Allusions to the Feminine in Season 4 of True Blood, OR, Has the Season of the Witch Brought Compelling, Multidimensional Female Characters to the Screen?

And since we're talking about the Season of the Witch, I've noticed that the past five episodes have been rich with to the allusions to the Feminine.

For example:

Moon Goddess Emporium
The sacred, feminine-feeling space Marnie and her eclectic circle of Wiccans call their own.

Luna
This newly-introduced character's name is evocative of the elusive, watery moon-governed depths associated with the Feminine.

Sookie's being gone for thirteen months, the number of moon cycles in a solar year.


As The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World's Sacred Feminine Hallie Iglehart Austen (1990) writes, The Great Goddess of Laussel (left) points to her belly with left hand, and in her right she holds a horned crescent notched with thirteen lines, representing the ancient honoring of the mysteries of the female body. In this image is reflected the waxing and waning of the moon parallelled by the ebb and flow of menstrual blood; it embodies the wisdom of non-linear, cyclic time - spiraling eternal growth.


According to Austen, in the French limestone cave where this relief is found, "The soot of countless fires has darkened the ceilings, and the floors have been beaten down by many feet" (1990, p. 6). Indeed, She once pervaded.

On her gorgeous website The Suppressed Histories Archives, Max Dashu explains that rock murals, clay and bronze pots, and countless figurines recovered from archaeological sites worldwide show that in the earliest cultures, representations of humans were almost exclusively female.

These recurring signs reflect spiritual concerns and ritual & everyday life of the people who created them.








Commonalities recur in artifacts of diverse archaic cultures; same patterns appear in more recent indigenous societies in the Americas, Africa, parts of Asia. Austen (1990) writes that for 25,000 years the female body was revered as sacred. The hold of the Goddess may go back much farther.

According to Ward (2006) some of the earliest work of human art in existence consists of female figures dating to at least a quarter million years old.

For example, the Berekhat Ram Figurine, a small yellowish-brown pebble the size of a jellybean (left) found in the Golan Heights in 1981, is dated to approximately 233,000 B.C.E. - a time when early humans weren't even supposed to have developed symbolic thinking, or even language yet. In fact, this carving dates to 100,000 before the appearance of Homo sapiens; the race that carved it was only just evolving into "us". And yet, one of them thought to shape a woman out of a small stone.

How might living in such a culture make you feel about women? The world?

This was not art as we know it, to be displayed on a museum shelf. Though these figurines, the Goddess truly lived amongst her people; they have been caressed, danced with, sung to, had oils and ochre rubbed into them.

Acheulian Goddess
Golan Heights, 800,000 yrs. old

Great Goddess of Willendorf
Europe, 25,000 B.C.E.

Imagine holding one of these Goddesses in your hand.

Feel her roundness, the comforting security of it.

Imagine carrying her throughout your day’s work…on your travels, sleeping with her beside your bed, waking up beside her (Austen, 1990, pp. 4-5) as our Paleolithic and Neolithic ancestors did.

How might being in such close contact and communion with Her form change your relationship to the female body?

Austen implores us to imagine a world in which images like the Great Goddess of Laussel were carved over the entrances to our houses of worship, or over our supermarkets and schools. She seems to be asking how a cityscape covered with (positive, representative) female images might shift our collective ways of being.

Do you agree that there is a dearth of such female images in our society?

Season 4 of True Blood  may offer a remedy, at least according to writers like John Kubicek of BuddyTv who in his June 24th piece describes it as the Season of the Witch and the Women.

With the addition of "a number of new strong women to the show" via two new female main characters (the powerful witch Marnie & shapeshifter Luna) and the promotion of Nan Flanagan (vampire spokeswoman) and Holly (witchy Merlotte's waitress) to series regulars joining Sookie, Jessica, Tara, Arlene & Pam, Kubicek feels the women really get their chance to shine.

Besides Marnie and Luna, we've also met three new female supporting characters, including the lawyer Portia, Wiccan-cum-vampire security woman Katerina, and Naomi, a cage fighter with an unlikely romantic connection to Tara.

