Women in House of Cards Master’S Diploma Thesis
Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Bc. Viktória Fedorová
Women in House of Cards Master’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph. D. 2019
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author’s signature
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank my supervisor, Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph.D. for all his help and valuable advice. I would also like to thank my partner, friends and family for their support. Table of Contents
1.Introduction………………………………………………………………….1
2. Foucault’s Theory of Power………………………………………………...4
2.1. What is Power?…………………………………………………………4
2.2. Disciplinary Power……………………………………………………..9
2.3. Panopticism……………………………………………………………15
3. House of Cards: The Book Trilogy………………………………………..18
3.1. The Background……………………………………………………….18
3.2. Plot Overview………………………………………………………….20
3.3. Power Relations in the Books……………………………………….....23
3.4. Mattie Storin……………………………………………………………26
3.5. Sally Quine……………………………………………………………..33
3.6. Claire Carlsen…………………………………………………………..38
4. BBC Adaptation…………………………………………………………….42
4.1. The Background………………………………………...……………...42
4.2. Plot Overview…………………………………………………………..44
4.2. Power Relations in the Series…………………………………………..45
4.3. Mattie Storin……………………………………………………………48
4.4. Sarah Harding…………………………………………………………..54
4.5. Claire Carlsen…………………………………………………………..58
5. Netflix Adaptation…………………………………………………………..63
5.1. The Background………………………………………………………..63
5.2. Plot Overview…………………………………………………………..64
5.3. Power Relations in Netflix Adaptation…………………………………67
5.4. Zoe Barnes……………………………………………………………...69 5.5. Jackie Sharp…………………………………………………………...75
5.6. Claire Underwood……………………………………………………..80
6. Conclusion………………………………………………………………….86
7. Works Cited………………………………………………………………...89
8. Resume (Czech)…………………………………………………………….93
9. Resume (English)…………………………………………………………...94
1. Introduction
Power as defined by French philosopher Michel Foucault cannot be held by a single person; it is distributed throughout the social relations where it functions through the tactics and strategies. While strategies are found at the macrolevel of governmentality, the tactics are found at the microlevel of the personal relations. One of the tactics applied in the exercise of power is discipline. This is the tactics that is frequently used by the main protagonist in his relationships with women who work for him, both in the novel and two subsequent adaptations, the miniseries made by BBC and the series made by Netflix. He works as the watchmen in the Panopticon who surveils and punishes.
The aim is to create “docile bodies”. This term is described by Foucault in
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The creation of the docile body is
“formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful and conversely” (D&P 138). The aim of the tactics of discipline is to function with the minimum level of the coercion while achieving maximum effectivity of the performance of the subjected. The power relation is used to make them to become the subjects of this subjection and they constantly correct their behavior in accordance with what they have been trained to do.
However, freedom of the individuals who are subjected to this exercise of power is the main condition for the power relation to exist. When physical coercion is used, it is no longer the power relation; power functions through language rather than violence.
This means that the exercise of power can raise a multitude of responses and there is never an absolute domination over the subject. The resistance is crucial part of the power relation and often shapes this relation and offers the characters the way out. As the main tactics of the disciplinary power is the individualization of the body which is
1 achieved by controlling the person’s time, actions and movement, the way out is achieved by resisting this individualization. This way out is often hinted at by the other people who are crucial in the lives of the women who are subjected to Urquhart’s and
Underwood’s discipline. As Foucault puts it in “The Subject and Power”, “maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political "double bind," which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures” (“Subject” 784). Foucault makes clear that power can be properly understood only through the forces that resist it and this is what the feminine characters in the books and the series do- they shape the power by their resistance which is internal to the power. However, as the power functions through all social relations through a network, the alignments with the other characters that are important in the women’s lives are crucial for their resistance. The more isolated the characters are, the more efficient the main character’s discipline.
The processes of the disciplinary power as defined by Foucault are to be analyzed on set of three feminine characters from the book- Mattie Storin, Sally Quine and Claire
Carlsen, three characters from the BBC adaptation- Mattie Storin, Sarah Harding and
Claire Carlsen and three characters from Netflix adaptation- Claire Underwood, Jackie
Sharp and Zoe Barnes. Although the tactics of the discipline applied on them differ, the main protagonist never achieves the total domination because the resistance is vital part of power relations and, although the women are in the tactically worse situation, they are never entirely powerless and they are provided with the way out. Foucault’s book
Discipline & Punish and his essay “The Subject and Power” provide the main theoretical framework for this analysis.
In the second chapter, the concept of power as well as the tactics of the disciplinary
2 power is described. It also covers the concept of Panopticon as the main representation of the disciplinary power. In the third chapter, the relation between women and the main protagonist of the novel are analyzed. The chapter starts with the description of the background of the novels provided mainly by the author Michael Dobbs. This section is followed by the plot overview and the explanation of the role of the main protagonist in the power relations in general which is followed by the analysis of the relations between main protagonist and the women. The fourth chapter covers the analysis of the BBC miniseries, with the description of the background, plot overview and the analysis of the power relations as a whole, followed by the analysis of the relations between main protagonist and women. The fifth chapter follows the same structure with the analysis of Netflix adaptation. The last chapter is the conclusion where the results of the analysis are presented.
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2. Foucault’s Theory of Power
2.1. What is Power?
The concept of power is the main subject of Foucault’s work. According to him, the power is omnipresent in the social relationships. In Discipline & Punish he says that
“power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege', acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions - an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated” (D&P
26). Power cannot be held by the single person– it can never be possessed– and can be found across the social relations which are shaped by it. In “Subject and Power”, he makes an assumption that “in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations” (“Subject” 780). Thus, for Foucault the means of resistance are the important aspect of the power relations through which these power relations can be analyzed. Only through studying those who are subjected to the exercise of power can one see functioning of this power.
Similarly, in Foucault’s “Two Lectures” published in Power/Knowledge, he describes power as dynamic and circulating, as “something which only functions in the form of a chain” (P/K 98). According to his description, “power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation” (P/K 98). The bodies over which the power is exercised are
“not only its inert or consenting target”; their response is equally important in the relationship where power is exercised. Joseph Rouse provides a further explanation of this concept in his essay “Power/Knowledge”: “Power is not possessed by a dominant
4 agent, nor located in that agent’s relations to those dominated, but is instead distributed throughout complex social networks” (Rouse 109). These social networks are the basis for the power to exist; without their support the dominant agent cannot exercise the power over the submissive agent.
Richard A. Lynch talks about this network of relations in his essay “Foucault’s
Theory of Power” where he explains Foucault’s view of power. He defines “the basic characteristics of power, according to Foucault” as “a network of force relations throughout society, relations that are characterized by resistance and which interact by means of local tactics and larger strategies” (Lynch 14). The word interact is important here, because it implicates that both sides of the relation are equally important. Power is to be found everywhere in the social relations and the resistance is always to be found integral to its existence. Various tactics and strategies are used to influence the person’s actions- “force relations consist of whatever in one's social interactions that pushes, urges or compels one to do something” (Lynch 19). But these forces are successful only as long as one allows them to be transferred through his body- as Lynch describes it,
“You still choose what you'll wear each day, even if those choices are conditioned and limited by the ‘strategical situation’ in which you find yourself” (Lynch 24). Although the strategies of power influence one in various ways, it is the individual that, in the end, chooses how to react.
Thus, these force relations function in both ways– the influence is not one-sided; as
Zohreh Ramin writes in “Shakespeare's Richard III and Macbeth: A Foucauldian
Reading”, “due to the persistent resistance and struggles, power is never able to achieve absolute unity” (Ramin 58). All of these definitions contain the prerequisite of the existence of freedom at the part of the subjected side. According to Foucault, this freedom ensures that “faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses,
5 reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up” (“Subject” 789). When physical coercion is present, it is no longer the power relation because “slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains” (“Subject” 790). The power is exercised through the discourse by applying various tactics and strategies and not through violence and coercion. The language is the tool in the power tactics and strategies and the aim is to act upon one’s actions rather than one’s body.
In “Subject and Power”, Foucault describes these power strategies as “totality of the means put into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it”
(“Subject” 793). He provides the three explanations of the word strategy: as “the means employed to attain a certain end”; “the manner in which a partner in a certain game acts with regard to what he thinks should be the action of the others and what he considers the others to think to be his own- ” and “the procedures used in a situation of confrontation to deprive the opponent of his means of combat and to reduce him to giving up the struggle” (“Subject” 793). It is “the mode of action upon possible action, the action of others” (“Subject” 794). The power strategies aim to influence the actions of the others so that the strategic position of the dominant agents in the network of the relations can be maintained and preserved. The power is exercised over the subjects who still possess the free will and thus shape this power relation either with their obedience or with their resistance.
Joseph Rouse explains this in his essay when he talks about the functioning of the power relations and the position of the dominant agents:
Power is exercised through an agent’s actions only to the extent that other agents’
actions remain appropriately aligned with them. The actions of dominant agents are
therefore constrained by the need to sustain that alignment in the future; but,
simultaneously, subordinate agents may seek ways of challenging or evading that
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alignment (Rouse 111).
Thus, the power relations exist only as long as the other agents are prepared to act in accordance with the agent’s wishes. However, the people who are subjected to the exercise of power are not only the in the role of the subjected but at the same time they act as the subjects of their own kind of power either to act in accordance with the agent’s wishes or resist the exercise of power.
Furthermore, Foucault continues by describing the strategy of struggle as internal to the power relation because “there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight” (“Subject” 794). The actions of the agent are limited by the actions of the others and their responses to one’s exercise of power. One is never entirely able to dominate other individuals; the possibility of revolt is always out there.
There is always “the means of escape or possible flight”; one can never achieve the total subordination and total individualization because the ones over whom the power is exercised shape the whole network of relations by their resistance. Later in the essay,
In his essay “Power/Knowledge, Joseph Rouse provides further explanation of
Foucault’s power structures working as a net-like structure: He further explains this notion in his on the example of Thomas Wartenberg’s description of the functioning of this social networks:
Wartenberg’s point is that even in situations in which we might characteristically
describe one person as having or exercising power over another, that power
depends upon other persons or groups acting in concert with what the first person
does. In Wartenberg’s examples, when teachers grade students or employers
discipline or fire employees, they exercise power only when others (the school
admissions officers or possible future employers) act, or are prepared to act,
in ways oriented by their own actions. Agents may thereby also exercise power
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unbeknownst to themselves, or even contrary to their intentions, if other agents
orient their actions in response to what the first agents do (Rouse 109).
This means that the exercise of power is conditioned by the social relationships because the one who exercises the power over somebody is limited by the actions of other people who are prepared to act either on his behalf or in opposition to it. Therefore, the exercise of power is conditioned by the network of social relations which also shape the power relationship. The power is omnipresent for each person acts in accordance with the approval or disapproval of other people employed in the power structure.
Richard A. Lynch explains this notion of power in his essay “Foucault’s Theory of Power” published in the book Michel Foucault: Key Concepts: “Power arises in all kinds of relationships, and can be built up from the bottom of a pyramid (or any structure)” (Lynch 13). The actions of those at the bottom of the social pyramid are equally important in the power structures as the actions of those on the top for both influence the power relations. The power relations cannot exist without the possibility of resistance, for the possibility to resist is internal to the structure of power relation.
As Foucault puts it, “every strategy of confrontation dreams of becoming a relationship of power, and every relationship of power leans toward the idea that, if it follows its own line of development and comes up against direct confrontation, it may become the winning strategy” (“Subject” 794). Thus, the power is omnipresent and the exercise of power always works side by side with resistance. While the dominating side might be using tactics and strategies which are supposed to minimalize the resistance towards the strategic position of the dominating party, the subjected party also pushes and “dreams of becoming a relationship of power”. This alignment between the resistance and the exercise of power makes it virtually impossible to escape power because it is present everywhere throughout the social relations.
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In summary, the exercise of power can be reversed through the resistance because the subject of this exercise possesses a free will and thus can change the power structures or, other way round, the exercise of power can be successful when it is not resisted and when the strategy applied in this exercise makes it virtually impossible to protest. To put it simply, the exercise of power by one agent is limited by the actions of the agent over whom it is exercised and the strategy used by the agent who is in the dominant position is dependent on the actions of the agent over whom he exercises his power and also by the network of power relations that make this exercise or resistance possible.
2.1. Disciplinary Power
The term disciplinary power has been coined by Foucault in his work Discipline &
Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In this book he exemplifies the power structures of the disciplinary power on the prisons and their functioning and makes a distinction between the premodern type of power which he calls sovereign power and the modern disciplinary power which arises as a result of the Enlightenment in eighteenth and nineteenth century. This distinction is made visible through the institution of punishment which exemplifies the changes in the different treatment of human beings and the differences in how the power is exercised and how it is functioning not only in the prisons but in the whole societal body of the Western countries.
According to Foucault, the change in the different functioning of the sovereign and the disciplinary power can be encountered mainly in “the disappearance of the torture as a public spectacle” (D&P 7). While under the sovereign power the bodies of the condemned have been rendered visible and their crimes repeated or even amplified by their executioners, the structures of the disciplinary power are made in such a way as to be invisible to those who are being dominated. The men who are responsible for the
9 functioning of the discipline work in the shadows and their work is supposed to be invisible. There is no longer the hold over the body of the person and if the violence is used, it is used in such a way as not to be seen: “Justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice. If it too strikes, if it too kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength, but as an element of itself that it is obliged to tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for” (D&P 9). While under the disciplinary power any offence against the laws and the rules imposed by the state has been viewed as a direct offence of the body of the sovereign and has been punished by the torture and violent death of the offender, under the disciplinary power the treatment of the offender is made invisible and the performers of the justice are the men distanced from the institutions that imposes the exercise of power and they work in a dark; they correct without being seen.
However, Foucault claims that even though the philosophers who designed the different treatment of the criminal claim to operate at the level of the soul without touching the body, it is not the case and the body remains the primary object of the disciplinary power, only the practices used to impose the power over the body are different:
One no longer touched the body, or at least as little as possible, and then only
to reach something other than the body itself. It might be objected that
imprisonment, confinement, forced labor, penal servitude, prohibition from entering
certain areas, deportation– which have occupied so important a place in modern
penal systems– are ‘physical penalties’: unlike fines, for example, they directly
affect the body. But the punishment– body relation is not the same as it was in the
torture during public executions. The body now serves as an instrument or
intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in
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order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as
a property (D&P 11).
In fact, the body remains the main area over which the power is exercised, what differs is the way how it is exercised and the functioning of this power because different methods and strategies are applied under the disciplinary power. While the sovereign power has been exercised over the body in a way as to inflict the pain and to repeat the offence of the crime on the offender, the disciplinary power is exercised over the actions of the individual, over his liberties and rights which are taken for granted by this offender. It is no longer the physical domain of the body which is punished but rather the area of its functioning, the body being only “an instrument or intermediary” of this exercise of power.
Foucault concludes this later in the book when he says that “even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use ‘lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue– the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission” (D&P
25). Thus, the body stays equally important for the exercise of power only the entire structure of power relations has changed, and the power is exercised at the domain of the actions. The body is now only “instrument or intermediary” for the exercise of power. One wants to achieve the maximum efficiency of the bodily movements in time and space but the main area of the argumentation of the disciplinary power are the possible actions of this body. The body is seen as part of the network of the social relations, as one of the multitudes of bodies which are meant to be spatialized and individualized so as to control their bodily activities.
Foucault describes the distinction between the sovereign and the disciplinary power:
“In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king’s property, on
11 which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation”
(D&P 109). This exemplifies the notion that has been described before that while under the rule of the sovereign the body has been totally subjected to his will, the disciplinary society is invested in the body as a tool to reach one’s soul by making it useful and by making it a subject of a constant subjection through control of its alignment with the other bodies in the society.
The chief function of the disciplinary power is to serve as a strategy which has the aim of creating “the docile bodies” as they are called by Foucault. This function is not reserved only to prisons for disciplinary power functions across the whole social body, in the families, prisons, asylums, schools, workplaces, etc. because it is exercised “on those one supervises, trains and corrects” (D&P 29). As Foucault makes it clear, “the chief function of the disciplinary power is to ‘train’, rather than to select and to levy; or no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more” (D&P 170).
