How feminist theory and gender roles are used in film, literature and society.

            Blu’s Hanging portrays the consequences of the untimely loss of the mother in the lives of three children.  The family structure crumbles upon her disappearance.  Her death translates into a state of demotion within the community.  The children can no longer charge groceries at Friendly Market and survive on mayonnaise bread as their primary food source.  Poppy is forced to take on several jobs, starts smoking pot and is never in the house, thus the children face the hardships of the world unaided by parental guidance.  The innocence of childhood confronts a grim adult jungle in which experience is learned through painful initiations.  The children are forced to prematurely seek and establish their identity as Mama is not there to supply the rules of survival.  As a result, confusion clouds the normal stages of formative development.  Identity definition without Mama becomes a crucial issue for Blu.

            At night, Blu “hangs on to a knotted sheet dangling from his window” because he wants to be a “Flier” and “fly anywhere in this world.” (162) In the immediate context of the scene, the young boy natural to his age, sails in an innocent adventure.  He enters a world of suspended disbelief in which by assuming the heroic identity of the Flier he can temporarily run away from the stifling monotony of the world around him.  In Blu’s case, he escapes a reality in which lack acts as the dominant feature.  He lacks food and friends.  He struggles to obtain fatherly love but his father is too busy coping with his own grief.  Finally, Blu misses his mother.  Escapism into a fantasy free from reference to the present can be seen as the child’s natural outlet for his pain.    However, the image of the boy hanging from the window in wild reverie, when connected with others, reveals a deeper psycho-sexual/social context.  Blu is not healing but regressing.  Unable to come to terms with the world around him, he hangs on to a surrogate umbilical cord and flees the space of the absent, condemning Mr. Ogata.  Blu literally hangs to his mother and finds peace and a wholesome identity, the Flier, only in terms of his relationship to her.    

            But why is Blu’s identity clear only in the overarching structure of the maternal space?  To explain this phenomenon, we can invoke Lacanian theory regarding the process of identity formation during early childhood.  The maternal space is the child’s first reality.  It stands as a safe haven where the passive fetus hangs in the vast space of embryonic fluid with the fulfillment of all his needs through the infant’s connection to the umbilical cord.  At this stage, the child’s bodily boundaries and sensations are not yet defined.  The child believes his body and the mother’s are one.  Shock envelops him upon the separation of their bodies, which happens at the time the child first sees himself in the mirror.  This is the moment of primary abjection—the child’s expulsion from the mother’s body.  He thus ceases to have a unified identity and by “othering” the mother, conceptualizes himself through lack-- “I am in as much as I am not you (the Other, the mother figure). 

            Once the child discovers its body as a separate entity, he establishes his primary identity using the mother as a point of reference.[1]  Since his identity is dependent on the mother, the boundaries between inside/outside and the notion of self are only existent with the presence of the point of reference.  The mother becomes a sort of idol for the child and her body stands as an object of desire which the child seeks to return to and lose itself in.  This desire is cut short by the entrance of the father figure who initiates the child into the realm of phallic signification and imposes the incest taboo.  In a normal development, the child identifies with the father figure.  The father acts as a guide to establish the delineation of bodily territories, sexual drives, and boundaries between pleasure and pain, all which create an secondary, socially-functional identity within the Law of the Father and no longer dependent on the body of the mother.

