Animated Children’s Films: An Open Letter to Pixar

This open letter previously appeared at Pixar Can Do Better.
November 2011
Berkeley, CA
An Open Letter to Pixar
Dear Pixar Creative Team:
I adore your films. Want proof? My car is named Dory. I have Boundin’ posters hanging in my house. My partner and I mentioned both a jackalope and a delay fish in our wedding vows. We are fans.  
I know that you are aware that last year, Toy Story 3 received criticism for a few lines and moments that seem sexist and homophobic. What you may not know is how to fix this situation, or why you should bother.
Let me briefly offer you answers to both of those questions:
1) How to fix this: I want you to hire a consultant to read your scripts and look at your storyboards. More on that later.
2) Why you should bother:
Here’s the thing. Your movies are funny, warm, moving, lively, and brilliant. And yet every so often, they contain a throwaway joke – something that doesn’t forward the plot, something that you don’t need! – that hurts kids.
Let me repeat. You are putting in jokes that aren’t necessary for the scripts, that no one will miss, and that hurt kids.
Here are some examples just from Toy Story 3 and Ratatouille:
A) Making fun of boys who transgress gender lines hurts kids.
In Toy Story 3, Ken laments, “Why do people always call me a girls’ toy?”, and he’s laughed at for having “girl’s handwriting.” What you are teaching here is that 1) girl’s toys and handwriting aren’t as good as boy’s toys & handwriting, and thus 2) girls, and feminine boys, just aren’t as good as masculine boys.  This is called gender policing, homophobia, and misogyny. It hurts kids. And you know what? This joke wasn’t necessary. No one would have enjoyed Toy Story 3 one whit less if the homophobia was left out. You make people laugh in plenty of other wonderful ways in every movie – why do it at someone’s expense?
B) Telling stories where women need to be rescued hurts kids.
In the end of TS3, Jessie is “saved” by Buzz in a very obviously cliched and evocative pose, like in an old western. You seem to have put this in as the final reason that Jessie falls for Buzz. Why bother? Jessie was a perfectly strong female character in her own right, and she already clearly liked Buzz. There was no reason to set her up as a damsel in distress – especially because this image hurts kids.  Damsels in distress create the expectation that women are powerless and need to be saved by men, which damages both girls and boys by 1) teaching them that the roles of Savior and Damsel are the most important roles they can have and 2) teaching girls that they can’t take care of themselves.
C) Showing men kissing women against their will hurts kids and leads to date rape.
Folks, in Ratatouille, there are THREE females – two characters and one bridal caketopper – that are kissed against their will. Each of these is presented as humorous or romantic.  Are you kidding me? When kids see these images, 1) they learn that when girls say no, it is romantic or funny to kiss them anyway, which can lead directly to date rape. 2) Girls learn that what they want or say is not important, and that what a guy really wants is for them to put up a half-hearted fight and then submit.  Is this really what you want to be teaching? I fervently hope that Ratatouille is the last time we will ever see that kind of thing in a Pixar movie.
D) Showing bikini-clad, voiceless women as supreme objects of desire hurts kids.
Night and Day was a gorgeous little gem of a film. But why did your two transparent beings have to fight over hot skinny bikini girls? Why not chocolate cake, or a bouquet of balloons? Are we in Tex Avery’s 1950s?  From this story (and Knick Knack before it) kids learn that hot skinny bikini girls are the most important prize in the world. Girls learn that in order to be interesting they need to be skinny, half-naked, and sexualized. This leads to anorexia, depression, and so much more, as documented in this study: Sexualization of Girls is Linked to Common Mental Health Problems in Girls and Women.
E) Making fun of people who are physically different hurts kids, and
F) Making the bad guy brown hurts kids.
Folks, you did both of these at once with your short, dark-skinned villain in Ratatouille. Again, is it the fifties? This was especially surprising considering that none of your other villains are dark-skinned, and your truly inspiring and groundbreaking portrayals of disability in Finding Nemo.
On the good side, we had some very positive possibly-not-Caucasian characters in Up and TS3. So I think you’re on the right track. Now how to keep going in that direction?
SO, that consultant.
Pixar Creative Team, you are experts and brilliant leaders in your field. You tell wonderful stories and create beautiful works of art. You don’t need to also be experts in fighting homophobia, misogyny, racism, ableism, or sexism.
What you DO need to do is to hire someone who is that expert.
Please, I beg of you: hire a consultant – someone experienced in noticing sexism, racism, heterosexism, and ableism – to look at your scripts and make sure that you are aware of the impact of your throwaway jokes. You need SOMEBODY on your payroll who can look at each story in the earliest phases, scripts and storyboards, and who can say, “that’s sorta sexist. Do we really need it?”
Because you don’t.
Your films are masterpieces. Please, do the right thing, and take out the unnecessary jokes that hurt kids.
Sincerely,
T. Bookstein

T. Bookstein has been noticing misogyny, racism, heterosexism, ableism and other “little” problems in the media for about ten years. She works in higher education at her dream job. She and her partner are raising two awesome sons, and one orange cat.


