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Locations of Motherhood in Shakespeare on Film
LAURA GALLAGHER Queens University Belfast
Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers (1992) appropriates feminist psychoanalysis to illustrate how the suppression of the female is represented in selected Shakespearean play texts (chronologically from Hamlet to The Tempest ) in the attempted expulsion of the mother in order to recover the masculine sense of identity. She argues that Hamlet operates as a watershed in Shakespeare’s canon, marking the prominent return of the problematic maternal presence: “selfhood grounded in paternal absence and in the fantasy of overwhelming contamination at the site of origin – becomes the tragic burden of Hamlet and the men who come after him” (1992, p.10). The maternal body is thus constructed as the site of contamination, of simultaneous attraction and disgust, of fantasies that she cannot hold: she is the slippage between boundaries – the abject. Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject (1982) ostensibly provides a hypothesis for analysis of women in the horror film, yet the theory also provides a critical means of situating the maternal figure, the “monstrous feminine” in film versions of Shakespeare (Creed, 1993, 1996). Therefore the choice to focus on the selected Hamlet , Macbeth , Titus Andronicus and Richard III film versions reflects the centrality of the mother figure in these play texts, and the chosen adaptations most powerfully illuminate this article’s thesis. Crucially, in contrast to Adelman’s identification of the attempted suppression of the “suffocating mother” figures 1, in adapting the text to film the absent maternal figure is forced into (an extended) presence on screen. 2 Gertrude, Tamora, the Duchess of York, Lady Macbeth, and the witches each represent variations of the monstrous mother (in both the play text and developed on screen) – as understood by the male characters/viewers (see Mulvey, 1975).
1 Indeed Adelman (1992, p.10) posits that “before Hamlet, masculine identity is constructed in and through the absence of the maternal”. 2 Often, scenes with female figures are not cut due to the influence of the female audience, and thus seem comparatively more significant characters on film than in the text version.
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What is most striking is that the abject mother is primarily sited and explored, in these films, in the symbolic locations of the house: the bedroom, stairs, kitchen and in the distance from the domestic, the wilderness. Location thus functions as ideographs for the thematic essence of a scene: “setting imbues the image with graphic properties which comment on story and characters” (Nelmes, 2007, p.68). The bedroom is the location of the mother’s sexuality, of consummation and enacted or suppressed oedipal desires. The various versions of Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier [1948], Franco Zeffirelli [1990], Kenneth Branagh [1996]) and Julie Taymor’s Titus (1995) use this setting primarily to encounter the phallic mother figure, and the bedroom (even when its connotations are disavowed) imparts an extra textual ideology that imbues the scene with repressed significance. The kitchen with its ideological focus on nurturing and providing is subverted in Taymor’s Titus and Billy Morissette’s Scotland PA (2001) and is instead envisaged as a place of consummation, of desire, of lack and of cannibalism. The stairs, because they transcend allocated room space and function, are the place of negotiation: position on the stairs symbolises the power dynamics between mother/son figures (Orson Welles’ Macbeth [1948], Richard Loncraine’s Richard III [1996]). So too the wilderness because it is located outside the domestic setting, provides the space for the enactment of ritual, of deviant sexuality and witchcraft (Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Welles’ Macbeth and Taymor’s Titus ). These films thus explore the spectrum of the monstrous female as outlined by Creed (1993, p.55): the archaic, castrating mother; the phallic, sexual mother; and the castrated, de sexualised figure. The absent mother of the text is made present in locations whose ideological significances associate them with mother (kitchen), lover (bedroom) and the places on the boundaries (stairs, wilderness), which represent the complete, yet impossibly limited, spectre of feminine identifications. In associating the maternal with a location illustrates the (male imposed) limits of female roles and denotes her constructed immanence. 3
The Mother in the Bedroom
Adelman (1992, p.13 36) demonstrates how, in the play text, Hamlet’s male subjectivity is centered upon the adulterous, sexualized female body of his mother. With the absence of his father, Hamlet projects his own insecure masculine identity onto his mother’s
3 See Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) theory that in a patriarchal society man equals transcendence and woman is immanence.
