Pam's Taken the Veil

So Pam's taken the veil.

And last night, she was hiding under a blanket to evade Eric's gaze when they were thrown in King Bill's subterranean slammer together.

Did she really have much of a choice?

Ever the style maven, last week's Pam—dressed in funerary black lace with a heavy veil covering her decaying face (“Even when her face is putrefying, she comes up with an outfit for putrefying,” Kristen Bauer van Straten remarked in an interview posted to The Vault)—had to deal with the aftermath of a spell cast on her by possessed witch Marnie that has caused her immortal vampire body to rot.

And this week, it's only gotten worse!

I found it interesting that HBO on Demand's description of last Sunday's episode, Me and the Devil, makes mention of this fact with the phrase, "Pam takes the veil".

What's so intriguing about this verbiage?

Thefreedictionary.com defines this term as the life or vows of a nun.

And when I think of  becoming a nun, one of the first mental pictures that comes to mind is that of a woman retreating from the world and hiding (or being confined) behind the imposing walls of the convent.

Let's take a look at thefreedictionary.com's definition of veil:

veil

n.

1. A length of cloth worn by women over the head, shoulders, and often the face.

2. A length of netting attached to a woman's hat or habit, worn for decoration or to protect the head and face.

3. The part of a nun's headdress that frames the face and falls over the shoulders.

4.

a. A piece of light fabric hung to separate or conceal what is behind it; a curtain.

b. Something that conceals, separates, or screens like a curtain: a veil of secrecy.

v. veiled, veil·ing, veils

v.tr.

1. To cover with or as if with a veil: Dense fog veiled the bridge.

2. To conceal or disguise.

One word in particular is repeated over and over: conceal.

This is significant because it speaks to what a woman must do when her beauty is marred. She must hide, separate, screen herself off. As The Vault interview "Kristin Bauer talks about her 'face-off' states, "Having her skin peel off in ribbons of goo is a massive blow for Pam"; an affront to her vanity.

And for a woman whose priorities include Eric and her appearance (not always in that order), this presents quite the predicament.

Pam: "I can put up with a lot, but fuck with my face and it's time to die!" S4E5 Me and the Devil

To understand why this fate is worse for Pam than, say, her maker's would be, let's take a moment to consider the core difference between the spells the possessed Marnie cast on both vampires.

The spell cast on Eric wiped clean his mind, that part of the self envisaged in Cartesian dualism as being characteristically male. The one cast on Pam disfigured her body, that which is associated with the female; the second-mentioned and therefore lesser valued of the male/female pair of lhierarchical dualisms.

Applying this framework of gendered hierarchical dualisms, the biblical Adam is revealed as a soul type, while Eve is of the flesh (Stone, 1976). In Christian theology, it was asserted that women must become more "like a man" (more "rational" and "spiritual" than is her "nature") to come into relationship with God, who was envisaged as masculine.

Feminist scholar Carol Christ writes that according to poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich, such views have made the body "so problematic for women that it often seemed easier to shrug if off and travel as a disembodied spirit" (1997, p. 148). If only it were so easy for Pam; if only she could escape the prison of her rotting flesh like her ghostly harasser Antonia has. But there can be no such simple solution for Pam. As a woman, she is, as Rich writes, controlled by being lashed to her body - "the carnal flesh to which the elevated mind is shackled" (Sanchez-Grant, 2008, p. 78).

As Sanchez-Grant writes, if the mind is allied with culture and reason, it follows that the body is associated with all that is "other"; if woman is inextricably associated with the body, and the body is regarded as inferior to the mind - then surely woman is the inferior Other.

This theme has run through several of my last posts.

That's why the curse Marnie (under Antonia's influence) uttered, "Corrupt unsanctified corpse who walks behold your true self" is so torturous for Pam; for woman, dualism insists that the body is the true self, the essentialized ground of our being.

Under this logic, had the spell beset Pam's mind as the one cast on Eric did, it wouldn't be so bad.

This sexist construction of gender holds that the [feminine] body is entirely separate from the true inner self.

Intriguingly, under the witch's magic, amnesia Eric has become more endearing - he's playful, gentle, contrite for past offenses; he openly displays emotion and seems perhaps more his authentic self.

You know something? The more I think about it, maybe in his current state amnesia Eric is even more than his authentic self. He seems transcendent, self-sacrificing. Godric-like, even.

And he gets the girl, since he is more attractive to Sookie than when he is cold, cruel and calculating, swaggering "real" Eric.

While it's true that he must hide in Sookie's house for fear his vulnerable state may make him an easy target for anyone gunning for him (i.e. the witches, Bill, etc.) Pam must truly hide behind a mourning shroud - lamenting the death of her "true" self since the face a woman shows the world is how she is judged.

This connects to Sam Trammell's uneasiness at his character's yelling "damn, you're ugly" at a female bar patron as he crashed into Merlotte's fresh off his bender; hung over, agitated, and over-the-top belligerent. In my post on Dragon * Con 2010 I noted that it seemed Mr. Trammell sensed the egregiousness of assailing a woman's appearance, since aside from impugning her sexuality (i.e. labelling her as promiscuous, a whore, a "dyke", etc.) it's is one of the most cutting attacks someone can level at a female in our culture.

