The Enduring Power of the Anti-mother |
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“Anti-mothers” invert the stereotype of the caring mother and prey on children and seduce and dominate men.
The trope of the monstrous feminine popular culture may be linked to Freud’s concept of the “phallic mother.”
Freud’s monstrous anti-mothers represent an enduring trope that deserves our full attention.
In one of the lesser-known but truly scary parts of Bram Stoker’s classic book Dracula, we hear reports of a woman stalking the night and attacking children. They call her the “Bloofer Lady.” It turns out that this villain is Lucy Westenra, a character who is already dead. She was killed by Count Dracula. Now reanimated as a vampire, Lucy feeds on children in the London night.
A band of vampire hunters finds Lucy in a graveyard. The sight of her is terrifying. “[W]e saw a white figure advance, a dim white figure, which held something dark at its breast…We could not see the face, for it was bent down over what we saw to be a fair-haired child.” Lucy is no longer human. She is a monster. Dressed in the pale clothes she was buried in, her eyes are “unclean and full of hell fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew.” Her crinkled features remind the hunters of “Medusa.”
The vampire Lucy tosses aside the child and even tries to seduce one of the men before fleeing into her tomb to avoid the rising sun. The next day, the vampire hunters return to Lucy’s grave and kill her monstrous form by hammering a stake through her heart.
The “Bloofer Lady” is a one of a select group of female monsters that seem to always crop up in pop culture. They are “anti-mothers,” women who invert the stereotypical cultural standard of the caring and nurturing mother, and who instead prey on children and maliciously seduce and dominate men.
As explained by scholar Barbara Creed, the female monster is typically a hideous object of “defilement,” a transgressive creature who must be destroyed, typically by a male protagonist. The “monstrous feminine” is typified by mother-figures who kill, often who also suppurate grotesque fluids or transgress the borders of human shape and form. In an extreme example, the bony mother monster in the "Alien" film franchise generates eggs that launch critters that impregnate people with alien babies. These babies horrifically erupt out of human chests—male or female.
Freud's "Phallic Mother"
Creed relates the trope of the monstrous feminine to the popularity of Freud’s concept of the “phallic mother.” According to Freud, phallic mothers dominate their male children, who go on to discover the “absence” of genitalia in the mother. This triggers a fear of “castration.” Freud argues that this primal terror lives in the male unconsciousness. Freud uses the example of the snake-headed Medusa as an embodiment of this horror. For Freud, Medusa is “a representation of the female genitals.”
The anti-mother predates Freud, of course. But Freud's influence gave it a pop culture function—namely, the creation of the monstrous mother-castrator. Barbara Creed finds that this misogynist image has long informed our mainstream concepts of villainous mothers.
In recent years, the monstrous feminine has seen some interesting permutations. In the HBO series "Sharp Objects," journalist Camille Preaker (played by Amy Adams) returns to her small hometown to report on the kidnapping and murder of teenage girls. She stays with her mother, a fearsome, controlling figure named Adora (Patricia Clarkson). Over the course of the series, we learn that Adora killed Camille’s young sister by slowly poisoning her. Adora has Munchausen syndrome by proxy (now known as factitious disorder imposed on another), an illness in which the afflicted person reports incorrectly that a loved one is ill to gain sympathy or attention. In this case, Adora makes her daughter ill to gain sympathy, to the point that the child dies.
Camille’s mother becomes a suspect in the murder of the girls. According to a witness, one of the victims was last seen in a park with a “woman in white.” This revamping of the Bloofer Lady cleverly connects Stoker's vampire to the modern anti-mother. Adora apparently destroys children both at home and outside.
What Is Freudian Psychology?
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But "Sharp Objects," while offering a new take on the monstrous feminine trope, delivers some interesting interventions. The protagonist is not a victimized son but a daughter. The woman in white turns out to be more of a “teenager in white.” Camille’s younger half-sister Amma is the killer. She’s a troubled young woman who has been psychologically damaged by Adora and thus becomes a monster herself.
Freud’s theories are obviously waning, but his monstrous anti-mothers are here to stay. They represent an enduring trope that deserves our full attention.
Creed, B. (2020). "Horror and the Monstrous Feminine." In Weinstock, J. A. Editor. The Monster Theory Reader. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Larumbe Villareal, E. (2025). "The Monstrous Feminine Then and Now: An Interview with Barbara Creed. Comparative Cinema. Vol 13:25, pp. 13–32.
Marcus, A. et al. (October 1995). "Munchausen syndrome by proxy and factitious illness: symptomatology, parent-child interaction, and psychopathology of the parents." European Child and Adolescent Psychology. Vol 4, pp. 229–236.
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