MaraBarreiro

I want to talk repetition. Robert Bloch uses repetition to great advantage in Psycho. There are two instances that stuck out to me. The first is the use of the word “clean” and the second is “mirror.” The word “clean” can be taken in many contexts, but for a horror story there is something almost menacing, yet purifying about the word. And the “mirror” is a reflection of the person looking into it.

When we think of the word clean we think of freshness and purity, but Bloch transforms the word into a moment of menace and dread. He uses it first when Mary is getting ready to take her shower. She had just made the decision to return the money and go home. She is feeling pretty good with herself at this point, nothing to fear. She is going to make everything right and make amends. For Mary the shower meant two things, “Get the dirt off her hide, just as she was going to get the dirt cleaned out of her insides” (49). One of these things was actual, to clean up after a long day of nervous running and the other symbolic, cleaning her insides. Washing away the bad decision that she had made and getting her life back on track. Then she thinks to herself, “Come clean, Mary. Come clean as snow” (49). Does this remind anyone else of the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb its fleece was white as snow”? I can’t help but wonder if Bloch did this on purpose, give the reader something familiar. But, isn’t there something eerie about nursery rhymes? I thought this not only had slight menacing overtones, but was also an interesting way to set the reader up for the shower scene. Here was a young woman that was on the wrong path deciding to do something right and in a moment she will be brutally murdered as she is trying to clean, not only her outer self, but her inner self. Scary.
Then there is Norman. After the murder Norman has to clean up Mothers mess. He comes back from dumping Mary’s car in the swamp and cleans himself up. He is only concerned about getting all the blood off of himself and anything else it may have contaminated, “No blood on his clothes, no blood on his body, no blood on his hands” (74). This was important to wipe away any residue of Mary and her death. But, it is more than just cleaning up the blood and the messy murder. It is about cleaning himself and his part in what happened. If there is no blood, then he doesn’t feel responsible. Perhaps this is another way for his mind to deny his own involvement with Mother and Mary. “Now he was clean. He could move his numb legs, propel his numb body up the stairs and into the bedroom, sink into bed and sleep. With clean hands” (74). He could finally sleep “with clean hands.” I found this to be a symbolic cleanliness, Norman washing himself clean of the murder and Mother. If he has clean hands then he had nothing to do with Mary’s death. Is there something in his subconscious that is trying to tell him that he is the murderer? I think so. This is one of the reasons he must clean up because, “now he was clean,” his subconscious is clean too. And there is something menacing and dreadful about Norman being able to sleep with his clean hands, knowing that there is a dead girl in the swamp behind his home.
The mention of the mirror was one of the first repetitions that I noticed. Mirrors can say so much to us as we look into them. There are bad days when we look in the mirror and think “Oh my God, do I really look this bad?” and there are other days when we preen happily in front of our reflection. But, what about Norman’s perception of the reflections he sees?

Norman watches Mary through the peephole of his office. She is standing in front of the door mirror and Norman can watch her reflection as she undresses. But, there is something wrong with his perception of the image, “the mirror was all wavy lines and lights that made him dizzy” (59). This happens as Mary is taking off her bra. Norman view is skewed by the wavy image in the mirror. It happens again on the same page when Mary starts to sway in front of the mirror, “she was swaying back and forth, back and forth, and now the mirror was wavy again and she was wavy, and he couldn’t stand it” (59). Every time Mary does something that begins to turn Norman on the reflection in the mirror becomes unstable. Norman and his mixed up ideas of what is evil and perverted bring on a spell of his psychotic behavior and soon Mother comes into the picture to make everything clear once again.
This skewed reflection could also be a representation of Norman’s split personality. Later in the book we see him in front of a mirror once more. He is shaving this time and he doesn’t like to shave because, “of the mirror. It had those wavy lines in it. All mirrors seemed to have wavy lines that hurt his eyes” (115). He goes on to remember how he used to like looking into mirrors, until Mother caught him looking at himself naked and smacked him in the head with a hairbrush (115). He remembers that “from then on it seemed he got a headache almost every time he looked in a mirror” (115-116). Looking into a mirror has become something dirty and evil, perverted even. So the way he sees his own image is the way he perceives himself. There is something wavy and unclear in his personality. I think it is the double image of his personalities. The mirror reflects what we see of ourselves and for Norman it is unclear.

Gender issues abound in this novel.
For the first time we witness a man who is psychologically bound to his mother. Does this make Mother a strong female character? Not necessarily. Yes, Normans “mother” personality seems to win over his in the end, but she doesn’t really exist. It is all in Norman’s delusion. How can a personality disorder be considered strength, especially the female inside the male body? Does the personality have dominance? Yes, she does, but that only emphasizes the weak shell that it inhabits. The real Mother is dead, long dead there is no strength left there.

