"You Smell Like Dinner"

Your blood tastes like freedom, Sookie; like sunshine in a pretty blond bottle.
                                                                            ~Eric Northman

As I sit here nursing a ginger ale on the rocks, I wonder if maybe it isn't high time for Sookie to start wearing a different eu de toilette. I mean, after all, Eric isn't the only one who has "complimented" her on her scent, in a more-menacing-than-admiring kind of way. You haven't forgotten Liam's "Man, she smells fuckin' sweet!" (S1E3 Mine), have you? I doubt Sookie has, either.

Thing is, there's no lotion, potion, body splash, perfume, or other such fragrance-emitting product that's responsible for the way Sookie smells.

In Season 3 Sookie began to struggle with her identity and self-worth after discovering that it's her blood - and its scent and taste; the delicate bouquet (in S4E3 If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'? Eric sniffs the air, catching her perfume which he can only describe as being "Like wheat, honey and sunlight") and exquisite flavor of it that has drawn Bill, and perhaps others as well, to her. She starts to think that it's not her - not who she is, but how she tastes; how her blood can service others - that matters. She's just the [pretty] packaging. 

And everyone, meaning every supe, has noticed. Her special palate, that is - although perhaps one might be sensitive to her growing sense of self-doubt, too.

Lorena may have hated Sookie, but she sure didn't mind her taste: "No wonder Bill was drawn to you. You're delicious.” (S3E7 Hitting the Ground).

While Bill insisted to Sookie, "it is not your blood I love. I love you. Your heart, your mind, your soul... you have brought light back into my life", he did admit that hers was, "the most delicious blood I've ever tasted" (S3E10 I Smell A Rat).

Last season, upon meeting Sookie - decked out in a lacy white top and cute denim mini; looking as much the fish out of water at Lou Pines as anyone likely could - Alcide's werewolf bouncer buddy eyed her up and down and quipped, "you look like dinner". In the next scene, if you recall, she was nearly sexually assaulted.

Even good 'ol Sam's thoughts echoed this "you smell good enough to eat" theme when Sookie listened in on him during their G-rated Season 1 canoodle in his office. Is that really any wonder, though, since his go-to shift is a collie, and we all know that man's best friend's nose is a mighty powerful organ! Even still, knowing that her smell is probably a big part of what caused her sexy boss to pine over her for so long has got to be quite a blow for Sookie. 

And the list goes on. The cavalcade of vamps, weres, and shifters itching to get a taste of Sookie seems virtually never ending.

We may well be onto something here, as if the episode's title alone wasn't enough of a hint. In her essay, "The Female Body in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle" Sofia Sanchez-Grant points out society's view that the (patriarchally encoded) female body is consumable.

And not just Sookie's body.

Other women are consumable commodities, too.

Now, of course, I know men are fed on as well, I do watch the show; but I think the sociocultural meaning of some of the examples I've pulled out here makes the consumption of females a little different.

Remember how Eric paid a "blood hooker" so that he could feed on her - and he seemed to prefer that she struggle and pretend that she didn't want it?

And when he consumed Hadley against her will as leverage to get her paramour the Queen to reveal  information about Sookie, he rated the other Stackhouse girl's taste like he was reviewing a take-out joint for the local paper: "Mmm-mmm. I 'd give her three stars." (S3E7 Hitting the Ground).

Speaking of take-out joints, perhaps you'll recall how Russell and Lorena deliberated before commanding Bill to procure a woman from a strip club for their dining pleasure, just like they were ordering off a Chinese food menu:

Russell: In the mood for anything in particular?
Lorena: Someone smoky. Not too fatty.
Russell: See, I was thinking... ethnic.
Lorena: Mm.
(S3E4 9 Crimes)

Once procured, they feasted on this "disposable sex worker" with relish - her blood running out of their limo and onto the ground like a perverse chocolate fountain.

