Category: Essays and Analysis

Posts analyzing media, particularly cinema and animation

The Nebulous Role of the Narrator in the House of Usher

Posted on by Nicki Chaput

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of my favorite Edgar Allan Poe stories, so I wanted to share an essay about it I wrote in college. You can watch the YouTube video essay adaptation here:

The Nebulous Role of the Narrator in the House of Usher

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” doubling and reflection foreshadow the fate of Roderick Usher, Madeline Usher, and the titular house itself. Doubling of several major aspects of the story occurs: the two halves of the Usher house split by a zigzagged fissure, Roderick and Madeline, and the Usher estate’s paradoxically dilapidated yet intact infrastructure. But the unnamed narrator breaks from this pairing off of elements—he is an outsider, not a part of either concept of the House of Usher, and he is the only one who manages to escape the crumbling mansion and live to tell the tale. Thematically, he seems to disrupt the doubling found throughout the rest of the story. However, the story integrates the narrator gradually into the mirrors of the narrative by splitting his personality into halves vying for control, drawing parallels between him and Roderick through his character development, and reflecting his body and disposition in the physical house of Usher.

At first, the narrator seems completely separate from the phantasmagoria of the estate, beginning the story skeptical of the supposed supernatural elements of the estate and maintaining that skepticism until he hears Madeline break out of the vault. When the narrator first approaches the estate, “a sense of insufferable gloom pervade[s his] spirit” (49) for reasons he cannot identify. He explains this gloom away, surmising that the estate is only unnerving due to its arrangement, and “that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene… would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression” (49). Later, when Roderick tells him that he believes his family’s destiny is tied to “the method of collocation of [the] stones” (58) of the Usher mansion, the narrator doesn’t believe him and sardonically writes, “Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none” (58). He continues to try to convince himself that everything frightening or supernatural about the estate is coincidental, even in the highly unlikely scenario when he reads “Mad Trist” to Roderick and believes not once, but twice that the house mimicking the sounds he imagined for both the cracking of the door to the hermit’s hut and the screech of the dragon was a “coincidence” (63). However, this logical personality is not the only one residing in the narrator by the end of the story.

The story splits the narrator’s personality in two, a split which mirrors the fissure running down the middle of the House of Usher, and the second half of his personality, based on emotion, emerges throughout his sojourn at the House of Usher and erodes the logical part of him. After failing to shake off the “depression of soul” (49) he feels looking at the reflection of the house in an attempt to rearrange its ghastly features, the narrator writes,

I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while… there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. (49)

He can logically determine that combinations of objects can elicit strong emotions, but he cannot shake off those emotions. He later makes a similar observation specifically about fear: “the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition… served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis” (51). Over the course of the story, that paradoxical law starts to affect the narrator more and more as he observes the dreary interior decoration of the house, such as “the sombre tapestries of the walls” (52), the “cadaverousness” (52) of Roderick, and other frightening details. About a week after Madeline’s death, fear overcomes the narrator as he attempts to sleep, “overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable” (61). After letting Roderick into his apartment on that stormy night, the narrator notices “the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion” (62) through the window. Attempting to convince Roderick that the lights are due to “merely electrical phenomena” or “the rank miasma of the tarn” (62), the narrator echoes the prior times he described a strange phenomenon and accounted for its origin to himself, and thus this assurance comes across more as him trying to convince himself than Roderick. And despite his attribution of the first two odd noises during his reading of “Mad Trist” to coincidence, by the third “coincidence” the narrator’s logical mind can’t take it anymore, and “completely unnerved, [he leaps] to [his] feet” (64). The story ends with the narrator fleeing the mansion “aghast” (65), unable to account logically for Madeline raising herself from the dead, the splitting of the mansion in two, or the sudden sinking of the entirety of the House of Usher into the tarn.

In addition to splitting his personality in two, the fear that consumes the narrator, overriding his ability to think logically about his circumstances, makes him a mirror to Roderick Usher. The pair start off as foils: Roderick is a recluse interested in occult practices such as “chiromancy” (59), while the narrator is an embodiment of the “society” (50) from which Roderick secludes himself who is unwilling to believe in Roderick’s “superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted” (54). The pair also view each other quite differently: to Roderick, the narrator is “his best, and indeed his only personal friend,” while the narrator admits that he “really knew little of [his] friend” (50) despite their childhood spent together. Likewise, the two begin the story with opposite dispositions. While Roderick is happy to see his friend, he is pessimistic about his prospects, telling the narrator, “I must perish in this deplorable folly” (54); still, the narrator does his best to comfort his friend. As the narrator gets to know Roderick better, however, his optimism towards raising the man’s spirits wanes, and his attitude becomes more defeatist like Roderick’s:

And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom. (55)

He also starts to believe, or at least understand, Roderick’s convictions about the house as the story progresses, like when Roderick performs “The Haunted Palace” for him: “I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne” (56). After Madeline’s apparent death, despite criticizing Roderick’s reasoning (or lack thereof) on various matters previously, the narrator begins to think like him, agreeing to help Roderick entomb Madeline in a vault underneath his apartment. After Madeline’s entombment, even the narrator notices his growing resemblance to Roderick, bitterly acknowledging: “It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (60). He even uses the exact same words as Roderick to describe his condition: when Roderick explains his illness to the narrator, he describes it as a “pitiable condition” (54); during the tempest, the narrator calls his illness “the pitiable condition into which [he] had fallen” (61).

