Part One: The Madwoman as a Starting Point for Criticism

Interests: anime, comics, and games (ACG) cultural studies / gender / space / intellectual history. An observer on the margins, overflowing with empathy.

This essay received the Banciyuan Recommendation Award at the Eighth International Academic Symposium on Otaku Culture in 2019.

Abstract

Starting from the concept of the “madwoman,” this essay examines madwomen in Japanese animation and the culture behind their representation. A cultural history of women’s bodies in Japan shows that shōjo, or girls’ culture, expresses the individual body’s opposition to the national body. Freed from the constraints of national discourse, the female body becomes, once again, an object of fetishistic desire in consumer society. This culture also informs the portrayal of female characters in anime. An analysis of the elements of visual resistance in these madwomen shows that “eyes without highlights” express a rebellion against a centralized visual order through the modern subject’s mechanisms of distracted attention. Yet narrative inevitably demands that the madwoman be restored or dealt with. An inquiry into the cultural background of her “frightening smile” finds that, although humor expresses her estrangement from order, humor’s power to escape order will still be reterritorialized as an irony that establishes order anew. Only the staging of the frightening smile itself produces the traumatic effect of the Real. Taken together, these critiques of the madwoman’s visual culture reveal the limits of visual resistance. Because animetism, unlike cinematism, relies more heavily on an aesthetics of layers, the perceptual apparatus works not by detaching attention from a center but by drawing it back into the multiple centers of separate layers. Compared with film, animation has a “hyperfantasmatic” character. How to break through the animated fantasy of the madwoman thus becomes a problem. Among moe attributes saturated with fantasy, darkening, unlike yandere, includes not only the dark side into which the character will ultimately fall, but also a moment of hystericization that negates given values.¹ Although animation’s hyperfantasmatic character as a medium indicates that the “madwoman” is always rendered as fantasy, Žižek’s ontology of incomplete reality emphasizes the possibility that fantasy, enacted to the extreme, can invalidate itself. Conflicts between psychic dimensions, each reflecting male desire, contain the possibility of traversing the fantasy.

Keywords

Madwoman · body · hyperfantasmatic character · yandere · darkening · traversing the fantasy

I. The Madwoman as a Starting Point for Criticism

Love between men and women, the reproduction of life: these have always been central concerns of art and literature, and unavoidable subjects in discussions of social morality and ethics. Literary and artistic works often express dissatisfaction with the decay that accompanies the progress of civilization in their societies, using imagination to pursue something better or to express pain. Yet, deliberately or otherwise, these same works also repeat and reproduce outworn ideas and ideologies—above all, for feminists, patriarchal ideology. In the late twentieth century, The Madwoman in the Attic, hailed as the “bible” of feminist literary criticism, systematically examined nineteenth-century women writers and the literary imagination of their time. It also issued a resounding challenge to the patriarchal imprint on the modern literature that arose alongside modernity in the nineteenth century. At the time, only men were generally thought capable of creation; women were created, depicted. The etymological relationship between “author” and “authority” reinforced this view:² only men were authors, and authors held authority over their creations, just as God exercised absolute control over his. Author-centered thinking converged with patriarchy’s misogynistic culture. Writing was taken for granted as an essential masculine quality, to be put into practice once a man reached maturity. Phallocentric discourse permeated men’s erotic recollections of writing: the pen was a penis, the paper an innocent virgin, and the act of writing as exhilarating as sex.³

