The Madwoman in the [attic] basement
7 May 2017 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
promethia_tenkSo Knock Knock was very boring, I thought, except as ENGLISH MAJOR CATNIP.
(I apologize in advance for the abuse of parentheses going on here. And for the general sketchiness, but I'm feeling lazy.)
Concept one: gothic novels. In a classic gothic novel, the mystery of the scary house serves as a metaphor for an interpersonal or psychological danger faced by the heroine, who must uncover the nature of this danger in order to (hopefully) overcome it. In this case, Bill is being exposed to the danger inherent in a possessive over-protectiveness. In many ways, this is a far more threatening lesson than what she learned about the Doctor last week. Clara's mirroring/amplification of the Doctor, especially in this trait, is what doomed them in season nine.
Concept two: all the women are one woman. In the footnotes to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, he notes that in his poem 'so all the women are one woman.' Now, personally I take The Waste Land as a model of what Moffat is doing with Doctor Who: a work about healing the societal/interpersonal/sexual devastation and stagnation in the wake of a war. And I think when you take a step back 'all the women are one woman' works just as well when applied to Moff Who: each woman has her own story, her own personality, but each is illuminating a different facet of the Doctor's relationship to an abstract Other who, for the Doctor, is almost always female. The women control the symbolism on this show (water, earth, sun, flowers, birds, music, forests, etc.). They are all linked through this symbolism, and their power lies in their ability to harness it. That Moffat's version of the Master is a woman makes her enormously more powerful than she ever could have been as a man because when she comes into the show, she inherits and takes over this entire network of female-centric symbolism (which she immediately makes evil: evil water, evil eggs, evil flowers, evil (Cyber)birds.)
Ok, so, Knock Knock.
Here the story about the Landlord and his daughter/mother (all the women are one woman) echoes many previous Who stories about people, almost all of them the Doctor or a Doctor mirror, attempting to unnaturally preserve someone from death and, in the process, endangering others.
The ghost of Clara has been haunting this season. First she showed up in the person of Heather and in the Doctor's frantic warnings to Bill against getting swept up with her lest she become 'not human' as well (which is what happened to Clara, after all, she mirrored an alien and now she's not human anymore). We've had a repeated theme of memory wipes. Last week Clara showed up in the Doctor coaching Bill into taking responsibility for a risky decision without cruelly kicking her out of the nest the way he did with Clara in Kill the Moon. Here, though, we have in Eliza the woman preserved/petrified in the moments before her death, and her preservation is a danger not only to herself and her preserver, but to others too (it's a bit glossed over in Hell Bent, but the Time Lords are deeply fearful of what the Doctor will do to Time by refusing to return Clara to her death).
Again, too, a theme of forgetting, and forgetting relationships or confusing relationships is shown to be the greatest danger. There's a strong repetition of a theme from The Empty Child here: a child who has become a monster because of a parent who has forgotten/abdicated their responsibility. The idea of companions as the Doctor's surrogate (grand)children comes up about as strongly as it ever has here with Bill claiming the Doctor as her grandfather, but it's an idea that's been sprinkled throughout Moff Who, from Eleven telling Amelia Pond bedtime stories and deciding he needs to leave Amy and Rory behind for their own protection because 'that's why grown-ups were invented,' to Danny Pink declaring Twelve to be Clara's 'space dad.' The parent/child theme is strong, though I don't think exclusive here. The downfall of Twelve and Clara was a mistaking of Self and Other. As ever in Moffat, right relationships = right everything.
We have another portrait here as well--the Landlord's portrait of his mother, a talisman like Clara's portrait is for Twelve in Heaven Sent (portraits or likenesses are a frequent symbolic thing in the gothic--they often hold the key to the psychological or interpersonal reality that is being dissected.)
And this episode, as in both Heaven Sent and Hell Bent, all have some overworld/underworld polarity going on with people moving from basements/catacombs to towers and back again, the (twisted) connection between the two being the key to (unnaturally extended) life, just as uniting the earth and heavens is the key to (good, natural) life.
(Interestingly, Clara's run also had not one but two gothic stories very early on. There was Hide and, more relevantly, Journey to the Center of the TARDIS--in which Clara's gothic trip through the secrets of the Doctor's 'mansion' reveals that the future Doctor and Clara are the very monsters that they fear.)
There's echoes of River in the Library in Knock Knock as well: the woman saved in the tower, surrounded by flesh-eating swarms. And forrest/wood imagery.
Everyone should go readnostalgia's musings about why the Hybrid really may be the Doctor (by having a human mother). The Landlord's questioning of the Doctor over what he might do to save his own mother, and the Doctor's grim non-confrmation, seems to nod to Nos's speculation that the Doctor losing his mother is the dark secret behind his frantic attachment to all these earth girls.
And so all the women are one woman . . .
The Landlord here has some very interesting lines when he comes in on Bill and Shireen's discovery of Pavel, trapped in the wall, with the skipping record playing:
"Music can be pleasant, but a simple repetition like that is merely a distraction from the inevitable. Hope is its own form of cruelty . . . Oh look: he is released. Mercy at last. Beautiful, isn't it? Nature contained. He is preserved in the walls. In the very fabric of the building forever."
