The image of the castrated woman has been around in literature for a long time. The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas speculated that the role of mother goddess was dethroned and replaced by male warrior gods about six thousands years ago. As a consequence, male dominated narratives permeate throughout western culture, from the classical epoch to the modern era. In such narratives the role of the female is reduced to that of the hero’s pleasure object, an object subjected to a gaze that represents her as silent, naked and in some cases mutilated.
It is this image of the female Laura Mulvey contended in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, that ‘allows man to live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman.'
In Mulvey’s theory, based on a psychoanalytical dissection of film (Hitchcock, Sternberg and others), narratives are controlled by an active male protagonist who holds the over all narrative fantasy as the bearer of the spectators gaze. Woman, on the other hand, is represented as a passive and erotic spectacle who connotes a ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’.
However, instead of analyzing narrative cinema like Mulvey, I offer here an analysis of dystopian science fiction wherein the castrated image of woman can be identified due to the heightened patriarchal nature of dystopian narratives (totalitarian states of fatherhood, where in most cases the role of mother has been abolished).
Some of the narratives to be discussed below have entered popular consciousness, and are considered works of remarkable genius, and it is not my intention to demote their grandeur by ignoring the significant cultural, political, and philosophical depths they probe. The purpose of this essay is to explore the role of the feminine within them so the image of the castrated woman can be acknowledged through a consciousness of the imagery it entails, and hopefully transcended or subverted with a new aesthetic. This is important for a variety of reasons. One of which Virginia Allen and Terri Paul pointed out in Ways of Theorizing About Women (1986):
When fiction incorporates patriarchal assumptions – assumptions that are demeaning to women solely because of their sex – and when these assumptions are repeated over a long period of time by a great number of highly admired writers they take on the status of reality in popular consciousness.
Such narratives are not only reductive to the role women can perform in society; they have also become a monotonous, boring and ugly aesthetic problem as well.
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Perhaps, firstly, one should be clear about what’s meant by the image of the castrated woman as it need not imply genital mutilation. One thing Mulvey illuminates in her essay that it is not the female body that is castrated, but the male gaze which psychologically projects its own fear of castration onto the female body.
Female castration suggests the silencing of the female through the use of her body as a passive object to-be-looked-at. In most cases the symbolic value of the womb is rejected. Furthermore, the image of the castrated woman is the sexing down of the mother/woman role to that of non-mother or girl/infant.
For instance, In George Orwell’s dystopia 1984 (1949) the heroin Julia is reduced from a 27 year old woman to an erotic ‘dark haired girl’, a non-mother who the hero Winston Smith wants to ‘flogg to death with a rubber Truncheon.’ He would ‘Tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like St Sebastian. He would ravish her, and cut her throat at the moment of climax.’(P. 17) Such projections are images of castration.
Likewise, in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World (BNW) the 19 year old heroine Lenina is reduced to a red faced girl so passive she can be petted on the bottom by the Director of Hatcheries. Very early on Huxley’s narrative establishes its male dominated gaze with a peeping-tom style journey into a GIRLS changing room where Lenina strips naked for the reader.
Lenina pulled at her zippers– downwards on her jacket, downwards with a double handed gesture at the two that held her trousers, downwards again to loosen her undergarment. Still wearing her shoes and stockings, she walked off towards the bathrooms (P. 40).
Throughout BNW Lenina is constantly stripped naked by the narrator, catering as an erotic backdrop to the stories central philosophical questions. Her breast are presented, and massaged with nozzles. Her underwear is explored. Late in the story she strips naked, and begs for sex with John the savage.
In contrast to her nudity the male characters in BNW remain unexposed and secure. This relates to the absence of a mother figure within the narrative. In BNW the role of mother has been replaced by science, whereas the political role of father remains in place.
This way of looking at the female body as a pleasure object is present from the beginning of the dystopian genre. As Martin Ball notes ‘Yevgeny Zamyatin has a sound claim to the invention of the science fiction dystopia.' In Zamyatin’s dystopia We (1921) the first female in the genre is reduced to an orifice; a pink mouth, an ‘O’. The main heroin, herself, 1-330, is described with a mysterious X. Like Huxley’s use of Lenina and Orwell’s fantasies, 1-330 is also stripped naked early in the story.
