Category: Film As Visual Literature Studies

By Mary Mba (Ph.D.)

When I was a child, Mom was a teacher and had a rich collection of literary work that I always got lost in as my escape. One of the memorable books I read was She—not just the first novel, but the entire trilogy: She, Ayesha: The Return of She, and Wisdom’s Daughter. I didn’t fully understand the cultural implications then, but I was captivated. Ayesha was beautiful, wise, terrifying, and unyielding. She ruled. She didn’t apologize. She lived for thousands of years, and her story stayed with me for decades.

Years later, while teaching Death Becomes Her in my Women in Film course, I began to see it differently and would often reference Haggard’s She in my classes. I’d shown the film many times as an example of visual satire, camp, and gender performance—but something clicked. The themes of fear, beauty, power, and punishment weren’t just superficial. They echoed the same cultural anxieties I had first encountered in She. And so, this paper—and this blog post—was born.

“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”: A Name I Know Too Well

Over the years, I’ve been called that—“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”—not as a compliment, but as an attempt to silence me. To mock my defiance, my curiosity, and my penchant for being a critical and logical thinker. To punish my refusal to bow to illogic or perform submissiveness so unquestioningly. But here’s the irony: they called me that not because I refused to obey—because I asked critical questions, thought outside the box, was creative, pushed boundaries, had a can-do attitude, refused to just conform, and stepped out of line – to improve on and do it even better.

Just like Ayesha.
Just like Lisle.

Two Immortal Women, A World of Fear

In She (1887), H. Rider Haggard introduces Ayesha: a veiled, ancient queen who rules over the lost African kingdom of Kôr. She’s more than beautiful—she’s unbearable to behold. Her gaze kills. Her voice commands armies. But she is also an Orientalist fantasy: white and wise, ruling over “uncivilized” African subjects, her power derived from a mystical fire hidden deep in the heart of Africa.

The novel is a product of British colonial anxiety—a time when the empire was both expanding and crumbling, and Victorian masculinity was obsessed with controlling the “wild” unknown. Ayesha, therefore, is the feminine Other: desired and feared, powerful and dangerous, and ultimately undone by the very mystery that defines her.

Fast forward to Death Becomes Her (1992). Lisle von Rhuman is just as commanding—an immortal beauty who seduces aging celebrities with a potion of eternal youth. Her appearance is coded as exotic but sanitized: a vaguely Mediterranean accent, long flowing gowns, Middle Eastern décor, and a surreal, ageless presence. She lives in a palatial Beverly Hills estate that could double as a temple. Her power, like Ayesha’s, is spiritualized, sexualized, and elusive. We never really know where she’s from. That’s the point. She is Othered, but safely packaged for the Western gaze.

The Psychology of Glamorous Entrapment

From a psychoanalytic view, Ayesha and Lisle embody the Freudian death drive—they don’t grow or evolve, they just loop: around obsession, vanity, loss, and denial. Their beauty is a trap. Their immortality? A gilded coffin.

In Lacanian terms, their reflection becomes their prison. They’re stuck performing an ideal version of themselves, and that performance… slowly falls apart.

From Freud to Lacan to Kristeva, the psychology in both stories is clear: these women are trapped in the mirror. Immortality is not a gift—it’s a loop. Ayesha can’t move on from her past. Lisle is frozen in her aesthetic present. And Madeline and Helen—Lisle’s customers—become grotesque dolls, eternally reapplying paint over decay.

Enter Julia Kristeva. In her theory of abjection, she describes the abject as what we try to cast off in order to be “clean,” “whole,” or “civilized.” It’s the stuff that blurs boundaries—between life and death, self and other, inside and outside. It’s vomit, blood, rot… or a woman whose neck is twisted backward but still walks in heels. In both She and Death Becomes Her, the immortal body becomes abject: a horrifying, leaking symbol of what must be expelled to maintain order—but that refuses to go quietly.

These women don’t live forever.
They perform forever.
And in doing so, they become both icons… and abjections.

Power + Punishment = The Price of Being “Too Much”

Ayesha and Lisle are punished not because they’re evil—but because they’re too powerful. Too commanding. Too unapologetic. Too unknowable. The narratives demand their collapse to restore patriarchal order.

Madeline and Helen, meanwhile, are punished for aging, then punished for refusing to age. Their co-dependent decay isn’t just grotesque—it’s a satire of how society turns women into rivals, then cannibalizes them.

The Exotic Immortal and the Colonial Gaze

Ayesha’s African empire is visually lush but racially caricatured. Her dark-skinned servants speak in broken English. The white male explorers see her as goddess and monster, mother and mistress. Her femininity is both the height of allure and the reason she must be destroyed.