While the narrator mimics Roderick, his mind and body also mirror the Usher mansion. The narrator immediately anthropomorphizes the Usher mansion, emphasizing its “vacant eye-like windows” (49) twice, making it a suitable projection for his personality. As mentioned previously, the “barely perceptible fissure… extending from the roof of the building in front, [making] its way down the wall in a zigzag direction” (51) mirrors the narrator’s two temperaments, logic and emotion. The atmosphere surrounding the house also illustrates the narrator’s mental state. When the narrator first sees the house in the distance, the narrator feels a depression “which [he] can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium” (49). The otherworldly depression that plagues the narrator manifests in “an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued” (51) that hangs about the Usher estate. The interior of the mansion, where the narrator spends the majority of his visit, also reflects his growing malaise: “I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all” (52). In addition to depicting the narrator’s mind, the Usher house also represents his body’s deterioration.While the physical effects of the illness the narrator experiences are nowhere near as debilitating as the ones Roderick suffers from, the “wild inconsistency between [the Usher mansion’s] still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individualstones” (51) still parallels the tenuous maintenance of the narrator’s logical brain within his fear-ridden body as “an irrepressible tremour gradually pervade[s his] frame; and, at length, there [sits] upon [his] very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm” (61).

If the narrator is just as susceptible as everything else to the doubling in the story, then it makes sense to question why he alone survives. If the narrator becomes a mirror for Roderick, apparently replacing Madeline’s role, why does Roderick die while the narrator lives? While the narrator mirrors Roderick, he does not entirely take over Madeline’s function in the story; he does not possess the physical “similitude” or “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature” (60) that Madeline andRoderick possess as twins that bind them together. Madeline and Roderick are two parts of a whole, Roderick’s “morbid acuteness of the senses” (53) complementing Madeline’s catalepsy. Also, unlike the narrator, who becomes a victim of fear like Roderick, Madeline becomes Roderick’s fear incarnate. Roderick believes that he will die “in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR” (54), and in the penultimate paragraph of the story, his prediction becomes true: “[Madeline] fell heavily inward upon the personof her brother, and… bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated” (65). Moreover, while the house reflects the narrator both physically and mentally, he is still not a part of the House of Usher, neither “the family [nor] the family mansion” (50-51). Because of his lack of family ties, the narrator is able to escape, and the power the house wields over him ceases as soon as he crosses “the old causeway,” watching the “fissure [splitting the house in two] rapidly widen… and the deep and dank tarn at [the narrator’s] feet close… sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher’” (65).

Though the narrator at first seems to escape the doubling present throughout the narrative, he is actually a major part of it, as it is through his perspective that readers feel the gloom that permeates the House of Usher in both senses of the appellation. However, the narrator survives the fall of the House because he is a copy of Roderick and the mansion, not a part of either of them. The extent of duplication in this story is astounding; there are many more examples of mirroring, doubling, and twinning throughout it that are not directly pertinent to the narrator’s story arc, such as the significance of the reflection of the mansion in the tarn upon which both the narrator and Roderick remark. The careful braiding of this imagery illustrates Poe’s approach to writing. In his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe writes about the drafting of “The Raven,” stating, “no one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (545).

Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Tales. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Poe, Edgar Allan, and J. Gerald Kennedy. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. Penguin Books, 2006.

cartoony drawing of a mouse that radiates stress with the caption "timidness/nervousness"

I Made a Zine!

Posted on by Nicki Chaput

It’s 2022! My last semester of college starts next Wednesday. I can hardly believe it. I wanted to share something I made last semester for my disability studies class: a zine! I’d never done anything quite like this before, but I’m super happy with how it came out. Check out a PDF of it here:

WG241-Zine-v3Download

And check out this YouTube video of me reading it and talking a bit about its production here:

a digital drawing of wolf licking a king on the chin

Queering Bisclavret

Posted on by Nicki Chaput

My final essay for my medieval literature class. Here’s the final image from the video:

a digital drawing of wolf licking a king on the chin

Transcript of essay:

In much of the scholarship surrounding the lai Bisclavret by Marie de France, little attention is paid to the homoerotic subtext between the titular Bisclavret and the unnamed king who takes him in while in wolf form. While the behavior between the men might seem simply emblematic of different norms of appropriate homosocial acts in medieval France and Britain, the sheer volume of hugging and kissing between the pair at the story’s climax seems to go beyond platonic intimacy. Thus, I want to examine the homoeroticism between the werewolf and the king by analyzing how Bisclavret is and is not a “monster” and the role monstrosity plays in cultural narratives, as well as how Bisclavret embodies and falls short of the archetypal courtly knight, the pinnacle of medieval masculinity. In order to support a queer reading of Bisclavret, I compare it to a similar lai Melion by an anonymous Picard author, which is significantly less homoerotic and was likely written to be an “improved” version of Bisclavret. Taking all of these things into account, I argue as a result of his lycanthropy, Bisclavret is able to circumvent the heterosexual norms codified by chivalric masculinity and navigate his sexuality into a nebulous, queer zone.

