On the Nature of Maternal Sin: A Classicist's Take on Portal and the Villainy of GLaDOS

On the Nature of Maternal Sin:

A Classicist’s Take on Portal and the Villainy of GLaDOS

            When I saw what Wheatley had done to the facility, the utter destruction he had brought it to, I was unperturbed, remarkably so. No sense of awe and guilt wracked me like it had at the onset of the game, when I traversed the wreckage brought to ruin by my hand, mine and GLaDOS’. And the truth remains: I never truly liked Wheatley. I liked and trusted GLaDOS more, even in Portal 2, when I knew hers was the face of my nemesis. When escaping from GLaDOS with Wheatley early in the game, GLaDOS called out to me. She told me to come back, to resume testing. All I had to do was go into this room to my left, and testing would continue; she wouldn’t kill me. And, gods help me, I went into that room. I did not follow Wheatley. And when GLaDOS killed me with Neurotoxin, I was honestly surprised. More than that, I was a bit stung.

            “But…But…!” I spluttered at the screen.

            She had spent all of the previous game trying to kill me. She had lied to me. Insulted me. I had killed her once already. And still I felt spurned, betrayed. Even saddened.

            And so it was with heavy heart that I respawned and trudged after Wheatley. I earned an achievement for being a “good listener;” it left a bad taste in my mouth, like bile. Something similar happened when Wheatley was in control of the facility and was trying to kill me. I escaped from his poorly laid trap, and he pleaded with me to return. Rolling my eyes, I went back and did as he asked, not because I trusted him or believed him, but because I wanted the achievement. I knew he was lying. I had never trusted him to begin with. All I wanted was the shiny badge listening to him would allow me to garner. No betrayal occurred. And when I killed him at the end of the game, no trill of tragedy streaked through my system like a shot of espresso.

            But it did when GLaDOS deleted Caroline.

            Oh, I cannot describe the subtle tragedy that accosted my senses when GLaDOS announced that she had erased Caroline. I had just spent half the game regaining my beloved advisor, my maternal tormentor, my one and only unreliable psychotic narrator. The only thing that kept me going when I was alone in the bowels of the facility was the pre-recorded messages of Cave Johnson. Not only did they serve to make me smile, they kept the loneliness at bay.

            Imagine what The Fall chapter would have been like without Cave Johnson. Just take a moment to imagine that. Already, when I stumbled across GLaDOS later, I felt relief surge through me. Something familiar! Something sentient! Something to keep me company in the darkness of below! Had Cave Johnson’s voice not been there, the relief would have been that much greater. I was already desperate for some sign of the familiar—imagine how that desperation would have multiplied without Mr. Johnson; the results would have been exponential. I almost wish Valve had done just that.

            And not only did GLaDOS amuse and reassure me, her character growth filled me with hope. I had hope that I could rid the facility of Wheatley. I had hope that, when I reinstalled GLaDOS, she would don the persona of maternal mentor once more—fully this time, without any traces of insidiousness.

            So, when the time came, when GLaDOS greeted me after I had sent Wheatley reeling through space, I felt as though I had really achieved something, and it was an achievement that did not require an official shiny badge on my Steam profile. GLaDOS was back, the GLaDOS I had always wanted, the GLaDOS I had always dreamed of. She was back, and she was caring and concerned, and she was—

            She was deleting Caroline…?

            What? No. NO! What?!

            But…! But…! We finally had it! The facility! The snarky yet loving mother-daughter relationship! The household had been restored! Our life had been restored! Home and Hearth and Heritage. All of it.

            And she had destroyed it.

            Not only that. Immediately after, she kicked me out, abandoned me in a field.

            That abandonment perhaps remains one of the greatest tragedies in the entire Portal series.

            In Classics, there is a name for that destruction. It is called oikos, meaning roughly “the destruction of the sacred household” (Vassiliki Panoussi, Greek Tragedy in Vergil’s “Aeneid”: Ritual, Empire, and Intertext (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 121). The term comes from Greek Tragedy, but can also be seen in later Roman literature as well. Oikos is first and foremost a feminine sin. It is a sad occurrence when men march on cities and destroy them, but it is a transgression of the highest order when a woman causes the ruin of a city. Why do we best remember Helen as having a “face that launched a thousand ships” instead of Odysseus as having a “mind that destroyed Troy”? One has more charge, more tragic consequences.

            Let us turn to other examples of oikos—all Classical (I’m a Classicist. So sue me).

            First, we have the Bacchae, a play written by Euripides. Maenadism—the practice of women, called maenads or bacchae, who worship Dionysus—is the epitome of the trope that is oikos, making the Bacchae a prime example of the destruction of the sacred household, which is found so contemptible because of the fact that such behavior is the antithesis of everything that is feminine purity and excellence. Dionysus is more than just a god of wine and revelry; he is a transformative god, elusive as a shadow, whose worship involves self-revelation through intoxication, madness and ecstasy (Brill’s New Pauly, vol. 4, s.v. “Dionysus”). The tragedy in this play lays in the actions of the women, not only in Pentheus, the king who refused to allow the worship of Dionysus. Angered by this refusal, Dionysus whipped the women of the city into a god-driven frenzy, resulting in the brutal death of Pentheus as well as the symbolic destruction of Thebes in the form of the invasion of Greece by an Eastern religion. The destruction of Pentheus’ death remains one of the most brutal I have ever read, and it was at the very hands of the women, beginning first with his own mother, Agave, whose primary role was to nourish home and hearth and husband and heritage. (No. Seriously. People complain about modern games/television being too violent and sex-crazed? I laugh at them.)

            The next prominent example of oikos I’d like to point out resides in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. When Agamemnon is away at Troy, his wife, Clytemnestra, remains at home. There she plots and schemes, defiling their marriage bed by sleeping with Aegisthus, driven to vengeance because Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to sail to Troy. When Agamemnon returns, victorious, from the war, he is greeted by Clytemnestra appropriately; she smiles and bows and graciously leads him to a refreshing bath. There, in the innermost sanctum of their home, she murders him in cold blood. When she emerges, covered in blood, she delivers a vehement speech as to how she killed him. If the description of Pentheus’ death is the most brutal I have encountered, then this description of Agamemnon’s death is by far the most chilling. Her words are fraught with icy venom as the scene unfolds, and the audience is left stunned.

      I’ve brooded on this struggle many years,
      the old blood feud. My moment’s come at last,
      though long delayed. I stand now where I struck,                 1630
      where I achieved what I set out to do.
      I did all this. I won’t deny the fact.                                                      [1380]
      Round this man I cast my all-embracing net,
      rich robes of evil, as if catching fish—
      he had no way out, no eluding fate.
      I stabbed him twice. He gave out two groans.
      Then as his limbs went limp, I hit again,
      a third blow, my prayerful dedication
      to Zeus, underground protector of the dead.
      He collapsed, snorting his life away,                                      1640
      spitting great gobs of blood all over me,                                            [1390]
      drenching me in showers of his dark blood.
      And I rejoiced—just as the fecund earth
      rejoices when the heavens send spring rains,
      and new-born flower buds burst into bloom.
      That’s how things stand, old men of Argos.
      Be joyful, if that’s how you feel. For me,
      this is my triumph. If it were fitting
      to pour libations on this corpse,
      I’d pour my curses out—that would be just.                          1650
      He filled the mixing bowls in his own house
      with such destructive misery, and now
      he drinks it to the dregs. He’s home at last.

                        (Agamemnon, the Oresteia: Aeschylus, trans. Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC).

            Clytemnestra’s nefarious actions result in the death of her husband, the destruction of her household, her own death at the hands of her son, Orestes, and the inevitable madness of Orestes, who is hounded by the Furies for his matricide.

            This is the scene I equate most with the entire Portal series.

