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.

Pyramids of London ('Deep Breath' 1)

I've realised who Strax reminds me of: the policeman from 'Allo 'Allo.  But not as good.  That's a cheap shot, but I do have a serious point to make.

Strax, you see, is essentially a funny foreigner.  You know, with his allegedly hilarious misunderstandings and all that stuff.  Moffat evidently imagines that Strax's misunderstandings are a rich and continuing source of humour, since he stops the plot of 'Deep Breath' for a few minutes so that he can (once again) run through all the same Strax jokes he's already done several hundred times in other episodes.  (This, by the way, is another way in which Strax resembles a character from 'Allo 'Allo - he is the same joke, repeated endlessly, over and over again, with the laugh demanded - upon recitation of a well-known catchphrase - from an audience supposedly trained via pavlovian technique.  If you object to my singling out 'Allo 'Allo here then, really, I agree with you.  How about we use Little Britain as our example instead?)

Of course, the funny foreigner - with all the imperial contempt and jingoistic chauvinism that is built in to it - is a very old, traditional, endlessly recurring character in British comedy.  Shakespeare, for instance, relied upon it heavily, with his nebbishy Welshmen Fluellen and Dr Evans, his amusingly touchy Irishman MacMorris, and his randy preening French vanitycase Dr Caius, etc etc etc.  So we can't be too hard on Moffat here.  He is, after all, simply doing (yet again) something very old, venerable and respected, despite it being unfunny and based in national chauvinism.  Can't really blame him, can you?

As I say, however, Strax isn't as good as the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo... because the policeman in 'Allo 'Allo (you remember, he used to come in and mispronounce his words - it was terribly amusing) is actually a jab at the English, at the English habit of imagining that, rather than bother to learn foreign languages, all you have to do is speak English at foreigners, but with an attempt at their accent, and in a loud voice, and they'll get it... because English is the only proper language, and people who don't speak it are thus functionally the same as the mentally disabled, and everyone knows that people with mental illness just need to try harder.

I don't mean to attribute attitudes like that to Moffat.  But its a shame that he falls back on a comedy trope that is so incredibly dodgy.  Though, in fairness, the employment of dodgy foreigner stereotypes (comic or otherwise) is not exactly unknown to pre-Moffat Doctor Who.  And Strax isn't overtly supposed to represent any particular non-British nationality.  He's supposed to be an alien.  And here we stumble across another complicating factor: the alien in Doctor Who has always been based on a kind of racial essentialism, a fear of the other, etc etc etc.  Strax could arguably be said to be considerably less dodgy than, say, Linx, because he represents a condition of mutual acceptance.  He is the other, sure, but the other muddling along amongst us and basically on our side.

