Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 7 Visuality – Textuality: An Uncanny Encounter
Elisabeth Bronfen
Abstract (E): Given that visuality is as much a part of all narration as the fact that we view images by reading them as though they were texts, this essay proposes to speak about an uncanny encounter between the two. In order to illustrate this mutual implication, as well as to bring in the theme of the spectral (that Freud suggests all experiences of the uncanny entail), it offers a cross-mapping between three different media at three different historical moments: a novella by the late Victorian author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a series of photographs by the late modern photographer Francesca Woodman, and a film by the postmodern film maker Amenábar.
Abstract (F): Cet article part de deux observations : à savoir que la visualité fait partie du champ plus large du récit, et que nous regardons les images en les lisant comme si elles étaient des textes. À partir de là, on examine la rencontre du textuel et du visuel comme une forme de l’inquiétante étrangeté. Afin d’illustrer leur implication réciproque et d’introduire la notion de spectre (dont Freud pose qu’il est sous-entendu par toutes les expériences de l’inquiétante étrangeté), l’article procède à l’analyse comparative de trois médias à trois moments historiques différents : un récit par une auteure des dernières années de l’ère victorienne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman ; une suite de photographes par la photographe du modernisme tardif Francesca Woodman ; et un film par le réalisateur postmoderne Pedro Amenábar.
Keywords: Alejandro Amenábar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Francesca Woodman, Image, Photography, Spectre, Uncanny
Article
Visuality is part of all story-telling. We can only grasp images by virtue of reading them, which means walking around in them, turning what we see into stories. As a useful point of departure for discussing the uncanny interdependence of the visual and the narrative which this essay seeks to explore, I suggest taking the double vision inscribed in the signification of mythic signs, which Roland Barthes proposes in his essay “Myth Today”. There is never any contradiction, conflict, or split between meaning and form, he suggests. Rather, one might imagine sitting in a car
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 8 and looking at the scenery through the window. “I can at will focus on the scenery or on the window-pane”, so as to grasp the presence of the glass while the landscape is unfocussed and at a distance. Or, by contrast, I can screen out the transparency of the glass so as to focus my gaze on the depth of the landscape. What I cannot do, according to Barthes, however, is see both glass and landscape at the same time. In this sense, the aesthetic form, into which materiality (be it body, spirit, objects or landscape) has been transferred, so as to endow it with meaning, is empty and present to me, precisely because I cannot help noticing the mediality of the art work. The materiality has in turn been rendered unreal, even though, or rather precisely because, formalisation has endowed it with meaning; it is both unreal and full (Barthes 1972, 123f). Barthes’ concept of the duplicity of the sign, which has persistently informed my own readings of images and narratives, makes the following compelling claim: if our gaze can only focus on one level of the image or the text – the form or the meaning, the manifest or the latent signification – what reveals itself to us displaces something; by becoming present, it screens out its double. Our critical gaze must therefore be concerned not only with the transferral of contingent materiality into an aesthetic formalisation, endowing it with coherent meaning. Rather, we must always also take note of the duplicity inherent in the image as well as in any narrative scene, in anything that has recourse to visual language to embellish it.
Apodictically put, we should cultivate the oblique gaze, which the visual culture of the Baroque period came to disseminate in the shape of anamorphic paintings. These baroque double visions exposed a dimension of meaning normally hidden from the ordinary gaze, which usually revolved around the transience of the world and the fragility of human existence. Looking awry, however, proves to be a useful hermeneutic tool in the critical engagement with all images and texts, especially those which have not explicitly elevated the duplicity of signification to their aesthetic project. According to Aby Warburg, profound emotion can only be apprehended by means of distancing oneself with the help of the Denkraum of formalisation. In the same manner, something insistently evades our grasp, something which inhabits the image but cannot be presented directly to the mind. While this fleeting quality inhabits the whole visual and textual sign, it can never be apprehended directly. At stake in interrogating the will to artistic conceptualisation which subtends all formulations of pathos is not only the question of what energy or intensity seeks to express itself. Rather, one must also ask what resists this drive,
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 9 either because it cannot be apprehended as an image formula or because it exceeds any formal articulation. As many of the artists discussed in my essays insist, something always escapes the transferral of contingent materiality into a coherent story or a meaningful image. Aesthetic formalisation produces a blind spot; it creates a secret, which stands to contradict the desire for unequivocal meaning and closure which it seeks to satisfy. The title of one of Sam Taylor-Wood’s video works, Sustaining the Antagonism, offers a useful critical metaphor for the duplicity the critical eye must entertain in relation to the contradiction on which images thrive. They show too little and too much, and what is revealed in and by them not only elicits both a direct and an oblique gaze. Rather, any straight gaze may, in fact obstruct an appreciation of precisely that resilient energia which forecloses any unequivocal expression.
