And cereal, because I crossposted with Nutty...
A little way ahead and to his left he saw suddenly, issuing from a black hole of shadow under the cliff, the most loathly shape that he had ever beheld, horrible beyond the horror of an evil dream. Most like a spider she was, but huger than the the great hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes. Those same eyes that he had thought daunted and defeated, there they were lit with a fell light again, clustering in her out-thrust head. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hair that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.
That's the particular passage I'm thinking of, Nutty.
But PMM, if the beast was to be a spider, because he hated them, and for it to do what he had to it had to be a she, how does that affect the reading of the passage?
If you switch everything to "he", does it lose any coherence past the biological?
Ah, the cross-postiness. But Ple -- don't you think that's a reasonably accurate description of a
spider
from someone who is phobic of them? (I.e. heavy on the yucky.) I mean, if you
blew up a normal garden spider to gigantic proportions,
I would probably have described it mostly the same way. Without the genedred pronouns, I suppose, because
normal garden spiders
don't have consciousness or a major part to play in a novel.
Can you interpret for me specifically what makes that passasge disturbing to you?
If you switch everything to "he", does it lose any coherence past the biological?
To me? It seems to, but I've been filtering that passage through Freud for so long that it's hard to take that filter off.
That's the particular passage I'm thinking of, Nutty.
So the analysis is that this is his wife or his mother and not his attempt to describe a horror of the ancient world, channelled through his singular scholarship of the norse sagas? Ick. And no thanks.
Heh. X-posty with the avowedly freudian analyst
FWIW, I never interpreted Shelob as a manifestation of Tolkien's gender issues. Just his spider phobia.
I get nothing inherently feminine from that description, PMM. Nothing at all.
So the analysis is that this is his wife or his mother and not his attempt to describe a horror of the ancient world, channelled through his singular scholarship of the norse sagas? Ick. And no thanks.
No, it's just a feminized threat, using feminine signifiers. Which, of course, you see at least in the Irish sagas as well, IIRC, though it's been years since I've had to read them. (They have a lot of sex in them, though, and I've found that Connor the character maps fairly well to some of the main men.)
An
actual garden spider blown up would remain stink-free and not squishy in the midsection. The rear of a spider, and my skin is crawling just typing this, so I hope you appreciate that my fear of spiders is about to send me into hysterics from picturing one in my mind, is firm, and larger rather than bloated, because bloated has different connotations.
Well, it's more than blown up -- it's horrorized. But I don't see the horror as being tied to its gender, and I'm curious to see where you do.
