Unclean Women: Transmasculine Allegory in Russian Drama and Beyond
A. R. Sherbatov
Konstantin Makovsky — Rusalki (1879)
Zinaida Gippius’ symbolist play “Sacred Blood”, which was written in 1901, is not just about any mermaid. It’s about a русалка (rusalka): the Russian legged mermaid, who in folklore was thought to have once been a woman who died drowning in water (often by suicide). The rusalka has thin, soft skin and cold blood, and is often heavily sexualized in imagery, her ugliness thought to be “not that of appearance, for she is gorgeous, but that of sin” (Moyle 222). In Gippius’ play, one such rusalka is disillusioned with her fate as one of these creatures. She knows that rusalki have an easy life, living 300 to 400 years and then ‘disappearing into the fog’. She speaks to an older rusalka about her concerns, asking if she will really disappear one day and there will be nothing more to her existence. The older rusalka answers, “Nothing. Why do you want more?” (Gippius 2). So the story goes: humans have an immortal soul that is forever reincarnated because God shed his blood for them, but, of course, He did not do the same for rusalki. Thus, humans live a shorter yet busier and more dutiful life, while rusalki sing songs about the glistening moon for centuries, then disappear forever. Our rusalka doesn’t want anything to do with this. Now here comes the fun part.
The rusalka is advised to see a witch, who was once a human but sold her soul for a longer life, and has been alive for five hundred years. The witch first laughs — “I’ve been waiting for a little fish like you for a long time. Why should it be impossible?” (Gippius 5) — then tells her to leave the lake and approach the two men — one old, one young — living at the secluded lakeside chapel. Essentially, she instructs the young rusalka to get closer to one of these men, close enough to eventually reveal to him that she has not been baptized and she wants him to baptize her. This will grant her the coveted immortal soul. Lastly, the witch instructs the rusalka to not let them know her true species, as they see her kind as ‘unclean’.
She follows these instructions to a T (haha), getting closer and closer emotionally to the older and more easygoing man of the two. Meanwhile, the younger man is suspicious of her from the start, and more devoted to his religious studies than the older man at the chapel. She then fesses up, admitting to the older man that she has not been baptized yet because she does not have an immortal soul. He agrees to baptize her out of the pity he has gained for her, but notes that though he’s ready to take on the risk for her, there is a chance the procedure will leave him without his own soul.
The rusalka is devastated after hearing about this possibility, running back to the lake, ready to leave her desire for an immortal soul behind. But as she is about to reenter, the witch stops her: “You’ll probably drown in the lake now. You’re not the same, little fish. Your blood may not be warm, but your body is solid. You got it from the humans. Beware of that lake!” (Gippius 16). The witch, upon hearing her plight, tells her that if she really loves this man, she should kill him, as that is another way to get an immortal soul without taking his. So, out of her desire, both of him and the soul, she does just that.
At first glance, this seems to be purely a religious allegory, with the older man’s sacrificial death representing God shedding His blood. However, looking at Zinaida Gippius’ own life and background provides a different outlook, framing the play moreso as an allegory for transmasculinity and breaking out of the sexual yet boring performance of femininity.
Zinaida Gippius lived a life characterized by her androgyny and highly publicized threesomes. She would have affairs with women, sometimes adding another man into the mix to create tension between her and the other woman and effectively place herself in juxtaposition with the man. She would also often dress in male clothing, and published works and criticisms under several male pseudonyms, including Anton Krainy (translating to “Anton The Extreme”). Furthermore, there exist paintings of her in male clothing, highlighting her thin figure and masculine hips. She did have her moments of femininity, though it was typically entwined with her masculine identity to some degree. As Olga Matich describes another picture of Gippius in Erotic Utopia, “A phallic cigarette between her lips, she holds in one hand a lorgnette, the female dandy’s counterpart of the monocle… She casts a small black shadow. In other words, she is phallic — a fetish object — but not mannish” (Matich 177).
Zinaida Gippius, 1897.
It is clear from Gippius’ background that a transgender (or at least, her rough equivalent of the term) allegory would not have been beyond her to incorporate in “Sacred Blood.” But the question is: did she, in fact, do that? Is it appropriate to view “Sacred Blood” through that lens?
Yes, it absolutely is.