The werewolf in Bisclavret is a multifaceted creature, at once a ferocious beast and intelligent man, and his dual nature is an affront to medieval cultural institutions of hierarchy and binary. According to Emma Campbell, “Human superiority over animals was generally considered a matter of hierarchy rather than essence in the Middle Ages” (96). Despite this, with his humility, affection for the king, and desire for justice, this lai allows the reading of Bisclavret “as more civilized than [his] human counterparts” (Griffin 140). Jeffrey J. Cohen argues that one of the essential components of a monster is its ability to overthrow cultural categories: “the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a “system” allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration” (“Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” 8). Despite the hierarchical relationship between humans and animals, “Writers of [the 12th century (when Bisclavret was written)] increasingly use animals as human exemplars or metaphors for human behavior, a phenomenon commonly considered to trouble an already unstable distinction between human and animal” (Campbell 96). In addition to calling into question the superiority of humans over animals, Bisclavret also disrupts the acclaim of the institution of marriage and muddies the distinction between heterosexuality and homoeroticism. And as Cohen writes, ““Deviant” sexual identity is… susceptible to monsterization” (“Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” 9).

Bisclavret’s weekly lycanthropic transformations complicate his relationship with the heteronormative institution of marriage and masculinity. Bisclavret’s lycanthropic sojourns put a strain on his marriage, making his wife “so anxious / on those days when [he] leaves [her]” (ln. 43-44). But Bisclavret doesn’t reject the institution of marriage outright; when his wife questions him about his whereabouts during his weekly three days of absence, Bisclavret tells her, “Trouble will come to me if I tell you, / for I will divide you from my love / and destroy myself in doing so” (54-56). It is his love for her that forces him to hide his werewolf identity instead of forgoing marriage altogether. Bisclavret’s unwillingness to choose between his marriage and his werewolf lifestyle reflects the archetypal position of the monster in fiction: monsters “are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” 6). Bisclavret defies the hierarchical order of humans and animals, in affect also defying the strict tenants of chivalric masculinity. As Cohen notes, “Animality is supposed to be a despised state, the abject condition against which humanity asserts itself. The werewolf knows better. This monster inhabits a space of undifferentiated concurrency” (“The Werewolf’s Indifference” 353). We can see that despite Bisclavret’s saying in the beginning that there “would never again be hope for [him]” (ln. 76) if he were to remain a werewolf eternally, he seems to not totally despise his lycanthropy. When the royal court torture Bisclavret’s wife and subsequently retrieve his clothing, enabling him to turn back into a human, the king offers the clothes to the wolf, but Bisclavret “[does] not take notice at all” (ln. 280). According to Cohen, this is because Bisclavret “learns the equivalence between two forms that seemed mutually exclusive [of human and wolf], learns their indifference” (“The Werewolf’s Indifference” 356). Instead of foregoing courtly masculinity completely or strictly aligning himself with every component of it, he creates a “hybrid masculinity” that is “deeply unsettling to the order of [medieval] society and the intimate relationships between men and women within the tale[]” (Schneider 37).

In the Lais of Marie de France, courtly and chivalric masculinity are inherently tied to heterosexuality; however, Bisclavret manages to be masculine while avoiding ending up in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Bisclavret is introduced as a paragon of chivalric masculinity: “In Brittany there lived a worthy man / whom I have heard marvelously praised; he was a handsome, good knight / and conducted himself nobly” (ln. 15-18). And in a society where “the ideals of the successful knight and the successful lover of a lady” were “increasingly conflated” (Schneider 29), Bisclavret’s relationship with his wife at first seems to fulfill those ideals, as “he loved her and she him” (ln. 23). However, once Bisclavret reveals his secret to his wife, “she [does] not want to lie beside him any more” (1 ln. 02), removing the heterosexual component from his masculinity. Yet despite the loss of sexual activity between Bisclavret and his wife, he still retains much of his courtly masculinity: “Even as a wolf, he retains the loyalty and sense of justice he (arguably) possessed as a human” (Schneider 28). His wife’s rejection does not emasculate him, but instead presents his “static masculinity: a concrete picture of what it means to be male and a knight, so solid that it remains constant even in physical transformations out of and into humanity” (Schneider 28). Moreover, the tale’s happy ending does not include a reunification between Bisclavret and his wife or marriage to a new, hopefully more faithful woman, but instead leaves Bisclavret in the service of the king in a purely homosocial environment, seemingly free of any women, even a queen. While Bisclavret does not end with a knight with a “willingness to physically accept a female lover” (Schneider 35), the lai does end with a knight who is “loyal in love” (Schneider 30)—it’s just that that loyalty is devoted to a man, the king. Due to his relationship with the king, Bisclavet subverts the outline of chivalric masculinity outlined by Schneider.

