“A Strange Desire That Never Dies”: Monstrous Lesbian Camp in the Age of Conformity

Abstract

Lesbians are sharks, vampires, creatures from the deep lagoon, godzillas, hydrogen bombs, inventions the laboratory, werewolves-all whom stalk Beverly Hills by night. Christopher Lee, in drag, in the Hammer Films middle period, is my ideal lesbian.-Bertha HarrisIn the opening precredit moments Edgar Ulmer's lesser-known horror gem Daughter Dr. Jekyll (1957), the viewer comes face-toface with smiling fiend who emerges from an absurdly dense veil fog-not the titular daughter but father figure. At first appearing in profile as the embodiment the backstory being offered, this shrouded male creature sits among scientific paraphernalia, including beakers and test tubes, while the narration conjures legend the strange experiment that transformed the good Dr. Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson's famous work terror into Mr. Hyde, a human werewolf. Clearly taking bit license with Stevenson's narrative, the precredit scene transitions from the silhouetted doctor figure into close-up monster, with sparse werewolf-like hair covering much his face and vampire fangs protruding from his impishly grinning mouth. When the authoritative voice-over promises that the evil will be vanquished in the end, this ghoulish grinning figure squeals out to the audience from within the diegesis Are you sure? and, with high-pitched giggles, fades back into the fog. Critic Gary Morris has called this moment one the genre's most memorably campy, within film that is marked by sheer weirdness and by paranoia about what women were in postnuclear era.1 While I agree with Morris that this moment's knowing artificiality and wonderful incongruities- including the inexact dubbing with the actor's mouth movements and the return the same scene at the end the film but with different voice actor-exemplify the film's camp style, Daughter Dr. Jekyll offers many more moments campy splendor, the majority which center on exactly what women might be capable of in the postwar era. Indeed, those scenes the daughter's queer transformations and apparent attacks on young women the village should be considered realization the promise this opening (and closing) delight, offering the campy consummation the film's fabulously weird world.2Typically, however, when we think camp icons or classical camp objects pleasure and study, the daughter who fantasizes or acts out her dreams pouncing on other women-in other words, the lesbian-rarely has starring role. The anguished lesbian subject or monstrous lesbian predator seldom delights as fabulous and humorous camp figure (Bertha Harris aside) and instead is taken quite seriously as negative stereotype, damning cautionary tale, and lethal source shame and self-loathing. Yet, in exploitation films the 1950s such as Daughter Dr. Jekyll, the cryptolesbians there both caution against and brilliantly camp up crudely imagined lavender menace. Her presence in these films provokes for me some fundamental questions. What might be the purpose for camping up lesbian desire in the popular culture the 1950s-at time when lesbian visibility was on the rise, as were, course, the vicious attempts to discipline, contain, and even excise gays and lesbians from public life, but then also what might be the consequences letting her run amok onscreen, especially considering that the era's she-monster films-such as Daughter Dr. Jekyll, Blood Dracula (1957) and Frankenstein's Daughter (1958)-were intended for female adolescent audience? In other words, how is this lesbian camp supposed to be functioning in/for dominant culture, but also how might it exceed that intended purpose for variety viewers? What I am arguing, through reading Daughter Dr. Jekyll, is that this camp lesbian figure both serves predictable misogynistic and homophobic purpose-an attempt to contain female sexuality in the age conformity-and has the potential to denaturalize and make comic the compulsory heterosexuality that was imposing itself on young women the period from seemingly every quarter. …