Postmodern Gothic In High and Low Places
Sep. 8th, 2012 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pheloniusfriarAs I said earlier, I got my final mark for the feminism seminar course I took over the summer ("The Monstrous Feminist: Gender and the Horrific in Popular Culture"): an A (yay!). Since the mark is posted I can post my essay now. We could choose any work in the horror genre (book, film, poem, etc.) and had to examine it "using the critical analysis tools presented in the class". I was overwhelmed over August with family issues and wasn't able to start on it until the last minute, and then I couldn't make up my mind whether to do it on Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant and horrifying tale "Bianca's Hands", or on the braindamaged but slightly charming gonzo book "The Haunted Vagina" by Carlton Mellick III (there are multiple videos of people reading the book on YouTube if you care to listen to it). I sent my choices in to the prof asking for guidance, and she came back and suggested that I do both. I struggled with how to pull it off given how different the stories are. Eventually, I read them both again a couple of times and saw that there were, indeed, sufficient similarity and difference, wrote the first couple of paragraphs, and the rest came together from there.
Postmodern Gothic In High and Low Places
The genre of horror can be studied in many ways. No matter the route such explorations take, most analyses of horror ultimately use it as a tool to help place the culture that generated the work into a sociological and psychological historic context – as a means of looking from the documented visible outside to the hidden or repressed internal subtexts of the day. Contemporary horror stories are less reliant on the obvious monsters that dominated into the 1960s and take a decidedly postmodern approach in pulling the dark inner dialogue of our society’s fears before the gaze of popular culture. While much of the structure and technique developed through over more than a century of Gothic horror remains intact as a backdrop for postmodern examinations of society, the subject matter and the focus has changed radically. Judith Halberstam states “Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century specifically used the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality” whereas “monstrosity within contemporary horror seems to have stabilized into an amalgam of sex and gender” (6) that may not even be externally visible as monstrous.
Two postmodern horror stories will be compared and contrasted for their representation of sex and gender within a gothic framework. The first was well ahead of its time, the 1947 short story “Bianca’s Hands” by one of the great masters of twentieth century speculative fiction, Theodore Sturgeon. The second is the novella “The Haunted Vagina” by bizarro fiction writer Carlton Mellick III, originally published in 2006. Both are also love stories in their own way and share numerous gothic story elements, but while the former was at the forefront of the postmodernist movement, it is considerably more overt at portraying female characters as outwardly monstrous than the latter. Despite its fetishistic story elements and often juvenile male writing style, “The Haunted Vagina” takes a much more nuanced approach to its portrayal of its female characters due to its situation solidly within our current postmodern feminism-influenced society.
The Victorian Gothic horror stories of the eighteen hundreds formed the foundation of the horror genre that carried through to the films and literature of the early nineteen hundreds. This period of development focused on the monster invading and disrupting society through its very existence, and spoke to the fears of a white imperialist society about the invasion of other races, of class warfare, of the rise of early feminist thinking, of uncontrolled technology and capitalism, and the fall of empire to moral corruption. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement gained momentum, and the fall of the British Empire after World War II was giving way to the rise of Pax Americana and its Cold War with the Soviet Union. The horror stories of the day represented a direct reaction to this new and changing environment, especially with regards to burgeoning technological advances and globalization. Initially, like earlier horror, these works were simply reactionary tales that used a new cast of fears to tell familiar monster stories. Through the 1950s and 60s though, postmodernism gained a significant presence in the literature of the west, and has come to dominate much of the subtext of popular culture – especially those forms of it, such as horror, that examine the myth of a universalized society by bringing attention to its outer edges and extreme manifestations.
The common heritage and effectiveness of the gothic roots of horror can be seen through the similarities in the overall composition of many manifestations of the modern genre, and its influence can still be felt strongly even in the postmodern horror story. In each “Bianca’s Hands” and “The Haunted Vagina”, despite their great distance from each other temporally, stylistically, and thematically, there are a significant number of parallels. In both, there are three primary characters: a naïve man, a flawed or problematic woman, and a female-identified monster. Both men are ultimately captured in love by the monsters and are thereby destroyed. The woman in each is effectively the mother of the monsters and plays a role in setting the tone of the story and mediating the relationship with the monster in the middle. The core of both stories take place in isolated locations surrounded by, but separated from, recognizable society to provide dramatic contrast. Both of them also progress along vaguely similar lines in that the man has to travel to the lonely world of the monster to finally be consumed by them.
There are certainly differences between the two stories, as there should be between two almost randomly chosen pieces. First and foremost, the actual nature of the monster has profound implications to the interpretations of each of the stories. In Sturgeon, as the title implies, the focus is not a person per se, but rather their hands. In the character of Bianca we have both a fusion and a fission in one body of two diverse externally visible manifestations of womanhood, thus creating a complex embodiment of monstrous transgression. The most obvious is her body, “Bianca was squat and small, with dank hair and rotten teeth. Her mouth was crooked and it drooled. Either she was blind or she just didn’t care about bumping into things. It didn’t really matter because Bianca was an imbecile.” (Sturgeon 30) Here, we see one side of the classic sexual dichotomy of the gothic female: the obviously monstrous figure, an uncomplicated embodiment of “the suggestion – embedded in works by Swift, Pope, Gay, and others – that all women were inexorably and inescapably monstrous” (Gilbert and Gubar 31). In Bianca’s case, no progression of failure was required, she begins as the fallen woman, as the madwoman and hag, as a vessel of corruption of form. She is also the ultimate in the feminine burden: asexual, utterly dependent, contributing nothing in return physically or mentally, and a visible embarrassment to her broken single mother whom society has forced to care for her.
Here, the mother plays the role of the intellect and voice of the disfigured and useless body of Bianca. The mother is still merely an extension of Bianca, acting as the mediator between her and a society that wishes to punish her crime of producing non-compliance, and ultimately between Bianca and the male protagonist Ran. She and Bianca are effectively a single entity, forming a whole self-actuating monster as Ran’s boss elucidates when he states “The woman is Bianca’s mother, and the girl is Bianca. I don’t know their other name” (Sturgeon 30). We do learn however that the mother did not begin in the fallen state we find her in, and once had a life of her own before Bianca was inflicted on her. When Ran comes to their door unbidden later in the day he first met them, she grudgingly allows him in and proceeds to transgress by telling him her story. She tells of how she was once young and desirable, but when Bianca was born, her partner abandoned her, “I’d go away myself, I would, but people know me [...] They’d bring me back to her, they would, to care for her. It doesn’t matter much now, though, because people don’t want me any more than they want her” (Sturgeon 31-32). Ran asks if he can rent space at their house, which we know is to be near Bianca’s hands. When the mother asks why and rises to her feet, Ran crosses the room and pushes her back into her chair and informs her she is not to ask questions about his motives. She is denied agency even in this intrusion into her household, and agrees to everything he asks in fear that he might withdraw the offer of an income. She must remain invisible, as the silent caregiver of her deformed child, without adding to her own story as an individual, in return for a modicum of participation in capitalist society.
