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4<br />
Emma Frost: The White Queen<br />
__________________________________________________________________<br />
WHITE QUEEN<br />
I don’t want to hurt you, my dear. I want us to be… friends<br />
STORM<br />
Haiearrrgh!! 14<br />
The prisoners are liberated by the intervention of Kitty Pryde, future member of the<br />
team. In a re-match with the X-Men, the White Queen and her henchmen are<br />
utterly defeated. Frost engages in a psychic duel with Jean Grey, which provokes<br />
the only moment of heroism she displays during this story arc. Almost at the point<br />
of destruction from the fiery onslaught of the Phoenix, Frost thinks: ‘Only one<br />
chance… must channel… all remaining power... into a telepathic psi-bolt…’. This<br />
display, in extremis, of the ‘extra effort’ or ‘all or nothing’ strategy is characteristic<br />
of superheroes at the crucial moment in any battle. But Frost’s heroic extra effort<br />
in insufficient, and she appears to have been killed.<br />
Reader responses in the letter column were frequently insightful about the<br />
achievements of Claremont and Byrne. The treatment of gender was much praised,<br />
and the X-Men emerged as the superhero comic of choice among the LGBT<br />
community − and more widely, among those with almost any kind of nonmainstream<br />
identity. Elizabeth Holden, writing from Ottawa in Canada, praises the<br />
Jason Wyngarde/Hellfire Club/White Queen storyline in the following terms:<br />
The sense of dangerous sexuality, Phoenix’s inability to<br />
understand what is happening to her… makes this plot very<br />
interesting indeed. …this seems to be the only Marvel comic that<br />
is free of sexual stereotypes or bias. 15<br />
Under the influence of villain Jason Wyngarde, who is able to project his optical<br />
illusions directly into Jean Grey’s mind, this formerly rather conventional young<br />
woman begins to explore her darker sexual fantasies, at the same time as she gains<br />
almost limitless psychic superpowers. 16 Part of Emma Frost’s function in this story<br />
arc is to introduce the notion of what Angela Carter termed the ‘Sadean Woman’ in<br />
her eponymous book of 1979. 17 The literary model for Carter’s sexual aggressors<br />
is Juliette, protagonist of De Sade’s eponymous novel, who employs sex ‘as an<br />
instrument of terror… [and] lobs her sex at men and women as if it were a hand<br />
grenade.’ 18 Frost’s fully-developed Sadistic instincts demarcate the emotional and<br />
sexual territory which Jean may be destined to explore. Emma is the finished<br />
article, the sexual terrorist that Jean may be on the way to becoming.<br />
But despite having been created (and destroyed) in the service of this limited<br />
function, Emma Frost swiftly took on a life of her own. She was a character which
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