Sinful Sunday: Barbara Covett and the Bitter Queerness of "Notes on a Scandal"
Judi Dench gives one of her best performances as an embittered and manipulative lesbian determined to ensnare Cate Blanchett's Sheba.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
It’s not every day that you get a film like Notes on a Scandal, which not only features two of the best actresses of their respective generations–Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett–but also showcases one of the most deliciously bitchy lesbian characters to have ever graced the silver screen: Dench’s Barbara Covett. Brittle and horrible and bitter, Covett is truly one of Dench’s great performances, and while the actress has always proven remarkably willing to turn herself into a portrait of the abject feminine–see also Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love and her two turns as an aging Queen Victoria–Barbara outdoes them all. When the film begins she is frumpy and ever-so-slightly unkempt, her hair a frizzy mess, her clothes unflattering. This is a woman who seems to go out of her way to appear as unappealing as possible.
Her inner monologue is, if anything, even more repellant than her physical appearance. She has nothing but contempt and disgust for everyone surrounding her, whether it’s her students–whom she dismissively refers to as “the local pubescent proles. The future plumbers, shop assistants, and doubtless the odd terrorist too”--or her fellow staff. In a meeting early in the film she undermines the headmaster by handing in a deliberately underdone report on her department, clearly savoring this moment of rebellion. Whatever enthusiasm Barbara might have once had for her noble profession has clearly calcified into something sour.
And then she meets Bathsheba Hart (who goes by Sheba for sort), and Barbara slowly comes to embody her last name, coveting and yearning for this young woman’s affection in a way that very clearly escalates into a dangerous and poisonous obsession. It’s clear from the way that she gazes at Sheba that she is immediately smitten (but who wouldn’t be, considering this is a young Blanchett we’re talking about), but it’s also clear that her affection goes beyond the merely platonic. And, as the film constantly makes clear, this isn’t the first time that Barbara has fallen in love with a friend, only for things to take a turn for the worse.
Because so much of Notes on a Scandal is conveyed through Barbara’s interior monologue and her diaries, we as viewers are sutured into her point of view whether we like it or not. The film contains many moments when the camera is aligned with her gaze, most notably when she catches Sheba engaged in a tryst with Steven (it’s thus also surely not a coincidence that Sheba’s name evokes both the biblical seductress the Queen of Sheba and also Bathsheba, who caught King David’s gaze while she was bathing, setting in motion a love affair with tragic consequences). And, despite the ugliness and brittleness of her soul, Barbara does have a number of good points to make, not just about the truly reprehensible and disgusting behavior in which Sheba has engaged but also about the damage this is going to inflict on Steven, whether or not the affair becomes public.
But, for Barbara, Sheba’s transgression also marks an opportunity and, say what you will about her, but there’s a certain Machiavellian brilliance to her subsequent scheme. She quickly realized that she can use what she knows about Sheba’s dalliance to bind the other woman more tightly to her, even as she also tries to coerce her into cutting Steven off (which Sheba promises but ultimately fails to do). Even though she succeeds in ingratiating herself into Sheba’s life, there’s always the whiff of desperation to her, and though for her part Sheba seems genuinely fond of Barbara, the film repeatedly calls attention to her family’s increasing contempt for this woman who has wedged herself into their midst.
Indeed, as with so many other queer villains, there’s more than a little tragedy to Barbara, particularly when one considers that she came of an age and has spent much of her life in a country in which (male) homosexual activity was technically illegal until 1967. As she herself says: “People like Sheba think they know what it is to be lonely. But of the drip, drip of the long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. What it's like to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. Of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.” Even delivered as it is in Barbara’s biting and cynical tone, it’s hard to feel sorry for her. The moment in which she tries to encourage some physical intimacy between the two of them certainly reads as creepy, yes, but it’s also more than a little pathetic.
Time and again throughout the film we see just how abjectly lonely Barbara is, and it’s not as if she’s totally lacking in human feeling or empathy. When her cat becomes deathly ill, for example she is clearly distraught, since the little creature is one of her few sources of companionship. Even this, though, is somewhat tainted by her growing obsession with Sheba, since the latter refuses to abandon her family to go with Barbara to say goodbye, and it’s this refusal that sparks Barbara’s ultimate act of vengeance: intimating the truth about Sheba’s affair to a fellow teacher.
Time and again, Notes on a Scandal fascinatingly positions Barbara as being on the right side of morality: after all, she notes from the beginning that what Sheba is doing is morally wrong. And there’s no question that what Sheba does is morally reprehensible, but Barbara’s cunning manipulation of her is no less awful and evil, particularly since she agrees to keep things hidden just so that she can keep Sheba under her control. For Barbara desire has curdled into something venomous and terrible, something that is more about power and domination and manipulation than it is about genuine affection. Neither woman seems to care much at all for Steve’s welfare.
Ultimately it all comes crashing down: the affair is exposed, Sheba goes to court and loses her family, Barbara loses her job and they move in together, only for Sheba to discover the truth of her manipulations, after which she returns to her family. In many ways, Barbara is as much the architect of her own downfall as Sheba is of hers. Her complicity in covering up Sheba’s actions gives the headmaster just the weapon he needs to force her into retirement. One can't help but think that had she been a more convivial colleague and not gone out of her way to challenge and humiliate him in front of the rest of the faculty, it’s entirely possible that he might have been willing to stick his neck out for her. As it is, he has no reason to support her and, in the end, it seems that Barbara is alone once again.
Here is where the film differs markedly from the novel, the end of which sees Barbara and Sheba still locked together in mutual dependence. In the film, by contrast, Barbara introduces herself to another young woman sitting in the park (Anne-Marie Duff, in a notable but minor part), and the cycle seems likely to start all over again. Unchastened by her actions, perhaps even emboldened by them, Barbara is ready to embark into another aspect of her queer future.
Queer villainy in Notes on a Scandal is a decidedly bitter and sour affair, but there is pleasure here, too. Dench gives her all to the role, and though we might recoil at Barbara and her methods and her obsession, there’s also something compelling about her. As so often in the movies, the evil queer gives expression to the darkness in all of us, giving it free rein to wreak havoc.
And honestly: who could ask for more than that?