Creelby is the key to Byler Endgame... just not in the way you're thinking (what I'm calling #BobGate)
Part 25: "It's Always the Mother" (1/3)
PART 1 HERE | PART 2 HERE | PART 3 HERE | PART 4 HERE PART 5 HERE | PART 6 HERE | PART 7 HERE | PART 8 HERE PART 9 HERE | PART 10 HERE | PART 11 HERE | PART 12 HERE PART 13 HERE | PART 14 HERE | PART 15 HERE | PART 16 HERE PART 17 HERE | PART 18 HERE | PART 19 HERE | PART 20 HERE PART 21 HERE | PART 22 HERE | PART 23 HERE | PART 24 HERE PART 26 (2/2) HERE | PART 27 (3/3) HERE | PART 28 HERE PART 29 HERE | PART 30 HERE | PART 31 HERE
Before you proceed, I suggest reading Part 24 first as it's the precursor to the arguments I'm about to make here. Buckle up, because this is a long, LONG one, and I'm afraid there's no cute cartoon animals involved.
Up until now, I've focused more on Dr. Brenner and Principal Newby's roles as the domineering -- at times violent -- paternal authority figures in Henry and Bob's respective lives; jealous to the point of incestuous; the main obstacles keeping them apart.
In my view, they are Canio; they are the Conjur Man*; they're King Triton; they are King Marke; they are Dr. Frankenstein.
*Within the narrative of the actual Dark of the Moon play, not "Alan Munson" in TFS
But what about Henry's own parents?
You have Victor Creel who, like his Frankenstein counterpart (also named Victor), not only turns away from his Creation, but denies his own role in creating the Monster.
From the Broadway version of TFS:
Virginia: He blinded that boy. Victor: It was an accident. [paraphrasing here] Virginia: But what if it happens again? Victor: WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?! Virginia: Help me protect him! Victor: STOP! [grabs her] Everything is fine. [embraces her] Virginia: He's not himself! And neither are you. Nothing has been right since you came back from the war [....] You can't just drink this away, Victor! This is our son!
We see in ST S4 that Victor portrays himself as the ideal husband and father of the 1950s, whose family was destroyed by a random "demon". But in TFS, we see Victor constantly downplaying Henry's attack on the neighbor boy back in Nevada, as well as the risk of Henry committing more attacks like it in Hawkins.
Virginia's concerns and her requests for Victor to *talk* to Henry (@thebestofmyrmidons) are brushed off with: "He's fine"; "Henry's a good kid"; "He made a mistake. Boys do that"; "It's normal." All the while, Victor is drowning himself in booze like it's Lethe water, trying to forget the sins he committed during the war.
A soldier so haunted by his own memories, so unwilling to deal, that he is helpless to save his family in their hour of need.
With Victor's absence leaving a hole in his son Henry's life, it's easy to see how the vacancy was filled by Dr. Brenner.
But what about Henry's mother, Virginia?
Her character isn't too different from how I described Brenner and Newby Sr. But perhaps I'd been disregarding her own role up till now because she never quite fit the character archetypes of the intertwining stories that make up the web of Bobgate.
However, if you substitute "paternal" with "maternal" in my description of Brenner and Newby, you have the classic "nightmare mother" so often found in the works of 20th century Irish playwright George* Bernard Shaw.
*Here we see a return of the name George in relation to Henry. Coincidence? Or just a really common name?
Shaw (who insisted on going by Bernard Shaw, rather than by the name he shared with his own absent, alcoholic father) authored plays such as Man and Superman (1903), Back to Methuselah (1921), and most famously, Pygmalion (1912), the source material for My Fair Lady. And, despite writing plenty of strong-willed female characters, he wrote *mothers* specifically as either absent, weak, or overly meddlesome.
Scholar Barbara Bellow Watson writes, "Shavian mothers, when they appear at all in Shaw's dramas, neglect, pet, and bully their sons, hamper and mislead their daughters. Some [...] are so thoroughly subjugated by Victorian womanism that they are merely ineffectual, bewildered burdens on their competent children."
