The Undead Edition

2009 nomadTHE UNDEAD EDITION The Comparative Literature Program’s Journal of Undergraduate Writing University of Oregon The University of Oregon is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution committed to cultural diversity and compliance With the Americans with Disabilities Act. This publication will be made available in accessible formats upon request. Accommodations for people with disabilities will be provided if requested in advance by calling (541) 346-0934. EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR Max Rayneard EDITORIAL BOARD Prof. Lisa Freinkel Chet Liseicki Monica McClellan Jamie Richards MENTORS TO THE UNDERGRADUATE WRITERS Prof. Ken Calhoon Andrea Gillroy Amy Legette Laura Mangano Emily McGinn Jenny Odintz Virginia Piper Moshe Rachmut Max Rayneard Laura Selph Jon Templin Elena Villa Erin Young COVER DESIGN COVER PHOTOGRAPHY SPECIAL THANKS Cynthia Stockwell CONTENTS vii Editor’s Comments ANNA WALLER 9 Dancing the Undead: The Social Implications of Giselle’s Wilis JEFFORY WILLIAMS 24 “The Remains of his Sickness”: Abjection and Intertextuality in I’m Not There REBECCA BAKER 38 When We all Rise Up Together: Subjectivity and the Zombie Apocalypse in The Walking Dead RICHARD BUHR 54 Roaming the Borderlands of Identity: Ron Arias’ The Road to Tamanzunchale and Undocumented Immigrants as Undead KAILA FROHMDAHL 65 “The Hideous Dropping off of the Veil”: The Uncanny in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher MARY RENOLDS 77 The Undead Author BROOKE WOOLFSON 93 Horror-struck: Reading Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight as Romance KATIE DWYER 108 La Llorona Cries for Me: Chicana Feminist Redefinitions of a Latin American Ghost CAMERON THURBER 120 Zombiotic (Re)Imaginings: Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and the Evolution of Ingestion CONTENTS FELICIA ROGERS 132 Undead Comedy: Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead KRISTIN MITCHELL 147 Created Human: The Posthuman Search for Humanity in Fullmetal Alchemist LESLIE WEILBACHER 159 Hearing Music that Nobody Hears: Bloodlust and Social Critique in Sweeney Todd GLENN PRATHER 169 I Am Who: The Created and Exodus from Human Definition in Metropolis . EDITOR’S COMMENTS Editor’s Comments Editor’s vii MAX RAYNEARD 8 nomad Anna Waller is a junior comparative literature major and dance minor. She ALLER trained in classical ballet from the age W of seven in her hometown of Sacra- mento, California, and continues to NNA A study ballet and modern dance at the University of Oregon. She is interested in the intersections between dance and the written word, as well as broader subjects in language, literature, and dance. After graduating, she plans to go back to school indefinitely. Nomad Prize for Excellence in Under- graduate Scholarship: Winner Mentor: Max Rayneard DANCING THE UNDEAD THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF GISELLE’S WILIS ct 2 of the 1841 ballet, Giselle, exhibits as frightening a band of Awomen as ever graced the stage of the Paris Opera. Clad in long, diaphanous white tutus that recall the remnants of wedding clothes, these women are wilis, feminine spirits insatiably vengeful – and irrevocably undead. Wilis are brides who died before being married. The poor young creatures cannot lie calmly in their graves; in their dead hearts and feet the passion for dancing, which they could not gratify in their lives, still burns. So at midnight they rise, assemble in troops on the highways, and woe betide 10 the young man who meets them! He must dance with them, they surround him in unbridled madness, and he must dance with them without rest or repose till he falls dead. (Heine 139) The wilis are terrifying on stage because of the violence of their actions and the insatiable lust they display for dancing and for men’s lives. Despite their menace, though, the wilis are aesthetic objects of erotic desire. The wilis reflect and perpetuate nomad the mid-nineteenth century’s double standard for women both to be passive participants in marriage – the essential task the wilis have failed to complete – and to embody a desirable image of femininity. Trapped between life and death, wilis can fully do neither. But this is not the most troubling aspect of their existence: the most horrifying consequence of the wilis’ presence on stage is the extent to which their trapped fate resembles the fate of the dancers who embody them. The ballerinas, under the gaze of a desiring, male audience, are simultaneously objects of idealized, aestheticized femininity and repellent objects signifying their non- procreative social bodies. On either side of the dance lie opposite worlds. On one side is the real world, material and social – the audience, the dancers and their bodies, the cultural values that place the dancer on the margin of society. On the other side, a fictional world inhabited by wilis – weightless specters whose femininity seems independent from patriarchal control but is ultimately subject to it within the narrative structures