Monster Mothers: Feminist Approaches to Mothering Sons

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MONSTER MOTHERS: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO MOTHERING SONS

JESSICA B. BURSTREM

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2006

Jessica B. Burstrem

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted first of all to my director, Kenneth Kidd, whose patience, persistence, and enthusiasm added incalculably to the quality of this work; to the other faculty in the

University of Florida English Department and Center for Women’s Studies and Gender

Research who supported and assisted me in this project, particularly Tace Hedrick, Kim

Emery, and Connie Shehan; to my fellow graduate students, my family, and my friends, particularly those whom I cite within the text, who showed interest in my work and gave me ideas for it through countless discussions on the subject; and to the other mothering theorists, particularly Andrea O’Reilly, Renee Knapp, and the other women in the

Association for Research on Mothering, who think, listen, and continue to inspire me to explore and pursue the issues that I consider here in the years ahead.

I must also thank once again my family for their unending patience and faith in me.

They have carried me through the darker hours and spurred me on to the completion of this project. My parents raised me to be a feminist, without which I would not have the perspective on the world that I do, and my son Alex, who was, of course, the impetus for this project, has also demonstrated an understanding beyond his years of my undertaking of it. Ultimately, without him it never would have occurred to me to try, and as I believe that this work is incredibly important, his has been a significant role indeed.

I dedicate my thesis, then, to all those whom I have mentioned here, to those whom I have not mentioned, to anyone who has worried about being a Monster Mother, and to feminist mothers and fathers everywhere—and those who would like to be.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

ABSTRACT...... v

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION...... 1

2 THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE CHILD...... 11

3 THE ROLE OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY ...... 16

4 THE REPRESENTATIONS...... 27

5 FEMINIST MOTHERING ...... 50

6 CONCLUSION ...... 65

APPENDIX MORE MONSTER MOTHERS ...... 67

REFERENCE LIST...... 85

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 93

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

MONSTER MOTHERS: FEMINIST APPROACHES TO MOTHERING SONS

JESSICA B. BURSTREM

August 2006

Chair: Kenneth Kidd Major Department: English

Much of feminist scholarship today emphasizes feminist scholars’ ethical obligation to enact both theoretical and practical activism. Academic studies of mothering and motherhood are one manifestation of that, particularly among those feminist scholars who are themselves mothers, as taking a feminist approach to mothering is an important aspect of their feminism for those who are feminist mothers. More recent feminist academic considerations of masculinity among scholars who are daughters, friends, colleagues, romantic partners, and/or mothers to men are another example. Considering the situation of mothers of sons therefore offers a valuable perspective on some of the challenging interrelation of these concerns of contemporary feminist scholarship. However, feminist mothering is not so simple for mothers of sons, as taking a feminist approach to mothering sons feels counter to the maternal desire to do what is best for one’s children.

Both that feeling and that desire are socially constructed; nevertheless, they are very real and difficult to resist, even with the intellectual awareness of their construction. Feminist mothering, for mothers of sons, then, seems to be a risk.

This impression comes from the pervasive negative images of supposedly inappropriate mothers of sons in the popular imagination, a subject that other feminist theorists certainly discuss. However, their discussions center on the timeliness of such images: that is, their relevance to the exact periods and locations where they appear—and as such, those theorists fail to recognize the images’ persistence over time. The images, on the other hand, demonstrate that the “Monster Mother” trope under analysis here is present in everything from the mythology, fairy tales, and classic literature that comprise the base of Western culture to popular American movies spanning multiple genres such as melodrama, suspense, horror, satire, and documentary. Such continuity is noteworthy for its demonstration of this trope’s persistence, despite the treatment that it consistently receives from feminists. The Monster Mother myth thus demonstrates what concerns our culture, both historically and also at this specific time and place.

The effect of these images on would-be feminist mothers of sons also suggests the need for positive and visible visual representations of feminist mothering of sons (i.e. in popular American movies) to counter the negative social constructions of it that originate and perpetuate themselves there. Then mothers of sons could be in more of a position to exercise what one could call a “feminist pedagogy” with their sons, an act that is essential both to advance the feminist movement in general and to allow mothers to feel confident about enacting feminist mothering with their sons, thus advancing the movement even more.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Much of feminist scholarship today emphasizes feminist scholars’ ethical obligation to enact both theoretical and practical activism.1 Academic studies of mothering and motherhood are one manifestation of such, particularly among those feminist scholars who are themselves mothers.2 More recent feminist academic considerations of masculinity among scholars who are daughters, friends, colleagues, romantic partners, and/or mothers to men are another example.3 Considering the position of mothers of sons therefore offers a valuable perspective on some of the challenging interrelation of these concerns of contemporary feminist scholarship.

Taking a feminist approach to mothering is often important for those who are feminist mothers. However, that is not so simple for mothers of sons, as taking a feminist approach to mothering sons feels counter to the maternal desire to do what is best for one’s children. As I argue in Chapters 2 and 3 below, both that feeling and that desire are socially constructed; nevertheless, they are very real and difficult to resist, even with the

1 For instance, bell hooks, in Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black, posits the development of “critical consciousness” as central to feminism (14). She defines critical consciousness as assuming “responsibility for transforming ourselves and society” (20) through both “words and deeds” (25) which we must share both in the university, as scholars and teachers, and out of it, “across kitchen tables” (24). hooks thus calls for both performing scholarship as an act of resistance and enacting resistance through the way that feminists live their lives.

2 Although it is also popular among feminists who consider the subject as daughters, who obviously approach the issue in a very different way than mothers, both of daughters and, particularly, of sons. As Maureen T. Reddy, Martha Roth, and Amy Sheldon write in 1994, “usually mothers are objects of analysis, with feminists often replicating the nonfeminist interest in mothers chiefly as objects of their children’s demands. Feminism has been largely the daughter’s critique” (1).

3 Again, as hooks writes, “it is a fiction of false feminism that we women can find our power in a world without men, in a world where we deny our connections to men” (The Will to Change xvi).

1 2 intellectual awareness of their construction. They are often, in fact, part of the very act of loving one’s son(s); it is not surprising that one would exercise caution when considering taking a risk with that love. As Susan E. Chase writes,

all mothers, even the most privileged, feel the pressure of [the] glorified image of the good mother. . . . Every action is morally freighted: taking or refusing painkilling drugs during childbirth; bottle-feeding or breastfeeding; deciding whether the child should sleep alone or in its parents’ (or parent’s) bed; allowing or prohibiting junk food and TV; working outside the home or staying home. Even the most mundane actions carry moral weight. (30)

Thus, for mothers of sons, feminist mothering especially seems to be a risk.

One source of this impression is the pervasive negative images of supposedly inappropriate mothers of sons in the popular imagination, a subject that other feminist theorists certainly discuss. However, their discussions center on the timeliness of such images: that is, their relevance to the exact periods and locations where they appear—and thus those theorists fail to recognize the images’ persistence over time. My discussion of the images in Chapter 4 and the Appendix below, on the other hand, demonstrates that the particular trope that I analyze—what I call the “Monster Mother”—is present in everything from the mythology, fairy tales, and classic literature that comprise the base of

Western culture to popular American movies spanning multiple genres (such as melodrama, suspense, horror, satire, and documentary). Such continuity is noteworthy for its demonstration of this trope’s persistence, despite the treatment that it consistently receives from feminists.4 As Lévi-Strauss writes, recurring myth demonstrates what concerns a culture, and in this work I discuss how the Monster Mother myth

4 Indeed, the fact that feminists’ treatment of this topic has not altered or significantly affected its pervasiveness indicates a problem with the approach that they take, as I argue below. In fact, I even find resonances of the ideology that these images manifest/perpetuate in feminist treatments of mothering themselves, as I will discuss below, which is to a large extent why I claim that it is these continuing representations that inhibit taking a feminist approach to mothering sons.

3 demonstrates what concerns our culture, both historically and also at this specific time and place.

In “The Case of the Missing Mother,” E. Ann Kaplan writes of the four kinds of mothers in Western culture: the Good Mother; the Bad Mother; the Heroic Mother; and the Silly, Weak, or Vain Mother (128). Here, I write of a fifth: the Monster Mother. The recurring story that I have found is that bad things happen to the world when a (White) boy’s mother is power-hungry. She exhibits a high level of concern for her son’s acquisition of power, purportedly in furtherance of his interests, but really in furtherance of her own, since she hopes to influence his actions by way of their relationship and thus essentially have power for herself. Because she therefore has access to the power of being

(White and) male that her son(s) have, she becomes powerful by using her sons; however, this act subverts the “traditional” male-female power dynamic, and as that happens, the boys’ socialization into “traditional” male sexuality is subverted as well—or so these representations suggest.5

I got the idea for the term “Monster Mother” from the actual appellation of it to various mothers in both written and visual fiction and from the representation of literally monstrous mothers in both mediums as well. For instance, the earliest literal Monster

Mother appears in one of the earliest pieces of writing in English: Beowulf, which features Grendel’s mother.6 Another early Monster Mother is Edmund Spenser’s serpent-

5 It would seem that feminism ought to actually be a solution to the “problem,” as it provides women their own access to power, and in Being Julia, as I will discuss much later, that is exactly the case. However, that movie is unusual in that respect; as in particular the newest version of The Manchurian Candidate will demonstrate, most mainstream movies find a way to depict feminism as an exacerbation of monstrous mothering rather than the other way around.

6 Grendel, a fatherless (l.1355), power-hungry “brute” [“Grendel wants only to dominate the hall,” not the “outlying buildings” (35n3)] and “fiend out of hell” from “among the banished monsters,/ Cain’s clan” of “ogres and elves and evil phantoms/ and the giants too” kills dozens of people every night for twelve

4 lady Errour, who eats her young. Similarly, Peter Jackson’s 1992 zombie thriller parody

Dead Alive, as I discuss in the Appendix below, is a movie with a literal Monster Mother, although the outward manifestations of it do not appear right away; 2005’s animated

Robots is another.7 One more 2005 “comedy,” Monster-in-Law, simply by replacing the word “Mother” with “Monster” in its title, provides further evidence of the easy connection that even contemporary popular American movies make between mothers and monsters.

It was actually only in hindsight that I realized that I conceived of this project because of my personal concerns about how to reconcile my feminist ideology as a woman and as an academic with my role as an autonomous mother to a son myself.8 At first, I was simply horrified at my recognition of my own instincts to socialize my son in accordance with traditional gender norms in a way that I believe that I would never have felt compelled to do with a daughter. My primary research consisted of reading books and

months, showing neither mercy nor remorse (ll.100-156; emphasis added). [Cain’s mother too, I note, could bear the blame for her son’s and his descendants’ inferior status.] The language of one passage even suggests that Grendel commits a kind of homosexual rape when he wins a battle, “glut[ting] himself” on the men whom he defeats, “swoop[ing] on that flower of manhood/ as on others before,” and, “gorged and bloodied,” carrying away the body of the men’s leader to “feed on it alone, in a cruel frenzy/ fouling his moor-nest” (ll.442-450). In the end, he is weaker than Beowulf, who brings forth from Grendel fear and an overwhelming desire to retreat like a child to his mother, to “flee to his den and hide with the devil’s litter” (ll.753-763). The “devil’s” child dies at that point, but then Grendel’s mother (presumably the devil herself), the “monstrous hell-bride,” comes after Beowulf, seeking revenge (ll.1259-1278; emphasis added). Grendel’s mother takes Beowulf to “her outlandish lair” (l.1500)—another indication of her deviance—where she shows that she is an even more challenging opponent than her son, almost killing Beowulf against whom Grendel had not had a chance; only God could surpass her strength in the end (ll.1543-1554).

7 Both of those Monster Mothers have deep, gravelly, masculine voices; keep their sons’ fathers imprisoned in high and not easily accessible places in their homes; and control even their grown sons’ outside behavior with their influence, which prevents the men from developing romantic relationships of their own.

8 Rather than “single motherhood,” I use the phrase “autonomous motherhood” throughout this essay to avoid reinscribing heteronormative marriage-centered attitudes about parenting. Of course, “autonomous motherhood” seems to support society’s irrational ideal of complete independence instead, but it does serve to draw attention to the fact that society does largely fail to support these women—like most mothers, of course.

5 watching movies for manifestations of the parental concerns that I vaguely sensed behind my instincts, and it quickly explained for me why I felt those inclinations in the first place. It also increased my horror as I realized that most of my primary source materials on mother-son relationships were rife with death, gore, and mortal fear.9 That legacy makes determining how best to understand such material in order to perform as a mother to a son on a daily basis even more daunting—and important.

My focus in Chapter 4 is on the Monster Mothers in the fictional Manchurian

Candidate, which appeared first in book form and then in two movie adaptations, and on the historical Alexander the Great, whose life has also been adapted into two movies. All of those adaptations are mainstream, well-known, easily accessible English-language

American feature films, and they are the most important here because they vividly represent all of the characteristics of the Monster Mother trope, many of which distinctly echo some of its earlier manifestations. Furthermore, comparisons of their various adaptations enable me to vividly illustrate the state of that trope today.

The other films that I discuss in the footnotes and the Appendix are, for the most part, also full-length English-language features that appeared in movie theaters across the

United States, thus giving most Americans a real opportunity for exposure to them and their influences at that time. That means that occasionally the movies were created in another country, such as Great Britain or Australia, but still played in most mainstream

9 One movie, Mother’s Boys, according to the Blockbuster Online sleeve, carries a telling MPAA rating of R for language and “a mother’s sociopathic behavior.” Unfortunately, because it ends before the son in question reaches adulthood, it is impossible to say whether or not it provides another example of a Monster Mother having lasting (homo)sexual and negative psychological effects on her son, although it certainly provides an example of a Monster Mother. Jamie Lee Curtis’s character abandons her family to travel the world and then returns to use her sexual allure, among other things, to try to gain power over her eldest son, even involving him in her own homicidal plot against (an)other woman, all in pursuit of regaining her foothold within the family. The last scene in the movie, though, does strongly suggest that the boy is on the brink of insanity as a result of these experiences, even though his mother will no longer be a physical presence in his life.

American movie theaters. I also include some films that may not have appeared in most theaters but that nevertheless generated enough awareness to attract the attention of many

Americans, who could then acquire the movies because they were—and still are—easily accessible at national movie rental chains. These references function here to help to illustrate the pervasiveness of the Monster Mother trope throughout history and today.

I conclude in Chapter 5 with my own suggestion—different from the arguably ineffective approach that others take—of pervasive positive visual representations of feminist mothering of sons, such as in popular American movies, to counter the negative social constructions of it that both derive from and perpetuate themselves there, as countering the Monster Mother myth is essential to the feminist mothering of sons. After all, mothers of sons are in a position to exercise what one could call a “feminist pedagogy” with their sons. As bell hooks indicates, “the reconstruction and transformation of male behavior, of masculinity, is a necessary and essential part of feminist revolution” (127), and bringing about that reconstruction and transformation requires feminist mothering of sons. Further, such reconstruction and transformation are also necessary to allow mothers to feel confident about enacting feminist mothering with their sons, thus advancing the revolution even more. As Sherry B. Ortner writes, “the implications for social change are . . . circular: a different cultural view can grow only out of a different social actuality, a different social actuality can grow only out of a different cultural view” (28). In seeking to determine in this work what that kind of balancing act might entail, I can enact my own feminism at the level of theory, and at the same time, since I am mother to a son, I can enact it with him in practice. Thus through this project I am trying to be a feminist in both “words and deeds” as hooks advocates.

My personal experience is very much present in this work, for several well- considered reasons. First of all, given my sense of a scholar’s obligation to reveal his or her own motivation(s), not acknowledging my own position as a mother to a son would be unethical. It would also cause me to negate the idea that the voices and experiences of actual mothers of sons are legitimate and important, as I will discuss further in Chapter 5 below. Furthermore, failing to speak as simultaneously mother and academic reinforces the patriarchal notion that such roles should (and even can) be separate. The invisibility of mothers in the workplace that comes from separating the roles of worker and mother allows employers to continue to neglect their workers’ familial interests and needs; it also, of course, creates the feeling that “working mothers” must do a whole day’s worth of mothering outside of the workplace every day in order to fully be mothers, as what they do inside of the workplace, in this construction, is foreign to the role of mother.10

Some theorists in the field of mothering studies have sought to address this problem by distancing their conceptions and acts of mothering from motherhood itself. For instance, Andrea O’Reilly’s idea of feminist mothering—what she calls “empowered mothering”—is “‘outlaw mothering’ or ‘mothering against motherhood’” (Mother

Outlaws 4),11 based upon her distinction between “mothering” (the act) and

10 We recognize that fathers, on the other hand, may show their love for their children by providing for them through their employment and by providing a good example for them just by being employed. We cannot seem to recognize that mothers can love in the same ways, however, perhaps because as a society we’ve never stopped questioning whether a woman working is a good thing the way that we implicitly accept that a man working is. As Rich writes,

the meaning of “fatherhood” remains tangential, elusive. To “father” a child suggests above all to beget, to provide the sperm which fertilizes the ovum. To “mother” a child implies a continuing presence, lasting at least nine months, more often for years. (12)

11 O’Reilly, who writes, edits, or critiques almost all of the other theories on mothering that exist and presides over the Association for Research on Mothering, all of which makes her the foremost mothering studies theorist today, also discusses that idea in her introductions to two of her other collections: Mothers & Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons and Mother Matters: Motherhood as

“motherhood” (the social construction) inspired by Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born.12

However, by distancing and dissociating the enactment of feminist mothering and other radical kinds of mothering from the idea of motherhood itself, O’Reilly merely reinscribes the idea that such practices are separate and distinct from the “traditional” conception of motherhood, thus legitimizing that conception even more. That, in turn, makes it even more difficult for feminist mothers to liberate themselves from the negative effects of the social construction of motherhood. Further, once outside motherhood, feminist mothers cannot have any transformative effect on the idea of motherhood either.

Yet, as I see it, both liberation and transformation are essential to a feminist response.

O’Reilly’s effective reinscription of societal ideals of motherhood within her attempt to resist them is one example of how even feminists themselves manifest socially constructed ideas about what constitutes an appropriate mother. As hooks writes, “Third

Discourse and Practice. In Mothers & Sons (which predates the others and, I note, is groundbreaking in some respects; notably, its mere existence on that subject matter), she suggests that mothers must reject motherhood and become “outlaws” in order to circumvent the effects of the kind of negative ideology discussed here.

