Abhumans across the Cultures: A Comparative Study of
Western and Indian Femme Fatale Beings
Nasrin Sultana
PhD Research Scholar
Department of English
Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma
University
Cooch Behar, West Bengal, India
Abstract
The sole aim of this paper is to examine and analyse
the aspects related to cross-cultural translations of ab-human bodies
represented in western texts and in Indian mythology. Western texts that focus
on the representation of monstrous body and sexuality procreating gendered
phenomenon will be taken up for the examination. Through the imaginations of
Romantic poets like John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge the characters from Greek mythology got
mysterious as well as graceful representations like Geraldine in Christabel as
a silhouetted being and Lamia as an ambiguous beloved. These monsters on one
hand acted egocentrically and committed evil acts against their human
counterparts and on the other hand tried to domesticate themselves.
The paper
will be focussing on the emasculation of the monstrous nature alongside its
accompanying translating aspects from one culture to another. In addition, the
paper will examine questions of why such shifts occur and what are the
significances related to it. The argument will also focus on the fact that
these demonic as well as monstrous beings are the reflexions of the culture’s
needs, it is a frequent tendency of the culture to opt for a supernatural or
superimposed figure capable of darkness but embodied with control. For the
constructive assessment two poems, Lamia by John Keats, Christabel by S.T.
Coleridge will be thoroughly discussed with a parallel comparison to Indian
mythological figures.
Keywords: Abhuman, Body, Femme Fatale, Metamorphosis,
Monstrous, Sexuality
Introduction:
The femme fatale or the deadly female icon has been a popular theme
throughout history. Whether she appeared as Helen of Troy, Circe, Medusa,
Medea, Pandora or as the Sirens in Greek mythology; or whether she made her
cameo appearance in Judeo-Christian culture in the characters of Eve, Jazebel,
Delilah, Judith, Salome or Lilith; or in the Hindu mythology as Urvashi, Menaka
and other Apsaras, she nevertheless has made her presence felt in most
mythological, social and religious systems. On the eve of 21st
century nor has the figure of femme fatale faded but increased popularity in
newly defined forms. The femme fatale became a symbol of women’s so called
natural devious nature in fin de siècle or decadent culture. The icon of femme
fatale had more to do with men and their reactions to women and nature in
general, than with ‘real’ flesh and blood women of the period. Carl Gustav Jung
convincingly said that the devouring and almost cannibalistic aspects of the
femme fatale were referred to as a ’deadly male anima’ (Allen 1983: 9), which
reappeared with a vengeance whenever repressed. Kelly Hurley places the revival
of the Gothic genre in the light of the fin de siècle or decadent anxieties
about the nature of human identity, reflected in Gothic literature as a
“horrific re-making of the human subject.” (Hurley, The Gothic Body 5). These
anxieties are generated by scientific discourse in biology and socio-medical
studies, which radically dismantled conventional notions of ‘the human’. These
discourses are evolutionism, criminal anthropology, and degeneration theory,
sexology and pre-Freudian psychology. These scientific discourses reframe
‘human’ as abhuman, as bodily ambiguous, or otherwise discontinuous in identity
(Hurley, The Gothic Body 5). The fin de siècle Gothic borrows from all these
new scientific models, by showing monstrous characters transforming into
beasts, changing their mental and physical identity, and by having ambiguous
gender identities both in body, mind and sexuality. The abhuman is a subject in
transition, as suggested by the prefix ‘ab’, which signals both a movement away
from one condition and a movement towards another (Hurley, The Gothic Body 4),
in other words, a body in a state of metamorphosis. Hurley links the abhuman to
Kristeva’s conception of the abject, which Hurley describes as:
“the ambivalent status of a human subject
who, on the one hand, labors to maintain (the illusion of) an autonomous and
discrete self-identity, responding to any threat to that self-conception with
emphatic, sometimes violent, denial, and who on the other hand welcomes the
event of confrontation that breaches the boundaries of the ego and casts the
self down into the vertiginous pleasures of indifferentiation.” (Hurley, The
Gothic Body 4)
This outcasting of the self results in nauseating anxiety, but
embracement of abjection in turn results in jouissance, a transgressive,
excessive kind of pleasure similar to lust. Hurley adds that this ambiguity
between repulsion and jouissance lies at the core of fin de siècle Gothic:
“convulsed by nostalgia for the ‘fully human’
subject . . . and yet aroused by the prospect of a monstrous becoming.”
