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Locations of Motherhood in Shakespeare on Film
LAURA GALLAGHER
Queens University Belfast
Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers (1992) appropriates feminist
psychoanalysis to illustrate how the suppression of the female is
represented in selected Shakespearean play-texts (chronologically
from Hamlet to The Tempest) in the attempted expulsion of the
mother in order to recover the masculine sense of identity. She
argues that Hamlet operates as a watershed in Shakespeare’s canon,
marking the prominent return of the problematic maternal presence:
“selfhood grounded in paternal absence and in the fantasy of
overwhelming contamination at the site of origin – becomes the tragic
burden of Hamlet and the men who come after him” (1992, p.10). The
maternal body is thus constructed as the site of contamination, of
simultaneous attraction and disgust, of fantasies that she cannot hold:
she is the slippage between boundaries – the abject. Julia Kristeva’s
theory of the abject (1982) ostensibly provides a hypothesis for
analysis of women in the horror film, yet the theory also provides a
critical means of situating the maternal figure, the “monstrousfeminine” in film versions of Shakespeare (Creed, 1993, 1996).
Therefore the choice to focus on the selected Hamlet, Macbeth, Titus
Andronicus and Richard III film versions reflects the centrality of the
mother figure in these play-texts, and the chosen adaptations most
powerfully illuminate this article’s thesis. Crucially, in contrast to
Adelman’s identification of the attempted suppression of the
“suffocating mother” figures1, in adapting the text to film the absent
maternal figure is forced into (an extended) presence on screen.2
Gertrude, Tamora, the Duchess of York, Lady Macbeth, and the
witches each represent variations of the monstrous mother (in both
the play-text and developed on screen) – as understood by the male
characters/viewers (see Mulvey, 1975).
1
Indeed Adelman (1992, p.10) posits that “before Hamlet, masculine identity
is constructed in and through the absence of the maternal”.
2
Often, scenes with female figures are not cut due to the influence of the
female audience, and thus seem comparatively more significant characters
on film than in the text version.
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What is most striking is that the abject mother is primarily sited and
explored, in these films, in the symbolic locations of the house: the
bedroom, stairs, kitchen and in the distance from the domestic, the
wilderness. Location thus functions as ideographs for the thematic
essence of a scene: “settingBimbues the image with graphic
properties which comment on story and characters” (Nelmes, 2007,
p.68). The bedroom is the location of the mother’s sexuality, of
consummation and enacted or suppressed oedipal desires. The
various versions of Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier [1948], Franco Zeffirelli
[1990], Kenneth Branagh [1996]) and Julie Taymor’s Titus (1995) use
this setting primarily to encounter the phallic mother figure, and the
bedroom (even when its connotations are disavowed) imparts an
extra-textual ideology that imbues the scene with repressed
significance. The kitchen with its ideological focus on nurturing and
providing is subverted in Taymor’s Titus and Billy Morissette’s
Scotland PA (2001) and is instead envisaged as a place of
consummation, of desire, of lack and of cannibalism. The stairs,
because they transcend allocated room space and function, are the
place of negotiation: position on the stairs symbolises the power
dynamics between mother/son figures (Orson Welles’ Macbeth
[1948], Richard Loncraine’s Richard III [1996]). So too the wilderness
because it is located outside the domestic setting, provides the space
for the enactment of ritual, of deviant sexuality and witchcraft (Roman
Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Welles’ Macbeth and Taymor’s Titus).
These films thus explore the spectrum of the monstrous female as
outlined by Creed (1993, p.55): the archaic, castrating mother; the
phallic, sexual mother; and the castrated, de-sexualised figure. The
absent mother of the text is made present in locations whose
ideological significances associate them with mother (kitchen), lover
(bedroom) and the places on the boundaries (stairs, wilderness),
which represent the complete, yet impossibly limited, spectre of
feminine identifications. In associating the maternal with a location
illustrates the (male imposed) limits of female roles and denotes her
constructed immanence.3
The Mother in the Bedroom
Adelman (1992, p.13-36) demonstrates how, in the play-text,
Hamlet’s male subjectivity is centered upon the adulterous,
sexualized female body of his mother. With the absence of his father,
Hamlet projects his own insecure masculine identity onto his mother’s
3
See Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) theory that in a patriarchal society man
equals transcendence and woman is immanence.