Russell's appetite for "something ethnic" calls to mind the language of "gastronomic sexuality" Raquel Z. Rivera (2003, p. 129) describes as being part of the hip-hop lexicon when it comes to the "sweet, thick, pretty, round and various shades of brown...blackberry molasses to butta pecan" women that populate many rap music videos.

If you remember dancing to Big Pun's hit "Still Not A Player" in the clubs back in the late '90's like I do, you know that blackberry molasses to butta pecan reference above alludes to this song. The line's actually, "I love from butta pecan to blackberry molass' I don't discriminate, I regulate every shade of that ass".

Back in S4E1 the drunkard hanging around the back alley near the cagefighting ring tossed similar language at Tara and Naomi, labeling them for his consuming gaze as: "...some of that chocolate banana swirl...every woman's got a price".

In her essay, "Butta Pecan Mamis: Tropicalized Mamis - 'Chocolate Caliente'" Rivera points out that while the video's camerawork alternating between groups of lighter and comparatively darker-skinned women in order to punctuate the singsong chorus, "Boriqua, Morena" is meant to distinguish between these two groups of women, they come together by virtue of Pun's sexual desire.

According to Rivera, these women are eroticized and exoticized, as Pun lays claim to both Puerto Rican and African American "ghetto brunettes". Boriquas and morenas, "brown" women and "black" women may be distinct, but as he and other artists including Jay Z ("Who You Witt II") and Son Doobie ("XXX Funk") construct them, they are part of a commercialized landscape of desire. Sistas and mamis are "their" women to be consumed.  

Here we have the beginnings of the transcultural reality of the "I-want-them-all" mentality, where women are not real subjects, complex and distinct, but interchangeable; "infinitely substitutable beings" (p. 145).

Tim Ward illustrates this concept clearly. In his book Savage Breast: One Man's Search for the Goddess (2005, p. 28) he recalls a translation of old Tibetan meditations that contained his ultimate sexual fantasy:

The sutra instructed the reader to visualize a Bodhisattva sitting in meditation while he projects 200 emanations of himself, each one appearing to a dakini, a powerful and beautiful female spirit. Immediately the 200 dakinis become sexually magnetized to his 200 emanations, and they couple in passionate embrace. To each feminine spirit, the Bodhisattva appears as if he is the only one, and each of them gives herself completely to him. But the true Bodhisattva, he sits alone in his meditation in perfect detached repose. I realized that this was my fantasy, to have every beautiful woman magnetized to me so I could enjoy them all, while giving myself emotionally to none of them. That's what I wanted with the women I had affairs with. Not that I ever once said that I loved them, ever once tried to fool them. Is that evil? I don't know. I don't think so. Is it shitty? Well, I imagine the dakinis would be pretty pissed off at the Bodhisattva is they knew... 

He wanted them all - all for his consumption.

In the sphere of the commercial consumption of female sexuality, women are "indispensible as members of the collective at the core of male pleasure - females, honeys, hotties, bitches, hoes, freaks, chickenheads, pigeons, chicks - they are branded with the 'mark of the plural' that makes them expendable and easily substitutable as individuals" (Rivera, 2003, p. 147).   

Sookie deflects Eric's characterization of her as being consumable; his leering gaze as he utters the phrase, "Well, aren't you sweet" suggesting that she is, in fact, as Rivera (2003, p. 127) writes of the six chocolate-drenched young women [of color - chocolate caliente] swirling in a cup of hot cocoa on the cover of the 1998 rap album The Rude Awakening "sexily awaiting ingestion". Sookie replies, "Not really." (S1E4 Escape from Dragon House)

So she's seen as consumable alright, even though she's like not to be - but perhaps not so interchangable. There's something different about her that sets her apart, that makes her extra-special-tasty. References to Sookie's "sweetness" are constant; no doubt, they are a marker of her "alignment with the good" which makes her not unlike Dracula's Mina Harker. In the words of the character Abraham Van Helsing, the fictional Mina is:

...one of God's women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a Heaven where we can enter, and that its light [emphasis mine, sound familiar?] can be here on earth...so true, so sweet, so noble...(p. 226)

According to Susan Parlour (2009), the text of Dracula is littered with references to Mina's sweetness, who, though she transgressed the role of women in Victorian society to a certain degree, was readmitted to the patriarchal machine due, largely in part, to her sexual reticence and acceptance of the sexual mores and etiquette of the times.