Bisclavret’s relationship to his king, which Marie “evidently considers part of his good character” (McCash 235), goes beyond the bounds of purely platonic or humble. Bisclavret’s first interaction with the king in the lai occurs after his wife has betrayed him and he is stuck roaming the woods as a wolf. Upon encountering the king on a hunt, he runs up to him and “kisses his leg and his foot” (ln. 148), which the king interprets as both a sign of humility and humanity. However, the subsequent behavior of Bisclavret and the king goes beyond the relationship of merely a humble servant and benefactor. On the way back to the castle, Bisclavret “stay[s] very close [to the king], it d[oes] not wish to leave, / it does not care to part from him” (ln. 163-164), illustrating an affection for the king as well as gratefulness. Bisclavret always follows the king “wherever [he] had to go, / [for he] did not care to be apart from him” (ln. 181-182) and desires to be close to the king even when the two of them are sleeping, going to bed “among the knights and close to the king” (ln. 177) every day. Cohen interprets Bisclavret’s actions as a manifestation of his indifference towards distinctions between animality and humanity, stating, “he is at once like a favorite hunting dog and like a good household knight” (“The Werewolf’s Indifference” 356). However, I believe that there is more to Bisclavret’s attention lavished on the king, namely that it signifies feelings of a romantic or at least deeply intimate, loving bond, as in response to Bisclavret’s behavior, Marie writes that the king “could see well that [Bisclavret] loved him” (ln. 184). There’s also the matter of Bisclavret’s relationship with his king predating the events of the story. While some of Bisclavret’s actions in wolf-form seem to be his trying to hint to the king that he is not a regular wolf, he seems more concerned with being close to him than turning himself back into a human. For example, Bisclavret doesn’t try to lead the king to his former wife, but instead the king leads the investigation after Bisclavret attacks her husband. Bisclavret’s affection for the king leads him to forgo getting his own vengeance.

Moreover, the king also has affection for the werewolf. After the king, his knights, and Bisclavret return to the castle, Marie writes, “He considered [the wolf] a great wonder / and held it very dear. / He commanded all his people / to take good care of it for love of him” (ln. 168-171). After Bisclavret attacks his wife’s new husband, the king, in a “wise and courteous” (ln. 221) act, takes it upon himself to investigate the matter by “[going] to the forest / where the wolf had been found” (ln. 222-223). After the wife reveals where she and her new husband hid Bisclavret’s clothes and brings them back to the king, the king takes care of Bisclavret alone: “The king himself led the wolf in [to his bedroom] / and closed all the doors on him” (ln. 293-294). While the king’s actions are under the advisement of the wise man, the wise man’s diction indicates he was suggesting that the king have one of his servants take care of Bisclavret for him (ln. 289); the king’s doing it himself suggests a higher level of affection than even the wise man seemed to be cognizant of. But the most intimate scene in the lai occurs when the king checks on Bisclavret with two of his men: “On the king’s own bed / he found the knight sleeping. / The king ran to embrace him; / more than a hundred times he hugs and kisses him” (ln. 298-301). While the presence of the two men with the king dampens the romance, suggesting that this interaction may have been construed as platonic, even considering the good relationship Bisclavret had with the king before his “disappearance” and the affection the two shared while he was in wolf form does not fully account for the excessively intimate imagery of kissing someone lying on one’s own bed more than one hundred times. And why does Bisclavret lie on the king’s own bed instead of merely near it, as he had done while a wolf? Could he have been hoping for a more private moment with the king after his transformation? And then there’s the aftermath of this scene, where the king returns Bisclavret’s lands to him and Marie writes, “he gave him more than I can say” (ln. 304). While in context this line seems to refer to lands and material riches, its phrasing also bears similarities to the ways in which medieval writers often described love and other emotions as incapable of being articulated with words. It also gives Bisclavret and the king some privacy they had previously not been afforded by the two members of the king’s men, suggesting a potential intimate relationship between the two. As June H. McCash notes, “The good king at the end of Bisclavret welcomes his restored knight back to his court, thus showing him the fidelity that the wife lacked” (ln. 246). The king essentially replaces Bisclavret’s wife, and unlike her he is able to accommodate and even love Bisclavret as both a man and a wolf, making Bisclavret’s hybrid masculinity not only possible but preferable to a life cohabiting with treacherous women.

