- Cave Canem -

This blog is 18+ (but SFW). Please, proceed with caution. 

Alexis is slender, fancy, good looking and young, but he is also dominant and violent. Who could've thought. Obviously, he's a typical trope of the 19th century heavily racialized Orientalist vision of the Balkans: beautiful yet savage.

But despite all of the prejudice and his bizarre characterisation through Severin's xenophobia glasses, Alexis still serves the argument against Severin’s claim on the appropriated Mediterranean antiquity as a living sample of Mediterranean modernity.

It’s such an obnoxious irony (no way it was accidental) that the man who beats up Severin is implied to be a part of Greek resistance to the Ottoman control of Crete. His appearance in the story sends cracks in Severin’s Orientalist fantasy of a cruel despotic Eastern mistress Wanda.

Although Alexis certainly plays a role of shattering the Venus mould, I think Wanda has a subconscious idea of what she was getting herself into pretty early on, even if it's not enough to stop it.

Her time period-appropriate libertine free-love thing crashed like a truck against a wall of Severin's objectification of female power and the fantasy of control. In his hierarchy of power a man is the one to truly decides if he is to rule or to be ruled in a violent battle between Mars and Venus, and Wanda was pretty close to getting it, but never fully.

He couldn't give less of a crap about her, though. She's just a way for him to channel the fantasy of Venus in Furs, his Oedipean, misogynistic and Orientalist idol. At first, Wanda can't even be cruel properly:

“Did I hurt you?” she asked, half-shyly, half-timidly. “No,” I replied, “and even if you had, pains that come through you are a joy. Strike again, if it gives you pleasure.” “But it doesn’t give me pleasure.”

“...because you know very well that it isn’t serious,” she replied, “because I haven’t the heart to hurt you. This brutal game goes against my grain. Were I really the woman who beats her slaves you would be horrified.”

"I am ashamed of myself," she says, while I embrace her, and she hides her head against my breast.  "Why?"  "Please try to forget the ugly scene of yesterday," she said with quivering voice, "I have fulfilled your mad wish, now let us be reasonable and happy and love each other, and in a year I will be your wife."

This concern sometimes breaks through even when she's fully gone into the Venus in Furs routine.

In the beginning, she constantly shows him affection, compliments his idiotic philosophy and random bits of knowledge. She is honest about her wants and limits that he constantly pushes, from her saying she doesn't want long term relationships to her being uncertain about the whole torture thing. Wanda loves Severin, but Severin loves Venus in Furs that she can never truly become. Years later, she writes in the letter:

But I also wonder how modern audience, used to violence and control represented as love, acceptance and healing, would perceive a film like The Master. An obvious excursion into the workings of a certain cult and other high control groups, it's very explicit in how charismatic cult heads prey on vulnerable, insecure, traumatized and mentally unstable people.

But since the main character is doing better while being actively psychologically tortured as he's brainwashed into obedience to the cult's will, would the current discourse represent it as liberation and healing through the unconditional submission to the controlling will of the other? The same thing now done to the stories of domestic violence against women, Isabella, Persephone, Rebecca's unnamed narrator and so on, the explicit acts of pretty brutal psychological, physical and sexual abuse - rapes, beatings, kidnappings, a looming threat of femicide - re-imagined as liberation. After all, violent cults and a dynamic of domestic violence have one and the same thing at their core: power and control.

What a coincidence that rape, abuse and forced confinement experienced by Isabella are re-imagined as something cool and fun at the time when globally, violence against women is merely daily news. Heathcliff, a self-admitted wife-beater and a rapist, is turned into a booktok daddy-dom, although in my opinion there's rarely much difference to find between the two. Neither could give much of a shit about "no"-s.

The attempts to give agency to the victims of violence by making them willingly submit to these very acts of violence are bizarre. We've had this shit with Persephone for years now, poor girl rebranded as a happy obedient wifey to her rapist uncle, a victim to the evil mother, who - what a btch, right? - grieved over her taken daughter. People love to confuse a grim acceptance of one's terrible fate for cheerful enthusiastic consent. Now there's this stuff.

There's no agency in tolerating violence by definition, as it always involves the abuser eroding it all via coercive control and power over the victim. An established victim posed as a willing participant creates an illusion that she might be in charge of receiving or resisting violence. I don't know how people can get an idea of well-negotiated, enthusiastic and consensual pretend play in a fully controlled environment, and use it to replace or merely denote an actual domestic violence scenario, as if those two are in any way comparable.

Sure, abuse has an exceptionally complex psychology. Victims can act like they are OK, romanticize their bruises and broken bones, defend the perpetrators, whitewash them, downplay even the most grievous violence, come back to their abusers again and again, even side with those who hurt others. None of that changes the fact that rape and violence are serious crimes that are solely on the perpetrator.

The weird old film frankensteins human onto animal. The modern popular fiction, The Daughter of Dr Moreau, re-imagines a story of animal into a story of a human woman.

Antonio del Pollaiuolo or some other Renaissance man adds two ravenous human boys beneath an Etruscan bronze she-wolf. So Lupa Capitoline is made, to honor the founding myth of Rome. Minotaur roams the labyrinth of Knossos.

Centuries come and go, but "-animal" must always be paired with"human-". Without "human", animal is not enough. Dr Moreau's tortured beasts and an iron-hearted scholar transform into the human-beast hybrids to be freed by man, and a vulgar mad scientist.

Tortured beasts are too common for humans to tear up over, and a cold scholar is usually seen a respectable luminary of science, perhaps until he vivisects a fellow man. The beast must become human to provoke sympathy. In the novel, the beast folks are merely the next logical step after the circus monkeys. Dressed like us, forced to move like us, changed to look like us.

In the later versions of the Island, human is twisted by its beast side, tormented by fully human for its beast side, liberated by human to stand tall among the fellow featherless bipeds.

While the great H.G. Wells eventually gives us an equivalent of this: