Tag: Shakespeare

‘Sons of Anarchy’: Female Violence, Feminist Care

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

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Mothers of Anarchy

This repost by Leigh Kolb originally appeared at And Philosophy and appears now as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Sons of Anarchy revolves around the chaotic yet highly methodical world of a motorcycle club and the forces around them—from law enforcement and crooked cops to gangs and organized crime rings. The entire series focuses on politics, power, violence, and authority in incredibly masculine spaces.

However, these are sons. And to be a son is not only to be a son of a father—the cornerstone for so many monomyths in Western literature—but also to be a son of a mother. While Sons of Anarchy was ostensibly about Jax’s atonement with his dead father and monstrous father figure (thus the countless accurate comparisons to Hamlet), who really is “anarchy” in this world?

If we look at the definition of anarchy— “a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority”—and focus in on the word “nonrecognition,” we can think about how throughout Sons of Anarchy, Gemma has been an authority figure in the domestic sphere—”fiercely” mothering her biological and nonbiological sons (she references wanting to have had a dozen sons in the final season, and really, she managed to do so through the MC), cooking meals, managing paperwork, and tending to children, all in the feminine sphere. Though she cannot ride, she and is seen as the ultimate “old lady.” She has power, and the men of SAMCRO, on some level, fear her.

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Gemma’s violence

Her true authority, however, is not recognized. From the beginning, we understand her power in Charming. She ran off when she was a teenager, and, as Wayne Unser says, came back “ten years later with a baby and a motorcycle club.” There is implied ownership here; the club is Gemma’s. In reality, Gemma herself can be seen as embodying and perpetuating anarchy—in that she is an authority figure, but not recognized as such. The masculine sphere—the bikes, the guns, the gavel, the long table (hello, phalluses)—is seen as powerful. Violence, politics, gun deals, drug deals, more violence: masculine. Powerful.

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

Anarchy is then truly unleashed; both parts of the definition resound throughout the final season. Jax’s authority is misguided (some might say absent) as he leads the club down a path of disorder and destruction. Because no one—not Jax, not Unser, not Sheriff Jarry—could recognize Gemma’s capabilities for brutality., Her authority, or rather her control of the situation, is left unchecked for most of the season. Had Abel not overheard her confess, she may well have gotten away with it. The Sons all underestimate the capabilities of women.

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Tara cannot escape Gemma

In “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” Peggy Kornegger points out that

“Anarchism has been maligned and misinterpreted for so long that maybe the most important thing to begin with is an explanation of what it is and isn’t. Probably the most prevalent stereotype of the anarchist is a malevolent-looking man hiding a lighted bomb beneath a black cape, ready to destroy or assassinate everything and everybody in his path. This image engenders fear and revulsion in most people, regardless of their politics; consequently, anarchism is dismissed as ugly, violent, and extreme. Another misconception is the anarchist as impractical idealist, dealing in useless, Utopian abstractions and out of touch with concrete reality. The result: anarchism is once again dismissed, this time as an ‘impossible dream.’”

This anarchy dichotomy is at the heart of the central conflict of Sons of Anarchy: the “malevolent” club that Clay and Gemma wanted versus the “impossible dream” club that John Teller and Jax wanted. We now know that John Teller’s death was at his own hand (albeit somewhat forced), when he realized that the former was the fate of SAMCRO. As Jax rose up the ranks of SAMCRO leadership, he wasn’t just fighting Clay’s philosophy of anarchy—he was also fighting Gemma’s. After Jax killed Clay, the fight wasn’t over, even though he initially thought it was. But the club wasn’t his. Anarchy was his mother.

As Tara plots and schemes to get herself and her sons away from the world Gemma had created and helped sustain, Gemma sees her as a threat, and resorts to fully embodying that destructive, violent anarchy that could uphold the status quo.

Because she has operated within this culture of masculine violence, Gemma adopts the patriarchal problem-solver of violent destruction. Since Tara is a threat to the malevolent anarchy that Clay and Gemma desired, she—in Gemma’s mind—had to be eliminated. Whereas Tara worked with other women as she was trying to make her plans to escape Charming with Abel and Thomas, Gemma consistently alienated herself from other women.

In “Socialism, Anarchism And Feminism,” by Carol Ehrlich, she says that the “debate over ‘strong women’” is closely related to leadership, and summarizes radical feminists’ position to include the following:

“1. Women have been kept down because they are isolated from each other and are paired off with men in relationships of dominance and submission. 2. Men will not liberate women; women must liberate themselves. This cannot happen if each woman tries to liberate herself alone. Thus, women must work together on a model of mutual aid. 3. ‘Sisterhood is powerful,’ but women cannot be sisters if they recapitulate masculine patterns of dominance and submission.”

Tara could have checked off all of those goals easily; she was of a new generation of old ladies. Gemma, on the other hand, isolates herself, acts alone, and in attempting to be dominant and in control, adopts masculine ways of doing so. Clay, as a harbinger of evil, wanted Tara dead. But the other Sons accepted and respected her. Her role wasn’t club mother, it was club healer. The power that she held—that she could and did save Sons’ lives (and Abel’s life in the series pilot)—was a restorative power that ran counter to what Gemma offered. And the more Tara worked with other women, the more of a threat she became to Gemma and the club.

Gemma embodies Sigmund Freud’s “masculinity complex,” which posits that girls identify with their fathers but eventually must assume female social roles. Gemma’s mother, Rose, died of the same heart defect that Gemma has and that her son Thomas died from. Gemma remembers Rose in a conflicted way, and says in season 7 that she thinks Rose had never wanted to be a mother. Gemma, by contrast, says that all she ever wanted to do was to be a mother (to sons).

Her father, Nate, was a pastor. She speaks of him with love and admiration, and one can easily see (just as easily as critics have seen the Oedipal parallels with Jax and Gemma) her own Electra complex—the Jungian theory that girls identify with and have a fixation with their fathers. While Nate leads a church and congregants, Gemma leads an outlaw club and outlaws—her dozen sons are different kinds of apostles.

In Sigmund Freud’s lecture, “Femininity,” he says,

“A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relationship to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex.”

In making Jax believe the Chinese killed Tara, Gemma is both preserving herself and continuing—whether consciously or not—the legacy that Clay would have wanted: destruction, violence, and chaos. She wants her son to live out her ambitions, to fully give himself up to the anarchy of her rebellious desires.

Tara’s rebellion—that Gemma could not seem to get over—is the antithesis of Gemma’s. Tara left Charming as a teenager, leaving Jax and the club because she wanted to escape. She became a talented doctor, and later returned to Charming. When she wanted to “transfer to her son(s) the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself”—escaping Charming and the grasp of SAMCRO, Gemma sees this desire as running counter to her own ambition for her son and grandsons: to stay in Charming, and to stay in the MC.

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Wendy and Tara collaborate

Both Tara and Gemma are underestimated by the men, in terms of the lengths they will go to in order to preserve their desires for their lives and their sons. Because women aren’t included in the ultra-violent, masculine club scene (and are instead relegated to being porn stars, escorts, or old ladies—all very “private” roles), Tara’s plots shock Jax. Gemma brutally killing Tara is out of the realm of possibility for feminine force.

Freud added in the aforementioned lecture:

“There is one particularly constant relation between femininity and instinctual life which we do not want to overlook. Suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favors the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been divested inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine.”

Gemma almost got away with murder because the expectation of women is that they are nonviolent and are not aggressive. Specifically, the brutal way she killed Tara was, according to law enforcement and Jax, in keeping with gang violence because it was so horrifying and malicious. When Gemma and Juice convince Jax that it was one of Lin’s men who killed Tara, Jax kills him in the same way Tara was killed, thinking he was enacting just revenge. He was, instead, simply doing as his mother taught him.

Showrunner Kurt Sutter said, “This is a story about the queen and the prince.” It seemed as if Jax had been trying to reconcile with his father and father figure all of these years; instead, we realize he needs to reconcile with his mother. When he finally realizes this, it’s too late—Gemma has killed Tara, Juice killed Eli to protect her, and they lied and set off a series of massacres and gang violence. Everyone immediately believed Lin’s crew was responsible for Tara’s death, because it looked like brutal gang violence—certainly not something a woman could do. There was no Mayhem vote for Gemma, because she isn’t at the table. However, even in her final moments, Gemma gives Jax permission to kill her, because she knows it must be done. She’s mothering—and controlling—until the very end.

As Hannah Arendt points out in On Violence, “Violence can always destroy power. Out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.” As soon as Gemma kills Tara, her power starts rapidly declining. A conglomeration of Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, Gemma vacillates between justifying her actions and apologizing for them (but mostly justifying). As soon as she sets the stage for Jax to enact revenge upon the Chinese, his rage and misplaced revenge—without the understanding or agreement of the club—makes him less and less powerful. In the last episode, as he ties up all of his loose ends (see: killing everyone), he is losing power. By the end, he gives up himself, and his power—just like his father did—and commits suicide. Violence robs Gemma and Jax both of their power, their dignity, and their lives.

So who—and what—wins in this modern Shakespearean tale? Certainly not those who rely on a sense of vengeful justice and violence to ride through this life. In a patriarchal framework of understanding, these actions are seen as desirable and just. Instead, we must work toward a feminist ethic of care. Feminist psychologist and philosopher Carol Gilligan defines a feminist ethic of care as

“an ethic of resistance to the injustices inherent in patriarchy (the association of care and caring with women rather than with humans, the feminization of care work, the rendering of care as subsidiary to justice—a matter of special obligations or interpersonal relationships). A feminist ethic of care guides the historic struggle to free democracy from patriarchy; it is the ethic of a democratic society, it transcends the gender binaries and hierarchies that structure patriarchal institutions and cultures. An ethics of care is key to human survival and also to the realization of a global society.”

Gilligan’s research has shown that traditionally “feminine” approaches to care are about more than the individual—connectedness and care override a sense of individualism and justice. In Sons of Anarchy, the characters who most exemplify this care ethic are Nero and Wendy, who, at the end, are riding together to parent their children—biological and non—far away from Charming. They are friends, not lovers, and their goals are not for themselves, but for the safety of one another and their sons—sons who they desperately want to keep away from the individualistic, vengeful anarchy they were coming to know. Nero and Wendy are coincidentally both recovering addicts. In their recovery—from the literal and figurative drugs of their past—they care more deeply about one another and those around them than they care about their individual desires.

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Wendy’s eventual ethic of care

Tara desired this kind of care for her sons, but couldn’t attain it in her lifetime because of the pull of Gemma and Jax’s patriarchal anarchy. After Gemma’s death, Jax is freed to fulfill Tara’s wishes, and legally makes Wendy the boys’ mother. As in so many Shakespearean dramas, women must die so that men will learn. However, what remains constant throughout Sons of Anarchy is that when the masculine ideals dissolve, and individuals cry, love, and care (exemplified in Tig and Venus’s powerful love scene in “Faith and Despondency”), intimacy and growth are possible.

