Computer-generated feature films for children, which emerged with Toy Story in 1995, have come to dominate children’s animated cinema in the Western world. Indeed, in 2006 Walt Disney Studios, the dominant force in children’s culture since 1923, bought Pixar, the production company behind Toy Story (1995) and five other hugely successful computeranimated children’s films (A Bug’s Life, 1998; Toy Story 2, 1999; Monsters Inc., 2001; Finding Nemo, 2003; and The Incredibles, 2004). John Lasseter, one of the founders of Pixar, was installed as the Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Studios, a move indicating that Disney planned to privilege investment in computer animation in future production, a suggestion endorsed by Lasseter himself at the time (Maddox, 2006). Other production companies, such as DreamWorks Animations, Twentieth Century Fox (NewsCorp), Sony, Warner Brothers (Time Warner), and Paramount (Viacom) have also moved into the burgeoning market of computeranimated children’s films.
Acknowledging that the socializing function of children’s literature is one of its defining characteristics (Stephens, 1992: p. 8) and that ‘children’s literature emerges from, and impinges upon, a nexus of social, political, and economic relations wherein adult desires are played out with “children” as a constantly and conveniently constructed category’ (Gupta, 2005: p. 299), theorists of children’s literature have increasingly turned their attention to the kinds of lessons present in children’s texts. Bob Dixon’s Catching Them Young: Sex, Race and Class in Children’s Fiction (1977) was an early and influential study of sexism, racism, and classism in children’s literature. Since the 1980s, traditional Disney animated films have been a prominent target of critics concerned with interrogating what Elizabeth Bell et al., in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, describe as ‘the “trademark” of ... innocence that masks the personal, historical and material relationship between Disney film and politics’ (1995: p. 5). The ways in which children’s culture ‘en-genders’ subjectivities has remained a prominent area of concern.
Little research, though, has been done on the emergent area of computeranimated movies for children. In existing commentary, mostly in the form of popular reviews, CG films (as they are called) are commonly promoted as a new, exciting alternative to old-style Disney animation, with overriding attention being paid to their technological innovations. However, as David McCooey and I have argued (Takolander & McCooey, 2005), discussing the enormously popular CG children’s feature Shrek (2001), the novelty of the animation cannot disguise old-fashioned politics.1 Shrek, which overtly presents itself as a revisionist fairy tale and in opposition to the saccharine tradition of Disney interpretations, remains profoundly rooted, like the Disney fairy tale it allegedly mocks, in patriarchal ideologies.2
Monster House, a CG children’s feature released by Sony and Columbia in 2006 and the focus of this essay, has been, like most CG films, appraised in terms of its innovative computer animation. In an essay published in Computer Graphics World, Martin McEachern (2006) focuses solely on the feature’s technological originality. He commends the film for its use of clay hand-modelling to inform the computer animation process and concludes: ‘In a summer flooded with CG features, each competing for technical supremacy, Monster House also steps out of the beaten digital path to assert, not hide, the authorship of the human hands behind it’ (2006: p. 48). However, while this film looks new – even apparently as a CG picture – its thematic interests and politics, particularly with regard to gender, are decidedly old.
The old-fashioned gender politics are suggested by the gothic modality of Monster House, in which an entire neighbourhood – its children, young adults, and even police force – are terrorized by a grotesquely obese dead woman named Constance who haunts the house built for her by her uxorious, downtrodden husband, Nebercracker. The gothic genre has long been associated with misogynistic politics. The genre emerged in the eighteenth century but underwent a significant resurgence in Victorian England, when the ‘New Woman’ emerged to contest her patriarchal subjugation and was portrayed by Bram Stoker as akin to a vampire. The gothic also has a long association with children’s literature, as Dale Townshend outlines in ‘The Haunted Nursery: 1764–1830’ (2008), and continues to be a conspicuous force in children’s culture, as the popularity of the Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and Spiderwick Chronicles series suggests. Indeed, Karen Coats contends that ‘children’s Gothic has become prevalent enough as a phenomenon to represent what can be considered a cultural symptom – an indicator that points to an underlying trauma’ (2008: p. 77). For Coats, the necessary rejection of the Oedipal mother is a possible source of the psychic disturbance therapeutically resolved by the gothic, which typically enacts the defeat of what Barbara Creed, in a landmark study, has called the ‘monstrous-feminine’ (2003 [1993]).
