any meaningful way. Glut refers to it as “Quasimodo-like,” highlighting the Monster’s deformity and stooped posture (2002: 51). Steven Forry notes that the Monster is “more terrifying than any

168

168

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

previous stage creature” and enumerates its component parts in his best effort to describe a creature that flouts the symbolic order: “His Kabuki-like expression, deformed visage, and protruding, bulbous eyes instill fright, and his misshapen body, malformed—or unformed—hands, patches of mangy hair sprouting from cadaverous arms, and tattered clothing all suggest a Creature from beyond the grave” (1984:  185). The Monster’s face is indeed Kabuki-like, resembling the makeup used to portray demons on the Japanese stage. There is no evidence to say whether Kabuki characters inspired the makeup used to create Ogle’s Monster. We also do not know who was responsible for the concept or application of Ogle’s makeup, but the consensus (which is by no means certain) is that Ogle conceived of and applied the makeup himself (Klepper 1999: 36). Also notable are the Monster’s long, pointy fingers with which he threatens Frankenstein in ways that suggest to us the terrifying possibility that he might use them at any time to pierce skin or penetrate his victim’s orifices (Wiebel 2010: 74). Like the fingers, the Monster’s chin and feet are also extended in length, making for a motif in his visual presentation, and yet one very different from the long limbs of Karloff’s Monster. Because the movie is silent, the meaning one can derive from the film is overdetermined by the intertitles that describe the action. The creation of the Monster is explained in one which states, “INSTEAD OF A PERFECT / HUMAN BEING / THE EVIL IN / FRANKENSTEIN’S MIND / CREATES A MONSTER.” With this text, the movie circumscribes the Monster’s range of possible motivations to the evil in its creator’s mind, reifying the common horror trope that tampering with nature and playing God inevitably results in catastrophe (Allen 2016: 49). The intertitles provide a narrative to the story, but it is exciting to note that Frankenstein’s apparel mirrors the action, providing a visual cognate to the otherwise static text. While pursuing his experiments, Frankenstein wears a long, sumptuous, cassock-style frock coat. The dark color of the coat mirrors the evil the intertitle informs us resides in his mind. Frankenstein is freed of evil, we are told, by Elizabeth’s positive influence:  “ON THE BRIDAL NIGHT / FRANKENSTEIN’S / BETTER NATURE / ASSERTING ITSELF.” Frankenstein’s better nature is realized visually by the reflective, satin wedding tailcoat in which he appears. Thus appareled, Frankenstein embraces the love that Elizabeth represents, and the Monster disappears into a mirror. When Frankenstein looks into the mirror, the Monster slowly vanishes altogether, leaving only Frankenstein’s reflection:  “THE CREATION / OF AN EVIL MIND / IS OVERCOME BY LOVE / AND DISAPPEARS.” While the two characters look at each other in the mirror, the differences in their apparel are brought into focus. The scientist wears clothes that are of rich fabric and fine detail. In contrast, the Monster wears rough rags that are barely held together with a simple cincture at the waist. Moreover, and importantly, the Monster’s apparel is never donned but rather is created by Frankenstein’s experiments. The clothes are quite literally a part of

169

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

169

him. By contrasting the clothes worn by Frankenstein and his creation, the movie visually connects evil to poverty and morality to wealth. The Monster quite naturally belongs in rags due to his evil nature and vice versa. Similarly, Frankenstein’s better nature, although challenged, wins the day, warranting the rich apparel he wears. In this manner, the movie sartorially imparts to our notion of monstrosity an economic dynamic: the fine clothes one wears visually assert, not merely affluence, but goodness. Similarly, one’s conspicuous poverty asserts evilness, with the most destitute proving to be an actual monster.

Fashioning Frankenstein and his Creature: The Curse of Frankenstein Horror films frequently support a conservative worldview as they work through traumatic events toward a placid conclusion that reaffirms accepted norms, but not all of them do (Rhodes 2001: 20). Released in 1957, The Curse of Frankenstein very significantly challenged prevailing moral ideals. Contemporary critical reception was strident (but not unanimous) with one reviewer recommending a certificate “SO,” from the Board of Film Censors: “For Sadists Only.” Another listed it “among the half-dozen most repulsive films I have encountered” (Pirie 1973: 40– 1). Produced by the British Hammer Film Productions, Curse breaks decisively with the Frankenstein tradition established by Universal Studios. This was not merely an artistic decision—the American company threatened to sue if the new movie emulated the earlier ones in any significant way (Harmes 2015: 48). In the wake of Universal’s success with the Frankenstein series, it was dangerous to attempt a new concept. As Chris Baldick has written: Myths are also susceptible to “closure,” or to adaptations which constrain their further development into fixed channels. In the case of the Frankenstein myth, this moment of closure arrived in 1931 in the shape of William Henry Pratt (better known as Boris Karloff), whose rectangular face and bolt-adorned neck have fixed our idea of the monster into a universally-known image from which it is hard to see further revisions breaking free. (1987: 4–5) While it cannot be denied that Karloff’s Monster has achieved worldwide recognition and is likely the first thing people think of when they hear the word “Frankenstein,” we find it difficult to argue that the myth has received “closure.” The sheer number of Frankenstein movies that followed the Universal Studios series argues strongly against such an idea. Even more importantly, these new films sometimes broke new ground, reinvigorating the myth by adapting it for new audiences and by making it speak to its audiences in new ways. Curse is such a film, with Glutt stating that it “arguably gave birth to ‘the modern’ horror

170

170

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

movie . . . where blood and eroticism, replacing the old Gothic tools of shadow and suggestion, were offered on the screen in vivid (and often dripping) color” (2002:  59–60). The film received an X certificate for its sensational depictions of gore and sexuality, a rating that often was a death knell for movies that then excluded all audience members below the age of sixteen. Additionally, some reviewers actively sought to discourage people from seeing the movie. Despite these challenges (and perhaps in part because of them), the movie was an immediate and international commercial success, spawning its own series with five sequels (Harmes 2015: 28). The first Frankenstein movie filmed in color, Curse makes no attempt to employ the expressionistic approach of the earlier films. Rather, the movie, directed by Terence Fisher, employs intense color to achieve horror through a more realistic portrayal of violence and sex than had been seen in movies before. Curse is positively tame by twenty-first-century standards of horror, but it was shocking at the time. The Creature, as Frankenstein’s creation was now termed, may or may not be considered more horrifying than Karloff’s Monster, but it certainly is more disgusting. Picart describes its head as “a grotesque collection of peeling tissue lashed by vivid yellows, greens, and reds, topped by a luxuriant mop of black hair” (2002: 109). A bright red scar and stitches across the forehead show where the head was opened to allow a new brain to be inserted. The reason for additional red scars on each cheek is less certain. One eye is milky white and sightless (which is strange since Frankenstein is shown purchasing fresh eyes). The pale skin is lumpy and seems almost to ooze off the face. The makeup artist, Phil Leakey, was given only twenty-four hours to devise the makeup used in Curse when Universal Studios threatened a lawsuit if their Creature resembled the earlier Monster (109). The actor playing the Creature, Christopher Lee, was quite tall, but gone were the five-inch heels, shoulder pads, and suit tailored to render the wearer enormous (Figure  8.4). Gone too, were the camera angles that provided a sense of accentuated height. Instead, the Creature wears a simple, worn, black overcoat that does not really manage to inspire fear or invoke particular notions of death. The Creature’s coat contrasts with his face by wrapping the sensational in the quotidian. Furthermore, the coat actually has the effect of detracting from the Creature’s potential to frighten, for it undermines Christopher Lee’s considerable height and renders him less imposing. The result was a creation that is revolting but not particularly alarming (108). It should be noted that the Creature’s potential to frighten is enhanced when his first act on being brought to life is to attempt to strangle his creator to death, but there is no denying that he represents a very limited threat compared to the hulking, nearly indestructible Monster created by Karloff. The Creature’s limitations as a source of horror in Curse are more than made up for by the fact that the true focus of the movie is the Baron. As Lavalley explains, in Curse, the “Cadaverous, repugnant, mummy-like, Christopher Lee’s

171

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

171

Monster has become a mere prop, an adjunct to the film’s emphasis on the necrophiliac activities of the half-criminal, half-pitiful Baron Frankenstein, played by Peter Cushing” (1974: 275). In his depiction of Victor Frankenstein, Cushing is entirely original. Gone is the moral, self-pitying researcher from Shelley’s novel who is determined to rectify his own mistakes. Gone too are the well-intentioned heroes of the Universal series who ultimately embrace love and family over science. Instead, Curse presents the Baron as a “magnificently arrogant aristocratic rebel . . . who never relinquishes his exploration for one moment” (Pirie 1973: 70). Cushing’s Baron is absolutely determined to create life and is undeterred by the Creature’s apparent bloodlust, using it to kill his maid Justine when she tries to blackmail him into marrying her. He even resurrects the Monster when it has been killed. Frankenstein is wealthy, brilliant, determined, immoral, and unrepentant. Unlike his Creature, the Baron is a formidable monster. While he pursues his depraved experiments and criminal activities, Frankenstein conducts himself, as Pirie has noted, “with an utterly unscrupulous and authoritative elegance: he dresses with an extravagant attention to detail, enjoys food, wine and women” (1973: 70). The apparel Frankenstein wears is the finest that appears in the film with small details marking his social superiority over his well-dressed partner and former tutor, Paul Krempe. Both wear clean, posh suits with tails, but the Baron’s shirt exhibits a fine ruffle at the chest. Frankenstein’s discriminating clothes and sociability have the effect of rendering his immorality immeasurably more engaging, as it utterly repudiates a notion of monstrosity that goes at least as far back as Shakespeare’s Richard III. Heffernan explains: “[F]ew ideas are more enduring or more deductively plausible than the assumption that deformity signifies depravity” (1997: 147). The inverse is equally true:  an attractive, dignified exterior naturally denotes virtue. Curse untethers these associations to create a character that belies its apparently simple truth: tall, attractive, and well groomed, and wearing the fine clothes that ought to signify nobility of both birth and character, Cushing’s Baron is an original and compelling villain. Moreover, Frankenstein’s posh couture marks his significance and social superiority over all other characters in the movie, while the Creature’s simple, subdued clothing visually establishes his secondary importance. Although Frankenstein customarily wears pristine apparel, the movie provides visual cues that hint at his true iniquity. When he is dressed to travel in a seemingly new coat of jet black, Victor walks out the door carrying a medical case of creased and worn brown leather. The accouterment breaks with his ensemble in color, texture, and wear, suggesting that something is gravely amiss.5 Even more significantly, when Victor works in his laboratory, he wears a distinctive lab coat that gets dirtier as he pursues ever more depraved activities. Unlike a typical lab coat that effectively covers one’s clothing, the Baron’s is a lightly colored sport jacket that reifies the wearer’s social prominence even while he conducts experiments. After he cuts the head from a cadaver, Frankenstein casually wipes his

172

172

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Figure 8.4 Christopher Lee in Curse of Frankenstein (dir. Terence Fisher), 1957, Warner Brothers. Zuma Press, Inc, and Alamy; Robert De Niro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (dir. Kenneth Branagh), 1994, TriStar Pictures. Columbia Pictures/Ronald Grant Archive/Alamy.

bloody hand on his lapel, leaving a large red smear. Considering the importance of stains on cinematic apparel, Jonathan Faiers has noted: Stains and stained clothing often enter a scene suddenly and spectacularly, literally imposing themselves on the garment and by extension the wearer of that garment. In addition, these marks direct the viewer’s attention to the garment with an uncharacteristic urgency that disrupts the seamless flow of images of clothing that is typically never less than perfect, functional and pristine. (2013: 261–2) Frankenstein’s lab coat, in the manner of Dorian Gray’s painting, continues to accrue stains through the course of the movie, standing in as a visual compendium of the wearer’s assortment of sins. Beyond the movie’s central narrative, Curse is structurally organized by a framing device. At the very beginning of the film, before we see the Baron in all his fashionable excess or at work in his laboratory, we find him sleeping in a jail cell with dirty, rent, disheveled clothes, an unshaven face, and wild hair. Most of the movie consists of a flashback as Frankenstein talks to a priest, ostensibly explaining that his creation is the murderer, not him. The film concludes by returning to the cell at which point it is made clear that Frankenstein will receive no reprieve, and the guillotine awaits. The visual dimension of the film’s framing device is key to its effectiveness. Throughout the movie’s central narrative, the Baron’s fancy apparel

173

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

173

and sophisticated presentation mark his ability to perpetrate evil. In direct contrast to the 1910 Frankenstein, which presented fine clothing as the outward sign of morality, in Curse, it proves to be the visual signifier of iniquity. Consequently, at the beginning and end of the film, when the Baron is deprived of his sophisticated clothing and deportment, his monstrous potential is contained.

Fashioning a “faithful adaptation”: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Considered objectively, Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is far more explicit than Curse in its depictions of violence, sexuality, and gore. Times had changed, however, and the later movie received only an R rating and drew no outrage despite its lurid presentation of subject, including the harvesting and hacking of limbs, brief nudity, graphic public hangings, and a beating heart being ripped from a woman’s chest while she is restrained on her nuptial bed. Instead, the movie received generally poor reviews, which noted the film’s many strengths, but concluded, as Roger Ebert wrote, that it is “so frantic, so manic, it doesn’t pause to be sure its effects are registered” (1994). With its title, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein claims fidelity to its source text.6 The notion of faithfulness in adaptation is a fraught one, and it would not be useful to list the innumerable ways the movie follows and breaks with Shelley’s novel.7 Some differences, however, warrant consideration for how they speak to this chapter’s particular focus. Most notable is the visual and material construction and presentation of the Creature, played by Robert De Niro. In the novel, Frankenstein describes his creation: I collected bones from charnel houses; . . . The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials. . . . I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. . . . His limbs were in proportion, and I  had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. (Shelley 1996: 34–5) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein chose features for his creation that were “in proportion” and “beautiful,” as one might pick gloves, a suit, and shoes to form an attractive ensemble. In Branagh’s movie, the features of the newly created life are anything but beautiful and the limbs are not even in proportion, lending the

174

174

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Creature a noticeable limp. The majority of the body is drawn from the virtually unknown one-legged man, also played by De Niro, who murders Professor Waldman. Beyond walking on a wooden peg, the man’s body is riddled with imperfections including lesions on the remaining leg, an arm that appears to be recovering from a severe burn, and boils on his face. Fulfilling the expectation that one’s exterior mirrors one’s inner character, the man stabs Professor Waldman for trying to administer a vaccine. Lacking a name even in the credits (De Niro is listed only as the Creature), this man is defined entirely by the sin of murder and his consonant, conspicuous physical deformities. The very different material constructions of the movie’s and the novel’s creatures have far-reaching consequences. Shelley’s Creature is born a tabula rasa who assumes an evil character when he is bereft of care and friendship upon being cruelly thrust into the world. Branagh’s Creature, contrarily, is born of evil. Professor Krempe explains in Frankenstein’s feverish dream: “bits of thieves, bits of murderers . . . evil, stitched to evil, stitched to evil” (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1994). The Creature’s limbs, like secondhand clothing, carry the stain of former deeds onto the new wearer. He notes that he remembers the experiences of his various component parts, suggesting that deep in his subconscious lies not the desire to be loved, but the overlapping motivations of numerous criminals. The brain belongs to Professor Waldman, but the potential it might have to improve the Creature is hampered by the fact that it is housed in the body of the man who murdered him. Inside and out, Branagh’s Creature is a composite of numerous, overlapping transgressions. In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein immediately rejects his creation, and the Creature asks: “Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?” (1996: 91). In Branagh’s movie, interestingly, Frankenstein does not immediately reject his creation despite his appearance. And his appearance is hideous. De Niro’s special effects makeup includes cruel, “barbed wire stitches” in individual, interrupted, haphazard patterns that “harrow his body and distend his face” (Heffernan 1997: 144). The prominent stitches reference previous versions of the Creature but are lengthier, harsher, and more extensive than we have seen before. De Niro’s Creature is bald, and one of his eyes is functional and conveys the Creature’s emotions while the other hangs like a glassy inanimate object. This may be a nod to the Creature in Curse who also had only one functional eye. Despite the gruesome appearance of De Niro’s Creature, Frankenstein immediately goes to him, takes him out of his metal birthing chamber, and tries to help him stand despite the slipperiness of the amniotic fluid that drenches the Creature and covers the floor. He only turns from the creature when, by accident, a counterweight is triggered and the Creature, who is standing with the aid of chains, gets pulled into the air and bashed in the head with a large wooden plank that seemingly kills him. It is not ugliness that makes Frankenstein turn away, but rather his belief that the Creature is dead.

175

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

175

Considering their very different materials and means of construction, we can see that the ugliness of the Creature in the novel and the one in Branagh’s movie follow very different guiding principles. Chris Baldick explains that, in the novel, the beauty of the parts and the ugliness of the finished combination can be explained by the idealist philosophy of the Romantics that argues: The parts, in a living being, can only be as beautiful as the animating principle which organizes them, and if this “spark of life” proceeds, as it does in Victor’s creation, from tormented isolation and guilty secrecy, the resulting assembly will only animate and body forth that condition and display its moral ugliness. (1987: 35) In the novel, Victor rejects the company of friends and family to focus all his efforts, at the risk of health and sanity, on the completion of this project. His own imbalanced mind manifests the imperfections that mar the Creature designed to be beautiful. This clearly is not the case with Branagh’s Creature, who embodies all the imperfections of multiple imperfect lives, their sins literally and figuratively stitched together to compose his whole. Branagh visually establishes his Creature’s nature and connection to his creator by presenting him in only one set of apparel: a large, gray coat that he takes from Frankenstein’s laboratory shortly after he is animated (Figure 8.4). Worn by Frankenstein, the coat looks clean and well fitted, appropriate to his wealth and upbringing. On the Creature, the coat, which features a capelet, appears to be the appropriate apparel of a Victorian coachman and seems considerably larger, lending the Creature a sense of increased size and physical threat. It additionally gets dirtier and more worn through the course of the film. When the Creature appears in Frankenstein’s laboratory late in the movie, shrouded in his enormous, dusty, gray coat, he seems to have just walked out of his grave onto the screen. Frankenstein, on the other hand, wears many different sets of apparel through the course of the film, appearing in the finest clothes worn in a sumptuously costumed Hollywood movie. The manner in which he appears is governed by a simple visual principle. When in the company of friends and family, he wears the fine clothes that mark his status as a wealthy and important member of society. In his laboratory and at work on his experiments, Frankenstein assumes ever increasing stages of undress. When he finally prepares to complete his experiment and bring forth life, the camera follows him as he rushes down the corridor wearing just trousers and a long, flowing red robe that suggests passion and life. He finally discards the robe and its consonant, positive associations before flipping the final switch, appearing nearly naked. Later in the film, after he has created the Creature but before he can rejoin society, Frankenstein needs to be nursed back to health by Henry Clerval and Elizabeth. With their help, he recovers and when we next see Frankenstein, he once again appears in fine apparel. The

176

176

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

movie deploys this visual scheme in an innovative way near the end of the movie. When Frankenstein and Elizabeth are married, they come together in bed, and as they kiss passionately, she begins to remove his clothing. When he wears only a shirt, which is the clothing in which he conducted most of his experiments, the Creature announces his return, invoked by the visual codes established earlier in the movie that connect Frankenstein’s undress with monstrosity.