Animated Children’s Films: Magical Girlhoods in the Films of Studio Ghibli

“For the people who used to be ten years old, and the people who are going to be ten years old.” 
— Director Hayao Miyazaki on Spirited Away

The films of Studio Ghibli provide their viewers with a rich variety of female characters from warrior princesses to love-struck adolescents, curious toddlers to powerful witches. These characters owe a great deal to the prototypes of European fairy tales and Japanese folklore and in many ways are traditional versions and depictions of femininities, but there’s an underlying sense of joy for feminist viewers in that these girls and women are active, subjective and thoroughly engaging. I’m focusing here on young girls in the lighter end of Ghibli’s production including sisters Mei and Satsuke in My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service and Chihiro in Spirited Away.

Spirited Away

Ghibli films tend to blend fantasy and reality so that magic and flight are acceptable parts of the worlds the characters inhabit. Girls especially tend to possess magic powers or particular appreciation of them and this is shown in an unexceptional manner. While Kiki raises some eyebrows in her new town, it’s because the townsfolk don’t see many witches, not because they don’t believe in their existence. Similarly, although Kiki is an outsider, there is a distinct lack of threat to her for being so. In Ghibli worlds girls are fully entitled to fly on broomsticks, as long as they don’t congest traffic, and 13 year olds are allowed to pursue their cultural practices of living alone. In My Neighbour Totoro when Mei tells Satsuke and their father about her encounter with Totoro, after initial disbelief they embrace the truth that there are friendly nature spirits in the area, even leading to father taking the girls to pay their respects to the forest’s deities.

This acceptance of magic is refreshing and marks a clear difference to American cartoons where ironic references are embedded in children’s fantasy to appeal to parents. In this way parents are encouraged to indulge, but secretly laugh at their children’s engagement with fantasy. There’s no knowing irony in Ghibli films, instead they are focussed on telling children’s stories for children and the lack of distinct boundaries between the magic and the mundane are part of this child-centred view. That the protagonists are predominantly female makes for a collection of films focussed on girls’ adventures and triumphs where girls’ experiences are trusted and valued.

Children, like women, are often depicted as having a close connection to the supernatural; that they can see things the rest of us cannot. Indeed Mei and Satsuke seem privileged more than anything to be invited to join the Totoros’ night-time nature ritual. Dancing and flying with creatures the rest of the world (the Ghibli world at least) would revere but aren’t lucky enough to encounter. Chihiro doesn’t have a natural affinity for magic but she’s gifted in the solving of magical problems like how to clean a dirty river spirit.

Mei, Satsuke, Kiki and Chihiro all work within the magical world as part of their quest narratives. Mei and Satsuke are dealing with the illness and potential death of their mother and a move to a new home. Kiki has moved away from her parents according to witch culture and Chihiro seeks the return of her parents from the spiritual realm where she’s been trapped and they’ve been turned into pigs.

My Neighbor Totoro

In all three stories there’s also the seeking of identity for the girls, especially and most literally for Chihiro for she has her very name stolen by a witch. In their quests for self-hood and identity all four characters go through similar trials and experiences: the absence of parental influence, the access to magical powers, the physical manifestations of anxieties such as the dust bunnies that feature in both My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away.

The absence of parents is a common way to allow independence to young females from fairy tales to Jane Austen and unlike for orphaned boys in fiction it can also represent a removal of patriarchal influence in general. It’s not just that these girls don’t have parents guiding them or checking up on them; they are also free to create their own rules of engagement with the world.

One way that all four girls find meaning and self is through work. Satsuke in school and house work, Mei despite being very young does gardening, Kiki sets up her delivery service and Chihiro works in the bath house. All of them do a lot of cleaning. There’s an interesting mix of public and private here and certainly the suggestion that domestic labour can be especially rewarding (for example Kiki’s paid work can provide anxieties and problems). But is the culturally feminine nature of this work an issue? In Chihiro’s case cleaning is linked to subservience and being a captive to the domestic but for the others (and eventually for her) it’s a tool of empowerment and liberation. Does such labour inevitably have negative associations of female drudgery?

Another way that selfhood and identity is achieved by these girls is by flight. Most obviously for Kiki where her broomstick is literally the means of earning a living and saving a friend’s life but also in how Totoro and Cat Bus fly Mei and Satsuke away from their worries and later to their mother. Chihiro’s flight is more anxious, as her encounters with magic are generally, but still serves to move her closer to self discovery by being the time she gives Haku his name so leading her to the rediscovery of her own.

Kiki’s Delivery Service
Work as empowerment isn’t the only moral message in these films, with ecological messages also being played out. In My Neighbour Totoro there’s the idyllic agricultural setting as well as the Totoros and other spirits of the forest. In Spirited Away rivers like Haku’s have been filled in because of the greed of humans. The messages of conservation, respect of nature (and blaming of humans as nature’s destroyers) are not as forcefully applied as in, for example, Princess Mononoke but neither are they subtle. While this preaching could be tiresome in other films, because of their earnestness and how the protagonists are fully on message it’s actually pleasant. Although nurturing the planet back to health is presented as an ungendered activity the films together can be viewed as showing the next generation of empowered young women actively making progress and solutions to the problems inflicted on the world by older generations. This also applies economically where Kiki and Chihiro’s enterprising labours lead to success for both. Chihiro especially is placed at the beginning of the film in the context of a Japan after economic downturn and reckless financial behaviour by her elders (as reported by her father) damaging Japan as a whole and its youth implicitly.

