Symbols Blood on Her Tongue Johanna van Veen

The Bog Body: A Symbol of Buried Secrets and Return of the Repressed in Blood on Her Tongue

What the Bog Body Literally Is

In Johanna van Veen’s gothic horror novel Blood on Her Tongue, the bog body is a preserved corpse unearthed by peat cutters on the Schatteleyn estate. The discovery is first recounted in a letter from Sarah to her twin sister Lucy. The body is naked, face down, with wooden stakes driven through its knees, elbows, shoulders, and neck — a method typical of historical revenant burials. A large stone has been forced into its mouth, breaking several teeth. Later, during an autopsy conducted by the doctor Arthur Hoefnagel and a specialist named Doctor Rosenthaler, further grotesque details emerge: the body has no internal organs, no tongue, and a small walnut-like object where the brain should be. Sarah, who assists at the autopsy, identifies the corpse as female and later calls her “Marianne.” The bog woman is thus a figure of extreme physical violation, its preservation and mutilation suggesting a deliberate ritual meant to prevent the dead from returning.

Where the Bog Body Recurs — and How Its Meaning Changes

The bog body appears or is referenced at critical junctures, each time accruing new symbolic weight.

  • Discovery and autopsy (chapters 1 and 3): Initially, the bog body is a scientific curiosity. Sarah is fascinated and disturbed. Her letter describes its “strangest, most haunting face” and her impulse to remove the stone. The autopsy reveals its emptiness, which unsettles the medical men and deepens Sarah’s obsession. At this stage, the body represents the eerie but explainable — a piece of archaeological evidence that triggers Sarah’s latent anxieties.

  • Sarah’s sleepwalking dream (chapter 9): After the autopsy, Sarah experiences a dream in which the bog woman comes alive, kisses her, and forces her to swallow something. This episode transforms the bog body from a static object into an active, predatory force. It becomes a symbol of the return of the repressed — Sarah’s suppressed desires, madness, and guilt over her dead daughter Lucille. The dream is sexual and violent, culminating in a parasitic transfer: the bog woman “spits” something into Sarah’s throat. The dream blurs reality and hallucination, making the bog body a conduit for exploring female desire and fear.

  • Not-Sarah’s emergence (chapter 11 onward): After Sarah’s apparent death and resurrection, the entity that takes over her body behaves like the bog woman. Not-Sarah craves blood, rejects normal food, and exhibits the “unnatural appetites” that the historical record of Marianne’s murder describes. The bog body thus becomes a model for Not-Sarah’s identity — a hungry, vengeful, queer female force. The physical remnants of the bog woman fade into the background as the living avatar (Not-Sarah) takes center stage.

  • Historical record (chapter 14): Research by Mrs. van Dijk uncovers a sixteenth-century court document detailing the trial of a man named J.W., who killed his wife M.W. because he believed she was a changeling. The method matches the bog body: rock in the mouth, body thrown in the bog. This reveals the bog woman’s name (Marianne) and her backstory as a woman abused, deemed mad, and murdered. At this point, the bog body represents historical erasure and male violence — a silenced woman whose story was buried until the present.

  • Final pages: The novel ends with the three women (Lucy, Not-Sarah, Katje) disappearing, possibly into the bog. The bog becomes a place of escape and transformation, echoing the bog body’s original function as both grave and crypt. The symbol cycles from life-giving peat (preservation) to deathly prison (revenant prevention) to liberating refuge.

Character Connections to the Bog Body

  • Sarah Schatteleyn (later Not-Sarah): Sarah is the character most directly linked to the bog woman. Her fascination is immediate and self-destructive: she cuts her hand on the corpse’s teeth, dreams of it, and eventually seems to become it. The author’s conversation in the back matter notes that the conflation of madness and queerness in the novel is a critique, not an endorsement. Sarah’s identification with the bog woman embodies that conflation — society views her obsessive interest as insanity, yet the narrative suggests the bog woman is real as a supernatural force. Sarah’s eventual transformation into Not-Sarah literalizes the merging of their identities.

  • Lucy Goedhart: Lucy, as the “submissive twin” (as van Veen describes her in the author conversation), initially sees the bog body as a source of her sister’s illness. She tries to rationalize Sarah’s writings and dismisses the bog woman as superstition. However, Lucy’s own fantasies are also entwined with violence and predation — she imagines being “caught” by Michael. The bog body forces Lucy to confront her fear of being a shadow, of losing her sense of self. When she ultimately helps Not-Sarah kill Michael and Arthur, she abandons conventional morality and aligns herself with the bog-bodied Other.

  • Michael Schatteleyn: Sarah’s husband treats the bog body as a scientific specimen and later as evidence of Sarah’s madness. He blames the body for triggering Sarah’s deterioration, yet he is also complicit in the system that dismisses women’s experiences. His eventual murder by Not-Sarah is a symbolic reversal: the violent male order is consumed by the female revenant.

  • Arthur Hoefnagel: The doctor is both a figure of rational science and romantic patron. He performs the autopsy with clinical detachment but fails to see the supernatural truth. His marriage proposal to Lucy is a form of social control; his death alongside Michael underscores the novel’s critique of patriarchal guardianship.