The other side of the sexual dichotomy within the body of Bianca is her hands, “they were lovely hands, graceful hands, hands as soft and smooth and white as snowflakes [...] they lay there half closed and crouching, each pulsing with a movement like the panting of a field creature” (Sturgeon 30). In her hands we have the classic Victorian angel figure, but strikingly enveloped by the grotesque platform of Bianca’s body on which they are formed. The hands become the object of desire and the target of worship for Ran who has no defences against their wily feminine enchantments. Where Bianca and her mother form a single voice/body fusion, the hands are the sexual organs of the monster and are a fission from the main bulk of the visible creature. They are at once virginal and untouched by the monster that carries them, and inherently corrupt by their femininity, the “stubborn autonomy and unknowable subjectivity [...] that underlies” even the most perfect of angels (Gilbert and Gubar 27).
Where modernist monsters would have carried implied genitalia, Sturgeon places her organs literally out on the table for all to see. Only Ran seems to be simple enough to look past the outer appearance of the failed woman that is the Bianca/mother, but he sees her as nothing but her sexual organs – her hands – the anthropomorphisation of the sex offered as promise to the man than can put the angel in her proper place. “Beautiful parasites they were [...] They cared for each other. They would not touch Bianca herself, but each hand groomed the other. It was the only labor [sic] to which they would bend themselves” (Sturgeon 33). Even though the hands have little choice but be on display much of the time, they behave as the proper Victorian gothic woman insofar as possible, teasing rather than flaunting, “when Bianca walked, her hands did not swing free, but twisted in the fabric of her dress” (Sturgeon 33). They, like Patmore’s Honoria, avoid the masculine world of action and simply tend themselves to please the male gaze, so as to ensure the greatness of the man that ultimately triumphs over them (Gilbert and Gubar 22). Ran has to pursue them and win them over to him in order to fulfil his horrific destiny.
Where the monster in “Bianca’s Hands” is externally manifest as a fusion/fission hybrid, the construction of monster in “The Haunted Vagina” is much more sympathetic and ambivalent. It is also a longer work and has the luxury of being able to be more nuanced. In both cases however, monstrosity is stated up front. In the former, monstrosity is presented narratively in the second line through the description of of Bianca; in the latter, the first line of the book is “I’ve been scared to have sex with Stacy ever since I discovered her vagina was haunted” (Mellick 7). This single line sets up a complex relationship with Stacy. On one hand, we are taken outside the subject of Stacy’s sole identification as the body around a vagina with the humorous absurdity of the statement. On the other hand, we are taken inside the subject with the psychologically loaded revelation that her vagina is so obviously grotesque as to elicit fear of it in her sexual partner. It also sets up an ambivalence about Stacy herself as the rejection is only of her sex, not of her entire being, thus leaving her as a flawed woman burdened with explicitly monstrous genitalia. Where Bianca’s exquisite hands are situated on a pair of fused horrible bodies, Stacy’s vagina is more classically the terrifying element of her femininity: “the monster may not only be concealed behind the angel, she may actually turn out to reside within (or in the lower half of) the angel.” (Gilbert and Gubar 29)
The male protagonist Steve’s discovery of the nature of her vagina comprises a series of revelations told in flashback form in the first chapter of the story. “It was all a joke. But then I heard it... A voice, inside of her. I couldn’t understand the words. A woman crying, babbling in a deranged language. Then she screamed into my ear and I jumped out from between Stacy’s legs” (Mellick 8). Given the psychoanalytic trope of the vagina as monster, and that “every angelic Snow White must be hunted, if not haunted, by a wickedly assertive Stepmother” (Gilbert and Gubar 28), Stacy’s ambivalence towards the internal dialogue escaping through her genitalia is perfectly reasonable in a modern feminist-influenced world – if her vagina is going to be implicitly monstrous, what is the big deal if it is explicitly so? In fact, in response to his statement that perhaps she should have it exorcized by a priest, she responds, “Actually, I kinda like it. [...] Who else has a haunted vagina? [...] My other boyfriends thought it was kind of sexy” (Mellick 8-9). He however is repulsed by her transgressive organ that apparently has a voice and agency of its own, and isn’t just for his pleasure anymore. After the revelation, she then engages in not entirely consensual sex with him where she was “getting off on the terrified look on my face. But for me, it was the most awkward sex I’d ever had. I swear I could feel strange things inside of her that night” (Mellick 9).
But, as the back cover of the book opines, “It’s difficult to love a woman whose vagina is a gateway to the world of the dead”. Steve states “I haven’t had sex with Stacy for over a month now, but I’m still crazy for her,” (Mellick 15) but goes on to say that “after a while, not having sex has taken its toll on our relationship” (Mellick 17). She eventually pressures him to engage in oral sex with her, “I’ll keep my legs closed,” she says. “You won’t even hear it” (Mellick 17). In the middle of their frantic “69” position sex, Stacy’s belly swells to impossible proportions and a skeletal hand emerges from her, “Stacy just watches her body in amazement as the hand clutches onto her leg and pulls. Another hand emerges and grabs her other thigh, trying to pull itself out [...] She looks at me with dilated pupils, frightened of her own vagina” (Mellick 20). In this way, she finally joins the male in her life in recognizing her haunted vagina as a source of independent self-actuating monstrosity and a source of justifiable fear instead of simply a quirky and entertaining extension of herself. She is finally coming of age and realizing as well that her sex is and will always be a monstrous thing ultimately beyond her control, with the coiled energetic potential to deliver life into the world when it so chooses. She is the carrier of a Lilith, and her vagina is birthing a fully functional monster, seizing the world of activity on its own volition. When it is halfway out of her, flesh starts to form on its bones and, at her direction, Steve kills with a night stand. The skeleton is finally pulled all the way out and it melts away on the floor as Stacy runs and cowers in another room from the fully grown but stillborn terror she has just had ripped from her. In her panic, she has fulfilled the curse of Lilith (Gilbert and Gubar 35) and has killed her offspring before it could escape. The vagina that roared must be denied the fruits of its agency, and punished for its transgressive act of attempting to define its own story in the world.
But this is a postmodernist tale, and instead of accepting that Stacy’s vagina is a particularly fearsome example of women’s reproductive biology and moving on from there, Stacy decides that the source of her feminine mystery must be explored – literally. In a drunken state later in the night after the skeleton incident, “I can’t see for myself,” she says. “I want you to tell me what it looks like in there. If you can see ghosts” (Mellick 29). She is incredibly stretchy and he tries to peer inside of her, “I slide my hands in, both of them, and spread the flesh apart as wide as I can. It stretches to about basketball width. I look within. There’s a pin of light deep inside of her” (Mellick 29). After more alcohol, Stacy declares “I want you to go in there [...] I can’t just forget about this and get on with the rest of my life [...] that skeleton thing was almost bigger than you [...] if it could fit through then you can fit” (Mellick 30). He is terrified of suffocating inside her vagina if he were to agree (his life consumed by her sex), but he is drunk enough and she is insistent enough. She shaves off his hair and lubricates herself as effectively as she can, insists he is not going to hurt her, and he tries as best he can to enter her, with limited success. She gets angry and eventually squats over him and drops all her weight onto him over and over again while she masturbates, and “the next thing I know, her lips close up around my wiggling toes” (Mellick 34). In a way, it is turning the tables on the man for his earlier rejection of her vagina for it daring to be more than an orifice for his use. The man then becomes nothing but a penis to fill her up and fulfil her desires, “It dawns on me. I’m all the way inside of her. I’m like a human penis” (Mellick 35).
