Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  Margaret is nothing if not a faithful servant to the patriarchy. This is a lady who wanders through her neighborhood carrying a prayer book literally titled The Sins of Women. She has to be pinned down with telekinesis to keep from flipping out when her daughter wears a sleeveless dress. No one would dispute that Margaret is as violent as any male misogynist: She routinely traps her daughter in a closet, screams at her, degrades and demeans her. When Carrie shows signs of falling in love or embracing her sexuality, Margaret comes at her with a butcher knife. She would rather see her daughter dead than in control of her own body.

  “Margaret White is the most terrifying screen villain there is,” writes film curator Kier-La Janisse in her tour of crazy-lady horror, House of Psychotic Women. “Her image gives me that same abject terror that staring into a great white shark’s open mouth does. It makes me wonder if maybe there’s nothing scarier than one’s own horrible mother.”51

  Yet—as with Norma and Norman—though Margaret destroys her daughter, she also is her daughter. Carrie is another demon girl whose puberty provides her with abrupt and unfettered access to superhuman power. Carrie’s rage, her hunger, her need for love or respect or revenge, radiate out from around her body, filling high school auditoriums with fire and blood. Margaret fears her daughter’s wild magic. She calls it demonic. Yet she, too—whether she recognizes it or not—is more powerful than our world likes women to be.

  Carrie has no father; there is no patriarch or husband in Margaret’s life, no one to subdue or contradict her. Like Augusta, she’s seemingly self-employed, meaning there’s no male boss she has to please. She’s religious, but doesn’t bend the knee to any male preacher or priest. Throughout Carrie, the only man Margaret even interacts with is the creepy homemade Jesus in her prayer closet. None of the “Bible passages” she reads are actually in the Bible, leaving the unsettling impression that Margaret may have written her own scripture, serving as both prophet and congregant to her own highly particular understanding of God. “If ‘The Exorcist’ made you shudder, ‘Carrie’ will make you scream,” one of the movie’s taglines promised; if The Exorcist is about how terrifying women are as demons, Carrie is about how terrifying they are as priests.52

  Margaret is the small, sad shadow of a goddess—the parthenogenetic Mother who creates for herself and by herself, who gives life and takes it away. But all of that power has been profaned, turned to the purpose of valorizing misogyny and keeping other women in line. Carrie represents what girls are when they first come into touch with their power—untamed, overflowing, throwing sparks and breaking glass. But Margaret is what female power looks like after a life spent in patriarchy: contained, made tiny and petty and bitter with self-hatred, turned to the purpose of rationalizing its own destruction. Margaret is like a trapped animal chewing its own leg off, but what she eats is her heart.

  As I say: context matters. The context of male violence does not force us to forgive our bad mothers, but it may help us to understand the sources of their damage. The ultimate violence patriarchy does to women is to make us believe we deserve what has been done to us—a loop forever closing, breaking us so that we will raise broken women.

  Haunted Houses

  Anna Michel was forced to wear black to her own wedding. It was penance for her sins. She’d had a child out of wedlock, a little girl named Martha; she never revealed the father’s name. Martha died when she was eight years old, during a routine operation to remove a tumor on her kidney. Anna believed it was God’s punishment. But when her next oldest daughter, Anneliese, got sick, Anna trusted God instead of doctors. It was when Anneliese went away to college and started dating that Anna saw the demon: her daughter, staring at the Virgin, with wedding-black eyes.

  Tina Resch, the “Columbus Poltergeist,” moved away from her foster family. But she never left them behind. By the time the Unsolved Mysteries segment on Tina aired, she was on trial for killing her three-year-old daughter Amber. Tina pled guilty, but she maintained that she had not killed the little girl herself; she’d simply seen her boyfriend beating the girl to death and failed to intervene.

  “I’m not guilty of beating her,” she said. “I’m guilty of not taking her to the hospital.”53

  All the clues as to how something like this could happen, or why Tina considered the sight of a grown man beating a little girl to be normal, had been there in plain sight. The journalists who mobbed her home didn’t notice. They were busy scanning the empty air for phantoms.

