Digging through my old university essays, I came across this very psychoanalytic essay on rape-revenge films. This means I had to not only watch I Spit on Your Grave but actually repeatedly view some scenes in order to analyse it. No wonder my head was messed up through my university days after watching this sick stuff. Anyway if you are interested in psychoanalytic readings of films or a vaguely feminist reading of the horror films that feature women characters as the 'femme castratrice' (or castrating woman), then this is essay is for you.
There are many
implications of the femme castratrice or ‘castrating woman’ for the analysis of
women’s role in horror, particularly from a feminist and psychoanalytic
approach. Creed says the femme
castratrice ‘assumes two forms: the castrating female psychotic…and the woman
who seeks revenge on men who have raped or abused her’ (Creed, 1993,
p.123). I would argue that the rape-revenge films in which the femme castratrice appears are
misogynistic despite creating empathy for the female protagonist. Films such as I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978) contain sickening sights of violence and rape against a woman, the
femme castratrice. She is represented as
monstrous, a seducing witch that confirms castration anxieties whereas on the
other hand slasher films such as Friday
the 13th (Cunningham, 1980) are more problematic as they show
the femme castratrice as the perhaps more empowering ‘final girl’, but also often
as the psychotic killer.
The femme
castratrice, Jennifer, in the rape-revenge film I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978) is constructed as monstrous to
an extent. Creed argues ‘the scenes in
which Jennifer carries out her revenge are deliberately eroticised. Woman is monstrous because she castrates, or
kills, the male during coition’ (Creed, 1993, p129). The film has three scenes of violence against
the male bodies of the rapists. One
rapist, Matthew, a mildly retarded man, is hung after Jennifer lures him into the
woods, reveals her naked body to him and allows him to have sex with her. Matthew is symbolically castrated when
Jennifer gets onto her knees and undoes his trousers. This causes him to drop to his knees and drop
his knife and therefore relinquish his phallic power. Jennifer also uses a gun to make her next
victim strip, therefore demonstrating that she has phallic power. After massaging and washing him, Jennifer
literally castrates the rapist with a knife.
The femme castratrice is presented as monstrous as ‘woman, pleasure and
death are intimately related in these scenes’ (Creed, 1993, p.129).
Furthermore it can
be argued that the film constructs the femme castratrice as a witch
figure. Creed also suggests in her book
that the ‘central reason for the persecution of witches was morbid interest in
the witch as ‘other’ and a fear of the witch/woman as an agent of castration’
(Creed, 1993, p.74). In I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978),
Jennifer is transformed into an agent of castration after recovering from the
rapes. She wears flowing robes and
seduces the men before killing them. The
rapists persecute Jennifer because of their fear of her apparently castrated
body when they see her in her bikini.
She is held down by three men during the assaults showing how
threatening she is to them and after the assaults she becomes a silent,
menacing figure. Similarly in another
film with rape as its subject, The Accused
(Kaplan, 1988), the girl seems to cast a spell on the men around her while
dancing provocatively. She is then raped
and symbolically castrates the men by taking away their freedom and appearing with
a newly shortened and less feminine haircut.
Peter Lehman argues ‘the women in these films are nearly always
beautiful’ (Lehman, 1993, p104), which confirms as Russell suggested that the
‘witch is essentially a male creation, a product of male fears’ (Russell,
1996:121). Jennifer lying in her boat in
her bikini is a threat to the men in their phallic speedboat. Matthew even thinks Jennifer is cursed as he
says ‘you’ve brought nothing but bad luck with you’. A review of The Accused quoted in Jacinda Read’s essay on the rape-revenge film
states the victim’s ‘blatant sexiness is a challenge, which they’, the men, ‘can
only extinguish by humiliating and hurting her’ (Walters, 1989: 32).
However it can
also be argued the film is not representing the woman as monstrous. Peter Lehman argues ‘the male spectators are
positioned to be disgusted by the rape and to identify with the avenging woman’
(Lehman, 1993, p.104). This is true in
that the narrative belongs to the woman.
