Carmen Borbély,

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania

 

 

Theriomorphic Bodies: (En)Gendering Monstrous Corporeality in Contemporary British Fiction

 

 

Abstract: This paper looks at how the topography of female corpor(e)ality – traditionally perceived in terms of a dysmorphic, aberrant, deformed counterpart of male bodily shape – is re-charted in two contemporary novels by British women writers. By programmatically deploying female protagonists with a monstrous genealogy, Marina Warner and A. S. Byatt emphasise the ruptures and distensions that have impinged on the discursive formation of the ‘monstrous-feminine.’ In effect, these novels interrogate the constructedness of marginalized categories, and are intent on re-valorising the ‘cavernous,’ ‘visceral,’ ‘secreting’ and ‘protruding’ female body as a fluid site of potentiality, as a transformative liminal ‘anti-structure.’

Keywords: contemporary British fiction, poetic imagination, female body, monstrosity.

 

 

That monstrosity amounts to what anthropological research has identified as “pollution phenomena” (Douglas 1966, 147-149) is by now well acknowledged. Hybrid, deformed or aberrant bodies challenge, through their impure, composite morphology, the structural solidity of the cultural categories they violate. As Elaine L. Graham astutely remarks in her study Representations of the Posthuman: Aliens and Others in Popular Culture, monsters, as boundary-crossing anomalies, concurrently demarcate and confound the limits of normative humanity, exposing the vulnerability, as it were, of the order of things. Uncannily straddling the borders between the human and the non-human, monstrous bodies problematise the “naturalness” of identity, their hybridity lays bare “the redundancy and instability of the ontological hygiene of the humanist subject.”[1]

The issue of the female body is crucial to understanding monstrifying tendencies, since the question of anatomical deformity revolves around the idea of “female, untamed nature which must be leashed, or else will wreak havoc.”[2] Similar to monstrosity, unruly female corporeality – almost always related to its mothering and reproductive function – may come to signify the invasion, pollution, contamination of identity. This “metaphorics of uncontrollability” (Grosz 1994, 203), with its metonymic series of qualifiers (seepage, indeterminacy, disruptiveness, excessiveness, expansiveness), is perhaps best accounted for by Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject and the maternal. The concept of abject liminality seems indeed to function as the locus communis of the monstrous-feminine (Creed 1993, 3) and to explain the manner in which woman qua mater, matter, mortality has tended to be locked in a binary, hierarchical logic, whereby she has been subjected, through representation and specular deflection, to a teratogenic impulse. The monstrous, as Kristeva maintains, lurks in the ambiguous, liminal space between the semiotic and the symbolic, in the simultaneity of repulsion and attraction posed by the maternal body and its catachretic substitutes: food, filth, waste, the corpse.[3]

This paper looks at how the topography of female corpor(e)ality – traditionally perceived in terms of a dysmorphic counterpart of male bodily shape – is re-charted in two contemporary novels by British women writers. By programmatically deploying female protagonists with a monstrous genealogy, authors like Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Marina Warner, Fay Weldon or A. S. Byatt[4] construct alternative historiographies of female monstrosity, emphasising the ruptures and distensions that have impinged on its discursive formation. In effect, these novels interrogate the constructedness of marginalized categories, and are intent on re-valorising the “cavernous,” “visceral,” “secreting” and “protruding” female body as a fluid site of potentiality, as a transformative liminal “anti-structure.”[5]

 

“Betwixt and Between”: A. S. Byatt’s Possession. A Romance

 

The first novel I am examining here, A. S. Byatt’s Possession. A Romance, embarks on what Linda Hutcheon calls a “complicitous critique” of gender representations, paradoxically destabilising and re-installing notions of [monstrous] femininity (Hutcheon 1989, 9). As its subtitle (A Romance) and one of its epigraphs (Hawthorne’s Preface to The House of the Seven Gables) attest, the novel is staged as a quest, connecting “a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.” The quest is undertaken by contemporary scholars in search for documentary and physical clues as to the identity of a colossal Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash’s mistress. Victorian poetess Christabel LaMotte is deliberately moulded onto the figure of the Melusine, with whom the nineteenth-century artist fantasmatically identifies and on whom she grounds her most accomplished work, an epic entitled “The Fairy Melusine”. If the focal point of Byatt’s novels comprises, as the author confesses, “problems of female vision, female art and thought,”[6] Possession rearticulates the iconography of Melusina, casting her as the emblematic figure of female creativity.

To this effect, Byatt undertakes an ambitious project – a genealogy of monstrosity – and appears to pay indirect tribute to Mary Shelley’s poetics of monstrous imagination.[7] Connections are established between “sexual and textual generation” (Baldick 1987, 32), combining, in effect, several strands of teratological discourse. First, the discursive practice of explaining monstrous progeny as the result of inter-species miscegenation, or of illicit intercourse between the human and the demonic. Second, the popular Renaissance contention, quite prominent up to the end of the Enlightenment, whereby maternal imagination possessed corporealising powers and was capable of engendering physiological prodigies. Third, the Romantic conception of artistic creation as “teratological disclosure” (Huet 1993, 3). If Mary Shelley unwittingly admits that her “hideous progeny” (book and monster) pertain to a tradition tying the birth of deformed offspring to their mother’s deranged imagination,[8] Possession also traces this “dynamics of monstrous creation” (Huet 1993, 156) as a complex trope for literary inspiration.