  Augusta Gein, according to Harold Schechter, died because she’d seen something horrible. Ed Gein never forgot or forgave it. Their neighbor, a cruel man, beat his girlfriend’s puppy to death—and did so in front of the girlfriend, who screamed and pleaded for him to stop. Augusta saw the man screaming at the woman; she saw the woman unable to protect something small and helpless, something she loved very much, from the man she lived with. The sight opened up something awful in her, some well of pain that consumed her entirely. She had another stroke and died just a few days later.

  You may or may not believe in ghosts, or poltergeists, or demons. I believe that evil is a human creation; that humanity rises or falls by its own hand. But I never said these women weren’t haunted.

  Women are placed under male control, penned in and intimidated by the interlocking forms of violence that constitute patriarchy, beginning when they are very young. Not a single woman gets out unscathed; there is not one woman who reaches the end of her life without being sexually assaulted, or sexually harassed, or abused by a partner, or verbally demeaned and intimidated in public spaces, or simply made smaller than she is by our hatred of her, or our fear of her, or the fear and shame we have taught her to feel about herself in a world where there is nothing more horrifying than being female.

  Yet at the end of the line, we give these women not respite, or understanding, but the responsibility for recreating the social order that has done all this to them. We tell them that “power” is something terrifying and violent, coming down from above and obliterating anyone who challenges or threatens it, and then we tell them that they have “power” over their children. We tell women that their suffering is necessary to the functioning of society, and then we tell them to pass that suffering down to the next generation, so that society can continue. And they do.

  That’s the thing: they do. Patriarchy teaches us to abhor the freaks, the deviants, the women who run wild. But in the end, no mother is more frightening than the one who does just what she’s been told.

  Holes

  “Sady inflicted life, with her crooked-ass genes, on to that child,” the call for my death reads. “I am so fucking eager for the day that that kid finds that blog post and blows a hole in her chest. And nobody will blame her.”

  This is a post in a “comedy” subreddit. The men therein are angry at me for a long list of confusing reasons, but in practice, they’re angry for the same reason men on the Internet always are: I’m a woman, and I’m talking, and they can’t shut me up. What’s interesting is not the death threat (which is far from my first) but how the threats have changed since I became a mother.

  Internet hate campaigns tend to sprout their own bizarre mythology; it is an article of faith, among these men, that I “hate” my daughter, or at least resent her, due to some humiliating injury I experienced during childbirth, and that somewhere there is a blog post where I call the baby names or say I don’t love her. “For coming out of her vagina and hurting her,” the man who wants me dead helpfully supplies.

  The confession of child-hatred, of course, doesn’t exist. Nor does my hideously deformed vagina. I didn’t even give birth through it; I had a C-section. I do not hate my baby, nor have I ever hated her, nor have I ever said that I do. But in their hatred for me, these men have entered the realm of mythology; they’ve replaced me with a stock figure of a cold, domineering mother, a selfish woman who can’t accept the sacrifices and selflessness and painful v
agina injuries motherhood demands, a woman who “inflicts life” on freaks and deviants, who deserves death at her own child’s hands. Without even raising a serial killer of my own, I have been Ed Kempered.

  That “blow a hole in her” post, to me, looks like the work of a dangerous person. It’s too detailed; he’s thought about the weapon, the hole, the location of the wound. It seems dangerously close to crossing the line that separates fantasy from plan. But within minutes, other men join in. It’s a shame, one writes, that a “feminist hag” like me “can’t appreciate a nice meaty blown out pussy.” Another calls me a “humorless cum sponge.” My weight is brought up. Several times, actually. I am the dragon Errour, all slime and folds and distended maternal orifices, and they are slaying me. They like to imagine blowing them out, blowing them open—all those meaty, bloody, cum-absorbing holes of mine.