He continues this claim by saying that the disciplinary power reduces the individuals to the function that they are meant to represent in the society and that their individuality is in fact created as a result of this training:
It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them
together in such a way as to multiply and use them. Instead of bending all its
subjects into a single uniform mass, it separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its
procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units. It
‘trains’ the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into
a multiplicity of individual elements– small, separate cells, organic autonomies,
genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments. Discipline ‘makes’
individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as
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objects and as instruments of its exercise (D&P 170).
The creation of the docile bodies is achieved by the means of individualization, because discipline “makes individuals”. It trains the bodies and ascribes them a certain place and function and also administers their time by the creation of the schedules. Society is structured as one large body which contains the multiplicities of other, smaller bodies which are made from the individual bodies which represent the people. This notion corresponds to that of a power viewed as a network of relations as mentioned in the previous chapter.
Ellen K. Feder describes this in her essay “Power/Knowledge” in which she describes the relation between the power and the knowledge as described by Foucault.
According to her, individuals are assigned certain space in which they can exercise their power and outside of this space, there is no longer power relation for the sphere of the influence they occupy and the individuality assumed in the process of disciplinary power is no longer present:
It is not that the individual in one or the other of these positions "is" powerful in
Foucaultian terms, but that different positions individuals take up or are assigned
afford specific arenas for the exercise of power. Once an individual no longer
occupies a given position– the parent goes to school to finish his college
degree and at least for some part of the day occupies the position of student, or the
clerk at the DMV goes home after a day of work – the power associated with that
position can no longer be exercised (Feder 59).
Thus, the exercise of disciplinary power is limited in accordance with the space which one occupies, and one type of power cannot be exercised in the other domain. The people are individualized to occupy a certain arena and the type of power they are able to exercise is restricted to that arena of influence. Thus, the network of relations as
13 described in the chapter before can be seen projected in the example of the different arenas which operate on their own and, at the same time they produce the multiplicity of bodies which work together and create one larger social body.
Lastly, this training is not the result of the decision of the few powerful individuals who exercise this power from their position of privilege but the disciplinary power functions through the whole social body through the networks and hierarchies, as described on Foucault’s description of the power structures in the previous chapter. The discipline is one of the tactics and strategies which are applied in the exercise of power in order to ensure that the strategic position of those who dominate is preserved and that the bodies move and act in accordance with the wishes of this dominant power. The best description of the mechanism of the disciplinary power is provided in Discipline &
Punish:
This power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who
‘do not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts
pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist
the grip it has on them. This means that these relations go right down into
the depths of society, that they are not localized in the relations between the state
and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and that they do not merely
reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behavior, the general
form of law or government; that although there is continuity (they are indeed
articulated on this form through a whole series of complex mechanisms), there is
neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanisms and modality.
Lastly, they are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation,
focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflicts, of struggles,
and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations (D&P 27).
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This is another instance of the power functioning as a network of relations. The individuals created in the process of training are responsible for certain area of these relations. Furthermore, the notion that power is shaped also by the people over whom it is exercised is also repeated here. Rather than being just a one-way relationship, the power functions as a form of structure in which each member has the power which is either exercised or is a resistance towards the exercise of power by the different person.
The power cannot be present in the one place only; it circulates through the whole social body and the individuals are at the same time “the objects and instruments of its exercise”.
2.3. Panopticism
The best representation of the tactics of disciplinary power is the structure of
Panopticon. It is a prison design by Jeremy Bentham which originates from the eighteenth century. Foucault describes the Panopticon structure in Discipline & Punish:
…at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower; this tower is pierced
with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building
is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they
have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower;
the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other
(Foucault, Discipline 200).
The tower in the center of the Panopticon is the space which is occupied by the watcher whose role is to supervise the individuals in the cells. While the cells of the inmates are made translucent through the use of the windows and this makes the prisoners easy targets of the surveillance, the position of the watcher is designed in a way as to make the position of the guard invisible to the prisoners. As a result, the prisoners are never aware if they are subject to the surveillance or not and this creates a sense of being
15 subjected to the constant gaze of the watcher. But the watcher himself is also subjected to the constant surveillance for his results and his effectivity are also subjected to surveillance and documentation.
As a result of the constant surveillance, the individuals become the agents of their own subjection: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (D&P 202). The individual begins to self-regulate his movements, his gestures and his behavior under the feeling of being constantly watched in order to satisfy the workings of the disciplinary power. He begins to feel responsible for his own subjection. By this design it has been possible to apply constant coercion on the individual bodies in order to make them totally subservient to the structures of power.
This function of the panopticon is also described by Ellen K. Feder in her essay
“Power/Knowledge”:
But among the many lessons of panopticism is that the power that seems focused
on one individual is in fact "distributed" throughout the structure, so that every
individual is at the same time both "object" and "subject" of this power:
the prisoner is "watched", but is being trained to watch himself, to be his own
inspector. The inspector is by definition the "watcher ", and yet he, too, is
the object of a gaze: his performance as watcher is ever under scrutiny (Feder 58).
This explanation of the structures of the panopticon strengthens the notion that the power is omnipresent in the society and each individual is at the same time the watcher and the prisoner who is being watched. The power is not centered in the few individuals but it is present in each social relation.
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Furthermore, by the constant surveillance, the design of panopticon makes it easy to gather the information about the prisoners and thus fulfills another role of the disciplinary society– to gather information about the subjects in order to use them as a tools to strengthen the position of the power. Foucault coins the term power/knowledge
(le savoir-pouvoir) which refers to the mutual constitution of the two. Foucault describes the birth of this relation in Discipline & Punish:
The modelling of the body produces a knowledge of the individual,
the apprenticeship of the techniques induces modes of behavior and the acquisition
of skills is inextricably linked with the establishment of power relations; strong,
skilled agricultural workers are produced; in this very work, provided it is
technically supervised, submissive subjects are produced and a dependable body
of knowledge built up about them. This disciplinary technique exercised upon
the body had a double effect: a ‘soul’ to be known and a subjection to be
maintained (Foucault, Discipline 295).
According to this description the power uses the panopticon to extract knowledge from the individuals which is then used for keeping the individuals subjected to this power in the same way as the public execution has been used under the sovereign power. The institution of public ceremony is no longer necessary for the Panopticon structure to function effectively because the surveillance takes its place. This mutual relationship between the power and the knowledge is clarified by Foucault in an interview with J.-J.
Broucher published in Power/Knowledge: “The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power” (Foucault,
Power 51). Thus, the existence of one presupposes the existence of other.
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3. House of Cards: Book Trilogy
3.1. The Background
In the afterword to the first of the books in the series, the author of the series
Michael Dobbs writes about how the novel came into existence. Working as the Chief of Staff under Thatcher’s administration, Dobbs have had a possibility to get a look of the structures of power. The book has been born out of his dissatisfaction with the politics after the event that became to be known as “Wobble Thursday” when
Thatcher’s irritation finally reached the peak and her sleepless nights and a toothache which followed her during the election campaign resulted in the tempest which in the end resulted in Dobb’s resignation.
When he recollects the night that had led to his resignation, he mentions in an interview that “during a very private meeting at party headquarters I saw Margaret
Thatcher as I had never seen her in all the ten years I had worked for her. She was more than furious; she was almost frothing” (“Glory and despair”). In the afterword to House of Cards, Dobbs says that the inspiration to write the novel has come on the holiday when he has been thinking about the words said earlier by his colleague Willie
Whitelaw who assumed that Thatcher will not last: “This is a woman who will never fight another election” (HoC 376).
This inspired Dobbs to make the plot of the novel about “getting rid of a Prime
Minister” (HoC 376) and he immediately came with the initials for the main character–
FU. The first novel, House of Cards, has been published in 1989. It has been soon made into BBC miniseries which has been very successful. The success of the TV series inspired Dobbs to write the subsequent books in the series, To Play the King in 1992 and The Final Cut in 1994. The sequels to the original novel follow the fall of Margaret
Thatcher in reality and she is even mentioned in The Final Cut when Francis Urquhart
18 wants to surpass her as the longest serving Prime Minister in history. Furthermore, in the last part of the trilogy, her statue is being elevated in the backyard of 10 Downing
Street which is often the source of uneasiness for the main protagonist.
In the interview for The Independent “Is he fibbing? I can’t possibly comment”,
Dobbs discusses how the other two books came to be. He admits that “he was greatly helped by the BBC adaptation, by the brilliant acting of Ian Richardson and the sharp dialogue of Andrew Davies - far better than in that first novel” (“Is he fibbing”). When he had been writing the last two novels of the trilogy, he was aware that they are going to be televised and made into the miniseries. That is why he communicated with the creators of the miniseries and found a great inspiration in their work.
Furthermore, he makes it clear in the introduction to the second book that the king from his second book is not based on the character of Prince Charles even though he is aware that “it was inevitable that some comparison would be made” (TPK ix). Because of the rumors of the Prince Charles’s divorce, he decides to make the king in the book single so as to dispel the comparison between the two. He makes it clear in interviews and in the introduction to the second book that the book is a work of fiction and should be taken as such. When asked about his portrayal of the politicians and the role of his books in the ever increasing skepticism towards the politicians and their good intentions, he also makes it clear that this portrayal is just a fiction and that he still believes that “most politicians are still motivated by good reasons” (“Is he fibbing?”)
Moreover, in this interview he makes it clear that increasing media attention towards the politicians makes it even harder for the politicians motivated by good reasons:
“What worries me is the media pressure they have to suffer, with every aspect of their personal life liable to be exposed. One result will be that good people won't come into politics” (“Is he fibbing?”). This increasing media attention is also visible in the novels,
19 especially in the first novel in the trilogy which contains the portrayal of the journalists and their role in Urquhart’s powerplay and the increasing role of the surveillance as the basis for the stories they publish.
3.2. Plot Overview
The plot of the first of the books in trilogy– House of Cards– begins on the election morning with the main female protagonist, twenty-eight years old journalist Mattie
Storin, who just comes home from a long day at work. Her ambition to become “the best political correspondent in a fiercely masculine world” (HoC 6) is revealed soon after the book begins. It is shown that her tight schedule does not allow her to have a time to spend time with somebody else and that she has been completely encapsulated in her work.
The book continues with the introduction of the main protagonist, a sixty-one years old politician Francis Urquhart who is the Chief Whip of the Conservative Party. His wife Mortima (or Miranda in previous edition of the book) is always at his side as a fellow accomplice in his political conspirations, though in the books she does not play a large role and her character is portrayed only in terms of being the typical wife who supports Urquhart and helps him to achieve his goals and the recognition in his political career.
In the first book, the plot starts with the betrayal of Urquhart who is promised the position of the Foreign Secretary during the election campaign as a reward for his long and loyal service. This position is promised to him by Prime Minister Henry
Collingridge and the Party Chairman, Lord Williams. However, they decide to give the position to someone else because they need Urquhart at the position of the Chief Whip which has been held by him for a long time. Urquhart does not want to stand back and watch others holding the position that he imagined for himself and he comes up with a
20 plan to get a revenge. He aims to get rid of the current Prime Minister and gain the position for himself. On his journey to political power, he needs every help he is able to get and Mattie Storin with her youthful ambition and enthusiasm is an invaluable helper with this endeavor.
She becomes his little helper and his fellow accomplice, through her he is able to shape the discourse of power and get the revenge he wants. With her help he can get the stories he wants out into public and by publishing those stories, she comes closer to the place she wants to occupy in the world of journalism. They become adversaries in a mutually beneficial relationship. By the help of her stories, he manages to crush Henry
Collingridge by spreading false information about supposed corruption on
Collingridge’s side. Later, his mastery of manipulation and his knowledge of the political structures gains him the place of Prime Minister. He does not shy to use the knowledge he gained as a Chief Whip to get away with all of his political opponents.
Again, he uses Mattie, who has fallen in love with him. She helps him to spread the information which disqualifies all of his opponents from the race.
But she hasn’t been the only one who Urquhart has been using as a tool in his strategy. He has been also using Roger O’Neill, the man responsible for the Party’s communication who has a secret addiction to cocaine. He blackmails him in order to get him to do various favors for him. When O’Neill begins to know too much and starts to threaten Urquhart’s position, Urquhart kills him by mixing rat poison into his cocaine.
From this moment, nothing stops him in achieving the position he has wanted.
However, Mattie finds out about his strategy of getting rid of his opponents and the murder of O’Neill and wants to publish it. Because she knows too much and wants to use this information as a way out from the power relation that he is exercising, he kills her, too.
21
In the second book, To Play the King, Urquhart assumes the position of the Prime
Minister and entangles himself in the power play oriented towards the king. This happens because Urquhart supposes that the king is meddling in the affairs which are outside of his reach and by doing so, undermines Urquhart’s position and refuses to make himself subservient to Urquhart’s wishes. In getting what he wants, Urquhart again uses the help of the young woman, Sally Quine, who is the proprietor of the polling company. Her help begins to be central to Urquhart because she knows exactly which questions to ask in order to get the answers Urquhart needs from the polls.
Because he is criticized by the king for not being elected in the general election (he assumed his position of the Prime Minister as a result of resignation of Collingridge and the new leader has been chosen from the party structures by the members of the party), he decides to hold an election so as to strengthen his position in the eyes of general public as well as his colleagues. Furthermore, he wants to strengthen his position in
Sally’s life, and they end up lovers. However, Sally has been secretly working for the newspaper proprietor, Benjamin Landless and is also his lover. She has used the relation between her and Urquhart as a way how to gain incriminating knowledge and when he asks her to falsify the poll, she leaks this information to Landless with whom she is now pregnant. This information, together with the photographs of Mortima’s affair, who is revealed as having weakness for young attractive men, are used against Urquhart to get him to back up on his war against the king. The novel ends with Urquhart being defeated and betrayed by his own lover and employee.
In the last book, The Final Cut, Urquhart is portrayed as aging politician who, having achieved ten years as a prime minister, is no longer feeling motivated and growing constantly more tired from the political plays. Mortima recognizes this and tries to fuel his passion once more by making him to orient himself towards the
22 foundation of the Urquhart’s library. He works together with Claire Carlsen, a middle- aged Member of Parliament who he hires for the position of his Parliamentary Private
Secretary. In this book he engages in the quarrel with his Foreign Secretary, Tom
Makepeace, who resigns from his position and joins the side of the opposition to protest
Urquhart’s foreign politics in relation to Europe.
The main part of the plot centers on Urquhart’s endeavor to be the one responsible for the peace treaty between the Turkish and Greek side of Cyprus. However, his old crimes in catch up with him in this affair, because he served at Cyprus as a young officer and is responsible for the murder of two young Greek Cypriots. These deaths are one of the reasons for his downfall, for it is the information that is revealed by Claire
Carlsen. Thus, when his political opponent organizes the march oriented against
Urquhart’s policies, Urquhart decides to orchestrate his murder and provokes the brother of the Cypriot boys who has been killed during his service. As a result of this provocation, he is killed right at the stage while addressing the people who have come to protest against him.
3.3. Power Relations in the Books
When the main character of the novel, Francis Urquhart, is first introduced, he is described as “the man of discipline” and “the Enforcer” whose job is “to put a bit of stick about” (HoC 11). He is the disciplinarian, the watcher in the Panopticon whose primary job is to observe and gather knowledge about the Conservative Members of
Parliament. His work as a disciplinarian is also described as “faceless task, toiling ceaselessly behind the scenes, making no public speeches and giving no television interviews” (House 11). Similarly, the figure of the watcher is described by Foucault as
“eyes that must see without being seen” (D&P 171). He has to move in the shadows so that those over whom the disciplinary power is exercised cannot see him.
23
Steven Fielding describes Urquhart’s work in his book A State of Play, which is dedicated to analysis of the portrayals of the British politics in recent political fiction.
Urquhart is “a self-described ‘loyal servant of the state’, who exploits those who display
‘human’ qualities (Fielding 228). He works at the sphere of the human actions and his power is exercised over those who he wants to discipline in order to work in compliance with his wishes as well as achieving the maximum efficiency of their endeavor.