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body. The “contaminated” maternal body is figured as the abject and
the site of Hamlet’s anxiety because it is on the boundary between
life/death, clean/unclean, self/other. Gertrude in the play-text is
sexualized through Hamlet’s interpretation and reading of her body:
“why, she would hang on him, /As if increase of appetite had grown /
By what it fed on” (1.2.143-45). He testifies to the shamefulness of
her quick remarriage, her age-inappropriate sensuality (3.4.66-67, 8183), and forcefully deems her sexuality to be a “rebellious hell”
(3.4.80). Gertrude’s body is thus read as the sign of her betrayal to
both Hamlet’s dead father and Hamlet himself, and she embodies his
fantasy of maternal sexuality and power. Similarly, the presentation of
Gertrude in film versions of Hamlet depends upon the avowal or
disavowal of this oedipal subtext – a subtext that, of course, existed
before Freud “read” it. Olivier’s Hamlet was consciously intended to
be a psychoanalytic, oedipal text4 and the centrality of the mother is
visually signaled by the mise-en-scene. The dark, long corridors,
twisting stairwells, empty rooms and the one large central space of
Elsinore castle signifies “the womb, the enclosing space inside the
mother’s body” (Mulvey, 1996, p.58). It could also represent Hamlet’s
confused mind, thereby connecting setting and theme: Hamlet’s
mental obsession with his mother’s body.5 Similarly, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet
signals its focus on the maternal with “equally cave-like, undulating
interiors” (Lehmann and Starks, 2000, p.3). The intimacy of the film’s
castle setting is furthered by the intense, cloying triangular network of
surveillance between Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius. The film opens
in a “womblike sepulcher” with the three primary characters looking
over the body of Old Hamlet (Charnes, 1997, p.9). The
claustrophobia of the scene, the replacement of one father figure with
another, the corpse of the “true” father laid out within the “womblike”
room conveys the associated fears of Gertrude’s maternal function:
over-intimacy, lack of differentiation and death. The womb is figured
here as a tomb (see discussion of Taymor’s Titus below). So too, in
Welles’ Macbeth the low ceilings, empty rooms and tunneled
recesses of the dark castle invoke the imposing, inescapable power
of the feminine. In contrast, the bright, expansive mise-en-scene of
Branagh’s Hamlet – the vast, barren, snow-covered setting, the grand
scale of the castle and the epic length of the film – asserts phallic
power, thus shunning the horror of the feminine.
4
As Donaldson explores (1990, p.31-35), Olivier was fascinated by the
contemporary theories of Sigmund Freud (further developed by Ernest
Jones) on Hamlet’s oedipal desires and Olivier consciously interrogated
Hamlet’s bond with his mother in his adaptation.
5
The film employs German expressionist techniques – in the 1920s this
movement made sets representative of the psychological disturbances of
characters (Nelmes, 2007, p.69).
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The archaic motherhood posited by the womblike setting in Olivier’s
Hamlet becomes associated with the phallic mother, due to the
innovative use of camera which focuses on the queen’s enigmatic
bed.6 In one single long take, the camera moves from our point of
view past a series of spaces “empty of people and yet pregnant with
significances we cannot yet fully grasp” (Donaldson, 1990, p.51) as it
searches out “something rotten”. The camera eventually lingers on
the suggestively shaped, vaginally hooded, and perpetually unmade
bed (suggesting it as a site of action) implying that it operates as a
metonymy for Gertrude’s perverse sexuality. As Donaldson (1990,
p.52) states “this symbolB is as kind of declaration of the film’s
Freudian intentions”. The repeated directorial decision to reposition
the “closet scene” of the play-text in the bedroom highlights the
intended reading of the scene as the pinnacle of the oedipal subtext.
In contrast, metaphorical significances of the bedroom are disavowed
in Branagh’s Hamlet: the “enseamed” bed has been replaced by a
chaste day-couch. In Olivier’s closet scene the viewer watches from
the door as Hamlet violently shouts at his mother inside; this lingering
shot demonstrates the private, intimate nature of the mother’s
bedroom. To cross the threshold signals an intrusion, thus Hamlet’s
unapologetic entrance is a sign of his phallic intent. Zeffirelli’s film
heightens the disturbing depravity of the mother/son incest. Hamlet
enters his mother’s bedroom swinging his sword around at crotch
level, clearly signifying his phallic intentions and later causes her to
stumble when he physically jabs her with it. Upon the bed, after some
grappling with their lockets, he lies on top of her as she is face down,
tugging at her necklace and getting worked up over her inability to
differentiate between the men.7 The position and frustration vividly
reads as rape, and in the next shot, after Hamlet has moved off her,
Gertrude speaks off camera, in close up, and appears naked as the
shoulders of her dress have been forced down. The hardly subtle
subtext is then made explicit when Hamlet positions himself above his
mother, and stimulates sex with her. With every thrust he says a line,
while she moans and cries beneath him: “In the rank sweat of an
enseamed bed, Stew'd in corruptionB”. Ironically the lines relate to
Claudius and Gertrude’s incest but here Hamlet acts out the perverse
sex acts he describes. Eventually, Gertrude grabs her son’s face and
6
Manvell (1971, p.44) does not share my enthusiasm for the camera work:
“camera movement is sometimes inexplicably overdone, becoming
technically self conscious and destroying the atmosphere”. The circling of
the King’s chair is definitely one such moment of over zealousness.
