The Depiction of Women as Monsters and Love as a Dependency in Cradle of Filth's works

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2016 im Fachbereich Englisch - Literatur, Werke, Note: 1,3, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), Veranstaltung: Hauptseminar British Heavy Metal: Performance and Theatricality, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Cradle of Filth singer Daniel Lloyd Davey repeatedly referred to the lyrics of his texts as "dark fairy tales" in interviews. As song-titles such as "Devil Woman", and "Nymphetamine" or album titles, such as "Cruelty and the Beast" imply, one of the central themes in the band's lyrics are monstrous women, often possessing supernatural powers, such as witches, nymphs, or vampires.
This paper will analyse the way women and the topic of love are presented in Cradle of Filth texts and argue that by de-humanzing women and inverting traditional gender roles, women are presented as monstrous creatures to whom men are subordinate. Love is depicted as a dependency that men cannot escape. Furthermore the paper will show in what way the dehumanisation of women operates and critically discuss to what degree this undermines or confirms patriarchal gender ideologies.

According to Eckstein, song lyrics cannot be studied without taking sonic and videographic aspects into account: "Lyrics and poetry are similar; they both employ verbal language, often using characteristic rhetorical and stylistic devices, to tell tales (in the ballad tradition), to propose ideas about life and the world, sometimes to illustrate the limits of language in negotiations between 'subject' and 'world' [...]. Yet they are also different in at least one respect: while the voice in poetry is generally perceived as an internalised one encoded in the medium of writing, the voice of lyrics is by definition external. Lyrics, this is to say, cannot be conceived outside of the context of their vocal (and musical) actualisation - i.e. their performance".

The primary material of the analysis will be the lyrics of Cradle of Filth's songs Nymphetamine and Gabrielle in conjunction with the musical realisation of both songs. Furthermore, aspects of the official music video of Nymphetamine and the album cover of "Darkly, Darkly Venus Aversa" are taken into account.

The different media will be related and contrasted to each other and the meaning potential analysed. For the textual analysis, a close reading combined with a gender perspective were chosen as critical approaches and were supplemented by interdisciplinary theories about the representation of monsters and monstrous women in particular. Though the core of the analysis is based on literary criticism, concepts of musicology and cultural studies are taken into account and discussed together with the textual analysis.