Whether we accept this thesis or prefer, like Adrienne Harris, to see culture as misogynistically ‘underwriting’ rather than helpfully facilitating maternal denial (2003: p. 259), the gothic certainly did not invent misogyny. The longevity of misogyny is also evidenced in Monster House (2006), which evokes older traditions of woman-hating, such as those embodied in the Genesis story of the Fall and in historical tracts portraying women as physically repellent or subhuman. Indeed, in its dramatization of the defeat of the archetypal figure that Julia Kristeva has described as the abjected, powerful, primordial mother (1982), Monster House is reminiscent of fifth-century-BCE Greek tragedy, which often re-enacts the conquest of the archaic mother to allegorize the founding of patriarchy.
Henry Giroux writes: ‘Under the rubric of fun, entertainment, and escape, massive public spheres are being produced through representations and social practices that appear too “innocent” to be worthy of political analyses’ (1995: p. 45). CG films, which emphasize spectacle and comedy, much like other contemporary children’s texts, as David Buckingham argues, are certainly ‘demanding – imploring, begging even – not to be taken seriously’ (1995: p. 58), and their innovative technology, as I have suggested, provides an additional distraction from their political work. However, CG films for children, with their sensational popularity both in cinemas and as DVDs available for repeated viewing, are increasingly implicated in our public sphere and consequently require our concern. Certainly, Monster House, despite its fantastical plot and revisionary look, manifests profoundly misogynistic sentiments. This chapter, employing feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives and looking closely at the gothic genre that informs Monster House, urges reflection on the traditions of woman-hating that continue with disturbing potency in our culture today.
While some literary critics have suggested that men occupy the central place in gothic narratives, the majority of gothic theorists envision the genre in terms of its preoccupation with the female. For example, Claire Kahane argues: ‘What I see repeatedly locked into the forbidden center of the Gothic which draws me inward is the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of female identity’ (2004: p. 279). Creed similarly argues that, in the gothic and horror genres, ‘when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’ (2003: p. 7), while Carol Clover suggests that the ‘occult genre in general is ... remarkably interested in female insides’ (1992: p. 105). The latter is suggested by both the invasion and mutilation of female bodies and the gothic iconography of enclosed spaces in which women are repeatedly located and which are often seen as contiguous with not only ‘the womb from whose darkness the ego first emerged’ but also ‘the tomb to which it knows it must return’ (Fiedler, 1982: p. 132). Indeed, if critics such as Fred Botting contend that the ‘key figure’ in gothic fiction is ‘the father’ (2002: p. 282), who assumes ‘a variety of guises: tyrants, murders, rapacious villains, ghostly revenants’ (p. 283), it is only, as Dale Townshend (2007: p. 102) concedes in the context of his similar argument, because the gothic plays out ‘the trope of maternal elision: maternity recedes into the depths of the crypt, the dungeon, the grave, or the abyss in order to clear the stage’. In other words, while male ‘monsters’ may often inhabit the foreground in classic gothic texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it is against a disturbing and enigmatic background, at times brought into dramatic focus, of abject maternity or feminine sexuality.
For example, The Monk ostensibly concentrates on the crimes of the monk Ambrosio, but the novel offers various encrypted and abject spectacles involving what Kahane calls the ‘dead-undead mother’. The most striking example is the character of Agnes who, while sequestered in a convent, becomes pregnant by her lover. Agnes’ lover, Don Alphonso, comes to be haunted by a spectre called the ‘Bleeding Nun’, a murderous and murdered woman who clearly functions as a doppelgänger for Agnes, representing her treacherous fertility. Meanwhile, Agnes is entombed alive with the rotting corpse of her infant in a sepulchral space of horrifying darkness that is inhabited by worms and toads. Dracula proves similarly interested in encrypted and terrifying visions of maternity and sexualized femininity. While the bloodsucking activities of Dracula, as Bram Dijkstra puts it, happen ‘virtually all offstage’ (1986: p. 345), what we do see is the newly married Mina drinking from a bleeding slit in the effeminate Dracula’s breast – an image that confuses menstruation and breast feeding – before denouncing herself as ‘unclean’ (Stoker, 1997: p. 259). We also witness Lucy Westenra, with her ‘bloodstained, voluptuous mouth – which it made one shudder to see’ (p. 190), when she returns to her tomb after preying on children. Both Mina and Lucy, who are affianced at the beginning of the novel, with Lucy fantasizing about marrying all three of her suitors, become aligned with the category of the abject sexual female through their vampirism. In Psycho the preserved corpse of Norman Bates’s mother compels her son to kill the women he finds sexually desirable, with the links between the horrors of female sexuality and maternity made strikingly clear.3
Monster House (2006), like its gothic predecessors, initially positions a man in the role of the ostensible villain before its prototypal ‘conflict with the all-powerful devouring mother’ (Fleenor, 1983: p. 16) is made manifest. At the beginning of the movie, Eliza, a girl, rides her tricycle along the footpath outside the haunted house and gets a wheel stuck in the lawn. The frail and elderly Nebercracker rushes out to the child and menacingly asks: ‘Do you want to be eaten alive?’ The film, which is largely focalized through another child protagonist called DJ, who lives across the road from Nebercracker, initially encourages us to believe that the old man is the sole occupant of the house and is independently responsible for terrorizing the neighbourhood children. However, when Nebercracker is taken to hospital after he suffers a heart attack chasing DJ and his friend Chowder from his lawn, and when the house begins to behave in a more outrageous fashion, the true source of the house’s terror is revealed. Nebercracker’s obese, long-deceased wife Constance lies in a concrete tomb in the cellar of the house and preys on the neighbourhood children after luring them with their own stolen toys. Nebercracker, in policing the boundaries of his property, has in fact been trying to protect the neighbourhood’s children from his abominable wife.