12 Rich writes,

I try to distinguish between two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control. . . . We know far more about how, under patriarchy, female possibility has been literally massacred on the site of motherhood. . . . If rape has been terrorism, motherhood has been penal servitude. It need not be. This book is not an attack on the family or on mothering, except as defined and restricted under patriarchy. (13-14; emphases in original)

Thus, despite what O’Reilly claims, Rich does not distinguish between the words “motherhood” and “mothering” in her book, just between two meanings of motherhood. Nor does Lauri Umansky (in Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties, New York UP, 1996), who O’Reilly notes draws from Rich’s distinction above in her own “classification” of “two competing feminist views on motherhood” (O’Reilly, From Motherhood to Mothering, 2), which I quote below. O’Reilly explains what must actually be her own definitions, then:

The term “motherhood” refers to the patriarchal institution of motherhood that is male-defined and controlled and is deeply oppressive to women, while the word “mothering” refers to women’s experiences of mothering that are female-defined and centered and potentially empowering to women. The reality of patriarchal motherhood thus must be distinguished from the possibility or potentiality of gynocentric or feminist mothering. (Ibid.)

World women, African-American women must work against speaking as ‘other,’ speaking to difference as it is constructed in the white-supremacist imagination” (Talking

Back 16). I argue, then, that feminist mothers must work against othering themselves in that way as well. Feminist mothers should not have to distance themselves from motherhood in order to live their feminism, and, again, making that possible is essential to ending the sense of inhibition that many feminist mothers of sons have about taking a feminist approach to mothering their sons.

I construct that phrase very carefully in order to acknowledge that there is more than one way to approach mothering that corresponds with feminist ideology. After all, there is also more than one way to define feminist ideology itself. In fact, how one defines feminist mothering is in some ways completely dependent upon how one defines feminism. It also determines how a theorist suggests a response to the negative representations of mothers discussed here. In fact, in mothering studies, very often a theorist’s suggested response and her definition of feminist mothering are one and the same, of which O’Reilly’s work, introduced above, is a perfect example, which I discuss further in Chapter 5. In that chapter, then, I also consider both the various definitions of feminist mothering that correspond with various approaches to the definition of feminism and some of the various definitions of feminist mothering that mothering studies theorists directly construct themselves. Those considerations enable me to ultimately propose my own definition in Chapter 6 of an approach to feminist mothering that can work in tandem with my proposed response to the inhibitory popular representations discussed throughout this work.

In order to begin to establish the risk that feminist mothering of sons seems to represent and how the Monster Mother trope manifests and contributes to that, I begin my analysis by discussing some of the contemporary circumstances surrounding parenting in general and issues of sexuality in particular.

CHAPTER 2 THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE CHILD

American attitudes about productivity tend to affect our notions of family life. In the past, parents’ compensation for the expense, personal and financial, of having and raising children was the children’s contributions, inside and outside of the home, to the work necessary to keeping the household running, or, in more comfortable households, to the parents’ sense of satisfaction in life, in one form or another.1 In more modern times, we have recognized the inappropriateness of both of those approaches and reconfigured our attitudes toward children accordingly, making their needs central to the operation of a household and reinforcing the idea of our children’s happiness as parents’ only compensation. Those efforts, we learn,2 should include enabling children’s psychological well-being to facilitate their current happiness. It seems equally crucial to have the

“right” kind of means in terms of money and time to afford our children every opportunity to facilitate their future happiness—which in a capitalist system often means trying to prepare them for the kind of success in their careers that will afford them financial comfort and security.3 Thus our children have become another kind of product; their parents, the machines that produce them. Any flaws in the product, then, must

1 Whether that be the boys’ continuation of the family (read: father’s) bloodline and preservation of the family fortune or the girls’ improvement of the family’s social status through their own marriages.

2 Explicitly from contemporary parenting guides and by implication from conversations with other children’s parents. A discussion of parenting guides is outside the scope of this work, but other theorists have approached it, and I may do so in the future as well.

3 Which of course assumes that financial comfort and security both will bring our children happiness and are the only and/or the best way for them to achieve it.

11 12 necessarily be the fault of the machines. Parents who expect any other kind of remuneration must, we think, be selfish.

For example, in family court proceedings, the assumption is that, in general, it is in the best interests of a child to have a strong relationship with both parents, whether or not that relationship is a good one. The courts have translated that assumption into the idea that every child has the right to a strong relationship with both of his or her parents.

Further, because a good parent seeks to facilitate his or her child’s best interests—and certainly the child’s rights—a good parent should seek to facilitate a strong relationship between his or her child and the child’s other parent, or else that parent fails to be a good one. Thus in many places the law states that one of the determinations that a family court must make in custody decisions is which parent is most likely to encourage a child’s relationship with the other parent. The court could determine that a parent is unlikely to do so if he or she even raises any concerns about the other parent at any time, which situation leads many lawyers to discourage their clients from mentioning those concerns, as simply doing so could lead the court to deny them custody.4

However, if something later happens to the child while with one parent, the possibility of which occurrence the other parent suspected but did not mention, the court could also hold that other parent liable for negligence. This situation illustrates just one

4 My comments up to this point in this paragraph come from my close study of aspects of Michigan family law, extensive discussions of its applications with a number of lawyers, and observations of some of those applications during my own two-year custody case. I have consulted the laws of enough other states as well to determine that many of them operate in much the same ways as I describe here. However, in The Custody Wars, Mary Ann Mason argues that the “best interests of the child” standard is essentially a cover for once again seeing children as property and thus custody/parenting time as a parent’s rather than a child’s right. I do not see that perspective as necessarily incompatible with the one above, though; indeed, the best interests of the child standard, applied objectively to parenting time, for instance, produces essentially the same result as would the parents’ rights approach—but it requires a different language—a performance, more or less—in the courtroom.

13 problematic aspect of society’s transformation of children’s interests into needs, as it can even be counterproductive; it also demonstrates how the expectation that good parents should always act in accordance with their children’s interests is often an utterly impossible one to fulfill.5

Still, both popular and academic parenting theory continue to stress the centrality of children’s interests/needs over parents’ interests—particularly mothers’—to such an extent that the latter completely disappears. Advice about parenting throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries hinges upon the best interests of the children rather than those of the parents. If it does suggest anything that might benefit the parents, it defends those suggestions with the ways in which they would ultimately benefit the children. Even in Mothers & Sons, which suggests how to separate the idea of service to one’s children from that of motherhood, the writers still justify their suggestions with how they would serve their children’s interests as well. As Mary Anne Ferguson explains, while theorists may differ in some views, what is more important is

their similarity in placing great responsibility for child-rearing upon the mother. Traditionally the mother has been presented as the source of all tenderness and love; . . . maternal tender loving care has been seen as necessary to a child’s self-love and ability to accept himself. (16)

Thus most of the blame for any flaws in the product falls upon the mother.

In Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Judith Warner writes that our society idealizes and celebrates the completely invested mother (81)—but she must invest herself in her child(ren) for their benefit, not for her own. Mothers should not even have any wishes outside of what’s best for their children, we think. Clearly we are unable to discuss mothers’ needs and wishes in and of themselves. However, as above, we are able

5 One must also wonder whether the legal maneuver described above might be another way to punish a woman who demonstrates disloyalty to her husband—even an estranged one—by opposing his wishes in a custody battle, as that attitude as well is common to historical treatments of motherhood, as I will discuss further in Chapter 4 below.

14 to defend some maternal decisions that come with inherent maternal benefit(s) by citing the benefit(s) to the children that come with them as well. This situation creates a gray area, making the incidence of maternal selfishness more possible. Those incidences, then, are what we fear.

In No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, Marina Warner explains that fear in our entertainment—in horror movies, for instance—functions by enabling us to deal with natural and inescapable fears through control of their sources, among other things. For instance, as Lucy Fischer notes in the essential text

Cinematernity, around the making of 1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, “news stories of infant snatchings by deranged barren women” were particularly worrying society; the movie exploits that concern (136). Similarly, in The Birth of Pleasure (2002),

Carol Gilligan offers another possible explanation for the pervasiveness of the Oedipus myth (or, as I discuss here, the larger Monster Mother trope within which the Oedipus myth often resides): “like all trauma survivors, we keep telling the story we need to listen to and understand. At the same time, we look for ways to break what quickly becomes a vicious cycle” (7–8)—a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it were.

Gilligan explains how Freud writes in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”

(1961) that “we repeat a traumatic experience, or whatever version we tell ourselves of the tragic story” as

an attempt at mastering loss—the fantasy that it will come out right this time. . . . Knowing the end of the story, knowing the tragedy, we have vowed never to repeat it. And yet of course we repeat it over and over again, until we know it by heart. (163)

I argue, however, that the past trauma that we seek to master through new manifestations of the Oedipus and Monster Mother myths is the trauma created by the myths themselves.

As Gilligan also writes, “the Oedipus complex is about: sexualizing the intimacy

[between a mother and her son], placing it under taboo, linking freedom with leaving women and going off with men, and making any woman who resists this separation a virtual Jocasta, Oedipus’ ‘unspeakable mother’”—even though “Jocasta didn’t resist” that separation (74). Thus patriarchy created that mythical family’s trauma, just as it continues to traumatize feminist mothers today.

Gilligan points out, for instance, some of the ways that allowing boys to remain in relationship6 can feel dangerous when she shares a man called Tom’s story of his 5-year- old son Jake, whose focus on “what is happening emotionally in the room . . . is separating him from the other boys, and he is losing his position in the group” (66). At the same time, Gilligan also shares stories of the mothers of young boys talking about

the freedom they feel with their sons to feel their feelings, a freedom often signaled by a mother’s discovery that her son can know her anger without turning on her or leaving her, know it as an emotion in the way they know her love. For a woman, for any woman living in patriarchy, it is extraordinarily freeing to go back or forward into a time when love is not split from anger, when the universe of emotion returns as a world in which she can move freely, where she is not bedeviled by a split between good and bad women, one loving, the other angry—images of women that are surreal, that come from the unconscious of men. Which may be why these mothers’ experiences with their sons are so powerful—why Clara speaks of such intensity of feeling, real rage and also the most intense love— because it signifies such release. There is no way to love freely, to experience freedom in loving, when you cannot feel your feelings, and anger is just that, a feeling. (71)

Women being free to engage in all of their emotions—even anger, which is usually unacceptable in patriarchal femininity—is dangerous, though, because a mother, “in turning toward her son” is therefore “turning away from the values and the judgments of patriarchy” (72). That, I argue, is another reason for the Oedipus myth. Thus the negative and even fearsome representations of mothers in literature and popular movies that I discuss in Chapter 4 below can serve as indications of the nature and degree of societal fears about motherhood, so investigating them can tell us much about our culture and ourselves—and thereby more about this situation facing feminist mothers of sons today.

6 That is, “being in sync with another person,” as distinct from “relationships” (9), which, Gilligan explains, tend to instead entail “dissociation . . . the psychic mechanism that allows survival in patriarchy” (11).

CHAPTER 3 THE ROLE OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Acting in our children’s best interests seems to involve facilitating their happiness, and to be happy, children need to feel that their society accepts them. Thus doing anything to hamper our children’s chances of acceptance is selfish and bad parenting. For example, a child writes to Jean Phillips (of “Dear Abby” fame) complaining that her mother keeps her hair long, permed, and bleached and wears only leather and T-shirts with the “Harley Davidson” insignia on them. The child and his or her siblings apparently find this style embarrassing. Phillips’ response, of course, is that the children should approach their mother and ask her to “dress more conservatively” in public. The children are “entitled to [their] feelings—and [their] preferences,” she writes.

People have used the same argument to oppose interracial marriage1 and same-sex adoption. The children in those situations may encounter society’s disapproval, they say, and we should not subject them to that. No matter that changing the way that society responds to such things would eliminate the problem; rather, no good mother should perform any action which might cause her children to suffer society’s disapprobation, reasonable or unreasonable, as a result. This attitude has consequences for feminist mothers as well.

1 Consider, for instance, the short film Coffee Colored Children, which seems to fault a White mother for her mixed-race children’s identity conflicts (and indeed, it was in response to such criticism that Ngozi Onwurah later made another short, The Body Beautiful, that, although still child-centered, offered her mother better treatment than the first).

16 17

Because society sees feminism as inherently female and marginalizes and disparages

“feminine” men and boys, raising our male children feminist would be, in society’s eyes, irresponsible. As hooks argues, conventional notions about masculinity dictate that feminist women are emasculating to men (“feminist focus on men: a comment,” 127–

133). Further, since feminism is “just” our own personal ideology and certainly not one that society in general shares, the thinking goes, it would be selfish to subject our children to it. Thus we ought to sacrifice even our own principles if doing so would be in the best interests of our children. Even the law supports that.2 This attitude illustrates one more consequence of the subordination of parents’ interests to children’s: the inhibition of feminist mothering.

The sexuality of our men and boys seems to be of paramount importance to our society today, most likely due to a confluence of factors. The ongoing anti-abortion movements, the increasing rates of autonomous motherhood, the GLBTQ civil rights movement, the advent of GLBTQ studies and of some expansion of the notions of masculinity and femininity, the Supreme Court’s repudiation of anti-sodomy laws,3 and conservatives’ recent accentuation of their opposition to same-sex marriage in American politics all indicate both change in the degree of sexual freedom and corresponding societal anxiety about that change. Plus, more women go to college these days than men, and in an increasing number of households, a woman is now the primary breadwinner— both of which challenge traditional notions of gender roles.

2 Consider, for instance, the prevalence of the acquisition of court orders overriding parents’ withholding of consent to certain medical procedures for their children for religious reasons.

 I am indebted for these two ideas to my colleague Cortney M. Grubbs.

3 See Lawrence v. Texas, 2003.

Meanwhile, it has become less acceptable to vocalize one’s stance against other kinds of progress, so those privileged groups who sense that they are losing that high ground quickly everywhere else feel the need to hang on to it more fiercely on this matter. Just as in other wars, the heightened emotion of our post-9/11 society makes this kind of scapegoating easier. And masculinity has always been a more sensitive subject than femininity—so much so that any concerns that there have been about transgressions of traditional femininity, such as women in the workplace, as above, have usually stemmed from concerns about the consequences of those transgressions for traditional masculinity as a result. As elucidated by M. Warner, Fischer, Gilligan, and Freud above, this situation is no different.

These concerns originate with psychologists’ suggestion that opposite-sex children base their sexual identity on opposing themselves to their opposite-sex parents. Thus mothers who exhibit “masculine” behaviors will draw out their sons’ complementary nature—that is, they will “turn” their sons “feminine.” (Even the language “conjures” the impression of female power as witchcraft, as above.) This idea resonates with contemporary notions that boys raised without a father figure are less likely to learn how to be traditionally masculine, since autonomous mothers must inevitably perform traditional masculine roles, such as providing for the household and administering discipline, which would then supposedly cause their sons to act more “feminine” in response, as the representations discussed below will show.

Since both parties in this “unnatural” kind of mother-son relationship would blur the gender distinctions that have been such a comfort to our society until now, society seeks

 I am indebted for this idea to my colleague Denise Guidry.

19 to cope with that discomfort, as M. Warner suggests, through negative representations of

“masculine” mothers. By controlling the images of such transgressive women, those disapproving representations also help to control women and thus to diffuse the challenge that any kind of women’s power seems to present to ideas of traditional manhood and masculinity. For instance, as Mary Ann Doane writes, “the femme fatale is represented as the antithesis of the maternal—sterile or barren, she produces nothing in a society which fetishizes production” (1991 2). Once again, the fault lies in the machine. Celibacy, sterility, miscarriage: all result in the frightening image of a woman who cannot bear a child and thus resembles a man, and we shall see examples of all such scenarios among my discussion of the representations below.

Psychologists also often suggest that normal young boys will fetishize their mothers as phallic—that is, as possessing a penis—as part of the boys’ denial of their mothers’ lack of one,4 but that never accepting that lack would amount to deviance. Likewise, since, as Gaylyn Studlar indicates, the mother is even before that fetishization the primary figure in a boy’s life, the child perceives her not as secondary to the father but as a powerful figure in her own right. When the father remains absent, then, such as in the case of an autonomous mother, that perception on the part of the child may continue,5

4 Freud writes in “The Infantile Genital Organization of the Libido” (1923) that “women who are regarded with respect, such as the mother, retain the penis long after” boys have realized that some women lack it (Sexuality 174).

5 Despite the fact that I have never taken a violent approach in my discipline of my own son, he indicates that he feels a sense of fear toward me from time to time, which has helped me to fill the “traditionally” masculine role of disciplinarian.

