Gothic Heroines on Screen

Representation, Interpretation, and Feminist Inquiry

Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Frances A. Kamm, Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Frances A. Kamm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351779371
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

Gothic Heroines on Screen explores the translation of the literary Gothic heroine on screen, the potential consequences of these adaptations, and contemporary interpretations of the form.

Each chapter illuminates the significance of this moving image mediation, relating its screen topics to their various historical, social, and geographical moments of production, while maintaining a focus on the key figure of the investigating woman. Many chapters – perhaps inescapably – delve into the point of adaptation: the Bluebeard story and du Maurier's Rebecca as two key examples. Moving beyond the Old Dark House that frequently forms both the Gothic heroine's backdrop and her area of investigation, some chapters examine alternative locations and their impact on the Gothic heroine, some leave behind the marital thriller to explore what happens when the Gothic meets other genres, such as comedy, while others travel away from the usual Anglo-American contexts to European ones.

Throughout the collection, the Gothic heroine's representation is explored within the medium, which brings together image, movement, and sound, and this technological fact takes on varied significance. What does remain constant, however, is the emphasis on the longevity, significance, and distinctiveness of the Gothic heroine in screen culture.

PART I

Bluebeard’s ghost

1

BLUEBEARD’S WOMEN FIGHT BACK

The Gothic heroine in contemporary film and Heidi Lee Douglas’ Little Lamb (2014)

Gisèle M. Baxter

I have long been fascinated by Bluebeard stories for two reasons: first, the story’s variable reputation as a children’s tale and its anomalies as a ‘fairy tale’; and second, I have noticed an odd trend when teaching Perrault’s iconic and literary ‘Barbe Bleue’, a reaction one could call the ‘poor Bluebeard’ response. This interpretation invariably includes sentiments such as: ‘Poor Bluebeard! He only wanted to be loved! He could not help that he was ugly! His wife was just after his money! If only she’d just done as he asked!’ I suspect (echoing Maria Tatar’s [2004] reading) that this reaction is evoked by the non-descriptive, two-dimensionality of Perrault’s story (a style characteristic of folk fairy tales): the wife is so functional as to be almost a non-entity. She fulfils her purpose, without action or agency, and is not rewarded at the end because she has defeated Bluebeard (her brothers accomplish that), but because of her legal position: she was his wife, and so she inherits all his money, so now she can reward her siblings and enter her second marriage with a dowry (significantly, the tale implies her first was brokered by her mother: marrying Bluebeard was marrying up). However, as described, she is almost devoid of interest except perhaps when she discovers Bluebeard’s secret, as here she does acquire a sort of self-awareness: she realises she is in big trouble now. If she is the functional protagonist, the story seems more to be about Bluebeard: the interesting questions attach to him. And sometimes they allow readers to gloss over the gruesome contents of the mystery room and their implications.

This chapter offers a counter to this ‘poor Bluebeard’ response, and an exploration of the reasoning behind its evocation, by examining examples of the Bluebeard story in contemporary Gothic films that focus on the female protagonist. I will do so by first briefly commenting on the fairy tale’s own unusual history and outlining, in particular, the challenges posed by identifying a Bluebeard text. The malleability of the story shall be further extrapolated through reference to a diverse selection of filmic adaptations depicting variations of the tale. Such analysis draws out how, in translating the fairy tale onto the cinema screen, these films shift the emphasis onto the transgressive wife or female protagonist, and in doing so ensure that the significant interpretations made possible by the text are now inextricably linked to her. Such possibilities raise a number of themes, including the relevance of what is included in the film’s adaptation (for example, who is saved within the story and who performs such a rescue), how the story is visually depicted (such as the importance of setting and the camera’s gaze), and why such aesthetic and narrative choices have been made. The latter is most important: I will argue that these examples lead to a reconsideration of the woman character in relation to Bluebeard and other male figures, ultimately raising the question of feminism. I bring these elements together by using Heidi Lee Douglas’ 2014 director’s cut of her short horror film Little Lamb as a central case study. I argue that, much like the other contemporary cinematic examples cited, this film’s status as feminist depends a great deal on who is looking at what; in the way the characters’ stories – and the events framing the portrayal of Bluebeard’s ‘wife’, in particular – are visually framed and performed.

