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Judith
A very cool reference that Dora makes to a popular, though not technically canon, biblical story.
"Everybody knows the story by now. Holofernes, commander of the conquering Assyrian armies, has the Israelites on the ropes. Frustrated by the ineffectuality of her countrymen, Judith takes matters into her own hands, using her beauty and intelligence to ingratiate herself into Holofernes’ camp. After a night of drunken revelry, during which Holofernes’ behaviour is often read as being sexually aggressive, Judith beheads the Assyrian soldier while he sleeps. Without their leader, the conquering forces are wayward, and the Israelites prevail."
Judith Beheading Holofornes. Caravaggio 1598.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1610 version)
The themes the many many depictions of this scene usually revolve around are Sex, Desire, Violence, and how much women do or don't wield these things in their own agency. Is it shocking that Judith would do something so masculine as kill someone? Is it empowering? Is it kind of hot? Is violence something that women do as naturally as men? Is she doing it passionately? Angrily? Professionally? Is she doing it like housework? Or like something terrifying?
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Madness and Witchcraft
This is some ramblings I wrote about what I see as the connection between Madness (writ large, as a social idea not necessarily as psychological conditions) and Witches.
Madness, like witchcraft, is an ascribed association. Identifying yourself as mad proves your sanity, like Catch-22. Only someone else can deem you mad, but once they have, there is nothing you can say that can remove that appellation. There IS no survivable test for witchcraft. There IS no freedom in madness. The moment that the term is given to you you have already been judged and executed, it just may take longer or different forms. The eye turns inward to constantly be looking for illness, madness, taint and to excise it to the best of your ability to survive the judgment of others. It’s a lot like the closet in practice. But it’s a closet you have been placed into against your will.
It is a personal characteristic that is a Societal Problem. Witchcraft and Madness are evils that have to be rooted out of the Community. An individual might be able to be saved, and wouldn't it be lovely if they were, but that is a secondary concern to the removal of the cancer in the larger community. Even if you do legitimately need help the asylum is not there to assist You, it is there to return a usable member of society with the strangeness or danger extracted from it by any means necessary. This is why the amnesia from electroshock or lobotomy is acceptable.
Everything becomes evidence of the term once it's given to you. Your hair, whether or not you float in water, how quiet or loud you are, your legitimate reactions to the way people treat you once you are assigned the role of Witch or Madwoman is just further evidence that the role is correct. How do you prove yourself sane? How do you prove yourself not a Witch?
Witchcraft is also a heavily gendered word with associations of women getting power from outside the natural or correct order of the world. They are usually independent, single, or if they do take sexual partners, they do it through magic and seduction. I think this is part of why Dora/ph clings to this idea so much. She's going back through her own life and trying to find the thing that convinced everyone that she had be thrown away. Was it the cigars? Was it the military fascination? Was it a sixth toe? Was it a Devil's Mark on her hair?
I think she is struggling with being called insane but not feeling insane. Or imbecilic, morally or otherwise, depending on her diagnosis. Her own perception of herself are at odds with the diagnosis of people who are supposed to know what they're talking about and at her lowest, maybe she thinks she is insane and just can't accept that. I think she looks for devil's marks and extra toes to try to find proof that she IS a witch, and therefore deserves the treatment she's got. If she can't find it, then she's stuck in this limbo of essentially being gaslit.
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Female patients at a British Mental Hospital exercising.
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Foucault on Images and Theatrical Representation
I talked about this idea in rehearsal for the scene with Dora and Persephone baptizing and naming Persephone's baby. What we talked about that night came from the book Madness and Civilization and I'm including some passages below that talk about the idea of "Theatrical Representation".
"Madness is... allowing the Image a spontaneous value, total and absolute truth. The act of the reasonable man who... judges an image to be true or false, is beyond this image, transcends and measures it by what is not itself; the act of the madman never oversteps the image presented, but surrenders to it its immediacy..."
"Thus Zacatus Lusitanus describes the cure of a melancholic who believed himself damned while still on earth because of the enormity of the sins he had committed. In the impossibility of convincing him by reasonable arguments that he could be saved, his physicians accepted his delirium and caused an 'angel' dressed in white, with a sword in its hand, to appear to him, and after a sever exhortation this delusive vision announced that his sins had been remitted."
"From this very example, we see the next step: representation within the image is not enough; it is also necessary to continue the delirious discourse. For in the patient's insane words there is a voice that speaks; it obeys its own grammar, it articulates a meaning. Grammar and meaning must be maintained in such a way that the representation of the hallucination in reality does not seem like the transition from one register to another... The theatrical device represents the object of the delirium but cannot do so without externalizing it, and if it gives the invalid a perceptual confirmation of his illusion, it does so only while riding him of it by force. The artificial reconstitution of delirium constitutes the real distance in which the sufferer recovers his liberty... The exchange of non-being with itself is carried out in this ingenious play; the non-being of delirium is turned against the being of the illness, and suppresses it by the simple fact that it is driving out of the delirium by dramatic representation... Its confirmation in theatrical fantasy restores it to a truth which, by holding it captive in reality, drives it out of reality itself, and makes it disappear in the non-delirious discourse of reason."
Dora helps Persephone through her delirium by entering into it with her through props and mime, taking the Image out of just Persephone's mind and putting it into something more tangible. They can then work through one of the sticking points of Persephone's grief and guilt, not being able to name her child, and resolving this in a theatrical matter gives Persephone enough distance from the image to move forward and back into Reason.
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