If life is a song, the skipping record that is keeping Pavel 'alive' becomes a metaphor for all the various methods of unnaturally prolonging life. Clara. Ashildr/Me. Ghost!River. Twelve looping through the confession dial. Abigail frozen in the ice in A Christmas Carol. Also 'nature contained.' The opposite of life isn't death; it's stasis. Either you accept life and death and birth and sex and change and the passage of time or . . . you don't. When you don't, the results aren't pretty. The entire run of Moffat Who has basically been a matter of coercing the Doctor into understanding this.
The hope of getting this story now is that somehow Bill can be Clara done right, that she can escape the preservation instinct that threatens them all. (The first time Bill and friends go to investigate a scary sound in the house, it's the Doctor. He's hiding in a cupboard that, we later find out, is really a lift that goes down to the basement--where the secrets are kept. This is reassuring at the time, but threatening when taken symbolically. Like the reverse of what's under the bed being Clara. The real threat here, to Bill, is the Doctor, not the house.)
Interestingly, since the show has brought up Susan, both with her picture and now with Bill calling the Doctor 'grandfather,' is that Susan was not preserved: the Doctor sent her off to have a life with what's his name who she'd fallen in love with. Have never watched that episode and understand that he did not necessarily handle this well, but there is a precedent here for the Doctor, in fact, being able to let go.
And now we get to what's in the vault. I'm going to go full ahead with the assumption that it is not just the Master but specifically Missy. This episode does certain things to mirror the Doctor's vigil of the vault with the Landlord's preserving of his mother in the tower. Both have been there for 70 years. In both cases the 'captors' seem to have an affection for their prisoners. They've given them music and food. They are keeping them in stasis. Both, we are told, are just as trapped as their prisoners. And I am going to assume, through the power of mirrors, that the Doctor is, in fact, protecting Missy by keeping her in there (or at least thinks he is).
So now we see why Missy had to become a woman. She first appeared as Clara's dark mirror, giving voice and form to Clara's desires for control over death and to her possessive relationship with the Doctor. Now, however, she can serve as a dark mirror for all the Doctor's women, preserved not in the tower but in the vault. Mother in the tower, madwoman in the basement.
(The subject line of this post is the title of a famous work of literary criticism about Mr. Rochester's wife, if you weren't familiar. A classic riff on a gothic trope where the secret of the house is a (dark) mirror for the heroine.)
When you ask 'what's in the vault?' I'll confess that I didn't think 'a complicated metaphor for the Doctor's relationship to the women in his life,' but on reflection, it probably should have occurred to me.
(I apologize in advance for the abuse of parentheses going on here. And for the general sketchiness, but I'm feeling lazy.)
Concept one: gothic novels. In a classic gothic novel, the mystery of the scary house serves as a metaphor for an interpersonal or psychological danger faced by the heroine, who must uncover the nature of this danger in order to (hopefully) overcome it. In this case, Bill is being exposed to the danger inherent in a possessive over-protectiveness. In many ways, this is a far more threatening lesson than what she learned about the Doctor last week. Clara's mirroring/amplification of the Doctor, especially in this trait, is what doomed them in season nine.
Concept two: all the women are one woman. In the footnotes to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, he notes that in his poem 'so all the women are one woman.' Now, personally I take The Waste Land as a model of what Moffat is doing with Doctor Who: a work about healing the societal/interpersonal/sexual devastation and stagnation in the wake of a war. And I think when you take a step back 'all the women are one woman' works just as well when applied to Moff Who: each woman has her own story, her own personality, but each is illuminating a different facet of the Doctor's relationship to an abstract Other who, for the Doctor, is almost always female. The women control the symbolism on this show (water, earth, sun, flowers, birds, music, forests, etc.). They are all linked through this symbolism, and their power lies in their ability to harness it. That Moffat's version of the Master is a woman makes her enormously more powerful than she ever could have been as a man because when she comes into the show, she inherits and takes over this entire network of female-centric symbolism (which she immediately makes evil: evil water, evil eggs, evil flowers, evil (Cyber)birds.)
Ok, so, Knock Knock.
Here the story about the Landlord and his daughter/mother (all the women are one woman) echoes many previous Who stories about people, almost all of them the Doctor or a Doctor mirror, attempting to unnaturally preserve someone from death and, in the process, endangering others.
The ghost of Clara has been haunting this season. First she showed up in the person of Heather and in the Doctor's frantic warnings to Bill against getting swept up with her lest she become 'not human' as well (which is what happened to Clara, after all, she mirrored an alien and now she's not human anymore). We've had a repeated theme of memory wipes. Last week Clara showed up in the Doctor coaching Bill into taking responsibility for a risky decision without cruelly kicking her out of the nest the way he did with Clara in Kill the Moon. Here, though, we have in Eliza the woman preserved/petrified in the moments before her death, and her preservation is a danger not only to herself and her preserver, but to others too (it's a bit glossed over in Hell Bent, but the Time Lords are deeply fearful of what the Doctor will do to Time by refusing to return Clara to her death).
Again, too, a theme of forgetting, and forgetting relationships or confusing relationships is shown to be the greatest danger. There's a strong repetition of a theme from The Empty Child here: a child who has become a monster because of a parent who has forgotten/abdicated their responsibility. The idea of companions as the Doctor's surrogate (grand)children comes up about as strongly as it ever has here with Bill claiming the Doctor as her grandfather, but it's an idea that's been sprinkled throughout Moff Who, from Eleven telling Amelia Pond bedtime stories and deciding he needs to leave Amy and Rory behind for their own protection because 'that's why grown-ups were invented,' to Danny Pink declaring Twelve to be Clara's 'space dad.' The parent/child theme is strong, though I don't think exclusive here. The downfall of Twelve and Clara was a mistaking of Self and Other. As ever in Moffat, right relationships = right everything.
We have another portrait here as well--the Landlord's portrait of his mother, a talisman like Clara's portrait is for Twelve in Heaven Sent (portraits or likenesses are a frequent symbolic thing in the gothic--they often hold the key to the psychological or interpersonal reality that is being dissected.)
And this episode, as in both Heaven Sent and Hell Bent, all have some overworld/underworld polarity going on with people moving from basements/catacombs to towers and back again, the (twisted) connection between the two being the key to (unnaturally extended) life, just as uniting the earth and heavens is the key to (good, natural) life.
(Interestingly, Clara's run also had not one but two gothic stories very early on. There was Hide and, more relevantly, Journey to the Center of the TARDIS--in which Clara's gothic trip through the secrets of the Doctor's 'mansion' reveals that the future Doctor and Clara are the very monsters that they fear.)
There's echoes of River in the Library in Knock Knock as well: the woman saved in the tower, surrounded by flesh-eating swarms. And forrest/wood imagery.
Everyone should go read
nostalgia's musings about why the Hybrid really may be the Doctor (by having a human mother). The Landlord's questioning of the Doctor over what he might do to save his own mother, and the Doctor's grim non-confrmation, seems to nod to Nos's speculation that the Doctor losing his mother is the dark secret behind his frantic attachment to all these earth girls.And so all the women are one woman . . .
The Landlord here has some very interesting lines when he comes in on Bill and Shireen's discovery of Pavel, trapped in the wall, with the skipping record playing:
"Music can be pleasant, but a simple repetition like that is merely a distraction from the inevitable. Hope is its own form of cruelty . . . Oh look: he is released. Mercy at last. Beautiful, isn't it? Nature contained. He is preserved in the walls. In the very fabric of the building forever."
If life is a song, the skipping record that is keeping Pavel 'alive' becomes a metaphor for all the various methods of unnaturally prolonging life. Clara. Ashildr/Me. Ghost!River. Twelve looping through the confession dial. Abigail frozen in the ice in A Christmas Carol. Also 'nature contained.' The opposite of life isn't death; it's stasis. Either you accept life and death and birth and sex and change and the passage of time or . . . you don't. When you don't, the results aren't pretty. The entire run of Moffat Who has basically been a matter of coercing the Doctor into understanding this.
The hope of getting this story now is that somehow Bill can be Clara done right, that she can escape the preservation instinct that threatens them all. (The first time Bill and friends go to investigate a scary sound in the house, it's the Doctor. He's hiding in a cupboard that, we later find out, is really a lift that goes down to the basement--where the secrets are kept. This is reassuring at the time, but threatening when taken symbolically. Like the reverse of what's under the bed being Clara. The real threat here, to Bill, is the Doctor, not the house.)
Interestingly, since the show has brought up Susan, both with her picture and now with Bill calling the Doctor 'grandfather,' is that Susan was not preserved: the Doctor sent her off to have a life with what's his name who she'd fallen in love with. Have never watched that episode and understand that he did not necessarily handle this well, but there is a precedent here for the Doctor, in fact, being able to let go.
And now we get to what's in the vault. I'm going to go full ahead with the assumption that it is not just the Master but specifically Missy. This episode does certain things to mirror the Doctor's vigil of the vault with the Landlord's preserving of his mother in the tower. Both have been there for 70 years. In both cases the 'captors' seem to have an affection for their prisoners. They've given them music and food. They are keeping them in stasis. Both, we are told, are just as trapped as their prisoners. And I am going to assume, through the power of mirrors, that the Doctor is, in fact, protecting Missy by keeping her in there (or at least thinks he is).
So now we see why Missy had to become a woman. She first appeared as Clara's dark mirror, giving voice and form to Clara's desires for control over death and to her possessive relationship with the Doctor. Now, however, she can serve as a dark mirror for all the Doctor's women, preserved not in the tower but in the vault. Mother in the tower, madwoman in the basement.
(The subject line of this post is the title of a famous work of literary criticism about Mr. Rochester's wife, if you weren't familiar. A classic riff on a gothic trope where the secret of the house is a (dark) mirror for the heroine.)
When you ask 'what's in the vault?' I'll confess that I didn't think 'a complicated metaphor for the Doctor's relationship to the women in his life,' but on reflection, it probably should have occurred to me.
