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From ancient literary figures like Grendel’s mother to modern depictions such as the Other Mother in Coraline, the figure of the monstrous mother has always been a vehicle for our cultural anxieties concerning motherhood. Nothing is more frightening than the mother, and by association, her body, when it distorts, subverts, and twists traditional ideas of maternal nurture and care. When the mother becomes a site of trauma, death, monstrosity, and injury, it breaks the foundation of our identity and invites intimate fears about our own mortality and ruptures the comfort of the family. In the epic fantasy graphic novel Unsounded, Ashley Cope utilizes the figure of the monstrous mother through the bird goddess Ilganyag to play with and subvert traditional expectations of the maternal as nurturing and selfless, and to reveal the implicit horror in the exploitation of power dynamics between mother and child and the maternal body. Using Kristeva’s and Freud’s theories, I will examine the abject horror of the monstrous mother who complicates the traditional family structure.

Ilganyag’s first appearance in the comic sees her take form of an innocuous black bird haunting the Khert, the source of magic, memories, and reincarnation in Unsounded’s world. However, that is far from her true form. When she interacts with one of the protagonists, Duane, her torso twists out of the bird’s mouth, which functions as her lower body, revealing sleek, red, insect-like limbs and a row of six black breasts with protruding nipples. It is her face that is most human, albeit slightly feathered, familiar but bordering on uncanny. From her first appearance alone, Ilganyag’s physical form embodies the abjection of the monstrous mother, where “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4). Ilganyag is both human and animal, both divine and monster, with her red skin, black hair, and bird body, and this amalgamation of differing parts disorders our own sense of self. Are we, then, not so different from monsters, and not just one step removed from them?

Additionally, her seemingly benevolent nature, her guidance of the narrative’s protagonists in matters both spiritual and emotional, and protruding breasts, bringing to mind a mother’s milk, positions her implicitly as a maternal figure. In particular, the breast serves as a symbol of motherhood, as Timofei Gerber breaks down in his article “Eros and Thanatos: Freud’s two fundamental drives:” “the mother’s breast is not as unconditionally available as the womb, it needs to be summoned by crying.” The breast is the source of the infant's sustenance and thus fulfillment, but is also the infant’s first exposure to lack and denial. Its needs are not fulfilled passively and wordlessly as it was in the womb, and satisfaction is now determined by external entities: the mother hearing its cries and thus fulfilling her role by feeding it. However, this also becomes a site of the human’s primal fear of the mother: someone who could reject and neglect the infant as much as she can nurture it, denying its need for survival. The presence of six breasts is discomfiting because it reinforces the disorientation three times over, of both lack and denial. In addition, Ilganyag’s gigantic size also positions the human characters she interacts with as juvenile and child-like in comparison, beings which are both physically and mentally inferior to her.

On a psychological level, the monstrous mother is also a site of fear because she is a reminder of mortality: “The theme of the two-faced mother is perhaps the representation of the baleful power of women to bestow mortal life” (Kristeva 158). If the mother can bestow life, then the mother can also take it away, which makes her monstrous, the dual harbinger of both life and death. The womb is simultaneously a grave, a site of the abject where identity can be both birthed and annihilated. This fear is also reminiscent of the Eros and Thanatos drives within each human present in Freudian thought: the Eros drive desires a creation of higher unities, or a return to the womb, while the Thanatos drive desires self-annihilation, or a return to a pre-birth, inorganic state of being (Gerber). The womb, and by extension, the mother and her body, is the fascination of both drives: it is where a place of higher unities and self-annihilation can take place simultaneously.

Ilganyag’s body is a physical representation of the cultural anxieties present towards the mother, the fear of its destructive power and a place of nurture that has turned hostile instead. Her nipples sprout razors that she guides towards the mouth of her children, cutting their own mouths as they wean on blood (Cope 110). Additionally, when she leaps to smother Duane for his perceived betrayal and insolence towards herself, she reveals that within her labia, her vagina is lined with teeth, a vagina denata (Cope 196). There is nothing more monstrous and abject than the mother’s body that you cannot return to but will also destroy you in the attempt, a rejection from the womb. The mother becomes not a protector but a threat to the life of the child, and by extension, a threat to the proliferation of humanity and its survival.