that surround these feminine creatures. However, the performance of Giselle brings the reality and the imagination together in the body of the ballerina. The dancer on stage in the midst of performance becomes socially acceptable as long as she embodies the desires of the audience: the erotic desire for the female body as well as the social desire to regulate the female body and attain bourgeois refinement. The plot of Giselle is the first indicator of the ballet’s entrenchment in the social milieu of the Bourgeoisie and the Romantic ballet of the 1830s and 1840s. Théophile Gautier, an author and avid dance critic, conceived of the idea for the ballet after reading the description of the wilis in Heinrich Heine’s De L’Allemagne. Gautier collaborated with career librettist, Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, to create a story around the legend of the wilis. What they wrote became the framework for the ballet. Giselle’s narrative reads like a cautionary tale for the bourgeois class and its prevailing values: in addition to the threat of the wilis, the ballet addresses the dangers of marrying outside of one’s Giselle class. In the first act, Giselle, a peasant girl fond of dancing, falls in love with Albrecht, a nobleman disguised as a peasant but Wilis ’s already betrothed to a noblewoman. When Albrecht’s identity is revealed, Giselle goes mad and dies. In the second act, Myrtha, the Queen of the Wilis, calls forth her band of wilis to initiate Giselle as the newest member of their sisterhood. Albrecht comes to mourn Giselle, but he nearly dies as he is forced to dance with 11 the wilis, even as Giselle attempts to save him. Dawn finally comes as a reprieve, the wilis vanish, and Giselle’s final gesture as she disappears into her grave blesses Albrecht’s marriage to the noblewoman. The written narrative of Gautier and Saint-Georges is sufficient to understand Giselle’s plot. However, the assumption that narrative alone incorporates the total meaning of a ballet is 12 misleading. Performance includes the body in addition to – and sometimes instead of – language. Any analysis of a ballet, a work of performance art, needs a means of understanding the ballet that is not dependent on language alone. The “scenario,” as Diana Taylor defines the term, is a useful paradigm for analysis: “The scenario includes features well theorized in literary analysis such as narrative and plot, but demands that we also pay attention to nomad milieux and corporeal behaviors such as gestures, attitudes, and tones not reducible to language” (Taylor 28). As dance, Giselle tells its story through movements of ballet technique and pantomime, gestures difficult to translate into words. Certain characteristics of the scenario become especially pertinent in this discussion of Giselle: first, the audience’s relationship to the scenario (32), or how Giselle’s spectators are as integral to the ballet as the dancers; second, the “embodiment of the social actors” (29), or how the dancers embody their roles as wilis. Later, the idea that the outcome of the scenario may shift (31) will also become important. First, however, it is necessary to examine the social context of Giselle, again in terms of both audience and dancers. The social make-up of the audience during France’s July Monarchy (1830-1848) and ballet’s Romantic era contributed significantly to the subjects and imagery put on stage. The Paris Opera became a symbolic “‘Versailles’ of the Bourgeoisie” (Johnson 245). In order to appeal to the audience, the productions on stage most often reflected the values, anxieties, and desires of the middle class. At the same time, ticket prices were lowered, making the opera and the ballet more accessible to the working classes. Since everyone who attended the ballet encountered a production meant to flatter the values of the bourgeois patrons, the entire audience adopted the values as their own, whether or not they belonged, economically, to the Bourgeoisie. What made the art of ballet particularly effective in transmitting cultural values was “the overtness with which it propagate[d] socially charged imagery as a form of the beautiful” (Alderson 291). Théophile Gautier, though, wrote about the beautiful, even the desirable, while leaving the more explicit social issues and eroticism of the dance an unwritten subtext. Simultaneously an audience member, a reviewer, and a creator, for Giselle and other ballets, Gautier reveled in the beauty expressed by the ballet, and most especially by the women of the ballet. Commenting on Carlotta Grisi, the original Giselle, in her Giselle performance at the ballet’s premiere, Gautier delighted in her ’s Wilis ’s exhibition of “a perfection, a lightness, a boldness, and a chaste and delicate sensuality” (Guest 101). Here and throughout his dance criticism, Gautier focuses on the otherworldly aspects of the ballerina’s feminine beauty. He simultaneously acknowledges the ballerina’s sensual presence and disavows the eroticism of it.

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