The Horror of Domestic Imprisonment
The panicked anti-feminism surrounding Chris and Regan is not, however, the film’s only commentary on the status of American women. The other is a strong critique of the patriarchal structures of power—and, specifically, of the structures of power in a domestic sphere-that keep Chris (and Regan) imprisoned in their shared tale of horror and violent suffering. Because although the film is, on one level, an anti-feminist screed, eager to lambaste both working mothers and pubescent girls, it is also, on a deeper level, a crushing exposé of domestic violence and what sustains it in America culture.
Regan, after all, is not the only person in the film who is being physically and sexually tortured.
Chris, too, at the hands of the demon who seems to have taken possession of Regan, is abused. Regularly and brutally. Furniture is thrown at her, she’s hit, she’s pushed. Chris is being battered, tortured, domestically abused. Her daughter is a pawn in that abuse pattern.
Whether William Friedkin intended it or not (and I seriously doubt he did, the demonic abuse narrative in the film amplifies the emerging feminist awareness in the 1970s about the all-too-real and all-too-quotidian horror of domestic violence.
As we watch Chris’s transformation over the course of the film, we see a liberated woman get broken-both physically and psychologically—by a demon who has entered her home. We watch her suffer at the mercy of this male demonic figure because she cannot leave her child, and that child, in turn, cannot leave their home.
The film lays bare Chris’s complete and total helplessness and her inability to find help from the outside.
Like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist showcases motherhood as a central site of vulnerability for domestic abuse—a social reality that, by the time the film premiered, had just begun to be acknowledged in scholarly conversations and at professional conferences.
To show how the film mounts its avant-garde critique of domestic violence, however, I need to take us on a brief tour of Anglo-American legal history.
For close to a thousand years, the beating of wives and children was a recognized and accepted fact of domestic life, first in English law and then in the American legal system that emerged directly from it. Domestic battery was understood as a good and necessary thing, if not done to excess.
Two pieces of logic underpinned the accepted practice of wife beating and child beating. The first was the idea that wives and children were in need of “correction”; women and children were understood to be mentally and morally weaker than adult men, so it was incumbent upon adult men to discipline, correct, and control women and children. The second was that wives and children were the property of their husbands—and I mean that quite literally.
By the doctrine of couverture (covering), when a woman married a man, she became of one flesh with him, and he had total legal control over her, her body, her children, her property, and her rights.
Legal commentator William Blackstone argued in the eighteenth century that “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”
Women belonged to their husbands, because their legally independent status died when they married, and their bodies became, literally, his to do with as he saw fit.
So, given this ideological bedrock of Anglo-American family law, if a man beat his wife, how would you prosecute him? For punishing his own body? A body he owned, by marriage, in the eyes of the law? The short answer is that you wouldn’t – even well into the twentieth century.
The head of the household in almost all of Anglo-American legal history was the absolute and uncontested paterfamilias, the “father” who ruled the family as a quasi-divinity and who had the power to correct, discipline, and harm his underlings as he wished. As a result of these beliefs and doctrines, the battering of wives and children was rampant in America throughout most of history.
Although rampant, it was also cruelly silent. Even in the relatively liberal 1960s, domestic violence was seldom featured in public writings or in legal and medical writings.
Indeed, a 1977 article from The New Women’s Times, which interviewed a domestic abuse survivor, noted that the survivor had only ever read or seen one article on wife beating during the time she was married.
An influential 1980 review essay noted that there was not one single article on family violence in the Journal of Marriage and the Family in the first thirty years of its existence-which is to say, up to 1969. There was precious little legislation that sought to curb the domestic abuse of wives, and there were far more articles in psychiatric journals about how wives provoked their husbands’ beatings than about how to support the wives who were being abused.
In fact, a very common and very erroneous belief among even psychiatric practitioners into the 1970s was that women in violent relationships were masochists who wanted to be there, and that, therefore, there was precious little a practitioner could do for them.
Even for more sympathetic medical practitioners and psychologists, there were no clear guidelines about how to help women who were clearly being abused.
Doctors routinely told women who reported being victims of domestic abuse that they, the women, were probably causing the problems, that they should try to reconcile with their husbands, or that they were simply “nervous” and needed medication.
Knowing the biases against abused women that existed broadly in American culture, abused women simply hid. They hid their bruised faces under large, dark sunglasses. They wore scarves to cover head lacerations and bald patches where their hair had been torn out by the roots. They wore bulky sweaters and coats to conceal injuries to their arms, chests, and necks. And more often than not, they simply stayed indoors, concealed from public view—which, of course, is where they were getting hurt in the first place. But they often stayed indoors anyway, often because it was an embarrassment to them if they were seen in such a state.