Byatt notices the fluidity of representations which collapses undines, melusines, sirens, or mermaids into a continuum of female monstrosity, connected as they are by their bipartite structure, a combination of human and serpentine forms. This might attest either to the universality of the Melusine myth or to the belated grafting of this half-woman, half-snake figure on a tremendous array of similarly hybrid legendary or mythical females – including the Echidna of Hesiod’s Theogony, the elementary spirits of esoteric, Paracelsian tradition, the demoniacal Lilith of the Cabala, or the Irish Banshees (Bouloumié 2001, 9). The Melusine’s hybrid anatomy (exceedingly beautiful female upper half joined to a lower ophidian bodily half) renders her a creature in-between genera (human v. beastly/demonic) and in-between gender, as suggested by her tail. Byatt exploits this liminal imagery, and has various readers in the novel express competing or complementary versions of its meaning, ranging from Fergus Wolff’s fictive reference to Virginia Wolf’s notion of the “essential androgyny of the creative mind” to exacerbated feminist contentions – held to ridicule – that it might represent “self-sufficient female sexuality” (P 34).

Clearly indebted to the Romantic iconography of demoniacal enchantresses (Coleridge’s Geraldine or Keats’s Lamia), Christabel’s Melusine is avowedly in-formed by the medieval legend compiled in the fourteenth century by Jean d’Arras. The Roman de Mélusine (1393) outlines its two-bodied, metamorphic, eponymous protagonist as a foundational figure for the illustrious House of Lusignan. As recounted by Jacques LeGoff (1986, 127-129) and (Brownlee 1994), the key moments in the Jean d’Arras narrative are as follows. Firstly, the encounter, in a forest, between Elinas, the King of Albany, and Presine, an exceedingly beautiful female; out of this union between a mortal and a fairy, three daughters are born, yet besides this intergeneric transgression, Elinas is also guilty of having flaunted the injunction whereby he should not have witnessed his wife’s labour. Secondly, the eldest of the three daughters, Mélusine, is indirectly punished for her father’s voyeuristic transgression, and doomed to sporadically assume serpentine form – a “periodic double corporality” (Brownlee 1994, 20) – until a mortal might marry and release her from the burden of immortality. Thirdly, another encounter, mirroring the first, occurs by the Fountain of Thirst, this time between Mélusine and Raimondin, much aggrieved by a murder he has committed; Mélusine vows to lend grandeur to his line should he marry her and abstain from gazing at her on Saturdays. The promise is fulfilled, great prosperity and fertility bless the Lusignans, although traces of this replicated unnatural union between a mortal and a supernatural being are visible in the deformities imprinted on Mélusine’s progeny. Fourthly, Raimondin’s visual and verbal breach of promise – spying on his wife’s metamorphosis into a siren and publicly condemning her demonic nature (“Ah, most false serpent”) – attracts Mélusine’s final transformation into a winged serpent and her (inconclusive) separation from her progeny. To sum up, as Brownlee maintains, a genealogical and morphological crossbreed, Mélusine possesses a “polycorporeal” hybridity that successively traverses three stages: from a female body to a composite, human-serpentine body, and, finally, to a winged snake’s body. The Melusine’s twofold metamorphosis, elicited each time by male gestures of transgressive voyeurism, precludes the resolution of her hybridity into unity; this indeterminacy of being is further reinforced at the level of her discursive compositeness: the Mélusine is “a figure constructed out of a set of discourses in unstable contrast with each other: fairy-monstrous, courtly-erotic, maternal, political foundational, Christian” (Brownlee 1994, 19-20, 38 & passim).

Insofar as Byatt’s narrative is concerned, the novel counterpoints colluding or overlapping readings of Melusine’s polymorphic body, two of which would seem to prevail. The first would demonologise female monstrosity, allying it with spiritual corruption and degeneration. Thus, a letter from Ash, purportedly quoting Paracelsus, renders Melusines as demoniacal spectres which hope to gain a soul through a union with mortals:

 

The Melusinas are daughters of kings, desperate through their sins. Satan bore them away and transformed them into spectres, into evil spirits, into horrible revenants and frightful monsters. It is thought they live without rational souls in fantastic bodies, that they are nourished by the mere elements, and at the final Judgment will pass away with these, unless they may be married to a man. In this case, by virtue of this union, they may die a natural death, as they may have lived a natural life, in their marriage. (P 172).

 

Furthermore, in Isidore LaMotte’s grandiose encyclopaedic project, rather “fashionably” searching for a universal Key to all Mythologies (references to George Eliot abound in the novel), the Melusine ranks amongst the dames Blanches, the Fate Bianche, whiteladies, who are harbingers of death. Similarly, in Sabine de Kercoz’s interpolated intimate journal, Christabel LaMotte acquires at one point the definite contours of “Aesop’s frozen serpent” (P, 370).

The second reading accepts a vacillation of meanings, accommodated by what Christabel LaMotte envisages as the reconciliatory topos of Romance. Grounded not “in historical truth, but in poetic and imaginative truth,” Romance embraces “women’s two natures,” dissolving the duality of either/or, of “enchantresses and demons or innocent angels” (P, 373). In the epistolary exchange between Christabel and Randolph Henry Ash, largely devoted to unravelling the iconology of Melusina and the poetic principles on which LaMotte’s epic is grounded, the “marvellous” ingredient of this myth is Melusina’s jointly daemonic and angelic nature, which is, indeed, governed by the logic of “both…and” and not of “either/or”:

 

What is so peculiarly marvellous about the Melusina myth, you seem to be saying, is that she is both wild and strange and ghastly and full of the daemonic – and it is at the same time solid as earthly tales – the best of them – are solid – depicting the life of households and the planning of societies, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children. (P 176).

