Scary Children

It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes, or bags!


Fans of Dr. Seuss, like me, will get the reference. Standing frozen in the snow, incredulous, the Grinch pondered thusly how Christmas could appear to the Whos down in Whoville without fanfare after he had so cruelly snatched their holiday trappings under the cover of night.


I feel like Arlene's baby has appeared in sort of the same way. Seemingly unannounced. Unheralded. Suddenly, he's just here.

Smiling sweetly up at his momma amidst a scattering of decapitated Barbies as if he'd been there all along.


Sure, we knew he was coming, what with Arlene's bizarre Season 3 experiences leading up to baby Mikey's appearance. Like when she first found out the little critter was on the way...

...and that the child she was carrying was not Terry's but René's.


But when Season 4 premiered and Mikey was, well just there...it felt oddly out of whack for me. As the audience, we did not get to witness Arlene's journey through the rest of her pregnancy and the pain, doubt and conflict - both inner and outwardly with Terry - she experienced as part of it.


We weren't there for Mikey's birth, and suddenly, he's just there. I'm sure the writers cooked up this little bit of cognitive dissonance for us quite purposefully.


Everyone gets so worked up over Bill's perceived betrayal of Sookie, what about René's deception of Arlene? Imagine her horror at the revelation that the fetus growing inside her was the offspring of the double-dealing serial killer who had conned his way into her heart and home using an invented persona? That the baby would be a constant reminder of the man who had wormed his way into her life and the lives of her children; the same man that she had slept next to each night, having been kept oblivious to his unspeakable acts of murder and butchery?


This could easily spawn thoughts and feelings rancorous enough to choke on, or be choked by, if you ask me!

 And is it any wonder Arlene's extreme unease would transfer to the unborn baby?  

That she would feel stifled, suffocated, and utterly snuffed out by the prospect of bringing this child - René's child - into the world? 

As a social worker who spends quite a bit of time seeing clients in the community, I'm in my car frequently; this affords me the opportunity to listen to the radio a lot. On June 23rd, I caught the tail end of a program on WBAI that I like to describe as one that plays the most edgy, underground-of-the-indie music you'll never hear on radio otherwise. It's called Shocking Blue and the DJ Delphine Blue spun one particular track that crept into my consciousness in such a creepy-crawly way that I just had to pull over and take note of it.


The song is called "Scary Children", and even though we had not yet met Mikey it made me think of Arlene's baby immediately.


Give it a play and maybe you'll see why.



In my mind, Arlene's body had been colonized by a baby she did not want to bring to term. As Sanchez-Grant (p. 77, 2008) writes, "The female body, as a site of oppression, has always been the means by which patriarchy exerts control over women".


The song's eerie, foreboding tone - it's plodding, incessant beat - conveys such an encroaching, inescapable sense of doom that I felt it captured and distilled the helplessness to express her own will that I imagined Arlene must have been feeling. Her confusion as Terry - generally benign, wise, battle-addled Terry - forced, imposed his will on her.


His need to be validated by this baby that is not biologically his robbed her of her free will and ability to choose as he insisted that she keep and carry the baby. He developed an irrational attachment to and love for this unborn child - a baby Arlene did not want and tried desperately to rid herself of...

...a baby growing inside her that reminded her of all the pain, betrayal, and devastation wrought by René - something she does not want back in her life.

Terry's over-identification with Mikey continues.

There were practical, economic concerns - can they afford this baby - that Terry ignored or denied while Arlene was pregnant.


Elsewhere in the blogosphere I've read other analyses suggesting that through this story arc woman is yet again portrayed as the crafty deceiver...

...this fallback trope is revealed as Arlene supposedly uses her feminine wiles to dupe the trusting Terry into believing that he is indeed the unborn child's father.

Yet, ultimately, even after he learns the truth about the child's paternity from Arlene, he emotionally manipulated her into keeping the baby, to be the conduit  through which his needs could be satisfied - his sense of self and worth bolstered, his desire for his life to mean something fulfilled.


This, coming after their joint experience at having both their wills subverted by Maryann...

 ...their relationship, which grew from a spark of genuine caring, consummated while their consciousness was not their own. That Terry, who even while under Maryann's influence was driven to protect his "special lady" would attempt to exert such control over Arlene and her reproductive sovereignty is surprising, and frankly, disconcerting.

But Terry gets to be the good guy, doesn't he? The bottom line is that Terry is a good guy, and it's admirable that he has stood by Arlene and been a father to her child, even if, because of Arlene's distrust and emotional rejection of the baby, continuing to do so will require that he (and Mikey) will have to "love on her more". Even so, the fact remains that although only he and Arlene know it right now, Terry is playing father to a child that is not his, and by doing so he can be judged positively as having "manned up", taken responsibility, and stepped in as a loving dad.

But, were it to get out that Arlene hoped and strived to miscarry her unborn baby - even though she is already a loving mother to Coby and Lisa...