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Wendy and Nero escape with their sons, embodying the feminist ethic of care

As Nero and Wendy leave Charming, it’s clear that this, then, is the preferred way to ride—not “all alone,” as Jax does—but all together. Gemma stands by her way of mothering until the end. She’s distrustful and dismissive of teachers and school (whereas Wendy is passionate about Abel attending school), and she covertly gives Abel his grandfather’s SON ring, which he wears at the end of the finale. Jax, however, sees the dire need for care, not anarchy. “It’s not too late for my boys,” he says. “They will never know this life of chaos.” Ultimately, Jax is a tragic hero because he realizes that care, not justice, will heal and raise his children.

The feminism of Sons of Anarchy has been not only its complex, three-dimensional female characters and Gemma’s role as the rare female antihero, but also its tragic depiction of the end game of violent, individualistic patriarchy. Wrapped up in the tragedy of masculine justice and violent revenge, Sons of Anarchy lifts up of the feminist ethic of care.

 

Leigh Kolb is an instructor at a community college in rural Missouri, where she teaches composition, journalism, and literature. She wrote “Mothers of Anarchy: Power, Control, and Care in the Feminine Sphere,” for Sons of Anarchy and Philosophy, and recapped the final season of Sons of Anarchy at Vulture. She is an editor and staff writer at Bitch Flicks, where she has written about the feminism of Sons of Anarchy.

“Men’s Vows Are Women’s Traitors”: Helen Mirren Runs the Chastity Gauntlet in Shakespeare’s ‘Cymbeline’

After recalling his greatest tragedies, Shakespeare suggests that all could end well, if men loved without defensive cowardice. “Some griefs are med’cinable.” Rising to such newfound greatness of heart, King Cymbeline describes himself as becoming “mother.” William Shakespeare: feminist punk?

Helen Mirren rocks. Just sayin'.
Helen Mirren rocks. Just sayin’.

 

Written by Brigit McCone.

Plots were not Shakespeare’s strong point. He borrowed most from history or other authors, before illuminating them with psychological insight and philosophical depth. One of his final plays, 1611’s Cymbeline, is particularly jarring because the Bard is actually plagiarizing (“reimagining”?) himself: King Cymbeline (King Lear) becomes enraged and imprisons his only daughter, Imogen (Desdemona/Cordelia), for daring to marry “poor but worthy gentleman” Posthumus (Othello), who is exiled and meets cynic Iochimo (Iago), provoking Posthumus to bet that Iochimo can’t seduce super-chaste Imogen. Iochimo fakes proof of Imogen’s infidelity, being Iago and all, so Posthumus flies into Othellish rage and orders Imogen killed. Imogen discovers the order and flees in drag (she’s also Portia and Viola) as “Fidele” (she’s faithful, get it?), taking a death-simulating drug along the way (did I mention she’s Juliet?) There’s a wise woman and a cryptic tree prophecy that comes true unexpectedly (unless you’ve seen Macbeth). We’re one suicidal Dane short of a Greatest Hits album here.

After five or six more annoying coincidences, the plot somehow resolves. But hang in there because, as ever, there’s human truth lurking in Shakespeare’s narrative tangle, and Cymbeline is probably his most feminist play. In theaters now: a radical new version with Ethan Hawke, that aims to prove the play really is interesting, by burying its interesting exploration of female fidelity and male double standards under guns! Bikers! Testosterone! And soldiers! If you watch the trailer closely, you may briefly glimpse Dakota Johnson, playing Shakespeare’s lead:

 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulaGT6b8tgg”]

Grit! Shakespeare! Guns! Blank Verse! Testosterone! Manpain! Grrr! 

Centering the woman is admittedly a dramatic weakness of Cymbeline, though not as dramatically weak as its plot. The crushing double standards of Shakespeare’s age demanded purity from a heroine, unstained by the fascinating flaws of Lear, Othello, Hamlet or Macbeth. Imogen is, honestly, a little dull. Shakespeare’s good servant, Pisanio, pointedly calls Imogen “more goddess-like than wife-like” in her endless forbearance. But crucially, jealous Posthumus repents his rage before discovering Imogen’s innocence. Where murder was the conventional response to female infidelity, at least on stage, Shakespeare has his hero turn on the audience, while still believing his wife guilty, and demand, “you married ones, if each of you should take this course, how many must murder wives much better than themselves for wrying but a little?” (Screw biker gangs; where’s Deepa Mehta‘s update confronting arranged marriage and honor killing?)

Though Shakespeare is limited to absolute chastity in his heroine, he subversively tests the play’s men with Imogen’s dilemmas, demanding female fidelity be equated with male. Luckily for Bitch Flickers, there’s a 1982 BBC adaptation smart enough to cast Helen Mirren and let her rip. Mirren breathes full-blooded life and passion into Imogen, adding conflict and doubt to her dull purity. Her Imogen is faithful, not by natural chastity, but by choice. From the opening, Shakespeare evokes possessive claustrophobia, with Posthumus gifting Imogen “a manacle of love. I place it upon this fairest prisoner.”

Posthumus' manacle of love
Posthumus’ manacle of love

 

For her loyalty to Posthumus, Imogen is condemned as “disloyal thing” by her father, King Cymbeline, who demands that she marry his royal stepson, Cloten. Yet, when Cymbeline hears his own wife’s deathbed confession that she never loved him, only “affected greatness” (wanted his rank and wealth), he gasps: “but that she spake it dying, I would not believe her lips in opening it.” King Lear’s expectations clash with Othello’s. Imogen’s conflicting loyalties are embodied by Pisanio, a servant forced to swear loyalty to two masters, who justifies choosing the heart over vows: “wherein I am false, I am honest. Not true, to be true.” Compare Lady Macbeth: though stereotyped as a scheming manipulator, her inner monologues are devoid of personal ambition and filled with her need to fulfil her husband’s desires, taking the burden of his guilt upon herself. In her sleepwalking, she feels Macbeth’s victims sticking to her hands, even those of which she had no warning. Lady Macbeth ruins her husband, not out of selfishness, but out of a love so selfless that it sacrifices her moral judgment and her very identity. If only she had known when to be “not true, to be true.”

Imogen: "what is it to be false?"
Imogen: “What is it to be false?”

 

As Iochimo claims Imogen has cheated with him, our “worthy” Posthumus seems eager to believe the oath of this stranger over his wife’s vows, even when reminded by bystanders that the proofs are not absolute. Convinced of Imogen’s guilt, Posthumus launches into a misogynist rant, revealing paternity fraud as the root of his anxiety – “we are all bastards!” – as well as scapegoating male flaws on women – “there’s no motion tends to vice in man, but I affirm it is the woman’s part.” But his bet’s true motive is rather suggested by Iochimo: “he must be weighed by her value.” Imogen’s virtue is Posthumus’ status symbol, while Iochimo himself seems driven to prove the falsity of all womankind, as if the mere possibility of female loyalty would imply Iochimo’s responsibility for provoking past disloyalty. As objectifying is a classic strategy for denying your own impact on another, so Iochimo longs to “buy ladies’ flesh” in some way that will guarantee its not “tainting.”

This insecure craving for guaranteed affection becomes the counterproductive engine of his repulsiveness. Robert Lindsay’s Iochimo is like polished igneous rock: the hard, glittering bitterness of a cooled eruption. As he smuggles himself inside Imogen’s bedchamber, to memorize its decorations and the moles of her body as proofs of infidelity, Iochimo even peers into her bedside book, finding “the leaf’s turned down where Philomel gave up.” Philomel was a mythical Grecian heroine raped by her brother-in-law, whose tongue was torn out to prevent her testifying, an image central to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Lindsay’s choked gasp makes it clear that his character interprets Imogen’s reading matter as rape fantasy. Is she reading Philomel’s story as a cautionary tale, or has the pressure of stifling chastity really provoked “hot dreams” (Iochimo’s words) about the release of imaginary ravishment? Is it any of our damn business?

Iochimo, wearing Imogen's stolen manacle while being a creeper
Iochimo, wearing Imogen’s stolen manacle while being a creeper

 

Though restraining himself from rape, Iochimo’s compulsive need to test and “prove” Imogen’s virtue is itself a violation. By referencing Philomel, Shakespeare reminds us of Imogen’s vulnerability, which the 1982 production underlines by Iochimo’s hovering shirtless over her as she sleeps, monitoring her every sigh. We must remember that our noble hero, Posthumus, has given letters of recommendation to this total stranger, along with a hefty bribe to rape his wife (theoretically, “seduce” her), because Posthumus is willing to accept proof of sex (not of consent) as evidence of Imogen’s betrayal. Though Posthumus swears the deepest love for Imogen, his underlying misogyny (“there’s no motion tends to vice in man, but I affirm it is the woman’s part”) has driven him to betray her utterly, ironically to test her faithfulness. As Imogen howls, when she discovers his suspicion: “men’s vows are women’s traitors!” Posthumus’ vow of love betrayed Imogen into believing herself exempted from his misogyny. But conditional pardons are no security. As Mirren mutters, ripping up love letters, all his scriptures are turned to heresy. There are many ways to break faith.

Tragically, Imogen lived before the invention of chocolate chip ice cream
Tragically, Imogen lived before the invention of chocolate chip ice cream

 

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest… meet Belarius, Cymbeline’s bravest soldier who, maddened by false accusations of treachery, kidnapped the king’s infant boys and raised them as his own. This apparently irrelevant subplot introduces the idea of unjust suspicion avenged by paternity fraud, just as Pisanio voiced Imogen’s divided loyalty. Belarius’ motive, “beaten for loyalty excited me to treason”, equally justifies Imogen in infidelity, by masculine logic. When his sons are returned to Cymbeline, the king asks if they are indeed his. Belarius does not answer “yes,” but “as sure as you your father’s.” Shakespeare proposes that no-one, male or female, can ever truly be verified. At least, not by the objective measure that Iochimo aspires to. Trusting their hearts alone, Imogen and her long-lost brothers love each other, without knowing their kinship.

Belarius, meanwhile, proves his “honest” courage fighting Romans, rallying fleeing Britons by yelling that only deer should be slaughtered while running away: “Britain’s harts die flying, not our men.” The pun is appropriate. Male culture promotes valor in warfare, but justifies defensive cowardice in love, provoking the very ruin it most fears. Britain’s hearts die flying, like its harts. Bayonets, bullets or biker gangs, they’re still metaphors for sexual insecurity. As in the battle, where some were “turned coward but by example” and needed only a rallying cry to regain courage, so Posthumus’ blistering “you married ones…” speech rallies Shakespeare’s audience to a more courageous love, where chastity is a faithful heart, not a flaunted status symbol: “I will begin the fashion, less without and more within.”

