Vagina Dentata Research Articles

Behold the Virago: Iconography of goddess Kali and body politics in Someday by Samidha Gunjal

ABSTRACT Based on the theme of sexual predation and violence, Samidha Gunjal’s short story Someday, anthologised in Drawing the Line (2015), is a visual narration of a well-dressed woman walking through an urban landscape. During her journey, she is subjected to sexual harassment as she gets catcalled and whistled at by the men around her. Eventually, she arrives at a place depicted as an all-male terrain that transforms into a realm of predators as the men metamorphosize into rapacious beings with egregious physiognomy. Overwhelmed by these men who grow into enormous predators, the woman shrinks into nothingness and is eventually rendered invisible. At this juncture, when her sexual harassment escalates, the woman, too, undergoes a transmutation and emerges as goddess Kali to overthrow her abusers. While deploying the theories propounded by stalwarts including Foucault, Goffman, McCloud, and Chute, this paper attempts to decode Gunjal’s visual narrative to understand its radical feminist stance. It undertakes a critical exposition of the representation of violent (vagina dentata) and non-violent (naked protest) modes of resistance and how the iconography of goddess Kali embedded in its visuals challenges despotic patriarchal constructions that render women powerless.

Medusa, trauma-informed

Medusa is a cadaverous head that has been disembodied by sword and malice. Her wide-open, fierce eyes glare over a gaping mouth with a wriggling red tongue, her black lips are crowned with sharp fangs and tusks, and she wears a mane of hissing snakes instead of hair. Medusa is a cephalic monster that emanates visceral terror, draining the life force out of any mortal onlooker by instantly turning them into stone. Even evil spirits stand back from her in fear. Her visage decorates artifacts, armoury, and sepulchral art from the Neolithic period onwards, and nowadays she is the face of a luxury fashion label. Legions of artists and literati have drawn inspiration from her. Dante places Medusa within the cycle of anger at the lower part of Hell, alongside the wrathful and the sullen. Cellini immortalised her in marble as the triumphant display of Perseus's kill, her severed head bearing an unnerving likeness to her slayer. The unconventional Caravaggio dared to give a lover's countenance to her legendary portrait. Psychoanalytic scholars have identified Medusa as a vagina dentata that threatens castration and should be killed. Others have examined her lethal gaze as the insignia of the precarity embedded in interpersonal relations. Among some feminist thinkers, Medusa stands for the archetype of the so-called monstrous feminine, an exposé of patriarchal narratives that transform non-subservient women into monsters. Of late, Medusa has appeared in the mental health discourse as a symbol of trauma. She is a powerful muse, irrespective of how she is interpreted. From prehistory to modernity, she keeps shape-shifting her way into immortality, nourishing the creativity and nightmares of generations.

A cultural phenomenon: The vagina dentata motif - post scriptum. Review of current discussions with a look back at a contribution from 1994

A cultural phenomenon: The vagina dentata motif - post scriptum. Review of current discussions with a look back at a contribution from 1994

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

“Where Shall We Place Our Hope?”: COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's “Lockdown Collection”

Penetrating Critiques: Emasculated Empire and Victorian Identity in Africa by Leslie Allin

