“Motherly Duty”- The aftermath of Postfeminism and its development of conflicting ideals surrounding the ‘Mother’ within the Post-Millennial Gothic
By Hannah Dwyer
The term ‘postfeminism’ emerged in the 1980’s and 1990’s, especially in popular culture and media, to discuss the perceived shift in feminist discourse and practice. Key ideas include a focus on the individual empowerment and critique of feminist activism, suggesting that feminism’s goals have already been achieved during the second-wave of feminism that began in the 1960’s. The 1990’s established the phrase ‘Girl Power’, first coined by the feminist punk band Bikini Kill in 1991 and later popularized by the Spice Girls who adopted it as their slogan. The girl power concept has a level of duality in the phrase itself, as it can be seen as a celebration of female strength and empowerment but also used to potentially reinforcing patriarchal norms through its focus on individual empowerment and consumerism; ironic when considering how the term was first devised by feminist group compared to how it was spread within music by corporate made girl group. Furthermore, with the creation of social media, we are seeing similar phrases to girl power from ‘she-power’ to ‘girl boss’ on platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok. The focus on individual success among women has allowed space for old fashioned values to creep back into political spaces. Most significantly being the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022 by the U.S Supreme Court. Those with female anatomy do not have the legal right to decide what they want to do with their body. Now, we see the affect that the ‘girl power’ movement has had on women– particularly mothers- today with in the post-millennial gothic. Similarly, like the confusion of the definition of the postfeminism, the gothic is also difficult to state whether the gothic as either subversive or politically correct, simply because it is both at the same time (Georgieva 2013). Postfeminist gothic was first defined in mainstream culture around 2007, with Brabon and Genz’s book ‘Introduction: Postfeminist Gothic’. They explained that the gothic was always a family affair that was courted by perpetually decay of characters and ideas of the past and of the present (Brabon and Genz 2007). Complacency is major target of the gothic, and postfeminist gothic texts disturb complacent assumptions of the radical achievements of feminism and neither failure nor complacency are honest and safe spaces for women- particularly mothers (Wisker 2019). So, postfeminist gothic texts can emphasise tensions and contradictions of the attitudes surrounding the idealmother. I will be looking at how the aftermath of postfeminism has affected the gothic mother in two novels: ‘Nightbitch’by Rachel Yoder (2021) and ‘Just Like Mother’ by Anne Heltzel (2022). ‘Nightbitch’ focuses on the mother and her loss of identity when becoming a mother, being a good mother and the internal rage existing within all women. In comparison, ‘Just Like Mother’ focuses on the two conflicting ideals of what it means to be a good woman, as in a good woman is defined but her ability to produce offspring and, more importantly, her hunger to be a mother.
In 2003, Hall and Rodriguez established that postfeminism has four claims: 1) overall support for the woman’s movement has dramatically eroded because some women (2) are increasingly antifeminist, (3) believe the movement is irrelevant, and (4) have adopted a “no, but…” version of feminism (2003, p.878). What creeps in during the postfeminist period is the idea that ‘what more do we need?’ by woman who believe that second-wave feminist movement had achieved everything it could possibly achieve, which led to a great deal of discussion about postfeminism and its effect on female writing. As Rosi Braidotti notes, ‘post-modern gothic and post-gender sexualities are haunting the imaginary of post-industrial societies’ (Braidotti 2002); which suggests that when writing about the female experience, we cannot escape the past struggles of women who fought for equal rights. This is supported by Meyers who concludes that the interpretation of the word ‘post’ suggests afterwards, beyond, as though now the old beliefs and values of feminist work, which has gender and values at its core, is swept away, passed (Meyers 2001). However, what we know about the gothic is that nothing is truly swept away and passed; whatever has died only lingers and causes disruption until it is acknowledged. So, the principles of the second-wave feminist movement have become the haunting ghost of the postfeminist movement. It is possible that we will see that postfeminist texts have tried to move on from feminism, as Bacon (2018) argues, as it finds it too harsh, abrasive, sharp and certainly outdated. It can be noted that postfeminism has caused a major distribution within the feminism movement due to its contradictory outlook on feminism and definitional ambiguity. This has led to commentators to claim the term ‘postfeminism’ for various, even oppositional, uses ranging from backlash to Girl Power to poststructuralist feminism. Brabon and Genz (2007) argued that that the reason for this interpretive struggle is the fact that the root of postfeminist, feminism itself, is also characterized by polyphony and multiplicity that undermine the possibility of a universally agreed agenda and definition. The sentiment is echoed by Geraldine Harris (1999) who emphasizes that feminism has never had a single, clearly defined, common ideology or been constituted around “a political party or a central organization or leaders or an agreed policy or manifesto, or even been based upon an agreed principle of collective action. Therefore, this makes any attempt to establish a meaning of postfeminism muddled and misguided. One the other hand, postfeminism has been seen to analyse the ways in which feminism has been paired with individualism (Winch 2013). This framing understands postfeminism as harnessing the Anglo- American liberal feminist rhetoric of agency, choice and empowerment to generate bonds between consumers and brands (Banet-Weiser, 2012). It is intricately bound up with a conservative and neoliberal political economy in which feminism is being ‘undone’ (McRobbie, 2009). However, neoliberalism is an aggressive form of capitalism that opens every area of life to exploitation for profit and limits democratic restraints on corporate and financial freedoms (Harvey, 2005). It is a political project that dominates social and economic norms by enabling a culture where the individual is prized above society and choice is placed in conflict with collective action (Winch 2013). The issues presented by Winch and Harvey is that their focus is on the effects of postfeminist on the middle-class, white American woman and ignores any other marginalized groups of women. Consequently, McRobbie (2009) supports this idea as complete perfection is elusive, unviable, and beyond reach for non-white women and therefore this separation of women reverts all the work that second-wave feminism tried to achieve by uniting women. From this we began to see the development of the cultivation of female platonic relationship (or ‘girlfriendships’ or being a part of a ‘sisterhood’) which is an affective social relation regardless of if it is positive or negative. Women friends constitute the most precious relationships as well as the most complex for women. Eichenbaum and Orbach identified that the exquisite intimacy of female friendships, while also noting how they have the potential to generate powerful negative feelings: ‘behind the curtain of sisterhood lies a myriad of emotional tangles that can wreak havoc in women’s relationships with each other’ (Eichenbaum and Orbach, 1988, 10–11). This therefore suggests that women have created a sociopolitical environment where women, alongside the patriarchy, can be their own worst enemy in the post-millennial.
Postfeminist gothic is the link between second-wave feminism, which commonly refers to the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, and the notion of the Female Gothic was first created by Ellen Moers in ‘Literary Women’ (1976). The female gothic described a familiar set of narratives that revolve around an innocent and blameless heroine threatened by a powerful male figure and confined to a labyrinthine interior space (Brabon and Genz 2007). This is supported by Whitney (2016) who stated that the postfeminist gothic is a powerful but underacknowledged strain of American women’s fiction that tells tales of gendered violence and pain, and of course menaced and victimized women are, of course, staples of the gothic genre. Whitney continued to explain that the purpose of the female gothic fiction of the twenty-first century both powerfully critiques postfeminist’s candy-coloured world and uneasily lives within it, proffering strategies to manage women’s fears in dangerous times. Specifically, now that we have entered a period where the innocent and blameless heroine could be threatened by both powerful male and female figures that can mirror the current US government. This is done through features of abjection of the protagonist, who are socially invisible, to emphasise women’s disempowerment. It is my judgement that there is no other character, within the post-millennial female gothic, that falls victim of abjection more than the mother. Philosopher Julia Kristeva (1982) explains that abjection is a ‘processes by which something or someone belonging to the domain of the degrading, miserable, or extremely submissive, is cast off’; and therefore, abjection has become a critical term that connects to the body and bodily fluids. Furthermore, for Kristeva, the abjected is always an essential part of the subject and the process of disposing the abject is an understood reassertion of the self. Reyes (2020) explains that abjection can help reveal the subjective underpinnings of the social dehumanisation, be it governmental (systemic) or personal (a phobia or fear), of certain communities to the point where some lives may be perceived to be less important. These concepts can be related to the mother in the gothic, the mother essentially uses the abjection to separate herself from her child, that has been physically attached and using her as a life source, through the expelling of bodily fluids to regain her individualism and self again. However, when the child is born, her identity is forever changed to the mother, and she must then abject her old identity when she was a single individual. To expand on what Reyes is stating, the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022 has meant that those with