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Paper presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Montreal 24–30 April, 2015

“Age Anxiety, Television Horror, and Off-Script Femininity: The Middle Age Mother

in The Walking Dead, Hemlock Grove, and American Horror Story”

1. draft version (April 2015)

Rikke Schubart, associate professor

Institute for the Study of Cultures

University of Southern Denmark

email: schubart@sdu.dk

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Age Anxiety, Television Horror, and Off-Script Femininity: The Middle Age

Mother in The Walking Dead, Hemlock Grove, and American Horror Story

by Rikke Schubart

Carol: You can never tell anyone, especially your mum. Because if you do, one

morning you wake up and you won’t be in your bed.

Little boy: Where will I be?

Carol: You’ll be outside the walls. Far, far away and tied to a tree and you’ll

scream and scream because you’ll be so afraid. And no one will come to help

because no one will hear you. Well, something will hear you. The monsters

will come.

The Walking Dead, season five, episode 14

“Torture the women,” French playwright Victorian Sardou (1831-1908) once advised

young playwrights on how to write successful drama plays. Years later, Alfred

Hitchcock referred to Sardou and added, “the trouble today is that we don’t torture

women enough.” This was at the time of The Birds (1963) starring blonde Tippi

Hedren who Hitchcock harassed until she suffered a breakdown on the set. Italian

horror auteur Dario Argento later, in an interview, added beauty: “I like women,

especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to

watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.”1 Neither Sardou, Hitchcock,

nor Argento mention age, and I guess this is because it goes without saying that the

tortured and beautiful women must also be young. Recently, Madonna lamented

ageism in our popular culture, feeling discriminated because she at fifty-six is in the

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wrong age demography: “It’s still the one area where you can totally discriminate

against somebody and talk shit. Because of their age. Only females, though. Not

males. So in that respect we still live in a very sexist society.”2

I have in earlier work described a postfeminist Horror Heroine as a descendent

of what Carol Clover coined the Final Girl. The Horror Heroine is defined by agency,

choice, independence, and incorporation of respectively stereotypical masculine and

feminine traits and behavior. The Horror Heroine begins with Ripley in Alien (Ridley

Scott, 1979) and includes Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984),

Sidney in Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), and Beth in Hostel: Part II (Eli Roth, 2007). If

the stereotypical female protagonist before Ripley was young, beautiful, and a victim

of torture, the Final Girl fought back, and the Horror Heroine gains agency. All are

young, either in their teens or twenties. Today this may be changing. I will here

examine the appearence of a middle age Horror Heroine, who is also a mother, in

three recent television series.3 In The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–) former mother

and now zombie apocalypse survivor Carol (played by forty-nine-years old Melissa

McBride) kills a girl and threatens a boy that she will let the monsters eat him alive.

In Hemlock Grove (Netflix, 2013–) vampire Olivia (played by fifty-years old Famke

Janssen) ostracises a daughter to ensure her own survival. And in American Horror

Story (FX, 2011) the Supreme Witch Fiona (played by sixty-five years old Jessica

Lange) causes her daughter’s malfigurement* and murders a teenage witch. Carol,

Olivia, and Fiona are middle age, challenge our maternal stereotypes, and are popular

with audiences. I pursue two questions, one theoretical and one analytical: first, I ask

how stereotypes operate as cultural constructs to create our ideas about gender.

Second, I discuss the middle age Horror Heroine in relation to agency, sex, and age. I

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conclude by asking if Carol, Olivia, and Fiona offer resistance to ageism and sexism

and if they are postfeminist role models for an expanded version of womanhood.

Postfemininity and Stereotyping

In What a Girl Wants (2009) film scholar Diane Negra says that “postfeminism is

consistently associated with a design for living that is deeply traditionalist and that

centralizes a female homemaker figure.”4 Postfeminism, a position hopefully

embraced in the early millennium, is today rejected by many (former) postfeminist

critics with disappointment. “Postfeminism,” says Negra, “continually hypes

empowerment but a closer examination of its affective registers reveals a sense of

stern disapproval and judgment for any manifestations of ‘off-script’ femininity . . .

[preferring instead] a self-surveilling subject whose concepts of body and behavior

are driven by status anxiety.”5 Genz (2016) also links postfeminism to neoliberal

forces and a rhetoric blaming women for their own victimization as they find

themselves caught between economic recession and impossible aesthetic ideals.6

I think, however, that postfeminism has been hijacked by neoliberal forces and

we need to be reminded of the usefulness of the term. I want to return to postfeminism

as the “loose attitude” Genz has described in her earlier work (2006, 2007, 2009)

where agency, plurality, and playfulness are key elements.7 One way such features

work today is in the way the postfeminist text plays with stereotypes. We know well

the stereotype of the angel in the house, the good wife, the good mother, the sexy

single, and so forth. Rather than point out female stereotypes in popular culture –

whether we think them “good” or “bad,” or, in ideological terms, emancipatory or

repressive – I want to consider their ecological role. Because they are not simply “out

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there”; they are in the cultural eco-system for a reason, they are flexible, and they

evolve and adapt to changes.

Let me return to Carol, who in the opening quote is caught stealing guns in the

pantry by an eight-year old boy. Carol was once married to an abusive husband and

had a daughter, but she is now single and a survivor after a zombie apocalypse. Upon

finding the gated community Alexandria, she and her group adorn the clothes and

attitudes to “fit in” which in Carol’s case means becoming a middle class lady adept

at baking cookies. Now, caught in the pantry, which holds both chocolate and

weapons, she threatens Sam: he can have cookies or be tied to a tree and fed to the

zombies. Carol was once a mother and wife. But she no longer fits the stereotype of

angel in the house. She threatens an innocent boy. So how to view her in light of

stereotyping?