 

Christabel’s “true insight”, sifting through “palimpsest on palimpsest”[9] (P 164), envisions “my Melusina” as “just such a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and the Wild […] the hearth-foundress and the destroying Demon” (P 178). Byatt gives here a deliberate twist to the thanatic interpretations of the Melusine, detecting in her procreational generativity similarities with a fertility goddess, Ceres or Proserpina. As LeGoff maintains in his study on the Mélusine Defricheuse – also cited in one of the scholarly glosses on Christabel’s epic – Melusina is released from such destructive associations through a foregrounding of her constructive capacities: this is a figure associated not only with extreme bodily fecundity, but also with the building of cities (a civilising, foundational figure) and with the fertility of crops. All in all, as LeGoff insists, a medieval avatar of the Mother-Goddess (LeGoff 1986, 142-143).). Hence Byatt’s careful inscription of her female protagonists in the representational frames of vegetation or resurrectionary myths. The association of the Melusine with light is etymologically reinforced by her derivation from Mère Lus (Mère Lusine or Mère Lumière), a selenary, transitional rather than solar light (Bouloumié 2001, 254). Silvery paleness of hair and skin imagistically conflate Christabel and her heiress, particularly since the latter emerges as a concrete trace of the Victorian photographic archive[10]. The most obvious clue, nevertheless, comes from the sumptuary details of the female protagonists’ attire, green becoming the dominant visual index of their potential for birth and replenishment.[11] While the Melusine of Christabel’s epic wears a “girdle green/ As emerald or wettest meadow grass” (P 296), Christabel’s body itself exudes the colour of vegetation:

 

He studied the pale loops of hair on her temples. Their sleek silver-gold seemed to him to have in it a tinge, a hint of greenness, not the copper-green of decay, but a pale sap-green of vegetable life, streaked into the hair like the silvery bark of young trees, or green shadows in green shadows in green tresses of young hay. And her eyes were green, glass-green, malachite green, the cloudy green of sea-water perturbed and carrying a weight of sand. The lashes over them silver, but thick enough to be visibly present (P 277).

 

Notwithstanding the above-mentioned duality of the Melusine’s hybrid nature, she is not restricted to a static aggregate of composite parts. The Romance of Melusine indicates that she is a shape-shifter, a metamorphic creature. As pinpointed in the Proem to Christabel’s epic The Fairy Melusine, this is the reverse of the Psyche-Cupid pattern, with the injunction against unravelling the secret bodily half of the spouse coming from the woman this time, and with her body actually assuming the shape of a dragon. Monstrosity’s double impact upon the viewer – that of alluring and repelling surface – also resounds in the lines of Christabel’s poem, The Drowned City, which reworks the Breton legend of the City of Is, submerged as a punishment for the sinfulness of its female inhabitants. Here women’s bodies are transparent, making visible their entire web of veins and arteries – another indirect reference to Frankenstein, since the translucent screen of the monster’s epidermis also reveals an intricate network of pulsating fibres, muscles and veins. An interesting reference to female corporeality is made by Maud Bailey, Christabel’s twentieth-century descendant and a scholar fascinated by the imagery of thresholds that Christabel’s poetry transgresses. Maud’s mention of the “awkward body” occurs at a point when she is coming to terms with the concreteness of her physicality, having relinquished the abstract notion of the self as “textualised subjectivity” (Buxton 1996, 218), divested of its embodied dimension (P 251):

 

Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego. Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a sussuration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist (P 251).

 

The “awkward body,” corps morcelés – the body fractured and fragmented so that its constituent parts can be visually (mis)construed into “natural” corporeality – the body which she shrouds under her garments – and other metaphors of containment, of closure and concealment abound in the novel. Hence the imagery of towers offering shelter as well as confinement to female figures (Rapunzel, the Cumaean Sybil, Ash’s Incarcerated Sorceress or Christabel herself). Whether it be Melusine’s or Christabel’s, the female body is imaged by the male gaze as unruly, excessive and potentially disruptive of order; in other words, it needs be disciplined or fashioned into a culturally determined signifier.

The “awkward body” is, indeed, the female body inserted in an economy of specular representation, subjected to decryption and inscription by the male gaze. The episode of Raimondin breaking Melusina’s prohibition and peering through a keyhole to spot her serpentine body is resumed over and over in Byatt’s text. Roland Mitchell, the twentieth-century scholar interested in Ash’s work, commits a similar voyeuristic gesture, attempting to peer through the crackling, translucent cover of Christabel’s picture, only to discern that “the generic Victorian lady, specific shy poetess” (P 38) remains mysterious and unknowable. In a letter to Ash, Christabel faces the poet with a riddle centred on the image of an egg – the obvious metaphor being one of incarceration but also hinting at its germinative power (“this gold cushion is enclosed in its own crystalline casket, a casket translucent and endless in its circularity”); the riddle is accompanied by a warning against crushing the solid shell, which would leave him with “something slippery and cold and unthinkably disagreeable” (P 137) – a veiled allusion to the slimy viscosity of matter. Ash however does flaunt this prohibition, not only in “extending [his] imagining gaze”[12] onto Christabel’s imaginary Melusine, but also in his Frankensteinian[13] probing of the secrets of nature. His enthrallment with the inside of matter, matter that uncannily comes to life under the lens of a microscope, is influenced by his scientific interest in anatomy and parthenogenesis, or reproduction by cell fission rather than by sexual fertilisation. An avid collector of molluscs, anemones, or other “slimy creatures from the viscous sea”, he also engages in the dissection and gemmation of medusas, hydras, polyps, driven as he is by his fascination with generation and the “origin of life”:

 

He made a particular study of the reproductive system of his chosen life-forms. […] He conducted rigorous experiments himself on various hydras and plumed worms which could be got to bud new heads and segments all from the same tail, in a process known as gemmation. He was greatly interested in the way in which the lovely Medusa or transparent jellyfish were apparently unfertilised buds of certain Polyps. He busily sliced off the tentacles of hydra and lacerated polyps into fragments, each of which became a new creature. This phenomenon fascinated him because it seemed to him to indicate a continuity and interdependence of all life, which might perhaps assist in modifying or doing away with the notion of individual death (P 249).