Conclusion Costumes are important to all movies, but in horror films, the connection between characters and their apparel becomes crucial. To truly frighten an audience, a cinematic monster must transcend the confines of its particular movie and come to live in the viewer’s imagination. Since film is primarily a visual medium, costumes provide the primary means by which one can see a monster beyond its movie’s specific narrative. Thus, without referencing a particular film, we know that Dracula entrances us in his aristocratic cape. Jason Voorhees terrifies us in his hockey mask. Freddy Kruger visits our nightmares in his striped sweater and wide-brimmed hat. Movie directors recognize the importance of costumes to the horror genre and invest considerable thought and a significant proportion of their production budgets on dressing their films. In this chapter, we have examined cinematic versions of the Frankenstein myth to demonstrate how costumes inform the monsters that wear them. The enduring popularity of Frankenstein movies is connected to how their monsters appear on screen. Karloff’s Monster lives in our imagination wearing both his distinctive black suit and his square head. Similarly, Ogle’s 1910 Monster is memorable for both his tattered apparel and kabuki masklike face. Curse takes a wicked turn by making the Baron an even greater monster than his creation, and his immaculate presentation renders his immorality even more terrible. Branagh’s film enjoyed the support of a Hollywood budget and sumptuously brings forth Frankenstein and his Creature in ways that are unforgettable, even though the movie itself exhibits flaws. From head to toe, costume and makeup choices inform the style, shape, shade, and the very substance of the enduring Frankenstein myth in film. Special thanks to Peter Caster and Michael Jaros for their comments and suggestions on this essay.

Notes 1 There have been several recent Frankenstein movies, including I, Frankenstein (2014), Frankenstein (2015), and Victor Frankenstein (2015). We do not include these movies due to limitations of space and the fact that all three make rather significant

177

FASHIONING FRANKENSTEIN IN FILM: MONSTERS AND MEN

177

departures in terms of plot, setting, or point of view. They fit more appropriately in the category “films based on the myth.”

2 Steven Forry writes that in designing his Monster, Pierce was “obviously influenced by the physical characteristics of the Creature in Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920), of Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and of the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (1925)” (1984: 196).

3 The movie changes the protagonist’s name from Victor to Henry and elevates him to the nobility. In the novel, Victor has no title but merely comes from an affluent family (Shelley 1996: 18).

4 Frankenstein, (1910). Available online: https://archive.org/details/ FrankensteinfullMovie (accessed August 5, 2016).

5 Pun intended. Apologies. 6 Many agree that Branagh’s movie is the closest to the book, voicing the opinion in print and more frequently online (Mann 2001: 1993).

7 For a theoretically informed consideration of Branagh’s efforts to faithfully adapt the novel into film, see J. S. Brannon’s essay. She concludes: “we must leave behind the evaluative nature of fidelity as a critique of adaptation” (2012: 18).

References Allen, K. (2016), “ ‘Sometimes Dead is Better’: King, Daedalus, Dragon-Tyrants, and Deathism,” in J. M. Held (ed.), Stephen King and Philosophy, 47–70, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Baldick, C. (1987), In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing, Oxford: Clarendon. Brannon, J. S. (2012), “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? Kenneth Branagh and Keeping Promises,” Studies in Popular Culture 35 (1): 1–23. Bride of Frankenstein (1935), [Film] dir. James Whale, Hollywood, CA: Universal Studios. Brooks, P. (1993), Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Clarens, C. (2004), “Children of the Night,” in S. Prince (ed.), The Horror Film, 58–68, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Creed, B. (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Curse of Frankenstein (1957), [Film] dir. Terence Fisher, London: Hammer Film Productions. Ebert, R. (1994), “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” rogerebert.com, November 4. Available online: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mary-shelleys-frankenstein-1994 (accessed July 6, 2016). Faiers, J. (2013), Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Forry, S. E. (1984), “ ‘The Foulest Toadstool’: Reviving Frankenstein in the Twentieth Century,” in D. E. Morse (ed.), The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts, 183– 209, New York: Greenwood. Fraistat, N., and S. E. Jones (eds.) (2009), “A List of Movies Based on Frankenstein, 1910–2005,” Romantic Circles, May 1. Available online: https://www.rc.umd.edu/ editions/frankenstein/Pop/filmlist (accessed October 17, 2015).

178

178

RAFAEL JAEN AND ROBERT I. LUBLIN

Frankenstein (1910), [Film] dir. J. Searle Dawley, USA: Edison Pictures. Frankenstein (1931), [Film] dir. James Whale, Hollywood, CA: Universal Studios. Glut, D. F. (2002), The Frankenstein Archive: Essays on the Monster, the Myth, the Movies, and More, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Harmes, M. K. (2015), The Curse of Frankenstein, Leighton Buzzard, England: Auteur. Heffernan, J. A. W. (1997), “Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1): 136. Hitchcock, Susan T. (2007), Frankenstein: A Cultural History, New York: W. W. Norton. Hollander, A. (1993), Seeing through Clothes, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kehoe, V. J. (1991), Special Make-Up Effects, New York: Routledge. Klepper, R. K. (1999), Silent Films, 1877–1996: A Critical Guide to 646 Movies, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Kristeva, J. (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Lavalley, A. J. (1974), “The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: A Survey,” in G. Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, 243–89, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lewis, J. (2014), Essential Cinema: An Introduction to Film Analysis, New York: Wadsworth. Mann, G. (ed.) (2001), The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, London: Constable & Robinson. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), [Film] directed by Kenneth Branagh, Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures. Nestrick, W. (1974), “Coming to Life: Frankenstein and the Nature of Film Narrative,” in G. Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, 290–315, Berkeley: University of California Press. Picart, C. S. (2000), “Visualizing the Monstrous in Frankenstein Films,” Pacific Coast Philology 35 (1): 17–34. Picart, C. S. (2002), The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein: Universal, Hammer, and Beyond, Westport, CT: Praeger. Pirie, D. (1973), A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, 1946–1972, London: Gordon Fraser. Raub, E. (2012), “Frankenstein and the Mute Figure of Melodrama,” Modern Drama 55 (4): 437–58. Rhodes, G. D. (2001), White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shelley, M. (1996), Frankenstein, 2nd edn., J. P. Hunter (ed.), New York: W. W. Norton. Son of Frankenstein (1939), [Film] dir. Rowland V. Lee, Hollywood, CA: Universal Studios. Wiebel, F. C. (2010), Edison’s Frankenstein. Albany, GA: BearManor Media. Young Frankenstein (1974), [Film] dir. Mel Brooks, Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox.

179

9 HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS Costume, Gender, and the Halloween Franchise Nadia Buick and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (Dwight H. Little 1987) was made at a time when the perceived glory days of the subgenre were seen to have given way to a parade of mediocre sequels. The lack of critical interest in these films stands in contrast to the slasher franchises of the 1970s and early 1980s: not only John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) but also Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984). This exemplifies Matt Hills’s concept of “para-paracinema,” expanding on Jeffrey Sconce’s notion of “paracinema.”1 For Hills, these sequels challenge binaries of “ ‘trash’ ” and “ ‘legitimate’ film culture,” and his examination of the Friday the 13th franchise indicates that when compared to the privileged “original,” its sequels “remain . . . resolutely beyond trash revalorization, while also being fixed in many academic accounts as a marker of the ‘low’ and illegitimate slasher film” (2007: 219). It is from this perspective that we consider the broadly ignored Halloween IV, which offers a reconfiguration of Carol J. Clover’s Final Girl figure central to slasher and fundamental to her claim for cross-gender identification in the horror film (1992). “The Final Girl is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril.” For Clover, the Final Girl is the character we see “chased, concerned, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified” (35). The Final Girl represents a kind of gendered empowerment that has influenced the intersecting (but not identical) experiences of fictional characters within the Halloween franchise and its women fans.

180

180

NADIA BUICK AND ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS

Through Halloween IV and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, this chapter examines the transformative and gender-subverting possibilities of Halloween costume within horror and its uptake as cosplay/crossplay. “Cosplay” is—as the word implies—a hybrid of the words “costume” and “play.” According to Rahman, Wing-sun, and Cheung, the term originated in the 1980s to describe subcultural groups, active from the 1970s, who dressed as Japanese manga characters (2012: 318). Its contemporary use reflects its global transition, where cosplay broadly describes a bodily performance—through costume and other elements—involving the emulation or adaptation of pop cultural characters from film, television, and other texts. Cosplayers often “perform” at fan conventions, or within other collective groups, where their intertextual references are read and understood by their peers. As Ellyssa Kroski notes, crossplay is “the practice of cosplaying a character of the opposite gender,” most commonly manifesting as “female-to-male costuming.” For Kroski, “crossplay is about empowerment and the ability to dress as any type of character that you identify with, regardless of gender” (2015: 95). The notion of empowerment through costume Kroski identifies is key to our consideration of how the act of costuming intersects and deviates within the Halloween films and in the fan practices that it has spawned. Through the Halloween franchise and the cos/crossplaying practices it has inspired (both in the films’ diegeses and in the real-world fan communities surrounding it), we identify the power of costume within extreme transformations located within the context of the Halloween holiday itself, and the carnivalesque possibilities it affords.

Approaching Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1987) Before exploring how costuming allows women and girls both within the Halloween franchise itself and in the fan communities that have blossomed around it, an exploration of the series—with an emphasis on Halloween IV— will contextualize its legacy. As a central film in the 1970s/1980s slasher cycle, the action of the original Halloween hinges around Michael Myers, referred to throughout the franchise as “The Shape”: less a character than an ephemeral presence. Set on All Hallows’ Eve, Halloween relies on costume for its spectacle: from the subversion of the traditionally playful (and unisex) child’s clown costume in the opening scene through to the adult Myers’s white face mask, costumes transform characters and grant them power. Ignoring the commercial disaster of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace 1982) that rejected the Myers plotline, Halloween IV continues from Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981), and begins as Myers comes out of a coma when learning

181

HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS

181

he has a niece, Jamie (Danielle Harris), in Haddonfield, Illinois. As Myers begins murdering those who stand between him and Jamie, his nemesis/psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) has deteriorated into a state of obsessive paranoia, opting for a hysterical diagnosis: Myers is “evil.” Jamie is the daughter of the Final Girl of the first two Halloween films, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) who, after the death of her parents, lives with a foster family. Her teenage foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell) is babysitting her on the Halloween eve that Myers returns to Haddonfield. Jamie is disturbed by nightmares about Myers and she sees him around town. The townsfolk discover Myers has returned to Haddonfield and a mob assembles to capture him while Jamie and Rachel join with Dr. Loomis, the latter two protecting Jamie from Myers’s attempts to kill his niece. After a final showdown where Rachel drives over Myers, Jamie tries to touch Myers’s hand, revealing he is still alive. Police arrive and shoot at Myers, seemingly killing him. But in the film’s important coda, Jamie, wearing the clown outfit similar to that of young Michael in the first scene of the original Halloween, goes upstairs of her home to wash. Mirroring that sequence, Jamie puts on the clown mask and stabs her foster mother, the film ending with her standing in a similar position to young Michael in the original as Dr. Loomis screams at the realization that Myers’s criminality has manifested in the very child he has sought to protect. Through its conscious rewriting of Myers as a little girl, Halloween IV is a poignant example to demonstrate how costume acts as a metamorphosing device within the diegesis, as Jamie adopts Myers’s costumes and his killer instinct. Jamie effectively “cosplays” Myers, allowing a consideration of the exchange of different types of power across not just the fictional/reality divide, but across that governed by gender difference within the franchise itself. The function of the Halloween costume within the already costumed environment of the filmic space does not hinge solely on conveying character, but acts as a powerful, self-transformative device. We then explore how the potent and personal transformation that takes places within particular films is recreated in the context of cosplay, often across gender lines as crossplay.

Halloween costumes and costume in Halloween Films are costumed environments, and Halloween is a holiday when the everyday world operates like a film set: a costumed space where characters replace people. As Clare M. Wilkinson-Weber argues, film costume “communicates, via the use of well-understood tropes, about moral character; it instigates actions and responses in the characters who wear and witness it; and it is the very substance of spectacle” (2013:  9). Halloween costumes within the film space

182

182

NADIA BUICK AND ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS

introduce another layer of masquerade, heightening both communicative and spectacular aspects. From Meet Me in St. Louis (Minnelli, 1944)  to To Kill a Mockingbird (Mulligan, 1962), Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001) to Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), Halloween functions as a breakout zone in which characters play with notions of the self through dressing up; the artifice of costume is brought to our attention. Halloween as a site for the exploration of identity, gender, and power through costume is key in the Halloween films, especially Halloween IV. Questions of identity through dress come to the fore at Halloween. It allows us an opportunity to publically wear the mask of another, often drawn from film through characters that become inspiration for both do-it-yourself (DIY) costumes, and commercially produced outfits. Jack Santino calls Halloween “public masquerade” (2009: 12); Halloween is a socially sanctioned space in which the masks of different selves are publically worn. It is a space where we can collectively shapeshift the self. Efrat Tseëlon argues that from a philosophical perspective masks offer “two approaches to identity”: while “one assumes the authenticity of the self’, alternatively ‘the other approach maintains that through a multitude of authentic manifestations the mask reveals the multiplicity of our identities’ ” (2001: 25). Yet in the Halloween franchise, a third approach is at play. With Myers, the mask is the true self. Through costume—overalls and mask—Myers becomes his true self: a faceless “shape” who uses Halloween as a cloak to commit murder. The Shape is dormant until this day when his true form, through the mask, is realized. For David Roche, “the mask is instrumental in Halloween’s (1978) uncanny play on the indistinct border between human and inhuman.” Adapted from a Captain James T.  Kirk mask from Star Trek (1966–9), it “distorts and defamiliarizes the reassuring face of an iconic hero of American popular culture whom most of the characters in the film and many viewers in the 1980s would have known.” Accordingly, “the inanimate mask, then, mimics the human while simultaneously concealing it” (2014: 175). This notion of Myers as inhuman is central to the Halloween films. Dr. Loomis frequently describes Myers as the embodiment of evil, and masquerade allows Myers to tap into this horrific core: he needs the mask to kill. While the lines that span gender, age, and morality through costume become fluid and unstable as the franchise unfolds, particularly in Halloween IV, the implications of the Halloween at the heart of the franchise are worth considering to emphasize the significance of costume.

Halloween, horror, and the carnivalesque Vera Dika (1990) noted that the situating of the first Halloween on that particular holiday evokes cultural tensions about what is considered acceptable and unacceptable social behavior. “Halloween . . . initially presents us with a normal

183

HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS

183

situation,” she says, acknowledging it as a “delightful practice” oriented primarily around children and “goodies.” Its “darker past,” however, refers to its history as a “pagan holiday. . . a night when the souls of the dead walked the earth and threatened to return to their homes.” Halloween, therefore, “presents us with a conflicting set of characteristics. Halloween is fun, but it still holds the age-old threat of the sinister. It is innocent, but it still incorporates the propensity for evil” (34). Likewise, William Paul notes, “Halloween is a time when children confront the terror of supernature.” Accordingly, then, “Halloween is a time when children may play with identity, learning that they can use the mask as the facade of an alternate self, which is how it is used here: six year-old Michael puts on the mask before he murders his sister” (1994: 321). Slasher’s playful approach to this tension was so closely associated with the subgenre during this period that subverting holidays, celebrations, or festivals became a convention, as seen in Black Christmas (Clark, 1974), Happy Birthday to Me (Thompson, 1981), Graduation Day (Freed, 1981), Prom Night (Lynch, 1980), My Bloody Valentine (Mihalka, 1981), April Fool’s Day (Walton, 1986), and the Friday the 13th franchise (1980–2009), to name a few. In the spirit of the carnivalesque, these films are carnivals of sorts where—combined with grotesque body-horror2—they become a forum for socially acceptable behavior to be rejected in a culturally sanctioned space as a subversive (yet temporally limited) celebration of rejecting order. Yet it is the playfulness between Halloween as a cultural celebration and its darker side that render it a meaningful horror staple. Central here is carnivalesque. In his consideration of François Rabelais’s La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel pentalogy (1532–64), Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World (1984) introduced the carnivalesque via his consideration of the Renaissance context in which Rabelais wrote. Bakhtin identifies two interrelated notions: the carnivalesque and the grotesque, arguing that the democratic nature of carnival allowed participants to unite as singular body that was fundamentally ideological in its rejection of social, cultural, and political norms: “The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during carnival time was of particular significance.” During non-carnival festivities, dress was central: “Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling, rank, and merits and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a concentration of inequality” (10). Yet through carnival costume, this hierarchy was destroyed: “All were considered equal during carnival,” breaking down barriers between “people who were usually divided by . . . caste, property, profession and age” (10). That the focus of this subversion was so intrinsically the body underscores the centrality of the grotesque, and as Bakhtin notes “the grotesque body . . . is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed: it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (317). This is particularly relevant to our examination of costume in Halloween IV.

184

184

NADIA BUICK AND ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS

For Russell W.  Belk, “carnival can be seen in numerous aspects of the twentieth-century North American Halloween” in rituals including trick-or-treating costuming and excessive eating and drinking (1994:  105). As Belk indicates, masks and costumes are an important part of carnivalesque Halloween traditions, which are central to our consideration of the gender-blurring capacities of cosplaying within Halloween IV in particular. For Bakhtin, the material focus for the subversion of social order that marks carnival is bodily, and it is here that his attention to the grotesque becomes key. Open, penetrative, abject bodies— objects of fascination within the slasher film—become a site for the process of renewal that is at the heart of carnival, where, for Bakhtin, “people were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract though; they were experienced” (1984: 10). The grotesque and the carnival usurp order into something far more ambivalent, and masks and costume are vital to this process. As Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist suggest, for Bakhtin “the mask is the very image of ambiguity, the variety and flux of identities that otherwise, unmasked, are conceived as singular and fixed” (1984:  304). For Bakhtin, masks were a focal theme of folk culture, “connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity.” Through masks and costume, the carnivalesque “rejects conformity to one’s own self. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries” (Bakhtin 1984: 39). In Halloween IV, masks and costumes work in precisely this way, explicitly and significantly across the lines that mark binary gender distinctions.

