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Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection & Horror and the Archaic Mother: Alien
KRISTEVA, FEMININITY, ABJECTION
Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror offers a framework for analyzing the representation of women as monstrous in horror films. Kristeva explores abjection, which is what doesn't respect borders, positions, or rules and disturbs identity, system, and order. Abjection separates the human from the non-human and the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject.
Ritual is a means by which societies renew their initial contact with the abject element and then exclude it, reinforcing the demarcation lines between the human and non-human.
This analysis focuses on Kristeva's discussion of abjection in relation to:
The border.
The mother-child relationship.
The feminine body.
It also considers her writings on the abject in relation to religious discourses, as definitions of the monstrous in modern horror are grounded in religious and historical notions of abjection:
Sexual immorality and perversion.
Corporeal alteration, decay, and death.
Human sacrifice.
Murder.
The corpse.
Bodily wastes.
The feminine body.
Incest.
The place of the abject is where meaning collapses, threatening life and requiring radical exclusion from the place of the living subject.
The abject is both threatening and helps to define life; its exclusion guarantees the subject's proper place in relation to the symbolic.
Abjection can be experienced through biological bodily functions and within a symbolic (religious) economy. Food loathing, for example, is an archaic form of abjection if it signifies a border between distinct entities or territories. The skin on milk, offered by parents, can represent their desire and a separation of worlds, leading to self-expulsion.
In horror films, food loathing, particularly the eating of human flesh, is a major source of abjection.
The ultimate in abjection is the corpse, representing the opposite of the spiritual and religious symbolic.
Figures like vampires, zombies, and ghouls are 'bodies without souls,' embodying ancient forms of abjection that continue to provide compelling images of horror. Were-creatures, signifying a collapse of human-animal boundaries, also belong to this category.
Abjection also occurs with hypocrisy and lies, highlighting the fragility of the law and threatening the living subject.
Abjection is always present, attracting desire but needing repulsion to avoid self-annihilation.
ABJECTION AND THE HORROR FILM
The horror film illustrates the work of abjection in at least three ways:
Images of Abjection: The horror film abounds in images of abjection, such as corpses and bodily wastes. When a horror film makes someone 'sick' or 'scared the shit out of me', it's foregrounding the film as a work of abjection. Viewing horror signifies a desire for perverse pleasure and a desire to eject the abject from the safety of the spectator's seat.
Woman is related to polluting objects (excremental and menstrual), giving her a special relationship to the abject.
The Concept of a Border: The concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film. That which crosses or threatens to cross the border is abject. The function of the monstrous is to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.
The monstrous is produced at the border between:
Human and inhuman.
Man and beast.
Normal and the supernatural.
Good and evil.
Those who take up proper gender roles and those who do not.
Normal and abnormal sexual desire.
The 'clean and proper body' and the abject body.
The image of woman's body, because of its maternal functions, acknowledges its debt to nature and consequently is more likely to signify the abject.
Various sub-genres of the horror film correspond to religious categories of abjection:
Cannibalism ('meat' movie).
The corpse (ghoul and zombie movies).
Blood (vampire film).
Bodily disfigurement (slasher movie).
The Construction of the Maternal Figure as Abject: All individuals experience abjection when breaking away from the mother. The mother-child relation is one marked by conflict. Because of the instability of the symbolic function in relation to the prohibition placed on the maternal body, the maternal body becomes a site of conflicting desires.
The position of the child is unstable because the mother's hold authenticates her existence. In the child's attempts to break away, the mother becomes an 'abject,' a precondition of narcissism.
Abjection is at work in horror texts where the child struggles to break away from the mother, representative of the archaic maternal figure, in a context in which the father is invariably absent.
Religious rituals ward off the subject's fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother.
Polluting objects fall into two categories:
Excremental (threatens identity from the outside).
Menstrual (threatens from within).
Both relate to the mother. The maternal authority is the trustee of the mapping of the self's clean and proper body, distinguished from paternal laws.
The period of the mapping of the self's clean and proper body is characterized by the exercise of authority without guilt, a time when there is a fusion between mother and nature.
The modern horror film often plays with its audience, saturating it with scenes of blood and gore, deliberately pointing to the fragility of the symbolic order in the domain of the body, where the body never ceases to signal the repressed world of the mother.
In The Exorcist, the symbolic (priest-as-father) and the pre-symbolic (possessed girl) clash in scenes where the foulness of woman is signified by her putrid, filthy body. In Carrie, the couple is drenched in pig's blood, which symbolizes menstrual blood; women are referred to as pigs, and women bleed like pigs.
Kristeva's semiotic posits a pre-verbal dimension of language which relates to sounds and tone of the voice and to direct expression of the drives and physical contact with the maternal figure. With the subject's entry into the symbolic, which separates the child from the mother, the maternal figure and the authority she signifies are repressed.