Reviewed by: Penetrating Critiques: Emasculated Empire and Victorian Identity in Africa by Leslie Allin Jochen Petzold (bio) Leslie Allin, Penetrating Critiques: Emasculated Empire and Victorian Identity in Africa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), pp. x + 306, $80 cloth. In her well-researched and well-written study, Leslie Allin traces signs of anxiety in a range of texts about Africa from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, including archival documents, newspaper reports, and popular fiction. She aims to show that “these texts, ostensibly profoundly invested in empire, in fact trouble the imperial tenets of bounded martial bodies, ordered colonial territories, and solid histories” (3). Throughout her study, Allin is particularly interested in tropes of fluidity that threaten to engulf, swallow, dissolve, and thus also penetrate the body of the colonial adventurer or soldier, as well as the inability of fictional narrators to exercise authorial control. The book is organized into three parts, each comprising two chapters: one looking at archival material or newspaper reports, the other treating [End Page 378] specific examples from popular fiction. The first part, “Ruptures in Adventure Romance,” examines letters and reports from the Zulu War of 1879, which Allin describes as a “crucial transition in British conceptions of imperial masculinity and the authority of the imperial narrative” (23). She shows convincingly how the humiliating defeat of British forces at Isandlwana led to descriptions of the Zulu “with imagery that oscillates between a penetrating phallus and an engulfing vagina dentata” (32). Allin reads the texts for signs of anxieties expressed in sexualized terms or images, particularly those indicative of castration or the penetration of the male body. In the case of the Zulu War, she shows how these anxieties deconstruct the traditional view of the soldier as hero; these views and particularly the ideal of the gentleman soldier were further undercut when the British took revenge for their defeats with extreme cruelty. Allin combines her analysis of the reports on the Zulu War with a reading of H. Rider Haggard’s highly popular adventure novels King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). Both texts have been frequently read as ultimately strengthening imperial discourse. Against these assessments, Allin argues convincingly that these texts, “far from simply acting out fantasies of empire or frankly championing British masculinity, playfully ridicule dominant models of British masculinity while simultaneously underscoring the limitations of imperial narrative authority” (59). The second section, “Gothic Penetrations,” reads newspaper reports and General Gordon’s journals on the siege and eventual fall of Khartoum in 1885 alongside Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). Allin argues that writing becomes “profoundly unstable” in this Gothic horror shocker because it is “limited,” “betrays fissures,” and “traces the circulation of unacknowledged desires” (151). In the third part, “Modernist Dissolutions,” Allin examines reports on a spree of cannibalistic killings in Sierra Leone that lasted from the 1860s into the twentieth century. The atrocities were committed by a secret organization known as the Human Leopard Society, and in their attempts to control the situation, the colonial administration condoned cruel reprisals by local chiefs that relied on identifying perpetrators through “a fetish dance or orgie” (169). In Allin’s analysis, this imperial archive “constitutes a regulatory fantasy that ultimately fails—it exposes the complicity of white British men in atrocities that the West repeatedly characterized as peculiar to African cultures” (193). Allin calls this “a Kurtz situation,” and indeed she examines Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) in the last chapter (181). Much of the existing criticism on Conrad’s novella reads the text as critical of and at the same time complicit in the colonial project. Thus, while Allin can call for a critical shift in the treatment of Haggard and Marsh, her addition to the body of Conrad criticism is less fundamental, though still important. She aims to show that the critique of imperialism [End Page 379] operates “through Marlow’s, the frame narrator’s, and potentially the reader’s engulfment in this ideology” (199). Indeed, Allin concludes that “the reader is invited to entrench in the ideology of the text through necessary reliance on shared cultural references in order to construct meaning and in so doing, to capitulate...

‘Being a horror fan and being a feminist are often a conflicting business’: Feminist horror, the opinion economy and Teeth’s gendered audiences

Horror has long been understood as a ‘bad object’ in relation to its audiences. More specifically, this presumed relationship is a gendered one, so that men are positioned as the genre’s natural audience, while women’s engagement with horror is presented as more fractious. However, those horror films framed as feminist require a reorientation of these relations. This article foregrounds the critical reception of a ‘conspicuously feminist’ horror film in order to explore what happens to the bad object of horror within an opinion economy that works to diagnose the feminism or its absence in popular culture. Reviews of Teeth (2007), a ‘feminist horror film’ about vagina dentata, illustrate the push and pull of gendered power attached to feminist media, where empowerment is often understood in binary terms in relation to its gendered audiences. The assumed disempowerment of male audiences takes precedence in many reviews, while other narratives emerge in which Teeth becomes an educational tool that might change gendered behaviours, which directly empowers female audiences or which dupes women into believing they have been empowered. Finally, Teeth’s reviews expose a language of desire and fantasy around vagina dentata as an automated solution to the embodied experiences of women in contemporary culture. Teeth’s reviews, I argue, offer a valuable case study for interrogating the tensions in discourse when the bad object of horror is put to work for feminism.