In her seminal article “Gender Schema Theory: A Cognitive Account of Sex

Typing” (1980) cognitive psychologist Sandra Lipsitz Bem discusses how gender

stereotypes are used to divide our world into feminine and masculine in a process she

calls sex typing. This is when female and male become qualities extended to unrelated

things such as the shape of objects (circular as feminine and angular as masculine),

emotions (empathy being feminine and aggression being masculine), colors (red for

girls and blue for boys), and so forth. This gender dichotomy is the most fundamental

and comprehensive of all culturally constructed binaries. The idea that gender

permeates everything – body, behavior, our world – is a cultural construct. That is, it

is not innate. Once we learn the gender schema (children see themselves as gendered

at about five), we apply it to filter all experiences, both in regard to our self and to the

world.8 The gender schema – that is, the one society narrates – becomes fundamental

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to future experiences including development of our self-concept. Thus, a schema

(and, by extension, the stereotype) is not some idea “out there” that we can reject or

accept, but is a process:

A schema is a cognitive structure, a network of associations that organizes and

guides an individual’s perception. A schema functions as an anticipatory

structure, a readiness to search for and to assimilate incoming information in

schema-relevant terms. Schematic processing is thus highly selective and

enables the individual to impose structure and meaning onto the vast array of

incoming stimuli . . . [it] construes perception as a constructive process

wherein what is perceived is a product of the interaction between the incoming

information and the perceiver’s preexisting schema.9

Bem asks that we abandon sex typing and just be human, neither male nor female.

Sex typing is prescriptive and regulates behavior “so that it conforms to the culture’s

definitions of maleness and femaleness,” turning “cultural myths” into “self-fulfilling

prophecies.”10 It is a process whereby we assimilate all input as gender information

and it teaches us that gender is a dichotomy of male/female which is crucial and

fundamental to “virtually every aspect of life.”11

One might think, “what’s the big deal” and just live with sex typing. However,

as social psychology has shown, stereotypes have consequences for our behavior and

our sense of self. Thus, when a stereotype is positive it enhances performance, and

when it is negative it makes us perform worse. A case in point is women and math.

Two stereotypical beliefs are that a) men are better at math than women and b) Asians

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are more intelligent than Westerns. In a social experiment, Asian women were

divided into three groups and given a math test, one group unconsciously primed that

they were women, one primed they were Asian, and a test group not primed with any

information relevant to their sense of self.12 If you wonder, the Asian primed group

performed best, the woman-primed group worse, and the neutrally primed test group

performed in the middle. Thus, the positive stereotype (Asians as intelligent)

enhances performance and the negative stereotype (being a women) depresses

performance. (Please note that merely being unconsciously primed that we are women

makes us perform worse at tasks where we feel our identity threatened).

Where some stereotypes are specific (Asians as intelligent), others incorporate

several features. Thus, as a black, being reminded of race, or, as a woman, of gender,

depresses our performance because the stereotype is seen as a threat to our identity,

our sense of self. In his illuminating book Whistling Vivaldi (2010), social

psychologist Claude M. Steele explains how stereotypes are ubiquitous, existing in

the mind as a mental process and in society as implicit clues or explicitly formulated

beliefs. Because they are cultural there is no way to avoid them, and they affect us

even when we are unaware of them. Thus, the women in the math experiment felt

they performed their best, quite unaware that they underperformed due to anxiety

caused by the unconscious priming with the negative stereotype. Negative stereotypes

cause anxiety and ruminating thoughts and “a mind trying to defeat a stereotype

leaves little mental capacity free for anything else we’re doing.”13 Negative

stereotypes are “an ongoing threat to your perceived self-integrity,” says Steele, and

“[t]his is how identity threat is hypothesized to work in real classrooms [referring to

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minority university students]. It constantly unsettles one’s sense of competence and

belonging” (emphasis added).14

If we cannot avoid them, Steele says we can combat stereotypes by making

them visible and by using an “incremental” narrative about ourselves instead of a

“fixed” narrative. In short, an incremental narrative says that the qualities you want

are learnable and expandable, whereas a fixed narrative says that “you either have it

or you don’t.” You either are beautiful, intelligent, or good at math – or you aren’t.

No Angel in the House: Carol and Agency

Man must be pleased; but him to please

Is woman’s pleasure; down the gulf

Of his condoled necessities

She casts her best, she flings herself.

Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House,” 1854

The stereotype of “angel of the house” remains embedded in today’s idea of a nuclear

family of two adults and two children, where the mother, whether she works or not, is

the foundation of the family. Mother is the ground upon which Family is erected. The

angel-in-the-house stereotype is from Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Angel in the

House” written in 1854, an ode to Patmore’s wife expressing the ideal of a woman

selflessly devoted to her husband, home, and children.

In season one of The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–), the protagonist Rick

(Andrew Lincoln) searches for his wife and son in a post-apocalyptic America

overrun by zombies. He finds them with a group of survivors outside Atlanta. In the

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group is middle age housewife Carol (Melissa McBride, forty-five-years old in 2010)

with her daughter Sophia and husband Ed, a wife beater. In the comic book series,

from which the television show is adapted, Ed commits suicide during the apocalypse

and Carol commits suicide later out of frustration of being rejected by her lover,

Tyreese, for a younger woman. When the show started in 2010, Carol was a minor

character whose husband is killed by zombies in the first season (1.04). In the second

season Carol is promoted to a regular character; her daughter Sophia disappears and

returns as zombie in “Pretty Much Dead Already” (2.07). In the rest of season two

Carol is depressed and bonds with the character Daryl (Norman Reedus), who is

twenty years younger than her. In season three, where the group lives in a prison,

Carol learns to handle a knife and shoot a gun. Once meek and afraid, she can now

defend herself. Carol is a compassionate and nursing character, especially with the

children who she teaches in a provisional school. She becomes surrogate mother to

the girls Lizzie and Mika when their father dies. However, in season four Rick

discovers Carol has killed two sick survivors to keep the rest from being infected. She

tells Rick “it’s about facing reality” (4.04). Rick disagrees and throws her out of the

group, leaving her with supplies and a car: “You are not that woman who was too

scared to be alone. Not anymore. You are gonna start over, find others . . . and you’re

gonna survive out here, you will,” he tells her (4.04).