Halloween IV and the crossplaying Final (Little) Girl In horror terms, Halloween IV’s “twist” (the revelation that Jamie has taken on the identity of Myers) is fundamentally reliant on costume. The gender fluidity that manifests in Jamie’s transformation through costume finds its critical foundations in Clover’s seminal monograph Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film (1992). Clover argues that slasher films represent a salient instance where spectatorial pleasure arises not from what has conventionally been read as sadistic pleasure at the suffering of others—in Mulveyian terms, an extension of the dominant and sadistic male gaze active within classical Hollywood spectatorship—but rather from a fluctuation between sadistic and masochistic positions, where the spectator instead is aligned with the victimhero, the Final Girl: “We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, the horror, comes from ‘knowing’ both sides of the story – from giving ourselves over to the cinematic play of pronoun functions” (1992: 12).

185

HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS

185

For Clover, there is a fundamental gender fluidity at work here. Building on the dubious assumption that horror’s audience is male (1992: 4–5), that their point of connection—if not outright identification—is female, suggests far more complex mechanics underpin the intersection of gender and spectatorship in cinema more broadly.3 Although its para-paracinematic status has seen Halloween IV excluded from critical discourse on gender and horror, it is a film in which these mechanics play out diegetically. Just as there is an effective blurring and androgyny to Myers’s alternate name “The Shape,” it is explicitly through costume that Jamie (note her unisex name4) demonstrates a similar ambivalence to binary gender distinctions. The wearing of Halloween costumes is not only privileged in the film’s final gender reversal of the original Halloween’s opening sequence but also foreshadowed throughout the movie. Early in the film her school peers tease Jamie both for not having a Halloween costume, and for being an orphan. Resistant to dressing up for Halloween due to her family history, Jamie later states, “I want to go trick or treating with the other kids.” Wearing a Halloween costume is for Jamie an active way of gaining social acceptance, and it works: when she later encounters the same children, she is welcomed as “one of them” in her clown costume. That the costume aligns Jamie both with her peers and Myers is a curious overlap, suggesting the possibility that Myers may not be as “Othered” as the series otherwise implies. The scene where Jamie chooses this particular costume is important: Rachel and Jamie are dropped off at the drugstore where Rachel’s boyfriend Brody (Sasha Jenson) works. The store is scattered with an array of masks and Halloween decorations, and Jamie rushes off excitedly while Brody and Rachel talk about their plans for the evening. Jamie enters the Halloween costumes section, and as she surveys them we see a familiar white mask, hanging on the back wall. Jamie’s angelic face passes it by unawares and she moves to a rack of costumes and chooses a clown costume. Her exclamation “Rachel! I’ve found the perfect costume, come see!” is ignored as Brody and Rachel make out, recalling the opening scene of the original where the negligent sister-babysitter has sex with her boyfriend, failing in her duties with disastrous results. There’s a quick cut to the wall where Myers’s mask had been hanging and his deformed hand reaches down and grabs it. Jamie stands smiling in front of the mirror with her costume held up in front of her, but her elation turns to fear as she imagines herself morphing into a bloodstained boy holding a knife. As Jamie’s joy turns to terror, the adult Myers appears behind her. He pulls the mask over his head and Jamie screams, crashing into the mirror and smashing it. Rachel hears Jamie’s screams and rushes to find her cowering on the floor. “It was the nightmare man,” Jamie tells Rachel, “he’s coming to get me.” At this stage, it is unclear if it is Myers or Jamie’s imagination: he exists in a liminal, ambiguous state to the child, creeping into her consciousness as Halloween approaches. The clown

186

186

NADIA BUICK AND ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS

costume acts as a portal between both the child and her uncle in the present, and Jamie and the young Michael across time. In both the film and the holiday itself, costume transforms identity. Recalling William Paul’s observation that “Halloween is a time when children may play with identity, learning that they can use the mask as the facade of an alternate self,” the clown costume Jamie selects is a potent method of disguise not only because of its connections to her family history but also because of its specific significance for a film set in Illinois in the late 1970s. In his discussion of horror clowns, horror author/director Clive Barker recalled serial killer John Wayne Gacy, whose clown disguise has become a macabre pop cultural icon (1997:  93). Also known as the Killer Clown, Gacy raped and murdered at least thirty-three young men and boys in Illinois, the same state that the Halloween franchise is set. Yet Halloween was released before Gacy confessed his crimes to police (the film was released in October, and Gacy confessed in December):  while clearly coincidental, this further underscores just how vital and powerful the image of the evil clown was in the broader contemporary imagination at the time (as seen by the success of Stephen King’s novel IT in 1986, among other examples). As Barker suggests, the association of horror and clowns goes back in screen culture to its earliest days, recalling Lon Chaney Sr.’s observation that “a clown is funny in the circus ring, but what would be the normal reaction to opening a door at midnight and finding the same clown standing there in the moonlight?” (1997: 88). Even for contemporary audiences with little knowledge of Gacy, as Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik suggest, “clowns remain ambiguous figures, often evoking fear and [sic] well as mirth. Pathological fear of clowns is a recognised phobia – coultrophobia” (2015: 333). Even without the context of the original Halloween and young Michael’s clown costume, there is, from a sociohistorical perspective, a forceful combination of joy and terror woven into Jamie’s costuming decision. The bulk of the action on Halloween night as Jamie, Rachel, and Dr. Loomis run around Haddonfield trying to avoid Myers are framed ironically through Jamie’s clown costume: there is a sophisticated doubling at stake, as child-girl Myers (frequently separated from Rachel and Dr. Loomis) plays hide-and-seek with adult-male Myers. This doubling is made more explicit when Jamie, Rachel, and Dr. Loomis are surrounded by two Myers: while disorienting, it is quickly revealed that it is merely two teens in Myers costumes. This raises a number of unanswered questions: Where did they get Myers costumes, and why are they wearing them? Halloween IV’s Haddonfield is riddled with duplicity. The film is littered with mirrors and reflections, and it is obvious that we cannot trust what we see. In this scene there are two more “Michaels”: Jamie herself in her young-Michael clown costume and the “real” Myers, who appears behind the car watching the action play out. The final sequence is a crescendo of horrific duplicity; here we see the full extent to which costume is a transformative device in Halloween IV. As Mrs. Carruthers runs a bath for Jamie, the original Halloween opening is replicated: a

187

HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS

187

first-person camera “walks” through the house, and the field of vision is divided into three sections. We see a black screen with two circles (eye-holes) of vision, as if viewed through the mask. Scissors are picked up and Mrs. Carruthers is attacked. Both narrative and technical aspects indicate that we are “seeing through” Myers’s eyes. Mrs. Carruthers’s scream draws a crowd from downstairs, where they meet not Myers, but Jamie in a familiar, heavily bloodstained clown outfit, recalling young Michael from the first film. Faced as he is with the inescapable collapse of his Manichean vision of morality that has until now governed his demonization of Myers, Loomis screams “No!” repeatedly. He raises his pistol to shoot Jamie only to be restrained by the local sheriff. By echoing Halloween’s opening scene, Halloween IV explicitly sets up a curious deviation explicitly through costume. With Michael in the original, the masquerade completes the transition to his “true” monstrous self; he picks up the clown mask and he kills his sister. Yet when this sequence is mimicked through the masked body of Jamie, the question of whether the mask reveals her “true” self remains ambiguous. In Halloween, his parents unmask Michael after murdering his sister. The child’s face seems at odds with the crime just committed: the mask is the transformative device. In Halloween IV, a similar “unmasking” does not occur, the film ends with Jamie embodying Myers, transformed more fully through his costume and mask into a similar form of “evil.” Through costume, Jamie has “become” Michael.

Cosplay and the culture of masquerade Costumes such as the clown outfit connect characters and have their own lore within the Halloween films and are a key part of the franchise’s mythology. Costumes function non-diegetically, referring to things outside of the filmed world. This can be understood through what Leeder calls the “self-reflexive” nature of Halloween (2014: 80). As Roche notes, Myers’s mask is itself a commercially produced Halloween costume based on a television character, Captain Kirk.5 Myers is therefore inserting himself into a broader tradition of popular culture costume, and even cosplay: Myers adopts and adapts the costume of another pop culture figure, and by doing so becomes one himself. Michael Myers costumes are popular Halloween outfits in the real world and—curiously— even in the films themselves:  in Halloween IV, that one can buy a “Michael Myers Halloween costume” is something that the film knowingly plays with. And, as we have mentioned, Jamie’s adoption of Michael’s clown costume is a connective thread that allows Halloween IV to refer to the franchise’s own lore by referencing the original film. This connection is made almost entirely through costume. In both the Halloween films (particularly the original and Halloween IV)—as well as the holiday itself—costume is a way to try on different identities. The link to cosplay is clear:  “[Cos]players are not only visually transformed by the

188

188

NADIA BUICK AND ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS

costume, but often become the imagined persona, both cognitively and affectively, carrying this into to their daily lives and other social worlds” (Peirson-Smith 2013: 90). Yet while the carnival holiday of Halloween is an occasion where costume transforms appearances in a one-day “public masquerade,” within cosplay communities, public masquerade is an ongoing practice. Popular culture artifacts become source material for a participatory culture of masquerade. The relationship between Halloween and Halloween IV in particular is useful to unpack the tensions between “dressing up” for a culturally sanctioned one-day holiday and contexts where costume has a more extended duration: be it for cosplayers as a subcultural and/or lifestyle choice, or within the diegesis of the film as Jamie’s turn toward “evil.” Costume is central to cosplay, and it is through cosplay that the significance of costume within pop cultural texts like film is physically illustrated. As Justin Smith argues, “cult films often use iconic costume design as a visual language for expressing the physical charisma of their heroes to their fans.” Costume from this perspective therefore “presents a fertile creative territory for audiences to rehearse their rituals of devotion” (2005: 306). In horror (as in superhero films), a single costume can function as shorthand for a character and thus takes on “iconic” status:  in Halloween IV, this underscores the impact of the film’s finale, as Jamie “becomes” Myers through an iconic costume change. Unlike drama or romantic comedy where costume is generally tied to verisimilitude— representing a particular time period and a sense of narrative and character progressing through time—both victims and villains in horror films are often in a single costume from beginning to end; their identity is fixed by their appearance. The costumed presence of villains can be visible throughout an entire franchise, like Freddie Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street or Myers in the Halloween films. The costume creates the iconography of the character both within, and beyond, the film, while establishing the villain as separate from protagonists. This makes these horror villains ideal fodder for cosplayers; they are on one hand “fixed,” immediately recognizable icons for a group fluent in a particular language of popular culture references. The horror of these villains (and, in turn, the impact sought to be attained by the adoption of their costumes) stems from the suggestion that what lies beneath, hidden, is unstable, dynamic, and unknowable. Norris and Bainbridge differentiate between cosplay and broader fan-based practices of dressing up at fan conventions, stating “the idea of dressing up to emulate heroes (or villains) is nothing new amongst fan cultures” (2009: 3). They see cosplay, which for them is only connected to Japanese manga and anime, as offering more subversive opportunities for playing with gender and identity than simple “emulation” among fan communities. However, we would suggest that the practice of cosplay, adapted and expanded from its Japanese origins, has increasingly infiltrated other fan-based practices of “dressing up” (including but not limited to live action role-playing games, zombie walks, and

189

HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS

189

any number of folklore-related costume-based festivals). This is supported by Hale, who is more expansive in his reading of the practice, setting up a number of defining terms to describe two main approaches—“discrete” and “generic” representation—borne out of observations at fan conventions in the United States.6 Hale defines “discrete representation” as “the material and performative reproduction or replication of a distinct and recognisable subject from a particular body of texts” (2014: 10). Alternatively, “generic representation is a practice that does not focus on reproducing a specific character from a given text . . . rather it engages a general character typology like a robot, superhero, or supervillain” (12). Hale sees these creative interventions and extensions of and within the original texts as rich spaces in the folklore of fan communities, where “taken together, discrete and generic character representation form the figurative ends of a continuum of cosplaying practice” (14). For Norris and Bainbridge, Japanese-informed manga cosplay is “unlike other fannish dressing up” and “is closer to drag” (2009:  3). For them, cosplay “is not merely an act of becoming a particular character, or marking out a particular alignment, but of disruption. This is the ‘play’ in ‘cosplay,’ a play with identity, and, more often, a play with gender identity.” They see, however, a far more ubiquitous practice “where the drag does not involve the assumption of a different gender but rather the exaggeration of the wearer’s own gender: the hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine.” Citing Judith Butler’s notion that gender is performative, they argue that “cosplay is a performance, through costume and the assumption of another identity, that reveals the performativity of gender.” It is therefore ironic, they note, that “it is through the wearing of another layer that the true nature of gender is revealed; the cosplay character creates a critical distance, a point of disruption, a vantage point from which the gender of the wearer can be critiqued, negotiated and explored” (3–4). While they are discussing manga-specific cosplay, again we would argue that this is relevant to global cosplay practices, and especially to horror cosplay, where crossplay offers the kind of “disruption” and “exaggeration” of hypermasculine7 and hyperfeminine gender ideals previously articulated. This is also connected to a further point made by Hale, in which he describes “textual transformative cosplay,” where cosplayers “maximise the intertexual gap generated when a source text is adapted and (re)animated” (2014: 19): “although transformation involves the distortion, augmentation, or reduction of the structure of a given text, these adaptations also have the potential to preserve and propagate the forms that they transfigure.” Hale continues: “When an original text and its adaptation are read in proximity, each illuminates the other by virtue of their many points of correspondence and contrast” (20). What Hale, Norris, and Bainbridge all articulate is the possibility for cosplayers to knowingly transform and adapt the original text, through costume, into something new that contests traditional concepts of gender. In so doing, they

190

190

NADIA BUICK AND ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS

challenge or play with the original text through the adorned body of the cos/ crossplayer. Thus, we identify crossplay at work in Halloween IV’s disruption of gender binaries and playfulness in regards to the “original” Halloween through the costumed body of Jamie. Through her Myers crossplay, Jamie restages the original film’s narrative, disrupting it with a female killer in a context where the “evil,” until this point, is assumed to be Myers alone. The mask itself affects the morality of its wearer. Within the genre of horror cosplay in the real world (and not in the confines of a film’s diegesis, such as in Halloween IV), female performers engage with disruption through exaggeration and contrast, transforming hypermasculine horror characters, such as Myers, into hyperfeminine “burlesque caricatures.” This can be seen in the fan Myers crossplay by Ivy Doomkitty, a cosplayer with an international social media following. Doomkitty’s crossplay of “The Shape” is a “hyperfeminization” that alters the original costume in a textual transformation. Doomkitty physically disrupts the filmic costume, cutting into the fabric of Myers’s overalls to expose her flesh. Rather than cover her face with the Shape’s mask, she clutches it in her hand, posing as though she had conquered, killed, and consumed him:  just as Clover argues that an (assumed) male horror audience can align itself with a female protagonist, Doomkitty’s costume suggests that gender does not bind women to the role of the Final Girl, either.

From Halloween IV to Halloween cosplay While Myers remains a popular figure to cos/crossplay at horror conventions, Jamie occupies a meaningful, albeit less ubiquitous place within this intertexual universe. If Myers’s overalls and mask are a popular, recognizable costume for male horror fans, or a site for exaggerated hyperfeminine crossplay for some women fans, it is Jamie who offers fans an opportunity to display a more nuanced allegiance to the Halloween universe through emulation. Within horror cosplay gatherings such as fancons (the colloquial name for fan conventions) Jamie has become associated with the clown costume, essentially displacing Myers’s connection to the clown through her own crossplay practice within the film. Instances of women and girls dressed as Jamie-crossplaying-Myers can be seen at many horror and fan cons, and while it would at first be easy to assume that their association is linked to gender alone, there are important differences between Jamie’s and Myers’s clown costumes: most obviously, Jamie’s is red and white, while Myers’s is multicolored. To those familiar with the franchise, it is obvious which character is being cosplayed through the color-coding of the clown costume in question: there is the young Myers, and then there is Jamie emulating the young Myers. There is a suggestion, therefore, that Jamie’s occupation of Myers’s persona through costume has become a meaningful gesture

191

HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS

191

for women horror fans who adopt Jamie’s costume as an example of both “discrete” and “transformative” cosplay (Hale 2014). Horror cosplay also allows women to present themselves as monstrous and grotesque, using extreme makeup. For many of these horror cosplayers, the goal is not to look pretty or sexy, but to impress with their ability to scare through the development and application of specialized makeup techniques, including wounds and disfigurative prosthetics. Again, this cosplay is often textually transformative and might include mash-ups like zombie Disney princesses, where the flawless damsel in a beautiful evening gown has been reborn as a grotesque member of the undead. Here cosplayers directly undermine the often highly gendered commercially available costumes produced for Halloween (Nelson 2000) by adapting them through DIY practices in horror cosplay. For female cosplayers who adapt masculine characters from male-dominated genres like horror and sci-fi, these acts can be read as subversive self-fashionings that reconfigure generic boundaries. Hence, women who cosplay male horror characters and transform them from scary, masculine, unsexy, and often anonymous archetypes into camp, sexy, feminine figures can thus be understood as transformative cosplayers, or crossplayers. To suggest that these performers, who are actively creating and transforming their appearance with the layering of complex textual references, are passively, unwittingly reinforcing gender stereotypes is to deny both their agency and the creativity at the core of cosplay practice. The gender politics of cosplay has immediate utility when examining the significance of Jamie’s transformation via costume that lies at the heart of Halloween IV. Evidence that Jamie’s gender-blurring transformation was a subversive one can be found most immediately within the franchise’s own diegesis: the next release Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989). In Halloween V, the ambiguous place occupied by Jamie at the conclusion of Halloween IV is undermined as she is placed in a psychiatric hospital and rendered a victim. Her outburst at the end of Halloween IV is rewritten as another insidious result of Myers’s (and not her own) agency. A  crucial double standard is revealed:  when young Michael dressed as a clown, he was dismissed as irreversibly “evil”—incurable. Jamie—as a girl—however, is positioned explicitly as a victim, despite choosing the costume herself, raising the knife herself, and (we assume, although it happens offscreen) brutally attacking her foster mother. With little consideration for this gendered double standard, Adam Rockoff, in his book Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986, insisted it was specifically Jamie’s gender that made such a notion untenable (rather than, as his overview implies, simply a resistance to any change in the Halloween mythology that moved attention away from Michael): “There were a lot of people who were, to say the least, unhappy with the way Halloween IV ended. They found the idea of an adolescent girl continuing the work of Michael Myers distasteful and ridiculous” (2002: 172)