Not everybody believes that Ghibli heroines represent empowered femininities. I’ve been rather selective in the choice of films to cover but even if I’d widened the selection I stand by my view. Ponyo for example wasn’t included as its heroine isn’t really a girl but although it’s a variation on the disempowering The Little Mermaid the core message is rather different. Ponyo accepts a loss of powers because they were never entirely hers and the sea’s power remains with the feminine; Ponyo’s sea-goddess mother.

There’s been significant note of the glimpses of knickers we get in Ghibli films like when Kiki is flying and generally when there’s any rough and tumble. There’s merit in the argument that this could be voyeuristic representations of young girls but it can also be seen as further expressing their freedom and activity. These girls don’t worry about skirts riding up because they totally lack vanity and are preoccupied with altogether more important missions. We’re not given alluring peeps at nubile bodies but girls in action which female bodies so rarely are; that gaze is usually reserved for male bodies. If female passivity is alluring then the kinetic energy of these girls places them beyond that.

 What’s pleasurable about these films from a feminist perspective is their alliance with joyful, engaged and active girlhoods. These girls don’t wait for princes and don’t focus on their appearances but determinedly pursue their missions, however difficult.

____

Rosalind Kemp is a film studies graduate living in Brighton, UK. She’s particularly interested in female coming of age stories, film noir and European films where people talk a lot but not much happens.

Animated Children’s Films: The Princess and the Frog

The Princess and the Frog (2009)
The Princess and the Frog is a Disney milestone for two reasons: it is the first hand-drawn animated motion picture from the company since 2004’s Home on The Range and features an African-American female heroine.
Also keep in mind that the last film co-starring a human princess was 1992’s Aladdin.
But hold that applause.
For these accomplishments mean little once the viewer realizes what is in store.
The poster of a pouting girl holding a frog amongst bugs, an alligator, and a snake amongst a dark, swampy background says it all. No cute fuzzy bunnies, kittens, or deer friends here.
Our characters: Tiana (originally to be Mamie–uh oh!), a two job hustling sassy twang lady with a lifelong dream of becoming a chef/owner of a fine restaurant. The leading man: disinherited, shallow, but very good looking, Prince Naveen. Tiana’s best friend since birth, Charlotte: a rich, apple-cheeked blond with ample curves to die for and a strange obsession with calling her sole parent “Big Daddy.” The villain: a top hat wearing, African mask collecting, voodoo havocking witch doctor with a smooth, seductive albeit evil voice, Dr. Facilier.
A bopping 1920’s New Orleans is where the story takes place.
The opening to the film was irking. After story time, little Charlotte demands a new dress and daddy begs Tiana’s mother to make her a new one. As the camera pans to several versions of the same pink dress, the kind black, very tired seamstress obediently obliges. Sadly, while she and Tiana leave, daddy spoils Charlotte’s silhouette with a puppy.
How cute!
Eye roll.
Tiana and her mom ride the bus back home- nice part of town disappears rather quickly. One does not need to mention where they have a home. Remember these are black people here.
Five minutes later, Tiana and Charlotte grow up. 
(I must also state that I found Charlotte’s treatment of Tiana infuriating.)
At the café, Charlotte just throws all of her daddy’s money at Tiana and demands that she make a boatload of beignets for her Mardi Gras soiree–on that very night! 
Inferiority complex is at play.
Charlotte and her daddy make Tiana’s family work like slaves even though they are paying for them. Much too docile and meek, Tiana and her mother take this dominating behavior and its sickening, even for an animated cartoon.
The plot thickens.
Tiana and Prince Naveen-turned-frog
Thinking her to be a real princess due to the tiara on her head, Prince Naveen-turned-frog begs for Tiana’s kiss. Unfortunately, she isn’t a princess at all. So after a slimy short make out session, she too becomes a frog.
Ah, how wonderful!
Arguing and swapping flies together, these two frogs embark on a journey in the wet, scary marshlands. The quest to finding their lost humanity is supposed to be funny, sweet, and somewhat romantic. Let’s not forget to mention there is a scene in which their long tongues get twisted in a style reminiscent of Lady and the Tramp’s infamous innocent spaghetti smooch. But that connection was due to a bug, not good old-fashioned Italian fare.
As Tiana and Prince Naveen search for the person who could make them “normal” by following a goofy alligator and a bug that is more friend than delicacy, the viewer quickly becomes annoyed and a tad bit infuriated.
By the near end, they are in love and willing to accept each other forever … as frogs!
When compared to the other Disney princesses, Tiana’s story is a bunch of BS. She didn’t have an evil stepfamily, eat a poisoned apple, have graceful legs instead of fins, receive many hours of beauty rest, or become a madmen’s “love” slave.
Does that make her luckier? I think not.
None of those women would wish to be a frog with long, batty eyelashes.
Nope. Not one.
After the green, jumpy lily pad life and having a grand night’s adventure in the bayou, our humanized heroine finally becomes a princess and a restaurateur. The end.
Feeling robbed? 
Yes.
We all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this is a distasteful metaphor. It kind of makes one feel that all brown-skinned women are frogs and that in order to love them, one would have to be a frog too.
Other notable lowlights: blacks are put in their “respective” places–living in close-knit, modest shacks and taking overcrowded public transportation. As previously mentioned, submissive Tiana and her mother both work diligently for white people and Prince Naveen’s right hand white man transforms into Prince Naveen via Dr. Facilier’s powers. It would almost be a cry for demeaning blackface politics, except Prince Naveen is not a black man.
Loved that an upstanding, loving, appreciative father shared Tiana’s passion for cooking and inspired her ethic. So glad Disney didn’t go with that stereotype about black men being absent from their children’s lives…
Now, Tiana’s mother: only commendable when not complaining about Tiana needing to find a “prince charming” so that she could have grandbabies. Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Jasmine, Ariel, and Belle lacked motherly parenting, which added to their naïveté about men. Little fairies and godmothers are sweet and all, but the genuine love from a mother is a special, sacred bond often missing in Disney films.