  

...she could well be recast in the image of the deviant woman who throws off the role of the maternal, her "reproductive destiny" (Sanchez-Grant, p. 78, 2008).

Not unlike Bram Stoker's Lucy; who, as a vampire, "violently thrusts an infant from her breast" ( Parlour, ¶11, 2009):

With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there motionless. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile, he fell back and hid his face in his hands.

Is this not the type of harsh judgement many women who wish to exercise their right to choose to have an abortion - and sometimes even just to practice birth control since initially, proof of marriage and a husband's written consent was required for American and British women who requested the Pill (Sanchez-Grant, 2008) and much more recently, pharmacists have denied filling prescriptions for it on religious or moral grounds - are met with? As a veteran of the 2004 March for Women's Lives in Washington D.C.  during which a million women demonstrated for our reproductive rights and health (Rebecca was there too, and so was our Mom) and were met by Bible brandishing, moralizing extremists, I would say yes.


I think there's plenty more mileage left in this story arc now that Mikey is with us:

• Sanchez-Grant (p. 78, 2008) quotes David Morgan & Sue Scott, editors of Body Matters: Essay on the Sociology of the Body, "Historically, women have been defined by their 'biological potentiality', and the female reproductive system has worked to reduce women to the sum of their child-bearing parts". Arlene has, as Adrienne Rich argues (Sanchez-Grant, 2008), been controlled by lashing her to her body in this way. If he is to be seen as inherently evil due solely to the genes passed onto him by his dead father, will Mikey, too, be the victim of the "biology as destiny" fate that the feminist movement has been battling for decades?
• Will he become a wedge between the newlywed Arlene and Terry?
• Is there something off about him, or will his alleged evilness become a self-fulfilling prophecy unfolding in response to Arlene's projections?

I, for one, will be watching this Season 4 sub story closely!


How about you?


Please use the comments section below to let us know.


~ 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.

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.

Boy, I wa-wa-want whatchu wa-wa-want...

...give it to me baby like boom, boom, boom...
what I wa-wa-want is what you wa-wa-want na nah...
                                                      ~ Rude Boy by Rihanna

After such a long wait the new season of True Blood is finally under way! But before we launch into our review of its premiere episode, "She's Not There", I'd like to first take a look at a particular piece of Season 4 promo material.

In this poster we see Sookie seated in the center of the frame surrounded by three suitors, each with a hand on her, staking a claim, wanting a piece. Which one will she choose? Which supernatural contender for Sookie's affections will prevail, who will win? Because it's a competition after all, and she's the prize - the object of strong male sexual desire being fought over. She's the spoils, the booty - her booty going to whichever alpha male can assert himself over the others.


That's one way of looking at it.


But this image isn't really about Team Bill, Team Eric, or Team Alcide, is it? It's about Team Sookie.


For me, it's no accident that she's the central figure in this poster. Look at her posture; her body, and indeed, her countenance as she gazes directly into the camera exudes relaxed confidence. An at-easiness with herself and who she has become.


Gone is the virginal innocent we met in Season 1. Swathed in deep red, this Sookie - like our tavern's heraldic pomegranate with its abundant scarlet seeds so evocative of the redness of the fertile womb - is the picture of blooming female sexuality.


Her hair is loose, unconstrained - quite unlike the tight ponytail stretching her facial features that she wore in "Strange Love", when she was so utterly thrown for a loop by the sexual banter of her co-workers at Merlotte's.

In the Show Your True Colors poster above Sookie is shown as being possessed of a healthy, active female-centered sexuality. Kind of like in Rihanna's Rude Boy - is it so shocking to think that women could want what men want...a gratifying sex life...and that our sex drive can be just as strong, just as audacious, and just as pleasure-for-pleasure's-sake seeking as theirs? And that it's normal, natural, and healthy - and doesn't make us deviants, whores, or hypersexualized vixens performing for men's benefit alone?



In the video above, a self-assured Rihanna sits astride a lion. Could it be that women aren't (or aren't just, only, or always) lithe prey animals made for men's hunting pleasure; or as 1970's pioneer of erotica and Imaginative Sex author John Gorman writes, "the smaller, more sleek female who is natural quarry and game" (p. 33)?


Writing as Pat Califia in 1997, the transgender activist now known as Patrick Califia-Rice described Gorman's work as "unrelievedly heterosexual" and as positing "a world in which biology is supposedly allowed to dictate the social and sexual roles which men and women will play - dominant and warlike, submissive and servile, respectively" (p.vi)..."the hero or the dazzling object of his desire" (p. xiii). But even Gorman (whose writing, Califia wholeheartedly admits, is focused on the arousal, excitement, and gratification of the female "slave" much more so than that of her male "Master") allows that women are not passive, that "She, too, has needs. She often provokes the male to her hunt" (p. 33).


