Death and the Maiden: Bataille, Blanchot and the Deathly Female Figure
In: Death, Dying, Culture: An Interdisciplinary InterrogationSearch for other papers by Leslie Anne Boldt in
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In Over her Dead Body, Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Elisabeth Bronfen argues that Western culture links the feminine with death, for both constitute figures of alterity, undecideability and ambivalence. In order to demonstrate the ways in which culture and art reinforce the link between the feminine and death, Bronfen refers to Lotman’s descriptions of the mobile (masculine) hero and the (feminine) boundary, cast as a grave, a cave, a home or woman, all of which are characterized by darkness, warmth and dampness. Bronfen notes that the lack of boundary separating womb, tomb, grave and home is ‘traditionally linked to the analogy between earth and mother.’ Since woman gives the gift of life and therefore death, beneath her skin lies the promise of the decay and rot to which all bodies are destined. For this reason, the male author and his male protagonist envisage contact with the deathly or dying female figure, whether in the guise of the mother or the beloved, in order to enact a confrontation with his own mortality which he finds simultaneously fascinating and repulsive. In the context of Bronfen’s and Lotman’s theories on death and the female protagonist, I compare the depiction of the deathly female in Bataille’s Blue of Noon and Blanchot’s Death Sentence. Bataille’s male protagonist, Troppmann, is attracted to but rendered virtually impotent by the ailing Dorothea (Dirty). At the end of the novel, he penetrates her skeletal frame over the earthy graves of a candle-lit cemetery. The experience of Blanchot’s dying female protagonist is not eroticized, but is voyeuristically witnessed by the male narrator who is deeply fascinated by her protracted death.