Gender, Agency and Violence : European Perspectives from Early Modern Times to the Present Day [1 ed.] 9781443853217, 9781443850377

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Gender, Agency and Violence

Gender, Agency and Violence: European Perspectives from Early Modern Times to the Present Day

Edited by

Ulrike Zitzlsperger

Gender, Agency and Violence: European Perspectives from Early Modern Times to the Present Day Edited by Ulrike Zitzlsperger This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Ulrike Zitzlsperger and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5037-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5037-7

CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................. viii Ulrike Zitzlsperger Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 Vanishing Women: Gendering History in Sixteenth Century Portrait-Books Susan Gaylard Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 23 “Where Violent Sorrow Seems a Modern Ecstasy”: The Violence of Women’s Actions and Speech in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century French and English Theatre Leila Goulahsen Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 38 Performing Violence to End Violence: Theatrical Entertainment for the Marriage of Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre Julia Prest Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 56 A Brute Brute: The Violent Pre-Histories of Early Modern England in Anthony Munday’s The Triumphs of Re-United Britannia Philip Robinson Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 74 Battle, Butchery and Fortitude: Violence, Agency and Gender in the Celebration of Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector of Brandenburg Sara Smart Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 87 Robbers and Lady-Killers Christian Jäger

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Chapter Seven........................................................................................... 96 Beauty and Violence: The Constitution of Surface and Depth in the Gaze of Male Artists on Kleist’s Penthesilea Ricarda Schmidt Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 123 Queering Violence and Masculinity in Marinetti Christine Kanz Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 132 Varieties of Gender War in the Literature of German Expressionism (1910–1925): The Female Stabber in El Hor’s “The She-Fool” (“Die Närrin”) (1914) Frank Krause Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 151 World War One Gueules Cassées and the Ambiguity of Violence Marjorie Gehrhardt Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 164 Male Murderers in Joseph Roth’s Tarabas and Beichte eines Mörders Johann Georg Lughofer Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 173 Unmasking Marian: Representing Violence, Gender and Agency in Medieval Films Andrew B. R. Elliott Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 188 “This Will Hurt You More Than it Hurts Me”: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon Esme Nicholson Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 205 Ostile o Affascinante? The Trouble with Perpetrators in Dacia Maraini’s Voci (1994) and Buio (1999) Alex Standen

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Chapter Fifteen ....................................................................................... 221 Remorseless Heroes: Gender, Agency and Violence in Contemporary Crime Fiction and Thrillers Ulrike Zitzlsperger Index ....................................................................................................... 235

INTRODUCTION ULRIKE ZITZLSPERGER Analysis of the link between gender and violence reveals patterns in society throughout history. Women as victims of violence, women as perpetrators and, more recently, men as victims of violence have proved to be fruitful subjects for investigation. “Despite its near universality around the globe”, Sally Engle Merry writes, “local manifestations of gender violence are highly variable”.1 It is for good reasons that gender and violence are usually qualified in terms of particular societies, cultures, education, international relations2 – or agency,3 here predominantly understood as the ability to make a conscientious change within society or personal lives and the capacity to act decisively.4 Gender, Agency and Violence: European Perspectives from Early Modern Times to the Present Day centres on literary, cinematic and artistic male and female perpetrators of violence and their discourses. While the focus is mainly on perpetrators the role of victims unavoidably comes into play – in particular when victims refuse to conform to stereotype. Even though deliberate infliction of violence depends on an individual’s or a group’s particular agenda, acts of violence are also shaped by social and political systems, cultural perceptions and economic conditions.5 Nevertheless, there are continuities within European societies over time: in fact, as this volume shows, patterns of violent agency can be translated across cultures, boundaries and times.6 If cultural manifestations of gendered violence illuminate power structures, the depiction of female violent agency is particularly interesting in that more often than not violent women are perceived as a threat to society – and, in turn, “scholarly writing has traditionally viewed sex/gender systems as restrictions imposed on women by men”.7 This is not least thanks to the fact that we still tend to associate all things female with passive acceptance and all things male with active engagement. Reactions to male and female violent individuals are therefore preconceived. Furthermore, the depiction of female and male violent agency betrays the existence of certain contemporary social and political rituals that shape our understanding – albeit not always acceptance – of

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existing hierarchies. The shock effect of deviant, criminal individuals goes hand in hand with recognition of those who thereby perpetuate power structures. This comes to the fore when societies or whole cultures undergo change and patterns of perception are challenged. This volume’s interdisciplinary and cross-European approach – covering French, German, English and Italian case-studies – illuminates patterns in the arts, literature and film.8 Gender, agency and violence matter at all times and everywhere; their mediation through the arts, however, responds to historical turning points in the widest sense. In their introduction to Warlike Women in the German Literary and Cultural Imagination Colvin and Watanabe-O’Kelly rightly caution that “one cannot impose patterns on history, but one can look for them”.9 Unavoidably, both the violent affirmation of power and major changes in society trigger a surge of cultural responses and the depiction of gendered violence, and therewith issues of social order. The results are frequently presented as an intrinsic part of the progression of a society. While the majority of examples here are cases of gendered violence in fiction, “real” violence tends to inform our understanding of the individual background. The chronological organisation of the contributions to this volume is intended to highlight recurrent themes and thereby to show development in European thought. Here the starting point is the early modern period when, courtesy of the printing press, cultural developments underwent more rapid changes, and power politics, thanks to the European Reformations, affected the masses. The early modern period not only continues the use of established figures in this context, ideas and symbols with which audiences were familiar but is also rich in addressing concerns about undue use of violence. Among established figures, one of the most striking images is that of the unruly woman who needs to be tamed by whatever means if the order of society is to be maintained. In contrast to popular labels such as “the whore” the image of the Amazon implies strength and a degree of a somewhat confusing Otherness. Both, though, proved popular long-term images. The biblical figure of Judith is potentially more uneasy: while she decapitates the enemy general Holofernes in an act first of seduction, then of betrayal, she ultimately does so to save her people and thereby earns their respect.10 Men are less prone to attract gender-specific labels with such dubious connotations. As regards concerns about the undue use of violence, the Nurembergbased sixteenth-century shoemaker, writer and poet Hans Sachs (1494– 1576) sets an example, since in his writings and with a new awareness noteworthy for the early modern period he eloquently bemoans the victims

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of wars, the pain mothers suffer and victims on the battlefields. This is all the more remarkable since early modern societies displayed a greater readiness to use violence in way of expression. By way of warning, Sachs does not shy away from detailing atrocities committed, especially by the Turks who come to represent unheard acts of cruelty that threaten Christianity, and for once Catholics and Protestants alike. As a number of the contributions to this volume show, the boundary between violence seen and violence imagined (in the case of Sachs) is meaningful, not least since both fictional and real men and women acting violently have the potential to serve either as role models or as deterrents. As such, individuals whose exceptional acts of violence are gendered gain crosscultural influence. Susan Gaylard (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) analyses the gendering of editorial decisions in sixteenth-century Roman portraitbooks. Here women, once powerful, now presumed deviant, increasingly “disrupt” the narrative of would-be male historiography. In the process, the images of women are adapted until their deviancy is finally identifiable with the unacceptable non-European Other. The importance of visual representation aside, early modern violence is closely linked with dramatic performances. Leila Goulahsen (Manchester Metropolitan University, England) analyses the patriarchal discourse about women as evidenced in French and English plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Here as elsewhere in this volume the precarious link between the audience of spectacles of pleasure and pain and various degrees of violence on display becomes evident; at the heart of this chapter is the expression of “violent sorrow” on behalf of female characters: suicide, rape and furor. Julia Prest (University of St Andrews, Scotland) proposes reconsideration of the role of Catherine de Médicis. The procedure of ending the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, she suggests, might have been a ballet devised for the wedding between her daughter, the Catholic Marguerite de Valois, and the Protestant Henri de Navarre – staged and carefully choreographed violence, then, to end real, religiously motivated violence. The Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572) nevertheless sealed Catherine de Médicis’s reputation as an extraordinarily violent woman. Violence can, however, turn into a spectacle for a variety of reasons. Philip Robinson (University of Exeter, England) shows how a violent past is instrumentalized for the present by its narrators when the reign of King James I – and therewith the state – is celebrated in a show for the London crowd. The images Anthony Munday’s The Triumphs of Re-United Britannia (1605) evokes are rich in deeply gendered violence: in fact, the creation of Britannia is only made possible this way. While violence on

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stage had beyond doubt – and still has – entertaining qualities, it also served political purposes.11 Sara Smart (University of Exeter) explores the close link between the assertion of authority, military power and the demonstrative celebration of violence based on the case of the Great Elector of Brandenburg and the seventeenth-century court poetry that promoted his cause. Christian Jäger (Humboldt University Berlin, Germany) places popular German novels around 1800 within the social and political context of their time and explores how the loss of a traditional, often glamourized aristocratic male agency in the context of the French Revolution translates into stories of “agency lost”. The links between beauty and violence and associations with animals are many, just as the choice of weapons with their implicit phallic potential and a military attire deserve special attention.12 Emotional frenzy and madness as opposed to male reason are of perpetual literary and artistic concern. Few examples are as poignant as the Penthesilea of Greek myth. In 1808 the German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist published his play Penthesilea, which dramatizes the battle between the Amazons and the Greeks. Despite its powerful imagery it held little appeal for his contemporaries. Ricarda Schmidt (University of Exeter) analyses the illustrations based on the play by Kurt Tuch in 1910, by Richard Seewald in 1917 and by Hans Wildermann in 1927. The march of time influences perceptions, and while all three artists consider the love between the queen of the Amazons and the Greek hero Achilles in terms of a war between the sexes, Seewald’s interpretation responds also to the effects of the First World War. If fundamental changes in society necessitate, among other things, reconsideration of the link between gender, agency and violence, it is hardly surprising that quite a number of contributions treat the age of the First World War and Modernism. There seems, for example, to be an immediate link between the aspirations of avant-gardes and male agency. Christine Kanz (University of Ghent, Belgium) analyses Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s novel Mafarka the Futurist (1909/10) and the role of male procreative powers which seek to make women, albeit in vain, superfluous – a “trend” that, with different impact, had already marked the editorial process of the sixteenth-century Roman portrait-books. In turn Frank Krause (Goldsmiths, University of London, England) shows the so far neglected violent assertion of the female body in German Expressionist literature. Here, the usual perception of a male movement with its domain of war that “deals” with women – whose remit is procreation – is reversed.

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The First World War as an event of unheard of mass death and mass victimization disrupted established cultural narratives – not least since in its aftermath the male body and therewith masculinity itself were threatened. Marjorie Gehrhardt (University of Exeter) considers the role of a group of veterans who until recently were often overlooked: facially injured soldiers – or gueules cassées as they called themselves in France – are victims of war. However, what is of interest here is not just the violence they endured themselves in the name of politics but their ambiguous role during the interwar years: they were welcomed home as heroes in 1918, but post-war society quickly tired of these (and other) walking reminders of war, and the state, whether France, Germany or Great Britain, did little to support them.13 There is both in reality and in literature a noteworthy number of soldiers who turn violent themselves. State-endorsed violence and its impact on post-war society is also at the heart of Johann Lughofer’s (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) re-reading of novels by the Austrian writer Joseph Roth. War and espionage deprive Roth’s male characters of any sense of humanity and this is channelled into a deeply misogynistic approach towards women. Here as elsewhere in this volume rape is a means to demean an individual woman but also whole communities: the act of brutality serves “incidentally” to dishearten victims and their communities for good.14 The last four contributions focus on more recent cinematic and literary treatments. They all prove that violence is consumable, albeit it with varying degrees of comfort for readers and viewers alike. While there is less evidence of established images coming to the fore, here too in effect patterns of depiction betray timeless concerns. The question as to what defines acceptable boundaries of violence and whether violence may serve a purpose is a recurrent theme throughout. Andrew Elliott (University of Lincoln, England) highlights films that present medieval women who act decisively and employ violence with competence. However, he also shows that these women tend to be masked and effective agency is lost the moment their gender comes to the fore. This case raises the question how we assess the past in terms of acts of violence from a current point of view – brutal acts safely placed in medieval, implicitly less civilized, times assume a sense of progression and safe distance that is, of course, wrong. Esme Nicholson (freelance radio and television producer) focuses on the Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose films are predominantly concerned with violence. The White Ribbon (2009) is a case in point and the fact that we are made to assume the perpetrators are children productively challenges the link between gender, agency and violence and what contributes to sustaining violence: Haneke’s argument is that

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education prepares both victims and perpetrators to accept traditional patterns of violence and agency in the name of best intentions. The Times quotes Jackie Malton, a former senior police officer who became a TV script-writer in 2011, as saying that it was “not violence itself we desire, rather the emotional impact and aftermath”. This is true both of film and of literature.15 In the article by Alex Standen (independent scholar), sound is – as, for example, in Haneke’s film – of implicit significance in that the male voices of authority and assumed integrity in the works of Dacia Maraini tend to employ a seductiveness that allows them to control and brutalize women and children alike. Her article raises the question of collusion in abuse and institutional responses. Arguably, it is the failure of the latter that has contributed to the ever rising popularity of crime novels, thrillers and films that present violent heroes. The final contribution by the editor of this volume (University of Exeter) continues the exploration of a theme that dominates Haneke’s – and the news producer’s – work: how much violence are readers and viewers, the all-important audience, ready to accept before they avert their eyes? Present-day male and female literary crime-fighters and the violence they employ appear to “put society right”.16 In the process they translate essentially unacceptable degrees of violence into popular culture while at the same time promoting their individuality: here, attributes such as niceness and beauty no longer matter; in the context of gender, agency and violence assertive action for a cause acquires prime importance. Violent individuals, be they “heroes” or “heroines”, “warriors”, “soldiers”, “saviours” or “criminals”, just like the acts of violence they commit or drive forward, have the potential to become part of the longterm memory and therefore of the make-up of communities. There is a difference, though, between a violent agency that is openly criticized and those acts of violence – filtered through film and literature as conduits of matters of concern – that seemingly go unnoticed, since they happen time and again and are ingrained in a system of beliefs. The impact of war must rank high here; recycling labels and images of gendered violence also proves a powerful vehicle. In this context agency finally becomes a precarious tool of political, social or moral justification. The majority of the papers in this volume are based on a two-day conference held at the Institute of German and Romance Studies (IGRS) in London in 2010. The event was part of a series of conferences under the umbrella of the then “Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender at the University of Exeter” (CISSGE). To simplify accessibility – individual terms and very brief sentences aside – quotations in the main body of the text are from published sources or are translated

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into English by the author of the individual article; originals are to be found in the footnotes. Particular thanks must go to Mary and Derek Lewis for their preparation of camera-ready files.

Notes 1

Sally Engle Merry, Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2008), p. 1. 2 See for example Jayne Mooney, Gender, Violence and the Social Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Killing Women. The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence, ed. Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord (Waterloo/Ontario: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2006); Laura J. Shepherd, Gender, Violence and Popular Culture. Telling Stories (Oxford: Routledge, 2012). 3 Thanks for suggesting the inclusion of “agency” must go to Lisa Downing (University of Birmingham). 4 See Ellen Messer-Davidow, “Acting Otherwise”, in Provoking Agents. Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice, ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner (University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 23–50 for a detailed discussion, including a variety of models of agency that come into play. 5 Apart from (gendered) violence, in current research a strong interest in “evil”, “villainy” and the “monstrous” can be observed which also responds to cultural, political and economic frameworks. See, for example Villains and Villainy. Embodiments of Evil in Literature, Popular Culture and Media, ed. Anna Fahraeus and Dikmen Yakali-ÇDPR÷OX $PVWHUGDP 1HZ son’s, C. K.@ face the ideal harmony” (MA, p. 186). There are two possible explanations for the artist’s desire to project the alienation from his work onto the image of a bastardized, black child. First, the face is a stereotypical face modelled on African masks as they were increasingly available on European art markets. One of today’s best known pictures is in Carl Einstein’s 1915 essay “Negro Sculpture”, a text that was not only highly influential at the time, but might also help us understand why Mafarka doubts his creative powers.9 The cover image of Einstein’s book matches rather nicely the description Mafarka gives of his son: “I was able to design your wide almond eyes, your straight nose with its big mobile nostrils, your thick, insolent lips and broad jaw!” (MA, p. 186) I see parallels between both texts in regard to the status of African sculpture within its cultural environment and, perhaps more importantly, in the relationship between the sculpture and its viewer. Like Einstein’s African sculptures, Gazourmah is formed out of an amorphous black mass.

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And like Africans who, according to Einstein, adore their sculptures like deities, Mafarka ultimately adores his own work, his son. There are other parallels, too. Einstein makes much of the potency of the African art object that is contrasted with the beholder’s weakness and even insignificance. Much in the same vein, Mafarka celebrates the annihilation of the artist-subject in favour of a greater force, embodied by Gazourmah. “The oldest among us is thirty”, Marinetti has Mafarka say, “so we have at least ten years in which to complete our task. When we reach forty, other, younger, and more courageous men will very likely toss us into the trash can, like useless manuscripts. And that’s what we want!”10 Why, then, can Gazourmah be regarded as a superhuman being? Gazourmah can create “total music” (MA, p. 205), thus suggesting a parallel with Luigi Russolo’s “Arte dei rumori” and the Futurist fascination with noise and machines. Speaking of Russolo and his machines, Gazourmah – and this is another oddity – is also a machine, an aeroplane. For the techno-enchanted futurists, this invention in particular had a stunning effect – not only because it was a novel experience, but because the view from a plane provided a new way of seeing things and thus should create new perspectives of images. It should lead to new aesthetics. In order to return to Mafarka, to male maternity queering male violence, what does all this mean in relation to his feminized reproductive powers? How does, as I have claimed throughout, this half-male, halffemale form of creativity cement male omnipotence and, on the other hand, deconstruct or queer it? And why are black stereotypes so important in mediating this link between male omnipotence, motherhood and artistic creativity and, furthermore, in this queering of gender stereotypes and constructions of violence and war? Standard accounts of the figure of Gazourmah have portrayed him as the embodiment of Nietzschean ideas of the Übermensch. And it, too, does not take much to realize that the fascination around 1900 with aeroplanes, machines, speed, energy, space and noise was an utterly male affair and a key trope of the European avant-garde. But there are, I believe, further aspects to the crisis of the modern Western (male) subject and the role of the futurists that cannot solely be accounted for within the conventional framework of European cultural history, but rather are infused with ambiguities generated by the colonial encounter. The amorphous mass, derived from female black bodies whose last groans are music in Mafarka’s ears, becomes a kind of muse, inciting his creativity. By this incitement Mafarka can give birth to a child and be a creative artist at the same time: birth is usually evoked in gendered ways,

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as the opposite of artistic and academic production, which are more often associated with the male. The product of woman is flesh, the child; the product of man is a more spiritual, intellectual kind of work. The mother as an image for poetic creativity and authorship had been popular since antiquity. At that point, the muse had become the artist’s mother since she was his source of literary inspiration. She stimulated his poetic creativity by singing her songs to him – similar to the audible, black amorphous mass of female bodies in this text, which stimulates Mafarka and his creative or reproductive power. In regard to the historical avant-garde, especially to the “African” novel discussed, the main reason for Marinetti’s paradoxical appropriation of maternity as a source of a new form of creativity lies in the specific material itself that is required for this superhuman act: an organic, amorphous material outside of the tradition-laden Western canon, in short: a “virgin material”. And thus it is no surprise that Mafarka, creator of the dead female green slime and pulp, draws his inspiration from a mass of undifferentiated black females. It is Africa herself – her sounds and smells – who becomes the muse-like material that will provide Mafarka with the power to form the ultimate sculpture: a sculpture with “negroid” features.11 There is an uncanny parallel between Marinetti’s use of the traditional triangulation “mass – fluidity – femininity”, and here also “race”, and Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of Freikorps constructions of femininity. Male bodies, Theweleit suggested, become geometric because the soldiers’ armoured bodies have to be understood as a defence against boundlessness and flood.12 In much the same way, Mafarka’s creations take their shape from the fluidity of black female bodies (as a protection against “femininity”). In the colonial zone – probably more so than in the heart of Freikorps Germany – there is, of course, no end to the project of fortifying the male. Between the bronze and the black, between Egypt and Sudan, Black and White, the abject female never really disappears. It can never be totally erased – just as Mafarka is not able to let go of his love for his deceased mother. Quite to the contrary, this love is so powerful and symbiotic that it causes anxiety and is thus ambivalent. It is this towering presence of the figure of the mother and the idealization of motherhood that is key to understanding the historical avant-garde.13 In his book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said deduces the cultural crisis of modernity and its deep ambiguity from the colonial experience – both direct and indirect – of the modern artist. The artist’s quest for a new formal language, Said claims, led him to draw on elements from both his own culture and that of

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the Other, a strategy he calls “new inclusiveness”.14 Hence, much like Said’s torn modern artist, Mafarka creates a new being from the mass of despised black females. And, like the Western artist, Mafarka can in the end relate to both cultures only with a mixture of familiarity and distance. He is at home in neither, never developing a sense of their separate sovereignty. Thus, as I have shown through various ambiguities encoded in Marinetti’s text, the modern project of cementing male omnipotence can never be fully completed. The idealization of motherhood and maternity, clearly, is the key feature of modernity. It finds its most cogent expression in male birth fantasies and, implicit in these fantasies, in the rejection of fatherhood. What is more, Mafarka’s ambiguous relationship toward his “product”, Gazourmah, the machine man who is half human, half aeroplane, suggests that the Futurists’ technophilia – destined to produce more perfect and “new” super-humans (Übermenschen) – is not free from Angst. This is even more so the case as male birth fantasies can be interpreted as a turn toward the organic, and to organic matter that must be brought under control. So, too, must ultimately the secret of birth – the organic, material process which takes place inside as the exclusive property of woman. Maternity and materiality resist attempts at clear-cut gendering.

Notes 1

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Mafarka der Futurist. Afrikanischer Roman, trans. by Michael von Killisch-Horn and Janina Knab, ed. Michael Farin and Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann (Munich: belleville, 2004); Mafarka the Futurist. An African Novel, trans. by Carol Diethe and Steve Cox (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998). Hereafter referred to as MA followed by page number in brackets. 2 For a profound discussion, see Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality. Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986). 3 Cited in Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, p. 75. 4 Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism. Critical Writings, trans. by Doug Thompson, ed. Günter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), pp. 11–17. 5 See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti et al., “Prozess und Freispruch von ‘Mafarka der Futurist’, mit der Rede von F.T. Marinetti, dem Gutachten von Luigi Capuana und den Plädoyers des Abgeordneten Salvatore Barzilai, von Innocenze Cappa und des Rechtsanwalts Cesare Sarfatti”, trans. by Michael von Killisch-Horn, in Mafarka der Futurist, pp. 177–252.

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See Christine Kanz, Maternale Moderne. Männliche Gebärphantasien zwischen Kultur und Wissenschaft (1890–1933) (Munich: Fink, 2009). 7 See Karen Horney, “Die Flucht aus der Weiblichkeit. Der Männlichkeitskomplex der Frau im Spiegel männlicher und weiblicher Betrachtung”, Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 12 (1926), pp. 360–374, here p. 365. 8 See for example Sigmund Freud, “Das Medusenhaupt”, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud et al. (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1940–1953), vol. 17, pp. 45–48, here p. 47. 9 Carl Einstein, “Negerplastik”, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Ernst Nef (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1962), pp. 80–104. 10 Marinetti, The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, pp. 15–16. 11 “Negresses” (MA, p. 23). 12 See Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien, 2 vols. (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 311–312. 13 See Kanz, Maternale Moderne. 14 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1993), p. 189.

CHAPTER NINE VARIETIES OF GENDER WAR IN THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM (1910–1925): THE FEMALE STABBER IN EL HOR’S “THE SHE-FOOL” (“DIE NÄRRIN”) (1914) FRANK KRAUSE Abstract The literature of German Expressionism criticizes the impersonal compulsions of modern civilization as forces that thwart metaphysically underpinned autonomy; violent assertions of agency take on a range of meanings in this context. Links between gender and violence are chiefly thematized as part of heterosexual gender wars; the canonical texts on such wars by male expressionists focus on violence as a defence of the male body’s agency against the threat posed by female expectations. The lesser known texts by female expressionists often celebrate a sacred sexual union of self and other, and they thus tend to confirm the fears of their male counterparts. The violent assertion of the female body’s agency has received comparatively little attention; it tends to be represented as an ambivalently gender-coded resistance against male hostility. Texts such as El Hor’s “The She-Fool” affirm pertinent forms of violence as paradoxical symbols of sacred meaning, and they thus destabilize the gendering of revelatory practice. Explorations in expressionist literature of links between gender, agency,1 and violence are typically focussed on father-son conflicts, on varieties of soldierly virility, and on aggression in heterosexual relations. Violence of sons against fathers is depicted as a defence against forces that undermine

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the youth’s quest for sacred self-realization.2 Warfare is mainly represented as a negative compulsion; some, however, see it as an opportunity for heroic self-assertion.3 Violence against heterosexual partners is chiefly portrayed as a male option: For Johannes R. Becher, it stems from ideals of virility which alienate men from the meaning of love, and Georg Heym holds similar, albeit more pessimistic views.4 By contrast, Paul Boldt’s praise of intensified sex includes physical threats against unaroused women,5 Gottfried Benn justifies the violent defence of male autarky against other-orientated females,6 and Oskar Kokoschka depicts, as we will see, a gender war of equally violent sexes as a revelation of irreconcilable metaphysical forces. Other recurrent forms of violence in expressionist texts are also coded masculine: often, violent acts as symptoms of mental illness are attributed to pathological forms of male authority, whilst rape, typically of women by men, tends to be cast in a negative light, though it may also appear as a sign of sexual vitality.7 Expressionism is largely a male “movement”, expressionist techniques for the critique of alienation or for the intuition of essences tend to be coded masculine, and expressionist views on gender antagonisms and gender war tend to sympathize with male perspectives.8 Whilst works of male writers are often well researched, texts by female expressionists have, with few exceptions, received little attention;9 as a result, the views of these female authors on gender war have been neglected. As a contribution to the stock-taking of such views, I will contextualise and analyse El Hor’s story “The She-Fool” (“Die Närrin”). After a sketch of views on gender war famously held by some male expressionists (1), I will focus on a contrasting and much-neglected ideal of heterosexual fulfillment typically held by female writers (2).10 Orientated towards an ideal of sexual love which cuts across such dichotomies as “masculine” and “feminine” viewpoints, El Hor’s narrative portrays violence by a mentally unstable woman against an alienating male sexual partner sympathetically, and it affirms this ambivalently gender-coded act of violence as a symbol of positive values (3);11 the perspectives and techniques of this story are of vital importance for current research on links between gender and crises of lived bodies in Expressionism (4).

Male views on gender antagonisms According to Otto Weininger’s highly influential study Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter) of 1903, “Woman” relates to her “fellowhuman” as a “natural, not spiritual” being.12 As Woman (=W) is “soulless” (“seelenlos”), she lacks the boundaries that separate a spiritual personality

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“from nature or from human beings”; governed by a coitus-orientated sexuality, she wants to be a desirable object for Man (=M) and finds fulfillment in “sexual fusion” (“sexueller Verschmolzenheit”).13 Whilst Woman’s being is defined by empirical other-orientation, Man has a soul and seeks spiritual self-realisation, which finds expression in his genius. According to Weininger, “[a] human being may be called genius if he lives in a conscious connection with the whole universe. Thus genius alone is the really divine element in humans.”14 Unlike Woman, Man wants to preserve the boundaries of the self: for “the man of genius”, the “outer life appears […] to be merely a case of his inner life”.15 The specific ways in which Man and Woman relate to the world are also manifest in their manners of thinking. Woman thinks in “henids” (“Henide[n]”), i.e. forms of experience in which articulable content is not separated from the feelings in which it is embedded; by contrast, Man strives to think conceptually: he aims to separate articulate thought from feeling.16 Weininger regards his differentiation between M and W as an analytical distinction of trends which are found in human beings of both sexes, but he claims that, from a psychological point of view, we are always either Man or Woman.17 And whilst there is no absolute M or W, the relation between the sexes is mainly defined by the antagonism of male genius and female desire. Weininger recommends sexual abstinence as an alternative to mutually hostile sexual relations; for him, the “negation of sexuality kills only the physical human being, and that only to give a full existence to the spiritual”.18 Oskar Kokoschka’s one-act play Murderer, the Hope of Women (Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen), published in 1910, engages with such ideas; the main antagonists, “the man” and “the woman”, enter into a fight. The male principle of belligerent self-assertion and the other-orientated female principle of seductive taming and maternal nurturing cannot be reconciled; however, as desire binds man and woman together, they engage in a violent struggle for the realisation of their gender-specific approach to the other sex. In order to remain independent, the man resists desire and tries to subjugate her by having her branded like cattle. In response, the woman stabs and imprisons the man and wants to tame him and conceive a child. Kokoschka depicts their power struggle in a symbolic scene which stylises the woman’s quest for sexual dominance into a vampiric draining of his bleeding wound. At the moment of her short-lived supremacy, the woman “stretches her arm through the bars” of the man’s prison “and reaches into his wound” she inflicted on him, “rampant and maliciously wheezing like a viper”, and later she “covers him”, who leans against the iron bars, “entirely”.19 As her serpent-like,

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phallic arm penetrates the male body, her gesture assumes a masculine form, which corresponds with her tactics of violent self-assertion which is also coded masculine, but soon the man’s power grows, as the woman unwillingly nurtures him with blood (“mit Blut” “säugt”). The attempt to secure female dominance strengthens the man who is now in the position of a fetus.20 Once recovered, he gets the upper hand and kills her: the woman’s identity as seductress and mother is realised in a power struggle which she finally loses, whilst the man’s identity realises itself through the destruction of the force on which he was once dependent. Kokoschka shares the depicted masculine horror of nurture that draws the autonomous self into the force-field of the other; at the same time, he exposes the contradiction which is built into the murderous victory of the man. The murderer of the female sex and the object of maternal hope, namely the child, are – against the male will – inextricably linked. Kokoschka’s view of man as warrior and woman as child-bearer links up with Friedrich Nietzsche’s view that “[e]verything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy. […] Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.”21 The motifs of the abstinent male and the redeeming assault on the woman’s body re-negotiate Weininger’s views:22 The anti-realist blood symbolism links both sides of the gender war with an immaterial realm beyond the experiential world; child-bearing Woman is also a manifestation of spiritual forces. With a view on the artistic and literary scene in Vienna, Ernst Fischer and Wilhelm Haefs have claimed that Weininger’s impact on Expressionism cannot be overestimated,23 and there are male expressionist writers who juxtapose man’s pursuit of spiritual self-realisation with woman’s spiritually empty quest for sexual love, but Kokoschka cuts across the dichotomy of sacred masculinity and profane femininity. Weininger’s belief in the “event of the self” (“Ich-Ereignis”), i.e. the experience of oneself as the site of a timeless soul, is akin to expressionist beliefs in sacred forms of subjectivity which reveal humanity’s essence: “At this moment of experience”, Weininger explains in the words of Schelling, “time and duration fade away: it is not we who are in time, but rather time – or not really time, but pure, absolute eternity – is in us”,24 and it is the man who has privileged access to such states, as a “female genius […] is a contradiction in terms” [“Ein weiblicher Genius ist demnach eine contradictio in adjecto”].25 This event can be compared to Kokoschka’s “visions” (“Gesichte”);26 in visionary states, forms of imaginative thought reveal the creative force of world-constituting consciousness and unite the mind with the essence of all beings. However,

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the specific beings revealed in visions may be an “I” or a “You”, and they can thus induce centripetal or centrifugal forms of self-experience, both of which show an impersonal quality: in visions, “[m]y spirit, It has spoken” (“Mein Geist, Es hat geredet!”).27 With its sympathy for male fears, the visionary world of Kokoschka’s play is coded masculine, whilst his theory of visions links masculine and feminine forces: the attention of visionary consciousness is like an “unborn child” (“wie ein ungeborenes Kind”), the vision’s life stems from “an ejaculation of the soul” (“Erguß der Seele”), and the self occupies the position of a mother who may not yet know that she has conceived.28 Whilst this myth of maternal forces distinguishes Kokoschka’s views from Weininger’s, it also supports Klaus Theweleit’s claim that male fantasies of spiritual birth chiefly aim to assert the mind’s autarky by erasing the body’s original dependence on the mother, and such fantasies are often linked with misogynist views.29

Visions of sacred heterosexuality in works by female expressionists The views of female expressionist writers on problems of heterosexual relations are varied, and some are shared by male expressionists; there is no “feminine Expressionism” in the sense of a homogenous genderspecific interpretation of heterosexuality. However, one particular ideal of heterosexual relations held by some female expressionists is not shared in this form by their male colleagues: the ideal of sacred heterosexual fulfillment under the conditions of reciprocal emotional closeness. According to Verena Mahlow, female expressionists are confronted with a specific identity problem; when they consider expressionist projects of spiritual self-realisation, they must come to terms with their ascribed identity as other-orientated natural beings.30 Writers who sacralize ideals of empathetic heterosexual fulfillment neutralize the tension between these potentially conflicting trends; often, they regard the lack of sensitive male partners as a source of sexual alienation. As the female expressionist Bess Brenck Kalischer puts it succinctly: “Weininger is stupid” (“Weininger ist dumm.”)31 In Paula Ludwig’s poem “I was awake” [“Ich wachte”, 1920], the persona endures an emotionally deadening body contact and compensates for her suffering in an ecstatic union of heart and terrestrial fire: You are the foehn And threw the torch into my living flesh. [...]

