Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  But if James was right that ghosts burst out of some psychological subbasement, bringing up our buried traumas or resentments with them, he was also right that having kids is a good way to get yourself haunted. Mothers are the people in our culture who are expected to repress and deny the most psychic energy, who are encouraged to live in a perpetual state of self-abnegation; we create a new ghost every time we breathe, every time we bite back a harsh word or renounce an ambition or cancel a plan for the child’s more pressing needs.

  When mothers try to live the way our culture encourages us to, as almost literally selfless vehicles for others’ fulfillment, we become something else; something cold and hungry, something you wouldn’t want to see standing over your bed in the dark. The selfish desires we carry, expelled from our bodies and our self-concepts, roam the halls at night, howling for relief. In patriarchy, every mother has something that frightens her, long buried but not quite dead, hidden under the floorboards. Some night, when you’re alone with yourself, listen. You can hear it, pressing against the door, waiting to be let in.

  7.

  BAD MOTHERS

  Think of the power to create a man. And I did! I did it! I created a man! And who knows? In time I could have trained him to do my will.

  —Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

  In the fall of 1957, the Waushara County Sheriff’s Department walked into a suspect’s farmhouse in Plainview, Wisconsin. America has never stopped telling the story of what they found.

  Ed Gein had human skulls decorating his bedposts. He had a bag full of women’s faces that he’d peeled off and turned into masks, some still wearing lipstick. He had a human heart, freshly cut out of a local hardware store owner named Bernice Worden, sitting next to his stove; Worden’s head was in another bag, elsewhere on the premises, and the rest of her was hanging upside down, headless and gutted, in a shed out back. Gein had a full suit of human, female skin—a vest with breasts on it, thighs turned into leggings—and he had accessories, like a belt made of nipples. There were lampshades made out of human skin, because he’d heard that the Nazis did that; Gein liked Nazis. There was a box of nine carved-out, detached vulvas, one with a jaunty red ribbon tied through it, salted so they would keep; Gein liked vulvas, too.

  Gein had been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade. He had actually shown a neighborhood boy his collection of severed heads, and other children had broken into the house afterward to look; when they told their parents what they’d seen, they were dismissed as kids with overactive imaginations. When his first victim, Mary Hogan, went missing, Gein cheerfully—and repeatedly—told male acquaintances where she was: “She’s not missing. She’s down at the house now,” sawmill owner Elmo Ueeck remembered him saying.1 Other men heard the same. They thought it was a joke.

  This was, in part, because Gein was so distinctly un-scary. He was small—only five-foot-seven—and delicate, even childlike. He refused to go deer hunting with the other men because, he said, he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. In his spare time, he picked up odd jobs around town. He was soft-spoken, gentle, and liked children; Gein was a very popular babysitter.

  Then, suddenly, the town babysitter was the guy who made wastebasket cozies out of human legs, and the community was left with the question of blame. How could Gein have gone unseen for so long? How could so many people have chosen not to see him?

  Gein, it soon turned out, was schizophrenic. He saw faces, heard voices; he had an eerie, prophetic vision of a dead world, “a forest with the tops of the trees missing and vultures sitting in the trees.”2 He claimed that an “evil spirit” forced him to hurt women; he also claimed that “he had been chosen as an instrument of God to carry out activities which were ordained to happen,” and that those women had been fated to die.3 Gein also believed that he, like Victor Frankenstein, had the power to restore life to the dead. And there was someone in particular he longed to bring back.