20 thus seemingly negating the necessity of a father in a boy’s life—another serious risk to the role of masculinity in society.6

6 The most visible marker of this concern is the sheer quantity of movies based on the idea that boys require fathers or (heterosexual male) father figures to survive. In The Aristocats (1970), for instance, a tom cat repeatedly rescues an autonomous mother cat and her three kittens (two of whom are male) from the dangers of the outside world and particularly the plotting of a greedy butler, whose malevolence their elderly, unmarried female owner is unable to recognize herself. With the butler vanquished at the end, the tom takes his place at the head of the household, as the cats’ owner declares, “we need a man in this house.” In Jerry Maguire (1996), the young son of a widow latches determinedly and poignantly onto the first “traditionally masculine” (read: misogynist) man who enters their home. In Finding Forrester (2000), there is a somewhat unusual example of a White man acting as surrogate father to a young Black man. As I will discuss shortly, it is unusual to see a Black male represented in a mainstream movie as even worth saving, but it is not unusual in that the movie takes pains to make it clear that his mother could never have done it herself. In Finding Neverland (2004), playwright J.M. Barrie rescues a widow and her three sons as they inspire him to write Peter Pan. Peter Pan is itself interesting for its unusual celebration of mothers, although in light of Barrie’s inspiration for the play, as depicted in Finding Neverland, that makes more sense. However, it is valuable to recognize that mothers are also very carefully defined in Peter Pan as people who do nothing more than tell bedtime stories, make and mend pockets, and manifest concern for what their charges do and do not eat. That helps mothers protect their charges, as we see it chance to keep the lost boys from eating a poisoned cake in the movie, but mothers still seem unable to determinedly protect their “sons.” That is the case with (Wendy and) Michael and John’s mother when Peter takes them all away from their home; with Wendy as mother to Peter, who because of her urging almost drinks poisoned medicine; and with Wendy as mother to the lost boys, when the pirates kidnap them all and only Peter can rescue them (with some help from the Indians, who, despite a bizarre and certainly stereotyped portrayal, are at least sympathetic characters in Peter Pan). Likewise, in Finding Neverland, the boys’ actual mother cannot protect them, as she succumbs to death; afterward, Barrie tells them, “she’s on every page of your imagination.” Mothers, we are to understand, are only there for such whimsical things; it is fathers who represent substance and reality. Most of all, though, Peter Pan defines mothers as people who cannot exist without and/or separate from fathers. Wendy makes that very clear when she only agrees to act as the lost boys’ mother if Peter agrees to act as their father. Likewise, in Finding Neverland, the widow’s mother wants her daughter to remarry. “Those boys need a father,” she says. Furthermore, Wendy, whose desire to “be” the lost boys’ mother only manifests her “proper” socialization to become one as an adult, is ultimately not completely dedicated to her assumed role in Neverland, which certainly shows that she is not overbearing. Thus one of the most positive representations of mothering in cinema is, in fact, one of the most narrowly defined ones of all. Of course, it remains deliciously interesting that it is a woman who plays bastion of masculinity Peter in the popular 1960 movie, but that does not change the story at all. It is also interesting to note that before rescuing the boys in Finding Neverland, Barrie himself laments his mother’s obsession with his dead older brother, which caused him to feel that he lost himself and his childhood. As a result, he acts like a child as an adult, which causes others to doubt his masculinity and thus consequently suspect him of homosexuality; his mother is, of course, to blame. On his own he learns to act as a patriarchal father, though, which seems to allow him to reclaim his masculinity; that is why he can still be the hero of the story. Meanwhile, the Weitz brothers, Paul and Chris, create several father-figure-saves-the-day movies. In 2002’s About A Boy, another misogynist really just looking for sex (as in Jerry Maguire) ends up helping the son of a troubled autonomous mother cope with his situation and appear socially acceptable enough to “get the girl.” In 2004’s In Good Company, there is the implication that an autonomous mother cannot teach her son anything useful, since the young male lead, whose father left him and his mother when he was age four, actually said that no one had ever taught him anything worthwhile until the older male lead did. By the end of the movie, of course, he is serving as the young man’s surrogate father. In 1999’s American Pie, the son of an autonomous mother best known for her sex appeal and lust for men her son’s

Ultimately, what psychology tells us is that we all go through certain developmental stages in life at which certain things are supposed to happen, or else we become pathological, unnormal, unnatural, and problematic. However, the opportunity for those pathologies to arise only exists within the nuclear family,7 thus indicating that it is probably not the “unmarried” parents whose children we should worry about the most.

For instance, it is supposedly natural for a young boy to desire his mother, but if he does not distance himself from her in order to partner with a more appropriate female later in life, then he becomes pathological.8 The theory is that it is the mother’s overpossessiveness of her son that causes that problem—and/or the absence of a “father figure” (read: dominant and heterosexual partner to his mother) in recognition of whom the boy would eventually be forced to relinquish that desire for his mother as well.

However, I want to suggest that it is actually only in imitation of a present father figure that a boy begins to feel desire toward his mother in the first place. Thus it is really no

age demonstrates his unfitness for society to the detriment of all the other characters in the film. Then, in the third movie in the American Pie series, 2005’s Band Camp (this one under the direction of Steve Rash), the same autonomous mother’s second son appears as though he is going to be the same way, until one of his brother’s friend’s fathers, leader of a “traditional” nuclear family whose son was the first among his friends to marry, gives the boy guidance so that he too is able to appear more socially acceptable and, once again, “get the girl.” At the same time, Dear Frankie, which takes place in Scotland but appeared in mainstream American movie theaters, depicts a young deaf boy, Frankie, whose entire world is the “father” that his autonomous mother, Lizzie Mitchell, invents for him, first through letters, and then by way of a man whom she hires to, of course, save their family. Lizzie, like Wendy, is celebrated in this film, though, for she is truly a selfless mother: Despite the fact that Frankie’s father was abusive and ruined both of their lives, causing Frankie’s deafness and forcing Lizzie to go into hiding with him and her own mother to protect them, all that Lizzie appears to do with her life is focus on her son and trying to replace his absent father. The “stranger” whom she hires does the actual saving, but Lizzie can be a hero too, for she reinforces the preeminence of fatherhood and the role of the selfless mother. Finally, 1999’s The Sixth Sense is just like all of these other movies, but with the added twist that in this one, the boy is so desperate for a man’s help that he turns to a dead man to get it.

7 As Freud and other psychoanalysts acknowledge as well.

8 For Raymond Bellour, the essence of the Oedipus complex is a failure to replace one’s mother with another woman—a “surrogate” for the desire that a son actually feels for his mother (Fischer 24–25). Likewise, Freud writes in “The Passing of the Oedipus-Complex” (1924) that “the Oedipus-complex becomes extinguished by its lack of success, the result of its inherent impossibility” (Sexuality 176).

22 surprise that the psyches of children raised outside a strict nuclear family structure do not fit into the presuppositions of psychoanalysis, as it never acknowledged their situations in the first place.

Monique Plaza is one of the theorists who also criticizes these psychoanalytic perspectives. She writes that “one of [the] first ideological tasks [of psychoanalysis] was to camouflage the history of the maternal function in psychobiologizing it . . . in order to naturalize the social relation that exists between a woman and the child she has brought into the world” (79, quoted in Fischer, 187). However, it has probably been successful in accomplishing that task, which is likely at least part of why society continues to fear

“masculine” mothers as it does. The consequence of that for feminist mothers of sons is that many mainstream representations of feminism construct (White) feminists as masculine.

In conducting my research, I realized that all of my cinematic Monster Mothers are either raceless or White.9 Other theorists have addressed the fact that the experience of mothering is different for women of color, but the ideology about good and bad motherhood affects them as well (albeit in different ways and to different extents).10 Thus mothers of sons of color must be absent from the catalog of Monster Mother representations for other reasons, and they are not difficult to recognize. For one, it is

Blacks’ and other minorities’ marginality to all aspects of society that causes and reinforces mothers of colors’ marginality to ideals of motherhood in the first place, as

Rickie Solinger discusses in Wake Up Little Susie; their marginality to literary and

9 I also realized that all of the directors of the American movies featuring these mothers are male.

10 The discussion of literary indications of such is beyond the scope of this work, but I intend to pursue it in the future.

23 cinematic representation results from the same cause as well. Even more importantly, however, because men of color consequently have less access to power than White men, the chance at getting some of the power denied them by way of their sons cannot tempt mothers of color, nor is there much danger of them achieving any.11

White mothers historically also faced that lack of access to power, which justifies those mothers’ pursuit of power by way of their sons, since for many years mothering sons was women’s only route to power. That notion was even institutionalized for a time when the establishment told women seeking suffrage that they already had representation through their fathers’ and husbands’ and sons’ votes. A woman who actually did achieve power on her own was often suspected to be a witch—as though it would take magical powers for a woman to become great in her own right. As Fischer indicates,

11 A good example of the situation of Black mothers of sons is Monster’s Ball. Because mainstream White society does not mind pathologizing Black children—especially Black male children, as that helps to negate the risk of their ever achieving much power in society—mainstream White society certainly does not mind getting rid of as many Black males as it possibly can either. So even though the mother here is an alcoholic, makes a poor choice of a father for her son, cannot support herself and her child, berates him for his compulsive eating (a habit which I note both serves to feminize him and her response to which probably worsens it), cannot get him to obey her, and cannot protect him in the end, we don’t see her or her mothering take any real blame. Meanwhile, the racist, misogynist White man demonstrates his superiority by overcoming his frailties (as the Black male characters could not) to end as both the survivor and, in fact, the hero, providing for the Black woman where Black men also could not and thus supplanting them in her life. And, of course, he makes that transformation without the help of a mother of his own, as it is always when men are separate from their mothers that the movies portray them as most heroic. Thus I argue that, ironically, until we do see manifestations of that possibility in the form of Monster Mothers of color, we must recognize the continuing existence of racial differences in opportunity in our society—and the current state of affairs certainly supports that suggestion as well, as do the few other contemporary movies that depict Black mothers of sons, such as Jerry Maguire, Ray, and Radio. In all three, sons of strong and/or autonomous Black mothers fail to exhibit markers of homosexuality as sons of strong and/or autonomous White mothers usually do in the movies. In fact, all three movies actually depict scenes that confirm their adult Black male characters’ heterosexuality. It is important to recognize here that the strong Black autonomous mother is another trope and that it represents a societal denigration of Black males’ masculinity, which might be why the sons of Black autonomous mothers in Monster’s Ball and Ray and Radio do still show some signs of pathology by way of their overeating, drug addiction, and otherwise inexplicable intellectual impairment, respectively. That circumstance suggests another reason why it is unnecessary for mainstream America to fear Black autonomous mothers: Their depiction actually serves the White patriarchy by providing an(other) excuse to denigrate a minority group—Black men’s— supposedly dangerous sexuality. In that regard, such representations help to reinforce Black men’s lack of access to power, which in turn once again minimize the risk of their mothers being able to gain any power either.

throughout the history of myth and religious practice, when women have been ‘granted’ magical powers by men, those powers have most often been regarded as evil or dangerous. We rarely find an image of a harmless female magician, playfully conjuring people or objects. Rather, she is cast as a figure of great perversity. (44)

In that sense, it is not surprising to recognize the language of witchcraft also pervading the discussion of what the Monster Mother can do to her sons’ sexuality.12

In fact, the Monster Mother is frequently celibate. As M. Warner indicates,

“bogeymen and women are frequently imagined as single, anomalous outsiders” (28).

The fact that films present her this way suggests that we are supposed to see her as lacking something as a woman, as distant from her “appropriate” role as a “true” woman.

Without a man to demand her submission in (and out of) the bedroom, this mother is not- submissive—rather, she is assertive. Like her hunger for power, her failure to submit to sexual intercourse with a man is a symptom of her violation of traditional gender boundaries. It is not just a matter of this women being an ideal sexless mother either, though, for she does still exhibit some degree of sexual desire. However, in these films, her desire is for her son, with whom she would be the more powerful partner—that is, the

“masculine” partner. And because her son partially consists of her, indulging in her sexual attraction toward him constitutes reveling in her own appreciation for herself, an act equally inappropriate for a “true” woman.

Moreover, the fact that this woman is responsible for the ever-crucial upbringing of boys makes her supposed violation of gender boundaries even more critical. These stories

12 One early example is Circe, the sorceress who in Homer’s The Odyssey turns men into docile animals and lures the married Odysseus into her bed for a year when he is supposed to be returning to his wife. Her sexuality is certainly dangerous to patriarchy, then, as is her capacity to make men idle and indolent (read: impotent). Her son Comus is, in consequence, a sorcerer who tries to engage John Milton’s heroine Alice in illicit sexual relations in his masque Comus. In so doing, Comus is more like his mother than his father Bacchus, Milton writes (l.35)—and indeed, Milton mentions Bacchus only twice throughout the masque, while both his narration and Comus’ own lines mention Circe relatively often. I will discuss this idea of maternal witchcraft and male sexuality further below.

25 pertain to politics and the governance of entire nations rather than to just individual families and communities, thus emphasizing the larger danger that such women represent.13 Joan Crawford’s daughter is angry,14 but Norman Bates kills people.15 It is significant that it is really only mothers of sons whose transgressions of “traditional” gender roles are portrayed as so horrible: Because of the political power that men can achieve, those transgressions result in problems that affect the world outside of the immediate circle of acquaintance to which the consequences of being a bad mother to a girl are usually restricted in the movies. In the Monster Mother scenario, it is not just a matter of being dissatisfied with one’s upbringing.

The sons, on the other hand, manage to impress the viewers with a sense of their impeccable honor, as they do not ever expressly dishonor their mothers (why don’t their mothers get any credit for that?), and yet they do not completely submit to their mothers’ wills either. We as viewers are supposed to be thankful that it is the men who are in power rather than their mothers, for then there would be no check on their violent

13 There are movies in which it seems to be actually the father to blame for a son’s socially significant problems, such as Peeping Tom (which is neither mainstream nor American, incidentally), or in which both parents bear the blame, such as Catch Me If You Can. However, their relative absence compared to the Monster Mother movies is telling; their lack of the depiction of sexuality issues that is rampant in the Monster Mother movies is, I think, to blame. Apparently if a boy’s father is present and active enough to screw up his son in ways that do not trace back to the boy’s mother, at least he can still be a “real” man. Society is just not as worried about boys as long as their “traditional” masculinity is safe, so such representations do not draw as much attention.

14 See Mommie Dearest.

15 In Psycho, Norman’s self-representation as his mother enables him to take from her her own power of self-representation, but he also attempts to offset her power of his creation by himself creating her. Thus it is a challenge to consider Psycho as a film with a mother in it, since Mrs. Bates herself does not figure in the movie at all—merely representations of her by way of her son throughout and by way of the policemen at the end. However, most film theory dealing with Psycho does consider Mrs. Bates as a character distinct from the character of her son—and indeed, Norman “as his mother” seems to be distinct from Norman “as himself” in the film. We must also recognize that rarely does a mother represent herself in anything anyway; even in feminism, representations of mothers usually come by way of their daughters (Fischer 23)—perhaps because, as so many have noted, the “creation” and responsibility of children is so great that it preempts creating much of anything else, as Fischer notes as well (214-215).

26 ambition at all—and thus we leave with the all-too-familiar message that women are not deserving or capable of power. Were these women, we are to think, merely to be partnered with men who would make them submit to sex again—“true” men—these women would remember their place, and the world would be safer for the rest of us. As

Iago says in Shakespeare’s Othello, woman does her work in the bed.

CHAPTER 4 THE REPRESENTATIONS

In this chapter, I do not differentiate between mythology and history for two reasons:

First of all, mythology and ancient history do not differentiate among themselves—in ancient times, there was no distinction1—and secondly, society seems to view them both as equally demonstrating psychological truth as well. Once again, as Lévi-Strauss writes, recurring myth demonstrates what concerns a culture. After Beowulf, Monster Mothers continue to appear in early Western literature, usually in the form of mothers literally damaging their sons—that is, killing them—for some personal motivation (which, of course, would be anathema to a good mother). These representations are thus precursors to the contemporary Monster Mother, who also damages her son(s) in the pursuit of her own interests, and as such, as I will discuss later, resonances of these early representations appear in the contemporary ones as well.

For instance, in Greek mythology, as M. Warner relates, there is a story of a man

Tereus who rapes his sister-in-law Philomela and then “cuts out her tongue so that she can no longer scald him with it.” In revenge, “Philomela and her sister [Tereus’ wife]

Procne kill Itys, Procne’s [and Tereus’] son, and serve him up to his father” for dinner

(56,225). Not surprisingly, the gods—and the readers of this tale—have little sympathy for Procne, whose loyalty to her sister surpassed that to her son and husband.

1 Consider, for instance, the mythological aspects of the ancient “histories” such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

27 28

Similarly, in Aeschylus’ trilogy of tragedies The Oresteia, Clytemnestra and her lover

Aegisthus kill Agamemnon, purportedly in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter

Iphigeneia to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, whom his army had angered by killing an animal that was sacred to her during the Trojan War. However, Aeschylus notes,

Agamemnon had also taken the beautiful Cassandra as captive, thus motivating his wife’s jealousy as well as her maternal anger—and thus giving the audience an excuse to condemn her murder of her husband as self-motivated rather than selfless and motherly.2

After all, once again, self-interest and acceptable maternity—or even acceptable womanhood—are socially incompatible. So, it seems, is choosing to be loyal to one’s child rather than to one’s husband, as suggested in note 2.5 above, as Clytemnestra gets little sympathy for her demonstration of greater devotion to her daughter than to her husband. Therefore she and Agamemnon’s son Orestes’ revenge of his father’s murder— the murder of Orestes’ mother Clytemnestra and of Aegisthus—the gods determine is justified.

Yet another story that resembles those of Procne and of Clytemnestra is that of

Agrippina, a widow and mother to the eventual Roman emperor Nero. The story goes that

Agrippina marries the emperor Claudius to give her son access to power, thus demonstrating her sexual danger. Then she murders Claudius, enabling her son to take the throne, at which point she tries to exert political control over Rome by controlling

Nero—until he tires of her power and, with some difficulty, has her killed. Like

Clytemnestra, despite being a victim of matricide, Agrippina gets no sympathy from her readers; in fact, in Canto XXXII of the Inferno, Dante makes a point of condemning her to hell for murdering her husband. Clearly, this type of story has a common theme.

2 All that the audience needs is an excuse for mother-blame, as we will see again and again later.

Likewise, M. Warner points to the Grimm Brothers’ story “The Juniper Tree,” which tells of a boy born of a woman who dies of poisoning from the berries of that tree shortly afterward. His father remarries to a woman who kills the boy out of jealousy over his beauty and then, in an action reminiscent of the Procne myth, feeds him to her husband in a stew. The woman’s daughter, Marlinchen, buries her stepbrother’s bones beneath the juniper tree where his mother’s body lies. The boy is reincarnated in the form of a bird that flies out of a sudden fire in the tree; its singing plagues his stepmother, whom he then kills by dropping onto her head a millstone that one of his enchanted listeners had given him as a gift. Upon her death, there is another sudden fire. After it dissipates, the boy is alive again, and he and his father and Marlinchen are perfectly happy without her (63–

65).3

Then there are the mothers who, like Errour, themselves eats their sons. Josephus

Flavius, in his History of the Jewish War, writes of Mary, a Jewish mother from an eminent and wealthy family, who cooked and ate her infant son because, as he writes, she had tired of searching for food, since “if she found any food, she perceived her labors were for others, and not for herself.” Caesar, in consequence, tells himself that “this horrid action of eating an own child ought to be covered with the overthrow of their very country [Jerusalem] itself” (VI.3).4 In this way, Josephus manages to blame one Jewish mother for the entire siege of Jerusalem; thus, it is an early example of mother-blame. As

3 This story of an evil stepmother is of course part of its own trope as well, which is outside the scope of this work.

4 Josephus also writes that Caesar determines that “such food be fitter for the fathers than for the mothers to eat of” (VI.3), which, although it might seem bizarre to us today, does accord with a long history of stories of fathers eating their young, some of which appear above and others of which M. Warner also discusses at length in No Go the Bogeyman. Caesar appears to mean that the Jewish fathers would also be more entitled to eat their young than the mothers because the fathers are working harder at the waging of the war.