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You have paralyzed my fingers And planted helplessness into my breathing. When your cheeks lie in my hands My senses are startled And my happiness becomes painful. I must go through the earth And let her embers into my heart, So that I do not become like death When you touch me.32

In Henny Stock’s poem “Nights” (“Nächte”) of 1919, the persona laments the evils of her sexual desire which remains sinfully hostile, as it is cut off from the implored other: My blood mumbles: You! It sways, burdened with undone sin, in sultry streets of tired loneliness. Hatred darts in me with rampant flames of hunger. Dully it descends on me and dribbles poison in my womb incessantly. O, woe! All my nights collapse over me! Help, you, o do help me … from sharp chards such evil things break off.33

Egocentric desire is thus profane and evil; redeeming sexual fulfillment requires the sacred union with a second person. In Stock’s “Promise” (“Versprechen”), also published in 1919, the gestures of an ecstatically adoring male sexual partner are seen as a sacramental invocation: Your hands are gentle gestures of a praying man. […] The symbol: You grow deep in me, softly carved in like names’ eternity in a young tree! You pours through me, restless like pleas of rosary! You burns itself through depth and every dream! Your hands, see, are gentle gestures of a praying man. I’m glowing in red incense light!34

Male expressionist authors often adopt perspectives which deny their heterosexual partner closeness: Alfred Wolfenstein prefers male friendship, which for him strikes the ideal balance between closeness and distance, to both, contemplative self-isolation and erotic self-dissolution; Gottfried Benn regards heterosexual practice as a form of masturbation; and for Albert Ehrenstein, sex is a flight into the unreal world of flesh.35 Male expressionist writers who do regard heterosexual practice as a sacred revelation of life forces tend to celebrate the intensities of the vitalised self rather than the closeness to a specific other. When they affirm you-

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orientated feelings of love, their merging with sexual body sensations is not of central relevance, and when they subscribe to an ethics of universal love, they aim to liberate the human species’ sensitivity to a shared inner essence: here, love unites two or more selves ecstatically in the spirit of identical meaning.36 Some female writers support vitalist ideals of sexuality or projects of universal love, too;37 the search for sacred heterosexual fulfillment in the merger of sexual body sensations with closeness to a specific other’s feelings occurs, as far as I can see, only in texts by female expressionists who in this case match the wide-spread male fear of woman as an agent of decentering alienation. Unlike Kokoschka, for whom feelings towards heterosexuality remain asymmetrically genderized, Ludwig, Stock, and other female writers38 sacralize and universalise their you-orientated sexual values. Here, the inner continuity of the self depends on its receptiveness, its boundaries are expanded to include the other, and both selves affirm one another. This project cuts across Weininger’s dichotomy of Woman’s natural boundlessness and Man’s spiritual self-expansion, as the “event of the self”, i.e. the awareness of oneself as the manifestation of divine forces, is experienced through henids: ethical meaning is embedded in a fusion of one’s own bodily feelings with the recognition of the other. And whilst Kokoschka’s notion of “visions” as disembodied “conceptions” unites male and female forces as symbols, Stock’s “Promise” lets symbols emerge from the corporeal fusion of male and female.

Affirmation of ambivalent gender-coding Expressionism tends to confirm traditional gender dichotomies from competing essentialist viewpoints which may allow for symbolic or actual heterosexual fusions, but which render ambivalently gender-coded acts mostly negative. Kokoschka’s depiction of female violence confirms this: he separates woman’s maternal essence from the alienated hybridity of her masculinized acts.39 Gender war forces Woman into an ambivalent genderperformance which contradicts her essential desire to tame and nurture; it is not her violent act which embodies universalizable meaning, but the blood transfusion that happens against her will. Only in rare cases such as El Hor’s story “The She-Fool” do expressionist texts affirm the symbolism of ambivalently gender-coded violence by women against male sexual partners.40 Here, symbolic violence reveals – under the conditions of alienating male dominance – an ideal of sexual fulfillment which cuts across the gender-typical differences outlined above.

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Unter the slightly modified pseudonym El Ha, the same female writer claims in Shadows (Schatten), a collection of prose sketches published in 1920,41 that humans are consciously aware of their volition which constitutes their individual essence (“Willwesen”). As a self-aware species of individuated beings, humanity rises above the universally shared and life-sustaining essence of the world as a whole (“Allwesen”) and thus steps out of the sacred order of nature.42 Sexual love (as the desire to merge with another human being emotionally and physically) aims to transcend this individuation, and El Hor’s / El Ha’s prose sketches often show how this task compels lovers to adopt sadistic and masochistic roles. Some try to overcome the boundaries between self and other in an active manner; in order to defy their isolation, they engage in eroticised punishments or, in the case of pathological obsessions, even kill to drink the other’s life-sustaining blood.43 The complementary role is passivemasochistic: in the spirit of spiteful goodness, the lover asks for punishments from the beloved which conjure up the Holy Spirit of the sensuously perceptible world;44 some ask for playful inflictions of bodily pain, whilst others even wish to be killed. Martina Lüke has shown that El Hor’s prose sketch “The Murderer” (“Der Mörder”) associates masculinity with violence, sadism, and brutality,45 and in El Hor’s / El Ha’s prose, the active position is often coded male. However, her prose sketches also show masochistic men and sadistic women,46 and the ambivalent fusion of self-enhancing pain and other-orientated desire is not always a problem; often, what matters is the search for closeness between an angry punishing figure and a fearful recipient of punishment who should both desire and reciprocally affirm one another. In “The She-Fool”, a male figure makes such closeness impossible, and the female figure can transcend this situation only symbolically. The story is told from the perspective of a mad woman who stabs her male partner during a sexual encounter. The murderous act is not endorsed, but its form is used as a valid paradoxical symbol of sacred meaning. Initially, the playful transgression of the partner’s bodily boundaries is blissful; when the first-person narrator recalls their first rendez-vous, she “still feel[s]”: how I pressed my nails firmly into his hands. And how I was happy about the beautiful, red drops of blood which ran heavily and glittering until I caught them with my fingertips and took them in my mouth.47

The man expresses sadistic wishes when he announces: “I’ll bind you before I kiss you”;48 his tenderness is “strange and sharp”, and his voice is simultaneously gentle, hateful, threatening and tender. By contrast, she

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does not inflict pain. For her, sensing the blood that runs through the veins of his hands means to feel manifestations of Life; when her heart beats in response to “bright and tortured” leaves that “tremble” in the “garden of life” where they first meet, and when she “breathes” his ambivalent voice and senses his blood with all her nerves, she “eats with” her “eyes the trembling of his being”;49 but even her most violent fantasy of oral incorporation does not serve the wish to hurt: “To me it seemed as if I had to bite into his naked heart in order not to wither away.”50 Much rather, she wants to incorporate the pulsating forces of life from a masochistic position. When they meet again, this time for sex, he shows his “delicate and sick roughness” (“delikate und kranke Roheit”);51 as he touches her, she only feels his clothes. Her sense of complete separation from his body implies an insurmountable emotional distance; instead of bodily centred closeness to a person, she feels the impersonal force of distancing objects: I did not feel his arms which embraced me. I did not feel his closeness, I only felt his clothes, his tie and his collar. As if from far away, I watched his gestures. […] Again I felt his sleeves coiling themselves around me, the buttons on his jacket hurt me, I was startled by his collar. But I could not feel the nervous courting of his hands and mouth. I bit into his lips to feel his closeness.52

As the man remains unreceptive and distant, the penetration of his body as a search for emotional closeness remains a symbolic act, but as the sensual experience of and emotive response to pulsating blood are revelations of Life, the act does get closer to essential forces, though their practically relevant meaning is not realised. In response to the bite, the man jokingly and angrily exclaims “Are you crazy” (“Bist du verrückt”),53 whereupon she stabs him in the neck with a dagger and feels the hot gush of the dying man’s blood glide over her. When she recalls the scene in prison, where she awaits her execution, she does not beautify the deed; “[we] only have the cry”, she thinks, “the convulsion, the laughter of sick human lust!”. By contrast, the ecstatic dissolution of beings in non-human nature reconciles Life with the meaning of sexual love: Here is paradise. Everything passes and exudes in love. The night’s breath is moist and soaked with beauty. From all bushes and trees bright blossoms drip, which have died of love. Their smell tears and gnaws at the heart, so that it fevers in pain and raptures. The nightingales sing incessantly –you– you–you–you– like radiant drops of blood it seeps down onto the mute love-death of flowers. Then there comes a whirling cataract of longing, it

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effervesces, gushes upward, drums and surges and is suddenly dashed on a sharp, glisteningly cruel trill. And then it starts over again, restless, sweet and bloody –you–you–you–you– All creatures pour out their being. From the depth of the pond the frogs rise, and their buzzing, gurgling calls gather above the waters into a great song of the wonders of darkness. The morning comes.54

Nature brings non-human beings close to the desired other by dissolving their boundaries, and the longing call for the other is likened to the dripping of life-giving blood, which points towards the impending lovedeath of the longing creature. The vision of nature as an incessant realisation of love that moves towards death echoes motifs from the murder scene: the nightingales’ song links images of blood with longing and alludes to the man’s death, and like the frogs, the dying man gargled.55 But whilst the man’s death is transparent for nature’s desire for the living to pour out their being, his being is poured out against his will. In nonhuman nature, the call of desire is like dripping blood; in the human world, thwarted desire sheds the other’s blood to find symbols of counterfactual ideals. In the human world, the unfulfilled gnaw at the hearts of their antagonists; in nature, images of a fulfilling love-death gnaw at the heart of the longing. The narrator’s wish to expand her boundaries is natural, but cannot be fulfilled under the conditions of male self-assertion. From her perspective, the universal ideal of love as ecstatic sexual fulfillment and closeness cannot be realised amongst humans; practically, it can only be expressed through an act which negates alienated relations in the name of futile love. To regard the depicted murder as a symbol of love is paradoxical, as the deed reproduces the hostility it wants to negate; however, the problematic murder remains a valid symbol of thwarted sacred desire. The ambivalent act is also ambivalently gender-coded: initially, the violent penetration of a sexual partner is coded masculine, and the yearning for closeness to the lover is coded feminine, but in the murder scene, she violently penetrates the man, whilst his dying body symbolises nature’s longing for closeness. “The She-Fool” criticises the accepted normalcy of social life from a mad person’s point of view, and it thus performs a poetic critique without reflectively discernible foundations. Whilst this paradoxical strategy is typical for expressionist prose texts that challenge the boundaries between the normal and the pathological, it is only rarely used to affirm symbols with ambivalent gender-coding. Claire Goll takes this approach in her story “The Tailoress” (“Die Schneiderin”, 1918). Here, a woman whose partner fell in the war is cut off from fulfillment through sexual love, and

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she thus takes revenge on men of the establishment whom she deems responsible for his death; loyalty to her dead lover compels her to destroy them with a sexually transmitted disease. “Sie verheerte sie”, the German expression for “she wreaked havoc among them”, is based on a word derived from “Heer” (for “army”), as though the men were devastated by military force (which is coded male). The idea to take revenge came to her in the form of a “malicious” thought from a “foreign world” (“ein tückischer Gedanke aus einer fremden Welt”) when looking into the face of an army officer who made advances to her.56 Like Kokoschka and El Hor, Goll regards the destructive re-channeling of bodily substances, initiated in heterosexual relations with the help of gender-role reversals, as a revelation of Life’s forces under the conditions of gender war, and this view is not restricted to Expressionism.57

Gender and crises of the body Jan Christian Metzler has pointed out that expressionists are not only concerned with crises of consciousness, but also with a crisis of the living body. In response to the problem that external reality intrudes upon the boundaries of the bodily self, many male expressionists explore body fantasies and scenes of nausea which initiate processes of abjection. In such processes, the boundaries of the self are constituted through the rejection of experiential phenomena as the repulsive other of the body.58 For male expressionists, abjection is often a salient feature of authorship. In their quest for spiritual autonomy through acts of poetic form-giving, they encounter in their matter a resistant force of deformation, and whilst some authors attempt to neutralise this force through the imposition of clear-cut forms, others negotiate a more precarious position through abjection of deforming matter that is chiefly coded feminine. Metzler’s study also sheds light on the nexus of gender, agency, and violence in expressionist texts: the male defence against resistant forces of matter may warrant a violent abjection of threatening female bodies.59 By contrast, the female expressionist Sophie Leer subverts the dichotomy of animating form and malleable matter: she depicts a male figure whose creative power to enliven a feminine wax-doll with his blood is inextricably linked with the intrusion of the material into his dying body’s veins.60 When Metzler compares male and female varieties of the expressionist avant-garde, he chiefly juxtaposes projects of masculine form-giving and de-formation with a female voice that unhinges notions of “male creativity”. El Hor’s story confirms Metzler’s observation that expressionists respond to crises of the lived body which stem from tensions between

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masculine form-giving and form-dissolving trends embodied in “feminine” matter; however, the text also shows that female writers might reverse rather than upset pertinent views of male expressionists. Whilst Leer depicts a reciprocal exchange of matter between a dying male body and an enlivened feminine wax-doll, “The She-Fool” attributes the formtranscending re-channeling of bodily matter to female agency, and the mad woman’s subversive mimicry of masculine body gestures confirms male fears of shape-shifting corporeality. Like many male writers, El Hor is caught up in an antagonism between embodied trends and the form-giving mind; however, she reverses the traditional hierarchy between form and matter, as the bodily trend to dissolve form is celebrated, whilst the formgiving compulsion of the self-aware mind is lamented. But whilst her yearning for an ecstatic expansion of the lived body is expressed through the penetration of the male form, the formation of her fluid self also depends on the abjection of the man’s body surface; the woman’s ambivalently gender-coded act thus opens up a paradoxical position. With her reversal of traditional male views, El Hor responds to a different crisis of the body. Her protagonist struggles not with bodies that infringe upon the self’s form, but with forms that hinder the realisation of embodied meaning. As her gendered body can realise its meaning only through a transgression of gender roles, the woman reacts to the crisis with an ambivalent performance: she enters into a gender-coded domain usually reserved for the contrasting pursuits of the opposite gender. Expressionist writers affirm a range of symbolic acts with ambivalent gender-coding, and all of these acts are responses to bodily crises of female figures. Fritz von Unruh’s drama A Generation (Ein Geschlecht, 1917) shows a mother who temporarily extends her body with the symbolic phallus of male authority in order to reconcile social power with the creative and nurturing force of holy nature; in Brenck Kalischer’s “The Mill” (“Die Mühle”, 1922), a young woman adopts a boy’s gestures in order to receive redeeming maternal care rather than sexual love from a male doctor; Georg Kaiser’s play The Flight to Venice (Die Flucht nach Venedig, 1922) shows a masculinised female genius from the perspective of her suffering, yet admiring male lover;61 and “The She-Fool” and Goll’s “The Tailoress” defend ambivalent gender-performances of violent women as symbols of futile loyalty to sacred ideals of love. We should, however, note that these trends can be found in texts by male and female writers, and ambivalently gender-coded gestures of yearning for ecstatic self-expansion can also be found in Erich Maria Remarque’s texts about male bodies.62 Labels such as “feminine expressionism” or “the masculine avant-garde” can helpfully remind us that crises of bodies are usually experienced in gendered forms,

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that strategies for the defence of bodily agency tend to be gender-coded, and that transgressions or dissolutions of gender boundaries are marked by the genderized positions from which they move away.63 However, the strategies which bring these positions in flux might cut across the distinction between “masculine” and “feminine” trends; in German expressionist literature, the violent preservation of the gendered body’s agency is chiefly coded masculine,64 but some pertinent strategies are ambivalently gender-coded, and whilst this ambivalence tends to confirm culturally established gender dichotomies,65 the cases in which ambivalent performances destabilize such dichotomies should not be underrated.

Notes 1 By “agency”, I mean that an act is a manifestation of empowerment; violent acts can thus empower a person to realise goals, or they may form part of disempowering practice. 2 See Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper, Expressionismus (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 176–180, and Frank Krause, Literarischer Expressionismus (Paderborn: Fink, 2008), pp. 92–96. 3 See Krause, Literarischer Expressionismus, pp. 103–107, pp. 160–162. 4 See Johannes R. Becher, “Der Dragoner”, Prosa des Expressionismus, ed. Fritz Martini (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), pp. 207–212, here p. 210 and p. 212; Georg Heym, “Der Irre”, in Georg Heym: Prosa und Dramen, vol. 2 of Georg Heym: Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider (Hamburg and Munich: Ellermann, 1962), pp. 19–34, here p. 20; see Heym, “Eine Fratze”, in Georg Heym: Prosa und Dramen, pp. 173–174, here p. 174, for his view that love may be desirable but seems futile. 5 See Boldt in Frank Krause, Klangbewußter Expressionismus (Berlin: Weidler, 2006), p. 111. 6 See Gottfried Benn, “Der Vermessungsdirigent. Erkenntnistheoretisches Drama”, in Gottfried Benn: Stücke aus dem Nachlaß. Szenen, vol. 6 of Gottfried Benn: Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960–1968), pp. 1498–1526; here, the protagonist, who avoids becoming a father to preserve his autarky, anaesthetises his pregnant girl-friend and performs an abortion against her will. 7 See, for example, Heym, Prosa und Dramen, pp. 22–23; Andreas Kramer, “The Traffic of Gender in Expressionist Prose Writing”, in Expressionismus und Geschlecht / Expressionism and Gender, ed. Frank Krause (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2010), pp. 45–60, here pp. 55–56 provides an example for rape as a positive form of ecstatic violence, and Günter Rinke, “Geschlechtersymbolik in Ernst Tollers Revolutionsdramen”, in Expressionismus und Geschlecht, pp. 99–116, here p. 106, shows that Toller uses rape as a trope for social exploitation and alienation.

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8 See Carol Diethe, Aspects of Distorted Sexual Attitudes in German Expressionist Drama (New York: Lang, 1988), and Thomas Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2002), pp. 33–35. 9 See Jan Christian Metzler, De/Formationen. Autorschaft, Körper und Materialität im expressionistischen Jahrzehnt (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2003), pp. 130–143; Barbara D. Wright, “Intimate Strangers: Women in German Expressionism”, in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, ed. Neil H. Donahue (Rochester/NY: Camden House, 2005), pp. 287–319; Krause, Literarischer Expressionismus, pp. 118–121; Frank Krause, “Zur Problematisierung von Geschlechterpositionen im Expressionismus”, in Expressionismus und Geschlecht, pp. 159–181 (here pp. 160–162 and pp. 180–181). 10 My juxtaposition of contrasting views of male and female writers does not imply that there are homogenous gender-specific varieties of Expressionism; I merely contrast selected approaches to gender relations which vary with the underlying forms of gender-coded identity that are by no means representative for expressionism as a whole. 11 Ambivalently gender-coded acts leave the dichotomies “male vs. female” and “masculine vs. feminine” intact; for example, when a woman’s body performs a violent act that is coded masculine, we are not dealing with a de-gendered, but with an ambivalently gendered transgression. 12 Otto Weininger: Sex and Character, ed. Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus (Bloomington/IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 172; “Die Frau […] fühlt […] sich mit ihm verbunden, als natürliches, nicht als geistiges Wesen”. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter [1903] (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1997), p. 256. 13 Sex and Character, p. 172 and p. 187; Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, p. 279 and pp. 255–256. 14 Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, p. 222. “Genial ist ein Mensch dann zu nennen, wenn er in bewußtem Zusammenhange mit dem Weltganzen lebt. Erst das Geniale ist somit das eigentlich Göttliche im Menschen.” 15 Sex and Character, p. 149. “Das Außenleben nur wie ein Spezialfall seines Innenlebens sich ausnimmt.” Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, pp. 221–222. 16 Sex and Character, pp. 87–88; Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, p. 125 and p. 128. 17 Sex and Character, pp. 69–70; Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, pp. 97– 98. 18 Sex and Character, p. 311. “Die Verneinung der Sexualität tötet bloß den körperlichen Menschen und ihn nur, um dem geistigen erst das volle Dasein zu geben.” Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, p. 458. 19 “Langt mit dem Arm durchs Gitter und greift in seine Wunde, geil böswillig keuchend wie eine Natter”, and later she “liegt ganz auf ihm”. Oskar Kokoschka, “Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen”, in Einakter und kleine Dramen des Expressionismus, ed. Horst Denkler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), pp. 47–53, here pp. 51–52.

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20 Kokoschka, “Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen”, p. 52; see Hans Schumacher, “Oskar Kokoschka”, in Expressionismus als Literatur, ed. Wolfgang Rothe (Berne: Francke, 1969), pp. 506–518, here p. 515. 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 91. “Alles am Weibe ist ein Rätsel, und alles am Weibe hat eine Lösung: sie heißt Schwangerschaft. […] Der Mann soll zum Kriege erzogen werden und das Weib zur Erholung des Kriegers: alles andre ist Torheit.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978), p. 59. 22 See David F. Kuhns, German Expressionist Theatre. The Actor and the Stage (CUP, 1997), pp. 85–86 and p. 264 (endnote 106). 23 Ernst Fischer and Wilhelm Haefs, “Hirnwelten, Nervenrevolutionen, Selbstentblössungen. Die Literatur des Expressionismus in Wien”, in Hirnwelten funkeln. Die Literatur des Expressionismus in Wien, ed. Ernst Fischer and Wilhelm Haefs, pp. VII–XIX, here p. XVII. 24 “In diesem Moment der Anschauung schwindet für uns Zeit und Dauer dahin: nicht wir sind in der Zeit, sondern die Zeit – oder vielmehr nicht sie, sondern die reine absolute Ewigkeit – ist in uns.” 25 Sex and Character, pp. 145–146 and p. 163; Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, pp. 215–216 and p. 242. 26 Oskar Kokoschka, “Von der Natur der Gesichte”, in Expressionismus. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1910–1920, ed. Thomas Anz and Michael Stark (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), pp. 562–564. 27 Ibid., p. 564 and p. 563. 28 Ibid., p. 562. 29 Klaus Theweleit, “Männliche Geburtsweisen”, in Masculinities–Maskulinitäten, ed. Therese Steffen (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2002), pp. 2–27. With reference to August Strindberg’s drama The Father, Nietzsche writes: “It has astounded me beyond measure to find a work in which my own conception of love – with war as its means and the deathly hatred of the two sexes as its fundamental law – is so magnificently expressed” (Michael Meyer, Strindberg: a Biography (OUP, 1985), p. 205), and in this phase of his work, Strindberg thematises gender war with clear sympathies for the male: “Women, being small and foolish and therefore evil […] should be suppressed, like barbarians and thieves. She is useful only as ovary and womb, best of all as cunt.” (Meyer, p. 194) About enriching conversations with men, he writes: “Don’t you think that deep conversations […] are as good as fucking?” (Meyer, p. 146), and he praises Nietzsche: “My spiritual uterus has found a tremendous fertiliser in Friedrich Nietzsche, so that I feel distended like a bitch in heat.” (Meyer, p. 198) 30 Verena Mahlow, “Die Liebe, die uns immer zur Hemmung wurde …”. Weibliche Identitätsproblematik zwischen Expressionismus und Neuer Sachlichkeit am Beispiel der Prosa Claire Golls (Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1996), p. 10. By contrast, the expressionist playwright Carl Sternheim regards context-sensitive shifts between self-orientation and openness to external reality as a constituting feature of authentic life and perceives Woman as a source of energy for the male partner; tensions between self-assertion and the other’s needs in heterosexual relations (see Wolfang Wendler, Carl Sternheim. Weltvorstellung und Kunstprinzipien (Frank-

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furt/M: Athenäum), p. 37, p. 158 and p. 189) can lead to morally unresolvable ambiguities (see Vietta and Kemper, Expressionismus, pp. 306–329). 31 Bess Brenck Kalischer, Die Mühle. Eine Kosmee (1922) (Bremen: Europäischer Hochschulverlag), p. 49. 32 Du bist der Föhn Und warfst die Fackel in mein lebendiges Fleisch. [...] Du hast meine Finger gelähmt Und Ohnmacht gesenkt in mein Atmen. Wenn deine Wangen in meinen Händen liegen, Erschrecken meine Sinne Und mein Glück wird schmerzhaft. Ich muß durch die Erde gehen Und ihre Gluten einlassen in mein Herz, Daß ich nicht werde wie der Tod, Wenn du mich anrührst. In Hartmut Vollmer (ed.), “In roten Schuhen tanzt die Sonne sich zu Tod”. Lyrik expressionistischer Dichterinnen (Zürich: Arche, 1993), p. 207. 33 Mein Blut lallt: Du! Es schwankt, mit ungetaner Sünde Beschwert, in schwülen Straßen müder Einsamkeit. Haß zungt in mir mit geilen Hungerflammen. Er senkt sich dumpf zu mir und träufelt Gift endlos in meinen Schoß. O, Weh! All meine Nächte brechen über mir zusammen! Hilf Du, o hilf mir doch … Aus scharfen Scherben bricht so Böses los. In Vollmer (ed.), “In roten Schuhen tanzt die Sonne sich zu Tod”, p. 141. 34 Deine Hände sind sanfte Betergebärden. […] Das Zeichen: Du wächst in mir tief, weicheingeschnitten Wie Namen Ewigkeit in jungem Baum! Du quellt durch mich, ruhlos wie Rosenkranz-Bitten! Du brennt sich durch Tiefe und allen Traum! Deine Hände, siehe, sind sanfte Betergebärden. Ich glühe vor rotem Weihrauch-Licht! In Vollmer (ed.), “In roten Schuhen tanzt die Sonne sich zu Tod”, p. 199. 35 In Ehrenstein’s poem “Life” (“Leben”) (in “Dich süße Sau nenn ich die Pest von Schmargendorf.” Erotische Gedichte des Expressionismus, ed. Hartmut Geerken (München: btb, 2006), p. 76), the persona looked for women and “found the void, formed to attractive flesh” (“fand das Nichts, zu gutem Fleisch gestaltet”); as part of the material world, the body is cut off from essential reality (“Real ist alles, nur die Welt ist’s nicht!”). 36 See Boldt and Arnolt Bronnen in Krause, Klangbewußter Expressionismus, pp. 105–113 and pp. 117–218; Max Brod, “Die Höhe des Gefühls”, in Der jüngste Tag, ed. Heinz Schöffler (Frankfurt/M: Heinrich Scheffler, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 431– 470; and Paul Zech, “Empor. Dramatisches Gedicht”, in Schrei und Bekenntnis. Expressionistisches Theater, ed. Karl Otten (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962), pp. 238–255 (p. 255).