192

192

NADIA BUICK AND ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS

But despite Rockoff’s claim that Halloween V fixes the errors of its predecessor by forcing Jamie back to a position of virtuousness, the box office statistics he offers suggest this may not be quite as simple as he claims. Made for $5.5 million, Halloween IV grossed $17 million and topped the box office for the first fortnight’s weekends following its release (2002: 171); whereas Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers grossed only $11.5U million (172). It is possible, as Rockoff alludes, that fans were so disappointed with Halloween IV that they did not have interest in seeing Halloween V. But perhaps the thought of Jamie as a killer was not as “distasteful and ridiculous” as Rockoff claims. Rather, it may have been simultaneously titillating, or at least intriguing—indeed, as viewers ourselves, this was our experience. Certainly the idea appealed to director Rob Zombie, who uses the mask in his reimagining of Halloween II (2009) during the film’s climactic twist, to suggest that his Laurie Strode (here played by Scout Taylor Compton) has herself—like Jamie—transformed into Myers. Jamie’s transformation in Halloween IV suggests the act of costuming holds (like cosplaying itself) a far more potent symbolic force than merely “dressing up.” The gender politics of cosplay, while desexualized in the case of Jamie, afford her an outlet for agency. By dressing as Michael, Jamie discovers aspects of her own identity previously unknown to her. Jamie’s transformation is a dark one, influencing her shift from virtue to villainy. Cosplayers who fashion themselves in the image of Jamie—replicating her knowing, subversive, and transformative crossplay of Myers—are arguably on some level drawn to this layering of gendered identities that Jamie transgressively represents. Costume plays both a crucial role in cos/crossplaying fan communities that turn to the Halloween franchise for inspiration, and within the diegetic world of the films themselves, particularly Halloween IV’s Jamie. This is not a case of identifying an identical trend across fictional and real-world contexts: the conceptual stakes in both instances are too nuanced for this. What is significant is that women cosplayers are responding to a use of costuming whose meanings they have gleaned from within the film text/s themselves: there is a meta-level of complexity. What remains clear is that the figure of Jamie and the trajectory of her character within Halloween IV has provided women fans of the franchise with a potent source of inspiration to explore their own identities through the act of cosplay. Be it a fictional little girl adopting the persona of her serial killer uncle or a sexy Michael Myers dressed to kill at a fancon, the transformative power of horror cosplay is often undertaken with knowing and subversive intent by the women who wear these costumes. In both the Halloween franchise (especially Halloween IV) and in the real world events focused on cos/crossplay, the adopting of certain costumes by women and girls presents a complex metatextuality with often explicitly empowering ends in mind. Through the carnivalesque

193

HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS

193

possibilities offered within horror culture—both in terms of fandom and within the diegetic space of the films themselves—the wearing of iconic costumes (often deliberately rejecting gender binaries) provides a space for women and girls to “play” not only with costume but also with identity, morality, and gender politics. Adding to this sense of metatextuality, the holiday of Halloween in this case brings another layer of meaning to the power of “dressing up.” Within the franchise, the context of Halloween sets the tone for shape-shifting and identity play through costume and visually creates lore around particular characters, such as Michael Myers as “The Shape.” In Halloween IV, costume is the central means through which a transfer of power takes place across gender lines as Jamie “becomes” Michael. That this transformative moment has become significant to women fans of the franchise speaks to the complex and transgressive nature of Jamie’s metamorphosis on screen.

Notes 1 For Jeffrey Sconce (1995), paracinema is a “particular reading protocol” rather than a specific a genre or selection of films: for Sconce, it encompasses a range of “historical manifestation(s) of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography” (372).. Paracinema is an oppositional category, distinctly anti-mainstream; “In short, the explicit manifesto of paracinematic culture is to valorize all forms of cinematic ‘trash,’ whether such films have been explicitly rejected or simply ignored by mainstream film culture” (372).

2 A term deployed often loosely in a definitional sense, Xavier Aldana Reyes (2014: 52) notes that “the general understanding seems to be that, if a text generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body, we might find ourselves in front of an instance of body horror.”

3 Clover briefly acknowledges in a footnote that the Final Girl can also be a Final Boy—such as in the infamous case of The Burning (Tony Maylam, 1981)—but she emphasizes his femininity and that as a “nerd,” he steps away from typical representations of masculinity (1992: 52).

4 Clover suggests that unisex names are a key feature of the Final Girl (1992: 40); however, she cherry-picks her examples selectively. This is not a case for the subgenre as a whole: see Sally from Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974), Alana from Terror Train (Spottiswoode, 1980), Alice from Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980), and Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984).

5 A thematic interest in the commercialization of Halloween is central to the premise of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the plot of which pivots around a mask factory that produces costumes that will kill the wearer as part of a mass child sacrifice.

6 Specifically, Hale uses Dragon*Con as his case study. 7 This is demonstrated through the slasher’s use of the knife, the phallic darling of psychoanalytic readings such as Clover’s. Knives for Clover “are personal, extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace” (1992: 79).

194

194

NADIA BUICK AND ALEXANDRA HELLER-NICHOLAS

References Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barker, C. (1997), Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror, London: BBC Books. Belk, R. W. (1994), “Carnival, Control and Corporate Culture in Contemporary Halloween Celebrations,” in J. Santino (ed.), Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, 105–32. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Clark, K., and M. Holquist (1984), Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clover, C. J. (1992), Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conrich, I. (2009), Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, London: IB Tauris. Dika, V. (1990), Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle, London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Gn, J. (2011), “Queer Simulation: The Practice, Performance and Pleasure of Cosplay,” Continuum 25 (4): 583–93. Hale, M. (2014), “Cosplay: Intertextuality, Public Texts, and the Body Fantastic,” Western Folklore 73 (1): 5–37. Hills, M. (2007), “Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13th Film Series as Other to Trash and Legitimate Film Cultures,” in J. Sconce (ed.), Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics, 219–39, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Horner, A., and S. Zlosnik (2015), “Comic Gothic,” in D. Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic, 321–34, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Kroski, E. (2015), How to Embrace Costume Play in Your Library, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Leeder, M. (2014), Devil’s Advocates: Halloween. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur/Columbia University Press. Mulvey, L. (1975), “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Nelson, A. (2000), “The Pink Dragon is Female: Halloween Costumes and Gender Markers,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 24 (2): 137–44. Norris, C., and J. Bainbridge (2009), “Selling Otaku? Mapping the Relationship between Industry and Fandom in the Australian Cosplay Scene,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 20: 1–15. Paul, W. (1994), Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy, New York: Columbia University Press. Peirson-Smith, A. (2013), “Fashioning the Fantastical Self: An Examination of the Cosplay Dress-up Phenomenon in Southeast Asia,” Fashion Theory 17 (1): 77–111. Osmund, R., L. Wing-Sun, and B. Hei-man Cheung (2012), “‘Cosplay’: Imaginative Self and Performing Identity,” Fashion Theory 16 (3): 317–341. Reyes, X. A. (2014), Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Roche, D. (2014), Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Rockoff, A. (2002), Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Santino, J. (2009), “Flexible Halloween: Longevity, Appropriation, Multiplicity, and Contestation,” in H. O’Donnell and M. Foley (eds.), Treat or Trick?: Halloween in a Globalising World, 9–15. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

195

HORRIFIC TRANSFORMATIONS

195

Sconce, J. (1995), “Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36 (4): 371–93. Smith, J. (2005), “Withnail’s Coat: Andrea Galer’s Cult Costumes,” Fashion Theory 9 (3): 305–22. Tseëlon, E. (2001), Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality, New York: Routledge. Wilkinson-Weber, C. M. (2013), Fashioning Bollywood: The Making and Meaning of Hindi Film Costume, London: Bloomsbury.

196

197

10 FACES OF RAGE Masks, Murderers, and Motives in the Canadian Slasher Film Rose Butler

Since the early 1990s, the slasher film has undergone a remarkable critical reappraisal. Once a maligned subgenre of horror, film scholars have since turned to psychoanalytical (Dika 1990), gender-based (Clover 1992), pedagogical (Robinson 2012), and formalist (Clayton 2015)  approaches to examine one of the most divisive and yet resilient film cycles of the twentieth century. Recently, Richard Nowell has addressed the subgenre in a complex production history in which he pays close attention to the masked killer’s role in boosting the slasher’s commercial viability. The slasher film, Nowell suggests, “identified striking maniacs as an important marketing hook” (2011: 205). Given the slasher’s narrative and commercial reliance on masked murderers, it is surprising that so little attention has been afforded to the significance of the killer. While John McCarthy’s Psychos (1986) includes a chapter dedicated to the slasher, and Adam Rockoff recognizes the “homicidal maniac” (2002: 6) as central to its formulaic narrative (see also Dika 1990; Harper 2004), there has yet to be an in-depth analysis of the significance of the killer’s mask and its design, an omission that overlooks one of the subgenre’s most important elements. In one of the few sources to comment directly on the relationship between mask and killer in the horror film, Thomas M. Sipos summarizes that specifically in the case of the slasher killer, “masks not only anonymise and depersonalise, they also dehumanise” (2010: 63). However, to immediately render the mask wearer as “inhuman” (ibid.) reduces the slasher killer to an indiscriminate murderer or a supernatural force of evil. It is true that certain American slashers, particularly in early examples of the subgenre, exploited the notion of a “soulless” killer (ibid.), exemplified by the white

198

198

ROSE BUTLER

death mask donned by Michael Myers in Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) and the featureless hockey mask worn by Jason Voorhees as of Friday the 13th Part III (Steve Miner, 1982). McCarthy suggests that these masked figures represent “a symbol of what scares society most: random and seemingly unmotivated violence” (1986: 163), while Tony Magistrale repeatedly refers to the slasher killer as a “monster” (2005: 147). Such readings reinforce the blanket suggestion that all of these killers are monstrously inhuman, disregarding the anthropological motives of many slasher villains. As the subgenre reached its commercial peak in 1980, a brief cycle of Canadian-produced slashers would utilize specific masks that would come to reveal a great deal about the killers who wear them; in these films, masked murderers are not just killing machines, but fractured individuals whose external visage reveals a great deal about their hidden motives. The Canadian slasher killer, then, is the antithesis of Myers and Jason: “a fractured personality, a recognizably human figure that does inhuman things” (McCarthy 1986: 163). This chapter will work to understand Canadian slasher killers through their chosen masks: external representations of the traumas that have led them to kill. Before coming to discuss the Canadian slasher in more detail, it is important to contextualize the mask as a cultural artifact. The complex duality between mask and wearer as exemplified by the Canadian killer is not a new invention. Historically, as Susan B. Kaiser suggests, “a mask is not just a cover or a disguise; it can reveal a moment of reflexivity about the otherness within and beyond ourselves” (quoted in Tseëlon [2001] 2003: xiv). Masks, then, demonstrate a dual quality of what Kaiser refers to as “familiar and other” (ibid.: xvii), and it is this binary opposition that underlines the connection between masks and the Canadian slasher film. In short, traditionally, masks reveal a great deal about the inner lives of the men and women who wear them, but their ability to disrupt normality suggests that they have the potential to elicit a horrific reaction. Of course, in its contemporary usage, “mask” is often interchangeable with more negative lexis such as concealment or façade, the connotations of which often suggest terrible deceit. Such implications of falsity developed as the word entered into the English language. Its negative connotations come from the Middle French masque, itself derived from the Italian maschera and the Medieval Latin term maska, translated most directly as “soot or smut,” though its more colloquial use “designated witches” (Johnson 2011:  56). The Italian etymology, then, cements that the term “mask” has long been associated with the monstrous. However, the horrific meaning that has come to be associated with the term “mask,” and the idea of it as “the antithesis to the authentic” is, as Efrat Tseëlon suggests, “a phenomenon of the Middle Ages” ([2001] 2003: 5). According to ancient Roman and Greek theatrical tradition, “the mask was used as identification of character, not as a deception or disguise” (ibid.: 4). The Canadian slasher cycle, then, can be read as an extension of these ancient

199

FACES OF RAGE

199

traditions in which masks worn by broken individuals who lash out against those who have wronged them represent “truth in the shape of deception” (ibid.: 5).

Killers up North: The Canadian slasher film Despite the mask and the horror film enjoying a relationship spanning almost a century, from The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925) to Hush (Mike Flanagan, 2016), they align most successfully in the first North American slasher cycle. Although Canada produced the proto-slasher in Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1974), it was with the release of the American Halloween that the slasher became associated with a “malevolent, but ambiguous” killer (McCarthy 1986: 162). Dressed in grey overalls with his face covered by a blank visage, Halloween’s Michael Myers is unsettling and distinctly unfeeling; his expressionless mask renders the Shape “an evil force that even knives and bullets can’t stop” (ibid.). However, the Canadian slasher film soon flourished. Following the success of Halloween and the introduction of the Capital Cost Allowance for Canadianmade films, producers moved their priorities away from art-house cinema and toward horror films in what is often remembered as a “shameful episode” for Canadian national cinema “during which the film industry sold its soul” (Corupe 2015: 91). But far from being a national embarrassment, this era produced several exceptionally innovative slasher narratives. These films were pushed for distribution specifically to American and British audiences to capitalize on the runaway popularity of Halloween, and many of them found enormous commercial success. Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode, 1980) and Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980), the first Canadian films to exploit the success of Carpenter’s picture, established a brief cycle of slasher films that Mikel Koven refers to as “Scooby-Doo movies”—murder-mystery narratives inspired by Agatha Christie in which “the killer is revealed to be human” (2006: 2). Referring specifically to Terror Train and Prom Night, Gregory Waller asserts, “though they do feature psychopathic killers, both of these stalker films are structured like classical whodunnits” (1987: 10). With narratives reminiscent of traditional crime capers, the first run of Canadian slashers were praised for their “capacity to provoke fairly intense intrigue” (Nowell 2011: 161), a sentiment shared by Kim Newman who finds Terror Train boasting “one of the few surprising surprise endings in the genre” (2011: 208). The killers in both of these films—and later Canadian slashers My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka, 1981) and Curtains (Richard Ciupka, 1983)—wear distinctive masks. Thus far, masked killers have often been read in reductive terms by scholars. For example, Magistrale posits that the antagonists in slasher films are “dark

200

200

ROSE BUTLER

extensions of Western culture’s masculine opprobrium against revealing deep emotion” (Magistrale 2005: 149). He goes on to attribute the “masculine prerogative” of the villain’s “utter refusal to explain themselves” (ibid.: 149) as the reason behind the killer’s choice to don a mask. This problematic reading reinforces a traditionally accepted notion that all slasher films perpetuate a fear or hatred of women, the killer functioning only to “re-establish masculine dominance” (ibid.). Such readings highlight the significance of this collection in addressing the need for a critical reappraisal for the costumed killer—something that will be tackled not just in this chapter but also in this volume as a whole. The Canadian slasher cycle refutes the commonly held assumption that slasher masks are featureless and emotionless; instead, they function as an outward reflection of the killer’s inner trauma or a wider cultural paranoia. This is not an element of the Canadian slasher—or the slasher in general—that has been afforded a great deal of attention. For example, when briefly discussing Prom Night, Nowell notes that the killer wears an “understated black ski mask” that is “barely visible in shadow-soaked school halls” (2011: 203). Though this mask might be considered uninspired in its simplicity, it is more significant than Nowell suggests. In conjunction with the killer’s all-black costume, it reveals his psychological motive. In the film’s prologue, the killer’s twin sister dies as a result of a traumatic accident. His black mask, then, is indicative of mourning and a representation of a murderous double: a “shadow sibling” who died before she was given the chance to prosper. Prom Night is only the first of several examples of the Canadian slasher film that use masks to reveal motive. Here they are important narrative tools, used to expose the inner workings of the killers who wear them. In discussing the slasher villain as a fully formed, emotionally and psychologically complex character, this reading avoids the psychosexual interpretations so common in scholarship on the slasher film (see Clover 1992; Dika 1990; Creed 1993). As such, in the slasher films discussed in this chapter—Terror Train, My Bloody Valentine and Curtains—the mask is less a device for deception or disguise than a vital piece of character costume:  an external representation of inner traumas and murderous motives.

“The girls and boys of Sigma Phi”: A man of many masks in Terror Train Terror Train begins with a New Year’s Eve party jointly hosted by a fraternity and its sorority partner. The party takes place some years before the film’s main action and closely follows Vera Dika’s “stalker” film formula: a two-part, chronological narrative structure that typically commences with a traumatic past event

201

FACES OF RAGE

201

(1990: 59–60). “As usual,” Jim Harper asserts, “the film has its basis in a college prank gone wrong” (Harper 2004: 172). Several fraternity pledges are present at the party, hoping to win their place in Sigma Phi Omega; they all wear brightly colored beanie hats, both to differentiate them from the frat brothers and to single some of them out as virgins. One pledge, the socially awkward Kenny Hampson (Derek MacKinnon), is sent upstairs to a bedroom where Alana (Jamie Lee Curtis) is waiting. She lures Kenny into the dark room while she hides behind a canopy of white sheets, where he quickly undresses and climbs onto the bed after Alana whispers, through stifled giggles, “Kiss me, Kenny.” As he leans down, Kenny reaches out to Alana, but she is still in hiding; he places his hand on a rotting carcass instead. At the realization that he is touching a cadaver, Kenny grabs at the corpse’s arm, lifting up a severed limb and holding it in abject terror. He spins madly in shock and becomes tangled in the sheets hanging above the bed. As the group of co-eds rush in to laugh at their cruel prank, Alana is repulsed by what she has done. This opening sequence adheres to Dika’s assertion that, in a slasher film’s opening, “the killer is driven to madness or is already mad because of an extreme trauma” (Dika 1990: 59). And so the scene is set for the present-day events of the film in which “the killer returns to take vengeance on the guilty parties or on their symbolic substitutes” (ibid.). Exactly three years have passed since the prank that cost Kenny his sanity; he has since been placed in an asylum. Meanwhile, the co-eds have booked a steam train for a costumed bash. After gathering on a station platform, the students we saw in the pre-credit sequence raise a toast and begin to board. The group laughs at Ed (Howard Busgang), the class clown—dressed accordingly as film star and comedian Groucho Marx—as he lurches forward with a sword in his stomach. Thinking this is just another prank, they pass him by as he falls to the ground, revealing a blood-stained shirt. As Ed lies dying, an unknown figure removes his costume before kicking him underneath the train. As the engine fires up, Ed is crushed beneath the carriages. This is the first of many times that the killer will change into new disguises. In fact, Terror Train’s most interesting element is its inventive use of masquerade through a many-faced killer. As Koven notes, “we suspect from the outset that the killer is Kenny Hampson . . . seeking revenge for a prank gone wrong,” but that, “because the New Year’s Eve party on the titular train is a masquerade party, both games of where the killer is and who the killer is are played out due to the narrative logic of having Kenny frequently change costume” (2006: 165). Kenny’s constant changes of costume, from Groucho Marx to an elderly man via an amphibian creature, position Terror Train as one of the clearest examples of the Canadian slasher’s inventive use of masks. Koven continues, “Of course . . . almost everyone present could be a suspect, as no-one knows what costume Kenny is wearing at any one time” (ibid.: 166).

