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maggot-monger · 11 months

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lucifer gender symbolism essay part 4: women in white

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this is far and away THE reason i started thinking about fem!lucifer in the context of spn back when i first got into the show.

women in white are SO ICONIC on supernatural. the first scene of the show features mary dying in a nightgown that is technically pale pink* but registers as white, and later in the same episode jess wears a mostly-white nurse costume and then dies in a pale periwinkle* nightgown that also reads as white. the pilot is all about constance welch, who is literally a type of ghost called a woman in white. in bloody mary, sam has a vision of jess standing on a street corner wearing a starkly white nightgown. lilith goes to her death to break the last seal in a white dress. it’s a whole thing.

women dressed in white especially in early spn are almost always either about to be the victims of something horrible, or are dangerous and monstrous — and often they’re both, especially if they’re dressed in all white.

our two main victims from this costuming-based character category are mary and jess. both of them represent brutal, devastating, life-changing, unfair loss. mary’s death is the reason the winchesters uprooted; it’s the reason john is like that; it’s the reason sam and dean grew up the way they did in this heavily trauma-based and trauma-inducing lifestyle. it feels random (even though we later learn it wasn’t); it was definitely shocking; it was cruel and unfair. jess died the same way, and her death at least played some part in sam going back to hunting; it didn’t feel as random because there was already precedent from mary, but it felt just as shocking and just as cruel and unfair. these women in life represented idealized domestic bliss and normalcy for their partners and families, and their deaths caused the end of the possibility for that kind of romanticized normal american lifestyle for the men close to them. in death, they become symbols behind which the men mourning them rally to seek revenge.

(there’s endless more things to be said about mary and jess’s death and their costuming etc but i gotta keep my eyes on the prize here of lucifer analysis. ok. carrying on)

now let’s do two of the main monsters in this category: constance welch was a victim of her husband’s infidelity before she became a killer, and as a ghost she kills unfaithful men, never able to get the revenge she wants for what was done to her and becoming a monster (partly) because of it. she can never have enough, she can never break the cycle, and, importantly, she “can never go home,” because she also killed her own innocent children, who want their revenge on her. again, lots to be said here about how sam and dean also can never go home etc, but i gotta keep it pushing. so: lilith. lilith was once a human woman whose essence was warped until she became a demon. we don’t know specifically how that happened, something to do with temptation, but in any case, the transition from human on earth to demon in hell is typically portrayed as undesirable, to say the least. beyond that, stories of the human fall are stories about not being able to go home: a human in a fallen state can’t live in their home of eden anymore, and has to rough it outside of the garden. presumably, that’s part of lilith’s story. the story of demons on supernatural is very similar: human beings who die and go to hell, and then are trapped there until they manage to get out (which is portrayed as being very difficult to accomplish in the earliest seasons of the show, especially for demons in the deepest parts of hell, like lilith). so the earliest humans fell and could never return to the garden, and humans who go to hell struggle to return home to earth.

so that’s all a whole symbol system, right? if you’re a woman in white on supernatural, either something horrible happened to you, or something horrible is about to happen to you. you’re going to represent horrible loss whether you’re just a victim or both a victim and a monster. you’re going to get trapped in an unending trauma cycle, or you’re going to be the reason for someone else’s unending trauma cycle — probably both.

and lucifer…

well!

lucifer’s first two appearances (after the nun) are as sarah, nick’s dead wife (another character who fits the victim subtype of women in white), and jess. both times, lucifer wears a white nightgown.

and for good goddamn reason, because lucifer fits the archetype perfectly.

did lucifer once represent an ideal? absolutely: lucifer was the most beautiful of the host, god’s favorite, THE angel.

does lucifer’s loss represent a loss of perfection and purity? yep, lucifer was proof angels could make choices they weren’t supposed to, even/especially the best of them.

did the loss of lucifer cause a huge upheaval for his family that sucks a lot and changes the course of their lives for the worse? big time: god left; gabriel ran away; heaven seems to have at least somewhat restructured in the fallout; everyone set their sights on the apocalypse after which the problems will end and they can finally rest.