  Gein’s crimes had begun soon after the death of his mother, Augusta Gein, who, as he saw it, had been the one genuinely loving presence in his life. “His only description of her was that ‘she was good in every way,’ ” as per his psychological evaluation.4 “My mother was real good to me,” he affirmed during his interrogation.5

  Augusta was, by most accounts, a deeply unhappy woman. Her father had beaten her regularly. Her husband, George, was an alcoholic so far gone that he became unable to work; Augusta had to take over and run the family grocery store, then move them out to a farm when that became too much to manage. George, too, routinely beat Augusta for her troubles. He also abused their sons, Ed and Henry; “[Gein’s] feelings for his father are completely negative,” the psychological report states.6 Another doctor’s evaluation confirms that George “seems to have been a threat to both the mother and the patient at times.”7

  George drank himself to death. Henry died a few years later in a farm accident, burning away weeds on the property. Ed and Augusta were alone together on the farm, the last known survivors of the catastrophe that was their family. Augusta had God to comfort her—she was a devout Christian; the Geins were the only family in town that didn’t work on Sundays—but Gein didn’t think a good God would let his mother suffer. Still, they were close, and they had to be; Augusta’s health was failing, and she had a series of strokes, rendering her physically dependent on Gein until the end of her life.

  “When she was sick she was just as nice as could be,” Gein made a point of telling his police interrogators. “You know a lot of patients when they’re sick they get crabby.”8

  Augusta had her final stroke and died in October 1945. Her obituary was three sentences long; it listed the cause of her death, the location of her funeral, and Gein’s name. Gein broke down and cried, describing his mother’s life. “She didn’t deserve all of her suffering,” he said.9

  So there went Augusta, another woman crushed into nothing by a man’s world. It had happened to millions before her, and has happened to millions since. In other circumstances, she would have vanished into history. Yet we remember her—not for herself, but through the actions of the man she raised.

  All the horror in Gein’s farmhouse, one psychologist concluded, “was the result of his desire to re-create the existence of his own mother.”10 After trying and failing to revive her with an act of “will power,” he thought he could “attempt the re-creation of his mother by using the parts of bodies from other graves.”11 Gein was a man living in the long shadow of Shelley’s monster; a child trying to create a parent, rather than the other way around. At last, the police and the psychologists had their explanation. It accounted for everything, absolved all the necessary parties, made total sense. Augusta Gein, the authorities declared, was a monster.

  Mother! Blood! Blood!

  Though it is extremely unlikely, in this day and age, that any woman would give birth to a winged bat-unicorn or a hobgoblin, it is still undeniably true that some children are evil. Every killer you’ll ever read about is some mother’s son. And—as authorities never stop reminding us—every killer is some mother’s fault, too.

  Gein is at the core of everything; the rotting display in that farmhouse has become central to how we understand the human capacity for evil. Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs are all directly based on his crimes, and each went on to inspire their own genres. Every slasher, splatter, torture-porn and serial-killer procedural movie emanates from Gein, and contains some part of him.

  As is inevitable in a case this heavily mythologized, our idea of Gein has spiraled out some way from the facts. It’s surprising, for instance, to learn that he only had two confirmed victims, less than the three it takes to meet the current definition of a “serial killer.” Both women were shot dead before they were mutilated; contrary to his reputation, there was no torture and no cannibalism. Most of the body parts in that farmhouse—they came from at least ten women, though, given the state
they were in, no one could be sure—he’d gotten by robbing graves. Nonetheless, every torture-happy, chainsaw-wielding serial killer in modern cinema is some director’s approximation of Gein, or an approximation of an approximation. When we imagine violence in the twenty-first century, it’s usually Gein we imagine.

  Which means that we are always imagining Augusta, whether we know it or not. She, too, has become mythic; her personality has ballooned out from the scant biographical details we have, creating the legend of a woman who was pathologically afraid of sex, fanatically religious, permanently enraged, a castrating, sexless, son-warping harpy. At the heart of horror is a bad mother; the familiar and terrible vision of a woman corrupting the world, unleashing her own flaws upon it through her monstrous children.

  Kill Her, Mommy

  The archetypal slashers were often bad, sticky mothers who kept their children freakishly attached. Think of Margaret White, the abusive, fundamentalist mother of telekinetic Carrie, wandering through the house shouting Scripture and waving a butcher knife. Or think of Margaret’s fellow sex-hater Pamela Voorhees, who spends the first Friday the 13th movie stabbing and torturing her way through a whole camp’s worth of counselors in order to avenge her son Jason’s death at the hands of negligent, horny teens.

