Christina Braithwhite’s Strange Love Craft

Amy Hough

Christina Braithwhite (Abbey Lee), the Hitchcock-esque, icy blonde, who steps into Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country with enough explosive force to knock a truckload of racist goons off their axles, is not an easy character to define. Her motives are hard to penetrate because she does not exist in our world. She is a character of our future, made from our past—yet dissociated from it. And she is definitely not of our present, or much less the present of 1950s Chicago. Much like Donna Haraway’s conception of the cyborg, Christina is an imaginary figure of the future who has manipulated biology and magic in such a manner as to banish the dualisms (she, he; Black, white) that separate those in society who are allowed to succeed and those who are held back (“Cyborg Manifesto”). Yet it is her inability to understand that such dualisms cannot be homogenized away without the messy work of social action that makes her monstrous beyond Haraway’s conceptions. In fact, it makes her the villain of the piece.

Like Haraway’s cyborg, Christina is unfaithful to her origins and to all the patriarchal sexist, genderist, and racist rot that has elevated her family to such heights while still leaving her branded as a second-class citizen, regardless of how hard she has worked to succeed. Christina will not reconcile herself with her family’s racist past and their refusal to share their magic with others—others whose magic they have co-opted and named as their own. She refuses such a reconciliation because she, too, feels she is an outsider—but it is this denial that is her fatal flaw. For Christina, her end goal defines her means: when she is immortal, she will share her magic. Of course, she will choose with whom to share. But unlike her forebears, Christina will not decide on the basis of race; rather, she will decide, most likely, on the basis of affinity. In this fabulation, I would speculate that she would align herself with others who have worked hard and earned their knowledge but have been held back by oppressive forces—but such theorizing is best left in alternate realities.

Like Haraway’s cyborg, Christina is capable of pure fluidity, of transgressing borders of gender, race and class—of doing whatever the fuck she wants and being whomever the fuck she wants to be. But, daring to break down these borders in the land of men has made her into a monstrous object who does monstrous things like scavenge off dead bodies to achieve her ends. It ultimately makes her willing to kill Atticus (Jonathan Majors)—not because of a long-institutionalized racism but because he is the key to her salvation. That Christina considers killing Atticus is deranged, but to her psychotic self, her teleology is quite straightforward: Atticus’s death will give her immortality; immortality will give her time to study and master the magic that allows her to defy the dualisms that hold her and those she loves down. And, yes, Christina does love. She loves in a monstrous manner that is perverse in so many ways and sometimes hard to fathom—but her love’s existence is quite mappable.

Christina and Ruby (Wunmi Mosaku) are visually linked from the beginning. Ruby is first shown on stage with red lipstick and a red flower in her hair—breathy from her singing. Christina first appears on screen with a red hat and red gloves—breathy from a car chase. They both present as women who need to be noticed—women who have power and sexuality brimming up from underneath their skin. When Christina first approaches Ruby as William (Jordan Patrick Smith), she does it with the goal of locating Hiram’s orrery, but it is Ruby’s yearning to be “other” that strikes a chord with Christina. As Ruby says, “For us it’s a rat-race to the finish line and it’s winner takes it all. And I damn know if I was in your skin, I wouldn’t even have to run” (ep. 4, “A History of Violence”).

With this utterance by Ruby, Christina realizes she has found a kindred spirit—one who will certainly be a convenient ally—but also someone with whom to share her magical world, a world we feel she has been unable to share with many others. When Ruby and Christina (in her William guise) first make love, Ruby cuts her palm and William licks the blood, sealing a bond between them as she literally ingests Ruby, just as Ruby will later ingest Christina’s magic potion.

The passion that drives Christina’s ambition is the same passion she feels for Ruby’s success. While Ruby is screaming in terror during her transformation back from the woman we will get to know as Hillary (Jamie Neumann), a television is turned up loud to drown out her cries. On it a news reporter discusses a swarm of invasive locusts: “After seven days they will reach full sexual maturity as adult locusts destined to devour everything in their path” (ep. 5, “Strange Case”). This is a vivid metaphor for how Christina hopes magic will help Ruby and herself to devour everything that dares to stand in their paths. Then, after Ruby undergoes her second transformation, she dons a set of red gloves—much like the pair we first encounter Christina wearing. A circle is drawn connecting the three women—Christina, Ruby, and Hillary—and their hopes and desires as they bravely wear the sartorial symbolical power colour, ready to take over the world in whatever form they are forced to use. (And if we wish to draw a line connecting William, let’s do that too: his jaunty red pocket square signals his membership in the quadrumvirate.)