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body. The “contaminated” maternal body is figured as the abject and the site of Hamlet’s anxiety because it is on the boundary between life/death, clean/unclean, self/other. Gertrude in the play text is sexualized through Hamlet’s interpretation and reading of her body: “why, she would hang on him, /As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on” (1.2.143 45). He testifies to the shamefulness of her quick remarriage, her age inappropriate sensuality (3.4.66 67, 81 83), and forcefully deems her sexuality to be a “rebellious hell” (3.4.80). Gertrude’s body is thus read as the sign of her betrayal to both Hamlet’s dead father and Hamlet himself, and she embodies his fantasy of maternal sexuality and power. Similarly, the presentation of Gertrude in film versions of Hamlet depends upon the avowal or disavowal of this oedipal subtext – a subtext that, of course, existed before Freud “read” it. Olivier’s Hamlet was consciously intended to be a psychoanalytic, oedipal text 4 and the centrality of the mother is visually signaled by the mise en scene. The dark, long corridors, twisting stairwells, empty rooms and the one large central space of Elsinore castle signifies “the womb, the enclosing space inside the mother’s body” (Mulvey, 1996, p.58). It could also represent Hamlet’s confused mind, thereby connecting setting and theme: Hamlet’s mental obsession with his mother’s body. 5 Similarly, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet signals its focus on the maternal with “equally cave like, undulating interiors” (Lehmann and Starks, 2000, p.3). The intimacy of the film’s castle setting is furthered by the intense, cloying triangular network of surveillance between Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius. The film opens in a “womblike sepulcher” with the three primary characters looking over the body of Old Hamlet (Charnes, 1997, p.9). The claustrophobia of the scene, the replacement of one father figure with another, the corpse of the “true” father laid out within the “womblike” room conveys the associated fears of Gertrude’s maternal function: over intimacy, lack of differentiation and death. The womb is figured here as a tomb (see discussion of Taymor’s Titus below). So too, in Welles’ Macbeth the low ceilings, empty rooms and tunneled recesses of the dark castle invoke the imposing, inescapable power of the feminine. In contrast, the bright, expansive mise en scene of Branagh’s Hamlet – the vast, barren, snow covered setting, the grand scale of the castle and the epic length of the film – asserts phallic power, thus shunning the horror of the feminine.
4 As Donaldson explores (1990, p.31 35), Olivier was fascinated by the contemporary theories of Sigmund Freud (further developed by Ernest Jones) on Hamlet’s oedipal desires and Olivier consciously interrogated Hamlet’s bond with his mother in his adaptation. 5 The film employs German expressionist techniques – in the 1920s this movement made sets representative of the psychological disturbances of characters (Nelmes, 2007, p.69).
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The archaic motherhood posited by the womblike setting in Olivier’s Hamlet becomes associated with the phallic mother, due to the innovative use of camera which focuses on the queen’s enigmatic bed. 6 In one single long take, the camera moves from our point of view past a series of spaces “empty of people and yet pregnant with significances we cannot yet fully grasp” (Donaldson, 1990, p.51) as it searches out “something rotten”. The camera eventually lingers on the suggestively shaped, vaginally hooded, and perpetually unmade bed (suggesting it as a site of action) implying that it operates as a metonymy for Gertrude’s perverse sexuality. As Donaldson (1990, p.52) states “this symbol is as kind of declaration of the film’s Freudian intentions”. The repeated directorial decision to reposition the “closet scene” of the play text in the bedroom highlights the intended reading of the scene as the pinnacle of the oedipal subtext. In contrast, metaphorical significances of the bedroom are disavowed in Branagh’s Hamlet : the “enseamed” bed has been replaced by a chaste day couch. In Olivier’s closet scene the viewer watches from the door as Hamlet violently shouts at his mother inside; this lingering shot demonstrates the private, intimate nature of the mother’s bedroom. To cross the threshold signals an intrusion, thus Hamlet’s unapologetic entrance is a sign of his phallic intent. Zeffirelli’s film heightens the disturbing depravity of the mother/son incest. Hamlet enters his mother’s bedroom swinging his sword around at crotch level, clearly signifying his phallic intentions and later causes her to stumble when he physically jabs her with it. Upon the bed, after some grappling with their lockets, he lies on top of her as she is face down, tugging at her necklace and getting worked up over her inability to differentiate between the men. 7 The position and frustration vividly reads as rape, and in the next shot, after Hamlet has moved off her, Gertrude speaks off camera, in close up, and appears naked as the shoulders of her dress have been forced down. The hardly subtle subtext is then made explicit when Hamlet positions himself above his mother, and stimulates sex with her. With every thrust he says a line, while she moans and cries beneath him: “In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stew'd in corruption ”. Ironically the lines relate to Claudius and Gertrude’s incest but here Hamlet acts out the perverse sex acts he describes. Eventually, Gertrude grabs her son’s face and
6 Manvell (1971, p.44) does not share my enthusiasm for the camera work: “camera movement is sometimes inexplicably overdone, becoming technically self conscious and destroying the atmosphere”. The circling of the King’s chair is definitely one such moment of over zealousness. 7 Adelman (1992, p.13) highlights that Gertrude’s failure to properly distinguish between Hamlet’s father and brother is the initiating cause of Hamlet’s identity collapse.
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passionately kisses him: the shot moves to behind Gertrude’s head and in extreme close up, we see Hamlet’s screwed up eye. His reaction proves unreadable: it is not clear whether he actually enjoys this non familial embrace. Nevertheless, the whole closet sequence in Zeffirelli’s film “leaves little to our post Freudian imagination” (Guntner, 2007, p.125). However, it is significant that the kiss occurs at this point in the narrative when in the play text (and other film versions) the kiss is delayed until the end of the scene to signal their pact.