In a blind chaste test, 3 out of 4 women preferred Posthumus
In a blind chaste test, three out of four women preferred Posthumus

 

Shakespeare not only explores the hypocrisy of chastity testing and daughterly duty, but the exhausting demands of unwanted attention. Imogen’s suitor, Cloten, seeks to win her by conventional expressions of love, serenading her with music to make her obligated. Tellingly, he describes this wooing as battle – “I have assailed her with musics” – urging his fiddlers and singer “if you can penetrate her with your fingering, so we’ll try with tongue too” to emphasize the violation of his unconsensual serenading. If she yields, Imogen betrays Posthumus. If she remains silent, her silence will be taken for yielding. Finally, she is provoked into telling Cloten that she hates him, that if every hair of his head were a man like him, she would prefer Posthumus’ rags to the lot of them. Cloten takes this insult as provocation to plot the rape of Imogen. There’s just no escaping the bind of his manacle of love. At least, not until he tries that arrogant attitude on a man, and gets his head lopped off. Gotta love Will. A fiery Helen Mirren dominates, as she battles through Shakespeare’s chastity gauntlet. If only her exasperated “but that you shall not say I yield, being silent, I would not speak” felt less familiar to today’s woman.

 By the finale, the Queen and Cloten, heartless plotters of murder and rape, are dead. But what of Posthumus, whose insecurity would enable a stranger to rape his wife? What of Cymbeline, shocked at his own wife’s lovelessness, but demanding loveless marriage for his daughter? What of Belarius, honest warrior but paternity fraudster? What of Iochimo, self-loathing “tainter” of womankind? Forgiveness is their punishment, conscience their natural judge. Though Iochimo stole Imogen’s “manacle of love” as false proof of her infidelity, he accepts his heart must bleed in its trap. Karma’s a bitch. Britons make voluntary peace with Romans. King Cymbeline declares: “pardon’s the word… to all!” After recalling his greatest tragedies, Shakespeare suggests that all could end well, if men loved without defensive cowardice. “Some griefs are med’cinable.” Rising to such newfound greatness of heart, King Cymbeline describes himself as becoming “mother.” William Shakespeare: feminist punk?

Aren't double standards some bullshit, for sooth?
Aren’t double standards some bullshit, for sooth?

 

See also at Bitch Flicks: What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Rape Culture, Helen Mirren stars in Julie Taymor’s Gender-bent The Tempest

 

Brigit McCone can rant for days about how misunderstood Lady Macbeth is. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and working “a breach in nature for ruin’s wasteful entrance” into everyday conversation.

 

‘Sons of Anarchy’: Female Violence, Feminist Care

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

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Mothers of Anarchy

This post by Leigh Kolb originally appeared at And Philosophy and is cross-posted with permission.

Sons of Anarchy revolves around the chaotic yet highly methodical world of a motorcycle club and the forces around them—from law enforcement and crooked cops to gangs and organized crime rings. The entire series focuses on politics, power, violence, and authority in incredibly masculine spaces.

However, these are sons. And to be a son is not only to be a son of a father—the cornerstone for so many monomyths in Western literature—but also to be a son of a mother. While Sons of Anarchy was ostensibly about Jax’s atonement with his dead father and monstrous father figure (thus the countless accurate comparisons to Hamlet), who really is “anarchy” in this world?

If we look at the definition of anarchy— “a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority”—and focus in on the word “nonrecognition,” we can think about how throughout Sons of Anarchy, Gemma has been an authority figure in the domestic sphere—”fiercely” mothering her biological and nonbiological sons (she references wanting to have had a dozen sons in the final season, and really, she managed to do so through the MC), cooking meals, managing paperwork, and tending to children, all in the feminine sphere. Though she cannot ride, she and is seen as the ultimate “old lady.” She has power, and the men of SAMCRO, on some level, fear her.

 

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Gemma’s violence

Her true authority, however, is not recognized. From the beginning, we understand her power in Charming. She ran off when she was a teenager, and, as Wayne Unser says, came back “ten years later with a baby and a motorcycle club.” There is implied ownership here; the club is Gemma’s. In reality, Gemma herself can be seen as embodying and perpetuating anarchy—in that she is an authority figure, but not recognized as such. The masculine sphere—the bikes, the guns, the gavel, the long table (hello, phalluses)—is seen as powerful. Violence, politics, gun deals, drug deals, more violence: masculine. Powerful.

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

Anarchy is then truly unleashed; both parts of the definition resound throughout the final season. Jax’s authority is misguided (some might say absent) as he leads the club down a path of disorder and destruction. Because no one—not Jax, not Unser, not Sheriff Jarry—could recognize Gemma’s capabilities for brutality., Her authority, or rather her control of the situation, is left unchecked for most of the season. Had Abel not overheard her confess, she may well have gotten away with it. The Sons all underestimate the capabilities of women.

 

gemma-tara

Tara cannot escape Gemma

 

In “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” Peggy Kornegger points out that

“Anarchism has been maligned and misinterpreted for so long that maybe the most important thing to begin with is an explanation of what it is and isn’t. Probably the most prevalent stereotype of the anarchist is a malevolent-looking man hiding a lighted bomb beneath a black cape, ready to destroy or assassinate everything and everybody in his path. This image engenders fear and revulsion in most people, regardless of their politics; consequently, anarchism is dismissed as ugly, violent, and extreme. Another misconception is the anarchist as impractical idealist, dealing in useless, Utopian abstractions and out of touch with concrete reality. The result: anarchism is once again dismissed, this time as an ‘impossible dream.’”

This anarchy dichotomy is at the heart of the central conflict of Sons of Anarchy: the “malevolent” club that Clay and Gemma wanted versus the “impossible dream” club that John Teller and Jax wanted. We now know that John Teller’s death was at his own hand (albeit somewhat forced), when he realized that the former was the fate of SAMCRO. As Jax rose up the ranks of SAMCRO leadership, he wasn’t just fighting Clay’s philosophy of anarchy—he was also fighting Gemma’s. After Jax killed Clay, the fight wasn’t over, even though he initially thought it was. But the club wasn’t his. Anarchy was his mother.

As Tara plots and schemes to get herself and her sons away from the world Gemma had created and helped sustain, Gemma sees her as a threat, and resorts to fully embodying that destructive, violent anarchy that could uphold the status quo.

Because she has operated within this culture of masculine violence, Gemma adopts the patriarchal problem-solver of violent destruction. Since Tara is a threat to the malevolent anarchy that Clay and Gemma desired, she—in Gemma’s mind—had to be eliminated. Whereas Tara worked with other women as she was trying to make her plans to escape Charming with Abel and Thomas, Gemma consistently alienated herself from other women.

In “Socialism, Anarchism And Feminism,” by Carol Ehrlich, she says that the “debate over ‘strong women’” is closely related to leadership, and summarizes radical feminists’ position to include the following:

“1. Women have been kept down because they are isolated from each other and are paired off with men in relationships of dominance and submission. 2. Men will not liberate women; women must liberate themselves. This cannot happen if each woman tries to liberate herself alone. Thus, women must work together on a model of mutual aid. 3. ‘Sisterhood is powerful,’ but women cannot be sisters if they recapitulate masculine patterns of dominance and submission.”

Tara could have checked off all of those goals easily; she was of a new generation of old ladies. Gemma, on the other hand, isolates herself, acts alone, and in attempting to be dominant and in control, adopts masculine ways of doing so. Clay, as a harbinger of evil, wanted Tara dead. But the other Sons accepted and respected her. Her role wasn’t club mother, it was club healer. The power that she held—that she could and did save Sons’ lives (and Abel’s life in the series pilot)—was a restorative power that ran counter to what Gemma offered. And the more Tara worked with other women, the more of a threat she became to Gemma and the club.

Gemma embodies Sigmund Freud’s “masculinity complex,” which posits that girls identify with their fathers but eventually must assume female social roles. Gemma’s mother, Rose, died of the same heart defect that Gemma has and that her son Thomas died from. Gemma remembers Rose in a conflicted way, and says in season 7 that she thinks Rose had never wanted to be a mother. Gemma, by contrast, says that all she ever wanted to do was to be a mother (to sons).

Her father, Nate, was a pastor. She speaks of him with love and admiration, and one can easily see (just as easily as critics have seen the Oedipal parallels with Jax and Gemma) her own Electra complex—the Jungian theory that girls identify with and have a fixation with their fathers. While Nate leads a church and congregants, Gemma leads an outlaw club and outlaws—her dozen sons are different kinds of apostles.

In Sigmund Freud’s lecture, “Femininity,” he says,

“A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relationship to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex.”

In making Jax believe the Chinese killed Tara, Gemma is both preserving herself and continuing—whether consciously or not—the legacy that Clay would have wanted: destruction, violence, and chaos. She wants her son to live out her ambitions, to fully give himself up to the anarchy of her rebellious desires.

Tara’s rebellion—that Gemma could not seem to get over—is the antithesis of Gemma’s. Tara left Charming as a teenager, leaving Jax and the club because she wanted to escape. She became a talented doctor, and later returned to Charming. When she wanted to “transfer to her son(s) the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself”—escaping Charming and the grasp of SAMCRO, Gemma sees this desire as running counter to her own ambition for her son and grandsons: to stay in Charming, and to stay in the MC.

SoA_503_0698_FULL

Wendy and Tara collaborate

Both Tara and Gemma are underestimated by the men, in terms of the lengths they will go to in order to preserve their desires for their lives and their sons. Because women aren’t included in the ultra-violent, masculine club scene (and are instead relegated to being porn stars, escorts, or old ladies—all very “private” roles), Tara’s plots shock Jax. Gemma brutally killing Tara is out of the realm of possibility for feminine force.

Freud added in the aforementioned lecture:

“There is one particularly constant relation between femininity and instinctual life which we do not want to overlook. Suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favors the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been divested inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine.”

Gemma almost got away with murder because the expectation of women is that they are nonviolent and are not aggressive. Specifically, the brutal way she killed Tara was, according to law enforcement and Jax, in keeping with gang violence because it was so horrifying and malicious. When Gemma and Juice convince Jax that it was one of Lin’s men who killed Tara, Jax kills him in the same way Tara was killed, thinking he was enacting just revenge. He was, instead, simply doing as his mother taught him.

Showrunner Kurt Sutter said, “This is a story about the queen and the prince.” It seemed as if Jax had been trying to reconcile with his father and father figure all of these years; instead, we realize he needs to reconcile with his mother. When he finally realizes this, it’s too late—Gemma has killed Tara, Juice killed Eli to protect her, and they lied and set off a series of massacres and gang violence. Everyone immediately believed Lin’s crew was responsible for Tara’s death, because it looked like brutal gang violence—certainly not something a woman could do. There was no Mayhem vote for Gemma, because she isn’t at the table. However, even in her final moments, Gemma gives Jax permission to kill her, because she knows it must be done. She’s mothering—and controlling—until the very end.