7
Adelman (1992, p.13) highlights that Gertrude’s failure to properly
distinguish between Hamlet’s father and brother is the initiating cause of
Hamlet’s identity collapse.
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passionately kisses him: the shot moves to behind Gertrude’s head
and in extreme close up, we see Hamlet’s screwed up eye. His
reaction proves unreadable: it is not clear whether he actually enjoys
this non-familial embrace. Nevertheless, the whole closet sequence in
Zeffirelli’s film “leaves little to our post-Freudian imagination”
(Guntner, 2007, p.125). However, it is significant that the kiss occurs
at this point in the narrative when in the play-text (and other film
versions) the kiss is delayed until the end of the scene to signal their
pact.
Indeed, Hamlet’s violence toward Gertrude in Olivier’s adaptation only
becomes openly erotic after the ghost bids Hamlet to “speak to her”.
Gertrude having made her pledge to abstain from Claudius’ sexual
advances, seals her forbidden union with her son with a fiercely
passionate embrace and kiss on the bed. The swirling, circular
movement of the camera registers them as lovers, in keeping with
cinematic convention. In contrast, critics have ignored how the
construction of Gertrude as phallic mother is rendered problematic in
Zeffirelli’s film after the arrival of the ghost. When the ghost departs,
Zeffirelli’s Hamlet and Gertrude stage an echo of the first kiss scene
in the study.8 Both are again on their knees, only now it is Hamlet
who holds Gertrude’s face in his hands and kisses her on the head.
He is positioned slightly higher than her, evoking his new dominance
and their pact of chastity is sealed with a close up of Gertrude’s slow
nod of understanding. This drop of urgency after the presence of his
father’s ghost signals Hamlet’s attempt to re-identify with his father,
rather than with his sexualized mother, for his masculine subjectivity:
“do not forget”. Gertrude, by the end of Zeffirelli’s closet scene, is left
castrated – rather than being a castrating influence. Hamlet maintains
an illusion of individuality by repressing the abject mother, thus in this
film, their mother-son relationship has been contaminated by its
relocation in the presence of the father.9
8
In this scene, Hamlet’s little-boy-lost look is compounded when he slowly
moves his head down to his mother’s stomach/womb in close up. His sense
of self is figured by his connection to the mother’s body (she has not yet
been constructed as the abject). As Zeffirelli (1991) articulates “his heart is
not come out of his mother’s womb! Because there is no safer place on all
the earth!” However Gertrude resists this interpretation of her as archaic
mother and moves down to this lower level to kiss him.
9
In contrast, Adelman’s thesis (1992, p.11) is that the return of the mother in
Hamlet “causes the collapse of the fragile compact that had allowed
Shakespeare to explore familial and sexual relationshipsBwithout
devastating conflict”.