 

What the aquatic Melusine assists both Christabel and Maud to accomplish is coming to terms with the “awkward body,” becoming aware of its immense generative potential. A genealogical hybrid herself (born of a fairy mother and a human father), the legendary Melusine produces a host of monstrous progeny, all bearing disfiguring facial marks, “strange defects – odd ears, giant tusks, a catshead growing out of one cheek, three eyes, that sort of thing,” as Fergus Wolff puts it (P 33). To her offspring Melusina is extremely attached, but is forced to abandon them. In Byatt’s novel, this maternal aspect registers several permutations. Thus, while the daughter that Christabel gives birth to is physically flawless yet somewhat degenerate, in the sense of devoid of her parents’ artistic aspirations, her Tales for Innocents – tales of terror derived from Grimm and Tieck – are fraught with references to the teratogenic powers of female imagination. One should only consider here the story about a woman who, desiring a child, of any kind, even a hedgehog, has her desire fulfilled. Like in the legend of Cupid and Psyche or in the fairy tale about Beauty and the Beast, the “half-hedgehog, half-boy” in this story queries the clear-cut divisions between monstrosity and humanity, and renders bodily contours amenable to metamorphic processes: “In the end it wins a King’s daughter who is expected to burn its hedgehog-skin at night, and does so, and finds herself clasping a beautiful Prince, all singed and soot-black” (P 53).

Besides, it is no gratuitous gesture on Byatt’s part that she should sequentially have inserted Christabel’s poem immediately after the episode recounting the erotic union between the two Victorian artists, making thus the analogy with Shelley’s narrative, “a book constructed like a pregnancy,”[14] stand even firmer in place. This conflation of sexual and textual offspring also resounds in the pastiched, quasi Pre-Raphaelite review of Christabel’s epic, which renders it “a quiet, muscular serpent of a tale, with more vigour and venom than is at all usual in the efforts of the female pen, but without narrative thrust; rather, as was Coleridge’s Serpent who figured the Imagination, with its tail stuffed in its own mouth” (P 37). Furthermore, Christabel’s final confession to Ash, whereby “my life-history” and “my Melusina epic” are firmly intertwined, traversing the borderlines between myth and reality:

 

I have been Melusina these thirty years. I have so to speak flown about and about the battlements of this stronghold crying to the wind of my need to see and feed and comfort my child, who knew me not. (P 301)

 

The novel’s insistence on liminality, on crossing thresholds (Denenholz Morse 2000, 157) revolves around the possibility of imaginatively re-visioning the figure of the Melusine. If in the medieval legend the male gaze (of Raimondin and story-teller alike) poses the threat of reifying or monstrifying the female body,[15] Christabel’s intent in writing an epic of the Melusine is to twist the visual angle from which the fabulous woman is looked at. Her aim is to write “from Melusina’s – own – vision. Not, as you might, in the First Person – as inhabiting her skin – but seeing her as an unfortunate Creature – of Power and Frailty” (P 175). This non-intrusive, transitional, and compassionate gaze allows Christabel to reconfigure the Fairy Melusine’s morphology, from “flying worm” with gruesome sinewy tail” (P 289) to a comforting image of “swaying supple brilliance” (P 296) encountered by a much aggrieved knight in a womblike cavern by the Fountain of Thirst. Christabel’s Melusine retrieves (repossesses) the lost appeal of romance and appears as the prototypal mother goddess offering the promise of an illustrious line. It is not so much that Possession disavows its own status as a “self-referring, self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game” (P 421), or that it eventually abandons its parodic, deconstructive glance at constructed notions of [monstrous] identity.[16] It is rather the case that this recasting of the Melusine as a foundational, tutelary figure of female (pro)creativity reinforces Byatt’s firm advocacy of Romantic conceptions of poetic imagination.

 

Out of the Orrery: Marina Warner’s Indigo, or Mapping the Waters

 

Marina Warner’s explicit intent underlying her re-vision[17] of the Shakespearean Tempest is that of producing an “alternative story” to its precursor canonical text (2003, 268). Indigo, or Mapping the Waters represents what Moraru has designated as (narratively) intensive and (ideologically) extensive rewriting. This, besides engaging in a substantial reworking of textual precedents, also performs a critique of dominant narratives, ideational formations and “cultural mythologies” (2001, xii; 26). Insistent, as the title reveals, on hybridisation (both narrative and corporeal), Indigo (ir)reverently traces its fractured lineage to The Tempest, and reconsiders monstrosity, filtering West European and Caribbean myth-history through the lenses of a socioculturally revisionist frame. Grafted upon Renaissance travelogues depicting encounters with monsters at geographical margins and upon colonial narratives which historically circumscribe Shakespeare’s atemporal island within the triangular slave trade, Indigo goes “against normative models of the unified self” (Warner 2002, 203) and reconfigures the agonic duality of identity/alterity (civilisation/savagery, humanity/bestiality) into a polychronic, liminal composite between self and other.

To this effect, Warner resorts to a mechanism of foregrounding the silenced yet “overarching female presence” from the play, attempting to restore the “foul witch Sycorax” to “presence, value and power” (2003, 266-268). As Diane Purkiss maintains, traditional representations of the witch picture her as an ex-centric, marginal figure, conceptually and discursively removed from the centre stage to the liminal topography of doorways, thresholds, or wild spaces, such as forests, caverns, etc. With Renaissance “witch-dramas,” such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, grafted as they are on “classical witch-texts” as well as on “tentative discourses of exploration, discovery and colonialism in the New World,” the figure of the witch becomes crucial, though silenced and expunged from the stage proper, in the sense that she is (mis)appropriated and made to serve ideologically as the reason that invites exploration and colonisation of the new topographies (1996, 250).