  White men with dangerous empathy deficits aren’t just spooky stories. They’re not outliers or aberrations. You can find dozens or hundreds of them by stumbling onto the wrong parts of Reddit. You can see them at alt-right rallies, faces twisted with hate behind tiki torches, or brigading women and people of color on social media. You can find these men in the White House, in the Supreme Court, in Congress, on CNN. We are swimming in it, drowning in it, all that masculine heartlessness; the patriarchal love of corrective, purifying violence is the basic currency of our political life, and the guiding ethos of our world.

  And so, no killer ever truly acts alone. Gein’s crimes were modeled on Nazi war atrocities—violence committed by perfectly sane and normal people, who were emboldened to torture and mutilation simply because their cultural context permitted it. Nor was Gein’s own culture lacking in permitted atrocities. The first time George Gein ever beat his defenseless children, he taught Gein that a man was defined by violence; though much is made of the fact that Gein’s two victims were middle-aged women who looked like his mother, much less is made of the fact that he grew up watching a man hurt just such a woman, and knew exactly where to aim his own violence when the time came.

  Gein brought the violence of war home, made it domestic and personal; he magnified the accepted, invisible violence against women that defined his culture, making it look as spectacular as war. But he was not sui generis. He did not come out of nowhere. In Worden’s autopsy—the one conducted when she was a headless, gutted corpse—her coroner took time to note that she had nice breasts “for her age.”54 How uncommon is it, really, for men to reduce women to a collection of parts?

  It’s reassuring, the idea that only bad mothers have bad children. But a mother is never the only person to raise her child. For every good or true thing I try to teach my daughter, the world will tell her something different: that a boy hits you because he likes you, that girls who dress like that are asking for it, that it’s funny to send people death threats on the Internet, that we had to destroy the village in order to save it, that control and power always come from the top down and the outside in, at the end of a fist or a sword or a gun.

  What chance does any woman have, I wonder, of raising a purely good and kind and nonviolent child within such an inherently, gleefully violent world? What chance does she have, after a lifetime spent in that world, of being purely good and kind herself?

  What if women were not in control of our fates, or our children’s fates?

  What if we weren’t allowed to be?

  What if bad mothers are the only mothers there are?

  CONCLUSION

  THE WOMAN AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

  Now is the time. This is the hour. Ours is the magic. Ours is the power.

  —The Craft (1996)

  There’s a monster who is threaded throughout every part of this book. She is both young and old, a daughter and a mother, equally entangled with sex and birth and death; for many of us, she’s the first monster we ever knew. I remember her best from a day in second grade when I was sent home from school with a high fever. My stepfather packed me off into bed, and when my mother came home, I was delirious, screaming about the woman at the foot of the stairs, who I was sure was coming to eat me.

  “The witch,” I was yelling. “The witch. The witch.”

  This is the primal threat in our earliest stories: a woman who lives on the outskirts of civilization, rejected by her community; a woman who is old, ugly, asexual; a woman who is, alternately, too beautiful, too sexual, too self-possessed; a woman who knows things others don’t know, and can do things others can’t do. When the loop of patriarchy closes, it can feel inescapable. Yet the way to freedom has been here, in our monster stories, all along. From the beginning, we’ve known that a woman who leaves society as we know it, who heads out to the dark and threatening spaces beyond the world we’ve built, will find not her death but her power.

  The Modern Prometheus

  Thus it begins, with lit candles and New Age paraphernalia and female voices chanting about power: The Craft, the 1996 teen-witch camp classic that I watched at up to 70 percent of all slumber parties throughout my teens. To describe The Craft as a mere movie seems like an injustice. Like The Exorcist, The Craft did not just scare people; it altered their relationship to the unseen world. And this time, its converts were almost entirely young women.

  My friends looked up their astrological signs and split off into groups of four to create covens—as per the movie, you’d need Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. We passed around battered manuals of spells and paperback copies of The Witches’ Almanac, which Neve Campbell is seen consulting in one scene; The Wicca Spellbook by Gerina Dunwich was our drug of choice, but in 1999, New Age publisher Llewellyn released a new book, Silver RavenWolf’s Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, specifically to capitalize on the surge in sales it had been experiencing ever since The Craft’s release. As per one peeved Christian author, it “sold more copies by year’s end than any other book Llewellyn had published in its ninety-five year history.”1 The cover—a group of stylishly dressed teens facing the viewer in staggered pyramid formation—also looked suspiciously like the poster for The Craft.