At the same time, the antagonism that must be sustained also pertains to the duplicity inherent in the will to artistic formalisation itself. On the one hand we need stories and images, which allow us to apprehend a pathos that affects us precisely because it can never fully be grasped. If our experience and explanation of the world can only be transmitted and handed down with the help of reproductions, these mediations produce an interval, described by Aby Warburg as a cognitive site (or Denkraum), in which we can come into emotional contact with a panoply of expressions of alterity that recede from rational apprehension and transparent signification: such expressions allude to a range of experiences, from the strangeness of the past and the ungraspability of anxiety, happiness or ecstasy, to the distinctness of another person in her or his physicality, her or his subjectivity; an individuality I can never fully capture. This third space of aesthetic formalisation, which sustains the antagonism between my personal experience of another person, and her or his singularity, represents one of our most culturally vibrant sites, where we can transgress the very boundary created by turning another person into an image. Cornelius Castoriadis has coined the term capacité imaginaire, in order to point to the fact that our imagination allows us to make something present to ourselves, which we have neither experienced nor could have experienced personally. Fantasy is neither made up only of images, standing for something else, nor does it exclusively consist in the ability to see something different in an object, or to see the object differently from what it is. Rather, the resilient power of the imaginary, according to Castoriadis, relates back to an originary ability to render present an object or a relation which was
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 10 never actually present in one’s own perception, so that there is no actual ground or source of the imagination. (Castoriadis 1975). Herein lies the aporia: based on such a fundamental ability to call forth images, an imaginative capacity to intuit and thus emotionally penetrate an alterity inaccessible to reason is rendered possible.
On the other hand, regardless of whether we are dealing with painting, photography, film or literature, the interval (or intermediary space) produced by an aesthetic formalisation always also misappropriates the very materiality it seeks to grasp. According to Georges Didi-Huberman, the body (sôma), which is to be translated in to figurability (sêma), so that contingent materiality or pure affect can be transmitted as signs, only reappears on the canvas (and, one might add, the page or the screen) as an approximation: the impression that it has again become flesh is a hallucination, and a diminished one at that. We always remain aware of the fact that what is missing from the image is precisely the corporeality of what it represents, its flesh and blood (Didi-Huberman 2002). We are not only dealing with bodies that can only be apprehended in an image and as an image. Rather, we are also confronted with the translation of bodiliness into a figurability, which always points self-consciously to its own mediality. Along the lines of Roland Barthes’ “window scene”, our gaze inevitably oscillates between our capacité imaginaire (rendering present a relation, of which strictly speaking we are not a part) and the sobering recognition that our ability to call forth an image, in which we can participate affectively, is none other than the result of lines and colours on a canvas, a play of shadow and light on a screen, or letters written on a blank sheet of paper. Figuration always also entails a degree of disfiguration, a defacement and distortion, obscuring as much as it discloses, and which dissolves the body it puts on display in the very image used to portray it, thus partially obliterating it from our view. Each performance of a body in an image uncovers something, but it also adds something. The image is always both more and less than the body, similar but never the same. The represented body is visible and invisible, present and absent at the same time. The image formula misses what it seeks to articulate; it is inhabited by a radical duplicity. It is this duplicity I want to call “uncanny”.
