Revolutionary Girl Utena and family abolition (English)
(This is a fairly old article that I left unpublished because I was never completely satisfied with it. That's why it is a lot more fragmentary than my other articles. I recently thought about it again and decided to edit it a little and publish it since it was quite complete.
Most of the article was written before I developed the majority of my current interpretation of Utena so if the reader notices anything incongruent with the article and my current interpretation, that's why.)
WARNING: This is an essay about Utena, so discussion of the series' sensitive content can be expected.
“Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour."
"
-Karl Marx.
Shoujo Kakumei Utena is, even decades after its creation, one of the most politically interesting anime I've ever seen. While of course, it has its problems, there are few series that criticize the patriarchy on the level that this series does.
As part of this, it also attacks one of the fundamental blocks of patriarchal society, the institution of the family. It criticizes the idea of the family itself.
Let me explain.
The conflict from which the plot arises, the duels for the bride of the rose, are an exaggerated version of the heterosexual marriage of the bourgeois family. Anthy is a commodity that the various characters in the series pass around to each other.
(I think the implication that most of the characters in the series are upper class, i.e. bourgeois, has to do with this. A school must be quite private and elitist to have a giant platform where students fight.)
Every family shown in Utena is horrible on one level or another. Let's see in detail how horrible they are.
Miki is obsessed with an idealized version of Kozue from his childhood who never really existed, and despises the current Kozue due to his madonna-whore complex. Kozue engages in unhealthy habits to get Miki's attention.
Episode 26 is very interesting, because here we see the series deal more directly with the issue of families, with a focus on Miki and Kozue.
The reason why Kozue is this way is because she feels abandoned by her parents, she describes herself and Miki as wild animals more than once. She is one of the many people that the current family model has failed. If she lived in a society where all affection is concentrated in the concept of family, she wouldn't be obsessed with her brother.
This whole situation is contrasted with the situation of Akio, Anthy and Utena, showing that even if the parents of the twins were more present in their lives, they would not necessarily be better off.
(Anthy even says that Akio is more like her father, showing the artificiality of the family unit.)
In a confusing scene in this episode, Miki is talking to her father on the phone, talking about her divorce, and then we see Miki's stepmother, who appears to be... Anthy?
This scene can be easily explained taking into account what the Bride of the Rose represents: the vision of a marriage not made for love, but to achieve something. Anthy here acts as a symbol of the concept of the married woman in the capitalist family unit, literally interchangeable with any other woman.
(Not only that, but the leaves seen near her back are reminiscent of the image of Anthy fading into a bush from the second sequence where Utena climbs the platform, implying that this Anthy is not the "real" one.)
And this is probably the healthiest family relationship in the entire series!
Kanae is a character who appears little in the series but I think her presence is interesting.
When she talks about Akio while in the black rose elevator she says that Akio is the "man her father chose for her". In other words, it is her family that leads her to end up in the sorry situation she is in.
Not only that, but all of her emotional suffering is caused by her desire to enter Akio and Anthy's family, to be not only his wife but her "sister" as well. It is her failure to enter this family that causes her anguish, which she then projects onto Anthy.
And when Utena asks about her status, she says the following: "it's a pity that something like this happens with who would be your sister".
Akio is only in a relationship with her to gain power in Ohtori, yet another example of a woman being treated only as a means to gain something.
And besides, Akio ends up having sex with her mother, because Akio strengthens the family unit and also breaks it, as happens in capitalism.
Even a sister who cares about her brother like Tokiko ended up harming Mamiya with her wish for eternity, which ends up being Mikage's wish for eternity.
Tokiko knew there was never a way for Mamiya to live, her wish for eternity at the end of the day couldn't help her brother.
Nanami is defined by her relationship with her brother, as is Anthy.
When Nanami accidentally comes out of the closet talking to Touga, Touga reprimands her and becomes homophobic. We can see how Touga, basically the second in command of the patriarchy in Ohtori, wants to reproduce the concept of the family unit, to which homosexuality is a threat.
(We can also see how Touga is much less subtle than Akio with this. Akio would surely have used this conversation as an opportunity to manipulate and abuse Nanami more, instead of just suppressing her.)
It's a pretty direct and explicit example of how family pressure pushes people to conform to the system, the ideological role of the family.
Later Nanami is miserable when Touga starts ignoring her, and Touga takes advantage of this to abuse Nanami.
When Nanami finds out that Touga is adopted, she is disturbed to realize the artificiality of her relationship with Touga. She feels that now she and her brother have no connection, that she has lost what made her special. So Touga takes advantage of this to convince her to fight Utena, turning her feelings into a weapon against her.