Constance is, then, another manifestation of Kahane’s ‘dead/undead mother’. Constance not only dislikes children but is also childless, the film thus eliding the reproductive essence of maternity (in favour of a destructive vision of maternity) in a manoeuvre common in gothic texts. However, various elements suggest the monster’s association with motherhood. To begin with, Constance is obese, her body constituting a grotesque parody of pregnancy. In fact, her size – and, by implication, her procreative power – is explicitly marked as unnatural and dangerous by virtue of Nebercracker’s flashbacks, which reveal that Constance, when he met her, was the ‘fat lady’, a freak in a circus show. On stage we see her pelted with rotten tomatoes, signifying her abject status, while off stage we witness her enclosure in a cage, suggesting the animal-like, dangerous nature of her body. Indeed, Constance is all body, which leads to my second point: Constance (notably voiced by Kathleen Turner, an actress recently in the tabloids for her obesity, alcoholism, and rambunctious behaviour) barely speaks. Rather, she groans, yells, and pants like someone barely human, recalling pathological and atavistic conceptualizations of the feminine from Aristotle’s in the fourth century BCE – ‘The female is as it were a deformed male’ (quoted in Huet, 1993: p. 3) – to the criminologist Cesare Lombroso’s in the nineteenth century – ‘woman is a male of arrested development’ (2004 [1893]: p. 37). As Kelly Hurley writes in The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration in the fin de siècle, woman is rendered ‘a Thing: a body that is at best imperfectly animated by a “human mind” and a “human spirit” ’ (1996: p. 120) in the scientific discourses of Victorian England – and, indeed, well before – in ways that clearly infected the gothic. However, Constance’s noises are also reminiscent of those of a woman in labour. In fact, the house, which Nebercracker builds for Constance and in which she becomes entombed, comes to embody her corporeality in ways that clearly suggest the primeval maw of the archaic mother or what Creed describes as the ‘mother-asabyss ... the cannibalizing black hole from which all life comes and to which all life returns’ (2003: p. 25).
We learn from Nebercracker’s flashback sequence that Constance becomes interred in the cellar of the house when, prevented by her husband from attacking trick-or-treating children with an axe, she falls into the concrete pouring into the basement of the new structure. From the time that Nebercracker is taken to hospital, leaving Constance’s ghost unsupervised, the house and grounds are increasingly anthropomorphized. While the door of the house is ostensibly the mouth, with the hallway rug serving as a long, funnelling tongue, the house and its grounds are also represented in ways that evoke images of the female genitalia and reproductive system. The lawn serves as a pubic mound, and the front door provides the entrance to the red-carpeted hallway, which represents the vaginal canal. This narrow space, at dramatic moments in the film, gives way to a terrifying tooth-filled gateway – clearly representative of the vagina dentata or toothed vagina.4 There is also a toy-filled uterine space in the cellar in which Constance herself lies buried.
The reproductive nature of the domestic space and the conjunction between mouth and vagina are explicitly acknowledged in various flippant ways in the film. DJ, Chowder, and Jenny Bennett, a precocious older schoolgirl, seeking to defeat the monstrous house in Nebercracker’s absence, are advised by a male adolescent gaming ‘legend’ to kill the monster thus: ‘You’ve got to strike at the source of life’. After a pause, this is clarified as ‘the heart’ and ends up being the furnace. When the children find themselves inside the house armed with phallic water pistols, Jenny identifies a light-fitting as a uvula, to which Chowder responds, confusing uvula with vulva: ‘Oh, so it’s a girl house’. Jenny later saves them from being devoured in the saw-tooth-filled abyss – the vagina dentata – that opens up in the hallway (or vaginal) floor by swinging on the uvula and causing a gag reflex. The children are washed out onto the lawn, and the birthing nature of this scene is underscored when Jenny says to the boys, ‘you’re acting like babies’. ‘We are babies’, replies DJ.