As Hannah Arendt points out in On Violence, “Violence can always destroy power. Out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.” As soon as Gemma kills Tara, her power starts rapidly declining. A conglomeration of Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, Gemma vacillates between justifying her actions and apologizing for them (but mostly justifying). As soon as she sets the stage for Jax to enact revenge upon the Chinese, his rage and misplaced revenge—without the understanding or agreement of the club—makes him less and less powerful. In the last episode, as he ties up all of his loose ends (see: killing everyone), he is losing power. By the end, he gives up himself, and his power—just like his father did—and commits suicide. Violence robs Gemma and Jax both of their power, their dignity, and their lives.

So who—and what—wins in this modern Shakespearean tale? Certainly not those who rely on a sense of vengeful justice and violence to ride through this life. In a patriarchal framework of understanding, these actions are seen as desirable and just. Instead, we must work toward a feminist ethic of care. Feminist psychologist and philosopher Carol Gilligan defines a feminist ethic of care as

“an ethic of resistance to the injustices inherent in patriarchy (the association of care and caring with women rather than with humans, the feminization of care work, the rendering of care as subsidiary to justice—a matter of special obligations or interpersonal relationships). A feminist ethic of care guides the historic struggle to free democracy from patriarchy; it is the ethic of a democratic society, it transcends the gender binaries and hierarchies that structure patriarchal institutions and cultures. An ethics of care is key to human survival and also to the realization of a global society.”

Gilligan’s research has shown that traditionally “feminine” approaches to care are about more than the individual—connectedness and care override a sense of individualism and justice. In Sons of Anarchy, the characters who most exemplify this care ethic are Nero and Wendy, who, at the end, are riding together to parent their children—biological and non—far away from Charming. They are friends, not lovers, and their goals are not for themselves, but for the safety of one another and their sons—sons who they desperately want to keep away from the individualistic, vengeful anarchy they were coming to know. Nero and Wendy are coincidentally both recovering addicts. In their recovery—from the literal and figurative drugs of their past—they care more deeply about one another and those around them than they care about their individual desires.

 

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Wendy’s eventual ethic of care

Tara desired this kind of care for her sons, but couldn’t attain it in her lifetime because of the pull of Gemma and Jax’s patriarchal anarchy. After Gemma’s death, Jax is freed to fulfill Tara’s wishes, and legally makes Wendy the boys’ mother. As in so many Shakespearean dramas, women must die so that men will learn. However, what remains constant throughout Sons of Anarchy is that when the masculine ideals dissolve, and individuals cry, love, and care (exemplified in Tig and Venus’s powerful love scene in “Faith and Despondency”), intimacy and growth are possible.

 

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Wendy and Nero escape with their sons, embodying the feminist ethic of care

 

As Nero and Wendy leave Charming, it’s clear that this, then, is the preferred way to ride—not “all alone,” as Jax does—but all together. Gemma stands by her way of mothering until the end. She’s distrustful and dismissive of teachers and school (whereas Wendy is passionate about Abel attending school), and she covertly gives Abel his grandfather’s SON ring, which he wears at the end of the finale. Jax, however, sees the dire need for care, not anarchy. “It’s not too late for my boys,” he says. “They will never know this life of chaos.” Ultimately, Jax is a tragic hero because he realizes that care, not justice, will heal and raise his children.

The feminism of Sons of Anarchy has been not only its complex, three-dimensional female characters and Gemma’s role as the rare female antihero, but also its tragic depiction of the end game of violent, individualistic patriarchy. Wrapped up in the tragedy of masculine justice and violent revenge, Sons of Anarchy lifts up of the feminist ethic of care.

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Leigh Kolb is an instructor at a community college in rural Missouri, where she teaches composition, journalism, and literature. She wrote “Mothers of Anarchy: Power, Control, and Care in the Feminine Sphere,” for Sons of Anarchy and Philosophy, and recapped the final season of Sons of Anarchy at Vulture. She is an editor and staff writer at Bitch Flicks, where she has written about the feminism of Sons of Anarchy.

What’s in a Soundtrack? The Sweet Sounds of ‘Romeo + Juliet’

Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is one told by the older generation. Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’ is one told by “unfaded” youth. When Des’ree was singing “Kissing You” as Romeo and Juliet kiss (and oh, how they kiss), she is singing with deep longing and pain. When Glen Weston sings “What is a Youth?” he sings at Romeo and Juliet, about how youth–and female virginity–fades.

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: Music From the Motion Picture (this CD was--OK is--one of my greatest treasures)
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: Music From the Motion Picture

 

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

When you are 14, your senses are heightened–music permeates every part of you, a brush of a hand sends shock waves through your body, and the smell of someone’s shampoo and chewing gum is enough to evoke lust. It’s no surprise that for adolescents, music is a powerful, integral part of their self-identity and emotional expression.

I’m thankful that I was 14 in the mid-90s. I know it’s easy to be nostalgic and believe that the moment we came of age was the best moment in the history of the world (“When I was that age…”), but I’m confident in saying that 1996 was really an epic year for being 14.

Riot grrrl was hanging in the air. Female musicians were featured on the airwaves, many male rockers were feminist, and teen films featured complex female protagonists. I was saturated in feminist media. We were riding an idealistic wave of feminism–a new generation of daughters whose mothers had lived through the women’s movement, who lived in a world where Title IX and Roe v. Wade always existed.

When I was 14, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet was released, and the play that has been speaking to and about teens for 400 years awakened my already heightened senses. As someone who identified more with Wuthering Heights than Pride and Prejudice as a teenager, this intense angst really spoke to me. And the music that accompanied the film was woven into the fiber of my life–I imagined it as my soundtrack, not just the film’s soundtrack.

I’ve written before about how I see the film (and Shakespeare‘s text) as challenging patriarchal social orders and revealing the toxicity of masculinity. Luhrmann’s version highlights this, certainly more so than Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version.

Zeffirelli’s soundtrack featured a score by Nino Rota and its “Love Theme” is known in two versions–“What is Youth?” and “A Time for Us.” “What is a Youth?” is included in the score, and features the lyrics that are sung on screen during the Capulet party when Romeo and Juliet meet. The lyrics to this version focus on how “cupid rules us all,” and that “youth” and the “fairest maid” all fade. In contrast, the lyrics to “A Time for Us” are more hopeful: “…some day there’ll be a new world / a world of shining hope for you and me.” Romeo and Juliet as a text can be read in both ways, of course. It’s important to think about Zeffirelli’s version in the context of the “youth” movement of the 1960s–anti-war rebellion, women’s rights activism, rising counterculture–and what Romeo and Juliet tells us about the utter ignorance and destruction of adults’ decisions.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCQMlyXMRJE”]

Luhrmann also pulls Romeo and Juliet into the context of an era dominated by youth culture (see aforementioned links and 1,000 Buzzfeed posts about how rad the 90s were). However, this Romeo + Juliet is marked with much more poignant commentary on gender and culture. The “Love Theme” from Romeo + Juliet is sung by Des’ree, a Black woman (she performs on screen at the Capulet party, a nod to the Zeffirelli version). “Kissing You” is a more abstract look at love: “Pride can stand a thousand trials / The strong will never fall / But watching stars without you / My soul cries… Touch me deep, pure and true.” The entire scene, and the song itself, is a more intimate and moving addition to the party scene.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7eH9qnH8TM”]

Luhrmann’s soundtrack (he is, after all, known not only for his showy films but also for his curated soundtracks) was the soundtrack to my teen years. If I want to really feel those 14-year-old feelings, I just need to listen to Romeo + Juliet. The choices of popular musical artists of the time (Des’ree, Garbage, The Cardigans, Radiohead, Butthole Surfers, Everclear, etc.) related the story of Romeo and Juliet through their own eyes, not those of a stodgy old narrator. And the diversity of the artists–male, female, Black, white–also reflects the progressive nature of youth culture.

Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is one told by the older generation. When Glen Weston sings “What is a Youth?” he sings at Romeo and Juliet, about how youth–and female virginity (eye roll)–fades. Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is one told by “unfaded” youth. When Des’ree sings “Kissing You” as Romeo and Juliet kiss (and oh, how they kiss), she is singing with deep longing and pain.

Luhrmann’s soundtrack, then, does what we imagine Shakespeare aimed to do with this play–forces us to look critically at love and life through the eyes of youth to critique the patriarchal social orders that cause the tragedy.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is often read in school when students are freshmen in high school. I would imagine the framers of this curricular choice were thinking that Romeo and Juliet is a cautionary tale against rebellion and teen lust. Instead, Romeo and Juliet really is about the absurdity and destructive nature of society’s bullshit norms and rules.

The songs in Romeo + Juliet aren’t just for backdrop; instead, these songs are characters–edgy, angry, beautiful, and poppy representations of the sweeping emotions of youth, love, anger, and rebellion.

Just listen, and be transported to a youth that won’t fade:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4xPXlneCGs”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJbXjIEP6rM”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkXdeUjM1pc”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNb93N3-ek”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU6i_JhbVsc”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIbiG04X3ws”]

 

See also at Bitch Flicks: The Tragedy of Masculinity in Romeo + Juliet

Recommended reading: Here is what I learned from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet at That’s Normal

 

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Rape Revenge Fantasies: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for Rape Revenge Fantasies Theme Week here.

Revenge Is a Dish Best Served…Not at All? by Angelina Rodriguez

Tarantino’s Kill Bill narrative requires The Bride to murder her rapist and to defend herself with some of the masculine characteristics that are used as institutionalized power to oppress women, such as physical strength and aggression. The film insists that she seek revenge, instead of demanding that men simply do not rape. This is barely better than teaching rape avoidance. It dictates that women must assimilate to a male culture of violence in order to have autonomy over their own bodies.

Irreversible: Deconstructing Rape Revenge by Max Thornton

Irreversible deconstructs the ethically dubious pleasures of the rape revenge genre through its structure as well as its plot. Its reverse chronology inverts the formula of rape-then-revenge, thereby robbing the viewer of any sense, however questionable, of justice done, and subverting the whole economy of violence.

“I’ll Make You Feel Like You’ve Never Felt Before”: Jennifer’s Power in I Spit on Your Grave Sophie Besl

No movies ever had to justify a cowboy going on a rogue revenge kick after his log cabin was burned to the ground or his family was killed; certain sufferings of injury, murder of loved ones, robbery, etc., have been accepted throughout cinematic history to merit revenge at all costs. I Spit on Your Grave was a large part of a relatively new phenomenon, possibly born out of the feminist movement, to add rape—based on the woman’s experience of rape, whether validated by law or not—to that list of worthy harms, which is an important statement in our rape culture.

When considering female agents of violence in a film, there is a troublesome tendency that plays to the audience’s anxiety about a women disrupting the essentialist notion that women are naturally gentle and nurturing: the tendency to have the woman acting in response to sexual violence, that only after a woman is overpowered and assaulted can she find a place of violence in her. Once the naturalness of a woman is disrupted by an outside force—a (usually male) perpetrator—she is no longer required to be viewed as “womanly.”

Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of Titus Andronicus then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.

In films, as in life, women aren’t supposed to be violent. Women make up the majority of violent crime victims (domestic violence, assault, rape, and murder) but they rarely retaliate in kind. Even in the relatively rare film where a woman seriously injures or kills a rapist, like Thelma and Louise she does so with lots of tears and anguish–in that film both from the woman pulling the trigger and the one who the man attempted to rape. The unwritten rule in movies seems to be that in order to justify a woman killing or even assaulting someone, we need to see her or some other woman suffer, a lot, beforehand. Contrast that rule with the male heroes of action films who leave dozens of corpses in their wake, and not one of the dead, usually, has raped or otherwise tortured the hero beforehand–though the hero may be avenging some great wrong the dead guy (or guys) did to his wife or daughter.

Cowboy Justice: Rape Revenge in Mainstream Cinema and TV by Morgan Faust

So maybe what had looked like a trend toward marginalizing rape survivors was actually a move toward bringing them into the fold of the American action hero? This is a move that discloses a terrible truth about the handling of rape cases in our legal system, but can be viewed as a genuine attempt to find a way to make the cowboy narrative, and the catharsis that comes with it, available and relevant to survivors of rape.

What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Rape Culture by Leigh Kolb

In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is brutally raped and disfigured (including having her tongue cut out so she couldn’t speak). This nod to Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses echoes the themes of the brutality of rape and the need for revenge. The women needed to name their rapists and share their stories (Lavinia writes in the sand; Philomela weaves a tapestry that tells her story). The women have as much power as they can in the confines of their society, and we the audience are meant to want justice and revenge.

But when Dawn learns that Ryan has bedded her as part of a bet while he is still inside of her, Dawn’s evolutionary adaptation intercedes and Ryan is punished for his use and abuse of Dawn.  So now two trusted boyfriends and a doctor have initiated Dawn into the world of oppressive sex and violence, and all three times her vagina—the thing that has left her most vulnerable—has acted as a protector.

More than being shitty to watch, it just pissed me off to 10 because I hate with the fiery passion of 10,000 suns the ubiquitous trope that surviving sexual violence (or attempted sexual violence) turns women into superheroes.

Trespassed Lands, Transgressed Bodies: Horror, Rage, Rape, and Vengeance Within Indigenous Cinema by Ariel Smith

By forcing the subconscious fears of audiences to the surface, horror cinema evokes reactions psychologically and physically–that is its power. This power can serve and support uncensored Indigenous expression by allowing Indigenous filmmakers the opportunity to unleash dark, unsanitized allegorical representations of the abhorrent, repugnant, violent abomination that is colonization.

Rape, Lies, and Gossip on Gossip Girl by Scarlett Harris

Her banishment by Blair when she finds out what transpired between Jenny and her on-again, off-again lover is typical of the punish-the-woman mentality Gossip Girl is so fond of. Instead of shaming her partner for taking advantage of a teenage girl, Blair blames Jenny for ruining her proposal. And when Jenny returns the following season to help Chuck take down Blair (keep up, people!), she should really be seeking revenge on her rapist, wouldn’t you say?

Girl Gang Fights Rape Culture in Firefox by Elizabeth Kiy

Though very different, the two films based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang, have a shared message: that rape culture is pervasive. and the experiences of girls and women within it are sadly, universal. In both films, one set in the 90s, the other in the 50s, teenage girls inhabit dangerous territory, full of sexual assaults and near misses, all ignored by the authorities around them. Their experiences aren’t considered unusual or justified within their respective narratives, instead, they point out that women are given a lot of reasons to feel unsafe and afraid in our society. At the very least, we’ve all been told not to walk home at night or frightened by a man following too close on our heels.

Agency and Gendered Violence in Thelma and Louise by Jenny Lapekas

These characters challenge our gendered assumptions about sex, trauma, and vengeance, which can make audiences uncomfortable. I was likely too young when I first watched Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991). However, I remember the surge of adrenaline I felt when Louise shot and killed Thelma’s rapist, how incredibly good it felt to idolize these convict women who had had enough with their monotonous lives, at an age when I couldn’t possibly comprehend patriarchal oppression, the comforts of solidarity and sisterhood, or the concept of escapism utilized not necessarily to run away but rather to find your wildest, most genuine self. 

 

What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Rape Culture

In ‘Titus Andronicus,’ Lavinia is brutally raped and disfigured (including having her tongue cut out so she couldn’t speak). This nod to Philomela in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ echoes the themes of the brutality of rape and the need for revenge. The women needed to name their rapists and share their stories (Lavinia writes in the sand; Philomela weaves a tapestry that tells her story). The women have as much power as they can in the confines of their society, and we the audience are meant to want justice and revenge.

Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee 

O, could our mourning ease thy misery! (2.4.56-57)

 

Shakespeare’s depictions of rape are too familiar today. However, his messages about patriarchy and rape aren’t familiar enough.

 

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

When a story about a girl who was raped and subsequently shunned and blamed breaks, I’m no longer surprised. It’s familiar. Townspeople gathering behind the rapists–just like in Steubenville–seems like the natural course of things in our toxic rape culture. She shouldn’t have been so drunk. She couldn’t say no. These boys are promising young athletes. 

 

The rapists in Julie Taymor’s Titus–Demetrius and Chiron–are wild young men obsessed with violence, depraved sexuality and video games.

 

When Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece in the late 1500s, women were quite literally the property of men (their fathers, then their husbands). The rape culture that plagues us in 2014 was essentially the same, although laws of coverture have dissolved and women are no longer legally property.

And Shakespeare understood the horror of rape. Shakespeare–more than 400 years ago–seemed to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

I read about the Maryville case with the familiar dread that accompanies these too-frequent stories. When it happens in my state in a town that looks like mine, it’s even closer. But I’m never surprised.

As I was watching Titus with my Shakespeare class just a few days later, I readied myself for the rape scene (which Julie Taymor handles brilliantly). When Lavinia’s uncle, Marcus, finds her brutalized, he delivers a long monologue, mourning the sexual violence that she has gone through.

 

Lavinia is raped and mutilated.

 

At the end of the monologue, he says as she turns away,

“Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee

O, could our mourning ease thy misery!” (2.4.56-57)

It took my breath away like it hadn’t before, and I checked the text to read the exact quote. I paused the film and asked my students if they’d heard of the Maryville case (in which the victim and her family were basically chased out of town after the case against the perpetrators was dropped). They hadn’t. I explained, and re-read out loud the final couplet of Marcus’s monologue.

Is this how we respond to women who are raped in our culture?

No.

What if we did? What if we rallied behind not the rapists, but the one who was raped? What if we never said, “I am not saying she deserved to be raped, but…“

What if all of this happened immediately and swiftly in our own communities, and not after a case gets national attention?

In Shakespeare’s texts, it’s clear that the rapists are sub-human and villainous. Even when rape isn’t part of the plot, he shows the figurative and literal violence of patriarchy.

Hermia’s father is willing to kill her if she doesn’t marry who he wants her to marry in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (“I would my father look’d but with my eyes,” she says.)

Hamlet‘s Ophelia commits suicide when she descends into madness from being pushed and pulled by patriarchal pressures. (She says to her brother after he advises her to be chaste and virtuous, “Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; / Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, / And recks not his own rede.”)

Emilia’s views on the patriarchal constraints of marriage and sexuality in Othello seem radical today.

Shakespeare understood.

Why can’t we?

In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is brutally raped and disfigured (including having her tongue cut out so she couldn’t speak). This nod to Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses echoes the themes of the brutality of rape and the need for revenge. The women needed to name their rapists and share their stories (Lavinia writes in the sand; Philomela weaves a tapestry that tells her story). The women have as much power as they can in the confines of their society, and we the audience are meant to want justice and revenge.

 

Lavinia writes the rapists' names in the sand. The men surrounding her are not unlike Anonymous in the Maryville case.
Lavinia writes the rapists’ names in the sand. The men surrounding her are not unlike Anonymous in the Maryville case.

 

Shakespeare’s epic poem The Rape of Lucrece also follows a young woman who is raped and seeks revenge (although her speech is left intact).

While the death of the women at the end of the plays seems problematic to 21st-century feminists, we must remember that in Shakespeare’s Roman fictions, self-sacrifice or honor killing was honorable and dignified, thus leaving the women with as satisfying an end as they could hope for. There are cultural differences, of course, but the anti-rape and anti-misogyny messages in these centuries-old texts are gripping.

In these texts, the following messages are clear:

• Rapists are depraved misogynists who want some kind of power.

•  Silencing of women is evil.

• Women aren’t always allies (see: Tamora, who mothers and encourages Rape and Murder) .

• Retribution is necessary for justice.

Four-hundred years later, we still can’t seem to grasp these realities.

We look to media for social norms and values. If we see objectification of women on screen, we can clearly see the if this objectification has deeper feminist implications if we are supposed to villainize the objectifiers. (This is, incidentally, why the sexism in The Big Bang Theory makes my skin crawl and Sons of Anarchy–in all of its vengeful Shakespearian glory–is one of my favorite shows.) Shakespeare’s women–who are victims of violent patriarchies–are the ones the audience is supposed to sympathize with. The tragedy of these tragedies is that this patriarchal social order creates hell on earth for many women.

At the beginning of Titus, Lavinia pours a vial of her tears in her father’s honor as he returns home from war. She mourns and rejoices with him and is able to express her emotions surrounding his losses and his victories.

Mourning with him comes naturally. It’s what we expect when men encounter battles.

And just as Marcus says that they must mourn with Lavinia, she must not withdraw, we need to learn to mourn with those whom rape culture affects so deeply.

Four-hundred years later:

• Rapists are still misogynists who do not want sex, but want power.

• Women are still silenced. (And when they speak out, it is not without consequences.)

• Women still aren’t always allies.

• Retribution is still necessary, although we must fight to see it happen (and rely on online hackers and internet outrage to open up cases). Far too often we must wait for justice, if it ever comes.

When we can look to fiction from centuries ago and see common and familiar–almost radical–representations of the violent outcomes of restrictive patriarchies, we are doing something wrong.

Because the masses still don’t seem to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

 

 

See also at Bitch Flicks: The Fractured Rape/Revenge Fantasies of Julie Taymor’s Titus

__________________________________________________________


Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

 

The Fractured Rape/Revenge Fantasies of Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus’

Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of ‘Titus Andronicus,’ then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.

