(FORMER) WHITE QUEEN OF THE HELLFIRE CLUB
When speaking to X-MEN: BLACK – EMMA FROST (2018) #1 writer Leah Williams, Ellie and Preeti got into Hellfire Club history, exploring Emma’s earliest brush with this elite enclave who exploit and corrupt mutants for personal gain.
“Their whole thing is power,” Williams explained. [The Hellfire Club] wants to accumulate power. They want to stay in positions of power. And it doesn’t really matter what the casualties are of that.”
“They’re [also] a traditional hierarchy where we have the queens, a White Queen and a Black Queen, and then we have the White King, and then at the top would be the Black King,” Williams continued. “And there’s also Bishops in the Inner Circle and inner sanctum. Like, all these different kinds of Freemason-esque levels of secrecy and hierarchy.”
Notably, Emma’s rise to the top of the Hellfire Club was meteoric. “So, she was 19 years old when Sebastian Shaw took notice of her and kind of turned her into his protégé,” Williams said. “And they were romantically involved, and he was significantly older than her. And [Emma] ousted the former White Queen and took over her position. It’s a huge rise to power from where she began. And as White Queen, [Emma] became far more involved in the behind-the-scenes puppeteering that the Hellfire Club has going on. And it’s not so much about morality, even though for Emma, it is always there. She just thinks that she can walk the razor’s edge of that morality.”
For Williams, there is a clear distinction between too the White Queen and the present Emma Frost, teacher and protector of mutantkind.
“As the White Queen, the way that I tend to think about it is [that’s when] we’re talking about Emma’s most famously villainous days, like when she was doing really awful things like kidnapping Kate Pryde and running a school for evil young mutants, the Hellions, who she loved dearly. But it was all sort of while she was with Sebastian and very heavily influenced by him.”
So, is Emma good? Or is Emma bad?
“I firmly think of her in gray territory, and I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Williams stated. “She is no saint. She has a checkered past. I would not take that away from her because I think it makes it more interesting. There is something fiercely exhilarating about a character who isn’t going to let moral scruples restrict her when she’s going after what she wants, but she still has the inner core of goodness in her. But she’s capable of doing terrible things, and I love that about her.”
EMMA FROST: FASHION AND POWER
Dr. Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, shared her take on Emma’s powerful, and sex-positive, approach to fashion. She also ran through some of Emma’s best looks from Hellfire Galas past.
“Well, no one person can decide [what] is a sex-positive look,” Steele said. “It’s always going to be something which is both individually subjective and culturally constructed. I think that whenever you have clothes which are body exposing, you’re going to have a wide range of responses. Some people will find it sexy and empowering and other people will find it disgusting and sluttish. You cannot control what other people are thinking.”
When talking about Emma’s sense of empowerment through fashion, Dr. Steele first defined “power.” Listeners might pick up that Emma checks both boxes!
“Power can mean two things,” Steele explained. “Power can mean freedom. If a woman feels empowered, she means she is free to walk at night on the street without being afraid. It can also mean, of course, power to oppress other people. And there you have again, not only a differing definition of power, but also the complexity of dealing with other people in the real world.”
“I think that there’s a lot of generational differences and a lot of cultural differences in how sex positivity and dress is perceived in terms of power and freedom,” Steele theorized. “But definitely from a subjective point of view, feelings of sex positivity make you feel more powerful and more free.”
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