The confusion of mouth and vagina through the motif of the vagina dentata is further supported in the film by the fact that DJ’s father is a dentist. In a strange scene, DJ’s father carries various larger-than-life-sized models of teeth as he and his wife pack their car for a dentistry conference (thus leaving the children alone to fight the beast in a convention typical of children’s culture). As they pack the car, DJ’s father asks his wife, ‘Will you help me bring out the incisor?’, and as they drive away, he resists his wife’s appeals to tell DJ that he loves him and to blow kisses to him. The conjunction seems to suggest something about DJ’s mother’s own monstrous, devouring instincts, which are barely contained by DJ’s father.5
In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (2003), Creed lists a number of cultural examples of the motif of the vagina dentata, which appears in mythical traditions around the world as well as in contemporary Western horror. In regard to the latter, Creed refers to Dracula, a novel preoccupied with descriptions of the fanged, voluptuous mouths of its lascivious female vampires, who flirt with notions of the ‘New Woman’, accused in fin de siècle Victorian England, as Ann Ardis writes, ‘of instigating the second fall of man’ (1990: p. 1). The more contemporary Alien films (1979–1997), Creed argues, combine a similar interest in a powerful female protagonist (with her potency marked by androgyny and phallic weaponry) and the dripping, toothy mouth of a monster.
Creed also considers a number of psychoanalytic explanations for the prevalence of the vagina dentata. She argues that we can interpret it in terms of a residual fear ‘of the oral sadistic mother’ (2003: p. 109), who might wish to feed on others just as children feed on her, or ‘of the dyadic mother; the all-encompassing maternal figure of the pre-Oedipal period who threatens symbolically to engulf the infant, thus posing a threat of psychic obliteration’ (2003: p. 108). In a persuasive revision of the Oedipal complex, in which Sigmund Freud presents the mother as horrific because she is castrated and the father as powerful because he threatens castration, Creed contends that the vagina dentata can be read as an expression of man’s fears about a woman’s ‘powers of castration’ (2003: p. 87). The vagina dentata, Creed argues, is an expression of ‘male fears and phantasies about the female genitals as a ... black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces’ (2003: p. 106) in punishment for their aberrant desire.
In Misogyny: The Male Malady, David Gilmore similarly notes the ‘universal’ nature of myths involving the vagina dentata (2001: p. 148) and reflects on the psychic importance of childhood experiences of the maternal figure in such gynophobic and misogynistic traditions. Gilmore considers the Oedipal child’s ‘unacceptable impulses’ (2001: p. 142), identifying the castration threat, like Creed, with the dominant mother and arguing that maternal rejection threatens ‘the vulnerable male body and ego’ (2001: p. 154). However, Gilmore argues that the pre-Oedipal stage, when ‘Mother looms larger than all other objects in the world’ (2001: p. 157), is more important. He contends that ‘the boy develops powerfully ambivalent feelings towards this fantastically omnipotent figure’ (2001: p. 157) in response to his narcissistic wounds of helplessness.
Both Creed and Gilmore, like Freud, ultimately reveal that male experience is the source of their interest. This is understandable in the case of Creed and Gilmore, whose area of concern is a misogyny diagnosed as a ‘male malady’ (although it is certainly one that women learn within the patriarchal symbolic orders of world cultures). What Creed and Gilmore also ultimately uncover, regardless of their different emphases, is that women seem to be experienced as threatening by men because women are invested with an archaic power that exceeds men’s. This power, as Kristeva argues, is clearly tied up with the maternal function (1982: p. 77), which is, as Creed suggests, a potent threat to men and to patriarchy because of its denial of patrilineage and its emphasis on the originary bonds between mothers and children (2004: p. 270). As Donna Heiland argues, quoting Robin Lydenberg’s counter-Freudian thesis that the Oedipal dilemma serves as an effective distraction from the mother as the ‘envied source of plenitude and procreation’ (1997 quoted in 2004: p. 81), ‘patriarchy inevitably celebrates a male creative power that demands the suppression – and sometimes the outright sacrifice – of women’ (pp. 10–11) and their generative potential.