Indeed, Hamlet’s violence toward Gertrude in Olivier’s adaptation only becomes openly erotic after the ghost bids Hamlet to “speak to her”. Gertrude having made her pledge to abstain from Claudius’ sexual advances, seals her forbidden union with her son with a fiercely passionate embrace and kiss on the bed. The swirling, circular movement of the camera registers them as lovers, in keeping with cinematic convention. In contrast, critics have ignored how the construction of Gertrude as phallic mother is rendered problematic in Zeffirelli’s film after the arrival of the ghost. When the ghost departs, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet and Gertrude stage an echo of the first kiss scene in the study. 8 Both are again on their knees, only now it is Hamlet who holds Gertrude’s face in his hands and kisses her on the head. He is positioned slightly higher than her, evoking his new dominance and their pact of chastity is sealed with a close up of Gertrude’s slow nod of understanding. This drop of urgency after the presence of his father’s ghost signals Hamlet’s attempt to re identify with his father, rather than with his sexualized mother, for his masculine subjectivity: “do not forget”. Gertrude, by the end of Zeffirelli’s closet scene, is left castrated – rather than being a castrating influence. Hamlet maintains an illusion of individuality by repressing the abject mother, thus in this film, their mother son relationship has been contaminated by its relocation in the presence of the father. 9
8 In this scene, Hamlet’s little boy lost look is compounded when he slowly moves his head down to his mother’s stomach/womb in close up. His sense of self is figured by his connection to the mother’s body (she has not yet been constructed as the abject). As Zeffirelli (1991) articulates “his heart is not come out of his mother’s womb! Because there is no safer place on all the earth!” However Gertrude resists this interpretation of her as archaic mother and moves down to this lower level to kiss him. 9 In contrast, Adelman’s thesis (1992, p.11) is that the return of the mother in Hamlet “causes the collapse of the fragile compact that had allowed Shakespeare to explore familial and sexual relationships without devastating conflict”.
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In contrast, Branagh’s Hamlet actively disavows the psychoanalytical subtext. 10 Instead the film self consciously attempts to set off any hint of underlying incestuous desire between Hamlet and his mother by emphasizing normative sex throughout the film. The privileging of the visual in Branagh’s film (particularly the persistent emphasis of heterosexual relations in flashback) undermines and distracts the viewer from the oral content of Hamlet’s soliloquies which reveal his erotic obsession with Gertrude’s body (see Burnett, 1997). After the ghost’s appearance, although their dealings have been dynamic and strained, Hamlet becomes gentle and soft to urge Gertrude’s abstinence. Their intimacy is established in the cross cutting, close ups of their faces and Hamlet holds their heads together but the viewer is denied the expected kiss and there is only a chaste hug between them. The scene is void of oedipal tension – even the circling 360° camera angle does not connote voyeurism on illicit lovers (as in Olivier) but the overwrought, spiralling dynamic of a son advising his mother. 11
The casting choice of Julie Christie, who is 19 years older than Branagh and her matronly costume, serves to resolutely affirm their on screen mother/son relationship. In contrast, Olivier’s Gertrude (Eileen Herlie) was only twenty seven when she played the role of mother to the forty year old Olivier, and thus we are alerted to her desirable youth. So too, Glenn Close (in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet ) is only nine years older than Mel Gibson. She is portrayed as a heady adolescent torn between two lovers: she skips about the castle (the camera unable to keep up) emphasizing her youth, frivolousness and energy (Rutter, 2001, 33). She is further sexualized by the audience’s inferences about her prior film character incarnations ( Fatal Attraction [1987] and Dangerous Liaisons [1988]).12 Her star power, combined with the privileging camera work, adds to the perceived significance of Gertrude’s character. The youthful sexuality of Olivier’s and Zeffirelli’s Gertrude “might also work to undo or reverse the generational direction of the incestuous subtext” (Donaldson, 1990, p.37). Oedipal fantasies are played out on screen with women whose comparative age to the protagonist diminishes the full ugly aversion of
10 For discussion of the “aesthetic of disavowal”, a displacement that moves the point of signification, see Mulvey (1996, p.12 14). Branagh’s film is obsessed with the father figure instead, see Lehmann and Starks (2000, p.6 11). 11 Lehmann and Starks (2000, p.6) point out that Hamlet assumes the figure of analyst, the Lacanian “subject presumed to know”, and they argue Branagh assumes similar authority. 12 Zeffirelli’s casting choice of Glenn Close and Mel Gibson as mother and son “effects a cinematic intertextuality” (Charnes, 1997, p.8) that plays upon their other cinematic roles, which emphasize their oedipal construction here.
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oedipal desire and their status as monstrous mother. Their apparently charismatic, youthful relationship is generally only disturbing when we bear in mind their mother/son status.