202

202

ROSE BUTLER

J. A. Kerswell has also commented on Terror Train’s unique use of masks: “The killer . . . is actually pretty spooky-looking, with cold eyes peering emotionless from the succession of masks stolen from each victim in turn” (2010:  192). However, Kerswell’s assertion that Kenny is an emotionless murderer overlooks his motives. Kenny reflects Rockoff’s observation that the slasher killer is “the victim of a devastating, humiliating or harmful accident, prank or tragedy” (2002:  12). Rockoff asserts that this event usually carries deep emotion and that “the killer is an ordinary person who has suffered some terrible . . . trauma” (ibid.: 5–6). Thus, Kenny’s masks do not just render him emotionless; they are significant external manifestations of his inner rage at the spectacular humiliation he suffered at the hands of his peers. Dika argues that Kenny’s humiliation is reminiscent of the opening bedroom scene of Halloween, though this time told through the female perspective of Alana’s character (1990:  94). Dika thus produces a psychosexual reading to the film, asserting that the encounter is “not only an entrance into the fraternity, but also into adult sexuality and manhood” (ibid.). In Dika’s psychoanalytical reading of Terror Train, Kenny is driven to murder “because of the castration he has seen and because of the threat this poses to his own masculinity” (ibid.). However, Dika’s approach reduces Kenny to a sexually repressed boy, castrated and emasculated by his peers. In fact, the opening sequence and Kenny’s subsequent actions are less linked to his relationship with women than to his male peers. In the pre-credit sequence, he already lingers on the periphery of the group; the cruel prank at the dormitory is the ultimate social humiliation. What Kenny desires is to be included; that he so desperately wants to join a fraternity suggests that what he yearns for is brotherhood and friendship. Notably, Terror Train lingers over the vengeful murders of its male characters. As his many masks suggest, Kenny’s murderous rampage is not sexually motivated, but rather a result of this severe ostracization. And while Dika suggests that Kenny’s costumes refer “to characters from film history such as Groucho Marx and the Creature from the Black Lagoon” (ibid.: 98), his shifting guises are actually a representation of his fractured sense of self and a desire to belong. By infiltrating the party under his victims’ assumed guises, he is able to shed his previous life as a socially awkward outsider and adopt the outward appearance of his peers and, by extension, their status in the social group. In short, he can become popular and attractive to the people who treated him so cruelly, if only for the night. Terror Train, then, uses masks as metaphors for the crushing pressures of social life and the exclusive cliques of college-age groups. After Kenny kills Ed, he assumes his identity by taking his Groucho Marx costume: an exaggerated mask with prominent eyebrows, a large nose, and circular glasses that became synonymous with the comedy star (see Figure 10.1). The first costume Kenny steals is symptomatic of his yearning for acceptance. As the class clown, Ed is immensely popular and occupies a relatively elevated position

203

FACES OF RAGE

203

Figure 10.1 The killer becomes the class clown: Kenny’s “Groucho Marx” mask in Terror Train (dir. Roger Spottiswoode), frame grab, 1980, Twentieth Century Fox.

among the group. Kenny murders Ed and adopts his costume to subsume this role, becoming—at least for a short time—one of the most popular kids in class. After trying out the guise of the class clown, Kenny murders Jackson (Anthony Sherwood)—a confident and attractive student of high social standing—in the bathroom and steals his costume: a monstrous and markedly amphibian creature, replete with webbed hands and enormous eyes. In addition to allowing Kenny to assume Jackson’s persona, this amphibious costume carries another interesting meaning. If we take Dika’s assertion that this second mask is representative of Universal’s tragic Creature (or “Gill-man”), Kenny is now even further removed from his peers: an entirely different species. The “monster” in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) is a tragic being from another time—the last of its kind. Disturbed by the scientists who are studying its habitat, the Gill-man becomes infatuated with a human female and attempts to secure her affection. In a clear intertextual link, once he is dressed as the Creature, Kenny uses Jackson’s guise to try to seduce Alana’s best friend, Mitchy (Sandee Currie). So Jackson’s Creature costume does not just give Kenny the confidence of his former classmate; it directly alludes to the tragic Creature’s obsession with the first woman it comes into contact with after many years of isolation. Kenny is starting to wear his loneliness on his face. Kenny goes on to kill Mo (Timothy Webber)—who has been dressed as a parrot, a reflection of his tendency to mimic his friends’ actions, words, and behaviors—before brutally murdering Doc (Hart Bochner), the initiator of the prank three years before, whose death is unsurprisingly the most prolonged and graphic. As his rampage continues, Kenny dons two final masks that cement his alienation from the group. The first is an elderly man’s face: pallid in tone, heavily

204

204

ROSE BUTLER

wrinkled, and particularly thin and drawn. The eye sockets are large, suggesting an emptiness and hollowness to the figure beneath. This visage cements Kenny’s isolation and positions him as the antithesis to his peers: a withered old man among youthful college students. The killer’s final disguise is only shown briefly at the very end of the film:  a featureless, transparent mask. Though it features contours to suggest the bone structure of a face, this guise renders Kenny’s own features almost invisible, creating a grotesquely blank version of his own appearance. This final visage, then, is symbolic of Kenny’s trauma. An acute manifestation of his total loss of identity, the transparent mask tells us that his personality and sense of self have now been totally erased by social exclusion.

“Cross your heart . . . and hope to die”: Working-class masks in My Bloody Valentine While Terror Train’s Kenny Hampson is driven by fraternal rejection, My Bloody Valentine’s masked killer is representative of sociocultural concerns related to deindustrialization and the demise of working-class communities in Canada. The film’s killer is the Miner:  an imposing and visually striking figure wearing a gas mask, black overalls, thick leather gloves, heavy-duty boots, and two brown utility belts around the waist. He uses a pickaxe as his weapon of choice, though he does carry out his killings in a number of ways, including dispatching one victim with another distinctly industrial weapon:  a nail gun. Such detailed and authentic costume design suggests that the killer is a product of a very specific time and place: his outward appearance a clear representation of the culture he inhabits and—as the narrative eventually reveals—a manifestation of traumatic memories. As with all slasher killers, the most iconic element of the Miner’s costume design is his headwear: a real coal miner’s gas mask, with metal outlines around its large oval lenses, a circular oxygen filter with an attached pipe, a black helmet, and a headlight (see Figure 10.2). The mask’s enormous glass eyes are its most notable feature. Many slasher masks are made of light-reflecting plastic to ensure that the space behind them appears blank and inhuman; as Sipos notes, Jason’s hockey mask and the white face worn by Michael Myers are “empowering partially because the masks’ eye sockets appear empty” (2010: 63). Similarly, the Miner’s eyes constantly shine with the reflection of the world before him, obscuring his features and subverting the common notion that the eyes are windows to the soul. The Miner’s surrogate face, then, is a dark visage and contrasts with “a slasher with visible eyes” who “will typically appear more naturalistic, mortal and vulnerable” (ibid.) than an “eyeless” killer.

205

FACES OF RAGE

205

Figure 10.2 The killer wears a mask that evokes his working-class culture in My Bloody Valentine (dir. George Mihalka), frame grab, 1981, Paramount Pictures.

However, Sipos also asserts that “masks have personalities” (ibid.), and this is distinctly true of the gas mask worn by My Bloody Valentine’s killer despite the fact that his human features are obscured and his eyes are rendered invisible. The Miner’s uniform does cover every inch of his skin but, rather than reducing him to a soulless monster, this is largely to highlight that it was designed to be practical and protective for its intended use. His chosen disguise is an accurate recreation of a miner’s work attire. So while the killer’s appearance might appear blank, it is the symbolic connotations of his costume and its links to his motives for murder that position My Bloody Valentine alongside its Canadian siblings. His decision to dress as a miner is intrinsically tied into his identity as a working-class killer who wants to eliminate those who refuse to respect the industrial heritage of his town. Just as in Terror Train, a traumatic incident pre-dates the main action of My Bloody Valentine. Here, though, we see only brief flashbacks of past events: a methane gas explosion that leaves five miners buried alive in the small mining town of Valentine Bluffs, doomed by the two foremen who abandoned their posts to attend the town’s annual Valentine’s dance; the only survivor—Harry Warden—being pulled from the wreckage, having survived on the flesh of his colleagues; Warden’s commitment to an asylum and his subsequent escape a year later; and his brutal attack on the town’s Valentine’s festivities, where he kills his negligent supervisors and vows to return if the town ever holds a dance again. Naturally, that’s exactly what the town’s youth intend to do in the present day.

206

206

ROSE BUTLER

The fictional Canadian town of Valentine Bluffs holds particular cultural connotations that are closely entwined with the killer and his mask. Filmed on location in a small mining town in Nova Scotia, My Bloody Valentine is clearly set in postindustrial Canada. Gone are the leafy suburbs of many American slashers and their populations of promiscuous teens; here they are replaced with college-age men and women who are in steady relationships and hold down regular jobs. The white wooden houses and cold, wind-battered aesthetic of Valentine Bluffs suggest the remoteness of Atlantic Canada, a point highlighted by the costuming of the residents: outside of their work clothes— many of the town’s young men still work in the lonely mine—the film’s central characters dress practically, wearing fur collars, jeans, thick checked shirts, and sweaters. Their outward identity, then, is shaped by the town and its industrial history. Valentine Bluffs and its community are distinctly working class, entrenched in the cultural heritage of Canadian maritime regions, traditionally sustained by mining, farming, and industry. It would have once been a thriving, prosperous settlement. As Rusty Bittermann notes, “around 1500 men found employment in and about Nova Scotia’s coal mines in the 1830s,” while “thousands more would be recruited in the coal boom of the third quarter of the nineteenth century” (2006: 13). However, as demand for such employment dropped during the second half of the twentieth century, these communities became ghost towns. Valentine Bluffs—with its population of 3,735 townspeople—is a shadow of its former self and functions as an ideal location for what director George Mihalka calls “a working-class horror film” (Mihalka 2009). My Bloody Valentine’s young residents have aspirations reaching beyond Valentine Bluffs, and the film’s costumed killer—the Miner—acts as a reminder of the town’s industrial heritage: a murderer desperate to resist deindustrialization. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the horrors at the core of My Bloody Valentine center on the town’s coal mine. While the mine is still functional, many members of its young workforce are keen to leave town—a place in which “nothing ever changes”—to seek better prospects elsewhere. T. J. (Paul Kelman), the mayor’s son, once attempted to do just that; the film alludes to his previous failed departure and suggests that his inability to find a life elsewhere is both a disappointment to his father and the cause of his breakup with Sarah (Lori Hallier), with whom he is now embroiled in a tense love triangle with Axel (Neil Affleck). These are young men and women who find their lives in a decaying postindustrial town tiresome and restrictive. When we see shots of Valentine Bluffs, its streets are empty and devoid of life. Much of the film’s action takes place in and around dilapidated industrial sites in a town that has been left to rot. Despite the fact that many members of the young community are themselves miners, they have very little respect for the town’s working past, highlighted by their

207

FACES OF RAGE

207

insistence on throwing a Valentine’s Day bash despite the fearful warnings of the town’s elder residents (i.e., those who remember what happened last time). They are driven by casual pursuits: they race their cars recklessly through the town, and throughout the film they drink more often than they work. The film’s killer, then—dressed in terrifying industrial garb—is representative of what Dika suggests is a common element of slasher or “stalker” films: an “archaic element, a relic from an earlier time that has now returned to disrupt the present stability of the young community” (1987: 93). The Miner returns to avenge a proud tradition that has been forgotten by a new generation that wants nothing more than to escape; it is both the young people’s lack of respect for the town’s history and their desire for social mobility that makes them targets. Thus, for much of its running time, My Bloody Valentine suggests that the Miner is Warden, returning for revenge on a town that has forgotten its working heritage through a period of deindustrialization. The film’s flashbacks primarily reveal his trauma, and the iconic Miner’s mask is associated with the accident that led to his psychological break. My Bloody Valentine’s North American poster stresses this narrative element. It depicts the killer staring straight ahead beneath his blood-stained mask as couples dancing under red love hearts are reflected in his headlight; water droplets—closely resembling tears—drip beneath his eyes. However, at the film’s conclusion, it is revealed in a twist ending that it is actually Axel behind the Miner’s mask; the son of one of the supervisors who left Warden to die, Axel witnessed his father’s death at Warden’s hands. To take this alone as Axel’s motive would be ostensibly nonsensical; it is difficult to comprehend why the child of a murder victim would want to assume the identity of his father’s killer. However, Axel’s motivations are deeply ingrained in his relationship with T. J., Sarah, and Valentine Bluffs. Axel resents T. J. not just because he is a rival in love but also for his desire to find a life away from his dying town. The two men discuss their love triangle in a scene that appropriately takes place in a junkyard. Axel expresses his anger that T. J. left their hometown: “Nobody asked you to go away.” Once T.  J.  has returned, Axel begins to lose Sarah to his educated, ambitious rival. At the film’s ending, it is revealed that Warden has in fact been dead for five years. However, Axel believes not only that Warden is alive but also that he is able to speak to him. Immediately before the film’s end, he tells the townspeople, “I’ll be waiting in hell for you!” He continues: “Harry? Harry! I’m coming! This whole fucking town is going to die! We’re coming back, you bastards!” Axel, then, becomes a vessel through which Warden can exact his revenge: a young working man who is driven to murder by his resentment of a friend who has striven for a life away from a crumbling town, with his mask denoting his working-class identity and the heritage that is slowly but surely disappearing from Valentine Bluffs.

208

208

ROSE BUTLER

“Six beautiful girls, trying to get ahead”: Masks of beauty and revulsion in Curtains Aptly, Curtains opens with a theatrical swish of a black curtain as an actress, Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar), practices a monologue on a lonely stage. Watching her intently is director Jonathan Stryker (John Vernon), a heavily critical and challenging filmmaker who is particularly demanding of his female stars. As Samantha dramatically delivers her lines, carefully enunciating and projecting her speech, Jonathan cruelly tells her “I don’t believe it.” Samantha is crushed, and the lights cut to black. After purchasing the rights to adapt an infamous stage play, “Audra,” and gifting those rights to Stryker, Samantha wrongly assumes that she will be given the eponymous lead role: a dangerous and psychotic woman. Exploiting Samantha’s history of method performances, Jonathan has her committed to an asylum, ostensibly so that she can become immersed in her character. Meanwhile, he opens a casting call for the part of Audra and invites six beautiful, young actresses to audition for him in his remote New England mansion. Samantha glimpses the casting call in an issue of Variety and, with the help of a friend, escapes to seek revenge. Enraged, she throws pictures of the six actresses into a fire, the photographs of their faces becoming hideous: distorting, bubbling, and then melting in the flames. Such an image encapsulates the driving themes behind Curtains: ambition, insecurity, and envy. Meanwhile, the young actresses invited to audition for Stryker are told to take a seat in an expansive dining room when they reach his mansion. But one actress never arrives: Curtains’ first victim wakes from a nightmare to see a small, blackhaired doll that becomes “the killer’s wonderfully effective calling card” (Rockoff 2002: 143). Unsettled by what she thought was a dream and looking for her boyfriend, she tiptoes across her apartment in the dark before she is dramatically stabbed in the stomach by a costumed killer wearing a horrifying Crone mask that recalls the jealous “Evil Queen” following her transformation into a hideous hag in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937). A grotesque, ashen face with excessively aged and wrinkled flesh, the mask features a down-turned mouth underneath a witchlike hooked nose. Defined eyebrows furrow over sunken, lined eye sockets, which are set back behind heavy bags of tired, shrivelled skin. The mask is topped with a receding mass of wild, matted, grey-streaked auburn hair: a final confirmation that this haggard face is the antithesis of manufactured youth and beauty (see Figure 10.3). The Crone’s mask, then, is a stark subversion of the standards of body image impressed on would-be starlets. The actresses at the mansion are all youthful,

209

FACES OF RAGE

209

Figure 10.3 The hideous Crone mask used in Curtains (dir. Richard Ciupka), frame grab, 1983, Jensen Farley Pictures.

beautiful women. They actually all look strikingly alike: fair-skinned with large, blue doe-eyes and thick, chocolate brown hair. They embody a vitality and beauty that is immediately juxtaposed with the killer’s grotesque visage and the jealousy that lies beneath it. As Sipos suggests, “the crone mask in Curtains is not only hideous but aesthetically appropriate. . . Thematically Curtains is about people so desperate to ‘make it’ in Hollywood that they are always ‘in character’ . . . their real selves hidden behind curtains (or masks) of their own making” (2010: 63). Indeed, the film goes to some effort to suggest that the identity and mannerisms of these women are at times “as contrived as the characters they portray” (ibid.) and comments on the superficiality of external beauty; these women are ugly on the inside. In particular, Sipos draws attention to a sequence in which Stryker gathers the women for a group test. Curtains is a rare slasher film in which the killer’s disguise appears out of context:  Jonathan forces Samantha to audition for a love scene while wearing the Crone mask. Demanding that she seduce him with her eyes alone, she struggles, visibly frustrated behind the grotesque visage. When Samantha fails to impress him, he angrily pulls the mask from her face and flings it on the floor before dragging her to a mirror and shouting, “This is a mask, too! Are you satisfied?” Curtains’ mask, Sipos asserts, “empowers the slasher and heightens the horror” and “augurs the fate of these pretty young actresses.” Indeed, just as he has carelessly discarded his one-time muse, Samantha, “so too will these actresses grow old and be discarded by Hollywood” (ibid.). It becomes clear that Stryker has little investment in the actresses beyond their outward appearance; as much

210

210

ROSE BUTLER

as the women joke about how far they will go for the part—in an unsubtle jibe at Hollywood’s casting-couch culture—the two most vulnerable members of the group, Christie (Lesleh Donaldson) and Brooke (Linda Thorson), are seduced by him. Christie, the youngest of the women, is left sobbing into her pillow, whereas Brooke, after later discovering Christie’s disembodied head, is terrified and confused; rather than comfort her, Stryker discards her hysterics and convinces her to sleep with him. The Crone mask, then, is representative of what Sipos asserts as Curtains’ dual themes: “(1) aging in Hollywood, and (2) wearing a false front in Hollywood” (ibid.). This duality is reinforced further by the film’s title, “of course, a double entendre, literally referring to theatre curtains”—which recur frequently at changes of scene—and “figuratively to death” (Willis 1984: 55). In the original script, the killer “is likened to . . . a banshee: a female supernatural being of Irish folklore, known to wail when someone is about to die” (Burrell 2014: 20). In this version, “the killer even sports what is thought to be the traditional banshee garb: a green dress with a grey cloak” (ibid.). In the finished film, the Crone remains a portent of doom: a vision of what these women will become and an indictment of a youth-obsessed culture. What Sipos misses in his analysis, however, is that the identity of the person beneath the Crone mask is as important to the film’s thematic significance as the mask itself. The film spends much time suggesting that Samantha is the Crone: an outcast, veteran actress, once beautiful and talented, but now no longer desirable to Stryker and, by extension, wider society. In this, she is given the perfect motive. Seemingly driven by jealousy and pride, it seems she is the most plausible fit for the killer. At the end of the Crone’s killing spree, Samantha and Patti (Lynne Griffin), an awkward comedienne, are the only actresses left alive. In the film’s final moments, Samantha walks into the kitchen to find Patti opening a bottle of champagne. Admitting that she killed Stryker in an act of revenge, Samantha advises Patti to go home and forget about “Audra.” In a shock twist, Patti reveals that she is the Crone and fatally stabs her older rival. Curtains closes with Patti revisiting a stand-up routine she performs earlier in the film, where she reveals her desire to be an actress and discusses what she would do to achieve her dream. Only now, Patti is incarcerated, performing the sketch to a group of women in a psychiatric institution. That Patti—a struggling comedienne and would-be actress—is the killer is a particularly interesting twist and a link back to the “clown” trope of horror cinema: while “a clown evokes an iconic funny face . . . indexically linked to such notions as laughter and good times,” more often, “the clown symbolically represents evil” (Kim Yoon and Williams 2015: 80). Indeed, Patti is largely played for comic relief and is unthreatening in comparison to the aggressive Samantha, but the subject of her standup act subtly reveals that she will do whatever she must to achieve her dreams.