Plus, the credits are now more evenly disbursed in terms of gender, with nine female and ten male primary cast members.

Clearly, Kubicek isn't just talking about quantity, he's also talking about quality.

When he talks about "strong women" on the show I get the impression that he means well-written female characters as opposed to ones who are invulnerable to pain and strife, etc. And goodness knows we need more of those; the lack of good writing for women in Hollywood - not to mention in literature - is what drove Tanya Wright (Deputy Kenya Jones) to pen the script for her film Butterfly Rising, which she later adapted into a novel of the same name. If you can't find solidly written female characters, you've gotta develop them yourself, right?

Here's an archetypal model for such a "strong woman"...

...Look familiar? Yup, this painted terracotta female figure circa 3,500-3,400 B.C.E. was the model for the artifact the maenad Maryann struck the pose of while summoning and channeling her considerable power.

All the other images in this post came from books or websites, but I took the picture above myself; when I visited this pre-dynastic Egyptian figure in person with Rebecca and our mom at its current home in the Brooklyn Museum I was awestruck.

So taken was I by this statuette that I took photos from several angles.


A plaque near its display case reads:


This female figure, shown in a long white skirt, was found in a tomb. Does she represent a goddess, a priestess, or a mourner? Is she grieving, dancing, or manifesting her power?


So striking is this statuette - one of the most famous pre-dynastic works in the world - that all of the museum's educational and PR materials are anointed with its image.

Another similar, "triumphantly female" (Austen, 1990, p. 8) terracotta piece also comes to us from pre-dynastic Egypt:

  

As Austen writes, she emphasizes her breasts and buttocks with a dignity and strength that reminds us of women's power and beauty.

These are compelling, multidimensional female images.

So what do you think, has True Blood stepped up to the plate in terms of writing women characters that bring such strong presence to the screen?

Let us know below!

~ Rachel

References

Austen, H. I. (1990). The heart of the goddess: Art, myth and meditations of the world’s sacred feminine. Berkeley: Wingbow Press.

Dashu, M. Icons of the Matrix. Retrieved March 15, 2011 from: http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/icons.html

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

FIRST TASTE: GUEST BARTENDING AT THE SIREN'S CONFERENCE

Here's your first taste of the GUEST BARTENDING feature that will be on the PPT's menu for season 4's analysis and commentary...


...LORENA FANS TAKE NOTE...


The Pierced Pomegranate Tavern will be setting up shop from October 6–9, 2011, at the Vail Cascade Resort and Spa in Vail, Colorado!


Rachel will be giving a talk at the Sirens conference; a networking retreat and academic conference dedicated to women in fantasy literature, providing perspectives on fantasy books by women, female characters in fantasy works, and how to support women in fantasy literature.


Within its focus on fantastic women, each year Sirens features a fantasy-related theme—and in 2011, the theme is "monsters"! Conference programming will examine and dissect monstrous characters and themes of monstrousness. As the Sirens site points out, women have too often been decried as "monsters," and examples of monsters and questions of monstrousness pervade fantasy literature. Sirens honored guests for 2011 are Justine Larbalestier, Nnedi Okorafor, and Laini Taylor, each of whom has written of female characters who may—or may not—be monsters.


Here's an overview of Rachel's presentation:

Title: Annihilating HER Again: How Eroticized Rage Against True Blood’s Vampire Lorena―Avatar of the Monstrous Feminine―Resurrects the Forgotten History of Goddess Culture's Suppression

 

 300-500 word abstract for 50 minute talk

This visual, multimodal and experiential talk revolves around the now infamous final scene of True Blood Season 3, Episode 3 entitled "It Hurts Me Too" which drew the ire of the National Organization for Women for what NOW called a “messed up depiction of women, men, violence, and sex”, prompting its call for feminists to deliver a “thanks but no thanks” message to HBO. 