The depiction of heterosexuality and the intimate relationship between Bisclavret and his king can be further understood by contrasting it with the relationships between the werewolf, his wife, and the two kings in the lai Melion. For instance, Melion presents a different type of masculinity than the chivalric one outlined by Schneider, instead exemplifying violence as the masculine trait. According to McCash, Melion is an “example of what Donald Maddox has called a “critically motivated rewriting” or, to use the medieval term, an aemulatio or modification of one of Marie de France’s lais, in this case Bisclavret” (247). As an aemulatio, we can examine the differences between Melion and Bisclavret as things that the author of Melion saw as lacking. For instance, Melion’s masculinity as a wolf is much more savage than Bisclavret’s, with Melion marauding around Ireland with a pack of real wolves, and “Melion comes far closer to fulfilling Marie’s stereotypical description [of a savage werewolf], which the Picard author no doubt knew, than does Bisclavret” (McCash 243). And while the wife of Bisclavret receives a more physically denigrating punishment than the wife of Melion, the “presentation of Bisclavret’s attack nonetheless anticipates its designation as human rather than animal behavior… [Marie] prefac[es] the denasalizing bite with an encouragement to see it in terms of human vengeance” (Campbell 100).

Bisclavret and Melion also have different family circumstances to contend with. Bisclavret has no children with his wife, so dooming her offspring to lives of noselessness has no impact on him. Melion, on the other hand, has two sons with his wife, who are “clearly children the author consider[s] more valuable [than Bisclavret’s wife’s daughters], particularly to a knight with little promise of a future marriage back in Arthur’s realm, where he still has not cleared up his little problem with the ladies” (McCash 245). Speaking of wives and family, there is a greater emphasis on heterosexuality in Melion than in Bisclavret. Melion is allegedly “very courtly and noble / And he made himself beloved of all” (ln. 7-8); however, “all” doesn’t extend to the female population of Arthur’s kingdom, as they vow that they will never marry him due to his exacting demands on their chastity. Because of that rejection, it’s not surprising that when Melion does find a woman who meets his demands, he marries her and devotes himself to her. The impetus behind Melion’s lycanthropy is due to his trying to please his wife, whereas Bisclavret attempts to hide his lycanthropy in order to maintain his relationship with his wife (McCash 241-242). Bisclavret’s lycanthropy is at odds with his heterosexuality, while Melion’s arises because of it.

And finally, there is the bifurcation of the role of the good king in Bisclavret into King Arthur and King Yder of Ireland. In Melion, King Yder does not happen upon the werewolf on a hunt like the good king of Bisclavret, but instead he sets out in a deliberate attempt to kill him and the ten other wolves in his pack. Once King Arthur arrives in Dublin in deus ex machina fashion, Melion throws himself at the king’s feet and remains with him during a dinner party. The king in Bisclavret notes that the werewolf “has human understanding” (ln. 157); in contrast, King Arthur describes Melion as “tame” (ln. 411), not ascribing any humanity to the wolf. Unlike Bisclavret and the good king, there is no romantic or even affectionate subtext between Melion and King Arthur, and the latter seems merely bemused by the marvel that is a wolf who eats bread. While both tales end with the lycanthropic knights reunited with their kings, “the relationship between Melion and Arthur” is downplayed “by comparison to the ending of Bisclavret” (McCash 246); after all, Melion has heirs and is thus still involved in the heteropatriarchal family system, while Bisclavret, with no offspring, is free from its confines to live as both a human and a wolf with his king.

The fate of Bisclavret is left ambiguous in the end; while we learn that his king has banished his wife and returned his lands to him, whether he intends to remain with the king or live as a bachelor (and possibly remarry and have children in the future) is left up in the air. Moreover, we don’t know what has become of Bisclavret’s lycanthropy. Did his transformation back into a human after living as a wolf for a year cure him of it, or does he still have to turn into a wolf three days a week? These ambiguities complicate the reading of Bisclavret, as we as readers cannot know whether Bisclavret returned to the heterosexual world or remained in his queer domain with the king. Knowing what Bisclavret does after the events of the story might also give a clearer picture on how we might construe Bisclavret’s sexuality in modern terms. Is he gay and hiding it from his wife, or is he bisexual but rejected by his wife due to his perceived sexual deviancy? Regardless, due to the nature of the werewolf as an archetype representing both duality and secret shame, I believe that Bisclavret is a useful story for the analysis of queer narratives from the middle ages.

Works Cited

Campbell, Emma. “Political Animals: Human/Animal Life in Bisclavret and Yonec.” Exemplaria, vol. 25, no. 2, Routledge, Nov. 2013, pp. 95–109, doi:10.1179/1041257313Z.00000000027.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 3–25.

—. “The Werewolf’s Indifference.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 34, 2012, pp. 351–56, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/492589.

Griffin, Miranda. “The Beastly and the Courtly in Medieval Tales of Transformation: Bisclavret, Melion and Mélusine.” The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture, edited by Amaleena Damlé and Aurélie L’Hostis, Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2010, pp. 139–50.

McCash, June Hall. “Melion and Bisclavret: The Presence and Absence of Arthur.” Moult a Sans Et Vallour: Studies in Medieval French Literature in Honor of William W. Kibler, edited by Monica L. Norris Wright et al., Rodopi, 2012, pp. 233–49.