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In contrast, Branagh’s Hamlet actively disavows the psychoanalytical
subtext.10 Instead the film self consciously attempts to set-off any hint
of underlying incestuous desire between Hamlet and his mother by
emphasizing normative sex throughout the film. The privileging of the
visual in Branagh’s film (particularly the persistent emphasis of
heterosexual relations in flashback) undermines and distracts the
viewer from the oral content of Hamlet’s soliloquies which reveal his
erotic obsession with Gertrude’s body (see Burnett, 1997). After the
ghost’s appearance, although their dealings have been dynamic and
strained, Hamlet becomes gentle and soft to urge Gertrude’s
abstinence. Their intimacy is established in the cross-cutting, close
ups of their faces and Hamlet holds their heads togetherB but the
viewer is denied the expected kiss and there is only a chaste hug
between them. The scene is void of oedipal tension – even the
circling 360° camera angle does not connote voyeurism on illicit
lovers (as in Olivier) but the overwrought, spiralling dynamic of a son
advising his mother.11
The casting choice of Julie Christie, who is 19 years older than
Branagh and her matronly costume, serves to resolutely affirm their
on screen mother/son relationship. In contrast, Olivier’s Gertrude
(Eileen Herlie) was only twenty-seven when she played the role of
mother to the forty year old Olivier, and thus we are alerted to her
desirable youth. So too, Glenn Close (in Zeffirelli’s Hamlet) is only
nine years older than Mel Gibson. She is portrayed as a heady
adolescent torn between two lovers: she skips about the castle (the
camera unable to keep up) emphasizing her youth, frivolousness and
energy (Rutter, 2001, 33). She is further sexualized by the audience’s
inferences about her prior film character incarnations (Fatal Attraction
[1987] and Dangerous Liaisons [1988]).12 Her star power, combined
with the privileging camera work, adds to the perceived significance
of Gertrude’s character. The youthful sexuality of Olivier’s and
Zeffirelli’s Gertrude “might also work to undo or reverse the
generational direction of the incestuous subtext” (Donaldson, 1990,
p.37). Oedipal fantasies are played out on screen with women whose
comparative age to the protagonist diminishes the full ugly aversion of
10
For discussion of the “aesthetic of disavowal”, a displacement that moves
the point of signification, see Mulvey (1996, p.12-14). Branagh’s film is
obsessed with the father figure instead, see Lehmann and Starks (2000, p.611).
11
Lehmann and Starks (2000, p.6) point out that Hamlet assumes the figure
of analyst, the Lacanian “subject presumed to know”, and they argue
Branagh assumes similar authority.
12
Zeffirelli’s casting choice of Glenn Close and Mel Gibson as mother and
son “effects a cinematic intertextuality” (Charnes, 1997, p.8) that plays upon
their other cinematic roles, which emphasize their oedipal construction here.
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oedipal desire and their status as monstrous mother. Their apparently
charismatic, youthful relationship is generally only disturbing when we
bear in mind their mother/son status.
The Mother in the Wilderness
The bedroom is also determined as a location of abject motherhood
in Taymor’s Titus. Tamora’s relationship with her husband Saturninus
is quasi-maternal: we never see them in the bedroom being sexually
intimate, and their physicality is limited to Tamora’s soothing strokes.
This is reinforced by the she-wolf sculpture that sits above
Saturninus’ oversized throne: both act as visual metonymies,
associating Saturninus with a vulnerable infant and Tamora with the
mythical mother of Rome (nourishing, and protecting Romulus and
Remus) and conversely with her own animalistic drives. Instead, she
lies suggestively with her sons in bed, and romps with them in the
woods. The woods provide Tamora and her sons with the freedom to
enact their uncivilised, feral desires. The dark “loathsome pit” that
Aaron has dug to capture Titus’ sons is emblematic of the “swallowing
womb” (2.2.239) of the abject maternal body (see below for
discussion on maternal cannibalism). Tamora wearing a perverse
little-red-riding-hood ensemble stimulates sex with her illicit lover
Aaron, rather appropriately, on the forest floor. Significantly she tells
him “this is the nurse’s lullaby to bring her babe asleep” before kissing
him, thus orally identifying herself as his mother, yet physically acts
as his lover. Crowl (2000, p.46) argues the encounter is “limp and
passionless rather than charged and sexy” and indeed the exchange
seems devoid of sexual energy, but this actually serves to expose the
rampant desires between Tamora and her sons in the next scene.
The sons tormenting of Lavinia is interspersed with kissing and
fondling with Tamora (the circling camera heightens the sense of
dread and horror) and thus castrating Lavinia is imagined as
consummation with the mother: “the worse to her the better you love
me”. In desperation, Lavinia taunts the son’s masculinity by
employing images of nursing: “the milk tho suck’st from her did turn to
marble”, thus constructing Tamora as the archaic mother, the abject
that must be repelled to enable masculine selfhood. However, this
feeding metaphor is adapted by Tamora to construct Lavinia as food:
“shall I rob my sweet sons of their feed?” She is horrifically figured as
a mother’s providence to her son’s and her rape is testament to their
phallic desire for their mother.13
13
For discussion of Lavinia as castrated body which falls outside the remit of
this essay, see Starks (2002, p.125 and p.127-29).
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The potency and authority of the Macbethian witches is also evoked
in their wild location. Welles’ film opens with the metaphorical “birth”
of the clay voodoo doll Macbeth from the witch’s bubbling cauldron.
