The Lady Vanishes: The Rise of the Spectral Mother

Abstract

Western culture has a predilection for displacing mothers from its literary, historical, and social narratives. To provide a framework to analyze maternal displacement across different times and cultures, this chapter identifies the expectations of maternal behavior, and the factors that lead to the marginalization and displacement of mothers in the West. The eighteenth century provides a crucial pivot for this analysis, because economic growth, rising literacy, and religious and gender expectations combined to formalize a domestic ideology for women—an ideology that reverberates through Western culture to this day. Yet this ideology did not provide cultural narratives for mothers, and the mother vanishes at the moment of her ideological definition.’Bad' mothers dominate the cultural landscape rather than’good' mothers, for’bad' mother narratives please by exposing and punishing the’bad' mother for her undesirable behaviors. The’bad' mother invokes, but does not represent, her’good' twin, whose narratives were (and are) largely absent from cultural representation. Instead, the spectral mother rises to fill a cultural and ideological gap: she depicts the desired ideology of the’good' mother with the narrative fecundity of the’bad' one. This chapter offers an anatomy of spectral maternal narrative—of maternal absence, maternal surveillance, and maternal death—and demonstrates that spectral motherhood fulfills domestic ideology, by facilitating child development and allaying anxieties about maternal sexuality, agency, and autonomy.