Likewise, might Sookie be seen as an avatar of virtuous and virginal [white] womanhood? After all, according to prevailing stereotypes at least, women of color are more primal and sexual but in the world of True Blood the taste of virgin blood is the best of all, second only to baby's blood. When she was a virgin, Sookie's blood was covetted, to be sure...but like butta pecanness, her fairy blood's got an enticing flavor all its own that makes her a highly sought after commodity.       

She does it again, thowing off amnesia Eric's hungry advances in Season 4's 3rd episode, yelling at him, "I'm not your fucking dinner!". Later in the episode, she reminds Eric of how he tasted her against her will; that he basically "fang raped" her. He seemed genuinely taken aback and sorry.

Must we be seen as essentially edible? And if we are, does this essentialism isolate us within our conmumable bodies from other facets of ourselves, i.e. the "masculine" brain and the "feminine" body?

Atwood's character Joan rejects the multi-breasted Diana of Ephesus as a symbol of "the essence of femininity itself"(2003, p. 80).

It is, rather, a "paradigm of the patriarchally controlled female body"  (2003, p. 80):

She had a serene face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. She was draped in breasts from neck to ankle, as though inflicted with a case of yaws: little breasts at top and bottom, big ones around the middle. The nipples were equipped with sprouts, but several of the breasts were out of order.

I stood licking my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly. Once I would have seen her as an image of myself, but not any more. My ability to give was limited, I was not inexhaustible. I was not serene, not really. I wanted things, things for myself. 

Sanchez-Grant writes that Joan's assertion is a protest against a society that situates her as a reproductive machine, suggesting as the food imagery and the character's unromantic terms imply - to be endlessly giving, to nourish and sustain others is "simply to be edible" (2003, p. 80).

My conclusion is that woman can be drained, she is not just a font of nourishment for [male] others.

Here's some other references to the edible & the consumable in You Smell Like Dinner:

• When Sookie walked in on Jessica feeding on a man other than Hoyt in the ladies room at Fangtasia, the baby vamp spat, "I can eat who I want"
• Bill's response to Nan Flanagan when in London, 1982, she asks him why he doesn't kill his prey: "They might be dinner but they don't deserve to die"
• The conversation within Sam's new shifter entourage about the ethics of factory egg farming and the bourgeois attitudes of some animal rights activists

What do these themes mean to you? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Please share them in the comments space below.

~ Rachel

References

Parlour, S. (2009). Vixens and Virgins in the 19th century Anglo-Irish Novel: Representations of the feminine in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Journal of Dracula Studies, # 11.


Rivera, R. Z. (2003). New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone. New York: Palgrave.


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


Ward, T. (2006). Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess. New York, NY: 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  

WHO IS SHE WHO MUNCHES THE DEAD?

O nether and nocturnal, and infernal
Goddess of the dark, grimly, silently
Munching the dead,
Night, Darkness, broad Chaos, Necessity
Hard to escape are you...you're Moira and
Erinys, torment, Justice and Destroyer,
And you keep Kerberos in chains, with scales
Of serpents are you dark, O you with hair
Of serpents, serpent girded, who drink blood
Who bring death and destruction, and who feast
On hearts, flesh eater who devour the dead
Untimely, and you who make grief resound...

~ Papyri Graecae Magicae, a 2nd century C.E.
Hymn to Hekate

I found this darkly intriguing verse in a fascinating book titled, "Savage Breast: One Man's Search for the Goddess". Author Tim Ward opens his chapter on Hekate - a primal torch-bearing Goddess of transitions who, by the time of Classical Greece, had degenerated into a vessel for the terrible, destructive aspect of the feminine divine - with this hymn.