Similarly Polanski’s Macbeth visits the lair full of (ugly) naked women
mixing potions. Their group nakedness, combined with the metaphors
of the potion and cauldron, their orgasmic squeals, and the image of
the newborn baby removed from the womb in the nightmare
sequence, portray them as symbols of malevolent maternal
femininity. Their abjection stems from this simultaneous ability to
attract and repulse the male subject. Indeed, Macbeth is first drawn
toward the lair by the witch who lifts up her skirt to show her crotch
region, while making an “err” sound (the noise of repulsion, combined
with the flirtatious gesture, links the lair to the pit of the womb) and
Macbeth’s sexual desire transfers from Lady Macbeth to the witches
in the film. Macbeth’s second visit to them is framed by the Lady
watching him leave wearing a Marian blue shade (covertly signaling
her castrated body), and then when the witches disappear the scene
cuts to Lady Macbeth asleep on the bed holding Macbeth’s cloak
(registering his absence from the marital bed). In both films, the
witches’ isolated, non-domestic locations signal that they offer an
alternative to patriarchal power and control. As Eagleton (1986, p.3)
identifies “their words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and
make sport of fixed positions, unhinging received meanings as they
dance, dissolve and re-materialize”. Or to appropriate Kristeva (1982,
p.4), they do not “respect borders, positions rules” and are found in
the “in-between, the ambiguous, composite”. The lack of fixed,
domestic place identifies the feminine as abject.
In the Macbeth play-text female power and control, represented by
Lady Macbeth and the witches, undermines Macbeth’s sense of male
identity and autonomy. As Adelman (1992, p.131) highlights, “the
maternal constitutes the suffocating matrix from which he [Macbeth]
must break free”. Macbeth’s contradictory fantasy about escaping
completely from absolute, destructive maternal power (“none of
woman born, shall harm Macbeth” [4.1.80-81]) encapsulates the
tensions within his own concept of masculine selfhood. Lady Macbeth
and the witches’ feminine powers are ultimately impossible to escape
and they are visually and thematically united in the selected films of
Macbeth (echoing their dual construction in the play-text [Adelman,
1992, p.134]). Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (Kumonoso-djo,
1957), a Japanese adaptation of Macbeth,14 aligns Asaji (Lady
14
The film uses none of the original play’s words (it is entirely in Japanese)
but powerfully develops the play’s fusion of superstition, psychology and
politics. For further information on Kurosawa’s Shakespeare films see, Kishi
and Bradshaw (2005, p.126-45), and Dawson (2006, p.155-74).
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Macbeth) with the grotesque femininity of the witches in her curious
disappearances and reappearances, her seemingly supernatural
powers, their similar mask-like face’s and the eerie swishing kimono
sound. In Polanski’s film, Lady Macbeth is associated with the
feminine evil of the witches by the mirroring of feminine
malevolence/madness with nakedness. The collective nudity of the
witches group is paralleled to Lady Macbeth naked in her bedroom.
Although watched by the male doctor in her private quarters, it does
not register as sexual voyeurism but as a tragically castrated body.
Her pathetic vulnerability in this film is further compounded in the
visual link with the young naked Macduff boy being affectionately
bathed by his mother. In this scene, Lady Macduff is tragically
powerless to protect him when the domestic space is invaded by
outside masculine forces, highlighting the susceptibility of the
confined female.
In contrast, at the height of her feminine powers, Lady Macbeth
imagines simultaneously readying her body and her castle against the
arrival of Duncan. Having already laid plans with Macbeth to murder
Duncan (significantly while in bedroom), she watches the King’s party
progressing towards the castle from its ramparts while the
internalized voice over narrates the “unsex me here” soliloquy. In
choosing to situate the speech upon the ramparts, the film constructs
the castle as Lady Macbeth’s body hardened against Duncan: in
voice over, while maintaining a hostile stare, she says “make thick my
blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no
compunctious visiting of nature shake my fell purpose”. The
metaphors adopted imagine an attack on her reproductive functions
and figures her desire for castration, the disavowal of femininity. Lady
Macbeth thus attempts to neutralize the masculine intrusion which is
enabled by the feminization of the domestic space. Curiously, she
does not complete the full soliloquy – leaving out the reference to her
breast milk as gall (1.5.52-55) and similarly her lines concerning her
plucking her nipple from her babe and dashing out its brains (1.7.6065) is omitted in this film. Hindle (2007, p.214) argues that this
sanitization of Lady Macbeth’s lines and her physical beauty reduces
her tragic stature. However, in concentrating on her feminine beauty,
the full intensity of her decline into naked vulnerability and madness
can be visually registered by the viewer.