‘Bluebeard’ enjoyed a fairly long if problematic stretch as a children’s story. The story presented the notion that a good scare can be pleasurable, although Perrault’s version – perhaps the most well-known telling of the story – provided droll and somewhat ironic morals at the end of his tale. Perrault’s Bluebeard was aimed at an audience of (primarily) marriageable young women at the French court in the late 17th century. By the 19th century, the fairy tale’s legacy had solidified its appeal to adult and juvenile audiences, as the wife-murdering protagonist appeared a favourite topic for illustrators and popular drama as well as featuring in the children’s anthology (Tatar, 2004: 11–15, 28–48; Zipes, 2006: 167–173).¹ The currency of Bluebeard as a children’s tale often retold for adults is evidenced by its numerous adaptations and reincarnations within diverse media texts, although the shape of these re-presentations can differ. Not all stories of serial killers are Bluebeard stories. Psycho (1960) is not one, even though it is in a way about a series of young women failing a test they are unaware of. Nor are all locked-room mystery stories: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is also not a Bluebeardian tale, though film versions play with Bluebeard tropes. Jane Eyre (1847) is closer in the way that it evokes the fairy tale’s motifs. Arguably, the necessary components of ‘true’ Bluebeard stories are entrapment (with an unsettling, even uncanny aspect attached to the ensnarer), prohibition, a mystery that must be unlocked, and grave peril for the person who attempts to do so.² Use of the colour blue is actually optional.

Echoes of and motifs from ‘Bluebeard’ run throughout Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano, but there is a pivotal scene where the story is performed as a combination of live action and shadow play by adult members of the community at a school pageant in mid-19th-century New Zealand.³ The children who performed earlier are in the audience, shivering with excited terror beside their parents, and the sudden conclusion of the play, when the Maori in the audience invade the stage, opens up important questions about culture and storytelling, as well as engagement and detachment. An 1866 photograph by John Coates Browne (‘A Children’s Play: Bluebeard’s Wives’) stages a scene from a children’s play based on the Bluebeard story, and The Piano’s visualisation echoes this strongly, especially in the young wife’s costume and the positioning of the dead wives seemingly suspended by their hair. However, The Piano engages as well with the Bluebeard story’s much more significant legacy: as an adult story whose horror depends on secrets.

Little Lamb, despite its depiction of a master/servant relationship instead of a marriage, fits into a discussion about such adaptations, and more specifically as an example of modern films that revise the Bluebeard story in a broadly Victorian context, using the tropes of Gothic horror and/or Gothic romance. Both The Piano and Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) are also narratives where the prison-house of marriage and the cultural assumptions about women as the property of fathers then husbands allow for analyses of agency and restriction, as well as desire and sometimes transgressive sexualities. Indeed, Heidi Lee Douglas’ use of archetype and history, with an awareness of real-life contemporary anecdotes (Douglas, 2015), echoes a point Tatar makes about the significance of the Bluebeard school play episode in The Piano and its effect on its audiences in terms of disruption in cinematic revision (while also raising the coloniser perspective in Tasmanian Gothic film noted by Jeni Thornley, whose work I will turn to later):

The Bluebeard folktale, as enacted in the shadow pantomime, is so palpably real to the Maori tribesmen who witness it that they storm the stage to disrupt the performance, bent on rescuing the hapless wife from an ax-wielding tyrant. At first blush, this episode seems designed to highlight the naiveté of the natives, revealing that they are unable to distinguish representation from reality. Yet it also serves as an interesting parallel to the way in which Campion herself disrupts the folkloric tradition of Bluebeard narratives through her cinematic intervention. And as subsequent events make clear, the play staged in the film foreshadows in a strangely literal sense the violence that follows in the wake of its performance. It can be seen as the original of the counterfeit version played out in reality by Stewart, and it thereby carries an authenticity that makes it a natural target of disruption by the natives.

(Tatar, 2004: 124)

However, this disruption can be complicated in such adult adaptations or appropriations of the tale. Consider the developed setting of The Piano or the potentially metafictional neo-Victorianism of Crimson Peak. Such films say much about how we reconstruct Victorian (and still construct) representations of gender, sexuality, class, and culture, but also about the enduring influence of popular romantic tropes in the insistence on a ‘humanising’ male figure who (even though he might not save the day) is there at the end to support the heroine. Both The Piano and Crimson Peak more or less uphold this tendency (even though arguably The Piano’s Ada chooses Baines as her ‘savior’, he seems to need Stewart’s permission to take up this role). Len Wiseman’s Underworld (2003) is a comparable Gothic film in this respect, albeit in a modern setting. Perhaps not strictly a Bluebeard story (even if its heroine does open doors forbidden to her), the film grants its protagonist Selene considerable agency, even to disrupting the structure of her vampire community and destroying her mentor, while her lover Michael plays the ‘damsel in distress’ role.⁴

