Mommie Dearest

The Domesticity of Death in "The Others"

I am going to completely ruin the twist ending of the film “The Others.”  If you wish to be surprised by the movie, I encourage you to visit surfthechannel.com or your favorite video provider to view it for yourself before continuing to read this post.  It’s not very long and it’s a purely psychological thriller, no blood or guts at all, just creaking doors.  It fits incredibly well with some of the feminist theory we have been exploring, and I cannot pass up the opportunity to talk about it.

As Gilbert and Gubar began to rattle off examples of the angel-woman, monster-woman dichotomy they identified in “The Madwoman in the Attic”, I attempted to do so on my own.  When they introduced the idea of the domesticity of death, “The Others” came crashing into my mind.  I find that the movie serves as an interesting illustration of Gilbert and Gubar’s theory, especially as the physical home comes to signify the body of the mistress of the house.

            The scene is set in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, in 1945.  The movie begins with the strict and religious mother, Grace, showing several new servants around her home, where she raises her two children while their father is away at war.  It is a very large mansion, and Grace demands that, while moving about the house, the inhabitants close and lock each door behind them before opening another door.  The reason for this becomes known when Grace introduces the servants to her children, Anne and Nicholas.  They are photosensitive, and must be kept away from all light stronger than that of a candle or two lest they have an extremely dangerous allergic reaction.  In Grace’s own words, the house is like a ship, and the light must be kept out like water.  Due to the children’s condition, the house is usually very dark, and Grace insists on taking the servants on a tour of every inch of it, because, as she says, most of the time you cannot find your way.

            Over the course of the following week or so, Anne claims to see people moving about in the house.  When talking to their new nanny, Anne and Nicholas obliquely refer to how Grace “went mad.”  The family begins to experience a significant amount of supernatural phenomena, and Grace attempts to find the village priest, but gets lost in the thick fog surrounding the house, ultimately winding up where she began.  The paranormal activity culminates in one terrifying night, when the children discover the ghosts, whom they call “the others,” in their nursery.  These “ghosts” are holding a séance, and Anne tells them about how Grace “went mad.”  One of “the others,” an old woman who appears to be a psychic, then informs Grace and the children that they are dead, that Grace smothered the children and then shot herself.  Huddled together with her children, Grace talks about the incident and wonders “where they are”, if they are not in Heaven or Hell.  She then instructs the children to chant, “This house is ours” with her, and vows never to leave.

            

Grace, played by a fair, blond, and delicate Nicole Kidman, certainly resembles the angel of the house on the surface.  She is slightly weak physically, often complaining about her migraines, but she is wholly devoted to the upbringing of her children and possesses a rigid moral and religious certainty.  Her very name evokes a sense of ethereal divinity.  She is clearly trying very hard to be a perfect mother and to raise exemplary children, despite their sickness; this makes the reality of her murders and suicide all the more horrifying.  I find that the development of Grace’s character exemplifies Gilbert and Gubar’s point that “the monster may not only be concealed behind the angel, she may actually turn out to reside within (or in the lower half of) the angel” (820).  To take this statement a bit further, it seems that, in the case of Grace, the angel and the monster alternately “took over,” and when the angelic Grace realized that she had allowed the monster within to take over in the act of killing her children, she killed herself in an act of angelic martyrdom.

The script of the film and Ms. Kidman’s performance allude to the frustration and anger that Grace hides behind her façade of angelic certainty.  At some points, Grace even attempts to explain how the darkness of the house drives her crazy, and how she feels abandoned by her husband who is no longer around to help her take care of their sick children.  Indeed, her house is so large that she is powerless to maintain it on her own, and for this reason must keep a staff of servants.  The stress of keeping up the house, the servants, and the children by herself while maintaining the image of the “slim, pale, passive” angel-woman contributes to the escalation of Grace’s mental instability that eventually leads her to kill her children and herself (817).  Hence Grace illustrates how “it is just because women are defined as wholly passive, completely void of generative power…that they become numinous to male artists.  For in the metaphysical emptiness their ‘purity’ signifies they are, of course, self-less, with all the moral and psychological implications that word suggests” (815).  The angel, then, denied the support of a male caretaker to please and to keep her passive, withers and is consumed by the monster.  Interestingly enough, it is this is shift, prompted by her growing sense of her “metaphysical emptiness” and “self-less”-ness after her husband’s departure, that initiates Grace’s suicidal transformation into the “numinous,” ghostly state of being.  Following this train of thought, Grace’s consciousness of her angelic passivity is what allows the monster within to take over, thus transforming her into the in-between, indefinable, ethereal state in which she exists.

Once she becomes the essentially “numinous” ghost, Grace’s identity maintains the domination/repression relationship of the dual angelic and monstrous identities. The angel seems to be usually “in control,” as evidenced by her meticulous schedule and generally gentle demeanor, and the monster, ever lurking beneath the surface, still takes over every once in a while, as when she attacks Anne during a supernatural hallucination.  It is very important to note that while we can apply the angel/monster dichotomy to Grace’s actions and say, as I have, that one identity at times “takes over,” this is not a case of multiple personality disorder.  Though her dual consciousness of herself is neatly played out in dramatic form, Grace exists as wholly angelic and wholly monstrous at the same time.  It is in this way that the artistic portrayal of Grace’s fragmented sense of self relates to the effect of a masculinist culture on all women, as Gilbert and Gubar describe in their essay: “The sexual nausea associated with all these monster-women helps explain why so many real women have for so long expressed loathing of (or at least anxiety about) their own inexorably female bodies.  The ‘killing’ of oneself into an art object…testifies to the efforts women have expended not just trying to be angels but trying not to become female monsters” (823).  Grace, fully understanding after the deaths of her children that she, like Spenser’s Errour and Duessa, is part pure, part corrupt, quite literally “kills herself into [the] art object” of the angel of the house in order to restore or recreate herself as the angel, not the monster.

However, as the continuation of her dual identities indicates, she fails at existing as only angel even in the numinous state.  Grace’s inability to explore her own consciousness emerges as a recurring theme throughout the film.  The darkness, locked doors, and compartmentalized rooms of the mansion mirror this lack of self-exploration and understanding.  Like the rooms of the house, Grace has locked off the separate parts of herself, choosing to exist only as she appears to be, but not as she may define herself.  When “the others” appear to have infiltrated the house, Grace, in an emotional outburst, exclaims that she never allowed the Nazis to enter her house during the occupation of the islands, and that she will not allow others to sneak in now.  This fear of discovery and penetration relates to Gilbert and Gubar’s discussion of the numinous female, existing outside of normal modes of being.  The idea is importantly complicated by the fact that, at the end of the film, Grace discovers that she herself is “other,” that she is the deviant element in the physical space.  If the house is her body and she must be defined by it, then it is clear why she cannot leave it, even after death.  As her struggles with the angel and the monster within continue, so does her residence in her house.  The house is forever in darkness on the inside and surrounded by a thick fog on the outside.  Grace claims she often cannot find her way in the darkness, and she cannot travel to the village because of the fog.  Society alienates Grace from itself because she is a woman and hence, “the other.”  However, it renders her incapable of knowing herself, as well: she is a stranger in her own house.