In her article “Bakhtin’s Carnival Reversed: King’s The Shining as Dark Carnival,” Linda J. Holland-Toll refers to the “seductive” and “siren-like” song of The Shining. She is assuming that the house is feminine in its engulfment of its many visitors. Since I have already discussed the central controlling mechanism of the Overlook, the toothy boiler, as encoded feminine, I would also like to posit that this gendered dynamic could connect the labyrinthine maze of the Overlook to a womb that calls its “children” home to participate in its bleeding death rituals. As King writes, “This inhuman place makes human monsters,” as if the reproductive and supernatural powers of the house are actually giving birth to these bloody murderous occurrences.
But at the same time, I am not entirely sure that the house itself is responsible for “birthing” monsters as Jack Torrance is an incredibly troubled and violently abusive man previous to contact with the Overlook, evident in the scenes where he breaks his son’s arm and hits one of his students. As we find out towards the end of The Shining, the house was not so much interested in Jack as it was in using Danny Torrance (who, born with a caul over his face could be seen as a witch-like entity) as a “psychic battery” to resurrect the ghosts residing within The Overlook’s walls. The Overlook can also be seen as a haunted womb that will do anything to trap her “child” inside. If Jack had killed his wife and child, like Delbert Grady the caretaker before him, the house may have been able to autonomously exist through time and space as its own womb-like being. But, as is the case in most Stephen King novels, It and Misery being two of the most striking, the womb and all its monstrous minions must be destroyed, and is at the end of The Shining as her “creeping” boiler explodes. The occurrences in the Overlook can also be read as menstruation as the house seems to thrive upon murder and bloodshed, these things happening periodically within the hotel.
The overwhelming presence of blood in Stephen King novels leads me to agree with Rosi Braidotti’s claim that menstruating and pregnant women are a major part of the construction of horror. The dead woman in Room 217 is a good example of the monstrous female body. Though she is not menstruating or pregnant, King’s descriptions of her suit the horror-full woman theme. First of all, she is an older woman having an affair with a younger man, who, according to Dick Halloran, leaves her. Subsequently, she slits her wrists in the Room 217’s bathtub. Numerous people in the hotel have had contact with this apparition and have been threatened by her. When Danny finally enters Room 217 he sees her “bloated” dead body in the bath tub, “her purple lips pulled back in a grimace.” Dick Halloran had told Danny that the apparitions couldn’t hurt him, yet her long dead fingers reach around his neck, bruising him. Being bloated in the water is an obvious link to monstrous pregnancy, in that if something were to puncture her body, I would imagine the foulest matter would issue forth. Plus, bodily decay is linked to pregnancy in terms of Kristeva’s idea of abjection in that they are both evidence of the collapsed boundaries between inside the body and outside, life and death, pure and impure. A pregnant body goes through stages of physical change just as a decaying body does, which would follow Braidotti’s notion of monstrously changing female bodies. There is a popular phrase from male bathroom stalls that goes: “Never trust anything that bleeds for four days without dying.” In terms of the Ghost in Room 217, she has been lying in that bathtub, bleeding, for years. Dead, but not dead enough because she ends up wounding young Danny. Like the menstruating woman, the ghost has been bleeding in the bathtub for more than four days, and she’s still “alive” in her physical presence. This distrust of the female and her body are evident in that you can’t “trust” a woman to follow the male standards of bodily display. A woman bleeds for days once a month and doesn’t die. She can expel a living creature from her body. These are masculine “phobic pressure points,” to use King’s own words, in that men fear what to them is the inconstancy of the woman’s body, because their body does not perform these same activities.
Further evidence of the vagina dentata within The Shining would be in the frightening presence of things with scary mouths that threaten to bite. Because part of the vagina dentata theory depends on the displacement of the male gaze from the female genitals to her mouth, there develops an interesting tension/dynamic in their reactions to biting beings. The fire extinguisher down the hall from Room 217 demonstrates its dentata-esque qualities as Danny is convinced that it will bite him. On page 185 the word red is used to describe the fire extinguisher tank and the background of the emergency axe sign. There are direct references to blood and biting with regards to the fire hose. The hose becomes a scary snake, which traditionally has been considered a phallic symbol, but in this case I would like to pose a revision: What makes a snake frightening is not its shape, but its fanged mouth. The horror of the snake is not that it looks like a penis, but that, like the vagina dentata, it has the power to either poison or remove parts of your (man’s) body. In this particular scene, Danny likens this hose to the wasp nest that brutalized the family earlier in projecting: “ Don’t worry. I’m just a hose, that’s all. And even if that isn’t all, what I do to you won’t be much worse than a bee sting. Or a wasp sting. What would I want to do to a nice little boy like you...except bite.....and bite....and bite?” This fear of the mouth, of being bitten is related to the displacement of the vagina dentata onto the mouth, thus constructing it as a scary place that has the ability to hurt....and hurt....and dismember.
The presence of wasps in this novel, especially in terms of the vagina dentata and monstrous births, is telling in that the queen wasp produces an “evil” brood of millions whose goal in life, to us, is to sting and hurt. Jack makes the point that wasps are “deadlier” than bees because they can sting multiple times, whereas bees only can sting once (p. 133). Because of the quite typical horror theme of monstrous broods, the wasp’s defining action, the sting, takes on new meaning. The idea of a stinger penetrating a body has been coded as masculine because of how sex is constructed in American society. The man penetrates, the woman is penetrated. The wasps mainly sting Jack and Danny, the two males in the hotel. The fact that they were “penetrated” by the insects is parallel to Jacks possession/penetration by the house. Women’s bodies are presented as abject, penetrable, etc. But men’s bodies have always been considered somewhat sealed off, impermeable to outside forces. In penetrating the male body, the wasps again revise the phallic connotations of stingers and re-genders them female.
The Overlook further unsettles our notions of stability and sanity as random things come to life. The topiary of animal hedges, in attacking both Danny and Jack assumes the female “power” of the house in self-animating. Again we see the monstrous birth as hedge animals, previously safe and enjoyable for visitors, attack, claw, and bite. There is even a clock on page 319 whose “round black hole” begins to “swell.” The clock then produces a horrific display of Danny’s father murdering him with a croquet mallet. The monstrous female energy of the house that bears these grotesqueries plays with notions of family stability and towards the end as Jack becomes less and less human, it begins feeding off of the humanity that dies in him every moment he remains in the house. Because Danny is the “battery” for the house, the ghastly sights can be re-read as a monstrous birth from a young boy, who is the catalyst for incredible terrors, all of which root within the horrific of the female body.
Though the Overlook needs Danny to remain alive and trapped inside “her” womb, she still threatens Danny on many occasions, one of the most frightening being the man in the dog costume. Again, as described with the fire hose, the dog man speaks to him and reminds him of how he will be bitten and eaten by him, “And I think I’ll start with your plump little cock (p. 350).” King doesn’t even disguise the vagina dentata here because, really, for a man, what would be scarier? The hotel seems to thrive on fear and by scaring Danny it probably would make his power, his “psychic battery” stronger. By explicitly stating castration by mouth, this
particular scene is where all of the other scenes I have discussed are leading. Emasculation and engulfment are what the Overlook do best, both physically and metaphysically.
IV. What Horror Means
The vagina dentata, the embodiment of the monstrous feminine, is alive and well in The Shining. My contention is that horror is gendered, and the horrific is gendered female. It is representative of the misogyny of American culture that exploits, abuses, disrespects, and as both cause and result, fears women and their bodies. As Andrea Dworkin writes in her book Intercourse, “Sadism and death, under male supremacy, converge at the vagina: to open the woman up, go inside her, penis or knife. The poor little penis kills before it dies,” (p. 190) The Overlook, constructed as feminine and ultimately destroyed for its engulfing tendencies is a product of a patriarchal America. Even though the misogyny that is present in this novel can be written off as being “fictional,” the fantastical can give us a place to begin discussing taboo issues of gender, sexuality, and the male fear and disgust of women in this country. It seems odd to me that an entire genre can be based on the male perception of female loathsomeness without people realizing its presence. That speaks to the fact that the abuse and exploitation of women and their bodies is acceptable by greater American society. Though I mainly focused on The Overlook as a site of the vagina dentata and the monstrous female form, I would like to point out that these themes underscore every occurrence in this novel and resonate past it into the way women are treated outside of King’s world. Of course, this is all very taboo and unspeakable as the patriarchy does attempt to control women’s bodies and position within society, all the more reason to re-read and re-vise the masculinist theories evident in most horror medias. The Shining as a horror novel and cultural text allow us to recognize how women are fetishized as monstrous, and thus Stephen King, (knowingly? unknowingly?), like the horror genre, supports a culturally acceptable and very American male dominance. When asked what horror means I would have to reply that it is representative of a patriarchal society having met the enemy, and she is Woman.
Can There Be A Feminist Ethnography?
Note: This is the final exam essay that allowed me to graduate from university with Honors and Distinction.
As Mascia-Lees and Sharp argue in “The postmodernist turn” James Clifford and the Writing Culture enterprise involved a group of men, who, like explorers, happened upon the theoretical school of postmodernism, a position from which feminists had been working for a long time. Mascia-Lees and Sharpe discuss Clifford’s reasoning in excluding female and feminist voices from the Writing Culture book was that women had not made as many innovations in the ethnographic enterprise as men have. He goes on to cite Marjorie Shostak’s ethnography of the Nisa as a key example of this new type of ethnography, while maintaining that women had nothing to do with the production of this “new” postmodern viewpoint. Because anthropological history is clouded with issues of the colonialistic and imperialistic projects of anthropologists, the idea of a feminist ethnography is fraught with contradictions, the co-optation of feminism into postmodernism and the subsequent erasure of women as innovators in this field speaks to the unequal gender politics within anthropology as a discipline. I would argue that because of the inherent contradictions between feminism and the anthropological project of ethnography, there can’t be a feminist ethnography per se, but at Abu-Lughod details in her essay “Can there be a feminist ethnography,” the possibilities of what this can be should be explored.