Later in season four, after the prison is attacked and the group scattered, Carol

finds Tyreese with Lizzie, Mika, and Rick’s infant daughter Judith, and saves them

from zombies. In “The Grove” (4.14) they find a house. Someone’s home. They clear

it for zombies and Carol bakes cakes and dreams of a future. The traumatized Tyreese

is unable to kill, but able to mother the children. Carol defends them with her knife,

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revolver, and rifle. Perhaps this could be a space for starting over? However, one day

Tyreese and Carol return from hunting and the unstable Lizzie has killed her sister.

Carol must kill Mika (so she does not return as zombie) and next shoots Lizzie, who

cries, “I’m sorry, please don’t be mad at me.” As the episode ends, Carol recalls

telling Mika: “You can’t win. You fight and you fight it, and you don’t give up. And

then one day you just . . . change. You’ll change” (4.14).

From abused wife in season one, compassionate and mothering woman in

season three, and compassionate but pragmatic character in season four, Carol keeps

changing. At the end of season

four, several group members seek

shelter at Terminus, a factory

facility that turns out to be run by

cannibals. In the season finale,

Carol and Tyreese catch a guy

from Terminus. “What are you

gonna do,” Tyreese asks Carol as

she prepares to help. “I’m gonna

kill people,” she responds and

leaves him to guard the prisoner

and the baby. Next, in “No S anctuary” (5.01), she camouflages as zombie, attacks the

facility with a bazooka and walks in and executes the leader, an elderly woman.

Season five has Carol as a strong, decisive survivor, capable of killing, caring, and

adapting. In “Remember” (5.12) the group is invited into the community Alexandria

run by a former Senator, Deanna, and every survivor is interviewed on camera. Sitting

Figure 1 Carol in Season One (1.03) and Five (5.01) of The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–)

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in Deanna’s mansion, a home interior with leather-bound books and Chesterfield

couches, Carol smiles and lies: “I did laundry, gardened, um. Always had dinner on

the table for Ed when he came home. Um. I miss that stupid, wonderful man every

day. You know, I really didn’t have much to offer this group, so I think I just sort of

became their den mother. And they’ve been nice enough to protect me.” Pretending to

be a naive, middle age, and middle class woman, Carol dresses in shirts and blouses

with flowers and bakes cakes. But she also breaks into the pantry and steals weapons,

agreeing with Rick that they should not become soft.

In the chapter “House and Home” in On Female Body Experience (2005)

philosopher Iris Young discusses the theme of home. “The rooms in house magazines

are nearly always empty of people, thus enabling us to step inside their space,” Young

notices.15 Home is where we construct our identity; it “carries critical liberating

potential because it expresses uniquely human values.”16 Young, drawing on

Heidegger’s discussion of dwelling as consisting of building and restoration (men

build and women restore), argues for the value of restoration. However, feminists are

suspicious of home as site of a feminist identity, since it positions man as builder and

keeper, and woman as ground and building material – a woman embodies home. Also,

home presents boundaries of included and excluded: “Longing for home is the effort

to retreat into a said unified identity at the expense of those projected and excluded as

Other.”17 In your home you feel safe – but safe from someone who is excluded.

Alexandria excludes both zombies and those humans not deemed valuable to the

community. Young mentions different kinds of home, some open and belonging to a

community, such as parks, churches, and communal spaces, others belonging to

families or individuals. Also, Young draws from Hannah Arendt the distinction of

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labor as cyclical (like household work) and work (producing new objects). Young’s

mission is to de-gender and re-evaluate the dichotomies at work in this discussion of

home as identity work; a discussion where men, on the one hand, are equated with

building, constructing, civilizing, and work (producing cultural objects), and, on the

other hand, women are equated with restoration, maintenance, and labor (serving men

and children and preserving the home). Young wants us to consider the subject as

fluid and her home as changing, and see household work not as labor (cyclical) but

also work (constructing our changing identity).

To take this discussion of home into the post-apocalyptic world of The

Walking Dead provides us with an intriguing example of play with stereotype and the

trope of home. Lying to the camera about her fondness of Ed and her lack of

contribution to the group, Carol plays angel-of-the-house. Thus, she uses the

stereotype to hide her

abilities to take charge

and kill. With Carol, we

know that in this world

there are no angels-in-

the-house. No home or

stereotype can any

longer provide an

identity fit for survival. The lesson of The Walking Dead is, indeed, that the angel-in-

the-house has disappeared because there is no such thing as a safe home; this goes for

the gated community, the church, the prison, the hospital, the factory, the bourgeois

Figure 2. Carol and Darryl in Season Five, equipped for fighting and foraging.

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mansion, and the cottage. No human dwelling place is safe. Thus, entering the gated

community of Alexandria, we know home as sanctuary is impossible and are waiting

for catastrophes to emerge.

Like home magazines, The Walking Dead lets the us picture ourselves inhabit

the homes left behind – after killing the zombies hiding here. This picturing is clearly

problematic and characters tend to distrust the homes. The group, offered two

mansions at Alexandria, sleeps together as a group in one of them, and Sasha uses the

portraits of former inhabitants for target practice in “Forget” (5.13).

The actor Melissa McBride, forty-nine at the time of writing (2015), is slim,

has grey hair, and ordinary looks. Her character Carol never wears makeup and

changes dress code from lower middle class

in season one to hunting/outdoors wear:

work pants, leather belt with sheet for a

knife and holding a revolver, loose blouses

and tight jackets, a backpack for supplies.

Carol was never a builder but did

preservation labor (washing) until season

four, where she became a forager, protector

– and a killer.18 Carol’s further change in the

series is uncharted territory; her character

dies at the prison in the comic book series,

and it remains to be seen how her

relationship with Daryl will develop. He is

Figure 3. Carol (Melissa McBride) in The Walking Dead was once an abused wife and a mother but develops into a survivor with agency and a silver pixie haircut.

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not in the comic book series at all, but proved so popular with audiences that he, like

Carol, has developed from minor character into protagonist. The two are intimate and

it remains to be seen if the intimacy will become romantic, in which case it will be a

middle age woman and a man half her age.