Poe, insanity, and containing the feminine monstrous

In fiction, unlike his life, Poe was able to contain his women. He derived many features from the European Gothic tradition, and utilized motifs such as incarceration, premature burial, and the pathetic fallacy, or the use of external landscape to express or reflect psychological turmoil. Poe’s psychologically intense tales feature narrators whose mental fabric disintegrates before the reader’s eyes. This essay will concentrate upon three such tales: ‘Berenice’ (1835), ‘Ligeia’ (1838), and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). Each of these stories are narratives of obsession and monomania featuring female incarceration and objectification, and the threat of the feminine monstrous. Berenice, Ligiea and Madeline Usher each embody the feminine monstrous in varying ways, a masculine projection of womanhood unrestrained, unsuccessfully repressed by their male counterparts, and thus returning in an act of unheimliche consummation. Berenice symbolizes the vagina dentata whose threat must be removed through dental extraction; Ligeia is an incubus who perverts the Eucharist in order to achieve an act of monstrous metempsychosis; and Madeline acts as both monstrare and monere: as both the warning and the source of impending destruction. The perceived female abandonment and thus betrayal which had become a pattern of Poe’s life was through his fiction able to be halted and contained. The inextricable link between Eros and Thanatos undergirds these stories in which, in a mirror of Poe’s own life, each love object wastes away during the prime of her beauty. This essay discusses the context of male–female relations in Poe’s life and how they impact upon his fiction. Unlike reality, in his tales Poe was able to resurrect the objects of his obsessions, and thus the female figures comprising the monstrous loves of his male protagonists. However, this essay also questions the extent to which such resurrections and containment are successful within each narrative, and how far Poe’s delineations of the feminine monstrous and unheimlich sexuality can be read as interrogations of compromised masculinity.

Gendered Devitalisations: A Double Reading of the “Vagina Dentata” Motif in India

The motif of the “Vagina Dentata” appears in various Hindu myths and tales belonging to Indic folklore, yet its iconic relevance extends beyond symbolic and religious fields and overlaps with the wider sphere of the discourses on gender and sexuality. Based upon this premise, the paper aims to illustrate the motif of the “toothed vagina” on two interconnected levels: on the first one, it offers a psychoanalytical codification of the symbol and of the violence connected with the removal of the “teeth,” while on the second it scrutinises the “extirpation” in the light of the patriarchal endeavour to subjugate women through abuse and debasement. The concluding part of the paper advances a metaphorical suggestion around the “vagina dentata” symbol, pointing to the resources implied in the affirmation of women’s voices in the public domain.

Joyce’s Vagina Dentata: Irish Nationalism and the Colonial Dilemma of Manhood

Joyce’s Vagina DentataIrish Nationalism and the Colonial Dilemma of Manhood Agata Szczeszak-Brewer (bio) In Edgar Degas’s Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879) we see a dark-skinned woman suspended in midair on a rope secured by her teeth. Placed in a position of a commercial display, she is an eroticized and exoticized object of public consumption, in a way also resembling a lynched figure, since the rope extends upward, and her head seems to be thrust backward. Marilyn Brown’s essay “Miss La La’s Teeth” discusses the painting “within a broader visual practice of social masquerade, ranging from depictions of minstrelsy to those of interracial performance, in which racial difference was simultaneously represented and obfuscated by the white gaze.” 1 However, as Brown notices in her groundbreaking study of the picture, the assumed strength of Miss La La’s teeth also points to something else: the threat she may pose to a vulnerable man who could be entrapped by her redoubtable jaw. If the popular assumption that Degas was impotent and celibate is true, then the powerful toothed mouth of Miss La La possibly reveals not only “a stereotypical colonial object for male modernist self-projection” but also Degas’s fear of female organs and castration. 2 The trope of exoticized and demonic women equipped with menacing powers, especially the power of castration, has been alive not only in European painting but also in North and South American folklore, Indian mythology, Irish legends, and Modernist literature. Recall Joseph Conrad’s dark voracious female representing Africa and numerous other Modernist (and pre-Modernist) tropes of the devouring mother to observe a certain pattern, a connection between the myth of a menacing female and endangered masculinity and—I’d like to add—collective national identity as well. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to make any universalist claims about anxieties relating to female sexuality, I will look at a localized example of a phallogocentric imagining of one nation—Ireland—in James Joyce’s fiction. Although Vincent Cheng, Enda Duffy, Jolanta Wawrzycka, Joseph Valente, [End Page 1] Kimberly Devlin, and others have published excellent scholarship on either nationalism or gender in Joyce, I believe that we can grasp the assumptions and sentiments about Irish society in Joyce’s texts more fully, in their complexity and paradox, when we look at issues of gender and nation as contrapuntal, interdependent elements. The nationalist ethos in turn-of-the-century Europe linked emasculation and deformation with ethnic otherness, and James Joyce—a writer who moved among Dublin, Paris, Trieste, and other major cultural centers—soaked in the popular representations of women and ethnic others in literature and art, which included Degas’s paintings of sharp-toothed circus women and hooknosed Jews. 3 Joyce himself explores the intersections among male-centered institutions, sexual performance, and performance of ethnic identities, and he links the problem of biopolitics of gendered body parts to the mythos of soon-to-be independent Ireland. He recognizes the subaltern characters—that is, in early-twentieth-century Ireland, women and ethnic others—as threatening not only to the perceived racial purity of a nation but also to a particular kind of masculinity inscribed within the mythos of Ireland: masculinity synonymous with domination, control, virility, and heteronormativity. The purveyors of the nationalist narratives linking valiant and virile masculinity with Irish identity cast the other as voracious, lying in wait to pounce upon the nation’s manhood. Joyce recognizes this trope in nationalist narratives and redeploys it, sometimes mockingly, in his own descriptions of the subaltern. However, he also counteraccuses this nationalist mythos by describing Ireland itself as an all-devouring, dangerous parasite. Ulysses thus presents a rather uncivil dialogue, accusations and counteraccusations, at the core of which is an unmistakable connection between the feminine and the threat of loss. For Irish nationalists it is the loss of purity and order; for artists it is the loss of productive artistic inspiration. In Ulysses Joyce gives us a confluence of contentious issues, from parochial bigotry toward women and Jews to musings on artistic autonomy, national belonging, and adultery. Leopold Bloom (a Jewish canvasser in Catholic Ireland), Molly...