Then we have Mary Crane, a young woman in love and willing to steal so that she can win her man and become an honest woman through marriage. Her relationship with Sam Loomis is unsatisfactory and must be hidden because it is unsavory for a young woman to be in a sexual relationship and not be married. So, when does Mary become a victim? When she is murdered in the shower, or when she has her moment of insanity and steals money to get a man? The thought of waiting for two years to marry Sam was something she could not bear, “two years, she’d be twenty-nine. She couldn’t afford to pull a bluff, stage a scene and walk out on him like some young girl of twenty” (27). The old maid syndrome was hitting her hard. This was a time when a woman had to be married to be complete and Mary was going beyond the call of duty to make this happen. And all of this for a man who can’t even tell the difference between her and her sister. She has to endure being hit on by Cassidy, the man she steals the money from, when he suggests “she take a ‘little trip’ with him down to Dallas for the weekend” (28). There had to be some satisfaction in stealing his money, yet there is the realization that there was nothing she could really do about disgusting men hitting on her in her work place. Mary gets victimized repeatedly until her murder, the ultimate victimization. And this happens again because of her sexuality.

Mary does have some strengths. She sacrificed her own ambitions to take care of her sick mother and send her kid sister college. It took a certain amount of strength to steal the money, and even more to decide to take it back. Unfortunately she never has the opportunity to return it.

So, who is the strong woman in Psycho? What about Lila Crane? Here is a young woman who went off to college and found herself a career that has her traveling (one of the reasons it is easy for Mary to steal the money, because Lila is off on a business trip). Lila is the one who initiates looking for Mary. She is the one who will not take no for an answer. It is Lila who eventually finds Mother in the basement. And in Bloch’s novel Lila goes up to the house without Sam’s approval or knowledge. Norman tells him, “You thought she went on to get the Sheriff, the way you told her. But she has a mind of her own. She wanted to take a look at the house. And that’s what she did do” (192). Lila doesn’t follow the rules that society and men set down for her, even Norman understands this about her immediately. She shows strength that the men in the story don’t even have. The only moment she needs someone to save her is in the basement when Norman is going to kill her after her discovery of Mother. Sam rescues her just in time, but I thought it was interesting that Lila screams, (who wouldn’t with a knife and crazy person coming at you), and then quits screaming quite quickly. She closes her mouth the “scream continued. It was the insane scream of an hysterical woman, and it came from the throat of Norman Bates” (208).

In the end the “hysterical woman” is a man. I thought this was a particularly interesting twist to the story. Bloch is a genius when it comes to blurring that gender line.

In Barbara Creed's The Monstrous Feminine, the womb is considered a monstrous place inside the female body. This is where another life comes into being and lives for nine months feeding off of the host body, like a parasite. What's so monstrous about that?

In the horror film The Brood David Cronenberg takes this image of the "monstrous womb" and goes a step further, not only are the products of Nola's womb monsters, but they are psychically linked to their mother. The rage that Nola feels towards the injustice done to her in her past and present manifests itself in the form of her "brood." According to Creed, "It is not that their identity has sunk irretrievably into the mother's; their identity is the mother's" (47). This link that these monsters have is tied completely to the feelings of the mother, as though they are one. She goes on to say,"the disease which is passed from mother to daughter is the disease of being female," so we have gender as a disease (47).

When we think of disease we usually think of a bacteria or organism that is destroying the confines of our bodies, yet sometimes these diseases surface in the form of lesions or growths on the outside of the body. This is seen in great detail through Jan and Mike the other two patients of Dr. Raglan. Creed attributes this to "the subject's rage-manifested as sores on the skin- is a rage at having been born of woman," but why, if this is so, are Mike's psychoplasmic treatments about his father (48)? If being born of woman is the disease, why are memories of his father what evokes such horrific lesions on his skin? And Jan, we never quite find out exactly what his problems were that led him to Dr. Raglan in the first place. It is only Nola's rage at her, supposedly, abusive mother which leads to the tumor-like womb that extends outside her body and the murderous brood that she births.

I actually enjoyed Creed's chapter on the monstrous womb, but I'm not sure that this movie is a great example of her arguement. Yes, the elements are definitely there, the angry woman, her perverted births, and her uncapped rage which boils over into the creatures that she has created, but my problem lies within the other characters. If Mike and Jan were not in the picture, or if their own psychological problems stemmed from relationships with their mothers then I would say that there is better validity to these claims.