Religion has historically purified the abject, but with its disintegration, the work of purification now rests solely with art. The horror film attempts to bring about a confrontation with the abject in order to eject it and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human.
Signifying horror involves representing and reconciling with the maternal body.
Abjection is ambiguous; it both repels and attracts. The monstrous mother also has a crucial role in relation to castration and the child's passage into the symbolic order.
HORROR AND THE ARCHAIC MOTHER: ALIEN
The science-fiction horror film, Alien, presents a complex representation of the monstrous-feminine as archaic mother.
Alien begins with a spaceship, the Nostromo, returning to earth with a cargo of 20 million tons of mineral ore. The ship has a crew of seven.
Director Ridley Scott introduces the crew members to the ship and its crew by emphasizing the small, practical details of life in outer space. Awakened by the computer, affectionately called 'Mother', the crew members complain about the cold, their low salaries, and the fact that the only good thing on board is the coffee.
After communicating with 'Mother', Dallas, the Captain, discovers she has interrupted the voyage because she has intercepted a transmission from a nearby planet. After some technical problems, three of the crew leave the Nostromo for the planet's dark, inhospitable surface. They enter a derelict space craft where Kane, one of the crew members, is attacked by an alien life form which attaches itself with a deadly grip to his face. Kane and the 'thing' are taken back on board the ship despite strong objections from Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who reminds the others that they have broken quarantine orders.
The remainder of the narrative is concerned with the creature's deadly attacks on the crew and their attempts to kill it. The alien is a mysterious, terrifying creature that changes shape as it metamorphoses into a mature life form. Highly intelligent, secretive, sadistic, it is impossible to find or kill.
One of the major concerns of the sci-fi horror film is the reworking of the primal scene, the scene of birth, in relation to the representation of other forms of copulation and procreation.
In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the themes of bodily invasion and paranoia are explored. The invading creature first exists as a giant egg/pod, which silently hatches and simultaneously creates a replica of the human it wishes to become.
In The Thing, the primal scene is also presented as a series of grotesque bodily invasions; here the creature can take over both the human and animal body and clone itself into an exact replica of the invaded being.
In Altered States, a male scientist can take himself back to more primitive stages of existence through the agency of hallucinogenic drugs, while enfolded in a womb-like bath of special fluids. Eventually he gives birth to himself as an ape-creature.
Procreation and birth take place without the agency of the opposite sex; and the creature born is primitive rather than civilized, suggesting that a thin line separates the human animal from its ancestors.
Central to all of these films are scenes which explore different forms of birth.
The primal scene is also crucial to Alien as is the figure of the mother, in the guise of the archaic mother. The archaic mother is the parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end. Although the archaic mother, the creature who laid the eggs, is never seen in Alien, her presence is signalled in a number of ways: representations of the primal scene, depictions of birth and death, images of blood, darkness and death, and the chameleon figure of the alien.
Signs of the archaic mother are evident in the film's first section, with its emphasis on at least four different representations of the primal scene.
According to Freud, every child either watches its parents in the act of sexual intercourse or has phantasies about that act. These phantasies are about origins: the primal scene represents to the child its own origins in its parents’ lovemaking; the seduction phantasy is about the origin of sexual desire; and the phantasy of castration pictures the origins of sexual difference.
Possibly the many mythological stories in which people copulate with animals and other creatures (Europa and Zeus, Leda and the Swan) are re workings of the primal scene narrative. The Sphinx, with her lion's body and woman's face, is an interesting figure in this context.
Alien presents various representations of the primal scene. Behind each of these lurks the figure of the archaic mother, that is, the image of the mother as sole origin of all life.
The first primal scenario, which takes the form of a birthing scene, occurs in Alien at the beginning, when the camera/spectator explores the inner space of the mother-ship. This exploratory sequence of the inner body of the 'Mother' culminates in a long tracking shot down one of the corridors which leads to a womb-like chamber where the crew of seven are woken up from their protracted sleep by Mother's voice. The seven astronauts emerge slowly from their sleep pods in what amounts to a rebirthing scene which is marked by a fresh, antiseptic atmosphere. In outer space, birth is a well controlled, clean, painless affair. There is no blood, trauma or terror. This scene could be interpreted as a primal phantasy in which the human subject is born fully developed - even copulation is redundant. The first birth scene could be viewed as a representation of incestuous desire par excellence, for the father is completely absent; here the mother is sole parent and sole life-support.