When the men arrive in their boat they are disruptive of Jennifer’s
peace and animal-like in their behaviour, hunting in packs and seemingly
communicating like monkeys. During the
rape the viewer identifies with Jennifer because we see her face in close-up as
well as having close-ups of the rapist's face as he forces himself onto
her. Clover also justifies the actions
of the femme castratrice in the film when she says ‘all phallic symbols are not
equal, and a hands-on knifing answers a hands-on rape in a way that a
shooting…does not’ (Clover, 1996, p.79).
The scene in I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi,
1978) where Jennifer forces one of the men to strip at gunpoint emphasises the
viewers’ and Jennifer’s need for a harsher punishment as afterwards it is
revealed he believes the rape is her fault because he’s ‘just a man’. Unlike Matthew, this rapist is unapologetic
and constructed as a monstrous, cheating and ultimately castrated victim.
Similarly it can
be argued that the men in the film lack any phallic power except in the rape
scenes. Jennifer is active, assuming the
masculine position in the narrative except during the rape scenes. It is her who moves to the country, it is her
who is writing a book and it is her that takes revenge. The men are already castrated; their scenes
do not drive the narrative, except when they rape Jennifer. Vera Dika argues of stalker films, ‘the
victims…occupy a ‘feminine position because their narrative and cinematic
enfeeblement has rendered them functionally ‘castrated’’ (Dika, p.90). The male victims of I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978), fish, play with knives, and hang
around their friend’s house until they are told to leave by their friend’s wife. They are the same as the stalker film
victims, ‘deemed guilty, sexually investigated, and then brutally punished’
(Dika, p.90).
The femme
castratrice can also be seen as a way of representing woman as psychotic, ‘a
borderline personality, her normal exterior hiding a demented female fury’
(Creed, 1993, p.137). This is clear in I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978) as
Jennifer appears normal in the first half of the film and then after the rape
becomes a relatively silent, unforgiving killing machine. She sits and listens to operatic music calmly
as the castrated man in the bathroom bleeds and screams himself to death. However the woman as psychotic castrator is
clearer in horror films such as Sisters (De
Palma, 1973) where one half of siamese twin sisters are invaded by the dead
other half. This shows woman as
unconsciously psychotic, ‘woman’s nature is represented as deceptive and
unknowable’(Creed, 1993,p.136), a point further demonstrated in I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978) by
Jennifer’s methods of seducing the men, even letting them share seemingly
intimate moments with her before castrating and killing them.
The rape-revenge
film and femme castratrice can also be argued to reduce women’s role in horror
to victim and psychotic. Rape is used as
a narrative device to begin a semi-pornographic slasher film. Peter Lehman
suggests ‘the gang rape lends itself well to the narrative demands… since the
avenging woman hunts the men down’ (Lehman, 1993, p107). One after the other Jennifer stalks and kills
the men, paralleling the killer in slasher films such as Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980). The rape is merely an event to begin the
killing spree, as Dika suggests of the slasher film, ‘it is always presented
with a two-part temporal structure. The
first part…presents an event…the killer is driven to madness’ (Dika,
p.93). In I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978), this is up until Jennifer is
raped, admittedly longer than most slasher films first parts. Dika argues the second part is when the
killer takes revenge, as Jennifer does in a brutal yet often sexual way. Therefore it can be argued the femme
castratrice is a tormented woman role, and the rape-revenge film’s narrative
emphasises the torment of the killer more than in slasher films. However this it could be argued is to create
more empathy with the killer.
Other films such
as Fatal Attraction (Lyne, 1987) represent
the psychotic woman as femme castratrice because she is castrated. Charles Derry argues ‘the recent
horror-of-personality films seem to reflect…a disturbing hostility toward
women, which seems a direct response to the feminist movement’ (Derry, p165). The
femme castratrice slits her wrists early in the film as well as cutting her leg
with a knife in the final scene of the film, perhaps indicating her desire to
be castrated and therefore dependent on a man and ‘the name of the father’. The character becomes psychotic after she
exposes her bleeding wounds and can be seen as wanting to give up her independence,
as showing herself to be castrated, in order to encourage the male character to
give up his wife and child and therefore symbolically castrate him. Her ‘desire to castrate man is related
directly to her own earlier mutilation, separation and the death of her active
self’ (Creed, 1993, p.136). She is a
psychotic femme castratrice that the viewer is not encouraged to identify with,
an independent woman who becomes dependent on a man who cannot control his phallus,
and yet can control the phallicised femme castratrice when she attacks him with
a knife.