When it aired on June 27, 2010 I watched—eyes wide and jaws agape—as during what some call an act of “hate sex,” vampire Bill Compton hurled his maker Lorena to the bed, tore off her clothes, and twisted her neck, turning her face to the floor as he forcefully thrust into her. Despite his contempt and brutality—and with blood dripping from her mouth—Lorena told Bill that she still loves him. This explicit rendering of eroticized rage shocked me at a gut level akin to the way feminist scholar Vicki Noble describes women’s response to the obscene prevalence of rape: “We experience our collective annihilation repeatedly, psychically and physically as a woman is raped every thirteen seconds in North America…”.¹

And yet, I can’t condemn or denounce this deliberately unsettling scene; in my view it raises vital issues that are better addressed through thoughtful dialogue than censure and several questions ripe for discourse spring immediately to mind: 

o    If Lorena is as NOW suggests the classic “bitch” archetype; the monstrous Feminine—a characterization that reduces her to a monolith—how might this comment on our culture which has long fragmented and demonized the Feminine? What kind of cultural context would need to exist for us to think differently?

o    Why does this scene disturb us so? Is it too hard to reconcile the genteel and romantic Bill Compton with his willful despoiling of Lorena; his determination to utterly ruin her—and harder still for us to place such a rapacious mindset not at the margins of dominant culture, but at its center?

o    Could Bill's pillage and defilement of Lorena be seen as a visceral rearticulation for a contemporary audience of mythologies depicting the slaying of the Great Goddess by the warrior god as peaceful, egalitarian society was supplanted by patriarchy some five millennia ago―the collective memory of which still pulses in our modern psyches?

Drawing upon 800,000 years of art, myth, histories and poetry and amplifying leading voices in feminist thought, archaeomythology, women's studies, and Goddess scholarship not often heard in mainstream discourse, we will explore these charged concepts and more. Tracing the intriguing parallels between the difficult-to-digest imagery “It Hurts Me Too” confronts us with and the mythologies of Goddesses dismembered, slain or made subordinate to male gods which represent the rupture from a Goddess-centered world to “dominator” world of today, we will open a discourse on contemporary issues like gender relations, sex and sexuality, attitudes towards autonomous women, and rape as a dominant social and cultural metaphor for behavior. We will identify new models for a “partnership” social structure. 

1.      Vicki Noble, Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World (New York: HarperOne, 1991), p. 3.

Any thoughts?


I hear the host resort, which combines the conveniences of a modern hotel with the laid-back, friendly atmosphere of a mountain retreat, is amazing, and with its great room rates during the beautiful fall season in the Rocky Mountains, as well as a discount on most services at their acclaimed spa, maybe that's enough to lure you to Vail to join us?


~ Rachel  

Here's the True Blood Reenacts the Goddess Persephone's Ordeal of Abduction and Rape...or Self-Directed Sexual Initiation? Opening a Vein on Woman-Centered Sexuality conference paper; you can view it in fullscreen mode by clicking on the 1st button on the left-hand side of the Scribd taskbar below

PCA ACA True Blood Conference Paper With Citations and Corresponding Slide Numbers

Here's a sneak peek BEHIND THE SCENES: True Blood Reenacts the Goddess Persephone's Ordeal of Abduction and Rape...or Self-Directed Sexual Initiation? Opening a Vein on Woman-Centered Sexuality

It's 4:23AM. Rachel sits alone on the couch. The house is quiet except for the furious clacking of her fingers on her laptop keyboard. Her eyes are blurry and close involuntarily from time to time, but she is determined...

So how'd you like my spoof of the True Blood S4 teasers HBO has been releasing? So far we've had brief scenes of amnesia Eric, Eric & Bill, Jason & Crystal, Sam & new female character (sorry, don't recall her name) and Pam, Tara, Jesus & company introduced by the disembodied voice over orienting us to the action I tried to mime above. Did I miss any?

