Kate Bush and her women ... part 2

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>]

Whoops! It seems that this article was too long for the net to handle,
so it came to a rather abrupt ending. So I've posted the rest in two 
parts. Here is part three. Sorry, sorry...

 larsi@ifi.uio.no


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	"I've always been a coward
	 And I don't know what's good for me"

This Woman is chased by the Hounds of Love, a repressive love that
strives to keep her down by pointing out that her will is not
independant. By doing this the woman, in my eyes, is transformed into 
a "Monkey of the Working Class," or, I should say, into a different
kind of bird than we are going to meet later - not into "this
Blackbird" - but into a parrot. The Woman, who, in "Running up that
Hill", wanted to swap places, puts herself back into "her proper
place". By making the Woman confused, the Hounds of Love make her
repent; she'll feel better if she remains in her prescribed role:

	"I've always been a coward
	 And never knows what's good for me
	 Here I go - Don't let me go - Hold me down..."

And continues:

	"Do you know what I really need
	 Do you know what I really need
	 I need love, love, love, love..."

In these two songs the listener/reader has been presented with both
(Song 1) a kind of theme for development or dramatization of the
Woman who must acquire the male (and phallic) pen in order to not
(Song 2) continue to be a hunted victim, a Snow White fleeing
through shadows, forests and streets. Or put in another way:
"Patriarchal texts have traditionally suggested that every angelic,
unselfish Snow White must be hunted, if not haunted, by an evil and
selfish stepmother; for every glowing portrait of humble women
trapped in family life, there exists an equally important negative
picture that encorporates the blasphemous devilishness that William
Blake called 'The female will'" (p. 28).
	But as the quote indicates, every Snow White has to have an
opposite, a negative mirror image. We get a glimpse of her in the
fourth song, "Mother Stands for Comfort." We meet the child that has
- in her own opinion - done somehing that is illegal. The Mother
knows this, but keeps silent:

	"She knows that I've been doing something wrong
	 But she won't say anything"
	...

	"Mother stands for comfort
	 Mother will hide the murderer"

This fits the child well as the mother lets the child live out its
monstrous aggressiveness (the child as murderer), the opposite of
the harmless Snow White. Still, the child is bothered by this
situation, because the aggressiveness has come to her from the 
outside, it has not been created by herself.

	"It breaks the cage, fear escapes and take possesion
	 Just like a crowd rioting inside"

"It" makes her do things:
	
	"Make me do this, make me do that, make me do this
	 Make me do that"

Is she the hunted or is she the hunter? In the mothers eyes she is
hunted, not a hunter, and here we might see a thematic conflict.
The mother, the very sign of "comfort", chooses to see her daughter
as an innocent victim, an unselfish Snow White. The child sees
herself as someone who has taken on the image of a very young
stepmother and acted out a symbolic murder. The murder can be
interpreted both as a murder of Snow White and as an acquisition of
the male pen.
	Is this an elegant dramatization, from the Woman who wants
to "make a deal with God", to a fully developed "son", a Woman who
must accept and enter the male world on these terms, by
becoming a man? With the last song of "The Hounds of Love",
"Cloudbusting", with it's music filled with victory, one is tempted
to answer "yes".
	"Cloudbusting" is directed towards a father figure, Daddy,
as opposed to the last songs Mother/Mum-figure. The father
represents something ambigous the same way the mother does. Kate
Bush here uses an image of rain for Daddy:

	"You're making rain
	 and you're just in reach
	 when you and sleep escapes me"

She has used this image in "Get Out of My House" from "The
Dreaming":

	"This house is as old as I am
	 This house knows all I have done
	 They come with all their weather hanging
	 around them"

This rainmaker as equated with a luminous yo-yo. What made the yo-yo
unique - the fact that if was luminous - was also what made it
dangerous. Therefore it had to be buried, hid away, let us call it
"repressed".

	"You're like my yo-yo
	 that glowed in the dark
	 what made it special
	 made it dangerous
	 so I bury it and forget"

The rainmaker has this luminous ability, he is a sort of god on
earth with creative superiority. This makes him dangerous. Why?

	"Everytime it rains
	 you're here in my head
	 Like the sun coming out"

This makes the cycle of nature, which God created - this image of
male creativity - defined, every time, as a male act. And it is
this luminous symbol of manhood that has to be buried if the
Female is not to remain a dominated culture. Or it has to be
sublimated, posessed and become a natural part of her. It seems as
if this is what happens - or what is at stake - in "Cloudbusting,"
described as the Womans change into the Rainmakers son.

	"Oooh, I just know that something good is going to happen
	 And I don't know when
	 But just saying it could even make it happen"

The song ends with this symbolic transformation:

	"Oh, God, Daddy - I won't forget
	 Your son's coming out"