Joyce's Vagina Dentata: Irish Nationalism and the Colonial Dilemma of Manhood

Joyce's Vagina Dentata: Irish Nationalism and the Colonial Dilemma of Manhood

The Ashgate research companion to monsters and the monstrous

Contents: Foreword, John Block Friedman Introduction: the impact of monsters and monster studies, Asa Simon Mittman Part I History of Monstrosity: The monstrous Caribbean, Persephone Braham The unlucky, the bad and the ugly: categories of monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Surekha Davies Beauteous beast: the water deity Mami Wata in Africa, Henry John Drewal Rejecting and embracing the monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome, D. Felton Early modern past to postmodern future: changing discourses of Japanese monsters, Michael Dylan Foster On the monstrous in the Islamic visual tradition, Francesca Leoni Human of the heart: pitiful oni in medieval Japan, Michelle Osterfield Li The Maya 'cosmic monster' as a political and religious symbol, Matthew Looper Monsters lift the veil: Chinese animal hybrids and processes of transformation, Karin Myhre From hideous to hedonist: the changing face of the 19th-century monster, Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson Centaurs, satyrs, and cynocephali: medieval scholarly teratology and the question of the human, Karl Steel Invisible monsters: vision, horror, and contemporary culture, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Part II Critical Approaches to Monstrosity: Posthuman teratology, Patricia MacCormack Monstrous sexuality: variations on the vagina dentata, Sarah Alison Miller Postcolonial monsters: a conversation with Partha Mitter, Partha Mitter with Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle Monstrous gender: geographies of ambiguity, Dana Oswald Monstrosity and race in the late Middle Ages, Debra Higgs Strickland Hic sunt dracones: the geography and cartography of monsters, Chet van Duzer Conclusion: monsters in the 21st century: the preternatural in an age of scientific consensus, Peter J. Dendle Postscript: the promise of monsters, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Bibliography Index.

La vagina dentada: una interpretación de la Estela 25 de Izapa y las guacamayas del juego de pelota de Copán

Las aves representadas en la Estela 25 de Izapa y el juego de pelota de Copán forman el punto de partida para un examen del tema mitológico de la vagina dentada en Mesoamérica, y sus expresiones en el arte y la narrativa. Un amplio conjunto de narraciones mitológicas recopiladas en México y Guatemala sirve como base para un examen de la historia de Siete Guacamayo en el Popol Vuh, la cual se interpreta como una variante de un mito ampliamente difundido, relacionado con el origen del Sol y la Luna. La identificación de asuntos comunes, entre ellos el de la vagina dentada, refuerza la relación entre el mito del Popol Vuh y las representaciones de Izapa y Copán. A la vez, revela detalles poco conocidos sobre el simbolismo sexual presente en los mitos cosmogónicos mesoamericanos.

Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England Sally Parkin Abate, Corinne S., ed., Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; hardback; pp. vii, 204; RRP £45; ISBN 0754630439. The essays in this collection present an English literary perspective on female spaces in Early Modern England. Through the medium of plays by Shakespeare, Wroth, Cavendish, Marvel, and Ford, female experience could transform the domestic and private sphere, providing agency and authority to English women. Though catalogued as English literature, the collection of essays is a welcome addition to gender studies, exploring 'indistinguished space', and presenting possibilities other than those of basic misogyny and the concepts often associated with vagina dentata. The essays propose that the Early Modern subculture of femaleness is more expansive and formative than has been previously understood or explored. Using the genre of plays, the book is divided into three parts or categories, each using a title from King Lear to provide a focus for the readings of privacy, domesticity and the 'indistinguished space' experienced by women in Early Modern England. Part I, 'Concealing Continent: Settings for Intimacy and Resistance', presents three essays which are contextualized within the physical and philosophical settings assigned to women in the period: marriage, the bedchamber, and interiors of the body. Lisa Hopkins, through The Duchess of Malfi, explores the interiors of women's bodies. Despite entombment, fashionable clothes and Ferdinand's fetishisation, the Duchess rises above patriarchal classification through her independent voice and spirit. Interiors represent safety to her, exteriors the dangerous world. Her death enables her to escape the world of exteriors but her interiority enables her to remain unmarginalized. Through The Taming of the Shrew, Corinne S. Abate analyzes marriage, seeing it not as a barrier to women's agency but a safe realm for female agency. The private and domestic spaces offered by marriage provide an avenue of removal from patriarchal restrictions. Katherine develops a marital interiority, a space that makes the public sphere immaterial, providing an escape from her father's domination and her poor public reputation, providing her with a private space. While both are inter-related, the lack of public existence becomes intensely beneficial. Kathryn Pratt takes the medium of Mary Wroth's Urania to [End Page 183] bridge the female private sphere and the public world that both repudiates and mirrors that world. Tree imagery, passion, possession, and the ownership of land emphasize the precarious position of self-ownership in a society that deprived women of legal rights pertaining to self and property. Wroth shows how the intersection of two notions, 'estate' as property and 'estate' as a mental, moral, or agentive status, reveal the subject's failure to achieve an identity which is unified. Pratt's exploration of the disjunctions between the body and the material world raises key issues faced by women in the Early Modern period. Part II, 'Hospitable Favors: Rituals of the Household', focuses on customary practices and family and household habits, and the opportunities which such spheres allowed women, either to resist or negotiate. Nancy A. Gutierrez explores the wider ramifications of arranged marriages through John Ford's The Broken Hearted. The dynamics of conflict can divide households, rupture the state, and threaten women's sanity. However, rather than portraying Penthea as a victim, Gutierrez shows that Penthea uses her victimisation to create her own space (by food refusal), thus establishing agency and concept of self. Theodora A. Janowski cites the poetry of Andrew Marvel and Margaret Cavendish to explore women's eroticism. Cooking was perceived by both as a highly erotic activity that challenged patriarchy. Although women were restricted to the domestic sphere, this did not deny them power to use their talents, needlework, voices, and culinary pursuits, for the pleasure of both themselves and other women. Their unwillingness to marry or reproduce imposed its own restrictions on inheritance and family dynasties. Catherine G. Canino explores female dominion over male identity in The Faerie Queen, portraying other ways in which patriarchal designs could be upset. The essay underlines the point that the power of the female characters and their domination of male identity in Spenser's work mirror that of the childless...

Love and death in Goethe: "one and double"

Goethe, in association with his younger Romantic compatriots the Schlegels, Novalis, Fichte, and Schelling, struggled with the subject-object dichotomy, and tried to bridge the gap between self and other, consciousness and nature. His theory and practice prefigured the Romantics' determination to display and interrogate the linguistic and cultural structures informing their own thinking and modes of representation-what Goethe calls one's 'Vorstellungsart.' His work exploits, subverts, and supplants inherited conventions and signs, demonstrating with virtuosic irony that literature is a system of texts, pre-texts, and pre-established but dynamic conceptual models. ' Love and Death in Goethe:'One and Double' ' explores Goethe's use, in a wide range of his poetry and prose, of the theme of 'Liebestod' (love and death) and related embodiments of the paradox of unity in duality. Ellis Dye also examines Goethe's use of other themes related to love and death-the 'femme fatale,' the 'vagina dentata, Frau Welt,' the Lorelei, venereal disease, the 'Lustmord'-and considers issues of selfhood and individuation as well as the possibility that the love-death theme contains an implicit gender bias toward the existential fact of personal separateness. Poems, plays, and novels are dealt with, nevertheless, as works of art, not only as illustrations of an idea or as points of intersection in a system of rhetorical conventions, and are examined for intellectual cohesiveness, elegance, and integrity of design as well as special meanings and effects. ' Love and Death in Goethe:'One and Double' ' explores the meaning of the central theme of Romantic poetry in the works of the most important Romantic poet of all. Students of literary culture, both the lay reader and the Goethe specialist, will be enlightened by its approach and find pleasure and instruction in its revelations. Robert Ellis Dye is professor of German at Macalester College.