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This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

It might seem a bit archaic to look to a Shakespearean text for an answer to any question about rape/revenge fantasies—that is, unless you’re a student of Shakespeare.  As Leigh Kolb has already usefully pointed out, it seems the Bard knew a thing or two about the deeply affecting rage felt by survivors of sexual abuse, and how patriarchy perpetuates that rage by blocking their ability to feel that justice is served in their honor.  He knew about it so well, in fact, that even during the time of performances of Titus Andronicus, a play penned relatively early in Will’s career that revolves around rape and revenge, stage productions included a strange conglomeration of historical periods, all of which were oppressive to women in varying degrees.  Witness the Peacham drawing, an early-modern representation of the costuming and staging of Titus Andronicus, and you’ll see a combination of classical Roman and Elizabethan garb, where Titus Andronicus, the play’s titular general, appears in traditional Roman costume, and his soldiers appear in armor worn in Shakespeare’s day.  Both the classical Roman and Elizabethan periods were two moments in time when women (with the possible exception of the Queen) were literally the property of their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and had little recourse of their own if they were misused in any way, except through these societally approved male allies.

So it’s not truly surprising that the raped woman in this play, Titus’s daughter Lavinia, has to rely on her male relatives to enact revenge for her violation.  After all, this isn’t I Spit on Your Grave.  It’s more like The Last House on the Left, which—like Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring—is after all based on a 13th century ballad about a girl raped by ruffians who then arrive for a respite at her family’s home.  When her parents find out about her rape, they torture and kill her rapists in retaliation.  If this origin story tells us anything (at least initially) about rape revenge narratives, it’s the unfortunate fact that sexual violence has been around for a long, long time.

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Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of Titus Andronicus, then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.

Taymor’s answer to these challenges is to mimic the pastiche represented in the Peacham drawing, with a bit of updating: her film, Titus (1999), is a lush visual mash-up of classical Roman architecture, iconography that vaguely recalls both Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany, avant-garde symbolism, Fellini-esque mise-en-scene, and even Degas ballerinas.  The influence of the Peacham sketch draws attention to the fact that the classical setting of Titus Andronicus reflects the violence of the Elizabethan period of the play’s production, as well as bringing to mind the violence of classical Rome, the coliseum as a theatre of violence, and the excessive, often despotic rulers of the classical period.  The overall look of Taymor’s film, with its naturalistic color palette, its blending and layering of historical periods and iconic imagery, and its direction and photography lends itself to a mode in which the grotesque is presented with utmost beauty, unsettling the viewer and increasing the tension between what the audience knows to be real and fiction.  Each of these symbols, referents, and cultural touchstones emphasize the powerlessness of women in those cultures (and, by extension, our own), and the fragility and repression that can characterize the feminine experience.  But perhaps most importantly, this approach destabilizes any complicity the audience might bring to these representations of violence.  Taymor wants her viewers to FEEL these wrongs, and feel them deeply.

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Enter what Taymor calls the “Penny Arcade Nightmares.”  Although the film is brimming with gorgeously realized but horrifying images happening in the play proper—such as Marcus’s discovery of Lavinia that has been much discussed—these sequences are the most obviously symbolic, and are meant to illustrate the intense emotions surrounding the events that drive the revenge plot: the supposed honor-killing of Goth Queen Tamora’s eldest son; her younger sons’ subsequent rape of Lavinia in retaliation; Titus’s murder of Chiron and Demetrius in vengeance; and finally the epically terrifying final scenes, where Titus has ground the  boys’ bones “to dust” and baked them into pies, which he’s fed to their mother Tamora, whose enraged husband slaughters Titus (but not before Titus kills his own daughter to save her from “surviv[ing] her shame”)… yeah.  Pile of bodies on the stage at the end of the play: check.  Taymor takes these remarkable cruelties, mingles them with horror’s libidinal audience reactions, and controls those reactions through unexpectedly stunning imagery to produce an increase of empathy.   In Taymor’s adaptation, each act of violence is an image that is hauntingly beautiful and still highly disturbing.  The Penny Arcade Nightmares illustrate not only acts of torture, dismemberment and cannibalism, but also their internal consequences, their effects on those who execute them, and how victims and those close to them are changed by such extreme violence.

Lavinia’s rape, though it occurs “off-stage,” is represented in one of these stylized vignettes.  Bathed in icy hues of blue, white, and grey, Lavinia appears at once as a sort of Old-Hollywood female icon, a suitable eye-rest for the male gaze, but also as a wounded deer, with a deer head placed atop her head, and deer hooves replacing her dismembered hands.  Twisting and cowering on a pedestal as if she’s trapped within a snow globe, she dodges the sharpened claws of Chiron and Demetrius, represented as man-tigers bent on consuming their herbivore prey.  Chaotic rock music and fast-paced editing underscores the brief scene, highlighting the jagged edges of Lavinia’s memory of her trauma, evoking her anger and her frustrating helplessness.  It’s also significant that this moment appears in the film as her male allies encourage her to write the names of her rapists in the sand, revealing their heretofore elusive identities in order to facilitate vengeance—by performing an act that will lead to justice for the violated girl, she is violated again by her own memory of the event.

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But what can this film teach us about rape culture?  The film and its source material are chock full of horrible acts of violence, including rape.  The problem is not that Lavinia doesn’t get justice—she does.  The problem is that this justice is achieved through additional violence, a fact that Taymor emphasizes by placing the final bloodbath in the setting of an arena, populated with viewers.  They signify us, those watching at home, and implicate this violent justice through their blank faces and silent stares.  They do not cheer.  Lavinia’s plight is finished, but the cycle of violence has claimed nearly everyone on “stage.” Taymor’s revision leaves the children to potentially clean up the massacre.  Taymor’s insistence on unmooring our expectations of representational violence through her painterly compositions, and her use of the audience suggest that she not only wants to change our ideas about rape culture and revenge, but about violence in general.  The very construction of the term “rape culture” includes that word, “culture”—a concept that is all-inclusive, encompassing all people, regardless of your place on the sexual spectrum.

Lavinia’s attack and subsequent mutilation is a horrifying, physical manifestation of how broken we are as a society in regards to rape and other forms of sexual violence, and Titus’s attempt at justice—however well intentioned—doesn’t really solve the problem.  The problem is not only rape culture. In Shakespeare’s text Lavinia is our center of empathy, the character through which we experience tragedy on a grand and grotesque scale.  But Titus himself is guilty of perpetuating the cycle of revenge that ends with that pile of (albeit mostly despicable) bodies on stage, and the layered representation of various historical moments in original performance and the contemporary film speaks to the agonizing continuation of these flawed approaches to healing. Extreme?  Sure.  But this text seems to ask audiences through the centuries: is more violence really how we want to handle terrible, soul-crushing, self-negating violence?  With everyone dead, does anyone really learn a lesson?  In her modern re-vision, Taymor’s use of the coliseum audience seems to refute the idea that rage unleashed in additional violence is any kind of cure for deeply felt pain.  Their silence, and perhaps ours, is a thoughtful one, one that might include some consideration of alternatives to perpetuating the cycle of violence that leads down a deep rabbit-hole to oblivion.

 

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University.  She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.  

 

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

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Watch Shonda Rhimes Talk About ‘Scandal’s’ Season Finale by Jamilah King at Colorlines

Megan Ellison to Develop TV Show about Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

When Women Take to the Sea to Provide Safe Abortions by Jessica Luther at Bitch Magazine

Heroines of Cinema: Mimi Leder and the Impossible Standard for Women Directors in Hollywood by Matthew Hammett Knott at Indiewire

Interview: Nadine Patterson’s Talks Her Reimagining Of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ Which Screens 4/23 In Harlem by Sergio at Shadow and Act

An Ode to My Four Favorite Women on Mad Men by Emilly Prado at Bitch Magazine

DreamWorks’ Latest Movie Will Have Something No Pixar Film Has Ever Tried by Zak Cheney-Rice at PolicyMic

How Many Of These Movies By Female Directors Have You Seen? by Alison Willmore at BuzzFeed

VIDEO: The “Orange Is The New Black” Season Two Trailer Is Here, Lovely, Amazing by Riese at Autostraddle

Naked if I want to: Lena Dunham’s body politic by Soraya Roberts at Salon

10 Women Directors to Watch in 2014 by Shannon M. Houston at Paste 

 

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

 

 

What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Rape Culture

When Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece in the late 1500s, women were quite literally the property of men (their fathers, then their husbands). The rape culture that plagues us in 2013 was essentially the same, although laws of coverture have dissolved and women are no longer legally property.

And Shakespeare understood the horror of rape. Shakespeare–more than 400 years ago–seemed to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee 

O, could our mourning ease thy misery! (2.4.56-57)

 

Shakespeare's depictions of rape are too familiar today.
Shakespeare’s depictions of rape are too familiar today. However, his messages about patriarchy and rape aren’t familiar enough.

 

Written by Leigh Kolb

When a story about a girl who was raped and subsequently shunned and blamed breaks, I’m no longer surprised. It’s familiar. Townspeople gathering behind the rapists–just like in Steubenville–seems like the natural course of things in our toxic rape culture. She shouldn’t have been so drunk. She couldn’t say no. These boys are promising young athletes. 

The rapists in Julie Taymor's Titus--Demetrius and Chiron--are wild young men obsessed with violence and video games.
The rapists in Julie Taymor’s Titus–Demetrius and Chiron–are wild young men obsessed with violence, depraved sexuality and video games.

 

When Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece in the late 1500s, women were quite literally the property of men (their fathers, then their husbands). The rape culture that plagues us in 2013 was essentially the same, although laws of coverture have dissolved and women are no longer legally property.

And Shakespeare understood the horror of rape. Shakespeare–more than 400 years ago–seemed to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

Last week, I read about the Maryville case with the familiar dread that accompanies these too-frequent stories. When it happens in my state in a town that looks like mine, it’s even closer. But I’m never surprised.

As I was watching Titus with my Shakespeare class, I readied myself for the rape scene (which Julie Taymor handles brilliantly). When Lavinia’s uncle, Marcus, finds her brutalized, he delivers a long monologue, mourning the sexual violence that she has gone through.

 

Lavinia is raped and mutilated.
Lavinia is raped and mutilated.

 

At the end of the monologue, he says as she turns away,

 “Do not draw back, for we will mourn with thee

O, could our mourning ease thy misery!” (2.4.56-57)

It took my breath away like it hadn’t before, and I checked the text to read the exact quote. I paused the film and asked my students if they’d heard of the Maryville case (in which the victim and her family were basically chased out of town after the case against the perpetrators was dropped). They hadn’t. I explained, and re-read the final couplet of Marcus’s monologue.

Is this how we respond to women who are raped in our culture?

No.

