I'm not the first to comment here on the manner in which the GOP has decided to pay back the loyalty of the Christian Right by making the Schiavo "right to life" case its own. Nor am I the first to insinuate that media interest in this case pulls national attention from the Middle East mess and Bush's domestic policies. But I am struck by the way in which the Schiavo case displays the most intransigent American narratives of class, race, and gender to bolster the status quo.
I will not rehearse the legal and ethical issues so eloquently defined by others on DKos. Instead, I'm intrigued by the cultural importance of the Schiavo case, at this moment in time. Would the Schiavo case merit breathless front-page headlines were the victim not white, middle-class, and female? I doubt it. Her face is photo worthy; she's pale, and she appears awake and even alert, despite guarantees from specialists that she is brain dead. Her visage is as ethereal as that of the Victorian heroine whose untimely demise functioned as a voyeuristic spectacle to be enjoyed by readers in the 19th-century.
By enjoyment I don't mean some sort of creepy sado-masochistic form of pleasure, although some might argue that this is indeed one dimension. I mean "enjoyment" as a recognition of some quality that fulfills a need. And the need is to invent an ethical center for a culture straining to design a moral framework that is under siege.
Those Victorian heroines or "angels" functioned as counterweights to the imperial designs of 19th-century Britain (and to a lesser degree, America). In similar fashion, Ms. Schiavo operates ideologically as the polar opposite to American militarism. Her story is capable of whipping up powerful emotions because her sad situation is overlaid on other well-known tales: Beth in Little Women (Mr. March was, of course, off in the Civil War); Snow White; little Eva. She's not a grown woman with a husband who is her legal guardian; instead, she's the perpetual child, desexed, a blank page. She is silent.
Her helplessness is being appropriated in order to reaffirm a clear, unambiguous moral axis. If war depends upon the creation of a fantastic version of masculinity (something in which soldiers of both sexes participate), Ms. Schiavo embodies a terrifying emblem of hyper-femininity. If her silent, passive space of pure existence suggests the alternative to the clang and horror of the battleline, the battleline arguably demands the existence of this figure back home.