OK, maybe sometimes we want to feel that we are being chased, caught, and "ravished in a thoroughly satisfying manner" (Califia, 1997, p. xii) by a determined, energetic, and worthy partner - on our terms. As agents of our own fate, not commodities for male consumption. And for mutual pleasure, not just his. But maybe, just maybe, sometimes we'd like to be the hunter.


Califia writes, "The process of creating a sex life or love life for oneself is at least as much about learning and teaching as it is about discovering one's secret, innate self" (p. xi, italics are mine). What if, as Sookie's secret, innate self - the seat of her sexual self - is bubbling up to the surface, she'd like to be something other than "game, sleek, beautiful and desirable, frightened of him, who could be caught and owned, and tamed, and who, in his snare, would writhe and cry out" (Gorman, 1974, p. 21)?


Hypothetically, why does she even have to choose between Bill, Eric, and Alcide?


Of course, that's a somewhat rhetorical question since we know that in this culture, the industrial family ethic - which was preceded by the colonial family ethic, insists that the proper place for a woman is in a monogamous relationship with one man. I'm not saying that coupling up is wrong, or that women (or men) of any sexual orientation who want to do so are somehow less liberated.


What I am saying is that it's limiting and outright damaging - especially to women - to insist that this is the morally ordained, right, and only way to live.


As Mimi Abramovitz writes in the feminist classic, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (1996) our contemporary social structures are still based upon the patriarchal family ethic that emerged during the early 19th century primarily as a means of controlling and regulating women’s productive and reproductive labor, placing them in their husband’s home and subordinate to him as the male head-of-household.


Seems like the basis for the Defense of Marriage Act - under which marriage = 1 man + 1 woman only - the fangs-out fight over which happily ended in marriage equality in my home state of New York just this past weekend.


In Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula we meet a female character reflective of a new social order - Lucy Westenra.

Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra in the 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula

Like Sookie, she too had three suitors - and collected marriage proposals from all of them on the same day. As Susan Parlour (2009) writes in her essay, "Vixens and Virgins in the 19th Century Anglo-Irish Novel: Representations of the Feminine in Bram Stoker's Dracula", even though she failed to postulate a new image of feminine roles in the the workplace - as her best friend Mina, who might on the surface appear more of an expression of the New Woman in that regard, did - Lucy nonetheless shook up the strictures of the Victorian patriarchal machine.


According to Parlour, Lucy demonstrated her voracious sexual appetite. She admitted to being a "horrid flirt". These behaviors certainly transgressed the accepted Victorian etiquette demanded of young ladies. But Lucy took it a dangerous step further in her desire to marry Arthur Holmwood, Quincy Morris, AND Dr. John Seward. "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all the trouble?" (Stoker, 1986, pp. 73, 78) Lucy wistfully wondered, and in doing so, embraced some of the more radical ideals of the New Woman's challenge to prevailing sexual values. In the minds of the Victorian patriarchs, could a destabilized society and accelerated moral decay be far behind?


Would Sookie ever suggest a similar solution to the Team Bill, Team Eric, or Team Alcide quandary? What if she did?


Do you know what became of that little minx Lucy? She fell prey to Count Dracula, was turned vampire, and as such became a "phallic woman", having fangs with the power to penetrate and draw blood; a sexually empowered aggressor. This, of course, could not stand. Lucy was subjected to a particularly brutal "second death" at the hands of four men - including her three suitors and the famed Dr. Van Helsing - during which she was staked in a manner reminiscent of gang-rape.

Vampire Lucy is destroyed in Bram Stoker's Dracula

The violation of her vampiric body yields the restoration of her benign femininity; her threat to the symbolic or social order extinguished (Parlour, 2009).


Is this the fate of the overtly sexually desirous woman? I'd like to think not, but one need only reflect back on René Lenier's Season 1 rampage to be reminded of how our society often treats its fangbangers, sluts, and bad girls (i.e. women whose sexual behavior transgresses the clearly demarcated gender roles mapped out for them).


This is a topic that is deserving of a lot more fleshing out and continued discussion. For now, suffice it to say that although I'm not holding out hope for Sookie to choose not to have to choose between Bill, Eric, Alcide, and whoever else may come her way (I'm not even saying that's the best option for her, anyway) I AM glad to have an image that we can claim as one representative of Team Sookie - where her needs, wants, and desires can be seen as central.

~ Rachel    

References

Abramovitz, M. (1996). Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present. Boston, MA: South End Press.

Califia, P. (1997). "No Fantasy, Please, We're Americans: A Foreward by a Feminist". In Gorman, J. Imaginitive Sex. (pp. v-xiv). New York, NY: Masquerade Books.

Gorman, J. (1997).  Imaginitive Sex. New York, NY: Masquerade Books.

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, Number II.

Stoker, B. (1986). Dracula. Penguin edition.