So what's my teaser all about? I mentioned a while back, I'll be presenting a visual talk exploring issues of sexuality and representation through the lens of True Blood at the PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations joint conference, in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area: Special Area: True Blood track in just a few weeks...(wipes sweat from brow, assures self presentation will be ready in time...steels self for 2 more weeks of living the vamp life by default, working on prepping my talk all night, in bed with the sunrise).

Now, this may seem like a pretty cool rock-star lifestyle and all, except for the fact that I don't have the luxury of going underground or hunkering down in a coffin all day...so the whole sleep deprivation thing is rather bothersome and the bleeds are sort of difficult to explain when working 9-5...


we were 1st introduced to the phenomenon of the bleeds during this scene, S2

...But anyway, I digress...the real point of this post is to pull the veil back a bit and give you a sneak peek of what is to come at the conference next month.

You may have noticed that we put out a teaser of sorts via Twitter with some shots of Neolithic goddess replicas I've been sucking up for the presentation.

My talk is entitled: True Blood Reenacts the Goddess Persephone's Ordeal of Abduction and Rape...or Self-Directed Sexual Initiation? Opening a Vein on Woman-Centered Sexuality. What do you think these images may have to do with it?



Persephone's return



Willendorf



Green Gulch Tara

 Oh well, you'll just have to stay tuned to find out, won't you?

;-0

And please do stay tuned for the frothy confection on groupies & fangbangers that Rebecca's mixing up, to be served here at the PPT soon!


~ Rachel 

Raise a Glass to Real Grrrl Power: Women in Solidarity Part IV: The Final 3 Themes

In this image as opposed to word-dense post, let's take a look at some alternatives to female rivalry and competition from the past and present in a slide show of sorts following these themes which sprang from the screen on True Blood:

• women sharing support, connection & compassion
• allies, helpers & guides
• women united in ritual

WOMEN SHARING SUPPORT, CONNECTION & COMPASSION

Psychoanalyst Jean Baker Miller has written that, "women stay with, build on, and develop in a context of attachment and affiliation with others" (Lowinsky, 1992, p. 55). Essentially, we need other women to become, and be, ourselves. The media and popular entertainment often show us a terrain of women's interpersonal relationships with one another pockmarked by strife and discord. Let's take a look at a few  images from True Blood to the contrary:


Tara experiences the support of other women rape survivors


 

Arlene hires Holly





Holly provides Arlene with moral support and empathy



Sookie and Jessica have a warming relationship

  



These True Blood images have some counterparts from archaic history.

As you can read in the notes associated with the left-hand image below, it depicts two women; perhaps sisters, mother and daughter, or lovers. The image comes from a temple in India; it is a representation of the way in which women were often shown together interacting in loving and beautiful ways in ancient times. It is much the same with the right-hand image depicting two women pouring libations together. The left-hand image comes from the book Shakti Woman by Vicki Noble - the author suggests that only under patriarchy did women become estranged from one another and competitive in relation to men. The image on the right comes from expert on female iconography Max Dashu's website http://www.suppressedhistories.net/index.html 

 

Looks kinda like Tara and Sookie in the shot below, huh?

ALLIES, HELPERS & GUIDES

Sookie's encountered quite a few allies, helpers, and guides of the female persuasion in Season 3 of True Blood:   


Claudine outstretches a helping hand to Sookie



Sookie & Claudine



Janine oversees Sookie's Lou Pines makeover




Tara orchestrates Sookie's escape from
the King of Mississippi's captivity






Yvetta helps Sookie escape from Eric's dungeon

 Do you see any parallels between the True Blood images above and these ones:

As Austen (1990) writes, on the left we see Nut, the Egyptian Goddess of  Death and Rebirth welcoming a dead noblewoman into her arms juxtaposed with an image representing the woman who was placed inside the coffin. When the casket was closed, the deceased would be able to look directly into the eyes of the Goddess who welcomed her into eternity. Nut, the Mother who gives life, was waiting to comfort and nurture.