But here we run into yet another twist in the story... because this alignment of the other with 'us' is worrying in itself.  This recurring team - Vastra, Jenny and Strax - worries me.  It represents the reconciliation of the antagonist with 'us'.  They don't just live with humans, they live in Victorian London, and this seems to me to be the most blatant possible way of integrating them into a kind of aggressively middle-class, twee, cutesy, ostensibly lovable, yet aggressive and insular and ressentimental Britishness, a Britishness at its most iconically imperialistic and hierarchical.  Victoriana is the heavy drapes and elaborate dresses and cravats and top hats of the middle-classes.  Victoriana is the coughing, shivering, gin-swilling street poor as an essential background decoration, a set of tropes to locate us.  Victoriana is brown derby-wearing police inspectors (probably called Lestrade) who consult toff private detectives because, being working class, they're too thick to do their jobs themselves (the implicit goodness and necessity of the police is never questioned in Victoriana - something that wasn't true amongst common people in actual Victorian London, who often saw the bobbies as incompetents at best, violent spies at worst).  Victoriana is empire as backdrop.  Queen and country.  Big Ben.  Smog, gaslight, cobbles, hansom cabs, etc etc etc.  This is the milieu that Vastra, Jenny and Strax have assimilated themselves into.  Vastra even challenges the bad guys "in the name of the British Empire!"  This sort of thing no doubt seems desperately cute to Moffat, and all those people who write those rubbishy Jago & Litefoot audios for Big Finish, but its only our historical amnesia to what the British Empire was that allows this kind of desperate cutesiness to subsist.  The subsistence of it, in turn, allows the amnesia.  And boy, do we love our symptoms... hence our desire to inflict them on everyone and pull everyone, and everything, into them.  The Silurian and the Sontaran, for instance, have joined us in our adorable, pop-Conan-Doyle-inflected national fantasy of a penny dreadful past of wonders and horrors.  The horrors are all safely in the past (things we've cured now) and the wonders remain as a kind of nostalgic longing for the lost times when, right or wrong, he had confidence and lush gothic cliches galore on our side.  Vastra - the representative of a displaced people who are perpetually denied redress and justice (umm... imperialism? colonialism?) - has isolated herself from her people and integrated herself into imperial Britain.  She has ceased to be any kind of rebuke to 'our' world, or 'us'.  And 'we' have become the national gestalt that once lived in the United Kingdom of Sherlock.  Strax - the representative of a culture of militarism and conquest - has similarly integrated himself.  His imperialist attitudes are turned into cute, amusing misprisions which allow him to sink with ease into the warm slippers of imperial Victoriana.  The militarism of the Sontarans is no longer a rebuke to 'our' militarism.  The Sontaran may not be a threatening other anymore, but he is now no longer, in any sense, a mirror reflecting our own nastier values back at us.  He's not a reflection that attacks.  He's a stooge who safely reminds us of our foibles by being sillier than us, and then puts on the uniform of a servant and takes his place in the pyramid.  The good pyramid.  'Our' pyramid.  The pyramid we all fit into somewhere, nicely and neatly.  The pyramid that even the comedy tramps fit into.  The pyramid in which the chirpy cockney maid voluntarily calls people "ma'am" and serves them their tea, as an empowered life choice.  The pyramid of contextless, gutted, sanitised tropes.  This is partly why our representations of the Victorian era are so tropetastic... because tropes slot neatly into each other (hence all the Victoriana crossovers, i.e. Holmes vs Jack the Ripper, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, etc), arrange themselves into pyramids of perceived cultural weight, and start to resemble a vertiginous but orderly class structure, a sort of naturally-occuring periodic table of the social roles, which is the ideology of Victoriana that we are sold by every bit of culture the tropes come from.  This is why 'actually existing steampunk' (which 'Deep Breath' appropriates in predictable fashion, Moffat having been pulling at this particular thread for some time) is so pernicious.  Because the iconography of the high era of industrialisation, imperialism and colonialism is reduced to contextless fetishized commodities, sumptuous archaic kit, and safely de-conflicted social classes.  And even the identification of the cogwheel and the top hat with villainy nevertheless makes no apology for the joy we're supposed to take in the sheen of the 19th century machine. 

Of course, once again, we shouldn't be too hard on Moffat.  He's just doing what lots of people do.  He's just going along.  And he's not doing anything worse than Robert Holmes did in 'Talons of Weng Chiang'.  In fact, he's better than that.  His obligatory Victorian chinese person looks right, according to the big book of stereotypes... but at least he was played by an actual Chinese person.  And at least he wasn't being singled out.  At least he was just another brick in the pyramid, another character on the picturesque Quality Street tin that Victorian London has been turned into by our culture industries.  That's what we do now.  We don't do stories about Victorian London in which Chinese people are The Enemy.  The sneer at the foreigner has been displaced elsewhere, translated into code.  Now, we do stories in which all races and classes, all costumes and styles, all tropes, are brought together, all present and correct, all slotted into place.

Is that so bad?  I honestly don't know.  I'm not necessarily arguing that we're looking at a regress.  But I'm pretty sure we're not looking at progress.  And I'm not talking about the paucity of round things on the wall.