Whether or not we avert our gaze when confronted with an image, a photograph or a film sequence; whether, when facing a painting, we look for what has come to be defaced in the process of its drawing; whether our attention is drawn instead toward the self-reflexivity inscribed in a given set of images; or whether we
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 11 prefer to give ourselves up to the satisfying protection which the condensation and distortion of aesthetic formalisation offers us: the decision is entirely our own. What is, in turn, decisive, is that we are dealing with an enactment of personal intensities, of intimate images on a public stage, which, because it appeals to our capacité imaginaire, our capacity to call forth images, is fundamentally uncanny. An uncanny effect is often easily produced, according to Freud, when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, “when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolises” (Freud 1955, 244). Indeed, the critical formula he offers for this experience of psychic disconcertion is as follows: “Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich” (Freud 1955, 226).i
With the following crossmapping of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Gothic tale, The Yellow Wallpaper (1890), Francesca Woodman’s photo works from the years 1975-1978 and Alejandro Amenábar’s film, The Others (2001), I wish to demonstrate how the duplicity inherent in all signification is inscribed both thematically and formally into our ability to call forth images, so as to intervene in our cultural imaginary. The relationship between these three texts, which has prompted my comparison, consists in the fact that all three have recourse to the critical metaphors of psychoanalysis, both confiscating and reformulating them. Gilman transforms a biographical anecdote about her own hysterical illness and the rest cure prescribed by her doctor into a Gothic tale. The bedroom of her fictional alter ego is transformed into a stage, where she can enact through her body the writing that has been denied her. Francesca Woodman, in turn, uses an empty house in Providence, Rhode Island, as a set for staging fantasies of herself vanishing. In these photographs she erects a monument to her uncanny self-fashioning, precisely by obliterating herself in the image, while at the same time forbidding us to avert our gaze from this spectacle. Finally, Amenábar plays with the correspondence between a country house, haunted by ghosts, and the darkened space of the film theatre, where white light falls on what Lotte Eisner calls a demonic screen, thereby calling forth a spectral play of light and dark, which is compelled to recognise its own fugacity.
All three artists enact a scene of haunting, in which something that had hitherto been regarded as imaginary suddenly appears as real. But what is most
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 12 striking about cross-mapping their work is the fact that the image formulas Gilman, Woodman and Amenábar use are also articulations of the uncanny, because they foreground how visuality and narration mutually inhabit each other. While Gilman’s language challenges our ability to call forth images, Woodman’s photographs require us to turn them into stories in order to make sense of them. Amenábar, in turn, explicitly stages his haunted house as an uncanny arsenal of the imaginary. The fleeting cinematic images, which resurrect the dead and restore them to life at this haunted site, dissolve into thin air at the end of the film. Although, or perhaps more precisely because, they have vanished, they survive, only to have an even more persistent after-effect on the imagination of those who participated in their spectral presence on the film screen.
Abigail Solomon Godeau, one of the first feminist critics to discuss Francesca Woodman’s vanishing act in the empty house in Rhode Island, has argued that in these photographs, “the woman’s body is physically devoured by the house. As in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the space of woman’s seclusion and worldly exclusion not only imprisons, it also consumes. Swallowed by the fireplace, layered over by the wallpaper, effaced, occulted, Woodman presents herself as the living sacrifice of the domus” (Solomon Godeau1986, 31). However, if one looks at these photographic works in relation to the duplicity of their own signification, one also notices that Woodman uses the dissolution of her body in the image, so as to transform a home, which has become uncanny, into a scene of self-creation, where the photographic process serves to celebrate fugacity. In one photograph, Woodman stands in the middle of an empty room, whose half opened door draws our gaze into an ominous darkness lying behind it. The dark shadow which her figure leaves on the floor might also be seen as a piece of darkness flooding into the lit room from beyond the threshold. The space appears uncanny, not only because in several places the paper has begun to peel off the walls, which themselves have begun to disintegrate, leaving pieces of plaster on the floor. Rather, the artist herself also embodies fragility. Owing to the movement of her body while the film was being exposed to light, her petticoat is blurred and appears in one place to be almost transparent. Furthermore, her strange, direct gaze at the camera invites us to follow her into the mysterious darkness on the other side of the door.
