 |
| A vestal virgin, detail of an engraving by Sir Frederic Leighton, created Lord Leighton, the first British artist to be given a title. (around 1880) The artist died in 1896. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
We've cut out about 2/3 of the paper; all the most interesting stuff, because we need to establish the ground first, which I am so over by now, and we've only got 20 minutes. I'm looking forward to writing the article that will be based on the paper. Whedon uses sacrificial virgins over and over and over, in various forms. By the time he got to "Cabin in the Woods" I would have said he had done everything he could with it. (Apparently i was wrong.) We could write a whole article just on Drusilla.
Several problems arose while thinking it through. Here's one: how do you identify a "sacrificial virgin"? By comparing a character to a similar character in Greek tragedy? Well sure, but what made you pick that character in Greek tragedy? Why didn't you pick some other character, in some other genre? One tends to assume one's fixed points, as Catherine Brown points out (I've been listening to her podcast on comparative literature), but in fact there are no fixed points; the reason you decided to compare X and Y is because you had already compared X and Y and decided you could talk about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment