Book Five (In the Flesh), Chapter Three
“The Madonna”
This story is the feminine yin to “Rawhead Rex”‘s masculine yang, as literally as is possible: While Rawhead represents everything unstoppable and monstrous about masculinity–the evil men suspect they contain, basically–the Madonna, her handmaidens, and her children represents everything alien and horrifyingly fecund about femininity–the evil men suspect women contain.
As he does in “Jacqueline Ess,” Barker associates monstrous femininity with fluidity: Jacqueline’s body roiled like a sea, while the Madonna’s amorphous form makes its home in a humid, sweating abandoned public pool and sauna complex, its children cavorting in the waters. There’s something about water that clearly strikes Barker as frightening to men–even in a story like “Scape-Goats,” where the water triumphs over everyone, it’s ultimately a woman who’s able really to accept the pull of the tide. And you’d probably be hard pressed to count how many times male characters “drown” in the eyes and bodies of their female beloved throughout these stories. So when “The Madonna”‘s male protagonist–one of Barker’s struggling professionals, whose frustration has thus far seen him make pacts with gangsters and rape his own girlfriend rather than admit defeat either in his career or his love life–becomes female, is it any surprise that his acceptance of this fact is directly accompanied by an embrace of death through drowning?
And yet, the transformed man’s girlfriend (not as estranged one would think, or hope) is the one who voices the most explicit rejection of his newfound status.
“I saw…,” she said. Her voice was guttural; thick with barely suppressed abhorrence. “Am I going mad?”
“No.”
“Then what’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” he replied simply. “Is it so terrible?”
“Vile,” she said. “Revolting. I don’t want to look at you. You hear me? I don’t want to see.“
He didn’t attempt to argue. She didn’t want to know him, and that was her prerogative.
What to make of this exchange? I mean, if your significant other woke up next to you one morning with a different set of primary and secondary sex characteristics, this would probably be your reaction too, but this is Barker World we’re talking about, where the acceptance of the extraordinary is a commonplace. What are we being told here? What is it about her that makes her reject her man’s womanhood, with far more vehemence than she rejected him for forcing himself on her two nights before? Is it a coincidence that Barker sets this scene in the bathroom, where she’s turned on the shower and let the water run, but simply sat outside, head in hands, without stepping inside to immerse herself?