The longer we look at the photograph, the more its familiarity comes to be dissolved before our eyes. Suddenly we notice a visual analogy between the large
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 13 door knobs and the ring Woodman is wearing on her left index finger, since both draw our attention to that which lies in the dark behind the door, at the vanishing point of the photograph. In a similar vein, her right arm, which is slightly out of focus, appears on closer inspection to be severed from her body, as though it has developed a life of its own and is gliding towards the surface of the image, towards us. By contrast, the young woman, locked into her solitary fantasy work, is clearly drawn towards the dark room at the left edge of the photograph, its vanishing point. If this empty home promises to consume her, she is, at the same time, the source of a desire, which also draws our attention to this uncanny site at the back of the lit room. Woodman thereby confiscates a commonplace in Western thought, which has always equated the feminine body with the home. A particularly resonant survival of this trope appears in Titian’s painting of a musician, whose gaze penetrates the sex of the women reclining next to him, while behind him a coach approaches a house. Projected onto the scene in Woodman’s photograph, it might be argued that the room, emptied out and in the process of dissolution, not only functions as an image formula for the fragile feminine body, which this female photographer seeks to explore with her camera. Vigorously directed at us, her gaze explicitly foregrounds the dark chamber behind the door. If we read its immeasurable emptiness as a visual trope for the female genitals, the chamber would frighten a fetishistic gaze. Woodman, however, challenges us to share in her curiosity, rather than averting our gaze from the dark spot, which leads to the unlit vanishing point of the photographic image, and she thereby commemorates the transience of all fantasy work.
The theme of fragility does not, however, concern only a feminine subjectivity, willing to engage with her own frailty. The fact that we can intuit a space inside this uncanny home without actually seeing it can also be taken as a form of visualising the limit of what can be seen. The empty room, the feminine body and the photograph’s restricted field of vision produce three mutually implicated figures of thought, which Woodman’s self-performance unites. The play of light and darkness, visibility and invisibility, runs along the open door. Because the edge of the door is completely black at the top it seems to reduplicate the play of light and dark at stake in the image as a whole. Furthermore, corresponding to the movement of light along the edge of the door, leading from the bottom upwards into darkness, one finds a similar movement on the wall, where the colour grows progressively darker as one’s eye glides from right to left. What is also striking is the disconcerting incursion of
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 14 darkness into light, towards which Woodman’s strange hand gesture draws our attention. The dark kernel of this uncanny home, to which our gaze has no access, seems to creep over the threshold and threatens to flood the scene. Or is the movement going in the opposite direction? Has the young woman magically opened a door with her arms, which leads to a secret place, into which the light behind her, falling through the window from outside the house, can now penetrate? Or does the darkness inside this uncanny home perhaps originate from her spectrally blurred figure?
In line with Mieke Bal’s notion of preposterous history, a reading of the novella “The Yellow Wallpaper” in conjunction with Woodman’s photographic work is less concerned with any solid proof of influence. Rather, it involves looking back at the earlier literary text through the lens of visual language, which emerged after it was written. A thematic relation between this late Victorian text and Woodman’s photographic scenes consists in the fact that Gilman’s heroine also triggers the strange events that occur in her bedroom, by tapping into her ability to hallucinate. She also emerges as the author of an experience of the uncanny which equates her psychic apparatus with the space she inhabits. Decisive, however, is not only the thematic similarity between the text and the photographs. Rather, this correspondence reveals a further connection, which in turn leads from the spectral language of photography to the capability of textual metaphors to evoke hallucinations. After the birth of her daughter, Gilman’s young mother suffers from episodes of postnatal depression. Her husband, who also functions as her physician, lodges her in the nursery on the top floor of an old country house which they have rented for the summer. His instructions are clear. She is not to receive visitors, she is not to undertake any physical or mental activities and, above all else, she is not permitted to write.
The irony of the novella, of course, consists in the fact that the rest cure, which John, the narrator’s husband, has prescribed, not only encourages the hysterical fantasies, which come to inundate the bedroom of his depressed wife with spectral visions. Gilman’s alter ego also clandestinely writes down these uncanny events on paper, as though she were keeping a diary. She convinces herself that the pattern on the yellow wall-paper is a cage in which a strange woman has been incarcerated. The paper on the wall, however, can also be understood implicitly as the paper onto which, by taking notes on the development of her hysterical hallucinations, she inscribes letters in order to apprehend in the double sense of that word her own
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 15 madness. Shortly before she and her husband are about to leave this summer home, she pulls the paper off the wall completely in order to liberate the prisoner which her fantasy work has placed there. In so doing, she not only gives free reign to her own delusions. Rather – and therein lies a further ironic point of the novella – she creates herself, albeit retrospectively, as the author of a story about an attack of hysteria, in other words, as the author of the text we hold in our hands. By liberating the feminine figure she believes she can discern in the pattern of the wall-paper, along with the letters she writes on the pages of her notebook, she brings forth a creation that sustains a compelling antagonism: she writes with her hysterical body, even while moving into the abstraction of pure writing.