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37 See Berta Lask, “Selbstgericht”, and Martina Wied, “Die Dirne”, in Vollmer (ed.), “In roten Schuhen tanzt die Sonne sich zu Tod”, pp. 40–41 and p. 74. 38 For Henriette Hardenberg, Südliches Herz. Nachgelassene Dichtungen, ed. Hartmut Vollmer (Zürich: Arche, 1994, pp. 13–14, p. 50, p. 59, and p. 71), the feeling of a reciprocal union of the bodily self is constitutive for all forms of love. 39 This strategy is also employed by August Strindberg, who refers to “masculinised” women as degenerated “hermaphrodites” (Meyer, Strindberg, p. 134); it is also worth noting that, by contrast, the man’s order to brand the woman in Kokoschka’s play is not a form of “feminine”, i.e. seductive taming. 40 The pseudonym “El Hor” definitely refers to a woman, who also published under the name “El Ha”; see Hartwig Suhrbier, “Nachwort”, in El Hor / El Ha, Die Schaukel. Schatten. Prosaskizzen (Göttingen: Steidl, 1991), pp. 77–100, here p. 90 and p. 95. 41 For the purpose of teasing out some Schopenhauerian implications of El Hor’s / El Ha’s vitalism, my focus on the shared perspectives of texts published under the two pseudonyms may suffice; for an instructive analysis of the differences pertaining to the pseudonyms, see Christian Jäger, Minoritäre Literatur (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 2005), pp. 266–282 and p. 548. 42 El Hor / El Ha, Die Schaukel. Schatten. Prosaskizzen, p. 73. 43 Ibid., p. 10, pp. 16–17 and p. 58. 44 Ibid., p. 63. 45 Martina Lüke, “Kampf der Geschlechter: Entfremdung und Lustmord in der expressionistischen Dichtung von El Hor / El Ha”, in seminar 46/2 (May 2010), pp. 112–130, here pp. 115–116. 46 El Hor / El Ha, Die Schaukel. Schatten. Prosaskizzen, pp. 16–17 and pp. 63–64. 47 “Ich fühle noch, wie ich meine Nägel fest in seine Hand drückte. Und wie ich glücklich war über die schönen, roten Blutstropfen, die schwer und glitzernd rannen, bis ich sie mit den Fingerspitzen auffing und in den Mund nahm.” El Hor, “Die Närrin”, in Die rote Perücke. Prosa expressionistischer Dichterinnen, ed. Hartmut Vollmer (Paderborn: Igel, 1996), pp. 39–47 [trans. into English by FK]. 48 “Ich werde dich binden, bevor ich dich küsse.” 49 El Hor, “Die Närrin”, p. 42 and p. 41. “Es war ein ganz gewöhnlicher Gasthausgarten, den der Abend mit Geheimnissen parfümierte, und da erschien er wie der Garten des Lebens, vom dunklen Himmel bewacht. […] Und man bekommt Herzklopfen, wenn man sieht, wie die zarten Blätter oben hell und gequält in den grellen Strahlen zittern. […] Ich atmete seine Stimme ein, ich fraß mit den Augen das Zittern seines Wesens, ich empfand mit allen Nerven sein Blut.” 50 “Es war mir, als müßte ich in sein nacktes Herz hineinbeißen, um nicht zu verdorren.” El Hor, “Die Närrin”, pp. 41–42. 51 El Hor, “Die Närrin”, p. 43. 52 “Ich fühlte nicht seine Arme, die mich umfingen. Ich fühlte nicht seine Nähe, ich fühlte nur seine Kleider, seine Krawatte und seinen Kragen. Wie von fern sah ich seinen Gebärden zu. […] Ich fühlte wieder seine Ärmel sich um mich schlingen, die Knöpfe an seiner Jacke taten mir weh, ich erschrak über seinen Kragen. Aber

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die nervösen Werbungen seiner Hände und seines Mundes konnte ich nicht fühlen.” Ibid., p. 44. 53 Ibid., p. 44. 54 “Wir haben nur den Schrei, den Krampf, das Lachen kranker Menschenlust! Hier ist das Paradies. Alles vergeht und verströmt in Liebe. Feucht und triefend von Schönheit ist der Atem der Nacht. Von allen Büschen und Bäumen tropfen helle Blüten, die vor Liebe gestorben sind. Ihr Geruch zerrt und nagt am Herzen, daß es vor Schmerz und Entzücken fiebert. Die Nachtigallen singen unaufhörlich – du–du–du–du– wie strahlende Blutstropfen sickert es herab auf den stummen Liebestod der Blumen. Dann kommt ein wirbelnder Katarakt von Wollust, es sprudelt, stürzt empor, prasselt und brandet und zerschellt jäh an einem scharfen, gleißend grausamen Triller. Und dann beginnt es wieder, ruhelos, süß und blutig – du–du–du–du– / Alle Wesen streuen ihr Dasein aus. Aus der Tiefe des Teiches kommen die Frösche herauf, und ihre schwirrenden, gurgelnden Rufe ballen sich über dem Wasser zu einem großen Gesang von den Wundern der Finsternis. / Der Morgen kommt.” Ibid., p. 47. 55 Ibid., p. 44. 56 In Vollmer (ed.), “In roten Schuhen tanzt die Sonne sich zu Tod”, pp. 29–35, here pp. 34–35. For a closer analysis, see Mahlow, Weibliche Identitätsproblematik, pp. 196–208, who points out that the protagonist’s initial illusions about love are shattered. However, in a paradoxical manner, the protagonist continues to express loyalty to her dead lover through revenge acts. See also Metzler, De/Formationen, p. 135 (footnote 274). 57 August Strindberg’s naturalist play Miss Julie (1888) deals with a masculinised woman who moves to a chopping block, presented as a space for the realisation of masculine violence, “as though drawn there against her will”, whilst she moves more shyly when she displays, according to the stage directions, “genuine femininity”. In the context of her masculinised performance, she articulates the following fantasy: “Oh – I’d like to see your blood, your brains, on a chopping block – I’d like to see your sex, swimming in a sea of blood, like that bird here – I do believe I could drink from your skull, I’d like to paddle my feet in your breast, I’d roast your heart and eat it whole!” See August Strindberg, “Miss Julie”, in August Strindberg: Miss Julie and Other Plays, trans. by Michael Robinson (OUP, 1998), pp. 55–110, here p. 87 and p. 103; see Christine Kanz, Maternale Moderne. Männliche Gebärphantasien zwischen Kultur und Wissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2009), p. 348 (footnote 241). 58 Metzler, De/Formationen, p. 204. 59 However, the expressionists tend to concentrate on the repulsive aspects of abject bodies, whilst sex murder as a masculine mode of furious self-definition is more typically found in post-expressionist texts (Metzler, De/Formationen, pp. 218–219). 60 Metzler, De/Formationen, pp. 130–143. 61 See Frank Krause, “Gerettete Mütterlichkeit: Zur Symbolik ambivalenter Geschlechter-Inszenierungen in der expressionistischen Moderne”, in Expressionismus und Geschlecht, pp. 61–81. 62 Ibid., pp. 68–71.

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63 See Hartmut Vollmer, “Vorbemerkung zur zweiten Auflage”, in Die rote Perücke. Prosa expressionistischer Dichterinnen, ed. Hartmut Vollmer (Igel: Paderborn, 2010), pp. 20–21. 64 Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus, p. 57. 65 See Frank Krause, “The Phallic Woman as Sacred Mother: Ritualistic Body Phantasms in Expressionist Approaches to Gender”, in Goldsmiths Performance Research Pamphlets, no. 4 (2014) [at press].

CHAPTER TEN WORLD WAR ONE GUEULES CASSÉES AND THE AMBIGUITY OF VIOLENCE MARJORIE GEHRHARDT Abstract Facially injured soldiers, or gueules cassées as they became known in France after the First World War, act as poignant testimonies of the brutality of war and its aftermath. The immediate consequences of the soldiers’ wounds aside, they had to deal with the challenge to their individuality and their masculinity. This contribution considers the violence the soldiers experienced and it pursues the case of gueules cassées who themselves turned into perpetrators, both in literature and in real life. It finally explores the unique role of the Union des Blessés de la Face in way of a response to their situation during the interwar years. Gueules cassées is the name for French soldiers who were facially injured during the First World War and formed a self-support organization in the 1920s. The fact they were organized distinguished them from those in other countries. Between 1914 and 1918, new weapons and the trench warfare had exposed soldiers to new risks, leading among other things to a high number of injuries to the face.1 Facial injuries are conspicuously visible; more than any other physically wounded combatants, gueules cassées were living embodiments of the brutality of war. The violence witnessed, suffered and inflicted during the war required them to find ways of coping after their return from the front. The role of the state as the overarching agency representing the masses, the victims and the perpetrators, is of particular significance here. To illustrate the ambiguous relationship between the state and the individual I will consider literary examples, but also the case of Léon Gardeblé, a French gueule cassée tried for murder in 1930.

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Gueules Cassées and the State Facial wounds, maybe more than other injuries, affect men in their individuality, isolating them from society but also creating a conflict in terms of self-perception. This feeling of alienation from one’s self is made visible in Pierre Dumas’s novel L’homme qui mourut deux fois in 1943: the main character, upon seeing himself in a mirror for the first time, is unable to recognise himself.2 Having resolved to sever all links with his past, he takes on the identity of a deceased comrade and decides to stay in Germany to promote Franco-German friendship. The expression “gueule cassée” (broken mug) French veterans chose for themselves emphasizes their feeling of de-humanization: the marks left by war led them to feel downgraded to the rank of animals. The “brokenness” – both physical and psychological – that is stressed, points to the brutality of war. In addition to the aesthetic and practical consequences of deformity, these men feared the impact of their wounds on their social life. Reactions from their families and society were a major source of concern.3 Wives and fiancées sometimes responded negatively to the return of their disfigured husbands (to-be), finding themselves unable to look at, let alone kiss, the mangled face.4 Nicknamed in France les baveux (the dribblers) since many suffered excessive salivation, some of them remained unable to eat solid food for the rest of their lives. It is therefore hardly surprising that Amy Lyford discusses gueules cassées in her publication Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France.5 Susan Sontag also chooses photographs of facially injured men to illustrate the impact of war photography in Regarding the Pain of Others.6 Gueules cassées had received their wounds while fighting for their country and they were on occasions acknowledged as national heroes. Thus, five French gueules cassées were invited by Clemenceau to attend the signing ceremony of the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919. Standing where all the delegates could see them, their presence functioned as a reminder of the realities of the war, a visual testimony of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans who were at this point officially designated as solely responsible for the conflict. In the following years however, rather than the Germans, many veterans considered the French state to be the real culprit of their misery. The responsibility of the state was highlighted in a pamphlet published by the German Socialist Ernst Friedrich in 1924.7 Based on photographs taken during the First World War, it includes captions written in four languages, thus targeting an international audience. The pamphlet’s

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purpose is clearly anti-militarist and the author encourages the readers to stand up against the state which triggers war but remains removed from the subsequent horror. A large section, entitled “The Visage of the War”, is devoted to facially injured men. One of the overall twenty-four photographs features on the original cover page. Compared with the rest of the book, here the captions are factual. Friedrich may have considered these photographs to be self-explanatory and saw no reason to add to their impact. Twelve of these photographs are accompanied by information regarding the victim’s name, age, rank, professional occupation or nature, date or place of injury. The facially injured men are the only ones to be identified – apart from prominent political leaders such as the Crown Prince and Wilhelm II. This information is, arguably, in lieu of personal features. While most of the photographs show patients under treatment, the very last picture is that of a soldier whose wounds are apparently cured but who is still missing most of his face. Tellingly, the next section is devoted to pictures of cemeteries, establishing a parallel between facial disfigurement and death. The state’s actions trigger a course of events that lead to man’s demise. The pamphlet openly condemns war and seeks to confront those Friedrich holds responsible for it – the state in general and its rulers in particular. To simplify the identification process, Friedrich included an empty table for names of those “rulers and governments of those countries who fear the truth and who forbid this book”.8 He distinguishes between those who order war and observe operations from a safe distance and those who, although they had no part in the decisionmaking process, are the ones who are actually forced to fight. This opposition between two groups is a recurring pattern throughout the book, as Friedrich juxtaposes official views on war with images of actual fighting experiences. The discrepancy between these two positions reinforces his attack against authorities who shy away from truth although “not a single man of any country whatsoever can arise and bear witne[s]s against these photographs, that they are untrue and that they do not correspond to realities”.9 The implicit danger of criticising the state and its actions was that this potentially undermined the value of the cause soldiers had served, rendering their sacrifice meaningless. Injured soldiers expected the state to provide adequate medical treatment. Specialised units bear testimony to the efforts made to care for men suffering facial injuries.10 However, the development of specialised maxillofacial centres was largely the result of individual efforts and was initially hardly supported by military authorities. Thus, whilst working at Aldershot, Cambridge, Harold Gillies, who was later to supervise the opening of the first purpose-built maxillofacial centre in Sidcup, took it

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upon himself to have tags printed and sent to hospitals so that facially injured men would be directly sent to him. In Great Britain, France and Germany, individual surgeons such as Harold Gillies, Hippolyte Morestin, Albéric Pont, Jacques Joseph and Christian Brühn played an instrumental part in raising awareness of the plight of facially injured men, and of organising their medical care. Once the surgical treatment was over, the soldiers were left to deal with the trauma caused by disfigurement. This psychological process of re-appropriating their own body and accepting their changed appearance was often helped by nurses and hospital visitors.11 This kind of help could hardly be offered after the men were discharged from hospital and they were left to deal with long-term consequences mostly by themselves. The freedom to choose a practitioner was at first denied to French gueules cassées (as opposed to other injured veterans).12 In terms of medical treatment, standard prosthetics were of little help; masks for instance needed to be hand-made and were carefully painted by the artist in the presence of the mutilated man so that the colour would match the man’s skin carnation. These disguises were sometimes made in hospitals, with artist’s studios such as Francis Derwent Wood’s at the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth, being set up in close relationship with maxillofacial units.13 In France, the work of sculptors Anna Coleman Ladd and Jeanne Poupelet at the “Tin Noses Shop”, is the only of its kind to have been documented in the country.14 In this studio, set up and run by the Red Cross, facially disfigured men were fitted with masks and attachments. Even some tools of general use, such as the “masticateur” – a device aimed to enable men with jaw injuries to masticate – were hard to obtain from the French state, as evidenced in the Bulletins de l’Union des Blessés de la Face: “Either we have not been very clear in expressing our request, or our claim [for a masticateur] has been looked down upon, so much so that one mixed up masticateur and re-education.”15 The state’s unwillingness to satisfy what facially injured men regarded as basic practical demands led to a growing dissatisfaction amongst French veterans. Beyond medical issues, expectations regarding the state’s provision for facially injured soldiers extended to pensions and professional reintegration. The question of pensions was contentious, as facial injuries were not always physically debilitating. In Great Britain, the Ministry of Pensions rated “very severe facial disfigurement” as 100 per cent disabling, although what fell into this category is not specified.16 French facially disfigured men had their pensions re-assessed in 1927, after years of campaigning. Official documents reveal that British authorities saw the

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case of disfigured men as separate from that of other mutilated veterans: a 1919 report on the training of disabled men states that “the Ministry of Pensions will deal with those cases where from the nature of the disablement, the man cannot be trained or employed in association with other men, i.e. facial disfigurement”.17 Once their surgical treatment had come to an end, opportunities to get such training became scarcer. The situation of facially disfigured soldiers in post-war Britain confirms Deborah Cohen’s general assessment regarding the state’s disengagement and the predominance of the charitable sector in supporting World War One veterans.18 Similar observations can be made about France, where there is no evidence to suggest that the state sought to offer professional training to facially injured men. The state’s failure to provide practical help to facially disfigured veterans could be interpreted as evidence of a lack of acknowledgement of the soldiers’ sacrifice or, more generally, of the realities of war once it was over. In her discussion of the symbolic function of the mutilated soldier’s body, Sabine Kienitz underlines the hostility of German civilians against wounded veterans, which sometimes gave way to open physical violence.19 Thus, the brutality inflicted on these men did not stop after the war, and the very people they had fought to protect appeared to turn against them. The antagonism between German society and veterans is analysed by Robert Whalen as the result of a deliberate strategy through which the German state sought to make veterans appear not as heroes but as burdens to society.20 They were, then, victimised twice: first as canonfodder during the war, later due to the lack of care they experienced.

Reclaiming control Gueules cassées reacted differently but they all have in common that they refused to be victimised and that they desired to reclaim control one way or another. Examples of facially injured men pursuing peace or committing crimes can be found both in literature and in real life. Léon Gardeblé, a gueule cassée who killed his wife’s lover in 1929, exemplifies this dual nature as a victim and perpetrator. His court case is reported in an article published in 1930 in the Parisian edition of Le Petit Journal. The headline leaves no doubt as to his culpability: “A facially disfigured man, Léon Gardeblé, who murdered his wife’s lover, is acquitted.”21 The accompanying picture shows him standing in court, a patch covering his eye, dressed in a formal suit. His representation in the defendant’s box, as well as his description as a murderer, contrast with the fact that he has been acquitted and suggests that the author disagrees with

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this verdict. The article itself starts with a description of the veteran’s face, showing that this court case was deemed newsworthy largely because of the defendant being a gueule cassée: His mutilated eye is hidden behind a black patch, the whole right-hand side of his face has been ravaged by the bullet which turned him into a severely wounded war veteran, a “gueule cassée”, the ribbons of the médaille militaire and the croix de guerre are visible on the lapel of his black jacket, very proper, very dignified, pitiable. [...] The physical and moral hardships he has faced, his conjugal misfortunes, his nervosity, have made him a criminal and led him to stand in the defendant’s box. 22

As in most literary depictions of facially injured men, the physical description of the wound is rather brief and the focus is on its moral and social significance. Although the ex-serviceman admitted that he committed a crime, the dramatic description of his situation leads the reader to empathize. Gardeblé’s wife and her lover are pictured with less sympathy: the woman appears unfaithful and her testimony is presented as unconvincing. Likewise, Platteau, the murdered man, is said to have threatened Gardeblé several times: the murderer is now described as a victim. A crime, the obvious infringement on society’s order, paradoxically turns out to be an opportunity to praise the perpetrator’s qualities. Far from being portrayed as a brutal monster, the emphasis is on Gardeblé’s humanity. The circumstances in which the crime took place further exonerate him from any responsibility for the murder: Gardeblé had just endured a painful medical procedure and was still under the influence of drugs. Like in literary examples, the wounded veteran states that he had lost control over his emotions, he was like a “drunk man” when he killed Platteau.23 This focus on the veteran’s suffering adds to the pathos of the mutilated man’s story and his wound itself seems enough to justify his acquittal: “the very look of his poor face eloquently pleads in his favour.”24 It is the jury who acquitted him but the representatives of the state seem to have encouraged this verdict. The police inspector in charge of the enquiry openly praised Gardeblé and the prosecutor himself only gave a “very moderate prosecution speech”.25 Under the circumstances, the acquittal was no surprise. This court case is indicative of society’s choice to regard him as a victim rather than a murderer. This verdict echoes the acquittal of François in Henri Galis’s novel, as if gueules cassées had already paid off more than enough of their debt to the state and to society.26 When a facially disfigured man becomes violent, the state cannot, or refuses to, condemn him.

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More parallels can be drawn between Gardeblé and François in Galis’s Mon visage fait horreur. Confession d’une “gueule cassée”. Here too, the mutilated man’s culpability is in no doubt: he killed his mistress, although apparently accidentally. The troubles he experienced following his injury, however, convince the jury to acquit him, even when he himself was hoping to be condemned to death, which would finally put an end to his suffering. In this fictional case, as well as in Gardeblé’s, the facially disfigured veteran is presented as having been dramatically changed by his injury, the violence that was inflicted on him accounting for his brutality, which the state and society choose not to punish. Pierre Dumas’s novel provides an example of a protagonist’s campaign for the promotion of peace that is void of any criticism of the causes of war; rather it is a means for him to make sense of his injury and its life-changing consequences: “I have not suffered in vain, if the sacrifice of my face is the price to pay for peace.” 27 Real-life gueules cassées also got actively involved against war. Their appearance in, and support of, Pour la Paix du monde / Les gueules cassées, a documentary described as “a major historical film” is evidence of the involvement of some French facially disfigured men in pacifist propaganda.28 So is their participation in Abel Gance’s J’accuse.29 The film (1938) features facially injured veterans in the roles of dead World War One soldiers who, answering the hero’s plea, come back from the grave to remind 1930s society of the gruesome reality of war. The director’s notes are telling in terms of the reaction he seeks to trigger in his audience: the sight of gueules cassées, “stone statues”, is to leave a lasting impact on viewers, a picture “engraved in spectators’ memories and lasting throughout time”.30 Although facially injured men only appear in one scene, their presence and support were widely acknowledged. However, in fiction as well as in real life, many of the veterans placed patriotism above pacifism. This also conferred a greater purpose on their wounds, turning them into tangible proof of the soldiers’ heroism. The specific status of facial injuries in the hierarchy of wounds is noticeable in Girard’s La vie intime d’une gueule cassée: at the military parade commemorating the armistice, the female heroine describes the group of facially disfigured men as the most “impressive” and “pitiable” group of veterans.31 To her, wounds evoke not the horror of war, but a man’s courage; not merely evidence of collective brutality, they are, moreover, telling of individual qualities. Such descriptions make the facially disfigured veteran the ultimate embodiment of heroism and point to the superior cause for which he sacrificed his face: his country. Patriotism forces the hero in Dumas’s novel out of his German retreat and brings him

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back to France to fight alongside his fellow countrymen. Patriotism also leads the main character in Jean-Renaud’s Gueules cassées, to go back to the front after he has been disfigured, thus underlining his strength of character: It was a terrible experience; but today, it doesn’t matter if I am disfigured, you know? ... No, not at all ... it is true, my soul has helped me to laugh at hunger, hardships, deprivation; it has helped me to offer without any regrets my past and my future to my Country! Duty, Country! How magnificent they are!32

A similar stance was taken by real-life gueules cassées. Although they sought to raise people’s awareness of the realities of war through films, their organisation did not rule out the possibility of armed combat. During the time he served as a député and government member, Colonel Picot, one of the most emblematic World War One gueule cassées, tried to improve the organisation of the armed forces rather than dismantle them. And when it became clear that a new war could no longer be avoided, his comrades of the Association des gueules cassées voluntarily took part in the war effort, as shown in their declaration that: Our duty is clear: we must extend our activities and take into account the new miseries caused by the war, we must bring our help and affection to those who are like us. Since we can no longer take up arms and go to the front, at least we can offer up what is left of our strength to serve our comrades and our country.33

Gueules cassées did not oppose violence, not even the very form of brutality of which they were themselves victims.

A surrogate agency The emphasis placed on supporting those men who were inevitably going to be injured during the course of the Second World War is telling of the esprit de corps which united facially disfigured soldiers of different military ranks but also victims of different wars. The particularly strong bond between French gueules cassées which led them to set up their own self-support organisation is worth noting. The Union des Blessés de la Face is a small-scale organisation which supported facially disfigured veterans when the state proved unable to provide for them. It constitutes an innovative response towards being victimised; through this organisation, mutilated soldiers were able to support each other, fashion the

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image they wanted the general public to see, and thus reclaim control over their destinies. The Union des Blessés de la Face was set up in France in 1921 and was one of the first injury-specific veterans’ organisations. It reveals the need by a small group of facially disfigured soldiers to maintain the relationships forged during the long months spent in hospitals, and their resourcefulness. The state was perceived as having failed to provide the material help gueules cassées needed or thought they were entitled to; the Union enabled them to have their voice heard and to defend their claims with more efficiency. A key factor was numbers, hence the constant emphasis, in the Bulletins, on propaganda. Amongst their main battles was the right to choose their medical doctor – a right given to other mutilated veterans by a 1919 law but denied to facially injured men. After repeated requests article 64 was modified, eventually meeting the demand of gueules cassées in 1924.34 The following year, a decree was passed that represented another victory of the Union over the state: their long-term claim to have their pensions revised was successful, as the problems caused by facial injuries and disfigurement were finally officially acknowledged and the state assumed responsibility for compensating victims.35 The Association des Gueules Cassées was sometimes in opposition to the state. In areas in which it recognised that the state would not, or could not, be of much help to facially disfigured veterans, it endeavoured to find solutions. Thus an “employment” service was established, through which people could advertise vacancies directly to other members. Although the state had taken legal measures to favour the return of veterans into employment, facially disfigured men found themselves to be in a situation they perceived as particularly difficult: If finding employment in hard for all mutilated veterans, gueules cassées have the greatest difficulties. This is due to the fact that we not only suffer from physical disabilities, but our faces also bear horrible injuries ... we can understand why employers hesitate to hire us, when they want to please their forgetful customers who would rather be served by people with a normal smile ...36

These observations are void of any bitterness towards employers who are reluctant to hire disfigured men, or towards the state for not ensuring that veterans can go back to work. According to the author, gueules cassées should not expect help from the outside, but rather rely on the natural solidarity amongst men who have gone through the same experiences. Interestingly, the Union did not rely on state funds to survive, but rather sought to develop its own network of supporters and came up with new

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ways of raising money, as evidenced in its early, and profitable, involvement in the national lottery. The entrepreneurial spirit of this organisation and its achievements in its various battles with the French state should not overshadow its concern for the psychological and social welfare of its members. This aspect of the work of the Union is underlined from the first Bulletin, its president Picot reminding members of the friendship which gave birth to this organisation and of the comradeship between injured veterans.37 The weekly meetings and annual assemblies aim to gather men, providing them with a network of useful contacts but also integrating them in a friendly circle of “people like them”. The rhetoric of the Bulletins stresses the organisation’s purpose to further friendship and fellowship, offering facially disfigured veterans a family. This social function of the Union des Blessés de la Face is also visible in later initiatives such as the purchase of houses, the organisation of holiday camps and the regular publication of family news in the organisation’s bulletins. Isolation was a real risk and the Union was a safe environment in which facially disfigured veterans could socialise. The Union des Blessés de la Face stands out as an original initiative by facially injured men to further their claims and make up for the shortcomings of the state. Refusing to remain passive victims, its members attempted to find solutions by themselves. This determination to overcome difficulties is obvious in some of the Union’s mottos: “GUEULES CASSEES suffer more than others but are not mere WRECKS” or “A Gueule Cassée must smile, no matter what”.38 Unlike the state that had failed to care for them, the Union des Blessés de la Face offered an alternative structure, founded on the model of an extended male family, which sought to respond to both the passive and active violence experienced.*

Notes 1

Sophie Delaporte estimates that between 11 and 14 per cent of French soldiers wounded during the war suffered from facial injuries and between 10,000 and 15,000 remained severely disfigured. Sophie Delaporte, Les gueules cassées: Les blessés de la face de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Noêsis, 1996), p. 30. 2 Pierre Dumas, L’homme qui mourut deux fois (Bordeaux: Editions Delmas, 1943), p. 40. 3 Henriette Rémi, Hommes sans visage (Lausanne: SPES, 1942) reports the case of a patient who committed suicide after his son failed to recognise him. In literature, a recurring motive is that of men rejecting other people out of fear that they might be rejected or pitied.

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4 In Renée Girard’s La vie intime d’une gueule cassée (Paris: Les Etincelles, 1931) Gérard’s fiancée breaks up with him. 5 Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of PostWorld War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 6 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: The Penguin Group, 2004), pp. 13–14. 7 Ernst Friedrich (1894–1967) was a German anti-war militant. His 1924 pamphlet Krieg dem Kriege! (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2004) made him famous. He is the founder of the Anti-War museum in Berlin (1925), which was shut down when the National Socialists seized power. 8 Friedrich, Krieg dem Kriege!, p. 5. 9 Ibid., p. 23. 10 The Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, the Val-de-Grâce Hospital in Paris and the Charité in Berlin were three major World War One maxillo-facial centres. 11 See Rémi, Hommes sans visage, and Elisabeth Baillaud, Témoignage d’une infirmière du Val-de-Grâce, Collection: Musée du Service de Santé des Armées au Val-de-Grâce. 12 The campaign to obtain this right is reported in the Bulletins de l’Union des Blessés de la Face. This demand is repeatedly mentioned until February 1923 (No. 6) when free access to this device is announced, in accordance with a December 1922 decree. 13 The work of Wood at his “Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department” is described in Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co, 1918), as well as in contemporary medical publications. Official war photographer Horace Nicholls took a series of photographs, entitled “Repairing War’s Ravages”, showing the different stages of the mask-making process (Imperial War Museum collection, Q. 30,449–Q. 30,450). 14 A short film documents their work: Red Cross Work on Mutilés at Paris, 1918 (National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology / United States). 15 “C’est à croire que nous nous sommes fort mal expliqués, à moins que l’on ait regardé notre modeste demande d’un peu haut, de si haut même qu’on aura confondu masticateur et re-education!” Bulletin de l’Union des Blessés de la Face, 4 May 1922, p. 2. 16 Cabinet Memorandum: Ministry of Pensions. Report for the period from the 24th March to the 30th March 1917 (National Archives reference CAB 24/9). 17 Ministry of Pensions, Report for January 1919 (J. A. Flynn, National Archives reference: CAB 24/76). 18 Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (London: University of California Press, 2001). 19 Sabine Kienitz, Beschädigte Helden: Kriegsinvalidität und Körperbilder 1914– 1923 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008). 20 Robert Wahlen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–1939 (Ithaka/NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

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Georges Martin, “Une ‘gueule cassée’ Léon Gardeblé meurtrier de l’ami de sa femme est acquitté”, Le Petit Journal (édition de Paris), 7 January 1930. 22 “Son œil crevé dissimulé sous un bandeau noir, toute la partie droite de la face ravage par le projectile qui fit de lui un grand mutilé de la guerre, une ‘gueule cassée’, le ruban de la médaille militaire et celui de la croix de guerre au revers de son veston noir, fort correct, fort digne, pitoyable. […] Ses malheurs physiques et moraux, son infortune conjugale, sa nervosité ont fait de lui un criminel et l’ont conduit sur le banc des accusés.” Le Petit Journal, p. 3. 23 “En sortant de l’hôpital j’étais comme un homme ivre.” Ibid. 24 “Le seul aspect de son pauvre visage plaide éloquemment pour lui.” Ibid. 25 “L’avocat général Gazier ne pouvait que prononcer un réquisitoire fort modéré.” Ibid. 26 Henri Galis, Mon Visage fait horreur: Confession d’une “gueule cassée” (Paris: Les œuvres libres, 1929). In this novel, the main protagonist, François, is awaiting his trial in prison following the accidental murder of his mistress. Urged by the prison chaplain, he tells him his story, focussing on the years following his facial injuries. The narrative underlines the challenges to his masculinity, especially with regard to women. 27 “Ce n’est pas pour rien que j’ai donné ma gueule ... si je l’ai donnée pour la paix.” Dumas, L’homme qui mourut deux fois, p. 72. 28 “Un grand film historique”, Le Journal, 29 September 1927. German critique Kurt Tucholsky underlines the impact of this pacifist plea in “Französischer Kriegsfilm”, Vossische Zeitung, 2 November 1927. 29 Abel Gance, J’accuse (Forrester-Parant Production, 1938). 30 Abel Gance, “Notes on J’accuse”, 1937 (Cinémathèque française, Casier 7 Stan B 7887, ref. 128–129). The original text specifies that Gueules Cassées are to be like “statues de pierre” and leave an impression “qui résiste au temps en se gravant indélébilement dans les mémoires des spectateurs”. 31 “Impressionnant” and “pitoyable”. Girard, La vie intime d’une gueule cassée, p. 14. 32 “Ce fut terrible; mais aujourd’hui, défiguré ou non, tu sais ? ... non, rien … c’est vrai, elle [mon âme] m’a aidé à me moquer de la faim, de la dure, de la privation; à offrir sans regret mon passé et mon avenir à la Patrie! Le Devoir, la Patrie! Comme c’est grand!” Jean-Renaud, Gueules cassées (Paris: Les Etincelles, 1929), p. 17. 33 “Notre devoir est tout tracé: nous devons accroître notre activité en nous penchant sur les nouvelles misères nées de la guerre, en apportant à ceux qui nous ressemblent notre aide affectueuse et fraternelle. Puisque nous ne pouvons songer à reprendre un ‘flingot’ et à monter là-haut, du moins pouvons-nous donner ‘nos pauvres restes’ pour servir nos camarades et en même temps notre pays.” Raymond-Noël Bréhamet and Noëlle Roubaud, Le Colonel Picot et “Les Gueules Cassées” (Rennes: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1960), p. 55. 34 Bulletin de l’Union des Blessés de la Face, 10 March 1924, p. 3. 35 Bulletin de l’Union des Blessés de la Face, 11 February 1925, pp. 1–2. 36 “S’il existe des difficultés de placement pour tous les blessés, il n’en est pas qui dépassent celles rencontrées par les ‘Gueules cassées’? C’est que, au degré d’incapacité fonctionnelle vient s’ajouter la nature même de nos blessures qui

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constitue à proprement parler l’Horreur… Et nous comprenons l’hésitation des employeurs empressés de mettre à la disposition de leur clientèle oublieuse, des employés au sourire correct …” Bulletin de l’Union des Blessés de la Face, 4 May 1922, p. 6. 37 Bulletin de l’Union des Blessés de la Face, 1 July 1921, p. 2. 38 “Les ‘GUEULES CASSEES’ souffrent plus que les autres mais ils ne se résignent pas à jouer les ‘EPAVES’” and “Une ‘Gueule Cassée’ doit sourire quand même”. Bulletin de l’Union des Blessés de la Face, 4 May 1922, pp. 6–7. * I would like to express my thanks to Shona Cooke for her support.

CHAPTER ELEVEN MALE MURDERERS IN JOSEPH ROTH’S TARABAS AND BEICHTE EINES MÖRDERS JOHANN GEORG LUGHOFER Abstract This article provides a close reading of two novels by the writer and journalist Joseph Roth (1894–1939). While he is usually associated with misogynistic tendencies, it will be shown that a focus on gendered violence reveals Roth’s aversion against institutionalised brutality. This becomes obvious on the one hand within the context of war and soldiers, and on the other, in view of police bodies in general and spies in particular. At the core of their unrepentant use of force is, it will be argued, a misguided male agency. Probably the most controversial question in the impressive body of research on Joseph Roth is the one concerning his position towards women. His work is mainly interpreted as a manifestation of hatred towards them. In particular, the novella Triumph der Schönheit contributes to this perspective. Here, an attractive English lady drives her Austrian husband to insanity through her infidelity: “He died at a young age and slowly and his disease was the most dangerous of all. He died because of a woman and she was his wife.”1 Women as a type of sickness that besets men became closely associated with Joseph Roth because destructive relationships appear in most of his works. In fact, Wolfgang Müller-Funk goes as far as to call Roth’s writing a thoroughly misogynistic oeuvre.2 The author undoubtedly concentrates on a society shaped by men. In particular, Roth’s first novels deal with former soldiers returning from war and the break down of the traditional order. They remain without a homeland, direction or father-figures, whilst women at the same time appear to possess and defend their homes.