female anatomy are no longer able to make decisions about their body legally making their voices and lives less important in American society. Additionally, Reyes continues to enlighten that when gothic deploys monstrous abjection, this tends to happen through the inclusion of a monstrous body that is presented in abject terms, which is often done through the disgusting bodily fluids. Childbirth and motherhood are excellent examples of the abjects during childbirth the mother not only abjects her child she also abject blood and faeces. Creed (1993) states that often horror films illustrate the work of abjection is in the construction of the maternal figure as abject. Creed clarifies this idea stems from Kristeva who argued that the maternal body becomes a site of conflicting desires as the child struggles to break free, but the mother is reluctant to release it. Alternatively, Rogers (2021) suggests that motherhood is rendered abject and becomes a monstrous space because the female body is much like an island, both insular and secretive as it incubates life where the capricious forces of nature operate unseen. Therefore, in fiction the female body is often constructed as monstrous as a result. In contrast, according to Nguyen, G.A.-N (2025), traditionally for women, having a child is the marker of the next stage in life – a maturation, a sign of transitioning to another plane of being. She then continues to explain that suddenly there is a whole new language to understand, a communion between yourself and other women like you – and that’s not even to touch on the new little person you’ve created, the one closest to you, a being both from and of you. However, as Palko (2021) argues that mothers and their mothering practices are often easy targets of ridicule and fear in moments of cultural angst or crisis and widespread obsession with monstrous mothers and their harmful behaviours reflects anxieties about the ways that mothering is an inherently unpredictable endeavour. This is down to sentiment that we cannot guarantee that a child will turn out well but because the child literally came from the mother, the mother is the source for any (or all) blame if the child is ‘wrong’. In response to Palko’s statement, I conclude that the aftereffects of postfeminism, with the added element of the current political turbulent discourse surrounding womans’ body in American, is the result of the mother once again being scrutinized and monster-fied in the post-millennial gothic. An example in post-millennial gothic where the mother has turned monstrous is in Rachel Yoder’s ‘NightBitch’ when an artist turned stay-at-home mum begins to transform into a dog as she struggles with the realities and pressures of motherhood. Similarly, Anne Heltzel explores the horror of female autonym and motherhood in her book ‘Just Like Mother’.
Gothic narratives have long used the house as one of their principal tropes; from its inception of the genre with Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1764) to the recent years with Mike Flanagan’s adaption of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting of Hill House’(2018) on Netflix as an example. The gothic has consistently depicted the house and the domestic space as not only as a setting for the unspeakable, but as a site that invigorates it. They continued to rationalise that the gothic has consistently recognized a quality invested in domestic space that has the power to unnerve, fragment, and even destroy its inhabitant unless something is done to arrest it and restore order and normalcy back to the house. Both Yoder and Heltzel explore in their novels that the domestic space of the modern home a symbolic prison for mothers. It is important for the mother to be present in the family home as she is responsible for the care and safety of the child within that space. Johnson (2:4) referred to the word ‘family’ as people sharing the same house, to a household. A similar definition can be found in Burke’s Reflections (1790) in which he suggests that the family itself is a political institution and its domestic structures or attachments are bound to the state and nation (Burke, 49). Again, at the heart of many gothic narratives sits a house, a trope that has remained consistent from its literary beginnings. In addition, Phelps (2017) states that the domestic space is frequently a place of containment and entrapment, especially for a female subject. Roger (2021) agrees with this as she writes that the gothic constructs both internal and external spaces as claustrophobic, insular and macabre. Freud (1919) identifies the characteristics of the intimate space that feels contradictory to the traditional view of the house as a place of refuge, comfort, and rest, for corresponding with the familiar (Heimlich or homely) but has become unfamiliar (unheimlich, or unhomely). This is also referring to the uncanny, which shows a fundamental shift in the relationship between the house and its inhabitant; this shift can be paranormally or supernaturally induced or due family conflict. There is a complicated relationship between the house and the female subject as the house indirectly reinforces or attacks ideology (Soon, A. and Soon Ng, A.H. 2015). Both Heltzel and Yoder use the domestic space to attack the imposed ideology around women after postfeminism