The second representation of the primal scene takes place when three of the crew approach the body of the unknown spaceship. They enter through a 'vaginal' opening which is shaped like a horseshoe, its curved sides like two long legs spread apart at the entrance. They travel along a corridor which seems to be made of a combination of inorganic and organic material - as if the inner space of this ship were alive. Compared to the atmosphere of the Nostromo, however, this ship is dark, dank and mysterious. A ghostly light glimmers and the sounds of their movements echo throughout the caverns. In the first chamber, the three explorers find a huge alien life form which appears to have been dead for a long time. Its bones are bent outward as if it exploded from the inside. One of the trio, Kane (John Hurt) is lowered down a shaft into the gigantic womb- like chamber in which rows of eggs are hatching. Kane approaches one of the eggs; as he touches it with his gloved hand it opens out, revealing a mass of pulsating flesh. Suddenly, the monstrous thing inside leaps up and attaches itself to Kane's helmet, its tail penetrating Kane's mouth in order to fertilize itself inside his stomach. This representation of the primal scene recalls Freud's reference to an extreme primal scene phantasy where the subject imagines travelling back inside the womb to watch her/his parents having sexual intercourse, perhaps to watch themselves being conceived. Here, three astronauts explore the gigantic, cavernous, malevolent womb of the mother. Two members of the group watch an enactment of the primal scene in which Kane is violated in an act of phallic penetration. Kane himself is guilty of the strongest transgression; he actually peers into the egg/womb in order to investigate its mysteries. In so doing, he becomes a 'part' of the primal scene, taking up the place of the mother, the one who is penetrated, the one who bears the offspring of the union.
When male bodies become grotesque, they tend to take on characteristics associated with female bodies; in this instance man’s body becomes grotesque because it is capable of being penetrated. From this union, the monstrous creature is born. But man, not woman, is the 'mother' and Kane dies in agony as the alien gnaws its way through his stomach. The birth of the alien from Kane’s stomach recalls Freud's description of a common misunderstanding that many children have about birth, that is, that the mother is somehow 'impregnated' through the mouth - she may eat a special food - and the baby grows in her stomach, from which it is also born. Here, we have a version of the primal scene in which the infant is conceived orally.
Another version of the primal scene occurs when smaller crafts or bodies are ejected from the mother-ship into outer space; although sometimes the ejected body remains attached to the mother-ship by a long lifeline or umbilical chord. This scene is presented in two separate ways: (1) when Kane's body, wrapped in a white shroud, is ejected from the mother-ship; and (2) when the small space capsule, in which Ripley is trying to escape from the alien, is expelled from the underbelly of the mother-ship. In the former, the mother's body has become hostile; it contains the alien whose one purpose is to kill and devour all of Mother's children who, in terms of normal burial procedures, would be ejected from the ship to float away into a more friendly environment - outer space rather than inner space. In the second birth scene the living infant is ejected from the malevolent body of the mother before the infant is destroyed; in this scenario, the 'mother's' body explodes at the moment of giving birth.
Although the archaic mother as a visible figure does not appear in Alien, her presence forms a vast backdrop for the enactment of all the events. She is there in the images of birth, the representations of the primal scene, the womb-like imagery, the long winding tunnels leading to inner chambers, the rows of hatching eggs, the body of the mother-ship, the voice of the life-support system, and the birth of the alien. She is the generative mother, the pre-phallic mother, the being who exists prior to knowledge of the phallus. This archaic figure is somewhat different from the mother of the semiotic chora, posed by Kristeva, in that the latter is the pre-Oedipal mother who exists in relation to the family and the symbolic order. The concept of the parthenogenetic, archaic mother adds another dimension to the maternal figure and presents us with a new way of understanding how patriarchal ideology works to deny the 'difference' of woman in her cinematic representation.
Roger Dadoun describes the archaic mother as:
a mother-thing situated beyond good and evil, beyond all organized forms and all events. This is a totalizing and oceanic mother, a 'shadowy and deep unity', evoking in the subject the anxiety of fusion and of dissolution; a mother who comes before the discovery of the essential beance, that of the phallus. This mother is nothing but a fantasy inasmuch as she is only ever established as an omnipresent and all-powerful totality, an absolute being, by the very intuition – she has no phallus – that deposes her.
Signs of the archaic mother in the Dracula film are: the small, enclosed village; the pathway through the forest that leads like an umbilical cord to the castle; the central place of enclosure with its winding stairways, spider webs, dark vaults, worm-eaten staircases, dust and damp earth - 'elements which all relate back to the imago of the bad archaic mother'. At the centre of this, Dracula himself materializes. With his black cape, pointed teeth, rigid body - carried 'like an erect phallus' - piercing eyes and 'penetrating look', he is the fetish form, a 'substitute for the mother's penis'.
Dracula represents the archaic mother's attempts to build a fortress against her imagined omnipotence. Dracula’s figure is very much acting on behalf of the mother - he desires to be the phallus for the mother, not understanding, or forgetting in his fear, that she is the mother who exists prior to the uncovering of 'the essential beance
the mother who is 'nothing but a fantasy inasmuch as she is only ever established as an omnipresent and all-powerful totality'. She is all-powerful and absolute unto herself.
