"What if Count Orlok's wife was reincarnated as a man" Part 2.0 (part one was on your prev blog): How would someone as conservative and sexist as Ellen's(Emil's) father have reacted to a seer son? Based on small things that Mister Eggers has put in the canon film, we already know how he treated his seer daughter, but I highly doubt Emil's gifts would be demonized in the same way those of his female counterpart were.
From the information we have in the film, Ellen’s “father wound” is due to her gender identity, and sexuality. As she tells Von Franz, she enjoyed to be outdoors as a kid and a teen, which her father didn’t approve: “Father... he would find me in our fields... within the forest... as if - as his little changeling girl. But as I became older it worsened... Father dispraised me for it…” A “changeling” is not a positive thing in European folklore, even though Ellen remembers it with a smile on her face. “Women’s place” was the house, the private sphere; that’s why Ellen’s father didn’t want her outside, when she should be inside. Since the “public sphere” was a man’s world, if Ellen had been born a boy, her father wouldn’t have any problem with him playing in the forest.
“I frightened him. My touch. I was so very alone, you see… I wish for comfort.” As Ellen grew into a teenage girl, her father would recoil from her touch, meaning he wouldn’t allow displays of physical affection from his daughter, because she was getting “too old” for it, which parallels Thomasin and her father in “The VVitch”:
“The VVitch” (2015) script
Next, she talks about conjuring Count Orlok and his shadow: “Then, a presence… the nightmares… the epilepsies…”, which gives context to what she says next “At last Papa found me laying unclothed I was... My body... my flesh...my… Sin, sin, he said. He would have send me to that place, I shan’t go… I…” Evidently, her father caught her masturbating, and “that place” is an asylum, since masturbation was considered a disease (for everyone) and institutionalization was common practice.
Here, Ellen’s gender is irrelevant, and men were actually subjected to more brutal “medical treatments” than women (mostly genital mutilation; and we see this on Herr Knock’s plot). This interview with Historian Dr John Woolf tells us the history of George Drysdale, whom, like Ellen, also “discovered” masturbation at 15 years old. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised Eggers took some inspiration from Drysdale’s story, since his case is also one of shame and liberation. And this is Ellen’s “sexual trauma”, which caused her to internalize an extremely negative view of her own sexuality.