However, those over whom he inflicts his exercise of power are free human beings and the power relation is working in two directional way.
Furthermore, the disciplinary power is described as gathering knowledge about the individual in the form of writing: “What was registered in this way were forms of behavior, attitudes, possibilities, suspicions- a permanent account of individuals’ behavior” (D&P 214). Similarly, Urquhart is also keeping extensive records about his colleagues and keeping “a permanent account of individuals”:
In order to deliver the vote, day after day, night after night, he needed to know
where his Members of Parliament were likely to be found, which meant he needed
to know their secrets- with whom they were conspiring, with whom they might be
sleeping, whether they would be sober enough to vote, whether they had their hands
in someone else’s pocket or on someone else’s wife. All these secrets with their
sharp little edges were gathered together and kept in a black book, locked inside
a safe, and not even the Prime Minister had access to the keys (HoC 11).
The keeping of records is one of the main responsibilities of the supervisor in the watchtower of the Panopticon. He is supposed to use the power in order to elicit knowledge which is in turn used to shape this power, in this case by delivering the votes of the Members of Parliament.
However, Urquhart is not the only one who gathers extensive records about the
24 behavior of others because the instances of eliciting knowledge and creating the knowledge/power relationship are found across all three books. In the first part of the trilogy, there are extensive accounts about the subscribers for the government literature, several polls about the popularity of the politicians and the likability of them being elected and reelected are carried out. This knowledge about the preferences of the general public is then used to shape the knowledge of the population because the officials in the party decide which of these polls are going to be published and which of them are to be seen by only a few high-ranking officials.
Urquhart as being the one who is responsible for the discipline within the party realizes this power/knowledge connection and in his disciplinary strategies he imposes his power over the action of the women who are useful to him as the tools to elicit and disseminate the knowledge. As the main watcher in the Panopticon, he has access to all the main polls carried by the Conservative Party and together with his wife Mortima they keep a watch over the aristocracy and the newspapers, too. Mortima even possesses the book which offers the knowledge about the people holding important positions and their behavior:
In unravelling these inner mysteries and tracing the origins of influence, no tool is
of more use than a copy of Who’s Who. Most of the gossamer threads of
acceptability are to be found within its pages, as well as the raucous buzzing from
the occasional brash interloper who, like the insect charging the spider’s web, rarely
lasts (TFC 116).
This is another example of the invisible “web” of the Panopticon structure based on the invisible subjection of the subjects to the gaze of the multiple watchers whose gaze forces the objects of the gaze to become the subjects of their self-subjection. Even though they are subjected to this gaze, they are still able to choose their fate and there is
25 always a “key”, a way out from the power relation. Without the resistance, the power does not exist, the preliminary condition for the existence of the power relation is broken.
As Foucault notes in “The Subject and Power”, “at every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power” (“Subject” 794). This is what often happens in the novels in the relationship between Urquhart and the women he works with. Because these women are often equally invested in the power situation, the relation of power often results in the confrontation between the two. Main protagonist of the novels inflicts exercise of power onto his women objects and by doing this, he creates conflict which “gives place to the putting into operation the mechanisms of power” (“Subject”
794).
3.4. Mattie Storin
Mattie Storin is the very first character that one encounters in the first novel of the trilogy. She is twenty-eight-year-old journalist who is trying to leave her mark as a political correspondent, the area that she perceives to be a strictly masculine world. She is described as being totally encapsulated in her work and her life outside her role as a journalist is practically non-existent: “The past few weeks had been ferocious for
Mattie, under siege from her editor, stretched too tightly between deadlines, tossed between excitement and exhaustion” (HoC 6). This description gives one the notion about Mattie’s individuality being tied to her job as a newspaper correspondent and strengthens the notion of not having other identity outside of this one– everything she does is tied to her being a journalist.
The world of the political correspondents is described as the world where the
26 network of power relations is particularly visible because their actions are watched not only by the politicians but also by the members of the press themselves. The power is described as being transformed through the Members of Parliament as well as the members of press themselves in the structures which resemble the Panopticon:
The world of Westminster is a club of many unwritten rules and guarded jealously
by both politicians and press– and particularly the press, the so-called ‘lobby’ of
correspondents that quietly and discretely regulates media activity in the Palace of
Westminster. It allows, for instance, briefings and interviews to take place on
the strict understanding that the source will never be identified, not even a hint,
everything in the shadows. This encourages the politicians to be wildly
indiscreet and to break confidences; in turn it allows the lobby correspondents
to meet their deadlines and create the most remarkable headlines. The code of
omertà is the lobby correspondent’s passport; without it he– or she– would find
all doors closed and mouths firmly shut (HoC 58).
This description of the parliamentary structures and their relation to journalists resembles the Foucault’s description of power functioning as the set of power forces in which the exercises of power and the resistances against these exercises of power shape the power relations. The actions of the journalists who are found in the middle of this
Panopticon are thus dependent on the actions of the other people in this structure.
All of them are the agents of their self-subjection for any disobedience against the rules of the journalistic structures makes them viable to losing their rights. As Foucault puts in Discipline & Punish, “the body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property” (D&P 11). The structures of journalism in Westminster function under the same conditions for breaking
27 of ‘lobby terms’ leads to “depriving the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property”.
The power relation between Mattie and Urquhart starts under the similar condition when Mattie breaks the rules and acts outside of the sphere where her power as a journalist can be exercised when she comes to visit Urquhart at nights in his private residence. Her punishment is described in the sense of “depriving her of a liberty” when
Urquhart exclaims that he “ought to be bloody furious, on the phone to that editor of yours demanding an apology” (HoC 60). However, his power is shaped by Mattie’s power who tries to seduce him and make him to answer her questions. Her resistance makes way for the existence of the machinery of power because Urquhart is given the triumph of knowing about this offence and is able to destroy her career. From the beginning of their relationship, he sees her only in a sense of her acquired individuality as journalist and sees nothing of her outside of this individuality. She is useful to him only as long as she possesses this position; without it she is no longer visible.
As a disciplinarian, he wants to make a docile body from her, the one which would be acting as the intermediary of his words, of everything that he would like to get outside without it being linked directly to him. This ambition to create a docile body is described in his conversation with Mortima who advises him to make it happen:
‘Will she be loyal?’
‘Loyalty amongst journalists?’
‘You must bind her in, Francis’ (HoC 76).
Urquhart acts in concordance with the notion of the power as being a result of the network of the social relationships. Mortima knows that he cannot assume the place of
Prime Minister without other agents’ help in acting in concordance with his power and transmitting his power throughout the social body. Thus, he decides to use Mattie as a
28 transmitter of his words and his thoughts in order to distance himself from the consequences of his actions. It is his aim as a “man of discipline” to exercise the power over Mattie’s actions and make her act in a way that he wants. His power is limited by her willingness to cooperate and because of this he wants to make her fall in love with him because “the actions of dominant agents are therefore constrained by the need to sustain that alignment in the future” (Rouse 111). He needs her to exercise the power of her position as a journalist not only now but also in the future and thus he feels the need to sustain this alignment between himself and Mattie.
The strategy of power is defined by Foucault as “the totality of the means put into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it” (“Subject” 793). Urquhart’s struggle to implement his power on Mattie in a way that she would not be able to resist it and Urquhart manages to do this with Mattie when he “binds her”. She is unable to see the truth about him because he makes her obsessed of him through careful manipulation of her actions and by making her dependent on her visits into his house.
“She’d done no more than touch the sleeve of this man but had spent the weeks since then fixated with him, lying awake, jumping when the phone rang, hoping it was him”
(HoC 121). His power operates on the sphere of her actions and he manages to get her actions to be totally aligned with his.
However, her actions are also limited by the actions of others and while she is under
Urquhart’s exercise of power which manages for her success as a journalist, her power is limited by the editor and proprietor of the newspaper she works for. This is another example of power operating as the sort of chain, or forces in the society for each individual is dominated while exercising power at the same time. Only after the proprietor of the newspaper gets himself aligned with Urquhart does her article gets recognition and this alliance sets the machinery of other power relations into motion.
29
Furthermore, disciplinary power aims to work in the shadows and to distance itself from the exercise of the power itself. In Discipline & Punish, Foucault makes a point that “if it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much ‘higher’ aim”
(D&P 11). This distancing from the manipulation of the body is achieved through
Urquhart’s famous phrase “you might say that, I could not possibly comment” (HoC
99). Similar phrase is used later in the TV adaptation by BBC: “You might very well think that, I could not possibly comment” (House E1 00:29:35). Sandrine Sorlin mentions this phrase in her book Language and Manipulation in House of Cards:
This quotation from British BBC TV series House of Cards is one of
the Conservative Chief Whip Francis Urquhart’s favorite replies to the young
journalist Mattie Storin when she reaches a conclusion that he has in fact led her
to reach without his taking responsibility for it. This enables him to deny
information he has indirectly led her to infer. The use of the second person pronoun
(‘you’) combined with the epistemic modal (‘might’) attests to Urquhart’s
disengagement from his own utterance, leaving it to Mattie to take responsibility
for her own thoughts of which he has nothing to say, except that her reasoning
might ‘very well’ be right (Sorline 1).
He distances himself even from his own words so as to make Mattie’s power limited because he knows that his power is limited by her loyalty and her willingness to work as his adversary. The power relation between the two functions as long as Mattie is willing to be his helper and thus, he tries to keep this alignment as long as possible. However, having a free will, Mattie can at any time resist the power relation because “there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight” (“Subject” 794).
Being aware of this, Urquhart is trying to make her into docile body, to crash any
30 resistance on her part by making her the subject of her own subjection.
However, the resistance is internal to the structures of power, and this happens also with the relationship between Mattie and Urquhart. As Rouse puts it in his explanation of Foucault, “power is exercised through an agent’s actions only to the extent that other agents’ actions remain appropriately aligned with them” (Rouse 111). Similarly,
Urquhart can only exercise his actions because he knows that Mattie is aligned with him, while Mattie’s exercise of power is possible only when her actions are appropriately aligned with the actions of the editor of her newspaper.
And similarly, her resistance would not be possible without her alignment with
John Krajewski, her fellow colleague who sees her for her true individuality, outside of her individuality as a journalist and the resistance of the editor of the newspaper who decides to not run her story and move her to the women’s section. As the disciplinary measures “are intended not to punish the offence, but to supervise the individual, to neutralize his dangerous state of mind, to alter his criminal tendencies, and to continue even when this change has been achieved” (D&P 18), the disciplinary measure against
Mattie and her downgrading work in the similar way. As Urquhart and the alignment he finds in the newspaper proprietor Benjamin Landless learn about the “criminal tendencies” which consist in Mattie’s search for truth outside of her supposed sphere, she is downgraded and her dangerous state of mind is “neutralized” because she is made unable to continue in her work.
Lastly, Foucault is describing the points of resistance as the possible “escapes” from the power relations. This resistance can be achieved by “refusing who we are”, the individuality installed in human beings in the process of individuation. Mattie’s learned individuality consists in her work as a journalist, she knows nothing outside this individuality, only the glimpses of her true self make themselves visible in the strained
31 situations such as when she knows that her action would result in getting somebody hurt. And yet, the resistance towards the power strategy played by Francis Urquhart comes in shattering the story that she has and forgetting about him Although he wants to make her resistance practically impossible for her, she is offered a possible way out in her colleague John Krajewski who is the only one who, at least partly, believes in her story and tries to help her with publishing the book and getting her life together. He sees her for who she really is and offers the possible point of resistance and escape.
By refusing John, Mattie ends up coming back to Urquhart and eventually getting killed for she poses to be “a point of possible reversal” (“Subject” 794) of their power relation. Urquhart cannot allow for her to publish the public where she reveals the truth about his crimes. The relationship of power and domination turns into the relationship of confrontation described by Foucault in “Subject and Power”: “For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target-at one and the same time its fulfillment and its suspension” (“Subject” 794).
Because Urquhart fails in fixing a power relationship, he uses the most extreme form of exercise of power and that is the use of violence because the relationship between him and Mattie begins to be the struggle for life– each of them has the power to destroy the other one. Foucault says that, “obviously the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent” (“Subject” 789). When Urquhart sees no way out, no way how to keep Mattie under his control, he indeed chooses to use the violence and destroy Mattie so that she cannot destroy him.
In conclusion, the relationship between Mattie and Urquhart is the instance of the disciplinary power as defined by Foucault because Urquhart tries to implement his
32 power over the actions of the other rather than over her body- her body serves only as an instrument through which the power is transmitted. Furthermore, when she is punished, she is punished by the means of taking away her personal rights which are taken for granted. That is what happens when she crosses the line and starts eliciting knowledge of Urquhart’s strategy and ceases to be his helper. The relationship between
Mattie and Urquhart is the example of the power functioning in a form of chain where the actions of one are shaped by the possible actions of the others and even though
Urquhart is the dominant agent, Mattie is not powerless but also exercises her power.
She begins to resist his power and by doing so, shapes the entire power relationship between her and Urquhart. She is also offered a way out from this power relation through resisting him. The way out is offered through her colleague John Krajewski who offers her a different life that she has been used to live because he is truly in love with her. By refusing his help and love and coming back to Urquhart to tell him about her plans, she ends up dead.
3.5. Sally Quine
The second novel of the trilogy, To Play the King, also starts with the character of the young, ambitious and influential woman, Sally Quine. She is the owner of the polling company. Her entire character is shaped by the power relation between her and her ex-husband who is portrayed as being responsible for her miscarriage because he has beaten her. This results in her resentment towards men which is hinted several times in the novel and especially in her first meeting with Urquhart: “She couldn’t imagine those hands clanged and balled, thrusting into her face or pounding her belly into miscarriage, the final act of their matrimonial madness. Damn all men!” (TPK 79). She wants to make place in the world for her own and does not trust men.
In the beginning of the novel, she comes to visit Benjamin Landless, the newspaper
33 proprietor whose alignment with Urquhart has been central to the power relations in the first book. Landless decides to create alignment with Sally so that she would keep him informed about the world of the parliament because he knows that her position as a head of the polling company is strategical for his power relationship. Being aware of her violent past, he knows that the relationship of domination would result in the failure and because of that, he establishes the relationship of partnership. The means of resistance and escape are therefore provided right at the beginning of the novel in the character of
Landless, because the alignment with him makes Sally’s resistance very easy for she always has a partner who is prepared to act in accordance with her actions.
In this conversation, Landless talks about the world of journalism and politics in the way which resembles Mattie’s panoptic description given in the first book: “There’s not a political editor in town who doesn’t know every word of what’s gone on within an hour of a Cabinet meeting finishing, nor a general who hasn’t leaked a confidential report before doing battle over the defense budget” (TPK 15). Not only does the press watch over the politicians, it is the politicians and their adversaries themselves who constantly watch over each other and are prepared to use any harmful information in order to get away with their political opponents. This leakage gives way to putting in motion the mechanisms of power for the relation between the two adversaries.
Because of this, the power relationship between Sally and Urquhart differs from the power relation between Mattie because while Mattie has been become subjected to
Urquhart’s discipline, served as the means to transfer the power and acted in accordance with Urquhart’s wishes, Sally shows right from the beginning that her relationship with
Urquhart would not be that of the domination through discipline. This the result of the different tactical situation that the two women encounter themselves. While Mattie has been offered the way out just at the end of the novel, Sally comes to the relationship
34 with Urquhart already with the way out on hand. When they meet for the first time, she is showed to have the upper hand, although Urquhart is trying to exercise power over her: “Urquhart realized he was relinquishing control of this conversation; she was working him over far more effectively than anything he could have expected from the charity representatives” (TPK 62). She becomes the dominating agent without Urquhart knowing it because her alignment with Landless who is prepared to act in reaction to her actions is the alignment which she needs to keep in order to ascertain her true individuality.