We view scenes in which Christina, in her William casing, gently bathes Ruby after her transformations, listening intently to her adventures in whiteness. She listens and responds caringly, but her inability to fully comprehend the extent of Ruby’s pain is emphasized in the scene in which she “gifts” Ruby with a maid/server’s costume, replete with gift box and bow (ep. 5, “Strange Case”). This scene is notable because in its counter in Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, Caleb Braithwhite—Christina’s alter ego—also sends Ruby to a party with the top lodge members of The Order of the Ancient Dawn, but he sends her as a guest wearing a black evening gown, not as a maid to scurry and hide unobserved (245-59). The contrast between the two vignettes could not be more poignant. Christina’s mission demeans Ruby and strips away the achievements she had been trying to enjoy wearing her Hillary guise, while Caleb’s mission values Ruby as an asset. Why did Christina’s mission have to humiliate Ruby? More than Ruby’s being a convenient pawn, this callous treatment by her lover signifies Christina’s tone-deafness when actually gauging what racial inequality might entail.

Christina is able to connect with Ruby in as much as she can see Ruby as a reflection of her own desires and will. To Christina, their bond is deep. They are both women who want to transcend the boundaries they are forced to inhabit. When Christina offers Ruby the use of her magic she is symbolically offering her love—the same love her father denied her, as he denied her membership into the Sons of Adam and, thus, her access to higher magic.

When Christina attempts to relate to Ruby’s pain over the murder of Emmett Till, she does so by hiring men to beat and “kill” her in the same manner Till was murdered (ep. 8, “Jig-a-Bobo”). Although she is brutalized and terrorized by the ordeal, Christina fails to understand that her physical experience of Till’s death is not an equivalent surrogate for living as Black because she was always in control of the situation—from hiring the men to carry out the brutality to resurrecting herself, good-as-new, after it was done. In the words of Jessica Toomer, “as we see Christina emerge from the water unscathed we realize its true meaning. Christina, like so many white women, carries inherent invulnerability. She can be made to suffer, but she’ll never suffer as badly as a boy like Emmett Till. As Ruby, or Tic, or Leti.”

So much of Christina’s villainy is bound up in her thoughtlessness—her inability to concern herself with things beyond her own goals and desires. Donna Haraway describes this dissociation with things other than oneself as a type of evil apathy that can lead to the destruction of species and worlds. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, Haraway states:

… here was a human being unable to make present to himself what was absent, what was not himself what the world in its sheer not-one-selfness is and what claims-to-be inhere in not-oneself. Here was someone who could not be a wayfarer, could not entangle, could not track the lines of living and dying, could not cultivate response-ability, could not make present to itself what it is doing, could not live in con-sequences or with consequence. (Staying 36)

This paragraph describing the SS-Obersturmbannführer Eichmann could just as easily apply to Christina: unaware of her flaws and never seeing any part of herself as lacking—beyond a missing Y chromosome—she has never worked on that part of her character that allows her to entangle with others, to feel as much for them as she does for herself. The people who die in aid of her cause are simply what is required for her to achieve the greatness she believes would have been rightfully hers if not for an accident of birth.

It seems inevitable that Ruby would be unable to return this strange woman’s strange love. She enjoyed all the advantages Christina’s magic and influence afforded. She enjoyed the attention Christina paid her and the concern she offered for her problems. She enjoyed making love to William—but herein lies the rub. She couldn’t love Christina as Christina. Much like Christina’s father couldn’t love her because she was a girl, Ruby was not attracted to Christina the woman.