211

FACES OF RAGE

211

She yearns to be taken seriously and is enraged that Stryker fixates on the other actresses. Earlier in the film, she confronts him: I’m as right as anybody else you’ve got here. I  mean, God damn it, you haven’t spent five minutes with me and now you’re telling me that I’m wrong for the part! Why? Because I haven’t got a staple to my navel like that centrefold, because I wouldn’t pirouette into bed with you and skate on your face? I mean, what the hell are you looking for anyway and what do you want from me? I mean, who the fuck is “Audra” anyway? Are you enjoying yourself? Stryker’s response is that he is “enjoying a little bit of Audra,” suggesting that Patti is only attractive—or interesting—to him when she embodies a falsehood, someone other than herself. Patti’s Crone mask reflects her fears that she will grow old, be forgotten, and never achieve her dreams of beauty, fame, and fortune. She literally removes her competition—by wiping out an entire house full of stereotypically beautiful young actresses—and demonstrates just how far she is willing to go to make herself stand out in a crowd of idealized women. Her horrifying visage, then, is also a metaphor for how she feels about herself in comparison to her peers. Due to the crushing pressures of adhering to an ideal image, she feels hideous next to the other actresses, and chooses a mask to match. Patti is made to feel ugly and undesirable by Stryker as he devotes his attention to the sexualized women he has brought to his house; by adopting the Crone mask to kill her peers, she wears her anxieties on her face.

Unmasked: Canadian killers and fractured identities While the slasher subgenre has been discussed at some length using several bodies of important theory—and while several scholars have attempted to examine the wider cultural concerns of the slasher (see Rockoff 2002; Kerswell 2010)—very little has been said about how these films utilize some of horror’s most iconic and recognizable masks, or what these guises reveal about the killers who wear them. For example, Sorcha Fhlainn argues that “the slasher’s face remains obscured for most of the film, allowing the audience to picture the monster as the embodiment of the age” (2008: 180), but she does not consider the significance of the apparatus used to cover the killer’s face, or what it might be able to articulate about the inner workings of the murderers beneath them. We are not just able to project our own fears onto slasher killers because their faces are hidden. The masks used to hide their features can tell us everything about them: their traumas and motives. This is an element of the slasher

212

212

ROSE BUTLER

movie that is too often overlooked; Harper attests that wearing a mask renders killers “faceless figures beyond scrutiny and analysis” (2004: 47). He continues: “The mask may conceal his identity, but it also states clearly what he really is—insane and dangerous” (ibid.). For a subgenre so reliant on killers and their appearance, remarkably little attention has been given to costume design in the slasher film. The Canadian slasher cycle offers a striking alternative to Harper’s view that the slasher killer is at best “less than human” or at worst, an “incomplete creature” (ibid.); its killers are ordinary, fallible people driven to kill by exceptional circumstances and marked by extreme emotional responses to terrible traumas. That the killers in these films are only human is evident in the ending of each narrative: Terror Train’s Kenny is pushed from the train to his tragic death; My Bloody Valentine’s Axel is left to wander a mine forever, his mind irreversibly divided between himself and the spirit of Harry Warden; and Curtains’ Patti is institutionalized, doomed to repeat the same stand-up routine over and over for a catatonic audience. As the makers of My Bloody Valentine attest by comparing the Miner respectively to Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, and Michael Myers: “Behind the mask it’s just an ordinary guy—he wasn’t the bastard son of a thousand maniacs, back from a watery grave or just evil” (Mihalka 2009). As such, the masks of the Canadian slasher cycle explore what John W. Nunley and Cara McCarty suggest is “the most ancient means of changing identity and assuming a new persona” (Nunley and McCarty 1999: 15). They use the killer’s mask as a metaphor through which to explore the psychological condition of the wearer. These films are suggestive of masquerade’s crucial role in our understanding of what it means to be human: a mask allows its wearer to experience transformation, to assume a different persona. This is an idea vital to the narrative development of the Canadian slasher, where killers are primarily driven by crises of identity. Canadian slashers use masks to reflect the motives, traumas, and inner workings of their antagonists, from the traumatized social outsider wearing the adopted masks of his classmates in Terror Train, to My Bloody Valentine’s Miner donning a working-class costume to punish a generation that has forgotten its industrial heritage, to Curtains’ Patti assuming the horrifying image of the aged Crone, an astute and scathing commentary on body image. The Canadian slasher, then, demonstrates that slasher killers are not just unstoppable killing machines and that their masks do not just serve to dehumanize them. Masks have traditionally been used to conceal, to hide, and to disguise, but as Terror Train, My Bloody Valentine, and Curtains reveal, the Canadian slasher has also utilized them to render their killers distinctly human and to articulate a great deal about the psychological, social, and cultural pain and suffering of the men and women who wear them: aesthetic clues to reveal their murderous motives and darkest desires.

213

FACES OF RAGE

213

References Bittermann, R. (2006), “Farm Households and Wage Labour in the Northeastern Maritimes in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in L. Sefton-Macdowell and I. Radforth (eds.), Canadian Working-class History: Selected Readings, 3rd edn., 3–28, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Burrell, J. (2014), “The Ultimate Original Nightmare,” Rue Morgue 146: 20. Clayton, W. (ed.) (2015), Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Clover, C. (1992), Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Corupe, P. (2015), “(Who’s in the) Driver’s Seat: The Canadian Brute Unleashed in Death Weekend,” in G. Freitag and A. Loiselle (eds.), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul, 91–107, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Creed, B. [1993] (1997), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge. Dika, V. (1987), “The Stalker Film, 1978–1981,” in G. Waller (ed.), American Horrors, 86– 101, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Dika, V. (1990), Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th and the Films of the Stalker Cycle, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Fhlainn, S. (2008), “Sweet Bloody Vengeance: Class, Social Stigma and Servitude in the Slasher Genre,” in H. L. Baumgartner and R. Davis (eds.), Hosting the Monster, 179– 97, New York: Brill. Harper, J. (2004), Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies, Manchester: Headpress. Johnson, J. H. (2011), Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kerswell, J. A. (2010), Teenage Wasteland: The Slasher Movie Uncut, London: New Holland Publishers. Kim Yoon, Y., and B. Williams (2015), Two Lenses on the Korean Ethos: Key Cultural Concepts and Their Appearance in Cinema, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Koven, M. (2006), La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Magistrale, T. (2005), Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film, New York: Peter Lang Publishing. McCarthy, J. (1986), Psychos: Eighty Years of Mad Movies, Maniacs and Murderous Deeds, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mihalka, G. (Director) (2009), Bloodlust: My Bloody Valentine and the Rise of the Slasher Film, Canada: Deluxe Digital Studios. Newman, K. (2011), Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen since the 1960s, 2nd edn., London: Bloomsbury. Nowell, R. (2011), Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Cycle, New York: Continuum. Nunley, J. W. and C. McCarty (1999), "Introduction," in J. W. Nunley and C. McCarty (eds.), Masks: Faces of Culture, 15–17, New York: Harry N. Abrams. Robinson, J. (2012), Life Lessons from Slasher Films, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Rockoff, A. (2002), Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986, London: McFarland.

214

214

ROSE BUTLER

Sipos, T. M. (2010), Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating a Visual Language of Fear, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Tseëlon, E. (ed.) [2001] (2003), Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality, London: Routledge. Waller, Gregory A. (1987), "Introduction," in G. A. Waller (ed.), American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, 1–13, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Willis, D. C. (1984), Horror and Science Fiction Films III, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

215

11 MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES The Costume in the American Slasher Film and the Cultural Myth of the “Foolkiller” Florent Christol

The costume and the mask worn by the killer are recurring motifs of the slasher film.1 In Halloween (1978), Michael Myers wears a Harlequin costume and a clown mask when, as a child, he murders his sister on Halloween night; upon his return to Haddonfield fifteen years later, he wears a blue mechanic’s suit and a white mask stolen from a hardware store. In The Redeemer: Son of Satan! (1978), the killer wears an assortment of grotesque costumes (clown, Elizabethan stage actor, medieval Death, etc.), each “adapted” to his victims and the way he is going to execute them. During their punitive sprees, Eric Binford (Fade to Black, 1980) and Kenny Hampson (Terror Train, 1980) wear several costumes inspired by Hollywood cinematic lore (Groucho Marx, a James Cagney-like gangster, and so on). In Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Jason Voorhees wears a burlap mask that enables him to hide his hideous features. From the third episode onward, he wears the iconic hockey mask with which he is now associated. The killer in The House on Sorority Row (1983) appears at the end of the film dressed in a red and green jester costume with a white collaret and pom-poms as well as a white and red clown mask topped by the traditional jester hat with bells. In Sleepaway Camp (1983), the killer is a little boy raised as a girl, which is visually constructed through the wearing of feminine outfits (small shorts, tight t-shirts, etc.).

216

216

FLORENT CHRISTOL

Surprisingly, this sartorial motif has been given little critical attention. Most of the time, critics or film scholars have accounted for it by the will, on the film creator’s side, to augment the killer’s terrifying aura and by the narrative need to hide the killer’s identity (and sometimes, his deformed features) to sustain suspense.2 However, as anthropologists and social historians studying rites of passage and religious rituals have shown, donning a mask or a costume is always a deeply significant gesture, carrying social and political implications. Nathalie Zemon-Davis (2007) and Mary Russo (1997) have established a connection between travestying and medieval carnivalesque rites such as the Feast of Fools and the charivari, in which costumed young men were temporarily invested with social and moral prerogatives. In her important discussion on masquerade in eighteenth-century literature, Terry Castle also notes the politically subversive potential of the costume (Castle 1986: 76–7). Relying on these connections, I  argue in this chapter that the motif of the mask and costume worn by the killer in slasher movies is a highly symbolic trope imbued with deep anthropological and political meanings. These meanings have probably been overlooked because of the prevailing theoretical construct of the slasher genre. Indeed, I  contend that the teen/post-Halloween slasher film is a contemporary expression of a cultural myth that has never been theorized before: the myth of the Foolkiller, whose archetypal expression can be located in “Hop-Frog” (1846), a revenge tale penned by Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe. Unveiling this cultural myth can help shed some new light on the importance and function of the killer’s array in these films.

An overlooked genre As “a basic slasher film premise [is] a male killer stalking and slaughtering a bevy of young and attractive female victims” (Prince 2000:  351), the slasher film genre has traditionally been seen as a symbolic backlash against the progressive social changes brought about by the 1960s (Rockoff 2002; Ryan and Kellner 1988). According to this widely accepted view, Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, the seemingly invincible killers from the Halloween and Friday the 13th series, would be the vehicle of punitive, Old Testament morals, displaying within the fiction the conservative ideology expounded by “Reaganite” entertainments and politics popular at the time (Wood 2003)3. The problem with this reading, which informs numerous histories of the genre, is that it stands on shaky ground. Indeed, many slasher film villains are not psychotic killers punishing sexually liberated teenagers, but physically and psychologically weak individuals subjected to constant mockery from their peers or hierarchical superiors, or victims of the irresponsible behavior of “practical jokers.” After a particularly humiliating incident of hazing or bullying, or an accident that leaves them physically and

217

MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES

217

psychologically traumatized, these victims (or people acting as their surrogates) decide to avenge themselves by killing their bullies in a series of spectacular set pieces. Examples of this narrative pattern abound:  in Terror Train (1980), Kenny Hampson, traumatized by a cruel prank in college, turns into a murderous vigilante who executes his tormentors during a masquerade set up in a train a few years after the event. In Friday the 13th (1980), Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) kills the teenagers who, in her mind, stand for the people responsible for the death of her mentally disabled and physically deformed son, Jason. In Prom Night (1980), a young man avenges the death of his sister killed because of child’s play gone wrong. Several years after the traumatizing event, he hunts down the irresponsible pranksters during the school prom. In The House on Sorority Row (1983), the killer avenges the death of his mother, who was accidentally killed following a practical joke pulled by immature students. In Killer Party (1986) and Pledge Night (1990), college students who were killed in a hazing incident come back from the grave to execute irresponsible pranksters who behave in a way that is likely to reproduce the original accident. With their atypical, queer, physically disabled body, structurally opposed to the powerful and muscled “hard-bodies” of those who mock them and embody the “ideal” norm from the point of view of the dominant American ideology,4 these grotesque-looking murderers belong to the sociocultural category of the “fool,” a character distinguished from the normal group member by a deviation in person or conduct that is regarded as ludicrous and improper (the fool’s characteristics frequently overlap with those of the “freak”).5 Because of this difference from the norm and his (and sometimes her) physical weakness, which prevents or discourages him from retaliating, the fool often incites mockery or the hostility of the social group to which he belongs and constitutes henceforth an “ideal” scapegoat on whom the group can vent its aggressive drives.6 Showing that, contrary to a deeply anchored belief, the slasher villain is not an invincible “phallic” threat or a depersonalized psycho-killer but, more often, a physically enfeebled “fool” avenging his or her persecution or the bullying of other vulnerable people (usually a loved one) contributes to shifting the traditional perception of the slasher killer’s violence, reconceptualizing it as a retaliatory answer to a preexisting (and seemingly endemic) social violence rather than as an idiosyncratic, individual “pathology.” More importantly, it opens up the possibility for a new film genre to be apprehended. Indeed, this “revenge of the nerd” scenario also runs, in a more overt way, through a series of films never officially charted onto the map of American cinema, and many of which predate the official birth of the slasher film in 1978 with Halloween. Willard (1971), Horror High (1974), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Carrie (1976), Massacre at Central High (1976), Fade to Black (1980), Trick or Treat (1986), or 976-Evil (1988), to name but a few, all feature the “revenge of the bullied nerd/freak” scenario. In a

218

218

FLORENT CHRISTOL

more comical vein, Revenge of the Nerds (1984), The Toxic Avenger (1984), and Funland (1987) provide burlesque variations on the same script. As opposed to the slasher films that are mainly shot from the point of view of the “practical jokers/bullies” (a group usually including the character of the “Final Girl”7) and relegate the killer in the off-screen space until he comes face to face with the Final Girl and fights with her in the final reel, these films are mainly shot from the point of view of the victim/murderous avenger who is the main focus of the narrative and with whom the viewer is encouraged to identify. In this light, the slasher film could be conceptualized not so much as a new genre than as a “syntaxic reorganization of semantic elements” in the terms of Rick Altman (1999), that is, a formal inflexion of a preexisting genre. As the main character of these films is a “fool” but also a killer of “fools” (in the looser and more moralistic sense of socially and irresponsible people acting in a foolish way), I propose calling this character the “Foolkiller” and naming this “new” genre comprised of many movies (some of which qualify as slasher films) the “Foolkiller” movie. In the next part of this chapter, I want to argue that this genre can be envisioned as a sort of contemporary retelling of a story originally and archetypically formulated by the nineteenth-century Gothic author Edgar Allan Poe in his short story “Hop-Frog” (1849). As we will see, this literary reference provides a powerful cultural lens through which to study the costume worn by the killer in the Foolkiller movies.

“Hop-Frog” and the Fookiller movie Published in the journal Flag of our Union (March 17, 1849), “Hop-Frog” tells the story of a crippled dwarf forced to be a jester at the court of a sadistic and tyrannical king. Hop-Frog is the official whipping boy of the monarch and his ministers; subjected to constant mockery, he only finds solace in the company of his friend, the dwarf Tripetta, who is also a victim of the king’s cruelty. One day, Hop-Frog is the object of a particularly cruel practical joke : while he cannot stand alcohol, the king forces the jester to get drunk, then throws his goblet at Tripetta’s face. This is the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back: the fool decides to avenge himself and his friend’s humiliation by executing those who have wronged him during a masked ball to be held at the king’s castle the same night. Hop-Frog suggests that the king and his ministers disguise themselves as orangutans to bring some fun to the event. At night, as the festivities have started, Hop-Frog releases the “monkeys.” The jester succeeds in tying the bullies to the chandelier hovering over the room, while the rest of the guests watch what they believe to be an integral part of the masquerade. The chain then pulls the tyrants up via a pulley far above the crowd. The jester climbs to their level and holds a torch close

219

MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES

219

to the men’s costumes which quickly catch fire. As the aristocrats’ bodies burn, Hop-Frog escapes through the roof with Tripetta. As can be seen from the outset, both Poe’s text and the films under scrutiny here share many motifs8: •

The persecution of a “fool” by practical jokers/bullies: Willard (Bruce Davison), Carrie, Winslow Leach (William Finley, Phantom of the Paradise, 1974) or Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher, Fade to Black, 1980) are, like the jester imagined by Poe, social outcasts, “freaks,” scapegoats of a savage society reminiscent of the “natural” world of Lord of the Flies (1954). The mean practical jokers/abusive figures in these films (Willard’s boss, Phantom of the Paradise’s record producer, Horror High’s [1974] and Carrie’s [1976] bullies) may be equated with the king and the ministers in Poe’s story.

