An Uncanny Resemblance

Fig.7

I confess that I set out on this latest journey in assessment writing with somewhat flippant intentions: a photographic essay - how hard could that be? Read up about little girls lost in the Aussie bush; shoot a few spooky black and white pictures at an abandoned goldmine; muck about with the focus; whip out a thousand words about the uncanny. Bam. A drive in the park. Sorted.

Backfire.

Fig.1

In attempting to explore my initial thesis that the Gothic exposes the fragility of social order in its uncanny intrusions of the past into the present (phew!) all I managed was to create a portfolio of odd doll portraits; odd, but not uncanny. All photographs bar two feature a large vintage doll in a red dress, positioned at the bottom of a cliff face and the entrance to an old mine shaft. They failed utterly to evoke any sense of the uncanny. The only images to achieve a peculiar quality were ironically those in which the doll did not feature: a red ribbon caught in the fingers of a scrubby bush and a shadowy hand reaching for an infant’s cardigan, both suggestive of an absent presence. (Figures 1 and 2.) I could have explored the connection to any of the many (in)famous child disappearances in Australian history, but felt it was not enough to craft a small photo essay around. It was certainly to slim to to flesh out Lucie Armitt’s valid notion of childhood in the late twentieth century having retreated into a phase of “fear and stifling lack of freedom to roam.” (2011, p.17)

Fig. 2

Shift gear.

I considered instead the notion that Gothic Male protagonists regularly position the adolescent Gothic Girl as uncanny - her newly developed ability to recreate life evoking a cognitive dissonance in him. The process of conception, pregnancy and childbirth is natural but simultaneously perceived as other. The threads that could be followed through such a labyrinthine concept are myriad: vampires are sired, not birthed (Bram Stoker’s Dracula); fertile but virginal adolescent girls tempt godly men to sinful lusts (Mathew Lewis’ The Monk); the immortality of girl-child vampires (Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat); unnatural monsters created by science (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein); even period cramps as a vampire approach warning system (Joss Whedon’s original Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie). In attempting to narrow the focus of my gaze and connect with a photographic theme I found I was once more frustrated. 

Fig.3

I sought the assistance of an expectant mother. I hoped that images of her surrounded by the trappings of modern technology might produce notions that challenge Anne Williams’ assertion that the “Male Gothic invites, even demands, that the female act according to the definition that has been imposed on her.” (1995, p246) Surely a shot of a pregnant woman in her workplace, surrounded by and using technology would produce an uneasy and unfamiliar familiarity? (Fig.3) It was not to be. Without a male gaze, it missed the point. If only the poster above Emma’s desk featured a male welder, instead of female.

Change lane.

Fig.4

I returned to the use of plastic dolls and shot dozens of posed Ken and Barbies. I wanted to create an arrangement that sufficiently illustrates the male gaze upon that particular form of female adolescence that Deborah Martin suggests is “inherently strange”. (2013, p.137) What I achieved instead was another set of mildly amusing portraits, only this time rather than odd they were just silly. (Fig. 4)

One image, however, stood out as disturbing. From my brother’s action figure collection, I selected She-Ra, a teenage warrior princess only a quarter of the size of the Ken doll. I sat She-Ra in Ken's lap (Fig. 5) and it provoked an immediate “ick-factor” that has nothing to do with female strangeness and everything to do with social mores. It conveyed perfectly Armitt’s meaning when she asserts that paedophiles have become the natural descendants of ghosts, demons and vampires. (p.18) It is a notion emphasised when considered in light of the age difference present in recent vampire literature.

Fig.5

The Joss Whedon Buffy The Vampire Slayer television series features a romantic involvement between the vampire Angel and the vampire-slayer Buffy Summers. Angel was 26 years old when he was ‘sired’ and is approximately 240[1] when he meets 16-year-old Buffy. Buffy goes on to become involved with Spike, also sired at 26 but a spry 126(ish) when he meets Buffy. The Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight franchise features Edward Cullen as an 18-year-old when sired but still 105 by the time he begins stalking falls in love with 17-year-old Bella Swan. Both girls are technically ‘legal’ and the men are made immortal in their relative youth, yet there still exists the sense of a taboo recognised but ignored. 

And there, I’d done it again. In trying to artificially create an image of the adolescent girl’s procreative abilities as the uncanny, I instead formed a tableau of the paedophile as the new Gothic monster. At which point I gave up trying to force a scene and just, well, played with dolls.

Crash.

Fig.6

I put a hairy beast on the shoulder of Ken evoking Freud’s Gothic “Wolf-Man”, described by Williams in the menstrual light of a “moon that regularly waxes to fullness”. (p.241) (Fig.6) I clad a half-man half-robot figure in a short dress. (Fig. 7 at top of article.) This not only successfully freaked out the six year old Barbie & Ken owner but touched on Nina Lykke’s contention that, like Frankenstein’s monster, cyborgs “transgress forbidden borders [and that] modernity manifests itself in its production of monsters and hybrids” (2000, p.77) It also evoked Claire Kahane’s discussion of hermaphrodite and androgynous hero/ines of Gothic being derived from ambiguity: “from what is visually obscure yet demands to be seen, from what is impossible but true, from what is wished for and feared.” (1983, p.347)

There I was, a 40-year-old woman sitting on the floor of a six-year-old’s bedroom dressing and photographing dolls and calling it academic work. It was... uncanny. Williams suggests that “instead of using Freud to read Gothic, we should use Gothic to read Freud.” (p.243) My repetitive inability to create a themed image had flipped to its mirror image, of fitting the theme to the image. Unable to give birth to the real thing, instead I have constructed a hybrid essay assembled from bits and pieces bearing an uncanny resemblance to an academic piece while yet, being other.

[1] Vampire ages are calculated from the time of siring. Yes. Really.

Bibliography

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