(Hurley, The Gothic Body 4).
The
Abhumanness Present in the Romantic Poems: Lamia
and Christabel
Lamia:
John Keats’s 1819 narrative poem Lamia is based on a short anecdote about
a sage in The Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton. The wise philosopher rescues his disciple from marriage to a
woman who is “found out to be a serpent, a lamia” (188). While Burton’s
narrator does not reveal that the woman is a serpent until the middle of the
tale, Keats’s heroine appears as a snake at the beginning and then
metamorphoses into a beautiful woman in the middle of the poem. According to
the OED, “lamia” is the name of “a fabulous monster” which is “supposed to have
the body of a woman, and to prey upon human beings and suck the blood of
children.” However, it is not clear that Lamia in this narrative tries to prey
on a man or a child. The female serpent of Keats’s poem dares to approach a
young man purely for love and wishes to be loved by him. At the end of the
story, she seems to be rather the victim. She is annihilated by the stare of an
old philosopher, Apollonius, and a shout from her lover, Lycius; however, she retains
a woman’s figure when she disappears.
The heroine appears as a
glaring snake and changes her figure to a brilliant woman. Her continuity
through her metamorphosis consists in her conscience and her sex. In spite of
her physical transformation, she is banished as a serpent at the end of the
story. It is true that she has a strong enchantment for the young man and
manipulates others in Part I. These abilities result from her nature as a
serpent or a monster. In Part II, however, she is deprived of her power to
dominate others and the male characters come to possess it. The power shift
suggests that her quality as a snake is decreasing. The serpent is originally
discovered by Hermes, who was looking for a “sweet nymph” (Keats, Lamia.1. 30)
in Crete. He hears her voice before seeing her appearance:
“There as he stood, he heard a mournful
voice,
Such as once heard, in gentle heart, destroys
All pain but pity: thus the lone voice spake:
“When from this wreathed tomb shall I awake!
“When move in a sweet body fit for life,
“And love, and pleasure, and the ruddy strife
“Of hearts and lips! Ah, miserable me!” (1.
35–41)
The sweetness seems to be
the main factor in her character that attracts satyrs, tritons and Hermes. It
is not clear whether this quality of the nymph attaches itself to her nature or
just to her looks; however, the “mournful voice” directs the word to “body.” A
“sweet body” is supposed to enjoy the pleasure of life and sensual satisfaction
in the following phrase. Especially, “the ruddy strife / Of hearts and lips”
(1.40-41) suggests a vivid and lively sensation. The voice declares that the
snake’s body is a “wreathed tomb” and it wants “a sweet body.” It demands to be
revived from the state of death to an active existence.
The poem’s literary origins
and the traditional perception of Lamia as a monster or victimized woman in
Greek mythology reflect the element of hesitation or the state of uncertainty
maintained throughout the poem. Keats presents Lamia as a suffering woman in
order to establish a connection with the corporeal world. As an outsider coming
from an unknown world, Lamia is the other to the self and always stands as a
threat to the rational structure. Hence, Keats evaluates Lamia figure not as a
monster eating her own babies, but as a sensitive woman wronged because of her
insistence on ‘love.’ The idealization of Lamia’s previously serpent form also
consolidates how Keats takes sides with the supernatural world as nourishing
power for alternate ways of life. However, even the origins of Lamia in both
affirmative and negative accounts prove the slippery ground of meaning with the
presence of the fantastic and the absence of the rational. The tension between
the world of the rational and the one offering a new subjectivity for the
poetic personas reflects the prevalent concern of going beyond the human sphere
in “Lamia.” The personas gain a glimpse of truth in Keats’ platonic poetic
universe through the paradoxical functionality of loss and despair. Thus, the
apparent negation of the last lines signifying ‘death’ affirms the presence of
nourishing alterity by offering a borderless and timeless existence in “Lamia.”