  Pamela is not just close to Jason, she somehow is Jason; though he is dead, she cradles him in her body, like a pregnant woman carrying her fetus. He emanates from her as a childish voice during the murders. (“Kill her, Mommy, kill her!”) Their inseparability cuts both ways: later, when Jason is somewhat improbably revealed to be both alive and a giant, adult mutant with a hockey mask, Pamela becomes the dead/alive possessing force, appearing in hallucinations to urge him on to more killing.

  Both Margaret and Pamela are based on an earlier monster—Norma Bates, mother of Norman, the disastrously troubling psychosexual presence at the root of Psycho. Hitchcock and author Robert Bloch, with all the renowned sensitivity of white men in the mid-1950s, translated Augusta Gein’s tragic life and death into the tale of a shrieking, ,razor-voiced harridan (“Nor-MANNN!!”) whose deep religiosity manifests primarily as a single-minded commitment to cock-blocking her son at all times. At the first hint that Norman might be capable of a relationship, Norma wanders into his prospective girlfriends’ hotel rooms with a butcher knife and a grudge.

  Although, of course, she doesn’t. The twist ending of Psycho has reached “Luke, I am your father” levels of spoilage by this point, but we are in fact meant to be surprised that Norma is dead, and has been from the beginning of the story. Her memory is harbored in her son’s body (aided by the fact that her corpse is harbored in his basement) and leaps out in the form of an alternate personality when he feels threatened. Norma’s maternal power is so all-consuming that her son can never quite disentangle himself from it: “He was never all Norman,” a psychologist tells us, “but he was often only Mother.”

  Women are meant to completely efface themselves in motherhood; to live for, and in, and through their children. But this means that a bad child infects the mother with his own sins, and vice versa. In these stories, a woman who raises a monster is that monster. He would not exist, on any level, if not for her. In the real world, mothers are endlessly blamed for any and every bad decision made by their children: “Hitler’s mother gave birth to Hitler, and Stalin’s mother to Stalin,” anti-feminist pundit Jordan Peterson writes in his manifesto 12 Rules for Life. “Perhaps the importance of their motherly duties, and of their relationship with their children, was not properly stressed.”12

  It seems highly unlikely that any mother operating within patriarchy has not received sufficiently stressful messaging about her “duties.” But the bad mother is patriarchy’s saving throw, its ultimate loophole: by moving the blame for male violence back one generation, it makes guilty parties out of the women who are its victims.

  After a life of being violently warped and scarred by patriarchy, women are given the responsibility of recreating patriarchy, by raising their sons to hold dominion over the world and women. We are also given the blame for everything that may go wrong. Stalin and Stalin’s mom, Ed and Augusta, Norma and Norman: we blame mothers, not men, for the violence that male domination has unleashed on the world.

  Real-Life Villains

  History has never stopped dumping on Augusta Gein. True-crime author Robert Keller, who has published numerous articles on Gein, calls her his “dominant, Bible-punching mother,” a frigid and obsessive “religious fanatic, who subjected Ed and his older brother Henry to daily lectures of the fire and brimstone variety.”13 The number-one Google hit for her name is the Real Life Villains Wiki, which calls her “the leading contributor in her son’s downward spiral into insanity.”14

  True-crime books are no kinder. I have yet to encounter a single male author who does not spare some unkind words for Augusta’s appearance (“a coarse-featured and heavy-set woman,” writes Keller in his book Unhinged, “she was hardly the type to set a man’s heart aflutter”15) before going in on her personality—specifically her terrifying and freakish levels of self-confidence. Keller calls her “a formidable woman,” who was “fiercely determined…set in her ways, judgmental, and entirely convinced that her own religious worldview was the only one that mattered.”16 Harold Schechter, in his unsubtly named Deviant, also throws in a dig at her weight, before calling her “self-righteous, domineering, and inflexible,” and complaining that “[she] never doubted for a moment the absolute correctness of her beliefs or her right to impose them.”17

