Dueling abjections: "Viola in Mid-Winter" by Marie-Helene Bertino (Best American Short Stories 2024)

“Like most things, the truth has contradictions that don’t fit neat theories,” Samarra, the vampire who turns Viola into another vampire, says, and there couldn't be a better clue to reading the entire story "Viola in Mid-Winter" than that. It's especially telling that Samarra doesn't say "don't fit neat concepts" or "neat pre-conceived notions," but theories. Many authors are indifferent to theory, and feel that if theorists want to apply this or that idea to their work, that's their business, but "Viola" seems to invite theoretical approaches. "Viola" doesn't really make it easy, however, for a reader to feel comfortable with any particular theoretical approach. All "neat theories" get complicated by the "contradictions of truth" the story presents.

"Viola" is a story about a vampire, which places it within the horror genre. It's also about a female vampire, which places it within the world of horror in which the main monster is a woman. There are few theoretical fields that are more deeply developed than the union of horror and feminist theory. Even as someone who prefers to keep his participation in theory to the sidelines, I'm aware of this. I generally try to use theory sparingly in reading for this blog, but with "Viola," there's no way out but all the way in.

"Viola" plays with many of the main concepts in the field of feminist horror theory. As readers of this blog know, I don't really care whether an author intends to put something in the story that could be read a certain way by a critic or theorist. If it's in the story, then it's fair game, whether the author intended it or not. But "Viola" seems to want its readers to know that it knows what it's doing. There is a moment when the EMT pulls out a book of short stories from her bookshelf to read. Who the hell reads a book of short stories but people with an intense interest in literature? It's more or less announcing to the reader: I know you're the kind of person who is probably aware of Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, because you're reading a short story in a journal like The Bennington Review.  

So how does this work? You have sex and then she eats you, or she just eats you? Because it makes a difference...

There are four major ideas from feminist horror studies that "Viola" plays with, and it doesn't have a "neat" view of any of them. I'm going to briefly explain the four ideas below, before looking at how the story is interacting with them. I'm as surprised as anyone to be doing this; theory of this kind isn't something I naturally love. As a matter of fact, it's got a lot to do with why I ended my time in grad school with just an M.A. instead of going on further. One thing I really dislike about theoretical discourse is the way some theorist will take a word that has already been in use for a long time and has an established meaning, and then the theorist will create a bespoke meaning for it, and soon a whole school emerges using this special term but not telling you they're using it in their special way when they use it. As the theoretical community interacts with the term, they use it in new ways, so the bespoke meaning expands. It often expands until it can mean almost anything, which is the same as meaning nothing. 

Below, I'm going to give much narrower definitions to these terms than the theoretical communities who propagate them. I'm also going to attempt simpler definitions than are usually given to them. There's a near certain chance I'll bastardize the meaning a bit, but I think the gain in clarity is worth the loss of exactness when writing according to the spirit of this blog, which is to write not for literary professionals, but for curious and intelligent outsiders trying to understand why a story is good enough to be included in BASS. Here we go.

The four theoretical concepts

1. Abjection or the abject

If you look up what the term abject means in feminism, you'll find it comes from the theorist Julia Kristeva. You'll find a lot of explanations that will say the abject has something to do with a loss of the distinction between subject and object, or self and other. That's not wrong, but I think it's a little hard to understand what that means, partly because "subject" and "object" have their own unique meanings in both psychoanalytical and linguistic theory which aren't always obvious. 

My understanding of the abject is this: all societies have ways of promoting the notion of order and of hiding the fact that we're just one disaster away from killing each other for scraps of food. On a personal level, we also have psychological methods for forgetting that we are just animals who are part of a nature that's red in tooth and claw. We call cow meat beef, and we carefully avoid knowing anything about what goes into making it. There are customs for avoiding speaking too directly about sex or death. We lock the door while excreting waste, and we spray deodorizing aerosols to prevent others from smelling the aftereffects. We have euphemisms for all kinds of things so we don't have to think about how, even with all the trapping of civilization, we are still animals living in a very physical and savage body.

Whatever removes the barriers that keep us from remembering these unpleasant truths is the abject. 

The abject isn't just a key concept in feminism. It's a major concept in horror generally, and it's used to explain what makes horror horrifying. But feminist theory has shown both that women are often considered as abject in society in general, and also that when women are the monsters in horror, they tend to be abject in a particular way.