However, the threat encapsulated by women does seem, as Creed’s and Gilmore’s readings suggest, profoundly related to desire (which is, in any case, an intimate companion of envy) for the maternal figure. The condition of desire, as Gilmore unselfconsciously reveals in his characterization of the narcissistic wounds suffered by male children, is essentially one of disempowerment.
The intimate interplay of desirability and danger in regard to the maternal and the feminine is represented by the ambiguous motif of the vagina dentata, which typically, as Creed puts it, ‘points to the duplicitous nature of woman, who promises paradise in order to ensnare her victims’ (2003: p. 106). While the gothic certainly cannot claim to have invented this conceptualization of the feminine – in the second century Tertullian represented woman as a ‘devil’s gateway’ strategically disguised by tempting ornament (quoted in Bloch, 1991: p. 40) – the representation of the vagina dentata in gothic texts is characteristically associated not only with horror but also longing. In Dracula, for instance, the men find the vampiric women both irresistible and atrocious. In The Monk, Don Alphonso is mesmerized as much as terrified by the ‘fallen’, murderous Bleeding Nun: ‘Her eyes ... seemed endowed with the property of the rattle-snake’s, for I strove in vain to look off her’ (1973: p. 160).
In another rendering of the vagina dentata and its double dynamic of desire and fear, gothic texts, like early Christian documents with their interest in ‘copresent images of the “Devil’s gateway” and the “Bride of Christ” ’ (Bloch, 1991: p. 164), also often pair innocently attractive women with monstrous doppelgängers. There is Agnes and the Bleeding Nun in The monk, and there is the twinning of Ripley and the alien, most apparent in Aliens, in which Ripley, her biological child dead and with a pseudo-adoptive substitute, defeats a breeding female monster. Even Mina in Stoker’s novel, who is praised by Van Helsing as ‘one of God’s women’ (Stoker, 1997: p. 169), proves susceptible to the beast, requiring Van Helsing to keep an eye on the development of her incisors (p. 291). In these doublings, as David Punter and Glennis Byron write, the safely desirable, ‘good’ woman constantly threatens to turn into the lethal fiend – with Agnes on the verge of joining the Bleeding Nun in death, Ripley’s body vulnerable to alien invasion, and Mina’s will and mind infected by Dracula – revealing all women as potentially treacherous (2004: p. 40).
In Monster House (2006), the vagina dentata is similarly associated with both desire and danger, and all of the female characters in the film are implicated in the duplicity encapsulated by that motif. In one scene, DJ and Chowder are shown keeping an overnight vigil on the untrustworthy house from DJ’s bedroom. Various elements are suggestive of the boys’ desire, such as the erectile telescope through which they watch the house and, significantly, their love interest, Jenny, when she appears on DJ’s street the following morning selling candy for a school fund-raiser. During their overnight vigil, the boys urinate into empty soft-drink bottles, an activity resonant of ejaculation. Chowder also confides to Jenny, after they rescue her from the clutches of the house and return to their post at the telescope: ‘Fascinating, isn’t it? It just sits there waiting, mocking us with its ... houseness.’ Indeed, DJ and Chowder come across as nothing less than Oedipal pubescent voyeurs, something made explicit when DJ’s father, before leaving for the dentistry conference, reminisces about using a telescope when he was younger to watch the ‘lovely Jensen twins’.
The joke, with its reference to twins, also alludes to the film’s strategy of doubling and its emphasis on double-dealing when it comes to the female characters in general. Jenny, whom the boys first see against the backdrop of the monstrous house, is explicitly associated with that graphic representation of the vagina dentata as well as with deceitfulness. When the viewer first meets her at DJ’s door, she is wearing a Halloween mask, having adopted the guise of a trick-or-treater as a sales tactic in order to persuade DJ’s babysitter to buy candy from her. She tells DJ’s babysitter: ‘You’ve just witnessed a simulation of what you’ll see this evening’. The warning is ambiguous, referring to both the imminent Halloween tradition of mask-wearing and trick-or-treating and the house’s impending revelation of its full, climactic monstrousness. In fact, ‘trick-or-treat’ epitomizes the ambivalence of the vagina dentata and its representation of pleasure and danger. Jenny’s façade of innocence in her role as a fund-raising candy seller is further belied as she makes a deal with the babysitter to share the profits of the candy sale. The babysitter, as this transaction suggests, is similarly dishonest. We see striking evidence of this when, in her guise as the ingenuous Elizabeth, she arrives at DJ’s house listening to Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Little more love’. As soon as DJ’s parents leave, Elizabeth is transformed into the scheming ‘Z’, throwing off her wig and revealing a t-shirt decorated with a skull and bones, the logo of her boyfriend’s heavy-metal group, whose music quickly replaces Newton-John’s. Indeed, even the innocence of the girl on the tricycle, Eliza (whose name is a shorter version of Elizabeth), is compromised. The opening scene of the movie emphasizes the autumnal season (the Fall) by its close-up of a drifting leaf and showing the girl carelessly naming objects in the world – ‘hello fence, hello bees, hello sky, la la la la’ – before she gets stuck in the lawn of the monstrous house policed by Nebercracker. This evocation of the Genesis myth of the Fall provides an immediate reminder of the temptation and treachery associated with women since at least early Christianity.