But he is fully enveloped by her sex, and he doesn’t suffocate inside her. He has been consumed by her and instead of panicking, he develops an erection, his unconscious desires to be utterly subsumed by a woman and to crawl back into the womb have been fulfilled and he is empowered by his success. He is able to make his way into her, for what seems to him like thirty feet of fleshy tunnel, and peers out of a cliff onto a world with “green grass, a forest, and an old rotten wooden fence” (Mellick 36). But Stacy has a powerful orgasm and Steve is literally ejaculated into the world at the end of Stacy’s vagina. Her excitement of having consumed her man utterly was too much for her to resist and she brought herself to sexual release, taking the full power of his masculinity and spraying him deep into herself. Steve’s fall from the cliff knocks him unconscious and when he awakes, considerably worse for the wear, he finds he cannot climb back up the cliff. He eventually discovers an old log cabin at the edge of the woods. There, he arms himself with an axe and clothes himself against the chill of the wind. While in the cabin, he sees a figure walk past a window, “It’s not exactly human. Its skin is white and red. A female, walking nude [...] She leaves behind a floral scent that tickles my nostrils” (Mellick 40).
And that is how Steve meets the monster proper of the story, who we later learn is named Fig. Stacy admitted earlier “When she was six years old [...] she had an imaginary friend who used to come out of her vagina to play with her. Another little girl, about her age, with paper white skin and funny slimy horns on her head” (Mellick 24). He has seen this odd playmate, now grown up like Stacy herself. Steve eventually makes he way up the cliff and back out of Stacy’s vagina. He has discovered that while women control the power to create life, Stacy is imbued with a literal world within her. Not content to hold that power within herself, Stacy decides that Steve will mount a proper expedition for an afternoon and enter her again pulling with him a bag of proper clothing, food, a camera, a walkie talkie, and a gun; to be followed in the future by teams of explorers. She is a product of her imperialist society, and she wants to wield the power that having her vagina properly colonized will give her. Stacy, like Bianca’s mother, is driven by the control dynamics of capitalist power. Where Bianca’s mother is merely the mother of Bianca, Stacy is the mother to this world inside her – a parasite drawing its life from her body as she in turn draws on resources from the world around her.
The parallels are there between the stories with the active/passive duality of the Stacy/world-inside forming the self-actuating body of the monster, and Fig playing the role of the Victorian angel, with her paper white skin, and living as the fissile extension of one of the facets of the fused monster body, just like Bianca’s hands. As Halberstam states, “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known” (Halberstam 2). Certainly the purpose of such elaborately constructed monsters in these stories is to cover large swaths of the terrain of deviance in order that a clear beacon can be seen pointing back to the centre. But a clear map to conformity isn’t enough, there has to be a motivation to want to move away from the vitality and excitement of the edges of society to the more predictable and ponderous middle – consequences of non-conformity need to be made clear. Here, gothic forms again provide a powerful tool:
It is a testament to the staying power of the gothic story form that its influence can still be found strongly in the postmodern horror story with its characteristic empowering and centering of othered characters and situations as a means of challenging the notion of authoritative sources of epistemology. Postmodern gothic at once illuminates normal and challenges the validity of its identification as such, leaving the reader with no clear answers or moral absolutes. In this sense, these contemporary stories are quite different in their intent than were the stories that laid the foundations of the gothic style: we are supposed to walk away from the stories with questions rather than answers, with conflicting emotions rather than comfort. While “Bianca’s Hands” predates the rise of postmodernism as a key feature of popular culture, it is the complexity of its construction of monster and the ambivalent treatment of its characters that places it solidly within that category. Suzanne Becker states that one of the hallmarks of postmodern feminine horror fiction is “the characterisation of the mother-daughter relationship devoid of the myths of mother-love. Abjection is foregrounded just as much as the mirror plot of female desire [...] by the ironic double voice” (Becker 77). Both stories certainly offer no sentimentality towards the mother-daughter relationship – Bianca’s mother wishes to be rid of her daughter, and Stacy wishes to colonize her inner world – and the fissioned forms of the monsters (Bianca’s hands and Fig) certainly provide ironic reflections of the monster-bodies off which they are feeding.
But even in postmodern gothic, the consequences of non-compliance have to be made clear, and they have to be significant. Whether the gain was worth the cost is up to the reader to decide. In both stories, the locations of the climax of both stories is isolated and free from interpretive guidance of the society that surrounds them. In “Bianca’s hands”, Ran asks his boss where Bianca and her mother live, and he is told “On the other side. A house on no road, away from people.” (Sturgeon 31) and when Ran goes to look for it “He found the house easily, for it was indeed away from the road, and stood rudely by itself. The townspeople had cauterized the house by wrapping it in empty fields” (Sturgeon 31). In “The Haunted Vagina”, it takes place within the self-contained world on the other side of Stacy’s vagina. In both instances, the male characters lose their lives in these locales to the supposed angels that live there: literally for Ran, and metaphorically for Steve.
Ran courts Bianca’s hands, spending time every day alone with them and providing them with gifts so they can groom and primp each other, ultimately winning their approval and affection. He asks the mother for Bianca’s hand in marriage (pun intended) and she acquiesces despite her shock, “you are a good boy [...] but you’re something of a fool. Bianca’s a monster. I say it though I am what I am to her. Do what you like, and never a word I will say. You should have known. I’m sorry you asked me, for you have given me the memory of speaking so to you” (Sturgeon 35). He worked even harder at his job to furnish and decorate a room in the house fit for him and Bianca’s hands to live in. Finally, he found a minister that would marry them early one morning. When they returned home after the marriage “he washed Bianca and used rich lotions. He washed and combed her hair, and brushed it many times until it shone, to make her more fit to be with the hands he had married [...] they were pleased. Once one of them ran up his coat and touched his cheek and made him exultant” (Sturgeon 26). He completed his day at work, spent several hours in a spiritual fog by himself in the woods until darkness had fallen (subconsciously hiding from any possible eyes), then went to join his brides in their marriage bed.
The hands move to Ran and he knows “this will be possession, completion” (Sturgeon 37) and he moves with them to meet his fate.
And finally we come to the demise of Steve on his ill-fated second expedition into inner space. His adventures are quite complex and weighed down with contradictory meaning, but they quickly centre around Fig. As we move through the story with them, we learn that the vagina is not the actual monster, it is just the vessel, like Bianca’s body – it is Fig that had animated the vagina to do the things it did, with the deliberate goal of claiming Stacy’s man for herself. Stacy, we also learn, isn’t the story in the book. She has merely been acting as the mediator between her vagina and a postmodernist society that, if it paid attention at all, has cynically looked to her non-compliant genitalia as occasional entertainment for the male gaze. Ultimately she is the mediator between Fig and the male protagonist Steve, and is left out of the unfolding story in the end.