When he is finally penetrated by the stake, his heart is revealed 'to be hollow, a gaping wound. This is castration made flesh and blood and absence'. In this way, according to Dadoun, the large 'omnipresent mother' is displaced on to the small 'occulted mother'. In other words, the figure of the archaic mother is collapsed into that of the pre-symbolic or dyadic mother, the mother who is thought to possess a phallus. In the process, the monster comes to represent the mother’s “missing” phallus.
Freud allowed that female fetishism was a possibility. Mary Kelly argues that the child is going to grow up, leave her, reject her, perhaps die. In order to delay, disavow, that separation she has already in a way acknowledged, the woman tends to fetishize the child: by dressing him up, by continuing to feed him no matter how old he gets, or simply by having another 'little one'.
The Freudian theory of the fetish is inadequate because it does not take into account the possibility that woman also terrifies because she threatens to castrate.
Mother Alien is primarily a terrifying figure not because she is castrated but because she castrates. Her all- consuming, incorporating powers are concretized in the figure of her alien offspring.
Alien supports the general principle of fetishization, but it suggests that the origin of the process of denial is fear not of the castrated mother but of the castrating mother. The alien's ever-changing shape, its chameleon nature also points to the maternal fetish object as an 'alien' or foreign shape.
Compared to the horrific sight of the alien, Ripley's body is pleasurable and reassuring to look at. The unacceptable, monstrous aspect of woman is represented in two ways: Mother as an omnipresent archaic force linked to death and Mother as the cannibalistic creature represented through the alien as fetish-object.
The image of the cat functions in the same way; it signifies an acceptable, and in this context, a reassuring, fetish-object for the 'normal' woman. Ripley holds the cat to her, stroking it as if it were her 'baby', her 'little one'.
Alien presents a fascinating study of the archaic mother and of the fear her image generates.
THE ARCHAIC MOTHER
Freud attempts to explain the origin of the archaic mother; he argues that the great mother-goddesses are not mythical but belong to the matriarchal period of human history.
Freud proposed that human society developed through stages from patriarchy to matriarchy and finally back to patriarchy.
In my view, Freud's theory also attempts to demystify myths concerning the archaic mother and her terrifying powers of creation.
Both Freud and Lacan conflate the archaic mother with the mother of the dyadic and triadic relationship. Kristeva extends the notion of the Freudian Oedipal mother to include two other faces of the mother: the fecund mother and the phantasmatic mother who constitutes the abyss which is so crucial in the formation of subjectivity. It is the notion of the fecund mother-as-abyss that is central to Alien; it is the abyss, the cannibalizing black hole from which all life comes and to which all life returns that is represented in the film as a source of deepest terror.
An opposition is drawn between the impure fertile (female) body and pure speech associated with the symbolic (male) body. Kristeva argues that a boundary is drawn between feminine and masculine as a means of establishing an order that is 'clean and proper'.
It is the mythological figure of woman as the source of all life is that, within patriarchal signifying practices, particularly the horror film, she is reconstructed and re-presented as a negative figure, one associated with the dread of the generative mother seen only as the abyss, the all-incorporating black hole which threatens to reabsorb what it once birthed.
The central characteristic of the archaic mother is her total dedication to the generative, procreative principle. She is the mother who conceives all by herself, the original parent, the godhead of all fertility and the origin of procreation. She is outside morality and the law.
The archaic mother is present in all horror films as the blackness of extinction - death. The desires and fears invoked by the image of the archaic mother, as a force that threatens to reincorporate what it once gave birth to, are always there in the horror text - all pervasive, all encompassing - because of the constant presence of death.
As this desire to merge occurs after differentiation, that is after the subject has developed as separate, autonomous self, it is experienced as a form of psychic death. In this sense, the confrontation with death as represented in the horror film gives rise to a terror of self- disintegration, of losing one’s self or ego - often represented cinematically by a screen which becomes black, signifying the obliteration of self, the self of the protagonist in the film and the spectator in the cinema.
The act of 'looking away' when viewing horror films is such a common occurrence that it should be seen as a fifth look that distinguishes the screen-spectator relationship. Confronted by the sight of the monstrous, the viewing subject is put into crisis - boundaries, designed to keep the abject at bay, threaten to disintegrate, collapse.
Fear of losing oneself and one's boundaries is made more acute in a society which values boundaries over continuity, and separateness over sameness. Given that death is represented in the horror film as a threat to the self's boundaries, symbolized by the threat of the monster, death images are most likely to cause the spectator to look away, to not-look. Because the archaic mother is closely associated with death in its negative aspects - death seen as a desire for continuity and the loss of boundaries - her presence is marked negatively within the project of the horror film. Both the mother and death signify a monstrous obliteration of the self.