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For example, in Roth’s most famous novel Radetzkymarsch, the role of mothers is questioned. Here, older women bring about disaster and cause the young Carl Joseph Trotta’s life-long misery. As a teenager he is seduced by the maternal Slama; Müller-Funk reads her Slavic family name as an indication of her sexual aggressiveness.3 She dies during delivery of a dead child and Carl Joseph never recovers from this experience. Eva, the wife of the army doctor Max Demant, plays a prominent role in the death of her husband during a duel. Finally, Carl Joseph’s un-heroic death during the First World War can be seen as predestined thanks to his fatal relationship with Frau von Taußig, an older married woman. Carl Joseph ends up in debt. Müller-Funk argues that these women all trigger a sense of uncertainty among men, at times even obsessions, ultimately leading to disaster.4 Men fail in the modern world, while women seem to be more adaptable. Müller-Funk’s approach fits the long-held tradition of viewing Roth’s depiction of women in solely negative terms. Roth’s stereotypical and misogynistic presentation of them has been criticized by Margarete Willerich-Tocha.5 Reinhard Baumgart interprets women in Roth’s work as representing obstructions to men’s success – but also as being objects of the lingering male gaze.6 Dietmar Mehrens, too, notices the negative influence of cold and destructive women on Roth’s male protagonists.7 Jon Hughes confirms the acknowledgement of a misogynistic portrayal, in that Roth uses only gender stereotypes.8 Unavoidably, this has been linked to the author’s treatment of women in real life.9 Although the evidence is on first sight convincing, I wish to argue that a distinction should nevertheless be made: while the various protagonists admittedly uphold a stereotypical view of women, the narrator highlights this very fact and makes sure to distance himself from the protagonists’ views. In Der stumme Prophet (1929), for example, Herr von Maerker believes in the depravity of all women. The narrator comments on the fact humorously by explaining that “although Herr von Maerker had read all sorts of French literature about nunneries and schools exclusively for girls, like most men he was deeply convinced of women’s corrupt qualities, with the exception of his own wife and her immediate relatives. Depravity begins with the cousins.”10 Isabel Dos Santos counters this trend in reading Roth’s work.11 Instead, she points out that his journalistic pieces consider women who are pushed by a patriarchal society into prostitution and crime. Dos Santos reveals the humanity of figures such as Klara in Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927) or Elisabeth in Kapuzinergruft (1938), characters who are usually considered examples of the writer’s supposed aggressive stereotyping.

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A closer inspection of Roth’s presentation of gender in the context of violence illuminates this further. Indeed, physical, verbal, emotional and sexual violence is omnipresent in Roth’s writing, although it tends to go unnoticed by the characters. For the writer, though, violence is anything but self-evident. On the contrary, he reflects on its coverage in media and literature. In an article titled “Nonpareille aus Amerika” (1929), Roth complains about newspapers that provide only a small space for everyday individual violence, in this instance, the story of four prisoners having been publicly beaten with whips. Even car accidents are more prominently placed. Instead, on the day of the beatings the first page of the news features the arrival of the Romanian king. Roth here sees parallels with war times at work, when few references to casualities were to be found in the papers and numbers tended to be hidden away.12 What constitutes for Roth the most shocking facet of the torture which the four prisoners were submitted to, is the presence of two hundred official witnesses:13 violence is institutionally endorsed. Violence is particularly prominent in Roth’s first three novels written in exile, after the National Socialist seizure of power forced him abroad permanently. I will focus on two of them, Tarabas. Ein Gast auf Erden and Beichte eines Mörders erzählt in einer Nacht. In these novels Roth addresses the question of the relationship between what could be termed “professional” and “private” violence. Tarabas (1934) was first published as a serialised novel in Pariser Tagblatt. It tells the story of the young Russian Nikolaus Tarabas who takes refuge in the United States because of his involvement in revolutionary activities back home. His girlfriend Katharina, a waitress in a bar, understands, it is claimed, his moods: “He was jealous, wild and tender, ready to do both, to beat and to kiss.”14 When one day the landlord is forced to protect Katharina against Tarabas’ beatings, he, in turn, is brutally attacked. The landlord’s suffering increases Tarabas’ lust to inflict pain: “It was as if only once the landlord lost blood he became his real and massive enemy, the only enemy in existence in this overwhelming city of stone, New York.”15 As the landlord reaches for a handkerchief, Tarabas rushes upon him, strangles and beats him until he lies unconscious. Tarabas flees and develops his own narrative of the event, one that tells of his chivalrous fight for a lady and his innocence. He does so influenced by a motion picture which presents a man turned murderer for the sake of a woman.16 Like the aforementioned newspapers, film acts as a veil over reality. Tarabas duly watches the film five times and begins to perfect his vision of himself as a victim of circumstances. Crucially, and betraying a pattern in Roth’s work concerned with violent men, he reports for service

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at the beginning of the war between Russia and Austria and – most ironically – “forgives” Katharina. From a distance he begins to reminiscence: “A short while later he remembered Katharina. He had treated her well and she had provided him with a sense of home – and only lied to him once.”17 Tarabas does not treat his cousin Maria much better; his acknowledgement of her presence is purely physical. However, once he finds out that she married a German officer, he yet again is overwhelmed with self-pity and regards himself as a man undermined by women.18 In reality, then, there is little evidence here of male characters being destroyed by women. Instead, Tarabas makes Katharina as well as Maria suffer and he does so for no other reason than to maintain his selfperception. It is exclusively in his mind, and part of his personal narrative, that women are responsible for crime and misery in general. In the reality the narrator is after, however, men brutally destroy women’s lives – and this treatment, framed by the all-encompassing First World War, is considerably worse than Tarabas’ handling of his own relationships. There is a telling scene in which Tarabas’ father beats his son following the misguided relationship with Maria: during the process, Tarabas’ only concern is for his uniform. Rather than his parents, war is the home Tarabas relishes: War was his unlimited, bloody home. He moved from one part of the frontline to the other. He reached peaceful territories, set fire to villages, left the rubble of smaller and larger towns behind him, mourning women; orphans; beaten, strung up and murdered men.19

Contrary to Tarabas, the narrator’s – and presumably Roth’s – interest lies with the victims, especially female victims. Tarabas, meanwhile, loves his soldiers, although he shows no concern for their well-being: “Tarabas loved his men, he loved them in his very own way since he was their master. He saw lots of them die. He liked that. He enjoyed in principal when people died all around him.”20 It is the simplicity of killing and dying that appeals to him.21 Strikingly, even though Tarabas loves war, not a single battle scene is depicted. All the more noticeable is the depiction of sexual violence against women in way of alternative battlefields. Debra Bergoffen interprets wartime rape to be as ancient as war itself. It is aimed at destroying the assumed enemy’s community, leading to a symbolic destruction of men, too. The raped female body represents the end of communal ties.22 Roth therefore depicts rape as a highly destructive tool in wartime. Tarabas displays, for example, his sense of limitless power when he spends the night with a fourteen-year-old girl in one of the

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occupied villages. In fact, she is dutifully delivered by her mother as a matter of course. The girl holds no meaning; he neither perceives her as an individual, nor is he interested in her name. Instead, he chooses to “christen” her with his riding whip and calls her Maria for the duration of his stay in the village.23 Jewish communities, notably Jewish women, are treated with even more brutality.24 Here, too, the visibility of bloodshed incites further violence. The murders and the eventual pogrom seem, however, to be all accompanied or anticipated by the acts of rape.25 Roth’s obvious concern here is the lack of awareness of violence against women. While Tarabas shows signs of regret and reflection after he wrenches off a Jew’s beard, a particularly male attribute, his attitude towards women remains the same. The boundaries between acting as a soldier and a murderer remain blurred. The fine line between the soldier as professional murderer, whose actions are ultimately endorsed by the state, and the murderer acting on his own behalf and who tends to get away with his actions, is yet again at the heart of Roth’s novel Beichte eines Mörders erzählt in einer Nacht (1936). Here, Semjon Semjonowitsch Golubtschik, who is simply called “the Murderer” among the Russian exile community in Paris, tells his story of being a spy, an informer for the tsarist secret police and finally, the suspected murderer of a couple. “Never”, the murderer states: could I have mastered enough passion to kill someone for political reasons. I actually doubt that political criminals are better or more honourable than others. That is if one thinks a criminal, no matter what kind of criminal, is unable to be a good person. I, for example, have killed and I am nevertheless convinced that I am a good man. Gentlemen: a beast, to spell it out, a woman forced me to commit murder.26

Yet another helpless man then, driven by female agency? This murderer grows up in a climate of systemic gender-related violence. Golubtschik’s mother is able to concede her personal guilt and express regret. Male characters, on the other hand, seem incapable of taking such a step. Working as a spy for the secret police, Golubtschik acknowledges his malicious acts carried out within this body;27 while he is aware of the implications of his work, he blames the impact on human nature in the most general terms.28 Even in exile he portrays his use of past institutional power as a typical human characteristic. Golubtschik, like Tarabas, firmly believes that women are in truth responsible for all evil, and it is solely their power that causes misery. “An enemy”, he argues in front of his avid audience, “destroys you speedily! But the woman – you will understand, how slowly, brutally slowly …”.29 The power he himself

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actually held as a spy goes unacknowledged. And when he finds the woman he loves – one he has pursued ruthlessly – in bed with his arch enemy, he coolly and authoritatively condemns the man to death: “In the name of justice I delivered my verdict: death.”30 Golubtschik describes himself as typical for being shaped by nothing but a policeman’s sense of imagination (“Polizeiphantasie”); the abuse of power, he argues, is an intrinsic part of his human make-up.31 The narrator terms power a specific eroticism policemen hold – a topic Roth time and again discussed in his journalistic pieces.32 This power is bound by uniforms and the power to act at will in the name of order. Even Golubtschik’s payment as a spy in Paris is based on his readiness to act with brutality: the more force he uses, the more money he receives.33 His warped morality goes so far that he contemplates the murder of his assumed opponent in order to finally facilitate what he considers to be a decent lifestyle: It seemed obvious to me that the origins of my nastiness were solely down to him; that guy – to kill him would really be a matter of decency. By annihilating him, I was able to destroy the cause of my miserable existence. Then I would be free to become a good person, to regret, to atone, perhaps a proper Golubtschik. But even at that point, while thinking this through, I lacked the energy to kill. Friends – at that point I was not yet sufficiently pure to be able to kill. Whenever I considered killing a particular person, for me it meant I had to ruin him one way or the other. Us spies – we are no killers. All we do is prepare the circumstances that lead to a person’s death. 34

When he finally gets to the point of killing the woman and his rival suitor, he sheds straight away any sense of responsibility – murder, instead, provides a sense of becoming a real person: “I’m no longer a spy. I am a good person. I’m being provoked. They force me to commit murder.”35 He admits to the pleasure he experiences while beating his victims, and at the same time he excuses (and thereby discredits) himself by assuming that they themselves appear to enjoy his brutality.36 Like Tarabas, Golutschik is fascinated with the flow of blood.37 And like his literary predecessor, he then seeks refuge in the war, which he happens to survive – and highly decorated at that. Roth provides the reader with a bitter turn at this point: while neither the beaten woman nor the man actually die, Golubtschik’s unnamed victims of long-term police brutality remain unnamed, unconsidered casualties and not even worth a story. In conclusion, I would like to highlight two points – one in relation to gender and violence, and one in relation to agency and violence. Firstly,

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Roth’s literary murderers are male. While these men construct an image of women as the true culprits of society’s and man’s woes, the narrator retains at all times the position that they are in the wrong. Dos Santos’ aforementioned argument that women in Roth’s work are not simply and exclusively a dark force is certainly correct. Roth instead highlights the brutality of mechanisms of war, when the rape of women is used as a purposeful weapon. What is more: Roth’s gendered violence highlights the troubling impact of state-endorsed violence as enacted by the secret police and soldiers. Both Tarabas and Golubtschik use institutional power to legitimize essentially private acts of violence. Secondly, Tarabas’ sole moment of insight is based on his act of brutality against another man – obviously something that does not fit into existing and endorsed patterns of aggression. In the case of Golubtschik, matters are worsened by the fact that it is not only the murderer who refuses to develop an understanding for what is wrong, but also his entire environment. Both Golubtschik and Tarabas are shown to have lost any sense of perspective: the acts of cruelty they perceive as such are in essence irrelevant in view of the wider scale of their brutality. As with the cases highlighted by Roth in his journalism, this imbalance goes unnoticed by the individual and by society as a whole. If violence is an issue that is weighed up carefully, the far more destructive trigger behind these acts of inhumanity is purposefully dismissed.

Notes 1

“Jung und langsam [starb er] und an der gefährlichsten und gewöhnlichsten aller Krankheiten; er starb nämlich an einer Frau, und zwar an seiner eigenen.” Joseph Roth, Werke, 6 vols., ed. Klaus Westermann and Fritz Hackert (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989–1991), vol. 5, p. 632. From here on references are abbreviated as Werke, the volume’s number, followed by the page number. 2 “[D]urch und durch mysogenen Werkes.” Wolfgang Müller-Funk, “Mutterlosigkeit und Misogynie bei Joseph Roth”, in Die Lust im Text. Eros in Sprache und Literatur, ed. Doris Moser and Kalina Kupcznska (Vienna: Praesens, 2009), pp. 147–158, here p. 148. 3 Ibid., p. 152. 4 Ibid., p. 157. 5 Margarete Willerich-Tocha, “Bezugsfelder der Roth-Rezeption. Wertungsprobleme schematischer Kommunikation”, in Joseph Roth. Interpretationen – Kritik – Rezeption. Akten des internationalen, interdisziplinären Symosions 1989, ed. Michael Kessler and Fritz Hackert (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1994), pp. 407– 416, here p. 410. 6 Reinhard Baumgart, Auferstehung und Tod bei Joseph Roth. Drei Ansichten (Munich: Hanser, 1991), p. 37.

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Dietmar Mehrens, Vom göttlichen Auftrag der Literatur. Die Romane Joseph Roths. Ein Kommentar (Hamburg: Libri BoD, 2000), pp. 311–312. 8 Jon Hughes, Facing Modernity. Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth’s Writing in the 1920s (London: Maney, 2006), p. 93. 9 Irena Samide, “Joseph Roth und seine Muse(n)”, in Joseph Roth. Europäischjüdischer Schriftsteller und österreichischer Universalist, ed. Johann Georg /XJKRIHU DQG 0LUD 0LODGLQRYLü =DOD]QLN 7ELQJHQ 1LHPH\HU   SS – 152. 10 “Obwohl Herr von Maerker allerhand französische Literatur über Nonnenklöster und Mädchenpensionate gelesen hatte, glaubte er wie die meisten Männer an die Verderbtheit aller Frauen mit Ausnahme ihrer eigenen und ihrer nächsten. Die Haltlosigkeit beginnt erst bei den Cousinen.” Roth, Werke, vol. 4, p. 809. 11 Isabel dos Santos, “Zur ‘Übersetzung des männlichen ernsten Militärexerzierens ins Weibliche’ und zu anderen weiblichen Erscheinungen bei Joseph Roth”, in Joseph Roth. Europäisch-jüdischer Schriftsteller und österreichischer Universalist, pp. 129–141. 12 See Roth, Werke, vol. 3, p. 39. 13 “Das Wichtigste an dem ganzen Schauspiel ist die Zeugenschaft der Zweihundert.” Ibid., p. 41. 14 “Er war eifersüchtig, wild und zärtlich, bereit, zu prügeln und zu küssen.” Roth, Werke, vol. 5, p. 482. 15 “Es war, als ob der Wirt erst in dem Augenblick, in dem sein Blut zu fließen begonnen hatte, sein wirklicher, großer Feind geworden wäre, der einzige Feind, den es im gewaltigen, steinernen New York gab”. Ibid., p. 486. 16 Ibid., p. 488. 17 “Eine Weile später fiel ihm Katharina ein. Er war gut zu ihr gewesen, sie hatte ihm die Heimat ersetzt – und ihn nur ein einziges Mal belogen.” Ibid., p. 492. 18 Ibid., p. 536. 19 “Der Krieg wurde seine Heimat. Der Krieg wurde seine große, blutige Heimat. Von einem Teil der Front zum andern kam er. Er kam in friedliches Gebiet, setzte Dörfer in Brand, ließ die Trümmer kleiner und größerer Städte zurück, klagende Frauen, verwaiste Kinder, geschlagene, aufgehängte und ermordete Männer.” Ibid., p. 501. 20 “Auch Tarabas liebte seine Leute, in seiner Art liebte er seine Leute, weil er ihr Gebieter war. Er sah viele von ihnen sterben. Ihr Tod gefiel ihm. Es gefiel ihm überhaupt, wenn man rings um ihn starb.” Ibid., p. 503. 21 Ibid., p. 538. 22 Debra Bergoffen, “Rape as a Weapon of War”, in IWMpost. Newsletter of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna, and the Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University, ed. Das Institut für die Wissenschaft vom Menschen, 101 (April–August 2009), pp. 13–14. 23 Roth, Werke, vol. 5, p. 504. 24 Ibid., p. 557. 25 Ibid., p. 576. 26 “Niemals hätte ich politische Leidenschaft genug aufbringen können, um einen Menschen aus politischen Gründen zu töten. Ich glaube auch gar nicht, daß

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politische Verbrecher besser oder edler sind als andere; vorausgesetzt, daß man der Meinung ist, ein Verbrecher, welcher Art er auch sei, könne kein edler Mensch sein. Ich zum Beispiel, ich habe getötet und halte mich durchaus für einen guten Menschen. Eine Bestie, um es glatt zusagen: eine Frau, meine Herren, hat mich zum Mord getrieben.” Roth, Werke, vol. 6, p. 9. 27 Ibid., p. 45. 28 Ibid., p. 53. 29 “Der Feind vernichtet euch schnell! – Die Frau aber – ihr werdet bald sehen, wie langsam, wie mörderisch langsam ... .” Ibid., p. 56. 30 “Im Namen des Gesetzes sprach ich mein Urteil: Es lautete auf Tod.” Ibid., p. 63. 31 Ibid., p. 69. 32 “[D]ie besondere Art der polizeilichen Erotik.” Ibid., p. 70. 33 “Außerordentliche Prämien bezahle ich nur für außerordentliche Schuftigkeiten.” Ibid., p. 76. 34 “[Es] schien […] mir klar zu sein, daß die Ursache meiner Schädlichkeit und meiner Schlechtigkeit er allein sei, dieser Bursche eben, und dass ihn zu töten eigentlich eine sittliche Tat sein müsste. Denn indem ich ihn auslöschte, tötete ich auch die Ursache meiner Verderbnis, und ich hatte dann die Freiheit, ein guter Mensch zu werden, zu büßen, zu bereuen, meinetwegen ein anständiger Golubtschik. Aber damals schon, während ich solches überlegte, fühlte ich keineswegs die Kraft in mir zu morden. Ich war, meine Freunde, damals noch lange nicht sauber genug, um töten zu können. Wenn ich daran dachte, einen bestimmten Menschen umzubringen, so war es bei mir, in meinem Innern, gleichbedeutend mit dem Entschluß, ihn auf irgendeine Weise zu verderben. Wir Spitzel sind keine Mörder. Wir bereiten lediglich die Umstände vor, die einem Menschen unweigerlich den Tod bereiten.” Ibid., p. 93. 35 “Ich bin kein Spitzel mehr. Ich bin ein anständiger Mensch. Man reizt mich. Man zwingt mich zum Mord.” Ibid., p. 117. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.

CHAPTER TWELVE UNMASKING MARIAN: REPRESENTING VIOLENCE, GENDER AND AGENCY IN MEDIEVAL FILMS ANDREW B. R. ELLIOTT Abstract This contribution explores, with a focus on a range of films depicting medieval times, retrospective projections of contemporary ideas of gender, violence and agency. In addition to familiar problems of accuracy and historicity, these issues of gender and violence highlight marked differences in cultural meaning when depicting the past in film. In the films examined, the tendency to attribute agency to medieval women simply by depicting them as capable actors able to employ violence paradoxically denies them agency when they are “unmasked” as female warriors. Effective agency, it appears, requires gender to be masked. There is a scene in Kevin Reynolds’ 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which Robin (Kevin Costner) arrives at Marian’s castle in order to offer his services as the maid’s protector. Marian, having sent her servant out in the guise of the lady herself, sharply rebuffs Robin’s offer of defence on the grounds that they “have enough protection”. On cue, a fully-armoured knight emerges from the shadows and engages Robin in a furious battle. As the duo struggle for over thirty seconds of screen time (far longer, it must be remembered, than it will later take Robin to dispatch three or four of the Sheriff’s henchmen), the message seems to come through loud and clear – that, despite years of grizzled and desperate combat in the Holy Land, Robin has met his match. Yet, as it reaches the point of near-failure of the hero (Aristotle’s perepeteia),1 in a desperate move, Robin forces his assailant’s hand into a candle; a female voice

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shrieks, and the knight’s helmet is removed to reveal an impeccably madeup Marian (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) reduced to a vulnerable, helpless and frightened maiden. Despite having put up rather a good fight (and even suggestively chopping off the horns held out at Robin’s waist), once her ruse is unveiled, Marian instantly reverts to her traditional characterisation as a frightened, helpless damsel who can do little more than pout guiltily at the revelation of her subterfuge. Even her last action of resistance against gender typecasting – kneeing Robin in the groin – is undermined by a worried glance for having transgressed manly codes of conduct. This short sequence, then, will serve as my first example of some of the complex fault-lines which the retrospective projection of contemporary thoughts and feelings about gender, violence and agency onto the past inevitably contains. The “unmasking of Marian”, as my title terms it, in fact reveals a great deal more than simply the discovery of Marian’s masquerade as a medieval knight. It speaks to a series of problematic themes that underpin the treatment of gender and violence throughout medieval film, and indeed, speaks volumes about the more complex notions of agency which emerge from attempts to apply to the medieval period concepts belonging to the late twentieth century, and the ideological rifts which such impositions expose. If we are fair to the filmmakers, it is reasonably clear what they were trying to do in this short scene. By dressing up Marian in the armour of a medieval knight and having her fight Robin, a character who has already demonstrated his valour and martial prowess both within the film and through a familiar intertextual paradigm, Reynolds sought to harness a rising trend of empowered heroines emerging in the 1990s. Drawing as much on the rise of “girl power” in popular culture as any gender debates proper, seemingly the idea was to revolutionise traditional depictions of the damsel in distress by allowing her to fight alongside, and in some cases against, men. The (perhaps laudable) hope in so doing seems then to have been to claim her rightful agency as a “knowledgeable and capable” actor on the martial, the marital, and the politico-ideological planes.2 However, when trying to apply such terms and ideas to the medieval period, a period characterised by a very different understanding of the role and function of women in society, things are rarely so simple. Reynolds’ fundamental idea, much like Fuqua’s in King Arthur, which will be discussed later, relies on a basic syllogism. If medieval men were perceived as both violent and powerful, and their power is broadly comparable to what we now call agency, then this agency must have been achieved through violence. All else being equal, then, logic suggests that

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constructing a female warrior capable of such violence will produce a similar effect. Perhaps such an aim ought to be applauded as at least a divergence from the traditionally passive acceptance of normative gender roles. Yet the means by which these aims were to be achieved are in themselves fundamentally flawed and betray a series of untenable assumptions: that gender representation is a direct and unchanging process; that the meaning of violence has a direct and stable relationship within its cultural context; that agency is derived from empowerment through violent means. Furthermore, and more worryingly, not only is the original principle based on flawed assumptions, but reading the film in these terms means that the remainder of the film sets off a chain of unmasking, in which Marian’s introduction as an empowered, strong and independent woman is progressively and systematically undermined on a variety of levels, reducing her at the film’s close to a helpless damsel who is once again reliant on Robin’s band of men to come to the rescue.

Representing Women in the Middle Ages The essential problem here, as with other examples to be adduced throughout this essay, is one of representation. The aims of the filmmakers suggested above are in fact the result of a mismatch between ideologies which have been simplistically overlaid one atop another. To take only one of these strata, by recasting Marian as a kind of empowered actor within the political sphere of the twelfth century, the film was simply mapping modern ideas of “girl power” and selected values of early 1990s feminism onto the medieval period, a period not only remote from us in time, but one whose values and ideological principles we do not fully understand. I have written elsewhere about the difficulties of representing the Middle Ages on screen,3 and a great deal of literature already exists on the projection of contemporary values back onto an earlier age.4 It is important, however, to recognise the essential tensions of representing women in medieval film as they relate to the subject at hand. In a posthumously edited collection of essays, Eileen Powers gives an overview of the place, role and lives of women in the Middle Ages which offers an insight into the complexities, distinctions and subtleties of medieval power structures.5 The conclusion she reaches suggests that, despite the traditional assumptions that women were wholly invisible and stripped of any power during the medieval period, more in-depth scholarship presents a highly ambiguous and at times contradictory picture of medieval women. As Jewell describes it, “in all the areas of study, the

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place of medieval women in England proves full of contradictions and controversy”.6 Such a view is corroborated by Mitchell in her collection on English medieval life: The cultural norms understood and accepted by the typical medieval clerk – that women could not be independent actors in the legal procedures surrounding the conveyance of land from one generation to the next; that women could not sustain a military action on their own; that women’s roles confined them to a domestic sphere in which they had no political voice – were periodically “fractured” as a result of changes in the law or in the social underpinnings of the culture. At these times, “new” realities of female participation and action occurred and provided a means by which women could insert themselves into public discourse.7

A second bone of contention arises when we consider that the notion of representation inevitably contains an element of negotiation, adaptation or even outright betrayal. The representation of medieval women on screen depends in the first place on understanding the values of the medieval period itself, which inevitably requires some simplification. It is disingenuous to try to make general assertions about medieval women’s agency. Aristocratic women and queens would of course have a far greater prominence than their male subordinates in the political sphere. All of these restrictions make generalisations about the subject questionable at best, and at worst downright absurd. Even assuming we had refined our parameters according to the above criteria, any understanding of the agency of medieval women would have to avoid a literal understanding of the extant sources. As Jewell reminds us, “not all cross-gender comment is what it seems, nor is the attitude of an identified male writer necessarily consistent in different situations or at different times in his life”.8 Finally, to complicate the issue still further, even for those films (such as The Prince of Jutland) which use a medieval text to inform an understanding of the period, variations in literary genres might have a marked effect on the ways in which female characters were imagined. Far from being a homogeneous entity to be understood as a whole, each character might find her behaviour filtered through the “horizon of expectations” established by each genre.9 Scandinavian sagas, for instance, on occasion present us with empowered warriors engaging fiercely either on the political level (such as Gunnhild and Bergthora in Njal’s Saga), or directly on the battlefield, fighting side by side with the menfolk (like Gautrekssonar in Hrolf’s Saga, the divorcée Lathgertha of Saxo’s History of the Danes, and the magnificent character Freydis Eiriksdottir of Eirik

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the Red’s Saga who, while pregnant, was nevertheless able to fend off a slew of would-be murderers with her sword). Courtly romances, on the other hand, are often castigated for providing passive, meek damsels who demurely await their male saviours and are denied anything which we might call empowerment or agency. Yet, examining certain Arthurian short stories which emerged from the same body of literature, we see a highly contradictory picture emerge. According to Howey’s study, here we see: female characters [which] do not exist simply to inspire knightly lovers to deeds of prowess; they administer kingdoms, seek out adventure, risk danger, and pursue quests. Furthermore, they do all of these things successfully and without relying on knightly rescue, that favourite device of romance. The stories thus play with our expectation of the legend through the protagonists, focalizing agents and/or narrators chosen.10

Representing violence in the Middle Ages The episode of Marian’s unmasking brings into play a second, equally complex level of representation, and one which produces its own level of ideological conflict: that of the representation, purpose and meaning of violence within the Middle Ages. The literature of chivalric heroes, for example, is filled with decapitated knights, duels, tournaments, swordplay and general derring-do. Even within the field of chivalric romance, a body of literature which might seem on the surface to be concerned with curbing the violent impulses of its knights in the service of courtly love and noblesse, we may cite frequent examples of violence which seem disturbing to our tastes. Malory, in particular, recounts numerous instances of violent acts described in graphic detail, causing Finke and Shichtman to castigate its “excessive violence”, observing that though “it is not quantitatively more violent than other medieval versions of the legend, […] it is often more gratuitously violent”.11 Looking back at the period as represented by its literature, then, we can perceive it to be one of violence and barbarity. Particularly so in the early medieval period in which nation states were being formed, which seems to rely on the very kind of “necessary” violence that served to forestall enemy invasions and became the nucleus around which social groupings, and the nascent feudal hierarchy, were to be formed. This forms the “violent tenor of life” to which Huizinga refers in respect to the later medieval period, and Eco’s “shaggy medievalism”, which seeks to represent the era as primitive, dark and barbaric.12

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However, it is essential to recognise that this violence was interpreted very differently from the violence of our own period since, like any meaning, it was inextricably tied to the social values of the time. As Meyerson, Thiery and Falk demonstrate, depictions of violence in medieval literature should not be understood as literal transcriptions of what they actually did, but may often be understood as a form of euphemerisation celebrating the hero’s power and – no less problematically – his masculinity and virility.13 Finally, to compound the problem even further, we must recognise that it is never possible to interpret such violence innocently, as though it were detached and isolated from modern perspectives, since “the fascination with violence in the Middle Ages stems [in some ways] from the postmodern challenge to the master narrative of the history of the West, which links progress, rationality, and the civilizing process to the rise of orderly nation-states”.14 Such fascination frequently causes modern filmmakers on the one hand to exaggerate the violence of the medieval period in modern accounts of it, in order to juxtapose the “barbarity” of the medieval period with the “civilization” of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, however, the recognition of our own teleological development from, and relationship to, that same period prompts many to modify – or at least to contextualise – the violence of the medieval state, in part as a response to what Sorel posits as an instinctive antipathy to aggression. As he claims, “(that) we are instinctively inclined to think that any act of violence is a manifestation of a return to barbarism”.15 According to such teleological viewpoints, violence is now not seen merely as a characteristic of a safely medieval and barbaric past, but as integral to the historical processes that have brought us to our present condition, as foundational to what we have become. A violent Middle Ages, with its repressive states, persecuting majorities and patriarchal structures is darkly familiar, the analogue of a negatively constructed modern West.16

By this process, modern films representing this period have a deeply ambivalent relationship to violence, on the one hand emphasising violence and primitivism in order to place the “civilised modern world” in a more sympathetic light, while, on the other, seeking to play down any form of extreme or unnecessary violence which carved out the nation states on which modern Europe is indisputably founded. Films representing the medieval past can thus often serve as a kind of redemption narrative which seeks to expiate the sins of our fathers (and here I mean to say “fathers” in particular) while at the same time disputing its parentage.

