Punisher MAX: Butterfly (2 of 3)

Thinking about it, there are a number of religious themes running through Butterfly’s story, as well as some extremely common (and unfortunate) tropes. The narrator is, of course, raped by her father as a child, then years later has a sexual bondage game go badly wrong, with the strong implication that this is why she became a hitwoman. She mentions, without remorse, having likely killed over 250 people in her short life so far, although she does state she tries to at least be kind about her murders.

This is particularly interesting when contrasted with the Punisher, who is the “classic” violent good guy. His origin story is having his wife and child killed in a drive-by mafia hit gone bad, and it’s quite possible he mowed down 250 people just in the single “hit” which Butterfly, our narrator, witnessed. It’s clear he has no thought of kindness whatsoever: without any apparent remorse and in front of children, he messily wipes out an entire mafia birthday party.

I find this tremendously annoying. Why do we keep insisting, well beyond rational view of either history or statistics, that violent men always gain power through bloody revenge… but somehow women are emotionally an entirely different species, and can gain power only through sexual abuse perpetrated against them? We know men are just as capable of emotional devastation due to being raped — why do we keep turning a blind eye to that, and pretending it’s not so? We know women are driven by just as many, and just as complex motivations, as men are — and a few more besides, I suspect — so why do we keep insisting they must be no more than powerless children and the playthings of violent men, before they realize something is wrong — and rebel?

Butterfly: I find myself pondering the source of the name. The story would appear to be about her spiritual development, so that would indicate to me the author chose “butterfly” as her protagonist’s alias on more than just the basis of its fragile beauty. Butterfly’s spiritual ascent, a la Inanna’s story, is more subtle than a simple length of time spent in a chrysalis, after all. She’s going to die in the physical realm, and she knows it — she effectively commits suicide by insisting on writing her book. It is the book, however, that I feel is also her re-ascent from her literal and metaphorical Underworld. Like Inanna, and through her “tell-all” writing, she returns with greater power — with the ability to turn her killing literary gaze on those who did not appreciate her, and therefore must go to the Underworld in her place.

The names are all evocative. Mort is the name of Butterfly’s “handler” — rather apropos — and Celeste is her beloved. Fascinating to discover Elliot means “my god is the lord.” So he’s a christian element? Interesting. He’s her “life editor” in a way — does that make him her sukkal? I like that.

The Punisher is almost ancillary to the story; I rather like the peculiar religious motif he fulfills through her near-dreaming remembrances. Where she is cast as Inanna, the half-remembered Sumerian goddess who was nevertheless empowered in her own Self, he appears as the heartlessly zealous Christian warrior-archangel. He is the great destroyer, in some ways, the one who enables “the temple brought down on their heads…” His scenes are few and heavily shadowed, and his weapon is always the most prominent object in the scene; very patriarchal feeling.

There are so many fascinating angles of intellectual approach to this story that I wonder if some of them were unconsciously added by the writer. From my admittedly limited experience, that’s often the case with really good, heartfelt writing, after all. Just sitting here thinking, I can easily spot the feminist aspect: Woman, abused by men until she snaps and kills them for power/revenge/a living, until she realizes she’s become just another of their tools — at which point she too does her best, even to her own physical death, to bring part of the patriarchal “temple” down. There’s the religious viewpoint: the slaughter and forced assimilation of more ancient religions and perspectives by the violent, judgmental sect of Christianity.

The story speaks on a supernatural and spiritual level as well: a tortured spirit, guided by the dead, which has descended so far and shed so much that it returns renewed and more powerful than before. Further, the narrator is a lesbian, and her black lover is killed — effectively accidentally sacrificed by her, in fact — in Butterfly’s quest to transcend both her past and her present; there’s another level of meaning. There are elements of the hero’s quest as well, although I like to think this story leans more towards a heroine’s quest instead of the classic, straightforward “hero slaying monsters to the adulation of the crowd.” There’s also Butterfly’s ultimate refusal of the classic male motivation of revenge — and there’s the weirdly effective foreshadowing of the wall with mythic elements scribbled all over it.