The Mother in the Wilderness
The bedroom is also determined as a location of abject motherhood in Taymor’s Titus . Tamora’s relationship with her husband Saturninus is quasi maternal: we never see them in the bedroom being sexually intimate, and their physicality is limited to Tamora’s soothing strokes. This is reinforced by the she wolf sculpture that sits above Saturninus’ oversized throne: both act as visual metonymies, associating Saturninus with a vulnerable infant and Tamora with the mythical mother of Rome (nourishing, and protecting Romulus and Remus) and conversely with her own animalistic drives. Instead, she lies suggestively with her sons in bed, and romps with them in the woods. The woods provide Tamora and her sons with the freedom to enact their uncivilised, feral desires. The dark “loathsome pit” that Aaron has dug to capture Titus’ sons is emblematic of the “swallowing womb” (2.2.239) of the abject maternal body (see below for discussion on maternal cannibalism). Tamora wearing a perverse little red riding hood ensemble stimulates sex with her illicit lover Aaron, rather appropriately, on the forest floor. Significantly she tells him “this is the nurse’s lullaby to bring her babe asleep” before kissing him, thus orally identifying herself as his mother, yet physically acts as his lover. Crowl (2000, p.46) argues the encounter is “limp and passionless rather than charged and sexy” and indeed the exchange seems devoid of sexual energy, but this actually serves to expose the rampant desires between Tamora and her sons in the next scene. The sons tormenting of Lavinia is interspersed with kissing and fondling with Tamora (the circling camera heightens the sense of dread and horror) and thus castrating Lavinia is imagined as consummation with the mother: “the worse to her the better you love me”. In desperation, Lavinia taunts the son’s masculinity by employing images of nursing: “the milk tho suck’st from her did turn to marble”, thus constructing Tamora as the archaic mother, the abject that must be repelled to enable masculine selfhood. However, this feeding metaphor is adapted by Tamora to construct Lavinia as food: “shall I rob my sweet sons of their feed?” She is horrifically figured as a mother’s providence to her son’s and her rape is testament to their phallic desire for their mother. 13
13 For discussion of Lavinia as castrated body which falls outside the remit of this essay, see Starks (2002, p.125 and p.127 29).
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The potency and authority of the Macbethian witches is also evoked in their wild location. Welles’ film opens with the metaphorical “birth” of the clay voodoo doll Macbeth from the witch’s bubbling cauldron. Similarly Polanski’s Macbeth visits the lair full of (ugly) naked women mixing potions. Their group nakedness, combined with the metaphors of the potion and cauldron, their orgasmic squeals, and the image of the newborn baby removed from the womb in the nightmare sequence, portray them as symbols of malevolent maternal femininity. Their abjection stems from this simultaneous ability to attract and repulse the male subject. Indeed, Macbeth is first drawn toward the lair by the witch who lifts up her skirt to show her crotch region, while making an “err” sound (the noise of repulsion, combined with the flirtatious gesture, links the lair to the pit of the womb) and Macbeth’s sexual desire transfers from Lady Macbeth to the witches in the film. Macbeth’s second visit to them is framed by the Lady watching him leave wearing a Marian blue shade (covertly signaling her castrated body), and then when the witches disappear the scene cuts to Lady Macbeth asleep on the bed holding Macbeth’s cloak (registering his absence from the marital bed). In both films, the witches’ isolated, non domestic locations signal that they offer an alternative to patriarchal power and control. As Eagleton (1986, p.3) identifies “their words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed positions, unhinging received meanings as they dance, dissolve and re materialize”. Or to appropriate Kristeva (1982, p.4), they do not “respect borders, positions rules” and are found in the “in between, the ambiguous, composite”. The lack of fixed, domestic place identifies the feminine as abject.
In the Macbeth play text female power and control, represented by Lady Macbeth and the witches, undermines Macbeth’s sense of male identity and autonomy. As Adelman (1992, p.131) highlights, “the maternal constitutes the suffocating matrix from which he [Macbeth] must break free”. Macbeth’s contradictory fantasy about escaping completely from absolute, destructive maternal power (“none of woman born, shall harm Macbeth” [4.1.80 81]) encapsulates the tensions within his own concept of masculine selfhood. Lady Macbeth and the witches’ feminine powers are ultimately impossible to escape and they are visually and thematically united in the selected films of Macbeth (echoing their dual construction in the play text [Adelman, 1992, p.134]). Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Kumonoso-djo, 1957), a Japanese adaptation of Macbeth ,14 aligns Asaji (Lady
14 The film uses none of the original play’s words (it is entirely in Japanese) but powerfully develops the play’s fusion of superstition, psychology and politics. For further information on Kurosawa’s Shakespeare films see, Kishi and Bradshaw (2005, p.126 45), and Dawson (2006, p.155 74).
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Macbeth) with the grotesque femininity of the witches in her curious disappearances and reappearances, her seemingly supernatural powers, their similar mask like face’s and the eerie swishing kimono sound. In Polanski’s film, Lady Macbeth is associated with the feminine evil of the witches by the mirroring of feminine malevolence/madness with nakedness. The collective nudity of the witches group is paralleled to Lady Macbeth naked in her bedroom. Although watched by the male doctor in her private quarters, it does not register as sexual voyeurism but as a tragically castrated body. Her pathetic vulnerability in this film is further compounded in the visual link with the young naked Macduff boy being affectionately bathed by his mother. In this scene, Lady Macduff is tragically powerless to protect him when the domestic space is invaded by outside masculine forces, highlighting the susceptibility of the confined female.