Schneider, Thomas R. “The Chivalric Masculinity of Marie de France’s Shape-Changers.” Arthuriana, vol. 26, no. 3, 2016, pp. 25–40, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26443642.

Waters, Claire M. editor. The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Translation. Broadview Press, 2018.

time lapse photo of the sky at night

The Form of Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Posted on by Nicki Chaput

Featured image by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

In RaMell Ross’s debut film Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross uses an an unconventional form to create a more participatory film than a typical documentary. The film is certainly a documentary; however, it lacks much of the narrative structure many documentaries utilize to “hook” their audiences, feeling surreal and whimsical as a result. The form of the film consists of alternating clips set during the day and night, hence the title of the film, and several other patterns of non-narrative clips. The film is largely iterative, exploring the lives of two young Black men in Hale County and their families and friends. Quincey and Daniel’s lives in the film don’t replicate dramatic story arcs; while there were some emotionally charged scenes in the film, they aren’t presented as climactic moments, but as everyday occurrences. In addition to the stories of Daniel and Quincey, the film intercuts many timelapses of sunsets, sunrises, and the starry night sky in order to emphasize the passing of time. Ross also intersperses narratively significant scenes with clips of repetitive actions: popcorn popping, a bee rolling around in circles, a deer swaying in the headlights, in order to emphasize the continual nature of life in Hale County.

The result of all of Ross’s artistic choices regarding the form is an intimate, engaging relationship formed with the subjects of the film. Their stories are not dramatized, and the passing of time feels natural, yet through seemingly insignificant anecdotes and moments the audience gets a sense of the cyclical nature of poverty and disheartenment that the citizens of Hale County endure. The film invites its audience to participate in the lives of its subjects, rather than passively consume a triumphant narrative.

two film stills depicting the heroines of "All That Heaven Allows" (left) and "Far From Heaven" (right)

Film Style in the Work of Douglas Sirk and Todd Haynes

Posted on by Nicki Chaput

In the aftermath of World War II, the nuptiality and fertility rates of the United States boomed as the U.S. entered one of the most iconic eras in American history. The early Atomic Era ushered in a wave of economic prosperity, as well as a desire to reinstate the patriarchal norms that had shifted during the war. The aesthetics of the 1950s remain prevalent in nostalgia and Americana today: discussions of the American Dream often elude to an idealized home with a “white picket fence” found in middle class suburbia, films such as Carol or Pleasantville take place in or are inspired by the 50s, and the large “retro” or “pinup” subculture takes inspiration from fashion after Dior’s “New Look” in 1947 more than any other period in the 20th century. One prominent element of 1950s iconography was the melodrama, the genre German-born director Douglas Sirk excelled at crafting. Nowadays, the melodrama doesn’t stand on its own and is rarely “played straight” by filmmakers; writers and directors usually add elements of satire, parody, or deconstruction to “update” the melodrama for a contemporary audience. One such filmmaker is Todd Haynes, whose 2002 film Far From Heaven appropriates the aesthetics and substance of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows while examining topics that would have been too taboo or transgressive for Sirk to address directly. Both films center around the conflict between the insular middle class of suburbia and the down-to-earth intellectual working class, as well as how the bonds of marriage stifle the autonomy of women, relegating them to wives, mothers, and caretakers. The major difference between the two is Far From Heaven’s retrospective look at attitudes towards homosexuality, race, and interracial relationships. Through their very prominent uses of film style, both filmmakers made their audiences question the status quo of the society they inhabited. Sirk used the subtext found in his style to hint at a more critical view of 1950s American society than outwardly apparent, whereas Haynes used the 50s as a setting to compare and contrast the world of 2002 with the world almost 5 decades before.

On the surface, All That Heaven Allows appears to be a trite tale about how love can conquer all, even the prejudices of a pompous country club. The story follows Cary, a widow with two college-age children trapped in the home of her dead husband. Cary longs for romance, not just the companionship the older man Harvey (whom her children desperately want her to marry) offers her, and freedom from the confines of her previous marriage. She meets Ron, the son of her late gardener, and immediately becomes enthralled with the change of pace his transcendentalist lifestyle gives her. He asks her to marry him, her friends and family don’t like him, and she breaks off the engagement, only to come rushing to his aid after inadvertently causing him to fall off a cliff. The film ends with Cary returning to her role as a caretaker, clutching Ron’s hand in hers as a deer (which Ron had hand-fed in an earlier scene) looks on at them from outside. While the film is certainly a bit of wish fulfillment for suburban women longing for romantic thrills, the subtext within the mise-en-scene and cinematography of All That Heaven Allows sends a bit of a different message than “love conquers all.”

