Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

by Sady Doyle

  “Older art thou than I,” Athena concedes, in Aeschylus’s account of the Furies’ negotiation.18 They are also fully capable of causing an apocalypse if slighted: “Turn not, I pray, / as goddesses your swelling wrath on men, / Nor make the friendly earth despiteful to them…. nor cast upon the ground / The malice of thy tongue, to blast the world,” Athena begs.19

  Yet matriarchy must end, and Athena must end it. Thus, to keep the world unblasted, the goddess of strategy offers a deal: the Furies, the ghosts of matriarchy past, must be given offerings after every wedding and after the birth of every child. Should men ever forget or underestimate the monstrous, female truths underlying the patriarchal family, the Furies will erupt from the Underworld, rendering the world a wasteland.

  The archaic mother—the mother who reproduces without male permission and for her own satisfaction—is the least human of female monsters because she poses the most profound existential threat. Women could, theoretically, take control of their reproductive capacity at any time. Or, more accurately, they could take it back. The Mother is female bodily self-determination, full-fledged and uncontrollable, out of the ocean and stomping skyscrapers, turning the male world to rubble. She is what happens when the Furies come home.

  This Mother is a fantasy about the life-and-death power women might have wielded before reproduction was put under male control. Or maybe she’s a memory from the wordless caveman time of infancy, a blurred recollection of how huge and unthinkably powerful our own mothers seemed to be before we learned they were second-class citizens. Or, just maybe, the Mother is only portrayed as archaic—extinct, primeval, older than time—to disguise the fact that her true home lies in the future. Maybe, when men say this is what it was like before we took control, they mean this is what will happen if we lose.

  Days of Blood

  To speak of patriarchy in terms of “men” and “women,” “mothers” and “fathers,” is probably inevitable. But it is also misleading. Patriarchy is not something superimposed on top of a preexisting gender binary; it created that binary, setting strict limits on what forms a body can take, and who can call themselves male or female.

  Men within patriarchy have to fit a very specific mold: they have to be straight, or at least willing to get a woman pregnant, and they have to impregnate others, rather than getting pregnant themselves. Women must have uteruses and bear children, rather than fertilizing other women (or men, for that matter). As for the genders outside of “male” or “female,” well—like female sexuality, or queer desire—it’s best not to admit they exist. They raise too many questions.

  Again, in order to be unassailable, patriarchy must be portrayed as inevitable. If men can give birth, or if women can perform the sperm donation that makes a man a patriarch, our current arrangement starts to look like what it is: artificial, and unfair to boot. Unlinking biology and identity exposes the lie in the patriarchal sales pitch. Patriarchy has dealt with this vulnerability the same way it’s dealt with cisgender women’s agency: violently, silencing any evidence of life outside the norm.

  The archaic Mother has always belonged to trans women, too. The Roman goddess Cybele—called Magna Mater, or Great Mother—was sometimes depicted as intersex, with both a penis and a vagina, and was served by a special caste of priestesses, the galli. In one of Cybele’s most sacred ceremonies, the Dies Sanguinis or “Day of Blood,” younger galli would gather at her altar, dance themselves into an endorphin haze, and castrate themselves. It was only after this initiation that the galli would begin to wear dresses and makeup and present themselves as feminine in public.

  It is risky to attribute present-day narratives to people who lived so long ago; scholars are still not really sure whether the galli identified as women or as some other, nonbinary gender. But we can say, at bare minimum, that Cybele’s cult looks very much like the experiences of trans womanhood we hear today—or, rather, it looks like how trans womanhood might work in a society where transition was held sacred. The blood of menstruation, the blood of a broken hymen, the blood of childbirth: all of them hold power. But the blood of transition is equally valid when the Dies Sanguinis rolls around.

  “Remember: pregnancy is a form of body modification so extreme that its result is another person. In this, it resembles nothing—except, perhaps, sex change,” writes queer theorist Andrea Long Chu.20 What matters, maybe, is not the precise origin of the blood, but that quality of transformation.

  So if we don’t see trans and nonbinary people in our history, it is only because special effort has been taken to render them invisible. In Rome, intersex people were put to death. According to Stephen T. Asma’s history On Monsters, “the founder of Rome himself, Romulus, felt threatened by hermaphrodites [sic] and ordered them to be drowned upon discovery.”21 The galli themselves were seen as “objects of disgust” and shut in their temple sanctuary for the majority of the year.22 Roman citizens were forbidden to self-castrate, so that only foreigners and slaves could serve Cybele, diminishing the influence of the goddess by making her bear the stigma of the lower class.

  The sacred, self-fertilizing body of the Mother became a monstrous, marginal body in the process of imposing male rule, and outlawing and stigmatizing gender transition became one of the key strategies through which patriarchy took hold. Eliminating deviant bodies was key to maintaining male order, just as it would be the first strike of twentieth-century fascist regimes some millennia down the line. In Rome, the intersex death sentence was eventually expanded to apply to any child with a visible disability; “the Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables [state that] ‘A father shall immediately put to death a son recently born, who is a monster, or has a form different from that of members of the human race.’ ”23

  Note that the mother, now legally reduced to the incubator this father used to produce his unwanted child, has no say in this decision. Note also the word: monster.