Before he goes back in, Stacy indicates that the world is not a gateway, but rather exists entirely inside her, “it’s just really small [...] I could feel you in there. I could see you through my skin [...] and you were getting smaller [...] the deeper in you went, the smaller you became [...] the whole world must be some kind of tumor the side of a pea” (Mellick 46). As he explores this new world, he realizes that it’s not an infinite one, but only about twenty square miles, indeed fully contained within his girlfriend. He initially talks to her via the walkie talkie, but eventually reception is lost in static and he’s on his own. When he encountering Fig again, he follows her to a small town where “most of the houses are wrought iron. They look melted, twisted burned. The windows are curled and wavy. One of them bubbles outwards. Even the doors and windows are warped” (Mellick 58). The insides of the houses are filled with items that also seem to be warped as though by some great heat, some cataclysm. He eventually finds Fig in one of the houses, wailing and crying by herself. When she finally notices Steve, she tackles him in her excitement and asks if he has come to play. He asks her about Stacy and she says that because Stacy had decided she did not exist, that Stacy is not her friend. They walk through the town together and eventually the wrought iron houses become wooden houses, sometimes halfway through the house. When he asks her what the wrought iron is, she answers “that’s the cancer [...] it took everyone away” (Mellick 64). In that way, we are informed that this is no utopian world, but one with new and real problems that will need to be dealt with as well.
Fig takes Steve to a mansion at the top of a hill where she introduces Steve to the dozen or so other people living in this world, “They are all just as alien as Fig [...] Many of them are couples, and the couples all look similar. [...] Only one of them looks like Fig. An old woman [...] Everyone is very sluggish and droopy. All of them are very old” (Mellick 65). They speak a strange language and Fig informs him that she has introduced him as her new playmate. They socialize for a while, all making arts and crafts for “dinner” – no food or drink is ever seen, everything in the world draws sustenance directly from Stacy. When he finally announces he needs to head back, Fig shouts that her mother said he would play with her forever, and that he could not go. When he tries to leave anyway, she calls skeletons from the the woods, and after a battle, he is carried by them and thrown into a well where Fig informs him that Stacy “will forget about you [...] like she forgot about me” (Mellick 70). Weeks pass and Steve undergoes a transformation as his appearance changes so he looks like Fig, then finally, “I awake to a cracking sound coming from the back of my head. [...] My bones and muscles separate. A skeleton crawls out [...] squats down in front of me, examining my face, touching its own face with bloody fingers. It looks as confused as I am, wondering what it is doing outside of me” (Mellick 73).
Fig finally comes back for him and informs him that since he is like her now, that he will have to stay with her and play. Steve is still planning to try to escape, but she says the exit is guarded by skeletons to prevent him from leaving. His hopes of leaving are utterly dashed when immediately upon leaving the well, the whole world starts to shake and Fig leads him to where she says it will be safe with the rest of the people, “the clouds scatter, as if wiped away with a rag, revealing the dome-shaped purple sky. Then the entire crowd leaps up with insane cheering as a pink film stretches across the atmosphere [...] Stacy’s been impregnated” (Mellick 76) and the exit to her vagina has been sealed in the process. In fact, we learn that they are no longer in Stacy’s body, but in that of her daughter.
Where Steve was afraid of Stacy’s vagina consuming him, it is actually Fig that does so. She has destroyed his humanity and subverted his masculinity – literally having pulled his spine out of his body along with his skeleton that she leads around and plays with like a pet. Steve finally learns that what she means by “playing” is sex and despite his anger at his plight, is ultimately seduced by Fig. She releases powerful pheromones that he has no defences against and whenever he is with her, he is happier than he has ever been before – even though he realizes why, he gradually accepts his new fate. Fig declares that he must love her because he changed, and that he is now hers to keep. He is fully consumed by the monster and has lost his male agency to the powerful biology she wields, which controls him, and transformed him in the first place. He muses that the world within Stacy must have been passed down through the ages, mother to daughter, and exists as an evolutionary response to overpopulation, drought, or famine... where entire villages could crawl inside one woman, who would feed them all and keep them alive until the world was safe again. In one last conversation, Steve manages to talk to Stacy and tells her he is not coming back, that he is in her daughter, and that her dreams of colonization have been destroyed by her actions, which we learned was a one night stand where she engaged in sex with a stranger to comfort her for losing Steve.
The two stories examined couldn’t be more different in so many ways, but the fact that they have such common elements speaks to the effectiveness of the toolkits of gothic horror and postmodernism. I purchased the 1977 Theodore Sturgeon anthology in a used bookstore when I was in my early teens, thinking from the Boris Vallejo artwork on the cover it was going to be light fantasy. The short “Bianca’s Hands” was first published in 1947 and is roughly 8 pages long in the collection, albeit in quite small print. I acquired the Carleton Mellick III book new via the Internet over 30 years later primarily on the strength of online reviews after a friend jokingly posted a link to one of his other bizarro books (“The Faggiest Vampire”, a children’s book) on a social networking site. “The Haunted Vagina” was first published in 2006 and weighs in at a fairly light 83 pages in a reasonably large font. The choices of the two stories for me were about as random as they could possibly be, and initially I could not make up my mind which to tackle. In the end, it was suggested to look at both (Ahman), and it was then that the common elements became apparent. While neither work could possibly stand as a feminist masterpiece, both use postmodern explorations of sex and gender as critical elements within a gothic horror structure to explore the place of those topics within society by looking from the edges back in. The flexibility, effectiveness, and staying power of those coexistent literary forms is evident in their use in works with such widely divergent backgrounds and narratives.
Works Cited
Ahman, Aalya. Re: My Final Essay. 9 Aug. 2012. E-mail.
Becker, K. -H. ‘Postmodern Feminine Horror Fictions’. Modern Gothic: A Reader. Ed. Victor Sage & Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester University Press, 1996. 71–80. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M, and Susan Gubar. ‘Excerpt from The Madwoman in the Attic’. : n. pag. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. ‘Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity’. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durhani and London: Duke University Press, 1995. 1–27. Print.
Mellick, Carlton. The Haunted Vagina. Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2011. Print.
Sturgeon, Theodore. ‘Bianca’s Hands’. E Pluribus Unicorn. Pocket Books, 1977. 30–38. Print.
The genre of horror can be studied in many ways. No matter the route such explorations take, most analyses of horror ultimately use it as a tool to help place the culture that generated the work into a sociological and psychological historic context – as a means of looking from the documented visible outside to the hidden or repressed internal subtexts of the day. Contemporary horror stories are less reliant on the obvious monsters that dominated into the 1960s and take a decidedly postmodern approach in pulling the dark inner dialogue of our society’s fears before the gaze of popular culture. While much of the structure and technique developed through over more than a century of Gothic horror remains intact as a backdrop for postmodern examinations of society, the subject matter and the focus has changed radically. Judith Halberstam states “Gothic fiction of the nineteenth century specifically used the body of the monster to produce race, class, gender, and sexuality” whereas “monstrosity within contemporary horror seems to have stabilized into an amalgam of sex and gender” (6) that may not even be externally visible as monstrous.