Lisle may not be “colonial” in the traditional sense, but she’s no less coded. She’s timeless, foreign, and unknowable. Her immortality is portrayed as forbidden knowledge—like ancient wisdom stolen from temples—and her body is marked not by race, but by exotic performance. She’s the kind of Other that Hollywood adores: seductive, mysterious, and conveniently unattached to any real cultural identity.

Camp, Queer Time, and Living on the Edge of Decay

Of course, Death Becomes Her doesn’t just lean into satire—it leans into camp. Stilettos on corpses. Lipstick on broken necks. Sequins over splinters. It’s fabulous and horrifying, and queer scholars have long celebrated it for refusing naturalism. The women don’t die. They don’t grow. They just exist, unnaturally and unapologetically.

And that, too, is a kind of resistance.

Ayesha is camp, too—in her high drama, her divine pronouncements, her robes and rituals. She is queen, priestess, diva, and drag.

What Do We See in the Mirror?

When I look at Ayesha and Lisle, I don’t just see fictional women—I see reflections of cultural obsessions. I see what we do to powerful women who don’t conform. I see the fear of aging, the punishment of visibility, and the danger of desire unbound.

But I also see possibility. Performance. Resistance. A touch of the divine.

💬 Let’s Talk

This blog post reflects just a portion of my full academic paper:
📖 *“The Immortal, the Vain, and the Undone: A Comparative Analysis of H. Rider Haggard’s She and Death Becomes Her”
🗣️ What does immortality mean to you?
👁️‍🗨️ What are you refusing to let die?
💅🏾 And what version of you lives forever in the mirror?

By Mary Mba, Ph.D.

I’ve watched Death Becomes Her more times than I can count. I’ve taught it in my Women in Film classes for years, always amazed at how this glammed-up, campy 1992 film sparks such serious conversations about aging, beauty, power, and the lengths women are asked to go to remain visible.

But the older I get—and the deeper I dive into stories of monstrous women, divine mothers, and witches with impossible grace—the more one character in this film stands out to me:

Not Madeline Ashton.

Not Helen Sharp.

But Lisle von Rhoman.

Swathed in silk, nearly nude, adorned with gold and mystery, Lisle floats into the story like a postmodern goddess. She’s played by Isabella Rossellini with the grace of an immortal and the gaze of someone who knows you will obey her—or suffer. And she offers something no woman in the real world is supposed to have: eternal youth.

Of course, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch.

“Take care of yourself,” she tells Madeline. “You and your body are going to be together a long time. Be good to it.”

“You may continue your career for ten years… but at the end of that time, before people become suspicious, you have to disappear from public view forever.”

That line always makes me pause.

We’re taught that beauty is visibility. That the reward for being young, slim, flawless, is to be seen. But what Death Becomes Her shows us—what Lisle teaches—is that in this system, beauty also requires erasure. You can stay beautiful… but only if no one sees you fall apart. And when that time comes, you’re expected to vanish.

It’s a terrifying deal. And yet, doesn’t it feel familiar?

The Goddess in the Algorithm

Lisle’s candlelit temple, her magical elixir, her immortality rituals—they might seem far from the world of filters, ring lights, and celebrity skin routines. But they’re not. Her logic lives on in today’s beauty apps, in TikTok transformations, in the $60 billion cosmetic industry that turns aging into failure and transformation into endless labor.

Makeup has become modern magic. People sculpt entire new faces daily. Drag queens remind us that gender, like youth, is something you can paint. Women in their 60s are going viral for reversing time with contour. The same power Lisle holds—the power of illusion—is now available in every Sephora and on every phone screen.

But the pressure remains.

Maintain yourself.

Be careful.

Don’t crack.

Global Goddesses, Real Monsters

Lisle isn’t alone in media history. Across African, Asian, and Latin American cultures, we’ve always had powerful feminine spirits. Mami Wata, La Llorona, witches who resist marriage or bear scars of survival. In films like I Am Not a Witch, Mami Wata (2023), or Onibaba, the female body becomes sacred, dangerous, ungovernable.

These women don’t always maintain themselves. Sometimes, they rot. Sometimes, they fight. Sometimes, they scream. But they never disappear quietly.

That’s what makes them monstrous—and that’s what makes them divine.

When the Mask Doesn’t Come Off

What Death Becomes Her leaves us with isn’t horror or comedy—it’s a question: What happens when the body is no longer yours, but a performance?

As I revisit this film with students, with friends, with myself, I see Lisle not as a villain, but as a warning. She who must be obeyed is also she who must be feared. She offers power. But it’s not freedom. It’s maintenance. And behind every mirror in her temple is a woman who will one day fall apart.

So maybe the question isn’t how to stay young forever.

Maybe it’s this:

What does it mean to be seen—truly seen—even as we change?

And how do we write ourselves into a story where we don’t disappear?