ptolemaea: destroying the Other

the face of love's rage

this was written as a final paper, hence the references and academic language. before perverts comes out, i wanted to unpack the genius of preacher’s daughter. while i someday want to break down the whole album, inspirations, references, visualizers, and more— for now, i’ve stucken with ptolemaea. enjoy!

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Central to Ethel Cain’s concept album, Preacher’s Daughter, is the intersection of desire and disgust as Ethel Cain herself is made object to these emotions. Sarah Ahmed (in The Cultural Politics of Emotion) examines disgust as a concept that is “deeply ambivalent, involving desire for, or an attraction towards the very objects that are felt to be repellent,” (84). I present the album’s climactic Ptolemaea as an embodiment of Ahmed’s observation: the intersection of desire and disgust achieves the destruction of the other, reflecting the interplaying nature of several emotions in identifying/ constructing the other and subsequently oppressing and destroying it.

The song begins as a nearly imperceptible, haunting voice echoes dissonantly against the sound of buzzing flies. Drums reverberate like ill-fated heartbeats in the opening of Hayden Anhedonia’s Ptolemaea, the climax of her concept album, Preacher’s Daughter¹.

Verse I: Isaiah

I followed you in
I was with you there
I invited you in
Twice, I did
You love blood too much
But not like I do
Not like I do

Verse II: Isaiah

Heard you, saw you, felt you, gave you
Need you, love you, love you, love you
Heard you, saw you, felt you, gave you
Need you, love you, love you, love you
Love you, saw you, gave you
Love you, gave you
Love you, love you
Love you, love you,
Love you, saw you
Felt you, love you
Love you, love you
Love you, love you
Love you, love you
Love you, love you
Love you, love you
Love you, love you
(You’d do well to say yes to me)

“I invited you in.” Ptolemaea is the ninth circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Reserved for those who commit the sin of treachery, it is a place where agony is amplified tenfold. Cain’s conditioning and indoctrination under the church fill her with a pervasive sense of shame—there is a sense of inherent otherness that comes from existing within a feminine body in a Christian context, which frames the female body as inherently inferior and wrong. The journey Cain takes across the country over the course of the album is reflective of her desire for freedom. She undergoes an ill-fated pilgrimage towards an imagined Eden- the West. But the past she left behind, embodied by the lingering presence of her mother back in Alabama, haunts her. Thus Isaiah’s opening words in this song paint a picture of Cain submitting to her shame; the act of following him in marks her as entering into a space from which she cannot come back from. The threshold that Isaiah refers to is one in which her self-destruction is guaranteed.

Harkening back to her family, Cain “loves blood too much.” This is a callback to Family Tree (Intro), the first song off the album, wherein Cain sings: “Jesus can always reject his father/ but he cannot escape his mother’s blood.” She is haunted by the guilt of leaving her mother behind, but also in repeating the generational cycles that her mother did in effectively falling victim to an abusive man. Cain is further obsessed with blood in a way that reinforces her sense of shame and self-hatred in that she holds strongly to her faith. She loves blood in the way religious fanatics through history have always fetishized the suffering of Christ. Cain is, in many ways, a Christ figure. Thus, her suffering is fetishized, at times by herself. We can see this in the self-destructive behaviors she has exhibited throughout the album. Bartky writes, of this phenomenon: “the peculiar dialectic of shame and pride in embodiment consequent upon a narcissistic assumption of the body as spectacle; the blissful loss of self in the sense of merger with another; the pervasive apprehension consequent upon physical vulnerability.” (84). Cain’s body is made spectacle in Gibson Girl, the song just before Ptolemaea. In Gibson Girl, Cain loses herself in her drugged-pimped-out state. She becomes the other within herself, Isaiah’s Other. Her suffering body is made spectacle: “And if you hate me/ please don’t tell me/ Just let the lights bleed/ all over me.” Gibson Girl is a song that exemplifies the distinction between the pornographic versus the erotic (Lorde); Cain, in her religious indoctrination, fails to identify the difference, and accepts her suffering as something erotic, something she loses herself in. The violent language of Gibson Girl (e.g. the connotation of the lights “bleeding,”) provides a precursive apprehension to Cain’s demise in Ptolemaea: Isaiah loves blood in the violent, fetishistic way. He loves blood in the way Christ’s mystic followers eroticized the spectacle of his bleeding body, of his vaginal side wound. The first stanza from Ptolomaea, spoken by Isaiah, reflects the multifaceted nature of Cain’s demise: the self-induced product of deep religious guilt and shame, but mostly the result of the intersection of lust and desire embodied by Isaiah’s thirst for blood. If Nussbaum’s argument, that “disgust concerns the borders of the body,”(14) is to be taken literally, Isaiah’s desire to infiltrate Cain’s body beyond sexual penetration reflects the fetishistic nature of disgust, which warps it into desire. Isaiah desires Cain in such a way that her destruction will satiate him: the borders of her othered body must be infiltrated, giving the language of the first verse even more complexity, as Cain becomes an object whose borders will be violated; her body becomes a threshold to be entered into much in the same way that she enters into this Ptolemaic space wherein she will be killed.