  Wave of Mutilation

  “Some [children], though resembling none of their relations, yet do at any rate resemble a human being, but others are not even like a human being but a monstrosity,” Aristotle wrote. “For even he who does not resemble his parents is already in a certain sense a monstrosity.”24

  Patriarchy is not just a structure, but an ethos—one that prizes control and order, the imposition of clean rules on messy realities. The imagined, pre-patriarchal rule of Tiamat is frightening because it is organic: fleshy, bloody, slimy, sexual, tied to a cycle of birth and death, governed by instinct and desire rather than set rules. The body governs itself—it breathes and pumps blood, not by command, but because it was born to—but it is also fundamentally ungovernable. Try all you like, but you cannot forbid your body to die. The world of the Mother is, in Edmund Spenser’s oddly germaphobic but illuminating terminology, “filthie” and “durtie”; being made of flesh, it dies like flesh, it stinks like flesh, it rots. It comes into the world coated in slime and blood, screaming.

  Patriarchy aims to clean up the mess. It reaffirms men and their importance by imposing artificial male-created, standards on organic, usually female-created flesh. Men subdue and hold dominion over matter/mater/mothers through the use of tools and rules, artificial creations that allow one to bring a subject under control while also holding it at a distance: laws, swords, guns, but also science, technology, medicine, everything that aims to discipline and subdue the chaotic female body of the world.

  Male expertise and discipline must always be brought to bear on the chaos of reproduction, not because they improve outcomes—they don’t—but simply to prevent women from holding sovereignty over their bodies. In her book on the biology of pregnancy, Like a Mother, Angela Garbes writes that as recently as the early 1900s, “nearly half of all babies born in America were delivered by midwives, most of them working-class immigrants and black women.”25 In response, states passed laws requiring babies to be delivered by doctors, who were nearly all white and male. The doctors’ more “
scientific” gynecological techniques, like forceps and making women lie immobile on their backs during labor, were often less safe and substantially more painful than midwives’ methods. Today, medical experts estimate that midwives “could prevent more than 80 percent of maternal and newborn deaths worldwide,” and the US states with the highest black populations are also the states where mothers have the least access to midwife care; the ever-growing number of dead black mothers in this country is a direct result of white men taking reproductive authority out of black women’s hands.26

  But it’s not just that patriarchy changes how we give birth. It also changes how we imagine birth, and what we think it is for. In the primordial nightmare of matriarchy, the Mother brings forth her thousand young in sundry forms, ill-favored or not. In patriarchy, the child is a product, a thing men have produced using the technology of a woman’s body. It has to be high quality to be worth making. The focus shifts from the endless possibilities of creation to the necessity for men to reproduce accurate reflections of themselves.

  This is the earliest meaning of the word monster: a deformed or disabled child. Throughout medieval Europe, pamphlets were circulated about children like the Monster of Ravenna, which, as per a contemporary account from pharmacist Luca Landucci, “had a horn on its head, straight up like a sword, and instead of arms it had two wings like a bat’s, and at the height of the breasts it had a fio [Y-shaped mark] on one side and a cross on the other, and lower down at the waist, two serpents. It was a hermaphrodite, and on the right knee it had an eye, and its left foot was like an eagle’s.”27

  Present-day commentators theorize that the Monster was born with Roberts syndrome, which gives limbs a flipper-like appearance. But in its day, it was a warning from God; “some great misfortune always befalls the city where such things are born,” Landucci concludes.28 In fact, Ravenna did fall, and the evil was (we’re told) traced back to its source: the monster’s mother had been a nun, sworn to chastity. The child’s monstrousness was God’s judgment on her hidden, but hideous, sexuality.

  It always comes back to Mom. Though society’s focus had outwardly shifted from monstrous mothers to monstrous offspring, in practice, the one was always the product of the other, the child’s ugliness a reflection of the mother’s own defects. Mothers could make monsters by satisfying unnatural appetites (like the Minotaur, offspring of Queen Pasiphaë’s monstrous lust for a bull), or by giving way to immoral conduct (like the hypocrisy and licentiousness that gave Ravenna its monster), or even by thinking the wrong thoughts or looking at the wrong images; one explanation for the mysterious disease afflicting “Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick was that his mother had been frightened by an elephant when she was pregnant.

  In the Guy de Maupassant story “A Mother of Monsters,” the narrator hears of an impoverished single mother who has fallen into depravity. Forced to conceal her first pregnancy by binding her stomach, she can now only give birth to hideous specimens, and earns her living by selling them to freak shows. Full of pity and disgust, the narrator goes for a walk on the beach, where—shortly after passing a beautiful and happy woman—he encounters another sad spectacle:

  I saw a nursemaid with three children, who were rolling in the sand. A pair of little crutches lay on the ground, and touched my sympathy. I then noticed that these three children were all deformed, humpbacked, or crooked; and hideous.