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As such, given that the sort of state violence which tends to be the focus of medieval films resides predominantly in the male domain (warfare, jousts, battles, etc.), over time, the violence of the state comes to be encoded as itself a gendered act, which “tended to portray a simplistic division of roles: men were the perpetrators (in defence of the nation and of their wives and children), while women were victims”.17 By simplifying the division of roles, gender relations come to be “a primary way of signifying relationships of power”, in which agency is re-inscribed as a gendered issue,18 for “since the Middle Ages, the romance, as a genre, has deployed violence to structure masculine identity”.19 This double-edged sword is particularly noticeable in Crusade films like Reynolds’ Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, made against a backdrop of new armed invasions in the Middle East, which therefore goes to extraordinary lengths to accommodate Otherness in its essentially white, male, aristocratic redemption theme. Robin, who has made his fortune based on violence in the service of a now questionable state ideology, is obliged to use this violence in the service of a greater good to build an inclusive society tolerant of difference, thus encoding his violence against Nottingham as a postcolonial vengeance theme which is legitimised by his fall from grace. Such a process of legitimisation takes place by curbing the visible effects of the violence depicted, reflecting not what happened, but rather what the filmmakers wish had happened – what Aronstein and Coiner have termed “Distory”, that is, the rewriting of history according to Disney, or “history as it should have been”.20 In this way, then, the representational wheel turns full circle; where once medieval commentators might have enhanced the violent content of their stories in order to communicate their hero’s masculinity to an audience,21 their modern descendants set about toning down the depiction of violence in order to communicate precisely the same thing. In this new Distory world order, “battles are vigorously fought, people are wounded and die, but they shed little visible blood; the sun shines as on a May morning, and the colourful costumes seem to be of a stuff that repels dirt”.22

Violence and Agency Alongside the problems of understanding the issue of violence in its historical context, there emerges a concomitant problem in understanding agency with respect to violence. To begin by establishing a working definition of agency, following Giddens, we might posit that “the notion of agency attributes to the individual actor the capacity to process social

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experience and to devise ways of coping with life, even under the most extreme forms of coercion”.23 By this definition, “within the limits of information, uncertainty and other constraints that exist, social actors are ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘capable’”.24 However, when it comes to representing the medieval period on screen, we realise that we are dealing with a different interpretation of such knowledge and capability since, as Long and Long themselves recognise, it is misleading to presume “a constant, ‘universal’ interpretation of agency across all cultures. It is bound to vary in its cultural make-up and rationality.”25 To the medieval mind, there was a clear coupling of violence and agency in the sphere of men. However, we have equally seen that violence (or at least its literary reflection) functioned as an indexical symbol of masculine power, just as masculine power suggested violence (hence the emphasis on swords, lances and other obviously phallic symbols). The combination of these two definitions suggests that in the Middle Ages there are two means by which a given individual can go about becoming a “social actor”: by a public and visible demonstration either of violence or of masculinity. Such a definition of agency, therefore, requires that the knowledge and capability must be performed on the social stage – that is to say, agency is achieved by actions beyond the private or domestic sphere, in which case Marian’s masked assumption of male agency is highly questionable. In some ways, such a strict reversal of values leads us to overlook that the hierarchy through which “empowered” heroines such as Marian and Guinevere are seen to rise were in the first place set in stone by men, and are consequently geared to embrace male-orientated demonstrations of power. To follow Kelly’s definition that “violence is a gendered phenomenon within the context of patriarchal social relations” suggests that any attempt simply to reverse gender roles nevertheless represents a tacit acceptance of this male paradigm.26 It is thus: easy to forget how modern concerns are being grafted into a film that purports to be about the medieval past. That women’s strength is measured entirely in terms that are coded as masculine illustrates how the film’s version of history depends very much on a masculinist account of history.27

Along the same lines, if “violence provides the foundation for an elaborate structure of exchange which determines hierarchies among men” (a viewpoint which Finke and Shichtman term “violence as symbolic capital”), then the power structure is not based simply on a binary opposition between men and women, but functions within a complex patriarchal hierarchy.28 It is a hierarchy in which women occupy a symbolic role as part of an economic model, causing violence to function

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“as a carrier of an ideology which endorses a particular sexual economy of violent exchange in which masculinity is built around the continual circulation of women and wealth as rewards”.29 Most definitions of agency agree on the importance of women’s role as “social actors”, that is to say the extent to which they are conscious of, and able to participate in, codified social interaction. However, recent work on gender and its relationship with agency has sought to re-examine traditional assumptions about “natural” gender roles, polarising men and women along an axis of passivity. Stereotypical essentializing of women as “victims” and men as “perpetrators” of political violence and armed conflict assumes universal, simplified definitions of such phenomena. Such a positioning, in threatening both women and men as “objects”, denies each their agency and associated voice as “actors” in the processes [...]. Thus the importance of “human agency” lies at the heart of a paradigm that recognizes the role of social actors.30

This dominant belief – which leads Reynolds to mask his heroine in order to ascribe agency to her – assumes that agency is demonstrated when a female character is seen to be taking on the role of a “social actor”, thereby overcoming the binary victim/perpetrator paradigm suggested above. Marian, the argument seems to run, is given a form of power akin to the agency of a social actor by simply inverting violence in political terms when she fights Robin on an equal level. Nevertheless, she can only be given the opportunity to fight Robin when he is not aware of her gender. Thus, we can see that it is precisely by masking her gender that Marian achieves any kind of agency as a “social actor” since her violence is understood as a symbolic act of empowerment which is undermined the moment she is unmasked.

Marian, Guinevere and Princes(ses) of the Realm Consequently, trying simply to ascribe agency to a female medieval hero by depicting her as the perpetrator of violence does not offer any re-coding of medieval gender values, but instead suggests that the masked Marian is acting like a man when she looks like one, and reverts to docile femininity when unmasked. Such an empowered heroine, which on the surface might seem to give cause for celebration, in fact assimilates a confused concatenation of contemporary ideas about so-called “kick-ass” heroines and the nascent form of “girl power”, ideas which transport the film away from the Middle Ages and fixes it solidly in the 1990s. Like Marion’s

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desperate duel with Robin, it does not ultimately redress women’s fundamental objectification, but simply unmasks heroines as women pretending to be men. As soon as they are revealed to be “false” men, their dissimulation marks a reversion to a traditionally male-orientated power structure and the status quo is once again restored. Virginia Blanton conducts an in-depth examination of a similar process of gender reversal and social agency in Fuqua’s King Arthur, demonstrating how in the film “the representation of Guinevere is a complicated hybrid of femininity and masculinity, one that illustrates contemporary anxieties about strong women, women in warfare, women who want to be equal to men on all playing fields”.31 Citing Guinevere’s initial construction as a bellicose warrior who is able to fight alongside the men and – in one instance – even offer protection to them, Blanton argues that the ending transforms this seeming overhaul of gender roles into a reassertion of them and a wholesale condemnation of the empowered female warrior. In one production still for the film, for example, Blanton observes the surface renegotiation of gender, where: Knightley holds a strung bow, which is leveled at viewers. Her body is tense and her mouth set in a grim line, and we are immediately aware that she is not only determined but also poised to kill. The description and the image together demonstrate that this film will not present the traditional romance focused on Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot; indeed, this Guinevere will differ considerably from those who have come before.32

Such auspicious beginnings, then, might offer some hope for viewers seeking to find in medieval films the same sorts of heroines that a slew of 90s productions like Tank Girl, G.I. Jane or Buffy the Vampire Slayer might offer, and which were to pave the way for empowered female characters such as Lara Croft or Resident Evil’s Alice. Such fare, it might well have been hoped, ought in theory to provide possibilities for postfeminist role models, who counterbalance the paucity of empowered heroines in the action genre, all the while reconciling these new roles with ostensibly traditional femininity. However, “the naïve description of Guinevere’s gender bending skills as a trained, guerilla fighter”, Blanton argues, “reeks of the fantastic, not the historical. It suggests fantasy figures like Wonder Woman, Kira Nerys from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Sara Pezzini from Witchblade, female characters who battle injustice but remain, nonetheless, very sexy icons of femininity.”33 Blanton’s reading of the film can thus be offered in support of my own reading of Marian’s masquerade in Robin Hood, arguing that Guinevere’s

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veneer of empowered-yet-sexy independence is equally unmasked, and her newfound agency once again placed within the context of “patriarchal concerns that are the hallmarks of the genres of fantasy and romance”.34 Although the second act of her film depicts her as an empowered, independent woman who fights in defence of her people, such agency is bracketed and moderated by her placement within a strictly patriarchal model of society. Despite her seeming independence, we must remember that she has first been rescued by the men, and will later be married off to Arthur, almost as though a reward offered in economic exchange for his rescue. In this way, Blanton rightly observes that “the ending serves an important need for American audiences: it resolves the problematic depiction of Guinevere as warrior, Guinevere as equal”.35 Reading the film in more depth, taking into account both her physical and her symbolic role, the subtext clearly emerges that just as her strength as a female warrior is a mere mask adopted in defence of her people (and which she voluntarily jettisons immediately after the battle), her union to Arthur is a symbolic pact between the Romano-Briton and the Woad, and not Guinevere’s conscious decision to settle into a maternal, meek role of femininity. Consequently, on the physical level, no matter to what extent she might be masked as a female warrior during the main battles of the film, Arthur’s final rescue at Badon Hill once again unmasks her, while her wedding then serves as a recapitulation of the patriarchal structure which sees women as rewards. On the symbolic level, too, “she can neither win her battle for Britain without Arthur, nor can she rule without him. Guinevere’s agency, then, is completely contingent on her ability to build an alliance with Arthur and the Roman forces”.36 Such an unmasking of Guinevere thus functions in the same way as Marian’s reversion to a patriarchal structure of society, and simply offers a wish-fulfilment of fantasies of “girl power”, with the net effect of countermining the purported feminist, or indeed post-feminist, stance. The result of this unmasking is thus perhaps more dangerous and counterproductive than its total omission might otherwise have been, since it is based on a simple reversal of male ideals of violence. “This vision of what ‘girl power’ means”, concludes Blanton, “is more about the Spice Girls or Mia Hamm than about the Feminist Majority or Gloria Steinem”.37 One final example, Disney’s A Kid in King Arthur’s Court, may be adduced here to demonstrate further how this process of masking / unmasking of female agency in medieval films works. Coming in 1995 at the height of the fashionable end of the “girl power” trend,38 this loose adaptation of Mark Twain’s novel centres on two invented princess figures, Princess Katey (Paloma Baeza) and Princess Sarah (Kate

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Winslet), who each enact a kind of twentieth-century emancipation rhetoric in their resistance to expectations. “While the emphasis in the film is largely upon Calvin’s [the twentieth-century hero] romance with Katey”, the subplot running through the film concerns Princess Sarah, who as royal progenitor holds, in a sense, the keys to the kingdom, and is overwhelmingly depicted as an objectified chattel to be acquired by marriage. Throughout the film it is suggested that the most probable suitor is the evil Lord Belasco, who represents the politico-ideological domination threat, seeking as he does to possess Sarah only for the symbolic capital she represents.39 Refusing to choose a suitor (and preferring the low-born Master Kane), her hand in marriage is offered as the prize to the champion of a tournament. Her only salvation, then, lies in her rescue by the mysterious Black Knight. Unsurprisingly, of course, after the Black Knight beats Lord Belasco (who has, naturally, won the tournament by ignoble means), she is unmasked as none other than Princess Sarah herself, who is then allowed to choose her own suitor with no restrictions. The mask motif here, then, is used in order both to mask her gender (and sidestep the implications of women-as-second-class-citizens mentioned above), but also to mask her identity, individuality and subsequent agency. Following the plotlines of the film to their logical conclusion, we come to an interesting impasse. If the tournament was put in place to allow the champion to win the Princess, by winning the tournament as the Black Knight, Sarah has become an empowered agent who wins herself – a knowing and capable social actor, to adopt the terms used above. Logically, therefore, by being allowed to gain ownership of her own person, the question ought not to be whom she will choose to marry, but whether she wishes to marry at all. Her unmasking thus divests her of the agency which her disguise has afforded her, as she instantly and unconditionally yields all power to her new husband, undermining her new-found agency in the process. In the “Distory” version of the Middle Ages, then, female agency – even when achieved through violence which mirrors that of the male – is only possible when the gender is hidden; once unmasked, Sarah, like Guinevere and Marian is only free to revert to traditional (and, incidentally, hetero-normative) gender roles. In all three of these examples, then, a clear parallel emerges; if the assumption of agency is only achievable when gender is masked, the act of unmasking (literally, in the case of Princess Sarah and Maid Marian) becomes a means to destroy new-found agency achieved through violent ends. The adoption of a disguise, then, is not a corrective to misrepresentation, but the mere assumption of outward symbols whose

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discovery serves only to restore the patriarchal status quo which we traditionally ascribe to the medieval period. The mask, it seems, maketh not the man.

Notes 1

Aristotle, Poetics (New York: Cosimo, 2008), p. 12. For an interesting exploration of peripeteia in medieval film, see François Amy de la Bretèque, “Une ‘figure obligée’ du film de chevalerie: le Tournoi”, Cahiers de la Cinémathèque 42/43 (1985), p. 21. 2 My understanding here of agency as evidenced by “knowledgeable and capable social actors” is drawn from Gidden’s’ classic definition in New Rules of Sociological Method: a Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 121. 3 Andrew B. R. Elliott, Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World (Jefferson/NC: McFarland, 2010); “Time Out of Joint? Why Asterix Fought the Norsemen in Astérix and the Vikings”, in Reel Vikings: Cinematic Depictions of Medieval Scandinavia (Jefferson/NC: McFarland, 2011), pp. 165–177. 4 See, for instance, Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Marnie HughesWarrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London: Routledge, 2006); Peter C. Rollins, Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, ed. Robert A. Rosenstone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History, or, How the Past Is Taught to Children (London: Routledge, 2003). For studies of how individual films can encode contemporary values in its rewriting of medieval history, see Kevin J. Harty, “Agenda Layered on Agenda”, in Hollywood and the Holy Land: Essays on Film Depictions of the Crusades and ChristianMuslim Clashes, ed. Nickolas Haydock and E.L. Risden (Jefferson/NC: McFarland, 2009), pp. 161–168; Alan Lupack, “An Enemy in Our Midst: The Black Knight and the American Dream”, in Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays (Jefferson/NC: McFarland, 2002), pp. 64–70. 5 Eileen Power, Medieval Women (CUP, 1997). 6 Helen M. Jewell, Women in Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 22. 7 Linda Elizabeth Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England, 1255–1350 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 3. 8 Jewell, Women in Medieval England, p. 19. 9 My use of the term “horizon of expectations” is drawn from Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Brighton: Harvester, 1982). 10 Ann F. Howey, “Queens, Ladies and Saints: Arthurian Women in Contemporary Short Fiction”, Arthuriana 9, 1 (1999), p. 24.

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11 Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, “No Pain, No Gain: Violence as Symbolic Capital in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur”, Arthuriana 8, 2 (1998), p. 118 (emphasis my own). 12 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (London: Picador, 1987), p. 69. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 9–30. 13 See A Great Effusion of Blood? Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery and Oren Falk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 14 Ibid., p. 4. 15 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (CUP, 1999), p. 175. 16 A Great Effusion of Blood?, p. 4. 17 States of Conflict. Gender, Violence and Resistance, ed. Susie Jacobs, Ruth Jacobson and Jennifer Marchbank (London: Zed Books, 1999), p. 3. 18 Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 42. 19 Finke and Shichtman, “No Pain, No Gain”, p. 117. 20 Susan Aronstein and Nancy Coiner, “Twice Knightly: Democratizing the Middle Ages for Middle-Class America”, Studies in Medievalism 6 (1994), p. 218. 21 See the introduction to Meyerson, Thiery and Falk, A Great Effusion of Blood?. 22 David Williams, “Medieval Movies”, The Yearbook of English Studies 20, Special Edition (1990), pp. 7–18. 23 N. Long and A. Long, Battlefields of Knowledge: The Interlocking of Theory and Practice in Social Research and Development (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 22. 24 Ibid., pp. 22–23. 25 Ibid., p. 26. 26 Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). The summary of Kelly’s text quoted here is taken from States of Conflict, p. 2. 27 Virginia Blanton, “Don’t Worry, I won’t let them rape you: Guinevere’s Agency in Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur”, Arthuriana 15, 3 (2005), p. 95. 28 Finke and Shichtman, “No Pain, No Gain”, p. 119. 29 Ibid., p. 117. 30 Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence, ed. Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona Clark (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 4. 31 Blanton, “Don’t worry, I won’t let them rape you”, p. 93. 32 Ibid., p. 94. 33 Ibid., p. 95. 34 Ibid., p. 93. 35 Ibid., p. 103. 36 Ibid., p. 103. 37 Ibid., p. 95. 38 By placing the term “girl power” in inverted commas, my intention is not to undermine the importance of the female movement as proposed by Greer et al, but rather to contain its less serious reflection in popular culture during the 1990s.

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Such a smash-and-grab reprisal of serious feminist thinking was, in the UK at least, most memorably associated with feisty girl groups such as the Spice Girls, who seemed to adopt the mantra – having first been carefully emptied of all significant intellectual content – as more of a marketing ploy than a serious attempt to redress inequalities in late twentieth-century culture. It is, therefore, in this sense that I have employed it here. 39 The quotation here, along with my summary of the film, is drawn from Tyler R. Tichelaar’s article “Creating King Arthur’s Children: A Trend in Modern Fiction”, Arthuriana 9,1 (1999), pp. 39–56, here pp. 48–49.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN “THIS WILL HURT YOU MORE THAN IT HURTS ME”: MICHAEL HANEKE’S THE WHITE RIBBON ESME NICHOLSON Abstract This article illustrates that the narration of the violent story told in The White Ribbon is neither conventional nor straightforward, and that despite the absence of television sets, the film is an exploration of the media’s representation – and our keen consumption – of violence. Crucially, for a filmmaker with a highly meticulous approach to sound, the very adoption of a voice-over narrator warrants particularly close attention, and the focus of this chapter is a neglected consideration of Haneke’s treatment of sound and voice, asking how the violent narrative is articulated.

Pitching Violence Confronted in Cannes in 2009 by a competition line-up that proffered not only grand auteurs but also cinematic violence in abundance, it was as if Michael Haneke himself had cherry-picked the competition films as part of his ongoing consideration of the representation and keen consumption of violence in the cinema and in the media. I was amongst those representing the latter, covering the festival as a producer for German public television news. The 2009 competition, which included Antichrist by Lars von Trier, Inglourious Basterds [sic] by Quentin Tarantino and Un Prophète by Jacques Audiard, proved to test both our endurance of such an array of filmic violence as well as our journalistic treatment of it.

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Yet it was an apparent practicality that landed many a producer, journalist and film critic in somewhat of a quandary. For those colleagues writing for a weekly publication, the scheduling of the premieres of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Michael Haneke’s Das weisse Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon) on two consecutive evenings proved an astute piece of festival programming, allowing them to write neat comparisons of two fictive depictions of Germany’s violent past. For those of us producing television pieces for daily news programmes, it presented us with a predicament. How were we to convince our editors to broadcast pieces from Cannes that deal with violence two days in a row? We already show real-life, off-screen violence, on screen constantly. For better or worse, a reporter’s arts contribution is intended as a form of compensation for the myriad images of war, oppression, poverty and natural disasters we broadcast. Although both Tarantino’s and Haneke’s films boasted German funding, German shooting locations, German casts, and apparently German stories, it was going to have to be one or the other, and predictably, we were granted airtime to report on the Hollywood director. Why? The short and cynical answer is ratings. Although Tarantino’s depiction of violence is far from palatable, its box office returns certainly prove it more digestible than Haneke’s. In an essay entitled “Violence and Media”,1 Haneke lists various premises under which cinematic violence may be deemed possible for consumption. These premises are “disassociation”, the “development of a critical situation” where violence becomes “the only solution” and “embedding >violence@ within a climate of wit and satire”.2 Haneke places Tarantino’s work within the last category. Our editors’ decision to run with Tarantino assumes that our news audience would rather take refuge in the escapism of an albeit violent, Hollywood blockbuster instead of being forced to think about what Haneke terms the “real existing violence of society”.3 Yet in an age of 24hour news, one might question whether it would actually have mattered which film report our editors had commissioned. An example from one of Haneke’s earlier films, Caché, illustrates my point. Haneke shows us how a television report from the war-torn Middle East elicits no reaction from his media-savvy television producer protagonist as he sits at his dining room table picking through paperwork. In Cannes, Haneke actually offered us a way out of our predicament, in a fashion eerily resembling his persuasive and demanding directorial style. By winning the Palme D’or for The White Ribbon, he forced us to award him airspace, and, perhaps, as Catherine Wheatley has observed, “to take responsibility for >our@ part in the workings of the cinematic institution”,4

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both as spectators who willingly enter the cinema, popcorn in hand, and as those who dutifully enter the press screenings, pen and notebook in hand.

Haneke and Violence I can’t stand violence. I’m allergic to any form of physical violence. It makes me sick.5

Haneke abhors violence, yet it features to varying degrees in every one of his feature films, from the family suicide in his first cinematic release Der Siebente Kontinent, to the student who runs amok in 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Schicksals, to Benny’s inability to distinguish between his own real violence from that which is mediated in Benny’s Video. Then there is the sadism of Funny Games and the masochism of La Pianiste; the sudden self-inflicted violence in Caché; the distressing, desperately tragic violent act in Amour, as well as that which is less glaring, such as the brutality documented by the war photographer in Code Inconnu, or the “teleintimacy”6 of suffering (or “tele-suffering”7) that features centrescreen in the form of television news in Caché. In The White Ribbon, a deluge of mysterious acts of vicious violence is coupled with a particularly heavy-handed approach to raising children and discipline. Haneke’s disdain for, and simultaneous deployment of cinematic violence seems, to some, somewhat of a mismatch; Thomas Elsaesser, for example, objects to a method he believes “come>s@ from a rather peculiar corner of Germanic pedagogy”.8 Yet Haneke’s approach meets with much approval. Since Cannes, The White Ribbon has taken away prizes from almost every major awards ceremony, from the European Film Awards to the Golden Globes. One might speculate upon the implications of such mainstream acceptance and approval for a director who has spent much of his film career railing against what Mattias Frey terms “Hollywood’s blithe treatment of violence”.9 Indeed, Haneke’s insistence that “violence is not a commodity”10 rather ironically appears to contradict the increasing commercial success of his films about violence. Irony aside, it is the way in which Haneke portrays his violent narratives that sets him apart from others. He rarely actually shows us the violence; his images are often entirely “bereft”11 of it. Brigitte Peucker observes that Haneke “refuses the choreography of violence”.12 So in order to narrate his stories of violence, he relies upon sound. A striking example of this in The White Ribbon is a thirty-second scene in which Haneke leaves his camera in front of a closed door and we are made to

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eavesdrop on the punishment the pastor’s children are forced to endure. Such depiction derives from several concerns. First, the refusal to make us voyeurs is part of Haneke’s ethical concern about the depiction of suffering.13 Second, depriving us of images requires more imaginative and active investment from his audience, and third, it affords his soundtrack yet more importance regarding the amount of information it is allowed to impart. This last concern is of particular significance, because, in The White Ribbon, Haneke adopts a voice-over narrator for the very first time. In fact, the film heralds somewhat of a departure in form and style from his nine previous feature films. Set in a rural village in Protestant Wilhelmine North Germany just before the outbreak of the First World War, the film renders a chillingly crisp, black and white panorama of what appears to be a prototypical feudal, patriarchal community with its baron, pastor, teacher, doctor, midwife, peasant farm hands, and their respective children. This is the first time Haneke has turned his attention to Germany as opposed to France or his native Austria. The black and white print and the deployment of a voice-over are also firsts within his feature film repertoire, as is the historical setting. The almost “costume drama”-like aesthetic seems strange coming from a director who is known for his images of contemporary society with its eternally switched-on television sets. It is undoubtedly the absence of television sets and communication technology that leads Peter Brunette to assert that, unlike his previous work, The White Ribbon is not a “critical examination of the media, of Hollywood manipulation of the audience, of the power of the image, and of the audience’s moral responsibility”.14 I would argue the opposite, that Haneke, more than ever, is pushing his ethical agenda and asking his audience to consider all of these issues. Specifically, I would contend that the film’s largely overlooked soundtrack is an exploration of the media’s part in the representation of violence. The focus here, therefore, is Haneke’s treatment of sound and voice in The White Ribbon, which will be examined following brief consideration of the film’s visual aesthetic and narrative plot. Haneke’s unprecedented use of black and white lends a perceived authenticity to the period he is portraying, an authenticity of which we should be immediately suspicious. Haneke’s pictures are not genuine black and white documents of a “proven” past. At the press conference in Cannes Haneke justified his aesthetic choice with the statement: “Every picture we know from this period is black and white.”15 This observation underlines just how influential visual culture is on our perception of the past. By telling his story in black and white, Haneke highlights how the

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media influences both collective and individual memory, a concern of particular significance for the consideration of agency below. Peter Brunette is not alone in perceiving the work as “refreshingly straightforward”.16 Hari Kunzru, in a piece for The Guardian, considers it Haneke’s “most traditional in feel”,17 the German weekly Focus regards it as an unusually quiet film that has entirely dispensed with Haneke’s stock “Schockmomente”,18 and in a conference paper, Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien insisted the film is “more conventional” than the rest of Haneke’s oeuvre.19 Certainly, Haneke’s usual arsenal of fragmented narratives, withheld information and frustratingly open ends, designed to question the power of cinema and its supposed transparency, appear at first glance to be missing. But look again, or rather listen more carefully, and a noticeable fissure between the image-track and the soundtrack emerges. This split takes the form of at least two narrative discourses, manifested in the doubled-self of the diegetic and extra-diegetic narrator, that is to say, the teacher on-screen within the film’s action, and the same teacher’s voiceover occupying a different, quasi off-screen space. Before exploring the voice and sound in any detail, asking how Haneke narrates The White Ribbon and, ultimately, how he “represent[s] representation”,20 a brief summary must be given of the story the narrator is attempting to recollect. A spate of mysterious acts of violence has taken grip upon the inhabitants of Eichwald. It begins with the doctor who is knocked off his horse by a razor tripwire, followed by the fatal accident of the farm worker’s wife. Then the baron’s son disappears and turns up bound and whipped; an infant nearly dies of hypothermia after a window is opened; and a boy is found tied to a tree and tortured. Although motive and culprit appear to be lacking, the narrator points the finger at the village children. Concurrently, Haneke shows us acts of violence dosed out with less mystery: the ritual abuse used to raise the village children. The abuse takes manifold forms. In the case of the pastor, it masquerades as discipline and is issued out of love, “for their own good”. The white ribbon he ties around his children’s arms and in their hair is to remind them of their sins and to teach them to strive for purity. The pastor, of course, wears a white band of his own around his neck. As made clear by Martin Luther’s catechism “those who love their children, cane them”, this type of violent upbringing is, for the time in which the story is set, “highly representative of the period’s attitude towards education”, as Haneke explains in interview with Roy Grundmann.21 But Haneke does not just attribute such child rearing to Luther’s teachings; he ascribes it to the pastor’s own upbringing. The education, or instruction, passed from generation to generation would appear to be a violent one.

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Apart from the doctor’s abuse directed at the opposite sex including his daughter, the various forms of violence in Eichwald discriminate only against those who refuse to toe the line. The pastor’s cruel-to-be-kind, authoritarian approach to rearing his children is gender-indiscriminate, even as they become sexual beings. He regrets having to tie white ribbons in the hair of his fourteen-year old daughter Klara. As she has reached the age of confirmation and puberty, the pastor considers her old enough to know better. Klara is intriguing. If the children are the perpetrators of the mysterious acts of violence, she appears very much to be the ringleader. Klara’s violent agency is something she is allowed to wield upon reaching adulthood, upon becoming a sexualized being. It is, possibly, a nod to the suffrage and agency she and other women were to be awarded as the result of the larger-scale violence to come, the First World War, and the political turmoil and civil unrest that would ensue upon Germany’s defeat. In direct contrast to Klara, Haneke gives us the doctor’s daughter Anna, who makes excuses for her father’s sexual violence towards her, thereby rather contentiously implicating her complicity in his abuse. Here Haneke is creating what his vocabulary of violence terms a “critical situation” in which the only way to escape such abuse is through violence itself. It contends that the children can only become either a Klara or an Anna upon puberty, although this seems to depend on their sex. The boys are also chastised for their burgeoning sexuality, but they are not violated as the girls are. Instead, their sexuality is repressed. Either way, it is suggested that the children’s loss of innocence upon becoming “gendered” beings at puberty warrants punishment.