Predator and “Bad” Mother: Olivia and Sex

Where The Walking Dead uses a sentimental maternal stereotype – the angel in the

house –werewolf/vampire television series Hemlock Grove (Netflix, 2013–) invokes

the stereotypes of woman as sexual predator and bad mother. I am thinking of Olivia,

played by Dutch actress Famke Janssen, known for playing Jean in the X-Men film

series (2000, 2003, 2006). Season one of Hemlock Grove centers on the gypsy Peter

(Landon Liboiron) who arrives to small town Hemlock Grove with his mother, Lynda

(Lili Taylor). In first season the town is plagued by a serial killer murdering young

women. Peter, who is a werewolf, becomes friends with Roman (Bill Skarsgård), who

in the season finale transforms into upir, vampire. Both teenage boys live with their

mothers, Peter in a trailer in the woods, Roman in an aristocratic mansion with his

mother Olivia and sister Shelley (Nicole Bolvin). The show is narrated in eerie Twin

Peak mode combining a serial killer plot with a philosophical take on monsters. If

they exist, what would be their nature, and how would they ecologically fit in an

environment dominated by the human species?

Contrary to shows True Blood (2008-14) and Vampire Diaries (2009–),

Hemlock Grove is not a teen show about being single and falling in love. Season one

explores predators, female sexuality, and family values, and although Peter is

protagonist (and first-person narrator in Brian McGreevy’s 2012 novel from which

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the show is adapted), Olivia emerges as the most intriguing character. She is the rich

widow of J.R. Godfrey and owner of The Godfrey Institute for Biomedical

Technologies, which conducts state-of-the-art research in human gene technology.

She is European and comes from a rich Romanian family. Olivia dresses in striking

haute couture clothes, usually white, whether sexy underwear, clingy silk dresses,

chic two-piece sets, elaborate dinner dresses, or fur coats with matching hats, outfits

beautifully worn by former Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent model Famke Janssen,

born in 1964 and forty-eight-years old in 2013. Olivia is a lavish spectacle of

meticulously handcrafted costumes in contrast to white-trash gypsy mother Lynda in

cheap and practical working class clothes.

Olivia is also a gold digger and a sexual predator. Her husband shot himself

after Shelley’s birth (and revival) when he learned his wife was a vampire who had

married him for a safe environment for her children. Also, when she met his brother,

Norman Godfrey (Dougray Scott), she started an affair which continued after J.R.’s

suicide and ends with Olivia killing Norman’s wife and literally ripping out his heart

in season’s two finale, “Demons and the Dogstar” (2.10). She is no faithful wife but

has a strong sexual appetite. Thus, after having had sex with Norman at a hotel in

“The Angel” (1.02), she picks up the hotel’s bartender (Steve Lund) and has sex with

him in her car, throwing him out when he displeases her. She enjoys sex for her own

satisfaction, not for sentimental emotions such as love or feelings of intimacy, but to

satisfy her drives and as comfort when she is stressed.

Our stereotypical idea is a good mother as one who nurtures her children and

has an a-sexual body, because sex is seen as leading to offspring and having had her

children, a mother no longer “needs” sex. These two notions – mother as caretaker

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and nurturer and mother as asexual – belong to our mother gender schemes. Olivia is

not the nurturing type, but pressures her children. In “The Angel” she has taken them

to a fancy restaurant and when Shelley wants salad, Olivia insists her daughter have

meat. She is

unmoved by her

daughter’s

crying and

Roman reaches

over and dries

his sister’s tears

with his

handkerchief. Olivia treats Shelley coldly and in the final episode her daughter runs

away from home. In contrast, Olivia is intimate with Roman, whom she encourages to

be hard and

cruel,

disapproving of

his friendship

with Roman and

his love for his

cousin Leetha (daughter of her lover Roman). Her intimacy is emotional and physical,

and in the final episode “Birth” (1.13) she holds Roman in her arms when he must

accept the emotional loss that will turn him into upir (Leetha has died giving birth to

Figure 4. Roman caresses his mother Olivia in Hemlock Grove (2013–) in "The Angel" (1.13).

Figure 5. Roman kisses his mother Olivia on the mouth.

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his child) and is excited when he transforms into upir and draws blood from her. She

has procured Leetha’s child, offering it as food for him. “I am so proud of you,” she

whispers. Roman kisses her on the mouth – and rips out her tongue. “You talk too

much” he tells the now dead Olivia.

Following our gender schema, Olivia’s sexual activity and harsh treatment of

her children make her a bad mother. Barbara Selznik has recently argued that the

antiheroine in contemporary television series is also a bad mother, “unable to put [her

son] ahead of a murder case” (Sarah in The Killing ), that “bad mothering prevents her

from being a heroine, justifying her husbands’ disrespectful treatment” (Betty in Mad

Men). Where contemporary antiheroes are portrayed as devoted fathers “putting the

‘hero’ in the antihero . . . the inability to care for children is what makes [mothers]

less than heroic; it’s the ‘anti’ in the antiheroine.”19 I have in earlier work described

the bad and good mother in the action movie as respectively a mother choosing a

career and being harsh towards her children versus a mother choosing family and

being nurturing.20 Such dichotomies echo the Victorian angel in the house.

Hemlock Grove plays Olivia as antiheroine and bad mother. However, it twists

the stereotypes so they are not simply evil. Olivia’s intimacy with Roman plays on

mother as sexual molester. Theresa Porter in “Woman as Molester” says the female

sexual molester is ignored and her offenses often go unreported because they

contradict our idea of women as safe around children. “The issue of female child

molesters is generally so discomforting that any discussion on the topic results in

multiple digressions and diversions. The most common is the idea that any woman

who does this ‘must’ be mentally ill.”21 The “sick” woman is, of course, another

stereotype. Porter’s point is that women, like men, become sexual molesters and

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perform the same violent and sexual crimes for the same sexual and/or sadistic

emotional motives. However, society ignores this and “sees” her offenses through the

lense of the stereotypes “mentally sick” and “evil witch.”

One myth about women underlies many other women myths: the Maternal

Instinct. We maintain the myth that women are inherently loving towards

children by virtue of the fact that we carried them in our wombs . . . We need

to view women as people, not just mythical mothers but as full persons with

the agency to exhibit a vast variety of behaviours. And some of those

behaviours are monstrous.22

As a postfeminist, I agree we should view women as people, not mythical creatures.