The poem’s inter-generic
position visualizes the literary genres’ flexibility and plurality from the
respect of culture and language. For that reason, it is possible to detect two
languages employed symbolically by Lamia and Apollonius besides the two
different cultures; one is distant and mysterious, the other is contemporary. As
Harrold mentions, that is why the scholars have focused on the “Lamia motif,
which appears in the folklore and literature of countries from England to China
and India” (579). The poem’s various local origins from Eastern and Western
cultures also contribute to its generic and temporal multiplicity. When the
story of Lamia’s medieval version is reconsidered, the poem’s temporal richness
becomes clearer with its concerns and implications free from centuries’
boundaries. In this vein, the study analyses Keats’ “Lamia” to demonstrate its
multilayered structure with the prevalence of fantastic elements. In addition
to that, the fairy tale material, gothic, and tragic items apparent in the poem
also culminate in the Romantic concern for voicing the individual’s complicated
inner world. The flexibility between the corporeality and the world of dreams
offers a hopeful way of life both for the poet and the personas in “Lamia.”
From this respect, the poem can function as a remedy to Reiman’s “humanistic
paradox” (669) to cope with the bitter realities Keats observes in both nature
and contemporary society. Thus, the poem can function as “a parable exhibiting
the situation of modern man confronted by the blankness of unbelief” (Reiman
669).
According to Marina Warner,
“Transformations bring about a surprise, and among the many responses story
solicits from us, is surprise. The breaking of rules of natural law and
verisimilitude creates the fictional world with its own laws” (18). Besides the
surprise conveyed through the mutation scene as the body turns into an
extremely different form by challenging the law of Nature, Keats also indicates
that the previous colourful serpent body stands as an entity belonging to the
world of dreams and anti-rational material (functioning like water snake image
in Coleridge’s “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs/ Upon the slimy sea” (39)
in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), and a better way of existence than the
new form.
Christabel:
Walter Pater famously characterized Romanticism as the "addition of
strangeness to beauty" (258). In defense of Pater, the Romantic poet whose
name is most often quoted is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The erratic Coleridge,
whether under the influence of drugs or outside it, often came out with
startling lines like "Is that a DEATH? and are there two? / Is DEATH that
woman’s mate?" (193) in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Christabel is a notable exception, it
would be wrong to portray women in this exceptional poem as mundane hobgoblins
and innocent heroines. As a reaction to traditional readings of Christabel (Part I) as a poem of ghosts
and ghostly happenings, I would like to submit my own reading of the poem as
being an exercise in woman’s abhumanness in terms of body and sexuality, and
not just supernatural.
Keats had once pointed out
that there is a budding morrow in every midnight, and if there is evidence of
suppressed sexuality in Christabel’s life, there are also indicators that in
this poem Coleridge would show how this lovely woman would try to overcome the
sexual barriers in her life, gaining knowledge of sex and becoming a complete
woman. She would thereby be completing Coleridge’s triangle and providing, with
her new-found sexual knowledge, a secure base on which love and marriage could rest.
We find Christabel heading deep into the nearby forest like a silhouetted being
to pray for her fiancé. Unlike women of her age who are tucked up fast asleep
at midnight, Christabel seems to be pulsating with a desire for sexuality as is
indicated by her being awake at night. While in the forest, she kneels down to
pray for her lover, which can also be construed as a prayer for sexual
liberation. As if in answer to her prayer, she hears a moaning sound which
later turns out to be made by Geraldine. In keeping with the supernatural basis
of the poem, it has been traditional to regard Geraldine as a witch who casts a
spell on Christabel. There are many lacunae in this supposition, the greatest
being travesty of poetic justice in the fact that a "holy" figure
like Christabel, who is a beloved of the Gods and renders service before self,
should so easily be injured by evil. Then there is also the question why
Geraldine should choose to harm a person who had helped her from the very
beginning. It seems as if the equations cannot be solved. But if we transform
the coordinates of the setting from the supernatural into the sexual, then we
can consider Geraldine to be Christabel's "other", a sexually
liberated person that Christabel desires to become (in order to establish the
triangle of love and marriage) but cannot because of the forcible repression of
her sexuality.
The poem makes its way to
associating Original Sin with the divided will by considering the dependence of
identity on a mediating other—the dependence of Christabel on Geraldine, of
course, and on Geraldine in her roles as a figure of libido, the mother, and
the delusory image. What Geraldine retains throughout these metamorphoses is
her power to block and frustrate the impulse to love. At times Christabel has
been regarded as an erotic affirmation in which the protagonist readies herself
for mature passion by confronting and embracing her sexuality. In her role as
specular other, Geraldine by her very presence testifies to the tensions and denials
underlying Christabel’s virtuous self-image—and to her unavoidable contact with
evil. For me, the most curious aspect of scholarly belief in Christabel’s
innocence, finally, is its coexistence with an almost equally widespread belief
in Geraldine as Christabel’s dark double—to the end that critics identify
Geraldine as the emissary of sin and leave Christabel morally vindicated, while
simultaneously interpreting Geraldine as Christabel’s displaced persona. When
Christabel’s act of stretching forth her hand to Geraldine glances at Milton’s
Eve, Coleridge stages a Fall conceived as self-violation, a closed transference
of corruption to one aspect of the human personality from another in which that
corruption was already present all along. So in the character of Christabel
Coleridge associates Original Sin with an inner division, an estrangement of
the moral will from itself: that much seems paradigmatic for the narrative, its
real reason for featuring Christabel and Geraldine.
Any inquiry into the moral
vision of Christabel must come to terms with Geraldine in her three principle
roles: as a personification of sexuality, as a surrogate mother, and as an
untrustworthy image—a simulacrum or mirage. About the first of these roles
there can be little doubt. The power of eros in Geraldine—and indeed, a
seductress before all else, she moves through the poem virtually as an
allegorical figure of sexual desire. What cannot be emphasized enough is that
she is also a predator. She roams around Christable as an agent of erotic
liberation and psychic wholeness, but such defenses slight both the darkness of
Coleridge’s poem and his own profoundly troubled attitude towards sex.
Celebrations of Geraldine as an avatar of the Great Mother and champion of
erotic jouissance would have struck Coleridge himself, I believe, as moral
liberalism at its most sentimental and self-deceived. With her appearance
signifying a return of the repressed, Geraldine represents not merely libido
but the motives of repression, the harrowing guilt and fear that accompany
desire for Christabel and for the poet as well. By integrating the motifs of
sexual initiation, dream, and especially touch—“In the touch of this bosom
there worketh a spell” (255)—the white-robed Geraldine seems like a revenant
from some of Coleridge’s own sexually charged nightmares.
Sexuality become
Iago-like, Geraldine signifies a calculating malevolence with the
shape-changing ability to exploit the vulnerabilities at hand. She is the
deceiver, the thing in the darkness, lurking on “the other side” (43) whose
name is an anagram of “Dire Angel,” a Satanic epithet. She is the
nightmare-bringer, a conveyer of guilt, abjection, and violation. Like the
vampire, or the mistletoe of Coleridge’s opening sequence, she parasitically
lives off others. The supernatural occurrences marking her entry into the
castle—the need to be carried, the suddenly flaring torches, the dog troubled
in its sleep—associate her with witchcraft because witches traditionally
figured in the night fears of Coleridge’s culture.
The Myth across the Cultures:
Association of Women with Serpent and Devil or evil is common in today’s
popular movies and literature, both in India and the West in the last century.
But the root of this popular trend lies in Genesis of the Bible, and its
interpretations by the theologians. In India, this motif came with British
literary and cultural products through colonization. Though we get references
of figures (Ulupi in the Mahabharata, myth of snake-goddess Manasa) similar to
the western serpent women in pre-colonial Indian literature and myth, they
stand apart from the western serpent women for several reasons. Firstly, the
serpent-women in pre-colonial literature are hardly demonized and denigrated
like their western counterparts. Secondly, fatal temptation and destructive
eroticism lie at the centre of the serpent woman myth in western literature and
culture after Christianization.
Among the major Indian
religious and mythical literature, only Brahminical and Buddhist literature
gives information about these mythical serpent-human creature or Nagas. In
Islamic literature, we can hardly find any evidence of them. Dutch visual
artist, J Ph Vogel identifies the three major texts from the Brahminical and
Buddhist literature as the “chief repositories of serpent lore” in India. They
are Mahabharatha, Rajtarangini and the Jatak Book. Besides these, there are
some Hindu Puranas and religious literature that deal with the Naga legend.
