Glossary of Theoretical Positions

Klein, Melanie (Object Relations):  
(close window to exit glossary)
While a full discussion of all of Melanie Klein’s theoretical applications is beyond the scope of this project, some of her theories are particularly useful in the analysis of fairy tales. Most important to this project are her theories of splitting, projection, introjection, projective identification, and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions of the baby, along with the ideas of love/hate and reparation.

One of Klein’s major propositions is that “the neonate brings into the world two main conflicting impulses: love and hate” (Mitchell 19). Each of these conflicting impulses must be dealt with, usually by either “bringing them together in order to modify the death drive with the life drive or expelling the death drive into the outside world” (19). Along with this conflict arises the conflict of a primary relationship with the mother which is seen as both satisfying and frustrating with the mother, and then later complicated with the addition of the father. The main conflicting love/hate binary is reflective of a number of ‘sets’ of dualities that surface when looking into the mother/child relationship. Besides love and hate, there is the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother, the mother as symbolic of both life and death, the symbolic (paternal) and semiotic (maternal), total oneness and total autonomy. The mother and the infant/child’s perception of the mother figures heavily in each of these sets. In fact, the curious ‘split’ nature of the infant’s perception of the maternal figure recalls a kind of doppelganger, a doubling of the maternal (in positive and negative incarnations) that itself can be seen as abject as Kristeva demonstrates.

The infantile ego, when threatened, can react in several ways that are important in discussing the actions/representations of both women and children in fairy stories. One of the options is splitting . When this occurs, the child either splits apart the bad from the good in the object that is causing the anxiety or danger, or splits off a part of itself (Mitchell 20). In fairy tales discussed in chapter two, this scenario arises when we encounter a ‘bad mother’. In these cases, the ‘bad mother’ reflects one half of the imaginary split mother, and poses some danger to the child. In the tales discussed in the following chapter, the ‘good mother’ is often dead or not mentioned at all. Her absence is telling, and also can be seen as a catalyst for the construction of a bad mother created in some sense out of the anxiety surrounding the good mother absence. Thus the mother is split into two: good and bad. Sheldon Cashdan discusses this briefly in The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives (1999). While Cashdan wants to say that the tales themselves reflect the infant/child’s need to “combat sinful tendencies in the self” (29), and he generally works to provide an alternative to a psychoanalytic reading, he does discuss the idea of the split mother as character: “...Over time, the realities of infant life force the child to face the unsettling realization that the person responsible for its survival is both consistent and inconsistent, both gratifying and frustrating—both good and bad” (27). E. Ann Kaplan addresses this in Motherhood and Representation : “Melanie Klein’s important theory of the two internalized unconscious (imaginary) mothers arising from the child’s experience at the breast was later literalized in the alternate ‘idealized’ nurturing mother and the dominating ‘phallic’ one…” (107). As children have difficulty comprehending a single person with conflicting qualities, the infant splits the figure into two: one gratifying good mother, one frustrating bad mother. The child must then deal with the aggressive, bad mother, who is almost always defeated in the fairy tales, and who in the cases presented in chapter three is seen as dangerous because she wishes to eat/kill the child.

In the case of projection, the ego “fills the object with some of its own split feelings and experience”(20). This is illustrated in tales when the child projects some of its own cannibalistic impulses and anger at the fear of mother-abandonment which in turn produces ‘mother’ characters whose actions are cannibalistic and abandoning. [“Hansel and Gretel”, “Snow White”, “Little Red Riding Hood”] In the case of introjection, the ego “takes into itself what it perceives or experiences of the object” (20). In projective identification, “the ego projects its feelings into the object which it then identifies with, becoming like the object it has already imaginatively filled with itself” (20). The ego uses these defenses to deal with anxiety and threats it perceives in relation to its mother, producing different ‘positions’:

Its own destructive feelings…make the baby very anxious. It fears that the object on which it vents its rage (e.g. the breast that goes away and frustrates it) will retaliate. In self-protection it splits itself and the object into a good part and a bad part and projects all its badness into the outside world so that the hated breast becomes the hateful and hating breast. Klein describes this as the paranoid-schizoid position. As developmentally the ego becomes able to take in the whole person, to see that good and bad can exist together in the same person, it continues to rage against the mother for the frustrations she causes, but now, instead of fearing retaliation, it feels guilt and anxiety for the damage it itself has done in phantasy. This Klein calls the depressive position. In overcoming this position the baby wishes to undo or repair the earlier phantasized destruction of the actual and the internalized mother. As it does so it also takes in the damaged and then restored mother, adding these new internalizations as part of the self’s inner world(21).