Intriguing about Olivia is how her character invokes a range of female stereotypes,

and remains ambiguous, unpredictable, sensual, and popular with audiences. At the

end of season two Olivia is set up as the Big Villain of season three, facing nothing

less than a dragon, a character/monster she earlier took down in a fistfight. Olivia

invokes and breaks the dichotomy of good/bad mother: First, she is a vampire mother,

thus an alien mother. Yet, her body differs from the alien maternal body in the Alien

film series, which Barbara Creed describes as “the mother as primordial abyss, the

point of origin and end” and “the primeval ‘black hole,’”23 threatening to swallow up

men (referring to the alien space ship in Alien [1979]). Olivia’s is a sexy, middle age,

and female body. Writing of the female alien body in Aliens, Lynda K. Bundtzen

asked “why the female body must be represented with such primal terror, such intense

repugnance, and why it needs to be so resoundingly defeated.”24

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Olivia’s body is not repugnant, but attractive, sensual, erotic, dualistically

culturalized by haute couture costuming and animalized by her desires. Her age –

forty-eight – begs the question: does her sexual appetite challenge our stereotypes of

age, sexuality, and maternal bodies? Does she contradict what gender and media

scholar Eva Krainitzki calls “normative timelines” where gender scripts dictate when

women are too old for certain looks and behavior? Does Olivia “avoid the master

narrative of old age as decline” and is her sexualized body an alternative to both the

archaic or castrating mother in horror and also to sexualized youthful femininity?25

We never see Carol in The Walking

Dead have sex, however, in contrast

Olivia, and Jessica Lange’s

characters in my next case study,

American Horror Story, are both

sexually active.

Second, how does Olivia fit

the myth of a Maternal Instinct? Is

her cold treatment of Shelley and

intimacy with Roman unnatural?

From a cultural perspective – echoed

in Selznick’s call for a “loving

mother” – Olivia is not a good

mother. However, biologist and

feminist Marlene Zuk in Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex

Figure 6. Olivia (Famke Janssen) in Hemlock Grove (2013–) as striking spectacle in haute couture. vampire, middle age and sexually active mother.

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From Animals discusses maternal instincts in a variety of species, including humans.

Recently, maternal and mating behavior such as priming and bonding has been

transferred from geese and sheep onto humans. However, animal mothers need not be

selflessly devoted to children’s survival, nor are they always gentle, and primates

have to learn maternal care, which does not come as innate instinct. A biological take

on natural and unnatural maternal behavior, in short, does not present a gentle angel-

in-the-house as innate in humans. “The maternal instinct, as behavior that arises

absolute and predetermined from its primordial gentle roots, is a myth,” says Zuk.26

Many animals abandon or kill offspring when circumstances are deemed unfavorable.

“If the going gets tough, however, the tough – and those in it for the long haul – stop

taking care of their children. The idea, then, is not to take care of the helpless but to

maximize one’s reproductive success . . .”27

If there is a lesson for us humans in our biology, it is that human maternal

behavior is exceptional because, on the one hand, it is socially learned and, on the

other hand, it is culturally scripted. Thus, animals do not have gender schemes, only

gender. Any “single-minded sacrifice by a mother for her young” comes from

evolutionary calculation of what serves the species: the survival of the offspring, of

the mother, or of the group?28 Zuk mentions “a biology of family,” a term by

behavioral ecologist Steve Emlen, who described collective breeding in white-fronted

bee-eaters (a bird species). Sometimes, serving the species means sacrificing one’s

offspring or oneself. Olivia offers herself to Roman in season one, but in season two

she is restored to life by The Godfrey Institute’s experimental biotechnology. She is

about to let cancer kill her, but when she learns Roman is ridding himself of his

precious upir genes she returns to claim a human host about to be used for her

21

daughter Shelley’s body transfer, and to kill her lover Norman. When children fail the

survival of the species, Mother comes first, her duty to secure survival of her kind. It

is, at least, natural behavior in the upir species.

Reflections on Bad Mothering:

Fiona and “another version of motherhood”

My last example of the middle age Horror Heroine is from American Horror Story

(FX, 2011–), where each season has a new storyline with a returning ensemble cast of

actors. Jessica Lange, sixty-one at the time of season one, thus heads each season as,

respectively, semi-psychopathic mother (“Murder House”), sadistic nun and head of

an asylum for the criminally insane (“Asylum”), Supreme Witch in charge of a coven

in New Orleans (“Coven”), and owner of a freak circus (“Freak Show”). Lange has

won, among others, an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe award, and the Screen Actors

Guild award for her roles in American Horror Story. She plays a biological mother in

seasons one and three and also does “mothering” in season two and four where her

characters care for the mentally sick and the physically challenged. Central to the

show is a self-conscious and intertextual play with genre conventions in terms of

plots, characters, tropes, and audience expectations, embracing the grotesque and

gruesome, grand guignol moments, and bordering on camp and kitch. Because each

season has a new story with new characters, I keep this analysis to the season

“Coven” (2013) where Jessica Lange plays the Supreme Witch Fiona Goode.

Carol and Olivia are in the early phase of middle age, but with Fiona played

by 63-year-old Lange, middle age borders on old age and is not far from what is

called “deep old age” (more than eighty years old).29 The plot attacks age anxiety

22

head on with Fiona in episode one, “Bitchcraft,” demanding a juvenation serum at a

pharmaceutical laboratory funded by her late husband. David, the researcher, is

showing her a video of an sick monkey, “the equivalent of a human female in her late

eighties,” rejuvenated and jumping around after injections with his serum.

Fiona: I’ll have what she’s having.30

David: And you will. It should be ready for human trials in two years time.

Fiona: This afternoon. Preferably in the next half hour. I have a dinner

engagement. [David refuses]

Fiona: I’ve made you rich and soon-to-be-famous. I want that medicine. I paid

for it. And I want it now!

David: Fiona. You are a very beautiful woman. But if you’re just looking for

something cosmetic I can recommend a plastique surgeon.

Fiona: What I need is an infusion of vitality. Of youth. I want that drug,

David, and I want it now (3.01).