On the right, we see Isis leading Queen Nofretari. This scene, dated to 1300 B.C.E. is painted on a wall of the queen's tomb and the inscription reads: Isis speaks: Come, Nofretari, beloved of the Goddess Nut, without fault, that I may show thee thy place in the sacred world (Austen, 1990, p. 48).
 

Here, we see ancient and contemporary images of divine and mortal allies, helpers, and guides which stand in stark contrast to the images of female conflict and rivalry we've seen.  

On her website "The Suppressed Histories Archives: Real Women, Global Vision" Max Dashu speaks of elder women leading and guiding younger women in womanhood initiations and coming of age ceremonies. These are cross-cultural rites of "seclusion, vision-seeking, body-painting, instruction by elders, and the dance of new women before the entire community, in sacred regalia, with cowrie strands, masks, beaded veils, layers of cloth, new belts or the long skirts of adult women...These rites are now being reclaimed - in some places they were never lost, in many they were crushed, and in others, where they were turned to enforcing masculine dominance, many women are choosing to change harmful practices while keeping the sacred core of the most ancient traditions" http://www.suppressedhistories.net/catalog/spheres.html.

Not only have women led each other in becoming, they have led and continue to lead each other, their families, and their communities in overcoming. 

Max Dashu speaks of rebel shamans - indigenous women in solidarity with one another - confronting empire. "Priestesses, diviners, and medicine women stand out as leaders of aboriginal liberation movements against conquest, empire, and cultural colonization". http://www.suppressedhistories.net/catalog/shamanliberators.html

Dashu's visual presentation Rebel Shamans introduces us to female shamans and leaders who led resistance movements; here are some of those she covers:

Wanakhucha, the mganga priestess who led the Zigula exodus out of slavery in Somalia; Veleda of the Bructerii (Netherlands), Dahia al-Kahina (Tunisia), the Kumari of Taleju (Nepal), Jeanne d'Arc (France), Tang Saier (China), Juana Icha (Peru), Kimba Vita (Congo), Maria Candelaria (Chiapas), Queen Nanny of the Maroons (Jamaica), Cécile Fatiman (Haiti), Antonia Luzia (Brazil), Toypurina (Tongva Nation, California), the Prophetess of Chupu (Chumash Nation), Wanankhucha (Somalia), Lozen (Apache Nation), Teresa de Cabora (Mayo, Sonora), Nehanda Nyakasikana (Zimbabwe), Muhumusa (Uganda), Nomtetha Nkwenkwe (Xhosa, South Africa), Alinesitoué Diatta (Senegal). Please visit her website for more information and images!

Here's a book on my reading list: The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion by China Galland. According to the editorial review, Galland draws inspiration from her travels in Asia and Latin America where she meets women of extraordinary activism who are battling the scourge of child prostitution, demonstrating against murderous dictatorship, and quietly, but no less dramatically, working to increase literacy amongst poor women and children and de-polluting rivers.

These are women joined to one another in their work for justice and healing, like the mothers of the "disappeared" in Argentina who bear witness against the government that stole the lives of their children. You can see some of these mothers of the disappeared united in struggle and rememberance in the U2 concert footage below; on U2's album The Joshua Tree there is a song called "Mothers of the Disappeared" which you'll hear along with the video:




Pretty moving, right?

WOMEN UNITED IN RITUAL

On her website Max Dashi writes that spiritual spheres of power have been crucial staging areas for women's political leadership, for challenging systems of domination, and for making change. Women can connect to one another and form bonds through spiritual and ritual expression; these images from True Blood illustrate that:

In Arlene's time of need, Holly joined with her in a powerful ritual that even if it wasn't effective in terms of eliminating her unwanted pregnancy, gave her renewed sense that she could trust another woman and feel empowered to control her body.  

Look at these images from archaic history of women joined in ritual; the first comes from Elinor Gadon's The Once and Future Goddess - here we see females, maybe Goddesses, maybe her priestesses, joined together in the esctatic dance that was part of Goddess religious devotion. The second is a plate from Max Dashu's Suppressed Histories illustrating a similar scene:  

 Do you see any resemblance between these ancient images of woman-centered religious activity and the one from True Blood below?

We can see that traditions of women's solidarity have lived in our past and continue to live in our future; both in the new mythology of True Blood and in our real lives as well.

So what, you ask?

I'll talk about why women's solidarity matters in the fifth and final installment of this Real Grrrl Power series!

Stay Tuned!

~ Rachel

References

Austen, H. I. (1990). The heart of the goddess: Art, myth and meditations of the world’s sacred feminine. Berkeley: Wingbow Press

Gadon, E. W. (1989). The once and future Goddess. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco

Lowinsky, N.R. (1992). Stories from the motherline: Reclaiming the mother-daughter bond, finding our feminine souls. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.

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

Real Grrrl Power: Women in Solidarity Part I 1/2 - Metaphoric Mind 101 and an Invitation to Plug Into Yours!

For Starters...What I'm Drinking

As I sit down to write this installment in the "Real Grrrl Power: Women in Solidarity" series, I am sipping my second mug in as many days of the decoction that's been most effective in the war I'm waging against the cold that crept up on me over Thanksgiving weekend: fresh garlic tea. Yep, you heard correctly, and yep, it's exactly what you think it is: boiling water poured over one clove of garlic, chopped, infused with honey for sweetness and added healing power. It doesn't taste half bad, if I do say so myself...



Royce brandishing garlic press during Bill's DGD talk





...(granted, I'm not a garlic sensitive vampire), and it's got the virus on the run!!!

*Requisite disclaimer* This anecdote is intended as comic insight into the gustatory lengths I'm willing to go to in my quest to rid myself of this cold naturally, NOT as medical advice (seriously, you knew that already, didn't you?) - but I digress...



A Primer on One Approach to Engaging with Our Archeomythology-Style Analyses of True Blood  
Subsequent posts in this series (and, no doubt, future entries in The Pierced Pomegranate Tavern as well) will tend towards the story and image-dense; it occurs to me that engaging with these types of expression require a somewhat different way of sensing and thinking than we generally use when we engage with straight-up print on the page.  

So, to help you get the most out of this series (and future ones) I've decided to take a brief time out from confronting female rivalry and conflict head-on to introduce you to the concept of the metaphoric mind and to share some approaches that might help you plug into yours. 

SO HERE'S THE SET-UP...

The Metaphoric Mind and The Importance of Image and Story
The Primacy of the Image
Cosmologist Brian Swimme suggests that from our present understanding, human culture dates back some 200,000 years (Mendel, 2009); artifacts unearthed from the enormous time span covering more than 30,000 years of human history from the upper Paleolithic (35,000-9000 B.C.E.) forward testify to the symbolic behavior that exploded from within our ancestors from the Ice Age to the Late Classical Age (Gadon, 1989).

From this time of deepest history, our ancient forebearers perceived the world with a metaphoric mind; as Jewish mystic and rebbetzin Heather Mendel writes (2009, p. 13), they were not writers but artists - creators of carvings, reliefs, vessels, and figurines whose

...legacy to us was made of the Earth. It came from the depths of being. They shaped the warm, living clay, slippery-soft solid silk, firmly in their hands. They strengthened it by flame and decorated its hardened surfaces with a painted language of symbols - not words, but a language nonetheless, telling of their lives, of their interpretation of Divinity 

According to Mendel, whereas our "father's house" (the cultural context of the patriarchal era), is built upon the written word which corresponds to the left-brained, linear-rational approach privileged in the Western milieu, the pillars of our "great-grandmother's house" (archaic cultures: Ice Age, Old Europe as described by Marija Gimbutas, Çatal Hüyük as described by James Mellaart, the pre-patriarchal Mediterranean, Near, & Middle East and Africa, etc.) were modes of expression that flow from what neuroscientists describe as right lobe functions - the grounding of our abilities to emote and to feel, to appreciate the rhythms of music or speech, and to recognize images in a holistic manner.

Thus, our distant ancestors used the vocabulary of "imaginative stories, creative arts, and belief systems that form cultural underpinnings and tell of the inner life of the human family" to make meaning of reality and to structure their lives and relationships.

What survives from this long past era is not written history but iconic history; the rock murals, clay and bronze pots, and countless figurines - which were in the earliest human cultures almost exclusively female (originally interpreted as "fertility fetishes" they are now seen as representations of what archeomythologist Marija Gimbutas calls "The Great Goddess of Birth, Death and Regeneration"; the godhead of the time) - which as Mendel suggests speak to us of how these ancients viewed themselves, related to each other, understood the ultimate mysteries of life, and imagined Divinity:


hair washing scene in North African rock mural



The Great Goddess of Willendorf, Europe, 25,000 B.C.E.



women on archaic Greek vase



The Great Goddess of Laussel, Europe, 20,000 B.C.E.



Can you imagine the power 

these images held for the peoples

whose lives they utterly suffused?







various female icons 










For more of this kind of art and imagery, please check out:
http://www.heartgoddess.net/
http://www.goddesstimeline.com/index.php
http://www.savagebreastbook.com/photos.php
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/index.html

The potency and resonance of these age-old icons point to the enormous influence have on us even today, in our literate and lettered culture within which text and visual images tend to have an "uneasy and unequal relationship on the page" (Silko, 1996, p 167).

As Hallie Iglehart Austen writes in The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World's Sacred Feminine (1990), pictures speak to our hearts and our guts - those in the visual media (like True Blood) and advertising of today included. She suggests that it's hard to obscure the message of an image, since unlike words which can be mistranslated, pictures speak directly to us.

When we use images  - from True Blood or from other sources - to evoke a particular feeling or mindset, or as part of our approach to analysis, please try to take them in not as what Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today author Leslie Marmon Silko calls "embellishments put to the service of the text" (1996, 167), but as modes of expression that can convey an essence of meaning. 

HERE'S AN EXAMPLE USING MY CURRENT SERIES ON FEMALE RIVALRY AND CONFLICT: True Blood has shown us some plenty-powerful representations of women's relationships with one another, especially this past season (S3). 

...some of which graphically depict what Naomi Wolf describes in her GIRL VS. GIRL Harper's piece as "the dark side of female rivalry"; in the case of Sookie and Debbie, it's taken to the extreme...

video clip courtesy:

http://twilog.net/2010/08/i-wanna-do-bad-things-with-you-true-blood-recap-season-3-episode-8/

...and others that display striking - and at times completely unexpected - shows of female solidarity; images that seem to counter what Wolf suggests, "an antifeminist world wants to say of us—that we can't create workable teams, we can't lead effectively, and we are indeed treacherous and bitchy"?

 Here, Lorena soothes Bill's Civil War era wife Caroline Compton. We were led to believe that Lorena meant to "turn" Caroline or perhaps kill her when the camera panned over Bill recoiling in horror after professing that he would not allow his maker to harm his wife in the previous scene, but what really happened was that Bill - barely able to control his hunger - had, as Lorena said, already done enough to hurt Caroline by returning to the home they shared and making himself known to her not as the husband she had known and loved but as a vampire. Out of expediency (another of Bill's messes to clean up), pity - or perhaps in solidarity with a woman who was hurting as she herself had once hurt in life, Lorena comforts Caroline and insists that Bill show her his love by "making her forget".

As you let these images wash over you, try plugging into your metaphoric mind - let it bring you into contact with the way the world is - and was - understood by humanity's long line of artists, storytellers, and poets.

Did you try it? Did this approach enhance your engagement with the images in any way? Bring you deeper into their impact or meaning? No!?! Try again!

Can you see how these and other images from True Blood might be connected to other images from the past or present that also tell stories for the psyche (how depth psychologist Carl Jung described myth); how they might carry along cultural currents, or recapitulate deeply felt archetypal themes? How they might loop into and illuminate these kinds of shared experiences - which that may be part of YOUR lived experience?