It is during the infant’s experience of the manic-depressive position that the her/his aggressiveness toward the mother is most clearly seen. Klein states in “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1935): “in the very first months of the baby’s existence it has sadistic impulses directed, not only against its mother’s breast, but also against the inside of her body: scooping it out, devouring the contents, destroying it by every means which sadism can suggest” (116). If this is so, one might question why children themselves in the tales are not more often connected with the cannibalistic activities ascribed to the older females. I propose that the child’s aggressive and cannibalistic tendencies are projected onto the body of the females (mothers), and thus represent the process of splitting, projection, and later reparation in which the children kill off what is constructed as the ‘bad mother’ [already filled with their own terrifying impulses] and are able to then repair their image of the mother and move to the next developmental stage.

During reparation, the infant must find the means to repair the damaged mother-image. This is accomplished through love, which battles the anxiety present in the form of guilt (Doane and Hodges 10). The restoration of the mother is made possible through “restorative phantasies and behaviours” (Doane and Hodges 10). Doane and Hodges make an important connection between this infantile process and its relevance in later life in a way that makes clear that these issues, while experienced at an early developmental stage, are carried through as concepts into life and even art: “Ultimately, the work of symbol formation, art and culture themselves can be attributed to our attempts to make reparation, to regenerate the mother” (12). I argue that fairy tales can be seen as part of the reparation process, and in fact as they so often focus specifically on mother (step-mother/mother substitute) child interactions, can also be understood as ‘maternal dramas’.

What is of primary importance here is the deeply rooted anxiety, and confusion of love, hate and guilt that permeate the relationship between mother and child. The mother upon whom the child projects its own hateful and aggressive impulses can be seen as scary, evil, cannibalistic. This connection between the mother and these negative qualities along with her influence on the child’s sense of internalized and externalized self and boundaries makes her closely connected to the cannibal image. The cannibal, as discussed in chapter one, is a figure connected with loss of autonomy and boundaries, and a figure desiring incorporation and symbolic merging. For this reason, it seems important to study specifically female cannibalistic characters (especially in fairy tales where protagonists are dealing with issues of growth and development as well as unconscious fantasies) as I believe they offer narratives that illustrate or dramatize the ways in which early ego development takes place. In many ways, the ‘cannibal mother’ is often portrayed as a phallic mother as well, aggressive and threatening.

The theoretical implications of an object relations theory as posited by Klein necessarily include an understanding of the first relationship with the mother as paramount. The feelings of aggression, fear, guilt and reparation the child experiences first with the mother become not only the basis of superego formation, but exist in the person throughout their lives. Klein makes this clear in “The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique” (1955) as she states that “the oral sadistic relations to the mother and the internalization of a devoured, and therefore devouring, breast create the prototype of all internal persecution; and furthermore that the internalization of an injured and therefore dreaded breast on the one hand and of a satisfying and helpful breast on the other, is the core of the super ego” (50). She clearly feels the significance of these activities that work upon the child throughout life, and states “all aspects of mental life are bound up with object relations”(52).

Klein moves against Freudian interpretation of the triangular relationships between mother, child and father. In opposition to Freud who posits that it is “discovery of the lack of a penis that causes the turning from the mother to the father”, Klein sees this moment only as a “reinforcement” that is first predicated on the lack of nourishment or “deprivation of the breast” it experiences in regard to the mother (Mitchell 78). This relocates the mother to a more central position in the child’s psyche; it is her actions (or imagined actions) and motivations that produce change in the child. When looking at fairy tale representations, then it is essential to see the effect of the maternal (or female) characters whose actions most clearly affect the child’s life. The father in these tales is presented as less powerful, at times even weak. It is only after the clash between child and mother that the father begins to gain power in the tales (see chapter three).