Warner’s restoration of Sycorax to the crux of this narrative of origins and reversions[18] is accomplished by inserting the Shakespearean hag figure in a transformational imagery (pertaining, she claims, to alchemy or witchcraft), based on four main metamorphic processes, as highlighted in Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. These are: mutating, hatching, splitting and doubling, all hinting at dynamic principles of creation, bearing strong analogy with various parturition processes, and yet removing attention from the maternal body as a site of uncontainable excess.

Two are the main sources that inform Warner’s metamorphic imagery, running counter to notions of integral, unique identity that prevail in the Judeo-Christian tradition. First, the metamorphoses of classical myths, and, particularly, Ovid’s incorporation of the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis into an awareness that the universe is protean, “unceasingly progenitive, multiple and fluid.” Second, the historical insight, assisted by postcolonial theories of hybridity, that narratives of metamorphosis are likely to be engendered in cross-cultural spaces, situated at the “mercantile and political confluence of heterogeneous peoples, histories, and languages, a shifting, metamorphic, and phantasmal zone, where le merveilleux Creole (the Creole marvellous) made its appearance in different languages and different genres” (Warner 2002, 5 & 21). Again, Warner’s commentaries in Signs and Wonders are illuminating. The impact of such narratives, born at the junction between classical myth and ethnographic surveys of the New World, is dual: on the one hand, they may instil a sense of the dissolution of identity; but on the other, they might open endless possibilities of self-fashioning and re-fashioning:

 

Broadly speaking, the idea of metamorphosis sets a huge tension around the idea of subjectivity, because to find yourself within a world that is in flux, that is metamorphic, that is constantly changing offers two possibilities: one, that you are fragmented and dispersed, that you are scattered, that your identity is actually lost and dismembered across the whole scenery; the other is that you are capable of any form of transformation, that you could or can be anything. […] these two states are often present and in conflict: on the one hand, you are under threat of disappearing, because your identity is subject to outside forces, and on the other you are actually capable of entering the plot of your own life and changing it (Warner (2003, 278).

 

The Caribbean – to which Warner dislodges the Shakespearean plot in Indigo – represents just such a liminal space of cultural hybridity, or, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, a third space of enunciation (1994, 38), where new cultural identities and meanings are produced through a subversion and transgression (métissage) of the essentialised categories of coloniser/subject and colonised/object. “An uninhabited island” (The Tempest, p. 2) is firmly identified as the twin isles of Liamuiga/Oualie around the year 1600, which will then register several renamings, according to the power regime claiming dominion over them: Everhope, or rather, Saint Thomas (under the rule of their first coloniser, Sir Christopher Everard, during the reign of King James); Enfant-Béate (the Blessed Child, after latest craze at Versailles, the cult of the Christ Child, when, in mid-seventeenth century, the islands fell briefly under French rule). Starkly divided in the heyday of colonisation, Europeans and native islanders reach, by the time of the fading empire, such levels of cross-culturation and miscegenation that Miranda, the twentieth-century descendant of the first Kit Everard, is herself creolised, though of a much lighter shade than the “local gradations”, ranging from musty and metis to quadroon and octaroon.

The first metamorphic process in the series analysed by Warner is that of mutation; this is limned as a result of the “cross-fertilisation” of European and New World mythologies, and consists primarily of shape shifting, hybridisation, or splicing, in a radical eschewal of normal channels of human procreation, with the result that the offspring produced are utterly dissimilar to the originating matrix: “the changes that take place involve swelling and opening, bursting and cracking and spilling, more akin to vegetable propagation and ripening than to human sexual coupling and parturition” (Warner 2003, 66). Noticing that in the Christian eschatology, such horrific morphological amalgams are relegated to the infernal circles or are purportedly arrived at through diabolical magic, Warner has the “blue-eyed hag” undergo mutation, a deliberate structural alteration, which is the result of the “damn’d witch Sycorax” being grafted onto the figure of la Diablesse, the she-devil, a figure of Carribean lore whose distinctive mark is a cloven hoof. This image of the deformed foot represents for Warner the distinguishing mark of the female storyteller, of the reviled devilish enchantress occupying the ambivalent position of both insider and outsider to her world.[19] The sixteenth-century figure of the bestial witch mutates thus into her double, the twentieth-century figure of Serafine Killebree, a “conteuse in the Caribbean tradition,”[20] who is displaced from her native isle of Liamuiga to the centre of the former empire. Here she voices tales of metamorphosis, of carnivalesque transformation, of origins and becomings. Thus Warner retrieves the muted witch figure from the Shakespearean master narrative and undertakes, as she confesses, to “pay tribute to the oral culture of women, to all pre­Gutenberg female voices, including the storytellers of the Caribbean” (2003, 266).

Serafine’s narratives frame and punctuate the doubly-tiered chronotope of the novel, interweaving past and present, Caribbean wilderness and European civilization. The opening story-telling frame (Serafine I) introduces the motif of metamorphosis, for in the classical myths she recounts (of King Midas, of Bacchic sileni and Dionysian cortèges) or in her fairy tales of Enfant-Béate (her native island curving its dragon-like spine into the sea) “everything risked changing shape” (I, 4). “Serafine II” neatly divides the novel into two halves, and while recounting a narrative of monstrosity, of the seadragon Manjiku roaming the seas that surround Liamuiga, it nevertheless ends in a twisted version of a western fairy-tale, that of Beauty and the Beast. Serafine III concludes the novel by overlapping the West Indian nurse and her Shakespearean precedent as the consciousness that convenes the destinies of “people scattered here and there, from the past and from the present” (I 402); the prevalent motif is again ceaseless wandering, peripatetic existence, provisional rest and perpetual nomadism, all in all, the incessant pursuit of identity, of roots and destinations.