It was an embarrassment to them in part because so many Americans overtly supported the practice of spousal violence as a mechanism for corralling unruly wives.
Indeed, 25 percent of American adults in a University of Wisconsin survey in the 1960s confirmed that they supported husband-wife physical battles-with a higher rate of approval among better-educated respondents.
A Harris poll from 1968 showed that 25 percent of people with a college education approved of a husband slapping a wife. Now, 25 percent may seem like a small fraction, but think about it: If 25 percent of highly educated people actively approve of slapping a wife, how many are willing to turn a blind eye, especially if it happens behind closed doors? Perhaps 75 percent? Maybe 90 percent?
The high approval ratings of physical violence were part of what made it hard to prosecute—many people simply didn’t have a problem with it as a social practice, because they felt it was necessary and normal to correct the behavior of women. And, of course, it happened behind closed doors, where no one could see it and no law could hope to regulate it.
Compounding and complicating the dual culture of shame and condonation around domestic violence, there was the logistical difficulty of doing anything through law enforcement or litigation to curb wife battery.
In 1972 and 1973—right when The Exorcist was filming – there were fourteen thousand complaints of wife battery in the Family Court system in New York City alone; the reported figure is estimated to be approximately 10 percent of the true total—140,000. Almost none of these 140,000 suspected instances of spousal battery were successfully prosecuted, and not only because so few of them were reported. The legal system routinely dismissed cases or ruled that the husband was well within his rights to do whatever act of violence he did to his wife.
It is worth noting that, until 1966 in the relatively liberal state of New York, it was not possible for a woman to obtain a divorce because of beatings and, even after 1966, she had to establish a “sufficient” pattern of physical battery.
Let me pause to emphasize that: in a liberal state, if a husband battered his wife once, it was not even grounds for divorce in 1966. In New York State in the 1960s, to get a divorce, let alone for criminal prosecution of her own abuser, which was entirely out of reach for most women, a woman had to establish habitual beatings.
So, given the amount of shame surrounding wife battery, given the hesitation of police to get involved, given the inadequacy of legal mechanisms for combating it, and, of course, given the social agnosticism about whether it should be classed as criminal behavior in the first place, how could American public and legal culture go about changing things?
What did change? First, there were scholarly conferences and studies in the works, many of which led to mass market book publications. Second, there was a rapidly exploding grassroots movement in the early and mid-1970s to support beaten women and help them escape violence, while also raising the consciousness of the average American about what intimate partner violence really was.
One of the books that spurred the rapid and public awakening about wife battery was Violence in the Family, published in 1974. This essay collection opens by targeting three “myths” it wanted to debunk: first, the “class myth,” which was that the physical battery of people within a family was a “working class phenomenon.” Second, “the sex myth,” that sexual drives were what produced violence toward women in the family. And third, the “catharsis myth,” namely, that the battery of wives and children was the outgrowth of normal male aggression. From there, the book argues that violence, while not normal or healthy, has its origins in pro-violence American culture and in families in which there are generational patterns of violence – that is, men who witnessed battery in their childhood homes are more likely to beat their wives and children.
Although these are truisms of twenty-first-century discourse around domestic abuse, they were revolutionary in 1974 because they suggested that intrafamilial violence was pathological, heritable, and linked with cultural patterns and mindsets that needed to evolve.
They suggested domestic violence was not something a woman was ever “asking for,” nor was it something for her to be ashamed of. It was an undesirable byproduct of cultural and intrafamilial dysfunction, and it was rooted in the violent psychology of the abusive male.
Meanwhile, grassroots organizations had begun opening women’s shelters—the first to appear in the United States—and circulating information in small-scale publications to help women understand their rights, and to help women make escape plans from abusers.
In 1974, one of the first battered women’s shelters opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1975, Abused Women’s Aid in Crisis was founded, an organization based in New York to help women exit violent marriages.
By 1978, the “We Will Not Be Beaten” movement had inspired the founding of more than 150 battered women’s shelters across the United States.
So, 1974 was a watershed year for women’s rights to safety and for anti-violence cultural awareness.
And in movie theaters across the country, with viewers watching Chris and Regan get brutalized, that awareness had begun to consolidate and to pick up momentum. You couldn’t see into your neighbors’ homes, but you could, thanks to the silver screen, see into Chris MacNeil’s home, and what you saw there would stop you dead in your tracks.
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hexafu 