Not unlike the Goddess Kali in India, to the ancient Greeks Hekate was a drinker of blood, a muncher of the dead...she was, as Ward writes, The Rotting Goddess.



Kali




Hekate

For Tim Ward, writing his chapter on Hekate was part of his way of processing his admitted :"fear of the feminine" (pg. 149). Let's stay with this theme for a moment...

The images you see above of Kali and Hekate above are probably NOT the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Goddesses, right? The word "goddess" probably conjures mostly positive vibes; images  connected to life, love, maybe sex, fertility, the earth, children and childbirth, etc. Goddesses are lovers, mothers, virginal maidens with flowers in their hair...but reapers? Bringers of darkness and death? No...

But here's the thing - death is part of life. It's not the opposite of life - and our most distant ancestors in dimmest history knew that. We need Kali, Hecate, and other dark Goddesses to re-inject the reality of the cycle of life, death, and regeneration - we can't have everlasting youth and life without chopping down and composting the old and decaying back into this ever repeating cycle. But in our society we deny death. We are viscerally repelled by death and aging; we fight them kicking and screaming. We demonize the death aspect because we reject and fear it.

We've splintered the feminine principle into myriad diminished forms. Where once She embodied the cycle of life, death, and regeneration - she's now scattered, her aspects most terrifying to our modern sensibilities relegated to a remote, lower place where her sharp blades and tearing teeth can't touch us.

It wasn't always so, but this mindset has been deeply ingrained in our collective psyche for such a long time that it seems the dark Goddess, the horrific feminine, still skulks in the shadows to menace us because we are not fully ready to accept her particular kind magic as part of our world.

Only now her wardrobe is a bit more fabulous...



Lorena

 

Maryann

 



Sophie-Ann



Diane

Richard Rudgley, author of "Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" wrote that Ward's deeply personal encounters with the goddesses' statues, frescos, temples and sacred sites he visited while researching "Savage Breast" remind us that "these artifacts are not sterile stones but the touchstones to a still living world of human experience".

Honestly, I am blown away by how a few of the darkest-of-the-dark ladies of True Blood do the same; at least for me, they exhume and reanimate Hekate in our contemporary culture. Sure, they may not look like Hekate 1.0; the hideous hag or flesh-eating ghoul of the later Greek imagination - her skin pallid and decaying, her robes a shroud (Ward, 2006) - but they certainly do resemble her in ways that run more than skin deep...

...if you're wondering how just take a look at the bolded words in the poem above for some hints!

I intentionally chose images representing some of the darkest-of-the-dark ladies of True Blood at their very darkest, so to speak, because while there are other female vampires (Pam, Jessica) and assorted supes who have had their menacing moments (Debbie, Daphne)...
Lorena,

Maryann,

Diane,

          
and Sophie-Ann seem to really project the "fearsome forces of the feminine divine" (Ward, 2006, p. 152) that Hekate became the repository of millenia ago.

What psychological need do these ultimate bad girls fulfill for us today?

Tim Ward writes that he gets "a flicker of something vile" when he contemplates 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" (p. 155). In this vein, he recalls when, in his 20's, during his his travels through Thailand and India he learned Buddhist techniques for eliminating sexual desire. He was instructed to imagine a woman's body split up into heaps of skin, nails, hair, teeth, and internal organs, or to...

..."visualize a woman as nothing but sacks of blood and pus and shit" (p. 155).

  
"Feel desire for that"? Ward writes; "Thus men learn what it is to treat women like dirt (as matter, not Mater) and break their spell over us" (p. 155).