And here's a (depressing) dose of reality: Nearly half of men questioned in a recent poll of 70,000 people said they would ditch a partner who gained weight, compared to only 20 percent of women. Talk about how the body "feeds" identity, how a woman's "corporeal experience" influences her overall experience (Sanchez-Grant, 2008)!

Pam's own maker has made constant reference to how he could never harm Sookie because she is so beautiful. Where you suprised that in last night's I Wish I Was the Moon Eric recoiled only slightly from Pam, that he didn't all-out reject her ruined visage?

She has become the dreaded Rotting Goddess.

Hecate, She who repels. "A hideous hag and flesh-eating ghoul, her skin pallid and decaying, her robes a shroud...the repository for all the dark and fearsome forces of the feminine divine" (Ward, 2006, pp. 152-153).

She is Rot. Ooze and decay may have no place in the life of the disembodied [rational, male] mind, yet the messiness of birth, sex, and death - the cycle of embodied life - refuses to disappear. This is Hecate's realm. To exhume Her is to face the death aspect of the Goddess and the fusion of need and fear She arouses.

According to Ward (2006), the fear we projected of the Rotting Goddess onto witches long ago we now put onto ordinary women. He writes:

I get a flicker of something vile when I contemplate the image of the Rotting Goddess. She viscerally repels me, yet draws me, as if she holds a secret for me inside her fetid mouth, a flicker of truth about men's revulsion towards feminine flesh. I remember a friend of mine - he was only in high school at the time, and yet he understood this all too well - he told me he had found an easy way to break up with a girlfriend after he no longer wanted to be with her. When they started making out he said he would keep his eyes open, and he would just examine her, as if through a microscope. He would stare at the glistening pores, pimples, blackheads, the creases, hairs, erupting moles and folded skin. He would feel nauseated, and that would be the end of his attraction for her. In my 20s, in India and Thailand, I learned Buddhist techniques for eliminating sexual desire that followed much the same course. I was instructed to imagine a woman's body split up into five heaps of skin, nails, hair, teeth and internal organs, or to visualize a woman as nothing but sacks of blood and pus and shit. Feel sexual desire for that? Thus men learn that it is to treat women like dirt (as matter, not Mater) and break their spell over us.

WOW.

Perhaps, in her current spellbound state, Pam can teach us about how men at large have been socialized to see women.

References

Christ, C.(1997) Rebirth of the goddess.  New York: Routledge.

Sanchez-Grant (2008).  The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 9, #2, 77-92

Ward, T. (2006). Savage breast: One man’s search for the goddess. New York: O Books.

Thou Shall Not Suffer a Witch to Live

*DISCLAIMER - GRAPHIC IMAGES AHEAD*

The Burning Times & Sexual Torture

Did you happen to notice the unholy glee with which these two matter-of-factly discussed the perversely sexualized protocol for burning a witch? Rebecca and I did, and it turned our stomachs.

"You must burn a witch properly, first the calves," the bishop leeringly explained in Spanish to the aristocrat at his side, "the thighs, and the hands, then the torso and forearms"...

...and as added sick delight played across both their faces, he continued, "los senos" (the breasts). 

Marnie's dreaming mind had conjured this diabolic vision, injecting her into the spectacle as an unseen, unheard observer. "This is madness" she shouted as a hooded figure touched his lit torch to the pyre that had been built up around the condemned Antonia, and ran into the crowd. "We must stop this, we have to save her!" Her frantic cries went unnoticed, as the bishop pronounced to the wealthy noble, "She cannot be allowed to die until her face is in flames."

*This scene appears in the video clip below, preceded by some context




Thou shall not suffer a witch to live

perhaps the world's most misogynistic book

(Exodus 22:18)


This single line of scripture also appears in Part One, Question 6 of the infamous Malleus Maleficarium (Latin for “The Hammer of Witches”, or “Hexenhammer” in German).

Written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger and first published in Germany in 1487, it went on to become the de facto manual for the witch-hunters and Inquisitors of the Burning Times in Europe - a brutal period spanning the four centuries preceding the Enlightenment.

Ashes and cobwebs have gathered in the dark corners of our collective memory of the time from the late Middle Ages to the early Modern Era when women [and some men] deemed heretics by the Church were ruthlessly persecuted. In her book Shakti Woman self-described radical feminist healer, independent scholar and wisdom teacher Vicki Noble sweeps them away, revealing the still smoldering embers of remembrance of "the incredible loss of nine million 'witches' (women healers)" (1991, pp. 2-3) still glowing in our psyches.

Noble writes of the Malleus Malleficarum:

This book charged women, in the lewd details that sprang from the repressed minds of the Catholic clergy, with all manner of lust and fornication. But most prominently this book declared in no uncertain terms that any woman who was successful at healing was by definition a witch and would be burned. Children were forced to watch their mothers burn at the stake, and women were routinely raped, violated, and tortured until they confessed to anything the Inquisitors accused them of. (1991, p. 192)

According to Noble, the virulence of the Church's enforced celibacy erupted in the mass acting-out of this most noxious of medieval treatises' prescriptions for identifying and dispatching witches. Women were accused of being “carnal” at the core, the source of every temptation for men, linked with evil, sin, and degradation.