Decisive for the connection which I am proposing between this scene of self-creation and the creative self-vanishing, which the photographer Woodman stages in her uncanny chamber, is the visuality invoked by Gilman’s metaphors, the capacité imaginaire which her narration demands. While the narrator initially compares her summer home, with its hedges, stone walls and iron gate, to the haunted houses she knows from Gothic fiction, she soon turns her attention to her own spacious room, which has a window on each side, so that air and sunlight can enter freely. Her interest, however, is soon fixated almost exclusively on the pattern of the yellow wall-paper, which has already been torn off in certain places: “[The wall-paper] is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study”, she notes, only to add “and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradiction”. The colour of the wall-paper, she goes on to explain, is “repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow; strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long” (Perkins Gilman 2000, 5).
With this description of the uncanny wall-paper, a grotesque visuality breaks into the ordinary language of the narrator. With the help of the letters, which she writes on the paper of her note-book in order to record her thoughts, the lines impregnated on the walls around her room become animated and give shape to the figures in the inner theatre of this young mother, who has been banned from writing. The metaphors with which she tries to apprehend the pattern of the wall-paper, in the sense of both capturing and understanding it, and which evoke a profound emotion in
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 16 her, express fugacity, contradiction and transience. Her intense reaction to the abstract image formulas appearing on the walls surrounding her bed evokes an excessive visual language, which both reveals her immense hysterical capacité imaginaire and encourages us to follow her in this production of outrageous images. In response to her husband’s interdiction, she indulges in a more intimate but also more visceral mode of writing: her psychic hallucination, based on endowing the lines and colours which she sees on the wall-paper with meaning. She reads them mimetically, projecting onto the ordinary pattern a double vision, which allows her to see feminine figures in what, to a less oblique gaze, is simply a pattern. At the same time, she allegorises this double vision along the lines of Baroque culture and interprets the incarcerated women as embodiments of imperfection. Furthermore, the correspondence between the pattern on the wall-paper (on the diegetic level of the novella) and the letters on the paper (on the extra-diegetic level of the text), transforms this uncanny chamber into a stage, where forbidden psychic material can be enacted in such a manner as to create a purely spiritual space in a two-fold sense: the intimate psychic realm of inner spirits and the shared cognitive space (or interval) where these phantoms will have an afterlife, once they have been transcribed into a novella.
In the following weeks, the bored young woman spends her days staring out of her barred window. Yet the power of her hysterical hallucinations is so strong that she increasingly transposes the idiosyncratic fantasies which her capacité imaginaire evokes on the wall-paper onto the ordinary images she finds outside her window. The longer she stares at the pattern, the more convinced she is that it contains a network of eyes, as if the wall-paper is looking back at her from all sides of the room. In search of an explanation, which would allow her to transfer the intensity of her profound emotion into a protective fiction, she finally convinces herself that, under certain light conditions, she can see a formless figure, lurking inside the absurd, obnoxious pattern, which makes her positively angry. Indeed, the wall-paper increasingly becomes a Denkraum, into which she enters through the bars of the pattern in order to creep around in it, imitating the figures she believes to be caught there. The manner in which she jots down the movement of her hallucinatory vision in her note-book sets up a poignant analogy to the process of reading, and thereby calls us to follow her in her fantastic apprehension of the uncanny wall-paper: “I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 17 for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion”.
On the one hand, the protagonist believes she can detect “isolated columns of fatuity” in the “bloated curves and flourishes”. On the other, she notices that the sprawling outlines are diagonally connected and seem to “run off in great slanting waves of optic horror”, which she likens to “a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase”. However, because she believes she can also detect a horizontal movement, adding “wonderfully to the confusion”, she admits that entering into this world of intersecting lines and morphing shapes leaves her exhausted. With the help of her imagination, she gives life to these de-animated forms, and in so doing she undertakes an act of creation, in which the creation of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster finds a resilient feminine survival: “There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all, – the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction” (Perkins Gilman 2000, 19). The image formulas, which she evokes in the course of her mental peregrinations along (or inside) the wall-paper, produce a visual alternation between vertical columns and horizontal enmeshments, but also between meaningless, confused figures and a central point. From this point, a force radiates outwards, holding everything together while also energising and animating everything, to the extent that one might call it the threshold or pivot of a birth and a return.