Through the male pen, patriarchal thought controlled the depiction of women, whose literary images seemed already, by nature, colored by the male gaze. Culture gave women’s othering a concrete, visible form. On the one hand, distance from the centered subject made it possible to aestheticize these marginalized female others,⁴ concealing the underlying sexual politics. On the other, as the anthropologist Sherry Ortner writes, “the psychic mode associated with women seems to stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating.”⁵ In short, in the process of becoming the other, female figures are repeatedly split between two extremes. They are either transcendent symbols—the merciful savior, the Virgin Mary, the angelic girl—or wicked witches, madwomen, and castrating great mothers. Men’s attitude toward the transcendent figure is somewhat more complicated. As Virgin, angel, or merciful savior, abstract woman transcends life and death, occupying the space between this world and the next. For those in this world, her tenderness and care therefore offer an experience of the sublime. Yet this very transcendence of life and death is also an uncontrollable, life-threatening energy within her. The appearance of angels and the Virgin is always connected with the spirit’s ascent to heaven and the body’s death and decay.⁶ Worship of feminine purity thus stands, paradoxically, in conflict with the this-worldly orientation emphasized by the Protestant ethic. Modernization, meanwhile, brought a pragmatic shift from concern with the spiritual world to concern with bodily reality; it also dissolved traditional divisions of labor within the family, freeing more women to enter labor and consumer markets. Once women began to speak, create, and produce, the stable boundaries imposed by patriarchal culture ceased to hold. The rationality of writing gave way to a feminized, poetic hysteria. This undoubtedly intensified anxiety about women. Men who lost the ability to write were mocked as “eunuchs.”⁷ Literature expressed this anxiety through a contradictory attitude: it placed male protagonists in a weak, castrated position while objectifying and depicting female power, then deftly set that powerful figure against the reader’s sympathies. Even where she was not a villain, the woman became a “spectacle” sufficient to estrange the reader. Through literature’s reproduction of ideology, exaggerated depictions of women in turn shaped social and cultural construction, making it difficult for women writers to find a point from which to articulate female subjectivity. Hence Woolf’s precise judgment and resigned advice about women’s writing: “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”⁸ Women writers must kill the fictional women male authors have created to control them, reestablish themselves as creative subjects, and write women’s bodily experience.

Wicked female figures—like Bertha, the “madwoman” in Jane Eyre—are, on the one hand, victims of a patriarchal culture that even women creators find difficult to escape. On the other, they point directly to its paradoxes. Standing opposed to reason and goodness, the madwoman wreaks reckless, incomprehensible revenge on others or herself, defies worldly morality and ethics, and destroys social civilization. From another perspective, however, morality, civilization, and life must define themselves through their opposites: immorality, barbarism, and death. The formation of the moral human subject always goes hand in hand with the cruel face of human social development. The civilizing of primitive societies rests on a process of abjection. It fixes their boundaries precisely, removing natural, barbarous threats beyond them.⁹ The threat does not disappear from view; it remains bound to us in the form of what has been “rejected.” At an ontological level, the madwoman who threatens the subject’s stability is precisely the other face of the “Angel in the House.” As Barbara Creed argues, the essence of horror is an encounter with the feminine.¹⁰ This offers contemporary feminism a path of cultural criticism other than entry into masculine discourse.

As The Madwoman in the Attic has circulated widely, the “madwoman” has become a popular paradigm of feminist literary criticism, entering analyses of all kinds of art and even becoming a promotional slogan. Gilbert and Gubar themselves joke about the recycling of their figure in widely differing settings—from Tori Amos, “the madwoman in the attic of pop music,” to “Attic Chat,” with photographs of “massively endowed women” alongside sexually explicit material for adults aged eighteen and over.¹¹ But once we turn our analysis of the “madwoman” to contemporary Japanese culture, new questions arise. Can a feminist criticism grounded in the English-language literary world, in nineteenth-century literature, and in the flourishing of late-twentieth-century American feminism really apply to the madwoman of contemporary Japanese animation? We might extend Gilbert and Gubar’s insight into patriarchal culture and propose that consumerist moe culture is one of patriarchy’s operations: the madwoman has already been encoded as moe attributes such as darkening and yandere, leaving nothing worth discussing or criticizing. Yet, first, without comparative work across cultures, historical periods, and media, this claim’s validity is doubtful; second, even if its conclusion is correct, its description is reductive. We should take seriously the following point: understanding how madwomen appear differently in different cultures and media, and how their cultural meanings differ, can help us identify the crucial issues in criticism of Japanese otaku culture and inform further critique. To bring the “madwoman” paradigm into a Japanese cultural frame, we must first stress that “madwoman” is a broad analytical concept. She is not only a woman suffering mental derangement, but also a figure in female form who disrupts order, resists discipline, and lies outside the terms of moral explanation. Nor is she a “personality” serving characterization, still less a technical question of how to realize a function in animation, comics, games, or other media. She is a point of entry into the relationship between textual representations of women and women’s social reality, and a manifestation of patriarchal culture’s operation in particular works. It is therefore especially necessary to examine Japan’s specific history and culture and their construction of the female other.

