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International
Journal of English Literature and Culture |
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International Journal of English Literature and Culture Vol. 2(3), pp. 18 –31, March, 2014 ISSN: 2360-7831 DOI: 10.14662/IJELC2014.010 Review The Corpse Bride: Ideal Beauty and Domestic Degradation in the Work of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Ingrid Fernandez
Stanford University, 1273 Lakeside Drive, 1151, Sunnyvale, CA 94085, United States. E-mail: ingridf@stanford.edu. Tel.: 408-900-8193, Mobile: 305-877-2353.
Accepted 18 March 2014
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 1996 album,
Murder Ballads, follows a tradition in which female sexuality is
punished and women occupy supporting and often highly restricted or
completely silent roles. Cave seems to take pleasure in playing the
cunning, desire-driven killer and often utilizes the plot of the
seduction of the unsuspecting female character who, after being
taken to a secluded spot, offers little resistance to her killer,
who then abandons her lifeless body. But Cave also indulges in
personifying the doomed poet and lover of the Romantic tradition,
one which brings a certain amount of vulnerability at odds with his
hyper-masculinity. This is especially the case in the music video of
“Where the Wild Roses Grow,” in which he shares the frame of the
screen as well as the vocals with Australian pop singer Kylie
Minogue. The visual representation of the song provides an alternate
reading in which femininity overpowers the misogyny present in the
lyrics through the fluid presence of Minogue’s body in contrast to
that of Cave, who is awkward and rigid. My inquiry goes beyond the
textual evidence of the lyrics to include embodied voices and Cave’s
performative persona, both of which prevent a simplistic diagnosis
of the Murder Ballads as a primarily misogynist cultural production. |
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