Furthermore, she differs from Mattie in the description of her individuality– while
Mattie has been allowed almost no identity outside of her work as a journalist, Sally, on the other hand, is portrayed mainly in the framework of her lost child and her secret grief and yearning of having another child. Because of this true individuality which she is aware of, and her past grievances, she is less vulnerable to Urquhart’s exercise of power. That is why Joseph Rouse describes Foucault’s notion of power with the word
‘dynamic’: “Foucault’s more general understanding of power as dynamic begins with his rejection of any reification of power” (Rouse 108). The power has never been solely in Urquhart’s hands, even though he is perceived as one of the most “powerful” men in the country. However, without the right social alignments, his position is worthless because these alignments are prepared to act in concordance with his actions.
He tries to act over Sally’s possible actions, but she constantly refuses to be the vessel for his power and instead exercises her power over him. This is explained by
Foucault in his description of the functioning of the structures of governmentality, where word government “must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals
35 or of groups might be directed” (“Subject” 790). The functioning of the governmentality is then described as following: “The forms and the specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another” (“Subject” 793). Urquhart can be described as designating the conduct of individuals, especially the people who work closely with him such as Sally upon whose actions he wants to act. Sally, on the other hand, from her position of resistance against the relationship of domination has the power to transgress and change this power relation.
Urquhart is constantly starting to be aware of the shifting power which is revealed several times by the narrator. When he reveals his plans to Sally, the narrator adds that
“he expected her to be taken aback, surprised by the revelation of his plans, but she seemed to show no more emotion than if she were studying a new recipe” (TPK 139).
Although he thinks that he is exercising his power over her and in that way shaping their relation to be the one of submissive Sally doing what he asks from her because he thinks that his position of power is absolute, Sally is the one who subjects him to the exercise of power, because she guides him to oppose the king. In “Shakespeare's
Richard III and Macbeth: A Foucauldian Reading”, Zohreh Ramin describes a similar situation in the power play encountered in Shakespeare’s Richard III: “He does not achieve absolute monarchy, even in the position of the King of the state. Richard only becomes a vehicle for the exercising of power relations. He fails to apprehend that he can never obtain it under his complete control. It is power that controls him and his world” (Ramin 59). Similarly, Urquhart’s ultimate goal throughout the trilogy is to achieve power which he thinks to be absolute which is exemplified also in his fight against the king who he thinks is undermining his position by his speeches. However,
36 he fails to see that power can never be attained but that he is rather the vehicle for its exercise.
Sally’s upper hand in shaping the power relation between her and Urquhart becomes evident also in their later meetings. Her thoughts reveal her resistance against Urquhart:
“She didn’t mind being used, so long as she could use him, too, and so long as she remembered that this, like all things, couldn’t last forever” (TPK 187). This is another instance of the false appearances of his power because while he thinks that he dominates Sally and can act on her actions in order to make her compliant to his plans, one sees that it is actually her resistance which shapes the entire power relationship.
Another instance where Sally has the upper hand while Urquhart thinks that he has succeeded in ‘binding her in’ is when Mortima finds out that they are lovers and wants him to break the relationship. When he is trying to break it, Sally exercises her power of seduction and makes him believe that she is completely loyal. That she actually has the upper hand and the relationship of power is to be fixed from the bottom structures of the society is shown in the juxtaposition of their thoughts at the end of the chapter: “She was a remarkable woman, this American, practically a true British sport, his smile suggested. What an utter English prick, she though” (TPK 293). Although he wanted to dominate her and act upon her actions, she manages to have the upper hand and change the power relation by agreeing to escape it in the means of resistance with the help of
Benjamin Landless because she has been feeding him with the information needed to destroy Urquhart for the whole duration of their relationship.
She manages to be the vessel for the powers of resistance and the power relation is changed from bottom to top and not the other way round which is made clear in the final scene in the king’s palace when Landless says that he chooses to advocate for the king “mostly because he welcomed, just as I am, Big Bad Benjamin from Bethnal
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Green, without looking down his nose, when I was never good enough for you or your high-and-mighty wife” (TPK 305). Landless offered Sally the means of resistance and by accepting it, she managed to leave the power relation because she manages to shift it from the bottom structures of the society. Her resistance makes for Urquhart’s failure to attack the king and leaves no room for him to act.
In summary, the power relation between Sally and Urquhart differs from the relation between Mattie and Urquhart because Sally’s strategic situation is completely different because she is entangled in the means of escape right from the beginning of the novel and because of that, succeeds in shifting the power relation to advance her rather than Urquhart. She is not described only by the means of her professional occupation and because of this, she is able to escape through the means of resistance because the polling industry is showed only as a means through which she wants to find her true individuality rather than the end in itself as has been the case with Mattie.
3.6. Claire Carlsen
The character of thirty-eight-year-old MP, Claire Carlsen, appears for the first time in the final novel of the trilogy, The Final Cut, when she is attending the party held in
Downing Street to celebrate Urquhart’s proceedings with Peace Treaty in Cyprus. She encounters herself in the circle of people who talk about the end of Urquhart’s career and speculate about succession of Tom Makepeace who works as Foreign Secretary in
Urquhart’s administration. She differs from the women in the previous novels because she is married with two kids. However, it is soon revealed that she has an affair with
Makepeace who is the man who represents the resistance and the way out for her.
That the strategy in the power relationship between her and Francis Urquhart is totally different from the situation of the characters in previous chapter is portrayed in their first meeting. Whereas before the first meeting between Mattie and Urquhart and
38
Sally and Urquhart happened in his home, the first meeting between him and Claire happens in her home. Furthermore, the shift in the strategical situation is also traceable to the presence of Claire’s husband and Urquhart’s wife which also shapes this power relation. Claire does not use the power of seduction over Urquhart– she uses only the strength of her position.
And it is her who has the upper hand for it is her who proposes that the position of
Urquhart’s PPS should be ascribed to her. She makes it clear from the beginning that
Urquhart can have no advantage over her and that she wants the equal share of rights in their power relation:
‘Would you get rid of the Mercedes and start buying your suits at Marks and
Spencer?’
‘No. Nor will I as your PPS shave my head, grow hair on my legs or allow myself
headaches for three days every month.’
He waved goodbye to the rest of the guests, the business of departure replacing the
need to reply. ‘Time to depart.’ He summoned Mortima who was bidding Nures
farewell, but Claire was still close by his shoulder, demanding his attention.
‘I am up to it, Francis’ (TFC 103).
Although the decision to make her his PPS is Urquhart’s to make, Claire has the upper hand in installing this power relation to achieve her own means. She is eager to become his fellow helper and throws away any resistance, even though her moral compass seems to tell her otherwise.
On her, the Urquhart’s past position of the disciplinarian whose work it has been to act upon the actions of others, is the most obvious from the three power relations in the books because he is involved in her “training” as she herself admits: “But her views, for the moment, didn’t matter– she was here to learn” (TPK 137). As Nealon Jeffrey puts it
39 in his book Foucault beyond Foucault, “discipline works on individuals precisely through the more efficient means of targeting their potential actions, their capacities: literally what they can—and can’t—do” (Jeffrey 31). Similarly, Urquhart trains Claire and targets her potential actions. It can be argued that similar thing happened in the relationships in the previous chapters. However, nowhere has it been so visible as in the case of Claire who is most directly represented as his creation and his pupil rather than just the device through which he can transfer the power and the powerful alignment which can help him in holding his position of prestige.
In the conversation between Foucault, Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot published under the name “The Eye of Power” in Power/Knowledge, Foucault describes the hierarchy of power relations:
It’s obvious that in an apparatus like an army or a factory, or some other such type
of institution, the system of power takes a pyramidical form. Hence there is an apex.
But even so, even in such a simple case, this summit doesn’t form the ‘source’ or
‘principle’ from which all power derives as though from a luminous focus (the
image by which the monarchy represents itself). The summit and the lower elements
of the hierarchy stand in a relationship of mutual support and conditioning, a mutual
‘hold’ (power as a mutual and indefinite ‘blackmail’) (PK 159).
This is what happens in the relationship between Claire and Urquhart. She is his
“mutual support”, his “mutual ‘hold’; the power that he exercises is transferred through her because she acts in concordance with his disciplinary power of acting over the actions of other. What’s more, she even exceeds his power as a disciplinarian when she shames Makepeace and elicits information from his driver in order to act upon his possible actions and to work as a vessel for the exercise of power.
Because she rejects Makepeace, she does not find the escape from the power
40 relation between her and Urquhart. As Makepeace makes it clear in the conversation between him and Claire when she manages to hurt him, there are “those who stand with him and those who don’t” (TFC 235). Urquhart’s training is complete and she starts to act in the way desired by her position and not according to her true individuality hidden behind the façade of the position installed through his disciplinary power. Only when she realizes that, she starts to resist and shape the power relation otherwise: “At the beginning, she regarded it as no more than a little idle mischief but she could no longer hide from the fact that it had been a mistake. The betrayal of a friend she still cared for.
She had demeaned herself, got carried away. Acted like Urquhart” (TFC 354). This is the start for the resistance from her part, but she does manage to shift the relationship of power even though she has incriminated herself because this realization makes her to go to Makepeace’s lover Maria and share the information which eventually leads to
Urquhart’s successful orchestration of his own death and thus the complete change in the chain of power. Because she realizes her position in Makepeace’s incrimination and realizes that this is not her true individuality, she succeeds in getting the position of
Minister at the end of the book.
In summary, the power relation between Urquhart and Claire most closely resembles the one of the disciplinary power because she becomes Urquhart’s pupil.
Even though she refuses the way out in the form of the resistance offered by
Makepeace, she is not destroyed as in the case of Mattie because the realization of acting in concordance with the power exercised over her makes her shift her position and help Makepeace after all. Despite her primary refusal, she still manages to get the position of Minister which would not be possible would it not for her decision to escape the power relation by resisting.
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4. The BBC Adaptation
4.1. The Background
Firstly, it is important to conceptualize the work of adaptation as the work of art, to define the adaptation and to mention some of its specifics. Linda Hucheon writes about the specifics of adaptation in her Theory of Adaptation when she talks about the multiplicity of adaptations:
All these adapters relate stories in their different ways. They use the same tools that
storytellers have always used: they actualize or concretize ideas; they make
simplifying selections, but also amplify and extrapolate; they make analogies; they
critique or show their respect, and so on. But the stories they relate are taken from
elsewhere, not invented anew. Like parodies, adaptations have an overt and defining
relationship to prior texts, usually revealingly called “sources.” Unlike parodies,
however, adaptations usually openly announce this relationship (Hucheon 3).
As Hucheon makes it clear, the adaptations are not the precise rendering of the art form they are based on. Rather they take on something from the art form that has been already there and change it accordingly to meet their intentions and their reading of the source. The author of the adaptation brings something of his own into the adapted texts and brings the changes which are connected to one’s reading of the source.
Sarah Cardwell dedicates an entire chapter to the questions of authorship in her book about the screenwriter Andrew Davies, who is the creator of the script to House of
Cards miniseries. She mentions the specificity of the media where the work is adapted as one of the criteria why she decided to treat the adaptations as the original piece of work with the comparison between the novel and the screen adaptation being able to show the differences and specifics of the two: “Indeed, underlying this book is a belief that studying television adaptations can enrich our understanding of television as an art
42 form. When we make tentative but detailed comparisons between texts in different media, we are moved to notice features of each medium that distinguish them from one another” (Cardwell 31). It can be concluded that the adaptation is the original work of art which is inspired by the original but cannot be read in the sense of the fidelity to the original text because the adaptation for the screen is dealing with the different media which has a different specifics. Thus, the adaptations in this thesis are to be taken as the original works of art which draw inspiration from the book trilogy but create original ideas which are based on the individual readings of the book as well as specificity of the television media.
The BBC adaptation of the first work in the series has been televised only a year after the book has been released– in 1990. It has been televised around the time when
Thatcher resigned from her place as Prime Minister and it might be considered one of the reasons for its popularity. Steven Fielding in A State of Play says that “timing helped: its first two episodes were broadcast while conservative MPs divested themselves of Thatcher and chose another leader, albeit in a less bloody way than was depicted on the screen” (Fielding 228). As mentioned above, the writer responsible for adapting the trilogy for the television screen is Andrew Davies. Fielding argues that
Davies’s adaptation brought with itself a humor that has not been present in the books:
A State of Play, Steven Fielding talks about this adaptation: “No Conservative, Davies gave House of Cards a darkly comic edge the novel lacked, parodying the
Parliamentary Novel by turning qualities previous novelists working in that genre had praised against themselves and critiquing how real Conservatives exercised power”
(Fielding 239). With Davies’s touch, the trilogy becomes much darker and the exercises of power ever more visible. He has made the feminine characters more visible and their resistance even more visible than in the novels.
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4.2. Plot Overview
The core of the plot is the same as in the books but there are significant shifts in the character portrayals and character developments. In Andrew Davies: Rewriting the
Classics Davies mentions Richard III and Macbeth as his inspirations while developing the plot: “Often the villain is the leading character and he talks to the audience so I thought I‘ll do that and just gonna use Richard III and Macbeth to just heighten up the story and give it a bit of stature and grandeur” (“Andrew Davies” 00:43:33). He adds the narrative device when the character talks directly to the camera about which I am going to talk later.
In relation to women, the first change comes in the portrayal of Mattie Storin who is made more submissive and more complacent to Urquhart’s powerplay. However, she carries the record and secretly makes a record of each conversation and interview that she has. In the series, she is not only in love with Urquhart, but they also have an affair.
When she is killed at the end of the first season of the series, her tape falls into hands of
Tim Stamper, Urquhart’s succession as Chief Whip who in the second season wants to use it against Francis to get the revenge. However, he ends up dead when his car explodes at the end of the second season.
The major shift comes in the character of Urquhart’s wife who is now the more powerful of the two, she dictates and oversees what is going to happen and, in the end, arranges Urquhart’s murder (in the books he orchestrated his suicide). In the series, she is called Elizabeth, the decision which has a symbolic value. According to Randall
Auxier in House of Cards and Philosophy: Underwood’s Republic, renaming
Urquhart’s wife is “devilish” because “it is she who arranges for his assassination in the end of the whole story– the Tudors did, after all, displace the Plantagenets in rivers of blood” (in Hackett 266). She is now more vicious of the two. Auxier also recognizes the
44 allusions to Shakespeare mentioned by Davies: “When the BBC contemplated the miniseries, however, they saw a wider opportunity. What if Lady Macbeth had married
Richard III? Macbeth himself was too weak and foolish for his ambitious Lady. What a disappointing match. She needs a more suitable mate, and who better than the last of the
Plantagenets?” (in Hackett 266). She is now the more vicious of the two, who is left standing victorious after Urquhart is killed during the ceremonial when the statue of
Margaret Thatcher is erected.
Sally Quine is also changed for the character of Sarah Harding. She becomes
Urquhart’s coworker and lover in To Play the King. The main difference between her and the character from the novel is that she does not feel the same remorse against men than Sally Quine and she is married. Because of Tim Stamper, she learns about
Urquhart’s murder of Mattie when he gives her the tape. She wants to give to the king in order to give him the weapon with which he can directly fight against Urquhart, however, she is met with the same fate than Tim Stamper when she is killed in car explosion.
Lastly, the character of Claire Carlsen is childless, and her husband never appears in the series although there are mentions of him and the viewer gets the idea that he is the successful businessman. In the series, she does not manage to get the record to
Makepeace because Urquhart’s bodyguard, Corder, seizes it from her on her way to
Tom. There is no happy ending for her because she does not manage to get the documents to Makepeace on time.
4.3. The Power Relations in the Series
In the series, Urquhart’s position as the disciplinarian is also foregrounded just at the beginning of the first episode. The series starts with him looking at the picture of
Margaret Thatcher and stating: “Nothing lasts forever” (HC E1 00:00:13). Right after
45 that, Urquhart looks into the camera and starts talking directly to the viewer to let him know what his thoughts and intentions are. The device that he is using is called aside or breaking the fourth wall and it has been commonly used in Shakespeare’s plays. In a paper “When Characters Speak Directly to Viewers: Breaking the Fourth Wall in
Television”, Philip Auter and Donald Davis describe the function of the fourth wall:
Viewing television follows the conventions established by live theater and film.