  “Those are the offspring of that charming woman you saw just now,” said the doctor…. “This is the consequence of preserving a slender figure up to the last. These little deformities were made by the corset. She knows very well that she is risking her life at this game. But what does she care, as long as she can be beautiful and have admirers!”29

  It was not just that pregnancy sometimes did produce monsters. It was that women, without male direction, inevitably would produce monsters. Far from being a preserve of terrifying female power, pregnancy and motherhood are now portrayed as something that women aren’t even particularly good at. To the extent that mothers follow their own inclinations—the corseted flirt in de Maupassant’s story; the slutty nun of Ravenna; or you, the pregnant idiot at home, eating sushi next to your cat’s litter box while slathered in paraben-containing moisturizers—they will bring forth only suffering.

  Aristotle is the one who started all this by passing medical history’s most infamous judgment on female bodies. His investigation of monstrosity set out to exempt fathers from all responsibility, placing the blame squarely on the hideous and unreliable uterus. Each man, he said, had a “seed”—a perfect image of himself in miniature. The uterus only supplied blood and matter, clothing the thought form in flesh: “While the body is from the female, it is the soul that is from the male, for the soul is the reality of a particular body.”30 But the uterus was known to malfunction and clothe the soul badly. When this happened, the result was an imperfect copy of the father—a monster. A woman’s body became a dangerous host for a man’s perfect sperm, resulting in story after story—from Melusine to Rebecca—in which a bad wife inflicts her own biological corruption on her husband’s family line.

  Thus Aristotle proclaimed that “the female is, as it were, a mutilated male.”31 A monster was a departure from the father’s image, and “the first departure indeed is that the offspring should become female instead of male.”32 Women were the original abominations—the ones that all other monsters came from. Mothers passed their own monstrosity down to every daughter they had, and to some unfortunate sons as well. Monstrosity had become the defining female quality, the essence of womanhood. So it only seems fitting that it was a woman—a mother, and the daughter of a famous mother—who brought the modern monster to life.

  The Miserable and Abandoned

  Mary Shelley, more than most women, had reason to find reproduction monstrous. You know already that her premature daughter died. She gave birth to two more children before Frankenstein was complete—her son, William, was six months old when she began drafting the book; her second daughter, Clara, was born seven months before it came out—both of whom were dead within two years of its first publication. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had died just after giving birth to her; Wollstonecraft contracted an infection because her doctor (as was standard at the time) did not wash his hands.33 Her half sister, Fanny Imlay Wollstonecraft Godwin, committed suicide when Shelley was halfway through the book; she was illegitimate, and had been marginalized all her life by her stepfather’s preference for Mary, his biological, born-in-wedlock child.

  Shelley’s body failed her. “Legitimacy,” and the patriarchal family, failed her. The medicalization of childbirth failed her, both while being born and while giving birth. Shelley was visited by Lilith, again and again throughout her lifetime, beginning in her own first moments. She could have turned against that archaic power or railed at her; she could have agreed, with all the great men of her age, that motherhood was a horrifying thing.

  Yet Frankenstein has no Aristotelian, paternal disgust for birth and maternity. It doesn’t aim to subdue the mother-ruled world, or to purge the world of monstrous children. Shelley’s monster—her illegitimate, nameless baby, whose howl of primal loneliness echoes through the text—is her most human character: “I am malicious because I am miserable,” he says plainly.34 Even the monster’s most violent and appalling acts are only attempts to avoid being abandoned—the tantrum of a child who wants his mother to stop what she’s doing and pay attention, Mommy, look, Mommy, look, look, LOOK!!!!! Famously, he speaks of himself in terms of reproductive catastrophe: “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion.”35 In Shelley’s time, the word meant “miscarriage.”

  It’s the rejection of that child, the drive to abandon or destroy a baby that does not perfectly reflect its father, that is the source of all the book’s suffering. Frankenstein is a story of patriarchy gone haywire. It is about the failure and breakdown of violence and science, tools and rules, when confronted with
the brute power of procreation; the terror, which every mother must someday face, of creating a new person with no way of knowing what havoc you may have unleashed upon the world. In the founding myths of patriarchy, men impose their will on the dead organic matter of the world, creating order and safety and civilization. In Shelley’s story, Victor Frankenstein imposes his will on dead matter, and the dead matter gets pissed.

  Aristotle insisted that men were the superior and flawless part of any child’s conception; “it is impossible for the female to generate an animal from itself alone,” he said, “for the process in question was seen to involve the male quality [of soul].”36 Without that male quality, a woman’s child “will be no better than a corpse or part of a corpse.”37 Yet in Frankenstein, it’s a male who tries to reproduce without a woman—who dreams of creating a “perfect” creature, without female interference. And his creation is, literally, a corpse that walks; it is dead, hideous. Shelley was the daughter of two philosophers; there’s every reason to believe she knew she was being subversive. Her masterwork argues that it’s male arrogance, not female weakness, which creates monsters.

  The Lost World

  We do not need fathers. We don’t need fatherhood, as we know it now, or as we have known it—the imposition of a male authority, appropriating and controlling women’s sexuality in order to produce smaller versions of himself, casting aside the strange and newly formed creatures as failures of his control. Nothing about the rule of fathers, or male supremacy, is natural or necessary to the survival of the species. Much of the time, it doesn’t even help.