 The Magdalene is, after all a Mother figure, and in that, she is arguably more monstrous and antithetical than anything else attributed to her: Conceptual nightmares are Clive Barker's millieu; he is a natural and sublime master at encapsulating elements that disturb or unsettle in the the various monstrosities he conjures. The novel Weaveworld is not generally noted in this regard, tending to be catalogued alongside Barker's flights of phantasmagorical fantasy rather than the horror he is most iconically associated with. However, the book includes some of the most disturbing and monstrous creations he has ever conceived, and some of the most disturbing and monstrous scenes in which to parade them: An inversion of the classic mythological “triune Goddess” (i.e. “Maiden,” “Mother,” “Crone”), the antagonist Immacolata and her sisters are wry and horrific subversions of those labels and the assumptions they encapsulate: Immacolata, representing “The Maiden,” is no thing of soft sighs and proscribed virginity; far from it. She is, rather, a thing of terrible purity; a creature that cannnot be borne because her contempt for creation is so utterly pure, nothing can withstand it. She is lethal virginity; a concept of “purity” that is self-authored and murderous, in her hands. As a result, even her breath, gaze and shadow are lethal; the desire she excites in those around her nothing less than an invitation to suicide. The “Crone” of this unholy trinity initially appears much closer to her mythological roots than her sisters, conforming to the thanatic and deathly qualities of her inspiration. However, here, the inversion comes from her status as midwife to her perpetually-pregnant sister; she is not merely a harbinger of death and decay, but something that eases the passage of monstrous births, a thing of strange vitality that lends her a certain innate ambiguity. But the most distressing and overtly monstrous of the sisters is “The Mother,” The Magdalene, as she is most commonly refered to: Classically, “The Mother” of the trinity represents exactly what her title implies; fecundity, ripeness, birth and affection. However, Barker sublimely and horrifically lampoons that status by making this particular “Mother” an undead rapist and a creator of monsters: According to Immacolata herself, her two sisters are long dead; they were never given the chance to be born, as she strangled them in the womb. Despite this original betrayal, they now follow and do her bidding, slavishly devoted to their sister and murderer. As a result of this circumstance, they have become ghostly perversions of what they might have been, and none more overtly than The Magdalene: Like her inspiration, she is indeed a thing of ripeness and fecundity, but she is also a thing of death: a hideous spectre that marries the monstrously sexual and lustful to the surreal and horrific: Appearing as a spectral column of vapour and ectoplasmic matter, she is a shifting, uncertain thing that one moment boasts the form of a ripe and gleaming woman, a vision of overt sensuality and sexual intent, the next a stitched-together, not-quite-coherent mass of limbs, a pregnancy-swollen belly and a sex that endlessly disgorges monstrous young. As grotesque and disturbing as her physical appearance is, it's nothing compared to the perversity of her nature: The Magdalene is no slave to men and their ideologies of proscribed reproduction, like her namesake: rather, she is an assaillant and rapist of men, her back mythology, in this regard, intermingled with that of Lillith, the first bride of Adam, queen of Hell and Mother of all demons. Throughout the story, she assaults several men, sometimes to the point of death, the experience that Barker describes a sublime inversion of the manner in which female rape is all too often portrayed in similar fiction; detailed, sensory and repulsive, The Magdalene swathing her victims in dreams and glamours that are not only sensual, but which reduce them to children in their own minds. Those that survive her assaults are often left weeping in horror at the violation, Barker playing on male power fantasies and narratives of female domination to invert those premises, to make the reader shudder and recoil at the sheer wrongness of it. It's an excellent example of how Barker uses his creations to turn the tables on standardised or enshrined traditions; to bring into question pervasive tropes, assumptions and stock-narratives that even incredibly lauded and acclaimed authors fall prey to. But that is far from the worst of it: The Magdalene is, after all a Mother figure, and in that, she is arguably more monstrous and antithetical than anything else attributed to her: Being dead herself, what “life” she creates is necessarily hideous, her undead body incapable of crafting whole or healthy babes from the seed she steals from her victims. Instead, Barker paints explicit and horrific scenes in which the entity gives birth, the children that slope from her smouldering, distorted body not truly alive, but not truly dead either; malformed mockeries of their parent, they often boast certain features and characteristics of the men that unwillingly sired them, rendered hideous and deformed so as to present the most horrific parody of parental pride imaginable. Conceptually, the notion is one most horror writers wouldn't go near, certainly not at the time of writing, and that fewer still could make fly in the manner that Barker does. The sensory detail of the Magdalene's assaults, the hideous atrocity of the births that follow, are at least as brilliantly repulsive as anything in Barker's more horror-oriented works. That they are framed in a book that also includes such transcendental imagery and subject matter only serves to emphasise them by contrast; the fantastical and inspiring lends the images of horror and grotesquery that much more weight, since the book also does not allow the reader to get away with such simple distinctions; the two are often one and the same, and nowhere is that more true than in Immacolata and her sisters: They are monsters, undoubtedly; creators of horror, sewers of death and trauma, but they are also semi-divine, other-worldly entities that operate in states of being that humanity can only realise in its dreaming imagination. Even The Magdalene, as monstrous as she is, is also strangely beautiful, certainly in terms of the elegance of her rendering; Barker himself clearly adores this creature, and relishes any instant in which he gets to introduce her to the reader and expand upon her mythology. In that, we cannot help but relish her company, as much as we might lament her rapine embrace. By George Daniel Lea   Comments are closed.
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