Nagas are not serpent, in a western sense. Nagas are demi-god, with physical
features of both serpent and human, residing in a different realm called
nagaloka. Nagas described in Brahminical and Buddhist literature are basically
of three types in appearance. First, they look like a serpent. Sometimes, they
appear in human form. Lastly, in rare cases, they appear in a halfhuman and
half-serpent form. The Adi Parva of Mahabharatha describes the origin of Nagas.
They were the descendents of God Brahma. There is also fierce and revengeful Naga
like Takshaka. The goddess of the snake is Manasa, who was first mentioned in
the Atharva Veda, as a snake goddess. In Puranas, she is described as the
daughter of sage Kashyapa and Kadru. But in Mansamangala Kavya, she is
represented as the daughter of the god Shiva. At first, she was denied the
status of a goddess, but later she acquires it by her own effort. She threatens
the famous merchant, Chand, by her destructive power and forces him to worship
her. Thus, she gains popularity and the status of a goddess. She is famous for
her wrath and revenge in Mansamangala Kavya. But she is also merciful to others
who worship her. But the nature of the serpent and its symbolization in Ancient
India is a problematic one. They sometimes stand for wisdom or knowledge.
Sometimes they symbolize fertility and also immortality. Sometimes they
symbolize the Kundalini or the sleeping life-force in man.
Nagkanyas or Nagins are
female of the species with unsurpassable physical charms. In Vishnupurana, sage
Narada gives description of beautiful Naga maidens when he visits Nagaloka. By
these charms, a Nagkanya could easily rouse passions in the hearts of mortal
man. There are several evidences in Indian art and literature about the union
of a mortal man and Nagin. Mahabharata describes the union of Arjuna, the
Pandava prince and Ulupi, daughter of Naga king, who urged Arjuna to gratify
her desires. Their union produced a son named Iravan who would play a great
role in the war at Kuru-kshetra. Rajtarangini describes another story of union
between mortal man Bisakha and nagkanya Chandralekha, daughter of Naga
Susravas. Another instance of such union is described in Raghuvamsa written by
Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. Here, Kusa, king Rama’s son, marries Kumudvati, the
youngest sister of Nagraj Kumuda. In Buddhist literature, Bhuridatta Jataka, we
get a story of how a widow of Naga origin wins the love of exiled prince of
Benarasa. In these stories, the Nagas or Nagkanyas sometimes may have a
physical semblance to the western serpent woman. But they seldom appear in
their serpent or serpent-human form. Instead, they have been described as women
with ineffable beauty and charms. They are not demonized and seen as the
devil’s ally like their western counterparts. Secondly, they hardly function as
the agents of temptation. In the Arjun-Ulupi episode in the Mahabharatha,
Nagkanya Ulupi’s physical beauty and sexual desire are described. But she is
never depicted like the western femme fatale, who destroys her lover after
making love. Lastly, in western popular stories of union between a mortal and a
serpent usually results in destruction, death or unhappiness of both or either
of the couple. But in Indian stories, such unions of lovers usually end in
happy conjugal life.
The character of Surpanakha,
Ravan’s sister who is commonly perceived as ugly and brutal. She had
transgressed the gender boundary, and was ‘justifiably’ mutilated for
expressing her sexual desire towards Ram. Surpanakha embodies the label of the
‘bad’ woman of Indian mythology who in contrast to the character of Sita, a
dutiful wife who easily succumbs to subjugation, is bold and liberated.
Srilankan writer Kavita Kane in her novel,
Lanka’s Princess (2017) narrates her story, expressing the progressive
outlook of a ‘new woman’ who wants to assert her individuality and is
constantly punished by the societal norms for her perceived transgressions.