Two postmodern horror stories will be compared and contrasted for their representation of sex and gender within a gothic framework. The first was well ahead of its time, the 1947 short story “Bianca’s Hands” by one of the great masters of twentieth century speculative fiction, Theodore Sturgeon. The second is the novella “The Haunted Vagina” by bizarro fiction writer Carlton Mellick III, originally published in 2006. Both are also love stories in their own way and share numerous gothic story elements, but while the former was at the forefront of the postmodernist movement, it is considerably more overt at portraying female characters as outwardly monstrous than the latter. Despite its fetishistic story elements and often juvenile male writing style, “The Haunted Vagina” takes a much more nuanced approach to its portrayal of its female characters due to its situation solidly within our current postmodern feminism-influenced society.
The Victorian Gothic horror stories of the eighteen hundreds formed the foundation of the horror genre that carried through to the films and literature of the early nineteen hundreds. This period of development focused on the monster invading and disrupting society through its very existence, and spoke to the fears of a white imperialist society about the invasion of other races, of class warfare, of the rise of early feminist thinking, of uncontrolled technology and capitalism, and the fall of empire to moral corruption. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement gained momentum, and the fall of the British Empire after World War II was giving way to the rise of Pax Americana and its Cold War with the Soviet Union. The horror stories of the day represented a direct reaction to this new and changing environment, especially with regards to burgeoning technological advances and globalization. Initially, like earlier horror, these works were simply reactionary tales that used a new cast of fears to tell familiar monster stories. Through the 1950s and 60s though, postmodernism gained a significant presence in the literature of the west, and has come to dominate much of the subtext of popular culture – especially those forms of it, such as horror, that examine the myth of a universalized society by bringing attention to its outer edges and extreme manifestations.
The common heritage and effectiveness of the gothic roots of horror can be seen through the similarities in the overall composition of many manifestations of the modern genre, and its influence can still be felt strongly even in the postmodern horror story. In each “Bianca’s Hands” and “The Haunted Vagina”, despite their great distance from each other temporally, stylistically, and thematically, there are a significant number of parallels. In both, there are three primary characters: a naïve man, a flawed or problematic woman, and a female-identified monster. Both men are ultimately captured in love by the monsters and are thereby destroyed. The woman in each is effectively the mother of the monsters and plays a role in setting the tone of the story and mediating the relationship with the monster in the middle. The core of both stories take place in isolated locations surrounded by, but separated from, recognizable society to provide dramatic contrast. Both of them also progress along vaguely similar lines in that the man has to travel to the lonely world of the monster to finally be consumed by them.
There are certainly differences between the two stories, as there should be between two almost randomly chosen pieces. First and foremost, the actual nature of the monster has profound implications to the interpretations of each of the stories. In Sturgeon, as the title implies, the focus is not a person per se, but rather their hands. In the character of Bianca we have both a fusion and a fission in one body of two diverse externally visible manifestations of womanhood, thus creating a complex embodiment of monstrous transgression. The most obvious is her body, “Bianca was squat and small, with dank hair and rotten teeth. Her mouth was crooked and it drooled. Either she was blind or she just didn’t care about bumping into things. It didn’t really matter because Bianca was an imbecile.” (Sturgeon 30) Here, we see one side of the classic sexual dichotomy of the gothic female: the obviously monstrous figure, an uncomplicated embodiment of “the suggestion – embedded in works by Swift, Pope, Gay, and others – that all women were inexorably and inescapably monstrous” (Gilbert and Gubar 31). In Bianca’s case, no progression of failure was required, she begins as the fallen woman, as the madwoman and hag, as a vessel of corruption of form. She is also the ultimate in the feminine burden: asexual, utterly dependent, contributing nothing in return physically or mentally, and a visible embarrassment to her broken single mother whom society has forced to care for her.
Here, the mother plays the role of the intellect and voice of the disfigured and useless body of Bianca. The mother is still merely an extension of Bianca, acting as the mediator between her and a society that wishes to punish her crime of producing non-compliance, and ultimately between Bianca and the male protagonist Ran. She and Bianca are effectively a single entity, forming a whole self-actuating monster as Ran’s boss elucidates when he states “The woman is Bianca’s mother, and the girl is Bianca. I don’t know their other name” (Sturgeon 30). We do learn however that the mother did not begin in the fallen state we find her in, and once had a life of her own before Bianca was inflicted on her. When Ran comes to their door unbidden later in the day he first met them, she grudgingly allows him in and proceeds to transgress by telling him her story. She tells of how she was once young and desirable, but when Bianca was born, her partner abandoned her, “I’d go away myself, I would, but people know me [...] They’d bring me back to her, they would, to care for her. It doesn’t matter much now, though, because people don’t want me any more than they want her” (Sturgeon 31-32). Ran asks if he can rent space at their house, which we know is to be near Bianca’s hands. When the mother asks why and rises to her feet, Ran crosses the room and pushes her back into her chair and informs her she is not to ask questions about his motives. She is denied agency even in this intrusion into her household, and agrees to everything he asks in fear that he might withdraw the offer of an income. She must remain invisible, as the silent caregiver of her deformed child, without adding to her own story as an individual, in return for a modicum of participation in capitalist society.
The other side of the sexual dichotomy within the body of Bianca is her hands, “they were lovely hands, graceful hands, hands as soft and smooth and white as snowflakes [...] they lay there half closed and crouching, each pulsing with a movement like the panting of a field creature” (Sturgeon 30). In her hands we have the classic Victorian angel figure, but strikingly enveloped by the grotesque platform of Bianca’s body on which they are formed. The hands become the object of desire and the target of worship for Ran who has no defences against their wily feminine enchantments. Where Bianca and her mother form a single voice/body fusion, the hands are the sexual organs of the monster and are a fission from the main bulk of the visible creature. They are at once virginal and untouched by the monster that carries them, and inherently corrupt by their femininity, the “stubborn autonomy and unknowable subjectivity [...] that underlies” even the most perfect of angels (Gilbert and Gubar 27).
Where modernist monsters would have carried implied genitalia, Sturgeon places her organs literally out on the table for all to see. Only Ran seems to be simple enough to look past the outer appearance of the failed woman that is the Bianca/mother, but he sees her as nothing but her sexual organs – her hands – the anthropomorphisation of the sex offered as promise to the man than can put the angel in her proper place. “Beautiful parasites they were [...] They cared for each other. They would not touch Bianca herself, but each hand groomed the other. It was the only labor [sic] to which they would bend themselves” (Sturgeon 33). Even though the hands have little choice but be on display much of the time, they behave as the proper Victorian gothic woman insofar as possible, teasing rather than flaunting, “when Bianca walked, her hands did not swing free, but twisted in the fabric of her dress” (Sturgeon 33). They, like Patmore’s Honoria, avoid the masculine world of action and simply tend themselves to please the male gaze, so as to ensure the greatness of the man that ultimately triumphs over them (Gilbert and Gubar 22). Ran has to pursue them and win them over to him in order to fulfil his horrific destiny.
