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4 Emma Frost: The White Queen __________________________________________________________________ WHITE QUEEN I don’t want to hurt you, my dear. I want us to be… friends STORM Haiearrrgh!! 14 The prisoners are liberated by the intervention of Kitty Pryde, future member of the team. In a re-match with the X-Men, the White Queen and her henchmen are utterly defeated. Frost engages in a psychic duel with Jean Grey, which provokes the only moment of heroism she displays during this story arc. Almost at the point of destruction from the fiery onslaught of the Phoenix, Frost thinks: ‘Only one chance… must channel… all remaining power... into a telepathic psi-bolt…’. This display, in extremis, of the ‘extra effort’ or ‘all or nothing’ strategy is characteristic of superheroes at the crucial moment in any battle. But Frost’s heroic extra effort in insufficient, and she appears to have been killed. Reader responses in the letter column were frequently insightful about the achievements of Claremont and Byrne. The treatment of gender was much praised, and the X-Men emerged as the superhero comic of choice among the LGBT community − and more widely, among those with almost any kind of nonmainstream identity. Elizabeth Holden, writing from Ottawa in Canada, praises the Jason Wyngarde/Hellfire Club/White Queen storyline in the following terms: The sense of dangerous sexuality, Phoenix’s inability to understand what is happening to her… makes this plot very interesting indeed. …this seems to be the only Marvel comic that is free of sexual stereotypes or bias. 15 Under the influence of villain Jason Wyngarde, who is able to project his optical illusions directly into Jean Grey’s mind, this formerly rather conventional young woman begins to explore her darker sexual fantasies, at the same time as she gains almost limitless psychic superpowers. 16 Part of Emma Frost’s function in this story arc is to introduce the notion of what Angela Carter termed the ‘Sadean Woman’ in her eponymous book of 1979. 17 The literary model for Carter’s sexual aggressors is Juliette, protagonist of De Sade’s eponymous novel, who employs sex ‘as an instrument of terror… [and] lobs her sex at men and women as if it were a hand grenade.’ 18 Frost’s fully-developed Sadistic instincts demarcate the emotional and sexual territory which Jean may be destined to explore. Emma is the finished article, the sexual terrorist that Jean may be on the way to becoming. But despite having been created (and destroyed) in the service of this limited function, Emma Frost swiftly took on a life of her own. She was a character which
<strong>Richard</strong> Reynolds 5 __________________________________________________________________ the Marvel Universe, during the slow death of the Comics Code, now had a place for. Frost returned for the first time in X-Men 151. 19 Having in some unspecified way survived her encounter with Phoenix, she remains intent on enrolling Kitty Pryde into her Massachusetts Academy. Without Byrne’s artwork, Frost’s return lacks the resonance of her first appearance, and the character continued as an occasional guest villain, also appearing in the mini-series Firestar, with her Hellions – the superhero team made up of students from Frost’s Massachusetts Academy. 20 Eventually, in the 1994 Phalanx Covenant series and spin-off Generation X comicbook, Frost completed her transition to heroine. 21 In Generation X, Marvel were responding to the popularity of Image’s new wave of team titles (WILDC.A.T.S, Stormwatch and so on). The elaborate X-Men mythology was ripe for development as Image’s competition. Frost, as an ex-villain, represented the kind of ‘edgy’ protagonist on which Image’s popularity was in part perceived to be built. Emma, fighting on the side of the angels, was now dressed in form-fitting green instead of frosty white. But she remained a sexual terrorist, as this exchange with the lessthan-trusting Sean (Banshee) Cassidy exemplifies. Frost has brought Cassidy (a fellow reformed criminal) and other members of Generation X to her luxurious apartment: BANSHEE Now tell us what ye hoped to accomplish by bringing us here. That is, if’n ye are through with trying to impress us? WHITE QUEEN I have a whole list of things I can do to impress you, Mr Cassidy… but there are children present. 22 Emma Frost may have undertaken her journey from the dark side, but she has never completely lost her ‘bad girl’ personality. Her dominant attitude provides a powerful counterpoint to the accumulated emotional baggage of ‘good girl’ superheroines, who are so-often saddled with what Judith Butler describes as gender melancholia, often manifested through ambivalent feelings towards their own super-powers. 23 Significantly, Frost soon returned to her signature white costumes. 24 After Generation X disbanded 25 , Frost taught young mutants in the sanctuary of Genosha. When the island was attacked by Sentinels, as depicted in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men 114 26 (his debut story for the title), Frost survived the ensuing destruction of 16 million mutants through the intervention of a secondary
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