{"id":516244,"date":"2026-04-06T18:03:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T18:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/516244\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T18:03:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T18:03:12","slug":"the-enduring-power-of-the-anti-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/516244\/","title":{"rendered":"The Enduring Power of the Anti-mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

In one of the lesser-known but truly scary parts of Bram Stoker\u2019s classic book Dracula, we hear reports of a woman stalking<\/a> the night and attacking children. They call her the \u201cBloofer Lady.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

A band of vampire hunters finds Lucy in a graveyard. The sight of her is terrifying. \u201c[W]e saw a white figure advance, a dim white figure, which held something dark at its breast\u2026We could not see the face, for it was bent down over what we saw to be a fair-haired child.\u201d Lucy is no longer human. She is a monster. Dressed in the pale clothes she was buried in, her eyes are \u201cunclean and full of hell fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew.\u201d Her crinkled features remind the hunters of \u201cMedusa.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s grave and kill her monstrous form by hammering a stake through her heart.<\/p>\n

The \u201cBloofer Lady\u201d is a one of a select group of female monsters that seem to always crop up in pop culture. They are \u201canti-mothers,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

As explained by scholar Barbara Creed, the female monster is typically a hideous object of \u201cdefilement,\u201d a transgressive creature who must be destroyed, typically by a male protagonist. The \u201cmonstrous feminine\u201d 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\u2014male or female.<\/p>\n

Freud’s “Phallic Mother”<\/p>\n

Creed relates the trope of the monstrous feminine to the popularity of Freud<\/a>\u2019s concept of the \u201cphallic mother.\u201d According to Freud, phallic mothers dominate their male children, who go on to discover the \u201cabsence\u201d of genitalia in the mother. This triggers a fear<\/a> of \u201ccastration.\u201d 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 \u201ca representation of the female genitals.\u201d<\/p>\n

The anti-mother predates Freud, of course. But Freud’s influence gave it a pop culture function\u2014namely, the creation of the monstrous mother-castrator. Barbara Creed finds that this misogynist image has long informed our mainstream concepts of villainous mothers.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a>. In this case, Adora makes her daughter ill to gain sympathy, to the point that the child dies.<\/p>\n

Camille\u2019s 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 \u201cwoman in white.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cteenager<\/a> in white.\u201d Camille\u2019s younger half-sister Amma is the killer. She\u2019s a troubled young woman who has been psychologically damaged by Adora and thus becomes a monster herself.<\/p>\n

Freud\u2019s theories are obviously waning, but his monstrous anti-mothers are here to stay. They represent an enduring trope that deserves our full attention. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In one of the lesser-known but truly scary parts of Bram Stoker\u2019s classic book Dracula, we hear reports…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-516244","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}