Unlike disruptive, incongruous mutation, hatching and its correlative, pupation (the second metamorphic subset in the aforementioned series), would pertain to organic developmental transformation and entail the emergence of new beings out of ovum-shaped shells. Such vital processes of generation, forming an important subset in the transformational imagery of witchcraft and alchemy, bring about “permutations of dissimilarity, not of similarity, into the development of an entity” (Warner 2003, 79). While hatching implies foreseeable outcomes (the like engenders the like), progressing through sequential metamorphic stages, such as those inherent to the butterfly cycle, allows for the reconfiguration of identity as resistant to closure and permeable to adventitious modification.

At the core of Indigo, not only is the voice of the witch-hag potently heard (she is indeed the source of many of the noises the isle is full of), but femininity and monstrosity are definitely forged together through the motif of pregnancy. Waters host the totemic monster of the islands, Manjiku, an aggregate of Leviathan and Behemoth, gendered as male yet craving the powers of female reproduction. Hence the strange association of Manjiku with the various women that he swallows and then disgorges so as to bereave them of their birthing capacities.

Manjiku’s got a snout like a crocodile, Manjiku’s got pointed teeth arranged in double rows, and a mane of spikes like sea urchins, and a forked tail with razor edges he uses to slice up his food. And cut his enemies to pieces! Anything that gets in his way, slash, slash. He can work up the ocean to scuds of foam when he’s cross. Manjiku’s pale, pale, he can’t bear the light of the sun, it burns his pale skin, his pale flesh, it leaches the life out of him in blisters and wens. You can see his bones through his warty hide, like a jellyfish, like an X-ray. He’s lived that long in the sea he glows in the dark. […] What Manjiku wants – more than food, more than drink, more than sweet life itself – is to have a child of his own. Yes! Not just to have it, like a father – no, he wants to be a mother, to bring the child out of its mouth, spit out a little Manjiku, think of that! For Manjiku is a monster, a seadragon, he sets fear in the heart of every man. Yet he wants nothing better than to be a woman – (I 219-220).

Several females who drown in these waters (Estelle Desjours or Xanthe) undergo marine transformations.[21] Miranda’s mother, in Warner’s retelling of The Tempest, also acquires hybrid morphic features: “half-mermaid, half-stormy petrel, like the woman-faced feathered sirens who blow about on the wind and plummet down to call the sailors to come their way” (I 57-58). The body of Sycorax becomes dry, sterile: she does not give birth to Caliban, but rescues the unborn infant from a slave mother’s womb, naming him Dulé. Instead, Sycorax acquires a “counterfeit fertility,” that of her imagination, exerting her preternatural insights and powers into producing indigo and healing the ailing islanders. This fertility of the mind rather than of the womb allows Sycorax to unscramble to chorus of voices (other noises the isle if filled with) resounding from the shipwrecked corpses of African slaves, washed ashore after the disintegration of their cradle-hearse ship – indeed, disgorged by the sea and laid to rest by the islanders to preclude pollution. The transformation these restless, disembodied spirits are clamouring for is disruptive of the process of natural decay, and envisages the submarine mutations their bodies would undergo as a guarantee of permanence, rather than a threat to identity:

 

Another cried, “Grit for oysters…”

Then another, “Bonemeal for vines…”

And yet another, “We’ll make rich loam…”

“From our carcases, the melon and the gourd…”

“From our flesh, mermaid’s purses, dolphin garlands – Haha!”

and another seemed to laugh too, and said, “Blood roses for the coral, black dust for the sand…” (I 83).

 

What is essential is that Sycorax’s sterility of womb, her dispossession of birthing capacities and circumvention of “natural” pregnancy are what attract her monstrification in the first place. She does indeed deliver Dulé, but by hatching the infant out of his dead mother’s swollen abdomen. It is at this particular point that Sycorax’s enfreakment – her transmogrification into a “monster’s dam” as she will be retained in the cultural memory, apud Shakespeare – begins. Enfreakment would represent, according to Rosemarie Garland Thomson, a process of discursive formation, whereby, through mediating narratives or cultural representations, the differences of various anomalous bodies are collapsed into a category of corporeal otherness. It is thus that the monster turns thus from a freak of nature into a freak of culture (Thomson (1996, xviii & 10). Sycorax experiences monstrification both endogenously and exogenously. First, at the hands of the islanders, who are repelled by her marked similarity to the seamonster Manjiku, suspicious of her apparent intercourse with the beasts or of her sorcery.[22] She is thus proclaimed “official wisewoman,” endowed with sangay, prodigious powers and preternatural insights, and a worshipper of Adesangé, god of fire. Then, through her inscription in the official records of the island’s colonisers. Kit Everard, for instance, a Prospero-Ferdinand deprived of any magic propensities – he is everything (a pioneer among planters, buccaneer, dreamer, civiliser, settler, hero, gentleman) but a magician[23] – ingratiates himself with the savage natives and learns from them the secrets of the isle, prior to mutilating and moulding them into docile subjects.[24] Thus, “this benighted creature and her foul magic” (I 136) is scantily referred to in Kit Everard’s correspondence to his father, and despite the tremendous apparatus of knowledge deployed to subdue Sycorax’s magic (“they had brought tales with them from England of witchcraft and the King’s concern,” I, 174), she is nevertheless altogether erased or obscured from official historiography, be it either King James’s scroll, French missionary and Enlightenment scholar Pere Labat’s chronicle of the natives’ customs, or the illuminated parchment (only a copy of which survives as the Everards’ heirloom) in which, waist-deep in waters, a Gulliveresque Kit dominates the native midgets. Significantly enough, it is through interpellation that Sycorax becomes the “damn’d witch” and that her sangay turns into “foul” magic, and it is Marina Warner’s insight that she should have made rather explicit the process of enfreakment that Sycorax undergoes:

 