And Nola is not reliable. We cannot immediately, if ever, believe her story of abuse. There is no proof other than her word and she is insane. Her problems stem from a deeper place in her mind. So, this passing of the disease of being female would have started with Nola's mother, and actually further down the genetic line. But, Juliana, Nola's mother, is not subjected to these bumps which seem to be the beginnings of all the problems which plague Nola later in life. Everything seems to start with the onset of these mysterious bumps. At the end of the film it is young Candy who is afflicted with the bumps, perhaps this can be seen as the passing of the disease, but where were it's origins? It had to begin with someone. The bumps began when Nola was a child and were not the manifestations of Dr. Raglans psychoplasmic therapy. When the film ends and we get a close up of Candy's arm and see the bumps forming there we realize that this is a sign that the horror will probably continue with the daughter. But why? What caused these unnatural growths? We are never given that information. Nola's mother only mentions that these bumps appeared on Nola and she was hospitalized because of them.
My disagreement with Creed lies in what I feel is the problematic position of Mike and Jan and how they fit in with the female as disease, and with the passing of the disease from mother to daughter. There is definitely a passing of something dreadful between Nola and Candy, we see this in the final scene with the close up of Cany's arm, but is it the disease of woman? I think that might be a stretch. Cronenberg never explains to us, the viewers, what these bumps are and their appeance is the greatest mystery of the movie. Are they manifestations of rage that came to Nola at a young age because she is already disturbed mentally, or are they caused by abuse that both Nola and Candy are subjected to at a young age? Because they certainly are not caused by Raglan's warped therapy, though other monstrosities are.

Cronenberg takes full advantage of Nola's femaleness by exposing her womb and creating the little monsters which are ripped by Nola's teeth out of the womb sac, but does he show that to be female is a disease? I don't think so, I do think he does an excellent job of showing the womb as having potential to be something monstrous, but I don't know if I would go as far as calling the entire gender a disease which gets passed from generation to generation.

Works cited

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1993. 43-58

The Brood. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar,
Art Hindle, Nuala Fitzgerald. MGM, 1979.

Is the Somafree Institute a cult compound? There are many similar characteristics to that of cults. Raglan is a domineering psychiatrist who demands complete obedience from his patients. He keeps them isolated from the outside world and even demands that their families obey his decisions. He lives in a rather extravagant home, while his patients are housed in plywood cabins on his property.

In the opening scene of the movie it shows how Raglan uses his psychoplasmic therapy to insinuate himself in a father role in order to "help" his patient Mike. It is almost an hypnotic form of therapy, where the patient comes to believe that it is his father who is speaking to him and he reacts to this stimulus in the way that Raglan manipulates him too. This scene is poignant because it sets up Raglan as a messiah-like figure to his patients, by being the one to console them after forcing them to a bad place psychologically. We, as participants in the film, must decide for ourselves whether or not Raglan's type of therapy is working. Does he get his desired results? I think to a point he does. He manages to bring his patients to the point of rage that manifests itself outwardly from their bodies, in the form of lesions, tumors, and for Nola a tumerous-like womb.

And what about his relationship with Nola and her brood of monstrous children? This is another area that Raglan seems to exemplify the cult leader mentality. He kicks all of his other patients out of the institute so that he can focus on Nola exclusively. Most, if not all, cult leaders demand that they have exclusive rights to the female members of their cult. Raglan manages this flawlessly. He keeps Nola locked up in her cabin and no one, not even her husband or father are allowed to see or visit her. The only person he allows access is her daughter Candy, another female.

In my opinion, Raglan is a type of father to the brood. He didn't father these creatures in the traditional sense, but he is the one who brought Nola to a place in her therapy that created them. The male patients outwardly projected their pyschoplasmic therapy through the markings on their bodies, while Nola gave birth. Raglan protected these creatures and housed them along side their mother, even when he had full knowledge of their murderous ways. Perhaps, it was his paternal instinct not to kill his own psychological childern. Raglan, even if not conventionally, is the father of the brood. He created the therapy and circumstances that surround their birth and life. The dormitory like room above Nola's is filled with beds, play toys and childerns clothes, which means that he also went out of his way to treat them, to some extent, like real childern.

Raglan dies in the end at the hand of his own creation. He sacrifices himself to save Candy, though why he does this is not completely certain. We can only assume he fears for the childs life. But, even the vision they give of his death is cult leader-like. The last we see of him he is lying on the floor with the brood's tiny bodies scattered around him. All of them dead. This is not a picture that is unusual for us, we have seen it in the case of many cult leaders and their followers.