            In Blu’s case the connection with the father is non-existent and he continues to depend on the mother for self-definition.  Once the mother dies, his point of reference vanishes and he finds himself at a loss.  The children’s pot smoking father, Mr. Ogata, fails to provide stability in the absence of the mother, forsaking his role as the representative of the Law of the Father.  He delegates his parental rights to teenage daughter Ivah and disappears from the family scene by always being away at work.  The father ignores his duty to maintain the family’s functionality and social status, thus a second form of abjection occurs.   The children are rejected by society as they do not follow the model of the two-parent family structure and hence are looked down upon by the rest of the community.  They no longer exist as a family, but a mockery of this structure.  With no rules or father-figure ideal to follow, it is not surprising Blu’s normal childhood development is marked by a rampage of outrageous behavior.  Literally, Blu expresses his anger at the father for failing to uphold the family’s social status, his grief over the sudden loss of the mother and his desperate attempt to reconstruct the happy family structure.  From a psychological standpoint, Blu’s reaction is two-fold.  Blu needs a clear definition of bodily boundaries and sexual drives, however lacks the support of the father for successful self-definition and entry into society.  He thus regresses and attempts to resuscitate the mother’s body as a point of reference. By entering the maternal space, literally through consuming objects connected with Mama, Blu attempts to mark his identity and body through a distorted mother double resurrected within him.  Social entrance and exploration of personality cannot arise as long as Blu inhabits this fantastic aberrance of the maternal space.  At some point, he realizes the need to sever the surrogate umbilical cord, to assert his body and mark his bodily territory apart from the mother.  However, as his self-conception only exists in terms of her presence, he will need to confront her, defile her and force her out of his body.  He lessens the grip of the surrogate umbilical cord through acts of individual signification and creates a unique space, the perverse space of the abject, existing somewhere within the loss maternal territory and the circumscribed realm of phallic signification.  To validate this space, he appropriates and distorts elements of both Mother and Father.  The task is not so easy.  In a state of frustration Blu resorts to extreme methods of behavior as the only means of marking his unique bodily territory and asserting himself as an independent Being.[2]   

He finally achieves self-definition through the inversion of pleasure into pain, the tenderness of sexual caresses into violent sodomy and love of Mama’s flesh into torturous degradation of the body to physically mark his space.

            Blu’s desire for the mother is expressed through his want of food.  It is the absence of a regular supply of food, of Ziploc bags to take to school, that separates Blu from the rest of children his own age and explicitly confesses his family’s abnormality.  His state of abjection is reflected in his schoolmates’ unfavorable reaction to his meagerly packaged peanut-butter and jelly sandwich lunch when he goes in the school field trip and becomes the laughing stock of the group.  He recounts the incident to Ivah:  “’How come?’ Scott tell.  ‘You guys no more lunchbox with thermos inside at home?  Your family no more sandwich Baggies your house?  Not even one Ziploc?  Thass why you gotta use tinfoil?’” (8)

Objects associated with homemaking and food are symbols of the maternal space.  Blu’s fixation on food is the most apparent symptom of his failure to adapt to the social norm of the father as well as the wish to return to the maternal space.  Blu’s over-eating represents a symbolic devouring of the mother.  It is a way to reach the ideal ego and find the subject’s primary identity, not the one established by phallic law.[3]  By eating the mother, Blu ensures she never escapes him and continues to depend on her for self-definition.[4]  From a biological perspective, ingesting food is a re-enactment of breast-feeding and the stimulation of the sensitive tissue of the mouth area by the mother’s hard, erect nipple.  When Blu eats, he saturates his mouth with the skin of the mother.  Food thus becomes the surrogate object of desire, re-enacting the mother’s presence and a normal lifestyle.  As Ivah relates:

Maisie likes to make him eat with his mouth  so stuffed with food that he looks like the Five Chinese Brothers, the one who swallowed the sea. Blu’s mouth is full of mayonnaise bread.  He pretends it’s chocolate pudding pie or lemon bars that the church ladies make in the summer for Vacation Bible School. (11)

We find two metaphors for the consumption of the mother’s space by the son.  The sea is symbolic of the maternal body and the containment of body within body.  In addition, Blu craves the chocolate pudding pie or lemon bars the maternal church ladies create by means of their body.  This is similar to the mother’s creation of breast milk as nourishment. As a result, Blu’s addiction to domestic surrogate objects of nurturing can be taken as his recreation of the physical and psychological comfort of the womb.    

            Blu’s compulsive aggrandizement of his own body displays another attempt to consume maternal space and consolidate it within.  Blu is 18-Hour Bra Boy, the Boy-with-Breasts.  He has “so much fat that his nipples go in and look like two sad brown eyes pulling down on his fleshy breasts.” (11)  Ivah tells us her brother eats so much, to the extent of becoming sick, so he does not feel Mama has gone so far away.  From a psychological standpoint, Blu uses food and the additional fatty layers its over-consumption generates to bring back the comfortable passive vastness of the maternal space and his powerful, centered position of undivided attention as the fetus.  It is not surprising he drifts into sleep, or regresses into the unconscious, after he binges. 