How Funny?

How Funny?

Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature by David Williams

REVIEWS ralizations are a fashionable precaution for the ideologically circum­ spect author; here Theresa Tinkle convincingly displays the multiple, discordant, and creatively chaotic nature of her subjects and the deep historical roots of their conflicted meanings, while in no way dissolving, but on the contrary strengthening, her readers' awareness of the pro­ fundity of medieval poets' engagement with the figures of Venus and Cupid and the philosophical importance of the poetic structures cen­ tered upon them. HELEN PHILLIPS University of Nottingham DAVID WILLIAMS. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature. Montreal and Kingston; London and Buffalo: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996.Pp.xiv, 392. $55.0 0. David Williams's challenging study of the monster in medieval thought and literature goes well beyond the catalog-style discussion that seems to be a typical feature of books and articles in this subject area.Williams offers a framework of understanding for monstrosity, contending that in medieval cosmology, and specifically in Pseudo­ Dionysian thought, the idea of the monster has a centrality to the scheme ofthings that postmedievals have to recover.The monster is not contra naturam, but rather extra naturam. Williams quotes Isidore's Etymologiae 1 1.3.1-2: "Varro says that portents are things which seem to have been born contrary to nature, but in truth, they are not born contrary to nature, because they exist by the divine will, since the Creator's will is the nature of everything created.... " The monstrous can be seen to have a major function within the scheme of things be­ cause of a series of moves Pseudo-Dionysius offers in his cognitive sys­ tem that effectively constitute a deformed discourse, or the proper in­ terpretation of sacred symbols.Pseudo-Dionysius, readers of The Cloud of Unknowing and related treatises will remember, offers the negative path to God: what God is not is easier to consider than what He is. Operationally this negation yields to paradoxical utterances and the failure to make any positive predication about God; this failure, how343 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ever, liberates the knower from the "logical" limits of predication and points to a transcendent possibility. As Cusa has it, God is the coinci­ dence of opposites. The monster is similarly a sign of negation, point­ ing to the paradox of "what is" and "what is not" or the transcendent. Amplifying John Scotus Eriugena and his Periphyseon, Williams can argue that in Eriugena's worldview "God the Creator is also seen as monster." Eriugena is a key figure for Williams because he sees the ninth-century thinker as creating a teratological symbolism based on a liberal interpretation of Pseudo-Dionysius. Having established the philosophical basis for his book in negative theology, Williams goes on to the second part of his grand argument, which part gives the necessary links between the general theory ofmon­ sters and the specific representations of them in select texts. Part 2, "Taxonomy," is, in one sense, the catalog of monsters so often seen in scholarship, but here it comes forward not as a descriptive inventory of things that go bump in the night but in the context ofa considered the­ ory offorms, based on the history ofideas. Williams does not lose sight of the foundation he established earlier, repeating the central ideas of negative theology and paradoxical utterances from time to time in his taxonomy with good rhetorical effect. Admittedly such a taxonomy is "a system ofcategories ofnothing," a contradictory "structuring ofdis­ order," and yet the "requirement of an affirmative discourse that at­ tempts to understand the negative." Foucault's famous comment on the Chinese encyclopedia and its taxonomy of animals is a proper motto to this theme that the "exotic charm ofanother system ofthought" makes us understand "the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that." Williams's first taxonomic divide is "The Body Monstrous," wherein size (i.e., pygmies, giants), locus and position (an­ tipodes, shape-shifters), the head (multi-, bi-, tri-, a-cephalic, as well as the human-headed animal), the mouth, the eyes, ears, and lips, and the genitals (disembodied, vagina dentata, and the hermaphrodite) are or­ dering categories. Since the body...