The former descriptor seems to apply quite well to Virginia Creel, while the latter, much as I hate to admit it, fits Joyce Byers' S5 characterization to a tee (which makes me think this drastic shift might've been done on purpose, but more on that later).
Sidenote, but relevant to this queer reading of ST/TFS: Although Shaw and his wife Charlotte were married for 45 years, the couple never had children. It's suspected that Shaw himself was asexual, and the marriage never consummated. (My hunch is they had a lavender marriage, but I wouldn't take my word for it.)
The only reason I'm bringing up Shaw up at all is because Dr. Brenner does. Quotes him anyway. When he and Henry have their first one-on-one conversation in TFS that seems to be going nowhere, Brenner pivots:
Brenner: "Let's talk about your mother." Henry: "Oh God, okay."
Henry by this point is beyond exasperated with his mom (as you'll see Shavian children are wont to do) and scapegoats her, suggesting she's "confused".
Rather than pushing back, Brenner agrees: "It's typical actually. It's the mother -- it's always the mother."
In doing so, he echoes the words of John Tanner, the self-proclaimed "revolutionist" and main character of Man and Superman:
TANNER: [...] What the devil do you mean by telling Rhoda that I am too vicious to associate with her? How can I ever have any human or decent relations with her again, now that you have poisoned her mind in that abominable way? ANN: I know you are incapable of behaving badly. TANNER: Then why did you lie to her? ANN: I had to. TANNER: Had to! ANN: Mother made me. TANNER: [his eye flashing] Ha! I might have known it. The mother! Always the mother! ANN: [...] You know how timid mother is. All timid women are conventional: we must be conventional, Jack, or we are so cruelly, so vilely misunderstood. [...] TANNER: In short, the way to avoid misunderstanding is for everybody to lie and slander and insinuate and pretend as hard as they can. That is what obeying your mother comes to. ANN: I love my mother, Jack. TANNER [working himself up into a sociological rage]: Is that any reason not to call your soul your own?
While Brenner is no fool when it comes to Henry's game, Tanner is too caught up in his own "enlightened" worldview and "sociological rage" to realize he's fallen into his charge Ann Whitefield's trap.
Because at the time and, let's be real, even today, *mother blaming* was all the rage.
In her article "Pre-Oedipal Shaw: 'It's Always the Mother'", Shavian scholar Lagretta Tallent Lenker writes on how the concept of maternal responsibility "haunted" Bernard Shaw throughout his dramatic career:
"As with many other social issues, Shaw employed his dramatic art to examine various mother-child relationships and to study the centrality in creating an individual's identity, even in a patriarchal society. Yet he recognized that sometimes despite the mother's best efforts, her relationships with her children so often prove negative." (Lenker, 36)
To Shaw's credit, he blamed this on the *forced* social structure of gender roles -- one of the ultimate tools of conformity.
At the same time though, he considered himself a Creative Evolutionist (his own version of Henri Bergson's theory), obsessed with the concept he dubbed the "Life Force": "the driving, undeniable, uncontrollable quest of men and women to perpetuate, in fact, even improve the human race by attempting to create a higher life form known as the Superman" (Lenker, 47). Again, rather fascinating given he never seemed interested in sex and reproduction when it came to his personal life.
He first brings up the Life Force in Man and Superman via Tanner, who fights between his desire for independence/individuality as a man and Ann's desire for him, which he chalks up to the enchanting sway of the Life Force:
TANNER: [...] that purpose is neither her happiness nor yours, but Natureβs. Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. She sacrifices herself to it [...] Because they have a purpose which is not their own purpose, but that of the whole universe, a man is nothing to them but an instrument of that purpose.
At the same time, Tanner acknowledges how women are given greater responsibility as both life givers and child rearers, and is loud in his support for his friend Tavy's sister, who is suspected of being pregnant out of wedlock (no worries, she's married on the DL).