•

The grotesque/deformed body: Hop-Frog is a dwarf and a cripple.9 Like him, many “fools” in the “Foolkiller movies” suffer from physical disability or deformity. In order to fight against his bullies, Vernon Potts (Pat Cardi) in Horror High (1974) makes a potion turning him into a limping monster. In the same way, David (Derrel Maury), victimized by sadistic bullies in Massacre at Central High (1976), has a leg crushed by a car he is repairing and also starts to limp. His sportive body (in several scenes he is shown jogging) is turned into a crippled body. In Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Winslow Leach (William Finley) has his face disfigured following an accident. Other characters present birth defects, such as Jason Voorhees or the killer of The House on Sorority Row (1983) who have bald, hypertrophied skulls.

•

The practical joke that goes “too far”: As in “Hop-Frog,” where the fool is the victim of a cruel prank, the mean practical joke that leads to the fool’s trauma (i.e., Carrie’s humiliation at the prom) is a central trope in these films.

•

The festive occasion: The recurring festive manifestations such as proms, fraternity hazings, or parties (the party organized by Willard’s boss, Carrie’s prom [1976], Swan’s wedding in Phantom of the Paradise [1974], Christmas in Christmas Evil [1980], Halloween in The Pit [1981], and Trick or Treat [1986], etc.) can be seen, in this framework, like avatars of the masked ball in “Hop-Frog.”

•

The mask/costume of the killer: In “Hop-Frog,” the narrator implies that the fool is dressed with the traditional motley costume of the jester.10 Like him, the killer in the movies often wears “grotesque,” “monstrous” disguises and outfits that are oftentimes linked to a specific festivity

220

220

FLORENT CHRISTOL

(Halloween, Christmas) or celebration (a masked party, a fraternity hazing). To the films already mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, we can here add the leather costume and bird mask of Winslow in Phantom of the Paradise (1974), the jester costume in Slaughter High (1986), and Carrie’s prom dress, as well as the ballet skirt worn by the Toxic Avenger. •

The protection of the weak/vulnerable people through vigilantism: Like Hop-Frog, who avenges and punishes his own humiliation as well as Tripetta’s, the Foolkiller executes not only those who have wronged him or her but also those who have imperiled or hurt their loved ones. Thus, Willard punishes his boss Martin (Ernest Borgnine) after he has killed Socrates, his innocent rat, and tyrannized the frail Joan (Sandra Locke); Winslow protects Phoenix (Jessica Harper) in Phantom of the Paradise; David defends the nerds bullied by the “jocks” in Massacre at Central High (1976), and Melvin Ferd (Mark Torgl) defends the most vulnerable people of Tromaville in The Toxic Avenger (1984).

•

The spectacular execution: Hop-Frog kills the king and his ministers in a spectacular way, setting their costumes on fire then hanging them over the ballroom with guests attending. Likewise, the Foolkiller in the Foolkiller movies often executes his victims by hanging them or burning them in a spectacular fashion (i.e., Carrie’s burning of the school during the prom, Coopersmith’s burning of the church in Evilspeak [1981], Sammie’s electrocuting of the Halloween school prom in Trick or Treat [1986], etc.)

A marginalized cultural myth As can be seen, many striking links can be drawn between these films and “HopFrog.”11 Granted, beyond a geographical and temporal shifting of the action from medieval times to contemporary America, there is an important difference between “Hop-Frog” and the Foolkiller movies: in Poe’s story, Hop-Frog escapes with impunity after the king’s execution while, in the films, the fool dies. Thus, Willard is killed by his rats, Carrie is knifed by her mother and crushed under the ruins of the house, Eric Binford (Fade to Black, 1980) is taken down by a sniper, and so on. This difference should not, however, deter us from foregrounding the striking links between the two objects. As surprising as it may seem, I have not found any reference to this short story in the books, journals, and magazines on horror or Gothic cinema that I have read for this research. This does not imply that the parallels I  draw between “Hop-Frog” and these horror films have never been made or that the screenwriters/directors/producers of these films were not familiar with Poe’s tale. Poe is

221

MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES

221

an integral part of the American cultural imagination; he is still widely read and studied today and his tales appear on many high schools and college curricula. “Hop-Frog” has been illustrated by famous painters such as James Ensor and Arthur Rackham. Roger Corman used it in 1964 in The Masque of the Red Death, as a subplot within the frame of an adaptation of another tale penned by Poe. However, it is likely that the makers of these films did not specifically have “Hop-Frog” in mind when they wrote, produced, or directed them. My assumption is that Poe’s tale is but one expression of an uncharted cultural myth—in other words a socially valued story expressing itself through a specific generic vehicle and finding a strong resonance with a part of American society (here teenagers and young adults).12 I believe that it is this myth that the movies (re) activated more than 100 years after Poe wrote “Hop-Frog.” In the rest of this chapter I will try to describe this myth more precisely. To do so it seems logical and valuable to study the main cultural referents in “Hop-Frog” (the myth’s original formulation). Citing Barbara Tuchman as his source, Jack Morgan (2002) suggests that “Hop-Frog” is explicitly inspired by the story on the “Bal des Ardents” at the court of Charles VI of France in January 1393. The king and five other aristocrats dressed as Wild Men in highly flammable costumes made with pitch and flax. Four of the men died in the fire, and only Charles was saved. According to Marie-Yves Bercé (1976: 41), the men dressed as savages because they participated in a charivari, a carnivalesque ritual popular in medieval Europe. I believe that this cultural reference can shed some significant light on “Hop-Frog” and the Foolkiller movie genre, as well as on the ethics of violence displayed by the Foolkiller and on the symbolical dimension of his costume.

Charivari and the political use of carnivalesque costumes Also known as “rough-music,” the charivari in medieval Europe was a burlesque judicial ritual in which persons who had engaged in certain foolish actions were publicly ridiculed. Traditionally conducted by young men dressed as clowns or wearing the ritual motley costume of the court jester, it usually took the form of a noisy mock procession in which an effigy of the guilty party or a person dressed up to look like him (or her) was paraded through town seated backward on a donkey. The victim of the charivari was also frequently made to play the part of a “wild man” or a savage beast and forced to wear horns and beast skins. He was then hunted down through the village, judged by a youth tribunal, and symbolically sacrificed (Zemon-Davis 2007). The costume worn by young people in the charivari was a way for them to be “officially” invested with sociopolitical prerogatives; among others, the license to criticize and the impunity culturally attributed to the court jester who could openly

222

222

FLORENT CHRISTOL

criticize the king’s politics because he was physically weak and unthreatening.13 The origins of this process through which young people played a moral and political role in society by donning a ritual outfit can be traced back to Greek and Roman festivals in which it was permissible to mask oneself, imitate magistrates, and publicly proclaim the vices and faults of others (101). The costumes and masks also helped the “fools” access the position of symbolical (and sometimes real) executioners through the anonymity provided by the disguise. They could thereby enforce punishment (in itself a form of legal transgression as punishment was normally a royal prerogative) with impunity. The charivari was a cultural expression of the Carnival, which was a complex of rituals and social practices in which marginalized people normally excluded from the discourse of power were temporarily endowed with some political attributes. Popular instances of the Carnival included the Feast of Fools, a winter celebration in which the low clergy in French cathedrals elected a “king” or “abbot” of “Misrule” to preside over wild revelries and engage in a wide range of blasphemous yet officially approved clowning within the church. In spite of its blasphemous dimension bordering on anarchy, it was at its core a celebration of the poor, the weak, and the persecuted innocents who most resembled Christ, the ultimate scapegoat figure (Muir 1997: 96). Although these carnivalesque festivities provided outlets for the habitual social conflicts of normal life and functioned for European youth as a rite of passage short-circuiting the anti-paternal drive identified by Freud, the sociopolitical prerogatives granted young people through the wearing of carnivalesque outfits gave them rights and liberties that could constitute a threat to official powers. It was not unfrequent for carnivals to turn into riots or political uprisings (ZemonDavis 2007). In medieval Europe, and well into the seventeenth century, when institutional political figures (kings, lords, church authorities) abused their power, emblems of the carnival were used as tools of protest and political violence. As Yves-Marie Bercé writes, “the normal sanctions of the youth kings and kings of fools—burlesque tribunals, charivaris, skimmingtons, and mock sacrifices— were endowed with obvious aggressive potential. These burlesque weapons could offer passages from carnival to revolution and appear as subversive” (16).14 This cultural reference to the rites of justice performed by the European youth in the Middle Ages sheds a symbolical light on the Foolkiller violence in “HopFrog.” We have seen that when official political powers were no longer legitimate, the carnival “fools” could “turn political,” rebel against these dysfunctional political authorities, and punish them through carnivalesque degradation/humiliation. This is what happens in “Hop-Frog.” Normally, the king’s abusive behavior toward his fool is hidden (or given a form of legitimacy) by the aberrant, “unlawful” behavior of the jester. But in Poe’s tale, the fool/freak, normally functioning as a convenient scapegoat “absorbing” the king’s violence, is depicted as a martyr.15 The explicit use of the jester as a scapegoat “short-circuits” the king’s

223

MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES

223

power, which appears as “pure,” random violence. The king is thus presented as a bullying monster whose violence is condemned as unfair and criminal. By bullying two innocent and defenseless “fools,” the monarch loses his status of legitimate sovereign and becomes a sort of disorderly mock king imperiling the social structure. In the face of this corrupted political state, Hop-Frog reestablishes order and justice by killing the tyrannical king through a political and lethal charivari. In his wonderful book on Gothic in film and literature, Jack Morgan has underlined the way the jester’s vengeance was culturally inspired by the sacrificial execution of the Carnival king (2002: 145). The dressing up of the king and his courtesans in “savage” beasts ritually degrades the tyrants. Hung from the chandelier of the ballroom, exhibited in front of the guests, the king and his ministers are subjected to the mocking laughter of the assembly, like the victims in the shaming ritual of the charivari. By punishing those whose irresponsible behavior imperil vulnerable people, the jester in “Hop-Frog” plays the role of “moral censor”/executioner played by the masked “fools” in the medieval Carnival.

The charivari of the Foolkiller: the case of Christmas Evil This cultural frame can throw some new light on the grotesque attire worn by the killer in the slasher/Foolkiller movies. I want to focus here on Christmas Evil (1980), a film that has received poor critical attention so far. The story bears all the generic topoï of the Foolkiller movie. Following an Oedipal childhood trauma,16 Harry Stadlin (Braggon Maggart) has developed a regressive, abnormal social behavior typical of the fool psychology. He works in a toy factory where he is mocked and abused by his colleagues. After a series of events that reactivate his trauma, he decides to disguise himself as Santa Claus and kill those who mocked him and took advantage of his kindness. Far from being a purely decorative or aesthetic motif, the Santa Claus costume plays, within the cultural frame developed in this chapter (the medieval carnivalesque rites of popular justice), a strong symbolical and political function. Santa Claus is indeed the Americanized version of St. Nicholas, a historical and mythical figure associated with the moral upbringing of children. For centuries in continental Europe, it was the custom in many churches to elect a choirboy as a mock bishop on the feast of St. Nicholas, December 6. Through the wearing of the Saint Nicholas dress, the “bishop” embodied the mythical character and was endowed with his powers. This ritual is still found in many places in Western Europe: When evening comes on, people dress up as St. Nicholas, with mitre and pastoral staff, enquire about the behaviour of the children, and if it has been

224

224

FLORENT CHRISTOL

good pronounce a benediction and promise them a reward next morning. Before they go to bed the children put out their shoes, with hay, straw, or a carrot in them for the saint’s white horse or ass. When they wake in the morning, if they have been “good” the fodder is gone and sweet things or toys are in its place; if they have misbehaved themselves the provender is untouched and no gift but a rod is there. (Miles 1976: 219) In Christmas Evil, the Santa Claus costume donned by Harry provides a direct link with the carnivalesque prerogatives and functions of its mythical model. Harry keeps a book of accounts on the behavior of the young boys and girls he observes. On Christmas night, he visits children in a hospital to bring them homemade gifts. On another occasion, stopping by a “families and friends association,” Harry says to the children: “I want you to remember to stay good girls and boys. Respect your mothers and fathers, and do what they tell you. Obey your teachers, and learn a whole lot. Now if you do this, I’ll make sure you’ll get good presents from me every year. But if you’re bad boys and girls, your name goes into the bad boys and girls book, and I’ll bring you something horrible.” Harry thus incarnates a strong moralistic figure that contrasts with the rather depreciative presentation of adults in the film (his bosses at the factory are presented as people only interested in financial gain, his colleagues abuse his kindness to have him work their shifts, etc.). In this sense, the world depicted in Christmas Evil is the same “upside-down” world depicted in “Hop-Frog” in which immorality, corruption, and meanness seem to run unchecked within the whole social fabric. In cultural representations and rituals, St. Nicholas is often accompanied by a monstrous helper/sidekick “whose duty was to mete out a traditional punishment to bad children. This carrier of the rod is variously named as Hans Muff, Knecht Rpprecht, Butz, Hans Tripp, Krampus, Klaubauf, Barter. . . . The creature is often shaggily dressed in fur, even with lighted eyes behind a mask; or blacked over, or given some other diabolic or animalistic attribute” (Sanson 1968: 82–3). This idea is present in Christmas Evil (1980) as Harry punishes immoral people such as Moss Garcia, a child who has “impure thoughts” (he is shown reading soft-core magazines at the beginning of the film). Harry stands in front of his house, blackens his face and his hands with mud, and sticks them against the wall to leave a black imprint as a form of warning. Then, his face still covered with mud, he scares the boy by hiding behind a bush and by suddenly extending his arm as if to catch the child when he passes in front of him. This makeup inscribes Harry’s punishment within the carnivalesque cultural frame of the Foolkiller myth. One of St. Nicholas’s helpers, Black Pete, has a face covered with black soot. In France, clerks celebrating the Feast of Fools often blackened their face with soot or mud as masks (Perrot 2000: 34). The entourage of the Abbey of Fools, “les Noircies,” paraded naked, blackfaced, and covered with soot (Shaw 1981: 215).

225

MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES

225

Harry also punishes his colleagues in a carnivalesque fashion, turning objects related to ideas of childhood innocence into punitive weapons.17 He thus rips one person’s throat with a Christmas star and kills someone who mocked him by planting a toy soldier’s bayonet in his eye. In this instance we can see how, through the carnivalesque disguise of Santa Claus, the fool (Harry) becomes a foolkiller/“moral” executioner. Far from being a purely “decorative” or aesthetic item, the costume helps Harry access a carnivalesque position from which he can play a primordial political role: the upholding of a moral law disregarded by social institutions, themselves depicted as severely dysfunctional, like the king’s court in “Hop-Frog.”

A cultural aberration Due to various sociopolitical factors (the influence of Puritanism among others), the archaic, carnivalesque association between the fool’s body and juridical activities (ritualized vengeance, charivari, burlesque tribunals, etc.), gradually censored or sublimated in Europe, was radically short-circuited in North America. The freak show, in which deviancy could be checked and normalcy enforced (Cassuto 1997), replaced the “egalitarian” carnival to become one of the structural aesthetical and ideological models of American society. Nowadays, the fool, under the guise of the freak or the nerd, is likely to be found within generic sites that exploit him as a source of laughter (burlesque/comical movies), pathos (melodrama), or fear (horror films)—that is, genres in which he can no longer exert any political power or threat to ruling agencies and in which his function is to serve as an “Other” whose ritual sacrifice can reaffirm the prevailing aesthetical, social, and moral norm (Norden 1994).18 The Foolkiller myth, which turns the bullied fool into a murderous avenger/vigilante, thereby reactivating the archaic carnivalesque connection between “Folly” and “rough” or popular justice, is therefore somewhat an aberration within American culture. Unsurprisingly, his “reign” was short-lived. The mythos (plot formula) of the fool avenging his persecution starts being inverted with the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the first film of an extremely popular series that numbers seven episodes. The film’s villain, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), is a child killer lynched by angry parents turned vigilantes after the failure of institutional justice to bring him to jail. Freddy comes back from the grave to avenge himself by murdering the children of his executioners through the dreams of his victims. Like Carrie, Cropsy (The Burning, 1981), or Eric (Fade to Black, 1980), Freddy is the victim of collective violence. Like them, he is physically freakish (he is extremely thin and his face is totally burnt). However, unlike them, Freddy’s criminality precedes his lynching. Freddy is not an innocent scapegoat but a sociopath “deserving” of his punishment. With his practical jokes and Rabelaisian brand of humor, he plays the function of prankster played by the bullies in the Foolkiller movies.19

226

226

FLORENT CHRISTOL

If the slasher film can be understood as an extension and a reconfiguration of the Foolkiller movie genre told from the viewpoint of the “practical jokers” characters, the Freddy series signals a new cultural paradigm and the end of the Foolkiller movie genre as a commercially successful venture.20 A film cycle (still going on today) featuring scary killer clowns (It [1984], Blood Harvest [1987], Out of Order [1988], Clownhouse [1989]) exploits thematic and aesthetic tropes from the Foolkiller movie (the element of physical deformity, the jester/clown costume worn by the killer, etc.) but associates them exclusively with ideas of moral and sexual depravity and evil. These movies, which carry among other things the negative associations between the clown and the pedophile figure cemented by the John Wayne Gacy case, turn the freak/fool into a murderer threatening children and innocent people instead of protecting them, thus inverting the genre’s original ethical philosophy.21 Deprived of a “positive” social role, the fool was once again a figure generating fear (or laughter in the “gross-out” 1980s comedies studied by William Paul)—a “good” scapegoat helping to define the aesthetic, moral and social norm, like Hop-Frog in the opening of Poe’s tale.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have proposed a new way of envisioning the slasher film genre and the costume and mask frequently worn by the killer. I have shown that many slasher film killers are not invincible embodiments of “Old Testament” morals but physically enfeebled “fools” avenging their persecution or surrogates punishing the tormentors of their loved ones (as in Friday the 13th or Prom Night).22 It is only through time that the vulnerable victims have become invincible “evil” entities, like Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th series.23 I have also suggested that the generic vehicle for this mythos—the Foolkiller movie— was a contemporary expression of a cultural myth whose main (anti-) “hero” was a “fool” punishing moral and social transgressions, as in the medieval charivari. In the cultural framework developed here, the costume donned by the “fool” is not a purely aesthetical feature only helping to increase the killer’s frightening potential but a symbolically charged motif serving as a gateway to the cultural, moral, and political powers of the Carnival. By wearing it, the vulnerable, bullied fool turns into the avenging Foolkiller, an extremely ambivalent figure, both “moral” vigilante and monstrous executioner. Along with his grotesque aesthetic features and his marginal positioning within American culture, the Foolkiller’s illegitimate use of lethal force (he kills people who “only” mocked him or one of his loved ones) surely complicates the viewer’s supposed identification with him, which may explain why, as a cultural figure, he never achieved any form of official recognition and was quickly replaced by more recognizable “evil” figures (Freddy Krueger and other morally monstrous characters among others) more fitting with traditional cultural categories.24

227

MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES

227

Notes 1 The slasher is usually defined as a genre organized around the ritualized killing of sexually uninhibited teenagers by a masked and/or physically deformed killer. Film historians date the official birth of the genre with the release of Halloween in 1978. Indeed, it was Carpenter’s film that gave the genre a recognizable form/pattern and became a blueprint for subsequent films (Rockoff 2002; Kerswell 2010).