Out of the Closet

The extraordinary cover of Mary Kelly's early Interim catalogue, published by the Fruitmarket Gallery, Kettle's Yard, and Riverside Studios in 1986, consists of a magnified detail of a leather jacket (fig. 1) taken from the first panel of Corpus, part 1 of an eventual four-part work titled Interim. Wrapped around the cover, the jacket becomes an “all-over fold” in the Deleuzian sense of a Baroque pli captivating art and aesthetics and microcosmically encrypting the periodization of style. Viewed at close range, the work reveals a sinuous suavity common to Mannerist painting and film noir that emanates from the leather, the effect of light mysteriously smeared across the dark furrows. And then there is the zipper with its large teeth snaking along the eastern edge of the volume in the form of a figura serpentinata, a “line of beauty,” in the words of William Hogarth, “which by its twisting so many different ways, may be said to inclose (tho' in a single line) varied contents.”2 No vagina dentata, this zipp...

Sex in Holy Places: An Exploration of a Medieval Anxiety

Sex in Holy Places: An Exploration of a Medieval Anxiety Dyan Elliott But those who forget their fear of me and in insane wickedness destroy the temples dedicated in My name, or defile that dedication originated by Jacob by polluting holy places with murderous blood or the impure seed of adultery or fornication ... O woe to those wretches.1 Hildegard of Bingen's prophetic denunciation of sacrilegious pollution is premised on a set of conventional assumptions. Pollution prohibitions in the Christian tradition were of sufficient antiquity to provide the kind of illusory stability essential to religious belief structures. Yet the expression and meaning of a particular anxiety still remained sensitive to historical contingency. This paper examines a case in point. A rather startling story enjoyed popularity across all genres of medieval didactic literature in the high and later Middle Ages. A man and a woman have intercourse in a holy precinct: be it a church, a monastery, a cemetery, or near a sainf s shrine. As punishment for this inappropriate act, the couple is miraculously stuck together, only to be discovered in this humiliating predicament by a wondering populace, whose reaction ranges from high hilarity to deep disgust. They are eventually released by the united prayers of the community. This graphic depiction of what specialists call penis captious or vaginismus (depending on which set of genitals is preferred as the locus of the drama) is fabricated from a tissue of anxieties.2 When construed primarily as an expression of gynephobia with the female genitalia as the singular site of "danger," the tale can take its place alongside more celebrated motifs like the vagina dentata? Nor does the adhesive climax of this particular narrative fail to achieve a transhistorical and transcultural ubiquity. Medical historians have demonstrated the breadth of its dissemination;4 when I first heard a version of this story it was making the rounds of préadolescent circles as an urban legend. In this latter context, the tale functioned as a generalized warning against the dangers of sex.5 Yet the historical longevity of this particular motif ought not to beguile us into regarding it as either static in form or meaning. The characteristic medieval rendering of the story focuses on consecrated soil as the locus of © 1994 Journal of Women-s History, Vol 6 No. 3 (Fall) 1994 Dyan Eluott 7 transgression and danger. As such, it is specific and timely with respect to origins, meaning, and application, as are its particular variants. The earliest versions of this topos surfaced around 1100. In a miracle in the acta of St. Guignerius (d. ca. 450), the offense was perpetrated on the tomb of a bishop who had been a member of the household of the father of the saint. The couple, locked together like dogs (more canum), were conveyed to the shrine of the saint "where by the merit of the witness of Christ and by the intercession of the faithful they were liberated."6 When compared with later analogues, proximity to the holy is notably oblique in this narrative. The consecration of a cemetery, the site of the offense, is of lesser occasion than that of a church. In the ceremony that evolved to contend with this and other forms of pollution, the cemetery's solitary defilement does not affect the integrity of the church-proper. On the other hand, if the church is polluted in some way, the cemetery is likewise desecrated.7 Similarly, the deceased bishop whose tomb is the site of the transgression is only remotely associated with the saint in question. Especially noteworthy is the fact that the author of the acta takes no pains to differentiate between actions that are unseemly and those which are ritually polluting. In the marvel immediately preceding our incident, for example, two soldiers are horribly punished for urinating on the rock where Guignerius had once anchored his ship.8 But there is all the difference in the world between urine on a rock (even a rock associated with a saint) and semen on consecrated soil, since the latter requires deliberate and public purification. Thus the boundaries for what constitutes "the sacred" seem somewhat amorphous. The "once-removed" proximity...