When Mrs. Heretic had our child, I was shocked by how savage childbirth is. Baby showers are all full of fluffy stuffed animals and soft pastel colors and kitschy games, but pregnancy is a parasite growing in a human being, altering all her bodily functions, and eventually coming out in a mess of fluids. Women's bodies bleed every month. So the female body is uniquely abject in a way that male bodies aren't. It makes us remember that we are animals. 

Creators of female monsters often capitalize on this. Think of the horror movies with women blasting out massive amounts of menstrual blood or projectile vomiting. Female monsters are monstrous in a way that is psychologically tied to how women tend to be demonized in general. 

2. Liminality or the liminal

This is an oft-used word in theory that I especially hate for the ways it gets used in extended senses. There are two basic meanings. One is to refer to a space that is mostly empty or blank, like a cave. The other is an extended meaning. Since a lot of liminal spaces, like doorways, tend to be a transitional spot between one place and another, "liminal" can also mean "transitional." 

In feminist horror theory, the liminality of the female body contributes to the particular terrifying effect it has. I don't know if you all are aware of this, but female bodies have a hole in them that male bodies don't have. Psychoanalysis since Freud has postulated various phobias of the female body, and some of them have to do with the liminal space of the vagina. Whether it's fear of castration or fear of the vagina dentata or just the fear that comes from realizing the vagina is liminal like caves or other places we fear, there are a number of ways of understanding the fear of the uniquely liminal space in women. 

The liminal space in women is also part of what contributes to what makes them uniquely abject. Part of not being reminded of our animal, gross nature is keeping our insides inside, where we never have to think about them. But vaginal sex requires being reminded of the inside of a body. No wonder so many horror movies involve a death during or right after sex. 

3. The damsel in distress

When women aren't the monsters in horror, they're often helpless and in need of saving. If the abject is the element in horror that makes it horrifying because of how it threatens the precarious hold we have on civilization and preventing carnivorous nature from going crazy on us, then the damsel in distress is what redeems horror. After all, what could be more acceptable to traditional society than protecting women from the horrors of what threatens order, so they can be free to have babies and make society grow, preferably out of sight so we don't have to grossed out by their abject and liminal bodies? Just ask Donald Trump! (I really hope that joke doesn't register with anyone in a few years.) 

A lot of horror movies do, of course, have a damsel in distress. The screaming horror movie woman is an old cliche that doesn't seem to be going away soon. When women aren't helpless, though, it's often because they're the monster. This is part of what makes the monstrous feminine uniquely feminine. Women are supposed to be helpless and protected by the males of the community, not threatening them. Somehow, a female monster feels more monstrous. 

4. The male gaze 

This is a theory term that isn't in any way tied just to horror. It applies to film studies across the board. There are lots of kinds of gazes in theory, but the one nearly everyone has heard of is the male gaze. We may think of looking as a neutral act, but according to the theory of the male gaze, nothing is innocent about "just looking." Western art has tended to depict women as sexual objects to be passively present and available to be observed by men for pleasure. Feminist film criticism often looks at how women are framed and situated within the shot, and whether this framing and situating tends to emphasize the character as a subject or object. 

I only bring this up because in "Viola," there is an interesting jockeying back and forth that goes on between two characters as they attempt to gaze at one another. 

The many ways "Viola" is impossible to pin down

When Viola is in "love jail" with the EMT, she feels herself "fixed in place by the softest pin," but the story is nearly impossible to pin down to any theoretical approach. Below are just some of the interpretations that occur to me, along with the ways in which the text undoes some of those readings.

1. It's tempting to read "Viola" as a somewhat man-hating fantasy in which women set up an alternate society without them. Viola's start as a vampire comes during World War I, when men are off slaughtering each other in one of the most gruesome real-world horrors that has ever happened. By contrast, the women Viola is around back on the home front seem to be quite content with their husbands gone. Some who were getting abused finally have bruise-free faces. 

Viola revels in how crude the women are, acting like stereotypical men who delight in scatological humor. She particularly likes Samarra, a manager at the factory. Samarra is the only one in the story who really is able to take care of Viola, although the EMT tries. Samarra provides food and clothing for Viola and her daughter Bea. It's Samarra who "occupies" Viola, turning her into a vampire. But unlike male vampires, females are polite. They have to get permission. Whereas in most vampire fiction, the act of biting a victim is a substitute for sex, with Samarra and Viola, the act of turning Viola into a vampire happens concurrently with sex, as Samarra is putting her fingers into Viola's special liminal space at the same time as she is biting her on the neck to turn her. It's an "occupation" that's bloody, but nonetheless far more civilized than the occupation going on in Europe at the same time. 