As a strong, independent woman, Tiana knew that one does not sit on her butt talking to baby animals and making wishes on stars.
Oh wait, she did wish on a star! Damn.
Still, she dreamed big and worked from the ground up.
Now that is a character for little girls to be inspired by. Too bad Tiana was a frog for so long in the movie.
Overall, The Princess and the Frog is enjoyable for a few laughs, infectious moments, and the trademark watery eye sap. But it takes many steps–backwards, forwards, sideways. One wonders what this film is truly trying to accomplish.
Janyce Denise Glasper is a writer/artist running a silly blog of creative adventures called Sugarygingersnap. She enjoys good female centric film, cute rubber duckies, chocolate covered everything (except bugs!), Days of Our Lives, and slaying nightly demons Buffy style in Dayton, Ohio.

Animated Children’s Films: ‘How to Train Your Dragon’

There is plenty to enjoy about How to Train your Dragon. The animation is lovely, the story is energetic, and the landscape feels fresh and inviting. The film also contains a number of plot elements that are far too common in children’s films these days.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Written by Jason Feldstein
How to Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, 2010) is based on a collection of books written by Cressida Cowell. The story takes place in a small village known as Berk where Vikings have been at war with dragons for three hundred years. The hero is a wisecracking passive-aggressive young boy named Hiccup. He wants to fight dragons to impress his community but he lacks the heart for it. After managing to take down a dragon known as a Night Fury, Hiccup discovers later on that he is unable to kill it. Instead he befriends the dragon, which he names Toothless, and discovers that dragons are not the creatures Vikings have always thought them to be. Toothless is one of the most enjoyable parts of the film. He looks like a cross between a bat, a panther, and a whale and his combat tactics seem to mimic those of a stealth bomber. He may be a destructive dragon, but he is also cute, loyal, and playful. Hiccup attempts to bring peace between humans and dragons but his father (and Viking leader) Stoick the Vast, sees war as the only option.
There is plenty to enjoy about How to Train your Dragon. The animation is lovely, the story is energetic, and the landscape feels fresh and inviting. The film also contains a number of plot elements that are far too common in children’s films these days. Take Hiccup for example. He is the runt of the litter who starts off as the town joke but will eventually save the day because he possesses skills that no one else does. Although he is initially looked down upon by everyone, he will end the film gaining the respect of his father and the affection of the girl he likes. It is almost a given that the protagonists in films like this have father issues. Hiccup wants to learn about dragons while his father views dragon killing as not only a necessity, but also a way of life. Stoick the Vast is a rather tiresome example of a closed-minded alpha male. He is so aggressive, hardheaded, and clueless that it’s tough to take him seriously. This is especially true when he eventually sees the error in his ways. It doesn’t help that his dialogue is so poorly written. I felt no regret when he told Hiccup in a clichéd fashion that he is no longer his son.

The film doesn’t make much use of its female characters. Hiccup’s mother is dead like many mothers in animated films geared towards children. Her only purpose is to provide the male protagonist with some sort of emotional complexity. There is a female elder who picks which student slays a ceremonial dragon but she is only in the film for a few seconds and she has no dialogue. The most prominent female character is a young Viking hotshot named Astrid. She is the star pupil in dragon training who is tough as nails and always on edge. If this character seems familiar it’s because she is. She’s Colette from Ratatouille, Eve from Wall-E, and Tigress from Kung Fu Panda. She is the latest in a long string of female characters that are tough and talented but second in importance to the males. Perhaps the most iconic example of this trend for our current generation would be Hermione from Harry Potter. She’s the brains but not the hero.