A Supreme Witch is the

most powerful of her

generation. When

another strong witch is

born, the Supreme

weakens and the

younger witch kills her Figure 6. Old and dangerous. Witch Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) flanked by voodoo priestess Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) and resurrected serial killer Madame Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates) in Season Three “Coven” (2013) of American Horror Story (2011–).

23

and gets her powers. Fiona has been ignoring her duties as Supreme (to teach and

lead) and left the Coven in the hands of her daughter, Claudia Foxx (played by 29-

year-old Sarah Paulson), who heads a school for gifted young girls in New Orleans.

Fiona now returns (“why don’t you just die,” Claudia welcomes her) and takes over

teaching the teen witches so she can find out – and kill – the new Supreme. It turns

out to be Claudia. In “Go to Hell” (3.12) Fiona stages her own death by inserting the

fake memory of her murder in her lover, a serial killer called The Axeman (Danny

Huston), whose ghost the teen witches have accidentally been pulled into the world.

When the Coven thinks the Supreme is dead, they go through the tests of The Seven

Wonders to find the new Supreme. In season finale, “The Seven Wonders,” a sick

Fiona, now aged into deep old age and looking ninety years old, returns to confront

Claudia: “You took my power the moment I gave birth to you. When a woman

becomes a mother she can’t help but see her mortality in the cherubic little face.

Everytime I looked at you I saw my own death.” “And all that time I thought you just

didn’t like me,” Claudia wryly replies. “It was nothing personal, darling. I loved you

plenty though. In just my own way. Which I’ll admit had its limitations. Your fault

was you were always looking for another version of motherhood. I can feel the power

vibrating of off you. It feels good, doesn’t it? Its mine, you know . . . I have to die for

you to truly live” (3.13).

Two elements recur in the season’s theme of ageing,: the horror of ageing and

the ageing woman’s refusal to age. Fiona’s line “I’ll have what she’s having” is from

When Harry Met Sally (1989), where it is said by a middle age woman at a table in

the restaurant where Sally loudly fakes an orgasm. Thus, vitality and sex belongs to

the young and is desired by older women who have “lost” these qualities. Fiona’s

24

mention of her dinner engagement further cements the connection between ageism

and sexism (her problem of being middle age and having a dinner engagement).

With the ironic surname Goode, Fiona’s character is clearly linked to “the

selfish, evil, or vain crones” in fairy tales and children’s classics like Maleficient in

Sleeping Beauty, the evil stepmother in Snow White, and Cruella De Vil in 101

Dalmatians, all obsessed with youth. Analysing negative representations of mothers

and grandmothers in fairy tales, Sylvia Henneberg (2010) points to the negative value

of aging and “the idea that as women grow old, they also grow evil and that any

power they have will naturally be put to ill use.”31 Henneberg identifies three roles for

an old woman –evil crone, self-sacrifising mother, and ineffectual nanny – of which

the first is the villain in fairy tales: the infanticidal mother, witch, or stepmother. “You

were the monster in everyone of my closets,” Claudia tells her mother (3.14). Aging

in fairy tales is represented as a stigmatising process where old women ought to

“‘naturally’

withdraw from

their social roles

so as to make their

ultimate

disappearance –

death – less

difficult for the

smooth

functioning of society.”32 Ageism is the equation between ageing, social withdrawal,

and physical decline, where the ageing woman is portrayed as a danger or a burden

Figure 7. Middle age people enjoying sex in Season Three "Coven" of American Horror Story (3.07).

25

and is expected to withdraw from her own life to make space for children to take over

her position and powers. This is, literally, what is expected of Fiona and what she

resists. At first glance Fiona fits Henneberg’s “highly problematic” stereotypical

wicked witch who combines ageism with sexism (and the idea that once women

become mothers, they no longer need sex, and sex becomes increasingly inappropriate

as they age). However, looking at the portrayal of sex, agency, and pleasure

surrounding Fiona, a rather complex picture emerges.

Like Olivia, Fiona likes sex and is a sexual predator.33 In “Bitchcraft” she calls

David to her home where she dances to psychedelic music and snorts coke and

demands more serum. When he refuses and is repulsed by her, she kisses him and

draws the life out of him, leaving him shrivelled and dead. David, a “good” family

man, had complained of being dragged from his daughter’s music lessons to serve

Fiona, the middle age “bad” sexual predator. And in “The Dead” (3.07) Fiona has

casual sex with The Axeman, who she has met at a jazz bar where he plays the

saxophone. He invites her for a drink in his flat (with the murdered tenant in the

bathtub). “Love transforms,” he says when Fiona rejects his flirting. “Come on, you

don’t believe in love,” she replies. “Okay, let’s table love then,” he says and offers:

“How about sex? Good, old-fashioned, great sex?” (3.07). The sex is rendered in red-

tinted images and an up-beat jazz soundtrack, clearly a pleasure for both of them.

Fiona then dumps him: “It was a charming evening, but that dead body in your

bathtub is going to start putting off some very noxious odors soon” (3.07). However,

when she learns he (as a ghost) has been in love with her and followed her since she

was eight, she decides to use him in her scheme to kill the new Supreme. This is an

unwise choice because when she double-crosses him, she is punished with the hell of

26

waking up every day in the proverbial cosy farm house in the country with The

Axeman as her eternally adoring, but also sexually demanding and physcially abusive,

husband.

In her analysis of actress Judi Dench as the character M in the Bond series,

Krainitzki reads Dench as subverting the “master narrative of old age as decline” and

the casting of 61-year-old Dench as a defiance of ageism, because the character M is

younger than the actress. 34 Dench continued to play M until Skyfall in 2012, retiring

from the role at seventy-eight. The media praised Dench as a WAG – women ageing

gracefully – a term indicating the minute attention society pays to women’s

performance of age.35 In a linear and normative notion of time and age, an ageing

woman becomes increasingly problematic and expected to withdraw and die, which

M and Judy Dench didn’t until M dies in Skyfall. Krainitzki notes the riscs and

possible scandal if a woman should break the age/gender scheme: “[N]ot acting one’s

age, for instance, is not only inappropriate but dangerous, exposing the female

subject, especially, to ridicule, contempt, pity, and scorn – the scandal of

anachronism.”