  • Katje: The servant’s care of Sarah and her loyalty to the twin sisters make her an ally. She does not fear the bog body—she is pragmatic, helping with the washing of Sarah’s corpse and later agreeing to disappear with Lucy and Not-Sarah. Katje represents the resilience of the lower-class woman who survives by staying quiet and useful.

  • The Bog Woman (Marianne): Though never a speaking character, her history emerges through the court document. She is a victim of changeling belief — a woman whose mental illness (or queerness) was labeled demonic and punished by murder. Her body’s preservation across centuries makes her a witness to patriarchal violence. The novel gives her a posthumous voice through Not-Sarah.

Thematic Connections

The bog body serves as a nexus for several major themes:

  • Buried secrets and the return of the repressed: The bog literally preserves what society wants forgotten. The stone in the mouth signifies the silencing of women. The bog body’s emergence parallels the unraveling of Sarah’s hidden past (child loss, suicidal tendencies, same-sex desire) and Lucy’s concealed adultery with Michael. As the repressed returns, it destroys the repressors (Michael, Arthur).

  • Sisterhood and codependency: The bog body catalyses the twin bond. Sarah’s obsession forces Lucy to grapple with their connection. Ultimately, Lucy chooses Not-Sarah over all other relationships, embodying the toxic codependency the novel explores. The sisterhood and codependency theme page details this dynamic further.

  • Madness and social control: The novel critiques the conflation of madness with deviance. Sarah’s “madness” (her dreams, her appetite) is partly a natural response to trauma and partly supernatural. The bog woman’s historical murder shows how society eliminates women deemed mad. The madness and social control theme examines this more deeply.

  • Parasitism and identity: The bog woman’s empty body suggests a hollowness that invites possession. Not-Sarah is a parasite on Sarah’s life. The parasitism and identity theme explores how characters borrow or steal each other’s selves.

  • Moral compromise and violence: Lucy’s decision to kill Michael and Arthur to protect Not-Sarah echoes the novel’s treatment of mercy kills. The moral compromise and violence theme shows how the sisters justify violence as survival.

  • Female desire and agency: The bog body’s sexuality is ambiguous — Sarah’s dream contains explicit erotic content, and Not-Sarah openly expresses desire (drinking blood, wanting to consume Michael). The female desire and agency theme highlights how the supernatural allows women to act outside societal bounds.

Study Questions

1. Why does the bog body lack internal organs, and what does that absence symbolize?

The autopsy reveals the body is completely hollow inside, with no bones, organs, or tongue. The medical men cannot explain this, but Sarah suspects a supernatural cause. The emptiness symbolizes a lack of soul or self — a person reduced to a vessel. It also mirrors Sarah’s feeling of being hollow after her daughter’s death, and foreshadows the way Not-Sarah will later take over her identity. The absence of a tongue especially suggests the silencing of women’s voices, a key theme.

2. How does Sarah’s dream about the bog woman blur the line between reality and hallucination, and what does it reveal about her desires?

Sarah’s dream is realistic and corporeal — she feels the bog woman’s cold skin, experiences pleasure, and wakes with a sore throat and the sensation of having swallowed something. The dream is so vivid that Sarah is unsure whether it was genuine. It reveals her suppressed homoerotic desire, her longing for physical intimacy after her husband’s neglect, and her fear of being consumed or possessed. The dream also acts as a premonition of her transformation into Not-Sarah.

3. What does the historical trial of J.W. (chapter 14) contribute to our understanding of the bog body as a symbol?

The trial transcript shows that the bog woman (Marianne) was killed because her husband believed she was a changeling — a common folk explanation for mental illness or nonconforming behavior. The document uses language stigmatizing her as “strange,” “foul-mouthed,” and “depressed in Spirits.” This historical context transforms the bog body from a generic horror prop into a specific victim of misogyny and social control. It echoes Sarah’s own vulnerability and the novel’s critique of how madness was weaponized.

4. At the end of the novel, Lucy, Not-Sarah, and Katje disappear. How does this ending reframe the bog body as a symbol of liberation rather than imprisonment?

The bog that once held Marianne’s body becomes the means of escape for the three women. They stage a fake elopement and vanish, likely into the peat fields. The bog, which had preserved a story of murder, now hides a new story of survival. The final newspaper article speculates that “the bog claimed them,” but the reader knows they have chosen this disappearance. The bog body’s original function — keeping the dead bound to the earth — is inverted: the living willingly enter the bog to escape the patriarchal world. The symbol thus evolves from containment to freedom, from silence to chosen obscurity.

Conclusion

In Blood on Her Tongue, the bog body is far more than a gothic prop. It accumulates layers of meaning through each recurrence: a scientific curiosity, a sexual nightmare, a historical document of female suffering, and finally a model for transgressive survival. By linking the bog woman’s fate to the twins’ story, Johanna van Veen uses this ancient corpse to explore how women are buried alive by society, and how they might claw their way back.