            Weight gain has additional significance for Blu.  It can be an action to erase his male gender and refuse to be like Poppy.  Blu looks like a pregnant or nursing woman.  Symbolically, he might be holding the body of the mother inside him as she once carried him during the gestation period and thus needs the extra tissue to prevent the fetus from touching the outside and breaking.  He is protecting the mother.  On the other hand, Blu physically embodies the image of the pregnant mother by possessing attributes such as breasts and an overblown belly.  In either case he uses food and weight gain to physically access the maternal space and consequently deters the moment of entrance into Poppy’s world of phallic signification.  Through physical re-enactment of the gestation stage, Blu reverses the separation, the initial abjection from the mother’s body and his “outsideness” from the social system by instituting and safely entering a phantasmal space purposely indefinable, infinite and unsignifiable.  He rejects one body/one identity and prefers to dwell in the ambivalence and non-commitment of the maternal space where the concept of the physical body and the individual’s need to signify his/her presence, constantly asserting a separation and a lack, do not exist.

            Internalization of the mother and habitation in her space proves a trap rather than succor.  Blu is unable to establish his own Being, and achieve the ensuing effective socialization the subject experiences once it has a corporeal sense of self because he only exists as an extension of the phantasmal, distorted maternal space.   He is nothing.   He cannot clearly locate his affective boundaries and his body is marginalized from human touch, both psychologically through lack of identity and socially through the inability to fit in and be looked down upon.  Consequentially, Blu needs to force himself out of a passive womb-surrounded state into an active state.  His survival now depends upon establishing his identity apart from the domineering figure of the mother.  Desperate attempts at self/body definition results in excess of signification: over-eating, over-expressing, and over-playing, all part of an orgy of violence against the sacred vessel of the body.

            Blu associates crave for food with crave for flesh and human contact.  Blu defines crave for Ivah: “ ‘I crave for chocolate.  All kinds, especially the kind with Rice Krispies inside Nestlé Crunch and $100,000 bar…I crave Mama come to see if Maisie and me sleeping… I crave for friends.’” (12)  Although the apparent craving is psychological, its primary manifestation is physical.  Blu’s identity is ambivalent.  Stimulation of his erogenous zones consequentially serves as actions of Being by which to exit the phantasmal world he is trapped in.  A sense of physicality and potential self-identity, marked by an overcharge of the erogenous zones, temporarily resolves Blu’s wants when he engages in oral sex with Mr. Iwasaki.  When the genital area is stimulated, Blu feels pleasure reinforced by oral gratification through food.  Sex becomes a real-world incarnation of the maternal space, in which all needs are promptly satisfied and he is able to float freely.  Because Blu is unable to relinquish an enduring hunger for the maternal space and the inside of her body, sex becomes the perfect marriage between the subject and the “Other.”  It provides orgasmic unity with the maternal space without ceasing to record the sensation of his own body.  The action gives Blu has a clear notion of the intensity and location of the pleasure and thus institutes a sense of his physicality.  

            Pain leaves Blu’s face when he engages in sexual intercourse with Blendaline.  The event takes place in the womb-like structure of a tub with Blu floating in water as he once floated in embryonic fluid.  Blendaline performs oral sex and acting as substitute mother, stimulates his erogenous zones.  It is not surprising Blu describes orgasm as flying, leaving behind the space controlled by the Law of the Father.  Orgasm is a way to at once inhabit the maternal space, touching the umbilical cord without fear of strangulation.  It also abides by the social norm as Blendaline can be a legitimate object of desire without transgressing any incest taboos.  By a method of transference, Blu is still in contact with the mother and even acts out his Oedipal desire.  However, since it comes in the form of Blendaline, she lies outside of his body.  Blu thus develops a sex addiction.  Flirting with disaster, the mixing death and desire produces an ambivalent space very similar to the maternal space.  Blu will explore this space to simultaneously access and renounce her body. 