(Although there is an extra context since in Japan, there is a stigma against the idea of being adopted, due to a prioritization of blood ties).
By contrasting the situation of Akio and Anthy, who are perceived as the ideal family in the series, with that of Nanami and Touga, we can see how this is a systematic situation and not something individual.
However, at the end of the episode where this happens, Touga reveals that they are actually related by blood. Because at the end of the day, there's nothing particularly special about a blood connection, it's something that people give meaning to.
The death of Utena's parents, in other words, her loss of her family unit, is eventually what leads her on her path of trying to be a prince.
Therefore, Utena upon losing it decides to try to replace it by becoming a prince. More than once she comments that she would like to have a family, and she talks about her situation of not having a family. It is obvious that the death of her parents continues to impact her to this day.
Mikage had the same desire as her to have a family, and that ended up destroying him.
On some level, Utena understands the fragility and artificiality of this structure, which is why she decides to become a prince instead of a rose bride. However, she can't fully escape the logic of this system, so she keeps trying to replicate it. She's still in the cave, just a few steps closer to the exit.
Akio is able to manipulate and abuse Utena thanks to her desire to be part of a family.
Anthy and Akio… Well they certainly have issues.
Ok, actually I can analyze something here.
Akio and Anthy are, in the series, basically the platonic ideal of the family. Every other family relationship in the series is essentially a version of Akio and Anthy.
In the sequence of episode 34 where the central idea of the series is explained to us, we are shown the perception that everything is the fault of the witch who is the prince's little sister. This shows that it is the idea of the family that is at the base of all the conflicts in the series, as it is in the system in real life. After all, it is one's family members who teach one's first knowledge of it.
In The Origin of The Family Engels says that patriarchal society began in order to control inheritance, in other words to control something given by one's relationship with a woman.
In the series, it was thanks to Anthy that God was able to be a prince in the first place. But eventually she was held back and caught by the swords of hate, something that can be seen as a parallel to what Engels was talking about.
If Anthy weren't bound by her family relationship with Akio, she could be free of the abuse she suffers.
Now let's talk of more general examples in the show.
In the show several characters say that true friendship is false, and just something stupid. This is because in capitalist society, the family unit is idealized as the only true source of love.
The characters say that the only thing that is eternal is blood ties, unlike friendships, but family is a social construct like any other in our system. And something that is eternal is something that never advances, that never moves.
During the first several episodes of the series, Utena and Anthy live in a distorted version of a domestic life, with the two living in a single dormitory where Anthy takes care of the housework.
And of course, in this pseudo family the children are Chu-Chu.
Let me explain.
Chu-Chu is insignificant, somewhat entertaining but also a nuisance, has no voice, is mistreated on a semi-regular basis, and isn't even a human being. Chu-Chu is society's traditional view of a child in the regular family unit, which is why he is always with Anthy, the personification of female suffering under patriarchy.
Chu-Chu even looks similar to Anthy and Akio in his design, indicating that he is part of their family in a way.
Akio eventually ends this pseudo family unit to make Utena and Anthy live in his giant phallic tower, being the greatest representative of the patriarchy and as such he is in charge of making sure that people have families in the right way.
When one watches Utena, it's hard not to notice how little relevance parents have. Although character´s parents are mentioned more than once, they are never given names or even full designs. Within the fiction of the story, it can be assumed that Ohtori Academy is a boarding school, but even so, the almost total lack of presence of the characters' parents is still something curious.
I believe this absence is for two reasons: first, to show us the total inability of the family unit to protect children from the system and its abuses seen in Ohtori.
Furthermore, it shows that society's ideas about how people should organize their lives are so ingrained that families don't even have to be fully present to influence reality. like ghosts
Now let's talk about the elephant in the room: incest.
Incest is the logical conclusion of the patriarchal family environment where all power is given to the patriarch of the family. And if for you love is equivalent to domination...
It is the most extreme form of abuse that the family unit ever facilitates.
It's not something that's nice to think about, but it's something that exists in real life, so it's something that art should discuss.
This is a very complex subject and one that can be talked about a lot, so I hope I did justice to the subject. I didn't go into depth about some characters due to the focus on this specific theme.
At the end of The Origin of The Family, Engels talks about how we do not know what the family unit of the next mode of production will be like, that we can only wait and see when it appears.
At the end of Utena, Anthy leaves Ohtori to search for Utena. We don't know what she'll find out there, what there will be, but we should look for it if there's a chance it's better than what we have now.