Portrayed as a monster, an adulteress, and wicked and flawed, even though the
Surpanakha episode from the Ramayana is considered integral to the main story,
she is considered a marginal character in the whole epic. Her characterisation
is done in sharp contrast to Sita’s character, who is generally considered to
be the epitome of feminine qualities and virtues. Surpanakha dared to express
her sexuality transgressing the societal markers of conceived femininity. The
character of Surpanakha has been condemned on the grounds of body, colour,
choice and gender. In post-globalization retellings these models are being
rationalized and subjected to women-centric consciousness. Kavita Kane’s Lankas’s Princess (2017) is one such
account of the unsung Surpanakha, Ravana’s sister - a strong independent woman
who is able to take decisions and make choices, but is questioned and
controlled by the diktats of a patriarchal society.
English literature is populated
with serpent woman and Lamia theme. The Romantic Age produced some classic
treatment of the lamia themes. Geraldine, in Coleridge’s Christabel, is a
serpent woman who, in the guise of a helpless royal lady, enters the castle of
Sir Leoline to seduce and destroy his humble and innocent daughter Christabel.
She hypnotizes Christabel under a spell in a way that she cannot reveal the
real nature of Geraldine to anyone. But Keats’ Lamia represents another serpent
woman, Lamia, in a different manner. Lamia is a woman trapped in the body of a
serpent. She gets the form of a beautiful lady with the help of Hermes. Lamia
is often seen as a creative force as she sheds off her old skin and is reborn
as a beautiful woman. In the poem, Keats neither demonizes Lamia nor makes her
a subversive figure. Instead, he humanizes her to raise her status from a
serpent to an affectionate lady craving for true love. But Lamia stands for
another side of the serpent that is deception and elusiveness. She is as
deceptive and elusive as imagination, beyond the corporeal world.
Conclusion:
Contemporary Gothic literature featuring female abhuman antagonists can
be viewed as a kind of attempted catharsis intended to alleviate the anxieties
of a male-dominated society; the “New Woman” was emerging, and a demography
that had previously been considered inferior was showing its teeth. The
physical attributes that establish abhuman women as atavistic seem to be the
very agents of their power, and therefore their horror. We see the central preoccupation
of the vampiric abhuman with the use of teeth, and in particular the canines. A
vampire’s teeth are phallic objects; they are agents of sexual dominance which
allow for oral penetration. Perhaps this is why the targets of vampire attacks
in Victorian Gothic literature are almost exclusively committed against
innocent young women, even when the vampire is female. Because the ultimate
goal of the vampire is to transform its victim into a being like itself, it
seems that social anxieties are manifested in the sense of independent thought
being something infectious in women, and something from which innocents like
Mina Harker of Dracula and Laura of Carmilla, among many others, must be
spared by the righteous hand of the patriarchy. On the other hand, when we see
instances of men being targeted by female vampires, as in the case of Jonathan
Harker, the apprehensions being expressed are those of a reversal of sexual
dominance, in which circumstance the teeth are paramount. Inevitably, this
growing phenomenon of feminine self-actualization was expressed in
fin-de-siècle Gothic literature as something monstrous to be feared and
quashed. There are numbers of texts present which deal with female characters
who are abhuman as an expression or as a direct result of their explicit
sexuality or their confused gender identity, and their eventual deaths become
necessary for the restoration of male dominance.
The Post-colonial Indian
films are also populated with such femme fatale serpent women who seem to have
been created under the direct influence of western literature and films. There
are numerous Bollywood films, popular of them of being Nagin (1976), Nagin Aur
Suhagan (1979), Sheshanaga
(1990), Jaani Dushman – Ek Anokhi Kahani
(2002), Jungle Ki Nagin (2003), Hiss (2010) and Nagin Ka Inteqaam (2015). Most of them deal with an unfulfilled
love story of a male and a female serpent. The male serpent is killed or
separated from the female. Then the female Nagin goes to take revenge.
Sometimes the female serpent goes to take revenge of any past humiliation or
injustice. The story line is simple and does not seem to demonize the female
serpent. But the way she is represented to take revenge, echoes the demonized
serpent woman of Christian misogynist fantasy. She is represented as a
seductress, who uses her physical charm to tempt and destroy her admirers.
Temptation and erotic desire leading to destruction, the two important aspects
of Western Lamia myth, can be noticed in these films. But the Nagin’s association
with god and her deification, which are obviously Indian influences, tend to
veil the western Lamia within her.
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