Le vagin denté : variantes ibériques

The folkloric motif of the «teeth-bearing vagina» appeared in a popular tale in the Léon in 1985, having never previously been noted in Iberian oral tradition. It is a so-called «pike's head tale». Several versions – both folkloric and literary – attest to the diffusion of such tales in Western cultures since at least the eighteenth century. This study considers the Spanish version, including its relations with other European tales on the same theme and with the «exotic» mythical cycle in the Vagina Dentata.

Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer by Bettina Knapp

Book Reviews entre le récit par les mots et le récit par l’image. Mais cette petite lacune est rachetée par d’autres aspects utiles de l’ouvrage: les photos extraites des films présentés, un appendice bio-filmographique, le générique des films et un index. Ces compléments sont heureux et contribuent à faire de ce livre un ouvrage de référence pour quiconque s’intéresse au cinéma, à la littérature et à la société en Afrique. M . E lisabeth M udim be-B oyi Duke University Bettina Knapp. M ac h in e, M etaph o r , a n d the W riter. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1989. Pp. viii + 244. $27.50. Bettina Knapp is the guru of archetypal criticism. Read her final paragraph: “ Will we allow humanity to be swept along mindlessly by the momentum of technology? Or will we attempt to find a balanced course. The problem is ours. Do we face it or walk away?” (218). Crafted as a persuasive essay, Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer “ applies” Knapp’s honed methodology. A short introduction defines the Jungian lexicon and serves as a statement of intent: to “explore the nature of the relationship between the protagonist and the machine” (7), between the author and the word, and the effect on readers in the “ mega-complex into which the mega-machine has transformed their world” (7). Knapp then devotes eleven chapters to works representing Orient and Occident. A succinct re­ capitulative conclusion is followed by a bibliography and an index. After a biographical sketch, a plot summary with commentaries reveals the “ symbols, images, and motifs [. . .] in relation to the meaning and impact of the specific machine that is featured [. . .] in each piece of writing” (10). Comparisons are drawn with mythology (Icarus), spirituality (mandala imagery), and religions (Elija’s visionary experiences). A train in Joyce’s “ A Painful Case” causes an “ epiphanic experience” (11), and in Witkiewicz ’s The Crazy Locomotive “ is viewed as a destroyer of individuals, societies, and cultures” (11). Throughout Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Wind, Sand, and Stars, a plane represents an “ inability to grow up” (72), a “ vagina dentata" (84), and “ aspiring to know spatial climes” (81). Again, in Arreola’s “ The Switchman” a train “ serves to heighten the feelings of aliena­ tion and powerlessness of finite beings living in the infinite vastness of an impersonal uni­ verse” (98), while in Yizhar’s Midnight Convoy, wheeled vehicles illustrate the quest for “ the right path” (112). Osaragi’s The Journey involves trains, cars, buses, and boats in a “ semiology of transformation” (125) making possible “expanding reality and cosmicity” (148). In “ The Man-Eater of Malgudi,” Narayan employs a printing press as a “ paradigm for the cosmic process of creation and dissolution” (150) in which “ letters, syllables, and words become manna” (151). The sidewinder computer in Shepard’s Operation Sidewinder exemplifies the “ mechanics of the profane and the sacred” (193) when paired with an initiatory Hopi dance. In Jarry’s The Supermale, the protagonist is seen as a robot, in Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise, theater itself becomes a machine “ hungry for poetry” (11), and in Handke’s Kaspar, words “ become mechanical devices endowed with concre­ tion” (12). Unfortunately, there are some puzzling errors. In the Jarry chapter, for example, plac­ ing the protagonist on the five-man cycle skews the analysis of the Jungian “ shadow.” Fur­ thermore, a confusion of Hindu and Native American nullifies the parallels to Yogitantrics . Marcueil is, in the novel, a “ Peau-Rouge,” “ un Indien chasseur de scalps.” Jarry’s displacement of the Indian of his sources to his own text is lost. Knapp seems to force her selections into a mold: Marcueil is perhaps not a “ negative view of the machine VOL. XXX, NO. 2 109 L ’E sprit C réateur age” (28) for his death recasts the newly invented electric chair used to punish an inhuman man. Nonetheless, this book (it could have been titled “ Machine, Metaphor, and the Male Writer” ) is criticism with its convictions showing. Its mission is such that its misreadings are forgiven in a rush of gratitude for Knapp’s concern with...