Verse III: Ethel

Suffer does the wolf, crawling to thee
Promising a big fire, any fire
Saying I’m the one,
He's gonna take me
I’m on fire, I’m on fire, I’m on fire
Suffering is nigh
Drawing to me
Calling me the one
I’m the white light,
Beautiful, finite

Verse IV: Ethel

Even the iron still fears the rot
Hiding from something I cannot stop
Walking on shadows, I can’t lead him back
Buckled on the floor when night comes along
Daddy’s left and Mama won’t come home

Verse V: Isaiah

You poor thing
Sweet, mourning lamb
There’s nothing you can do
It’s already been done.

The voice of Ethel enters the song; high pitched and hollow like a waif, verses three and four draw upon Ethel’s self-perception against the projection of disgust upon her. She relies upon animalistic imagery to demonstrate a change taking place here. There is an interplay of conflicting ideas of purity and decay, as imagery of wolves, lambs, rotting iron, and white light suggest a sort of transmutation occurring due to the projected disgust Ethel is subjected to. The imagery of “suffer does the wolf crawling to thee, promising a big fire,” suggests the draw of Isaiah, promising comfort in something that holds danger (fire). Cain frames herself as a wolf at first, an object of fear, but one that is suffering in some regard, vulnerable to a greater predator (once again, Isaiah). The symbolic fire engulfs her, purifying her in some way (“I’m the white light.”). In the next verse, Cain draws upon alchemical ideas; no longer is she a wolf but iron. “Even the iron still fears the rot.” Nussbaum affirms that “those that are loathed are those that are connected to death and decay,” (14). Despite the strength and solidity of iron, it can still be contaminated with decay and rot. Cain fears this transformation, and yet Isaiah holds the means to transform her through his projected disgust. Thanks to the Mars-Venus (hooks) model he embodies, he Others her simply by being the male, patriarchal subject and making her his object. He projects his disgust over her through his desire to penetrate and destroy her, transforming her into a “lamb,” a symbol of innocence and helplessness; a follower. The wolf to lamb transformation reflects the “psychic distress occasioned by a self or a state of the self apprehended as inferior, defective, or in some way diminished,” (Bartky 85). Cain perceives herself as inferior because of the disgust Isaiah projects upon her and the effect of shame. Within these verses, Cain loses her ability for self-determination.

Verse VI: Ethel

What fear a man like you brings upon (Isaiah: Show me your face)
A woman like me
Please don’t look at me
I can see it in your eyes
He keeps looking at me

Verse VII: Ethel

Tell me, what have you done
Stop, stop, stop
Make it stop, stop
Make it stop
Make it stop
I’ve had enough
Stop, stop, stop, stop
Stop, stop, stop, stop

[scream]

Verse VIII: ??

