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9th Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness
Monday 10th March - Thursday 13th March
2008
Salzburg, Austria
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 2: Scelestus Familia
Chair: William Myers
Peter Pan as Evil Escritoire: A Children’s Classic and the Heart of Darkness
Phil Fitzsimmons
Centre for Research in Language and Literacy, University of Wollongong, Australia
Often considered to be a children’s picture book classic, Barrie’s (1905) script and subsequent versions of Peter Pan, including Disney’s (2007) platinum boxed DVD set, had their origin in Barrie’s earlier text entitled Little White Bird (Barrie 1902). This latter text is now recognised as an autobiographical treatise on paedophilia in general and Barrie’s obsession with a child in particular. Literary myth has also suggested that this text appeared in a men’s only magazine, which had paedophiliac leanings, as perhaps the first sealed centrefold. With the exception of Rose’s (1984) brief mention of this foundational essence of evil and a few psychological applications of Barrie’s text as representing some men’s inability to mature psychologically (Mead 1993), no research appears to have been undertaken into the transtextual nature of Peter Pan or its existential commentary. Using the principles of visual metaphor (Fitzsimmons 2007) and Lakoff’s (2006) ‘folk theory of language’, this paper argues that because Peter Pan arose in a context of time and place when the concept of evil had begun to lose it’s religious overtones and in a context of situation when Barrie began to wrestle with what he perceived to be the social epitome of evil it represents a grounded theory of liminality. In other words Barrie’s words are “heavy words lightly thrown” (Nieme and Ellis 2001) and although couched in a children’s text represent an untapped definition of evil.
Download Draft Conference Paper - 
Bad Mummy: Kate McCann and the Media
Nicola Goc
University of Tasmania, Tasmania
Ever since three-year-old Madeline McCann went missing from a Portuguese resort in the summer of 2007, while her parents were having dinner with friends at a nearby restaurant, the world’s news services have carried rolling news bulletins about the “story” of every parent’s worst nightmare. From day one news bulletins ran with parallel news discourses: one focusing on the desperate search for the child and hypothesising about the “evil” predator who allegedly kidnapped the child; and the other a moral news discourse focusing on the “bad” parents who left their children home alone. Outside this news paradigm through news web blogs a vociferous global debate has proliferated that has centred on the behaviour of the McCanns, and in particular on the mother, Kate McCann. In Medea style (reminiscent of Lindy Chamberlain in the pre-digital age) Kate McCann has become the central figure in the public discourse about the missing toddler. She is being judged as guilty or innocent of her child’s disappearance through a moral frame. Kate McCann, it is said, is unemotional, and yet she is also too emotional, she laughs too much, she doesn’t cry enough, she dresses inappropriately, and she deliberately courts the media, she was depressed and struggled with her “difficult” child—she is a “bad” mother. Since Madeline McCann’s disappearance there have been many twists and turns in the police investigation, and even more twists and turns in the ongoing news coverage, with both feeding into a strident public discourse which positions the debate within a moral frame. This paper will map both the news coverage and public discourse on the disappearance of Madeline McCann to draw parallels with the 1980 disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain in outback Australia and will uncover a recurrent and disturbing meta-narrative that places Kate McCann, not as a grieving mother, but in a deviant maternal frame.
Download Draft Conference Paper -
Blaming Daddy: Representing the Evil Father in Popular Culture
Jason Bainbridge
University of Tasmania, Tasmania
The father remains an ambiguous figure in popular culture. For legal scholars, like Peter Fitzpatrick, (drawing on the work of Freud, Darwin and Atkinson), it is the death of the father that enables law and morality to be enacted. For most writers of heroic literature, it is the absence of the father that forces the protagonist to become the hero. But what occurs when the father is not only present, but also a figure of evil? This paper looks at the representation of the evil father in three popular media texts - Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars, Norman Osborn in Spiderman and Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks. In each text, evil is manifested in the creation of a secondary persona, the alter egos of Darth Vader, the Green Goblin and BOB respectively. This offers the child (or surrogate child) of the father the potential to become as evil as the father by adopting his alter ego. But ultimately it also permits the father to be redeemed, to have the atrocities he has committed to be blamed on this alter ego and therefore insulates and absolves the father from responsibility. In this way, popular cultural representations of the evil father provide an interesting way of mapping how we perceive the evil that fathers do (they are, quite literally, "not themselves") and how we apportion blame.
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