Fashioning the Gothic Female Body: the Representation of Women in Three of Tim Burton’S Films
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FASHIONING THE GOTHIC FEMALE BODY: THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN THREE OF TIM BURTON’S FILMS by JULIE LYNNE SMITH submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the subject ENGLISH STUDIES at the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA SUPERVISOR: DR A.D. KREUITER OCTOBER 2016 i Student Number: 47 320 443 DECLARATION I, Julie Lynne Smith, declare that “Fashioning the Gothic female body: the representation of women in three of Tim Burton's films” is my own work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. I further declare that I have not previously submitted this work, or part of it, for examination at UNISA for another qualification or at any other higher education institution. October 2016 ……………………………………………… ……………………………………… SIGNATURE DATE (Julie Lynne Smith) ii ABSTRACT This study explores the construction of the Gothic female body in three films by the director Tim Burton, specifically Batman Returns (1992), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Dark Shadows (2012). Through a deployment of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the intention is to indicate the degree to which Burton crafts his leading female characters as abject Others and embodiments of Barbara Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’. In this Gothic portrayal, the director consistently draws on the essentialised stereotypes of Woman as either ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’ as he shapes his Gothic heroines and femmes fatales. While a gendered duality is established, this is destabilised to an extent, as Burton permits his female characters varying degrees of agency as they acquire monstrous traits. This construction of Woman as monster, this study will show, is founded on a certain fear of femaleness, so reinstating the ideology of Woman as Other. Key terms: Tim Burton; Gothic; abjection; monstrous-feminine; The Angel in the House; Gothic heroine; femme fatale; virgin/whore; female Other; embodiment iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge my supervisor Dr Allyson Kreuiter for her tireless dedication and commitment to assisting me through the research process over the past three years. Regardless of her busy schedule, she was always willing to sacrifice her time, and her gift as a teacher and scholar is an inspiration to me. I also wish to extend my deepest gratitude to my husband, Bradley, for supporting me every step of the way, always, and for listening to me endlessly talk of girl power. iv CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter One: Batman Returns……………………………………………………………………………..19 Chapter Two: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street………………………….56 Chapter Three: Dark Shadows……………………………………………………………………………..95 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………136 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………143 v Introduction The repressed, archaic, and thus deeply unconscious Feminine is a fundamental level of being to which most Gothic finally refers … and all the blurred oppositions that are abjected onto monsters or specters by Gothic characters face their ultimate dissolution into primal chaos as they approach this feminized nadir that is both the ultimate Other and the basically groundless ground of the self. Jerrold E. Hogle (2002: 11) The Gothic, steeped as it is in theatricality and excess, has conventionally given rise to the exaggerated construction of gender, imagining hapless heroines and gallant heroes, wicked witches and cold-blooded villains aplenty. The marked gendered roles within the genre, where femininity is all too often represented as unsettling and Other, has provoked ample academic interest over the years.1 Scholastic readings probing the female body have covered the scope of the Gothic tradition, from the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), to the postmodern Gothic, with its subversion and revision of established staples of the genre.2 Indeed, despite ebbs in popularity over the centuries, the Gothic tradition is still very much alive today. Celebrated Hollywood director Tim Burton, whose work spans more than thirty years, delights in deploying recognisable tropes of the Gothic. While Burton’s work might be concerned with Gothic motifs, it also reveals a postmodern tendency to fuse genres, drawing on concerns inherent to fantasy, horror and comedy narratives. Idiosyncratic and largely inimitable in style, the director’s films have become a veritable brand, labelled as ‘Burtonesque’ and characterised by “dark gothic atmospheres and quirky misfit characters” (Pereira 2012: 51). It is these peculiar, rebellious and even disquieting characters who pose interesting critical questions, especially as their eccentricity appears correlated with the construction of the female body. Strange and irregular, it is the framing of Gothic female corporeality which this study plans to explore in three of Burton’s films. Employing a psychoanalytical feminist reading of Batman Returns (1992), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), hereafter referred to as 1 See Anolik (2014); Becker (1999); Heiland (2004); Hoeveler (1998a); Kahane (1985); Massé (1992); Wolff (1979). 