do those who lost lucifer miss lucifer/what was lost when lucifer fell (even if that’s complicated)? seems like it. uriel definitely does; michael seems to have missed lucifer, even while being angry at and blaming him; and raphael at least misses how everything was before it fell apart.

was what happened to lucifer violent and awful? pretty unquestionably. regardless of how much you think he deserved it, what ended up happening to lucifer — being cast down, imprisoned in isolation in the depths of hell for millennia, total loss of reputation, and a death sentence — is point-blank brutal.

can lucifer ever go home? nope.

does anyone want revenge for what happened to lucifer? well, lucifer does, at the very least

can lucifer escape the cycle of trauma? nope: he perpetuates it by doing the apocalypse among other things, leaning into the devil role, doing more of what got him that title in the first place, and even when he tries to escape it by offering to drop everything to walk off the chessboard with michael in swan song he gets shot down.

that’s a signature supernatural woman in white, babey.

so, ok. woman in white, though. men show up wearing white sometimes on spn. a man wearing a white shirt is less of a tell that something is going to happen to him or because of him than it is for women, but it’s still part of the visual shorthand. men also wear all white sometimes, especially in psychiatric contexts (notably sam as a patient in season 7 in the context of hallucifer, as well as sam in houses of the holy while he’s playing a nurse). but these instances are uniforms that the wearers have little choice about wearing, and they are not especially gendered: female patients also wear all white (e.g. marin in ‘the born-again identity). to my knowledge, there are no roles in supernatural specifically for men in white; men wearing white do so in contexts where women also would and do wear white.

the one** exception to this is lucifer in ‘the end;’ how much endverse is zachariah’s creation vs what literally happened in that version of 2014 is debatable, but either way, sam!lucifer was one of our few examples of a ~man in all white in spn. and like…this reads to me as costuming wanting to do a woman in white thing, but not wanting to put jared padalecki in a white dress. lucifer already appeared as sarah and jess in all white nightgowns; lucifer fits the woman in white archetype; there’s no Thing like that for men, so they put sam!lucifer in an all-white suit that draws a stark visual parallel to the women in all white we’ve seen lucifer as before, and there you go. still a woman in white archetype, just wearing a man costume at the time.

**i know asmodeus did a white suit too but that's way outside of the range of kripke-era symbolism i’m mainly talking about, and it seems like probably a direct reference to lucifer’s endverse look. i’m also probably not the right person to do an analysis of asmodeus even if i wanted to include a discussion of his suit. so.

to sum up, lucifer is a genderless non-human entity, but (s)he’s also a Woman In White™, even when appearing as a man. lucifer is, i would go so far to say, the epitome of the Woman In White, the maxed out, most op version of everything the show did with that symbolism. so. lucifer is fitting into a feminine archetype real well, there.

*i’m not trying to ignore that neither mary nor jess actually died in white. as far as i can tell, most of the fandom remembers mary’s nightgown as white, and i’ve had conversations about whether jess’s nightgown is actually white and it’s just a lighting thing, so they’re both Women In White (TM) even though they’re not actually that (and jess is explicitly turned into one in sam’s memory and in lucifer’s appearance as jess wearing the same nightgown as in ‘bloody mary,’ since that nightgown is actually definitely white).

it’s a great choice, i think, to have them fill this symbolic role while actually having been maybe more complicated than that; having their memory simplified and ~purified so they can serve the perfect fridged domestic woman role — regardless of their actual personalities in life or how well that symbolism actually applies to them (and it really doesn’t fit at least mary that well, given her hunter background that we learn about later!) i bring this up because of lucifer’s endverse white suit, which, you know, is an all white look, but also has that off-white shirt. so, like, something something, attempts to fit into a specific archetype, but there are inevitably going to be slight imperfections because no living thing can be JUST a symbol.

(a lot of people have written extensively about women in white in supernatural, including me. i have focused largely on lucifer, because of course i have. some additional posts here, here, here, and here.)

part 3: the dead nun part 5: white women masterpost

#spn #spn thots #meta #lucifer #women in white #jess!lucifer #sarah!lucifer #sam!lucifer

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