The viewer actually is eavesdropping on characters who function within a "three-
walled" environment. The "fourth wall" is a transparent one through which the
audience voyeuristically looks. The characters are not aware of the audience and,
thus, make no direct statements to them (Auter & Davis 165).
The device of fourth wall is reminiscent of the Panopticon where the actors are subjected to the constant visibility by the invisible eye of the viewers which remains in the shadows and cannot be seen. As Foucault writes about the panopticism in Discipline
& Punish, “full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap” (D&P 200). Urquhart wants to exercise his power and act upon the actions of the viewers, too. Similar notion is mentioned by
Michael Noble in his article “Looking Back at the BBC's House Of Cards”: “As expositor, Urquhart is the viewers’ guide, forcing us to take him in our trust. The viewer is made to feel part of the scheme, guilty by association” (Noble). He acts upon the viewer’s actions, too, because the viewer is just another body whose actions are to be acted upon.
The supervisor as the watcher in the Panopticon and his power is supposed to be invisible. What adds to this notion is the fact that his direct addresses often take place in the dim light where only the face of the main protagonist is visible. Miran Božovič describes the Panopticon as designed by Jeremy Bentham having a problem with the
46 two functions of the inspector as a keeper of the books and the watcher in his paper
"’An Utterly Dark Spot’: The Fiction of God in Bentham’s Panopticon”. The difficulty of the design is then resolved so that the guard can fulfill both of his missions:
The lantern, which would resolve this dilemma, has the shape of two short-necked
funnels joined together at their necks; it is pierced in certain places, and pieces of
colored or smoked glass, through which the inspector looks, are inserted in the
holes; the lantern is just big enough for the inspector to see everything around him
without having to move from this spot - a turn of the head or body is sufficient.
Owing to these numerous apertures, the lantern cannot entirely pre vent light from
passing through it, but is translucent, so that the inspector's body within it is to
a certain degree discernible - from the cells he is visible as a silhouette, a shadow,
or an opaque, dark spot (Božovič 94).
Similarly, Urquhart in his addresses is very often seen only as a silhouette with his face illuminated only by the dim light. To see the audience of his address, he has to just turn his head into the camera, so that the people he is talking to does not see him in his entirety, for to be seen directly is to lose part of one’s power as Božovič makes it clear in his essay: “The inspector's real presence, then, cannot produce the idea of his omnipresence in the minds of the prisoners in the same way as real punishment produced the idea of punishment in the minds of the innocent” (Božovič 90). That is why the audience cannot see Urquhart in his entirety for this would mean that he would lose part the sense of omnipresence which forms part of his disciplinary power.
Another thing that points to his position as a disciplinarian– the watcher in the structures of the Panopticon– is his very first occurrence in the Houses of Parliament where Urquhart is seen overlooking the others, commenting on their behavior while he himself remains unseen by all of those who he overlooks. In Shakespeare/ Adaptation/
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Modern Drama, Urquhart’s position at the top of the stairs is described as following:
“His superiority to his colleagues is stressed by his viewpoint above them, at the head of a staircase, as they assemble for the initial leadership meeting following the implied departure of Thatcher, his scathing characterization of each of the leading contenders continuing as they move across the camera shot” (Scheil 100). I would argue that it is not so much his superiority as his omnipresence and oversight that is expressed in this shot because his knowledge about them that he deicides to share with the audience results from his work as a party disciplinarian.
In the series, he also pronounces it out loud that he is a disciplinarian. When he talks with his wife Elizabeth, he says that: “I’m in charge of discipline. But I can’t deliver if my troops are disaffected” (HC E1 00:21:50). This is another allusion to his part as the watcher in the Panopticon whose role is to watch the inmates which are represented by his colleagues and make them to self-subject to his disciplinary gaze.
But he is also watched as his results are watched by the people higher in the societal hierarchy because he needs to deliver votes. This is what he means when he says that he
“can’t deliver if his troops are disaffected”.
4.4. Mattie Storin
In the series, the viewer encounters Mattie for the first time in the office of the newspaper called The Chronicle where she, her colleague and her editor talk about the
Conservative party losing its seats and just barely gaining the majority in the election.
Her presence is foregrounded by Urquhart, who pronounces: “And of course, one needs a sympathetic ear, amongst the ladies and gentlemen of the press, those valiant seekers after truth” (HC E1 00:07:39). What the viewer sees in the newsroom is the affirmation of Urquhart’s words because the editor of the newspaper, Greville Preston announces that they “backed those bastards all the way” (HC E1 00:08:14). Mattie is described as
48 being the cheeky one when she makes fun of Preston when he is angry about the results of the election and the situation he is in.
Mattie’s situation is now different than in the novel because it is not Urquhart who threatens her with the loss of liberties but rather it is her who hands the triumphs into
Urquhart’s hands when she proclaims: “You could have called Greville Preston and complained about my outrageous harassment and threatened him with this and that and he’d listened” (HC E1 00:25:35) and later “and if I would to betray your confidence, you could have me not just sacked but unemployable within a week” (HC E1 00:25:48).
However, since then it is mostly Urquhart who exercises his power when he orientates her towards the points of the discussion he wants her to see rather than the ones she should see for herself. When she comes to his house, he recognizes her as the newest correspondent in The Chronicle and knows about the susceptibility to listen to him at all costs, because as Mattie proclaims, “I need a friend in high places, Mr. Urquhart” (HC
E1 00:26:10). She falls into his net of exercise of power very easily because he provides her with an insider information. Thus, she willingly becomes the vessel for his exercise of power and pushes the information he wants her to write about into the newspaper.
In the series, there is also conversation between Urquhart and his wife Elizabeth where they conspire about making Mattie into a docile body:
Interesting girl. Clever.
Not too clever.
No, no. Just clever enough, I should say.
I think she might be just the little friend you need, Francis. Well, political
correspondent with her way to make, I mean (HC E1 00:30:50).
As Foucault writes about the docile bodies in Discipline & Punish, “the individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others. Its bravery
49 or its strength are no longer the principal variables that define it; but the place it occupies, the interval it covers, the regularity, the good order according to which it operates its movements” (D&P 164). And this is what Urquhart is aiming for– he needs
Mattie as a journalistic body and needs her strength originating from this position as “an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others”. He needs her to exercise his power through the relation with her because he knows that he needs to keep this alignment in order to be able to exercise the power.
Raymond Belliotti explains this in his book Power: Oppression, Subservience, and
Resistance in the chapter dedicated to Foucault’s view of power. According to Belliotti,
“At the level of society, oppression requires specific forms of knowledge and recognized truths in order to exist, while those specific cognitive foundations emerge in relation to the particular structure of oppression in place” (Belliotti 155). Urquhart needs Mattie and the information she shares with the people through the pieces she writes for the newspaper because of his influence in order to make his oppression of the parliamentary colleagues function. This need to create a docile body from Mattie is urged by this necessity to form a relation with her which makes it easier to exercise power over her actions.
That Urquhart installs the disciplinary power over Mattie is made evident in the last episode of the series where he talks about their relation in the similar vocabulary as a parent would talk about the relationship with his children: “Playing with the hopes and dreams of a daughter. Now gentle, now hard. Rebuking and rewarding. Chastising and forgiving. The pleasures of a father. Of a father of daughters. What greater power is there than that? Why should a man want more? Why should I yearn to be everybody’s daddy?” (HC E4 00:11:40). He talks about their relation in the disciplinary terms, as if he was her father who needs to discipline her and make her to self-subject even more
50 because she has been disobedient and breaks the rules that he has laid out for her. Her actions need to be supervised and he needs to act upon them in the same way as the parent would.
On the other hand, the fact that the person over whom the power is exercised must be free is foregrounded in the series in the scene where Urquhart finally manages to seduce
Mattie to become his faithful lover. She declares that “You know I’d like to do anything you ask me to” (HC E3 00:11:49) by which she means that she is willing to be his cooperator in power relations and that she acknowledges his exercise of power to be her own. She stresses that this is her own decision, that being “faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up” (“Subject” 789). When Urquhart answers to her remark about doing anything he asks her, he says that her words are “hardly the words of the independent young woman” (HC E3 00:11:50) by which he wants to make his power visible. However, she claims her freedom by answering, “oh, but they are. I’m not anyone’s toy. I don’t get chosen; I choose” (HC E3 00:11:55). Thus, she makes it clear that she is not just a powerless woman who can be easily manipulated; her free will is the basis for this exercise of power to exist and it is her choice to respond in the way that she does.
However, Mattie, too, is presented with the means of escape through the relationship with other man– her colleague John Krajewski– who supports her in finding her true individuality which is free from Urquhart’s exercise of power. His role becomes evident in the first episode of the series when Mattie declares that Urquhart “has a sort of magnetism about him” (HC E1 00:45:40). Krajewski responds to that with declaring that it is “Kissinger syndrome- the aphrodisiac effect of power” (HC E1 00:45:44).
Although one can see that it is more of a hurt pride speaking from him when he realizes that Mattie fancies Urquhart more than him. However, his insight is crucial because that
51 is exactly what happens in the relation between Mattie and Urquhart but she refuses to see it because she is completely self-subjected to Urquhart’s disciplinary power.
Another instance where he offers the way out is when Mattie comes into office and talks about the investigation into Collingridge’s affairs where he makes her realize that the affair is rather strange and she has forgotten to take a clues because she is subjected to power relation with Urquhart. He makes her realize that it could not have been
Collingridges: “Think about it. Henry Collingridge had the means but not the motive.
Charlie had the motive, but he didn’t have the wit to play any part at all in the fraud.
And if you were doing it, would you use your own name? (HC E3 00:20:20). This dialogue inspires her to head to the installment where Charlie Collingridge is staying and to learn that it could not be him who has bought the shares, that it is actually making of somebody else. It is for the first time that she has doubts about what Urquhart is saying to her. Furthermore, during her visit there, the panoptic structuring made by
Urquhart becomes even more evident because she is watched by one of the workers of the facility who immediately lets Urquhart know about what has happened.
Furthermore, it is John who truly cares for Mattie. It is John who comes to visit
Mattie when she is threatened. And when Urquhart’s disciplinary power bans her the right of writing for the newspaper because she now knows too much, it is John who advises her to leave the story be. It is in this conversation, that he actually uncovers that Urquhart has been behind everything that has happened but Mattie refuses to see this because she self-subjects herself to Urquhart’s power just like Urquhart has wanted.
She refuses the means of escape provided by the resistance which is proposed by John.
By refusing his help, she becomes totally embodied in Urquhart’s acting over her actions. She shares all her secrets with him and he, knowing about her insubordination applies the disciplinary technique of surveillance which allows him to know her every
52 step. When talking about surveillance, Foucault notes:
It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although
surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations
from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this
network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of
power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised (DP 176).
The surveillance that Urquhart organizes to have power over Mattie functions as network of relations; thus; this is another instance of the power functioning in the form of network where there is no single person who possesses it but it functions throughout the social relationships which either work in accord with it or resist it and through the resistance, manage to fix the power relation and as a result, escape it.
Finally, Mattie do manage to take John’s words into account when in the final episode she realizes that John has been right all along, and it has been Urquhart behind everything that has happened. However, she is still not able to see Urquhart’s power and that is why she throws away resistance which could bring her the means of escape and goes to see Urquhart about it to hear it directly from him. She refuses all of John’s advice and because of running straight into Urquhart’s hands, she ends up dead in the same way as in the novel.
In conclusion, the power relation between Urquhart and Mattie is another example of the exercise of disciplinary power over the feminine character. Mattie is clearly subjected to Urquhart’s exercise of power. The fact that the primary condition for the exercise of power to exist is that the subject who is subjected to its exercise possesses free will is made very obvious through Mattie’s address to Urquhart in their intimate moment– it is her decision to serve as a vessel to Urquhart’s power. She, too, is provided the means of escape through other masculine character and that is displayed
53 through her relation to her colleague, John Krajewski, who sees the truth about things all along. However, her refusal to see his point of view results in her death because she does not manage to escape the power relation through the means of her resistance.
4.5. Sarah Harding
Sarah Harding, another of Urquhart’s subjects, is introduced in the second part of the miniseries, To Play the King. She is presented by Urquhart’s wife Elizabeth who is taking increasingly more control of Urquhart’s life and decisions. In the conversation with Urquhart, she calls Sarah “something interesting” (TK E1 00:18:34) and invites her to dinner where he can meet her and see her usefulness for himself. During the dinner,
Sarah is in the center of the attention with her opinions and the abilities rewarded by the cheering of the other visitors in Urquhart’s house and her abilities being judged to be sufficient by Elizabeth who is showed nodding to express her approval of her abilities for her husband to see.
When Sarah and Urquhart meet for the first time, he directly exercises the power over her and states overtly that he wants her to be totally subjected to the power of his discipline when he asks whether Sarah “would be interested in becoming his slave” (TK
E1 00:21:58). Later when he provides an explanation of what he means by this, he states” “If I can put it bluntly, you have a remarkable brain. And I should like to plunder it. I should like to have free and constant access to your thinking, Sarah” (TK E1
00:22:20). As Foucault states in Discipline and Punish, under the disciplinary power the mind becomes the place where power is exercised rather than the body of the condemned:
This discourse provided, in effect, by means of the theory of interests,
representations and signs, by the series and geneses that it reconstituted, a sort of
general recipe for the exercise of power over men: the ‘mind’ as a surface of
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inscription for power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through
the control of ideas; the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of
bodies that was much more effective than the ritual anatomy of torture and
execution (DP 102).
The discourse mentioned at the beginning of this passage is the discourse of the
Idelogues, the group which has been responsible for introducing penal reforms. David
Garland summarizes their contributions in his “Review: Foucault's Discipline and
Punish-An Exposition and Critique”: “But if punishment still aimed to influence others, it was now addressed to the calculating, reasoning mind of the citizen and not to the trembling bodies of cowed onlookers, a matter of gentle didacticism, and not of terror”
(Garland 856). It is the mind of the people subjected to the disciplinary power that this power aims to influence and over which it is exercised. The body is a vessel, an instrument in the exercise of power.
However, Sarah’s resistance to his proposition shapes the power relation in a way that it makes it even stronger when she says: “I won’t be your slave. But I’m very interested in learning what you have to teach me” (TK E1 00:23:47). Her reaction to his exercise of power shows that she is aware that the freedom of the individual and the freedom to respond is indeed the crucial part of the relation of power. Before declaring that “she won’t be his slave”, she states “You can make people say anything, but you can’t make them do anything” (TK E1 00:20:54). And later she states that “there’s no such thing as absolute power” (TK E1 00:23:05). Her proclamations go in line with
Foucault’s definition of power where power “is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege', acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions - an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated” (D&P 26). Thus, she proclaims the freedom as the internal
55 part of the exercise of power in the same way as it has been proclaimed by Mattie in the first part of the series. Zohreh Ramin makes it clear in his essay “Shakespeare’s Richard
III and Macbeth: A Foucauldian Reading”, “due to the persistent resistance and struggles, power is never able to achieve absolute unity” (Ramin 58) and this is what
Sarah is trying to convey to Urquhart. But because her proclamation that “she is interested in learning what Urquhart has to teach her” serves as the extension of
Urquhart’s domination because from this moment on, he starts to treat her like a teacher who is disciplining and training his fellow student.
These disciplinary methods are visible in almost every interaction that Urquhart and Sarah have. When she leaves, Urquhart is seen in the garden with his bodyguard,
Corder, where they discuss the file they have on Sarah which contains every detail about her life, even the information about her family and her husband which is a reminder of Panopticon where the details about the inmates are also written down.
Furthermore, when she comes to visit him for the first time after he calls her to his townhouse in the middle of the evening, he is shown as just the silhouette watching and standing in the door while she gets out of the car. The light is functioning in the same way as described by Božovič in the chapter about power relations in the series where
“the lantern cannot entirely pre vent light from passing through it, but is translucent, so that the inspector's body within it is to a certain degree discernible - from the cells he is visible as a silhouette, a shadow, or an opaque, dark spot” (Božovič 94). And when she presents him with the result of any kind of work that he asks her to do, he either responds with “oh that’s very good, very well put” (TK E1 00:39:51) and scolding her whenever she is not acting in accordance with what he considers to be proper such as when she is complaining that he called her when she has been having dinner with her husband and friends.