The Mother on the Stairs
The disturbance of patriarchal power is also signalled in female
negotiation of the stairs. The stairs represent the connections
between the rooms and relationships of the house and their meaning
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and significance is only evoked in the confrontations which occur
there.15 The use of stairs as a scene for mother/son conflict is
compellingly realised in Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (1996). The
film is peppered with highly significant scenes conveying the
castrating power of Richard’s mother.16 Her disproportionate
presence and number of lines (she takes some of the lines and
qualities of the omitted Queen Margaret) highlights the director’s
intended reading that Richard’s evil is motivated by his mother’s
rejection.17 After a couple of scenes that foreground the strained
mother/son relationship (the Duchess’ smile fade at the celebratory
ball; her ignoring of Richard after Clarence’s death; her mock blessing
on the stairs where her rejection is tempered by Buckingham’s
address of “My Lord Protector” – Richard’s new political position), the
seminal exchange again takes place on the stairs. She rails against
him and the “grievous burden” of his birth and though he is at first
untroubled by her remarks, his emerging dismay is apparent in his
pause on the stair, while she continues to rage against all the stages
of his life from a couple of steps above. On “bloody”, Richard permits
himself a small self-satisfied smile, which quickly fades when his
mother comes level with him and angrily hisses about his loathsome
company. Though he tries to interrupt, the Queen determinedly
continues and in close up, she declares “take with you my most
grievous curse”. The close up reaction shot shows Richard’s stung
expression, the pain of his mother’s rejection etched over his face.
Indeed, her words return to haunt him in his nightmare sequences,
replacing the textual curses of his victims. After the final curse, the
duchess descends the stairs off-camera, and a long sinister music
note is held while the camera registers Richard’s speechless
devastation. The scene reveals Richard’s surprising vulnerability and
susceptibility to his mother’s influence and rejection. Here she is
concerned with distinguishing herself from her son, by being repulsed
by her son’s deformed body and polluted soul. He is the abject that
his mother disavows to reclaim her sense of self and thus the scene
is symptomatic of the mother’s repulsion of what is and is not herself
(Kristeva, 1982). As McKellen (1996, p.22) articulates, the scene
exemplifies “the verbal and emotional abuse which from infancy has
15
Donaldson (1990, p.39-63) explores how stairs in Olivier’s Hamlet are
often the setting for violence and the repeated motif of the attacker fleeing
upward leaving the victim, points to the themes of Hamlet and also the
director’s own personal boyhood experiences.
16
The strained, oppressive relationship between mother and son is typical of
the classic gangster movie (e.g. Scarface [1983], Public Enemy [1998],
White Heat [1949]). See Loehlin (1997, p.73-74.)
17
Indeed Rutter (2007, p.250-52) praises the extra-textual narrative allowed
for women in Loncraine’s film. They are the only figures that oppose his
nihilistic agency.
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formed her youngest son’s character and behaviour”. Although this
psychological reading is overly simplistic, the rejection is established
as one of his primary motivations for his ruthless climb to power. His
masculinity is reestablished by rejecting the maternal – that seeks to
deny herself as origin of his deformity – and by attacking the family
that the maternal body has produced.
However, Richard’s violent unmaking of the maternal body, the origin
of his selfhood, is never fully realized in this film. Adelman (1992, p.9)
argues that the play-text makes the female characters increasingly
powerless before removing them from the stage altogether. In this
film though, because of an intertextual reference, Richard’s mother is
profoundly present in act five. At the film’s conclusion, having climbed
stairways pursued by Richmond to the top of a tower, Richard’s
defining relationship with his mother is evoked in the explicit allusion
to White Heat (1949). Richard plunges to his fiery death, reminiscent
of Coby Jarret’s defiance on top of an exploding petroleum tank
(yelling “On top of the world, Ma”). Indeed the soundtrack operates as
a leitmotif, glossing this visual allusion, with Al Jonson singing “I’m
sitting on top of the world”. Just as Ma Jarrett is constructed as a
castrating mother, in this scene guilt is similarly assigned to the
maternal womb (see Fischer, 1996, p.92-110). For Richard, his
mother is both the origin and the destination – the very hinge of his
masculine self identity.