M. Warner notes, “accusations of such crimes will haunt the propaganda of racism and anti-Semitism” as well (56).

Queen Tamora in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is another mother who eats her sons, although in this case it is completely unintentional on her part. However, the resonances of this play with the stories above are remarkable. First of all, like

Agamemnon, Titus “sacrifices Tamora’s eldest son to the memory of his own sons who died during his campaign” against the enemies of Rome. Then, like Clytemnestra,

Tamora, with the help of her lover Aaron, “plots her revenge against Titus.” She

“encourages her [other] sons Chiron and Demetrius to rape and mutilate Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, cutting off her hands and tongue so that she cannot testify against them”—as

Tereus does to Philomela.5 Nevertheless, “Lavinia manages to write out the names of her attackers in the dirt by holding a rod with her stumps and in her mouth.” In revenge, like

Philomela and Procne, “Titus kills Chiron and Demetrius, cooking them into a meal” which he then feeds to Tamora. After Titus and Tamora die in the ensuing “bloodbath,”

Titus’ son Lucius, “ascending the throne with the blessing of the masses, rules that . . .

Tamora’s body be thrown to wild beasts” (“Titus Andronicus”). Once again, the public has little sympathy for the mother.

Despite the power of myth, there is something about history—our sense, mistaken as it might be, that it is true—that makes historical examples of Monster Mothers very powerful. Movies that have “true” stories as their basis, then, serve to add a lot of credence to the idea of the Monster Mother, even though they even more than history are subject to artistic interpretation. Thus a premier example of a historical (and practically

5 As though those circumstances are not proof enough of her dangerous sexuality, Tamora is mother to Aaron’s bastard son as well.

31 mythological) Monster Mother that has likely inspired many of the representations that follow her appears in the 1956 film Alexander the Great. It is also valuable to consider that moment because it is around then from which other theorists trace the origination of this trope, as I will discuss later. (Of course, as demonstrated above, even though the manifestations of the Monster Mother vary slightly over time, she clearly originated earlier than the twentieth century.)

In this movie, Alexander’s Persian mother Olympias is most likely celibate and depicted as consumed with achieving political power through her son. From the moment of Alexander’s birth, she refuses sex with his father, her husband, King Philip of

Macedonia, thus denying him patriarchal power. Philip then tries to deny her power in return, ultimately divorcing her by way of a (most likely false) charge of infidelity and asking Alexander, as Regent, to exile her so that Philip can marry another woman.

Alexander refuses—understandably, considering that divorce under those pretenses also makes him retroactively illegitimate and thus no longer Philip’s heir—but nevertheless does not resist Philip’s decision to divorce Olympias and also saves Philip’s life in battle.

Once Philip declares Alexander’s illegitimacy, the movie shows that Olympias does plot against Philip, but at that point, her action truly does seem to be in defense of her son’s chances for power, which is also necessary to ensure her own and his sister’s protection.

Still, when Philip is murdered, Alexander, in the speech that he gives upon his natural ascension to the throne, blames only “men.” Somewhat surprisingly, Olympias seems displeased with Alexander’s ascension at that point, although that is most likely the case because that ascension begins to fill prophecies that include Alexander living only a short

32 time. Of course, nevertheless, the suggestion in the movie is that her displeasure stems from her lust for power for herself instead.

Indeed, in the movie, Olympias does commit a slip of the tongue at one point, saying,

“when you’re Regent, we’ll rule.” Alexander responds with a bemused “we?” but in actuality, she is already effectively ruling at that time; Philip says sarcastically that she claims to be doing so “for [Alexander].” Still, when Alexander does rule, Olympias stays very close, and the words of women always influence Alexander’s political decisions more than those of men. The implication is clear; however, because Alexander would see all men as challengers, whereas a woman could never truly unseat him, it is understandable that he would trust men’s words less than those of women. And even in the movie there is enough to make one question whether Olympias was indeed interested only in her own power or has just been represented that way. For instance, she could actually be demonstrating her loyalty to her son when, after his ascension, she prays only for his eternal glory. Likewise, because of signs present at Alexander’s birth, she calls him a god. She compares him to Achilles, who, significantly, became greater than his father—but then she also says that she does so because Alexander, like Achilles, was

“born of a god” (referring to herself), which simultaneously suggests her desire for her own advancement.

As a young man, Alexander himself claims to be independent from Olympias as he shows that he has his own hunger for glory. His “independence” turns out to be a lie, though: He continues to visit her, despite his claim to the contrary, and he also thinks of her as a god and himself as Achilles, as the viewer just saw his mother do when he was a child. Near the end, he prays to all the gods to prove him to be the son of heaven by

33 granting him victory—and he wins. Then Darius, king of Persia, addresses Alexander both as a god and as a son, suggesting Alexander’s disavowal of his father as well. The movie thus intimates that Alexander’s hunger for power comes from his mother rather than being actually his own and that she, in the ultimate act of disobedience, as above, motivates his disdain of his father as well. Yet of course it is impossible now to know for sure what really happened so many years ago.

Alexander the Great also contains the typical indications of less than “ideal” masculinity, by mainstream societal standards. At one point, after Alexander must, for political reasons, kill his friend Clytus, he cries. At another point, Philip, suggesting that

Alexander is unlike “normal” men, tells him to choose a woman. Tellingly, Alexander immediately goes to his mother. She even once comes to him while he is in bed. He does eventually take not one but two women of his own, but both are Persian like his mother rather than Macedonian like his father, as most of the Greeks had wanted him to choose.

In the psychoanalytic tradition, that implies that Olympias has inappropriately sexualized

Alexander.6 Even before that, in fact, Alexander seems jealous of his father’s mistress/fiancée, as though he only wants the women, like his mother, who belong to his father, but in this case the woman was actually Alexander’s love interest before his father took her.

Still, despite that and the fact that Alexander also shows interest in another man’s wife as well, the movie suggests that Alexander’s jealousy demonstrates his disloyalty to

6 Freud writes in “A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men” (1910) that

in the normal attitude there remain only a few traces unmistakably betraying the maternal prototype behind the chosen object, for instance, the preference young men show for mature women; the detachment of the libido from the mother is accomplished comparatively swiftly. In [the pathological] type, on the contrary, the libido has dwelt so long in the attachment to the mother, even after puberty, that the maternal characteristics remain stamped on the love objects chosen later—so long that they all become easily recognizable mother-surrogates. (Sexuality 53)

34 his father and king. Further, it implies that it is really the fact that Olympias, with her supposedly controlling nature, is Alexander’s mother that leads others (particularly

Philip) to question Alexander’s loyalty, and thus she actually hurts his political situation.

As Philip says to him, “you are her power.” Likewise, as one of his female lovers says to him, “no woman is my rival but your mother.”

This 1956 representation does not go further than the above toward acknowledging

Alexander’s bisexuality or homosexuality, which a National Geographic special calls likely.7 However, 2004’s Alexander does. From the beginning, the 2004 version also emphasizes Olympias’ supposedly detrimental effect on Alexander’s sexuality to that end.

The first image of Olympias in the film depicts her teaching Alexander about snakes; she is a snake-charmer and constantly worships Dionysus, and, the viewer learns, some call her a sorceress. Alexander is probably an 8-year-old boy at this point, but he and his mother share a bed. Then Philip enters, ugly and with only one good eye, and tries to rape

Olympias in front of Alexander. After Philip leaves, Olympias calls Alexander her avenger; the sexual tension between them throughout this film is far heavier than it was in the 1956 one.

Immediately, the next scene shows boys wrestling. The only person who ever beats

Alexander is Hephaistion, with whom he (eventually or already) has a sexual relationship. After the wrestling ends, Alexander says that his favorite Greek hero is

Achilles because he loved and defended Patroklos; his meaning is clearly sexual. Philip

7 I use this film here only because it explicitly critiques the movie on some of its less historically reliable aspects which, by their presence in a movie about a historical figure, help to perpetuate the Monster Mother myth. The film itself is probably also problematic, as I will discuss later, but as such, the ways in which even its makers admit that this movie goes too far are even more telling.

35 mocks Alexander’s masculinity, talking to him about the struggle to escape mothers and how women are less trustworthy than men but then taking the liberty of “deflowering” his woman for him, as though Alexander himself was incapable of doing that. Another time,

Philip tells his son, “don’t look so scared all the time. Be a man.”

It is also far easier to view Olympias as selfish and controlling in this movie than it is in the 1956 version. Alexander’s successor, who narrates the film, begins, “he was a god .

. . or as close as anything we’ve ever seen. . . . No tyrant ever gave more back. . . . He was Prometheus, a friend to man . . . Colossus . . . force of nature. . . . We idolize him, make him better than he was.” Prometheus was another mythological half-god, and the narrator speculates as to whether Alexander is as well: Could Dionysus have fathered him? Zeus, even? There are strong suggestions here that Olympias cuckolded Philip; in this movie, she calls her son Hercules, another half-god, the son of Hera and Zeus. She tells him over and over that he can conquer the world. The viewer even wonders whether she may have helped to arrange his father’s murder; in this film, one must at least recognize that Olympias influences Alexander both against his father and in his ultimately ill-fated attempts to dominate the world.

She also pushes him to take a Macedonian wife, which he resists, instead marrying a foreigner like her, whom he calls, tellingly, “a pale reflection of my mother’s heart”; the movie suggests that in doing so he is still “running” from Olympias. She tells her son,

“remember, my only thoughts are of you,” but then she asks him to consider her needs. It is only when his friend Clytus insults his mother that Alexander kills him. After

Alexander moves into Babylon, she even tries to guilt him into making her his queen!

Philip calls her a “harpie mother,” Alexander calls her a “crazed woman,” and even

Olympias herself admits that “a mother loves too much.” In that, perhaps, she demonstrates her own awareness of the Monster Mother trope.

However, the 2004 National Geographic special Beyond the Movie: Alexander the

Great: The Man Behind the Legend clarifies the actual history of this mother-son relationship. Olympias did worship Dionysus; she was “powerful” and “mystical” and

“just as impressive and intimidating as her husband”; and she did have “powerful influence” over her son, toward whom she was “proprietary.”8 Apparently, it was she who spread the rumor that he was a god. Alexander, the documentary states, inherited her

“passionate and emotional . . . intelligent . . . tough as nails” nature. But she was not the only powerful influence on his life.

For instance, it was Aristotle who introduced Alexander to The Iliad, which revealed to him that if Zeus was indeed his father, Achilles was an ancestor of his on his mother’s side. Alexander ultimately betters Achilles for cruelty, though, once dragging a man around a city alive. Alexander was not the hero as which the movie, like so many that feature the Monster Mother trope, constructs him.

Meanwhile, Philip, who was indeed a womanizer, was also “a great politician” and “a military genius,” despite the representation as a dumb brute that the 2004 film afforded him. It could just as likely have been from him that Alexander got his ambitious nature, particularly as the National Geographic film leaves Olympias out of the father/son rivalry that continues even after Philip’s death. She did not assassinate Philip either, as he was actually killed at his daughter’s wedding by the young woman’s potentially jilted male

8 The movie’s use of words such as “mystical” and “proprietary” certainly indicate its makers’ problematic awareness and acceptance of aspects of the Monster Mother myth as well: in particular, the association of powerful women with witchcraft and the supposedly inappropriate possessiveness of mothers toward their sons.

37 lover. Alexander’s downfall, the film concludes, was “his own megalomania”—nothing more.

A completely fictional (but, like Olympias, now practically mythological) literary

Monster Mother appears in Richard Condon’s 1959 bestseller, The Manchurian

Candidate. Even his first mention of her characterizes her along the same lines as the mythological mothers above:

Let her liddul Raymond pull up dead and he knew the answer from his liddul mommy. If the folks would pay one or more votes for a sandwich she would be happy to send for her liddul boy’s body and barbecue him. (8)

Raymond Shaw’s mother, then, is like Agrippina, seeking to use her son to advance her own political power and, just like Nero, Raymond sees no alternative but to kill her to escape from her power in the end. The Manchurian Candidate, in all its versions, is also comparable to The Oresteia, as many other theorists also note, perhaps because Condon himself makes that comparison in the book, comparing Raymond’s telling of his life story, which “all seemed to revolve around his mother” to “Orestes grip[ing] about

Clytemnestra” (23)—again foreshadowing the ending.9 Raymond even calls her a monster in the book (239).

Raymond’s mother’s name is, incidentally, Eleanor, although, like the name of

Grendel’s mother, which is absent from Beowulf, the word “Eleanor” itself appears very infrequently in Condon’s book. Instead, he refers to her as “Raymond’s mother” throughout—even when her being his mother would have no other explicit connection to the storyline at that point. Such negation of all aspects of a woman besides her role as a

9 One theorist who teaches the first movie version of The Manchurian Candidate in a Classical Mythology course at the University of Texas also makes that comparison because, she writes, “in the novel . . . Mrs. Iselin had secretly poisoned Raymond’s father” (Taylor), but there is no indication that that is actually the case, as Condon writes that the man poisons himself, without so much as a suggestion to the contrary (70)—and Condon’s writing, as demonstrated throughout this part of my work, is anything but subtle.

38 mother quietly gestures to and thus perpetuates the idea that, once a mother, a woman is never anything besides a mother. That, in turn, perpetuates the ideal of her subordination to nothing besides, as above, the “best interests” of her child(ren). As suggested in the quote above, however, Eleanor does not fit that ideal.10 Instead, she is “the woman who could think but could not feel” (17) anything besides violent rage (242), with the voice of

“a hard woman on the make for big stakes” (289)—all characteristics of stereotypical antifemininity.11

Condon also describes Eleanor as “as ambitious as Daedalus” (23), suggesting that her drive for power will result in her son’s destruction, which it does. Raymond seeks to

“keep the rest of the world on the other side of the moat surrounding the castle where he had always lain under the spell of the wicked witch” (150; emphasis added)—his mother, of course—because he “distrusted all other living people because they had not warned his father of his mother” (10). As Yen Lo, the Chinese doctor who carries out Raymond’s brainwashing, explains, “Raymond’s mother helped bring about his condition [of “true resentment”] to the largest and most significant extent” (43) because “his soul has been

10 In the book, Eleanor never seems to bother to deny that, but she does in the movie adaptations. In 1962, she tells Raymond, “you know I want nothing for myself. You know that my entire life is devoted to helping you—and to helping Johnny. My boys—my two little boys—that is all that I have.” (Her calling of two men “little boys” could constitute an indication of her emasculation of them; in 2004 as well, she treats Raymond like a child, and I discuss other indications of her emasculation of the men in her life below.) Likewise, in 2004, Eleanor tells Raymond, “I did this for you, [to make you] who you really are”—that is, who she wants him to be. Meanwhile, her political statements to others indicate that it’s because of what she wants to happen on a national level, which she describes as “controversial.” However, like Olympias, she appears to belie those sentiments when in 1962 she describes what she is working for as in fact paving the way for “when I take power.” The implications of that statement are the same as those created by the statements in the book listed in note 4.11 below.

11 In fact, Condon goes to great lengths to prove that Eleanor’s desire for power is strictly for herself: He lists more than 28 organizations of which “she had been a member or officer or founder or affiliate,” all of which she used “to claw out recognition for herself. . . . She sought power,” he notes, “the way a superstitious man might look for a four-leaf clover. She didn’t care where she found it” (65-66). Condon then explicitly connects her ambition with masculinity by indicating that it comes from “competition with her only brother to show him which of them was the heir of [their] father” (74).

39 rubbed to shreds between the ambivalence of wanting and not wanting; of being able and unable; of loving and hating” (44). In fact, “Raymond did not feel emotion, and that could not be changed” (181). Raymond’s ambivalence, of course, is directed toward his mother, and Condon illustrates that throughout the book.

Eleanor, the reader learns, “cast off” Raymond’s late father while pregnant with

Raymond (25) for her second husband Johnny,12 but “there was more than the usual talk in their community that loud, lewd Johnny Iselin was the father of the unborn child.”

Thus “to Raymond . . . his mother would always be a morally adulterous woman” (62–

63)—and Johnny, as he repeatedly points out, is “not [his] father!” (15; emphasis in original) And yet he finds her so incredibly attractive and irresistible to him13 that when he does find another woman to love—Jocie Jordan, who loves him in a more maternal way than his own mother does, incidentally14—he still “battle[s] to hold the thoughts of

12 As the reader learns later, in fact, Eleanor actually leaves her first husband because he would not submit to her control, while, on the other hand, she “ruled” Johnny (67), and “he had been custom-made by” her (91). Since she orchestrates her son’s brainwashing and is also the “operative” who uses it to control him, she literally custom-makes and rules Raymond as well. As an investigator confirms in an interview, she “manufactured” him (286).

13 For instance, at one point he “Suddenly [feels] himself being made soft” toward her (144)—which is, incidentally, certainly not the way that men normally feel arousal. At another point, the reader learns that he “always felt a nagging fear that he was gaping at her beauty” (190). He thinks,

oh, what a woman! What a beauty she is. . . . How can I look into those serenely lovely eyes, how can I be so deeply thrilled by the carriage of her exquisitely wholesome body and grow so faint at the set, the royal set of that beautiful head and not remember, not always and always and always remember that it encases a cesspool of betrayal, a poisoned well of love, and a city of deadly snakes? (191)

In the 2004 adaptation, Raymond says that his mother has destroyed his life and describes her as controlling—yet irresistible.

14 Condon also makes a point of demonstrating without question that Eleanor does not behave toward her son as a mother when Raymond’s first thought upon awakening in a hospital bed—eight or nine days after his admittance, incidentally—to see her crying is “is Johnny dead?” (140) He suspects that she is “just a very clever impersonator sent over to play the mother while [his] true mummy tries to sober up the Great Statesman” (140), “pretending to be . . . honest and maternal and wistfully remorseful about how we had let our lives go along—coldly and separately” (142). Raymond even tells her so: “You are such a fraud, Mother” (141).

40 his mother and Jocie apart” (100). Ultimately it is only allowing the conflation of the two that enables him to actually have Jocie, though, when she appears before him at a costume party dressed as the queen of diamonds—the playing card that Lo had chosen, as a symbol for his mother—to initiate the effect of Raymond’s brainwashing.