Unlike the Hekate of Classical Greece our True Blood dark ladies are beautiful to be sure, but look at what they're reduced to - burned or boiled down to quite literally - in death. Violent death. Sophie-Ann hasn't met her end yet, but we'll see what fate has in store for her, possibly at the hands of Bill Compton. Of course, male vampires and weres have met similarly erupting, oozing and bloody deaths on TB. Still, there's something about the glee with which many watched the demise of two of these ladies in particular - Lorena and Maryann - that feels quite telling.

Did they - do they - play Hekate's role as death aspects of the Goddess for whom our culture collectively feels a fusion of need and fear?

For some insight, let's briefly consider a motif from a crucible of civilization of the the deepest past that might help us understand the strange push-and-pull the deathly and deadly feminine exerts upon us: Catal Huyuk.

Between 7500 and 5500 B.C.E. about seven thousand or so people lived together in an unprecedented massing of humans the world would not see again until the city-states of Mesopotamia 3,000 years later. Wall paintings and other art work have been unearthed at this site that open a window on the ritual life and belief systems of the people of Catal Huyuk; for instance:



vultures feeding on human corpse and head atop elaborate burial platforms

 Ward writes that vultures - carrion eaters that were well suited for the excarnation mode of burial they likely practiced at Catal Huyuk - seemed intimately connected with birth.


vultures, mother and child



Look at the peculiar symbolic pattern in the wall painting to the right that hints at the meaning of their rites - double rows of vultures face each other wingtip to wingtip; inside each diamond is the body of a woman, and inside the belly of the woman is the dark outline of a child.

In this art the people of Catal Huyuk expressed their belief not in a gruesome death cult, but in a cycle of regeneration in which the vulture would munch the bodies of the dead back into the circle of life, to be re-birthed by the mothers of the community.

Ward describes aspects of the shrines discovered at Catal Huyuk that some experts (I would add, experts looking at relics of a bygone worldview through the lens of today) find sinister and disturbing: molded breast-like shapes protruding from the walls. Some resemble anatomically correct breasts, others contain the skull of a vulture with the beak sticking out in place of the nipple, or the jaws of a jackal (another scavenger). 

Whereas Michael Rice, author of "The Power of the Bull" views these breast-shaped protrusions as evidence that, for the people of Catal Huyuk, "the Mother's breasts do not deliver life sustaining milk but are rather agents of death..." (Ward, 2006, p. 161) archaeologist Marija Gimbutas saw in these artifacts symbols of regeneration.

Lorena and Maryann are, in many ways, cast as what Ward calls the "cannibal mother". Lorena is Bill's maker/lover/mother and Maryann took in/seduced the much younger Sam; in the act of drinking his blood and giving him hers Lorena birthed Bill into his vampire life thereby ending his human one, and Maryann sought to sacrifice Sam to reap his heart for her God Who Comes.

Here's a striking excerpt from "Savage Breast"; Ward is imagining what it would have been like to enter the ancient world of Catal Huyuk within which people experienced death not in the abstract, but as viscera, exposed and eaten.

Picturing himself going down a ladder into a dark shrine with painted black vulture wings spanning the walls, he writes:

I search for the clay breast, take it in both my hands and out the vulture-beak nipple to my lips. As I suck I feel the beak in it tear at my tongue, the flesh inside my cheeks. White milk gushes into my mouth and my red blood flows back into the beak. No way to escape the longing I have for that breast. Though it wounds me I go to her as a child, my cannibal mother, bleeding into her and clinging to her. It's little comfort that she eats back the living when I'm the one that she's gnawing on. It's too real, this fusion of need and fear. (p. 162) 

Do parts of Ward's imagining evoke a "turning" for you?

Will we in the 21st century be able to embrace the cannibal mother; she who gives us life, nurtures us, and - at the time of our death - welcomes us back into the cocoon of her womb-tomb as the 2nd century Greeks did: Night, Darkness, broad Chaos, Necessity?

Lot's of questions, huh?

What do you think?

Don't be shy, please let us know!

Until next time...

~ Rachel

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.