The Veil ('Deep Breath' 3)

The veil.  A politically loaded symbol.  It carries all sorts of old semiotic baggage, of course.  Weddings.  Widowhood.  Ladies in Conan Doyle who want to hide their identities (thus it has a trajectory into the figure of Madame Vastra via Victoriana).  In genre TV these days, a woman wearing a veil is likely to be a tragic or vengeful figure, hiding a facial scar of some kind.  (See 'Silence in the Library' / 'Forest of the Dead'.)

The veil is thus something that implies a particular set of social situations for women.  The connection appears to be the concept of separation.  The veil is a boundary between the woman and society.  It creates a space in which she can hide her unsightliness, either disfiguring grief or grievous disfigurement, from those who don't want to have to see it.  The wedding veil is lifted as the woman is taken possession of in the marriage ceremony; thus it is there to emphasize her acceptability by temporarily putting it in doubt.  It is, of course, the symbolic tearing of the hymen.  The man takes possession and breaks through the barrier.  All very nasty. Not to mention anatomically inaccurate.

Vastra's veil takes on enormous significance in 'Deep Breath'.  Indeed, the whole episode is full of talk about faces, with them being stolen, exchanged, worn, hidden, changed... with them contemplated in mirrors.

Vastra is married to Jenny (by Silurian law perhaps?), and yet this marriage hardly seems to have anything to do with Vastra's veil (unsurprising, given that it is black rather than white), since Vastra and Jenny's relationship fails to fit easily into any patriarchal schema.  There is no sense in which Jenny owns Vastra.  Indeed, the power relationship appears to go the other way (with implied consent).

There is a sense in which Vastra could be said to be mourning.  She is an isolated figure in some ways, cut off from her lost people.  But this is hardly emphasised at all.  She doesn't seem tragic, and her complete lack of vengefulness is so complete as to be worrying (to me anyway).

As mentioned, she reiterates - in some ways - the figure of the veiled lady from Victorian popular fiction, via her place in the regurgitated Victoria trope pyramid.  But she inverts this, to some degree, by being the detective.  Her veil isn't to hide her secrets from the investigator, rather it is to hide the secrets of the investigator from the client - as long as is necessary.

There is another significance to the veil in our culture at this time: the immensely freighted issue of the hijab... or perhaps I should say, the immensely freighted issue of Western ideas about the hijab.  I've likened the Silurians to the Palestinians before now, which would obviously chime... especially when you remember that Vastra has plonked herself down at the hub of the British Empire as a kind of refugee, and the British Empire was mucking around with the area that became Palestine from the 1830s onwards (though Victoriana places Vastra well before the disastrous British interventions of the early 20th century).  

Vastra's choice to wear the veil makes her a better representation of this issue than we tend to get from the culture industries.  It's a widespread prejudice in Western culture (which imagines itself to be post-sexist) that all or most Muslim women wear the hijab and other such articles of clothing because they're forced to by Muslim men.  If Vastra's veil can be tied into our wider 'debate' about this (with 'debate' here meaning the sickening display of Islamophobia dressed up as liberal concern for women's rights) then it looks quite good.

We're onto something with the issue of disfigurement too.  The figure of the disfigured woman hiding herself (and thus also her identity and vengeful agenda) is overused and overfamiliar, and laced with some quite nasty assumptions... but Vastra isn't disfigured.  Rather, as she herself says, it is Victorian society that considers her disfigured.  This is a more-or-less direct connection between race and social exclusion (with race filtered through the SF concept of the alien), and also connects with a critique of attitudes towards women who don't fit the sexist concept of acceptable female appearance.  (Slightly undermined by Vastra's fixation on Jenny's prettiness.)

At first sight, this reading also seems undermined somewhat by the way in which Vastra can walk around on the banks of the Thames, surrounded by people, without wearing her veil, attracting no attention.  On the other hand, maybe those people do see the veil even if we, the viewers, don't.  Because - and this is the really interesting thing - Steven Moffat now seems to be implying that the veil is only visible to people who feel some need to see it because they are unprepared to look the facts about Vastra in the face, as it were... and, by implication, to see past their own prejudices.  This, I suppose, is how to read Vastra's comment that she wears the veil as a judgement on others.

Read this way, the veil is a way for the viewer to judge themselves.  That's actually quite good, and more pleasant than my initial thought, which was that the "judgement" comment was a rather weasily way of making the need to escape the consequences of social marginalisation into an empowered choice made by the victim.

If the veil is a property of the viewer's perception, that would fit into Moffat's established habit of treating the camera as a diegetic eye (see Phil Sandifer on the Weeping Angels and the Silence for some interesting thoughts on this).  It is also, I suppose, the reason why Clara suddenly starts seeing Vastra's veil when she is having problems accepting the new Doctor, and confronting Vastra's support of him.  By that logic, it is also why the veil vanishes when she gets her talking to from Vastra.  The thing that makes this work is the way Clara's acceptance of the Doctor and Vastra comes via her giving Vastra a severe and confrontational talking-to, which concedes Vastra's basic point while also objecting to her arrogant way of making it.

The Perfect Companion

Yes, the female companions of the Moffat era are smart, strong, capable, multi-talented, capable, prone to saving the day, etc.

But this is just the job of the companion.  Even the worst of the classic series companions - Victoria, Dodo, etc - gets to be smart, strong, capable, etc when required.  They don't tend to save the day in the classic series, but they always do what is needed and expected of them.  It's a tautology: the companions do the companion things more or less successfully.  That's not something that's entirely untroubling, but - for good or ill - it's how this works.  In the revived series, a great deal more is expected of the companions.  It's actually worrying just how much is expected of Martha.  But the point is that they all step up because that's what they're in the text to do.  The ones that don't, fail to be companions (i.e. Adam).

