jenny and vastra

August 26, 2014

The Veil (‘Deep Breath’ 3)

Jack Grahamclara, deep breath, hijab, jenny and vastra, patriarchy, steven moffat, veil, victoriana3

The veil. A politically loaded symbol. It carries all sorts of old semiotic baggage, of course. Weddings. Widowhood. Ladies in Conan Doyle who want to hide their identities (thus it has a trajectory into the figure of Madame Vastra via Victoriana). In genre TV these days, a woman wearing a veil is likely to be a tragic or vengeful figure, hiding a facial scar of some kind. (See ‘Silence in the Library’ / ‘Forest of the Dead’.)

The veil is thus something that implies a particular set of social situations for women. The connection appears to be the concept of separation. The veil is a boundary between the woman and society. It creates a space in which she can hide her unsightliness, either disfiguring grief or grievous disfigurement, from those who don’t want to have to see it. The wedding veil is lifted as the woman is taken possession of in the marriage ceremony; thus it is there to emphasize her acceptability by temporarily putting it in doubt. It is, of course, the symbolic tearing of the hymen. The man takes possession and breaks through the barrier. All very nasty. Not to mention anatomically inaccurate.

Vastra’s veil takes on enormous significance in ‘Deep Breath’. Indeed, the whole episode is full of talk about faces, with them being stolen, exchanged, worn, hidden, changed… with them contemplated in mirrors.

Vastra is married to Jenny (by Silurian law perhaps?), and yet this marriage hardly seems to have anything to do with Vastra’s veil (unsurprising, given that it is black rather than white), since Vastra and Jenny’s relationship fails to fit easily into any patriarchal schema. There is no sense in which Jenny owns Vastra. Indeed, the power relationship appears to go the other way (with implied consent).

There is a sense in which Vastra could be said to be mourning. She is an isolated figure in some ways, cut off from her lost people. But this is hardly emphasised at all. She doesn’t seem tragic, and her complete lack of vengefulness is so complete as to be worrying (to me anyway).

As mentioned, she reiterates – in some ways – the figure of the veiled lady from Victorian popular fiction, via her place in the regurgitated Victoria trope pyramid. But she inverts this, to some degree, by being the detective. Her veil isn’t to hide her secrets from the investigator, rather it is to hide the secrets of the investigator from the client – as long as is necessary.

There is another significance to the veil in our culture at this time: the immensely freighted issue of the hijab… or perhaps I should say, the immensely freighted issue of Western ideas about the hijab. I’ve likened the Silurians to the Palestinians before now, which would obviously chime… especially when you remember that Vastra has plonked herself down at the hub of the British Empire as a kind of refugee, and the British Empire was mucking around with the area that became Palestine from the 1830s onwards (though Victoriana places Vastra well before the disastrous British interventions of the early 20th century). …

August 24, 2014

Pyramids of London (‘Deep Breath’ 1)

Jack Grahambritish empire, britishness, culture industry, imperialism, jenny and vastra, reviews, stereotypes, steven moffat, strax25

I’ve realised who Strax reminds me of: the policeman from ‘Allo ‘Allo. But not as good. That’s a cheap shot, but I do have a serious point to make.

Strax, you see, is essentially a funny foreigner. You know, with his allegedly hilarious misunderstandings and all that stuff. Moffat evidently imagines that Strax’s misunderstandings are a rich and continuing source of humour, since he stops the plot of ‘Deep Breath’ for a few minutes so that he can (once again) run through all the same Strax jokes he’s already done several hundred times in other episodes. (This, by the way, is another way in which Strax resembles a character from ‘Allo ‘Allo – he is the same joke, repeated endlessly, over and over again, with the laugh demanded – upon recitation of a well-known catchphrase – from an audience supposedly trained via pavlovian technique. If you object to my singling out ‘Allo ‘Allo here then, really, I agree with you. How about we use Little Britain as our example instead?)

Of course, the funny foreigner – with all the imperial contempt and jingoistic chauvinism that is built in to it – is a very old, traditional, endlessly recurring character in British comedy. Shakespeare, for instance, relied upon it heavily, with his nebbishy Welshmen Fluellen and Dr Evans, his amusingly touchy Irishman MacMorris, and his randy preening French vanitycase Dr Caius, etc etc etc. So we can’t be too hard on Moffat here. He is, after all, simply doing (yet again) something very old, venerable and respected, despite it being unfunny and based in national chauvinism. Can’t really blame him, can you?

As I say, however, Strax isn’t as good as the policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo… because the policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo (you remember, he used to come in and mispronounce his words – it was terribly amusing) is actually a jab at the English, at the English habit of imagining that, rather than bother to learn foreign languages, all you have to do is speak English at foreigners, but with an attempt at their accent, and in a loud voice, and they’ll get it… because English is the only proper language, and people who don’t speak it are thus functionally the same as the mentally disabled, and everyone knows that people with mental illness just need to try harder.

I don’t mean to attribute attitudes like that to Moffat. But its a shame that he falls back on a comedy trope that is so incredibly dodgy. Though, in fairness, the employment of dodgy foreigner stereotypes (comic or otherwise) is not exactly unknown to pre-Moffat Doctor Who. And Strax isn’t overtly supposed to represent any particular non-British nationality. He’s supposed to be an alien. And here we stumble across another complicating factor: the alien in Doctor Who has always been based on a kind of racial essentialism, a fear of the other, etc etc etc. Strax could arguably be said to be considerably less dodgy than, say, Linx, because he represents a condition of mutual acceptance. …