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However, Sarah is also provided with the means of escape of this power relation of domination through the resistance and the alignments outside of relation with Urquhart through the relation with another man; in her case it is her husband. While Urquhart’s exercise of power is constantly being more present in her life and she is becoming constantly more subjected to his power, her relationship with her husband is getting constantly worse. Urquhart individualizes her time by calling her at odd hours so that she has to subject her time to achieve maximum effectiveness, he also individualizes her actions with the ambition to achieve the best result. Rabinow describes this in The
Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought: “The inmate is not simply visible to the supervisor; he is visible to the supervisor alone– cut off from any contact.
This new power is continuous and anonymous. Anyone could operate the architectural mechanisms as long as he was in the correct position, and anyone could be subjected to it” (Rabinow 19). This is what Urquhart is trying to achieve– that she would be visible to him as a supervisor only.
When she starts to have an affair with Urquhart, her husband immediately finds out about it and gives her another chance to resist when she is asked to “just give him up”
(TK E3 00:39:58). She refuses this offer and because of this decision she becomes increasingly isolated and visible to the gaze of the supervisor only. When Stamper lets her know about the tape, she wants to give it to king’s assistant in order to shift the power relation and resist Urquhart. When she drives towards the king’s assistant, her husband is seen waiting for her. However, it is too late for her because for Urquhart it has become the struggle for life. Because of her initial inability to resist and because of surveillance which Urquhart has installed as the form of control over the actions of the people who work for him, her resistance is unsuccessful, and she ends up dead. As
Foucault notes, “if it too strikes, if it too kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength,
57 but as an element of itself that it is obliged to tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for” (D&P 9). Similar position is frequently expressed by Urquhart since he finds no pleasure in the murders but rather “finds it difficult to account for” which is represented by his frequent flashbacks of the murders which come to haunt him.
In summary, Sarah is another subject over whom Urquhart exercises the power of domination which is shown from the beginning of the first episode when he declares that he wants her to be his slave. Urquhart aims to create a docile body from her and individualize her and he partly succeeds However, the fact that she is free individual with the range of reactions towards this exercise of power is made clear since the beginning of the series where she states this fact very clearly. She, too, is offered the means of escape from this power relation through resisting the exercise of power by aligning with another man. By failing to recognize this chance from the beginning and letting him to make her slave, she is unable to resist and escape the power relation and ends up dead as a result of Urquhart’s surveillance.
4.6. Claire Carlsen
Claire Carlsen is shown for the first time while admiring Urquhart’s craftmanship in
House of Commons during the debate in the first episode of the third part of the series,
The Final Cut. She is portrayed to be a very ambitious woman. Urquhart’s relationship with Claire is again based on discipline which is organized to train and control the docile bodies created by Urquhart. On the other hand, this relationship differs from the relations with the other women in the previous parts of the series in the sense that the alignment with other people is completely different. While the other women have been subjected to Urquhart’s discipline from the very beginning and the way out has been provided only later, Claire is provided with the way out from the very beginning as is portrayed through her relationship with Urquhart’s adversary, Tom Makepeace.
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Urquhart and Claire meet for the first time on Urquhart’s birthday party. The exercise of discipline is visible from their very first meeting since Urquhart acts as if does not know her to make her to confess to her plans as well as to her ambition.
Similarly, when they meet again in his office where he interviews Claire for the place of his Private Party Secretary (PPS), the formula of using her brain is repeated in the similar fashion as with Sarah: “You realize that my PPS is in effect a spare set of brains for me?” (TC E2 00:13:32). Again, as in the case of Sarah, the place of articulation of the exercise of power is the mind and the actions of the individual are to be acted upon by the dominant agent in this relationship.
Another instance of discipline is the surveillance applied to control Claire and her relationship with Tom Makepeace about which Urquhart as the supervisor has known from the very beginning of their alignment. The aim is to use Claire’s docile body in order to individualize Urquhart’s adversary. In Discipline & Punish, Foucault talks about the individualization of the bodies in order to render them docile and make it possible for their actions to be acted upon:
One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled
disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous
coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration. Its
aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate
individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each
moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to
calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing,
mastering and using. Discipline organizes analytical space (D&P 143).
Urquhart’s discipline functions through controlling the alignments between the individual bodies in the net of the relations that sustain his strategic position in the
59 society. By controlling the relationship between Claire and Makepeace, he is in control of this alignment and knows their exact location and is able to “supervise their conduct” and keep the actions of his adversary positively aligned with his.
Similarly, he uses surveillance to track the missing document which has been taken from the archives by Claire. Urquhart’s personal bodyguard Corder gets a phone call immediately after the document leaves the building and is therefore able to stop Claire from releasing the document to Makepeace. However, as power functions in the dynamic fashion and, as Joseph Rouse writes in his analysis of Foucault’s analysis of power, “the actions of the peripheral agents in these networks are often what establish or enforce the connections between what a dominant agent does and the fulfillment or frustration of a subordinate agent’s desires” (Rouse 109), Corder begins to be the
“peripheral agent in these networks who establishes or enforces the connections”. In the end its him who releases the document to Makepeace and who is responsible for
Urquhart’s murder.
But it is also Claire’s doing that leads to Urquhart’s defeat at last because by her tactics of playing on both sides, she manages to effectively play the game so as to bring
Urquhart and Makepeace against each other. In “Subject and Power”, Foucault says that
“at every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries” (“Subject” 794). Similarly, Claire’s game puts into motion the mechanisms of power and the struggle between Makepeace and Urquhart becomes a confrontation where it is in effect Claire who acts upon their actions and Urquhart’s discipline is failing from the beginning. And similarly, it is her who manages to get Makepeace’s telephone number to another peripheral agent, Maria Passolides. Maria is trying to get the information about the graves of her uncles who have been killed by Urquhart during his mission at Cyprus. It this information that ends up being crucial in the way out from
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Urquhart’s exercise of power.
Urquhart’s power is not absolute and the inability to make Claire into docile body foreshadows the shift in the power structures where power continually stops to be exercised through Urquhart. His manipulative tactics seizes to be successful even on other agents in the network of relations and the points of resistance come together to dethrone him. His downfall reminds one of the downfall of Richard III in Shakespeare’s play whose last days are marked by the rebellions and desertions of his supporters. As
Zohreh Ramin notes in her essay,
No matter how hard he tries to hold on to it, power lets go off Richard, seeking to
exercise in another individual. Power is not, according to Foucault, something
you decide to achieve or let slip away by your own accord. Neither is it exercised
solely by one absolute individual even if that individual occupies the head of the
state (Ramin 61).
Similarly, Urquhart has never held the absolute power which is shown on the countless resistances from his feminine coworkers. It is not only Claire who resists, although she has been the most obvious example of resistance because she never falls for Urquhart’s disciplinary technique. The power shifts from Urquhart to Makepeace and this dynamic functioning of the power is foreshadowed by Urquhart’s inability to make Claire to self- subject herself in the face of the Panopticon.
And yet, she is unable to escape the power relations because her resistance comes too late. Makepeace has asked her for the document sooner, but she has been too afraid to go and find it because she knows that the consequences of this action might have been dire for her. If Urquhart finds out she might go to jail and the resistance might end up in “depriving the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property” (D&P 11). Because she does not resist soon enough, there is no happy ending
61 for her. As Makepeace finds her to be “pure poison” (TC E4 00:44:07) because she has been far too close to Urquhart, she does not find any place for herself. And though
Urquhart does not achieve the absolute domination over her, her resistance is inefficient because she does not manage to forget her “political double-bind” (“Subject” 785).
In summary, Urquhart uses the tactics of discipline over Claire, but her positive alignment with Makepeace makes Urquhart’s workings of discipline ineffective right from the beginning of their relationship. This foreshadows Urquhart’s downfall since the shifting alignments in the societal body result in his unfavourability even in the eyes of his closest allies. Although he still wants to control the multitude of bodies which all move in order to satisfy Urquhart and allow him to keep the strategic position in the society, he is never able to achieve the absolute power because of its dynamic nature and the power shifts from him to Makepeace.
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5. Netflix Adaptation
5.1. The Background
The series has been adapted by Beau Willimon for the internet streaming company
Netflix in 2013. Margaret Tally writes about how the series came to be in The Rise of the Anti-heroine in TV’s Third Golden Age: “In the case of House of Cards, Netflix had committed to purchasing all 26 episodes without making the producers create a pilot first. This allowed the creators of House of Cards to develop both complex storylines and characters that they believed would be compelling for potential viewers to watch”
(Tally 42). It was Netflix’s first original production. To purchase two seasons at once without doing the pilot first has been unheard of before Netflix’s venture. Greg Satell talks about this in “What Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ Means For The Future Of TV”,
“it’s the first major TV show to completely bypass the usual television ecosystem of networks and cable operators” (Satell). He mentions that it was also the first TV series developed with the help of big data (Satell) which means that it has been developed using the user’s preferences in order to create a show that the users would find appealing.
The story of the novel trilogy and BBC miniseries is adapted to fit the American politics. In the discussion called “The Roosevelts and House of Cards: Projections of
Power”, Beau Willimon talks about how the story has been created. He says that “more than the politics, I wanted to tell the story of a marriage” (Burns and Willimon
00:01:25). Later, Willimon talks about what he had in mind when writing the character of Claire: “She needs to be someone absolutely and completely formidable and Francis has to have got the better end of the deal. He needs to constantly be aspiring to get her approval” (Burns and Willimon 01:30:31). In this interview, he explains that character of Claire is the result of the rewriting done after he talked with Robin Wright who
63 portrays Claire in the series because he could not imagine her in the position of the housewife (Burns and Willimon).
The series has been affected by MeToo movement because Kevin Spacey, who portrays the main character in the series, has been accused of sexual misconduct. As a result, he has been fired from the show. This led to rewriting of the series and “two episodes of the new season that had already been shot with him were scrapped” (Hunt).
The producers decided that the show would air without the main protagonist, making his wife, Claire Underwood, the leading character of the last season.
5.2. Plot Overview
The main protagonist, Frank Underwood is the Chief Whip of the Democratic party, who, similarly to Francis Urquhart, is promised the seat of Secretary of State by
Garrett Walker whom he helped to get to the position of president. However, he is betrayed and asked to stay at the position that he has held till then which makes him furious and willing to seek the revenge by trying to get away with the president and getting himself into his place. He does this with the help of Claire Underwood, his wife who helps him only because she has the political ambition, too. She is initially seen as the head of the charity organization Clear Water Initiative but after Frank is finally inaugurated to the place of the president, she gives up this position because she has highest aims at her mind– she wants to be the ambassador at the United Nations.
In the first season, Frank meets young and ambitious journalist, Zoe Barnes, who he uses to achieve his plan of aspiration to the highest position in the state. She writes favorable articles which help him to get positive results in his endeavor. However, because she starts to resist his power and learns more about his foul tactics, he kills her in the second season. That is not the only murder which Frank has on his hands, since he also killed Congressman Peter Russo, who is another figure on his chessboard. At the
64 end of the first season, Frank is sworn as the vice president with the help of the entrepreneur Raymond Tusk who is influencing the actions of the president. In turn,
Frank promises that he will work together with Tusk on achieving Tusk as well as
Frank’s ambitions.
In the second season, Frank manages to frame the impeachment of the president and at the end of the season, he is sworn the president. He achieves this with Claire’s help who exercises the power over the First Lady and manages to manipulate her. In the first episode of this season, Jackie Sharp is introduced as the replacement on the position of the Chief Whip. Although Frank appoints her mainly because he wants to get her to whip the votes on the laws that he wants to pass, she openly resists Claire’s sexual assault bill which Claire wants to pass. This bill is a result of revelation that
Claire has had an abortion which she claims to be a result of rape. She has been raped but the abortion has been of Frank’s baby because they have decided that they do not want one. The bill fails as a result of this resistance.
In the third season, Frank engages in the peace talks over the region of Jordan
Valley with the Russian president Petrov. He manages to get Claire into the position of the Ambassador to the United Nations despite the resistance of other politicians.
However, he is forced to ask her to resign after Russian president Petrov positions it as condition leading to peace resolution that Frank has been trying to get during the course of the third season. His condition results from the situation when Claire humiliates
Petrov in her address after activist for gay rights, Michael Corrigan, hangs himself on her scarf while she is visiting him in Russian prison. After her resignation, the division between her and Frank is getting bigger and they are falling apart. The divide between them is finished when she deicides to leave Frank.
In the fourth season, the division between Frank and Claire is getting bigger as the
65 date of the general election is getting closer. She leaves for her home where she stays with her mother who is sick. She wants to get to the position of the Congresswoman in her home state. However, Frank cancels this plan for her by endorsing another candidate. She is sabotaging his presidential campaign as a result of this and she is willing to continue to do so unless he makes her his vice president. At first, he refuses but then he deicides to agree on this proposition and makes her his running mate after all. In this season, Claire starts an affair with the writer Tom Yates who has been assigned the job of writing the book about Frank’s politics in the previous book. What he actually has done is that he has written about their marriage and has made Claire to realize that she is constantly more unhappy and disillusioned in it. The season ends with
Frank and Claire breaking the fourth wall together while watching the attack on the terrorist organization, the act that they orchestrated together in order to secure their position.
The fifth season sees the reshuffle of the forces. While Frank and Claire manage to get elected as a president and vice president very narrowly by the foul tactics, he is becoming to be incriminated by the work of Tom Hammerschmidt, the former editor of the newspaper where Zoe Barnes used to work and the hearings of impeachment are to be started against him. As a result, he deicides to resign, leaving the presidency to
Claire with the ambition to influence her from the background by being the part of the private sector. This is conditioned by the fact that she would give him the presidential pardon. However, she refuses to do so which is shown by her refusal to answer his calls at the end of the season. In this season, Claire also kills Tom Yates because he knows too much and has become dangerous to her and manages to get away with all Frank’s closest coworkers so that “her turn” can begin.
In the last season, Claire appears alone as a widow after Frank has died. Later in
66 the season, it is revealed that his closest coworker, Doug Stamper, has killed him in order to protect Frank’s legacy. Claire is trying to get rid of Frank’s influence by any means possible, the main problem being the Shepherd family, the main sponsors of
Frank’s political career. She creates a new cabinet made wholly by women and manages to get rid of all her opponents by her scheming. When Doug confronts her with the information about Frank’s will in which he states that he leaves everything to Doug because Frank and Claire have no heir, she reveals that she is pregnant which means that everything goes to her. In the final scene, Doug wants to kill her, but she is faster and manages to kill him.
5.3. Power Relations in Netflix Adaptation
In this adaptation, the device of the aside where the main character breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience is used here with the same aim as in the British miniseries- to let the viewer know that Frank knows about him. The viewer is again acted upon and made complicit to Frank’s and later also Claire’s actions. They both see everything; they operate in the darkness where their actions are invisible to those over whom the power is exercised.
From the very beginning, Frank is shown disponing with the insider knowledge about the members of his party when he visits the party to celebrate the New Year and circles around the room pinpointing to those on the very top of the party structures and telling the viewer about their secrets. In this aside, Frank also provides the description of his job: “My job is to clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving. But I won’t have to be a plumber much longer” (House S01E01 00:03:12). This implies that his job is to watch over the party members and to know all their dark secrets in order to be able to use them for the party machinery to work.
Furthermore, he keeps the files about the members of the congress in the same way as
67 the supervisor in the Panopticon. This is made visible in the second season when he shows Jackie Sharp, his future replacement at the position of Whip, the files about her as well as her colleagues stored in his computer. His ever-watching gaze is also revealed in the conversation with the journalist Zoe Barnes who comes to visit him in his house in order to get the powerful alignment to advance her career. When she reveals her plans to him, he says that “he reads everything” (House S01E01 00:33:23). He also uses his closest ally, Doug, to surveil Rachel in order to stop her from talking to the media.
