Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  In James’s novella, the ghosts are (fight me) not real. Though they take the shapes of real people from the house’s past—Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, a manservant and nanny discharged for inappropriate and never-specified sexual activities, which may have involved the children—they are only ever seen by one person, an inexperienced governess left alone with two children and instructed not to ask for outside help. They soon become projections for every fear or forbidden emotion she’s ever had. The governess feels doubtful of her own competence; therefore, the children are prey to invisible dangers she cannot effectively fight off. The governess is afraid of her own sexuality—she has a crush on her employer, the children’s uncle—and soon pedophile ghosts are leaping out from behind every corner.

  The governess fears that she is not sufficiently maternal. Like countless women, she has been hired to do the mother work that the children’s actual family can’t or won’t do. Unfortunately for her, she’s also swallowed the patriarchal bill of goods about who mothers are and how they think. In her mind, being “good” with children means adoring them, worshiping them, never for an instant giving way to normal human feelings of boredom or irritation. Though the governess tries her best to think this way—boy, does she ever; “there could be no uneasiness in connection with anything so beautific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty,” and so on, and so forth—the endless, selfless devotion she demands from herself isn’t human.38 No one could feel that way toward two rambunctious, difficult, school-age children at every moment of the day or night, least of all a stranger.

  And so, in the coded and unspeakable truth of the ghost story, the children become perverts, demons, eagerly in league with dark forces and plotting to destroy her. They become changelings, whose “absolutely unnatural goodness” is only proof of how horrible they are underneath.39 When she kills one of them—as, of course, she does—she doesn’t have to see her own hand in it; her exhaustion, her gut-level dislike of the boy, her rage stopping his heart.

  Fun Home

  The Turn of the Screw is taught in high schools; you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out the subtext. What’s striking, in this context, is how James seems to nail the mechanics of so many “real” hauntings. A ghost story often resembles an allegorical family portrait, or a shared dream, with ghosts standing in for resentments it might be disastrous to openly name.

  Patriarchy is a violent system, but it tries mightily not to be seen as such. The father-ruled nuclear family is sold to us not just as natural or inevitable, but as the only path to lasting happiness; single mothers and childless couples are portrayed as inherently unfulfilled and miserable, their brave smiles hiding empty lives. The idea that a woman might be straight, married, surrounded by children, and still find life fundamentally empty is threatening—especially as it calls into question the “natural,” effortless quality of motherhood.

  “In spite of our most open-minded intentions, the mother who does not love her child is still regarded as abnormal,” French feminist Élisabeth Badinter wrote in her 1980 book, Mother Love. “We are prepared to explain away everything, to justify anything, rather than to admit her within the range of normality.”40

  Badinter herself inspired tremendous anger—which is odd, given that her work is less an anti-child manifesto than a historical overview. She argued not that “maternal instinct” was nonexistent, but that it was socially constructed; throughout history, mothers breastfed their children or didn’t breastfeed them, devoted themselves to immersive child-rearing or sent their kids away to be cared for by strangers, greeted individual infant deaths with wrenching grief or shrugged off massively high infant mortality, not due to some immutable need or desire, but according to the norms of the societies in which they lived. Women as a group had no innate gift for handling children, and no universal drive to have them. But sometimes, some women did fall in love with the babies they had.

  “Maternal love is not a given but a gift,” Badinter wrote. “It is a human feeling, and like any feeling, it is uncertain, fragile and imperfect.”41

  You would think she’d told every mother in Paris to drown her kids in the Seine. Badinter was deluged by angry letters and public condemnation. The famous child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote a letter of protest to her American editor, not because he thought Badinter was wrong, but because she was right, and women ought not to be given this information.

  “I am well familiar with the absence of any mothering instinct in many mothers,” he wrote, but letting those mothers know they weren’t alone would “remove the feeling of guilt about rejecting their children which was the only thing that offered some protection for the child.”42

  It’s rare for patriarchy to show its hand this clearly, but there you go: guilt, not joy, kept Mama in place. Women had to be confined to childbearing and child-rearing, but they also had to believe there was something wrong with them if they didn’t enjoy it. Of course, we are slightly less likely to take Bettelheim seriously these days; in 1997, his biographer found that he had faked his medical qualifications, and former students at his “school” for autistic children alleged that he had subjected them to routine beatings and sexual abuse.43 (Lessing was not kidding about the grimness of life for institutionalized children.) Nonetheless, at the time, his was thought to be the more compassionate, child-friendly opinion.

  The supposedly “natural” quality of the patriarchal family, or of high-impact parenting methods, is a fiction that prevents us from asking uncomfortable questions. That includes the possibility that we may not be happy in our maternal roles, or that we did not make our own mothers happy. (Badinter wrote that “we are repulsed to think that mother love is not immune to all defects or variations of character…because we refuse to question what we prefer to believe is the absolute and unconditional love for us of our own mothers.”)44 But we are also excused from questioning whether our current arrangement can make women happy—whether, by making motherhood an unpaid, unsupported, guilt-ridden endeavor that actively prevents women from achieving their other goals, we are not actually making it harder for mothers to love their children.