Monster House (2006), in its use of the vagina dentata motif, asserts the importance of vigilance when it comes to women as the source of both desire and profound danger. The film also starkly and disturbingly demonstrates, like other gothic literature, Kristeva’s process of abjection involved in overcoming what Jerrold Hogle refers to as ‘the pull of the masculine back toward an overpowering femininity’ (2002: p. 11).
Following Kristeva, Creed argues that ‘Woman’s abjectification is crucial to the functioning of the patriarchal order’ (2003: p. 166), enabling resistance to the dangerous lure of the mother and participation in the symbolic order of the father, which is marked by its ascendency and mastery over the desirable and annihilating feminine. Creed also contends, like Kristeva, that the gothic or horror genre itself provides one of the rituals through which patriarchy ‘stages and re-stages a constant repudiation of the maternal figure ... in order to secure and protect the social order’ (2004: p. 270). That is, the gothic genre, through its representation of feminine abjection, serves to cure men of the disempowering experience of desire in relation to the maternal figure.
Indeed, in the gothic genre, the process of feminine abjection, achieved through ancient motifs such as the vagina dentata, is arguably as stark as the millennia-old ‘menstrual cure’, documented from pre-Christian to medieval times, which involved displaying a woman’s stained menstrual cloths to her lover in order to turn his unmanning desire into an empowering revulsion (Dawson, 2005). In Dracula, for instance, all three of the men who love Lucy (her fiancé Arthur Holmwood, Dr Seward, and Quincy Morris) learn to see Lucy, under Van Helsing’s tuition, as a ‘foul Thing’ (Stoker, 1997: p. 190). When Arthur stakes the vampiric Lucy in her coffin, when she returns from feeding upon children, we read in Seward’s diary:
The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut; and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. (p. 192)
As this example suggests, the abjection of the maternal figure in gothic texts is often complemented by the violent reassertion of patriarchal power. The scene, as Dijkstra argues, resembles nothing less than a ‘therapeutic rape’ (1996: p. 120) with the men ‘rightfully reasserting their control over the offending body of the sexual female’ (p. 122).
Monster House reveals a similar pattern involving the abjection and overthrow of the monstrous woman. The bottled urine of the boys, referred to earlier, is a striking demonstration of the abjection that should appropriately accompany desire. In fact, the uxorious and unmanned Nebercracker, who is carried over the threshold by Constance after they marry, is himself depicted as an abject figure (something suggested by his feminized appearance in an open-backed hospital gown for the latter half of the film) before he resolves ‘to make things right’ by abjecting his wife. To overcome his enthrallment to Constance and restore patriarchy, Nebercracker provides the boys with the dynamite they use to destroy the house in a scene that recalls the ‘therapeutic rape’ of Lucy in Stoker’s novel. DJ and Chowder battle the monstrous house, which has broken free of its foundations to become mobile, with diggers and cranes in an abyss-like construction site, where a lake has been drained. It is a vista that pits the modern instruments of men against the primordial power of the vagina dentata, with the house’s maternal nature invoked by Chowder fearfully calling out ‘mummy’ as the house attacks. During the battle, he yells, ‘You ain’t nothing. You’re a shack. You’re an outhouse’, recalling age-old expressions of disgust for the feminine genitalia, such as Jean Palfyn’s 1708 description of a woman’s organs as ‘the most contemptible place of the body ... the main sewer for all elements’ (quoted in Huet, 1993: p. 59). Constance is defeated when DJ, swinging on a crane, throws the dynamite into the house’s chimney to strike at ‘the source of life’.
The film, though, does not end there, and the closing scenes offer a resounding vision of the defeat and abjection of the feminine. In the last frames, we see a dog urinating at the former location of the monstrous house, now also a pit, extinguishing a small flame that persists inside a pumpkin lantern. This occurs just after Bones, Z’s ex-boyfriend, who had been lured into and swallowed by the house, crawls out of the hole. Z, making out on the bonnet of a car with her new boyfriend, says to Bones: ‘Skull’s not like you. He gives me the respect I deserve and makes time for me’. Bones responds with ‘Whatever’ and walks away.
