The Female Monster In Your Closet

Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power

The monster under your bed exists specifically because you expect it to. Let’s start with that strange, paradoxical belief. But what fuels your expectations? Are your fears uniquely your own, or are they conditioned by social forces you haven’t even consciously processed yet? The answer to that last question is painfully obvious, especially if you’re already reading literary criticism. But what forces condition our private monsters?

Journalist and pop-culture critic Sady Doyle has written extensively about the ways society treats women who step outside their social roles. Her second full-length book deals specifically with how women shape, and are shaped by, images of horror in pop culture. This begins with literal horror, like the feminine monstrosity in The Exorcist, but extends beyond, into how we discuss crime and violence, the popularity of “true crime,” and how we talk to women.

To speak of feminine monstrosities, Doyle divides femininity into three overarching roles: the Daughter, Wife, and Mother. Each role represents a female archetype that women (or girls) should honor, and when they don’t, we perceive them as monstrous. The little girl transitioning to motherhood, the rebellious and willful wife, or the negligent mother, all permeate our culture’s nightmares. But why, and what does that say about us?

Common criticisms of sexualized violence in slasher films, to give one example, notice that teenage girls are doomed the moment they acknowledge their sexual nature. To kiss or, worse, to actually have sex, becomes a death sentence. But Doyle also acknowledges a contradiction: before the middle 1990s, the major slasher audience was teenage boys. Now, it’s mostly teenage girls. What changed, in our culture’s fears, to popularize slashers this way?

Doyle uses the word “patriarchy” generously. Veteran lit-crit readers know this word has loaded implications, depending on who uses it and how. Doyle means a society organized according to male, hetero-normative standards, which slots people into social roles according to their assigned-at-birth genders. Our society reproduces roles which people have to either accept or resist, and for women, that means literally reproducing roles.

That titular “Dead Blonde” can, depending on how stories handle her, represent male fears of women exceeding their roles, as when young girls transition into women. Or it may represent women’s fears of patriarchal violence: consider Drew Barrymore in the first Scream movie, literally trapped inside her house, knowing that stepping outside the kitchen means death. Thus the same image can reinforce, or ironically resist, patriarchal culture. What matters is violence.

Sady Doyle

But the “Bad Mother” has proven more obstinately resistant to ironic subversion. From Norma Bates and Pamela Voorhees, to Jordan Peterson and the language of online discourse, patriarchal culture persists in blaming women, particularly mothers, for men’s violent behaviors. Doyle keeps circling back to Augusta Gein, whose bad mothering, always somehow considered in isolation, supposedly motivated her murderous son Ed.

In fairness, though Doyle’s arguments create an eye-opening context in which to read patriarchy’s fear of women, she sometimes seems unaware of her own lens. Reading slasher films as a totalized phenomenon, for instance, overlooks particular examples. Freddy Kreuger is often as hostile to men as women, especially closeted men. The Exorcist subliminally condemned puberty, but The Exorcist III (the only good sequel) condemned male religiosity.

Careful readers, going through Doyle’s exegesis, can find examples where she overlooks the obverse of her position. If patriarchy forces women into artificial, constraining roles, then aren’t the roles reserved for men equally constrictive? What about intersectional roles? White stay-at-home mothers are lionized, while paid childcare workers, Doyle admits, are despised, and often given sub-poverty wages. How, then, does class influence gender roles?

I say this, knowing that all writers make choices about what to include. At nearly 250 pages plus extensive back matter, this book is about as long as most literary criticism written for general audiences these days. Anything longer would’ve made imposing reading, especially on a topic as difficult and morally taxing as horror and violence. Doyle must have known how much she necessarily omitted to create a book audiences would actually read.

Therefore, accepting that it looks at one side of a multifaceted puzzle, this book makes a worthwhile prolegomenon to further examination of how our society uses tacit violence to reproduce social roles. When the monster forces us back into the kitchen, or back into the closet, it doesn’t do so in morally neutral ways. Public art can display our public aspirations, but it also showcases our public fears. Far too often, our most visible monsters are female.