Back in August 2013, I had no idea what I wanted to spend an entire academic year researching, writing about, and presenting. My overambitious desire to create a thesis around a chronology of British Gothic fiction (Penny Dreadfuls and sensation novels galore!) evolved, with the great aid of my thesis adviser Lee Quinby, into exploring the thematic similarities between the short stories of my favorite poet and Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
The parallel between Hitchcock and Poe is nothing new, drawn up by countless critics and the director himself.What my thesis project attempts to do is argue that a close reading of a particular Poe story can act as a lens through which a specific Hitchcock film can be viewed and more thoroughly analyzed, building upon pre-existing film criticism.
Once the main topic was established, I could then narrow this down even further into a formal written thesis split into two sections. The first investigates how both Poe and Hitchcock use humor to highlight and heighten horror by comparing the former’s lesser known short story “Berenice” and Hitchcock’s popular horror flick Psycho. In my various presentations of this section, I have focused on the two main male characters of these works, Egaeus and Norman, who I label “broken males”.
The “broken male,” a term I designated over the course of my research, is present in both of the works that I’m addressing. Egaeus, the narrator of “Berenice”, and Norman Bates are broken in the sense that they suffer from stunted mentalities, brought on by unhealthy relationships with their mothers. In their respective fictional settings, they represent the traumatized male whose brokenness allows him to commit irrational acts of violence, mostly upon women. This presents itself as “body horror,” a phrase derived from the horror film genre that features explicit displays of the mutilation, dissolution, and decay of the body.
The second section dealt with another set of works: Poe’s short story “Ligeia” and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Here, I deal more with the sympathetic nature of the “broken males” discussed in the first section, as Scottie Ferguson and the unnamed narrator of “Ligeia” appear to be slightly more sane individuals (given the fact that neither film nor story explicitly mentions mental illness or a psychological diagnosis as the first set does) who are coping with traumatic situations through either obsessive behaviors or drug addiction.
A great deal of time has come between now and when I first decided that I wanted this project to culminate in an online portfolio and self-portrait series. The initial ideas have come and gone and the passion for this project may have faded a little. As part of the course requirements under Professor Lindsey Freer, I began to keep a digital reading journal where I could store inspirational images and chronicle the artistic process. My Tumblr blog allowed me to store images and movie clips that in turn inspired conceptual sketches for my photography series. Several images and clips from a Poe inspired dream sequence in the film Twixt reminded me of this quote:
“Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death — was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious — “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”
-Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”
Poe was mainly discussing The Raven in this instance, but it is a theme that permeates through a great number of his writings, especially the pair that I selected for my thesis project. “[T]he death..of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” is the motto for this photography project. Poe may not have meant that a woman’s death is beautiful or romantic, but poetical in the sense that it evokes intense emotional and visual potential…food for his highly imaginative writings.
I am no expert photographer, in fact, I have only taken one class a few semesters ago with photographer Katie Murray. However, I am a very visual person and was encouraged by this professor to take up color photography instead of the black and white film photography I had come to love. This series was an even greater challenge due to the fact that I hate being photographed and cannot stand looking at pictures of myself. Yet, when discussing the possibilities for this project with Professor Freer and our incredible ITF Jenny Kijowski, it became clear that self-portraits giving life to the dying women who haunt these works would be more meaningful than, say, digital manipulation of film stills and text (which I may decide to pursue as a separate project for my gap year). And so, that is how these photos grew out of a written thesis that I have become very protective of.
This entire endeavor is far from over and I plan to revisit these ideas and these images in the near future, with larger sets, better make-up, and a stronger grasp on the ins and outs of Photoshop.
Until then, you can view the digital reading journal that followed the progression of this project here.