Kristeva identifies a cultural pattern, which occurs beyond the gothic and horror genres, in which ‘it is always to be noticed that the attempt to establish a male, phallic power is rigorously threatened by the no less virulent power of the other sex, which ... becomes synonymous with a radical evil that is to be suppressed’ (1982: p. 70). This pattern is identifiable not only in Monster House but also in texts as old as Aeschylus’s fifth-century BCE Greek play, The Oresteia, which has been read by Johann Bachofen in Das Mutterrecht (1861) as evidence of the historical overthrow of matriarchy by patriarchy, seen as necessary for progress. In the third play of the tragedy, The Eumenides, the reproductive power of women is not only depicted in abject ways but also explicitly denied when an Athenian court rules, on a god’s testimony, that women are vessels rather than active participants in the reproductive process. The verdict justifies Orestes’s murder of his mother, Clytemnestra.
As Lynne Zeavin writes, in such misogynistic texts, ‘frightening experiences of maternal power are replaced by fantasies of masculine dominance and superiority.’ She continues: ‘No longer feared, femininity is reviled. The sexuality that once was a site of the most profound desire, envy, and longing, is now a socially structured site of possession’ (2003: p. 237). At the close of The Eumenides, not only is patrilineage asserted over maternity but also the Furies, who had sought vengeance on Orestes for his matricide, are transformed into the Eumenides (or The Kindly Ones) of the play’s title and installed outside the city’s limits. By the end of Dracula, Mina, who had once entertained the feminist notions of the ‘New Woman’ and who had once threatened the male characters with her possible metamorphosis, is the tamed receptacle for a child that is claimed by all of the male characters. Similarly, in Monster House, after Constance is destroyed, the two male police officers who were overpowered and engulfed in an earlier scene crawl out of the hole left by her destruction in a symbolic restoration of patriarchy. DJ, Chowder, and Nebercracker take over the pit and, working happily together, return the stolen toys of the neighbourhood children.
Gothic texts, as noted at the beginning of this discussion, in their encryption and abjection of the maternal, ultimately tend to focus on men. Indeed, Heiland argues that ‘gothic novels are all about patriarchies, about how they function, what threatens them, what keeps them going’ (2004: pp. 10–11). What seems to keep patriarchies going, as Kristeva suggests, is the production of subjects within a patriarchal symbolic system which works to abject and destroy the matrilineal power that threatens it (1982: p. 70). The gothic genre, as Kristeva argues, plays a ritualistic role in supporting patriarchy. Judith Halberstam, in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, similarly contends that gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, which produces, through the vehicle of the monster, the ‘perfect figure for negative identity’ (1995: p. 22). While Halberstam argues that ‘the monster works as a kind of trash heap for the discarded scraps of abject humanity’ (p. 143) and can ‘represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in one body’ (pp. 21–2), she also concedes that ‘part of the power of horror within a contemporary context lies in the reception of horror as always very literally about the destruction of a woman’ (p. 127).
However, if misogyny is, as Gilmore writes, ‘a sexual prejudice that is symbolically exchanged (shared) among men, attaining praxis’ (2001: p. 9), it is not only the gothic that plays a role in promoting this ‘public value system’ (p. 14). Indeed, Bloch identifies misogyny as a ‘cultural constant’ (1991: p. 7), and the various references to older gynophobic traditions within both the gothic and Monster House are a testament to the enduring presence of misogyny in Western culture.
The source of misogyny is certainly of interest. While Gilmore and Creed, as we have seen, posit psychoanalytic explanations that focus on the powerful maternal figure of early dyadic life, Bloch contends that such accounts serve only to naturalize misogyny (1991: p. 79). Intervening in the debate, Harris argues:
I see no value in sanitizing or diminishing the power of early dyadic life and consequently the power of the maternal object as an object of desire and of fear. I think it is one of the poignancies of contemporary culture that maternal power is so unusable, so unmetabolizable. The human processes of attachment and individuation that I am describing leave inevitable sequelae of anxiety and excitement. (2003: p. 264)
However, the problem of misogyny, she writes, is ultimately ‘not the primary process effects that surround our experience of early mothering but the fragility and absence of secondary process that could be deployed to modulate the archaic form both inside us and in the culture’ (pp. 259–260). In other words, traditions of woman-hating are formed by ‘patriarchal structures that draw out and capitalize on these deeply emotional feelings that women in various incarnations evoke’ (p. 264), demonizing rather than celebrating maternal potency.
