Fictional Worlds III: Tragedy & Mystery (Storytelling on Screen) by L.A. Alexander

Author:L.A. Alexander [Alexander, L.A.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2014-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Symbolism of the Devouring Mother

The Reader is best understood via the symbolic paradigm of the Devouring Mother. This archaic mythic figure, who “swallows its children whole,” became a powerful weapon of subversive political criticism in the twentieth century. In earlier myths, a devouring mother was associated with the womb-tomb, the Nature-deity who gives birth and takes life back. Gradually, the mythic figure became a signifier of disorder in the life of society, connoting unnatural, and later political, processes rather than the forces of nature.

Symbolic Father-Tyrants are abundant in narratives, but Devouring Mothers are a rare and heavy weapon in storytelling, delivering a message of deep unacknowledged crisis in the motherland. Medea was one of the first symbolic images in this context in literary culture. In Euripides’ play, she disappears from the devastating murder scene, leaving behind her grief-stricken husband; carried away with her children’s bodies in a chariot drawn by dragons. This detail reminds of Medea’s connection to the chthonic realm.

Mothers are typically nurturing and kind: if the opposite is stressed by a narrative, it is a symbolic inversion, which points at a large scale disequilibrium in society; occurring in plain view, but repressed and often publicly silenced out of fear. This symbol is the last resort in any culture’s honest self-reflection and brutal self-criticism, particularly in countries with censorship. This symbolism is powerful, when used knowingly and wisely. If its implicit social critique is overlooked, the stories of evil women connote nothing but misogyny. When the Devouring Mother paradigm is used, not the mothers but the motherlands are the targets of critical inquiry.

While Brecht’s Mother Courage connotes Nazi Germany, two murderous characters in Russian culture, conceived in the era of Stalin rule, suggest similar symbolism, that of the criminality of dictatorship: Efrosinia, a murderous aunt of the czar in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, and the antiheroinne Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk or Katerina Izmailova. Dmitry Shostakovich wrote this opera, based on the 1865 novella by Nikolai Leskov, in the 1920s, when the country fell under Stalin’s rule. It was adapted to the screen in the USSR in 1927; Yugoslavia (Andrzej Wajda, 1962); and 1969; Germany (Petr Weigl, 1992); and USA, 1990. Note the political significance of the years! Stalin’s rise to absolute power; the beginning and the end of the liberal movement of the 1960s; and the dawn of the 1990s (respectively); all are associated with turning points in the political histories of these countries, hence the adaptations of the story were intended as political warnings against the dangers of totalitarianism, just as Shostakovich conceived it.

The most feared by Soviet censorship was the banned film Commissar (Alexandr Askoldov, 1967), a parable of Mother-Russia abandoning her children. The sacred political figure, connoting Motherland, was portrayed as a monster rather than a heroine, implying that the country discarded her children, just like this mother did, valuing politics more than human life. Based on a short story by Vasily Grossman, the film featured a civil war era pregnant political chief of an army

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