Welles’ Macbeth also stunningly adopts the stairway as metaphor for
power dynamics. In an impressive ten minute extended take,
featuring Macbeth and Lady Macbeth before and after the off-stage
murder of Duncan, the stairs to Duncan’s room, (aided by the low and
high angle shots), enacts the switching dominance of one character
over the other. Before the murder, Lady Macbeth is on a higher level
to taunt Macbeth; she reasserts her supremacy by moving up the
stairs to replace the daggers; and stands above the now dazed and
fearful Macbeth to instruct the clean up. Macbeth is only once on a
higher step when he pauses to tell Lady Macbeth “I have done the
deed”. The murder of Duncan here, as in the play-text, becomes the
test of Macbeth’s virility and manhood: “when you durst do it, then
you were a man” (1.7.37). As Adelman (1992, p.138) posits, “if he
cannot perform the murder, he is in effect reduced to the
helplessness of an infant subject to her rage”. In repeatedly
positioning Macbeth below Lady Macbeth on the stairs, Welles
renders her his castrating mother.
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The Mother in the Kitchen
Similarly, Morrissette’s Scotland PA (a modern comedy version of
Macbeth set in a Pennsylvania burger restaurant in the mid-1970’s),
portrays Pam McBeth’s (Lady Macbeth) powers and influence over
Mac[beth] as resolutely feminine. She adopts a distinctively motherly
role and tone in encouraging the infantile Mac with practical advice in
all aspects of shop management and murder, yet simultaneously
uses her sexuality to control and reward Mac: she convinces him to
murder Duncan by sensuously whispering and kissing him and he is
repeatedly rewarded with kinky sex. Hence, Pam’s abjection is
focused on this slippage between her roles as sexual wife and loving
mother. Her disturbance of identity is echoed in the film’s selfconsciousness: by focusing on the high-brow merits of vegetarianism
versus meat-as-murder, the film betrays a sense of self-loathing in its
own consuming and recycling of the Shakespearean text. The
restaurant now figuratively serves up Duncan to its cannibal
customers (in the film and to the viewers). Pam’s new control over the
kitchen resolutely links her to the source of the abject – Duncan’s
dead flesh as food. The kitchen is thus sexualized, stressing the
connection between food, death, guilt, consumption and sexuality.
This train of associations is vividly realized when, located in her own
private kitchen, the provocatively dressed Pam takes a chopping
board and knife and personally dismembers her “infected” hand, the
symbol of her guilt. The act dually signals the abject in the
dismembered body part and onto the monstrous sexualized female
who disturbed the ideological understanding of the kitchen as a place
of motherly providence.18
Titus continually focuses on the kitchen – eating and the table – as a
site of abject femininity.19 Tamora moves from enacting oedipal
desires to being a manifestation of the monstrous-womb of the
archaic mother, a progression primarily facilitated by the Penny
Arcade Nightmare (PAN) sequences, culminating in the final banquet
scene. Generally, the PANs are extended meditations on the abject,
as they focus on the blurred boundaries between alive/corpse,
flesh/meat, attraction/repulsion, clean/unclean, human/animal,
profane/divine, illusion/substance (see Kristeva, 1982). The fifth PAN
blurs the boundaries between reality and nightmare: “at first the
audience should believe that the event is a figment of Titus’
18
In a similar scene in Titus, in which Aaron chops off Titus’ hand in a
domestic kitchen, the abject is only focused on dismemberment.
19
Taymor (2000, p.175). highlights that “Tamora, the Goth queen, could be
the precursor for Lady Macbeth”. The similar imagery of abject motherhood
in the studied films extends the parallels.
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tormented mindBsoon it becomes apparent that the masquerade is
not a vision but a reality” (Taymor, 2000, p.185). Tamora really is
dressed as the goddess revenge, while her sons play Rape (in bra
and pants, with owl wings) and Murder (wearing a tiger head),
heightening the abject in this collapse between animal/human and
masculinity/femininity.20 Tamora wears a fetishized costume and an
armour plate in the shape of a pregnant (or perhaps obese) female
body – with swollen breasts and stomach – constructing her as
monstrous-feminine. From one of her oversized breasts comes a
plastic tube (emblematic umbilical cord) which feeds smoky
nourishment to Murder/Demetrius at her feet. Here, she embodies the
phallic mother whose monstrous desire stems from her possessive
attachment to her sons, and such attachment also renders her the
archaic mother of suffocating maternity (Starks [2002, p.131] posits
her only as phallic mother).
The figuration of Tamora as archaic mother is made literal in the
banquet scene. Absurd and grotesque humour (the abject) is
employed in the opening shot of two flesh-filled pies cooling on the
open windowsill, as the curtain flutters in the wind and 1950s style
Italian music plays. This construction of idealised, feminine
domesticity that is focussed on nurturing and providing is parodied by
the gender of the chef and the contents of the pies. It also links with
the film’s opening sequence, where Lucius plays war with the objects
on the kitchen table without the supervision of a mother figure. It is
curious that Lucius also articulates his desire to kill a fly at the kitchen
table, surrounded by male father-figures and the castrated Lavinia.