What if we did? What if we rallied behind not the rapists, but the one who was raped? What if we never said, “I am not saying she deserved to be raped, but…“

What if all of this happened immediately and swiftly in our own communities, and not after a case gets national attention?

In Shakespeare’s texts, it’s clear that the rapists are sub-human and villainous. Even when rape isn’t part of the plot, he shows the figurative and literal violence of patriarchy.

Hermia’s father is willing to kill her if she doesn’t marry who he wants her to marry in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (“I would my father look’d but with my eyes,” she says.)

Hamlet‘s Ophelia commits suicide when she descends into madness being pushed and pulled by patriarchal pressures. (She says to her brother after he advises her to be chaste and virtuous, “Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; / Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, / And recks not his own rede.”)

Emilia’s views on the patriarchal constraints of marriage and sexuality in Othello seem radical today.

Shakespeare understood.

Why can’t we?

In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is brutally raped and disfigured (including having her tongue cut out so she couldn’t speak). This nod to Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses echoes the themes of the brutality of rape and the need for revenge. The women needed to name their rapists and share their stories (Lavinia writes in the sand; Philomela weaves a tapestry that tells her story). The women have as much power as they can in the confines of their society, and we the audience are meant to want justice and revenge.

 

Lavinia writes the rapists' names in the sand. The men surrounding her are not unlike Anonymous in the Maryville case.
Lavinia writes the rapists’ names in the sand. The men surrounding her are not unlike Anonymous in the Maryville case.

 

Shakespeare’s epic poem The Rape of Lucrece also follows a young woman who is raped and seeks revenge (although her speech is left intact).

While the death of the women at the end of the plays seems problematic to 21st-century feminists, we must remember that in Shakespeare’s Roman fictions, self-sacrifice or honor killing was honorable and dignified, thus leaving the women with as satisfying an end as they could hope for. There are cultural differences, of course, but the anti-rape and anti-misogyny messages in these centuries-old texts are gripping.

In these texts, the following messages are clear:

• Rapists are depraved misogynists who want some kind of power.

•  Silencing of women is evil.

• Women aren’t always allies (see: Tamora, who mothers and encourages Rape and Murder) .

• Retribution is necessary for justice.

Four-hundred years later, we still can’t seem to grasp these realities.

We look to media for social norms and values. If we see objectification of women on screen, we can clearly see the if this objectification has deeper feminist implications if we are supposed to villainize the objectifiers. (This is, incidentally, why the sexism in The Big Bang Theory makes my skin crawl and Sons of Anarchy–in all of its vengeful Shakespearian glory–is one of my favorite shows.) Shakespeare’s women–who are victims of violent patriarchies–are the ones the audience is supposed to sympathize with. The tragedy of these tragedies is that this patriarchal social order creates hell on earth for many women.

At the beginning of Titus, Lavinia pours a vial of her tears in her father’s honor as he returns home from war. She mourns and rejoices with him and is able to express her emotions surrounding his losses and his victories.

Mourning with him comes naturally. It’s what we expect when men encounter battles.

And just as Marcus says that they must mourn with Lavinia, she must not withdraw, we need to learn to mourn with those who rape culture affects so deeply.

In 2013:

• Rapists are still misogynists who do not want sex, but want power.

• Women are still silenced. (And when they speak out, it is not without consequences.)

• Women still aren’t always allies.

• Retribution is still necessary, although we must fight to see it happen (and rely on online hackers and internet outrage to open up cases). Far too often we must wait for justice, if it ever comes.

When we can look to fiction from centuries ago and see common and familiar–almost radical–representations of the violent outcomes of restrictive patriarchies, we are doing something wrong.

Because the masses still don’t seem to understand that patriarchy hurts women. Patriarchy kills women.

Patriarchy is rape culture.

__________________________________________________________


Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

 

Wedding Week: Joss Whedon’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and the Wedding That Wasn’t

Benedick (Alexis Denisof) and Beatrice (Amy Acker) in Much Ado About Nothing

Written by Lady T.
Joss Whedon’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is soaked in sex, languidness, and alcohol, as any decent adaptation of a Shakespeare comedy should be. It’s not a “wedding movie” in the traditional sense: there are no Bridezilla jokes, montages of wedding planning going hilariously wrong, or subplots about in-laws fighting each other.
But Much Ado About Nothing does have more than one wedding scene, and the film does employ the classic “left at the alatr” plot point. Claudio (Fran Kranz), in love with Hero (Jillian Morgese), abandons her on their wedding day. What follows is not the typical “wacky wedding hijinx” story, but a story that exposes the true nature of the characters involved in the ceremony, where several male characters reveal disturbing attitudes toward women, and one surprises us by being a little more enlightened than we expected.

Beatrice and Hero react to the behavior of the men around them.

Claudio doesn’t have cold feet because he’s nervous about marriage. At the beginning of the film, there’s nothing he wants more than to go to the chapel and get ma-a-a-a-aried. In fact, he wants to marry Hero the day after she accepts his proposal, prompting her father Leonato (Clark Gregg) to tell him to put on the brakes because he’s not quite ready to transfer ownership of his daughter to a husband…I mean, er, “watch his little girl grow up.”
Then the villain Don John (Sean Maher) tricks Claudio and Don Pedro (Reed Diamond) into believing that Hero is unfaithful to him. Don John stages a moment where his cohort Borachio (Spencer Treat Clark) seduces Hero’s lady-in-waiting, Margaret (Ashley Johnson), in Hero’s bedroom. Claudio and Don Pedro witness two shadowy figures going at it behind a curtain, and believe that Hero is disloyal. She is, as Don John puts it, “your Hero, Leonato’s Hero, every man’s Hero.” (Keep away from that Runaround Sue.)
So, naturally, Claudio and Don Pedro a) forget that Don John is the same villain who was in handcuffs at the beginning of the film for trying to stage a coup against Don Pedro, and b) decide that two shadowy figures in his fiance’s bedroom is concrete proof that Hero is cheating on him. They believe this because someone wrote “gullible” on every ceiling in every building they’ve ever been in.

Dumbass.

Feeling betrayed and resentful, Claudio doesn’t simply call off the wedding or privately ask Hero for an explanation. He manhandles her at the ceremony, shoves her back into her father’s arms, calls her a whore, and refuses to marry her. Don Pedro joins in on the slut-shaming, and once they’re done humiliating Hero in front of her friends and relatives, they stalk off with Don John (who hilariously steals a cupcake from the dessert platter before leaving the ceremony).
The scene is mostly played as serious; Whedon even eliminates Benedick’s Captain Obvious moment where he comments, “This is not a nuptial.” The film focuses on the horrifying behavior of Leonato, the previously affectionate father, who wishes for his daughter’s death after hearing the prince declare that she is nothing more than a “common stale.” Some of his exact words: “Let her die.”
Leonato’s denunciation of Hero is the most disturbing moment of the film, as it should be. Verbal and physical abuse at the hand of a lover or boyfriend is traumatizing and life-altering, but there is something profoundly and uniquely painful in suffering at the hands of a parent. The casting of Clark Gregg, aka everyone’s favorite Agent Coulson from The Avengers, is a particularly brilliant move; any fan of Joss Whedon’s is conditioned to see Gregg as a good guy, and the moment of betrayal feels particularly pointed when coming from the mouth of such a likable actor.

“Spoiler alert–I’m going to call my daughter a whore in half an hour!”

Meanwhile, only two men present at the ceremony believe Hero’s (accurate) version of the story without question. One man is a priest, who is not so much a character as a plot device, serving the same purpose as Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet and coming up with the always brilliant “hey, let’s pretend the girl is dead!’ scheme.
The other man who immediately believes Hero is Benedick.
Remember Benedick? The man in the beginning of the play who proudly proclaimed his eternal bachelorhood to anyone who asked his opinion (and those who didn’t?). The man who only ever referred to Hero as “Leonato’s short daughter”? The man who, when pressed to think of a compliment for a woman, could only say, “That a woman conceived me, I thank her”?
He’s the only male character of note who takes Hero’s word.
Granted, Benedick did not witness Don John’s display of shadow puppet porn theater on Hero’s balcony–but then again, neither did Leonato, who immediately believes the accusations against his beloved daughter. Benedick also knows better than to trust anything that comes from Don John’s mouth.
But even though he believes Hero, he’s not willing to engage Claudio in a fight. He puts the blame on Don John. His position seems to be that even though Claudio and Don Pedro were wrong, they were tricked, and not entirely to blame.
After his conversation with Beatrice, however, Benedick changes his tune. He agrees to challenge Claudio.

Beatrice and Benedick shortly after he challenges Claudio
This is a complete role reversal from the beginning of the film. Claudio, the professed lover, and Don Pedro, seemingly a friend to women, think nothing of denouncing and humiliating a woman in public. Benedick, the proud bachelor and misogynist, prioritizes the woman he loves over his closest friends.
What can we learn about misogyny from the Much Ado wedding that wasn’t?
To put it in the most cliched terms, we can learn that actions speak louder than words. Claudio’s sweet professions of love mean nothing when compared to his behavior towards Hero, and Benedick’s rants against women and marriage are redeemed when he defends one woman on behalf of another woman he loves.
Or, to put it another way–the guy who says a lot of sweet things and seems genuine might turn out to be a gullible asshole with a lot of internalized misogyny, and the mostly-decent guy who stands up for you will still need to make a lot of sexist jokes for the sake of appearances and male ego.
Yay?
(Go see this movie immediately.)