2 As an example for this argument, I quote horror magazine HorrorHound’s critic Kenneth Nelson on Terror Train: “The killer assumes the costume of his latest victim which [. . .] drives the whodunit aspect of the film’s story since the characters just assume they are speaking to or interacting with one of their buddies. Simultaneously, the audience is infused with a greater sense of tension as they are aware that the unidentified killer is toying with his victims and are never quite sure when he will strike” (Horrorhound, special November issue 2012: 19). Ian Conrich elaborates on the use of the mask to generate suspense in his article on the Friday the 13th series (2010).

3 These critiques have not prevented slasher films from being extremely successful financially (see Rockoff 2002).

4 See Jeffords (1994). 5 “The person who hobbles, limps, or is physically awkward more easily acquires this role. The deformed fool deviates in appearance from group norms of beauty, stature, posture, health, etc. He may be ugly, dwarfed, crippled, gigantic, animal-like, or subhuman in appearance. Deformity has the symbolic capacity to suggest various inappropriate roles of the fool” (Klapp 1949: 158).

6 On the physical criteria of a “good” scapegoat, see Girard (1989). 7 Film scholar Carol Clover theorized the Final Girl figure in a book that has become an important reference in horror scholarship (1992). Unlike her friends who spend most of their time having fun, the Final Girl is characterized not only by her seriousness but also by her determination and her courage. One of the only people to survive the massacre, she battles the killer in the climax of the film.

8 This list is not exhaustive. For a more complete one, see Christol (2014). 9 “I believe the name ‘Hop-Frog’ was not given to the dwarf by his sponsors at baptism, but it was conferred upon him, by general consent of the seven ministers, on account of his inability to walk as other men do. In fact, Hop-Frog could only get along by a sort of interjectional gait—something between a leap and a wriggle— a movement that afforded illimitable amusement, and of course consolation, to the king” (Poe 1986: 317).

10 “At the date of my narrative, professing jesters had not altogether gone out of fashion at court. Several of the great continental ‘powers’ still retained their ‘fools,’ who wore motley, with caps and bells” (Poe 1986: 317).

11 Of course, I realize that the characters of the king and the fool and the theme of the revenge of the weak on the strong run through many cultures and have been given various narrative treatments in literature and drama. Obviously, Poe’s tale does not have a monopoly on these tropes. However, “Hop-Frog” is, to the best of my knowledge, the only short story that gathers all the elements appearing in the

228

228

FLORENT CHRISTOL

films I discuss and displays the complete configuration of the persecuted fool who avenges himself by murdering his bullies in a festive or carnivalesque setting.

12 For a useful distinction between myth, archetype, cultural myth, and cultural artifact, see Slotkin (1973: 8–9).

13 As Enid Welsford remarks: “The adoption of motley . . . is very understandable. They were wearing the dress because they were adopting the role and tacitly claiming the privilege of the licensed court-fool. The whole point of the jest depended on their wearing the recognized garments of imbeciles who could not be blamed because they were irresponsible” (1961: 218–19) On the ‘magical’ and sociopolitical powers of the jester or the ritual clown, see Welsford (1961) and Willeford (1969).

14 « Les sanctions coutumières dont les chefs de jeunesse et les fous devenus rois appuyaient leur prérogatives—tribunaux comiques, charivaris, chevauchées de l’âne et exécutions figuratives—comportaient des aspects agressifs évidents. Tout cet arsenal burlesque pouvait offrir des passages de la fête à la révolte et recéler une dynamique subversive” (Bercé 1976 : 16; my translation).

15 On the scapegoat function of the jester, see Weslford (1961). 16 While a child, Harry has witnessed his mother having sex with “Santa Claus” (his father in disguise, although Harry does not know that).

17 Mikhaïl Bakhtin, the most important theoretician of the Carnival, writes about the use of everyday objects such as kitchen implements as burlesque weapons during Carnival (1984).

18 Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), in which circus freaks spectacularly avenge a dwarf’s humiliation, would surely deserve some attention here as an important forerunner of the Foolkiller movie.

19 On the character of Freddy as a carnival Lord of Misrule, see Conrich (2000). 20 Since the mid-1990s, this plot has resurfaced in movies such as The Craft (1996), Bruiser (2000), Valentine (2001), Tamara (2005), Drive Thru (2007), Truth or Die (2007), Stitches (2012), and The Final (2010), as well as the Masters of Horror episode, “We All Scream for Ice Cream” (2007). I believe that this resurgence can be productively discussed in the light of heavily mediated school shootings such as the Columbine massacre (April 1999) in which two bullied outcasts took revenge on their tormentors, thereby proposing a real, modern-day take on the Foolkiller mythos.

21 For a discussion on the killer clown horror subgenre, see Dery (1999). 22 From afar, Halloween seems to be foreign to the generic dynamic studied here (Michael Myers does not appear to be directly victimized). However, I think that it also belongs to the Foolkiller movie genre. Indeed, Michael performs the function of Foolkiller played by the avenging victims in the Foolkiller movies. At the beginning of the film, dressed in the ritual costume of the clown/jester, Michael murders his irresponsible sister who prefers making out with her boyfriend than watching over her vulnerable younger brother. For a development, see Christol (2010).

23 This process through which the victim of collective violence turns into a monster via the receding of lynching violence in the viewer’s memory is well accounted for by René Girard’s theory of myth (1979). I develop this analysis in Christol 2016.

24 See, for instance, Carol Clover’s discussion of this issue in her reading of Carrie (1992). Of course, this paper raises many obvious questions. Why did the Foolkiller

229

MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES

229

mythos, archetypically formulated by Edgar Poe in “Hop-Frog” in 1846, get (re) activated in the 1970s? Why did it lose its popular appeal by the mid-1980s, with the release of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and killer clown movies? These questions, among many others, will have to remain unanswered for now, but the interested reader will find some hypothetical answers in my articles (Christol 2014 and forthcoming).

References Altman, R. (1999), Film/Genre, London: British Film Institute. Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bercé, Y.-M. (1976), Fête et révolte: Des mentalités populaires du XVI° au XVIII° siècle, Paris: Hachette. Bruiser (2000), Dir. George Romero, USA: Canal +. The Burning (1981), Dir. Tony Maylam, USA: Filmways Pictures. Carrie (1976), Dir. Brian DePalma, USA: Redbank Films. Cassuto, L. (1997), The Inhuman Race: the Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Castle, T. (1986), Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Christmas Evil (1980), Dir. Lewis Jackson, USA: Edward R. Pressman Film. Christol, F. (2010), “Etait-ce bien le croquemitaine? Pour une démystification d’Halloween,” in A.-M. Paquet-Deyris (ed.), CinémAction, Les cinémas de l’horreur, 105–11, Paris: Corlet. Christol, F. (2014), “La violence du slasher film: une affaire de morale,” Darkness 15: 18– 33, Besançon: Sin’Art. Christol, F. (2016), “The Foolkiller Movie: Uncovering an Overlooked Horror Genre,” in Edmund Cueva and William Nowak (eds), Interdisciplinary Humanities: Expanding the Scope of Horror, 93–106, HERA, Fall Issue 2016, El Paso: University of Texas. Clover, C. (1992), Men, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conrich, I. (2000), “Seducing the Subject: Freddy Krueger, Popular Culture and the Nightmare on Elm Street Films,” in A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds.), The Horror Film Reader, 222–35, London: Limelight Editions. Conrich, I. (2010), “The Friday the 13th Films and the Cultural Function of a Modern Grand-Guignol,” in Ian Conrich (ed.), Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, 173–99, London: I. B. Tauris. Dery, M. (1999), “Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns,” in M. Dery (ed.), The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, 65–86, New York: Grove Press. Dika, V. (1990), Games of Terror, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle, London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Evilspeak (1981), Dir. Eric Weston, USA: Leisure Investment. Fade to Black (1980), Dir. Vernon Zimmerman, USA: Leisure Investment. Fiedler, L. (1978), Freaks, Myths and Images of the Secret Self, New York: Simon and Schuster. Freaks (1932), Dir. Tod Browning, USA: MGM.

230

230

FLORENT CHRISTOL

Friday the 13th (1980), Dir. Sean S. Cunningham, USA: Paramount, Georgetown Productions. Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Dir. Steve Miner, USA: Paramount. Funland (1987), Dir. Michael A. Simpson, USA: Double Helix Films Girard, R. (1979), Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Girard, R. (1989), The Scapegoat, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Halloween (1978), Dir. John Carpenter, USA: Compass International Pictures. Horror High (1974), Dir. Larry N. Stouffer, USA: Crown International Pictures. Horrorhound, special November issue 2012: 19 The House on Sorority Row (1983), Dir. Mark Rosman, USA: VAE Productions. The Initiation of Sarah (1978), Dir. Robert Day, USA: ABC Family. Jeffords, S. (1994), Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jennifer (1978), Dir. Brice Mack, USA: American International Pictures. Kerswell, J. (2010), Teenage Wasteland: The Slasher Film Uncut, London: New Holland. Killer Party (1986), Dir. William Fruet. USA: Marquis. Klapp, W. O. (1949), “The Fool as a Social Type,” American Journal of Sociology 55 (2):157–62. Golding, W. (1954), Lord of the Flies, London, Faber and Faber. Massacre at Central High (1976), Dir. René Daalder, USA: Evan See. Miles, C. (1976), Christmas Customs and Traditions, New York: Dover. Morgan, J. (2002), The Biology of Horror, Gothic Literature and Film, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Muir, E. (1997), Ritual in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. National Lampoon’s Class Reunion (1982), Dir. Michael Miller, USA: ABC Motion Pictures. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Dir. Wes Craven. USA: New Line. Norden, M. (1994), The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Paul, W. (1994), Laughing Screaming, Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy, New York: Columbia University Press. Perrot, M. (2000), Ethnologie de Noël, Une fête paradoxale, Paris: Grasset. Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Dir. Brian DePalma, USA: Harbor Productions. The Pit (1981), Dir. Lew Lehman, USA: Amulet Pictures. Pledge Night (1990), Dir. Paul Ziller, USA: Scarlet Productions. Poe, E. A. (1986), “Hop Frog,” in David Galloway (ed.), The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, 317–26, London: Penguins Books. Prince, S. (2000), A New Pot of Gold, Hollywood under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989 (History of the American Cinema, vol. 10), Berkeley: University of California Press. Prom Night (1980), Dir. Paul Lynch, USA: Simcom. The Redeemer: Son of Satan! (1978), Dir. Constantine S. Gochis, USA: Jack Foster. Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Dir. Jeff Kanew, USA: Twentieth Century Fox. Rockoff, A. (2002), Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Russo, M. (1997), The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity, London: Routledge.

231

MASSACRES AND MASQUERADES

231

Ryan M., and K. Douglas (1988), Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Sanson, W. (1968), A Book of Christmas, New York: McGraw-Hill. Shaw, P. (1981), American Patriots and the Rituals of the Revolution, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), Dir. Charles E. Sellier, USA: TriStar Pictures. Slaughter High (1986), Dir. George Dugdale, USA: Spectacular Trading International. Sleepaway Camp (1983), Dir. Robert Hiltzik, USA: American Eagle. Slotkin, R. (1973), Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Terror Train (1980), Dir. Roger Spottiswoode, USA: Astral Bellevue Pathé. To All a Goodnight (1980), Dir. David Hess, USA: Four Features Partner. The Toxic Avenger (1984), Dir. Michael Herz, USA: Troma Entertainment. Trick or Treat (1986), Dir. Charles Martin Smith, USA: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. Weslford, E. (1961), The Fool. His Social and Literary History, New York: Anchor Edition. Willard (1971), Dir. Daniel Mann, USA: Bing Crosby Productions. Willeford, W. (1969), The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Wood, R. (2003), Hollywood, from Vietnam to Reagan, New York: Columbia University Press. Zemon-Davis, N. (2007), “The Reasons of Misrule,” in N. Zemon-Davis (ed.), Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 97–123, Cambridge: Polity Press.

232

233

INDEX

abjection 3, 12, 13, 14, 20, 48, 67, 139, 141–6, 154, 163 ancient Egypt 46, 47, 69, 71, 170 barber 5, 134, 135 Bible, The 26, 27, 47, 48, 112, 216, 226 black (color) 8, 19, 51, 104, 159–76, 200 Black Death 4, 5, 34 boundaries 6, 10, 12, 16, 27, 60, 95, 144, 146, 147, 154, 155, 184, 191 cannibalism 149, 203 carnivalesque 1, 15, 145, 180, 182–4, 192, 215–26 class 15, 17, 19, 30, 35, 37, 101–15, 121–35, 139–55, 204–7, 222–3 clown 180, 181, 185–7, 190, 210, 215, 221, 226 consumerism 10, 12, 17, 30, 39, 121, 131, 133 costume 4, 8, 16, 17, 18, 51, 57, 101, 179–93, 215–26 costume design 13, 67, 159–60, 176, 212 dandy 15, 19, 73, 75, 105, 142, 148–50, 165, 171 death 3, 5, 14, 15, 25–39, 59, 162–3 devil 5, 27, 32, 65, 101, 103, 109, 122 difference 49, 91, 127, 141, 142, 146, 148 disfigurement 4, 32, 34, 46, 66, 73, 78–9, 86, 102, 111, 123–4, 143, 160, 167–8, 170, 174, 217, 219 disguise 14, 17, 49, 51, 53, 145–7, 197–212, 215–26 doll 8–9, 10, 70, 208 dress 4, 17 fashion 4, 17 fashion design 6–7 femininity 8, 12–13, 15, 19, 65–81, 83–97, 101–15, 121–35, 179–93, 208–11

fire 52, 80, 88, 89, 94–5, 110, 208 Frankenstein, see Shelley, Mary gender 15, 179–93 ghost 5, 50, 86, 88, 93, 95, 96, 115, 133, 135 gold (color) 53, 104, 106–7, 115 Gothic 2, 4, 16, 55, 85, 95, 96, 142, 218, 220 Great Expectations 57, 83–97 Greco-Roman antiquity 26, 48, 51, 107, 198, 222 Halloween (holiday) 10, 15, 80, 179–93 horror 12, 14, 20, 51, 86, 102, 115, 149 identity 15, 17, 35, 46, 49, 51, 58, 60, 147–8, 155, 187, 197–212, 215–26 illusion 1, 8, 27, 29, 111, 199 innocence 8, 57, 66, 70, 75, 76, 83–97, 112, 225 Jack The Ripper 15, 121–35 liminality 60, 69, 83–97 Lovecraft, H. P. 20, 48–9 macabre 2, 7, 20, 25, 28, 30, 36, 37, 96, 104, 186 madness 60, 85, 91, 92–4, 95, 96, 150, 191, 201, 210 male gaze 13, 77, 80, 122, 128, 129–30, 184 masculinity 52, 93–4, 125, 127, 159–76, 179–93, 202 mask 14, 15, 16, 17, 53, 75, 160, 176, 179–93, 197–212, 215–26 masquerade 15, 16, 53–4, 151, 182, 215–26 McQueen, Alexander 7, 95–6, 122, 130–3 memory 33, 50, 51, 131

234

234

modernity 10, 51, 58, 59, 101–15, 121–35 monster 10, 15, 17, 20, 47, 51, 53, 58, 60, 65–81, 112, 114, 140, 159–76, 203, 226 norms 1, 6, 10, 12, 17, 19, 49, 85, 104, 129, 144, 148, 169, 183, 198, 217, 222, 225, 226 nudity 5, 27, 28, 73, 112, 128, 141, 161, 173, 175, 224 past 4, 10, 17, 25, 46, 50–1, 85, 114, 197–212 plaid 128, 149–50, 152–3, 155 Poe, Edgar Allan 2, 37, 102, 215–26 puberty 12, 55 red (color) 46, 52–5, 75, 84, 110, 175, 180 rites of passage 15, 26, 54, 69–70, 75, 85, 93, 216 serial killer 13, 17, 121–35, 139–55, 186, 192 sexuality 9, 19, 55, 58, 65–81, 83–97, 101–15, 121–35, 153, 170, 173, 185, 201, 202, 209

INDEX

shawl 93, 107, 111–13, 115, 122, 133–4 Shelley, Mary 2, 12, 15, 19, 37, 65–81, 159–76 sin 1, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 52, 91, 112, 175, 224 skeletal remains 6, 33–5, 104, 173 slasher 4, 15, 179–93, 197–212, 215–26 supernatural 3, 5, 10, 52, 210 tailor 27, 37, 127, 132 transience 27, 36, 59, 208 uncanny 1, 5, 97, 143, 144, 154, 182 vampire 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 17, 19, 25, 45–60, 91–2, 101, 148, 155 vanity 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 112 veil 16, 17, 94–5, 101–15 wedding dress 9, 15, 54–9, 79, 83–97, 168 white (color) 8, 14, 19, 46, 70, 75, 83–97, 128, 190 witch 7, 10, 54, 198, 208 zombie 17, 25, 30, 139–55, 188, 191