I am the face of love’s rage
I am the face of love’s rage

The transmutation has taken place: Cain’s objectification has led to her destruction. In these verses, Cain’s demise is built up through a haunting crescendo of emotion, culminating in her blood-curdling scream at the final “stop.” Her helpless pleas are just that—helpless. If, as Ahmed claims, “disgust brings the body perilously close to an object only then to pull away from the object in the registering of the proximity,” (85), what takes place is the rage of the subject’s repulsion taken out on the object of disgust. Rather than pulling away in repulsion, Isaiah’s ambivalent fetishistic disgust towards his object, Cain, manifests in her destruction. The nature of this relationship—one that came from a mutual desire to travel west and find love, culminated in Cain being murdered and cannibalized. Is this, as hooks puts it, reflective of the “sadomasochistic power dynamic [that] can and usually does coexist with affection?” If so, that would explain Isaiah’s closing in, rather than pulling back. This is not to say that murder is an act of love; rather, that Isaiah, and in a greater context—men, fetishize disgust in such a way that acts of violence towards women are treated as crimes of passion rather than what they are; crimes of deep-seated, cultural loathing. We have, thus far, seen Cain’s subjugation to victimhood, as she exists in the target of Isaiah’s hostility, her transformation as an object of disgust, and her murder, as a culminative act of patriarchal violence disguised as “love.” Which leads us to the next question, who is the face of love’s rage? And do love and rage truly exist in tandem with one another? I would posit that hooks is correct, in identifying that although violence and love coexist, this is not the way love is meant to present itself. This is a depiction of abuse culminated from the gendered nature of projected disgust. As listeners, we are not privy to Isaiah’s motives. This ambiguity is intentional, a reflection of Cain’s victim complex—the function of shame is to condition the other into inferiority. This wholly manifests in Cain’s sense that she deserves what happens to her. As a woman deeply entrenched in shame for a number of reasons (her transfem identity within a religious community, her abandonment of family, her history of being sexually exploited), she does not see the need to identity a reasoning for Isaiah’s act—that's not what this story is about. In the album’s final song, Cain sings, “I forgive it all as it comes back to me.” The album is a spiritual Odyssey, Isaiah just being a vessel for which masculinity and patriarchal violence is represented. We do not need to know why his disgust is projected upon Cain to such extreme ends. We just need to know what Cain’s demise represents.

Final Verse: ???

Blessed be the Daughters of Cain,
Bound to suffering eternal through the sins of their fathers
Committed long before their conception
Blessed be their whore mothers
Tired and angry
Waiting with bated breath in a ferry that will never move again
Blessed be the children, each and every one come to know their god through some senseless act of violence
Blessed be you, girl, promised to me by a man who can only feel hatred and contempt towards you
I am no good, nor evil, simply I am,
And I have come to take what is mine
I was there in the dark when you spilled your first blood
I am here now as you run from me still
Run then, child, you can’t hide from me forever

The final verse of this song is haunting. Coming from a disembodied voice, whom I have identified as a representation of God, or some “primordial Other,” as Bartky puts it (85), this verse eulogizes Cain. Beginning with her namesake, “Blessed be the Daughters of Cain, bound to suffering eternal through the sins of their fathers,” the prayer harkens back to the biblical precedent set by Cain’s murder of his brother. This once again cycles back to Ethel’s belief that she “cannot escape,” her blood, be it the blood of the suffering martyr or of her “whore mother,” which may even be one in the same. The identification of Cain as a daughter of her namesake invokes a sense of lost autonomy. Cain was, it seems, destined to be othered to a point of destruction, in much the same way the biblical Cain was: “I am not my brother’s keeper,” (Genesis 4:9). If the biblical Cain’s abandonment (killing) of his brother condemned his progeny to eternal suffering, then this clearly parallels Ethel’s abandonment of her past and her subsequent murder. She tried to disentangle herself from unresolved aspects of her life in such a destructive nature that she herself was the one destroyed. The pervasive shame of her past stems from sexual violence (in the song Hard Times, it is revealed that Cain was sexually abused by her father, a preacher. This creates an inherent connection between Cain’s sexual trauma and religious trauma. Rather than finding a healthy escape, Cain unintentionally traps herself in the same cycle—in Western Nights, her lover shows his “love in shades of black and blue.” In Gibson Girl, Isaiah exploits Cain into prostitution). It can thus be said that her shame is a heavily gendered and sexualized one. “These crosses all over my body remind me of who I used to be,” she sings, in Family Tree (Intro), “and Christ forgive these bones I’m hiding, from no one successfully.” In Family Tree, she sings, “give myself up to him in offering, let him make a woman out of me.” Cain’s conceptualization of femininity is deeply rooted in shame. This God voice tells her, “I was there in the dark when you spilled your first blood,” likely dually reflecting the social inscription of menarche as a marker of femininity, but also representative of the sexual abuse Cain underwent. There is so much trauma to unpack within Cain’s life that she simply fails to unpack it. Instead, she harbors a deep-seated kind of shame that culminates in her complete destruction—a destruction so final that her death is not the end. In Strangers, Cain is cannibalized, marking her complete bodily destruction and engulfment into the subject. Her destruction came out of her objectification, and her objectification made her into an object to be consumed. While this is all fictional, it nonetheless conveys the impact that shame has on a means of making the shamed body an inferior object. Barky affirms that shame is a tool by which othered bodies (in this case, feminine ones) are made inferior. In this fictional case, Cain’s shame destroys her, reflective of the way shame works in the real world to make one inferior, to degrade and diminish the Other.