As Gilman’s heroine becomes increasingly manic in her attempt to read the wall-paper and discover the meaningful story inscribed in it, by which she believes she can live, she convinces herself that she can see a crouching woman shaking the lines of the pattern as she tries to escape through its bars. Her hallucinatory blurring of the boundary between the material walls surrounding her and the pattern of the paper, serving as a screen onto which she can project her profound inner emotions, offers a further connection to Francesca Woodman’s photographs from the series House. In one of these photographic images, the artist has merged with the wall beneath a window by covering her body with a piece of the wall-paper, both of which are blurred in the picture. The light on her face has taken on the colouring of the naked walls. Nevertheless, a duplicity is inscribed in the photograph. Although the uncanny place seems to be consuming the young woman, the wall itself is not a permanent structure. The plaster lying on the floor next to the pieces of the
wall-Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 18 paper, which have been torn off the wall, attests to its own fragility. If one reads the hysterical enactment of writing in Gilman’s novella through the lens of Woodman’s photographic works, the following double-edged interpretation emerges: in the same gesture, in which her neurotically afflicted heroine seeks to enter into the patterned paper on the wall, her doppelganger attempts to detach herself from this paper, only to reappear as a fictional character, imaginatively evoked by virtue of the letters she jots down on paper, in order to record her hysterical hallucinations. Through the very gesture in which Gilman’s hysteric calls forth the image of a woman, who – as an image – seeks to escape from a pattern imprisoning her, she herself enters into this hallucinatory space. The hallucinatory phantom thereby offers her an image formula for her own imprisonment, her enforced rest cure.
The analogy between the feminine body and the wall, enveloping but also imprisoning her, finds a compelling after-life in another photograph by Francesca Woodman. The naked legs of the artist are visually equated with pieces of torn-off wall-paper. We see both the printed side of the wall-paper and its white reverse side, and we see a piece of the patterned skirt which would normally cover the white legs of the young woman. The bare white patch on the wall in turn offers an inverted imprint of the space between her two nude legs. In a photograph from the series Space, Woodman covers both her face and her naked body with a large section of flowery wall-paper, as though this were her second skin. This protective screen, which not only equates the feminine body with the wall, but also links the photographer’s genitals with her face, is particularly confusing, because it produces a visual uncertainty. Is the feminine figure about to merge completely with the wall, or is she about to emerge from the wall? The photograph uncannily blurs the boundary between the woman and the walls of her chamber, and also effaces the distinction between the disappearance and (re-)appearance of these figures, thereby demarcating the acts of destruction and creation. In this photograph, a new figure is brought forth out of the waste lying on the floor, which attests to the transience and imperfection of all phenomenological appearances.
In Gilman’s novella, the psychosomatic enactments of the bed-ridden hysteric’s imaginary capacity culminate in a double competition: the narrator must apprehend, and thus contain, the confusing image formulas on the wall-paper by finding a coherent story for the intense emotions which they evoke, a story which will allow her to live with her predicament. At the same time, however, she must assert
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 19 her own will to create stories in the face of her husband’s interdiction. Having reached the acme of her psychic delusion, she is convinced that the feminine figure is trying to liberate herself from the bars of the pattern. On paper she notes, “she is all the time trying to climb through”, yet she feels compelled to add, “but nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white” (Perkins Gilman 2000, 16). Her delusion allows a meaningful story to come into being, because – and that is the decisive point – the hallucinatory cognitive site which it produces, the site of her writing and the creation of the novella, is coherent, despite being riddled with terrifying images. At the same time, we find here the survival of one of the seminal image formulas of Gothic fiction: namely, the terrible and endangering fascination with self-creation. To engender oneself artistically means to expose oneself to death so as to survive as an image. At the same time, Gilman’s ironic re-writing of this Romantic notion of creation revolves around the fact that her hysteric enacts it literally. She removes the oppressive wall-paper to ensure the survival of her doppelganger. However, the liberated woman, creeping along the floor inside her chamber, also guarantees her own survival as the author of a novella entitled “The Yellow-Wallpaper”.