In contrast, at the height of her feminine powers, Lady Macbeth imagines simultaneously readying her body and her castle against the arrival of Duncan. Having already laid plans with Macbeth to murder Duncan (significantly while in bedroom), she watches the King’s party progressing towards the castle from its ramparts while the internalized voice over narrates the “unsex me here” soliloquy. In choosing to situate the speech upon the ramparts, the film constructs the castle as Lady Macbeth’s body hardened against Duncan: in voice over, while maintaining a hostile stare, she says “make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visiting of nature shake my fell purpose”. The metaphors adopted imagine an attack on her reproductive functions and figures her desire for castration, the disavowal of femininity. Lady Macbeth thus attempts to neutralize the masculine intrusion which is enabled by the feminization of the domestic space. Curiously, she does not complete the full soliloquy – leaving out the reference to her breast milk as gall (1.5.52 55) and similarly her lines concerning her plucking her nipple from her babe and dashing out its brains (1.7.60 65) is omitted in this film. Hindle (2007, p.214) argues that this sanitization of Lady Macbeth’s lines and her physical beauty reduces her tragic stature. However, in concentrating on her feminine beauty, the full intensity of her decline into naked vulnerability and madness can be visually registered by the viewer.
The Mother on the Stairs
The disturbance of patriarchal power is also signalled in female negotiation of the stairs. The stairs represent the connections between the rooms and relationships of the house and their meaning
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and significance is only evoked in the confrontations which occur there. 15 The use of stairs as a scene for mother/son conflict is compellingly realised in Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1996). The film is peppered with highly significant scenes conveying the castrating power of Richard’s mother. 16 Her disproportionate presence and number of lines (she takes some of the lines and qualities of the omitted Queen Margaret) highlights the director’s intended reading that Richard’s evil is motivated by his mother’s rejection. 17 After a couple of scenes that foreground the strained mother/son relationship (the Duchess’ smile fade at the celebratory ball; her ignoring of Richard after Clarence’s death; her mock blessing on the stairs where her rejection is tempered by Buckingham’s address of “My Lord Protector” – Richard’s new political position), the seminal exchange again takes place on the stairs. She rails against him and the “grievous burden” of his birth and though he is at first untroubled by her remarks, his emerging dismay is apparent in his pause on the stair, while she continues to rage against all the stages of his life from a couple of steps above. On “bloody”, Richard permits himself a small self satisfied smile, which quickly fades when his mother comes level with him and angrily hisses about his loathsome company. Though he tries to interrupt, the Queen determinedly continues and in close up, she declares “take with you my most grievous curse”. The close up reaction shot shows Richard’s stung expression, the pain of his mother’s rejection etched over his face. Indeed, her words return to haunt him in his nightmare sequences, replacing the textual curses of his victims. After the final curse, the duchess descends the stairs off camera, and a long sinister music note is held while the camera registers Richard’s speechless devastation. The scene reveals Richard’s surprising vulnerability and susceptibility to his mother’s influence and rejection. Here she is concerned with distinguishing herself from her son, by being repulsed by her son’s deformed body and polluted soul. He is the abject that his mother disavows to reclaim her sense of self and thus the scene is symptomatic of the mother’s repulsion of what is and is not herself (Kristeva, 1982). As McKellen (1996, p.22) articulates, the scene exemplifies “the verbal and emotional abuse which from infancy has
15 Donaldson (1990, p.39 63) explores how stairs in Olivier’s Hamlet are often the setting for violence and the repeated motif of the attacker fleeing upward leaving the victim, points to the themes of Hamlet and also the director’s own personal boyhood experiences. 16 The strained, oppressive relationship between mother and son is typical of the classic gangster movie (e.g. Scarface [1983], Public Enemy [1998], White Heat [1949]). See Loehlin (1997, p.73 74.) 17 Indeed Rutter (2007, p.250 52) praises the extra textual narrative allowed for women in Loncraine’s film. They are the only figures that oppose his nihilistic agency.
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formed her youngest son’s character and behaviour”. Although this psychological reading is overly simplistic, the rejection is established as one of his primary motivations for his ruthless climb to power. His masculinity is reestablished by rejecting the maternal – that seeks to deny herself as origin of his deformity – and by attacking the family that the maternal body has produced.
However, Richard’s violent unmaking of the maternal body, the origin of his selfhood, is never fully realized in this film. Adelman (1992, p.9) argues that the play text makes the female characters increasingly powerless before removing them from the stage altogether. In this film though, because of an intertextual reference, Richard’s mother is profoundly present in act five. At the film’s conclusion, having climbed stairways pursued by Richmond to the top of a tower, Richard’s defining relationship with his mother is evoked in the explicit allusion to White Heat (1949). Richard plunges to his fiery death, reminiscent of Coby Jarret’s defiance on top of an exploding petroleum tank (yelling “On top of the world, Ma”). Indeed the soundtrack operates as a leitmotif, glossing this visual allusion, with Al Jonson singing “I’m sitting on top of the world”. Just as Ma Jarrett is constructed as a castrating mother, in this scene guilt is similarly assigned to the maternal womb (see Fischer, 1996, p.92 110). For Richard, his mother is both the origin and the destination – the very hinge of his masculine self identity.
