The Dark Side of the Street, Part 2

This essay is a follow-up to The Dark Side of the Street.

Catriona Ward

In Catriona Ward’s novel The Last House on Needless Street, major protagonist Ted Bannerman is abjectly terrified of “Mommy.” Ted tiptoes around the house, afraid of transgressing Mommy’s many unwritten rules, or damaging anything that belongs to Mommy. Though he assures us that Mommy’s wrath is sudden and direct, he also doesn’t describe her actions; he only reports her dialog through the filter of carefully edited memory.

So be warned, this commentary will include spoilers for The Last House on Needless Street.

Ted Bannerman draws immediate comparisons to another notorious mama’s boy, Norman Bates. Like Ted, Norman performs elaborate rituals to appease his mother, whose love is contingent on Norman remaining permanently childlike. For Ted and Norman alike, adulthood and the outside world is frightening and uncertain; staying home is infantilizing, but at least it’s reliable. So both accept their mother’s violent control as the adequate compromise.

Cultural critic Sady Doyle writes that mothers frequently get blamed for sons’ violent behavior. Besides Norman Bates, Doyle cites evil mothers in the Texas Chainsaw franchise, the X-Files episode “Home,” and real-life weirdo Ed Gein. Unlike evil daughters in franchises like The Exorcist, who are presented as solely culpable for their own actions, evil sons are ostensibly molded by their mothers, who are responsible for their sons’ choices.

Doyle wrote before Ward published her novel, so I’m left to speculate how she’d handle this “evil mother” fable. Considering how Ward demonstrates familiarity with horror standards, and subverts them to serve her own mission, she probably wrote the Norman Bates parallels deliberately. We watch Ted struggle to refer to “Mommy” using adult language, despite his age, and we’re coached to expect a Bates-like snap in Ted’s psyche.

Alfred Hitchcock (working from Robert Bloch’s novel) presents a mentally ill man as a ticking time bomb, a perpetrator of violence who leaves a carefully orchestrated trail of bodies behind. Sixty-two years later, I’m probably breaching no confidence to reveal that the “Mother” Norman constantly appeases, lives entirely inside his head. He’s created an entire secondary identity, and invested it with his own insecurities and terrors of the outside world.

Sady Doyle

Catriona Ward has done something similar. “Mommy” lives entirely inside Ted Bannerman’s head, reinforcing his fears. But Ward subverts that paradigm twice. First, from the beginning, first-person narrator Ted acknowledges that Mommy isn’t present. He knows already that her persistent voice is a self-made delusion, one he attempts to control with pharmaceuticals and beer. Mommy’s exact whereabouts are one of the novel’s lingering mysteries.

Second, Ward acknowledges something other writers either don’t know or don’t admit: the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Both Alfred Hitchcock and, more recently, M. Night Shyamalan have presented mentally ill people as incipient monsters, who assuage their tortured inner lives by inflicting that torture outward. Ted, by contrast, desperately wants to be normal. He just doesn’t know how.

American culture shuns mental divergence. While Hitchcock and Shyamalan have presented people with mental disorders as violent masterminds, our mental health community has long marginalized even minor mental illnesses. As Oliver Sacks writes, in the 1960s, simply admitting to “hearing voices” was sufficient legal grounds to forcibly institutionalize people—even though most people hear disembodied voices occasionally.

Meanwhile, a growing body of Americans, fueled by what’s derisively called “mommy blogs” (paging Sady Doyle!), have avoided vaccinating their children. Their stated motivation is avoiding autism, a poorly understood developmental disorder. These parents, derided as “mommies,” have permitted recent recurrences of polio and measles, diseases once nearly extinct, to recur in modern America. Sure, the diseases are real, but the conflation of mental illness and mother-phobic language is concerning.

Ted Bannerman demonstrates how mentally ill people are regularly acted upon by a world that fears them. Rather than monsters and manhunters, the mentally ill are usually traumatized, and that trauma usually happens in childhood. In the final reveal, we discover that Mommy has done literally every crime for which the world blames Ted. Mommy is crafty, capable of elaborate planning and terrible violence. Ted is small, weak, and traumatized.

I suspect Sady Doyle wouldn’t appreciate the stereotype of shifting blame onto Mommy. In our post-Hitchcock era, that smacks of laziness. Yet Doyle might appreciate how Ward subverts that stereotype by using it to demonstrate the consequences childhood abuse has on actual children. Unlike Norman Bates or Ed Gein, Ted Bannerman reflects how the outside world continues repeating the adult child’s trauma. Unlike Norman, Ted Bannerman just wants to heal.