Nov 30 2008
The Feminine Katabasis
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Bibliography
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. (2007). The Greek Goddesses. New England Review, 28, 194-207. November 10, 2008.
Homer. (1967). The Odyssey (Richmond Lattimore ,Ed.). New York: HarperCollins.
Homer. (2001). The Homeric Hymns (Michael Crudden Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Negra, Diane. (1996). Coveting the feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill. Literature/Film Quarterly, 24, 193-200.
Psycho (Collector’s Edition). Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh,V era Miles. DVD. Universal Studios, 1960.
Suter, Ann. (2002). The Narcissus and the pomegranate: an archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. University of Michigan Press. November 10, 2008.
The Silence of the Lambs (Widescreen Special Edition). Dir. Jonathan Demme. Perf. Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins. DVD. Mgm (Video &Amp; Dvd), 1991.
The Feminine Katabasis – in All its Forms
The feminine Katabasis is one that is generally thought to be less… physically demanding than the masculine Katabasis – looking through class notes on the female Katabasis, they say, “mentally-based”, “tragic”, and even “depressing”. But it seems that while it is not the blatantly action-based, heart-pumping journey a male undergoes, it is much more complex, more emotional. That does not mean that it has to be boring. The most well-know feminine Katabasis is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. We all know the story – beautiful Persephone, wandering alone through fields to gather flowers, is seen by Hades, god of the Underworld. Finding her beauty captivating, he kidnaps her, taking her to live with him in the underworld. Ceres, Persephone’s mother, is greatly distressed by her daughter’s kidnapping, and refuses to let crops grow until she is returned to her. When Zeus sends a messenger to tell Hades he must relinquish Persephone, Hade tricks her into eating the seeds of a pomegranate, and makes her stay in the Underworld with him for part of the year because she ate them, (Homeric Hymns, 2001).
Both the female characters in this story experience a Katabasis, both literally and figuratively. Persephone is physically taken to the Underworld, and forced to marry the ruler there. Even when the story ends, Persephone’s Katabasis does not end. Every year, she may leave for a short time and be with her mother, but soon that time is up and she must return to her master in the Underworld. Her cycle is unending. Ceres’ Katabasis is not physical in the least, but instead is all in her mind. The loss of her child makes her withdraw from the world, and her job – she can only think on her lost daughter. Her horror at the loss of her daughter makes her descend to the underworld, if only in her mind.
But these are not the only types of female Katabasis – these are successful completed Katabasis, but what of those that do not succeed as the traveler would wish? And must a female Katabasis be limited only to, well, females?
I hope you are all familiar with at least the general stories of Hitchcock’s Psycho and Tomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs. If not, let me at least introduce to you the two villainous characters in the story – Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill. Norman Bates is a young man that runs a small motel rather off the beaten track – he also has a mother complex, and when he sees a woman that he desires sexually, he dresses up in his dead mother’s clothing and kills them. He wants nothing more than to be accepted and loved by his (deceased) mother, and by the end of the movie has completely lost all sense of self, and, in his mind, becomes the mother. At the end of the movie, Norman Bates talks to the camera as if he were his mother, saying, “They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching… they’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…,”” (Psycho, 1960).
Buffalo Bill is another disturbed young man – he is convinced that he is a transsexual, but has been denied the operation from all of the major hospitals that offer the surgery. So, in a way to become the female he so desires to be, he starts killing and skinning young girls, in order to create a female body suit.
These two characters, more than anything else, wish to become females in some way, shape, or form. “Norman Bates… and Buffalo Bill share a profoundly ambivalent view of femininity based on attraction/repulsion,” (Negra, 1996). Norman Bates wishes to become his mother, Buffalo Bill, a girl that men would desire. Norman Bates dresses up as his mother, talks like her, and kills people he feels would be threatening figures to her – he wishes, desperately, to be a Ceres-like figure. Buffalo Bill, as I said, attempts to create a suit of skin. In one scene of the movie, Buffalo Bill is filming himself, dressed in makeup and a wig, and dances around, saying, “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me. I’d fuck me hard,” (Silence of the Lambs, 1991). He wishes to be a Persephone-type.
But neither of them is actually what they wish to be, for all their efforts to become them. Norman Bates kills people, something his mother would not do – he takes the traditional role of a protective mother and adds a violent, masculine edge to it. While he wishes to be Ceres, in actuality he is little more than the hero/suitor gone horribly wrong. And Buffalo Bill, for all his attempts at becoming Persephone, is in the end much more similar to Hades that Hades’ would-be lover. After all, “Lenne… notes that in fairy tales “woman is almost always a princess who, no matter what happens, never participates directly in the action,” (Negra, 1996). This cannot be said about Buffalo Bill at all. Yes, in the story of Silence of the Lambs he is, in a very twisted way, the object of desire, hunted and pursued throughout the book, but he covets more than he is coveted, does more than he is done to. His lair is in his basement, an ‘underworld’, and he traps girls inside; he always returns the girls to the world from whence they came, but, like Hades, with a twist – in Buffalo Bill’s case, he always returns them dead.
In the end, neither character is able to properly complete their Katabasis – they are men, attempting to bring masculinity to the feminine Katabasis, and therefore being unable to complete their quest. But, in many ways, what these men desire is impossible – the women they try to become are unrealistic, impossible figures, regardless of how relatable they may be. Goddesses tend to be idealized – “we begin to see how much of the stateliness of polytheism lay in its ideal women,” (Higginson, 2007). So while they never complete their Katabasis, there can be no denying that they attempted one, nor, even, that they tried to fit they parts they were to play.
Bibliography
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. (2007). The Greek Goddesses. New England Review, 28, 194-207. November 10, 2008.
Homer. (1967). The Odyssey (Richmond Lattimore ,Ed.). New York: HarperCollins.
Homer. (2001). The Homeric Hymns (Michael Crudden Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Negra, Diane. (1996). Coveting the feminine: Victor Frankenstein, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill. Literature/Film Quarterly, 24, 193-200.
Psycho (Collector’s Edition). Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Perf. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh,V era Miles. DVD. Universal Studios, 1960.
Suter, Ann. (2002). The Narcissus and the pomegranate: an archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. University of Michigan Press. November 10, 2008.
The Silence of the Lambs (Widescreen Special Edition). Dir. Jonathan Demme. Perf. Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins. DVD. Mgm (Video &Amp; Dvd), 1991.
(Posting both of these again, as apparently they did not go through the first time.)