Sirk uses color coding in costuming, sets, and props to symbolize different characters’ relationships with their society. The color red symbolizes sexuality and womanhood, most prominently in Cary’s red dress early in the film, but also in how red consumes Kay’s costuming as she matures and eventually gets engaged. The partygoers at Mick and Alida’s house wear mostly earth-toned clothing in contrast with Cary’s grey suit, making Cary stand out visually to emphasize how she doesn’t quite fit in as well as alluding to the partygoers’ closeness to nature. Even the cars represent the different types of people in the community: Cary’s pristine sedan embodies her character as a middle class suburban mother, while Ron’s dingy brown truck alludes to his nature as a non-materialistic working class bachelor. The mise-en-scene used to separate the worlds of Cary and Ron suggests a dichotomy of haves and have nots that cannot be overcome rather than a spectrum of wealth and class where individuals can elevate their economic standings.

Similarly, the cinematography and staging of Cary work together to illustrate how marriage traps women in patriarchal confines, particularly with the motifs of mirrors and windows. The mirror motif first appears early in the film, trapping Cary and her two children in its reflection as Kay literally talks about how ancient Egyptians used to seal the wives of deceased men along with them in their tombs. It returns with a vengeance towards the end of the film when Kay and Ned buy Cary a TV set, the salesman droning on about how it’s the only companion she’ll ever need, as the camera zooms in to reveal her morose expression staring back at her, stuck within the frame of the television.

While mirrors serve to illustrate how Cary feels suffocated by her late husband and children, windows represent her longing for freedom (and, by extension, Ron). When Ron asks her to marry him, the camera pans as Cary walks from the warm red hearth (a common symbol of family) over to the large window Ron had put in and stares out into the blue winter, the light rendering her and Ron in silhouette. After reconciling her doubts about marrying Ron, the camera once again depicts Ron and Cary in front of the window, this time in a medium long shot with warm undertones in the coloration rather than the more intimate medium close-up of the instance before, suggesting the acceptance of a return to the institution of marriage. After breaking up with Ron, the front window of Cary’s house acts as a barrier between the happiness she desires and the conventions of society trapping her in her home, the camera zooming in on her to highlight the tears streaming down her face as children pass by singing Christmas carols. Most significantly, in the final shot of the film, the camera tilts up from Ron bedridden on the couch as Cary asserts that she’s home to the giant window, nature looking on fondly at the pair, as the film ends. The windows throughout the film, in particular the large window in the mill, suggest that the freedom from societal conventions Cary needs for her relationship with Ron is out of reach, blocked by an invisible force, as even though the film ends optimistically, none of the conflicts created by this force have been resolved.

In Far From Heaven, Haynes took the color symbolism in Sirk’s film and amplified it, matching characters with props and their surroundings to enhance the narrative. As Cathy perches on her couch in a vibrant blue dress answering questions for a local magazine, she mirrors a Magnatech advertisement on the wall behind her, illustrating her embodiment of the ultimate wife and mother. Later, during a lunch date with her friends where Cathy awkwardly realizes she’s the only one whose husband never has sex with her, not only are all the women dressed in color-coordinated outfits, but the color scheme makes them blend into the fall foliage of Hartford, representing their seamless integration into not only their community, but also to the gender roles expected of them. Throughout the film, Cathy primarily wears bold red, green, or blue outfits, and like All That Heaven Allows the dramatic lighting often takes on the same hues to heighten the intensity of the scene and sense of the characters’ emotions. Green lighting in particular indicates unease, such as when Cathy picks Frank up from the station in the beginning or when Cathy discovers Frank kissing a man in his office (this scene even has Cathy wear a green coat to accentuate this stylistic choice). Those three colors come together when Cathy—wearing a green dress and hat—meets Raymond in the modern art gallery, gazing at a Miró painting that epitomizes the contrast of blue and red as Raymond posits that modern art “pares [divinity] down to the basic parts of shape and color.”

The cinematography often adds a sense of unease throughout the film, mirroring the discomfort the characters feel about the artifice and hollowness in their lives. In many shot-reverse-shot sequences with Cathy and Raymond, when we see Cathy’s face, Raymond’s head is completely out of frame, rendering him a headless, intimidating form, illustrating Cathy’s unease talking to a black man. In scenes set in the Whitaker house such as when Frank tries to have sex with Cathy or when the children open presents on Christmas day, the film utilizes long shots to emphasize the the vast emptiness of the house, mirroring the emptiness and loneliness of the characters. The short focal lengths used to create wide shots throughout the film make the characters seem small within the frame compositions, as if they’re swallowed up by their environments (which they often blend into due to mise-en-scene), exacerbating the conformity present in Hartford.