Astrid
Tigress
Eve
Colette

 

In the past decade Hollywood seems to have grown fond of girls like Astrid. The most likely reason is that they still consider female protagonists to be a liability, but they don’t want to be seen as backwards. So what do they do? Simple. Write a male protagonist who is gentle and silly and have a female character that is tough and feisty but only second in command. Characters like Astrid are the current solution for an industry that is afraid to have a woman be the lead in a story, but doesn’t want to be viewed by anyone (including themselves) as being antifeminist. The film eventually feels the need to soften Astrid. After Hiccup introduces her to Toothless she goes into Disney Princess mode. When the two of them fly together for the first time it would not be too out of place for them to sing “A Whole New World.” Astrid may be tough but she adds very little to the plot. If every female character were removed from this film it would change almost nothing.

There are a number of other problems with female sidekicks of the types that I have just listed. One is that they are only skilled when it comes to playing by the rules. Characters like Astrid and Tigress are shown as being obsessed with following instructions. They work hard to receive approval from their teachers both of whom are male. Likewise Colette told Linguini that it was their job to “follow the recipe.” Female characters like this are shown operating specifically within the boundaries that have been laid out for them by male superiors. They are not shown to have the insight to break rules and challenge the system the way the male protagonists do. Another problem with these types of female sidekicks is that while they are very talented they often don’t possess the talents that the stories they exist in value. Take Hermione for example. While she is incredibly smart, the story she exists in only treats intelligence as second in importance to bravery, which is what Harry embodies. With How to Train Your Dragon, it’s the same problem. Astrid is strong-willed, physically powerful, and full of fighting spirit, but this is not what is valued in a story that ultimately preaches gentleness and a sense of compassion, which is what Hiccup represents.

The film’s final setback is that it boasts antiwar and antiracism credentials that it doesn’t live up to. While it is true that Hiccup is presented as the symbol of peace between humans and dragons, the story also uses a battle as its climax. Hiccup and Toothless have to save everyone by defeating a giant dragon in combat in a sequence that is clearly set up for audience suspense and enjoyment. Even more troubling is the relationship between the humans and the dragons at the end of the film. While they may be at peace the dragons have become Viking pets. It is a peace that is built on a hierarchy and it makes the film’s message very disturbing if the dragons are to be viewed as a metaphor for another race of people. This movie wants to have it both ways. On the one hand it uses the dragons to tell a story about different races rising above war. On the other hand it portrays the dragons as less intelligent pets because the audience will find this amusing and empowering. The title of this movie is not How to Coexist with a Dragon.

How to Train Your Dragon is an attractive and at times enjoyable movie, but in the end its problems outweigh its charms. The characters are too simplistic, the plots are too familiar, and the politics are too compromised. If a film is going to teach politics to children (or adults for that matter), the film should challenge them, not cater to them.

Jason Feldstein is an NYU graduate with a Master’s Degree in Cinema Studies. He specializes in fairy tale films.

The Madwoman’s Journey from the Attic into the Television – The Female Gothic Novel and its Influence on Modern Horror Films

The Mysteries of Udolpho, the first female gothic novel
This guest post is written by Sobia.

The very words “Gothic heroine” immediately conjure up a wealth of images for the modern reader: a young, attractive woman (virginity required) running in terror through an old, dark, crumbling mansion in the middle of nowhere, from either a psychotic man or a supernatural demon. She is always terminally helpless and more than a bit screechy, but is inevitably “saved” by the good guy/future husband in the nick of time.

– from “The Female Gothic: an introduction”

Described in such a way, it’s easy to see why scholars have speculated that the “female gothic” novel is what gave rise to both the modern horror film and the modern romance novel. While the gothic form itself is attributed to Walpole, who collected all the possible tropes of the narrative and populated his “Castle of Otranto” with them, Anne Radcliffe is credited with popularizing the form. At the end of the 18thcentury, Radcliffe employed a female heroine as the protagonist of her novel, giving birth to what Ellen Moers later described and defined as the “female gothic,” which is considered a subgenre of Gothic literature. Novels, and gothic novels in particular, were consumed and written primarily by women during this time period, which made them a reviled form of fiction, generally depicted as the source of problems such as women’s vapidness, hysteria, nervous disorders and such. Twentieth century, however, saw scholars like Gilber, Gubar, and Moers starting to deconstruct the gothic form, which emerged as a unique battleground for the metaphoric struggle between women and the patriarchal structures/institutions that confined and limited them.

In their landmark study, “Madwoman in the Attic,” Gilbert and Gubar embraced the figure of Bertha Mason (the insane, ghostlike previous wife of Jane Eyre’s hero, Mr. Rochester, whom he has locked up inside the attic…apparently for her own good and out of the goodness of his heart!) as somewhat of an alternate literary heroine, and started to analyze exactly what was at work in the common themes found in the literature that women were writing during that time period. As women attempted to write themselves into the purely patriarchal forms of literature that they had grown up reading, they faced the limits of the representation of women in heroic roles. So the gothic heroine emerged as somewhat of a compromise: a heroine who is perpetually endangered and perpetually courageous in the face of that danger. This is the precursor of the modern horror movie heroine who, against all logic, insists on checking out that pesky sound in the middle of the night or following the creepy voices outside of her room. In the female gothic, the haunted castle emerges as a prison that the woman cannot escape, where she’s often being held against her wishes. Given this subtext, it’s easy to see why the castle was commonly used as a metaphor for patriarchal institutions, where the domestic sphere to which women were socially confined became a stifling prison that drove them insane.