            Blu begins over-exercising in order to faint or become unconscious.  He desires to materialize or record the happy state of unconsciousness by being photographed while fainting.  Not having enough money to buy the flash-cubes for the camera, Blu begins fainting before the mirror: “He’d hold his breath in the hot shower and collapse.  Or he’d put his bed right behind him as he stood looking into his bureau mirror, then hold his breath, and fall backwards on the bed.  That way he could see himself in the mirror as he was going down.” (26)  Blu is obsessed with the state of death and resuscitation as a method of linkage between the maternal space and the nascent space of his yet undefined abject space.  Unconsciousness presents a state where he can access the dark insides of the mother without completely surrendering his Being.  When he faints, he is transposed into the space of the mother.  Upon waking, he lets go of her body and once again has a sense of identity—one not dependent on her phantasmal space where he can assert his Being through conscious activity, such as over-exercising and sexual intercourse.    The photographs or mirror image record the symbolic copulation and slaughtering of the mother during the lapse between conscious and unconscious.    Both resurrection and self-mutilation are actions to partially force the body of the mother out of Blu, a necessary act of matricide to break the imaginary umbilical cord that keeps him from fully experiencing the territories of his body.  Nonetheless, he cannot finish the murder he starts.   Blu is unable to completely eject her from his body because he does not want to admit her loss. 

            Blu’s morbidity, manifest in his attempts to decide whether to surrender the mother and fulfill the imminent need to establish his Being, comes to a crisis in the third half of the story.  At this point he is temporarily inducted into the Christian doctrine which promises the dead a place of rest in heaven.  He takes on the part of singing narrator in the Baptist Youth Choir’s musical “He is Alive,” a depiction of the life, death and resurrection of Christ. An abject in his time, Christ becomes a figure of identification for Blu.  He can see Jesus on the cross, feel the nails on his hands and feet and the crown of thorns.  The suffering of Jesus resembles his own suffering.  Both figures share a lack—the distant father, the scarcity of food and water and the absence of a parental figure to heal the wounds and provide emotional support.  He sings the part because, “I know what Jesus feel like hanging there all sore and thirsty and how he like go see his fadda ‘cause he miss um so much.” (217)

            Unfortunately, faith is short-lived for Blu and the possibility of safely surrendering Mama to God is no more than an illusion Jim has carefully crafted to get them to bite into his religion.   The fact remains the children are Buddhists. Buddhists cannot enter the Christian heaven; they burn in hell.  Mama cannot be resurrected and will disappear if Blu’s body is not there to protect her.  Based on this premise, Blu resignedly expresses the inextricability of his situation--maintaining his identity and keeping Mama alive:  “Mama in hell, gotta be, and if thass where she stay, then thass where I like to go too.  I ain’t going be Baptist.” (217)

            Through song, Blu articulates his own story and internal conflict. The madness of “being” without being, of not letting go of the mother because resurrection outside his body means complete loss finally plunge out.  Ivah describes the scene:

His head bowed, he looks up slowly at Jesus.  I know he feels the nails in   his own hands as he turns his palms upward, fingers trembling…Blu looks at my father for a long time, his voice rising to heaven…He raises his arms—that’s not the way we rehearsed it—he’s a cross, singing so chilling, with his head bowed and sad, then he wraps around himself…And when the branch breaks off the wall of the choir box, and Judas tumbles to the ground with the rope stuck around Glenn’s neck, the branch dangling from it, the whole Youth Choir scrambling around him, my brother sings on, like it was meant to be.  He moves to the feet of Christ Jesus and falls there weeping for himself, for my mother, for a place for all of us in heaven. (219-220)

In an apocalyptic moment, Blu figures letting go of the mother implies accepting her irrevocable loss.  He realizes his Being depends on the death of the desired object and no resolution can take place until the process is complete.  Blu is an empty castle.[5] The only viable method of escaping the mother now is through the physical inscription of his presence on earth. Furthermore, by the perversion of his body, the vessel carrying her spirit, the immaculate mother gains negative attributes.  The result is a defilement of the object of desire, which once it loses its halo and becomes tainted, can be surrendered easily.