In the fourth season, he even uses surveillance to watch over his wife who wants to get away from his influence and his disciplinary power.
Furthermore, in Discipline & Punish Foucault describes how the disciplinary power uses delinquents in the process of training and punishing the individuals: “Delinquency, with the secret agents that it procures, but also with the generalized policing that it authorizes, constitutes a means of perpetual surveillance of the population: an apparatus that makes it possible to supervise through the delinquents themselves, the whole social field” (D&P 281). This presence of the delinquents in the disciplinary tactics of the panoptic society is made visible in the Netflix adaptation through the presence of Gavin, whose body is made absolutely docile to the disciplinary tactics of the state apparatus controlled by Frank. As a result of Frank’s discipline, Gavin is used as an instrument in the surveilling machine when he watches over Lucas Goodwin, the journalist who knows about Frank’s illegal actions.
Frank’s position as the supervisor in the Panopticon is revealed also in his position to the women he works with and uses to achieve the efficiency of his plan and in order to be able to keep his strategic position. His actions are influential in the lives of the women to such an extent so that he is able to persuade Jackie Sharp to marry in order to make her more favorable in the eyes of the voters. The power he exercises over the
68 women works through the language. He trains the women to become the docile bodies by using the surveillance to know each detail of their life in order to act upon their actions.
5.4. Zoe Barnes
Zoe Barnes is most visibly the character who is subjected to the tactics of discipline from the main protagonist. She is a young, ambitious journalist who does not shy to use any tools which could bring her recognition in the area of journalism. From the very beginning, she is portrayed as being trained by Frank. Their first communication happens when Zoe comes to visit him at his home to get aligned with him in order to gain more prestigious position in her job. Since that very first meeting, she is disciplined by Frank. When she is showing off her body, Frank answers: “That’s a cheap ploy” (House S01E01 00:32:00). This the first instance of a many when Frank trains Zoe to become the more professional version of herself so that she would be more suitable subject through which the exercise of his power can be transgressed.
His position as the watcher in the watchtower of the Panopticon is also revealed in this dialogue when he talks about Zoe’s position: “So which Zoe Barnes am I to trust?
The one who wrote about the fireman that married the meter maid? Or the one who authored a very fine article on a new jogging path in Rock Creek Park? Don’t be flattered, I read everything” (House S01E01 00:33:10). From this description it is visible that he knows about everything and is a very skillful watcher of the inmates since he knows about the marginal articles which are largely forgotten. It is his work to watch without being seen and he does precisely that.
Soon after their first meeting, Frank starts to individualize Zoe’s time and space, calling her to meet him at unusual hours and on unusual places. When he calls her for the first time, he wants to see her immediately even though she is at work. She rushes to
69 meet him, and they meet in gallery where Frank is looking at the picture. This picture is
The Biglin Brothers Racing by realist painter Thomas Eakins. The significance of the painting is explained by Frank who declares that he and Zoe “are in the same bout now”
(House S01E01 00:43:11) and that she should “take care not to tip it over” (House
S01E01 00:43:13). Through this, he lets her know that she is acting as the vessel for the exercise of power and that she should be careful not to resist it. He exercises power through language and he disciplines her through organization of her schedule.
This is also made apparent in the second episode when Zoe is waiting for him on the street on the cold night. After he hands her the article by which he wants to discredit his political opponent, there is another instance of his training of her when he dictates how she should do her job after she shows the skepticism about the piece as well as concerns of the possible denial from Frank’s opponent. After she asks what if he denies,
Frank answers: “He will. Let him. This is a man trying to be confirmed as Secretary of
State. Everything is a story” (House S01E02 00:13:30). This is another instance of his training where he is telling her how to do her job in order to achieve maximum efficiency of his powerplay.
Similar thing is stated by Marjoilane Boutet in her essay “The Politics of Time in
House of Cards”: “During this entire scene, as well as for the first ten episodes of this first season of House of Cards, Frank is in control of Zoe’s agenda: he plans their meetings, tells her what to write about and even when to get on the subway. She has willingly become a “puppet,” and he clearly enjoys playing with her” (“Politics of
Time”). She willingly becomes the inmate of the Panopticon who self-subjects her actions in order to satisfy the watcher who is always there, watching without being seen.
The scene Boutet has in mind is when Zoe meets Frank on the train station in the second episode of the first season of the series and he instructs her to write about Catherine
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Durant as the replacement on the place of Secretary of State. She asks whether it is true, and Frank’s answer is that “it will be after you write it. Catherine Durant. Say it over and over. Tomorrow afternoon, write it down. And watch that name come out of the mouth of the President of the United States. This is where we get to create. Don’t miss your train, Miss Barnes. It’s the last one tonight” (House S01E02 00:37:18). This is yet another instance of Frank’s individualizing tendency when he controls Zoe’s time, her location in place and her movements. She is becoming the docile body and Frank as a watcher is acting upon her actions.
Furthermore, she is portrayed as childlike to strengthen the notion of Frank’s training. Chad Painter and Patrick Ferrucci write about this in “Gender Games: The
Portrayal of Female Journalists on House of Cards”:
Zoe Barnes begins season one as a junior reporter at the Washington Herald, which
is a thinly veiled version of the Washington Post. She is often shown in a childlike
manner. She dresses like a college student, wearing hoodies, T-shirts and jeans to
the newsroom; very short, very tight dresses at events; and sweatpants and
a sweatshirt in her apartment. Many journalists do dress sloppily, and Barnes’ dress
does improve; she evolves as power dresser as she becomes more successful at her
career. Further, she is typically shot from a high angle, which accentuates her short
and slight frame, and she is often depicted filling only a small portion of the screen.
Other characters on the show treat her as if she was a child (Painter and Ferrucci
498).
That she is portrayed as childlike makes it easier for Frank to discipline her and exercise the power over her. When their affair starts, he is often acting like a parent, disciplining his misbehaved child such as in the scene when they start having the affair. His first question when entering her flat is “Do your parents know that you live like this?”
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(House S01E04 00:45:04). Later in their affair, he also gets her to call her father on the
Father’s Day.
However, as power is never held and can be only exercised, Frank is not able to discipline Zoe indefinitely, and she too, searches for the way out from the power relation as she is reminded by her colleague Janine Skorsky that she does not have to do what she is doing. After that, Zoe does not allow Frank to individualize her time and for the first time, she leaves him waiting and schedules a meeting outside her house. They meet in the gallery again in front of the picture called Little Girl in a Blue Armchair by
Mary Cassatt. This picture has a symbolic meaning since it portrays their relationship.
As Germaine Greer talks about this painting in the article “Storm in the Teacups” published in The Guardian, she describes it “as an icon of the awfulness of being at once controlled by adults and ignored by them” (“Storm”). This painting is a direct representation of their relationship where Zoe is the little girl who is disciplined by
Frank and at the same time, her needs are ignored. This painting is a direct representation of the shifting point in their relationship where Zoe starts to shape the power by resisting Frank’s exercise of power. This is also directly stated in the address by Frank when he states that “proximity to power deludes some into thinking they wield it” (House S01E09 00:15:22).
Furthermore, the best representation of Frank’s discipline working over Zoe is when she tells him that she does not want to have an affair with him anymore and she wants their relationship to be strictly professional. He responds by not giving her any further information and she ends up cut off from the contact and from the inside information. This is a direct representation of Foucault’s description of the functioning of the discipline: “The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the
72 individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as a property” (D&P 11).
Similarly, Frank responds to Zoe’s disobedience with “depriving her of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as a property”. She is no longer granted the liberty of having the exclusive information shared only with herself. Her body is an instrument in his scheming and he only uses it as a tool to act upon her actions.
And the change in their relationship is evident also afterwards as she restarts their affair. He is no longer able to exercise his power over her actions and make her to self- subject herself as he asks her to go to shower before they talk about politics which is met by her answer: “I’ll shower when you leave” (House S01E09 00:43:53). It is the first time that she directly resist his work of discipline and it is in this moment that she starts her own discourse and reclaims a power for herself. “His” power is not absolute as he would like to think because he has never owned it; it is only exercised through him.
Furthermore, her resistance is visible also in her leaving her apartment and staying with her colleague, Lucas. As Ellen Feder describes it “different positions individuals take up or are assigned afford specific arenas for the exercise of power” (Feder 59).
Zoe’s flat has become the arena for Frank’s exercise of power, and she can no longer tolerate this arena because she wants to shift the power relation by her resistance. From this moment, the relationship between her and Frank begins to be the relationship of confrontation and for Frank, “the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target-at one and the same time its fulfillment and its suspension” (“Subject” 794). As Zoe becomes more and more estranged and digs more into his secrets, this “fixing of a power relationship” is becoming to be more necessary because her resistance is threatening
Frank’s plans. Thus, he applies even more surveillance in her case- he knows when
Janine comes to interview Christina and he knows that Zoe has been after Rachel, the
73 only person that is able to incriminate him with the information that she has. Thus, he kills Zoe at the train station because he is threatened by her knowledge. The killing is not the orchestration of his strength; nor he does it for the passion of the act. As
Foucault puts it, “if it too strikes, if it too kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength, but as an element of itself that it is obliged to tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for” (D&P 9).
As Frank himself talks to the camera, he wants to excuse what he is doing: “Don’t miss a breath mourning miss Barnes. Every kitten grows up to be a cat. They seem so harmless at first, small, quiet, lapping up their saucer of milk. But once their claws get long enough, they draw blood, sometimes from the hand that feeds them. For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain, there can be no mercy” (House S02E01
00:46:24). This killing is described by Roberto Sirvent and Ian Diorio in their essay
“Freedom and Democracy in House of Fear”: “But he doesn’t want to use people so much as he wants to control them. After all, Frank doesn’t kill Peter and Zoe because he can no longer use them. He does so because he can no longer control them. (in Hackett
167). It is not ceremony of strength; Frank does not want to glorify it by this killing.
The killing is rather used as extreme measure taken to ensure Frank’s strategic position which he finds “difficult to account for” and thus, he deicides to create a justification as to its necessity.
In summary, Frank uses the discipline over Zoe to act upon her possible actions and make her do what he wants. However, he does not realize that he does not possess power- it can only be exercised, and it shaped by the resistance. Zoe, too, starts to resist when she realizes that has been using her and coercing her all the time. Her resistance shapes the whole relationship and it becomes the relationship of confrontation where
Frank is trying to fix the relation in order to keep her compliance while she constantly
74 struggles against him. The power is not absolute, and Frank has to constantly fight in order to keep his strategic situation. In the end he kills Zoe as to ensure his strategic position because he realizes that he can no longer use discipline over her for she refuses to be the master of her self-subjection anymore.
5.5. Jackie Sharp
Jackie Sharp is encountered in the second season as the replacement at Frank’s former position of Chief Whip after he is inaugurated the Vice President. When they meet for the first time, they discuss the photographs that Frank has on his wall. It is the photograph of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Russell while discussing the Civil Rights
Act. Jackie immediately recognizes Russell who was the Senator for Georgia between the years 1933-1977. Following the Postdam Declaration, he advocated for the more ruthless approach against Japan as is visible in his letter to President Truman: “We should continue to strike the Japanese until they are brought groveling to their knees.
We should cease our appeals to Japan to sue for peace. The next plea for peace should come from an utterly destroyed Tokyo” (Russell).
This photograph foreshadows Jackie’s importance for Frank which is explained later when Jackie asks why he chose her as the replacement on the position of Chief
Whip:
FRANK. How many missile strikes did you launch?
JACKIE. Enough to keep me awake at night.
FRANK. But you did it anyway.
JACKIE. Yes, I did.
FRANK. How many women and children?
JACKIE. Too many.
FRANK. And you launched those missiles knowing all those innocent people
75
would die.
JACKIE. I had orders to eliminate the enemy.
FRANK. Which you carried expertly and efficiently (House S02E01 00:43:19).
Frank chooses her as the replacement because she already is a docile body ready to do a ruthless thing when instructed to, with the maximum efficiency and expertise. That is why he chooses her– because she is used to being disciplined and that is what he finds valuable because he fears being opposed and resisted.
Frank’s position of the watcher in the watchtower is also revealed when he meets
Jackie for the first time. He shows her the extensive files he has both on her and on the other two candidates for that position. When they meet later and talk about Jackie’s fight for the seat of the whip, he immediately opens a file on her opponent and shares an information about his illegitimate daughter that only a few people know. Foucault addresses this issue in Power/Knowledge: “Power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it instutionalises, professionalises and rewards its pursuit” (P/K 93). Similarly, Frank never ceases his interrogation and the disciplinary gaze through which he acquires the information that he later uses to create docile bodies.
In the conversation they have immediately after he reveals the file on the illegitimate daughter, he wants Jackie to be the master of her self-subjection just as the watcher in the Panopticon: “I’ve given you all I can. Whatever you decide is your prerogative” (House S02E02 00:38:42). In here, he is training her to become the most efficient worker in his machine because “the chief function of the disciplinary power is to ‘train’, rather than to select and to levy; or no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more” (D&P 170). This is exactly what Frank is doing here; he is training her to become the most ruthless version of herself who is prepared to act against one of
76 her closest allies. By doing this he selects and levies; she is worthless to him when she does not follow the orders. James Ketchen and Michael Yeo describe Jackie’s position in their essay “Of Sheep, Shepherds, and a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing”: “Stamper,
Meechum, Sharp, Seth, his Gaffney constituents– all are, for Frank, merely sheep to be used as the shepherd sees fit: groomed and perhaps pampered one moment, fleeced and even sacrificed the next” (in Hackett 7). The body is seen as the instrument; the aim is to act upon one’s actions.
Paul Rabinow also talks about this in The Foucault Reader when he describes the techniques of the self-formation: “These operations characteristically entail a process of self-understanding but one which is mediated by an external authority figure” (Rabinow
11). Similarly, what Frank is doing here is that he wants Jackie to self-form herself; but it is done with his help as an external authority figure rather than by Jackie herself. In the interview mentioned before, when Jackie asks why he chooses her as his replacement, he also answers that it is her “ruthless pragmatism” (House S02E01
00:44:06). It is this quality that he values the most and he makes it clear as to make
Jackie accentuate this quality what she does by throwing her colleague and the one who treated her almost as a daughter overboard. Frank trains her the be the worst version of herself and the discreditation of those who are closest to her is his way of selecting who he finds worthy to work for him.
The Panoptic effect of their relationship is accentuated when Jackie comes back from the California and Frank is sitting in her chair, waiting for her, knowing exactly where she has been and when she is returning. However, this scene is shaped by
Jackie’s resistance because she refuses to deliver the votes he asks from her. In her response to Frank’s disciplining, she says: “I made it very clear that I wouldn’t be a puppet” (House S02E10 00:29:01). This is the first instance of the resistance that is
77 formulated by Jackie and shapes the power relation. It is at this moment that Frank is unable to act upon her actions because she is provided with the opportunity to resist.
Foucault makes it clear in an interview published in Final Foucault:
The relationships of power have an extremely wide extension in human relations.
There is a whole network of relationships of power, which can operate between
individuals, in the bosom of the family, in an educational relationship, in the
political body, etc. This analysis of relations of power constitutes a very complex
field; it sometimes meets what we can call facts or states of domination, in which
the relations of power, instead of being variable and allowing partners a strategy
which alters them, find themselves firmly set and congealed. When an individual or
a social group manages to block a field of relations of power, to render them
impassive and invariable and to prevent all reversibility of movement– political or
military– we are facing what can be called a state of domination. It is certain that in
such a state the practice of liberty does not exist or exists only unilaterally or is
extremely confined and limited (in Bernauer 3).
Thus, it cannot be considered the power relation when Jackie is refused all possibility to resist and respond in the way that she finds suitable; from the moment when all the possibilities are canceled, it is the state of domination and not the power relation. Power relation cannot exist without the resistance which consists in shifting the relation.
