During a summer in Maine, my friend who interned at the Farnsworth, which houses one of the largest private collections of New England painter American Wyeth’s works, drove me the back way to see a touchstone of American Pastoralism – the Wyeth house.
The Wyeth House is most notable for its faded appearance in Wyeth’s Christina’s World. The subject of the painting is a woman stricken with polio. As she strains to the insurmountable distance between her and home, we are terrified for her, for her helplessness (Small “The Controversial Story Behind Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World”).
(Here’s a link to more of an in depth explanation of Andrew Wyeth and Christina Olson:
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-controversial-story-andrew-wyeths-famous-painting)
Upon visiting the locale, a tourist might be struck by how small the hill actually is, how seemingly comforting, sunny even, the rolling hills of the Wyeth property are. Gone seemingly is the melancholia, the borderline American Gothicism, that the artistic rendering of the place provokes.
Wyeth’s brush embeds Christina in a different narrative setting. Perspective triumphs. We are in a listless wind with Christina. The house above her looms hauntingly.
Christina’s body is made a subject of this mood. We are made, however problematically, to feel the anguish of her disability. She is a subject of Wyeth’s gaze. We see of her what he desires we see. There is set dressing involved.
In The Monstrous Feminine, Barbara Creed relates Julia Kristeva’s notion of the female abjectivity to Regan of the Exorcist. Creed writes that the “abject represents that which “disturbs identity, system, order’” (Creed 37). This, Creed then relates to the “infantile.” Christina’s shape seems one of the yet developed “crawling” of a child (Small “The Controversial Story”). I insert Creed’s notion of the abject because what is rendered in Wyeth’s painting is a subject of the female abject. Christina is isolated by her abjected, disabled body just as Marjorie’s declining mental illness isolate and render her abject.
This is all to say that perhaps this rumination on the interiority on a female’s illness is why the painting finds its way into Merry’s adult apartment. As the class has spoken about many of the intertext in A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay chooses his cultural references with care and narrative purport (Tremblay 108).
Just as we are wound into Christina’s mental state, so too are we involved in Marjorie’s emerging “schizophrenia” (if that indeed is what afflicts her). The reality or unreality of the T.V show subjects her, her feigned complicity in this (she initially tells Merry that she schemed this for the financial benefit of the family) is shown when she “flips off” the camera wielding Merry (Tremblay 137).
Merry describes Marjorie as the “ghost of the house” in that she “haun[ts] her own bedroom” (Tremblay 138). In the way Christina’s broken frame seems to haunt the home she strains to reach so too does Marjorie become an abstracted presence, a subject of surveillance even in her own abode. I want to ruminate on this idea of being made a “ghost” of one’s own private space. Seemingly, Marjorie’s identity, which was the former owner of her space, is altered, her abject body is made a phantom of her former self. However, this is seemingly a product of the way her identity is constructed through the process of filming. Her reality is made less real by the existence of the other family who acts as stand in personae for her real self in The Possession. Their presence dictates a residual absence, their simulation of Marjorie’s life replaces her private lived experience with a public, excepted, “real,” truth. Therefore, through the processing of subjectivity, Marjorie indeed becomes possessed, but not by a demon necessarily, but of public perception. Simply put, our narrative idea of Marjorie comes to force her into an inescapable personae that even she seems confused by. The audience who watches her comes to be the demon who ultimately possesses Marjorie.
Just as we impose a face to the faceless image of Christina in the painting, so too do we impose a subject position upon Marjorie that assumes an interiority that lessens perhaps her actual identity. Our notions of subject materialize, they shape, they contort, they manipulate, they reduce and deny. They possess.