The mother is thus repeatedly figured as absent from her traditional
position, defined by lack.21 In the final banquet table scene, Tamora
literally becomes the abject maternal body: the devouring womb. In
unwittingly consuming her own sons, the film explores the subject’s
desire for and simultaneous terror of being ingested by the mother,
fused once again with the maternal body – the origin and destination
(Starks, 2002, p.125). Cannibalism here, as with the implicit
cannibalism of Scotland PA, confronts the fear of the consuming
maternal body:22 “Tamora’s womb [is] ultimately her children’s tomb”
(Rutter, 2007, p.264). In a highly comical and yet repulsive scene
20
As Starks (2002, p.131-32) highlights these emblems of abjection often
underpin constructions of the male monster in horror films.
21
Burnett (2003, p.276-77) and Starks (2002, p.134-37) highlight that father
figures in the film, particularly Aaron and later Lucius himself in adopting the
black child, offer positive alternative models of maternal parenthood.
22
Adelman (1992, p.3-4), demonstrates how the Richard III play-text is
diffused with the nightmare of motherhood in adopting the imagery of
engulfment and swallowing: “the nightmare of a femaleness that can weaken
and contaminate masculinity”.
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which undermines the trope of dining as signifying friendship, Titus,
the flamboyant chef serves son-pie to his guests. The Italian, 1950s
style music rises as the camera shot darts between extreme close
ups of the chewing mouths around the table thus emphasising the full
horror of ingestion. When Titus finally announces that Tamora has
eaten her own sons, he significantly stabs her in the neck. The neck
is associated with perverse feeding and sexuality: the dual aspects of
Tamora’s abject motherhood. The cluedo-like deployment of the
objects of the table for murder (the dagger, the candlestick) harks
back to Lucius’ childlike enactment of war with the condiments. The
gunshot signals the fall of the dining room walls to reveal its actual
location in the centre of a silent, people filled auditorium. The dining
room is thus constructed as a public performance space, where the
maternal is assessed and judged. In Tamora’s failure, Lucius
assumes the role of maternal nurturer to the illegitimate black baby.23
By confronting the fear and attraction of the mother, he refigures the
monstrous feminine and provides an alternative, transcendent24
possibility of parenthood in the empowering space outside the
performance, beyond the limiting domestic spaces.
In conclusion, the mother is figured as abject because of the
slippages between her sexuality and fertility, and the arbitrary
construction
of
associational
locations
(mother/kitchen,
lover/bedroom) highlight the desire to keep female sexuality and
motherhood in distinct, separate spheres. The blurring of the
boundaries between maternal and sexual flesh is echoed in the
conduction of oedipal desires in the mother’s bedroom, the theoretical
collapse of difference between kitchen and bedroom as ideological
spaces, and the slippage between womb and tomb. The stairs
provide a space of negotiation, free from the ideological impositions
of rooms and successive examples have developed the possibility of
female power play. Furthermore, the space in the wilderness, which is
removed from the ideological cage of the domestic, creates
possibility, but it is grounded in the subversive. To utilise such
positions on the boundary is to be condemned, in these films, as a
witch or whore. Attempts to reclaim control over the domestic space
(Polanski’s Lady Macbeth and Taymor’s’ Tamora) are ultimately
severely punished: these films thus exploit the power of the abject
feminine only to reassuringly repress and vanquish its power by the
23
Starks (2002, p.134-36) argues he becomes the “final boy”, constructed as
feminine, thus inverting the horror movie tradition of the “final girl” who has
masculine characteristics.
24
Transcendence, according to Simon de Beauvoir (1949), is the ability of
the masculine subject to be active and subjective.
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conclusion. Despite the transgressive potential of the abject, these
films ultimately reaffirm cultural and social order (Creed, 1996, p.1314) and in doing so highlight (patriarchal) society’s unconscious fears
of the abject mother, the horror of femininity, sexuality and repressed
desire. 25 To associate the maternal with space imposes limits on
female self-identification and relinquishes female claims to
transcendence and authentic subjectivity. Rather than being
represented as actively subjective without ideological limits, she is
constructed and restricted by the masculine interpretations of the
locations she occupies. Hence, she is the bearer, rather than the
creator of meaning (Mulvey, 1996).
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