2 For examples of postmodern Gothic works, see: Auster (1985); Ellis (1991); Rushdie (1998); Yu (1998). 1 Sweeney Todd, and Dark Shadows (2012), my intention is to scrutinise Burton’s portrayal of the heroine and femme fatale. A mere cursory viewing of these three films will inevitably reveal Burton’s attraction to those deemed monsters, misfits and outsiders. In crafting his weird and dangerous characters, the director’s films repeatedly bring to life those othered by ‘proper’ society. For Burton, his ‘monster movies’ are a “form of myth” or folk tale, illustrative of “a kind of extreme, symbolic version of life” (Burton cited in Breskin 1992: 332). Just as the Gothic explores deep-seated and repressed societal fears, so Burton’s narratives delve into that which is feared and decidedly Other. This dissertation, while examining these disconcerting figures in Burton’s films, cannot be considered a film study per se. Instead, the focus is on the interpretation of Burton’s narratives in the films under examination and their relation to the Gothic literary genre. The objective is to investigate the director’s moulding of the female body as Gothic form, in a teasing out of narrative elements, such as costume and plot, rather than evaluating filmic constructs, such as camera angles and framing. While aware that the films under discussion in this dissertation are adaptations of other genres, I will only briefly mention this, as my work will not engage in an adaptation theoretical approach. Rather, my argument will focus solely on the manner in which Burton envisions feminine embodiment within his films. I will posit that his female characters can be seen as somewhat stereotypical, taking on the dualistic roles of the ‘good’ girl virgin and the ‘bad’ sexual predator, in order to argue that his work is largely founded on the fear of femaleness itself. In the films under discussion, Burton’s construction of his female characters reveals a degree of gender essentialism, which can be understood as the attribution of traits to “some underlying and static ‘essence’” (Phillips 2010: 46). Evidently, the director adopts a position regarding what constitutes ‘femininity’ or perhaps how society conceives women’s bodies, and this standpoint is visually brought forth in his storyworlds. In the three films I have chosen to explore, I will maintain that not only his femmes fatales, but his ‘good’ girl heroines come to suggest that feminine corporeality is in some manner shocking and aberrant. It is, after all, Woman who has historically been associated with the body, and the body gone awry, at that. Raia Prokhovnik notes the “privileging of male over female in the male/female dichotomy” where this relationship “is entrenched by the mind/body duality” (2002: 11). It is women who are constructed as excessive, irrational and all too closely 2 affiliated with the unruly and ‘improper’ body, which remains opposed to the ‘clean’ and ‘proper’ male hierarchy. In his films, I consider that Burton evokes these preconceptions, as he positions his female characters as disruptive and, potentially, frightening bodies. Animalistic, vampiric, spectral and hysterical, his women, both the heroine and femme fatale, can be understood as thoroughly liminal and borderline creatures. However, I will argue that there is a certain transgression of the construct of Woman as either ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’. While his heroines might epitomise womanly virtue, beauty and innocence, I will demonstrate that they are stained with attributes associated with the femme fatale, so taking on this figure’s excess and ambivalence. In contrast, I will suggest that it is only the femme fatale Catwoman of Batman Returns who retains traits of the ‘good’ girl. It is for this reason that I will argue that she is a composite figure, a woman not quite so stereotypically conceived as ‘bad’ by Burton. Alternatively, the femmes fatales of the director’s other two films under study, Sweeney Todd and Dark Shadows, I will maintain, can be seen as emblematic of the ‘real’ femme fatale, an eroticised embodiment of moral excess and ‘evil’. Yet, Burton, I will reveal, both celebrates and punishes his all-too-feminine monsters. Although the femme fatale is certainly frequently disciplined or killed off, this character possesses a measure of real agency, as she deceives, speaks out against and even violates those around her. Nevertheless, the female body, both that of the heroine and femme fatale, in Burton’s films comes to signify a place of troubling and volatile bodily excess founded on the fear of sexual difference. My contention is that in Burton’s work, the concept of the monstrous becomes tantamount to the essentialised construct of Woman as utterly uncontrollable and uninhibited, creatures more closely and stereotypically aligned with a perverse sort of animalism or borderline identity than men. As my opening quotation implies, Jerrold E. Hogle considers the Gothic to be plagued by the pull of “an overpowering femininity” (2002: 11).