  For a woman to hold strong opinions—an unattractive, middle-aged woman, at that—is not just abusive or unlikable (all of these men go to tremendous lengths to avoid the word bitch, which nonetheless seems forever perched at the tips of their tongues), it is, in and of itself, enough to drive a man to a lifestyle of murder, grave robbing, and skull-based interior decor. Schechter writes that Gein was driven to kill by “fury at the terrible mistreatment he had suffered at [Augusta’s] hands”; the victims were “innocent, unwitting surrogates for Eddie’s malevolent mother.”18

  Yet Augusta’s “malevolence” often seems apocryphal at best. In one story from Schechter’s book, Gein recalls nearly falling down some stairs, only to be snatched back from the edge by his mother, who shouted at him. Schechter hopefully hints that Augusta may have been the one who “pulled” or “pushed” Gein down the stairs.19 This, of course, does very little to explain why she stopped him from falling—and if there is a mother alive who has not raised her voice when frightened for her child or trying to stop them from doing something dangerous, I do not know who she might be.

  In another popular story, Augusta caught Gein masturbating in the bath. Depending on the storyteller, she either poured scalding water on his penis or pinched it and called it the “curse of man.” This certainly sounds like something a serial killer’s mother would do; in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, it sounds almost exactly like a scene from the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, in which the future murderer’s grandmother menaces his junk with a pair of scissors. It also wouldn’t be unheard of for a woman of Augusta’s generation. She was born in the nineteenth century, when harsh physical punishments for masturbation were common. Scalding water was specifically recommended by Christian health expert John Harvey Kellogg, who went on to invent Kellogg’s Corn Flakes; for other children, Kellogg recommended “the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris.”20 But try as I might—and I have looked through biographies, newspaper archives, legal transcripts; I have emailed authors and ordered out-of-print books from across the country; if I Google any more variations on “Ed Gein masturbate bathtub,” someone is going to send the police to my house—I can find no reliable primary source for this story. What I do have is that psychological report, which states that, though Augusta was firmly against premarital sex, she was “not as strong in her admonitions against masturbation.”21

  Of course, Gei
n did have at least one violently abusive parent; he said so himself. But if George Gein figures in these stories at all, it is as Augusta’s victim. Schechter describes Augusta “ordering her husband about,” and claims she “assumed the role of domestic tyrant,” framing George’s routine violence as a form of self-defense: “[After] an especially vicious tongue-lashing, [George] would lose control and flail out at Augusta’s face, hitting her open-handed again and again.”22 Keller, too, states that Augusta provoked her own abuse: “George inevitably reached the end of his tether and struck back, slapping his wife with an open hand.”23 Both men stress the openness of his hands during these beatings, as if George were paying his wife a compliment by assaulting her with something other than his fists.

  Augusta’s professional competence—her ability to keep the family financially afloat despite George’s addiction—routinely raises men’s hackles. Of the move to the farmhouse, for example, Keller tells us that “Ed’s father, George…had no say in the matter.”24 Nor, by inference, did he have a say in anything, as long as the dreaded female breadwinner was giving orders with her vicious tongue. In another book, The Serial Killer Files, Schechter concludes that “though George could be brutal when drunk, he was no match for his domineering wife, Augusta.”25 Keller simply says that, when compared to Augusta, “George [was] a weakling.”26

  But George beat Ed and Henry, too; Schechter never tells us what he thinks two little boys could do to deserve a beating from a grown man, nor do those beatings figure largely in Keller’s account of Gein’s mistreatment. Gein’s formative trauma, in Gein lore, is always and only Augusta—and in our fictionalized Gein stories, Pamela Voorhees, Margaret White, and Norma Bates are all single mothers. To be clear, I can’t discount the possibility that Augusta was abusive, and I’m hesitant to hand her any Mother of the Year trophies. Yet Gein’s father, whose violence and abusiveness are widely acknowledged facts, has been given a pass, while the whole world lines up to blame his victim. We’ve erased any male culpability for Gein’s upbringing, or his crimes, in order to portray him solely as the work of a monstrous woman. This was a conscious and deeply political act. If Augusta Gein did not exist, we would have had to invent her. And we did.