I see in Fiona and the casting of 63-year-old Lange a different take on ageism

and sexism than the Dench/M case. Dench was applauded for being strong,

masculine, and butch, and her character M does not have sex or is concerned with her

age. Lange, in contrast, plays a bad mother, a sexual predator, an ageing SYF (another

popular media stereotype, Single Young Female, modeled over Sarah Jessica Parker

in Sex and the City), and her character resists ageing.36 When she leaves the bed, The

Axeman accuses her of being afraid of her own desire and afraid of falling in love and

27

getting close to someone. “So what was this, some mercy lay?” she shouts at him,

kissing him, slapping him, and leaving him.

Both Olivia and Fiona invoke the possible “scandal of anachronism” by

enjoying and engaging in sex, thus presenting different WAGs than Dench. In fact,

the comments to the online article praising Dench as WAG reject the concept as being

repressive for women. Why should we care – just because we age – how others

evaluate our behavior and the way we dress? Why try to adjust to society’s ageism

and sexism? Where Dench is in line with a version of the reigning ageism and sexism

– that if an ageing woman won’t make room for the young, at least she must have the

courtesy to age gracefully – Fiona poses a more complex resistance to ageism and

sexism. She refuses to age, and to quit her position as Supreme, and to pass on her

powers to her daughter. She wants to keep her powers, to stay in power, and

furthermore to be an independent woman in control of her sex and social life. She is

conscious of being a bitch, a bad wife (she tells The Axeman she had three husbands),

and a bad mother. She are these things by choice.

Fiona – and Lange in her next role as Elsa Mars in “Freak Show” (2014) – not

only evokes the scandal of anachronism, but embraces it and gives it flesh (the

actress’ real ageing body), and poise in Fiona’s elegance and stylish dresses, and also

agency and attractiveness by being a witty, funny, and arresting character. Thus, a

scene where she parades the young witches through modern-day New Orleans, all

dressed in black and sporting hats (except for Fiona who protects her skin with

umbrella and sun glasses), is meta-conscious of the show’s generic monster, the

witch, as also an asthetic stereotype.

28

The young witches are less than happy, especially Madison (Emma Roberts) who is a

self-absorbed millennium. An example of Fiona’s wit is after the coven has been

attacked by zombies, who were resurrected by voodoo priestess Marie Laveau

(Angela Bassett), and they

burn the bodies in the

garden. The serial killer

Madame Delphine

LaLaurie (Kathy Bates)

comments that two of those

zombies were her daughters

and that “they deserved a

better mother than I could

ever be.” “I know the feeling,” Fiona replies. “Perhaps our shared tragedies will bring

us closer together,” says Delphine. “I doubt it. You are after all the maid” (3.05).

Fiona dug up Delphine, who was cursed with eternal life and buried in the 1830s, to

learn the secret of eternal life. She is now using Delphine, once a rich slave owner, as

maid in her coven.

Conclusion

Having examined Carol, Olivia, and Fiona, we can return to gender stereotype and

our initial question whether the middle age mother Horror Heroine presents off-script

femininities that resist rather than hype a self-surveilling and self-sacrificing angel in

the house.

Figure 8. Fiona parades the witches through New Orleans, a strange show of good and bad taste in witch fashion.

29

The answer is ambiguous. On the one hand, Carol has agency and a silver

pixie haircut, embodying the age of grey hair and aquiring skills necessary to hunt,

fight, and kill. Carol doesn’t trust any home as sanctuary or sacred. As she tells Mika,

she has changed. Carol’s change is an example of Steeler’s incremental narrative

where we combat negative stereotypes not by rejecting them but by countering them

with the knowledge that we can learn, expand, and change. Carol rejects ageism and

she is the only female survivor from the original group in season one. Perhaps

because Carol’s character shows us that women can learn and expand their social

roles. Olivia, on the other hand, is more problematic. Her role as sexual predator and

the focus on survival of her species – upir – combines ageism with sexism. She is a

sexualized spectacle and her supernatural defiance of ageing can be read both ways as

resisting yet also confirming ageism and sexism: Even if Olivia is middle age, actress

Famke Janssen does not look fifty years old. Last, Fiona raises the scandal of

anachronism by exposing and expressing fears about society’s master narrative of old

age as decline, burden, and danger. She is unable to learn and expand her behavior

and neither does she reject the aesthetical and biological decline of middel age.

Yet the three characters’ centrality, visibility, and head-on thematization of

age, sexual pleasure, and power still makes them material for new scripts of

femininities that question heteronormative time lines. Krinitzki, quoting Judith

Halberstam on the notion of queer time, suggest that “queerness can be understood

beyond the realms of sexuality, as a concept with the ‘potential to open up new life

narratives and alternative relations to time and space’ [because] queer time is

‘unscripted by the conventions of family, in heritance, and child rearing.”37

30

In recent horror television series, time and space have become queer indeed.

In the company of zombies, vampires, werewolves, and witches, it is possible to

narrate new scripts with middel age mothers. Theirs are indeed “another version of

motherhood.” Whether they are good or bad is beyond the scope of this paper. They

are first and foremost visible – which is a change from being invisible.

Notes

1 Dario Argento quoted from StoneCyper [a female guest editorial], ”Dario Argento –

Misogynist or Feminist?” on the website horror-movies.ca, accessed Mrch 15, 2015,

http://www.horror-movies.ca/horror_15321.html.

2 Madonna quoted in Daniel Kreps, ”Madonna Accuses BBC Radio of ’Ageism’ After

Song Ban,” Rolling Stone, March 14, 2015, accessed March 14, 2015,

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/madonna-accuses-bbc-radio-of-ageism-

after-song-ban-20150314

3 I take the definition of middle age from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders, American Psychiatric Association, which in Edition IV (1994)

defines it as 45-65. Erik Erikson defined middle adulthood as 40-65. Wikipedia,

accessed March 25, 2015, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_age. Old age, next, is

by some gerontologists divided into several phases, “young-old (65-74), middle-old

(75-84), and oldest-old (85+),” accessed March 25, 2015,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_age#Official_definitions.