  Maybe in a world with universal childcare and communal or coequal parenting, mothers would be more likely to experience joy with their children, rather than frustration or stress. Maybe instead of endlessly chirping that mothers have “the most important job in the world,” we could pay them for it; maybe instead of forcing women to purchase their own freedom by offloading childcare onto even more marginalized women, we could begin to treat mothering as a vital communal responsibility, with all mother-workers being equally entitled to value, compensation, and support. Maybe, if we unlink sex and love and gender and parenting, we can put families together in ways that actually fit the people involved: motherly men taking years off to be with babies, powerful mothers loving their children without giving up the world, inseminating mothers and pregnant fathers and families with no men or women at all. Maybe the patriarchal nuclear family doesn’t work, and has never worked, and can never work; maybe the whole thing can only run by suppressing and oppressing a real, live woman, turning her into a resource for free labor rather than a person, and calling her crazy or evil whenever she complains.

  Maybe. But in the meantime, we have the picture in every sitcom and every storybook: Daddy and Mama and Baby, their happiness, their normalcy, their blissful acceptance of their lot, which is, after all, the only conceivable lot that could befall them. Real families try to fit themselves into this picture; real women love or hate themselves depending on how well it matches their experience, and live full to the brim with the guilt that Bettelheim found so essential to the creation of happy childhoods. All the time, inside them, something else is gathering, waiting for a dark hour to make itself heard.

  The Other Mother

  “A happy family, a happy home, is the best protection against evil,” says Ed Warren, one half of t
he popular husband-and-wife ghost-hunting duo of Ed and Lorraine Warren.45

  The Warrens are (or were—Ed died in 2006, Lorraine in 2019) sort of the William and Martha Sears of the paranormal, deeply Christian co-experts who believe that ghosts and demons are always “invited” into a home by a lack of good family values. Like the Searses, the Warrens are wildly popular; they first gained the media’s attention through their involvement in the Amityville Horror hoax, and currently have a whole movie franchise, The Conjuring series, devoted to their adventures.

  That popularity is particularly odd when you realize that their particular cosmology—as captured in Gerald Brittle’s 1980 book, The Demonologist—reads less like a haunted house story than like a Jack Chick tract on the dangers of permissive liberal parenting. These are people whose list of questions for the recently haunted includes “has anyone in the family [bought] a picture of a deity from another religion?” and “have you been attending sessions with consciousness-raising groups?”46 Where once you might have had to perform dark blood sacrifices to summon Beelzebub into your living room, in the world of the Warrens, reading The Feminine Mystique and buying a Buddha statue at an import store is enough.

  As you might expect, the Warrens’ ghost stories tend to have wildly different morals depending on the politics of the observer. One of their more famous cases—the basis for their first movie, The Conjuring—concerns a frustrated, isolated mother of five, Carolyn Perron.

  The most detailed account of the Perron case comes from eldest daughter Andrea’s self-published memoir House of Darkness, House of Light. In that version of the story, Carolyn and Roger Perron live happily with their daughters in the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, until a rash of sudden and gruesome violence makes them question their safety. Their family dog, Bathsheba (note the name), is hit by a car; “her leash got wrapped around a wheel well,” Andrea writes, “and the damage to her skull was so extensive, there was no question…no saving her.”47 A group of delinquents break into their home, vandalizing it and beating one of their cats to death with a baseball bat. Andrea retaliates by beating up their ringleader, raising the specter of legal retaliation from the boy’s family.

  Carolyn becomes determined to move her girls out to the country, where things like this don’t happen—and she does, impulsively spending the family’s entire savings and then some on an ancient, isolated farmhouse. She doesn’t even check in with Roger before making the down payment. Carolyn, we sense, is a woman with a romantic temperament. Her politics are liberal, whereas Roger is a staunch Republican. She’s an agnostic; Roger is a Catholic, who made her convert before their wedding. She recites poetry to the children, and once harbored literary ambitions; she had been “a poet since childhood,” Andrea writes, but “becoming the mother of five left no time for writing.”48

  If Carolyn dreams of getting back some of the time or focus she’s lost out there in the country, those dreams are soon crushed. The house turns out to be rickety and infested with insects. Rural Rhode Island is bitterly cold, and the family has to spend hours every day shoveling doorsteps and cars out of the snow. The house seems incapable of retaining heat, and all the fireplaces have been walled up thanks to some long-ago renovation project; their utility bill climbs higher every month, yet Carolyn and her girls still begin each day by breaking up the ice in the toilets. At one point, Carolyn goes at the wall with a crowbar, then with her bare hands, trying to excavate one of the buried fireplaces. She is that desperate for fire.

  In fact, Carolyn is desperate, period. The Perron marriage, already strained by Carolyn’s investment in the house, soon reaches its breaking point. Roger has an explosive temper, and Carolyn begins shouting back. Their political disagreements surface; there are screaming arguments about Nixon. Soon, Roger begins spending most of his nights in town—to be closer to work, he says—leaving Carolyn and the girls on their own. Under the combination of emotional stress, physical labor, and near-constant cold, Carolyn’s body breaks down. She develops debilitating arthritis, becoming all but bedridden.