Where the monster in “Bianca’s Hands” is externally manifest as a fusion/fission hybrid, the construction of monster in “The Haunted Vagina” is much more sympathetic and ambivalent. It is also a longer work and has the luxury of being able to be more nuanced. In both cases however, monstrosity is stated up front. In the former, monstrosity is presented narratively in the second line through the description of of Bianca; in the latter, the first line of the book is “I’ve been scared to have sex with Stacy ever since I discovered her vagina was haunted” (Mellick 7). This single line sets up a complex relationship with Stacy. On one hand, we are taken outside the subject of Stacy’s sole identification as the body around a vagina with the humorous absurdity of the statement. On the other hand, we are taken inside the subject with the psychologically loaded revelation that her vagina is so obviously grotesque as to elicit fear of it in her sexual partner. It also sets up an ambivalence about Stacy herself as the rejection is only of her sex, not of her entire being, thus leaving her as a flawed woman burdened with explicitly monstrous genitalia. Where Bianca’s exquisite hands are situated on a pair of fused horrible bodies, Stacy’s vagina is more classically the terrifying element of her femininity: “the monster may not only be concealed behind the angel, she may actually turn out to reside within (or in the lower half of) the angel.” (Gilbert and Gubar 29)
The male protagonist Steve’s discovery of the nature of her vagina comprises a series of revelations told in flashback form in the first chapter of the story. “It was all a joke. But then I heard it... A voice, inside of her. I couldn’t understand the words. A woman crying, babbling in a deranged language. Then she screamed into my ear and I jumped out from between Stacy’s legs” (Mellick 8). Given the psychoanalytic trope of the vagina as monster, and that “every angelic Snow White must be hunted, if not haunted, by a wickedly assertive Stepmother” (Gilbert and Gubar 28), Stacy’s ambivalence towards the internal dialogue escaping through her genitalia is perfectly reasonable in a modern feminist-influenced world – if her vagina is going to be implicitly monstrous, what is the big deal if it is explicitly so? In fact, in response to his statement that perhaps she should have it exorcized by a priest, she responds, “Actually, I kinda like it. [...] Who else has a haunted vagina? [...] My other boyfriends thought it was kind of sexy” (Mellick 8-9). He however is repulsed by her transgressive organ that apparently has a voice and agency of its own, and isn’t just for his pleasure anymore. After the revelation, she then engages in not entirely consensual sex with him where she was “getting off on the terrified look on my face. But for me, it was the most awkward sex I’d ever had. I swear I could feel strange things inside of her that night” (Mellick 9).
But, as the back cover of the book opines, “It’s difficult to love a woman whose vagina is a gateway to the world of the dead”. Steve states “I haven’t had sex with Stacy for over a month now, but I’m still crazy for her,” (Mellick 15) but goes on to say that “after a while, not having sex has taken its toll on our relationship” (Mellick 17). She eventually pressures him to engage in oral sex with her, “I’ll keep my legs closed,” she says. “You won’t even hear it” (Mellick 17). In the middle of their frantic “69” position sex, Stacy’s belly swells to impossible proportions and a skeletal hand emerges from her, “Stacy just watches her body in amazement as the hand clutches onto her leg and pulls. Another hand emerges and grabs her other thigh, trying to pull itself out [...] She looks at me with dilated pupils, frightened of her own vagina” (Mellick 20). In this way, she finally joins the male in her life in recognizing her haunted vagina as a source of independent self-actuating monstrosity and a source of justifiable fear instead of simply a quirky and entertaining extension of herself. She is finally coming of age and realizing as well that her sex is and will always be a monstrous thing ultimately beyond her control, with the coiled energetic potential to deliver life into the world when it so chooses. She is the carrier of a Lilith, and her vagina is birthing a fully functional monster, seizing the world of activity on its own volition. When it is halfway out of her, flesh starts to form on its bones and, at her direction, Steve kills with a night stand. The skeleton is finally pulled all the way out and it melts away on the floor as Stacy runs and cowers in another room from the fully grown but stillborn terror she has just had ripped from her. In her panic, she has fulfilled the curse of Lilith (Gilbert and Gubar 35) and has killed her offspring before it could escape. The vagina that roared must be denied the fruits of its agency, and punished for its transgressive act of attempting to define its own story in the world.
But this is a postmodernist tale, and instead of accepting that Stacy’s vagina is a particularly fearsome example of women’s reproductive biology and moving on from there, Stacy decides that the source of her feminine mystery must be explored – literally. In a drunken state later in the night after the skeleton incident, “I can’t see for myself,” she says. “I want you to tell me what it looks like in there. If you can see ghosts” (Mellick 29). She is incredibly stretchy and he tries to peer inside of her, “I slide my hands in, both of them, and spread the flesh apart as wide as I can. It stretches to about basketball width. I look within. There’s a pin of light deep inside of her” (Mellick 29). After more alcohol, Stacy declares “I want you to go in there [...] I can’t just forget about this and get on with the rest of my life [...] that skeleton thing was almost bigger than you [...] if it could fit through then you can fit” (Mellick 30). He is terrified of suffocating inside her vagina if he were to agree (his life consumed by her sex), but he is drunk enough and she is insistent enough. She shaves off his hair and lubricates herself as effectively as she can, insists he is not going to hurt her, and he tries as best he can to enter her, with limited success. She gets angry and eventually squats over him and drops all her weight onto him over and over again while she masturbates, and “the next thing I know, her lips close up around my wiggling toes” (Mellick 34). In a way, it is turning the tables on the man for his earlier rejection of her vagina for it daring to be more than an orifice for his use. The man then becomes nothing but a penis to fill her up and fulfil her desires, “It dawns on me. I’m all the way inside of her. I’m like a human penis” (Mellick 35).
But he is fully enveloped by her sex, and he doesn’t suffocate inside her. He has been consumed by her and instead of panicking, he develops an erection, his unconscious desires to be utterly subsumed by a woman and to crawl back into the womb have been fulfilled and he is empowered by his success. He is able to make his way into her, for what seems to him like thirty feet of fleshy tunnel, and peers out of a cliff onto a world with “green grass, a forest, and an old rotten wooden fence” (Mellick 36). But Stacy has a powerful orgasm and Steve is literally ejaculated into the world at the end of Stacy’s vagina. Her excitement of having consumed her man utterly was too much for her to resist and she brought herself to sexual release, taking the full power of his masculinity and spraying him deep into herself. Steve’s fall from the cliff knocks him unconscious and when he awakes, considerably worse for the wear, he finds he cannot climb back up the cliff. He eventually discovers an old log cabin at the edge of the woods. There, he arms himself with an axe and clothes himself against the chill of the wind. While in the cabin, he sees a figure walk past a window, “It’s not exactly human. Its skin is white and red. A female, walking nude [...] She leaves behind a floral scent that tickles my nostrils” (Mellick 40).