This prayer embodies that sense of ambivalence that pervades this narrative. The God voice presents itself as morally ambiguous (“I simply am,”), yet it also identifies itself as an omniscient being, almost spiteful: “I am here now as you run from me still.” This identifies Cain’s strongest internal strife: her abandonment of God, embodied through the abandonment of her family and community, regardless of the trauma enacted upon her by them. Cain “came to know [her] God through some senseless act of violence,” in that, her father, the central religious figure in her life, enacted that violence upon her. The relationship Cain has with religion conveys her shame, but it does something more in that it operates as a force of power and dominance in her life. Whereas Isaiah is one person, religion is an institution, a living, breathing force deeply entangled with patriarchy. If this God claims Cain’s life was “promised to [him] by a man who can only feel hatred and contempt,” towards Cain, then Isaiah seems to act as a sort of prophet. A hand of God. What does this mean, then, if hatred brings her to her God?

Ptolemaea marks Cain’s succumbing to shame. Though she tried to escape it, she was enculturated into it in such a way that it followed her, destroying her; this is why she associates her God with ambivalence and hatred. While the fictional events of the album are horrific and dramatized, they metaphorically serve to reflect the construction and performativity of disgust upon the shamed body; disgust performed to such an extreme that the shamed body is destroyed entirely. As a whole, Anhedonia’s album is an exploration of the misogyny entrenched within the institution of the church and normative culture, how the patriarchy inscribes shame upon the feminine body. Isaiah is only a fictional character, his masculinity an embodiment of these forces, and Cain’s death a metaphor representing the cultural function of shame in destroying or suppressing the Other.

References:

Ahmed, Sara. “The Organisation of Hate.” In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, NED-New edition, 2., 42–61. Edinburgh University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09x4q.7.

Ahmed, Sara. “The Performativity of Disgust.” In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, NED-New edition, 2., 82–100. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Sandra Lee Bartky, “Shame and Gender,” in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (NY: Routledge, 1990), 83–98

hooks, bell, 1952-2021. All about Love : New Visions. New York :William Morrow, 2000.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09x4q.9.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “The Politics of Disgust: Practice, Theory, History,” in From Disgust to Humanity. Oxford University Press. 2010.

1. Ethel Cain is the fictional alter-ego of Anhedonia, and the titular preacher’s daughter. Throughout this album, Anhedonia explores themes of family, generational trauma, religion and religious trauma, southern culture, poverty and patriotism, sexual assault, murder, and cannibalism. To help pad the analysis of Ptolemaea, I will briefly recap the events of the album. According to the album’s lore, Cain grew up in Shady Grove, Alabama in the 90s. Her father was a preacher who sexually abused her throughout her childhood and died shortly before the timeline of the album. Following the death of her high school sweetheart, Willoughby, Cain struggles between carrying on her father’s legacy as an active member of the church and heartbreak. She runs away and is picked up as a hitchhiker by a man named Isaiah in Thoroughfare. She is pimped out by him when they reach California, in Gibson Girl. Finally, in Ptolemaea, she is brutally murdered by him, and cannibalized in Strangers. In some tracks (Televangelism and August Underground) Cain’s post-death existence is embodied through instrumentals, representing her limbo-like state in death, following her ascension to Heaven. In the last track off the album, Sun Bleached Flies, Cain sings an introspective death dirge: “What I wouldn’t give to be in church this Sunday, listening to the choir, so heartfelt, all singing, God loves you, but not enough to save you.”