Bertha Mason, the original Madwoman in the Attic, from the 2006 “Jane Eyre.”

Ellen Moers further identified the two concerns of the gothic novel which deal with sexuality and child birth in the form of metaphors, where women are constantly confronted with the threats of living in a patriarchy disguised as the supernatural. It is noteworthy that while male writers of the time were tackling subjects like rape and sexual assault head on, the women were using complicated metaphors to confront these issues I would argue that for the male writer, given the distance they already have and maintain from these topics, it was easy to tell the story of the assault happening to an Other, where the assault is experienced by someone other than the male hero that the writer and the readers identified with. For women, however, there are different things at stake. Primarily, they were not allowed to write about sexuality in a straight-forward manner in a time when just the act of writing had male writers of the day calling these women tradeswoman, the implication being that they were not much better than prostitutes. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, women, for whom these things were a real concern (within and without marriage), needed to cultivate the distance that male writers already had from these subjects, and they did so by wrapping the horrors in layers of metaphor.

In order to understand exactly how the gothic formula works almost as feminist deconstruction, it’s important to understand the gothic heroine and her unique struggles. It’s been said that the act of creating a work with a female heroine alone is feminist because it recognizes that women can exist in important stories without needing to be part of a man’s. The female gothic, however, goes a step further in portraying the dangers of confining women to the domestic sphere, confining them to enforced social roles, and the dangers of the kind of insanity that emerges from the kind of isolation and limitations.

The gothic heroine is almost always isolated, and isolated from female companionship in particular. The usual formula (which Jane Austen later deconstructed/parodied in her “Northanger Abbey”) has the mother of the heroine die either giving birth to the heroine or shortly afterward, ensuring that the heroine is an only child. The heroine is brought up under her father’s care, who is a benevolent, loving male figure who dies promptly when the heroine reaches maturity. At this point, the heroine comes under the guardianship of a sinister male figure and is removed to his castle, to which she is confined. This is the pattern Radcliffe’s “Mysteries of Udolpho” follows, and it’s one that’s still common to see in gothic slanted horror movies like “Skeleton Key,” wherein the heroine’s mother left when she was young, she was close to her father, and the father’s death is what indirectly leads to her coming to live in her own gothic manor with its secrets. One of the things that Gilbert and Gubar address in their book is the woman author’s lack of connection to female writers because the literary canon is made up of male writers alone. So perhaps the birth of a heroine who knows she had a mother, but one that she’s unable to connect to is a reflection of the gothic writer’s lack of connection to her own literary foremothers.

Once locked inside this castle, by the men or circumstances, the heroine usually goes exploring, and often finds secrets having to do with the death/imprisonment/insanity of another woman. It is worth noting that her primary motivation often has to do with saving herself by trying to figure out what became of the woman who occupied this place before her. Essentially, this can be seen as her search for female companionship/connection. This is where the other big theme of the gothic emerges: the theme of insanity and fragmentation of self. The heroine, surrounded by men who wish to keep the fate of the women before her secret, comes to doubt her own sanity as everyone around her questions her. So the entire structure of the gothic became an elaborate metaphor for the perils of women living in confined spaces and being controlled by men. Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” which has famously been referred to as a love story, features a young woman marrying much above her social class and moving into another mansion with its own secrets. Du Maurier herself said that the book was about the imbalance of power within a marriage. Written to reexamine the figure of the insane wife locked away in the attic, “Rebecca” recreates this figure into an alluring, haunting portrait of a woman whose death and whose life echoes in every corner of the house. Unlike the Bertha Mason of “Jane Eyre,” who needs to be hidden and never talked about, Rebecca is all anyone in Manderley talks about, until the unnamed narrator finds herself falling under her spell, too. Even though Rebecca is a much more alluring take on the Madwoman concept, she has one thing in common with her precursor, which is that she, like Bertha Mason, challenges patriarchal notions of what a proper woman should be like.

The second Mrs. de Winter being forced to confront the ghost of Rebecca by Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s 1938 “Rebecca”

Gilbert and Gubar offer the following analysis of the Madwoman figure and her prominent appearances in 19th century women’s literature:

We will find that this madwoman emerges over and over again from the mirrors women writers hold up both to their own natures and to their own visions of nature. Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures which both their authors and their authors’ heroines seem to accept as inevitable. Of course, by projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or poem), female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the structures of patriarchal society and to reject them. What this means, however, is that the madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage.