I. The Lake
The rusalka, seen through a transmasculine point of view, is a manifestation of femininity as performance. She must be delicate, sexy and easy to please, content just with singing odes to the moon for hundreds of years. Yet for our rusalka, this lifestyle is depressing. She wants to do, be something more, yet can’t, because of the way her body has come into this world devoid of soul. She is filled with desire, but cannot act on it until made aware of the witch who did. As soon as she finds out the process of gaining a soul is possible, she jumps at the opportunity to speak with her, begging the witch to teach her how to transform her dysphoric, soulless being.
It must be mentioned that the term ‘unclean’, while used in essentially all English translations of “Sacred Blood” to describe how humans see rusalki, is not fully accurate to the original Russian text. The term used is нечисть (nechist’), which means evil spirit in this context but is also used to mean scum or vermin. The usage of a noun instead of an adjective highlights the one-dimensionality in which rusalki are seen; their uncleanliness is not just a trait, but a core feature that determines the entirety of who they are supposed to be. Thus, Gippius utilizes word choice to set up an atmosphere of initial immutability and lack of control, similar to the lack of control felt by those who experience gender dysphoria.
II. The Chapel
There are no women in this chapel for a reason: our desire-driven rusalka is knowingly migrating from the sphere of womanhood to the sphere of manhood, even if by means of masquerade. Our rusalka makes herself at home here, finding love in the human lifestyle and in humans themselves. While the transition allegory, at least in this part of the text, is now abundantly clear, it is worth analyzing why the chapel specifically was used. Surely, the rusalka could have felt even more at home in someone’s home, not a half-abandoned chapel of eccentric recluses, right? Both inside “Sacred Blood” and her own life, Zinaida Gippius does very much see the Russian Orthodox Church as fluid, capable of reinvention, and emblematic of new beginnings. In her lifetime, Gippius, along with two of her intellectual colleagues, began a new strain of the church — the New Church — to merge faith and intellect, preserving the religious values of Russian Orthodoxy while criticizing how they were implemented presently. Therefore, it would certainly not be beyond her to use the church in “Sacred Blood” to spread a fresh point of view on gender, expression and mutability.
This reading of “Sacred Blood” is certainly not the first to establish a link between the chapel in the story and Gippius’ New Church. Professor Emerita Tatiana Osipovich, in her reading of “Sacred Blood” as a lesbian allegory, says of the older man at the chapel: “[he] is like Dostoyevsky's Zosima, kind, humble and pantheistic. He teaches a very different, loving God and represents a much gentler, more inclusive Christianity” (Osipovich 20-21). This interpretation of the older and younger men in the chapel as representing more or less inclusive strains of Christianity introduces the possibility that the older man, Father Panuty represents the New Church; consequently, the younger man, Nikodim, represents the ‘traditional’ Russian Christianity. This would also explain why Father Pafnuty feels more sympathy towards the Rusalka when she reveals her identity. Additionally, Osipovich brings up the important detail that “Sacred Blood” was written while Gippius was with her husband in Hamburg to think through their joint plan to create a New Church. Given this context, it is fully possible that the older man was created to symbolize the New Church and benefits of its establishment.
While Osipovich argues in her article “God’s Other Children: Gender Marginality and Intertextuality in Zinaida Gippius’s Play ‘Sacred Blood’” that the rusalka is a lesbian rather than transgender, there are points of convergence that reconcile these differing interpretations. Osipovich in her essay first refers to the rusalka as a “gender misfit whom society perceives as subhuman” (Osipovich 2) rather than a lesbian; there persists the consensus that the rusalka is escaping a performance of femininity.
III. No take-backsies
Reminded of how much easier it is to live as a sexual object and mind her own business, she attempts to go back, but can’t. Her action on her own desires has already begun to change her, baptism or no baptism. This is perhaps the part that cements most influentially the transmasculinity of “Sacred Blood”: once you act on the desire for masculinity, it is difficult to let go of the experiences it has given you. This particular quote from the witch is a most illuminating one: “I know it’s easier, little fish. It’s so much easier in the lake. I told you so, you know, about the knife. I know what a labor this is; not one of the humans, nor any other creature either, could take it on themselves. Creatures like the kind you used to be in the lake couldn’t, because they don’t know love” (Gippius 18). She understands how much easier it is to live as before, but it’s now impossible, because the rusalka has grown to feel so at home with humans. In the heart of the witch, the young rusalka has already become un-fishlike, though not human; rusalki are no longer kin, but ‘the kind [she] used to be’. This plight directly translates to how much easier it is to be gender-conforming and live a peaceful, acceptable life as a woman, but the task actually becomes impossible once one has grown so accustomed to the joys of masculinity. The Becoming — the transition — doesn’t just happen during the baptism, or the murder; it starts from the rusalka’s very first step out of the water.