Eleanor conflates Raymond with her romantic partners as well, “wooing him as she had wooed Johnny Iselin” while telling Raymond of the “absolute sexual experience” that she was having eating a steak stuffed with oysters for lunch (193). She also twice sees a resemblance between Raymond and “her darling, darling Poppa”—her father and first sexual partner. The first time it motivates her to take and lead him by the hand in such a way that “one woman guest [tells] another woman guest that they looked as though they were rushing off to get a little of you-know-what” (260). The second time, she orders him to kiss her, “really, really kiss” her, as she “pull[s] him to her on the chaise” and opens her robe (290). The reader is left to guess at the rest.15

His feelings are made further ambivalent by “a constant, summer-long nausea as he trie[s] to equate the daughter of Senator Jordan with the ancient, carbonized prejudice of his mother” against the Senator (99). Thus in the end, Condon is able to portray Eleanor’s compulsion that Raymond end the relationship with Jocie as motivated by a desire for political gain (102)—and, of course, it also constitutes maternal interference with the healthy psychological replacement of the mother in the son’s affections, which Eleanor had clearly already been doing anyway. At one point she expresses the hope that he “will kneel beside [her] and thank [her] and kiss [her] hands and [her] skirt and give only [to

15 There is a similar moment in the 2004 movie version, in which Eleanor kisses Raymond on the mouth and appears to be about to do so again when the scene changes.

41 her his] love” (144).16 Then, when Raymond does finally marry Jocie, it is only with his mother’s approbation (239), and when he (insensibly) kills her in the end, it is essentially at his mother’s bidding. It is no surprise, then, that Condon portrays Raymond as demonstrating detrimental sexual effects of his mother’s style of mothering.

Bruce Krajewski claims that Raymond is homosexual in the book (219–220), although in actuality he is merely “a sexual neutral” (235) and “inhibit[ed] against the uses of sex” (18) until he undergoes brainwashing. Lo calls it “his concealed tendency to timidity, sexual and social” (43). Nevertheless, Condon does describe him as “a very handsome man, very nearly a pretty man,” wearing his hair “in a style affected by many

American businessmen of a juvenile or eunuchoid turn” (24, emphasis added). Condon further describes his prettiness:

He could not have moved up the scale to a better tailor because he had always used the best. He could not have worn whiter linen. His fingernails gleamed. His shoe tips glowed. His color shone. His teeth sparkled. (181)

Eleanor herself even calls him “a homosexual” in the letter that she writes to the Jordans to effect the end of her son’s relationship (104). Then, a very attractive, “very very ready” woman asks him at one point if he’s “queer” (111), and his best friend and former commanding officer Ben Marco suggests that what the brainwashers did was not just remove his inhibitions but “fix it up . . . so that, all of a sudden, [he]’d get interested in girls” (231)—so Krajewski’s claim is not completely unfounded.

Eleanor emasculates Johnny as well, as Condon transcribes, telling Johnny, “you’ll be a goddam fool if you don’t go in there and do as you’re told,” indicating that he does not

16 As though the example of Eleanor is not clear enough, Condon also includes another example of a man whose mother interferes with his capacity to have a mature relationship with another woman: 39-year-old Lou Amjac, whose longtime fiancée leaves him for another man because, as she explains it to him, “maybe if you had been able to make up your mind between me and your mother, you and I would have been married by now” (211).

42 know “what the hell [he is] talking about,” and, finally, ordering him to “shuddup!”— which he does (130). Thus Eleanor makes him “seem docile and harmless,” forcing him to crinkle “his thick lips and make them prissy” (60). Condon emphasizes the transformation that she effects by emphasizing Johnny’s inherent manliness: With his

“raucous laugh and . . . fleshy nose” (62), “that old-time mattress screamer and gasper

[was] throughout his life quite capable of getting and giving full satisfaction with other women.” With Eleanor, however, he “found himself as impotent as a male butterfly atop a female pterodactyl” so that, in fact, “the marriage was never consummated” (70). Thus, even though she is married, Eleanor does not submit to sexual intercourse with a man, as society dictates that she should. Instead, she uses her sexual allure to get political favors from other men (81), thus epitomizing the literal danger to society of unchecked female sexuality.

The political component of this story is important here, as it is that, I argue, which makes it so film-worthy. Condon’s book constructs Johnny Iselin as a corollary to Joseph

McCarthy, as, at Eleanor’s bidding, Iselin creates his political career through his accusations about Communists in the U.S. government—an approach that one person in the book tellingly calls “Iselinism” (153). The danger in it, Condon tells us, is that “Mrs.

Iselin achieved more for sustained anti-Americanism and drove infected wedges more deeply between America and her allies than any other action by any individual or agency, excepting her husband, of the twentieth century” (217). Of course, Eleanor creates and controls her husband as well. Thus it is a Monster Mother—a controlling, sexually powerful mother to a son—who represents the greatest political danger to the nation.

In 1962, John Frankenheimer directed a movie adaptation of this book, although it did not begin to garner much fame until 1987 (Menand vii). Nevertheless, it contains many of the scenes from the book that are pivotal to the establishment of Eleanor as a Monster

Mother, along with a few more vivid ones as well. For instance, the viewer sees clear indications of Eleanor’s emasculation of Johnny in her control of his career when she says to him, for instance,

well you’re going to look like an even bigger idiot if you don’t get out there and do exactly what you’re told. . . . So just stop talking like an expert all of a sudden and just get out there and say what you’re supposed to say. . . . I keep telling you not to think. . . . I will handle the rest.

Raymond too follows Eleanor’s orders, but in his case he must do so due to his brainwashing. Drunk, he tells Ben, “my mother, Ben, is a terrible woman—a terrible, terrible woman.” Then Raymond himself makes the ubiquitous reference to Orestes and

Clytemnestra. He indicates that he hates his mother for convincing him to break up with

Josie (which circumstance differs from the book in that in the movie he does still do it himself). Nevertheless, he still cries and shows an excessive (read: “feminine”) degree of emotion while lamenting that Eleanor is not “loveable,” thus demonstrating the same ambivalence toward her as in the book.

Josie verbally identifies another manifestation of that ambivalence when she calls her own saving of Raymond’s life after a snake bites him “Freudian,” as it gives a maternal aspect to her relationship with him from the start. His susceptibility to harm from the likes of a snake—which resonates with his description of Eleanor in the book from note

4.13 above17—could constitute another indication of his femininity. Bruce Krajewski cites Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Freud that “the medium of [the castration] threat

[is] the woman’s voice” as evidence of the threat to Raymond’s sexuality that this movie

17 And with the 2004 depiction of the snake-charming Olympias.

44 depicts, as it is Eleanor’s voice over the phone which controls him (221). However, he also writes that “the Oedipal tension in the film seems to be one-sided” (218), as indeed,

Raymond does not express any positive ideas about his mother here. Nevertheless, he does continue to tolerate and respect her, as he must to maintain the image of a good man as which the movie presents him, once again in accordance with the traditions of the

Monster Mother trope. Meanwhile, Eleanor seems jealous of Josie, which circumstance also differs to some extent from the book, thus leading the viewer to suspect that Eleanor might actually have intended for Raymond to kill her when he does so in the end. Once again, the audience only needs an excuse.

Likewise, in the 1962 Manchurian Candidate, there is no indication that Eleanor is celibate with her husband, as there is in the book (where it is clear that Eleanor engages in sexual intercourse with other men anyway, although always as the aggressor). In a

2004 movie version, though, Producer/Director Jonathan Demme keeps Eleanor a widow and has her take over her husband’s position as Senator after his death. These changes eliminate the justification for a mother to use her son to gain any amount of political power for herself, as evidently Eleanor already has some; that makes it easy for the audience to consider any further ambition on her part to be pure selfishness. In addition, the changes mean that 2004’s Eleanor (Shaw) is more likely to be celibate than 1962’s remarried Eleanor (Iselin), and they also increase the visibility of the Oedipus complex. It is most telling that 2004’s Raymond literally plays the role that his stepfather does in the

1962 version, in addition to his “own” role. In 1962, Johnny is a politician running for

Vice President and shot, along with his wife, on the stage. In 2004, Raymond is a politician running for Vice President and shot while dancing with his mother on the stage.

And as in the earlier versions, it is Eleanor who gets him on the party ticket in the first place.

In “The Enemy Within: Inside the Manchurian Candidate,” one of the special features on the DVD, Daniel Pyne, the co-screenwriter of the 2004 adaptation, explains the changes:18 “In 2004, Eleanor Shaw [is] a force in her own right.” In her own political career, he explains, “She hit the glass ceiling.” That terminology suggests an association with feminism—and therefore that her attempts to get around that ceiling in this movie are what society fears from feminists as well. As Demme and Pyne discuss in that clip, in general what people fear has changed, but one thing that they fear has not. Pyne explains that with political power in “the hands of someone as damaged and scary as Eleanor

Shaw, disaster could ensue. . . . Eleanor Shaw is the enemy in the film.” He concludes that this movie is “a mirror of who we are and who we’ve become.”

That discussion continues in their commentary during the movie itself. In it, they say,

Meryl Streep, as Eleanor, draws attention to issues of mother-love and the character’s enactment (or lack thereof) of a “balance of mom and power.” She is “a modern, twenty- first century woman who [is] a power in her own right and yet still could have this strange relationship with her son: . . . She uses him as a weapon to eliminate the people that oppose her.” Once again, Demme and Pyne are essentially saying that it was not, as feminists argued, mothers’ need for power that drove them to seek it through their sons.

Rather, it must be something “damaged and scary” about mothers themselves. To

18 Interestingly enough, according to the creators’ commentary during the movie, it was actually co- Producer Tina Sinatra’s idea to eliminate Iselin from the 2004 version. Tina is daughter to Frank Sinatra, who plays Ben in the first film; in the second movie, Denzel Washington takes that role. (Incidentally, neither is likely ideal for it, though, as in the book Condon describes Ben as looking “like an Aztec crossed with an Eskimo” with “metallic (copper-colored) skin and . . . the straight (black) hair, the aboriginal look, and the eyes colored like Pôtage St. Germaine, the potage’s potage (green)” (27).)

46 illustrate their point, the 2004 version begins with Eleanor lecturing a group of male politicians in such a way that she demonstrates her love of military strength and power— like the reference to using her son as a weapon, representations that masculinize her character. As Demme and Pyne comment, “she’s all power. She’s the most intelligent person in the room. . . . She doesn’t extort anything. . . . She just convinces them.”

The first Manchurian Candidate movie would seem to correspond with what numerous feminist theorists tell of the “pernicious” 1940s stereotype of the

“overinvested” mother (Fischer 13). They blame that perception for the popular cultural representations of Monster Mothers at that time. Likewise, Fischer uses Doane’s The

Desire to Desire (81) to argue that “the sin of excessive motherhood was tied to a politics of international isolationism” (18). Thus Fischer notes a correlation between societal worries and the timing of the appearance of Monster Mothers in films, indicating that after WWII, “primary among the concerns for the returning soldier was his potential violence. It was understood that he had been trained as a murder machine and that he might fail to override his ‘education’ in a civilian context” (101).19 Meanwhile, “the discharged soldier [feels] hostility . . . for the working woman who has taken his job”

(106). Men experience hysteria as a consequence of their involvement in the war and thus visit male doctors who must play the role of caring for them (102)—both hysteria and care traditionally being women’s domain—while women are working like men. Those perspectives are clearly relevant to movies like The Manchurian Candidate.

However, as I indicate in Chapter 3 above, those concerns about women replacing men in their domain are contemporary ones as well, and they are intensified by the

19 I note that a similar concern can apply to Monster Mothers’ sons, as I discuss here, in that they have been trained to be “feminine”—or, even worse, “turned” feminine—and are therefore unable to override it.

47 myriad other concerns about masculinity that dominate the political arena today. Thus the fact that there is a 2004 version of The Manchurian Candidate, along with other recent manifestations of the Monster Mother trope, as in the Appendix below, reveals the political situation at this time in our culture as well. Further, the pervasiveness of the

Monster Mother trope over time, as discussed throughout this chapter, even more strongly suggests that it is not merely indicative of the contemporary political or social situation but, rather, demonstrates that this trope is about mothers themselves. As above, there is something “damaged and scary” about mothers. That attitude persists despite the treatment that it consistently receives from feminists, as above, and thus it is a continuing problem.

Even in other media, blaming mothers for their sons’ problems is practically instinctive these days, although such conclusions are certainly not intellectually sound.

For instance, in a recent Newsweek cover story, author Peg Tyre lists a range of

“pressures” contributing to American boys’ increasing academic problems:

Instead of allowing teachers to instruct kids in the manner and pace that suit each class, some states now tell teachers what, when and how to teach. At the same time, student-teacher ratios have risen, physical education and sports programs have been cut and recess is a distant memory. (48)

She goes on to blame feminists who “thirty years ago . . . argued that classic ‘boy’ behaviors were a result of socialization” when “these days scientists believe they are an expression of male brain chemistry” (48) and also points out that ours is “a culture that discourages bookishness” (chart, 49). However, in the end, she nevertheless concludes that it is autonomous motherhood that is ultimately to blame.20 She writes,

20 An idea which she introduces at a conspicuous point in the article, right beneath a large picture of primarily Black boys. In fact, none of the pictures in the article before that point, in which she considers other factors, feature Black boys, while all of the pictures after that point, in which she considers only the presence of a father figure, do.

one of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school rests on a single question: Does he have a man in his life to look up to? Too often, the answer is no. . . . Older males, says Gurian, model self-restraint and solid work habits for younger ones. And whether they’re breathing down their necks about grades or admonishing them to show up for school on time, “an older man reminds a boy in a million different ways that school is crucial to [his] mission in life.” (51)

The implication, of course, is that somehow a woman cannot do those things—and that a father is the only man who can.21

Likewise, in a recent New York Times article, author Erik Eckholm indicates,

terrible schools, absent parents, racism, the decline in blue collar jobs and a subculture that glorifies swagger over work have all been cited as causes of the deepening ruin of black youths. Scholars — and the young men themselves — agree that all of these issues must be addressed. . . . All the negative trends are associated with poor schooling, studies have shown. (2)

However, nevertheless, in the middle of that passage, Eckholm places the following quote:

Joseph T. Jones, director of the fatherhood and work skills center here, puts the breakdown of families at the core. “Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good role models,” said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison time. “No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream society.” (2)

Thus despite what the studies actually show to be the primary problem—poor schooling—and the number of other issues involved—racism, the economy, societal ideals of (Black) masculinity itself—Jones “at the core” blames autonomous mothers, who apparently don’t know “how to navigate the mainstream society.”

This situation has serious consequences for feminist mothers, who probably want to act on their feminist ideology in their approaches to parenting their sons but find our society’s attitudes about that daunting, as those attitudes seem to require giving up all merely “personal” ideologies once one becomes a mother. Yet as people live longer and

21 Fortunately, Carol Gilligan points out the same problem that I do in her article immediately following Tyre’s. She writes, “for some, the trouble boys are having with school becomes grounds for reinstating traditional codes of manhood, including a return to the patriarchal family,” as, indeed, I discuss here. Instead, she suggests that it is “when . . . emotional openness, sensitivity and connectedness are seen to compromise masculinity, boys often repudiate these human qualities,” which, she points out, indicates that what we really need to do to address “The Problem With Boys” of the preceding article’s title is “to redress a system of gender relationships that endangers both sexes” (2005), as I will discuss further in Chapter 5 below.

49 longer lives, the prospect of sacrificing all self-interest so early in it seems more and more unappealing. No wonder more Americans are choosing to wait to have children these days or—perhaps because the length of time of reproductive capability has not increased as much as that of life itself—not even to have them at all. Parenting responsibly seems to require giving up all other parts of one’s identity and any and all self-interest. It should not be so—and not just because that attitude does a disservice to our children!22 As above, feminist mothers should not have to distance themselves from motherhood in order to live their feminism. Instead, we must find another way.

22 We teach them that, in order to succeed in life, they must achieve financial wealth through their careers. At the same time, we show them that, in order to be good parents, they must put their children’s wants and needs before their own. Very often, these two approaches are completely incompatible—especially for our daughters, on whom we allow society to place the particularly demanding ideologies about good mothering that I discuss here, but also for our sons, who usually will not any longer be able to perform the “traditional” masculine role of breadwinner for their entire households and yet who do not have any other avenues to a socially acceptable masculinity to pursue instead. Plus, the pathologization of other approaches—and thus the pathologization of the children who experience them, as depicted in the representations discussed in this chapter—victimizes those children just as much as it claims that those approaches do. However, I choose not to include these arguments in the body of my work because they reaffirm the idea that I problematize in Chapter 2 above that one must prove the benefit(s) to one’s children in an approach to parenting in order to legitimate it. That idea is already well-represented enough in society that any parent actually taking a considered approach to parenting is highly unlikely to forget it. It is the other idea—that parents can do something that may not benefit their children without, by default, harming them—that bears emphasis, and that is what the essentialization of children’s “interests” elides.

CHAPTER 5 FEMINIST MOTHERING

As above, one’s definition of feminist mothering is linked to one’s own approach to feminism. Evelyn Nakano Glenn makes a similar point in her introduction to Mothering:

Ideology, Experience, and Agency. Here, she considers how one’s definition of motherhood itself tends to parallel one’s position on political issues:

The pro-life position grew out of a conviction that women were bound by their biological roles, and that motherhood should be women’s sole mission and source of gratification. In contrast, pro-choice women’s position grew out of a conviction that women were not or should not be subject to the dictates of biological reproduction, and that motherhood was one of many roles, “a burden when defined as the only role.”1 In a similar vein, contending ideas about the significance of motherhood in delimiting women’s place in society are central to debates over whether institutions should be required to make special accommodations for women because of their unique responsibility for bearing and caring for children. Feminist lawyers took opposing sides in a case brought by an employer challenging a California law requiring employers to provide pregnancy and maternity leave. Lawyers at Equal Rights Advocates, pioneers in the fight against sex discrimination, filed a brief in the Supreme Court supporting special treatment for women, saying it was valid to recognize “the real differences in the procreative roles of men and women.” The sex discrimination and reproductive rights staff at the American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief on the other side, opposing special treatment for women, arguing in part that pregnancy should be treated as one of a number of temporary disabilities warranting accommodation by employers. This position reflected the belief that codifying “difference” would work against women, since historically, women’s capacity for bearing children has been the rationale for excluding them from public roles and high-paying jobs. (2)

Thus feminists’ perspectives and approaches to various issues depend upon their ideas about feminism itself: what it ought to accomplish and how it ought to go about trying to accomplish it. What comes first—how one enacts one’s feminism or how one defines it— remains unclear; thus I suggest that feminist mothers’ ideas about the nature of feminist mothering and their actual approaches to enacting it also relate in a similarly complex and interdependent way.