            First, Blu indecisively asserts his body through a parody of Christian rituals.  When he buries Mrs. Ikeda’s dogs he uses borrowed phallic signification, that of the Holy Host, to both free himself and the dogs from sinking into the inevitable decay death brings.  Blu fixates upon rituals that inscribe bodily territories independent from the symbolic space of the mother.  He conceives himself in the form of the Holy Host.  The rituals have a dual function for Blu: it reverses the decay of the dogs through signification that allows entrance into a meta-physical heaven and, through active use of the same signification, inscribes him and his social role within patriarchal space and apart from the body of the mother.   As Kristeva mentions, religious rituals primarily function “to ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother.” (Kristeva, 64)  Blu’s ability to perform the rituals reassures him of his existence.  Through their repetition, Blu also reconciles the conflict presented by the loss of the body and soul upon death and the obliteration of Mama by creating his own version of religion and heaven accessible to polluted, non-Christian dogs and individuals. 

            Blu places a Choward Violets mint upon the dead dog’s tongue and says, “This is my body.”  From a psychological standpoint, Blu gives birth to his Being and records his presence in time as the action is done “In remembrance of me.”  However, the maternal space still lurks within.  He cannot accept Mama’s loss.  When Chloe, one of the most horrendous products of Mrs. Ikeda’s negligence, is about to die, Blu becomes frantic.  He takes the body and runs home, disregarding Mrs. Ikeda’s threat of calling the police.   Blu questions the materiality of his heaven.  Although he appeases the dying dog with sweet images of the afterlife, he does not let go of the body until the police enter the household and probably wrest it out of his arms.  In a similar way, Blu is not ready to let go of Mama’s body because the archaic attachment to the womb holds him.  As Mama once carried him he must carry her now or, like Chloe, she will fall into the void.  The resuscitation of his pure body, without polluting residues acquired within the space of the mother, cannot take place.  His only option to establish an independent Being is to consciously defile the immaculate image of the mother residing inside him. 

            Blu physically marks his Being and the bodily territory it comprises through violence and self-destruction.  He desires to seduce danger and invite pollution into his body.   He wants to corrupt the mother inside him and, by forfeiting Mama’s socio-sexual prohibitions, erase her influence and give birth to the self through physical signification.  Self-destruction and aggression, and the pain and pleasure ensuing from it, reaffirm his body exists.  In extreme fear of losing himself into the body of the mother that resides inside him, Blu searches for his identity by literally carving himself out in skin.

            Blu wants to go on a real adventure outside the world of make-belief.  The reality of the adventure is marked by the probability of death.  Uncle Paulo both attracts and repulses Blu as he represents an abject figure who has resolved the ambivalence of his social condition and boundaries.  He is outside the space of the mother as she would warn Blu against contact with him.  At the same time, Uncle Paulo is a child molester and thus breaks the rules of patriarchal law.  He stands as an abject figure whose life revolves around fulfilling his instinctive drives, especially sexual gratification. Paulo has all the things Blu desires.  He holds social status and drives around in a Da Sun picking up and deflowering girls.  His pleasure reservoir is full, with Blendaline, Henrilyn, and even Trixi always on call.  It is not surprising that Blu, desiring a similar physicality, in some way looks up to him. 

            Paulo is also the means for Blu to consciously enter and literally feel the horrors of the space of the abject.  Blu dismisses Ivah’s warnings of the danger of playing with Paulo and his nieces.  He experiences an erotic thrill upon facing danger and death.  There is an unreasonable sense of animation in his meticulous description of a near-fatal hanging incident, in which Paulo encourages him to play the bad-guy about to be hung:

“The rope went  snap tight around my neck and I felt all the blood stucking in my head.  ‘Ivvahhh,’ I wen’ try yell.  ‘Ivvahhhhh.’ But was one whisper.  I was hanging for real, my feet was dangling.

“’This is it,’ I was thinking.  ‘I going die right here on the mango tree with my whole head turning purple and hot like hell.  Holy shit, now I did it for real and Poppy going kill me, but maybe he too late ‘cause I going kill my own self.’