With the exception of the EMT and possibly Viola's husband who died, all the men in the story are a threat. They are mostly hunters, and they try to fix Viola in their gaze from beneath street lamps. It's clear they are hunting her as much as they are the animals in the area. So after one reading, I was more than halfway convinced this was an alt-feminist version of horror in which females are just way more sensible about being monsters than men are. 

But on the second read through, that reading fell apart completely. Viola doesn't become a strict lesbian who eschews the company of men forever. She's bisexual. Her name--especially when she names a dog after another Shakespeare character--calls to mind Viola from The Tempest, who is a woman pretending to be a man who is in love with a man but is trying to woo a woman for the man she is in love with. It's pretty gender- and sexuality-bendy, and Viola is herself quite fluid in her sexuality and in how she acts relative to gender expectations. When she loves men, it isn't predatory in any sense. She doesn't fuck them just for pleasure and she doesn't consume them when she's done. She genuinely cares for the men she is intimate with. 

Moreover, the story doesn't portray female behavior as always better than men. Samarra changes Viola but is unwilling to help teach her how to handle her immortality. Viola, thinking of what she's learned over a century of life as an immortal, bemoans "the tendency of women to wound their own." This may be a story about female monsters, and they might have somewhat different rules from men, but that doesn't make them essentially less monstrous. 

2. On many levels, it seems that Viola resists being seen as a damsel in distress, mainly because she of course isn't in distress. She's immortal. The hunters might see themselves as stalking her, but in reality, they're lucky if they don't end up on her menu. Nonetheless, Viola seems at least somewhat nostalgic about some aspects of chivalry. When she first meets the EMT, he thinks he is protecting her from obnoxious hunters in the parking lot of the Shop & Save. Viola's reaction is to spit loose tobacco onto the ground--that is, to resort to the abject, because she's not interested in being saved. Nonetheless, just before the EMT comes to her "rescue," she is pulling out a cigarette, and finds herself pausing "as if waiting for a light, an extinct ritual from a former life." Part of her finds the ancient practice of a man leaping to light a cigarette for any lady in the vicinity charming.

When the EMT comes to her house, he warns that her lack of winterization means she's "not protected." He offers to build her a house. Viola "doesn’t want him to build her a house but doesn’t mind the sentiment." Viola is actually kind of a sucker for even a chauvinistic gesture. The stereotypical angry feminist cooked up by Fox News would be so full of theory brain that she would immediately take offense to someone offering to build her a house because it was an attempt to control her through feigned protection. Viola can see that while protection is a mixed blessing, it's not entirely done with evil intent.

3. Is Viola abject? Other than the fact that she's a vampire and so feeds on blood and is a woman which, because of the female relationship to blood through their menstrual cycles, seems worse, she's only partly abject.

She is drawn to one type of abject behavior. Female shock comics who talk about sex in graphic detail or bodily functions are often considered abject, because polite ladies aren't supposed to talk about those things. But more than anything else about life among the women at the factory, it's their bawdiness that speaks to Viola. "Viola didn’t know women could speak so candidly, but she’d never been among so many, protected by war’s isolation," the narrative tells us. (Interesting that war here is thought of as "protecting her," given the complex relationship she has to being protected.)

Viola especially finds Samarra's ribaldry appealing. She remarks on how Samarra moves through a room like a "cleaver," a stock horror weapon of carnage. Samarra, whose "wide, expressive mouth made everything she said sound scandalous," seems to enjoy her vampire carnality with a gusto Viola lacks. Samarra is more than happy to eat her lovers when she's done with them, whereas Viola only engages in affairs with people she actually cares for. It's not hard to see why Viola and Samarra grew apart not long after one turned the other into an immortal. That being said, Viola never quite loses her fascination with the utterly abject Samarra, and when they meet after many years, Viola happily indulges in the "party" of a multi-day sex fest with her elder, followed by drinking down all the blood in the blood bank where the EMT works.

Viola is abject, but only sort of. She curses, and she likes that the EMT laughs when she does. But in the next breath, she is wondering if the EMT's biceps are defined, which is sort of a traditional, swooning female kind of thought. Her brain isn't quite a complete theory brain, meaning it's full of contradictions, because Viola is a real person. She's never able to fully subdue one half of her contradictory thoughts in order to bring order to her psyche.

4. Viola's liminal status is even more difficult to determine. If we include the sense of liminal that means "transitional," Viola certainly thinks she's not at all liminal. She contrasts herself to women at various "thresholds—after college, before marriage, before babies, after changing careers--" and thinks that because she will forever appear to be middle aged and no longer on the threshold of anything, she is able to pass unnoticed. "You’d be surprised how easy it is for an older woman to go unnoticed," both Viola and Samarra think.