Returning to another work by Francesca Woodman, one might speak of a mutually dependent act of engendering. Captured in this image is not only the vanishing of the artist into the wall, but also her emergence from it, while at the same time the image formula of the birth of Venus finds a poignant after-life. The decapitated young woman does not rise from the waves of the ocean, but rather from a piece of paper tacked onto the wall. The shell at her right arm, a reference to the uncanny feminine genitals from which all life comes forth, further signifies an act of self-creation. As in the other photographs, we are confronted with arrested movement, since the paper, through which Woodman’s figure is bursting, also serves to restrain her. Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper”, however, ends with a rather more shocking act of emergence. On the day of their planned departure, the doctor breaks the lock on the door of his wife’s uncanny bedchamber and sees her creeping along the wall amidst the shreds of wall-paper which she has torn off. In her subsequent written record of this meeting, Gilman’s narrator notes, “I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. ‘I’ve got out at last’, I said, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’” (Perkins Gilman 2000,
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 20 20). Not without irony, Gilman adds a final comment to this monstrous scene of birth, attesting to the resilient will of her heroine. In the last sentence of the novella, her hysteric asks herself laconically why her husband should have fainted, and then continues with her description of how she had to step over him cautiously, so as not to be interrupted in her path along the wall.
Francesca Woodman also offers a photographic version of a woman crouching close to a wall. The decisive correspondence which my crossmapping seeks to uncover consists, on the one hand, in the way in which the psychosomatic performance of both artists is aimed at transcending the mediation of written transmission. Beneath the photograph we read the following inscription: “Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands”. Such a statement recalls the way in which Gilman’s narrator relies entirely on the bodily enactment of her fantasies in the culminating scene of the novella. Furthermore, in this photograph we also find a woman turning her shoulder to us, thereby signalling that as an artist she is withdrawing from any gaze seeking to constrain her self-expression. At the same time, by self-consciously presenting us with her bare shoulder, she is also making sure that we will not avert our gaze from her subjectivity: we may have no access to it, but it is also not reified as an enigma or a riddle. The figure in the image also occupies a spatial interval between the paper on her back and the wall in front of her, as she, too, is surrounded by the debris that has resulted from her attempt at self-creation. The transformation she enacts with her body is two-fold: she is a woman who assumes a pose in order to transform herself into an image body in a photograph.
A comparative reading, unfolding the relation of this photograph to the final scene in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, reveals why it is fruitful to draw our critical attention to the way in which visuality inhabits the production of meaningful stories in much as the same way as a narrative impulse is inscribed in the creation of images. Gilman’s novella appeals to our capacity to produce images. Indeed, she literally challenges us to re-trace empathetically in our minds the images which her narrator painstakingly produces in the field of vision, only to record them on paper, both as a narrative about an imprisoned woman, which she extracts from the wall-paper, and as her own hallucinatory self-creation, which brings with it a leap into pure, non-mimetic writing. Woodman’s photograph, in turn, reveals that writing is not only inscribed in her photo by way of an explanatory title supplementing the image.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 21 Writing also inhabits the image in the sense that we can only begin reading Woodman’s photographic scene if we re-trace it as a story, even if this is merely a story about the effect her vanishing act has on us. Such a story would appear to have severed itself from any notes which Woodman might have made about this photograph, and it thereby moves into the pure intensity of our affective engagement with her work.