“I promise, my veins in my head was throbbing and my face was burning up fast.  Then the branch wen’ broke and I wen’ tumble, branch and all, on the cement blocks.  I no could loosen the noose, and I no could take the rope off the branch.  (31)

Afterwards, Blu finds his father, who authoritatively cuts the rope with his pocketknife and slaps him on the head as reprimand.  The incident has psychological as well as symbolic repercussions.  Blu has unconsciously found his territory in the realm of perversion, where he can stand as a fully gratified Being.  He fears it because it breaks the rules of prohibition of both father and mother.  How does he react to it?  His purposed involvement in prohibited games and the rope-burn markings on his neck are both actions against the father who as we see, does not approve of such behavior and punishes him. Blu’s scars record the pleasurable event of contact with the space of perversion and his ongoing refusal of the father.       

            The marks upon the body also constitute a method of rejecting and forgetting the mother and his dependence on the maternal space through defilement of her body, which he has eaten and cannot properly digest.  The mother’s body is locked inside of Blu and serves as a trap preventing his individuation.  Hence, Blu commits matricide by polluting his body through signifiable acts of lewdness, and thus succeeds in tainting the image of the mother. He then establishes his Being in the perverse space of the abject through the torturous obliteration and re-marcation of his body.  Poppy symbolically severs the umbilical cord and Blu’s connection to the maternal space when he cuts the rope from his neck.  Somehow, phallocentrism finally steps in to provide identity and independence from the mother, although too late.

            At this point, Blu no longer wishes to enter the paternal space. Poppy and the Law of the Father he personifies are miles away from the young boy and no longer wanted or needed.    On the contrary, Poppy represents an agent of prohibition threatening to annihilate Blu’s pleasure reservoir in the perverse.  By a greater act of defilement, Blu completely renounces the power of the mother, escapes the prohibition of the Father, and settles in the perverse space of the abject.  As Christ established a new religion, Blu becomes Christ the martyr, founding the perverse space of the abject and being resurrected within it, when he is sodomized and symbolically baptized by Paulo.    Ivah describes the rape scene in a language suggesting religious epiphany:

The smothering heat of bodies in a closed car, steam on the window.  My brother’s gagged mouth and tied hands, his face neon white in the light of Jesus Coming Soon. And in that moment, Paulo’s left hand around his own penis, his right hand around Blu’s, the slapping of flesh, Paulo spitting in his hands and the quick jerk over skin, over skin, over skin. I grab my brother, who stumbles out of Da Sun, and Paulo spurts out of himself, white mucus, all over the steering wheel, and leans back, moaning. (247)

The act of sodomy reinforces the connection between the abject space and the perverse.  Blu once more marks his body, this time allowing penetration by the male organ to touch the possible remains of the mother’s body inside him.  He is thus cleansed by the white mucus of sperm, which substitutes the embryonic fluid of the womb.  Blu brings the ultimate symbol of patriarchal signification into his body, and erects this monument inside his boundaries.   However, anal penetration does not abide by the Law of the Father and his sexual pleasure exists in an alternative social structure.  Blu finally fully realizes his physical Being.   He feels the slaps on his flesh and the body of another copulating with his own.  Desire to “be” materializes into skin over skin, sweat, pleasure and pain.  He is no longer inside the ambivalent space of the womb, but tied down, anally probed, and sexually stimulated in the steamy inside of a Da Sun. 

            Blu has been consciously broken in into the broken world of abjection. The pivotal realization of his physicality allows him to let go of the mother. Blu has accepted he cannot keep her.  The notion of heaven and her loss outside it are inconsequential.  He tells the mother to go away to “the light of the Buddha, the light of Jesus—both feel the same, feel warm, you cannot miss um.” (249)  Poppy looks down upon Blu.  He is ashamed and chooses not to deal with his son’s conflict of sexual orientation.  Blu now has no parents.  He refuses the authority of the father, giving up all efforts to please Poppy and stand up to his standards.  In the perverse space of the abject, Blu institutes his own law by using fragments of phallic signification, like Christian prayer, and accepting alternative modes of sexual fulfillment rejected within the heterosexual matrix. 