  Is The Craft any good? I honestly don’t know. It directly or indirectly convinced a generation of women to convert to a new religion, some permanently. For better or worse, I’ve never seen anything like that happen after a screening of Barry Lyndon.

  Though The Craft is less a movie for me than it is a full-body memory—the woods at sunset, body glitter and Yankee candles, the slick maroon cover of Linda Goodman’s Love Signs, which my friends and I liberated from a New Age emporium because, as Neve taught us, “everything in nature steals”—it’s an instructive memory to revisit.

  The Craft’s witches are girls the town wouldn’t mind burning: Rochelle is one of the few black students at a mostly white school. Nancy is poor, with abusive parents and behavioral issues. Bonnie (Neve) is living with physical disabilities, burn scars covering most of her body. Our heroine, Sarah, carries an invisible disability, in the form of a recent psychotic break and suicide attempt. (Rochelle, as played by Rachel True, is also very clearly a thirty-year-old woman playing a high school sophomore, presumably a reference to how witch panics historically target the elderly. Or, you know, the movie is just kind of cheesy. Who’s to say?) Alone, they are vulnerable, but together, they gain supernatural abilities. Witchcraft is not just a form of power for these girls, it’s more or less the only power they have; magic is the voice of the marginalized responding to their oppression.

  “We can actually do it! We can make things happen,” Nancy whoops with joy. Grown men who watched the movie were puzzled—“here are four girls who could outgross David Copperfield in Vegas, and they limit their amazing powers to getting even,” Roger Ebert grumped in his two-star review—but, like food, like air, like money, the ability to make things happen only seems small if you’ve always had it.2 The girls’ “spells”—disfiguring a racist, making a street harasser fall into the path of a moving truck, givin
g an abusive parent a heart attack—may seem vindictive, but they are, more often than not, political actions, points where the girls refuse to accept the violence that defines their lives.

  Yet The Craft is not exactly the straightforward empowerment narrative its cult following suggests. It’s deeply ambivalent about how much power women can have, or want, without becoming monsters. When Sarah is nearly raped by her would-be boyfriend (Chris, incarnated by the ’90s teen’s sex creep of choice, Skeet Ulrich), Nancy uses her powers to push him out of a window to his death. It seems like an obvious choice, especially given that Nancy has had her own run-ins with Chris in the past. Yet Sarah, who believes she “made” Chris assault her with a love spell, forgives him; he was “really a good guy underneath it all,” she insists. It’s Nancy, who put a stop to his violence, whom she fears.

  Nancy is the bad girl, the wicked witch, the one who openly, shamelessly wants to make things happen. In one scene, each girl makes a wish. Mostly they ask for gentle, feminine virtues: for beauty (Bonnie), love (Sarah), forgiveness (Rochelle). Nancy wishes for “all the power of Manon.” Then she tries to take that power by invoking the deity into herself, effectively becoming her own God. While the other girls are wishing for boyfriends or better skin, Nancy uses magic to kill her abusive stepfather and inherit a massive windfall from his life insurance. When Sarah threatens to split up the coven, she goes berserk.

  Several decades down the line, it seems obvious that Nancy is not a villain—or at least, she wouldn’t be, if the script had even slightly more progressive views on women. In a better world, Nancy’s choice to kill Chris would make her a Fury, an Amazon, an angel with a flaming sword. But this is not that story. Nancy’s brain is fried by the power of Manon, turning her into a screeching villain, and she’s sent to a mental institution. Sarah discovers that she’s a “natural witch” who doesn’t need a coven to work her magic; the movie ends with her not-so-subtly threatening to kill Bonnie and Rochelle if they don’t stay away from her, thereby decisively turning her back on the possibility of shared female power.