And that is how Steve meets the monster proper of the story, who we later learn is named Fig. Stacy admitted earlier “When she was six years old [...] she had an imaginary friend who used to come out of her vagina to play with her. Another little girl, about her age, with paper white skin and funny slimy horns on her head” (Mellick 24). He has seen this odd playmate, now grown up like Stacy herself. Steve eventually makes he way up the cliff and back out of Stacy’s vagina. He has discovered that while women control the power to create life, Stacy is imbued with a literal world within her. Not content to hold that power within herself, Stacy decides that Steve will mount a proper expedition for an afternoon and enter her again pulling with him a bag of proper clothing, food, a camera, a walkie talkie, and a gun; to be followed in the future by teams of explorers. She is a product of her imperialist society, and she wants to wield the power that having her vagina properly colonized will give her. Stacy, like Bianca’s mother, is driven by the control dynamics of capitalist power. Where Bianca’s mother is merely the mother of Bianca, Stacy is the mother to this world inside her – a parasite drawing its life from her body as she in turn draws on resources from the world around her.
The parallels are there between the stories with the active/passive duality of the Stacy/world-inside forming the self-actuating body of the monster, and Fig playing the role of the Victorian angel, with her paper white skin, and living as the fissile extension of one of the facets of the fused monster body, just like Bianca’s hands. As Halberstam states, “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known” (Halberstam 2). Certainly the purpose of such elaborately constructed monsters in these stories is to cover large swaths of the terrain of deviance in order that a clear beacon can be seen pointing back to the centre. But a clear map to conformity isn’t enough, there has to be a motivation to want to move away from the vitality and excitement of the edges of society to the more predictable and ponderous middle – consequences of non-conformity need to be made clear. Here, gothic forms again provide a powerful tool:
Gothic [...] may be loosely defined as the rhetorical style and narrative structure designed to produce fear and desire within the reader. The production of fear in a literary text [...] emanates from a vertiginous excess of meaning. [...] multiple interpretations are embedded in the text and part of the experience of horror come from the realization that meaning itself runs riot. Gothic novels produce a symbol for this interpretive mayhem in the body of the monster. (Halberstam 2)The similarities between the monsters in the two widely divergent stories being examined can then be seen to be due to their underlying gothic structures.
It is a testament to the staying power of the gothic story form that its influence can still be found strongly in the postmodern horror story with its characteristic empowering and centering of othered characters and situations as a means of challenging the notion of authoritative sources of epistemology. Postmodern gothic at once illuminates normal and challenges the validity of its identification as such, leaving the reader with no clear answers or moral absolutes. In this sense, these contemporary stories are quite different in their intent than were the stories that laid the foundations of the gothic style: we are supposed to walk away from the stories with questions rather than answers, with conflicting emotions rather than comfort. While “Bianca’s Hands” predates the rise of postmodernism as a key feature of popular culture, it is the complexity of its construction of monster and the ambivalent treatment of its characters that places it solidly within that category. Suzanne Becker states that one of the hallmarks of postmodern feminine horror fiction is “the characterisation of the mother-daughter relationship devoid of the myths of mother-love. Abjection is foregrounded just as much as the mirror plot of female desire [...] by the ironic double voice” (Becker 77). Both stories certainly offer no sentimentality towards the mother-daughter relationship – Bianca’s mother wishes to be rid of her daughter, and Stacy wishes to colonize her inner world – and the fissioned forms of the monsters (Bianca’s hands and Fig) certainly provide ironic reflections of the monster-bodies off which they are feeding.
But even in postmodern gothic, the consequences of non-compliance have to be made clear, and they have to be significant. Whether the gain was worth the cost is up to the reader to decide. In both stories, the locations of the climax of both stories is isolated and free from interpretive guidance of the society that surrounds them. In “Bianca’s hands”, Ran asks his boss where Bianca and her mother live, and he is told “On the other side. A house on no road, away from people.” (Sturgeon 31) and when Ran goes to look for it “He found the house easily, for it was indeed away from the road, and stood rudely by itself. The townspeople had cauterized the house by wrapping it in empty fields” (Sturgeon 31). In “The Haunted Vagina”, it takes place within the self-contained world on the other side of Stacy’s vagina. In both instances, the male characters lose their lives in these locales to the supposed angels that live there: literally for Ran, and metaphorically for Steve.
Ran courts Bianca’s hands, spending time every day alone with them and providing them with gifts so they can groom and primp each other, ultimately winning their approval and affection. He asks the mother for Bianca’s hand in marriage (pun intended) and she acquiesces despite her shock, “you are a good boy [...] but you’re something of a fool. Bianca’s a monster. I say it though I am what I am to her. Do what you like, and never a word I will say. You should have known. I’m sorry you asked me, for you have given me the memory of speaking so to you” (Sturgeon 35). He worked even harder at his job to furnish and decorate a room in the house fit for him and Bianca’s hands to live in. Finally, he found a minister that would marry them early one morning. When they returned home after the marriage “he washed Bianca and used rich lotions. He washed and combed her hair, and brushed it many times until it shone, to make her more fit to be with the hands he had married [...] they were pleased. Once one of them ran up his coat and touched his cheek and made him exultant” (Sturgeon 26). He completed his day at work, spent several hours in a spiritual fog by himself in the woods until darkness had fallen (subconsciously hiding from any possible eyes), then went to join his brides in their marriage bed.
The hands move to Ran and he knows “this will be possession, completion” (Sturgeon 37) and he moves with them to meet his fate.
For a long moment they lay there, gathering strength. Together, then [...] they became rigid [...] passing their rigidity to him [...] the hands bore down with all their hidden strength [...] Something burst within him – his lungs, his heart – no matter. It was complete. [...] There was blood on the hands of Bianca’s mother when they found her in the morning in the beautiful room, trying to soothe Ran’s neck. They took Bianca away, and they buried Ran, but they hanged Bianca’s mother because she tried to make them believe Bianca had done it. Bianca whose hands were quite dead, drooping like brown leaves from her wrists. (Sturgeon 37-38)Ran pays for his transgressions with his life, as does Bianca’s mother after the one genuinely motherly act – too little too late – she performs in the whole story of “trying to soothe Ran’s neck”. Bianca’s hands die as well bringing pleasure to their man, deflowered, “drooping like dead leaves”, fulfilling the role of the good Victorian angel, “whether she becomes an object d’art or a saint, however, it is the surrender of her self – of her personal comfort, her personal desires or both – that is the beautiful angel-woman key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice which dooms her both to death and to heaven. For to be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead” (Gilbert and Gubar 25). And Bianca ... “well, nobody cared for Bianca” (Sturgeon 36), as is the plight of the disabled in a capitalist society. Her status is ultimately restored by society as a useless body, the only one not to express their sexuality or take action, and thus the only one spared a terminal judgement.