Having a voice For a filmmaker who makes no concessions when it comes to the treatment of sound, refusing outright to make use of non-diegetic film music, Haneke’s adoption of a voice-over narrator is unusual and warrants closer attention. The significance of sound within Haneke’s filmic repertoire has been noted by an array of scholars,22 but most references to sound are no more than brief nods of recognition, likely directed towards the filmmaker’s own explicit and constant references to the importance of the sonorous within his works. The White Ribbon is, as Oliver Speck defines all of Haneke’s work, “deceptively simple”;23 few have picked up on Haneke’s hints given in interview on where to really look (and listen) for the film’s true meaning. In interview with the German daily taz, for instance, Haneke

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invites his audience into the “off” spaces within his film when he states: “Anything of significance in >my@ films is set, where possible, in off.”24 Haneke is not only referring to the off-screen violence, but to his offscreen narrator. The overbearing auditory presence of the narrator in The White Ribbon is a striking contrast to Haneke’s silent newsreader in his fiftytwo-second contribution to the 1995 cinematic anthology Lumière et compagnie. While the white noise of the newsreader – whose lips emit neither synchronous nor asynchronous sound – is visibly evident, the voice of the reporter in the field has disappeared altogether. Haneke’s news-sourced images of suffering would normally, without exception, be “accompanied” by a reporter’s commentary in “off”. The ease with which Haneke has erased an integral and influential element of the “audiovisual contract”,25 deploying a directorial version of what Michel Chion defines as the “masking method”,26 further illustrates how Haneke’s narrative device in The White Ribbon is an exploration of the media’s representation of violence. The narrator has been tasked with a “whodunit”, and a whodunit suggests the search for a guilty party; a quest to find out who is responsible for the vicious attacks, if, of course, they are one and the same. As was the case in Caché, the camera’s eye refuses to show us the culprits, but in contrast to Caché, the narrator is uncharacteristically explicit in voicing his suspicions, both in the image-track and in the extra-diegetic acoustic space of the soundtrack. Indeed, he goes so far as to accuse the children of being the perpetrators, an accusation which, according to his rendition of the story, is based on convincing evidence. Yet it is the older narrator himself, who, at the very opening of the film, warns: “I’m not sure whether what I am about to tell you is faithful to the truth – much of it I’ve forgotten, and much of it relies on hearsay.”27 This caveat brings to mind the warnings issued by newsreaders before broadcasting a report that contains what might be considered particularly “disturbing” images or descriptions of violence. One might wonder whether Haneke’s warning and that of the newsreaders are in actual fact inter-changeable. Haneke, at any rate, would no doubt contend that such images surely should disturb us, as ethical beings. Just as Haneke frames the silent news anchor in his one-minute Lumière work with the clicking triplets of a projector – drawing attention to the cinematic apparatus – he uses voices to bookend The White Ribbon; voices which, momentarily unaccompanied by an image, fill the screen and the auditorium rather than the diegesis. In complete contrast to the now much-cited beginning of Caché, where it is the voices of Georges and Anne which finally betray to the viewer the

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ontology of the image they (and we) are watching, sound actually precedes image at the start of The White Ribbon. As the film opens, we are confronted with the voice of the narrator who issues his warning whilst the screen is still black. As the narrator continues, Haneke slowly fades from black to his opening image. Correspondingly, the soundtrack momentarily outlives the image track at the film’s close. Interestingly, the voice that seals the final frame is not that of the narrator but that of the choir, the significance of which will be questioned below. The published version28 of Haneke’s script betrays his meticulous approach to sound and voice in what is predominantly thought of as a visual medium. Sounds are delineated in capital letters, sound directions are, at times, onomatopoeic, the narrator’s text is interpolated between the set directions, and Haneke goes so far as to detail text to be uttered unintelligibly – sotto voce even – in the auditory “background”. His almost poetic opening instructions “White on black, the CREDITS” point towards another dominant sound: Haneke’s film is black and white in another sense. If we take “white on black” to mean “white noise mixed with black image”, the outcome is silence. Haneke’s instructions for silence at the end of his script are less lyrical: “Finally everything is dark and silent. FALL SILENT.”29 However, the resulting swift visual fade to black and acoustic fade to white throw a spotlight upon the auditorium, making his audience very much aware of their (and their neighbour’s) presence, and their own part in the stories being told. Certainly it becomes clear that the film is not framed by voices, but in fact by silence. Relevant here is the continuation of a discourse about the veracity of the image that Haneke has developed throughout his feature film repertoire, yet here he turns upon the veracity of cinematic sound. If we make use of Mary Ann Doane’s theoretical approach to sound film, it is immediately apparent that, from the film’s outset, Haneke shatters any illusion that the film might be a linear, classic realist narrative. He makes no attempt to deny the existence of the spaces30 of the screen and auditorium. We are aware of what Doane refers to as the “mixing apparatus”: one might therefore consider whether, just like the camera and sound technology, Haneke’s narrator, too, is an apparatus for story telling and recalling memories. The voice is often the most dominant sound within the hierarchy of any soundscape. Michel Chion refers to this phenomenon as vococentricism. Chion notes that classical cinema frequently offers the voice “on a silver platter”.31 This is exactly what Haneke appears to be doing: the most dominant voice can be found off-screen, partially disembodied in the form of an apparent voice-over. But if Haneke’s previous films have taught us

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anything, it is to be highly wary of anything he offers on a silver platter. Indeed, the deployment of a male voice-over appears to be a very conventional, artistic choice for Haneke. For the sound-savvy spectator this voice-over has already been drowned out by the sound of alarm bells. As Christian Metz asserts,32 a voice in “off” is not an off-screen sound, but an off-screen sound source. Chion defines this as the acousmêtre, a sound that is heard but whose source remains hidden. Haneke’s acousmêtre in The White Ribbon cannot be categorised as a commentatoracousmêtre for although he does not show himself, he does have an investment in the image. If it is a visualised-acousmêtre, it is only partially so, on account of the temporal difference between the teacher on-screen within the diegetic world of images and the teacher in the more elusive extra-diegetic sonic space. We do not know whence the narrator speaks nor does Haneke allow us to see him. The grain33 of the male narrator’s voice betrays his advanced age, but whether he occupies the temporal space of, say, the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933 or even zero hour in 1945 is information Haneke refuses to impart. That the narrator is afforded the privileged, and particularly male position of voice-over, which – as Kaja Silverman observes in The Acoustic Mirror34 – is hidden from the gaze of both the camera and the spectator, suggests he is attempting to evade all responsibility. His position is similar to ours. Yet our complicity with the cinematic spectacle brings with it responsibility for what we pay to see. Significantly, what appears to be the “dominant” voice is not always overtly vocal; its silences are just as revealing as its audibility. For instance, the split narrator absents himself in voice as well as in body in those instances about which anything is rarely spoken, particularly within the context of the time in which the story is set. Specifically, the lack of vocal commentary indicates a taboo, such as certain types of violence. Be it the baroness telling the baron she would like a divorce – announced only once she has dismissed the maid –, or be it the doctor’s sexual abuse of his daughter, the narrator steps back and lets the image track break the taboo, rendering the audience pure voyeurs. It is as if the narrator considers himself morally beyond detailing such smutty gossip: when he attempts an explanation for the doctor’s and the midwife’s disappearance, he names his source of unreliable information, referring us to the village grapevine. The child abuse is acknowledged vocally, however, but diegetically by the midwife, for which she receives a slap from the doctor. In contrast, Klara’s assumed act of revenge against her father, in which she takes a letteropener and stabs his beloved caged bird is left uncommented both diegetically and extra-diegetically. Indeed, Haneke does not show us the deed, only the aftermath,35 and his interpolation of the narrator’s text with

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the image track is particularly incongruous. The narrator neither comments upon nor acknowledges explicitly the images “over” which he is speaking. By referring to Klara’s frail condition following her fainting episode, it is as if the narrator wishes to excuse her behaviour. In this instance, it is not only the acousmêtric narrator who keeps quiet, but everybody else. The mistreatment of an animal would appear to shock and dismay more than that of a human being. When Haneke is not deploying silence, it becomes apparent that his vocal treatment is polyphonic rather than monophonic. In addition to the narrator’s sometimes overbearing vocal presence (and visual absence), a number of other dominant voices can be heard. Significantly, these voices all have a visible source within the diegesis. If, as Bonitzer asserts, the voice-over is “beyond criticism”,36 does that render Haneke’s nonacousmatic voices more reliable than the narrator? Indicative of the film’s feudal setting, both the pastor and the baron’s voices carry weight. Haneke illustrates their social influence not only by showing them speaking publicly, as to be expected by such members of society, but in other instances by temporarily detaching these characters’ voices from their bodies, permitting them to enter the privileged realm of the concealed commentator, that of the acousmêtre. Having a voice signifies status, a privilege that is inherited. Like their respective fathers, Sigi and Klara have voices, albeit within the limits of their age and gender. Yet the two children are audible in different ways. Sigi – the baron’s son – does not utter a word throughout the film; he does not need to. His social status is a given: he will inherit his father’s estate and he already possesses the material goods to mark his dominance, namely the pennywhistle which his less fortunate friends confiscate out of frustration by their lack. In sonic terms, this is a particularly interesting scene. The steward’s sons (who are not afforded names) sit together with Sigi by the riverside. Whilst they attempt to hollow out their own whistles from twigs, Sigi lies on his back and plays his bought instrument – a prosthetic voice of sorts. The entire scene is without dialogue, yet the steward’s sons’ efforts at gaining a voice pale in the auditory shadow of Sigi’s piercing pennywhistle. Klara, on the other hand, is privileged in that she is educated, but she must earn her status within society, which, as a girl and woman, will remain inferior to that of her brothers. Of all the children, both boys and girls, Klara is the most vocal. Like her father, she too articulates herself through violence. In stitching together sound and image, Haneke also makes use of what Chion has coined as “anemphathetic sound”, both in the form of diegetic music and voices. An example of the former is the rather conventional

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audibility of the jolly harvest festival music whilst we see the field worker’s son desecrate the baron’s kitchen garden. When Haneke treats voices anemphathetically, the result is more jarring, an example being the apparent “inconspicuous indifference”37 of the children’s playful laughter that accompanies a son’s discovery of his father’s suicide. Just as the narrator is heard and not seen, it might only be expected that the children should be “seen and not heard”, considering their stringent Protestant upbringing. Certainly, it is surprising that the children have a voice at all, and it contributes towards an explanation for the mysteriously sinister crimes that plague the village. It is not until the film’s final scene that Haneke allows the choir, made up entirely of the village children, to sing an entire chorale, and as already observed, it is the choir who have the last word, outliving the image track by seconds with its cadential return to the tonic before titles run in silence.38 If we are to accept Haneke’s oftspoken challenge and test his thesis that all his films have their “basis in music”,39 this comment surely hints towards the musical form upon which the film is based, a chorale. The closing chorale is Luther’s own musical setting of his text A mighty fortress is our God, a commonly used hymn sung before Lutheran Protestant church services. The chorale’s three-part strophic structure is of less significance to Haneke’s film than its vocal treatment, rendered in four-part SATB (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) harmony. Significantly, a chorale is often part of a larger musical work, such as a cantata, which consists of fugues and preludes, whose vocal lines are quite different in nature. The main characteristic of a chorale’s vocal setting is that it may very well be “mehrstimmig” – to cite Haneke’s filmscript – but it is, in musical terms, homophonic rather than polyphonic or even monophonic. When the children are not formed as a choir, their “voices” combine differently, from the chaotic cacophony of laughter that sonically undermines the police officer’s investigation of the film’s first crime, to Anna and Klara’s very different “voices”. Haneke’s decision to follow the scene in which Anna is abused by her father with the scene in which Klara takes revenge on her own father is not only stark on account of its violent and symbolic imagery, but also because of the contrast created. Anna’s silent acceptance of the abuse she suffers resounds in fugue-like counterpoint with Klara’s violent deed. The homophonic form, rather than the monophonic (or unison) lines usually sung by a congregation, still suggests a collection of different and perhaps differing voices, but – as choir master – the teacher is bringing these voices together to make one. The church choir’s homophony suggests agreement; each voice is rhythmically and harmonically in synchrony with the other, and the text is

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articulated with absolute clarity, not obscured by melisma and the independent polyphonic – or rather contrapuntal – lines typical of a fugue. Note too, that the teacher’s upbeat coincides with his voice-over’s final word and, more significantly, that he surreptitiously sings along with the choir as he observes them from the side. So, who really has the final word of the film? Whether it is the choir, the teacher, the narrator, Haneke, or even the audience, the voice that utters the final word is not necessarily the loudest within the narrative. If “violence is not mute”,40 as Eugenie Brinkema asserts in her analysis of Benny’s Video, and if it is to be understood as a method of articulation, is violence the most resounding voice in Haneke’s film? If the children don’t understand the sentiments of the Bible, beat it into them?

Whodunit? My title – “This will hurt you more than it hurts me” – is a deliberate inversion of a commonly heard justification for physical punishment and one the pastor uses in the film. It is meant not only as a reference to the children in the film, but also to the spectators in the cinema. When Kali, the midwife’s son, is found severely beaten in the forest, a note accompanies him, quoting from Exodus 34.7: Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.41

It would appear that the children have taken the pastor’s teachings into their own hands, punishing in this instance the illegitimate child of the doctor and mid-wife, a child – it is rumoured – they attempted and failed to abort. Daniel Kothenschulte, in his review of the film for the Frankfurter Rundschau, sees the pastor’s attempts to rid his children of sin with the visual marker of shame, the white ribbon, as futile, claiming that “the seeds of violence planted by a patriarchal society have long been sown”.42 Das weisse Band is a continuation of the exploration of generational guilt Haneke considers in his Glaciation Trilogy and Caché. During an interview in Cannes,43 Haneke stated quite clearly that the children in his film are victims; even as perpetrators, they are victims in search of other victims. One might ask whether this also applies to Haneke’s audience: perhaps we are his innocent victims, or perhaps we should bear more responsibility for what we choose to see at the cinema. Either way, Haneke, by raping the spectator to independence,44 as he

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himself has put it, forces us to acknowledge and question our willing participation in the “pursuit of spectatorial pleasure”,45 particularly if that apparent “pleasure” includes scenes of violence. In the case of The White Ribbon, our complicity is implicated further by the film’s subtitle: A German Children’s Tale (Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte). Somewhat provocatively, this appendage is used only for the German-language version of the film, yet even without it in the English-language version, Brunette and Grundmann both see an allusion, the latter “with rhetorical force”, to the Third Reich in The White Ribbon. Haneke does not deny the reference to the roots of German fascism in his film. However, almost twenty years to the day, in the same press conference room, after he stated that Der Siebente Kontinent addresses “the entire advanced industrialised world”,46 Haneke insisted that The White Ribbon is also to be understood universally and that it tackles “every form of terrorism”.47 If as Catherine Wheatley notes, “Haneke has long railed against his films being seen as treatments of specific national situations”,48 why the subtitle? Such specific labelling seems uncharacteristic for a filmmaker who, if asked to clarify meanings within his films, generally refuses to issue what he terms a “Gebrauchsanweisung”49 – an instruction manual – as a comprehension aid. When I asked Haneke at a screening in Berlin as to why the German version required a subtitle, he replied that he wants it to be understood as a German story in Germany, but to be seen universally elsewhere. In an article published in the run up to Cannes, Hans-Georg Rodek of Die Welt proposes that the subtitle is in fact a ploy by the German producer Stefan Arndt to secure both a place – and prizes – at the German Film Awards, and, more importantly, a German Oscar nomination. Rodek’s rather cheeky imagined conversation50 with the film’s head producer Arndt, which acknowledges the film’s substantial German funding in a German/French/Austrian/Italian co-production, cuts remarkably close to the real exchange Gudula Moritz of the German television arts show Kulturzeit went on to have with Arndt in Cannes: “So is it a German film? Producer Stefan Arndt of X Filme considers the ‘deeply German, Protestant story about children in a village’ to be the ‘most German film’ they’ve ever shot.”51 It would appear, then, that national specificity is more of a non-diegetic issue emblematic of the dilemmas faced by European co-productions when it comes to fitting into award ceremony categories still stipulated by nationality.52 On the other hand, if we return to Haneke’s vocabulary of violence – as outlined at the beginning – the subtitle may serve to shatter the “disassociation”53 that allows a cinema audience to consume on-screen violence. Perhaps Haneke is anxious that a more abstract exploration of

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discipline might fail to point the finger at his audience. Both with and without the subtitle, The White Ribbon and the Le rubin blanc seek to implicate the audience in the consideration of the question commonly heard after its screening: “Whodunit?” If, as David Bordwell claims,54 we – the spectators – are like detectives in our endeavour to construct a story from a film’s plot, perhaps we are free of suspicion. Like the extra-diegetic narrator, it is possible we are afforded a privileged position in which we may wash our hands of any responsibility for the violent narratives we hear and pass on. Yet Haneke’s unresolved “whodunit” implies that the finger is yet to be pointed at somebody. In refusing to resolve the mystery, and by quite literally “shortcircuiting suture”55 with the sudden plunge into black screen and white sound leaving those in the auditorium more than aware of themselves, Haneke would appear to implicate his audience in the story, closing what Caroline Dean terms “the gap between representation and responsebility”.56 Interestingly, Georg Seeßlen views the “icy silence” of the children in Haneke’s Glaciation Trilogy as indicative of the “amplified >…@ guilt passed from one generation to the next”.57 By leaving us in dark silence at the end of The White Ribbon, it is conceivable that Haneke is actually “pass>ing@ on the inability to speak”58 to his audience. Alternatively, he perhaps intends that we fill the silence rather than inherit it. Much to the frustration of film festival journalists tasked with filing their reports by the end of the day, Haneke is notorious for refusing to provide interpretations of his films, claiming that all he can do as a director is ask the questions. So if this so-called children’s tale, German or otherwise, forms a quasi “Listen with Haneke”, in which the director’s overt presence defies stitching us into a seamless, rounded story, surely the first question he poses as the film fades to black and white, is “Are you sitting uncomfortably? Then we may begin.” And by begin, he surely means “begin to ask questions”.

Notes 1

Michael Haneke, “Violence and Media”, in Visible Violence: Sichtbare und verschleierte Gewalt im Film, ed. Gerhard Larcher, Franz Grabner and Christian Wessely (Münster: Lit Verlag, 1998), p. 95. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), p. 36. 5 Michael Haneke, interviewed by Lars-Olav Beier and Philipp Oehmke, “Jeder Film vergewaltigt”, Der Spiegel, 21 October 2009. “Ich kann Gewalt nicht

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aushalten. Ich bin allergisch gegen jede Form von körperlicher Gewalt. Sie macht mich krank.” All translations into English are by the author of this article. 6 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 18. 7 Libby Saxton, “Close encounters with distant suffering: Michael Haneke’s disarming visions”, in Five Directors: Auteurism from Assayas to Ozon, ed. Kate Ince (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 86. 8 Thomas Elsaesser, “Performative self-contradictions: Michael Haneke’s mind games”, in A Companion to Haneke, ed. Roy Grundman (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010), p. 55. 9 Mattias Frey, “A cinema of disturbance: the films of Michael Haneke in context”, in Senses of Cinema (August 2003), http://sensesofcinema.com/2010/greatdirectors/michael-haneke/ (last accessed: 9 May 2013). 10 Michael Haneke, in “Nicht so wahnsinnig lustig: Das Kino des Michael Haneke”, interviewed by Alexander Bohr, 3sat Kennwort Kino, 18 December 2007. 11 Eugenie Brinkema, “How to do things with violence”, in A Companion to Haneke, p. 357. 12 Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 131. 13 Libby Saxton has cited the filmmaker’s disgust for the “dangerously, spectacular violence” in Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List; Haneke labels it “pornography”. See Saxton, “Close encounters”, p. 104. 14 Peter Brunette, Michael Haneke (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), p. 135. 15 “Alle Bilder, die wir kennen aus dieser Zeit, sind schwarz-weiss.” 16 Brunette, Michael Haneke, p. 132. 17 Hari Kunzru, “Nowhere to hide”, Guardian, 31 October 2009. 18 Harald Pauli, “Ich habe kein Faible für Gewalt”, Focus, 12 October 2009. 19 Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, “Michael Haneke’s Das weiße Band and the Question of European Art Cinema”. Paper presented at the annual ECRF Conference “Is there such a thing as European Cinema”, University of Exeter, July 2010. 20 Oliver C. Speck, Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 13. 21 See Companion to Haneke, p. 604. 22 Eugenie Brinkema, “How to do things with violences”, in Companion to Haneke, pp. 354–369; Christa Blüminger, “Figures of Disgust”, ibid., pp. 147–160; Georg Seeßlen, “Structures of Glaciation: Gaze, Perspective, and Gestus in the Films of Michael Haneke”, ibid., pp. 323–336; Peter Eisenman, “Michael Haneke and the New Subjectivity: Architecture and Film”, ibid., pp. 124–129; Jean Ma, “Discordant Desires, Violent Refrains: La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher)”, ibid., pp. 511–531. 23 Speck, Funny Frames, p. 23. 24 “… alle Dinge, die in einem Film von Bedeutung sind, >werden@ nach Möglichkeit ins Off gesetzt.” Michael Haneke in Dietmar Kammerer, “Liebe ist zu wenig”, taz, 10 October 2009.

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25 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 188. 26 Ibid. p. 187. 27 “Ich weiß nicht, ob die Geschichte, die ich Ihnen erzählen will, in allen Details der Wahrheit entspricht. Vieles darin weiß ich nur vom Hörensagen und manches weiß ich auch heute nach so vielen Jahren nicht zu enträtseln.” 28 Michael Haneke, Das weisse Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2009). 29 “Schließlich ist alles dunkel und stumm. SCHWEIGEN.” 30 For a detailed definition of these spaces see Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space”, in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 162–175. 31 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 5. 32 Christian Metz, “Aural Objects”, in Film Sound, p. 157. 33 Roland Barthes, “The Face of Garbo”, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Marshall Cohen and Gerald Mast (OUP, 1979), p. 720. 34 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1988). 35 For further discussion of the phenomenon of showing the aftermath of a violent act, see Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 19. 36 Doane, “The Voice”, p. 168. 37 Chion, Audio-Vision, p. 221. 38 In the DVD supplementary interview, Haneke states that his initial concept for the film was a story about a children’s choir. 39 Haneke in Brinkema, “Violences”, p. 361. 40 Ibid., p. 363. 41 Haneke, Das weisse Band, p. 166. 42 “>D@ie Saat der Gewalt, von einer patriarchalischen Gesellschaft eingepflanzt, ist längst in ihnen aufgegangen.” Daniel Kothenschulte, “Melancholie und Musikalität”, Frankfurter Rundschau, 23 October 2009. 43 As recorded in my transcript from the master tape of an interview Michael Haneke gave 3sat in Cannes, 21 May 2009. 44 Haneke in Alexander Horwath, Der Siebente Kontinent: Haneke und seine Filme (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1991), p. 213. 45 Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema, p. 39. 46 Ibid., p. 21. 47 Haneke at the Cannes Press Conference, 21 May 2009: “Die Wurzel jeder Form von Terrorismus.” 48 Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema, p. 21. 49 Michael Haneke speaking at the Akademie der Künste/Berlin, 3 October 2010. 50 Hans-Georg Rodek, “Nazis, Antichristen, Fußballer – so wird Cannes”, Die Welt, 3 May 2009. 51 Gudula Moritz, “Galgenhumor in Cannes”, Kulturzeit/3sat, 24 May 2009: “Ein deutscher Film also? Produzent Stefan Arndt von X-Filme, findet die ‘zutiefst

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deutsch-protestantische Geschichte um Kinder in einem Dorf’ den ‘deutschesten aller Filme’, die sie bisher gemacht hätten.” 52 Christina Tilmann, “Kein böser Land zu jener Zeit”, Der Tagesspiegel, 12 October 2009. 53 Haneke, “Violence and Media”, p. 95. 54 Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran, The Philosophy of Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 179. 55 Michael Cowan, “Between the street and the apartment: disturbing the space of fortress Europe in Michael Haneke”, Studies in European Cinema 5, 2 (2008), p. 127. 56 Carolyn Dean, “Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child”, ed. Lisa Cartwright (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 235. 57 Seeßlen, “Structures”, p. 333. 58 Ibid.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN OSTILE O AFFASCINANTE? THE TROUBLE WITH PERPETRATORS IN DACIA MARAINI’S VOCI (1994) AND BUIO (1999) ALEX STANDEN Abstract The author Dacia Maraini persistently returns to questions of gender, agency and violence. Nonetheless, the concept of female seduction by the patriarchy also pervades her work. This article suggests that for Maraini the traits of seductiveness and violence are implicitly linked. It focusses upon two works: the detective story Voci (Voices) (1994), and Buio (Darkness) (1999), a collection of short stories. In both texts, the types of masculinity that her male characters embody are considered and it is posited that, more often than not, it is through their voices that they seduce and bewitch the women around them. In Maraini’s construction of masculinity, physical violence offers a means of controlling women, and seduction keeps these women thinking that it is indeed a position in which they desire to be. Throughout Dacia Maraini’s long career as author, poet, playwright and social commentator, she has persistently returned to questions of gender, agency and violence, and the spaces at which all three intersect.1 Her debut novels, La vacanza (The Holiday) (1962) and L’età del malessere (The Age of Discontent) (1963), present young female protagonists who are relentlessly objectified by a threatening patriarchy, whilst in later works she foregrounds female characters who fall victim to a whole litany of horrors: one protagonist suffers conjugal rape, another dies following a botched abortion; in a different work an eighteenth-century aristocrat is

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rendered deaf and dumb after being raped by her uncle, whilst in a text with a current setting, two young girls are trafficked from Albania into Italy, where they are forced into the sex trade. Some of her characters ultimately escape their abusive situations, others demonstrate agency in smaller, but no less significant ways, through the development of female friendships or by finding a voice with which to denounce their mistreatment. Another motif which pervades Maraini’s oeuvre, however, is the seemingly contradictory concept of female seduction by the patriarchy. In Storia di Piera (Story of Piera) (1980), a published conversation between Maraini and the actor Piera Degli Esposti, Maraini first identified, “the hostile and bewitching world of the fathers”,2 to which both women admitted to being inexplicably attracted.3 She has recourse to a similar term in the 1984 novel Il treno per Helsinki (The Train for Helsinki), in which a female character describes the mondo dei padri as “spectacular, bewitching, [and one with which] we are all in love”.4 Discussing this latter text, Maraini has stated: “Literature is full of books about the mystery of women. This novel, by contrast, explores the mystery of men.”5 Additionally, in her more recent autobiographical works Bagheria (1993) and La nave per Kobe (The Boat to Kobe) (2001), significant attention is paid by Maraini to her feelings towards her own father, Fosco, whom she dubs, “a Triton, an unrepentant seducer, a heartbreaker”.6 Judith Bryce has described Maraini’s attachment to her father as, “an intense and unreciprocated passion”,7 whilst Maraini has spoken of her desire as a child to “take [my father] away from my mother”.8 It is vital to stress here that there is no implication of anything improper nor any form of violence in Maraini’s relationship with her father, rather there is significance in the regularity with which she returns to an examination of her, often confused, feelings towards him. The suggestion that Maraini’s male characters are seductive, “a mystery” to be solved and objects of passion to both Maraini and her female protagonists, is evidently an intriguing and unsettling one if these characteristics are considered in relation to the violence that so many of them commit. It is precisely this problematic juncture that provides the focus of this article, in which I question whether Maraini might be proposing that the traits of seductiveness and violence are implicitly linked. I focus upon two works: the detective story Voci (Voices) (1994) and Buio (Darkness) (1999), a collection of short stories that are all inspired by real events. The latter work won Maraini the Premio Strega, Italy’s most prestigious literary award. In both texts, I consider the types of masculinity that her male characters embody and posit that, more often

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than not, it is through their voices that they seduce and bewitch the women around them. I ultimately argue that in Maraini’s construction of masculinity, physical violence offers a means of controlling women, and seduction keeps these women thinking that it is indeed a position in which they desire to be.

Constructing the archetypal perpetrator in Buio The twelve short stories included in Buio are all written, as Tommasina Gabriele explains, “to condemn Italian society for not protecting its most vulnerable members”.9 As Gabriele goes on to describe, alongside longstanding social ills such as intolerance and hypocrisy, the book deals, above all else, with patriarchal violence: “the violence long condemned by Maraini.”10 In fact, with its treatment of topics such as paedophilia, rape and murder, the collection could be seen to mark the point in Maraini’s career at which her concern for the victims of violence reaches a peak. The opening story exemplifies this, telling of a young boy named Gram, whose parents leave him alone in the family’s apartment whilst they go out to work. Gram spends the day looking out the window, where he notices what his child’s mind convinces him is “a pigeon-man” who gestures to the young boy to join him outside. Enchanted by the man’s promises to teach him how to fly, Gram gets into his car and is driven into the woods, where he is brutally abused and murdered. The narrative focus subsequently switches to the investigation and it is discovered that the perpetrator is a man who works at the local hospital as a social worker. Crucial to the story is this emphasis upon the respectability and apparent normalcy of the perpetrator. He is the last person whom a reader would expect to be capable of such acts and is indeed able to use this to his advantage when he comes under suspicion: when asked for an alibi, he claims, “I was at the hospital, caring for some children with Down’s syndrome”.11 In their study of masculinities and violence, Neil Websdale and Meda Chesney-Lind question whether it is possible to identify a “typical” perpetrator of patriarchal violence, and conclude that, “killers appear, for the most part, to be ordinary men”. They thus infer that “this normalcy is yet further evidence of the powerful connection between the structure of hetero-patriarchal relations and the murder and mutilation of women” and, of course, children.12 This model recurs throughout the collection of stories, with the perpetrators of abuse and violence regularly seeming to be the most reputable, courteous characters. They include a university professor, another two hospital workers, a dedicated family man and a lawyer. They

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constitute the characters that the reader would least expect to behave violently, to the extent that, by the end of the book, it becomes almost too obvious to the reader who the perpetrators will be, due to their very respectability. Evidently, the demand for concision is a feature of the short story, in which authors must select their material to convey meaning within the strictest limits of time and space.13 Yet I would contend that the necessarily direct style and focus of the short story are not the only reasons for Maraini’s approach to perpetrators in this collection. I believe that the almost blatant obviousness of her message – that the perpetrators of abuse and violence are not shadowy figures lurking in parks at night, but can just as easily be respectable friends and neighbours – is merely the surface level of a particular model of behaviour that she sees at work between men and women across society. It is not just the perpetrators’ respectability that is key, but it is the ways in which they charm and seduce their victims that appears to concern Maraini. She establishes this latter aspect of her male characters’ construction in rather more subtle ways, however. One of the longest stories in the collection involves the repeated denunciations of sexual abuse by a young boy against his father. The police are convinced of the man’s innocence and that the son, Tano, must instead be a pathological liar. Police officers visit the family and find the father to be “kind”, “affectionate” and “polite”.14 A female social worker additionally believes the father over the son, because, as Tano describes, “she was enchanted by […] Dad. He’s a handsome man, women like him.”15 In this, and other stories in the collection, domination is constructed and perpetuated through the dual power of physical violence and seduction, performed by a dangerous, and seemingly ubiquitous, patriarchy. Critical discourse that theorises men and maleness largely concurs, however, that speaking about a “one-size-fits-all” definition of masculinity is far from productive.16 As such, violence should not be considered inherent to masculinity, but perhaps to a certain type of masculinity. Moreover, as R.W. Connell writes, “to recognize diversity in masculinities is not enough. We must also recognize the relations between the different kinds of masculinity: relations of alliance, dominance and subordination.”17 The model has proved productive for those seeking to understand the relationships connecting men, and for its recognition of the existence of subordinate masculinities. Nonetheless, its focus upon the power relations at work between men could detract from questions surrounding the use and abuse of male power towards women. In reality, even those men who would appear to be at the lowest rung of Connell’s spectrum of masculinities benefit from a patriarchal society and enjoy

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some power over women. Connell recognises this in what she terms “complicit masculinities”: The number of men rigorously practising the hegemonic pattern in its entirety may be quite small. Yet the majority of men gain from its hegemony, since they benefit from the patriarchal dividend, the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women.18

I would argue that in Maraini’s texts, the two forms of power – the physical and the more insidious, seductive power – maintain this masculine hierarchy simultaneously. As such, whilst not all men may exercise it, the majority do profit from its advantages. Nevertheless, Connell has also suggested that if the masculine hegemony requires violence to control it, it must accordingly be a rather fragile and vulnerable one. As she maintains, “a thoroughly legitimate hierarchy would have less need to intimidate”.19 By often resorting to violent means of domination, therefore, are Maraini’s male perpetrators actually laying bare the very fragility of patriarchal domination? I would suggest that it is in fact quite the opposite: what Maraini creates is a seemingly polished and impenetrable hierarchy that is at work without its victims even realising it, and not, as Connell might presume, one that reveals its own weakness. Maraini’s suggestion appears to be that, whereas physical violence can be used to dominate women and children, the most effective facet of the masculine hierarchy is its use of seduction, which makes the women almost complicit in their own subjugation. These are problematic intimations, which suggest that Maraini’s victims are perhaps “inviting” the violence that they experience. By identifying some level of complicity in Maraini’s female characters, I certainly would not want to infer that she is indicating their guilt, nor allying herself with those damaging contentions that suggest that a raped woman “asked for it”. Yet, in Maraini’s work, it becomes unavoidable to question whether there is nonetheless the implication that her victims participate in some way in their own mistreatment. In many of her works, including the two under discussion here, she seeks to unpick what she sees as a two-way relationship between victim and perpetrator. In Buio, two stories can help readers to understand both the establishment of this relationship, and the psychology of both victim and perpetrator in cases such as these. Both tales present the reader with one particular outcome of sustained and unrelenting male domination, in which the victim responds with violence of her own. Whilst this is certainly a provocative way of looking at the “victim” of domestic abuse, in Maraini’s narratives it does not present an opportunity to demonstrate

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her female victims as courageous, newly empowered women who are taking control of their lives. Rather, both women can only profess remorse and guilt at their crimes; unable to see the actions of their partners as abusive, they instead claim to have been loved and worshipped by them. Similar descriptions of the men recur throughout: in these stories too, the partners are respectable men, and to outsiders their relationships appear perfect. Yet in the first story, behind closed doors, the husband forces his wife into sexual acts against her will; after she has the courage to murder him, she can only admit to missing his embraces. This apparent desire to be controlled is even more evident in the second tale, in which the wife declares, “I dedicated myself to him with passion and generosity. It was my duty.”20 In both instances, Maraini describes a relationship in which the craving to be needed is so strong on the part of the women that they are blind to the mistreatment that they experience. The wife of the second story describes how she was first attracted to her partner: “I immediately fell for his voice, dense and sensual.”21 A distinguishing trait of nearly all the stories is Maraini’s focus upon the perpetrator’s voice: describing his father, for example, Tano also states “when he speaks, everyone thinks he’s a nice guy”.22 Indeed, in both Buio and Voci the voice is frequently the means by which Maraini’s perpetrators “seduce” not only their victims, but other characters as well. Maraini subsequently fabricates a sharp discrepancy between voice and action, as the latter story of a wife who murders her husband makes clear: having heard a guilt-ridden confession by the wife, detective Adele Sòfia bluntly tells her, “they’re words, signora Verbano, just words. Your husband tried to kill you with a kitchen knife.”23 In Buio, Maraini constructs both an archetypal identity of a male perpetrator and a specific model of behaviour between men and women. Certainly, she is not pretending that either is the only type of perpetrator or violent relationship, but they are constructions that, due to their recurrence across her work, clearly hold substantial interest to her. What’s more, neither is she merely criticising the paradigm nor intimating that her victims are somehow responsible for their abuse. Instead, she endeavours to understand their motivations, entering into their psyche through an analysis of her own behaviour. It could even be suggested that one explanation for her continued focus on the seductive male is due to the recognition of his role in her own life. As I noted at the beginning of this essay, there are a number of works in which Maraini admits to her seduction by the patriarchy, namely Storia di Piera, Bagheria and La nave per Kobe, and that a significant feature of this surrounded her relationship with her father. Storia di Piera foreshadows some of the issues which

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Maraini returns to in her life writings. In it she admits, for example, “I too wanted to seduce my father”.24 In this text she goes further than simply recognizing her feelings. Both women also discuss their early sexual relationships and, drawing upon Piera’s experiences, Maraini tries to explore what may be the consequence of masculinities that are both seductive and dangerous: “You’re saying something that we usually don’t dare: that the memories of our first sexual experiences, even the most degrading ones, always creep back in and leave us with a desire to repeat them.”25 This is a situation that matches the one expressed above, in which the seductive nature of masculinities leads women into a position of submission, but concurrently makes them believe that it is a position in which they want to be. It is a construction that lies at the heart of many of the stories in Buio and is, moreover, the central theme of the novel Voci.

