In one of Bram Stoker’s lesser-known but truly terrifying parts of the classic book Draculawe hear news about a woman to pursue night and attack children. They call her the “Bloofer Lady”. It turns out that this villain is the already dead Lucy Vetenra. He was killed by Count Dracula. Now reanimated as a vampire, Lucy feeds on children at a London party.
A group of vampire hunters find Lucy in a graveyard. His appearance is terrible. “(W)e saw a white figure holding something dark on his chest, a pale white figure… We didn’t see a face because it was a boy with white hair leaning over what we saw.” Lucy is no longer human. He is a monster. Dressed in the pale clothes in which she was buried, her eyes are “full of impurity and hellfire instead of the pure, soft orbs we know.” Its wrinkled faces remind hunters of “Jellyfish”.
Vampire Lucy throws the boy aside and even tries to seduce one of the men before fleeing into her grave to avoid sunrise. The next day, the vampire hunters return to Lucy’s grave and drive a stake through her heart, killing her monstrous form.
The Bloofer Lady is one of a select group of female monsters that pop up all the time in pop culture. They are “anti-mother” women who subvert the stereotypical cultural norm of the caring and nurturing mother and instead prey on children and maliciously seduce and dominate men.
As scholar Barbara Creed has explained, the female monster is typically a repulsive object of “pollution,” a criminal entity that must be destroyed by a typically male protagonist. The “horror woman” is represented by mother figures who kill, often tear apart grotesque fluids or break the boundaries of human form and form. In an extreme example, the bony mother monster in the Alien movie franchise produces an egg that launches monsters that impregnate humans with alien babies. These babies horribly erupt from the chest of a person – male or female.
Freud’s “Phallic Mother”
Creed attributes the image of a formidable woman to its popularity FreudThe concept of “phallic mother”. According to Freud, phallic mothers dominate their male children, who discover the “absence” of the genitals in the mother. This is a fear about “castration”. According to Freud, this basic horror resides in the man’s unconscious. Freud uses the example of the snake-headed Medusa as a symbol of this horror. For Freud, Medusa is “the symbol of female genitalia”.
Of course, anti-motherhood predates Freud. But Freud’s influence gave it a pop-culture function, namely to create the monstrous mother-castrator. Barbara Creed finds that this misogynistic image has long informed our basic understanding of evil mothers.
In recent years, the formidable woman has seen some interesting changes. In the HBO series Sharp Objects, journalist Camille Preaker (played by Amy Adams) returns to her small hometown to report on the kidnapping and murder of teenage girls. He stays with his mother, a scary, controlling figure named Adora (Patricia Clarkson). Over the course of the series, we learn that Adora has been slowly poisoning Camilla’s sister to death. Munchausen syndrome (now called impersonation disorder) by Adora Proxy is a condition in which a person with the condition may falsely report that a loved one is ill, to gain sympathy. attention. In this case, Adora makes her daughter sick to gain sympathy, so the child dies.
Camilla’s mother becomes a suspect in the girls’ murder. According to a witness, one of the victims was last seen in the park with a “woman in white.” Bloofer Lady’s update combines Stoker’s vampire with the modern mother’s anti-intelligence. Adora destroys children indoors and outdoors.
But “Sharp Objects” offers some interesting twists while offering a fresh take on the female horror trope. The main character is not the victim son, but the daughter. The woman in white is more “teenager in white.” Camille’s younger sister Amma is a killer. She is a troubled young woman who has been psychologically damaged by Adora and thus becomes a monster herself.
Freud’s theories are certainly waning, but his monstrous anti-mothers are here to stay. They represent a persistent trope that deserves our full attention.