Our rusalka understands that Becoming is sinful and that she will never be fully ‘clean’; in fact, she learns to revel in her uncleanliness, telling the witch, “If He wants my immortal soul in order to torment it—that doesn’t matter, does it? He wants it” (Gippius 18). If her existence is unclean, Gippius proposes, may she make the best out of it regardless.
IV. So what about the murder?
That is easy. In order to overturn gender like this, there must be a murder, whether a fully metaphorical one or a real murder such as the one at the end of “Sacred Blood”. Something must go. In this case, that thing is the normal order of the ‘common Russian Orthodox man’ — it’s as if Gippius is claiming that to arrive at a world where gender and its expression is fully mutable, we must sacrifice the ostensibly tranquil, ‘clean’ norms we have now. To desire manhood is to scorch it; I maim, therefore I am. The murder is her final and most violent departure from the peaceful, moonlit life of the rusalka, circumventing the lake-reminiscent water immersion of the baptism and thus completely antithetical to what her existence once was fated to be.
Yet, in the end, Gippius could not fully reconcile the New Church — or any church — with her queerness, and this shows in the ending of ‘Sacred Blood’. One of the most befuddling parts of the interpretation of Father Pafnuty as a manifestation of the New Church is his death. If he was supposed to represent a new beginning, why did he die? As aforementioned, Father Pafnuty was written to mirror Jesus, who died for humanity and their sins. Now that he has shed his blood for the rusalka, she is also, therefore, a human. It is as St. Peter of Damascus, a 12th-century Orthodox scholar, says in his Treasury of Divine Knowledge: “If we are not willing to sacrifice this temporal life, or perhaps even the life to come, for the sake of our neighbor, as were Moses and St. Paul, how can we say that we love him? … St. Paul said, ‘For I could wish that I myself were severed from Christ for the sake of my brethren’ (Rom. 9:3). He prayed, that is to say, that he should perish in order that others might be saved — and these others were the Israelites who were seeking to kill him” (St. Peter of Damascus). The plight of Father Pafnuty mirrors that of St. Paul in the passage; he has ‘severed [himself] from Christ’ to recognize the rusalka’s newfound humanity.
That just leaves one question, the question that plagued Gippius for years during her well-documented affairs with women: can the New Church sustain itself, or is it, according to Gippius, ultimately incompatible with queer and trans thought? Osipovich sheds light on this question while discussing the activities of the New Church in, “The core of this church became a nontraditional union of three like-minded individuals: Merezhkovsky, Gippius and their close friend Dmitry Filosofov. In October 1901, the trio had a secret religious ceremony in which they combined the wedding ritual with Communion. This alternative marriage of three people of nontraditional sexuality and their very private church, with its regular liturgical services, existed [sic.] for almost 15 years, providing its participants with a sense of belonging … the creation of this private ‘church’ by Gippius and her associates, as well as their unusual alternative marriage, was no less terrible than the young rusalka’s murder of the old holy man in ‘Sacred Blood’. Just like her heroine, Gippius committed an awful sin in order to find her own unique path to God” (Osipovich 23). Thus, the New Church sustains, but in sin. It will forever be, to a degree, ‘unclean’, but because it represents the same sense of sacrifice as traditional Christianity, it perseveres.
Gippius works this sense of continued uncleanliness into the ending of ‘Sacred Blood’. In order to gain an immortal soul, the rusalka must, according to the witch, not only kill the older man, but “make sure his blood, shed by [her] hand, touches [her]” (Gippius 18). The blood splattering over the rusalka is a physical manifestation of her uncleanliness, of her sin. She will never be fully clean, but she will still have a soul, albeit a heavy one that has sinned gravely. By giving the rusalka a soul and humanity, the ending of the story offers a tentative synthesis between her uncleanliness and her faith.