Then the unzipping of the buttons, the collar, to the breast and further, lower (P.48)
The stripping down of the female into a pleasure object continues as Dystopias change in media. In Fritz Lang’s 1927 dystopian film, Metropolis, the heroin Maria is kidnapped by the crazed inventor Rotwang who creates a machine version of her, one that will be subordinate to man’s control. As Katharina Von Ankham and others have noted, Rotwang’s lost hand, replaced by a metal convulsed claw, is ‘a sign of castration'. This castration is projected in Rotwang’s machine-woman Hel whose hands become similar claws that grope at her breast constantly.
Interestingly, Hel’s first task when created is performing an erotic dance in the red-light district of Yoshiwara. Despite the film’s early date, Hel’s breast becomes central to the spectacle.
More recently, in the 1995 Japanese Animation Ghost in the Shell directed by Mamorii Oshii, the heroine Kusanagi’s first act is showing her naked body.
Indeed, there is so much nudity (more breast than vagina as animators failed to give her one) in Ghost In The Shell that the heroine appears naked more than she appears clothed.
This excessive nudity can be explained with Mulvey’s theory as the consequence of story having no male protagonist. Because of this absence, the heroin has to perform two roles: that of hero controlling the film fantasy, and that of pleasure object to-be-looked-at.
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As modern science fiction dystopias moved forward and expanded their parameters of investigation (cybernetics, genetics, psychology and post-modern science) after WW2 the use of heroine as pleasure object underwent various transformations.
In narratives about artificial intelligence (AI), the gynoid or female pleasure android represent man’s complete objectification of woman. In Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) the hero Rick Deckard becomes sexually attracted to the female pleasure model androids he is paid to kill. This desire climaxes in a hotel room with a bottle of bourbon and the naked ‘almost childlike’ heroine Rachael Rosen: a nexus 6 pleasure model android.
‘I’m not alive,’ says Rachael. ‘You’re not going to bed with a woman.’(P.194)This doesn’t bother Deckard as he doesn’t care about equality in the sexual act. In his mind Rachael is what he wants her to be: a sexually attractive object of desire. She is also the ultimate non-mother, because she ‘can’t bear children.’
As Patricia S. Warrick notes in her authoritative book on AI, The Cybernetic Imagination In Science Fiction, Rachael ‘makes love to with Rick without loving because she is a mere machine… She is, she realizes, not much different from an ant.’
Later, In William Gibson’s acclaimed novel Nueromancer (1984) new computer technology allows cyber cowboys the ability link into the bodies of others; however, Gibson’s first use of this new technology is pleasure related. In chapter four of Nueromancer the hero Case steps into the heroine Molly’s body.
She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed, but the link was one way. He had no way to reply. (P. 72)
Gibson is credited with creating a new genre in SF: that known as cyberpunk, and there can be no denying Necromancer’s inventive qualities, but Molly’s use as pleasure object remains anachronistic. She is presented as an action hero, but in the stories end the cyber-hero Case saves the day.
Molly also takes on a heightened erotic role. Early in the story a massage turns into a hard-core sex scene with the hero, and later in the narrative we learn of her work as a sex-slave; programmable to fulfill the needs of Night City’s various sadists.
There is also a large amount of violence directed towards her body. Her leg is broken and reduced to a ‘bloody stump’, and her eyes are gouged out. These auto-mutilations are more literal symbols of castration.
Another movement in science fiction to appear after the Second World War was New-Wave fiction in England and, together with many other great writers, was the challenging writer J.G Ballard.
In his psychologically driven dystopia Super-Cannes (2000) the heroine Jane Sinclair cannot escape the sexual role of infant/girl the protagonist projects onto her. Although Jane is a doctor, the elderly and very dapper hero/husband Paul Sinclair wishes she were his daughter.