  “Carolyn began to withdraw into a shrinking form, cocooning in blankets and heavy sweaters; doing whatever she could to avoid freezing to death though she was never really warm,” Andrea writes.49 She loses alarming amounts of weight and begins to look years older than her age: “[Carolyn] recalls it as an oppressive weight crushing her rigid, frozen joints. The woman was becoming too cold to move and too tired to care. Retiring to the relative warmth of her bed for hours a day, the young mother felt old; decrepit.”50

  Then the witch shows up.

  Carolyn has visions: A ball of fire lighting on the furniture without burning it. A group of women chanting around a flame. The fire Carolyn is dying for haunts her dreams, turned dark and satanic. Carolyn’s youngest daughters say they’ve been visited by “another lady” who comes to kiss them goodnight after Carolyn tucks them in, a lady who smells like strange perfume and death: “When she leans over me it feels so cold,” says little Cynthia, “but when she leaves it gets warm again.”51

  Finally, one night, the presence shows herself: the child-killing witch, Bathsheba Sherman, who once sacrificed a baby for youth and beauty, only to become decrepit overnight. She appears as an old woman with no face, her neck broken from her suicide by hanging, floating in midair. Carolyn writes a description with fingers locked stiff from arthritis, a last, mad poem: “No eyes no mouth sprigs of hair no facial features gray ancient…threatening / intimidating wants to kiss me wants to kill me wants me dead.”52

  Bathsheba is obsessed with claiming Carolyn’s daughters. Her voice—which sounds exactly like Carolyn’s—haunts the house. One girl spends hours locked in a small trunk, terrified that she’ll suffocate or starve to death. She says the thing with her mother’s voice told her to climb in, then shut the lid.

  None of this, needless to say, makes it into The Conjuring, where Carolyn is portrayed as an angelically contented housewife who is inexplicably possessed by demons until Lorraine gives her a lecture on the joys of motherhood. We never note the repressed ambitions and frustrations driving Carolyn’s breakdown. We never note the name of the creature haunting her: Bathsheba. The dog whose death first provided the impetus to move.

  In the Warrens’ preferred telling, the Perron haunting is church-camp dogma: a mother who dared to become unsatisfied, and the demonic, baby-killing witch who was responsible for warping her desires out of their “natural,” maternal shape. But in her daughter’s version of events, Carolyn’s haunting is the most straightforward feminist horror story since “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Carolyn has become another mother, an old, faceless, angry woman haunting her own house. Carolyn, the liberal, atheist poet, is being dragged bodily through life as a conservative Christian housewife; her leash is caught in the wheel well, and her brain is being crushed.

  “Negative emotions conjure spirit activity,” the Warrens warn us.53 Mothers have an obligation to be devout, traditional, and above all, reconciled to their situation; they must “create an emotional atmosphere in the home where no problems can occur.”54 The alternative is to give way to Bathsheba; to confront the feeling bubbling through Carolyn, the truth she can barely put a name to, even as she writes with frozen fingers that she “can’t move can’t speak jaw locked desperation grief fear.”55

  To Myself a Monster

  “My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience,” Adrienne Rich wrote in Of Woman Born. “It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.”56

  Her sons resented her writing, Rich explains, and she resented them for resenting it: “As soon as [a child] felt me gliding into a world which did not include him, he would come to pull at my hand, ask for help, punch at the typew
riter keys. And I would feel his wants at such a moment as fraudulent, as an attempt moreover to defraud me of living for even fifteen minutes as myself.”57

  As adults, the boys don’t appear to have been particularly scarred by her anger. “There is no human relationship where you love the other person at every moment,” she quotes her oldest as saying. Nevertheless, Rich says, “women—above all, mothers—have been supposed to love that way.”58

  Mothers try to be Mama. They try to love perfectly, faultlessly. Some destroy their children and themselves in the process. In the Perron farmhouse, or Hinton Ampner, or The Turn of the Screw, there is always a foreboding, dark mother lingering in the background, someone who both mirrors and threatens the saintly, devoted maternal figures at the center of the frame. Bathsheba, or the bad governess Miss Jessel, or the woman who buried her baby in the floorboards; these are frighteningly distorted portraits of the heroines, walking antitheses to these women who are (so they say) happily and completely submerged in devotion to their children. The bad, dead mothers overlap and complicate the living women, just as, in The Fifth Child, Harriet the Child Abuser always complicates our vision of Harriet the Overwhelmed Mom.

  A happy home is your best defense: Ghosts don’t want to destroy the living. They only want to be seen. Ghosts win when they force us to drop the façade of normalcy; they want to drive the skeletons out of our closets, unearth the sins we’ve buried, force us to admit who we really are. They seem inhuman, or monstrous, because we would be monstrous and inhuman if we owned the feelings they represent; changeling babies look hideous to their mothers because, if there were nothing wrong with the children, those mothers would have to admit their desire to abandon a child.