Both All That Heaven Allows and Far From Heaven use film style to highlight the facade of tolerance and progressiveness that Americans perpetuate. In the beginning of All That Heaven Allows, Kay waxes on about how glad she is that women aren’t considered property anymore and widows aren’t walled up with their deceased husbands, even though Cary is obviously an object to the community and to her family, and she’s metaphorically trapped in her late husband’s tomb. (In a self-aware response to Kay saying the practice doesn’t happen anymore, Cary jokes, “Doesn’t it?”) The community and children pretend to support Cary in her romantic endeavors, but only if she chooses the man they want her to marry: Harvey. But when Cary deviates from the patriarchal norm, marrying someone younger than her from a lower socioeconomic standing, they ostracize and threaten her until she conforms to their practices. Even after Cary abandons her dull, comfortable life for Ron at the end, the film ends with the uncomfortable reality that Ron and Cary are still outcasts whom Cary’s family and friends will never truly accept. This ending suggests a discrepancy between the romantic ideal of upward social mobility and the reality of America’s rigid caste system; the sign for Cary’s country club embodies this rigidity, reading, “for members exclusively.” In the midst of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, rampant social conformity was a symptom of widespread fear of outsiders. Deviation from the conservative, consumerist lifestyle of American suburbia, such as the transcendentalist lifestyle lived by Ron and his associates, indicated a rejection of so-called “American values” that Cary hesitates to abandon. The visual distinction between Ron’s circle and the country club acts as a physical representation of how othered Ron and his friends are from mainstream suburbia.

Similarly, in Far From Heaven, there are multiple scenes where characters talk about how progressive they are, highlighting Cathy especially as being “kind to Negroes.” Cathy herself has one particularly hilarious moment in the art gallery with Raymond where she awkwardly rambles about how she’s “not prejudiced.” Yet despite all their talk, the citizens of Hartford—even the children—are not even subtly racist, glaring at Cathy for daring to speak to a black man in public, throwing rocks at Raymond’s daughter Sarah because her father has a “white girl,” and ostracizing Cathy for nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors about her relationship with Raymond. Notably, in All That Heaven Allows, Cary’s best friend Sara defends her in the country club despite believing that Cary’s making a mistake marrying Ron, while in Far From Heaven, Cathy’s best friend Eleanor immediately turns against her after she indicates she might have minutely romantic feelings towards Raymond, indicating an even larger disparity between surface progressivism and deep seated bigotry than in Sirk’s film. Yet unlike Cary, who lacked agency and direction but at least had some protective instinct towards Ron, Cathy directly lies about her relationship with Raymond, claiming she didn’t go with him to a restaurant not only to protect her reputation but also to distance herself from the shame their relationship gives her. While Cary tries to be the ultimate mother, putting her fickle, selfish children’s needs in front of her own, Cathy only embodies the image of the perfect mother, like the Magnatech poster seen early in the film: when Raymond tells her he and Sarah are moving to Baltimore, Cathy doesn’t hesitate to offer to join him, not thinking about her children stuck in the middle of a divorce.

Another theme both films examine is how marriage traps women into unfulfilling relationships or lifestyles. For Cary, her marriage to Martin defines her even after his death, the house remaining the same as when he was alive, including one of his trophies on the mantelpiece. With the exception of the bright red dress towards the beginning, Cary wears mostly dark or dreary clothing typical of a widow; when she wears the aforementioned red number, Kay commends her for wearing “something besides that old black velvet.” But even after getting together with Ron her wardrobe stays desaturated, suggesting that despite outward appearances, her situation hasn’t changed much. Even before she decides to stay with Ron at the end, her life was never truly free from the control of men: in his father’s absence, Ned takes up the mantle of patriarch, waiting up for his mother to return from the party with Ron framed in the manner of a stern father admonishing his teenage child for staying out too late. Cary at her core wants love, be it romantic, familial, or platonic, but the death of her first husband inhibits her pursuit of romantic love in his absence; her love for Ron is add odds with, as Ned puts it, her “sense of obligation to [Martin’s] memory.”

Cathy, meanwhile, does not cherish her status as a wife or mother, instead craving the more carnal aspects of marriage. When her husband cannot satisfy her needs for sex or romance, she turns to Raymond for companionship, toward the end of the film developing one-sided romantic feelings towards him. But her marriage to Frank prevents her from ever getting what she wants: if she’s faithful (unlike him) to her husband, she’ll remain sexually frustrated, but if she starts an affair with Raymond, her reputation will be ruined and she’d put Raymond and his daughter in danger. (In fact, she doesn’t even start an actual affair with Raymond, yet all of the above still happens over the course of the film.) The cinematography and set design of the Whitaker household, which minimize the space figures take up in the frame, illustrate the emptiness Cathy’s seemingly perfect life provides her; after Frank and Cathy get divorced, the film reveals that this emptiness is also literal in the sense that the family has no savings, nothing to fall back on after Cathy is stuck with the children and Frank loses his job.The 1950s were a time of conservative conformity, and any deviation from “traditional American values” resulted in expulsion from the elitist general public. Yet those traditional values benefit only certain groups (men, upper-middle to upper-class people, white people) while trapping others in unfulfilling and displeasing lifestyles. Douglas Sirk and Todd Haynes explore the consequences of that conformity in All That Heaven Allows and Far From Heaven respectively through film style, with both films criticizing how marriage takes away the autonomy of women in their pursuits of happiness and how shallow the tolerance Americans purport to have is.