The description of Sycorax’s magic circulated and of course grew in the telling: scarred by fire, she now played with the element, burning circles of flame round creatures […] Adesangé, god of the volcano, was the lord of Sycorax’s rites […] the fervour of the woman who had once been so sceptical of others” belief in her powers, who used to insist that all mysteries lay in the processes of nature and need only be observed and analysed and understood. (I 174)

 

Warner takes here issue with Kermode’s groundbreaking study of The Tempest, and shows how the distinction neatly operated there between theurgy/good magic and goety/sorcery/maleficium breaks down, since, on the one hand, Prospero resorts actually to both these forms of supernatural manipulation, and on the other, usurps Sycorax not only of her island but also of her magical powers over the elements:

 

So his magic does not figure as malign – except to Caliban, of course, who rains down curses on his head. […] Yet in the course of the play Prospero spellbinds the survivors of the storm which he commanded Ariel to raise, he conjures spirits to harass his victims, torments Caliban with phantom pinches and stings and beatings and pursues him with dogs; he performs these magus-like feats through Ariel his airy messenger, and Ariel creates an historical as well as emotional link between Prospero and Sycorax. More particularly, Ariel, who was once bound in a cloven pine by Sycorax, now serves Prospero against his will (Warner 2003, 241).

 

Besides this act of dispossession, whereby Sycorax is deprived of her Circean powers of transformation, Prospero’s dramatic abjuration of his arts is heavily indebted to Medea’s speech from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which leads Warner to conclude that:

 

Circe and Medea, these two malignant but alluring witches, seem to be standing in the wings of the play and the lights behind them cast their interlaced shadows across the stage, forming the phantom, Sycorax, whispering to Prospero how to command the insubstantial pageant of the action (2003, 242).

 

The third metamorphic process, splitting, describes the severance or separation of consciousness from its bodily container, all in all approximated by the African and Caribbean belief in zombification, which was disseminated then into Europe throughout the cultural-political geography of empires. Brought about by mind-body scission, zombies, whom Warner sees crystallised in the figure of the Creole outsider (Antoinette Cosway in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, or Miranda in Indigo, for instance), are to be distinguished from disembodied spirits, the phantom condition being reversed to a living, mortal husk marooning in search for a soul. For these female protagonists, this could be translated as a suspended state of indeterminacy, of wavering between conflicting attachments to diverse cultures, locations, identities. While in the case of Antoinette, zombification is completed through her metamorphosis into the madwoman in the attic, the Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre’s grand narrative, Miranda experiences creolisation as awareness of the various strata, influences and cultures that meld into a multi-layered identity rather than threatening to disperse it or bring it out of the orbit. Transformational processes, and the narratives that “activate”[25] them in Indigo point to the radical indeterminacy of being, to liminality, to in-betweenness, to the fluidity of identity. Identity becomes indeed an endless chorographic[26] process of “Mapping the Waters” – an ongoing project of imag(in)ing, mapping and dismantling borders (geographical, as well as cultural), since most characters suffer displacement, dislocation and are in perpetual pursuit of “imaginary homelands” (Warner (2003, 264). To reinforce this idea of nomadism as the essential condition of mankind, Warner adduces two epigraphs for her novel, which insist on displacement, diaspora, dislodgement. There is an unacknowledged tension between the two paratextual frames, in the sense that the extract from Derek Walcott’s quasi-Homeric epic Omeros, also set in the Caribbean, counterpoints the dis-location of cultures to an organic blend of nature/culture, whereas the quotation from Empson pithily affirms peripatetic restiveness as a universal human condition. As Warner confesses,

 

Indigo is a novel about migrations, geographical, colonial, imaginary and emotional. It’s about crossing barriers, and about erecting them, about being foreign and strange in the eyes of someone else, and about undoing this strangeness in order to find what can be held in common (2003, 264).

 

Assisted by Serafine’s distillation of the Black Atlantic’s cultural memory, Miranda herself turns out to perpetuate the idea of maroon (from the French marroner, meaning to be on the run), merging with this “imaginative symbol of the fugitive in our time,” crossing borders, breaking out of boundaries and longing to inhabit “a place of elective affinities” (Warner 2003, 265). Splitting, the divisive process whereby consciousness is separated from the body afflicts Sycorax herself: Locked in her vertical grave at the foot of the sacred saman tree, yet condemned to the fate of a mortal immortal, the blue-eyed had continues, across centuries, to generate and record the noises on the isle. Warner challenges here notions of history as flux, for time is likened to a cauldron, a churn or a vat in which substances and essences are mixed and brewed together (I 122).

Doubling, the fourth and final way of telling the self in Warner’s Metamorphoses, posits uncanny threats to notions of integral, self-contained identity, and registers several variations, ranging from permutations of outer and inner selves, to monstrous doppelgangers (the self being shadowed by an Other self). The agrestic cradle,[27] flanking and at the same time defining civilisation, was also inhabited, much prior to the age of European colonial expansion, by the wild man, who has consistently functioned – if we are to credit Hayden White – as a culturally self-authenticating device for the civilised European, or as part of a “technique of ostensive self-definition by negation” (1978, 151-152). Acknowledging that Shakespeare’s wild man is partly moulded onto the figure of European homo salvaticus, and partly indebted to descriptions of exotic savages encountered in the New World, Kermode maintains that Caliban is central to the play, to the extent that he structurally enforces the logic of binary oppositions whereby civility can be “estimated.”[28] Nature is thus contrasted with “nurture” (education/cultivation), but also with innate grace or nobility of spirit, with refined morals/virtue as well as consummate bodily beauty. Caliban is thus consistently pictured as the counterpart of Prospero, the magus, (the “natural” man v. the “artist” delving in supernatural craft); of Miranda (subjected to the same process of education, yet with altogether different results);[29] of the European noblemen (naturally inferior to them, hence, naturally, a slave to them); of Ferdinand (consistent with the romance pattern, inner deformity is platonically reflected in Caliban’s outward deformity, or viceversa).