Monster House, which is aimed at a child audience and which pits children against the archaic mother, is certainly a film that resonates in the context of Harris’s argument. Largely through its utilization of the age-old motif of the vagina dentata, powerfully conflated with the domestic space traditionally attributed to the feminine, the film evokes the original gravitas of the maternal figure for the child and promotes a violent response of abjection and rejection. While the media spectacle offered by CG children’s films such as Monster House hardly encourages serious analysis, as Susan Miller and Greg Rode argue, children’s culture forms a significant ‘site of persuasion’ (1995: p. 88), constituting an ‘entirely permeating extracurricular identity-schooling’ (p. 102). In addition, studies such as Susan Auty and Charlie Lewis’s have shown that children are more vulnerable to media messages than adults (2004: p. 118). As Dijkstra puts it, ‘an image can kill. It can eat into reality and force our world to take on the shapes and colors of our fears’ (1996: p. 311), something attested to, I would suggest, by the enduring power of misogynistic conceptions of women. All of this makes children’s culture, perhaps even more so than adult culture, a necessary site for interrogation as well as for innovation, less in terms of animation technology than content.
James, K. 2009. ‘Verisimilitude: representing death “in the real” ’. In Death, gender and sexuality in contemporary adolescent literature. Routledge, New York.
Mallan, K. 2000. ‘Witches, bitches and femmes fatales: viewing the female grotesque in children’s film’. Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 26–35.
1In fact, Jack Zipes argues that in traditional Disney animation attention was similarly drawn to ‘innovative camera work, improved colour, greater synchronisation, livelier music and lyrics, and unique drawings of exotic characters’ (1995: p. 111), while ideology and plot remained relatively unchanged over decades.
2According to the Executive Producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, the message of the film, which stars a green ogre as its hero, a princess/ogress as his love interest, and a donkey as his trusty mate, is that ‘[w]hether you’re a princess, a donkey, or even a big, green, stinky ogre, you can find love and happiness’ (cited in Hopkins, 2004: p. 33). However, Shrek, with its heroic male and Jekyll-and-Hyde female, is in fact another version of humanism-as-masculinism and the male as normative (even as it presents men as victims and outcasts). While masculinity has been exposed as ‘the dominant ideology of patriarchy’ (Hanke, 1992: p. 190), Shrek, with its carnivalesque emphasis on scatological humour and violent adventure, suggests that it is, rather, about being natural and having innocent fun.
3A distinction is sometimes made between the male gothic and the female gothic on various and legitimate grounds. Kari Winter, for example, argues that male-authored gothic texts locate ‘evil in the “other” – woman, Catholics, Jews, and ultimately the devil’, while female-authored gothic novels reveal ‘the terror of the familiar: the routine brutality and injustice of the patriarchal family, convention, religion, and classist social structures’ (1992: p. 91). However, Juliann Fleenor persuasively argues that the ‘dread of female physiology and female sexuality is a constant’ in both male-authored and female-authored gothic texts, where ‘this fear of sexuality ... is linked to attempts to destroy the mother’ (1983: p. 14). As an example, Fleenor refers to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the modern prometheus (1818), in which birth and death are grotesquely mixed in a womb-tomb-like laboratory but in which the disturbing phenomenon of maternity is occluded by the focus on paternity. Fleenor also cites Ellen Moers’s well-known reading of the novel as an expression of a female writer’s horror of motherhood (1977). Karen Stein agrees with Fleenor’s reading. However, unlike Fleenor and Moers, who consider female gothic gynophobia as an expression of a ‘natural’ horror of an uncontrollable generative force and of female bodily transmogrification, Stein also contextualizes female gothic misogyny in terms of a cultural discourse about women that has been historically determined by men: ‘it is precisely this male disgust with woman’s sexuality, the male hatred and fear of women’s awful procreative power and her “otherness”, which is at the root of the Female Gothic’ as much as the male gothic (1983: p. 124). I will return to the patriarchal context for gothic gynophobia and misogyny, upon which Monster house, as I have suggested, provokes reflection.
4Indeed, this is so clear that it was noted in a popular review (Brown, 2006), not normally a forum for psychoanalytic or feminist readings.
5Significantly, Chowder’s father is a pharmacist. While we never meet Chowder’s mother – or father – the ways in which the patriarchs of the film are associated with medical practice would seem to underscore the main spectacle of feminine pathology and the necessity of male intervention.