He simply does not want to submit *himself* to Ann's (or the Life Force's) wishes... Even though that's exactly what he ends up doing, much to his own dismay ("I solemnly say that I am not a happy man"). [Hold onto that.]
Shaw brings up the Life Force again in Back to Methuselah, where he depicts the story of Adam and Eve, who learn about reproduction from the Serpent, who also tells Eve how their mysterious mother Lilith created them:
THE SERPENT: She imagined it. EVE: What is imagined? THE SERPENT: She told it to me as a marvellous story of something that never happened to a Lilith that never was. She did not know then that imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
"To desire. To imagine. To will. To create."
We see in Back to Methuselah that creating human life is as much an effort of the soul and the mind as it of the body. Yet Lilith, who created Adam and Eve from her imagination, wills it so that *two* must share the labor of reproduction -- Man and Woman, with the latter taking on the burden of actually birthing human life.
Eve, as biographer Michael Holroyd writes, "blames Lilith's miscalculating in sharing the labor of creating so unequally between man and woman. 'That is why there is enmity between Woman the creator and Man the destroyer'."
And just like that, mother-blaming was "willed" into being.
"Lilith, one of Shaw's most inventive characters, serves not only as the first mother, the quintessential pre-Oedipal mother, but also as the imaginative spark behind creative evolution." [Lenker, 49]
Unlike his contemporary Freud, who at the time had come out with his theories surrounding the Oedipal complex, Shaw identified more with object relations theory, which focuses on the pre-Oedipal period when "male and female infants experience primary identification with the nurturing parent, who throughout history has almost exclusively been the mother" (Lenker, 40).
Lenker writes, "resolving the early pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother rather than surviving the Oedipal crisis [is] the key to achieving a healthy identity." In our society of strict gender roles, that means "the son must individuate from the mother in order to mature fully, while the daughter is expected to identify with the mother." (41)
It becomes clear that what Shaw really meant to call out when writing "nightmare mothers" was not the mothers themselves, but the social constructs that have created them:
If mothers were to blame for their child's development, it was because men were nowhere close to playing an equal role in raising that child. And if mothers were "nightmarish", it was because society kept them from living out their full potential as human beings first and foremost. Because they were prevented from being anything but a mother.
"This linking of the mother with both ultimate joy and distress evokes in the child an agonized ambivalence of love and hate toward this powerful figure, who becomes both icon and scapegoat, a convenient dichotomy for the patriarchy who retains power, in part by keeping his distance from the day-to-day-duties of nurturing and child-rearing." (Lenker, 40)
Virginia herself says "nothing has been right" since Victor returned from the war, which ended before Henry was even born. We eventually learn from Henry/the Shadow that Virginia's fear of spiders came from her own abuse at her father's hands, which included being locked in a closet with them for hours on end.
We see from one stage of life to the next -- from daughter to wife to mother -- that the males in Virginia's orbit have been her greatest source of grief, if not love.
So, if all of a mother's energy has nowhere to go but toward her child, wouldn't that include her rage, her bitterness, her resentment at her lot? Per Lenker, "In this system, the angel of the house can also be the suffocating nightmare mother lurking in the closet."
And if a child in the pre-Oedipal phase is to *identify* with the mother, wouldn't Mom's negative feelings become their own?
What happens then, when separation occurs? If separation occurs?
Virginia and Henry Creel, I think, make a compelling case as the Shavian mother and child with a very much *unresolved* pre-Oedipal crisis.
But does Virginia (entirely) deserve to be cast in a villainous light? Or is this case of "mother blaming" also meant to hold a mirror back up to us, the audience?
Freud (always back to Freud) did account for individuals attracted to the same sex in his theories, even if he did not center them in his discourse. Admittedly, he made a point to state on the public record that he didn't think homosexuality deserved to be labelled as a crime or mental illness; per his theories, homosexuality was simply what happened when children diverted from the "usual" resolution of the Oedipal crisis. And while Freud never seemed to have come to the conclusion himself (at least, not according to any sources I'm finding), mainstream psychology ran with the idea that *male* homosexuality was caused by the child's inability to separate his identity from his mother's, therefore sharing the same attractions as her.