Ruby’s inability to love Christina is evidenced by parallel scenes in episodes two and ten. In episode two, Christina is called down to the barn to help a cow give birth to a breach shoggoth. She cuddles the mewling creature, freshly expelled from its mother’s uterus, covered in blood and dripping in gelatinous goo. A farm labourer asks her if she has ever done this before and she replies, “No, it’s my first time,” as she presses the fleshy, wet, monstrous mass into her hair and face (“Whitey’s on the Moon”).

In episode ten, the aptly titled “Full Circle,” Ruby tries to kiss Christina. It is an unenthusiastic and awkward kiss. The audience is left wondering if this is a distraction so Ruby can steal some of Christina’s essence. Then Christina asks, “Have you ever?” She is asking if Ruby has ever been with a woman before. In a reprise of Christina’s reply in episode two, Ruby says, “No, it’s my first time.” We are reminded of the image of that gnarled, slimy wriggling body, and the idea is formed that this, for Ruby, goes against her instincts—whether it is because Ruby is not sexually attracted to Christina or because Christina’s own monstrosity has become impossible to ignore. The abnormal grotesquerie of the birthing of a monster does not pair well with a love scene and foreshadows nothing good.

Although Christina offers to spare Atticus’s life and leave his family alone if he gives her the Book of Names, Atticus refuses. It is in her uncharacteristic flash of rage that we see her true villainy—her white-woman privilege that makes her believe she could so easily trick a man into giving up his family’s history—their magic—for his life. With this gesture she has shown that she does not, will not, cannot, despite her strange love for Ruby, understand the experience of the Black American.

As a white woman, I can’t say I didn’t hope for more from Christina. She arrived on the scene with such style, helping the heroes avert danger while her Veronica Lake-like hair rippled and shone. And when Ruby kissed her in her Christina form, my inhale was audible: could this be a turning point? But of course not. Christina was never meant to be an ally—although she had so much at her disposal to help her be one. Instead of using her experience of oppression to help people climb out from under it, she did nothing—she didn’t think about it, she was thoughtless. She loved Ruby, as much as a damaged, self-obsessed woman can, but her love for Ruby was never enough to disengage her from her own self interest.

But as with all the best villains, it is their human frailties that seem to pull us toward them—hope against hope. And for Christina it was her desire to be loved, the desire that completely undid all her careful planning. When Ji-Ah (Jamie Chung) goes into the darkness and connects Christina and Atticus, we are made privy to a vision of Christina—in her Ruby guise—recasting the invulnerability spell on Leti (Jurnee Smollett). She is keeping the promise she made to her dead lover and keeping her sister safe. Leti, in return, will cast the spell that robs Christina—and all white people—of magic. The little humanity Christina was able to share becomes her undoing because it was not enough.

In Ruff’s book, Christina’s counterpart, Caleb Braithwhite, while being unceremoniously deposited outside the Illinois border, manages to escape with his life but loses all power to wield magic (365-6). In the television series, Christina loses her magic and then dies a merciless death at the hands of Dee (Jada Harris)—Atticus’s young cousin (or sister). She is of a younger generation, and, unlike Atticus who is willing to die for his family, his magic, and his history, Dee represents a younger generation who is tired of white apathy. Christina may first appear as a cyborg vision of the future able to use magic to transcend the dualisms of biology, but we soon learn her transcendence is merely superficial: she is slipping on a skin, much like a video-game character slips on a skin that changes its appearance but does nothing to affect gameplay. She isn’t evolved enough to conceive of the responsibility of dwelling in another person’s skin. It is young Dee who represents a sociopolitical view of an empowered present, of oppressed people the world over who are tired of all those in privileged positions who stand by and gaze on as those without power are taken advantage of, disrespected and killed. It is Dee, now truly a cyborg with her mechanical arm, who squeezes the breath out of Christina. It is Dee who says, “You still haven’t learned” (ep. 10, “Full Circle).

 

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books, 2006.

Green, Misha, creator. Lovecraft Country. HBO, 2020.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–181.

—. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Ruff, Matt. Lovecraft Country. Harper Perennial, 2020.

Toomer, Jessica. “Lovecraft Country and the Ugly Consequences of White Women’s Complicity.” SYFY WIRE, 26 Oct. 2020.