1 Nakano Glenn quotes there from Kristen Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. 214).

50 51

For some, in fact, the only feminist approach to mothering is not to do it at all:

Umansky, in her study of feminism between 1968 and 1982, ascertained two competing feminist views on motherhood: [One is] the “negative” discourse that “focus[es] on motherhood as a social mandate, an oppressive institution, a compromise to women’s independence” (2–3). (O’Reilly, From Motherhood to Mothering, 2)

This view corresponds with the first feminist perspective on motherhood from Nakano

Glenn’s later discussion of the relationship between feminists’ ideas about feminism and about motherhood:

In these formulations, liberation for women would have come only when women were freed from having to be mothers, or released from primary responsibility for mothering. In contrast, other feminist writers [called “motherists” (24)] have sought to reclaim motherhood for women, seeing it as a source of special power, creativity, and insight. (22)

Sandra Lipsitz Bem would include the latter group with the feminists whom she calls

“woman-centered theorists,” as they believe that

woman’s special virtue is her ability to easily transcend the many isolated little units and artificial polarities that men are said to almost compulsively invent. . . . This tendency to see everyone and everything as interconnected and hence needing to be in balance has implications not only for a woman’s psyche and her interpersonal relationships but also for the kinds of values that she would be inclined to build. Had women been the ones with the power to construct the dominant cultural institutions, it thus follows from the woman-centered perspective that we human beings would now be in much less danger of destroying both ourselves and our planet than we are. (128)2

Nakano Glenn explains the crux of the issue:

This divide grows out of a basic fault line that Ann Snitow identified as running through the history of feminism. What do feminists want? Do we want to do away with the category of woman—minimize the significance of sex differences and claim our rights on the basis of our essential sameness with men? Or do we want to claim the identity of woman, valorize women’s culture and organize on the basis of our commonalities as women? (22)

And just as feminists’ ideas about feminism also relate to their ideas about other issues, as these examples illustrate, for feminist scholars their feminist ideology manifests itself in the scholars’ approaches to their work as well. In hooks’s case, as above, her work itself is part of her own enactment of feminism since she sees education alone as an

2 A recent example of the woman-centered approach appears in Vivian Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin’s collection, The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism, where Shireen Lee argues that more women working in “The High-Tech Sector” would help to “redefine[e] capitalism in a more human way” (97).

52 act of critical consciousness.3 Feminist mothering scholars’ academic work often manifests the scholars’ ideas about feminist mothering in the same way.

O’Reilly, then, defines mothering in the introduction to her collection Mother

Outlaws in opposition to societal ideals. She writes, “we know what empowered mothering is by what it is not: namely patriarchal motherhood” (4). O’Reilly in turn defines “patriarchal motherhood” as follows:

Children and culture at large do not see mothers as having a life before or outside of motherhood. As well, while . . . our culture regards mothering as natural to mothers, it simultaneously requires mothers to be well-versed in theories of childrearing. . . . Good mothers today are concerned with their children’s educational and general psychological development. Thus, good mothers ensure that their children have many varied opportunities for enrichment, learning, self-growth, and so forth. And, of course, mothers are not sexual! (4)

That implies, then, that “empowered mothering” is the opposite of everything in that description. Empowered mothers must apparently have a life before and/or outside of motherhood. Mothering is not natural to them, but they still do not seek out and/or comply with the popular theories of childrearing of the day. They do not even concern themselves with their children’s educational and psychological development, so they do not work to “ensure that their children have many varied opportunities for enrichment, learning, self-growth, and so forth.” And, of course, empowered mothers are definitely sexual!

O’Reilly’s work clearly seeks to make space for alternative approaches to mothering, and it does so. However, by opposing those alternative approaches to “patriarchal

3 Again, as above, hooks defines critical consciousness as assuming “responsibility for transforming ourselves and society” through both “words and deeds” which we must share both in the university, as scholars and teachers, and out of it, “across kitchen tables.” Later she quotes from Richard Shaull’s introduction to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herden, 1970): “Education [can be] ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” She explains, “a liberatory feminist movement aims to transform society by eradicating patriarchy, by ending sexism and sexist oppression, by challenging the politics of domination on all fronts” (50). That is critical consciousness indeed.

53 motherhood,” she reinforces its primacy and the radical status of empowered or feminist mothering, which can deter some feminist mothers from fully engaging in it, since once again, it is a monumental challenge to take such a risk with the upbringing of one’s children. Plus, by requiring “mothering” to be everything that “motherhood” is not, mothering is by implication just as limited in scope as motherhood. And as above, neither does it bring about any alterations in societal ideology, which thus continues to deter mothers from enacting feminist approaches to mothering and actually helps to perpetuate the power of “patriarchal motherhood.” Similarly, Judith Butler writes,

if to become a lesbian is an act, a leave-taking of heterosexuality, a self-naming that contests the compulsory meanings of heterosexuality’s women and men, what is to keep the name of lesbian from becoming an equally compulsory category? [That perspective] suggests a necessary relationship between the homosexual point of view and that of figurative language, as if to be homosexual is to contest the compulsory syntax and semantics that construct “the real.” Excluded from the real, the homosexual point of view, if there is one, might well understand the real as constituted through a set of exclusions, margins that do not appear, absences that do not figure. What a tragic mistake, then, to construct a gay/lesbian identity through the same exclusionary means, as if the excluded were not, precisely through its exclusion, always presupposed and, indeed, required for the construction of that identity. Such an exclusion, paradoxically, institutes precisely the relation of radical dependency it seeks to overcome: Lesbianism would then require heterosexuality. Lesbianism that defines itself in radical exclusion from heterosexuality deprives itself of the capacity to resignify the very heterosexual constructs by which it is partially and inevitably constituted. As a result, that lesbian strategy would consolidate compulsory heterosexuality in its oppressive forms. (162, 163)

That kind of result, then, is what my work here strives to avoid.

This example illustrates how one definition of feminist mothering (in this case,

O’Reilly’s) can seem to work against other definitions (mine). However, I do not oppose

O’Reilly’s project of encouraging alternative textual representations of mothering, as I will discuss shortly. In fact, I do the same by including some of my personal experience in my work. However, academic textual representations are practically powerless in the face of popular movies. As Michael Gurian writes,

even once we’re adults, our brains remain malleable to media imagery, as the continued effectiveness of commercials confirms. . . . Movies are “entertainment,” are not “important,” so we are allowed, even encouraged, to be lax in our attitudes toward them. . . . Yet they are all too real. As storytelling

agents, media productions are as powerful as any we’ve ever had in history—in some neurological ways, they are even more powerful. (2,3)4

As Ferguson writes, “knowing the images influences our view of reality and even our behavior” (5). Thus not only do these images depict our anxieties, they reinforce and perpetuate them as well. The visibility of movie representations makes them even more influential, while our ability to see them with our own eyes makes them seem all too real.

Bem offers an even more dire statement:

According to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the hallmark of a native consciousness is not being able to distinguish between reality and the way one’s culture construes reality; in other words, the reality one perceives and the cultural lenses through which one perceives it are “indissoluble” (1983, p. 58). . . . This kind of consciousness can sometimes be retained by adults who live in a sufficiently homogeneous society. (140)

Thus without any positive representations of mothers demonstrating a modicum of self- regard, society cannot imagine any positive results from such behavior—and neither can mothers themselves. As O’Reilly writes, “these images serve to regulate mothers and mothering” (Mother Matters 16; emphasis in original).

O’Reilly’s collections Mother Matters and Mother Outlaws (referenced above) and

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey’s collection Mothering:

Ideology, Experience, and Agency are a few works that likewise seek to challenge the homogeneity of the societal ideal of motherhood through their documentation of “the existence of diverse, often submerged, constructions of mothering that have coexisted alongside the dominant model” (Nakano Glenn 4). Plenty of other anthologies, as listed in Andrea J. Buchanan and Amy Hudock’s introduction to one such work, Literary

Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, also “offer personal narratives that challenge

4 Gurian’s work is problematic for its acceptance of the same societal ideas behind the Monster Mother trope, as demonstrated in his inclusion in the Tyre quote above. However, as with the National Geographic film cited above, he offers some perspectives that, significantly, still support my argument.

55 and question social constructions of motherhood” (xii).5 Their approach, then, coincides with Nakano Glenn’s definition of feminism, as presented in her introduction to the collection: “challeng[ing] notions of womanhood and manhood as inherent qualities linked to biological sex by showing that relationships between men and women, and definitions of womanhood and manhood, are continually constituted, reproduced, changed, and contested” (3). In fact, Nakano Glenn argues that feminist theorists can take the same approach to do for mothering what they have already done for gender—that is, proving its heterogeneity—simply by illustrating its diversity in texts. In this way, these theorists’ ideas about the nature of feminist mothering directly correlate with their ideas about the nature of feminism.6

However, the difference between the situations of gender and mothering is that positive examples that contest narrow definitions of gender are increasingly present not only in texts but in the popular media, while examples that contest the narrow definition of a good mother are not, as I discuss here. I criticize the popular cultural negative representations of mothering—or, rather, the narrow range of what popular culture characterizes as good mothering—in the same way that feminists criticize the lack of popular representation of women and/or minorities performing certain roles (or, in other

5 The anthologies that they list are Mothering Against the Odds (1998), Wanting a Child (1998), A Mother’s World (1998), Bigger Than the Sky (1999), Child of Mine (2000), Mothers Who Think (2000), Room to Grow (2000), Breeder (2001), Pregnancy Stories (2001), The Bitch in the House (2003), Toddler (2003), Mamaphonic (2004), You Look Too Young to Be a Mom (2004), Because I Said So (2005), Rise Up Singing (2005), Cradle and All (1989), Double Stitch (1991), Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood (2001), Birth (2002), Mother Songs (1995), Mother Knows (2004), and The Grand Permission (2003); they also mention the magazine Brain,Child, and the websites HipMama.com, AustinMama.com, Mamaphonic.com, and Literary Mama itself (xii,xiv).

6 In some sense it actually appears as though feminist theorists might be responding to other feminists just as much if not more than societal ideals with that approach: As Nakano Glenn acknowledges, “theorists have been attacked for universalizing [about mothering] from a narrow social and class base of experiences—presumably their own” (5). As I will discuss below, the objective of diversifying the images of mothers has certainly met with more success within feminism than in society as a whole anyway.

56 words, the restriction of their representation to stereotypical situations). That tendency, we recognize, reinforces stereotypes, and so, I argue, do the negative representations of mothers of sons that I discuss, which are far more prevalent and pervasive than even most feminist theorists realize.

Nakano Glenn still has a good point, though. She writes, “mothering is constructed through men’s and women’s actions within specific historical circumstances” (3). Thus performing different actions of mothering will help to vary the societal construct of mothering and, through that, the institution of motherhood itself. 7 Unfortunately, it is no small challenge to act in a manner completely contrary to one’s socialization—especially when our children are involved. As the above quote from Ferguson’s book (Women in

Literature) suggests, positive representations of feminist mothering of sons in literature may help; as O’Reilly argues in her introduction to Mother Matters, “the messy and muddled realities of motherhood are camouflaged—masked—by the normative discourse of motherhood,” so her collection seeks to examine “how, in turn, practices of mothering—in all of their complexity and diversity—challenge the denial of such difficulty and difference in the normative discourse” (14). As hooks writes, “we need detailed accounts of the ways our lives are fuller and richer as we change and grow

7 Nakano Glenn even argues that such an approach has already worked: “By becoming increasingly visible as actors in a variety of arenas outside the family, [middle-class women] have challenged the monolithic identification of women with motherhood” (11). However, since women across all classes still feel the effects of that identification—in the workplace, for example, where even if they do not have children they can find themselves involuntarily on the “mommy track”—it is questionable whether it has worked very well at all. Likewise, The New York Times recently caused a stir when it used a headline including the Republican-coined phrase “the Mommy Party,” which was originally intended to be derogatory toward the Democratic Party for its supposed ideology of nurture and care, on an article about how women candidates are finding their gender to be an asset to their political campaigns. Nowhere does the article discuss the candidates’ status as mothers, though; it is thus merely their status as women that seems to have merited the original title. Incidentally, the article, by Robin Toner, now appears online under the headline, “Women Wage Key Campaigns for Democrats.” Meanwhile, the first sentence remains, “if the Democrats have their way, the 2006 Congressional elections will be the revenge of the mommy party.” It is the only place that the words “mommy” or “mother” appear on that page.

57 politically” (Talking Back 26), and for my work that means that mothers of sons need proof of the efficacy of feminist mothering. hooks calls for “substantive models and strategies for change” (33) and suggests “publishing articles and books that do more than inform, that testify, bearing witness to the primacy of struggle, to our collective effort to transform” (29); indeed, there are mothers of sons doing that, and my own work here is part of it.

However, unless people can see those different actions—and unless mothers can feel good about doing them themselves—those societal constructions cannot change. As hooks indicates, “feminist theory should necessarily be directed to masses of women and men in our society” (Talking Back 35). Academic books and articles certainly cannot accomplish that, but I question whether simply “less academic” books and articles can either.8

In fact, I argue, because literary representations still require visualization on the part of their readers, and because, once again, movies tend to be much more present in the public experience and awareness, literature cannot sufficiently contest the pervasive negative images from the movies. Thus my objection to O’Reilly’s and others theorists’ approach is not that it is wrong, but rather that it is not enough. The continued pervasiveness of those negative images indicates that feminists’ criticism of them and attempts to counter them have not served to change or even lessen their power; in fact, as shown in Chapter 4, in some ways the representations have become even more negative.

Rather, I suggest that more positive representations of otherwise “deviant” mothers in popular movies would help to make feminist mothering of sons seem less monstrous—

8 Certainly there are those outside of academia who read them, but one wonders whether the kind of people who would do so are the ones who most need to read such books and articles anyway.

58 and I do mean “more,” since there is already at least one: Being Julia, while not necessarily featuring a woman taking a feminist approach to mothering, does feature a strong mother who has achieved great success in a dramatic career—a field in which society tends to much malign mothers9—and who does not comply with society’s sexual imperatives for married women. Yet Julia’s son Roger is a young gentleman of impeccable behavior and demeanor, and their relationship is a breath of fresh air in comparison to everything else discussed in my work.

First of all, there is no sign of Oedipal attraction between them, nor is there any other sign of fixation on his mother on Roger’s part, despite the story offering a perfect opportunity for such an indication of the psychological abnormality that a popular movie featuring a mother like Julia would normally offer. For instance, Freud writes that young men fixated on the mother-infant relationship will fantasize about older women like their mothers engaging in sexual activity with younger men like themselves,10 but Roger disapproves of such a relationship between his mother and another young man, Tom.

Freud also indicates that a fixated man will lower his estimation of his mother to that of a promiscuous woman to enable thinking of her as sexually available to him, but Roger does not appear to lower his estimation of his mother at all, even though she arguably actually is a promiscuous woman.

9 Consider the representations of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother, for instance.

10 Freud writes in “A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men” (1910) that the pathological young man

does not forget that the mother has given the privilege of sexual intercourse with her to the father instead of to him, and he regards it as an act of infidelity on her part. If these feelings do not rapidly pass, […] phantasies of the mother’s infidelity are by far the most favored; the lover with whom the mother commits the act of unfaithfulness almost invariably bears the features of the boy himself, or, to be more correct, of the idealized image he forms of himself as brought to equality with his father by growing to manhood. (Sexuality 55)

The absence of such indications of psychological abnormality in Roger speaks well for Julia’s mothering, and the lack of signs of an inappropriate degree of control or power-hungriness exerted toward/through Roger on Julia’s part, as in so many of the other movies discussed in my work, speaks well for a woman being able to achieve success in her own right rather than by way of her son(s).11 Thus Being Julia, while not actually depicting feminist mothering, still provides an example of a “deviant” mother who “produces” a fine son.

The existence of a movie such as Being Julia is barely the first step, though. After all, all that it represents, as above, is an absence of the usual negative aspects of representations of mothers of sons in popular American movies. It is not a movie about mothering, though: Its treatment of Julia’s motherhood is marginal at best, while in most of the movies that I discuss in my work, the mother-son relationship is central.

Furthermore, as above, Being Julia does not depict anything that could easily suggest a conscious effort on Julia’s part to enact a feminist approach to mothering Roger. If her approach is not a conscious one, it would be difficult to call it “feminist,” as I will discuss in Chapter 6. Further, because even positive representations of supposedly deviant mothering are so rare, the positive outcome of a strong women mothering a son that

Being Julia depicts still seems counterintuitive or exceptional. Nevertheless, I remain optimistic that continued efforts at popularizing positive images of “deviant” mothers will make feminist mothering of sons a more seemingly viable approach to actually take.

11 However, the movie does portray that success as being mostly due to the sage advice of the ghost of Jimmy Langton, a late theater owner who mentored her during his life and appears to continue to do so in her mind even after his death. Another potential drawback is the fact that Julia’s relationship with her son Roger is one in which she still seems to have to do as he wishes in the rest of her life in order to gain his approval in their relationship, but a couple of scenes insinuate that he looks to her for approval of him in the rest of his life as well, both of which are actually pretty realistic characteristics of any interpersonal relationship—and the combination of the two prevents either from seeming exceptionally problematic, as one or the other alone likely would.

In that regard, O’Reilly and I are in agreement; I only differ in suggesting that it is popular visual images that are most necessary at this moment rather than written ones.

A work that further bridges the gap between O’Reilly’s perspectives and mine is a collection from Reddy et al., Mother Journeys: Feminists Write about Mothering, which explicitly seeks to answer the question: “What does it mean to be a feminist mother . . .

?” in part, like O’Reilly’s work and the other collections above, by illustrating “feminists’ varying experiences of motherhood,” seeking thereby “to change the popular myths about mothering by giving voice to feminist mothers’ real experiences and wisdom.” However, this collection is, like hooks’s work, explicitly “not academic. . . . We are aiming this collection at a wide audience” (3), which is what I see the work to reclaim motherhood for feminists as needing to do. This collection also attempts to directly and explicitly define feminist mothering, which the editors note to be “multiple, complicated, sometimes contradictory” but still generally involving “conflict with majority values, especially as represented by children’s schools; sadness at children’s inevitable contact with racist, misogynist culture; and pride in self and family for doing things in feminist ways.” They also indicate that feminist mothers tend to enjoy the experience for “the sensual joys of mothering”—which I note resonates with the descriptions of the motherists’/woman-centered theorists’ perspective, as above—“the intellectual joy of discovering another person’s growth, and ultimately the joy of claiming identities as women with choices” (2). Those ideas about feminist mothering are similar to my own as well, as I will discuss in Chapter 6.