The Oracle Turret hints that GLaDOS is a metaphorical Prometheus, fallen to the depths of the earth and pecked at by birds for his sin of giving humans fire. While this still stands, I cannot help but lean towards the image of GLaDOS as a contemporary representation of oikos. She is the slow dissolution of comforting maternity into raving maenadism. She is a modern Medea, striving to slaughter her last child out of some twisted sense of contrived vengeance. The entire time Wheatley is destroying the facility, GLaDOS, a skewered potato on the end of your portal gun, laments and bemoans the fate of her beloved home, for she is the protector of the home, taking up the mantle of maternal aegis for the sacred household. The irony is not lost, since in the previous game it was her actions that resulted in oikos. GLaDOS pursued infanticide with wild abandon, thus propagating oikos.

            And herein lays the very reason why GLaDOS remains a far more chilling villain than Wheatley, why her character is so much more sinister yet simultaneously intimate. When Wheatley destroys the facility, the act is not as personal to the player because of the single fact that Wheatley is male. His masculinity detracts from the truly tragic notions behind oikos. Oikos absolutely requires femininity. Without femininity, oikos looses meaning, even today. GLaDOS’ sin is far greater because of her inherently maternal relation to Chell. Wheatley is at most a paternal figure (really, though, he is like a bumbling brother, a shunned sibling). Even so, paternal sin does not resonate in the home the same way maternal sin does. Masculinity implies outright aggression, whereas femininity implies passivity. Even GLaDOS’ personality reflects this. She is always passive. She is Amata to Wheatley’s Turnus, marching with hymenal torch rather than steel sword.

            GLaDOS acts as mother and murderer. In the first Portal game, she is the only connection Chell—and therefore the audience—has with anything other than cold silence in a world of even colder science. One cannot help but feel the acrid sting of betrayal when GLaDOS turns to murder in the first game, and the betrayal only grows sharper when she kills Caroline, effectively destroying any chance she and the player had at re-forging a mother-child relationship. In effect, Chell in the first Portal is Orestes, confronting Clytemnestra for her betrayal, and then herself performing the most intimate and sinful act of murder. But it is a necessary act, as much for preservation as for justice. And upon killing GLaDOS, the player does not feel righteous, nor should the player feel righteous. GLaDOS’ death leaves the player feeling conflicted, even shameful at having completed such a sordid deed. Yet, her death stands as a sort of self-revelation, and like a maenad blinking away visions of Dionysus, the player feels a strange and sickly satisfaction at this matricide.

Something similar occurs when GLaDOS deletes Caroline. The deletion of Caroline is, in effect, an act of suicide. Death should never be approached as a simple event. It is transformative, or transcendental, or an act of control, or an end of power—and so much more. Essentially, suicide is an act of control. Foucault notes that “death is power’s limit” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 138). By controlling one’s death in the act of suicide, one takes power into one’s own hands and becomes sovereign. This is part of the reason why suicide is often seen as a sin, for it detracts from the natural power of the divine (in other words, “Death is God’s business, damn it! How dare you infringe upon God’s power?!”). GLaDOS killed a part of herself that connected her on an emotional level to Chell and the player, severing any and all ties she may have rediscovered throughout the game. There can be no greater betrayal.

In endeavoring to kill the player, GLaDOS exhibits a twisted sense of care. This intent to murder is actually an intensely intimate emotion. By wanting to kill you, GLaDOS displays maternal instincts. Therefore, by killing Caroline, GLaDOS kills the part of herself that once harboured any sort of maternal instinct, and then she quite literally throws Chell out of the facility, along with the much beloved companion cube. This feat of abandonment cuts far deeper than any of GLaDOS’ attempts at murder.

At the end of Portal 2, I felt worse than I had during any other moment in these games. Many people have remarked similarly, but have not been able to express why exactly. The intimacy of murder cannot be overstated in this instance, for it is a far colder and more clinical thing to abandon someone than it is to kill them. Agave and the women of Thebes tore Pentheus to pieces on account of the fact that they were in god-possessed throes of self-revelation. Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon on account of the fact that she was so enraged at what he had done to their daughter. Medea killed her children on account of the fact that she was so impassioned at Jason’s treachery.

But GLaDOS? GLaDOS abandons Chell.

And that abandonment, more than oikos, more than murder, is her greatest maternal sin.