The fascino of masculinity in Voci Voci is presented as a typical detective story in which the protagonist, Michela, returns home from a trip to find her neighbour, Angela, brutally murdered. Admitting ruefully to having barely known the young woman, Michela decides to carry out her own investigation into her neighbour’s death. She ultimately discovers that which the police were unable to: that the murderer was Angela’s step-father, a man who had been sexually abusing Angela and her sister since they were ten years old. Michela, who works as a radio journalist, is simultaneously requested by her manager to research a series of programmes about unresolved crimes against women. As both she and the reader are to learn, Angela is only one of a catalogue of women who have been raped, abused and murdered at the hands of a violent patriarchy. These dual narratives permit Maraini to use the text as a statement about the pervasiveness of gender violence. The central focus of the narrative remains, however, Michela’s investigation into Angela’s death. It is an investigation which is complicated by the dizzying array of characters (many of them male) who vie for her attention and try to throw her off course with their stories, halftruths and lies. As the novel’s title suggests, moreover, often all that she has to go on to help her in her task is their voices, as Bernadette Luciano explains: The text is dominated by a chorus of animate and inanimate voices that surround and haunt Michela [...]. [They] form a web of incomplete clues that Michela must interpret as she tries to re-construct the life of a woman who has remained voiceless.26

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Michela also reveals how she delights in voices, imagining that even inanimate objects in her apartment are trying to communicate with her. Similarly, what she recalls and retains of the men that she encounters are their voices. If the aforementioned discrepancy between voice and action remains true in this text as well, this will, of course, only add to Michela’s confusion in finding the truth. One such example of her bewilderment involves her long-term partner, Marco, who is nothing more than a voice on the telephone, calling from a far-off African nation to which he has been sent for work. As his role in the plot intensifies – unbeknownst to Michela, he knew Angela well and has become a suspect in her murder – so too does his voice appear ever more fragmented and distant, until Michela is unsure whether his calls are real or imagined. Whilst a face-to-face encounter would perhaps have enabled her to judge what is real about his words, Maraini never grants her this opportunity. Instead, it is a police officer’s voice on the telephone that reveals to her that Marco had known Angela, whilst Marco’s own final words to Michela are yet another voice recording. It seems, however, that this is enough to convince her of his innocence: “His voice, hearing it again with a clear head, says much more than the words themselves. […] I know with certainty that Marco didn’t murder Angela.”27 Marco is only one of a number of suspects in Angela’s death and before discovering the truth, Michela has to sift through them, their pasts and the complex web of relationships that surrounded the murdered girl. The first that she encounters is Giulio Carlini, Angela’s lover, from whom she begins to learn a little about the neighbour she had never really known. As she listens to Carlini, she becomes caught up in the version of events he presents, and it is only when she switches off her tape recorder that she realises, “in every movement he makes, there’s the subtle hint of seduction. And I’m certainly letting myself be seduced.”28 Leaving him, the spell is broken and she is able to question what, if anything, he told her was the truth. Later that day, however, she re-listens to their conversation and is unable to prevent herself from being, once again, seduced by his “enchanting […], snakelike” voice.29 Critics of the novel have recognised that a thread running through it involves Michela’s gradual realisation of the similarities that exist between herself and her murdered neighbour.30 With relation to the male characters, Maraini presents this “doubling” through their dual seduction by successive characters. Whilst for Michela this never goes any further than her desire to listen to their bewitching voices, Angela becomes caught up in affairs with them, none of which are more complex than her relationship with Nando Pepi. Introduced as a pimp and small-time criminal, he

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appears as easily the most obvious suspect, both to the reader and to Michela, in spite of the police’s initial reluctance to trace him. Bryce has argued that Nando is little more than a narrative function, “engineer[ing] what turns out to be an illusory atmosphere of threatened violence towards Michela”,31 but his role is not without significance. Three scenes in particular evoke this threatening atmosphere, all of which involve Michela in a position of vulnerability and Nando dominating the space with his (albeit imagined) air of danger. Early in the novel, Michela finds herself on her own in a lift with him; later, they are alone again in a cemetery and finally, she watches as he breaks into Angela’s flat, fearful that he will come to hers next. However, during the scene in the cemetery Michela describes how her fear of him evaporates once he begins to speak: After what seems like an eternity, he finally opens his mouth and from that moment my fear evaporates: his choice of speech surely excludes action, I tell myself, or at least it delays it: I’m so thankful for the world of words, what joy comes from hearing the exquisite sound of a voice!32

Towards the end of the novel, Michela even tells a friend how, “he charms everyone he meets”.33 Nando exemplifies the combination of seductiveness and threat that many of Maraini’s male protagonists embody. The line between fear and pleasure is a fine one, and Michela seems unable, as Angela was before her, to resist the seductive nature of male danger. One final avenue that Michela must investigate before arriving at the real suspect is Angela’s brother-in-law, Mario. Although only peripheral to the narrative, he characterises, perhaps more than any of the other male characters, the archetypal perpetrator of violence against women. Angela’s sister, Ludovica, arrives at Michela’s flat late one night and is covered in bruises which, she explains, were the result of a beating from her husband. She, along perhaps with many other female victims of abuse, is unwilling to go to the police, fearful of not being believed and mistrustful of institutional responses. She tells Michela, “no-one will believe me, no-one […] he’s a respected architect”,34 denoting once again the surface propriety of a violent male. Her mistrust is not unfounded, for when Michela convinces her to press charges, she is not believed. Even Ludovica is unable, just like the abused women in Buio, to condemn his abuse and instead continually forgives him: He hit me and made my lip bleed. The following day he apologised, he was scared. He looked after me so tenderly, every five minutes he asked me: do you feel better? Will you forgive me? […] And the way he makes love to me when he feels guilty and wants to be forgiven …35

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Mario uses violence as a means of controlling his partner and declarations of love to convince her that it was a mistake that is never to be repeated. It is ultimately a character whose voice is, ironically, absent for much of the text whom Michela discovers to be Angela’s murderer. Glauco, Angela’s step-father, is presented as a caring family man and upstanding citizen. Indeed, even in the midst of describing to Michela the abuse that he used to inflict upon her and her sister when they were young, Ludovica is unable to prevent herself from praising him: “everyone said he was an exemplary step-father [...]; and he was, you have to believe me, when he wasn’t all over me he was so tender and everyone envied me.”36 He is wealthy, having made a career as a successful sculptor, and this alone appears enough to eliminate him from the list of suspects. Besides which, he too presents an image of himself through his voice that, as before, emphasises the gaping chasm between voice and action: “I think back to [his] voice […]: helpful, clear, polite […]: the voice of a person who is educated, tolerant and humorous.”37 Likewise, his is a voice that charms Michela, it is “dense and sensual”, “with an underlying desperation to seduce”.38 Glauco never openly confesses to Michela, but instead sends her a lengthy tape recording in which he offers his version of events. Dealing, as we are, with a narrative that places the voice at centre stage, it seems apt to analyse in more depth the way in which he talks about himself, his behaviour towards his step-daughters, and the events on the night of Angela’s death. In a study of male perpetrators of violence against women, Kristin Anderson and Debra Umberson (2001) analyse a number of interviews with convicted abusers, in order to posit that the men’s identities are not constructed solely through their actions but also through the discourse about violence that they provide. The outcome of their analysis gives some important insights into the ways in which violent men talk about their actions: The respondents in this study used diverse and contradictory strategies to gender violence and they shifted their positions as they talked about violence. Respondents sometimes positioned themselves as masculine actors […]. At other times, […] they positioned themselves as vulnerable and powerless.39

Glauco’s discourse about violence is similarly revealing, and so too does he “shift position” as he talks. He begins by reiterating the extent to which he sees himself as a good father. He admits to having occasionally used violence as a means of “teaching them a lesson”, but sees nothing wrong

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in having done so. Throughout this monologue there is the overwhelming sense that everything he did was “for their own good”. Yet as he becomes more expansive, Michela observes a change in his voice, which becomes, “little by little more coarse and obsessive. What else does he have to tell me?”40 What he has to say is disturbing, and exposes the extent to which he believed himself to be entitled to Angela’s body and desirous of controlling it: “Her body tempted you, it cajoled you, it was difficult to resist it, no-one could resist it in fact … the body of a child hungry for love.”41 His abuses towards her body are thus, in his mind at least, legitimised through his mistaken belief that Angela “wanted” the abuse. He convinced himself that Angela’s body spoke to him and he, maybe with many other perpetrators of violence, believed it to be inviting him to possess and violate it. A nod towards men’s possessive approach towards women can also be discerned in his words: his mistaken belief that female members come under the ownership of the male head of the family. Liz Kelly (1988) describes this as sexual access, which, in the private sphere, refers to the assumed rights of the male to his wife or lover, or, in extreme cases, his daughters. As Kelly explains: There are remnants of the historical status of women and children in men’s proprietorial attitudes […]. Sexual access, like other resources, is determined by relational power [...] the greater his perceived right to exclusive sexual access, the more likely it is that some level of sexual aggression will be considered legitimate.42

Glauco, the self-appointed head of this household, believed himself entitled not only to Angela’s adult body, but to that of her and her sister when they were children as well. The outcome of Anderson and Umberson’s research into discourses of violence was that, “violence is an effective means by which batterers reconstruct men as masculine and women as feminine. [...] They naturalise a binary and hierarchical gender system”.43 Their hypothesis is influenced by Butler’s performativity and reiterates the extent to which the subject is the product of its actions, rather than the architect of them. In a similar way to the respondents, Glauco too imagined an account of himself and Angela in which she was weak, vulnerable and in need of his protection, and he was the responsible maker and enforcer of laws. In his mind, everything that he does to her body she both needed and had asked for. He never admits to having killed her, perhaps out of a conscious choice to reveal only certain details to Michela, in the hope that she will accept the version of himself he wants to present: a family man incapable of murder. The text does not provide us with any easy answers, but Glauco’s

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tape recording does represent, perhaps most compellingly, the discrepancy between voice and action that I have identified throughout. Ironically, in the end it is Glauco’s actions, rather than his voice, that lead to proof of his guilt: instead of running away, he kills himself, allowing the police to take a blood sample that offers irrefutable evidence that he was indeed Angela’s murderer. From all these character analyses, it would perhaps appear conclusive that, for Maraini, masculinity is implicitly linked to aggression and dominance, and that women inhabit a world in which the masculine hierarchy is maintained through a powerful combination of violence and seduction. It therefore seems salient to pause momentarily upon the question of whether either text ever challenges this assumption of masculine violence through the inclusion of any “types” of masculinity that could be deemed “redemptive”. The masculinity theories outlined above all concurred that, instead of talking about a single masculinity, the concept of masculinities should instead be recognised, in which aggression and violent behaviour characterise one type, rather than being systemic to all men. One secondary character in Voci offers an example of such a nonviolent, redemptive form of masculinity. Mid-way through the novel, Michela turns to Signor Merli, an older lawyer, for advice about her investigation. She is able to discuss the case with him at length, and his intelligent and considered responses help her to clarify her thoughts and gain new perspective on the investigation. Following a conversation with him, she even regrets not having recorded it, certain that his comforting and supportive voice would have helped her. Nonetheless, in spite of his intellectual strength, physically, he is weak: he is too ill to go to work, and Michela must instead visit him at home, where she finds him alone, bedridden and hungry. It is easy to read in the couple a father-daughter relationship that Michela has lacked since the death of her own father. Indeed, this connection assumes further significance if we consider, with Testaferri, the importance of fathers in the narrative more generally: References to the father are interspersed throughout the story disguised as dreams, myths and fables. They foreshadow the final act of the book, the accusation brought against Glauco of prolonged violence leading at first to rape and incest and in the end to murder.44

Michela’s own deceased father actually makes a number of ghostly appearances in the novel, and in these scenes too it is possible to read affection and reassurance from this alternative version of masculinity. Where Signor Merli was physically weak, of course, these ethereal

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apparitions of Michela’s father mean he lacks entirely a bodily presence. It may perhaps therefore be assumed that in Maraini’s imagining, for masculinity to be redemptive, it must also be physically vulnerable. What these apparitions may additionally prompt in the careful reader of Maraini, is a recognition of the similarity between Michela and Maraini herself. After one such visit by her father’s ghost, Michela recalls her fear as a child of losing him, and the subsequent description mirrors almost exactly a passage from the autobiographical text, La nave per Kobe.45 Whilst there are numerous dangers associated with an autobiographical reading of any work of fiction, it remains nonetheless an interesting connection to make, specifically in the context of this essay. For if this link is acknowledged, it becomes difficult to avoid the theme of seduction: as I have already stressed, a central topic in Maraini’s life writing relates to her passion for her own affascinante father. With a connection between author and protagonist thus established, it may consequently be possible to read in Voci what Bryce terms “the seductive father and the desiring daughter” in Bagheria.46 Doing so, however, further troubles the idea of redemptive masculinities which might have been suggested through the “father figures” in Voci: albeit non-violent, this type of masculinity may well be just as seductive as those analysed above. In turn, this suggests that even in relationships in which physical power and violence are absent, the maintenance of the masculine hierarchy is in many ways still alive and well. Maraini’s construction of perpetrators and victims is complex and multi-layered. Her male culprits are both hostile and bewitching, and her female protagonists appear almost powerless to their seductive charm. In texts such as these, moreover, the ubiquitous power of the mondo dei padri is not only oppressive, but also manages to maintain its position through its credibility and status. What these, and indeed many of her narratives, represent above all else is Maraini’s recognition of the continuing abuse that many women undergo, and her hope that, through writing about it, the phenomenon can be better understood. As Slavoj äLåHNZRXOGKDYHLW³WKLVLVZKDWZHVKRXOGGRZKHQZHILQGRXUVHOYHV bombarded with […] images of violence. We need to ‘learn, learn, learn’ what causes this violence.”47

Notes 1

For an up-to-date bibliography of Maraini’s works, see www.daciamaraini.it. Some of her key works, which are well-known in both Italy and abroad, include Isolina (1985, winner of Premio Fregene; translated as Isolina, 1993); La lunga

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vita di Marianna Ucrìa (1990, awarded Premio Campiello; translated as The Silent Duchess, 1992) and Bagheria (1993; translated as Bagheria, 1994). 2 “L’ostile e affascinante mondo dei padri.” All translations of Maraini’s works into English are my own. 3 Dacia Maraini and Piera Degli Esposti, Storia di Piera (Milan: Bompiani, 1980), p. 10. 4 “Un affascinante grandioso mondo di cui siamo tutte innamorate.” Dacia Maraini, Il treno per Helsinki (Milan: Bompiani, 1984), p. 125. 5 “La letteratura è piena di libri sul mistero della donna. Il libro è invece un libro sul mistero dell’uomo.” Cited in Grazia M. Sumeli Weinberg, Invito alla lettura di Dacia Maraini (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 1993), p. 86. 6 “Il tritone, il seduttore impenitente, il rubacuori.” Dacia Maraini, La nave per Kobe (Milan: Rizzoli, 2001), p. 140. 7 Judith Bryce, “Intimations of Patriarchy: Memories of Wartime Japan in Dacia Maraini’s Bagheria”, in European Memories of World War II, ed. Helmut Peitsch et al (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998), pp. 220–228, here p. 221. 8 “Volevo [...] portarlo via a mia madre.” Maraini, Piera, p. 54. 9 Tommasina Gabriele, “From Prostitution to Transsexuality: Gender Identity and Subversive Sexuality in Dacia Maraini”, MLN (January 2002), pp. 241–256, here p. 250. 10 Ibid., p. 250. 11 “Ero in ospedale, coi miei bambini down.” Maraini, Buio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1999), pp. 19–21. 12 Neil Websdale and Meda Chesney-Lind, “Doing Violence to Women: Research Synthesis on the Victimization of Women”, in Masculinities and Violence, ed. Lee H. Bowker (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1998), pp. 55–82, here p. 62. 13 Heather McClare, Women Writers of the Short Story (Eaglewood Cliffs/NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), p. 5. 14 Maraini, Buio, pp. 95–135. 15 “Si fa incantare […] di papà. È un bell’uomo, piace alle donne.” Ibid., p. 103. 16 See, for example Understanding Masculinities: Social Relations and Cultural Arenas, ed. Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), and Michael Kimmel et al, Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005). 17 Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995), p. 37. Emphasis in the original. 18 Ibid., p. 79. 19 Ibid., p. 84. 20 “Io mi dedico a lui con generosità e passione. Questo era il mio compito.” Maraini, Buio, p. 91. 21 “Mi è subito piaciuta la sua voce densa, sensual.” Ibid., p. 89. 22 “Quando parla lo trovano tutti simpatico.” Ibid., p. 103. 23 “Sono parole, signora Verbano, parole. Suo marito ha tentato di ucciderla con un coltello da cucina.” Ibid., p. 93. 24 “Anch’io volevo sedurre mio padre.” Maraini, Piera, p. 54.

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“Dici una cosa che non si osa dire di solito: le prime esperienze sessuali, anche le più sgradevoli, poi tornano come memorie che si insinuano nei tuoi sensi, e c’è un desiderio di ripeterle.” Ibid., p. 103. 26 Bernadette Luciano, “(Re)dressing the text: The film adaptation of Dacia Maraini’s Voci”, in Vested Voices: Literary Transvestism in Italian Literature, ed. Rossella Riccobono and Erminia Passannanti (Leicester: Troubador, 2006), pp. 145–156, here p. 149. 27 “La sua voce, riascoltandola a mente fredda, dice molte più cose di quante dicano le sue parole. [...] so con certezza che Marco non può avere assassinato Angela.” Maraini, Voci (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994), p. 256. 28 “In ogni movimento che fa, c’è una sotterranea voglia di seduzione. E io certamente mi sto lasciando sedurre.” Ibid., p. 99. 29 Ibid., p. 105. 30 See Judith Bryce, “The Perfect Crime? Paternal Perpetrators in Dacia Maraini’s Voci”, in Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture Since 1945, ed. Anne Mullen and Emer O’Beirne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 207–218; Ada Testaferri, “De-tecting Voci”, in The Pleasure of Writing. Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini, ed. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Ada Testaferri (West Lafayette/IN: Purdue University Press, 2000), pp. 41–60. 31 Bryce, “Perfect Crime”, p. 208. 32 “Dopo una attesa che mi sembra lunghissima, finalmente lui apre bocca e in quel momento perdo ogni paura: la scelta della parola esclude l’azione, mi dice l’istinto, o per lo meno la ritarda: che gratitudine per il mondo delle parole, che gioia sentire lo squisito suono di una voce!” Maraini, Voci, p. 183. 33 “Shi lo incontra ne rimane incantato.” Ibid., p. 219. 34 “Nessuno mi crederà, nessuno ... è un ingegnere così stimato.” Ibid., p. 209. 35 “Mi ha tirato uno schiaffo che mi ha fatto sanguinare il labbro. Il giorno dopo mi ha chiesto scusa, era spaventato. Mi ha curata, sapesse con che tenerezza, ogni cinque minuti diceva: stai meglio? mi hai perdonato? [...] E sapesse come fa l’amore quando si sente in colpa e vuole farsi perdonare ...” Ibid., pp. 209–210. 36 “Tutti dicevano che era un patrigno esemplare [...]; e lo era, mi deve credere, quando non mi saltava addosso era tenerissimo e tutti me lo invidiavano.” Maraini, Voci, p. 265. 37 “Ripenso alla voce che mi ha risposto al telefono: disponibile, ricercata, chiara e pulita [...]: una voce di persona colta, tollerante e ironica.” Ibid., p. 222. 38 “Sensuale e corposa”; “con una intenzione disperata di seduzione”. Ibid., p. 280, p. 235. 39 Kristin Anderson and Debra Umberson, “Gendering Violence: Masculinity and Power in Men’s Accounts of Domestic Violence”, Gender and Society, vol. 15, 3 (June 2001), pp. 358–380, here p. 374. 40 “Mano a mano più irsuta e ossessiva. Che altro avrà da raccontare?” Maraini, Voci, p. 287. 41 “Il suo corpo era lì a lusingarti, blandirti, era difficile resistere, nessuno resisteva in effetti ... un corpo di bambina affamata d’amore.” Ibid., p. 288. 42 Liz Kelly, Surviving Sexual Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 30. 43 Anderson and Umberson, “Gendering Violence”, p. 375.

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Testaferri, “De-tecting”, p. 45. See Maraini, Voci, pp. 93–94 and Maraini, Nave, p. 67. 46 Bryce, “Perfect Crime”, p. 216. 47 6ODYRMäLåHNViolence. Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), p. 7. 45

CHAPTER FIFTEEN REMORSELESS HEROES: GENDER, AGENCY AND VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY CRIME FICTION AND THRILLERS ULRIKE ZITZLSPERGER Abstract This chapter considers German, Swedish and US-American crime novels and thrillers that employ male and female individuals who at times use exceptional violence as part of their mission. They have all amassed a substantial following among their readers. These heroes and heroines translate into popular culture degrees of violence that would normally be regarded as unacceptable. While all of them interpret violence as a necessity to improve an individual’s or society’s status quo, the discourses about the crime-fighters’ violent agency vary. The link between gender and violence is shaped by cultural experience within a society even if some basic responses – such as the greater shock female violence tends to trigger as opposed to male violence – apply across boundaries. Within this context, the appeal of violent fictional crime fighters is indicative of a craving for heroes – strong personalities that do not, for better or worse, compare to the rest of us.1 It is the tough loner who, by transgressing collective norms and following his or her own rules, takes care of those wronged by individuals and society.2 The violence they employ is executed with deliberate precision. In A Savage Place, Robert B. Parker’s Spenser responds to the question “Are you attracted to violence?” with a statement that holds true for all of them: “Maybe. To a point. But it’s also that I’m good at it. And there’s a need for someone who’s good at it.”3

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This article considers the formula that shapes both male and female crime fighters who, to maintain popular appeal, must work within certain parameters in terms of both agency and violence. The focus will be on Stieg Larsson’s Salander (Sweden), while Doris Gercke’s Bella Block (Germany), Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher (United States) serve to outline further the differences between male and female protagonists.4

Taking Charge Crime fiction, and even more so thrillers, are a natural habitat for violence and its potential for entertainment; after all, violence sells.5 However, proactive female detectives still encounter a degree of prejudice while the male investigator is easily accepted as being larger than life. In the afterword of Broken, writer Karin Slaughter laments the fate of one of her protagonists: I cringe when I read reviews where Lena is called “feisty”. The word seems like a catch-all for a woman who doesn’t shop all the time or sit around dreaming of getting married. Men of this ilk get better adjectives – haunted, dark, driven, a loner, a loose cannon wrestling with his demons. Women get a word that brings to mind a pig-tailed teenager who sneaks out of the house to go to her first boy / girl party.6

It is this very perception that makes the reader of Lee Child’s The Visitor choose to associate the anonymous murderer’s reflections instinctively with those of a man – not least since the victims are female: “A little violence never hurt anybody”, the murderer muses. In fact: “A little violence” will make the next murder “a little more interesting”.7 However, the boundaries of any depiction of violence are precarious. In “Batman battles the Politics of Resentment”, Andrew Klavan states with reference to the film The Dark Knight Rises: “Murder is the opposite of art: destructive, impoverishing, nihilistic. To discuss the act of a killer as if it had some relevance to a work of culture is to usher the age-old enemy of mankind into one of his citadels.”8 Still, contemporary female and male crime investigators whose actions are out of the ordinary in that both agency and violence are part of their distinctive make-up are exceptionally popular – in fact, if reviews and marketing blurbs are anything to go by, they are the ultimate modern-day heroes. The grave issues they tackle are of cross-cultural relevance: rape, torture, beatings and murder, to name but a few. In countering injustice they are principled – with female protagonists breaking without further ado into male domains.

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At first sight, the depiction of the female detective rarely differs from that of her male counterpart: she is equally independent and gets the job done. As with a wide range of male detectives, childhood experiences come into play, as do life-changing events, intense friendships, a tendency to pursue a minimalist lifestyle, independence in all matters of sexuality and a range of dysfunctional habits that lend some credibility to the character in question. One way or the other, the process of institutionalization and the need to escape it feature strongly, whether the character is a former participant or a victim. The reader is thereby offered an explanatory context for the crime fighters’ unwavering principles. The range of outstanding literary female detectives, which provides the basis for the heroic female outsider, is considerable. They include established figures such as Carolyn Heilbrun’s [Amanda Cross] groundbreaking academic investigator Kate Fansler (1964), P. D. James’s Cordelia Gray (1972), Liza Cody’s Anna Lee (1980), Sue Grafton’s assertive Kinsey Millhone (1982), Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski (1982; the “mega-feminist trouble-maker”)9 and Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta (1990). Karin Slaughter refers to Denise Mina and Mo Hayder as exemplary when she explains that she “wanted to bring a woman’s perspective to the darker areas of crime fiction”.10 Over the years, these authors have all added nuances to their female protagonists: Heilbrun interwove academic and feminist discourse into the narrative, while Grafton continues to stress her character’s independence. Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta added a new dimension as a competent forensic medical examiner. In her Rizzoli & Isles series, Tess Gerritsen has since 2001 juxtaposed the dilemmas of a female detective and of the forensic examiner Moira Isles, nicknamed “Queen of the Dead”.11 Kathy Reich’s crime fiction features Temperance Brennan (1991), whose insights as a forensic anthropologist highlight the interest in a new generation of women in a male domain. However, things become more controversial once such heroines act violently themselves and the author is then forced to juggle her actions with the readers’ need to accept – but not necessarily applaud – such behaviour. One such example is the German Doris Gercke’s creation of the feminist Bella Block (1988).

Crossing Boundaries In the first novel of the Block series Bella Block is a book-loving, disillusioned Hamburg policewoman who investigates mysterious suicides in an idyllic rural setting. From the start her scepticism towards the workings of society, which to Block’s mind is represented by corrupt men,

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is mirrored in her depiction of individuals. This includes the visitor to a pub who talks derogatorily about a local woman. Block, listening in to the conversation, observes: He was about sixty years old, he was fat and small and on his shoulders rested the most amazing pig’s head. She had to look twice to believe what she saw. That guy did not even have a neck. Instead, he boasted three chins and bright red protruding ears. All that was missing was a lemon in his snout and some parsley behind his ears.12

Each chapter in Gercke’s crime mystery is headed by a traditional rhyme for children that, superficially light-hearted, describes the brutality of a very ordered and deeply gendered rural life. Block eventually realizes that she wants the woman who had been raped by a group of self-righteous villagers to succeed in taking her revenge. It is worth noting that it is usually the act of rape which raises the investigator’s (and the reader’s) level of acceptance of a victim’s revenge and a detective’s unconventional response.13 Accordingly, Block, once she is in the know, meets one of the culprits and: […] in passing she smiled at the owner of the pub. She remembered a childhood friend who, while stroking a cat on his lap, had declared in a tender voice: we are about to cut your head off, little cat. The cat had purred with pleasure. She resisted turning around and smiling at the man again.14

Block allows what she perceives as justice to take its course – then sleeps and takes a shower. This act of cleansing is of limited effect since the flies that appear everywhere in the village are indicative of the true plague: violence that is integral to daily life – but also to a sense of vigilante justice that in itself undermines society. These failures are systemic and Block preserves her integrity only in as much as she resigns from the police force to become a private investigator. This first book in the series featuring Bella Block sets the agenda. Contemplating another avenging woman, the Russian Tolgonai, Block later observes as first-person narrator that her uncompromising approach against male perpetrators had relieved her own bad conscience for showing less involvement than Tolgonai.15 Maureen T. Ready has argued that the emergence of modern female detectives marked a change in society and that feminist debates contributed to their popularity.16 The female detectives, Ready argues, might show some superficial similarities to the male detective but they differ profoundly in terms of the literary discourse that their use of

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violence triggers. Bella Block provides a prime example of the ongoing reflection on justice that characterizes this kind of literature.17 The Swedish left-wing journalist and anti-racism activist Stieg Larsson – the world’s second-bestselling author in 2008 – took this approach and a new kind of heroine even further when he wrote his Millennium series: Salander acts on her own and on other women’s behalf.

