Screenshot courtesy of “The Resistance”
For all the press that men get in the chronicles of history and myth, some women stand out.
The prehistoric, limestone figurine Venus of Willendorf is routinely invoked as the mother of all revered female figures. Discovered in an archaeological dig in northeast Austria, her corpulent form made her an icon of fertility and nurturing. She is the first all-purpose “mother goddess.” Ancient England’s Queen Boudica led ill-fated charges against the Roman Empire, but the legend of her ferocity lives on. No one doubts the enduring status of the Virgin Mary, mother of You-Know-Who, as the iconic female figure to rule them all, even though Isis and Horus of ancient Egypt paved the way. Before she was a patron saint of France, Joan of Arc was a military leader and protector of French culture. Today, it is speculated that she was history’s first nonbinary or transgender hero.
We might now add to this small but significant list, thanks to statements last week by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the mysterious figure of a “girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa.” In this instance, however, the iconography is more complicated and still evolving.
The race to discover exactly who this woman is started last week with a White House “Antifa Roundtable” in which Secretary Noem and President Trump rubbed elbows with a cast of right-wing influencers to declare Antifa a national threat, and bask in the afterglow of President Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a Domestic Terrorist Organization. Noem backed her boss up to the hilt, informing Americans that Antifa is “just as dangerous” and “sophisticated” as the international terrorist stalwarts ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the heavily armed Islamist group of at least 50,000 militants that has for decades antagonized Israel’s northern border.
“And I want to thank our attorney general for prosecuting them [Antifa] and making sure they never see the light of day again,” Noem said in her trademark tone of complete confidence. “They have been so bold in making sure we’re bringing those individuals to justice. One of the individuals we arrested recently in Portland was the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa, and we are hoping that as we go after her, interview her, and prosecute her, we will get more and more information about the network and how we can root them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society.”
Noem’s comment was vexing for at least four reasons and probably scores of others. First, can the U.S. government, in fact, “go after” and outright “prosecute” someone on the grounds of mere past association? For how long was this woman a paramour and partner to a founder of Antifa? Six months? Six years? Second, why not name her if she is being prosecuted? (Noem’s comments are so tantalizing with possibilities that we could ask questions about this mysterious “founder” as well. If he is “a founder,” how many founders does Antifa have? How many girlfriends has he had in addition to this past girlfriend, who has ostensibly moved on?)
Third, in most criminal cases, formal prosecution begins after charges are filed. The names of the criminally charged are generally made public. Perhaps most troubling of all in its reflection of the current administration’s investigative skills, if law enforcement has seemingly charged, prosecuted, and even detained for questioning a past girlfriend of a founder of Antifa, surely the name of that past founder can also be identified for a posted reward and subsequent arrest. Parsing the difference between deduction and induction would be irrelevant. In this case, it would be as simple as drawing a straight line between two points. If the stakes are as high as the President and Noem insist, why stop at just one past girlfriend? What on earth is preventing more arrests and prosecutions?
None of the roundtable’s ominous warnings stopped online commentators from squeezing laughs from speculation about the exact identity of “Antifa Founder’s Girlfriend.”
“WTF, you mean they arrested Eleanor Roosevelt?” wrote one wag on Reddit. Others posted gifs of their favorite female celebrity, with a purple-haired Drew Barrymore moving up the ranks of internet favorites. “Did you know Antifa has its own cemetery?” asked another. “There are more than 40,000 Antifa buried there, including my grandfather. It’s called Arlington [National Cemetery].” One of the more on-point speculations pointed to Marion Ravenwood, played by actress Karen Allen in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark. As the past girlfriend to Harrison Ford’s Indian Jones, she stood by him as, both tied to a pole, they witnessed the supernatural, face-melting deaths of Nazis who violated the Ark of the Israelites. What could be more appropriate for half-baked charges against a woman who cannot be named than a film character?
Common knowledge of history implies that Antifa has its intellectual roots in the years leading up to, and during, World War II. But the term first surfaced in 2007 in the U.S. Pacific Northwest as a response to the growing number of White supremacist organizations that had then settled and operated in the region. Given Noem’s scorched-earth rhetoric, backed by the muscle of President Trump’s White House, it would be reasonable to assume that affiliating with anyone linked to the group, let alone declaring membership, would be a sure-fire ticket to legal trouble. Yet no one can say for certain who leads and operates Antifa. It is so loosely organized that, according to law enforcement, it attracts people by way of ideological “affinity” rather than official registration for membership, in the style of political parties and advocacy groups. Actions carried out in the group’s name are sporadic, with just one individual responsible for a shooting death during the George Floyd street protests of 2020. Only Rose City Antifa, in Portland, Oregon, seems to maintain a web presence.
It seems fitting that this unnamed woman has so far proved—at least until Noem and her team choose to reveal more—as shadowy as the group she is alleged to have allied with, or was at least sympathetic to. A stereotypical imagination pictures her brewing tea and cooking meals just hours before her partner’s next move. Maybe she broke down in tears one night, pleading with him to find a way out of his life in hiding. Doubtless, the right-wing blogosphere paints a different scenario, and it is worth noting that some on the right are not impressed by either Trump’s argument or those on the left who insist Antifa is no danger at all.
In the meantime, though, it is fun to watch imaginations in action as the list of possible candidates marches on. There is nothing new in filling in the blanks of text and hints to create characters out of whole cloth. Christian theologians went wild in speculation over the legend of the Wandering Jew, with its origin in the gospels of Matthew 16:28, Mark 9:1, Luke 9:27, and John 21:22. The Old Testament had its turn before that in the wandering of Cain from the fourth chapter of Genesis.
The most jarring literary example of all the uncertainty Noem leaves hanging with her nebulous statements regarding “the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa” is Henry James’s Miss Jessel from his horror novella, The Turn of the Screw. Miss Jessel’s spectral figure appears only momentarily from across a pond where the narrator and main character, an unnamed governess, watches over two children, the siblings Miles and Flora, but the impression her ghost—and also that of her dead partner Peter Quint— carries lasting repercussions. The governess insists Miss Jessel is real, haunting the pond bank and the country estate where she watches her charges. Flora and Miles, meanwhile, see nothing at all, except for their governess, who is clearly disturbed. Throughout the tale, and between scenes and dialogue that tip the existence of Jessel and Quint back and forth, James keeps readers guessing as to whether the governess is slowly going insane or haunted by an emerging reality of tangible danger. James makes it almost impossible to pin down the truth. By the novella’s end, though, he shows how the fear and confusion of deliberate ambiguity mean that no one—especially not Miles and Flora—will be left unscathed.