Another important aspect of Klein’s theory is her understanding of the differences between the boy and girl child’s experiences and connections to their mothers. This has a direct impact on analyzing both the roles of girl/boy children in the tales, and understanding of the female child/adult as being specially connected to cannibalistic/incorporative fantasies. For Klein, the boy’s experience of the mother is always tainted or influenced by his castration fears. She says in “The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique” (1955) that for boys, “the connection of these [castration] anxieties with castration fear can be seen for instance in the phantasy of losing the penis or having it destroyed inside the mother” (50). Thus in the child’s imaginary, the mother stands in as a potentially castrating image, as well as representing the figure who (for all infants) first satisfies and then frustrates, and threatens to consume. When the boy child experiences the world during this early developmental stage, the things he encounters remind him of or recall the connections he has made with his mother: “When the boy flees into the world of nature we see how it takes on the role of the mother whom he has assaulted…the world, transformed into the mother’s body, is in hostile array against the child and persecutes him” (89).

This is represented in the tales when the child or children must enter a dangerous wood or encounter daunting natural boundary. Most clearly in “Hansel and Gretel”, the children (led by the boy) must enter the forest (a symbol of danger and abandonment) several times. In the forest, which itself can be seen as a representation of mother danger, they encounter the house (womb) of the witch. This scenario poses the greatest threat for the boy child, in whom the witch takes primary interest.

The relationship between the girl child and the mother is more complicated. For the girl, Klein proposes that “the mother is felt to be the primal persecutor who, as an external and internalized object attacks the child’s body and takes from it her imaginary children. These anxieties arise from the girl’s phantasized attacks on the mother’s body, which aim at robbing it of its contents, i.e. of faeces, of the father’s penis and of children, and result in the fear of retaliation by similar attacks” (48). The appearance of good and bad mothers present in the fairy tales can be seen as a result of the girl child’s anxieties when one understands Klein’s theory that “when a little girl who fears the mother’s assault on her body cannot see her mother, it intensifies her anxiety. The presence of the real loving mother diminishes the dread of the terrifying mother, whose image is introjected into the child’s mind” (Mitchell 92). This connects to tales in which the ‘real’ mother is not present at all, and the mother stand-in comes to signify a terrifying mother who threatens the very life of the child(ren).

Kristeva, Julia (Abjection):
(close window to exit glossary)
As one of my aims is to uncover the specific connection between women and cannibal(ism)s, Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection in Powers of Horror is essential for this study. What I find most interesting about this particular phase of Kristeva’s work is her understanding of the mother/child relationship as connected with abjection, particularly the threat the mother represents to the child as wanting to return to an undifferentiated state. Through Kristeva, one can see that women (through their associations with motherhood and their position as other) present a threat that is connected with loss of autonomy and borders, much as the cannibal figure is. Kaplan’s Motherhood and Representation addresses this:

For Kristeva, then, woman is particularly implicated in abjection by virtue of being the one against whom the child has to develop subjectively. If woman culturally is defined as the one at the margin between culture and chaos, order and anarchy, reason and the abyss, then she typifies abjection…but for culture, she represents that dangerous zone against which culture must struggle to retain itself (43).

Before proceeding, a clear definition of abject and abjection is in order. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is cast out in order that ‘I’ may exist. It exists at the borders of the self and continually draws the subject into it. As the subject revolts and pulls away, it is in the process of defining itself as separate, proper and autonomous. The abject is what “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Powers of Horror 4). The role of the abject in the formation and constitution of the ‘I’ is analogous to the role of the cannibal in the constitution of ‘self’ or ‘society’. Kristeva goes on the explain that “The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with the fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism…” (13). But it seems that not just ‘primitive’ societies engage in ‘marking out’ space, whether that space be imaginary or real territory, people and societies are in a constant state of marking and re-marking the boundaries of self/other, human/animal, savage/civilized, me/not me.

What is perceived as abject is also closely related to infant/mother experience: “The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before ex-isting outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (Powers 13). Here the mother represents abjection, and also represents a very compelling, powerful image, an image that brings with it the very real possibility of pulling the subject back into itself.

The abject for Kristeva is that which must be “driven away” and that which is cast out, but challenges. It “lives outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree with the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master” (2). The language she uses to describe the abject is very similar to the language used to describe the cannibal figure, or cannibal idea.

The role of the abject and the role of the mother in the texts discussed in this study are those which cause blurring of boundaries. Addressing or repelling those things that threaten to consume, swallow, threaten to collapse meaning, signification and self are the issues that again emerge and are played out in the ‘maternal dramas’ of the fairy tales discussed here. As McClintock points out, “This is Kristeva’s brilliant insight: the expelled abject haunts the subject as its inner constitutive boundary; that which is repudiated forms the self’s internal limit” (71). The good and bad mothers and women who appear in the tales are representations of the primary understanding of women, motherhood and the constant friction between the desire to pull away from that which threatens borders at the same time one desires to give in and collapse those boundaries. Grosz states that boundaries of self and other are “constituted and blurred in the mother-child dynamic…the abject is the space of struggle against the mother…at the same time it is a desperate attempt to be her, to blur the divisions between the child’s identity and the mother’s” (78).

Julia Kristeva's Black Sun is an extensive study of melancholia and its causes in which Kristeva posits the melancholy/depressive position occurs through object loss and the contingent aggression toward the lost object. Kristeva: " ‘I love that object’ is what the person seems to say about the lost object, 'but even more so I hate it’ " (11). What Kristeva discusses as 'Melancholy Cannibalism' deals with the fantasy of consuming the lost/desired object, which is

the intolerable other that I crave to destroy so as better to possess it alive. Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested...than lost. The melancholy cannibalistic imagination is a repudiation of the loss's reality and of death as well. It manifests the anguish of losing the other through survival of self, surely a deserted self but not separated from what still and ever nourishes it and becomes transformed into the self--which also resuscitates--through such a devouring (12).

In some tales this suggests a possible motivation for the cannibalistic actions of the women/mothers in question. Why then do the tales not focus upon the children's eating of the mother? Aside from the possibility of projection discussed earlier in regard to Kleinian object relations theory, there is yet another possible reason. Simply written as stories for children, the tales relate more to the child's subconscious fear of being consumed by the parent, and are aimed at providing successful ways to maneuver oneself out of the alliance the mother (or anti-mother) seeks at all costs to manifest for herself. In each case in the tales, autonomy for the child comes with the death of the mother, which as Kristeva asserts is both a "biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous" (27). This imaginary matricide is “a vital necessity” for the “psychic health of both men and women”, but still presents a difficult scenario (Doane and Hodges 61). I would argue that this is one reason that the ‘mothers’ who are cannibalistic in the tales are characterized as either step-mothers or witches, placed at a distance from the true maternal (even though they may be symbolic of the ‘true maternal’).

Creed, Barbara (On Kristeva) (sexual) jealousy :
(close window to exit glossary)
One of Creed’s propositions in The Monstrous Feminine is most interesting in terms of this study, as she begins to discuss the abject nature of the woman and mother in horror film:“The third way in which the horror film illustrates the work of abjection is in the construction of the maternal figure as abject. Kristeva argues that all individuals experience abjection at the time of their earliest attempts to break away from the mother” (11).This is most clearly explored in fairy stories in which female cannibals appear. Although the mother figure is often eschewed in favor of a mother substitute (step-mother, witch) the scenario is still the same. The child must symbolically escape the ‘clutches’ of the female in order to take up the ‘proper’ place in the symbolic. The mother’s threat is so psychologically terrifying and at the same time incomprehensible, that she can only be represented as a monster, or mother-at-one-remove. This will be discussed in terms of “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Snow White” and “The Juniper Tree”.

Creed speaks often of the particularly abject nature of the female, which bears examination in terms of this project in which I am looking primarily at the representations of female cannibals. Creed had this to say: “In Kristeva’s view, woman is specifically related to Polluting objects which fall into two categories: excremental and menstrual”(12). She goes on to explain that the mother is seen as particularly abject “by refusing to relinquish her hold on her child, she prevents it from taking up its proper place in relation to the symbolic” (12). Thus the mother frustrates the ‘natural order’ of things and threatens to erase the child’s borders and autonomy. When portrayed as (cannibal) monster/mother this symbolic threat is illustrated by a very literal desire to consume the child, eradicating the proper boundaries and disallowing separation. In this case, the (cannibal)monster/mother both symbolizes and becomes abject to the child, who perceives the intent as one of incorporation and the wish for undifferientiation, even though the mother/witch/step mother may present another motivation for the reader.

In the fairy tales, step mothers (also represented as ‘phallic mothers’—‘anti-mothers ) are connected to the abject because they desire to consume the children. While this can be seen symbolically to represent the fear of the disavowal of the individual subject and the desire of the mother to remain ‘at one’ with the child, the anti-mothers seem to have another agenda as well. They desire either to assume some positive quality represented by the child, or to quell the feelings of jealousy over the child’s qualities or budding sexual power. Deeply abject figures, these cannibalistic and phallic mothers threaten the natural growth and development of the child in question, denying the child access to maturity. They threaten natural boundaries not by holding them in life but by causing or desiring death for them.