Likewise, Audre Lorde directly addresses feminist mothering in her essay, “Man

Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response.” First she establishes the goals of her approach:

Raising Black children—female and male—in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. . . . I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self. (74)

Then she describes her methods:

[The knowledge] that [parents] are not omnipotent . . . is necessary [for our children] as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel, or if he wins. . . . The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. . . . These assumptions of power relationships are being questioned because Frances [her partner] and I, often painfully and with varying degrees of success, attempt to evaluate and measure over and over again our feelings concerning power, our own and others’. And we explore with care those areas concerning how it is used and expressed between us and between us and the children, openly and otherwise. (76,77,79)

Finally, she offers results. This part is arguably the most important of all, as it is exactly that part that worries would-be feminist mothers the most: How will sons raised feminist function in society?

Black children of lesbian couples have an advantage because they learn, very early, that oppression comes in many different forms, none of which have anything to do with their own worth. . . . Jonathan [her son] has had the advantage of growing up within a nonsexist relationship, one in which society’s pseudo-natural assumptions of ruler/ruled are challenged. . . . Most importantly, as the son of lesbians, he has had an invaluable model—not only of a relationship—but of relating. (75,79)

Nancy K. Bereano, one of the editors of Sister Outsider, explains the importance of that information in her introduction to the text:

I read “Man Child,” and . . . I came to understand it was not merely that Lorde knew more about raising sons than I did, although I had been given expert advice. I realized how directly Lorde’s knowledge was tied to her difference—those realities of Blackness and lesbianism that placed her outside the dominant society. She had information that I, a white woman who had lived most of my life in a middle-class heterosexual world, did not have, information I could use, information I needed. (9)

So as Nakano Glenn writes, feminists need to move this kind of information “from the margins to the center” (11)—or, as I argue in this work, grant it visibility. One must not forget the realities behind Lorde’s writing, though: There is an enormous difference between a Black lesbian and a White heterosexual feminist, and as a result there is a lot more at stake in the former’s approach to mothering than in the latter’s. After all, the considerations involved just in determining how to raise a Black son well vary widely from those involved in determining how to raise a White son well. And neither a Black woman nor a lesbian can ever even approach society’s ideal of the good mother, since she is always heterosexual and White.

Likewise, even though I use hooks’s theories to help construct my own feminist ideology of mothering in this work, the same racially specific circumstances apply to her work as well. Yet in both cases, if one’s approach to feminist mothering includes responding to societal violence and “children’s inevitable contact with racist, misogynist culture,” as in the collection from Reddy et al., as above, both hooks’s and Lorde’s ideas can be useful.

In The Will to Change, hooks writes that “feminist thinking and practice are the only way we can truly address the crisis of masculinity today” (xvii). She explains that as long as society perpetuates the ideas of what it means to mother and to father a child, as indicated in note 1.10, “because patriarchal culture has already taught girls and boys that

Dad’s love is more valuable than mother love” (2), and “because of [the] scarcity” of fatherly love (4),12 “it is unlikely that maternal affection will heal the lack” and thus

“these girls and boys [will continue to] grow up angry with men” (2). Patriarchal culture,

12 hooks quotes there from Jan L. Waldron’s In the Country of Men: My Travels (New York: Anchor, 1998).

63 she explains, makes it “hard . . . for men to practice the art of loving,” as “it really does not care if men are unhappy” (5), and, as Lorde also suggests, “the masculine pretense is that real men feel no pain” (6). Even “reformist” feminism’s “focus on male power reinforced the notion that somehow males were powerful and had it all” (4), while even

“when feminist movement led to men’s liberation, . . . when men worked to get in touch with feelings” (6)—besides anger (7)—“no one really wanted to reward them” (6). Thus

Gilligan details her idea for a feminist approach to mothering sons:

If boys can be encouraged to embrace [the] human qualities [of] emotional openness, sensitivity and connectedness [which] are seen to compromise masculinity, . . . these qualities will develop, expanding their capacity for relationships and also their sense of themselves [thereby] recognizing their sensitivities, building honest relationships and strengthening a capacity for resistance. (2006)

Also like Lorde, hooks argues that “men must be able to let go the will to dominate”

(xvii), but she notes that “we cannot change men but we can encourage, implore, and affirm their will to change” (15). Of course, hooks is not writing about mothering; as other mothering theorists argue, though, through feminist mothering, we can raise sons in a different way. Besides all of the reasons above, that is also important because, as hooks notes, it is fathers who teach their sons to act this way (The Will to Change 9–11). As

Ortner writes, “in virtually every society there is a point at which the socialization of boys is transferred to the hands of men” (19). Thus “more and more males need to engage in feminist struggle if there is to be an end to sexist oppression, to male domination”

(hooks, Talking Back, 132). So if we can involve their fathers and other men and then our sons grow up to parent sons of their own, our sons can raise their sons as feminists as well.

Feminism has long since managed to enable some change in women’s roles in society; what must happen to enable further societal change is an expansion in men’s roles. As Bem writes,

different and unequal [gender identity] assignment constrains both children and adults psychologically, by channeling their motivations and their abilities into either a stereotypically male or a stereotypically female direction. It also constrains them more coercively, by restricting their ability to step outside their assigned positions should they be motivated to do so. (135)

So no longer can fathering a child merely mean enabling fertilization; it too must involve enacting feminist mothering. For that to happen, not only do we need the redefinition of mothering, but we also need more positive visible representations of it so that would-be feminist parents can recognize its value and enact it with their children. It will never be easy—as hooks writes, “true politicization—coming to critical consciousness—is a difficult, ‘trying’ process, one that demands that we give up set ways of thinking and being, that we shift our paradigms, that we open ourselves to the unknown, the unfamiliar” (Talking Back 25). That, in turn, as above, will help to advance feminism in general.

CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

I said before that there are multiple legitimate approaches to feminist mothering, and I still believe that. However, as Reddy et al. note, there are similarities among those approaches, and as it is difficult to determine how to enact something without knowing just what that thing entails, I also think that it is important to offer some specific ideas as to what constitutes feminist mothering. My research into the different perspectives on feminism and feminist mothering for this work has enabled me to construct such a definition; thus I will elucidate that here.

Feminist mothering must first of all, as I suggested above, be a conscious decision, made with the intention of bringing about some kind of change for the better, on any scale. For instance, one form of feminist mothering could constitute simply raising children to be feminists themselves—that is, giving them the knowledge and the opportunity to resist socialization into particular categories of gender, sexuality, race, and class, as Bem and Lorde suggest—while another could involve supporting and encouraging others to enact that form of feminist mothering themselves, in a variety of ways, some of which I describe above. What is essential to recognize is that both forms would entail something like hooks’ “feminist pedagogy,” and both would require an appreciation of the danger of such activity, as Lorde suggests as well. The prospect of feminist mothering frightens society, as manifested in the representations of mothers of

65 66 sons included here; thus feminist mothers and their children must be prepared to encounter more of that kind of negative reaction and resistance, as hooks suggests in the last quote in Chapter 5. With an understanding, as also discussed here, of why it takes place and why it is worthwhile to persist with feminist activity, though, we will be able to persevere.

With sons, as Lorde, hooks, and Gilligan suggest, the most important aspect of feminist mothering may be simply allowing them to continue to develop the emotional skills that they exercise as young children; what makes it less than simple, of course, is the fact that much of the rest of society will be trying to train them otherwise. I also think that feminists of all genders can do much both for children and for other adults by serving as role models, though, enacting feminism in as many aspects of their lives as they can.

My son is learning to expect women to have their own lives, as I do; I do not allow myself to apologize for that. Likewise, a pregnant colleague wrote to me recently asking for advice on how to be the kind of mother who, as I do, lives her life for more reasons than being a mother. It is my intentional visibility as such that gave her the idea that such an approach is even possible in the first place, though. Both examples show the potential of the kind of feminist mothering that I propose: If more mothers could just know the possibilities of feminist mothering, therein would lie tremendous power and success for feminism.

APPENDIX MORE MONSTER MOTHERS

Like Alexander the Great, another historical leader, Howard Hughes, the billionaire aviator and movie producer, is also the subject of a movie that enacts mother-blame. We know Hughes to have suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the movie The

Aviator (2004) presents all of that obsession as stemming from one moment in his youth, when his mother bathes him in the opening scene (raising Oedipal suspicions as well) while warning him about both typhus and Blacks. This representation of her as a bigot is calculated to turn a modern audience against her immediately—and her son’s later obsession with that moment, which interferes with his ability to function in society, solidifies that impression.

Howard Hughes does not murder anyone, like other sons of Monster Mothers, but his mental instability keeps him from making full use of his genius to make positive contributions to society, and that is how this movie depicts the consequences of his monstrous mother. Whatever he does, the audience sees, he does it by overcoming what his mother does to him (rather than because her warnings keep him alive through the typhoid epidemic and then his parents’ money affords him the luxury to live out his every whim and dream). What is even more unrealistic, however, is that someone so obsessive would really only recollect one moment from his childhood. Even more problematic is that the movie, not bothering to problematize his misogyny and gross disregard of others’ needs, chooses to celebrate Hughes while denigrating his mother, who remains

67 68 nameless—like Grendel’s mother—and lifeless—except for that one moment that supposedly returns over and over again to torment her son.

Stanley Kubrick’s Citizen Kane (1941), a fictionalized version of the story of historical newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, has a similar structure. It begins with a scene of the magnate as a child playing on a sled—until a man comes and takes him away, at his mother’s bidding (and purportedly in the child’s best interests).

However, that scene haunts the eventual tycoon throughout his life, leading him into compulsion, as happens to Hughes, and thus presumably depriving the world of the best application of his talents. This character even demonstrates the same kind of flaws that

Hughes’s does in The Aviator.

Then there are the movies based on the lives of real-life criminals. The characters in

White Heat (1949) are modeled after the real-life criminal Barker family of the 1930s, although the character Ma Jarrett is possibly a ramped-up version of Ma Barker (Fischer

93–97). Briefly (as numerous other theorists discuss this film), White Heat is about the widowed and, as Fischer describes, “masculine” Ma and her son Cody, who demonstrates that he is “emasculated” through his migraine headaches and hallucinations, which are symptoms of hysteria. Ma is not explicitly indicated as the criminal mastermind behind

Cody in the film, as that is whom the undercover police officer seeks and finds in another man by the end; however, she is many times responsible for Cody’s criminal success, and she even engages in some criminal behavior herself during the film, which contributes to the viewer’s sense of her masculinity.

 I am indebted for this interpretation to my friend, Eliot Kieval.

Another indication of her dominance is the fact that the male undercover police officer is able to take her place in assisting, protecting, taking care of, and even, it seems, caring for Cody while he is in prison. Most important for my analysis, though, is her failure to facilitate Cody’s separation from her, as he himself admits that she is the only person who means anything to him—to the exclusion of his wife, with whom there is even a suggestion that he does not engage in sexual relations, which is not entirely surprising considering that he and his mother are never apart. As one police officer puts it, “where Ma goes, Cody goes.” That is also why a supervisor warns the undercover officer of Cody’s potential for insanity during his forced separation from her in prison— and indeed, in the end, they are right. Tellingly, Russell Baker calls Ma “a monstrous old witch” (Fischer 103).

Philip L. Simpson mentions in passing Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) for its purported but flawed class-consciousness (157) and its theme of “the hatred of a serial killer for his mother” (161n6), although I note that rarely does a movie depict a son as feeling only hatred for his mother, as Henry does; rather, it is the combination of his attraction toward and repulsion from her that originates his psychosis, as with The

Manchurian Candidate’s Raymond and the killer in The Eyes of Laura Mars, which I will discuss below. Simpson does correctly identify Henry as “fictional,” however (157)—and yet because it seems to represent real-life events, its constructions hold far more credibility for its audience than more explicitly fictional movies. The most fictional aspect of Henry, of course, is its sympathetic portrayal of Henry Lee Lucas, combined with a narrowing of the possible causes of his psychosis to his mother’s sexual deviance—particularly her supposed mandate that he transgress “traditional” gender

70 boundaries as well. Henry’s mother apparently forced him as a child to wear a dress and watch her have sex with all sorts of men, even with his father in the house, which

Director John McNaughton depicts as resulting in Henry having an unavoidable and murderous reaction to the prospect of intercourse. Granted, Henry’s mother treated her son unspeakably, but a lot of other unspeakable things happened to him too, only a couple of which the movie even mentions—and even then it remains clear that

McNaughton constructs Henry’s motive as a direct result of his mother’s behavior— nothing more, nothing less.

Other changes include the addition of Henry’s murder of his partner-in-crime, Otis, which actually never happened, and Otis’s “sister” Becky (in real life his daughter), who in the movie becomes Henry’s girlfriend. In the movie, Henry introduces Otis to murder by killing some sex workers trying to do their job with the two men one night. When he later catches Otis raping Becky, Henry kills him too, and presumably it is because Becky tries to have sex with Henry that he kills her as well. The movie suggests that all of that happens because of Henry’s distaste for sex, which was supposedly brought on by his mother. In fact, that construction allows McNaughton to give even Henry the guise of heroism, as in the movie he frequently stands up for women, and rape is the one crime that he will neither allow nor commit. In reality, the real Henry Lee Lucas had no problem raping as well as murdering many of his possibly hundreds of victims.

Nevertheless, McNaughton’s artistic license accomplishes nothing less than seeming to confirm with a real-life example the Monster Mother trope.

Capturing the Friedmans (2003) is an actual documentary about Arnold Friedman, a teacher and a pedophile whose child pornography, once discovered by the police, led to

71 his arrest for sodomizing dozens of boys. Whether or not he actually committed exactly the crime to which he pled guilty, although in one sense or another what motivates the film, is less important for this work than who bore the blame for his pedophilia and for his conviction: mothers. His own mother, divorced and poor, apparently had sex with her dates in the bedroom that she shared with her sons (like Henry’s mother!); in consequence, Arnie claims, in order to emulate her, he looked to have relationships with other males—but I note that those relationships were with boys, not men, as his mother’s were, and he played the “masculine” or “aggressive” role in those relationships, not the

“feminine.” Supposedly he actually started with his brother, but his brother remembers none of that and seems, in fact, quite healthy, which belies the mother-blame in this instance. He is gay, though, which the movies discussed here do tend to “blame” on mothers; while Capturing the Friedmans does not explicitly do that, perhaps Arnie did, which might have led him to construct his own rationalization about himself to that effect as well. It was only situations resembling his memory of that experience with his brother that aroused him for the rest of his life, he suggests, and indeed, his wife Elaine says that his sexual relationship with her was stilted and mechanical.

Her and Arnie’s son David, however, blames his mother for his parents’ sexual problems because he says that she is “ignorant” about sex and “crazy.” He also accuses her of emasculating Arnie by “manipulating” him into pleading guilty in the hopes that it would save their youngest son Jesse from conviction of some of the same charges; in retrospect, Jesse blames her for later pressuring him to plead guilty himself, but he blames his lawyer and his father as well.

The actual home movies of the Friedmans do not support either of those men’s assertions, though: Instead, they show David endlessly abusing his mother, which behavior he only stops when his father tells him to; refusing to acknowledge that his father had committed any kind of wrongdoing; and thus only engaging in the societal tradition of mother-blame. They show Jesse recognizing the impossibility of proving his innocence in the same community in which the crimes allegedly took place and where they were certainly highly publicized after the fact, and even more tellingly, they show that he, at least, must be lying at some point, since he just as convincingly tells one story in the courtroom and a number of others out of it.

The film does construct Elaine as what drove Arnie to teach the computer classes

(where he encountered the boys that would eventually accuse him and Jesse of sodomizing them) in the first place, though, supposedly because he did not want to be around her. She herself even uses the word “unbalanced” when discussing her mothering, but she also points out that she simply did not know how to do it. As the mother to three boys, she was “overwhelmed,” as she says in one of the special features on the extra

DVD, and once even tried to take her own life because she felt that she was a bad mother.

Considering the consistent lack of support for mothers in their mothering in this country, that is not much of a surprise; considering the kinds of images discussed here, her self- criticism is not a surprise either. In fact, many mothers share that hypercritical attitude about themselves.

Interestingly enough, despite David’s vilification of her, as the film leaves more room for Jesse being innocent than Arnie, nothing is explicitly made of Elaine’s mothering of

Jesse causing him to go wrong; that further supports the notion that mother-blame is

73 indeed a representation in this case as well.1 And when movies employ that approach in

“true” stories such as Henry and Capturing the Friedmans—which, although very different in terms of their intentions toward revealing “the” truth, ultimately equally fail to illuminate any more of it than conjecture and this kind of representation—it takes on such an appearance of truth that it affects the way society as a whole, including mothers of sons themselves, view their mothering. Perhaps these mothers were in fact to blame in these cases; if so, so be it. The effect that the consistent representation of that possibility as truth has on mothers themselves, though, is the larger problem that I seek to discuss here.

Likewise, although it is fictional, Copycat’s references to numerous real-life serial killers adds credibility to its plot. Copycat (1995) is about Helen Hudson, a woman rich from her research on serial killers and famous among them. Then Hudson becomes the target of a serial killer who seeks to achieve fame via the same public fascination with serial killers that earned Hudson so much money. The killer starts with strangers but eventually murders her “assistant,” who actually appears to be the only person of any significance in her life. Thus the movie is purportedly a critique of that fascination with serial killers, even when its purpose is opposition to such violence, as depicted in the character of Hudson.2

1 In fact, the film itself omits all references to Jesse’s sexuality; only the special features illuminate such circumstances as the fact that even the (now retired) Director of the local Sex Crimes Unit at the time of the investigation thinks that Jesse was engaging in a homosexual relationship with one of his peers at the time of the sexual abuse.

2 Yet of course director Jon Amiel himself also seeks to profit from that fascination, as it is that which draws viewers to this film. In one of the special features he also claims,

one of the things that I love so much about this movie is that it is about two professional women who join forces for professional reasons. They bring their own expertise to the table and their collaboration brings about the resolution. You don’t see that very often. (“Behind the Scenes”)

However, as Simpson notes,

as is common in the contemporary serial killer subgenre, of which Psycho is the prototype,3 the implication [in Copycat] is that the sexualized mother of the serial killer is to blame for arousing and twisting the son’s normal sexual desires. Thus, the male killer remains curiously innocent and wounded, while the demonic mother assumes the lions’ share of textual blame for the mayhem. (153)

One of the comments that the character of Hudson herself makes in the movie is that what usually causes the “disassociation” that she says is the first step toward the creation of a serial killer is “rejection or humiliation by his parent.” In the audio commentary during that scene Amiel says that the scene originally included flashbacks of the serial killer’s “furious, powerful mother” dragging him from “the bed he’s just wet” and throwing him in the closet. Earlier, he also mentions that audiences, presumably inspired by Hudson’s remarks, frequently ask about whether the woman who lives with the killer in adulthood is his wife or his mother; Amiel says that he intended her to be his wife but that one could still interpret her as either. All that actually appears in the movie itself is the implication in Hudson’s words, though. She gives Edmund Kemper III as an example of a serial killer with a parent who rejected or humiliated him as a child: “Kemper’s mother locked him in a cellar when he reached puberty.” Right before that, she also mentions that “Gacy’s father beat him for fun,”—and yet it is the mention of the mother onto which audiences apparently latched. That is one more indication of the notoriety of such representations of mothers of sons.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) functions the same way. It purports to be a criticism of even anti-violence representations of violence in the media, as it depicts a supposedly

However, as Simpson explains, Copycat is anti-feminist, anti-academic, and anti-media, while still remaining a very violent part of the media that it seeks to criticize for its violence.

