It is oddly coincidental to me that just as I was wrestling with my long ago fascination with Joan of Arc, the famous "Maid of Orleans", that I would be involved in a deep literary conversation about Jane Mendelsohn's Innocence. In the midst of discussion of the "Final Girl" theory and how it applies to the story and comparisons between the book's protagonist, Beckett, and other lost innocent girls of literature, I was drawn again and again to the images of innocence and violence that permeate the story. There are real acts of violence, but the imagery outweighs the actions. The imagery carries more power - somehow - than the action.

In dreams I open my mouth and butterflies come pouring out. But what happened wasn't a dream. What happened was real. I opened my eyes and the shadows took shape. The folded into origami wings. I opened my eyes and I began to see.

I opened my eyes and out flew bats.

Here is the second part of a discussion of Innocence where talk is about pink and red, innocence and blood. See Bildungsoman for Part I.

CM: I found out about Innocence from the short Endicott review and I find the cover comment from Dennis Cooper kind of interesting - that it is "a kind of Rosemary's Baby channeled through JD Salinger".

Okay, I didn't get that at all. I think the Rosemary's Baby comparison was too obvious and Beckett did not seem at all smart mouthy like Salinger's boy wonder. I think this book goes much further back than mid-20th century teen angst or devil stories. To me it is completely a throw back to the old fairy tales - the OLD tales.

KH: Definitely. I think, too, that it has elements of something more primal even than those to it. The significance of blood, the nature of the suicide pacts, all of these suggest to me something ancient, tied up in very traditional pagan rites. [I worry that by using that there, I will offend pagans. But this story conjures up Druidic imagery in my mind, so there that is.] The importance of Beckett being a virgin plays into that, I think.

CM: Blood is a huge part of this story. The menstrual blood, the bloody way the suicide girls kill themselves - yes, it seemed to show a definite tie between this story and older stories. That fits with the true nature of the stepmother on the one hand, but really the girls did not have to kill themselves that way. They could have taken pills instead of using that "pink razor blade". Blood is everywhere constantly and it is always part of life or death; of change in general.

I saw my bloodied face, and behind that my new, beautiful face, and behind that the face I used to wear, my lonely face. I saw them merge together into a face I had never seen. A face that looked back at
itself, a face that was not a mask. - Page 193

CM: I just finished reading Lily Archer's much lighter The Poison Apples but it is also about how step parents always, to a certain degree, destroy your life. I mean that in the most complete way - even if your new life is better than your old, the old life is still destroyed - it's over. Archer tackled that with some seriousness and fun but Mendelsohn clearly was reaching back to Snow White and Cinderella, etc. with Innocence; she goes back to when bad things could happen and still be believed and makes that part of a story about a modern blended family.

The stepmother came and changed everything in this story, as she always does. But Beckett is wary of that change, as she should be: But the Final Girl knows for hours, maybe days that she is going to die. She feels death coming. She hears it. She sees it.

Isn't death the ultimate life change?

LW: In a word: yes. Life is ultimately death. Wow. Now I am depressed.

KH: Very true, with ultimate in its most literal meaning. And on this subject, [again I am tempted to censor myself but it's not an honest conversation about the book if I do] I think - especially to a girl living without a mother - the onset of menstruation is about as scary as death. To bleed without a wound... It's very chilling.

I got out of bed slowly. I sat up, looked at the picture of my mother on the bedside table, and pulled back the covers. In my hand the comforter was white and the top sheet was white, but underneath me the sheet was red. Underneath me, a rough liquid feeling of wet cotton rubbed against my skin because the sheet was soaked with blood.

CM: I love your quote here "to bleed without a wound". So for a girl to become a woman, she must suffer mysteriously, which in a way means that Beckett and her stepmother are in a bit on the same blood secret; something her stepmother exploits to gain her trust.

Peter Pan saw death as the ultimate adventure - not as something to be afraid of. How do you feel about the pink and red imagery throughout the book? Is it all about death or life or innocence?

KH: I love it. There isn't a more powerful combination than pink, which is a very lively but sort of innocent and gentle color, and red, more vibrant but also scarier, the color of power and blood, which is life itself but when spilled always makes us think of death.

CM: Is it all about death or life or innocence?

KH: Yes, yes, it is. I think it's about the loss of innocence, or the value of innocence. It reminds me of Elizabeth Bathory, who -according to folklore from many years after she died- bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her youthful beauty.

It's about how a part of you dies when you aren't innocent anymore, but how at the same time you have a richer life, too. I feel like the haze I keep talking about really clears for Beckett at the end of the book.

CM: And right from the first page, with that pink razor blade and the red massacre of a sunset, Mendelsohn gives us those two colors; she gives us both innocence and death. She demands that we see both of them, side by side; that we see the sides from the very beginning. And it is as if Beckett must choose what kind of girl she will be. I thought it was really interesting (and surprising) that Mendelsohn has her make a choice for sex and not even in a romantic, making love, kind of invitation but in the most direct and non-innocent way possible. She says to Tobey, "Fuck me". So much for little girls in pink dresses.

LW: I think it is also of note that it is the first actual line of dialogue in the book. In any event, or if nothing else, it tells you that Beckett is control of her choices right then and there. She is not the victim, nor is she attempting to be masculine. She is trying to control her own destiny.

It factors into the Final Girl theory as well.

CM: Interesting that she makes that choice to control her own destiny, or rather that Mendelsohn presents sex as the choice Beckett has to make to live. But if we look at the other girls Mendelsohn alludes to in the book, at Alice rebelling at the croquet match and Dorothy throwing the bucket of water at the witch, etc., it seems there is a moment when the heroine must refuse to be controlled if she wishes to be free. Just in this case, the refusal meant no longer being a virgin.

How often does a teenage girl have to choose sex in a novel in order to be free?

LW: I think it is also a nod towards the definition and connotation of innocence...

CM: Yes - that's it exactly.

And that, really, is the biggest message I got from this book - the ambiguous nature of the word innocent. So much of the story is about Beckett knowing she is in trouble, that her stepmother is serious trouble, but she is not believed. How often are teenage girls not believed. Consider date rape - did she really say no? Or how about, she was asking for it by the way she dressed/acted/talked. The girl is the temptress as we have most graphically seen recently in the murder of Du’a Khalil Aswad in Northern Iraq. She had to die to preserve the mere notion of innocence.

And again with the red blood - her face, as Joss Whedon so eloquently and angrily put it, was nothing but red.

It doesn't matter whether something is real. What matters is whether it's true.

We still debate if Joan of Arc's claims were real - even the church that made her a saint does not know whether to embrace her or remain cynical. But we can not deny what Du’a Khalil Aswad died for. She was, simply put, not innocent enough. Who gets to decide is what I want to know; who gets to make the rules for innocence?

Part III is over at lectitans.........

[Post title from Innocence. Pictures from: Red Lense, Dark Horse Comics and the Iraq War.]