The Beguiled

The Seminary and the Stranger: Immanence Under Siege in The Beguiled

Don Siegel's 1971 hothouse melodrama opens on a child gathering mushrooms in a Mississippi forest. She is twelve, she is humming, and she is about to find a bleeding Yankee in the underbrush. The film has been called a Southern Gothic, a psychosexual thriller, a fever dream with Clint Eastwood as its unreliable center of gravity. It is all of these. But watched now, fifty years on, it reveals itself as something stranger and more instructive: a laboratory experiment in what happens to women who have been confined, by war and custom, to the airless room of pure waiting.

Miss Martha's Seminary for Young Ladies is a closed economy. The Confederacy is collapsing somewhere offscreen; the men are dead, deserted, or distant; the slaves are gone except for Hallie, whose labor continues to underwrite the whole arrangement. The women tend the garden, practice their French, say their prayers, and above all sustain the fiction that this arrangement is a life rather than a suspension of one. Their days are structured by repetition without direction—the definition, more or less, of immanence. There are no projects here, only maintenance. No futures, only the preservation of a present that has already been hollowed out by history. When the headmistress locks the gate each night, she is performing a ritual whose real function is to keep everyone from noticing that there is nowhere to go.

Into this sealed jar drops Corporal John McBurney, and the jar begins to hum. What makes the film so uncomfortable, and so philosophically rich, is that it refuses to let him be either victim or villain. He is, more precisely, a vector of transcendence—or its counterfeit. For these women, whose horizons have been shrunk to needlepoint and vespers, a wounded man in the cellar represents the only thing that has happened to them in years. He is their event. And because he is their event, they cannot see him; they can only see what he might mean. Edwina sees a gentleman who will carry her off into romantic rescue. Martha sees a surrogate for the brother she loved with suspicious intensity. Carol sees a body. Amy sees a friend, which in this context is perhaps the most radical and the most doomed reading of all.

McBurney, for his part, understands immediately what has happened. He has been granted, by the accident of his wound, a brief sovereignty over a household of starved imaginations, and he goes to work. To each woman he presents a different face—tender suitor, worldly sophisticate, wounded boy, potential lover—calibrated with the precision of a salesman reading a room. This is not seduction in the romantic sense. It is the strategic deployment of the Myth of Woman, inverted and wielded by its usual beneficiary. He has intuited that each of these women has been taught to recognize herself only through a particular feminine script, and he offers each of them the script they have been rehearsing. He does not create their hunger. He merely identifies it and sells it back to them at markup.

What the film understands, and what makes its famous third act so vertiginous, is that the women's eventual violence against McBurney cannot be reduced to a single meaning. Siegel, in interviews, cheerfully described the film as being about women's "basic desire to castrate men," and you can feel this interpretation pressing against the frames like a thumb on a lens. It is the dumbest possible reading, and it is also the reading the film half-invites. The amputation of McBurney's leg, the poisoned mushrooms served with ceremony at dinner, the tableau of the women sewing his shroud—these are images that trade in the oldest patriarchal nightmare, the coven, the maenads, the Eternal Feminine revealed at last as devouring.

But watch what actually happens. McBurney discovers the women's fantasies and exploits them; when he is caught sleeping with Carol instead of Edwina, he is pushed down the stairs; Martha amputates his leg under medical pretext that everyone, including Martha, suspects is also a punishment; McBurney retaliates by terrorizing the household, brandishing a pistol, destroying Amy's pet turtle, announcing that he will rape and ruin them all. Only then do the women decide he must die. The "hysterical revolt" is in fact a series of responses to concrete threats, each one legible, each one arguably rational, and each one contaminated by the sexual and psychic investments that the situation itself made inevitable. The women are not monsters erupting from some essential feminine darkness. They are people improvising, badly, inside a structure that has given them no tools for any other kind of response.

This is where the film becomes genuinely tragic rather than merely lurid. Because the women cannot act except through the narrow channels their situation permits, their act of self-defense takes the exact form that the misogynist imagination has always predicted. They become, in killing him, the creature he and the culture had always half-believed them to be. The trap is perfect: confinement produces distortion, distortion produces violence, violence confirms the necessity of confinement. The seminary gate closes again at the end of the film, and nothing has changed, except that a man is dead and the women have been initiated into a complicity they did not choose but cannot now refuse. They will keep each other's secret because they have no one else to tell.

It matters that this film was made in 1971, at the hinge moment when American second-wave feminism was moving from manifesto to mass culture. The Beguiled is not a feminist film—its director would have been horrified by the accusation—but it is a film that could only have been made under feminism's pressure, a film nervously metabolizing anxieties it cannot quite name. The women are given interior lives, desires, strategies; they are not merely scenery for Eastwood's brooding. And yet the camera keeps returning to their bodies with a gaze that wants them to be dangerous in the old way, secretive and succulent and obscurely guilty. The film knows more than it can say, and says more than it means to. This is often the condition of genuinely interesting art made by people whose politics have not caught up with their perceptions.

What endures, then, is the film's accidental honesty about situation. These women are not evil and they are not saints; they are what happens when human beings are denied the conditions for a fully human life and then judged by the distortions that denial produces. McBurney is not a monster either; he is a man who has learned, as men generally do, to move through the world by reading women as mirrors and trading on their reflections. When the mirrors finally crack and cut him, the shock is not that women can be cruel. The shock is that we ever expected the arrangement to hold. Lock anyone in a room with nothing to do but wait for meaning to arrive from outside, and meaning, when it arrives, will be eaten alive.

The last shot is of the women carrying the body out through the gate, depositing it beyond the wall, and retreating back inside. It is one of the great images of ambiguity in American cinema: are they free, or have they simply sealed themselves more tightly into the tomb? The film, to its credit, does not answer. It only closes the gate.