3 Of course, as I have noted here, despite what Simpson writes, that implication is not present only in the serial killer subgenre, and it does not originate with Psycho in 1960 either.

“moral” artist creating representations of violence, which she claims are actually critiques of the violence of society. Purportedly as a result, the serial killer punishes her by killing many of the people close to her—just as in Copycat. Likewise, Eyes condemns itself in the same way, since whatever its creator’s intentions, it too is a representation of violence—and then, even more than Copycat, it undercuts its message further by placing the true origin for the violence in the movie not with the presence of violent representations in the killer’s society but with his mother’s transgressions. In an echo of

Henry, her profession as a prostitute and her neglect of her son supposedly resulted in her death at the hands of an anonymous john, whom the killer calls his “father”—whether specifically or in general is unimportant—but because the child still cannot help but love his mother, he feels the irrepressible compulsion to murder all those who do not hold death sacred, thus becoming the same kind of hypocrite as everyone else involved.

Nevertheless, Eyes gives us one more example of a sympathetic, even celebratory portrayal of a killer—he even describes himself as a “moral” killer—whose violence is a consequence of the perplexing construction of a mother’s un-maternity.4

Copycat and Eyes are two more contemporary examples of the “serial killer subgenre” that Simpson mentions, but as I argue here, the Monster Mother trope figures in a wide variety of genres from throughout the history of movies in the United States.

One of the genres where that trope is actually most prevalent is the drama.

An early drama with what approaches the Monster Mother trope is Rebel Without a

Cause (1955). In it, the son about whose mother the viewer first learns is John “Plato”

4 Kenneth Branagh’s 1991 Dead Again ends like The Eyes of Laura Mars, with a quick revelation that it was actually the angry son of an autonomous mother who committed the murder investigated throughout the film. In Dead Again, that revelation is that the son killed his mother’s employer’s wife because he wanted the man to be his father instead. As always, the implication is that it was not having a father that led the boy astray.

Crawford. Mr. and Mrs. Crawford are separated, Plato hasn’t seen Mr. Crawford in a while, and Mrs. Crawford is often out of town—including on Plato’s birthday, when he gets into trouble killing some puppies with her gun while she visits her sister. The absence of a husband in and of itself makes Mrs. Crawford unfeminine; the frequent traveling, which is “traditionally” a masculine pursuit, adds to it, while her apparent lack of concern for her son further compounds the viewer’s sense that she is a bad mother. Of course one cannot defend her, as, like Mrs. Bates, she never actually appears in the film; meanwhile, by making her maternal shortcomings so plainly evident so early in the movie, the viewer cannot fail to connect them with Plato’s crimes.

Then we meet Jim Stark’s mother Carol, who to Jim’s great distress dominates his father Frank, just as the viewer senses that Frank’s own mother did. Juvenile delinquent specialist Ray Fremick intervenes, physically resisting Jim and thus becoming his father figure; after that moment, Jim’s intentions turn good. Jim continues to beg Frank to resist

Carol, particularly when Jim discovers Frank in a frilly apron, cooking for and trying to serve Carol while she is sick. This scene again blatantly illustrates how dominant women supposedly emasculate men, and as is typical in the Monster Mother pattern, such a woman as a boy’s mother drives him to become a danger to society at large. As Ray observes, Jim does so out of fear that he too will be “chicken” like his father. Thus when

Frank still fails to “stand up” to his wife and thereby be a man, Jim goes looking for Ray, whose absence at that critical moment causes Jim to get into even deeper trouble.

Meanwhile, Jim’s own demonstrations of physical prowess and courage lead him to become Plato’s father figure in the same way that Ray became Jim’s. Plato also finds a surrogate mother in Judy; as with Jim and Ray, however, when both surrogates are absent

77 at a critical moment, Plato too gets deeper into trouble—but as Plato’s relatively worse situation suggests, his trouble should be proportionately worse as well—and it is. In the end, Frank finally “stands up” and promises to “be strong” for his son; thus Jim, the viewer recognizes, will be fine from now on.

The implication of another drama, American History X (1998), is that it is his father’s absence that causes Derek Vinyard to fall under the influence of white supremacist

Cameron Alexander, as though it is because an autonomous mother raises him that he goes wrong. Her daughters are fine—conspicuously so—while her sons follow whatever man is there—first Alexander, then Derek’s teacher Dr. Bob Sweeney. Furthermore, she cannot care for her family or even herself. In the absence of her husband, her boyfriend, and her eldest son she loses their house and her own health deteriorates, perpetuated by her continuous smoking. She herself even takes the blame for Derek’s violent turn, asking him what she did to cause it and then attempting to explain it by pointing to his lack of a father. Thus whether his father’s absence makes Derek more susceptible to his crime or not, his mother’s suspicion that it does confirms it. Indeed, that is exactly the psychological effect that the Monster Mother trope has on mothers.

While her second son Danny recognizes that it was his father’s influence that initiates

Derek’s racism, he is only able to do so after Derek himself is emasculated through being raped at the hands of other white supremacists in prison and turns to Sweeney for guidance. At his direction and with his assistance, Derek, after his parole, fills the role of father in Danny’s life to turn him away from the same path that Derek followed.

Ultimately, both Danny and Derek realize that it was not until after their father’s murder at the hands of a Black man that Derek’s ideology turned violent in the first place. Thus it

78 is the absence of a father and corresponding insufficiency of an autonomous mother that once again causes the tragedies depicted in this film.

In Requiem for a Dream (2000), Sara Goldfarb, a widow occupied with television and the specter of appearing on it, disregards her son Harry’s drug addiction, which ultimately spirals out of control, destroying in the process his own and a few other people’s lives. When the pawn shop owner to whom Harry continually sells his mother’s television and from whom Sara continually buys it back asks her why she does nothing about that, she indicates that she sees no alternative to her actions, as he is her only child.

The film shows us that she chooses not to address his addiction for fear of driving him away, as all that she does do is make him feel guilty for his addiction and for her own loneliness. Yet the movie depicts that behavior as driving him away nevertheless, plus even further into drug use as well. A later scene shows Sara, high on the uppers that she takes for weight loss, interrupting her son, who is trying to tell her about his gift to her of a new television, to beg for a grandchild and lament the fact that she is alone. Harry, in tears in the taxi that he takes when he leaves, immediately takes drugs to cope with the negative feelings that result from that visit. Then, even though he continues to hallucinate about his girlfriend wearing his mother’s favorite red dress, for which she is trying to lose weight, they never see or speak to each other again. Still, such hallucinations indicate the

Oedipal tendencies present in Harry’s relationship with his mother.

Meanwhile, his friend Tyrone, who utilizes his drug connections to acquire drugs for

Harry, reminisces about being a child and hugging his own mother, who tells him that all that she wants from him is his love. One suspects that, like Sara, had she asked more from her son than that, he might not have involved himself with drug dealing and gotten

79 in so much trouble either. Furthermore, the fact that Tyrone does that reminiscing while he is naked and about to have sex with his girlfriend Alice indicates that his relationship with his mother is marked by the same Oedipal tendencies as Harry and Sara’s. When

Alice asks Tyrone what he is doing, he tells her that he is thinking about what he is going to do to her next.

The Hours (2002) is another movie, like The Manchurian Candidate, that is based on a book. In it, a young boy named Richard sees his mother Laura’s unhappiness with her life as housewife and mother and her desire to escape from it. He also sees her inability to successfully bake a cake for her husband’s birthday; later, the viewer watches her sitting in the bathroom while her husband repeatedly asks her to come to bed. Instead, we ultimately learn, she was planning her escape from her family, and indeed she does, taking a train, getting a job, and living on her own for the rest of her life. Particularly for the 1950s, Laura clearly violates societal ideals of femininity, and the movie actually seems quite sympathetic toward women’s resistance to patriarchy. Still, its dual emphasis on Richard’s loss of his mother and on the end of his life, in which his father and sister are marginal or invisible much of the time, does reflect our sense of the consequences of improper and unfeminine mothering on sons.

As an adult, Richard is a gay poet, dying of AIDS. He writes a novel in which his mother commits suicide, which act he recognized that she almost committed on her husband’s birthday when Richard was a child. The character of his mother in the novel also closely resembles that of his longtime friend and caretaker Clarissa, with whom he once shared a kiss in college, although Clarissa is a lesbian. Thus Clarissa is, in Freudian terms, simultaneously Richard’s mother, for whom he has never abandoned his desire,

80 and the real woman with whom he was unable to replace his mother as a result. As a child, Richard is most pleased when his mother tells him that he is her guy; as an adult, as

Clarissa’s daughter terms it, he portrays her as a “monster.”

Even in the otherwise progressive Brokeback Mountain (2005),5 the mother of Jack

Twist, the gay male character who seems less able to make himself socially acceptable, could be said to be to “blame” for her son’s sexuality being what it is. First of all, she seems to support it (of which certainly some in mainstream society would disapprove— including, it seems, her husband), but even before that, she always keeps his bedroom just as it was when he was a child. Thus Brokeback links being gay with being less than mature as a man; that corresponds with the tendency of the kind of movies discussed in this work to portray as gay sons of mothers who won’t let go of their sons—that is, who won’t let/make them become the stoic, untouchable, completely independent and autonomous men that the Hollywood western (and mainstream America) idealizes even today. And it is that character’s childish idealism that the viewer sees preventing him from even knowing how to exist safely in society: “I wish I knew how to quit you,” he says of his longtime gay lover.

Fortunately Brokeback doesn’t leave it at that, as we also see a criticism of those societal ideals of traditional masculinity. We see them hurting women and children as the two gay men try to pretend to live “normal” lives, and we especially see them manifested in violence, which in this film always serves both to assert one’s own accordance with those ideals and to punish others’ discordance with them. Likewise, it is only showing a spirit of dominance and possessiveness that gets Twist’s father-in-law to stop suggesting

5 Which is tellingly rated R for, among other things, containing “sexuality” (as though heterosexuality is not actually sexuality at all).

81 that his son-in-law is not manly enough to raise his own son into a man. It is not merely a matter of genetics, though, as a son to an autonomous mother could have a very

“traditionally” masculine father, but if he is absent, society will still worry about the child’s “eventual” sexuality, as indicated throughout this work. But that would mean, then, that “traditional” masculinity/heterosexuality is not inherent—not automatic—not all that’s natural, as society would like to think. It is strictly socialized, just as the possessive mother trope above suggests that homosexuality is.

The Grifters (1990) is another movie in which a single mother—this one who had her son too young, at age 14—abandons her son, simultaneously lusting after him, seeking to profit from him financially, and actually doing so, by destroying him—literally. Until then, he is dating an older woman who closely resembles his mother, physically and professionally, while always trying to emulate and live up to his mother’s “professional” success himself; in the end, however, he fails.

Fight Club (1999) bears a mother-blaming subplot, if only because it is the story of a man with split-personality disorder who therefore becomes increasingly dangerous—and whose alter-ego expresses a sense that, like so many other men of his/their generation, having been raised by a single mother, he/they had probably spent enough time with women. Therefore, instead they begin to associate primarily with men—only with men, in fact, except for the alter-ego, who continues to have heterosexual sex that the original personality of the protagonist eschews. He, it seems, prefers crying into the breasts of a man who has had his testicles removed.

A final genre that helps to illustrate the pervasiveness of the Monster Mother trope is the satire, which by nature makes use of tropes to critique the society that creates and

82 maintains them. Thus Peter Jackson’s 1992 zombie movie Dead Alive is an over-the-top horror satire6 which features the favorite trope of the horror genre, the Monster Mother.

In this case, she is Vera, exerting control over her consequently emasculated son Lionel.

The first scene in the movie with Vera shows her wielding a butcher’s knife, exclaiming about her ambition to be an officer in a philanthropic organization, and ordering Lionel around: all examples of her “unfeminine” relationship with power. The knife in particular is a wonderfully vivid symbol of what could be called her castration of Lionel’s

“masculinity.”

She begins to display acute jealousy when he directs any of his attention toward another woman, Paquita, and as the audience will learn later, Vera’s jealousy has turned homicidal in the past. Indeed, that is how she became an autonomous mother in the first place, and that is more or less what happens again during the film. A Sumatran rat monkey bites her while she is spying on Lionel and Paquita’s first date at the zoo, and within days that bite causes Vera to begin eating anything living that crosses her path as well—all of which of course interferes with Lionel’s pursuit of romance. He even tries to show disinterest in Paquita, thus choosing his mother over the more appropriate companion, in a literal manifestation of the Freudian Oedipal pathology. Later his uncle puts him to work serving hors d’oeuvres at a party and laughs about how different Lionel is from his father, who was apparently a notorious womanizer. The implication is that

Lionel is either gay or womanly, but either way he is certainly not “masculine.” Of

6 The actual zombie scenes in Dead Alive are in many ways reminiscent of those in Night of the Living Dead, which starts with a scene in which a son dies at the hands of a zombie because his mother has ordered him and his sister to drive hundreds of miles to place flowers on their father’s grave while the widow herself stays at home. Later the zombie that that son, once dead, becomes is the one who delivers his still-living sister into the hands of other zombies. One could argue, then, that Dead Alive is simply a full-length exposition of the societal stereotypes underlying those circumstances in Night of the Living Dead, thus demonstrating once again the ongoing effects that those stereotypes have on moviegoers and thereby on the mothers of sons among them trying to determine the best way to relate to their sons.

83 course, Dead Alive, like any other satire, plays with those tropes and others as the movie progresses, but their presence and central figuration in the plot of the movie is, at the very least, one more indication of their continuing pervasiveness. Moreover, the character of

Vera is one more example of a literal Monster Mother whose relationship with her son has fatal consequences for society itself.

Like Dead Alive, another satire, which also serves at least to illustrate that pervasiveness through its parody of it, is Mother’s Day (1980), although this film remains disturbing enough to still also be a horror movie in its own right. In it, an autonomous mother teaches her sons to be the best rapist-murderers that she can yet also demands that they, although grown, never leave her to pursue their own lives. The movie thus combines all of the aspects of the Monster Mother trope: autonomous motherhood, violence perpetuated by sons but for which their mother deserves and receives the blame, and an inappropriate degree of intimacy between the mother and her son(s). In Mother’s

Day, she watches, encourages, and, like Queen Tamora, even instructs her son in the act of raping one of the women that they kidnap, and she seems to garner some personal sexual pleasure from the violence as well, as she kisses the lips of the first female victim in the film before killing her herself; there was just before that a male victim, however, which apparently did not interest her.

Her hatred of other women, made apparent through her desire to see them tortured, resonates uncomfortably with the end of this long but worthwhile excerpt from Jo

Freeman’s wonderful description of society’s definition of a Bitch, which one can very easily see applied to the Monster Mother as well:

It is . . . generally agreed that a Bitch is aggressive, and therefore unfeminine (ahem). She may be sexy. . . . But she is never a “true woman.” Bitches have some or all of the following characteristics.

Personality. Bitches are aggressive, assertive, domineering, overbearing, strong-minded, spiteful, hostile, direct, blunt, candid, obnoxious, thick-skinned, hard-headed, vicious, dogmatic, competent, competitive, pushy, loud-mouthed, independent, stubborn, demanding, manipulative, egoistic, driven, achieving, overwhelming, threatening, scary, ambitious, tough, brassy, masculine, boisterous, and turbulent. Among other things. . . . If something gets in their way; well, that’s why they become Bitches. If they are professionally inclined, they will seek careers and have no fear of competing with anyone. If not professionally inclined, they still seek self-expression and self-actualization. Whatever they do, they want an active role and are frequently perceived as domineering. Often they do dominate other people when roles are not available to them which more creatively sublimate their energies and utilize their capabilities. More often they are accused of domineering when doing what would be considered natural by a man. . . . “Bitch” serves the social function of isolating and discrediting a class of people who do not conform to the socially accepted patterns of behavior . . . . The most prominent characteristic of all Bitches is that they rudely violate conceptions of proper sex role behavior. . . . She disdains the vicarious life deemed natural to women because she wants to live a life of her own . . . . The mere existence of Bitches negates the idea that a woman’s reality must come thru her relationship to a man and defies the belief that women are perpetual children who must always be under the guidance of another. Therefore, if taken seriously, a Bitch is a threat to the social structures which enslave women and the social values which justify keeping them in their place. She is living testimony that woman’s oppression does not have to be, and as such raises doubts about the validity of the whole social system. Because she is a threat she is not taken seriously. Instead, she is dismissed as a deviant. . . . She also accepts less than her due. Like other women her ambitions have often been dulled for she has not totally escaped the badge of inferiority placed upon the “weaker sex.” She will often espouse contentment with being the power behind the throne—provided that she does have real power—while rationalizing that she really does not want the recognition that comes with also having the throne. . . . The trial by fire which most Bitches go thru while growing up either makes them or breaks them. They are strung tautly between the two poles of being true to their own nature or being accepted as a social being. This makes them very sensitive people, but it is a sensitivity the rest of the world is unaware of. For on the outside they have frequently grown a thick defensive callous which can make them seem hard and bitter at times. . . . Bitches can become so hard and calloused that the last vestiges of humanity become buried deep within and almost destroyed. Not all Bitches make it. . . . These are Bitches who have gone Bad. . . . Bitches who have been mutilated as human beings often turn their fury on other people— particularly other women. This is one example of how women are trained to keep themselves and other women in their place. Bitches are no less guilty than non-Bitches of self-hatred and group-hatred and those who have gone Bad suffer the worse of both these afflictions.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jessica B. Burstrem earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a concentration in English language and literature from the University of Michigan in December of 2003. She earned a Master of Arts degree in English and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from the University of Florida in August of 2006.