The men who paves the way for Jackie’s resistance is Remy Danton. When Frank makes a fool of her during the presidential debates, Remy resigns and inspires Jackie to resign, too. According to Steven Michels, “Remy and Jackie have the last laugh, however: Sharp resigns her campaign and endorses Dunbar, and Remy just resigns” (in
Hackett 135). Their resistance paves the way for Frank’s downfall since it is also their testimony that brings him down at the end of the fourth season. Although they both
78 appeared to be powerless at first, because Frank manages to act upon their actions and discipline them through the powerful forces of the Panopticon, it is their resistance that at last, shapes the power relations.
Furthermore, Remy makes Jackie realize that she can live without the individuality installed on her through the forces of discipline. When they meet after
Jackie has endorsed Dunbar and started to work for her in her campaign, Remy has the conversation with her that closely resembles Foucault’s words when he says that
“maybe the target nowadays is to refuse who we are” (“Subject” 784):
REMY. I’m out Jackie. No more politics.
JACKIE. You know you don’t mean that. It’s who you are.
REMY. That’s what I though, too, for a long time (House S03E12 00:13:23).
Furthermore, when Jackie asks him what he is going to do now when he is out of politics, he answers, that “that’s the best part. I have no idea (House S03E12 00:13:38).
That completely takes the wind out of her sails since in her political “double bind” it is unthinkable to not foresee one’s future and one’s further actions. Moreover, this dialogue foreshadows Jackie’s further actions since this notion about spontaneity is repeated as she escapes the power relation when they sit in the Remy’s car and listen to the radio where they announce her testimony against Frank. When Remy asks her where they should go, she answers “surprise me” (House S04E13 00:38:18). It is at this time that she manages to get out of the power relation completely. She refuses her given individuality and she no longer plans her movements ahead. From this moment on, she plays just for herself and refuses Frank’s discipline. As Myron Jackson writes in his essay “Broken Friendships and the Pathology of Corporate Personhood in House of
Cards, “Sharp realizes her love for Remy is the only thing she has left that is not of
Frank’s doing (in Hackett 201). By aligning herself with Remy, Frank is no longer able
79 to get to her and act upon her actions.
In summary, Jackie, too, is initially self-subjecting herself as a result of Frank’s disciplinary tactics. She does what is expected from her and Frank manages to act upon her actions. However, as she is free person with the liberties, Frank is not able to assume absolute domination of her actions and she manages to escape from the power relation by resisting it. It happens with the help of Remy, who also starts his resistance by resigning. It is through the alignment with him that she is able to “refuse what she is”– her individuality resulting from Frank’s training is largely forgotten.
5.6. Claire Underwood
Claire Underwood is another of women who Frank subjects to the disciplinary power. Her position is different from the position of Mortima and Elizabeth Urquhart since they are shown to have an aim that is aligned with the aim of their husband. With
Claire, the situation is much more difficult since she entered the marriage with Frank to have a partner who can help her to achieve the aims of her own which often clash with the aims of her husband. At first, she is portrayed as being completely self-subjected to her role of Frank’s wife where he acts upon her actions and transfers his power through her.
Romana Andò describes this aspect of Claire’s and Frank’s relationship in her essay
“Fashion and fandom on TV and social media: Claire Underwood’s power dressing”:
Her style accents her use of power in politics as well as in her domestic life. Mrs
Underwood is married to a powerful man who exercises power through the
presence of his wife, and through the power that she herself exerts. Indeed, the
color combination of their clothes, in many cases, is the most immediate
confirmation of their shared power. They wear clothes of the same shade of grey or
black, reinforcing a coherent image of the couple as a team and pointing out, in
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some ways, both their outfits as power-dressing uniforms (Andò 214).
This explanation of her dressing shows that she is completely self-subjected to her role of the wife of the successful politician which is shown also through her clothing which is designed to fit the role of the successful woman even while staying at home. She has been trained to fit her role perfectly and does not allow herself to step from it even while alone at home.
The fact that Frank acts upon her actions is made visible from the very first season when he uses her body to transfer his exercise of power while forgetting completely about her goals. When their aims clash for the first time, she leaves Frank and goes to see her ex-lover Adam Galloway. It is for the first time that one sees Claire’s true individuality and who she could be if she would not be subjected to Frank’s discipline.
Sarah Palm and Kenneth Stikkers write about this in their essay “’What Will We Leave
Behind?’ Claire Underwood’s American Dream”:
Adam in many ways embodies everything Claire gave up all those years ago—
passion, love, creativity, freedom, independence, and selflessness—much like The
Sentinel represented all those values Frank has sacrificed in his quest for power.
When Claire leaves Frank briefly for Adam, we see an entirely new side to her,
much as we did with Frank when he returned to The Sentinel. She is carefree,
wearing Adam’s jeans and button-up shirts (a far cry from her usual austere
wardrobe). She actually laughs—something we never saw her do previously—with
his artist friends, dancing with them and smoking joints into the wee hours of the
morning. She and Adam spend their few days together making love and talking
about life. She allows herself to wonder, to philosophize (in Hackett 48).
When Claire comes to visit Adam, she unleashes her true individuality free from the
“political double-bind” (“Subject” 785). It is the first time that she is seen being herself,
81 free from the individuality she has been trained to represent while playing Frank’s loyal wife. It is in Adam’s company that she is finally free from the individualization that is in control of her time, actions and movement. When Frank needs her to be the representation of his power dressed in the fitting clothes, she has to be there; her plans are secondary because, according to Frank, her goals are less important than his.
Similar thing is mentioned by Adam Galloway himself when they walk through the park. Upon seeing young and dreamy girl who is reading the book, Adam points at her and declares: “If he’s looking for you, that’s where you are. Over there. Before you met
Frank. Alone. Curious. Absorbing everything (House S01E11 00:45:39). He sees right through Claire and offers her the way out by offering her everything that she used to be before she has met Frank. There is the way out by resisting Frank’s exercise of power through allowing herself to be like her young self and joining Adam. When he prints the photograph of the girl that Claire takes during their conversation, he says that when
Claire “walked through that door yesterday, he (Frank)walked right in with you” (House
S01E11 00:36:40). This is another instance of Frank’s everlasting presence in Claire’s life where he is constantly present with her wherever she goes.
She even admits this conscious presence and the fact that Frank is acting upon her actions just before she leaves to come to Adam when she and Frank argue: “Then be honest how you’ve been using me just like you use everybody else (House S01E10
00:44:22). She recognizes Frank’s disciplinary presence in her life where she is forced to act with the maximum effectivity and self-subject herself and her plans to fulfill the plan that is mainly his. She is the body that moves according to his will and is trained to be subservient to his wishes. Yet, she too resists the power relation since she leaves to see Adam. However, feeling the constant pressure in herself, she self-subjects herself again and returns home to Frank to fulfill her role of the wife and to keep her actions
82 positively aligned with his.
Yet when the disciplinary presence in her life becomes strong again after she is forced to resign at her place of ambassador because of the deal between Frank and the
Russian president Viktor Petrov, she begins to resist again as Tom Yates appears in her life. Tom Yates is similar to Adam Galloway in a way that he also reminds Claire of everything that she could be would it not for her political double-bind. His portrayal of the relationship between Frank and Claire is the thing that makes realize that she has been subjected to Frank’s discipline all along and, at the end of the third season, she decides to leave Frank to pursue her own ambitions and create the way for herself where her actions would not be acted upon. Yet, Frank exercises the disciplinary power and manages to get control over Claire through the use of surveillance.
However, as the resistance is central to the exercise of power, similarly Claire resists
Frank’s exercise of power and pushes against him to make him realize that she holds the key position to his success and without the positive alignment with her, Frank would not be able to hold his strategic position. His decision to make her his vice president after she manages to resist his exercise of power points to the shifting nature of power which would not be possible would it not for Tom Yates and his analysis of their relation that shows Claire in the subordinate position, constantly self-subjecting her behavior to achieve her husband’s goals.
Sandrine Sorlin talks about their relationship and the turning point where the power starts to be exercised through Claire rather than Frank: “The Underwood’s identity unit was predicated on a lie that the last episode of the third season brings out. Frank’s physical threatening of his wife reveals the hitherto covert manipulative aspects in their relationship. He has been selfishly using her to achieve his own ambition” (Sorlin 187).
From this moment onwards, Claire’s resistance starts to shift the entire network of the
83 power relations since her revelations of the harmful pictures along with the testimonies of the other characters in the series such as Jackie Sharp or Remy Danton result in the power no longer being exercised through Frank because he is not able to keep other agents positively aligned with him.
Another symbolic representation of the power shifting from Frank to Claire and his inability to achieve the absolute domination of her body as well as her actions is portrayed in the shifting focus of the camera. While in the seasons where Frank’s disciplinary power has been evident in Claire’s life, the focus of the camera has been usually on him while Claire has been usually portrayed in the background, after she becomes the president, the focus of the camera is on her while Frank is portrayed in the background, watching over her but not having any influence over her actions any more.
This is made evident in the last episode of the fifth season, where which foreshadows Claire’s actions in the last season where she tries to erase Frank completely from her life and even starts using her maiden name to install herself through the resistance as means of escape from the power relation. In this episode which foreshadows Claire’s future actions, she refuses to pardon Frank in her address, and she does not take his phone calls afterwards after he is desperately trying to reach her. In the last season, she manages to resist him completely, while fighting with the shadows from his past that try to act upon her actions in the same way as Frank used to. Through her resistance, she manages to get rid of all the exercises of power done by the tactics of discipline installed by Frank.
In summary, Frank is using the tactics of discipline to exercise the power over his wife because the positive alignment with her makes it possible to transfer the power through her body and use her in order to enforce his strategic position in the society.
Her body is used as the vessel for Frank’s power which in result, manages to reinforce
84 his exercise of power over the other characters in the series whom Frank manipulates and uses to achieve his goals. However, as she realizes the tightening grip of Frank’s discipline in her life, she starts to resist his exercise of power. This realization comes through the help of Adam Galloway and Tom Yates, both of whom make it possible for
Claire to see the true reality of her relationship with Frank and manage to escape the power relation through resistance of the powerful forces originating from his body.
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6. Conclusion
In conclusion, the women in the novel and both adaptations have shown the characteristics of being subjected to the tactics of the discipline which comes from the main protagonist. Both Francis Urquhart and Frank Underwood act as the supervisors in the watchtower of the Panopticon and they operate by using the surveillance in order to achieve the docility of the women through which they want to transfer their power.
They act upon the actions of the women and want to make them subservient to their wishes in order to keep the strategic position in the social body.
However, the women in the story are free individuals and are assured with the freedom of action. Because the resistance is integral part of the power relation and in effect shapes this power relation, the women in the story also resist the exercise of power by the main protagonist. The resistance is their means of escape and it often comes with other character in the story which hints at the possibility of the resistance and the means of escape from the power relation which is achieved by forgetting their training installed by Urquhart and Underwood.
In case of Mattie, both in the novel and in the BBC miniseries, this character who reminds her about her true self is her colleague John Krajewski who sees behind
Urquhart’s facade from the very beginning. In case of Sally Quine, it is the newspaper proprietor John Landless who prepares the scene for the resistance from the very beginning. Sarah Harding is provided the hint to the corruptibility of Urquhart by her husband. Claire Carlsen both in the novel and the miniseries is provided the way out through the character of Tom Makepeace. Zoe Barnes is provided with the hint to resistance by her colleague Janine Skorsky who teaches her about the nature of the incorruptible journalism, while Jackie Sharp is provided the means of escape through the character of Remy Danton who remains the only thing in her life that is not the
86 result of Frank’s training. And finally, Claire Underwood is provided the means of escape through the character of Tom Yates who is the only one able to see behind the façade of her marriage with Frank.
The success of their resistance is dependent on whether they find their true individuality through the help of these marginal characters whose actions help to establish the power relations or whether they stay positively aligned with the actions of the main protagonist. For some of them, the resistance comes too late because the main protagonist already knows about their plans and is able to align his actions with their decisions. Because he wants to keep his strategic position and clings desperately to the workings of power, he kills, and he uses violence in order to keep the bodies sufficiently aligned with his actions. In the situations where the women characters in all three versions listen to the advice given by the peripheral agents and resist the power relation to which they are subjected through the workings of the main character’s disciplinary power, they are able to escape these power relations and establish the life for themselves without the presence of the supervisor in the watchtower.
However, the main protagonist is unable to achieve the absolute power, both in the lives of the women subjected to his discipline as well as in the political world even though his position is one of the highest in the state. The power functions in dynamic fashion and the feminine characters shape the character of the power by their resistance.
The power, according to Foucault, functions through the network of the social relations where the actions of the dominant agent are limited by the actions of other individuals that either work in accord with the dominant agent’s exercise of power and work as the bodies through which this exercise of power is transferred, or they resist and in effect change the entire power relation. Each individual subjected to the exercise of power must have a free will- without it, it is no longer power relation but the state of
87 dominance where there is no possibility to resist.
However, as shown here, the resistance is central to the power relation and each feminine character resists the exercise of power to some extent. While some women, such as Sally Quine, Claire Carlsen (both in the novel and the miniseries), Jackie Sharp and Claire Underwood manage to escape the power relation completely where the dominant agent is left without the means to act upon their actions and is in effect completely erased from their lives; other women stay subjected to the disciplinary tactics for far too long and reveal too much information to the main protagonist which results in their violent death because the relation of confrontation has turned into the struggle for life for the main protagonist.
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8. Resume (English)
The aim of this thesis is to analyze and compare the relations between the main protagonist and the women in the novel, the BBC miniseries and Netflix adaptation through Foucault’s theory of power to show that the main protagonist in all three works functions as the watcher in the Panopticon and uses the tactics of discipline as described in Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison with the aim to create a docile bodies to ensure his strategic position in the society. All three works show that even though the main protagonist uses the disciplinary power to limit the possibility of resistance, he is not successful because he fails to realize that the power is not absolute and cannot be held by him; it is only exercised.
As the women in the relations are assured the freedom of action, they shape the power relations by their resistance which is internal to the power structures. Although their strategic situations differ and they are all presented with different opportunities to resist, the main protagonist is never able to achieve the absolute domination over them because, from Foucault’s point of view it is not possible precisely because of the internal character of the resistance.
Their resistance often comes with the help from the marginal character who is outside the relation between the main protagonist and the women subjected to discipline. The character of the outsider serves as the eye opener since it is that character that allows for the women to see that they can refuse their given individuality which is installed in them through the workings of the discipline originating from the main protagonist.
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9. Resumé (Czech)
Táto práce je analyzuje a porovnává vztahy mezi hlavním hrdinou a ženskými postavami v knize, miniseriály od BBC a adaptaci od Netflixu z pohledu Foucaultovy teorie o moci. Cílem je dokázat, že hlavní hrdina reprezentuje hlídače v strukturách
Panopticonu, který užívá disciplinárních taktik, aby ze žen udělal „poslušná těla“ jak jich Foucault popisuje ve své knize Dohlížet a trestat, a to vše jenom proto, aby si udržel své strategické místo ve společnosti. Všechny tři díla dokazují, že i když hlavní hrdina používá disciplinárních taktik, aby omezil možnosti vzpoury, se svými taktikami nemá úspěch, protože si neuvědomuje, že moc nikdy nemůže být absolutní. Hlavní hrdina nikdy moc nevlastnil, protože moc se nedá vlastnit, může ji jenom používat.
Protože ženy, které jsou součástí těchto mocenských vztahů mají slobodní vůli, součásti jejich reakce na užití moci je vzdor. Odpor je neodmyslitelnou součásti mocenských vztahů a ženy svým odporem pomáhají formovat mocenské struktury. I strategické situace, v kterých se nachází a jejich možnosti vzdorovat se liší, hlavnímu hrdinovi se nepodaří úplně podmanit ani jednu z nich, protože to z Foucaultova pohledu ani není možné, protože vzdor je vnitřní součásti mocenských vztahu.
Vzdor je často formován prostřednictvím pomoci od vedlejších postav, které se nacházejí mimo mocenského vztahu mezi ženami a hlavním hrdinou. Tato vedlejší postava má za úlohu otevřít ženské postavě oči, protože jim umožní na věc pohlédnou z jiného pohledu a odmítnou individualitu, která jim byla dána prostřednictvím disciplíny, která pochází od hlavního hrdinu.
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