You also have to look at what they do and what happens to them on top of their basic role as companion.  Rose rejects the roles of shop worker, daughter, girlfriend, etc. in favour of gradually becoming a committed social actor.  Sadly, she is reabsorbed into such roles by the end (a major disappointment).  Martha throws herself into the role of social actor to a huge extent, ultimately rejecting the Doctor because he cannot satisfy her level of newly self-created level of self-esteem.  Donna escapes her emotionally unsatisfying family life and work life to, once again, become a social actor.  The theft of this from her is horrific, and is clearly meant to be.  It all goes wrong by the end of the RTD era, with them all married off, etc.  But this, however awful (and it is crushingly awful), is still a relatively late development.

The early-to-mid Moffat-era companions, by contrast, are given the arrangement of their domestic lives as their main extra-curricular activity (so to speak) on top of their 'duties' as a companion, right the way through.

Amy's character - i.e. what she does, says and thinks on top of all the fulfilment of 'companion duties' - is focused upon getting married or not getting married, being a mother or not being a mother, having a domestic home life or not having a domestic home life, being a wife, saving her marriage, etc, etc etc.  The Doctor actually intervenes, several times, to ensure that her personal life runs along the proper lines.  Whereas, in the RTD era, the Doctor was a force that (selfishly) drew the women out of the confines of personal and work life and into the wider arena of social action, in the Moffat era the Doctor actively tries to provide Amy with a perfect, middle-class domestic idyll.  House.  Car.  Marriage.  Etc.

River is ostensibly an archaeologist, or sometimes an assassin, but her character arc (if the random string of things she does can be called a character arc) is all about her assimilation into stability via her romance with, and marriage to, the Doctor.  Far from dragging her out of domesticity into social action, the Doctor saves her by dragging her the other way...and she does the same to him.

Clara, it must be admitted, is a little different.  She's got hardly any personal life at all, and has her duties on top of this absence.  They are initially employment duties which seem to meld strangely with her companion duties (i.e. the kids in 'Nightmare in Silver').

She's interesting actually, because she's an inflection of the true neoliberal ideal of the female as both domestic provider and multi-tasking worker.  Her work is domestic.  But she also plays whatever role is required of her by whatever episode she's in.  She is fractured into multiple selves, all of whom perform necessary tasks.  She's even shown to literally moonlight between two jobs in 'The Snowmen'. 

The objection that she doesn't revolve around the Doctor because she chooses to enter his timelines and save him, and that she is therefore her own woman and the solution to her own riddle, flounders on the realisation that she has, essentially, accepted a job or a duty and the fracturing of self that this entails.

Admittedly, Clara is not depicted without a certain occasional ambivalence towards the idea of absorbtion into the workforce as a multi-tasking, multi-skilled drone with multiple jobs.  In her debut proper, 'The Bells of Saint John', she is caught in a vast corporate machinery of soul-sucking employment.  However, ultimately, the inescapability of neoliberalism is arrived at, once again, as she enters a similar kind of self-fracturing machinery of work by her own choice.  The 'good' machinery rather than the bad.  The ultimate irony here may be that the self-fracturing machinery of work in question, the supposedly good machinery, her ultimate destination, turns out to be the Doctor himself.

No, actually, that's not quite an irony...  because this has always been latent in the companions, to a greater or lesser extent, almost since day one.  Remember above, when I said that it wasn't entirely untroubling that companions had to fulfill certain demands and do certain jobs simply in order to remain functional within the texts as companions?  Clara may be the final and open acceptance, on the part of the show, of one version of what the companion is: a precariously employed worker with great and various demands made upon them because of their (usually) voluntary decision to serve the Doctor.  She is the moment when that troubling, duty-laden, ideologically market-based conception, triumphs over the others.

Does this mean, then, that the pre-Clara Moffat companions are actually the most liberated from this syndrome, given the emphasis placed on their private lives aside from their 'duties'?  Well no, I don't think so.  They are still dragged away from the role of social actor - the potential positive flipside of the 'Doctor's happy worker' model - by their entanglement within extremely gendered conceptions of personal/emotional life.  They are dragged away from being either workers or social actors by also being women.

The better course to have taken would have been to trump RTD's failed (self-betrayed) project to fully embrace the companion as transitioning from the truncation of personal life under neoliberalism into independant - sometimes emancipatory - social action.  Instead, one way or another, Moffat does the exact opposite.

Maybe some of us BELONG in the fields

A very good overview of the squalid pass to which Moffat has brought the show in its 50th anniversary year, with special attention paid to the issue of mysoginy, via River and Clara:

...we're not being encouraged to think there's something wrong with this person [River]: it's the show itself that comes across as jaded and withdrawn from empathy and decency to a psychopathic extent (and what a charming ethical copout to have the Doctor leave before he can witness the rest of the killing). Again, we have the depressingly widespread idea that a woman acting violently is empowering and a corrective to sexism and misogyny. When questioned about his ability with female characters during a Guardian interview Moffat replied:

River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It's the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.

It would indeed. Unfortunately, a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people is no substitute for an interest in human beings.

http://richardhcooper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/steven-and-women-or-how-steven-moffat.html

I don't agree with every jot and tittle of this, but it's still excellent.  Very well worth reading, with lots of points which seem, to me, pretty much irrefutable... depressing but irrefutable.

I do want to express my increasing impatience with the idea of accidental reactionary writing, a notion that the writer of the above article flirts with (though his conclusions are nuanced).  Personally, I'm coming to the brain-bending conclusion that people who aren't racists or sexists don't need to concentrate on remembering not to say racist or sexist things. 

Thanks to Johnathan Barlow (or 'old Legohead' as I always think of him) for putting this my way.

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