Final Maids: Slasher Theory and Renaissance Revenge Tragedy
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Lila Shelley English 4784 Prof K Cleland November 21, 2019 Final Maids: Slasher Theory and Renaissance Revenge Tragedy Slasher films and Renaissance revenge tragedies fill similar niches in the storytelling of their time, in both content and audience. Both of these genres fixate on blood, taboo, deception, death, and on secure, upper-class settings being torn apart in a violent spree (Gill 19–20; Willis 40). In audience, both had either mostly or entirely male viewers when first performed or shown in a theatre. And despite these audiences of men, both of these genres often feature heroines. These similarities, while somewhat superficial, reveal much about the aesthetic of these genres. Horror film theorist Carol J. Clover describes horror as one of the two sensation or “body” genres, alongside pornography, and she argues that while pornography has to do with the act of sex, horror is about gender (Clover, “Her Body, Himself” 186). This perspective allows us to examine sensational work within the framework of gender and feminist theory. Horror aims to create sensations in the audience, and it accomplishes this through externalizing societal anxieties, particularly through fixating on women, especially well-off or privileged women, in distress (Loh 325; Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws 35). Violence against women, or the idea of a damsel in distress, features prominently in early modern revenges as it does in slasher horror films, particularly in Titus Andronicus with the rape and mutilation of Lavinia. The audience identifies with the victim, and as they relate more to her, they feel her distress as their own, and how 1 much pain an audience feel as a part of viewing a sensational work, the better they regard that work, a phenomenon described as strong ambivalence (Strohl 203). Clover coined the term Final Girl for “Her Body” in order to discuss a component of the formula for the slasher genre, and she expanded on the importance of gender in horror further in her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws. The Final Girl story adds a hero arc to a character that would otherwise be a victim and thus restores or enhances their agency as women within the narrative. Given this context, I will use the lens of slasher films’ Final Girl theory in looking at the narratives of Aspatia of The Maid’s Tragedy and Bel-imperia of The Spanish Tragedy, which both include victimized women who achieve their desired result in their story endings, to argue that these characters are Final Girls of the early modern revenge tragedy. Final Girl theory, as the basis of this analysis, requires some explanation. The Final Girl is the protagonist of the slasher film. She is the lone survivor at the end of the movie. Clover, when creating the term, introduces the concept as “abject terror personified. […] She alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued … or to kill him herself” (Clover, “Her Body” 203). The Final Girl is always a woman or teenaged girl, but in Clover’s terms, she is not feminine by the end of the narrative and has become both masculine and feminine. Femininity in horror is a performance and state of mind, one associated with victimhood and passivity as compared to the masculine performance of strength and activity (Wester 317; Clover, Chain Saws 22). Clover argues that the key to the Final Girl’s survival is her willingness to cross from the performance of femininity to one of masculinity. 2 Additionally, the Final Girl’s femininity is not threatening to a masculine audience. She, at least in appearance, fits the conservative moral attitudes of how women should behave, and she is almost always a virgin in films from before the 1990s. She remains fully clothed and does not do drugs or drink. In short, she starts the story more on the side of being the damsel who will fall into distress, and she is often contrasted with other women or teenaged girls displayed as promiscuous who are murdered early on (Clover, Chain Saws 34). The Final Girl discovers the bodies of her friends, and that trauma and knowledge of her own peril is what begins her transition out of moral norms of femininity into what Clover deems masculinity. I will look at two examples of Final Girls, Laurie Strode from Halloween (1978) and Sidney Prescott from Scream, to illustrate how this theory applies in both Ending “A” and Ending “B” situations. Clover notes that Laurie Strode codified the Final Girl tropes for other movies. Her arc is one of victim as hero, or victim-hero, which combines the feminine aspects of her character with the masculine violence of the story. Before her friends are killed, she is already on alert. She has seen the killer, Michael Myers, watching her throughout thee neighborhood, and her watchful paranoia characterizes her as more careful and focused than her friends, who are characterized as carefree and sexually active without much more detail. All three of the young women who are murdered in the movie die while not fully clothed, and in each case, their carefree sexuality is presented as the reason they don’t notice Michael Myers ready to strike. In the case of Lynda, she is strangled by a phone cord while calling Laurie for help, and Laurie assumes, based on the moans Lynda makes while gasping for air, that Lynda has called her during sex. It is only later 3 that she realizes what she bore witness to, as she finds her friends bodies. She is thus the only target in the film who is aware of her situation, and that is what triggers her to go from her feminine role to a survivor. She flees, with Myers in pursuit, and through her smarts, she eludes him, running, hiding, and breaking through glass windows to escape him. It is only when cornered in a closet that she strikes back violently, with a clothing hanger, and then Myers’ own knife. This violence is displayed as masculine, and the camera shifts to her perspective to illustrate as such. Laurie does not kill Michael Meyers, nor does she take him out. Dr. Loomis rushes to the rescue, shooting Myers until he crashes out the window to the ground below. This ending is what Clover describes as Ending “A” for Final Girls, as Laurie did not take herself out of distress but held on long enough for a man to rescue her. Sidney Prescott of the Scream (1996) film, however, fits the Ending “B” storyline, as she kills both of the slasher villains herself and does not need to be rescued. She survives, covered in blood, but she survives. In a departure from earlier slasher films, she is not the last person standing. Also, she has sex in the movie, with one of the killers, her boyfriend Billy Loomis. However, this is still painted as sinful in the story, and Billy Loomis tells her that because they had sex, she has to die. Scream relies heavily on parody of slasher film moral rules, so this is not itself shocking. The first scene of the movie follows the murder of Casey Becker, who has invited her boyfriend over while her parents aren’t home. Billy Loomis also killed Sidney Prescott’s mother because her affair with his father led to his own mother leaving him, illustrating that the motivation for his murderous revenge originates in women’s sexuality. 4 An interesting part of her character is how she begins the film much more aggressive and fitting Clover’s idea of masculine action than Laurie’s version of the Final Girl. Before the film starts, her mother died violently, and so Sidney begins the story already coping with trauma. The death of her friend Casey also keeps her wary. The reporter Gale Weathers keeps trying to get specific soundbites from her, and Sidney responds rudely each time rather than acquiescing. When she receives the first anonymous call from Ghostface, she mocks him over the line, challenging him by opening her front door and daring him to attack her. This directly contrasts the death of Casey, who upon receiving the threatening call, anxiously double checks locks and grows terrified and hunted. Sidney starts off already with a sense of her agency and power. As the Ghostface incidents escalate, she suspects her boyfriend is responsible, and she reports him to the police. The police eventually clear him after another Ghostface call comes in from Billy’s partner, Stu, and he and Sidney tentatively reconcile though she remains wary. When Officer Dewey is stabbed and drops his gun, Sidney takes it with her. He proves her suspicions right in the finale, where he and his friend Stu Macher reveal that they were the Ghostface killers the whole time. Sidney waits for a moment of surprise when Gale Weathers bursts into the scene, and she takes control of the situation. She defends herself against Stu Macher by pushing a TV, that is playing the movie Halloween, on his head, and she shoots Billy Loomis in the head, making sure he’s dead. The Final Girl narrative adds a heroic arc to slasher films which otherwise just depict as extended scenes of women as victims to violence. I believe there is a 5 misogynist aesthetic in how these films depict women. There is, broadly speaking, more screen-time in slasher films devoted to the suffering of female victims than there is to that of male victims, to the point where many male victims are killed offscreen (Clover, Chain Saws 35).