The love for the older man mixed with the burning for his manhood is both reminiscent of Gippius’ own threesomes - desiring the man, but also to be him and see the world, the Woman, through his lens — and Jacques Lacan's work on the psychoanalysis of desire. Our desire for another, according to Lacan, is inherently narcissistic, based both on how we perceive that other and how we want to be perceived by them. Theorist Keith Peterson writes on this Lacanian desire in his essay “Paradise Lost: Hawaiian Tourism and Corrosive Desire”: “The desiring void always yearns for more — more escape, more pleasure, more jouissance — whatever external sacrifice or mutilation or exploitation is necessary to chase that eternally suspended goal” (Peterson). Desire hurts, drains – in the older man's case, kills. And as Lacan puts “this effect of mutilation: I give myself to you, the patient says again, but this gift of my person — as they say — Oh, mystery! is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit” (Lacan 268). The rusalka has killed him, her objet petit a, out of love, but loved him out of her own selfish goals. Does it get more Lacanian than this?
“Sacred Blood”, by complicating the relationship between desire for Man and desire for Manhood, has deep implications for transmasculinity then, now and everywhere in between. The rusalka’s love for the older man does not take away from her own found masculinity — rather, it augments it. Obsession — for lack of a better word — with men who the subject desires to be like is a rather common experience among transmasculine people, and can often be confused with just romantic attraction and further weaponised to invalidate people of that experience. A similar experience is documented in the diaries of Lou Sullivan, one of the first ever transgender men to publicly identify as gay. He writes in the early 1960’s: “Mom said I could maybe have a Beatles haircut before the last day of school. Paul-Ringo-Paul-Ringo they keep bouncing around my head. They’re so perfect. Model yourself on them [and] you’ll have no worries. Paul! I love the name. Such a beautiful sound to the ear. Ringo! Such an adorable boy. So sweet and modest. So bouncy. Know that I love you and I’m not crazy. This is a love so strong and real. Oh, love me, too, anyone” (Sullivan 5). Sullivan’s love for the Beatles complements his desire to look like them, rather than detracting from that desire.
A later Sullivan entry about making love to a man pre-transition reads, “I want to make him the lovely boy I wish I could be” (Sullivan 72). In this line, Lou Sullivan offers a slightly different perspective from what we have seen in “Sacred Blood” and Lacan’s Seminar XI; while Gippius claims that transition is destructive of sex in the sense of gender norms, Sullivan argues that it could very well be a constructive action. You are not only building yourself from the ground up; you are building the other man as well. Regardless, whether the action is constructive or destructive, both works attest to the malleability of the sexes, even as time and place drastically change.
Another exhibit that displays the combination of desire for Man and Manhood, and reclaims violence as a manifestation of transmasculinity, is Keito Gaku’s manga Boys Run the Riot (which, to absolutely no one’s surprise, is my favorite manga ever). In Boys Run the Riot, a closeted transgender student Ryo Watari befriends Jin Satou, a rebellious classmate who convinces him to start a streetwear company together. At first, Ryo is hesitant to even speak to Jin, determined to make it through high school without being particularly noticed. Ryo has learned his lesson from years prior: “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” (Gaku 11). Ryo used to talk to guys frequently, and be more open, but people at school picked on him for being “boy crazy” and “secretly a slut” (Gaku 12). This is yet another example of the confusion of desire we have seen complicate the narratives of Gippius, Sullivan, and countless real-life transmasculine people: someone who loves Manhood is characterized as one who loves Man himself. Of course, both can coexist, as can only one; the issue with this mixed desire is when its idea is weaponized against the trans community to accuse us of fetishization or bastardization.
Over the course of Boys Run the Riot, the once fearful, straight-laced Ryo Watari comes out of his shell by learning to express himself through art. One of the most epic shots in the first volume of the manga shows a wall covered with graffiti of a man taking off a jacket to show his chest. The excessively large zipper is made to vaguely resemble shackles and chains; Ryo is imprisoned both by himself emotionally and by the world systematically. Yet, this work of art is the first step to him ‘breaking free’, as the man on the wall is doing. The illegality of graffiti and the usage of imprisonment imagery allows Keito Gaku to underscore the (this time, fully metaphorical) violence inherent to Ryo taking steps to be more confident in himself and his expression. Ryo’s graffiti is akin to the rusalka’s murder in that sense.
Graffiti wall in Boys Run the Riot.
We must take from “Sacred Blood” and its climactic ending that to desire is to revolt. Our innate ability to change our circumstances comes with deep sacrifice, but maybe that’s not so bad after all.
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Bibliography
Gaku, K. (2021). Boys Run the Riot 1. Kodansha America LLC.
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Peterson, K. (2022). Paradise Lost: Hawaiian Tourism and Corrosive Desire. Gadfly Magazine, (Fall 2022).
Sullivan, L. (2019). We both laughed in pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991. Nightboat Books.