            The boundaries between inside/outside, pain/pleasure, his identity and the identity of the mother are no longer blurry.  He confesses his homoerotic feelings to her through close detail to signification. Outside his body, whether decaying or resurrected in heaven, she is an ideal, Blu’s interpretation of a Virgin Mary icon.  Blu implores the mother not to reveal his secrets, his new Being, to God the Father, Commander in Chief.  Once more he consciously excludes the father figure as guidance or part of his life, thus admitting to inhabit the space of the perverse abject.  His Being does not submit to the restrictions presented by the Law of the Father.  Blu is free to explore prohibited desires without fear of punishment by the mother, who is no longer there, or the father, who has conclusively exited his life.  His symbolic act of confession is the physical as well as psychological articulation of his Being, following a perilous quest marked by the stages of rejection, acceptance, rebirth and re-entry.

Works Cited

[1] The relation between mother and child constitutes a formative stage in the latter’s construction of self-identity and thus, unavoidable reliance on the mother to affirm this identity.  Upon the child’s expulsion from the mother’s body, the subject’s sexual drives focus on an object inside the individual, his ego.  However this ideal ego’s identity is formed in relation to the presence of the mother, which is yet not a defined object in itself.  Thus, the subject’s position within the maternal space creates his ego.  If the mother is absent, the subject automatically loses his identity.  Desperation sets in as the subjects rampages through the dark walls of an empty castle.

[2] The Being is the only reassurance the subject exists.  This concept validates the totality of his living being and prevents his identity from sinking into the void of the maternal space and the darkness of the womb.  The Being possesses a body which he is able to define and control and which links the individual to the world around him.  In Blu’s case the interiorization of the mother has created a phantom identity preventing his individuation.  He has been caged in the maternal space and is split between two bodies, with the mother figure constantly reminding him of his diminishing power and potential obliteration of his living being.  Without the conception of an independent Being, the subject exists as an eternal fetus in its own body.   However it is only through the violation of the rules of the mother, the defilement of the self and repulsion of the impotent Law of the Father that the abject child establishes an independent Being.  Through this process he simultaneously seeks to claw itself out of the asphyxiating embrace of the mother.  However his efforts are undermined by the unconscious desire to return to her body.  His goal is to position himself somewhere between the space of the mother and the social space of phallic signification.  The means of return to primary unity of identity and the establishment of identity are established from the space of abjection and thus become an inversion or perversion of social objects and rituals that reenact the archaic attachment to the maternal space, seeking to define this space through borrowed phallic signifiers.

[3] Blu cannot find his ideal primary state, one of complete passivity and outside nurturing reminiscent of the prenatal state inside the mother’s body.  When the wounded ego realizes the impossibility of his desire, it fixates on surrogate objects by which his desire for “the Other”—the unformed idealized notion of the mother-- freely flows, although in a phantom space.  The subject once again evades reality and adherence to the Law of the Father by transferring the tabooed incest desire for the mother’s body to substitutes within phallic signification, maintaining the initial erotic drive intact.  However, the primary function of these objects of desire, acting in lieu of the mother, is to define the subject’s boundaries and corporeal identity within phallocentric order.  As the subject is unable to properly enter the phallocentric order through the utter lack of identification with the father figure, the subject will use and misuse elements of phallic signification to create a phantom space where the maternal space, his ideal ego, and the patriarchal space will simultaneously exist.  This state is only arrived at through excess and defilement—it is a reality where the boundaries between inside/outside, pain/pleasure, life/death are blurred.  Fulfillment of desire at this stage will be concentrated in the subject’s erogenous areas where inside/outside converges. It comprises an over-saturation of these boundaries. These zones, mainly oral, genital and anal, are significant as they were stimulated by the mother during the early stages. 

[4] Caleb Crain, “Lovers of Human Flesh:  Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels,”  American Literature, vol. 6, issue 1 (March 1994): 25-53.

Write Comment
Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article. Personal verbal attacks will be deleted. Please don't use comments to plug your web site.. Such material will be removed
Name:	Guest
Title:
BBCode:
Comment:
	Enter what you see: * tips: hit Reload page before writing a text if you have difficulty reading characters in image

Powered by AkoComment 2.0! and SecurityImage 3.0.5