Her watchful eyes and toneless skin were like those of an over gifted child. Before meeting me Jane had spent too many hours in elevators, and pathology rooms and the pallor of strip lighting haunted her like a twelve-year-olds memoires of a bad dream (P.6).
Coincidentally, Jane is also 27 years old like Julia in 1984, and like Orwell, whenever possible the hero reduces Jane to an erotic ‘girl’; in Jane’s case, a ‘rebellious Alice In Wonderland school-girl.
However, one of the impressive things about Ballard’s novel is that, unlike earlier 20th century narratives, Ballard gives Jane autonomy from the hero, which allows the reader to distinguish between Jane herself, and the image of Jane in the narrator’s eyes. Throughout the story she matures, and moves away from the hero.
Jane was growing up, like the Alice in Through The Looking Glass, and I sense something of Carrols regret when he sensed that his little heroine was turning into a young woman and would soon be leaving him. (P.81)
Ballard’s novel goes a considerable way into exploring the darker consequences of demoting the status of women down to that of an infant/girl, which raises a question. If psychoanalysis is correct and, women represent man’s fear of castration, and as a consequence they reduce them to girls with sexual functions, do they want to sleep with children?
Another implication related to looking at something like the pleasure object is that objects can be owned. When such things happen, as they tend to in Dystopias, people become a means to another’s end. In man’s situation he is usually reduced to a machine or a slave with no free will, while woman is typically reduced to an object, whose sexuality has in turn been reduced to social utility
As Marleen Barr notes ‘sexuality that reduces one partner to the status of object is, indeed, reductionist.’ Such reductions to sexuality are explored in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale (1985), wherein a theocratic belief system has transmogrified women into objects who operate like sexual machines.
My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love because this is not what he is doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply too people and only one is involved. Rape would not be correct either… (P.104)
In the land of Gilead ‘the function of the handmaids is to open their legs and become impregnated by their commanders. They are not allowed to read, barely to speak. They are allowed no individuality, stripped even of their names.’
Atwood’s dystopia is significant because it places a woman at the centre of the narrative; however, of more interest to this analysis is the disparity that can be seen between Atwood’s book, and the film directed by Volker Schlöndorff in 1990. The book, owing to the psychological nature of reading as medium, allows the reader to enter the mind of the female heroine Offred, but the film fails in its attempt to do so.
As the film develops, the viewers gaze falls under the control of the shadow hero Nick whose gaze controls the story fantasy, while Offred is demoted from protagonist to woman to-be-looked-at. This happens despite the fact Nick isn’t the protagonist, and regardless of the feminist themes latent in the story. The film version of The Handmaid’s tale shows Mulvey’s theory in action.
In one forgettable scene Offred exhibits her breast from a window down to the hero Nick (ill 3). ‘Get away from there,’ gestures Nick. ‘The commander may see you flashing your breast at me.’ It is at this point in the narrative Offred loses all control over the narrative. What is also significant about this display of breast is that in the frames preceding Offred at the window she is not even naked, which leaves one to ask what Schlöndorff was doing when he constructed this scene?
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In this analysis we have seen the representation of the female heroine in a variety of media in the modern dystopian SF narrative. These narratives have ranged across the 20th century from the emergence of the dystopian genre in Russia in 1921(Zamyatin’s We), to its appearance in early film, and later on in Post WW2 dystopian science-fiction.
In all of these stories the image of the castrated woman can be found, and identified. She is usually stripped naked, portrayed as an object-to-be-looked-at by the protagonist who controls the narrative fantasy.
In some narratives, like Ballard’s Super-Cannes, the heroine is presented within a narrative deep enough to question the construction of the image of the heroine. While in other, older, stories the heroine emerges as nothing more than a narrative device used as backdrop for larger philosophical questions.
Nevertheless, the portrayal of women in fiction effects society, and it is just as important to question the role we give her as Huxley’s bio-ethical questions, or Orwell’s crusade against political totalitarianism. When such writers create sexually imbalanced narrative roles they can later be absorbed by society either consciously or unconsciously. As a consequence women are forced to perform roles that limit their potential, as well as society’s.