Maybe this has been part of your strategy for interpreting True Blood all along, like the folks over at a TB blog I recently discovered which appears to overlap somewhat with ours in terms of approach: The Ancient Pythonness seem to do.

I'll bet that if you practice this approach each time you encounter imagery - whether it be in the remaining installations in this series on female rivalry and conflict, future Pierced Pomegranate Tavern entries that rely heavily upon the visual, or even out there in the wider world - you might just find that your way of perceiving pictures and three-dimensional art like sculpture shifts, deepens even.

So give it a shot!    

Image and Story Are Connected; Stories (like True Blood) Tap Into An Alternative Consciousness
This should come as no surprise...Silko writes that in the Pueblo view, "From the spoken word, or storytelling, comes the written word, as well as the visual image" (1996, p. 21). This motif of connection between words and images, stories and art was alive in pre-modern societies as well; the myths and oral histories which have come down to us from old contain kernels of ancient wisdom that are accessible to us now.     

Even today, humans are storytelling beings; we lead storied lives. The story is a basic communicative and meaning-making device pervasive in the human experience; it's an attempt to explain and understand what is happening to us. Stories are an innate activity by which we strive to establish who we are in the changing contexts of our lives.

Ever heard soap operas referred to as "stories"? 'Cause that's exactly what they are! Those shows like General Hospital, One Life To Live, and All My Children - sometimes derided as trifling forms of entertainment since they're mainly aimed at...GASP...women - follow a non-linear, "looping" associative style in which the narratives unfurl that is evocative of what Lowinsky (1992) calls the "mother tongue" as well as of the way Silko (1996) describes qualities of Pueblo narrative - a story within a story that incorporates both positive and negative aspects of family and clan history, the idea that one story is only the beginning of many stories and the sense that stories never truly end.

As Lowinsky writes, these kind of stories weave back and forth through generations, in the familiar flow of "women's talk". She contrasts action shows on T.V. in which "the myth is heroic; the hero defeats the villain, right and wrong are clearly defined, courage and strength are virtues" with soaps in which "the myth is matriarchal; fate takes a hand with the good as well as the bad, relationships are complex and of central importance, betrayal is an ever-present possibility, miscarriages, deaths, sudden illnesses, and axe murderers spring out of the shadows at hapless humans" (1992, p. 15).

Sound familiar? Substitute shifters, vampires, weres, or telepathic waitresses for the hapless humans above and we've got True Blood, haven't we? True Blood is considered by some to be a "vampire soap" and it is just that in many respects (communal focus, story structure). In these ways the show seems linked to the literary tradition out of which contemporary novels like A Weave of Women by E.M. Broner and The Red Tent by Anita Diamant flow - poetic books that celebrate and give to voice women's mysteries, that express the ancient continuity and unity of women, and that point to the strength of interconnection and interdependence with others.

It's a feast for the metaphoric mind, indeed!      

TO SUM UP; in our analyses of True Blood that use an archeomythology-style approach, images and stories of the past and present meet, and little-known histories are dusted off and mingled with symbology and mythology in the making.

I hope that I've encouraged you to try plugging into your metaphoric mind to get the most out of them as well as given you some tools with which to do so!

Maybe you'll even look at True Blood in a new light.

In my next post I use several compelling themes which arose from a sampling of images I found depicting women's relationships in True Blood to organize my thoughts as I take on "girl-on-girl combat" and look for alternatives to it. Be sure to bring your metaphoric thinking caps!

~ Rachel

References

Austen, H. I. (1990). The heart of the goddess: Art, myth and meditations of the world’s sacred feminine. Berkeley: Wingbow Press

Gadon, E. W. (1989). The once and future Goddess. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco

Lowinsky, N.R. (1992). Stories from the motherline: Reclaiming the mother-daughter bond, finding our feminine souls. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.

Mendel, H. (2009). Dancing in the footsteps of Eve. Washington: O Books.

Silko, L.M. (1996). Yellow woman and a beauty of the spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.