The femme
castratrice is also an association of the slasher film, a genre that is a clear
descendent of the rape-revenge film.
Woman is portrayed as psychotic when the slasher is female, for example
in Friday the 13th (Cunningham,
1980). The killer, Mrs Vorhees,
penetrates a man with a knife in the neck and opens a woman’s neck with a knife.
However
much like Jennifer in I Spit On Your
Grave (Zarchi, 1978), the female killer is to an extent, rendered
sympathetic as her ‘anger derives…from specific moments in their adult lives in
which they have been abandoned or cheated on by men’ (Clover, 1996, p.77). The femme castratrice in both films kill
because of trauma in their past, in I
Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi, 1978) because of being raped by men, and in Friday the 13th (Cunningham,
1980) because of men and women abandoning the killers son, causing him to die.
However the role
of women in slasher films is rarely the killer so the femme castratrice is usually
the ‘final girl’ as Clover theorises, ‘films following Halloween present Final
Girls who not only fight back but do so with ferocity and even kill the killer
on their own’. In Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980), Alice is the final
girl and her revenge on the killer is in no way eroticised as in the
rape-revenge film, representing woman less as monstrous castrator. Final girls are independent and show signs of
masculinity and of needing men less than other women, sexually or otherwise,
‘her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters,
and sexual reluctance set her apart’ (Clover, 1996, p.84). Alice
is a femme castratrice as she symbolically castrates the killer by chopping her
head off. This eliminates the phallic
power of Mrs Vorhees who carries a knife and holds the gaze of the
victims. In such films the femme
castratrice is the heroine, but whereas in slasher films ‘the heroine survives
not only by her ability to see the evil, but also by her ability to use
violence’ (Dika, p.99), in the rape-revenge film, Jennifer is unable to see or
use violence until it is too late and she has been horrifically assaulted. In Friday
the 13th (Cunningham, 1980) the final girl sees the bodies of
her friends, and dispatches the killer by symbolically castrating her.
The implications
of the femme castratrice are still clear in modern slasher films such as ‘The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre’ (Nispel, 2003) in which the final girl, who screams a
lot less than her predecessors, symbolically castrates the killer by cutting
his chainsaw-wielding arm off. Similarly
modern rape-revenge films such as ‘Monster’
(Jenkins, 2004) and ‘Irreversible’ (Noe,
2003) show women less as seductive monster and more as psychotic killer or
sympathetic victim. The similarities between the slasher film
and the rape-revenge film are obvious from the writings of many theorists,
particularly Creed, Clover, and Dika.
The femme castratrice is associated with both genres and as a result the
role of women in these horror films has changed over time, remaining generally
fairly negative. However I feel the
femme castratrice has evolved from the rape-revenge films and early slasher
films such as I Spit On Your Grave (Zarchi,
1978) and Friday the 13th (Cunningham,
1980) and is gradually becoming an increasingly empowering role of women in
horror.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Clover, C. (1996) Her
body, himself: gender in the slasher film In: Grant, B. (ed.) The dread of difference. USA. University of Texas Press
Creed, B. (1993) The monstrous-feminine: film, feminism and
psychoanalysis. London:
Routledge
Derry, C. (1987) More dark
dreams: some notes on the recent horror film In: Waller, G. (ed.) American horrors. Urbana
and Chicago. University of Illinois Press
Dika, V. (1987)
The stalker film, 1978-81 In: Waller, G. American
horrors. Urbana and Chicago. University of Illinois
Press
Hart, L. (1994) Fatal women: lesbian sexuality and the mark
of aggression. London.
Routledge
Haskell, M. (1973)
From reverence to rape: the treatment of
women in the movies. New York,
Rinehart and Winston
Lehman, P. (1993)
Don’t blame this on a girl: female rape-revenge films In: Cohan, S. and Hark,
I. (eds.) Screening the male: exploring
masculinities in Hollywood cinema. London: Routledge