4 Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants: Fantasicing the Reclamation of Self in

Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2009), 152.

31

5 Negra, What a Girl Wants, 152, 153.

6 See Stéphanie Genz, “‘I’m not going to fight them, I’m going to fuck them’: Sexist

Liberalism and Gender (A)politics in Game of Thrones” in Women of Ice and Fire:

Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements, eds. Rikke Schubart

and Anne Gjelsvik (New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming February 2016), no pages

yet.

7 Stéphanie Genz, “Third Way/ve: The Politics of Postfeminism” in Feminist Theory

7, no. 3 (2006): 333-53; Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz, eds. Postfeminist

Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007); and Stéphanie Genz, Postfemininities in Popular Culture

(Palgrave, 2009).

8 Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us,

(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, Kindle edition), *.

9 Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. “Gender Schema Theory: A Cognitive Account of Sex

Typing.” Psychological Review, 1981, vol 88, no 4, 354-364, 355.

10 Bem, “Gender Schema Theory,” 356.

11 Ibid., 362.

12 The experiment is described in Margaret Shih, Todd L. Pittinsky and Nalini

Ambady, “Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative

Performance,” Psychological Science 10, no. 1, January (1999): 80-83. For race as a

negative stereotype see also S. Christian Wheeler, “Think Unto Others: The Self-

Destructive Impact of Negative Racial Stereotypes,” Journal of Experimental Social

Psychology 37 (2001): 173-180.

32

13 Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us,

(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, Kindle edition), 123. The intriguing

fact that test persons can be affected by negative stereotypes and be completely

unaware of being affected even if their anxiety can be measured as increased heart

beat and quicker pulse and worse performance (in e.g. a math test) is reported by

several experiments. See Steele, Whistling Vivaldi, 170-71, and Shih, Pittinsky and

Ambady, ”Stereotype Susceptibility,” 81.

14 Steele, Whistling Vivaldi, 169, 173.

15 Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Lika a Girl” and

Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Kindle edition, location

1829.

16 Young, On Female Body Experience, 1696.

17 Ibid., 2065.

18 For a discussion of the character Carol see The Walking Dead wiki page, accessed

March 18, 2015, http://walkingdead.wikia.com/wiki/Carol_Peletier_(TV_Series).

19 Barbara Selznic, “Television’s ‘Bad’ Mothers: Putting the ‘Anti’ in the

Antiheroine,” blog entry February 13, 2015, on In Medias Res, accessed March 20,

2015, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2015/02/13/televisions-bad-

mothers-putting-anti-antiheroine.

20 For a discussion of the mother archetype, see Rikke Schubart, Super Bitches and

Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006 (Jefferson:

McFarland, 2007), 29-32. One example of a mother is female action hero Charly

(Geena Davis) in The Long Kiss Goodnight who transforms from good to bad mother

33

and finally into what I call “the new mother,” integrating elements form both the bad

and the good mother. For a discussion of mother in the Alien film series see chapter 7,

“Sigourney Weaver: The Alien Series and the Mother Archetype,” 169-194.

21 Theresa Porter, “Woman as Molester: Implications for Society,” in Grotesque

Femininities: Evil, Women and the Feminine, ed. Maria Barrett (Oxford: Inter-

Disciplinary Press, 2010), *.

22 Porter, “Woman as Molester,” 84, 85.

23 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis

(London: Routledge, 1993), 17, 27.

24 Lynda K. Bundtzen, “Monstrous Mothers: Medusa, Grendel, adn now Alien”

(1987), quoted in Schubart, Super Bitches and Action Babes, 182.

25 Eva Krainitzki, “Judi Dench’s Age-Inappropriateness and the Role of M:

Challenging Normative Temporality,” Journal of Aging Studies 29 (2014): 32-40, 36.

26 Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex From

Animals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, Kindle edition), 51.

27 Zuk, Sexual Selections, 56.

28 Ibid., 59.

29 See note three above on middle age and old age. The term “deep old age” was

coined in 1989 by Featherstone and Hepworth*. For a feminist discussion of age

ideology and deep old age see Susan Pickard, “Biology as Destiny? Rethinking

Embodiment in ‘deep’ Old Age,” Ageing and Society 34 (2014): 1279-1291.

34

30 This sentence, of course, echoes the famous scene i When Harry Met Sally (Rob

Reiner, 1989) where Sally (Meg Ryan) fakes an orgasm in a restaurant and a woman

at a neighbor table says to a waitress: “I’ll have what she’s having.”

31 Sylvia Henneberg, “Moms do Badly, But Grandmas do Worse: The Nexus of

Sexism and Ageism in Children’s Classics,” Journal of Aging Studies 24 (2010): 125-

134, 130.

32 Henneberg, “Moms do Badly,” 129.

33 Other mothers in “Coven” are also portrayed as sexual predators and punished by

death: the character Madame Delphine LaLaurie (played by 64-year-old Kathy Bates)

is another resurrected serial killer and slaver torturer, who bathed in young women’s

blood and killed her own daughters (who return as zombies); and the mother of the

resurrected young Kyle (Evan Peters) has been living off her son and also committing

sexual intercourse with him, a full sexual molester (played by 54-year-old Mare

Winningham). The resurrected and malfunctioning Kyle utters his first post-mortem

word when he kills her, screaming “No” in “The Replacements” (3.03).

34 Krainitzki, “Judi Dench,” 36. Dench first played M in GoldenEye (1995). The

female M was modeled on Dame Stella Rimington, the real-life head of the British

MI5 – Military Intelligence Section 5 – between 1992 and 1996.

35 See Bianca London’s article “Meet the New WAGs: No, Not Footballers’ Wives...

the Women Ageing Gracefully,” accessed March 25, 2015,

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2244604/Helen-Mirren-Joanna-Lumley-

Meet-new-WAGs--Women-Ageing-Gracefully.html.

35

36 For a discussion of the SYF, see Kay S. Humowitz, “The New Girl Order,” City

Journal, Autumn 2007, accessed March 25, 2015, http://www.city-

journal.org/html/17_4_new_girl_order.html.

37 Krainitzki, “Judi Dench,” 34.