The idea of doubles remains a major theme in gothic themed horror films of today. The heroine’s doppelganger is often the quest object of her journey, where salvation often comes by discovering the story of this woman who can be seen as a darker or more otherworldy version of the heroine. Gothic stories have, arguably, at their center the idea of women trying to form bonds with each other, while resisting the influence of the men around them. Horror remains, to this day, one of the very few genres where it’s more common to find a female heroine than a male protagonist, and it’s no wonder that it’s primarily consumed by women and considered to be the other major women’s genre, besides romance. It’s also a genre that often easily passes the Bechdel test because of the relationships it portrays between the women. Horror genre, however, seems to have split into two separate branches. There’s the gothic themed stories where women are at the center of them and the threat is supernatural/psychological, and there’s the torture/slasher horror where women mostly run for their lives. Admittedly, I am a lot more interested in the former kind, and will mostly be exploring how they’re the literary successors of the female gothic.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a classic gothic tale where the young heroine coming under the domain of a powerful and sinister male figure forms bonds with another woman and finds salvation in her own discoveries and the story of an exiled princess, who serves as both a double and the supernatural presence on the other side of the mirror. The mother, while a significant part of the story, is in no position to protect Ofelia, who is left under the rule of her step-father, as she discovers hidden passages and lost worlds in order to save herself.

As I mentioned before, the female gothic split into the genres of modern horror narratives and modern romance novel. Divorcing the romance plot of the gothic novel from the rest of it has arguably left us with narratives where the heroines are left to save themselves, with no strong and benevolent male figure coming to help them. However, I should mention that the gothic romance wasn’t as clear cut as the above quote makes it out to be. In a gender-reversed reflection of the Dark Heroine/Light Heroine dichotomy that male-centered narratives seem to be obsessed with, the gothic romance is the one major genre where the male characters are split off into their own versions of Madonna/Whore. The Shadow Male figure is the sinister, powerful man who rules over the heroine’s life but with no benevolent intentions towards her. She’s sometimes sexually attracted to this figure, but also fearful of him. While the man that she’s actually in love with is often powerless to defend her despite his desire to protect her.

In taking out this benevolent male figure, the modern horror leaves the heroines to their own discoveries. “The Skeleton Key” is an especially subversive example of these tropes. The heroine, isolated from her native element, comes to live inside the old manor presided over by a powerful yet sinister seeming woman. As noted before, the heroine of the movie, Caroline, has a very gothic background, but in a gender reversal of the usual tropes, she forms a bond with the powerless male figure residing inside the house, while coming to suspect the powerful Violet as his abuser. In converting the Shadow Male figure to a woman, the movie lets the men become the Other presence in the attic, who are silenced, ghost-like, and pushed into the background as the women fight their battle of wills in the foreground of the movie. Violet can, however, also be read as a more corporeal version of the Madwoman, the doppelganger who perhaps embodies the character’s more rebellious urges, while existing outside of Caroline as a force to be struggled against. The ending is especially interesting if we choose to read Violet as a metaphorical version of Caroline’s fragmented self.

“Silent Hill” is another movie that seems to get rid of the sinister male figure, populating its world entirely with powerful women with agendas and various motivations. Rose, the heroine of the movie, travels to a ghost town in an attempt to discover the cure to her daughter’s nightmares. Once inside the town, Rose is trapped inside a haunting alternate verse that seems to have enveloped the entire town. In order to escape the tainted reality of Silent Hill, Rose must discover the origins of the taint, and that leads her to discover the stories of various women who were responsible for the genesis of the new reality. This act of discovering the stories and secrets of the lives of women in the past seems to run through most gothic horror movies, in an echo of the attempts of the gothic writers who searched the past to find literary foremothers and of their heroines who attempted to decipher their own future by discovering the pasts of other women. This movie is especially relevant to gothic themes because the idea of fragmentation of selves is the foundation of the premise and leads to the genesis of Silent Hill as it currently exists, with two sets of doppelgangers.

There’s also “Beneath,” perhaps the most underappreciated horror movie of all time, that brings back the themes of “Rebecca” and “Jane Eyre” wonderfully by dealing with the theme of menacing husbands and women who live on even after their deaths. Its heroine, who is the sister of the Madwoman in the Attic figure of the movie (again, the theme of a darker self/mirror), comes back to the town where her sister died and gets pulled into a web of secrets and deceptions that lead her to have visions. She becomes obsessed with discovering exactly how her sister died, while the men around her doubt her sanity. The theme of the heroine’s sanity being doubted is probably the biggest common denominator in these. serves further to isolate the heroine, to push her to do things on her own for the fear that she will be labeled as insane. Historically, the fear of being mislabeled as insane has had a unique significance for women, many of whom were driven to brinks of insanity by what was referred to as “the rest cure.”

Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a gothic themed look inside just such a madness, brought on by lack of mental stimulation. “The Ring,” while populated with more men than is common for these types of movies, still has at its center the idea of a woman deconstructing the story/life of another woman. Rachel’s search for answers is triggered by the death of a woman and it leads her to discover the lives of Anna and Samara, both of whom have elements of the Madwoman figure. Samara, in particular, is reminiscent of the “creeping, crawling” woman trapped behind the Yellow Wallpaper. Interestingly enough, Samara is kept isolated in a room with yellow wallpaper that Rachel is forced to tear off before she can uncover the truth behind Samara’s story.

