In a world where womanhood is often measured by marriage, what happens when that identity is taken away from a woman?
This is the subject matter of the painting ‘I Cannot Be A Bride Anymore’ by Yuko Tatsushima, whose works are often explorations of femininity, identity, trauma, and societal expectations. Not much is known about the painter, with her having almost no online presence, however some facts about her include having graduated from Joshibi University of Art and Design in 1998. She is an active painter in Japan to this day, also making art in different forms such as dolls, puppetry, and performances. Tatsushima has stated before that most of her paintings are self-portraits, and incorporate themes of sexual abuse, nuclear holocaust, and borderline personality disorder.
Societal expectations usually command a girl to be ‘pure’ before she gets married, and if she isn’t a virgin before her marriage, she is considered undesirable and ruined, even if she was assaulted or raped. Somehow, she is deemed to be responsible for her ‘lack of purity’, even if it wasn’t her choice to be ‘impure’ by society’s standards in the first place.
In ‘I Cannot Be A Bride Anymore’, Tatsushima depicts a woman in white, a black belt around her waist, her eyes hauntingly wide as she floats in a halo of red and black. Her neck is elongated, stretched in an inhumane way, with cuts and finger prints imprinted on the reddened skin. The red is more prominent on the woman’s chest and pelvic region, likely a metaphor for assault. When assaulted through penetration, a woman typically bleeds through the process. The areas she was touched are depicted to be redder than other parts of her body.
The painting itself carries a chilling aura – horror, pain, anguish, and suffocation so brilliantly portrayed by Tatsushima, that you cannot help but be pulled into despair at its sight. However, the woman in the painting does not dramatize her suffering. There’s neither any overt display of anguish, nor any theatrical gesture demanding attention or empathy. Instead, her posture and stillness depict a quiet internal collapse. Her body seems to carry the burden of an experience that cannot be undone, suffering through something the world does not acknowledge, in fact refuses to do so.
In olden societies, and in many contemporary societies as well, womanhood is intimately tied to marriage. To be a bride is to be seen as complete, pure, worthy of social recognition and respect. When this status is taken away from a woman, whether through consensual or non consensual means, the woman herself is treated as diminished and fit to be disrespected. Her character is judged, along with her value, as if she is not a human being, rather an object that none would buy because it has been ruined. The painting exposes this cruel arithmetic computing of worth, where womanhood is measured not by the humanity of the woman, but by her eligibility and desirability.
When society assigns value to a single role, losing that role can fracture the self. The woman in the painting remains suspended between who she once was and who is now reduced to be. This gives way to a sense of ‘looking-glass self’, which is the idea that we come to see ourselves through the eyes of others. When society no longer views her as someone fit to be a bride, will she also stop thinking herself worthy? Did she even want to marry in the first place, or was that identity also given to her by the very society that labelled her ruined? The painting captures this internalised judgement of her own self, the external stigma becoming her internal truth. Her stillness is the evidence of her exhaustion, a bone-deep fatigue that has resulted from repeated invalidation, and her attempts to appease a society which does not even consider her a human.
It is very ironic how one may look upon the painting for the first time and be so disturbed by its sight that they perceive the woman in the painting to be a monster, something evil, dangerous, something to be contained within a cage to ensure the steady continuation of the status quo in which somehow it’s always the woman’s fault and never the man’s.
This painting itself was used across the internet as a ‘creepypasta’, popularising it as an urban legend, a meme to scare people randomly. This goes to show that modern society does not accept anything to be more than what they perceive at face value, not even bothering to learn the name of the image they’ve been circulating so widely as something it is not. Unfortunately, so is the case with the reputation of a woman as well.
Every girl, no matter where she is born, learns a few things at a very early age – how to avoid the gaze of a man staring directly at her when she’s just trying to go about her day; how to escape an approaching man’s threateningly close proximity; how to stay quiet when she is told to, because making a noise never made anything change anyway.
Such is true even in the case of our university, where a girl cannot walk the roads past 6 pm in the evening alone without feeling unsafe within the campus she’s meant to stay in, to get her education in. It is absolutely disheartening to admit that the eyes that follow women everywhere never seem to stop, sometimes a constant within their own homes as well.
The painting does not offer an answer to the question asked at the beginning of this article, instead it lingers in the aftermath of something irreversible, something unrepairable, something absolute.
The following is a free verse that I felt compelled to write when I first laid eyes upon ‘I Cannot Be A Bride Anymore’ by Yuko Tatsushima:
Am I ruined, mother?
you say I can be a bride no longer.
Is it my fault, mother?
I can still feel his hands on my skin.
Am I unlovable, mother?
you were the only one who ever loved me.
Did he take it away, mother?
when he took something else away too.
Am I imperfect, mother?
you say no one will marry me.
Is there truly no one, mother?
who can look past the marks on my body.
Am I done for, mother?
You told me getting married was my dream.
did they all look away in disgust, mother?
when they laid their eyes upon me.
Am I a monster, mother?
I’m sorry I couldn’t stop him.
Is it too late, mother?
birth me again, i wish to start over.
Am I destroyed, mother?
I’m floating in a sea of red.
Why is he grinning, mother?
He has reduced me to nothing.
Am I wasted, mother?
He stretched my throat too thin.
Have I been demolished, mother?
there must be something that can be done.
Am I wrecked, mother?
Please look at me again.
Did he spoil me too much, mother?
I’m still your little girl.
Am I a disaster now, mother?
I hear them all laughing at my fate.
Where are you going, mother?
Please don’t leave me to bleed out.
I cannot breathe, mother.
Will you please come back?
He’s here again, mother.
I feel his hands on me once more.
He’s taking me apart anew, mother.
and no one’s coming to help.
not even you, mother.
you were the only one i trusted.
I’m bleeding out, mother.
and so, I’ve closed my eyes.
Isn’t it best to give in, mother?
better than hearing your lies.