A final concluding image will bring my crossmapping to its own point of closure. Alejandro Amenábar has also chosen a country house as the scene for his Gothic film, The Others (2001), which can be compared to that of “Yellow Wallpaper” since it is also surrounded by hedges and has a big iron gate at its entrance. The significant relation to Gilman’s novella, as well as to the photography of Francesca Woodman, consists in the fact that this uncanny home is also the setting for a painstaking process of self-recognition on the part of the heroine, resulting in a moment of feminine self-creation, which self-reflexively comments on the medium of film as well. The film begins with a woman screaming as she wakes up from a nightmare. In a vertical close-up we see Grace (Nicole Kidman) holding her hand to her mouth, sobbing in terror. As she slowly calms herself down, the camera moves into a horizontal position. Only then does the confused woman stir from her petrified terror, quickly wiping the tears from her face and looking at the wrist-watch on the table next to her bed. She briefly presses her lips into the pillow before sitting up on the edge of her bed and, visibly relieved, begins breathing calmly. Everything seems to have been a dream. As will become clear in the course of the film, Grace is no hysteric, but rather a dead woman, who, despairing over the fact that her husband had died in battle, suffocated her children with a pillow and then shot herself with a shotgun. Because she is able to ward off the knowledge of this terrible deed, she believes she is still alive. The strange events that set in on this foggy morning represent a fantastic work of repression, with the uncanny house supporting her need to screen out something to which she cannot ultimately remain oblivious. Grace artificially darkens all the rooms by drawing heavy curtains across the windows, in order to protect her allegedly photosensitive children from any direct sunlight. The act of keeping light out of the house, however, also signifies her need to prevent the triple murder from coming to light, that is, to prevent it from moving from a position of repression in the unconscious to one of conscious recognition.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 22 The previous night, the new tenants of the house (who are still among the living), decide to hold a séance, because they have come to realise that their new home was haunted. As a result, Grace is finally forced to recognise that she belongs to the dead. In the penultimate scene of The Others, we see her sitting on the stairs, holding both of her children fondly in her arms, while she is finally able to describe to them, and to herself, how her act of murder came about. The terrible knowledge, which has been tormenting her throughout the film, can finally be transformed into a meaningful story about how her willingness to kill her children was nothing other than the anamorphotic counterpart to her unconditional maternal love. By transferring her initially ungraspable and unacceptable deed into the pathos gesture of a mother who kills out of despair, only to project onto this a second image formula (of the mother protecting her children), Grace is reborn as the subject of her traumatic story. At the same time, this postmodern film, which self-consciously thrives on the survival of the poignant pathos formulas from Gothic fiction, does not conclude with the dissolution of the spectral appearance of the dead. It is precisely because Grace finally acknowledges that she and her children are no longer alive that they can take possession of their uncanny home for ever. As we see sun light streaming through the windows, we hear their collective voices claiming, “this house is ours”. Whereas Grace previously had had to lock her photosensitive children away in darkened rooms, to protect them from any natural light, now they can dance in the light of daybreak. Though dead, they remain among the living, precisely as creatures of light, which is to say as cinematic figurations.
The uncanny home – and therein consists its correspondence to the cinema screen – remains an interval, a site where the deceased can have an after-life and affect the living. In the final scene, we see Grace standing with her two children at the window of the house which they have re-possessed. Calmly she watches as the members of the other family, having removed their last remaining belongings, climb into the black car that will drive them away for ever. Until the end, however, even as the car is already driving along the gravel path, the little boy has been intently watching the three spectral figures that seem to appear only to him, and of course, to us. While he could initially see them distinctly, they then vanish, and he is now in their possession as well. Even if he is able to repress the uncanny knowledge of their survival from his ordinary consciousness, the image of the three figures at the window will continue to haunt him in his fantasies – as an enigma, a promise and a hope.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 23 If, in this final scene, Grace and her two children are initially visible, only to ultimately dissolve into the film image, then this is because we are dealing with a mise-en-abîme of cinema’s mediality. After all, one of the themes of The Others is how an uncanny play of light and darkness allows spectral figures to appear as a result of our imaginative capability, even though we know that we do not share any world with them; that they are not present to us. Indeed one might ask, are film figures, which flicker across a white screen in a darkened movie theatre, not defined by the very oscillation between presence and absence within a given frame which Amenábar presents to us in nuce with the help of a window in a forlorn country house? And is the uncanny magic of film characters not such that – insofar as they have moved us emotionally – they will continue to haunt us in our memories, in our fantasies and in our dreams? Something remains, even after we have come to translate a gripping, but ultimately ungraspable affect into image formulas and meaningful stories, after we have apprehended what has profoundly affected us. Something tarries after all the spectral figures projected onto the screen have once again dissolved into pure light and pure darkness. And as we oscillate between the after-glow of our intense emotion and the success of our intellectual apprehension, we are sustained by the after-effect of this antagonism.
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Castoriadis, Cornelius. L'Institution Imaginaire de la Société. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Die leibhaftige Malerei. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny”. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press 1953-74. Vol. XVII, 217-56.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 24 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. The Yellow Wall-Paper and other Writings. New York: Modern Library, 2000. 3-20.
Solomon Godeau, Abigail. “Just like a Woman”. Francesca Woodman: Photographic Works. Ed. Ann Gabhart. Wellesley: Wellesley College Museum; New York: Hunter College Art Gallery. 11-37.
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, she has also written articles in the field of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and art. E-mail:bronfen@es.uzh.ch