THE WITCHES SABBATH German, 1510. C.E.

Brazen nakedness was a sign of witches' evil nature

Once held as sacred, female body now represented depravity

The "blaming of the flesh" (Sanchez-Grant, 2008, p. 89) - and its harsh punishment - was part of every Inquisitor's playbook as the female body (seen as naturally unstable, deficient, unruly) became a site of oppression.

In the fevered and repressed minds of the witch-hunters, if sex = evil (Stone, 1976), the punishment must fit the crime.

I hesitated to post the image below due to its graphic nature, but after consulting with Rebecca I decided to go ahead and put it up because it's actually one of the tamer representations of the interrogation by sexual torture inflicted upon accused witches. 

It comes from an excellent slideshow on About.com on the persecution of witches and witchcraft where you'll find other such period illustrations that rival today's most hard-core pornography.

*PLEASE NOTE* We believe that no matter how dark and disturbing, we can't deny our history lest we be doomed to repeat it. However, we do feel some images are just too graphic and offensive for display at the PPT. To view a woodcut depicting the true depth of the depravity of the sexual torture of accused witches (and information on the origins of witchcraft, influences on our modern perceptions of witches, etc.) see Garden of the Witch

According to Noble (1991), the late American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian Mary Daly would cite a parallel between the killing and maiming of women in large numbers during that time to the modern practices of gynecology.

In this vein, Arisika Razak writes of "the cultural rape of women by the dominant health care model" - a model that has usurped the woman-centered and woman-dominated profession of midwifery and placed birthing in the hands of "an obstetric speciality that accepts the myth of the dangerous womb and the hostile vagina" (1991, pp. 165 & 171). She continues that under the Newtonian and Cartesian worldview, the body was seen as a functional machine. The male body was he perfect expression of that machine; the female most imperfect and scarcely worth study. Under this logic, which persists today, the medical profession casually removes the sexual parts of women; breasts, uteri, and ovaries - and a hundred years ago, clitorises.

Interestingly, Razak notes that since pain in labor was sen by the medieval Church as God's punishment to wisdom-seeking Eve, midwives in the Middle Ages were burned as witches for the sin of seeking herbs to reduce women's pain.

The About.com gallery covers witch hunt and Inquisition-related topics ranging from the suppression of dissent & outsiders, Church depictions of witches & witchcraft, and how misogynistic, patriarchal attitudes fed the fear of witches to the persecution of women, torture implements used, witch hunts in America, and witches as scapegoats.

If you're curious (and brave) I encourage you to check out these valuable resources to learn about this shameful time during which the Catholic church seized all property of the witches it murdered and became rich as a result of the plunder; centuries from which records tell of whole villages where all the women were wiped out (Noble, 1991).

Implications of this Barbarous History for Today's World

I hate the disagree with ya, Nan Flanagan, but what happened in Salem, MA in the terrifying year of 1692 when nineteen men and women were hanged as witches, one man was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to confess, and several more people died in jail can't just be chalked up to, "just a bunch of neurotic Puritanettes who needed a good lay". 

The same formula that led to the conflagrations of the Burning Times (fear + trigger = scapegoat) was at play in Salem and still operates in the modern world - as evidenced most recently by last week's terrorist attacks against multiculturalism in Norway that claimed the lives of more than 70 people.

And we are still living in a culture in which, as Razak writes, "male participation in the acts of sexuality and procreation have become so equated with the acting out of hostility, physical oppression, and fear that rape, incest, and sexual abuse and murder of children, and the battering of women have become health issues of pandemic proportions" (1991, p. 165). This is certainly not to brush all men with the broad strokes of modern-day Inquisitors, but the larger societal patterns Razak speaks of are undeniable. 

The Salem Witch Museum serves as an educational resource for the lessons of that time applied to the present day. My husband and I visited in 2005 and I still have our admission stickers glued to my wallet:

 

There we saw an exhibit asking visitors to consider the phenomenon of witch hunting in the context of contemporary examples of witch hunts: the Japanese-American internment after Pearl Harbor, the McCarthy hearings on Communism and the persecution of the gay community at the start of the AIDS epidemic - these examples of the fear + trigger = scapegoat formula bring the lessons of stereotyping and prejudice full circle.

For some people, Marnie and her circle & their alternative religious practices/lifestyle might just fit the scapegoat bill. Who are the other scapegoats, what other witch hunts are under way today?

Thoughts?

~ Rachel

Transcription credits to Fangs, Wands & Fairy Dust

References

Noble, V. (1991). Shakti woman: Feeling our fire, healing our world. The new female shamanism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Razak, A. (1991). Toward a Womanist Analysis of Birth. In Orenstein, G.F. (Eds.), Reweaving the world: The emergence of ecofeminism. (pp. 165-172). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.