Motherhood is one of those roles that assumes an almost-outsized cultural importance in the significance we force it to bear. It becomes both the source of and the repository for all kinds of cultural fears. Its ubiquity perhaps makes it this perfect foil. After all, while not everyone will become a mother, everyone has a mother. When we force motherhood to bear the terrors of what it means to be human, we inflict trauma upon those who mother. A long tradition of bad mothers thus shapes contemporary mothering practices (and the way we view them), including the murderous Medea of Greek mythology, the power-hungry Queen Gertrude of Hamlet, and the emasculating mother of Freud?s theories. Certainly, there are mother who cause harm, inflict abuse, act monstrously. Mothers are human. But mothers are also a favourite and easy scapegoat. The contributors to this collection explore a multitude of interdisciplinary representations of mothers that, through their very depictions of bad mothering, challenge the tropes of monstrous mothering that we lean on, revealing in the process why we turn to them. Chapters in Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes explore literary, cinematic, and real-life monstrous mothers, seeking to uncover social sources and results of these monstrosities.
Acknowledgments
3
Introduction
Abigail L. Palko
9
Part I
Precarious Mothering
21
1.
Patchwork Girl?Fractured Maternal Monsters
Anitra Goriss-Hunter
23
2.
In Search of Laura?s Story:
Decolonial Love and Indigenous Mothers of Missing Children
Josephine L. Savarese
39
3.
?Science Put Babies in My Belly?:
Cyborg Mothering and Posthumanism in Orphan Black
Susan Harper and Jessica Smartt Gullion
63
6
MONSTROUS MOTHERS: TROUBLING TROPES
4.
The Maternal Maleficent
Abigail L. Palko
85
Part II
Maternal Violence
105
5.
?She Laughed at Anything?: The Portrayal of the
Monstrous Maternal in Anna Burns?s No Bones
Shamara Ransirini
107
6.
Central Intelligence and Maternal Mental Health:
The Apparently Aberrant Bad Mother in Homeland
Aidan Moir
127
7.
Karla Homolka under Maternal Surveillance:
A Critical Analysis of Mainstream and Social Media Portrayals
of a Released ?Monster? Who Became a Mom of Three
Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich
147
8.
?A Victim Twice?:
Maternal Violence in the Poetry of Ai
Jessica Turcat
161
Part III
Mothers Made Monstrous
181
7
CONTENTS
9.
The Monstrosity of Maternal Abandonment in the
Literature of Women Writers from the American South
Jennifer Martin
183
10.
?What Is Incomprehensible?:
The Myth of Maternal Omniscience and the Judgment
of Maternal Culpability in Sue Klebold?s A Mother?s
Reckoning and Monique Lépine?s Aftermath
Andrea O?Reilly
201
11.
Monster Mothers and Mother Monsters from
Dracula to Stranger Things
Melissa Dinsman
223
12.
?The Terror of Mothering?:
Maternal Ambiguities and Vulnerabilities in Helen Phillips?s
The Need and Melanie Golding?s Little Darlings
Andrea O?Reilly
243
Coda
A Trace of What It Is Not:
The Hauntings of the Monstrous Mother
Andrea O?Reilly
269
Notes on the Contributors
279
About the Cover Artist
283