"a pet black spider"
I'm still following the silken ribbon of spiderweb to see if it leads to women, and here's a little bit that came up.
Paula Graham, in "Girl's Camp? The Politics of Parody" (in Tamsin Wilton, Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image, 1995, 2005), writes of the play Red Sonja, in which the lesbian queen Gedren is associated "with the female genitals" and "has a pet black spider" signifying "voracious female sexuality" (p. 140).
This is far along from Jean Webster's time, but the association of a spider with the female sex is intriguing.
Labels: Literary Criticism
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 3:57 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
You and your prurient obsession with hairy chasms. In high school, we seniors used to joke that our English teacher was obsessed with sex since she seemed to interpret everything in a sexual light. (Come to think of it, we were surprisingly prudish for a group of horny high-school seniors....)
I'll be curious to see how far down the rabbit hole you can go with this. I've never heard such an association before, between the female sex and spiders, but I have heard the other hole—the, uh, one for sewage—referred to as "the brown starfish." Oh, yes: and I've also heard a fart referred to as a "barking spider."
(I'm trying, really trying, to keep the language family-friendly, but your subject matter is making this Oh So Difficult!)
What would Freud have said about Saddam Hussein being found in a "spider hole"? Was it an attempt to return to the womb?
Actually, in Saddam's case, the womb would have to have been a hellhole.
Horace Jeffery
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