In all the cinematic portrayals of sexual immorality and spiritual decay, none have given such a precise depiction of the relationship between mental instability and sin as did Showtime's British-American television series, Penny Dreadful. Through the characterization of a mysterious and powerful medium, Vanessa Ives, a woman who’s guilt surrounding her past transgressions have left her vulnerable to demonic possession, the series blends the study of psycho-analytic theory and Gothic mysticism while adopting a Judaeo-Christian approach to sin and eternal damnation. This peculiar consideration for the soul when dealing with mental illness contrasts the modern secular approach to suffering and madness, and ultimately highlights what I consider most unsatisfactory about the way we deal with anxiety and depression today.
Creator John Logan conveys the erotic and supernatural connection in the scene below.
Having dealt with severe anxiety and depression, I can testify to the fact that the traditional approach to dealing with these issues can be quite insufficient. I believe this is because we cannot begin to discuss the psyche without discussing the soul, and admit that there are principles surrounding the sanctity of the soul. While John Logan attributes Vanessa’s vulnerability to her conception of Sin, I think the show writers succeed in conveying something beyond what they’d intended. Through the internal struggle of Vanessa Ives, the show managed to give visual expression to the problem of sin and how it weaponizes guilt as an instrument of self segregation. While the average psychiatric patient might be trying to reconcile a traumatic incident or a repressed desire, the mystic is troubled with eternity and damnation, and ultimately with a sense that the wind which animates her has been ruined. Her sexual experiences bear a spiritual taxation. She leaves with a sense that she has blurred the line between the sacred and the profane. How then do we deal with a trauma that has afflicted us spiritually?
Sex for Miss Ives is not a sacred experience but rather the key to a spiritual war. She wrestles with the sense that there is a flame in her. Which is a peculiar restlessness I find prevalent in many artistic women. The practice of art requires one to position themselves as a kind of medium (a vessel for ideas), and the earth binding experience of femininity intrinsically links this disposition with that of nature, that of blood and birth, and recollects the fact that a woman was the first to eat from the fruit of knowledge.
I’d like to clarify that none of this should be taken as fact, but simply an account drawn from my own experience dealing with mental instability. In my view, more often than not what we are actually dealing with is Sin. A principle and power antagonistic to the law of God. It is a disobedience and restlessness inherent to our nature. We fight ourselves (our nature) when we go mad. But if there is no moral authority, no spiritual salvation to this war, then one might find themselves as I did, seated before a shrink and his chair struggling to root the cause of my suffering, sedating myself with anti psychotics instead. What I needed then was not a therapist but an exorcist. I needed a priest and a prayer.
But how is this related to sex or the sanctity of the soul? Perhaps it has everything to do with embodiment. As a woman, I’ve always struggled to inhabit my body. Our bodies are painful and bloody and sacrosanct for their use in the continuity of man. As a consequence we do not always feel that it belongs to us. Sex, for us, is both an act of pleasure and servitude, and the guilt this duplicity creates manifests in us a sense that we have sinned, and from this guilt our souls are made vulnerable. That is at least how it appears for Ms. Ives. She proceeds like a cup emptied, restored only from a period of abstinence, where she easily succumb to her rage, her nature, and she is unable to shake the feeling that there is a weight leaning on her chest.
consider feeling this way each time you made love to a stranger. An eternal struggle to reconcile woman as Eros, woman as psyche, woman as matter, measure, mother of men.