Of course, in early 20th century psychology everything that "went wrong" with a child's development was, you guessed it, the mother's fault.
If she was a "refrigerator mother" -- too cold and detached -- then that was why her child had developed autism or schizophrenia. If she was too attached -- too affectionate or overbearing ("Momism") -- that would explain why her son was gay or otherwise too "soft" for the demands required of *men*.
Philip Wylie would coin the term "Momism" in his controversial, but popular 1942 book Generation of Vipers, and later have his theories legitimized by actual psychologists (setting back women's rights 25 years probably). These "theories" wouldn't be debunked until the 70s, then again in the 90s, but they placed mothers in "a no-win situation where they were required to walk a thin line between being over-or-under-involved with their children," as Kate Jones writes in her Substack article, "It's always the mother's fault."
It was this kind of talk that made the rounds in postwar America. Men were (reasonably) too traumatized by what they'd experienced abroad to take an active role in their family's lives, but rather than confronting the mental and emotional toll fighting and killing had had on them, they turned things around on the women who'd held the fort while they were gone. The same women who were immediately ushered back into the home (by the very same patriarchy!) to raise the next generation, aptly named the Baby Boomers.
And still, despite the mental gymnastics involved, a collective paranoia formed in the American psyche: That the women were corrupting the children, and that together, they were conspiring against Dad to turn their proud nation into a matriarchy (gasp!).
From the Broadway version of TFS:
Victor re: Virginia and Henry: "You two and your secrets."
As Lenker writes, "pejorative representations of motherhood may be a direct or indirect fear of maternal engulfment." (41)
I say all of this because it is desperately-needed context (IMO) for understanding Virginia Creel's anxieties as a wife and mother trying to conform to her children's needs, her husband's, and to her new, small-town community.
As far as the culture zeitgeist of the 1950s? Noir thrillers painted femmes as fatale, Western flicks reasserted American masculinity, and Technicolor musicals ushered in a romantic optimism that defined the decade. But another popular, but often maligned genre that took over was the melodrama.
Melodramas, colorful spectacles with sweeping scores that played big on emotion, were considered a "woman's genre" since they primarily took place in the domestic sphere. The protagonists were usually either desperate housewives and mothers, or struggling youths -- with these characters oftentimes at odds with each other.
Douglas Sirk's films have undeniably shaped the genre. But the music, lush scenery, and overwrought acting dressed up a greater critique on the pressure-cooker that was 1950s American society -- a culture of forced conformity based on gender (Written on the Wind), race (Imitation of Life), and class (All That Heaven Allows).
However, the time that's passed since these films were released has allowed critics to peel back yet another layer to Sirk's works -- its queer-coding. A theme I noticed in most of Sirk's filmography was taboo romance, usually due to one or more of the social conditions I mentioned above. Circumstances that would be easier for audiences to swallow than open queerness.
Hmm... Where have we (maybe) seen that before?
While there are those who believe Sirk may have been queer himself (presumably due to his aesthetic sensibilities and the stories he depicted), his muse and frequent collaborator Rock Hudson* is one of, if not the most well-known gay actor in Hollywood history.
Hudson would eventually become the first major celebrity to die from AIDs in 1985 at age 59. But prior to his death, he made the decision to disclose his diagnosis to the public, and in doing so, not only brought awareness to the AIDs genocide, but helped destigmatize the disease. At the risk of his own reputation and legacy, Hudson used his platform and gave voice to a community the government was desperately trying to silence. As Joan Rivers of all people once said, "Rock, in his life, has helped millions in the process. What Rock has done takes true courage."
Sirk's films have gone on to serve as inspiration for the melodrama auteur of today, Todd Haynes -- who is gay (and about to start filming his next film, De Noche, a queer period romance starring Pedro Pascal).