The second aspect of the female gothic was identified by Ellen Moers as dealing with the fear of giving birth/creating life, and the modern birth horror genre definitely echoes the themes Moers identifies. My knowledge and viewing experience of this type of horror is not nearly as vast as my knowledge of the haunted house/insanity type of horror, but I will identify some movies that deal with this type of horror, in case someone else is interested in watching/analyzing some of these. According to Moers, Mary Shelley reinvented the female gothic with her “Frankenstein.” Shelley, unlike most women writing during that time period, who tended to be unmarried, had had experience with child birth. Moers’ essay here more fully explores how Shelley’s own experiences led to the creation of her monster, but it’s worth noting that Mary Shelley chose to make her protagonist and her monster both men in a step away from the female-centered gothic novels of years past. However, I am pleased that the modern birth horror tends to place women at its center, and perhaps, it’s more relevant to women’s reproductive rights issues today because a lot of it deals with women losing control of their bodies/identities/agency in the course of the pregnancy. “The Clinic” deals with several pregnant women trapped inside an unsanitary clinic, waking up to find that they’re no longer pregnant. The rest of the movie follows them as they attempt to find their babies and discover how they got there. One of the major themes, I would say, is the idea of women’s bodies and reproductive systems as commodities.

There’s the famous “Rosemary’s Baby” that perhaps better echoes Mary Shelley’s novel because the fear of the baby being a monster runs through the entire movie. Rosemary’s rising anxiety and fears for her baby as she discovers the existence of the cult and its plans are very in with keeping the Gothic heroine’s general mental state. “Blessed,” starring Heather Graham, is similar in its themes to “Rosemary’s Baby,” where the heroine is used as an incubator for a cult needing to bring about the birth of a demonic child. The 2009, “Grace,” deals with a mother who decides to carry her baby to term despite the heartbeat having stopped following a car crash, and when the time comes, the baby is miraculously born alive. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that there’s something wrong with the baby, and our heroine has created a monster. The recent “Splice” deals with a female scientist who creates a new species by combining her own DNA with the DNA of various animals.

While the first subgenre of gothic horror deals with the metaphor of women being trapped inside patriarchal institutions and being forced by them to question their own sense of reality, the birth horror genre, arguably, deals with and plays into women’s fear of patriarchal control over their bodies and the lack of agency that comes with that control. The fate of the birth horror heroine, however, is often worse than the earlier gothic heroines, who, while often up against great odds, are fighting a monster/institution that exists outside of themselves. In the birth horror genre, the woman is fighting a more personal and internal battle. Women today still struggle to control the fate of their own bodies in a largely patriarchal world.

Gilbert and Gubar, too, identify a fear of creation in their study, specifically, the fear of creating a literary text in a canon that’s made up of patriarchal and male-centered texts. The female author learns to see the act of creation as a male one because she’s learned to see herself only in passive roles from the literature she’s consumed. Gilbert and Gubar refer to this as “anxiety of authorship,” and since the gothic heroine is often an artist of some kind (in fact, Jane Austen, in her parody of the form, goes out of her way to assure the readers that her heroine, Catherine Morland is not at all inclined to the arts and furthermore, is really bad at them) this anxiety of authorship can always be called an anxiety of creation. And the birth horror movies that do not fit under Moers’ definition of the birth horror story with the fear of creating a monster certainly deal with the anxiety of giving birth and creating life. Returning to the mental health side of it, since insanity and anxiety remain major themes of any sort of a gothic story, post-partum depression is another side effect of living in a patriarchal society that expects women to be mothers, and most women get conditioned into thinking that that is what they want for themselves. Given the cultural subtext, motherhood can become just another patriarchally enforced institution, one that patriarchy values over most other social obligations/interests of a woman. Birth horror genre is the perfect medium to deconstruct some of those expectations and institutions.

“To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health, since the human animal’s first and strongest urge is to his/her own survival, pleasure, assertion,” write Gilbert and Gubar. Studies have linked mental illnesses commonly found in women such as agoraphobia, anxiety disorders, eating disorders to the effects of patriarchal conditioning and socialization. Girls get conditioned to be pleasing at the cost of disowning their own pleasures, they learn to place a high value on physical beauty, which is fleeting, and they learn to see themselves through the male gaze from early on, whether it’s through reading literature in the 19th century or through media and advertising portrayals of themselves in the current one. Women learn to see themselves as men see them while struggling with their own conflicting points of view of themselves and this fear of conflicting with the dominant paradigm enforces a culture of silence and repression that locks women into their own metaphorical castles of terror. This may be why horror films continue to resonate with modern women. Many horror films today take place in suburban homes, which can be just as stifling as the castles in the gothic novels. Films may no longer need dark and crumbling castles to be scary, but the ideas those castles represented are still alive in the horror genre. As long as women’s stories and voices are suppressed, the horror genre will continue to be the metaphorical battleground for women to fight against the patriarchal institutions that dominate their lives.

Note: While Gilbert and Gubar introduced ideas that have been used to analyze gothic fiction, they did not specifically deconstruct the genre itself. For further reading on that, I recommend “Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years,” which explores the effects of their study on feminist lit critique. There’s an essay within that collection that specifically deals with the gothic form by Carol Margaret Davison entitled “Ghosts in the Attic.”


Sobia spends her free time consuming media and thinking a lot. She uses her English lit degree for little else than critiquing media’s portrayal of gender and race, which is possibly just another excuse to consume more media with awesome women.