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darkmuseum · 6 years

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Before this trip, I’d developed some ideas about Matron. I was interested in the Matron/Hecate connection, uniquely exploited by Careena Melia during her time at the show. The classical Hecate is a multifaceted goddess--she has three faces--and one of her aspects is “kourotrophos,” or “nurturer of shoots”--that is, caretaker of children. What I knew of Matron’s one-on-one made me wonder if she might, in some portrayals, represent this face of Hecate: a dark caregiver who offers you both fear and succor.

This idea is in keeping with my personal interpretation of Hecate. As I discuss here, I think of Hecate as psychologically fractured. Deeply wounded from the trauma of her apotheosis, she has no resources to heal herself, and lashes out in her pain. It makes sense to me that someone so hurt might cast out an aspect of herself--the aspect of herself that loves and cares--in an attempt to reject its meaning and the ways it makes her vulnerable. She cannot reconcile herself with the weakness implied in caring or nurturing, so she throws it away.

Having seen much more of Matron, I now have more information, and my ideas about her are changing. I still think of this as a possibility--especially because of how the role may differ from performer to performer, and how little is explicitly stated. But I’m beginning to think that if she is an aspect of anyone, she is an aspect of Nurse. My essential idea is the same: I believe that Matron may be, or may represent, a piece of Nurse which has been personified and rejected, in much the way that Hecate may have personified and rejected her ability to love and care. My theory hinges on Nurse’s possession, and what it implies about Nurse as a character.

Modern interpretation of the phenomenon of possession is heavily psychological. For example, in Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, John Putnam Demos argues for the 1671 possession of Elizabeth Knapp as representing a form of deep regression, with “exhibitionism, dependency, rage” as the major themes of her psychological illness. Although the historical evidence is thin, he suggests that on the basis of what we do know about Elizabeth Knapp, her possession constituted a rejection of the harsh discipline and social mores of Puritan culture, a violent overthrow of the young woman’s role in Puritan society as worker, helpmeet, servant. The bubbling-up of attention-seeking, needy, vengeful behavior became personified in the figure of the demon or witch possessing her, allowing Elizabeth to disavow responsibility for it and to reject it as a part of her self. It wasn’t her--it was the Devil.

Worker, helpmeet, servant: I can’t help but think of Nurse. She is the caretaker, folding clothes, carrying shoes, tending to patients. She and Matron scrupulously return the Macbeths’ bedroom to pristine condition, pressing water out of letters with the fabric of their aprons, delicately folding the pages, making all as it once was--servants to the very end of the loop. Her possession implies a latent rejection of this role. She does not need to be a perfect, attentive caregiver when she is being violently tossed against walls or when she is coughing up pins. Her self-control is finally released; she can finally be as other characters are, as her patients are: a body subsumed by its violent desires, a woman out of control.

In light of this, I first wondered if Matron could be the possessing agent--like the Devil to Elizabeth Knapp, embodying the desires she cannot incorporate into her sense of self, becoming the thing she rejects. But thinking on the scene in the operating theater, I came to a different conclusion. Matron stands above, watching, as below Nurse enacts a scene of possession, throwing herself against walls, at one point seeming to coyly expose her leg before twisting away violently, her body knocked wildly about as if by some invading force. Wearing the same clothes as Nurse, present but apart--present but not in control.

In a word, I believe Matron may represent Nurse’s superego. She is still a personified, rejected aspect of Nurse’s self, but rather than embodying her violent and unacceptable desires as a demon or devil, she embodies her self-control, her adherence to norms, against which Nurse aggressively revolts. She is cast out far, isolated in the woods, emphasizing Nurse’s psychological fragmentation. Periodically she and Nurse attempt a reconciliation, reaching for each other again and again in the mirror dance. But there can be no true reconciliation for them--if they can rejoin, it is only temporary, before Nurse is once again subsumed by the pain and rage expressed in her possession.

In this interpretation, the whole fifth floor becomes a stage for the drama of Nurse’s psyche. The dark, the maze, the fog, the one-room inaccessible hut all point to how remote and inaccessible her sense of control, her sense of self is. In the clinical, regimented environment of the hospital ward, where Nurse is supposed to perform her acts of service and care, audience members can instead witness the bodily violence of her possession and the overthrow of her reason. And we can follow her as, three times a night, she goes out into the woods to seek her double, her own self, trying to piece herself together again.

I have to append a disclaimer: I don’t know if any of this is “true” or “right.” Compared to many in the community, I’m a very inexperienced fan of the show, and I’m not even the most experienced fan of the fifth floor (hi Panda!). But I think it offers an interesting lens to view the story and I hope others find it as intriguing a possibility as I do 😊

#sleep no more #sleepnomore #sleepnomorenyc #mckittrick #mckittrick hotel #my posts.#post no more.#here it is....... my Hot Take

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