Welles’ Macbeth also stunningly adopts the stairway as metaphor for power dynamics. In an impressive ten minute extended take, featuring Macbeth and Lady Macbeth before and after the off stage murder of Duncan, the stairs to Duncan’s room, (aided by the low and high angle shots), enacts the switching dominance of one character over the other. Before the murder, Lady Macbeth is on a higher level to taunt Macbeth; she reasserts her supremacy by moving up the stairs to replace the daggers; and stands above the now dazed and fearful Macbeth to instruct the clean up. Macbeth is only once on a higher step when he pauses to tell Lady Macbeth “I have done the deed”. The murder of Duncan here, as in the play text, becomes the test of Macbeth’s virility and manhood: “when you durst do it, then you were a man” (1.7.37). As Adelman (1992, p.138) posits, “if he cannot perform the murder, he is in effect reduced to the helplessness of an infant subject to her rage”. In repeatedly positioning Macbeth below Lady Macbeth on the stairs, Welles renders her his castrating mother.
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The Mother in the Kitchen
Similarly, Morrissette’s Scotland PA (a modern comedy version of Macbeth set in a Pennsylvania burger restaurant in the mid 1970’s) , portrays Pam McBeth’s (Lady Macbeth) powers and influence over Mac[beth] as resolutely feminine. She adopts a distinctively motherly role and tone in encouraging the infantile Mac with practical advice in all aspects of shop management and murder, yet simultaneously uses her sexuality to control and reward Mac: she convinces him to murder Duncan by sensuously whispering and kissing him and he is repeatedly rewarded with kinky sex. Hence, Pam’s abjection is focused on this slippage between her roles as sexual wife and loving mother. Her disturbance of identity is echoed in the film’s self consciousness: by focusing on the high brow merits of vegetarianism versus meat as murder, the film betrays a sense of self loathing in its own consuming and recycling of the Shakespearean text. The restaurant now figuratively serves up Duncan to its cannibal customers (in the film and to the viewers). Pam’s new control over the kitchen resolutely links her to the source of the abject – Duncan’s dead flesh as food. The kitchen is thus sexualized, stressing the connection between food, death, guilt, consumption and sexuality. This train of associations is vividly realized when, located in her own private kitchen, the provocatively dressed Pam takes a chopping board and knife and personally dismembers her “infected” hand, the symbol of her guilt. The act dually signals the abject in the dismembered body part and onto the monstrous sexualized female who disturbed the ideological understanding of the kitchen as a place of motherly providence. 18
Titus continually focuses on the kitchen – eating and the table – as a site of abject femininity. 19 Tamora moves from enacting oedipal desires to being a manifestation of the monstrous womb of the archaic mother, a progression primarily facilitated by the Penny Arcade Nightmare (PAN) sequences, culminating in the final banquet scene. Generally, the PANs are extended meditations on the abject, as they focus on the blurred boundaries between alive/corpse, flesh/meat, attraction/repulsion, clean/unclean, human/animal, profane/divine, illusion/substance (see Kristeva, 1982). The fifth PAN blurs the boundaries between reality and nightmare: “at first the audience should believe that the event is a figment of Titus’
18 In a similar scene in Titus , in which Aaron chops off Titus’ hand in a domestic kitchen, the abject is only focused on dismemberment. 19 Taymor (2000, p.175). highlights that “Tamora, the Goth queen, could be the precursor for Lady Macbeth”. The similar imagery of abject motherhood in the studied films extends the parallels.
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tormented mind soon it becomes apparent that the masquerade is not a vision but a reality” (Taymor, 2000, p.185). Tamora really is dressed as the goddess revenge, while her sons play Rape (in bra and pants, with owl wings) and Murder (wearing a tiger head), heightening the abject in this collapse between animal/human and masculinity/femininity. 20 Tamora wears a fetishized costume and an armour plate in the shape of a pregnant (or perhaps obese) female body – with swollen breasts and stomach – constructing her as monstrous feminine. From one of her oversized breasts comes a plastic tube (emblematic umbilical cord) which feeds smoky nourishment to Murder/Demetrius at her feet. Here, she embodies the phallic mother whose monstrous desire stems from her possessive attachment to her sons, and such attachment also renders her the archaic mother of suffocating maternity (Starks [2002, p.131] posits her only as phallic mother).
The figuration of Tamora as archaic mother is made literal in the banquet scene. Absurd and grotesque humour (the abject) is employed in the opening shot of two flesh filled pies cooling on the open windowsill, as the curtain flutters in the wind and 1950s style Italian music plays. This construction of idealised, feminine domesticity that is focussed on nurturing and providing is parodied by the gender of the chef and the contents of the pies. It also links with the film’s opening sequence, where Lucius plays war with the objects on the kitchen table without the supervision of a mother figure. It is curious that Lucius also articulates his desire to kill a fly at the kitchen table, surrounded by male father figures and the castrated Lavinia. The mother is thus repeatedly figured as absent from her traditional position, defined by lack. 21 In the final banquet table scene, Tamora literally becomes the abject maternal body: the devouring womb. In unwittingly consuming her own sons, the film explores the subject’s desire for and simultaneous terror of being ingested by the mother, fused once again with the maternal body – the origin and destination (Starks, 2002, p.125). Cannibalism here, as with the implicit cannibalism of Scotland PA , confronts the fear of the consuming maternal body: 22 “Tamora’s womb [is] ultimately her children’s tomb” (Rutter, 2007, p.264). In a highly comical and yet repulsive scene
20 As Starks (2002, p.131 32) highlights these emblems of abjection often underpin constructions of the male monster in horror films. 21 Burnett (2003, p.276 77) and Starks (2002, p.134 37) highlight that father figures in the film, particularly Aaron and later Lucius himself in adopting the black child, offer positive alternative models of maternal parenthood. 22 Adelman (1992, p.3 4), demonstrates how the Richard III play text is diffused with the nightmare of motherhood in adopting the imagery of engulfment and swallowing: “the nightmare of a femaleness that can weaken and contaminate masculinity”.
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which undermines the trope of dining as signifying friendship, Titus, the flamboyant chef serves son pie to his guests. The Italian, 1950s style music rises as the camera shot darts between extreme close ups of the chewing mouths around the table thus emphasising the full horror of ingestion. When Titus finally announces that Tamora has eaten her own sons, he significantly stabs her in the neck. The neck is associated with perverse feeding and sexuality: the dual aspects of Tamora’s abject motherhood. The cluedo like deployment of the objects of the table for murder (the dagger, the candlestick) harks back to Lucius’ childlike enactment of war with the condiments. The gunshot signals the fall of the dining room walls to reveal its actual location in the centre of a silent, people filled auditorium. The dining room is thus constructed as a public performance space, where the maternal is assessed and judged. In Tamora’s failure, Lucius assumes the role of maternal nurturer to the illegitimate black baby. 23 By confronting the fear and attraction of the mother, he refigures the monstrous feminine and provides an alternative, transcendent 24 possibility of parenthood in the empowering space outside the performance, beyond the limiting domestic spaces.
In conclusion, the mother is figured as abject because of the slippages between her sexuality and fertility, and the arbitrary construction of associational locations (mother/kitchen, lover/bedroom) highlight the desire to keep female sexuality and motherhood in distinct, separate spheres. The blurring of the boundaries between maternal and sexual flesh is echoed in the conduction of oedipal desires in the mother’s bedroom, the theoretical collapse of difference between kitchen and bedroom as ideological spaces, and the slippage between womb and tomb. The stairs provide a space of negotiation, free from the ideological impositions of rooms and successive examples have developed the possibility of female power play. Furthermore, the space in the wilderness, which is removed from the ideological cage of the domestic, creates possibility, but it is grounded in the subversive. To utilise such positions on the boundary is to be condemned, in these films, as a witch or whore. Attempts to reclaim control over the domestic space (Polanski’s Lady Macbeth and Taymor’s’ Tamora) are ultimately severely punished: these films thus exploit the power of the abject feminine only to reassuringly repress and vanquish its power by the
23 Starks (2002, p.134 36) argues he becomes the “final boy”, constructed as feminine, thus inverting the horror movie tradition of the “final girl” who has masculine characteristics. 24 Transcendence, according to Simon de Beauvoir (1949), is the ability of the masculine subject to be active and subjective.
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conclusion. Despite the transgressive potential of the abject, these films ultimately reaffirm cultural and social order (Creed, 1996, p.13 14) and in doing so highlight (patriarchal) society’s unconscious fears of the abject mother, the horror of femininity, sexuality and repressed desire. 25 To associate the maternal with space imposes limits on female self identification and relinquishes female claims to transcendence and authentic subjectivity. Rather than being represented as actively subjective without ideological limits, she is constructed and restricted by the masculine interpretations of the locations she occupies. Hence, she is the bearer, rather than the creator of meaning (Mulvey, 1996).
Works Cited
Adelman, J. (1992) Suffocating Mothers . New York and London: Routledge. Beauvoir (de), S. (1997 [1949]) The Second Sex. Ed. and Trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Vintage. Burnett, M.T. (1997) “The ‘Very Cunning of the Scene’: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet ”. Literature/Film Quarterly, 25 (2), p.78 82. ——— (2003) “Contemporary Film Versions of the Tragedies”, in Dutton, R. and Howard, J.E. (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare's Works . Oxford: Blackwell, p.262 83. Charnes, L. (1997) “Dismember Me: Shakespeare, Paranoia, and the Logic of Mass Culture”. Shakespeare Quarterly, 48 (1), p.1 16. Creed, B. (1993) The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis . New York and London: Routledge. ——— (1996) “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imagery Abjection”, in Grant, B.K. (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film . Austin: University of Texas, p.35 65. Crowl, S. (2000) “Titus”. Shakespeare Bulletin , 18 (1), p.46 47. Dangerous Liaisons (1988) Directed by Stephen Frears [Film]. USA/UK: Lorimar Film Entertainment. Dawson, A. (2006) “Cross Cultural Interpretation: Reading Kurosawa, Reading Shakespeare”, in Henderson, D.E. (ed.), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen . Oxford: Blackwell, p.155 74.