Lady T is a writer with two novels, a screenplay, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

The Tragedy of Masculinity in ‘Romeo + Juliet’

Written by Leigh Kolb.
The opening scene of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet is an intense display of masculinity. While in the original text the Capulet and Montague men draw swords and taunt one another, Luhrmann’s rivals pull guns, rev car engines, smoke, shoot, and light fire to gasoline.
Luhrmann’s 1996 film takes Shakespeare’s text–he stays truer to the language than other modern adaptations–and places it in a decidedly modern world of gang violence, guns, and ecstasy.
It’s Baz Luhrmann. It’s over-the-top and gorgeous, and perfectly encapsulates the timeless themes of the tragic story. At 15, audiences see violent action, young love (lust) and parents who just don’t understand. Older audiences, however, see a tragedy borne out of patriarchy and a culture that expects and respects traditional masculine power.
Capulet and Montague, business moguls and patriarchal forces. Jesus looks on.
While Romeo’s Montague cousins are tied up fighting Capulets and taunting nuns, Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) is emoting on the beach over a recent breakup. His father references Romeo’s “tears augmenting the fresh morning dew,” and Romeo is seen smoking a cigarette, sweeping blond hair out of his eyes. Romeo doesn’t seem to be like his cousins, and even when they play pool together, he’s lamenting his lost love.
The feuding men.
When he meets Juliet (Claire Danes) at her family’s costume ball, they are equally smitten and she is forward with her feelings–“you kiss by the book,” she says, as they attempt to escape her meddling mother (who’s attempting to set her up with Paris, played for laughs by Paul Rudd). In discussions about marrying off Juliet, her father indicates to Paris that while mothers are made at her age, it usually doesn’t bode well for a good life. Her mother–who knows her less than her nurse–seems to want to push her into marriage because she had to marry young. Her bitterness and desire to push Juliet into an arranged marriage and young motherhood is portrayed as villainous.
Luhrmann’s take on the balcony scene isn’t for purists, but it’s great for feminists. Instead of Juliet being separated from him on her balcony, elevated literally and figuratively as Romeo struggles to hang on, Juliet walks down to the pool as Romeo waits for her, and the two deliver their lines in the pool–on equal footing, intertwined.
A nontraditional balcony scene places Romeo and Juliet closer together.
Juliet is continuously more mature than Romeo. While she falls for him as he does for her, she wants to know that he’s serious. Romeo stumbles, he’s clearly much more juvenile than Juliet is. They represent youth, yes, but also a departure from not only their fathers’ patriarchal social order and the gendered expectations placed upon them. Juliet’s world is protected and arranged for her; she’s expected to have a life like her mother’s (arranged and out of her control). Romeo’s effeminate nature goes against his father’s powerful corporate position and his cousins’ violent outbursts.
Romeo changes, however, when Tybalt (John Leguizamo) kills Mercutio (Harold Perrineau). Mercutio is frequently played flamboyantly–he doesn’t adhere to masculine norms and makes bawdy jokes at the expense of both Montagues and Capulets–and he represents a neutral party between the two families. Luhrmann’s Mercutio is played by a black man who convincingly cross-dresses for the costume party and attempts to bridge ground between the families. His death, then, is tragic to Romeo, but it’s also a sense of lost hope to the audience. Romeo gets behind the wheel of his car–he’s now part of this violent, masculine world–and chases after Tybalt. He maniacally shoots him as tears stream from his eyes.
When Romeo enters the violent, masculine sphere, the story changes completely and tragically.
He drops the gun, and the rain that has been approaching finally falls.
This crisis is what leads to the couple’s downfall–Romeo stepping into the patriarchal, violent world of senseless feuds pulls him away from the feminine that he’d so willingly embraced and embodied before.
As Juliet’s father drunkenly promises his daughter’s hand in marriage to Paris, he’s surrounded by guns and mounted hunting prizes on the wall behind him. As Romeo and Juliet sleep upstairs, she, too, is being pulled into the patriarchal order against her will.
When Juliet first refuses, her mother turns away from her and her father throws her to the ground, screaming, “I give you to my friend.” Juliet sobs, begging her mother to delay the marriage–but she refuses, and walks away.
Even those closest to her betray her desires–Father Laurence (Pete Postlethwaite) and her nurse (Miriam Margolyes) encourage her to marry Paris.
Juliet goes to Father Laurence and holds a gun first to her head, and then points it at Father Laurence to prove her determination to not marry Paris. Juliet takes control, even when all is working against her. Juliet refuses to bend to the will of the men (and world-weary women) around her.
Noteworthy in Luhrmann’s adaptation is his profuse use of religious symbolism, specifically Catholic iconography. This is another set of patriarchal rules they live under. The images in the film have meaning but not depth; they are as threatening as they might be comforting. Jesus looms over the city (he’s under repair when Tybalt lies dead in the fountain below him). Christianity is present in the city, in Juliet’s room and around Romeo and Juliet’s necks, but it doesn’t save them.
The modernization of key plot points–the certified letter that wasn’t delivered, the dealer that supplies Romeo with poison (fetched from the base of a Virgin Mary lamp), Captain Prince surveying the city in a helicopter–work remarkably well. And the soundtrack–oh, the soundtrack.
In the original text, there is a span of time between Romeo’s suicide and Juliet waking to see him lying dead. Luhrmann plays this scene much more dramatically–she wakes as he’s about to take the poison, and in his shock his hand bumps it into his mouth. They are both alive for a moment, and she kisses him while he’s dying. The lack of bystanders or spectators in this scene makes it more powerful–even a Shakespeare purist could attest to that fact.
The death scene is altered from the original text, and adds to the emotional impact.
Juliet shoots herself with no comment, and the camera pans up, looking at their dead bodies below while flashing back to moments of happiness.
Captain Prince screams “All are punished,” while their dead bodies are put into ambulances and the fathers look on bewildered.
In the original text, Friar Laurence gives a lengthy monologue, explaining all that had happened. Capulet and Montague shake hands and commit to peace.
In most Shakespearian tragedies, while there may be a pile of dead bodies at the end, there’s a sense of closure that things will be better in the future, or that the tragic tale will serve to teach others a lesson.
Not here.
There’s simply bewilderment, and the sense that the patriarchy, the violence, the incessant masculinity of Verona Beach has won, and everyone has lost because of it.
The story, then, isn’t about tragic young love. It’s about the tragedy of adhering to codes of behavior that are inherited and not freely chosen.
Luhrmann–by capturing a time and place that was at the same time specific and completely timeless–reminded a new generation of these messages that are as important and poignant today as they were in 1996, and as they were in 1595.
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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Shades of Feminism in ‘Othello’

Written by Leigh Kolb

First, allow this to sink in: Laurence Fishburne was the first black actor to play Othello in a major film production of Shakespeare’s Othello.
In 1995. 
One of the reasons Shakespeare’s texts are so timeless is that we can’t figure out how to evolve.
Othello (written around 1603) is about racism, jealousy, greed, trust and feminism.
While its themes of all-consuming greed and jealousy and misplaced trust are clear to all audiences–Iago is the ultimate villain, after all–and prejudice against Othello’s “otherness” seem unfortunately all too familiar, a feminist reading of the text illuminates two female characters who embody many shades of feminism.
Oliver Parker’s 1995 film adaptation is stunning, and the actors are excellent. Kenneth Branagh plays Iago perfectly, and Fishburne is a smoldering Othello, convincing in his love with Desdemona (Irene Jacob), his valor as a leader and his downfall at the hands of infectious, false jealousy. Emilia (Anna Patrick) is the acerbic wife of Iago and assistant to Desdemona, who delivers a shockingly 21st century monologue before unraveling her husband’s villainy. 
Desdemona and Othello’s love is new and vulnerable to outside attack.
Iago explains early on that he “hates the Moor,” and immediately sets down a path of attempting to ruin Othello’s happiness. While Iago cites jealousy of being passed up for promotion and the rumor that Othello once slept with Emilia, he doesn’t seem to be incredibly concerned with either situation. Iago truly hates women. He hates his wife and he hates Desdemona–after all, while his lies were directed at Othello, his plan was to turn Desdemona’s “virtue into pitch.” At the beginning of Act II, he lashes out at Emilia with contempt, and Desdemona attempts to correct him. Our villain–who is evil to the core without clear motive–is also villainous because he is cruel to women. 
Some directors and filmmakers have seen a homoerotic lust that drives Iago to Othello and suggest that it is the root cause for his obsession. Parker seems to hint toward that reading, especially in the scene when Emilia delivers the stolen handkerchief to Iago. In the film, Iago first resists her sexual advances, and then she gives him the handkerchief he’d wanted. He delights in this, flips her over (suggesting sex without facing her) and he sniffs the handkerchief, which had last touched Othello’s sweaty brow. This may be nothing, but watching with the idea that maybe Iago’s deep jealousy and obsession with Othello lies in repressed homosexuality would make his actions have new meaning.
Iago looks on with seething rage as Desdemona and Othello are still happy.
As for the feminist themes of Othello, they are clear from the very beginning. Desdemona goes behind her father’s back to marry Othello–a celebrated general but not a native Venetian (he is a “Moor,” a black man of African/Muslim descent). She goes before the senate to prove Othello didn’t win her by “witchcraft” (see: racism) and she requests to travel with him to Cyprus. She stands up to her father convincingly, and while she is dutiful to the men in her life, she clearly has an independent spirit. Parker’s Desdemona is also sexual (he includes a sex scene between Othello and Desdemona, and shows flashbacks of their courtship and intimate relationship). 
Desdemona is incredibly innocent, though, and her naive subservience (which was to be expected at the time) to Othello makes her blind to his outlandish suspicions and jealousy. 
Emilia, on the other hand, is on the opposite end of the spectrum. She knows Desdemona legitimately lost the handkerchief and that Iago has it. When Emilia sees Othello go into a jealous rage, she assumes he’s showing his true self to Desdemona and that Desdemona might as well know now what husbands become. “They are all but stomachs, and we all but food;” she says. “They eat us hungrily, and when they are full/ They belch us.” Her jaded views of men and marriage cause her to think she’s protecting Desdemona by allowing her to see the true nature of men. 
Shakespeare’s women are frequently much more complex than his men. One of my favorite theories of Shakespearean authorship is that a Jewish woman actually wrote the plays–this would, I admit, make a lot of sense considering his female characters are more drawn out than most women in Hollywood films 400 years later.
Emilia is jaded about men and marriage, and has realistic views of female sexuality.
Emilia’s speech in Act IV is groundbreaking in terms of its frank discussion of female sexuality. Desdemona, preparing to go to bed (and presumably be punished and killed by her husband, although she knows she’s innocent) asks Emilia if she can imagine that any woman would ever be unfaithful to her husband. She couldn’t understand Othello’s accusations, because she couldn’t imagine a woman ever having sexual relationships outside of marriage. 
Emilia steps in and basically says, “Of course!” She says:
But I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands knowTheir wives have sense like them: they see and smellAnd have their palates both for sweet and sour,As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?Then let them use us well: else let them know, The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. (IV. iii. 89 – 107) (emphasis added)

There still exists a strict double standard about men’s and women’s sexuality–men are subjects, women are objects. Men cheat because they want sex, women cheat because they want love. Scientists still debate the existence of the G-spot. The fact that this monologue was written 400 years ago and still seems groundbreaking is profoundly depressing.

Desdemona prepares to be punished.

Desdemona dies at the hands of a jealous husband who thinks he’s acting justly (this still happens, of course). Emilia dies at the hands of a husband whose schemes almost work, but she figures him out and exposes him. Othello manages to regain some of his reputation before committing suicide–dying at his own dishonored hand.
The women are the true victims of Iago’s manipulation and Othello’s weakness. Desdemona and Emilia are both wiser than the men around them, but they have no power. This tragedy is not lost on Parker, who adeptly paints passionate and angry female characters to foil the men’s foolish actions. 
The pile of dead bodies at the end–a hallmark of Shakespeare’s tragedies–were meant to convey messages about jealousy, racism and the toxicity of imbalanced gender relations to audiences hundreds of years ago. How unfortunate, then, that the play doesn’t even need to be adapted and restructured to make sense to a modern audience, because we still haven’t gotten it.

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.