Victims and Villains: The Legacy of Mother Blame in Violent-Eye American Literature

Abstract

This chapter looks at violent protagonists in contemporary American literature, where trauma is a recurring method of representing such protagonists as deviant aetiologically rather than ontologically. Mothers are frequently used as the principle traumatizing factor, demonized and depersonalized in order to reassert their violent offspring’s humanity. The mother’s death or absence serves an important purpose in violent narratives. It can be utterly disastrous, presented as the pivotal traumatic factor that sets the child on the path towards violence, can be liberating yet traumatizing to an already damaged/abused child, or can simply hint at something untoward. The chapter analyses A. M. Homes’ The End of Alice (1996), a profound yet academically neglected novel, alongside Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), a text more frequently associated with absent fathers but one in which the damage mothers inflict on their sons is in fact thematically central, and Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004), in which the violence of the son is presented as inextricably linked to the absent mother. Taken together, these texts are used to challenge the assertion that mother blaming, rife in mid-twentieth-century American society, has disappeared from contemporary thought. A close analysis of these violent narratives reveals the persistent assumption that mothers make monsters, reminiscent of theories such as Momism and the schizophrenogenic mother. The chapter highlights the issue of persistent mother blame in order to expose and challenge its prevalence in contemporary American literature and society.

And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. (Whitman 1855, 27)