25 Laura Mulvey (1996) argues that film can be understood as a “massive screen on which collective fantasy, anxiety, fear and their effects can be projected” (p.12).
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Donaldson, P.S. (1990) “Olivier, Hamlet, and Freud”, in Donaldson, P.S. (ed.), Shakespeare Films/Shakespeare Directors. Boston: Unwin Hyman, p.31 67. Eagleton, T. (1986) William Shakespeare . Oxford: Blackwell. Fatal Attraction (1987) Directed by Adrian Lyne [Film]. USA: Paramount Pictures. Fischer, L. (1996) Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood and Genre . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Guntner, J.L. (2007) “Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear on Film”, in Jackson, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film . 2 nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.120 40. Hamlet (1948) Directed by Laurence Olivier [Film]. UK: Two Cities Films. Hamlet (1990) Directed by Franco Zeffirelli [Film]. France: Canal+. Hamlet (1996) Directed by Kenneth Branagh [Film]. UK/US: Castle Rock Entertainment. Hindle, M. (2007) Studying Shakespeare on Film . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, R. (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film . 2 nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jorgens, J.J. (1977) Shakespeare on Film . Bloomington: University Press of America. Kaplan, E.A. (1992) Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama . New York and London: Routledge. ——— (1993) Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera . New York and London: Routledge. Kishi, T. and Bradshaw, G. (2005) “Shakespeare and Japanese Film: Kurosawa Akira”, in Shakespeare in Japan. London: Continuum, p.126 45. Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection . Trans. L.S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lehmann, C. and Starks, L.S. (2000) “Making Mother Matter: Repression, Revision, and the Stakes of ‘Reading Psychoanalysis into’ Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet .” Early Modern Literary Studies 6 (1), p.1 18. Loehlin, J.N. (1997) “‘Top of the World, Ma:’ Richard III and Cinematic Convention”, in Boose, L.E and Burt, R. (eds.), Shakespeare, the Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV and Video . New York and London: Routledge, p.68 80. Macbeth (1948) Directed by Orson Welles [Film]. USA: Mercury Productions. Macbeth (1971) Directed by Roman Polanski [Film]. UK/USA: Caliban Films.
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Manvell, R. (1971) Shakespeare and The Film . London, Littlehampton Book Services. McKellen, I. (1996) William Shakespeare’s Richard III,¨A Screenplay Written by Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine, Annotated and Introduced by Ian McKellen . Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press. Mulvey, L. (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, p.6 18. ——— (1996) Fetishism and Curiosity . Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nelmes, J. (2007) Introduction to Film Studies . 4 th Edition. London and New York: Routledge. Public Enemy (1998) Directed by Jay Woelfel [Film]. USA: Wildcat Entertainment. Richard III (1996) Directed by Richard Loncraine [Film]. UK/USA: Bayly/Paré Productions. Russo, M.J. (1994) The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity . London and New York: Routledge. Rutter, C.C. (2001) Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. New York and London: Routledge. ——— (2007) “Looking at Shakespeare’s women on film”, in Jackson, R. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film . 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 245 66. Scarface (1983) Directed by Brian De Palma [Film]. USA: Universal Pictures. Scotland PA (2001) Directed by Billy Morissette [Film]. USA: Abandon Pictures. Stallybass, P. (1986) “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed”, in Ferguson, M.W., Quilligan, M. and Vickers, N.J. (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.123 44. Starks, L.S. (2002) “Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor’s Titus ”, in Starks, L.S. and Lehmann, C. (eds.), The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative cinema and Theory. London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, p.121 42. Taylor, Neil. (1994) “The Films of Hamlet”, in Davies, A. and Wells, S. (eds.) Shakespeare and the Moving Image . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.180 95. Taymor, J. (1999) “Titus”, in Blumenthal, E. and Taymor, J. (eds.), Julie Taymor: Playing With Fire . 2 nd Edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, p.225 34. ——— (2000) Titus: The Illustrated Screenplay; adapted from the play by William Shakespeare. New York: Newmarket Press.
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Throne of Blood (1957) Directed by Akira Kurosawa [Film]. Japan: Toho Company. Titus (1995) Directed by Julie Taymor [Film]. UK: Clear Blue Sky Productions. White Heat (1949) Directed by Raoul Walsh [Film]. USA: Warner Brothers Pictures. Zeffirelli, F. (1991) “Franco goes to Elsinore”, Independent on Sunday , London, 14 April.
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