Listening for Reconciliation: Gendered Truths about Death and Mädchen from Dorfman and Polanski to Kathia Rock

Abstract

Memento mori gained popularity in high and late Medieval Europe as populations were ravaged by plagues and pestilence of all kinds. Communicating the Latin admonishment to “remember that you must die,” allegorical motifs such as skulls and skeletons, and genres such as the Danse Macabre, emerged to convince Christians that because of the necessity of death, they should prepare themselves to meet their Maker.... My focus in this contribution is a pivotal shift that the “Death and the Maiden” motif underwent with the waning of modernity at the turn of this past millennium, and how a subtle but decolonizing shift in representations of the relationship of death and young women can be illuminated through an analysis that puts Dorfman’s play and Polanski’s adaptation in dialogue with “Terre de nos aïeux,” a 2022 music video by Kathia Rock, an Innu singer from Quebec’s Côte Nord. The shift that occurs between Dorfman’s and Polanski’s approaches to Death and the Maiden towards the need not to withhold judgement on gendered experiences of violence motivated me to see in the searing disappearances and deaths that too many across North America identifying as female, especially Indigenous, have met with over the past decades a decolonized version of the “Death and the Maiden” motif.