II. The “Madwoman” in Japanese Culture

Premodern Japanese attitudes toward women before the Meiji period were charged with complex feelings. Buddhism affirmed and praised women as mothers, potentially capable of bearing children and reproducing society’s labor force. At the same time, the childbearing, menstruating body and other female sexual characteristics were regarded as unclean.¹² Folk literature and picture scrolls also depicted many monstrous women, sometimes joining female and supernatural forms to emphasize the filth and threat of female sexual characteristics. In folklore, for example, the ubume was understood as the obsessive attachment of a woman who had died in childbirth, given form. Stories of the yamauba, born from an old woman’s resentment and preying on travelers, were often used to instruct children. The futakuchi-onna, or two-mouthed woman, vividly combined the two extreme images of woman in one body, suggesting that the incomprehensible, lethal monster hidden beneath her long hair was her true face.¹³ Early Japanese folklore was deeply misogynistic, yet its hostility toward women was also a pragmatic strategy. To vilify and criticize feminine traits while praising the moralized body was, to some extent, to emphasize the responsibility of raising children and celebrate the maternal spirit. This spirit, placed above the flesh, also formed part of Japanese aesthetic discussion. The aesthetics of mono no aware, the pathos of things, treated flesh as ugly mud and spiritual beauty as the flower blooming above it, constructing and pursuing an aesthetic space wholly isolated from political and moral judgment.¹⁴ Applied to real or fictional women in Japanese culture, this aesthetic consciousness undermines both criticism of the maternal spirit and the empowerment of women’s flesh. Only a maternal spirit that devotedly nurtures life and tends the family—gentle, virtuous, untouched by worldly affairs—deserves affirmation. “Mother” became both the standard of women’s self-identification before Meiji and the moral norm of another form of patriarchal society: a society of maternal authority.¹⁵

The Meiji Restoration set Japan on the path of Western modernization. Changes in traditional gender norms and currents of women’s emancipation accompanied it, shaking traditional foundations to some degree. But “Westernization” was not a gender-neutral reform. It brought Japan closer to a West that was itself misogynistic, and the gender anxieties produced by the disintegration of older social morality also appeared in Meiji Japan. More specifically, capitalist industrial development, the birth of the modern nation-state, and the resurgence of indigenous nationalism dissolved the family unit of Japan’s traditional small-farming economy. Citizens also experienced a political and cultural split within the body. On one side stood the body as an object of state governance and a constituent of the nation, linked to the power to defend home and country and to a nationalism committed to revitalizing Yamato. On the other stood modernity’s individualistic body, concerned with immediate sensory gratification, adapting rapidly to dizzying change and lingering over consumer goods. The need for a self-restraining national body in turn fostered hypersensitivity to the dissolute individual body that disrupted and destabilized it.¹⁶ Social attitudes toward this uncontrollable body also grew complicated. The body that escaped with the advent of modernization weakened the traditional binary of the “normal” and the “abnormal.” Anxiety at this uncertainty also produced fear.¹⁷ The most typical case at the time was the notorious criminal woman Takahashi Oden, whose case shocked Japanese society. Fear and anxiety were equally evident in contemporary literature and art. Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō seems a thick description of the period’s social customs and relations between the sexes. Moving through the modern metropolis, Mineko embodies the modern individualistic body. Her teasing and provocation of Sanshirō, her rebellion against authority and the old order, express the power of the emancipated modern woman while fully manifesting the individual body’s destabilization of the national body. Her final choice of an unfree marriage seems to imply an appeasement of castration anxiety. Here, the female figure is bound to a cultural body escaping traditional constraints, often providing a “site” where panic can be lodged and resolved.

The individual and national bodies oppose yet depend on each other, in a distinctly gendered binary: the “national body” means the governance of the body, while the individual body means its indulgence. As Chizuko Ueno explains Masahiro Morioka’s distinction between men’s and women’s bodily experience, women are considered to have a greater “degree of bodiliness” than men: “Women are subject to the body, while men control the body.”¹⁸ Japan’s defeat in the Second World War marked a change in the balance of this antagonism. The centralized national body had been defeated. As the defeated country, Japan underwent prolonged political and economic control by the victor, the United States, and psychic castration by its occupier. In the occupiers’ eyes, Japanese men were weak and effeminate. Confronted with overbearing rulers, disempowered Japanese men came to feel what Japanese women had long experienced.¹⁹ Male castration anxiety was now also rooted in the trauma of wartime defeat. The atomic-bomb survivors, or hibakusha, offered extraordinarily rich and disturbing material. Their bodies—injured, twisted, even rotting from the atomic blasts—were an ironic counterpoint to the crimes Japan’s Unit 731 had committed in China, a return of the repressed, and sensory evidence of their own subordination. In gender-cultural terms, the shock of these bodies also brought psychic trauma, evoking their own “emasculation”: they themselves had become filthy, feminine monsters, estranged from civilization and cleanliness. Efforts to assuage this fear dialectically produced more madwomen in cultural works, figures through which to represent and imaginatively resolve the unsettling changes accompanying modern Japanese society. As Susan Napier describes it, women in the aesthetic imagination increasingly became othered, inaccessible, and even evil.²⁰