Successively called in The Tempest: “a savage and deformed slave” (in the list of dramatis personae); “a freckled whelp hag-born – not honoured with/A human shape;” “a thing most brutish;” “ a strange fish;” “this monster;” “ half a fish and half a monster;” “misshapen knave;” “demi-devil,” Caliban’s name is etymologically derived from several possible sources, the most plausible being a corruption of “cannibal”[30] – one umbrella term under which fabulous races encountered by renaissance travellers, or imagined to inhabit the margins of the earth, were collapsed together, given their different dietary habits. Although cannibalism does not specifically rank amongst Caliban’s nonhuman characteristics in The Tempest, Warner’s novel does chart the entire process of monstrification Dulé undergoes. Thus, in a letter addressed to his father, Lord Clovelly, Kit Everard unwittingly reveals how, fearing his witchcraft, the colonists attempt to subdue the rebellious slave and contain his aberrant nature by naming him, by inserting him in a category:

 

Some of our men call him “cannibal”, seeking to undo the power of his monstrousness by naming it, like to conjuring. “Tis to my mind a false notion, and I prefer the lisping usage of the children, Caliban. […] I know them to be human creatures made in God’s image too, the womenfolk most lovely and most temperate (for the most part), and I would not abet the evil Spaniard in his slanders. Yet some are dangerous to our cause […] The Good Book has taught us their image, they must be outcasts with the mark of Cain upon them, Ishmaels for whom the savage wilderness is home till they come to know the wisdom of the Lord. (I 201).

 

The other possible source – “Cauliban,” the Romani term for “black” – tends to account for Caliban’s abjection via similar biases that Jacobean society espoused towards travelling gypsies, their pagan beliefs and practices (Warner 2003, 261). Again, while no definite references to Caliban’s blackness are made in the play, Warner twists this detail into explicitness: Dulé, the child disgorged onto the shores of Liamuiga from the bowels of the slave ship, epitomises the Black Atlantic,[31] or the so-called middle passage of the slave trade, which disseminated black diasporic communities from the coasts of Africa to those of the New World. Colour symbolism is crucial in Warner’s novel; far from limited to a Manichean duality of black against white, colours are disposed into a spectrum of gradients that unite, rather than separate diverse shades and nuances. Warner exploits this transitional colour imagery and the title, along with the hyphenated subtitles of the novel’s chapters, evinces a crossing of time, cultural and identity thresholds.[32]

I called the novel Indigo, with a subtitle, “Mapping the Waters”, because I wanted to introduce a pattern of many colours, and suggest their mingling. The light I was trying to shed on history was made up as light is from strands of different colours — themes and moods, not races or flesh tones. The book moves through indigo to maroon, the point being that indigo sounds related to “indigenous” (though this isn’t so) and is the original colour used in “blueprints”. It’s the colour of the ink used for the first pattern. I wanted the novel to look for the story or scheme that lay beneath the visible layers. That is not to suggest that an original truth exists which could be retrieved and re­traced. But there is always another story beyond the story, there is always as it were another deeper blueprint. I was writing about change from the beginnings, as far as they could be disclosed (Warner 2003, 265).

Serafine’s palms, just like Sycorax’s body, are imprinted with the colour of indigo, “as if she had steeped them in ink to bring out the pattern” (I, 4); flesh discards markers of ethnicity and becomes the discursive, scriptible surface onto which cultural meaning is enciphered: mapped with dark, crisscrossing, wandering lines, Feeny’s palms are the script or the narrative Miranda awaits to decipher. For this, she must go beneath layer upon layer, blueprint upon blueprint, with the result of questioning the possibility of retrieving “original” truths. In fact, in Sycorax’s cauldron, indigo – concurrently original and end colour, blueprint and finality – is the result of consecutive transmutations, in the course of which colours successively blend and gradually pupate into newer shades:

 

The blue I used to make, she thought to herself, was the culmination of a sequence. It marked the end of the long process of transformations – starting with the seething leaves of the plant, then the reeking green stage of the first steepings, and the sulphurous yellow stage of the liquor before it was exposed to the air, then binding with the air, it gradually turned to blue (I 147).

 

Serafine’s stories similarly evince grafting, interweaving and splitting of European and West Indian motifs. In so far as doubling is concerned, not only does Serafine claim double literary extraction (Shakespeare’s Sycorax and Jean Rhys’s Christophine from Wide Sargasso Sea) but most of The Tempest’s protagonists register similar duplication. Thus, for instance, contemporary Miranda’s counterpart is Xanthe, the golden girl whose agent of metamorphosis is either King Midas or Princess Alicia; conversely, Miranda is abstracted from the quasi-Shakespearean seventeenth-century setting and supplanted by the figure of Ariel, “another stranger’s child” (gendered feminine this time), who is brought under the foster motherhood of Sycorax. Warner “undoes the enmity” from the Shakespearean plot and renders Sycorax and Ariel welded together (“cloven”) in the “doubled oneness of a woman and her child” (I 110).

To conclude, Byatt’s. Possession revisits traditional notions of female monstrosity, suggesting, in effect, that such theriomorphic bodies as the Melusine’s ultimately refuse representational or discursive containment. Gaming with the notion that teratogenesis is related to maternal, as well as poetic, imagination leads to a destabilising of Victorian notions of excessive female sexuality and disrupts “natural” assumptions about the monstrous-feminine. As regards Indigo, it is perhaps through its reshuffling of the Shakespearean characters into patterns that are at once similar and dissimilar to their precedents that Warner orbits most significantly out of the orrery. Serafine/Sycorax and Ariel/Miranda, “old hag and lovely Amazon,” offstage vilified witch and compliant daughter are redistributed into a continuum of femininity-monstrosity, restored to presence and valorised in the process.

 

 

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Notes

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