However, the monstrous mother is not just limited a physical manifestation; it is also a emotional and mental monstrosity, one made apparent when Ilganyag manipulates her children and places their care second to her goals. Within the narrative, she gathers a group of men, the Black Tongues, throughout the centuries to function as both lover and child to her. To join this group, which offers the temptations of forbidden knowledge, they must castrate themselves and wear silver circlets around their neck as a symbol of her domination over them. However, this relationship is fertile ground for manipulation, control, and abuse. As Ilganyag tells her favorite follower, son, and lover Bastion when he tries to probe into her plans: “Shh... Mother is tending them. I am the sun that unfurls your fronds; the cool water that entices your roots. I nourish and hope, the subtle gardener. And for now, the garden pleases” (134). As Ilganyag speaks, she is positioned behind Bastion, cradling him with her hands placed provocatively on his chest and near the hem of his pants, visually placing him as both lover and child as she denies him agency. The monstrous mother is horrific because she destroys the traditional patriarchal family structure and subverts a woman’s typical role as passive caretaker, active only as she nurtures the husband and child.

The pseudo-incestuous placement of her followers as both lovers and children also become a symptom of abuse and control, where children are then placed as vulnerable subjects that the mother harms, blurring the traditional boundaries and protection of the heterosexual and patriarchal family. In Ilganyag’s own words, she is their “gardener,” which dehumanizes them as objects under her control, and the implicit warning that she will prune them should they prove to be undesirable growth. She only keeps them alive so long as the garden “pleases,” an inherent selfishness and conditional love that’s frightening when it means the mother considers herself first, and the child second, if at all.

This also ties back to the Thanatos and Eros drives and abjection: the monstrous mother is horrifying because she is the site of both creation and higher unity, but also complete annihilation, and the monster is not afraid to enact the later. The monstrous mother evokes primal worries over mothers who do not nourish us but instead reject or manipulate. If the mother’s womb is a site where needs are passively meant and the mother is an extension of the infant, then to the child, there is abjection in realizing the mother is an outside entity, disordering their sense of identity and creating fear. The monstrous mother arises from the mother who does not fulfill her patriarchal role and thus does not know her place, fragmenting our own identity as “child” in response.

The monstrous mother continues to haunt our imaginations because she serves as a site of primal, cultural anxiety over our own mortality, the precarious nature of our own identity, our inherent vulnerability but also as a mediation over women who reject, subvert, and resist their roles. As a monstrous mother, Ilganyag’s inhuman body and manipulation of her “children” embodies that fear of a mother who does not nurture but destroys instead. However, this monstrosity also reveals the instability and fragile construction of traditional patriarchal family roles. Through the destruction and deconstruction of such traditionally oppressive and strict roles for mothers and for women by extension, this can provide a different avenue for female characters that is not reliant on their patriarchal worth as womb and child-bearer.

extra notes:

ilganyag is not human, and as such, her affection cannot be measured in human terms. is it wrong for the divine to treat humanity as she pleases? there is an inherent power imbalance present in the god/worshipper dynamic, after all, and gods and humans occupy different social strata. and ilganyag is not a cruel person! she does not relish excessively in suffering, but simply sees it as a means to an end. she is monstrous from a human perspective, but she's not human; she's a senet beast. to ilganyag, her actions are justified, and everything she does is out of love, even if it's a love that's frightening to us. but then again, isn't a mother's love always frightening in its capacity to smother and control? isn't she right, to an extent, that she has more knowledge of this world than the humans that reside in it? what does it mean to be a god in the unsounded universe, and is it just a title we attach to beings that are simply inconceivably different from us?

there's a line that jacaranda says in particular that i keep turning over in my head: "mother expects father of all men." if ilganyag views men as a proxy for her lover, that explains her fascination with control and her jealousy over her black tongues. they're a way to reproduce her relationship with her original lover. then, in her words, we can also expect the inverse: ilganyag sees herself in all the women she looks upon, and so they become an avenue for her self-loathing.

bastion's circlet in particular is a source of fascination of me, especially when he compares it to dried cum in conversation to darkest paul. the collar is a sign of favor from ilganyag, but it is still a collar: a sign of ownership and possession. bastion's in particular serves as a violation of his body, and it's no coincidence he's her favorite either. while the other black tongues are able to take off their circlets, bastion's is rooted deeply in his body, physically attaching him to ilganyag, the mother-lover. and aren't children, in the end, just possessions of their parents?

unsounded in general is interested in deconstructing and criticizing familial roles and the traditional family structure, which is part of what the monstrous mother is meant to destroy. power imbalance is inherent to a traditional family structure, which makes it a fertile ground for control, manipulation, and even abuse. this isn't to say that parents are irredeemable terrible people or that Family Is Bad, but that the traditional family structure necessitates that children are powerless, and are treated as lesser because they are not seen as whole people. this is just how the system is intended to work, and adults are will never be punished for simply reinforcing this system. we see it over and over with sette and nary, quigley and matty, jivi and his particular family circumstance, the kept twins, and the plat children sent off to war. even duane is not immune from this, for as full of love as he is. parents are people, and people are flawed, but parents are also supposed to be a sole, unquestioned, all-knowing voice of authority. and this is a contradiction, the consequence of which children bear the brunt of.