I acknowledge that I've gone on a bit of a tangent here, but if we're talking about the importance of queer history, media/ communication, and the themes of truth, courage, and individual authenticity in Stranger Things, I wanted to at least give voice to this.
While Sirk's pictures tend to define the genre, Nicholas Ray's 1955 coming-of-age melodrama Rebel Without a Cause is one of the most recognizable films of all time. It forged a "cool", new masculinity of leather jackets, hot rods, and James Dean.
But you don't need to look much deeper to realize how as a film, it's quite literally about "forced conformity killing the kids". Dean's Jim Stark feels he's being "torn apart" by his stifling family, Natalie Wood's Judy is struggling with being perceived as a "woman" in men's eyes when she's still a girl, and Sal Mineo's more effeminate, queer-coded Plato -- the most obvious "outcast" -- is gunned down by police who refuse to listen to what the kids are telling them.
Does this dynamic seem... familiar to you?
That's not even mentioning the gay subtext between Jim and Plato, which has been acknowledged by the movie's screenwriter, Stewart Stern, and Mineo (who was gay), who described his character as "the first gay teenager on film". The film's director Nicholas Ray was known to swing both ways.
So it happens melodrama is not just a "woman's" genre, but a queer one as well.
So, why did I just give a theater, history, and film genres lesson when this is supposed to be a post about "nightmare mothers"?
The point (though it's taken very long to get there) is that The First Shadow seems to be combining several genres and styles of storytelling, but specifically uses Shavian ethics/philosophy and the conventions of the melodrama (music, heightened emotions and physicality) to tell one particular story --
Not a tragic teen romance, or a sci-fi psychological horror, but a family drama: The breakdown of a mother-child relationship on account of miscommunication, generational trauma, and of course, conformity.
There's one last use of "It's always the mother" that stuck out to me when I was researching the phrase -- spoken by a character from Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin:
"'It's always the mother's fault, ain't it?' she said softly, collecting her coat. 'That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don't teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean. ...'"
The novel is about a mother's reflections on her relationship with her teenage son after he's sent to prison for murdering his father, sister, several classmates, and school staff members.
Once a successful writer, the main character, Eva, recalls her reluctance to give up her career in exchange for motherhood, the difficult time she had bonding with her son Kevin, and her increasing alarm as she begins noticing the signs of his psychopathy, which his father Frank ignores.
Sound familiar?
As Mary Shelley suggested when she wrote Frankenstein, a mother's worst nightmare isn't being perceived as the nightmare mother (though it's certainly a factor) -- it's being the nightmare's mother.
From Back to Methuselah:
Cain: [letting his spear fall into the crook of his shield arm, and twirling his moustache] "There is something higher than man. There is hero and superman." Eve: "Superman! You are no superman: you are Anti-Man [...]"
It's the fear that the child she bore -- the object of her desires, willpower, and imagination; the physical reminder of everything else she's had to sacrifice; her creation forged from her very flesh and blood -- has turned into, not "Superman", but "Anti-Man"... a monster she can no longer help... or control.
And when that fear supersedes a mother's love, that is when the "nightmare mother" arrives.
Sorry for the cliffhanger (and for taking longer than expected, @mylifeasashipper), but believe me when I say that putting together the framework for this argument has been a labor of love that's been tormenting me all week, but worth it I think. I think Shaw's ideas and plays to unlocking the stories underlying ST's female characters, particularly Joyce, El, Kali, and Mother Goose.
I'll be writing posts for those after Pt 2 of this "Nightmare Mother" piece, which I should be able to get out more quickly, since it's pure textual analysis, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
Until then --
Stay Tuned.
Disclaimer: I'm going to break my evidence for this theory into different posts under #BobGate (also #PuzzleGate), but if possible, let's keep this contained to Tumblr because I think there are folks who might care about being spoiled for what I think is going to be an amazing twist (if #conformitygate is in fact real.) **I haven't come across a theory/analysis like this yet, but if there is, let me know in the comments!