Beast of Prey Lisbeth Salander has been described as a “mixture of Lara Croft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, “the most original character in crime fiction since Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley”, as a bisexual, anorexic, traumatised and sociopathic “neo-punk”, who is a far cry from the “typical feisty [!] female crime fighter” of the more conventional detective-stories.18 Salander, minute and “doll-like”, a splendid hacker with a mathematical mind and photographic memory, has been damaged by her horrific childhood and years of institutionalized abuse.19 The status of victim would nevertheless appear to be inappropriate: following her own moral code, she is relentless in pursuit of those who do not abide by her understanding of justice. In this respect she is by far more proactive and ruthless than the mature Bella Block, whose intellectual engagement with politics and literature make her outspoken and angry but at the same time more removed. Salander is characterized by her inability to seek help. After she is raped by one of her guardians, she nurses her wounds and coolly analyses her options: Crisis centres existed, in her eyes, for victims, and she had never regarded herself as a victim. Consequently, her only remaining option was to do what she had always done: take matters in her own hands and solve the problems on her own.20

Her attempts at survival and revenge are supported by the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and a number of other men, all in all rather scrupulous, whose friendship is unwavering. Their loyalty is partly motivated by an understanding of her troubled character and her personal history, but what comes just as strongly into play is a passionate view of right and wrong in respect of institutions in general and the media in particular. At the core of the trilogy is the critical view of the Swedish establishment.21 The intention to take society to task is clear from the beginning – Larsson includes in the first volume statistics that reflect the dire state of violence against women in modern Swedish society. While only part of the narrative in the first and most conventional of the three volumes, this

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theme is then broadened in the second to take in the role of sex trafficking, and in the third the failings of institutions. In this final volume, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the four main sections that structure the narrative are anticipated with elaborations on the role of Amazons. In fact, while Salander does remain centre-stage, the third volume brings other women to the fore, all of whom boast characteristics such as outstanding intelligence (Salander’s lawyer), first-class leadership skills (the main editor of Millennium, the magazine-cum-publishing house), or remarkable physical strength paired with intelligence (a representative of the Swedish Secret Service). All of them are self-assured, sexually liberated and of high integrity. None of them shows any inhibition about doing the “right thing”. In the first of his four passages of critical reflection about Amazons – brief interruptions of the narrative addressing the reader directly – Larsson states that “Historians have often struggled to deal with women who do not respect gender distinctions, and nowhere is that distinction more sharply drawn than in the question of armed combat”.22 His agenda is the “common” female soldier who did not qualify as a leader, and he continues in the second and third of his interposed reflections to qualify what he perceives as the true nature of the Greek Amazons. The last and final part, conclusively entitled “Rebooting System”, focuses in its introduction on the largely unacknowledged women’s army of the Fon of Dahomey in West Africa who can be traced back to the 1600s and who were in evidence until the 1940s. However, and this would appear to be Larsson’s point, they remain obscure: clearly there is only a very limited interest in such warriors. The last part of the trilogy consequently places Salander among other fearless women who defend her and who do dare to announce wrongs in public. Gercke’s Block, meanwhile, sees other forces at work, but they, too, betray an established historical pattern. Block ponders in one instance whether the Greek myth of Heracles was in fact invented to sustain patriarchal laws – a male myth that included in her opinion murder and booze, violence and cunning, executions and theft.23 Block marvels at the longevity of the myth, which to her mind keeps women in check – by contrast with Larsson’s army of women this is a victimized group with a number of individuals who break rank. Salander’s behaviour, like Block’s and that of the women she protects, leads to regular discussions of her character – which, together with the explanatory information about her background, make her readiness to employ violence acceptable to the reader, adding colour to a central figure who might otherwise, like the rest of the trilogy’s protagonists, appear at times too far removed from reality. Salander at best threatens and

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humiliates, at worst shoots, beats, zaps and tattoos those whom she considers to be in the wrong. In the finale, when she faces her monstrous half-brother, she resorts to using a nail gun to fix his feet to the floor. The fight is of biblical proportions and the comparison with David and Goliath unavoidable. Her capacity to feel and act upon her anger is acute: at one point the reader is told that “Salander was seething inside. She was so enraged that she tasted blood in her mouth.”24 On another occasion, Blomkvist observes her in action: As long as Blomkvist lived, he would never forget her face as she went on the attack. Her teeth were bared like a beast of prey. Her eyes were glittering, black as coal. She moved with the lightening speed of a tarantula and seemed totally focussed on her prey as she slung the club again, striking Martin in the ribs.25

When she attacks, Salander turns into a beast; her exceptional clarity of thought is, under these circumstances, countered by her no less exceptional readiness to leave conventional reason behind. Her passionate anger nonetheless makes her more human in comparison to the men she is forced to fight: like Gercke’s predators, they find ways to rationalise their own acts of violence. The suspicion that Salander might have murdered three people is divisive: “If she murdered someone, then she must have felt that she had a very good reason to do so”, declares one of those who believe in her.26 The behaviour of the authorities in turn is utterly predictable: “They were going to be satisfied if they could find a motive for what she did, but failing that they were ready to paint her killing spree as a sequence of insanity.”27 Larsson plays with his readers in that he challenges them to ponder the degree to which they would accept Salander’s actions – given what one learns about Salander’s dreadful childhood and teenage years, and her deeply felt convictions, is murder acceptable and perhaps even necessary after all? Salander takes a systematic approach to avenging her brutal rape and near-death at the hands of her guardian. Under threat and while plotting his counterattack, the guardian, Bjurman, disparages her character, thereby legitimizing his own actions as part of a popular – stereotypical – discourse: “She lacked social inhibitions, one of her reports concluded. Well, he could conclude a stage or two further: she was a sick, murderous, insane […] person. A loose hand-grenade. A whore.”28 Salander, whose institutional declaration of incompetence is finally revoked when Bjurman’s behaviour comes to light, at that point begins her slow re-

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integration. One of the judges points out, for her too this will mean that a citizen’s rights come with certain obligations.29 Blomkvist states at one point that Salander “loathes men who hate women” – a theme that runs through the whole series.30 Society’s shortcuts in its perception of the elusive young woman and a number of ill-informed snippets of background information eventually build a public figure which develops its own dynamic in that the girl’s potential to act violently when provoked leads to an accumulation of other characteristics. In fact, Bjurman’s stereotyping simply mirrors popular media constructions about disorderly women by being coupled with standard anxieties: When it was discovered that Salander was friends with the lesbian Miriam Wu, a frenzy broke out in certain papers. […] The combination of a lesbian suspected of mass murder and titillating S&M sex was evidently doing wonders for circulation figures. […] When all the assertions made in the various media were put together, the police appeared to be hunting for a psychotic lesbian who had joined a cult of sadomasochistic Satanists that propagandized for S&M sex and hated society in general and men in particular, and because Salander had been abroad for the past year, there might be international connections too.31

What makes this dynamic so interesting is that the public construction of Salander reduces her to a violent woman out of control,32 shaped by attributes that appear to fulfil both clichés about violent women and a hunger for certain, mostly sexual sensations. The replacement of the “Amazon” with the “whore” in turn then justifies her and other women’s ill-treatment on behalf of the men who are in charge. The obvious injustice brings the reader on side. Salander does act brutally when her sense of justice is challenged. But her personal motivation is a far cry from the public perceptions of a female threat that is presumably undermining an establishment which works because it believes in itself. Larsson, allowing the pieces of a puzzle that provides the make-up of her character to fall into place bit by bit, narrates Salander’s fate in childhood, at home and at school. Her desire for revenge is a major force and Salander begins early on to differentiate between physical and mental brutality, the latter all the more frightening since it appears to be state-endorsed.33 What she and male protagonists of the same ilk have in common is that authors stress the presence of certain character traits early on, allowing for limited personal development throughout the fiction and instead promote all-consuming principles. In Larsson’s trilogy the short- and long-term storylines inform each other. The slow build-up is crucial: extreme violence is not just

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spontaneous but enacted over long periods of time; it shapes characters, institutions and society, and effectively leads to the confrontation between different sets of moral codes.

Warriors Larsson highlights a pattern that is typical of autonomous, modern heroines associated with endurance and readiness to act: while lifestyle, career, appearance and behaviour set them apart, they are still to be understood in the context of society. If the character is to remain convincing, their behaviour requires a corrective body. In Larsson’s trilogy it is the journalist Blomkvist – comparable, for example, to the psychoanalyst Susan Silverman in Robert Parker’s Boston-based Spenser.34 Silverman and Blomkvist are both at pains to understand the nature of the private moral code that the crime fighter, whose job always becomes personal, follows. Their reflections balance brutal actions against the implications of a crime. While the ever-loyal, albeit sometimes troubled, Silverman provides psychological explanations, the journalist Blomkvist is on a mission to uncover the truth about criminal dealings past and present; his and Silverman’s weapon is the word, the informed and at times learned reasoning that allows for a background. But even then, it is still obvious that female violence must make “more” sense if the reader is to accept certain behaviour. Spenser and his considerably more reckless sidekick Hawk come across, not least thanks to their competent use of force, as all masculine. Violence is a necessary skill, the criminal victims tend to remain faceless, their deaths are reported as matter of fact, an act of tidying up. The description of a fight in the middle of a devastating storm is indicative of this approach. Spenser, here as first-person narrator, provides a step-bystep account. Death turns into a matter of technicality – with a quip to finish it off: Neither of us had enough footing to land a decent punch. Then he made a mistake. He tried to kick me and lost his footing and staggered to his left. I turned my hip in a little and hit him with a big uppercut. Bingo! He staggered. I hit him again and he disappeared. […] I felt the cliff edge. I had, in fact, knocked him down. A lot further down than I had imagined.35

When injured, the heroes’ recovery is built on sheer willpower and based on all the satisfying trademarks that also characterize their use of violence:

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focused on a task, with unwavering objectives, recovery turns into a first step towards revenge. If man becomes even more manly in the face of brutality (a logic that clearly does not apply to women), Spenser’s endurance and readiness to enact force can be outdone: Jack Reacher, yet another warrior mainly called by his surname, is Lee Child’s best-selling former military policeman who cherishes being unburdened by a home and possessions while in permanent, albeit accidental, pursuit of justice. Characterized by exceptional analytical skills and having grown up to be a soldier, Reacher needs no counsel – his sense of right is unwavering, his readiness to employ brutality to protect it knows no boundaries. After multiple killings he remains calm: Just another night of business as usual in his long and spectacularly violent life. He was used to it, literally. And the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely. It just wasn’t there. Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.36

The violence that Reacher employs is counterbalanced by his particular code of honour, which is comparable to Spenser’s and Salander’s. The acceptance of his actions rests on the fact that he is hardly ever wrong – in contrast to Parker’s Spenser, though, Child’s hero, who has little sense for life’s finer things, is so independent and physical that his appearance frightens most people off. Disillusioned, Reacher drifts through a corrupt society offset by a few principled characters who just about maintain a sense of what must be perceived as “real” order. His treatment of any situation mirrors that of a battlefield – and, accordingly, the degree of violence employed is adapted: Reacher waited until he bent low enough for the finishing kick to the face, delivered hard but with a degree of mercy, in that smashed teeth and a busted jaw were better than out-and-out brain damage. […] The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.37

Frighteningly consequential, neither Salander nor Block spend too much time musing about done deeds; Reacher is utterly free of such sentiments. Parker’s Spenser and Child’s Reacher are from the very beginning unwaveringly loyal to the people they trust, Salander eventually understands the importance of the ability to do so. Parker’s private detective, while not a feminist, is unconventional enough in terms of

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gender to have been labelled “soft boiled”; Jack Reacher appreciates strong, moral and beautiful women, and wins them, although unlike Spenser he does move on. Salander, meanwhile, defies most genderrelated labels. Parker, whose doctoral thesis considered the evolution of the American hero, portrays Spenser as an agent of traditional values – to enforce them, violence does, on reflection, come into play. Reacher stands for an “ideal” army, with fear systematically translated into aggression. Salander, meanwhile, is guided by her instinct to act as a corrective to the plight of women. With her half-brother finally trapped, she adds up the crimes and murders he committed, most importantly the women he “had transported, drugged, abused and sold […] both retail and wholesale”. You could get pretty angry with less provocation. She saw no reason to let him live any longer. He hated her with a passion she could not even fathom. What would happen if she turned him over to the police? A trial? A life sentence? When would he be granted parole? How soon would he escape? […] Salander was afraid of no-one and nothing. She realized that she lacked the necessary imagination – and that was evidence enough that there was something wrong with her brain. […] What would she be ready to sacrifice for the satisfaction of firing the nail gun one last time?38

The end of the novel finds her taking a steaming hot bath – an indulgence for a person with no interest in luxuries, but also an act of cleansing that recurs strikingly often in crime novels featuring violent detectives whose existence highlights the woes of society. In contrast though to their readily violent male counterparts, Salander and Block both depend on a contemporary perspective that uncovers the workings of long-term violence. Both women benefit from the fact that the heroine’s potential personal losses along the way remain limited, in as much as the worst, the unspeakable and therefore most formative has usually already happened in the past.

Eternal Combat All four protagonists under discussion share a striking sense of independence: Salander, Block and Spenser cherish their privacy, they are able to move on without further ado. Reacher takes this a step further in that he chooses to be homeless. All four have over a long time hit a nerve with a loyal readership. The female warrior who employs violence to set the record straight and eventually finds like-minded women is opposed by men who are part of

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corrupt institutions. Gercke and Larsson employ references to ancient Greek mythology and thought to embed their protagonists in a broader context. The uninhibited superman, meanwhile, chooses to tackle the whole of society, his demons safely stored away and rationalised. Violence is systemic and endemic – in response, the modern hero is depicted not as a “normal” person: he acts within archaic (male) und ancient (female) patterns of combat. Reacher and Salander get away with brutality because their characters, independent, anti-materialistic and on a mission, have morphed, more so than Spenser and Block, into cartoon-like figures for whom normality does not apply. As such, comparable to games and films, they do not fight villains, but pure – either mentally disturbed or highly educated – evil. It takes the acknowledgement of their broken personalities to make the measure of violence acceptable – they are, however, like the crimes they fight, beyond any human scale, free from the constraints of space and time. While murder, even in the hands of forces of good, remains, as Klavan had observed, the opposite of art, it appears to cater for the readers’ need for modern literary heroes.

Notes 1

Over the years, academic interest in crime fiction has steadily risen. Edward Rathstein states that detective stories have “become a touch-stone for academic criticism, raising issues that have become cultural obsessions”. Edward Rathstein, The New York Times Book Review, 4 March 2000. 2 Ian Rankin argues that “people are interested in crime fiction because they are fascinated by the margins of the world, those places where society’s rules break down”. Ian Rankin, “Foreword”, in Barry Forshaw, The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction (London: Rough Guides 2007), pp. vi–vii, here p. vii. 3 Robert B. Parker, A Savage Place (London: Penguin 1985), p. 61. 4 All four series of books have been adapted for cinema and TV; in this article the focus is on the development of the original literary characters. 5 The writer Amelia Hill quotes a publisher who stated with reference to images on book jackets that “Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t”. Amelia Hill, “Sexist Violence Sickens Crime Critic”, The Observer, 25 October 2009. On the impact of visual in comparison to written violence, see Gabriele Holzmann, Schaulust und Verbrechen. Eine Geschichte des Krimis als Mediengeschichte (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2001), p. 45. 6 Karin Slaughter, Broken (London: Random House, 2011), p. 8. 7 Lee Child, The Visitor (London: Bantham 2000), p. 135. 8 Andrew Klavan, “Batman Battles the Politics of Resentment”, Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2012. 9 Sara Paretsky, Hardball (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010), p. 195. The years given in brackets indicate the beginning of each series.

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Karin Slaughter, Broken (London: Random House, 2011), p. 3. Tess Gerritsen, Keeping the Dead (London et al: Bantam Books, 2008), p. 137. 12 “Er mochte etwa sechzig Jahre alt sein, war fett und klein und trug einen so unglaublichen Schweinskopf auf den Schultern, dass sie zweimal hinsehen musste, um zu glauben, was sie sah. Einen Hals hatte der Kerl überhaupt nicht. Das Kinn war dafür dreifach vorhanden, die knallroten Ohren standen ab. Es fehlte nur die Zitrone in der Schnauze und hinter den Ohren Petersiliensträußchen.” Doris Gercke, Weinschröter, Du musst hängen (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2008), p. 36. All translations are by the author of this article. 13 Arguably, the aggression at the core of acts of rape mirrors a declaration of war; after all “rape has been a tool of warriors for centuries”. Laura L. O’Toole, Jessica R. Schiffman, and Margie L. Kiter Edwards, “Preface. Conceptualizing Gender Violence”, in Gender Violence. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Laura L. O’Toole, Jessica R. Schiffman, and Margie L. Kiter Edwards (New York: New York University Press, 2007), p. xi. 14 Doris Gercke, Weinschröter, p. 110. 15 Doris Gercke, Die schöne Mörderin (Munich: Ullstein, 2001), pp. 105–106. 16 Maureen T. Ready, Detektivinnen. Frauen im modernen Kriminalroman, trans. by Susi Harringer (Vienna: Guthmann & Peterson, 1988), p. 8. On the importance of the predecessors of modern female detectives, see, for example, Joseph A. Kestener, Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003). 17 Ready, Detektivinnen, p. 125. 18 These characterizations stem from the The Sunday Times (27 September 2009) and the The Telegraph (10 September 2009) respectively. The closest observations of the character are made by Salander’s friends who note her anorexic appearance and behaviour that might be considered symptomatic of Asperger’s syndrome. 19 In the first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a damning assessment of the Swedish social services in general, and the guardianship in particular, is addressed (p. 142 and p. 202); in the third volume, the system is then called to account. 20 Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, trans. by Reg Keeland (London: Maclehose Press, 2008), p. 213. 21 Sweden has a long tradition of crime novels that use a gripping story as a vehicle to point at the failings of society. In the 1970s, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall created the Stockholm-based detective Martin Beck for this purpose; in recent years Henning Mankell and Håkan Nesser have been among the bestselling authors who contradict the image of a perfect society. Tellingly, in Larsson’s novels Blomkvist is portrayed as an avid reader of Anglo-American detective and crime novels. On the link between Swedish society and crime fiction, see Risto Saarinen, “The Surplus of Evil in Welfare Society: Contemporary Scandinavian Crime Fiction”, Dialog: A Journal of Theology, vol. 42 (2003), pp. 131–135. 22 See Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, trans. by Reg Keeland (London: Maclehose Press, 2009), p. 3. 23 Gercke, Die schöne Mörderin, p. 241. 24 Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, trans. by Reg Keeland (London: Maclehose Press, 2009), p. 175. 11

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Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, p. 409. Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, p. 227. Blomkvist is made to argue in a similar fashion, acknowledging that she is “peculiar by all means, but completely rational according to her own scheme of things. She did a hideously violent thing because it was necessary, not because she wanted to.” (p. 272) 27 Ibid., p. 273. 28 Ibid., p. 41. 29 Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, pp. 546–547. 30 Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, p. 337 and 524. The great male loners of the classic detective story such as Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer and Sam Spade are actually such men but nevertheless appear acceptable thanks to an explicit moral code. 31 Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, pp. 351–352. 32 On the tradition of anxieties caused by women presumably out of control and the means to channel them, see the exemplary study by Natalie Zemon Davies, Sociology and Culture in Early Modern France (Palo Alto/CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). 33 Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, pp. 355–356. 34 Robert Parker began the Spenser series in 1971. Spenser is representative of the “hardboiled detective novel” which “is both the first American species of crime novel and the most resolutely masculinist”. Greg Forter, Murdering Masculinities. Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel (New York University Press, 2000), p. 1. 35 Robert B. Parker, Rough Weather (London: Quercus, 2008), p. 39. 36 Lee Child, The Hard Way (London: Bantam Books, 2001), p. 511. 37 Lee Child, Worth Dying For (London: Transworld Publishers, 2011), p. 66. 38 Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, pp. 594–595. 26

INDEX Abortion 205 Abuse xiii, 169, 192-93, 196, 198, 207-17, 225, 231 Agency viii-ix, xi-xiii, 16, 18, 2327, 33, 38, 55, 73, 79-80, 91, 131-32, 142, 144, 151, 158, 169, 173-84, 192-93, 205-6, 222 Female viii, 10, 23, 143, 168, 176, 183-84, 193 Male viii, xi, xii, 73, 144, 164, 180 Alienation 127, 133, 136, 138, 152 Amazon(s) ix, xi, 43, 49, 97-99, 101, 103, 105-8, 112, 114, 226, 228 Anxiety 31, 41, 50, 65, 129, 152, 182, 228 Aristocracy (also see elite) xi, 1, 1314, 58-59, 87, 90-93, 157, 159, 176, 179, 205 Army 74-76, 78-79, 83, 94, 98, 142, 165, 226, 231 Audience ix-x, 1, 5, 8, 13-15, 17, 24-33, 42-43, 57, 61, 96, 153, 157, 168, 179, 183, 189, 191, 194-96, 199-201 Authority x, xii, 12, 61, 69-71, 128, 138 Avant-garde xi, 124, 126, 128-29, 142-43 Ballet x, 39-50 Bartholomew’s Day Massacre x, 3839, 41, 49 Battle (also see combat) xi, 2, 26, 42, 74, 76-81, 96-98, 100-2, 105, 111, 166, 171, 177, 181 Battlefield ix, 75, 78, 112, 166, 175, 229

Beast of Prey 125, 225, 227 Birth 7-8, 62-63, 66, 123, 12630,136, 160 Birth fantasies (male) 123, 12627, 130, 136 Blood 7-8, 30, 63-64, 68, 77, 125, 135, 137-42, 166, 169, 179, 216-17 Bloodshed 77, 169 Body xi, xiii, 6, 26, 28-29, 31-33, 60, 62, 67-68, 77, 101-2, 109, 112-15, 123, 125-26, 132, 13536,138, 140-44, 154-55, 167-68, 182, 196, 215 Body language 97, 101, 106 Mutilated bodies 154-159, 207 Brutality (also see violence) xii-xiii, 33, 69, 77, 79, 82, 90, 93, 124, 139, 151-52, 156-58, 164, 16670, 190, 207, 211, 224, 227-30, 232 Catholics 25, 38-43, 46-50 Censorship 5, 11-12 Centaur 97 Childhood 82, 124, 223-25, 227-28 Child(ren) xii, 6-8, 10, 12-14, 63-64, 80-81, 123, 126-29, 134-36, 179, 190-94, 197-202, 206-7, 209, 215, 227, 224 Civilization 132, 178 Combat (also see battle) 38, 41-47, 75, 102, 106, 108, 112, 156, 171, 224, 230 Criminal ix, 90-93, 156, 168, 212, 229 Deviancy ix, x, 1, 5, 16, 18 Disorderly women 228

236 Dominance 75, 134 Female dominance 135 Male dominance 138, 197, 208, 216 Ecstasy 24, 27-28, 31, 33 Education viii, xii, 121, 151, 189 Elite (also see aristocracy) 12, 1415, 44, 75 Emotion xi-xii, 28-29, 31-32, 88, 96-97, 99-100, 119, 126, 136, 139-40, 156, 166 England 21, 31, 45, 54, 56, 61, 6465, 67, 73, 174 Eroticism 28-31, 91-92, 124-25, 137, 139, 169 Establishment 142, 225, 228 Execution 31, 140, 226 Fantasy (also see birth fantasies) 13, 29, 88, 103, 130, 136, 140, 142, 182-83 Father(hood) 7, 79, 89, 129, 131, 164, 175, 190, 193-96, 203, 205, 207-8, 211, 213-14 Fear 18, 24-25, 28, 31, 48, 50, 57, 79, 90, 96-97, 100, 112, 125, 131, 135, 137-38, 142, 151-52, 210, 214, 223, 228 Femininity 18, 25, 29-31, 33, 97100, 105-7, 124-26, 129, 133, 135-36, 141-44, 181-83, 213 First Northern War 77 First World War xi, 112-13, 151-52, 155, 157-58, 165, 167, 191, 193 Force (divine; military; use of) 5-6, 40, 61, 75, 77-78, 80-81, 83, 92, 96, 99, 113, 119, 128, 132-33, 135-38, 140, 142-43, 153, 15758, 164, 166, 169-70, 173, 183, 189, 191, 200, 206, 210, 215, 223-24, 225-32 France xi, xii, 4, 23, 33, 38, 40, 42, 46, 49-50, 76, 93, 151-52, 15455, 158-59, 191 Frenzy xi, 31, 99, 228

Index Gaze 30, 96, 101, 196 Male gaze 30, 101, 165 Gender / Gendering viii-xiii, 1-19, 26-27, 30-32, 56-57, 60, 64, 66, 92, 98, 100, 119-20, 128, 130, 132-44, 163-64, 167-69, 172-84, 192, 196, 204, 210, 213-14, 220, 223, 228, 230 Gender distinction 80, 134, 144, 226 Gender norms 97, 99 Gender war 132-33, 135, 138, 142, 146 Genius 88, 134-35, 143 Germany xii, 87, 129, 152, 154, 189, 191, 193, 200, 222 Girl power 172-73, 179, 181, 183 Gladiator 7-8, 46 Great Britain xii, 46, 56, 65-66, 68, 153 Harmony 39-41, 47, 127, 198 Heracles 226 Hero xi, xiii, 18, 32, 82, 88, 90, 92, 97-98, 107, 152, 155, 157, 173, 177-79, 181, 184, 221-22, 22932 Heroine 27, 32, 157, 174, 180-82, 221, 223, 225, 229, 231 Heroism 1, 18, 25, 92, 157 Ideal / Idealization 2, 14, 50-51, 7475, 77, 79-80, 86, 89, 92-93, 98, 126, 128-29, 132, 135-37, 140, 142, 182, 230 Image / Imagery (of violent men and women) ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, 18, 29-30, 55-56, 59, 61, 63, 73, 7576, 78, 81, 95-96, 113, 123-24, 126, 128, 169, 188, 190, 193-94, 197, 216, 219 Insanity 27, 164, 227 Institution 13, 162, 164, 166, 168, 187, 211, 223-25, 227, 230 Ireland 46, 48 Italy 4-5, 18, 204

Gender, Agency and Violence Jewish communities 168 Judith ix, 82 Killer / Killing 6-7, 10-12, 26-29, 31, 67, 76-78, 80-81, 85, 88-91, 95-96, 110, 132-33, 137, 15355, 165-67, 180, 205, 208, 21314, 220, 224-25, 228 Language 26, 32, 97, 101, 106, 129 Leopard 97 Lust (also see pleasure) 2, 6-9, 18, 88, 93-94, 140, 164 Machine 88, 91, 112-13, 128, 130 Manipulation 13, 18, 32, 69, 191 Marriage 10, 12, 16, 38-41, 45, 4950, 61, 184 Masculinity xi, 19, 27, 30, 91, 98, 100, 106, 125, 133, 135-36, 138-39, 141-44, 151-52, 178-82, 203-7, 209, 212-15, 227 Maternity 123-24, 126, 128-30, 13436, 138, 143, 165, 183 Media 83, 100, 166, 188-89, 191-92, 194, 225, 228 Middle Ages 175-81, 184 Misogyny xii, 17, 125, 136, 164-5 Modernism / Modernity xi, 100, 124, 129-30 Monster 5, 15-18, 156, 227 Mother(hood) x, 2, 6-7, 10-11, 2829, 81-82, 123-24, 126, 128-30, 135-36, 143, 165, 168, 206 Motivation 11, 27, 101, 210, 228 Murder 7, 10-12, 18, 28, 44, 62, 6667, 82, 87, 112, 135, 139, 141, 151, 155-56, 167-69, 207, 21012, 215-16, 226-28, 230, 232 Murderer 87-89, 90, 93, 134, 139, 155-56, 164, 166, 168, 170, 177, 211, 214, 216, 222 Music (also see sound and voice) 39-41, 47-48, 88, 100, 123, 12526, 128, 193, 197-98

237

Myth / Mythology 26, 41-42, 56-59, 66, 69, 89, 99, 108, 112, 136, 216, 226, 232 Narrative(s) x-xi, 1-2, 6-8, 10-12, 18, 29, 43, 57-59, 82, 133, 16667, 178, 188-95, 199, 201, 207, 209, 211, 213-14, 216-17, 223, 225-26 Other(ness) ix, x, 1, 5, 16, 88-89, 97, 130-42, 179 Outsider 63, 210, 223 Paedophilia 207 Pain (infliction and suffering of) x, 26-29, 31-33, 137, 139-40, 156, 166 Passion 6, 25, 31, 48, 87, 91, 168, 206, 210, 217, 225, 227, 231 Patriarchy / patriarchal structures x, 21, 23, 28, 31, 163, 176, 178, 181, 183, 189, 197, 203-9, 224 Performance (of violence; also see spectacle) x, 30, 33, 38, 41, 4345, 47-48, 50, 58, 96, 100, 138, 143-44 Perpetrator iix, xii, 111, 149, 15354, 177, 179, 191-92, 205-8, 211-13, 215, 222 Pleasure (also see lust) x, 22, 26, 2831, 38, 42, 123, 167, 198, 211, 222 Pogrom 168 Poison 26-27, 137 Poland 75, 77 Popular culture / appeal (of violence) 13, 27, 33, 56-57, 175, 221-22, 224, 228 Propaganda 1, 13, 58, 157, 159 Protestants x, 23, 36-42, 44-47, 189, 196, 198 Race 5, 101, 123-24, 129 Rape xii, 24, 27-31, 59-62, 87, 98, 112, 125, 133, 167-68, 170,

238 205-7, 209, 211, 216, 222, 22425, 227 Renaissance 2, 4, 18, 27-28, 30, 33, 61 Revolution 98-99, 196 French Revolution xi, 87, 93, 99 Role model v, 4, 56, 182 Savages 16 Scotland 24, 58, 62-64, 67-68, 70 Secret Police 168, 170, 226 Seduction ix, xii, 11, 91, 134-35, 205-13, 216-17 Sex trafficking 206, 226 Social class / status 14, 89, 92, 184, 197 Society viii-ix, xi-xiii, 30, 33, 88-94, 100, 152, 155-57, 164-65, 170, 174, 179, 183, 189, 191, 197, 199, 207-08, 219, 221-23, 22630 Soldier (male and female) xii-xiii, 6, 78-80, 83, 113, 129, 132, 151, 153-55, 157-59, 164, 167-70, 226, 230 Sound (also see music and voice) xii, 125-26, 129, 188, 190-99, 201, 213 Spain 46 Spectacle (also see performance) x, 24, 27-33, 34-39, 45, 196 State xii, 24-25, 77, 93, 97-99, 11112, 118, 150-59, 167, 169, 17678, 227 Suffering 29-30, 32, 63, 114, 118, 136, 143, 151-53, 156-60, 166, 168, 191, 194, 198, 205 Sweden 83, 222 Tartars 77-78 Terrorism 201 Theatre (also see performance) 24, 28, 30, 33, 45, 96, 100 Third Reich 200 Thirty Years’ War 75, 82 Trojan War 97

Index Turks x, 43, 53 Tyranny 24, 27, 126 Uniform 79, 167, 169 Vampire 8, 134, 183, 225 Victim viii-ix, xi-xii, 29, 32, 80-81, 90, 93, 113, 151-53, 155-60, 166-67, 169, 179, 181, 199, 205, 207-10, 213, 217, 222-25, 229 Victimization x, 155-56, 226 Violence (also see brutality) viiixiii, 23-33, 38-39, 46, 56-57, 59, 60, 67-69, 74-75, 77-80, 82-83, 87, 92-94, 96, 98-99, 113-15, 118, 123-25, 128, 132-35, 13844, 151, 155-58, 164, 166, 16770, 173-75, 177-81, 183-84, 188-94, 196-201, 205-11, 213-17, 221-232 Voice (also see music and sound) xii, 32, 99, 125-26, 139-40, 142, 159, 173, 176, 181, 188, 191-99, 205-7, 210-16, 224 War / Warfare (also see Trojan War, Thirty Years’ War, First Northern War, First World War and Wars of Religion) ix, xi, xiixiii, 23, 28, 39, 46-48, 50, 68, 74-77, 80, 82-83, 93, 96-98, 100, 107, 115, 119, 128, 133, 135, 141, 151-53, 155-58, 164-67, 169-70, 179, 182, 189, 191 Warrior (male / female) 76, 78, 80, 82, 97-98, 100-1, 103, 106, 108, 113, 135, 173, 175-76, 182-83, 226, 229-31 Wars of Religion x, 38-39, 50 Weapon xi, 25-27, 31, 44, 89, 102, 151, 170, 229-30 Whore ix, 11, 227-28 Wolf 11 She-Wolf 11, 97