Yet, she isn't ever completely unnoticed, because she's constantly subject to the gaze of hunters and people who regard her with suspicion. She thinks that as a middle-aged woman she's no longer liminal, no longer on any thresholds or in any transition, but she couldn't be more mistaken. When she was frozen in biological time, she was actually in the middle of a transition so big, it's often euphemistically referred to as "the change."  For Viola, "menstrual blood disappeared for months then, as if to compensate, returned with painful hemorrhaging." After she has to quit being an airline attendant because 9/11 identity regulations make it impossible for her to be anonymous, she returns "to America and moved to the Western Catskills, where she spent the rest of the century in and out of hot flashes, chased by an unleavened smell, fertile and not, fertile then not, joints swelling, trapped in a developmental doorway." (emphasis mine)

Poor Viola decided to enter immortality at a time in her life that would mean eternal menopause. That's maybe the most liminal space any woman occupies.

Her complicated liminality--both not changing and changing all the time--partly explains why she also has such a complicated relationship to various forms of male gazing, both desiring it and wanting to hide from it. She bares her shoulder to a child in the grocery store but also creates a spell to keep anyone from being able to find her house.

5. It's not even sure which feminine-monstrous archetype Viola is. Barbara Creed lists six folkloric archetypes:  the mother, the witch, the mermaid, the werewolf, the vampire and the undead bride. It might seem like Viola is obviously the vampire (which, because it quasi-sexually sucks life out of men, is similar to the succubus), but she's also kind of a witch. Witches are partly considered monstrous because they're crones/spinsters, old women no longer capable of producing life but only death. 

Before becoming a vampire, Viola's community found her threatening because she was nearing becoming a spinster: "The neighbors viewed Viola with suspicion for waiting until thirty to wed." She narrowly escapes the fate of a crone by marrying late and having a child, but mid-career as a vampire, she learns from a woman how to put a "glamour spell" on a house so it can't be found or, if she wants someone to find it, so the house will tell her whether she's compatible with that person. A glamour spell is a witch's occupation, and Viola is hard at work doing it, armed with a dog named for Shakespeare's king of fairies who also uses spells to trick people.

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In short, no matter what kind of theoretical approach you try to apply to the story or what kind of archetype you try to find in Viola, both the story and Viola will slip the bounds you place on them. Viola is living contradictions, perhaps, as a response to the contradictory things both society and men want of women. The EMT is charmed by her curses, but cowed by her showing skin. He wants to protect her, but when he finds she can hunt as well as she can, he puts her in his own crosshairs, warning her that if you think someone is watching you, they are.

I once knew a guy in the Marine Corps who liked to say that he was looking for the type of wife who was a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom. I hated that guy so much, I'd totally understand if any woman who met him became an angry, man-hating feminist. But wanting both a good wife and a wild whore is exactly what the EMT who breaks Viola's heart ends up doing:  "The EMT takes up with another local girl, homely with pretty eyes. Another progressive who insists that hunting is fair to the animal and who defers to him, unlike the bartender he keeps fucking even after he and the pretty girl marry."

Men are both fascinated by the abject and repelled by it. They want an abject woman to titillate them and also a demure woman to protect. Viola, who has to now suffer the long years of ideas "genuflecting" through time, is going to see every contradiction in both male and female desire, so it's no surprise if she becomes a series of contradictions herself to adapt.

A song that speaks to how men want impossible-to-achieve contradictions from women

What's the end for Viola?

At the end, Viola's granddaughter comes looking for her. Perhaps she wants what Viola once wanted from Samarra: instruction and guidance. Viola never gave it to her own daughter, Bea. Viola became immortal and unable to help her own daughter just as she was starting to try out abject monstrous womanhood herself ("she spit food and threw her plate"). Will Viola let down the defenses of her house and let her progeny in? Could the story itself be an undoing of the glamour spell that will allow women to learn from an ancestor? Will Viola, standing next to Oberon in mid-winter (the opposite of mid-summer, when Shakespeare's Oberon uses illusions to trick everyone), end the illusion? 

Viola finds herself wanting to kill someone deathless. Is it Samarra, who cursed her with immortality? Is it death herself, whom Viola saw on a train and wanted to befriend? Does she want to kill herself and end the long drudgery of immortality? Or is it something more abstract, like the longing she cannot kill through the endless years?

Also read: Karen Carlson emphasizes the "eternal life is a drag" nature of the story.