And finally we come to the demise of Steve on his ill-fated second expedition into inner space. His adventures are quite complex and weighed down with contradictory meaning, but they quickly centre around Fig. As we move through the story with them, we learn that the vagina is not the actual monster, it is just the vessel, like Bianca’s body – it is Fig that had animated the vagina to do the things it did, with the deliberate goal of claiming Stacy’s man for herself. Stacy, we also learn, isn’t the story in the book. She has merely been acting as the mediator between her vagina and a postmodernist society that, if it paid attention at all, has cynically looked to her non-compliant genitalia as occasional entertainment for the male gaze. Ultimately she is the mediator between Fig and the male protagonist Steve, and is left out of the unfolding story in the end.
Before he goes back in, Stacy indicates that the world is not a gateway, but rather exists entirely inside her, “it’s just really small [...] I could feel you in there. I could see you through my skin [...] and you were getting smaller [...] the deeper in you went, the smaller you became [...] the whole world must be some kind of tumor the side of a pea” (Mellick 46). As he explores this new world, he realizes that it’s not an infinite one, but only about twenty square miles, indeed fully contained within his girlfriend. He initially talks to her via the walkie talkie, but eventually reception is lost in static and he’s on his own. When he encountering Fig again, he follows her to a small town where “most of the houses are wrought iron. They look melted, twisted burned. The windows are curled and wavy. One of them bubbles outwards. Even the doors and windows are warped” (Mellick 58). The insides of the houses are filled with items that also seem to be warped as though by some great heat, some cataclysm. He eventually finds Fig in one of the houses, wailing and crying by herself. When she finally notices Steve, she tackles him in her excitement and asks if he has come to play. He asks her about Stacy and she says that because Stacy had decided she did not exist, that Stacy is not her friend. They walk through the town together and eventually the wrought iron houses become wooden houses, sometimes halfway through the house. When he asks her what the wrought iron is, she answers “that’s the cancer [...] it took everyone away” (Mellick 64). In that way, we are informed that this is no utopian world, but one with new and real problems that will need to be dealt with as well.
Fig takes Steve to a mansion at the top of a hill where she introduces Steve to the dozen or so other people living in this world, “They are all just as alien as Fig [...] Many of them are couples, and the couples all look similar. [...] Only one of them looks like Fig. An old woman [...] Everyone is very sluggish and droopy. All of them are very old” (Mellick 65). They speak a strange language and Fig informs him that she has introduced him as her new playmate. They socialize for a while, all making arts and crafts for “dinner” – no food or drink is ever seen, everything in the world draws sustenance directly from Stacy. When he finally announces he needs to head back, Fig shouts that her mother said he would play with her forever, and that he could not go. When he tries to leave anyway, she calls skeletons from the the woods, and after a battle, he is carried by them and thrown into a well where Fig informs him that Stacy “will forget about you [...] like she forgot about me” (Mellick 70). Weeks pass and Steve undergoes a transformation as his appearance changes so he looks like Fig, then finally, “I awake to a cracking sound coming from the back of my head. [...] My bones and muscles separate. A skeleton crawls out [...] squats down in front of me, examining my face, touching its own face with bloody fingers. It looks as confused as I am, wondering what it is doing outside of me” (Mellick 73).
Fig finally comes back for him and informs him that since he is like her now, that he will have to stay with her and play. Steve is still planning to try to escape, but she says the exit is guarded by skeletons to prevent him from leaving. His hopes of leaving are utterly dashed when immediately upon leaving the well, the whole world starts to shake and Fig leads him to where she says it will be safe with the rest of the people, “the clouds scatter, as if wiped away with a rag, revealing the dome-shaped purple sky. Then the entire crowd leaps up with insane cheering as a pink film stretches across the atmosphere [...] Stacy’s been impregnated” (Mellick 76) and the exit to her vagina has been sealed in the process. In fact, we learn that they are no longer in Stacy’s body, but in that of her daughter.
Where Steve was afraid of Stacy’s vagina consuming him, it is actually Fig that does so. She has destroyed his humanity and subverted his masculinity – literally having pulled his spine out of his body along with his skeleton that she leads around and plays with like a pet. Steve finally learns that what she means by “playing” is sex and despite his anger at his plight, is ultimately seduced by Fig. She releases powerful pheromones that he has no defences against and whenever he is with her, he is happier than he has ever been before – even though he realizes why, he gradually accepts his new fate. Fig declares that he must love her because he changed, and that he is now hers to keep. He is fully consumed by the monster and has lost his male agency to the powerful biology she wields, which controls him, and transformed him in the first place. He muses that the world within Stacy must have been passed down through the ages, mother to daughter, and exists as an evolutionary response to overpopulation, drought, or famine... where entire villages could crawl inside one woman, who would feed them all and keep them alive until the world was safe again. In one last conversation, Steve manages to talk to Stacy and tells her he is not coming back, that he is in her daughter, and that her dreams of colonization have been destroyed by her actions, which we learned was a one night stand where she engaged in sex with a stranger to comfort her for losing Steve.
The two stories examined couldn’t be more different in so many ways, but the fact that they have such common elements speaks to the effectiveness of the toolkits of gothic horror and postmodernism. I purchased the 1977 Theodore Sturgeon anthology in a used bookstore when I was in my early teens, thinking from the Boris Vallejo artwork on the cover it was going to be light fantasy. The short “Bianca’s Hands” was first published in 1947 and is roughly 8 pages long in the collection, albeit in quite small print. I acquired the Carleton Mellick III book new via the Internet over 30 years later primarily on the strength of online reviews after a friend jokingly posted a link to one of his other bizarro books (“The Faggiest Vampire”, a children’s book) on a social networking site. “The Haunted Vagina” was first published in 2006 and weighs in at a fairly light 83 pages in a reasonably large font. The choices of the two stories for me were about as random as they could possibly be, and initially I could not make up my mind which to tackle. In the end, it was suggested to look at both (Ahman), and it was then that the common elements became apparent. While neither work could possibly stand as a feminist masterpiece, both use postmodern explorations of sex and gender as critical elements within a gothic horror structure to explore the place of those topics within society by looking from the edges back in. The flexibility, effectiveness, and staying power of those coexistent literary forms is evident in their use in works with such widely divergent backgrounds and narratives.
Works Cited
Ahman, Aalya. Re: My Final Essay. 9 Aug. 2012. E-mail.
Becker, K. -H. ‘Postmodern Feminine Horror Fictions’. Modern Gothic: A Reader. Ed. Victor Sage & Allan Lloyd Smith. Manchester University Press, 1996. 71–80. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M, and Susan Gubar. ‘Excerpt from The Madwoman in the Attic’. : n. pag. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. ‘Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity’. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durhani and London: Duke University Press, 1995. 1–27. Print.
Mellick, Carlton. The Haunted Vagina. Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2011. Print.
Sturgeon, Theodore. ‘Bianca’s Hands’. E Pluribus Unicorn. Pocket Books, 1977. 30–38. Print.