Yet postwar Japanese development did not remain unchanged under the shadow of defeat. From the 1950s onward, Japanese society and culture underwent continuous transformation. In class terms, a new middle class emerged, organized around the nuclear family. Its members were often highly educated intellectuals who benefited from the seniority-based wage system promoted to meet the needs of economic growth, enjoying stable, ample incomes and levels of consumption. Culturally, Japanese cinema and animation developed rapidly. Even during the American occupation of 1945–1952, freedom of expression and rejection of feudal thought received affirmation and encouragement. Those in power encouraged cultural workers to innovate in a variety of forms, seeking to eliminate the remnants of Japanese militarism as quickly as possible.²¹ By the end of the occupation in 1952, Japan accounted for nearly a quarter of all films exported worldwide, while the West and the Soviet Union together contributed only around 60 percent. These two changes indicate, to some degree, Japan’s turn toward consumer society between postwar reconstruction and economic takeoff. Consumer culture first appeared in the new middle class’s material desires and consumption of cultural commodities.

Women played a crucial role. The movement toward women’s emancipation that began with the Meiji Restoration continued; at the same time, accelerated capital accumulation demanded more workers and consumers in the market. Women were encouraged to enter the labor market as a hidden labor reserve. In a clear departure from feminist hopes, however, part of this postwar development still belonged to what Shinji Miyadai calls the “age of ideals”: “People evaluated reality by reference to an ‘ideal order.’ Men took as their reference a national order—the ‘ideal order’ of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—while women took the domestic order of the ‘good wife, wise mother’ known as the family.”²² The employment discrimination that followed confronted women with a binary choice between family and career. Those who actually acquired a measure of influence were often housewives rather than career women. Kyoto Animation, founded in 1981, began as a collaboration among several housewives. The Seikatsu Club, founded in 1965, provides another classic case: a group of women organized against the environmental pollution caused by excessive corporate development and advocated mutual care and assistance throughout society.²³ From a gender-cultural perspective, the housewives’ claims and actions seem stamped with widely accepted gender associations: closeness to nature, mutual support and affection, family harmony. These fitted traditional positive impressions of women, especially mothers, very well. Such images emphasizing motherhood both met a male expectation and seemed to exclude women with independent careers. Rather than simply a source of women’s political power, housewife identity was also a restriction on women inherited from the distant past. It reproduced in postwar Japan the Meiji contradiction between the national body, concerned with familial, social, and national harmony, and the individual body, committed to personal freedom and emancipation. Women who tried to escape familial control were deemed “impossible to reason with,” split off from society’s maternal expectations. Miya Moro argues that Japanese feminism has been unable to develop because the history of maternal-authority culture is too long.¹⁵ In the late 1970s, the urban legend of the slit-mouthed woman spread through Japan’s streets and neighborhoods. Ordinary people attributed her desire for revenge to “madness” following failed cosmetic surgery. This background implies a possible cultural process: spending large sums and obsessively remaking one’s body into an object of (male) desire is precisely a violation of wifely fidelity and motherhood. The unsuccessfully altered body reproduces, with a difference, the bodies of Unit 731’s experimental subjects and the atomic-bomb survivors. This act reawakened the trauma of the devastated postwar national body and the collapse of the old order, and was linked in turn to the self-determination of women who had acquired power to control or even remake their bodies. Such women were cast as the antithesis of flourishing urban civilization.