The problematic invention of postmodernism is interesting because it incorporates feminist methodologies of multiple voices, reflexivity, rhetorical strategies, and overall an unsettling of the traditional academic voice. The difference between postmodernism and feminism lie in that feminism unapologetically claims a politics, while postmodernism is critiqued for its apolitical content. This issue is a driving force in why there cannot be a feminist ethnography, as male academics co-opt these strategies and maintain the scientific rigour of objectivity in denying the presence of politics in postmodern issues. For example, since postmodernism relies heavily on alternate modes of expression, therein still lies an effort to construct an ideal of ethnographic authority. Vincent Crapanzano’s “Hermes’ Dilemma” is an incredible example of how postmodern (feminist) strategies manage to reproduce the typical stereotypes of writing as a phallic enterprise, along with the recycling of notions of feminized cultures meant to be penetrated and exposed to the world. Though this article is considered and valued as postmodern, the erasure of politics and gender theory actually make Crapanzano’s argument a severe backtracking within the anthropological effort. Feminism attempts to subvert these masculinist views, and I find it shocking that these men so blatantly steal from feminism and then claim it as their own after erasing those things (most importantly, the political questions) that make the study worthwhile. As Judith Stacey argues, there can’t be a feminist ethnography, but there are ways of applying feminist theory and methodology to ethnographic work. Part of what needs to happen in order for there to actually be anything like feminist ethnography would be for these male postmoderns to accept the history of feminism and how it has shaped modern theory.
In terms of theory itself, George Marcus does an extensive study of changes within the canons of many different disciplines. But, much like the Clifford school of feminist erasure, Marcus only touches upon the idea that feminists have been shaping these changes within discourses, but he does discuss how postmodernism is seen as a threat to the academic canon. Catherine Lutz speaks to this issue of the academic canon in her essay “The gender of theory” whereby she deconstructs the act of theoretical writing as specific to men and values of objectivity and masculinity. She also discusses the idea of the canon as another masculinist opportunity to deny alternate voices a place within formalized academia. Though women like Zora Neale Hurston had practiced a feminist ethnography (and postmodernism in Clifford’s sense) way before feminism (and postmodernism) was even an issue, she has been marginalized from the anthropological canon. Lutz sees theory as gendered male, and thus promotes the theoretical intellectual (white) male dominance over other voices within academia. Men writing postmodern theory are, in essence, cross dressing as the thematic issues of postmodern representation have been a feminist project for some time now. It would be difficult to write a “feminist ethnography” when the idea of ethnographic writing itself is a male enterprise. It is a contradiction in terms to link these two theoretical ideas of feminism and ethnography, the former of which politics is key and the latter of which “butterfly collecting” (i.e. trapping cultures into static representations and objectification) seems to be the main purpose.
I would liken this issue to post-colonial critic C.L.R. James and theoretical issues of cricket and coloniality. James’ belief was that in order for Caribbean peoples to emancipate themselves, they had to prove their worth by beating the British at their own game. The problem with this is that by becoming better at the colonizer’s game, the colonized submitted and somewhat naturalized the process of colonization. By writing a feminist ethnography using the language of theory is performing this same submission to the dominant male voice, as an attempt to legitimize the practice of feminist ethnography. If there is to be a feminist ethnography we would have to completely reconfigure what our notions of ethnography would be as feminists, and we would have to call it something completely different from its other anthropological counterparts. But again, the issue is problematized when working within an academic situation that constantly erases and devalues the work of women, to call a feminist ethnography something else would further marginalize the issue of having a feminist oriented ethnographic practice.
Donna Haraway works towards this new ethnography by discounting the validity of science in linking it with the feminist practice of storytelling, thus claiming science as a myth. She also discusses the prospects of cyber-ethnographies that would combine issues of women, representation, fiction, and feminist methodo
logies within a new framework for ethnographic encounters. Her critical and respectful deconstruction of scientific objectivity opens new areas for feminist oriented ethnography as the idea of objectivity has been used by past and current anthropologists to make false statements about their positions in relation to their research. Since science and feminism are not easily reconciled and since anthropology would like to think of itself as a science, the idea of a feminist anthropology is further problematized. Haraway notes how human behaviours are displaced onto non-human primates, and she uses this to explicate how science is in fact biased in its supposedly objective views. Unsettling the notion of scientific truth is one step closer to a feminist ethnography in that it challenges the basic scientific presumptions of what we can know as truth.
Though I know that feminist ethnography must be accepted as it is in anthropology in order to change the marginalized position of women, it is incredibly problematic for feminists to align themselves with a practice that has in fact perpetuated stereotypes of femininity and the masculine right to power and phallic domination. Much like the issues surrounding the Women’s Studies/Gender Studies major at Occidental, having a department dedicated towards women marginalizes their status in all other disciplines. I don’t think there is any way to reconcile the intense discrepancies between feminism as a political project and ethnography as a colonialist enterprise (even now). But, as Abu-Lughod describes in her conclusion of the feminist ethnographic question, there are possibilities of a feminist ethnography and it is time for us to figure out how these possibilities can be presented and accepted into academia.
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