Crimson Peak did not advertise itself as such, but it is a Bluebeard story (even to the colour blue unsettlingly echoed in the dark teal blue attire of the Sharpe siblings at home, which echoes the walls of Allerdale Hall’s main rooms). However, in keeping with the above trend of contemporary cinematic adaptations offering reconfigurations of the original story’s gender dynamics, Crimson Peak has Lucille as the principal Bluebeard figure: because Thomas redeems himself (and never seems nearly mysterious or ambiguous enough at any point), he and Alan McMichael function as the brothers who at least enable Edith’s rescue, even if she is the one who dispatches Lucille at the end. It is tempting to view Edith as a New Woman riposte to the functional wife figure in Perrault’s tale, with her apparently modern attitudes and practices: she learns to type to disguise her ‘feminine’ handwriting; she shuns the predatory marriage-market attitude and social world of Alan’s sister; she is broad-minded about both technology and the supernatural; and in virtually all romantic scenes with Thomas, she takes the lead, and when they do have sex she is on top. Ironically, when Edith notices a volume of Arthur Conan Doyle in Alan’s office, she asks if Alan fancies himself a detective, although, of course, it turns out both pursue detective type work; Edith’s investigative instincts help her to discover the key, which she takes without any warning or prohibition, even after Lucille has told her she does not need her own copy of the house keys. Indeed, costume designer Kate Hawley refers to the embroidered gold dress Edith wears in some key scenes of exploration at the Hall as her ‘Nancy Drew dress’ (Hawley, 2016).

Yet if the ghosts are real, as Edith claims, and not just practical metaphors for the past, it becomes debatable to what extent Edith solves mysteries for herself, or the information is revealed because these spectres (sometimes literally) point her in the right direction. By the time Alan arrives with Mr Holly’s documentary evidence, the pieces of the puzzle are pretty much in place. It is also possible that Lucille allows Edith to find the key to Enola’s trunk, not least because the more Edith knows, the stronger the case Lucille can make to Thomas that the current Hall’s mistress must go the way of his previous wives (indeed, this provides a more practical motive than ego – as in Perrault’s tale – for keeping mementos of the crimes). Still, at the end, Edith is remarkably proactive: she has the ability to run and fight with anemia from poisoning and a broken ankle, in a sheer nightgown, in a blizzard; she impulsively repurposes household items, such as her pen, a kitchen knife, and a shovel, as deadly weapons; and she promises the wounded Alan (the men seem much less able to withstand injury in this last showdown than the women) that she will get help and return for him. Nevertheless, Alan is there for her, just as now-ghostly Thomas is there for her too, as if to lessen the risk of her becoming what she fights, or at least to make sure that Lucille is really dead and doomed to ghostly isolation.

This saving of the heroine from what she might become is more explicitly Michael’s function in Underworld. Selene does emerge as the heroine: she rejects the role of consort and ultimately of ‘daughter’, humiliating the ambitious traitor, then destroying the deceptive father figure who executed his blood daughter. While Michael is consistently the ‘damsel in distress’ figure, midway through and at the end he ‘humanises’ Selene, takes the thorn from her paw, and enables her to admit to vulnerability in her residual grief over the long-ago loss of her family. In its contrasting approach to triumphant action heroines, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015) is much more obviously a Bluebeard story, while also strongly echoing the original-series Star Trek episode ‘Requiem for Methusaleh’ (1969). Reclusive tech genius Nathan’s mystery closet is filled with the rejected prototypes of Ava, but Ava becomes the Bluebeard figure herself, a point reinforced by the song played over the end credits: post-punk women-led band Savages’ ‘Husbands’.⁵ The choice suggests that if there is no proactive lover (nerdy Caleb does not measure up; at least Underworld’s Michael, thanks to Selene, can become a vampire/werewolf hybrid) to redeem or ‘humanise’ the female figure escaping her confines, this is what she will become.⁶

Ava and Selene are sexualised similarly: sleek modern figures with perfect bodies who are focal points of masculine desire, even though the men around them are invariably inferior and often physically weaker. This raises the (complicated) role of the gaze in film, as articulated by Robert Dale Parker’s discussion of the enduring impa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Bluebeard’s Ghost
• Part II Returning to Manderley
• Part III The Gothic and Genre Forms
• Part IV National Cinema and the Gothic
• Filmography
• Index