The urban legend’s female monster was an early sign of the “uncontrollable woman” of contemporary Japanese popular culture. Japan’s bubble economy in the 1990s further exposed a truth: men’s trauma of castration after defeat had not been alleviated by economic takeoff, merely concealed beneath the glitter of a materialistic society. Economic collapse brought mass unemployment, placing more far-reaching pressures on Japanese families, forcing more women into the workforce, and unsettling Japanese male identity.²⁴ As family organization disintegrated and employment prospects worsened, young women, already facing a discriminatory labor market, confronted a still grimmer prospect: they could neither enter the ideal family nor attain a sufficiently satisfying career. In this predicament, women’s bodies also escaped the control of institutions such as family and corporation, appearing in expansive urban public spaces in distinctive cultural forms. Eiji Ōtsuka made some precise observations about the period’s psychic culture. Modern Japan had moved from a production-led culture to one led by narrative consumption. The emergence of the cultural figure of the girl, the shōjo, was especially important. As part of the consumption of moe (kawaii) culture,²⁵ the girl unable to resist cute things shaped a new Japanese subjectivity driven by endless consumer desire.²⁶ On one hand, the “girl” answered an internal split within the female subject. Eternal girlhood rejected the role of “mother” and distrusted central discourses such as a return to order. On the other, it meant that hidden gender discourse was no longer expressed as explicit rules and prohibitions through centralized spaces such as family, school, and company; it had entered the postmodern cultural representations of urban space. The appearance of “** girls” in the mid-1990s concentrated this process.²⁷ “**” escaped family and school discipline, expressed doubts about women’s career ideals, and displayed new desires founded on individual pleasure. “** girls” also presented society with the image of the uncontrollable mad girl. This phase passed through the early and late aspects of Miyadai’s “age of the self,”²⁸ reflecting negative cultural change and the disintegration of the center. As ideals receded, the pursuit of fleeting sensory experience in a postmodern setting took their place. The body in a Deleuzian sense put the controlling power of traditional ideological state apparatuses—family, corporation, school—to the test.

The girls’ subculture that opposed maternal culture suggests another course for gender discourse: on escaping a constraining culture of roles, the girl embraced a new patriarchal aesthetics. Looking back at the relationship between feminism and Aum Shinrikyō, Ōtsuka notes that many women believers were committed feminists. Unable to find what they wanted—something “feminist in character”—within conventional feminist discourse, they turned to faith in Aum. Ōtsuka locates this something feminist precisely in “the bodily dissonance that has persisted since the onset of modernity.”²⁹ As a critique of and response to narrow feminism and the New Left’s grand narratives, Japanese women from the 1980s onward tended to focus emancipation on the body in which emotions had become somatized. Meanwhile, feminists reflecting on their earlier positions were eager to foster the “collapse of motherhood” by embracing modern sensory experience. A bodily strategy rooted in consumerism won approval. Not without skepticism, Ōtsuka remarked: “If such a situation exists (women’s bodies being socialized into consumer society) as a means of pursuing women’s desires and self-realization, then it cannot be denied.”³⁰ Continuing this conviction, anime featuring girls and affirming female power sprang up everywhere, explicitly rebelling against elements of grand feminist discourse.³¹ The girl became a distinctive diplomatic image for Japanese culture: innocent, cute, sunny, inspiring, and a stimulus to the global consumption of Japanese moe culture.³² Sensitivity to reactionary elements in the native culture also intensified the split between Japanese and Western feminisms. Published in 1994, Japanese Feminism reviewed and reflected on Western feminism’s influence on Japan, proposing that Japanese feminism was Japanese women’s articulation of their own experiences in their own language, a distinctive contribution to the formation of feminist thought as a whole.³³ To some extent, this also affected the subsequent spread of certain recent Euro-American feminist concerns in Japan.

The “girl,” and even the visibly powerful “beautiful fighting girl,” is a cultural expression of feminism’s local practice in Japan, but inevitably becomes an aesthetic object in consumer society. The girl’s body both disturbs rules and accommodates consumer culture. Women’s autonomous power is constructed as a consumable, intelligible moe attraction, establishing an immense schema of database consumption in the minds of otaku consumers. Just as new fashions opposing the old aesthetic order have established distinctive niche markets in dōjinshi, or fan-made comics, the classic “madwoman,” once brought to the screen, has been integrated into negative moe attributes—darkening, yandere, a fall into evil—that nevertheless satisfy consumers’ desires to some degree. Even if a broad historical survey suggests that these madwomen, born of new currents of thought and escaping traditional constraints, have fallen into a new patriarchal discourse, an analysis of “extreme” female characters in contemporary anime and their cultural background can still help us understand how otaku subculture expresses patriarchal culture, and whether that expression contains contradictions. People hold relatively extreme opinions of dark, threatening moe attributes such as darkening and yandere, whose appearance often accompanies cruel and unsettling plots. Directing a critical gaze toward these marginal areas may be a worthwhile experiment in feminist cultural criticism.

Original Chinese publication: Lab on Roof, March 16, 2020.