The Finalizing Woman

Abstract

The chief subject of this book has been the ways in which female protagonists of the woman’s film and horror film transform within cinematic narrative and the significance of this transformation. Barbara Creed, in her reading of the horror film, argues that it expresses and defends against a fear of return to the archaic mother and her mawlike, devouring womb. Despite my admiration for her work, I argue against Creed that horror film also, perhaps even more ardently, expresses a powerful desire to return to the mother and to origins, to a state of total oneness with the world (the mother’s body indistinguishable from the child’s body) that psychoanalytic theory calls primary narcissism. Loss of connection with one’s mother pervades the genres of the woman’s film and the horror film, as well as psychoanalysis. The mythic precedent for both psychoanalysis and these film genres is the myth of Demeter and Persephone, in which Persephone, the maiden daughter of Demeter, the mother-grain goddess, is abducted by Hades, the king of hell, leading to her mother’s world-destroying grief. While Demeter’s grief occupies a considerable amount of the myth’s narrative, other themes it foregrounds are the young woman’s struggle between her desires to remain with her mother and to be married, marriage as a social death for women, and marriage and heterosexual male desire as hellish.KeywordsSerial KillerOedipus ComplexHorror FilmHorror MovieSlasher FilmThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.