Kadın Gotiğinin Hayaletleri

Bu makale, kadın Gotiğinin çağdaş örnekleri arasında sayılabilecek Robert Zemeckis’in What Lies Beneath (Gizli Gerçek, 2000) ve Andres Baiz’in La Cara Oculta (Gizli Oda, 2011) filmlerinde kadının hayalet ve hayaletimsi bir figür olarak temsilini incelemektedir. İlk olarak, gerek hayaletin gerekse hayaletlerle ilintili bir kavram olan “musallat olma”nın, Gotiğin bir alttürü olan ve cinsiyetçi tahakküm, eve hapsolma gibi kadının ataerkil toplumda maruz kaldığı baskıları mesele edinen kadın Gotiğinde sıkça karşımıza çıkan metaforlar olduğu vurgulanacaktır. Bu makalede What Lies Beneath ve La Cara Oculta filmlerinin, ölü (veya dış dünyanın gözünde ölüden farksız) bir kadının başka bir kadına musallat olması temasını merkeze alarak cinsiyetçi tahakküme dikkat çektiği ve böylece feminist meseleleri dile getirdiği savunulacaktır. What Lies Beneath cinayet kurbanı bir kadının hayaleti vasıtasıyla cinsiyetçi tahakküme ve kadına yönelik şiddete dikkat çekerken, La Cara Oculta ise ataerkil, fallomerkezci kültürde kadınların hayalet konumuna indirgendiğini göstermektedir. Sonuç olarak bu makale, her iki filmde de kadının hayaletimsi bir figür olarak temsilinin, onu adeta bir hayalet konumuna indirgeyen fallomerkezci, ataerkil kültürde kadının maruz kaldığı tahakkümü, baskıyı, eril şiddeti anlatmanın vasıtası olduğunu gösterecektir.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

Kadın Gotiği, hayalet, musallat olma, ataerki, cinsiyetçi tahakküm, Sembolik düzen

THE GHOSTS OF FEMALE GOTHIC

This article explores the representation of woman as a ghost or at least a ghostly figure in two films, What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis, 2000) and La Cara Oculta (The Hidden Face, Andres Baiz, 2011), both of which, it is argued, are situated in the female Gothic tradition. Ghosts and haunting, i.e., activity associated with ghosts, are widely used metaphors in female Gothic works of art, a sub-genre of Gothic that addresses the themes of gender oppression and domestic entrapment, both of which are emblematic of women’s experience in a patriarchy. This article argues that What Lies Beneath and The Hidden Face depict the haunting of a woman by another woman who is either dead or, if still alive, dead to the world, in ways that articulate feminist concerns and draw attention to gender oppression. WhileWhat Lies Beneath makes use of a ghost to address female victimization and male violence against women, The Hidden Face deals with the “ghosting,” or erasure, of women within patriarchal, phallocentric power structures that negate her existence. In both films, the figure of the ghostly woman serves to highlight the ways in which women are oppressed, victimized, disempowered – in short, rendered ghostly – in phallocentric, patriarchal culture.

Keywords:

Female Gothic, ghost, haunting, patriarchy, gender oppression, Symbolic order,

PDF

___

Baiz, A. (Director/Screenwriter). (2011). La cara oculta (The hidden face) [Motion Picture]. Colombia: Avalon, Cactus Flower, Dynamo & Fox International Productions.
Bolton, L. (2011). Film and female consciousness: Irigaray, cinema and thinking women. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Botting, F. (1999). Gothic. London & New York: Routledge.
Brewster, S. (2008). Access denied: Memory and resistance in the contemporary ghost film. In J. Jervis & J. Colins (Eds.), Uncanny modernity: Cultural theories, modern anxieties (pp. 112-127). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chapman, M. (1998). The masochistic pleasures of the gothic: Paternal incest in Alcott’s “A marble woman”. In R. K. Martin & E. Savoy (Eds.), American gothic (pp. 183-201). Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Davison, C. M. (2009). Gothic literature 1764-1824. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
DeLamotte, E. C. (1990). Perils of the night: A feminist study of nineteenth-century gothic. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dickerson, V. D. (1996). Victorian ghosts in the noontide: Women writers and the supernatural. Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press.
Doane, M. A. (1987). The desire to desire: The woman’s film of the 1940s. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian subject: Between language and jouissance. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
Hanson, H. (2007). Hollywood heroines: Women in film noir and the female gothic film. London & New York: I. B. Tauris.
Hogle, J. E. (2006). Foreword. In J. Bomarito (Ed.), Gothic literature: A Gale critical companion (Vol.1, pp. xiii-xviii). Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale.
Horner, A. & Zlosnik, S. (2009). Keeping it in the family: Incest and the female gothic plot in du Maurier and Murdoch. In D. Wallace & A. Smith (Eds.), The female gothic (pp. 115-132). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Horner, A. & Zlosnik, S. (2006). Female gothic. In A. Powell & A. Smith (Eds.), Teaching the gothic (pp. 107-120). Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Irigaray, L. (1993a). An ethics of sexual difference. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Irigaray, L. (1993b). Je, tu, nous: Toward a culture of difference. New York & London: Routledge.
Kavka, M. (2002). The gothic on screen. In J. E. Hogle (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to gothic fiction (pp. 209-228). Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kaye, H. (2012). Gothic film. In D. Punter (Ed.), A new companion to the gothic (pp. 239-251). Malden & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lacan, J. (1998). On jouissance. In J-A. Miller (Ed.), The seminar of Jacques Lacan: On feminine sexuality, Book XX (pp. 1-13). New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company.
Mulder, A-C. (2006). Divine flesh, embodied word: Incarnation as a hermeneutical key to a feminist theologian’s reading of Luce Irigaray’s work. Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Patrick, B. (2000). Lady terrorists: Nineteenth-century American women writers and the ghost story. In J. Brown (Ed.), American women short story writers: A collection of critical essays (pp. 73-84). New York & London: Garland.
Short, S. (2007). Misfit sisters: Screen horror as female rites of passage. Houndmills, Basingstoke & Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wallace, D. (2009). The haunting idea: Female gothic metaphors and feminist theory. In D. Wallace & A. Smith (Eds.), The female gothic: New directions (pp. 26-41). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wallace, D. & Smith, A. (2009). Introduction: Defining the female gothic. In D. Wallace & A. Smith (Eds.), The female gothic: New directions (pp. 1-12). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Williams, A. (1995). Art of darkness: A poetics of gothic. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Zemeckis, R. (Director). (2000). What lies beneath [Motion Picture]. USA: DreamWorks Pictures.