O’Reilly (2021) explains that the monster within us, the hidden side of motherhood, focuses on the monstrous feelings of the mother, particularly as they are expressed in maternal ambivalence, disappointment, and regret. However, little has been said on the monstrosity of mothering itself—the potential terror and horror the experience creates and causes for mothers. In Heltzel’s novel ‘Just Like Mother’ the protagonist Maeve becomes trapped in her ‘cousin’ Andrea’s house that resembles Walpole’s gothic house with its secret corridors and hidden spaces. Maeve slowly becomes a prisoner in her cousin’s house when her own life implodes as she loses her job, and her boyfriend dies in a freak fire accident (which we later learn that Andrea was responsible for) so she is forced to move in with Andrea and her husband. Maeve is ‘plagued’ by the ‘staticky noises’ coming from the pipes and ‘nightmares’ (Heltzel, p.142). Over time, Maeve settled into a ‘quiet cycle- wake up, eat, care for the doll, read, nap, eat dinner with Rob and Andrea and always took her medicine’ (Heltzel, p.173). From then Maeve is repeatedly drugged and raped by Andrea’s husband Rob. All this happened because Maeve refused to donate her eggs for Andrea to use as she couldn’t conceive another child naturally. Once Maeve figures out that this home isn’t as welcoming as she first thought, she tried to leave but it is too late- she is already pregnant. The house that was once her salvation and place of familiar comfort, quickly became a literal prison for Maeve as she is tied down to the bed and swallowed ‘ragged chunks’ of Andrea’s placenta (Heltzel, p.255). Furthermore, the house is also a symbolic replacement to US itself and the conflicting opinions surrounding motherhood and abortion by having Maeve stuck in a house with women like Andrea and Emily, who all have clashing views on motherhood. Andrea and Emily signify the conservative view that ‘childbirth is semi-miraculous and incredibly empowering’ and no women should ‘deny’ their bodies ‘natural right’. In contrast, Maeve believes that Emily and Andrea have drank ‘the Kool-Aid’ (Heltzel 2022, p.72). Kool-Aid being a reference to the Jonestown cult, where 900 people dies because they drank the Kool-Aid. This nod to a very devastating event suggests that Heltzel is proposing that motherhood is a cult that women keep drinking and though they don’t (always) die entirely, a part of them does. In Yoder’s novel ‘Nightbitch’ this shift in the domestic space is caused by a (supposed) supernatural change within the mother when she believes that she is turning into a dog. Gothic fiction is often a literature of transformations where identity is unstable and sanity a debatable state of being (Dryden 2003). Yoder’s mother believes that she is turning into a dog after a period being a stay-at-home mum. The mother ‘never longed for a family or even to be married’ but fantasized about the echoing rooms of a museum and her work in that white space but now all the walls are blank around her as she is blank too (Yoder 2021, p.82). Yoder specifically mentions ‘The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman as this nod to female entrapment in the domestic space being forced upon the mother by the ‘all-knowing’ husband. By not being allowed to indulge in her individual desires of work and creativity, she feels that her sense of self is vanishing into nothingness. However, she puts the blame onto herself as if it is her fault that her identity has gone. After all women didn’t have to stop their lives now, they can work from home (Yoder 2021,10). Yet, the mother only finds the strength to regain herself as an individual again and not just a mother when she gives into her inner dog and escapes the house at night. From then she can sense that society adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to women in her place and keep her there (Yoder 2021, p.49). Therefore, the domestic space for the mother in Yoder’s novel is her prison. Once she was stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an antifeminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable (Ibid). Thus, inferring that mothers are trapped in a horrifying cycle where they lose their identity and freedom when they become a mother and then come to hate the idea of freedom and individuality because they believe that they cannot have that freedom again.
Furthermore, Yoder uses the supernatural change in her mother to not only demonstrated the mother’s feelings of being trapped in the domestic space, but to express her internal need to be an individual again. Yoder does this by the mother ‘turning’ into a dog. The supernatural animals in texts are symbolic for ideal sites to explore radical queries and pervasive anxieties related to gender and sexuality. When we consider the political climate of when Yoder wrote ‘Nightbitch’; which was when President Trump was inaugurated and the topic of rights over female anatomy was an important discussion within American politics. Rachel Yoder herself explain that “After the 2016 US elections, I was in shock and I was also vibrating with anger” Ferguson (2024). ‘Nightbitch’ is a strange story of a about a sleep-deprived stay-at-home mother who, after apparently growing extra nipples, sharper canine teeth and a tail, develops a magical ability to become a powerful dog or “Nightbitch” as the narrator calls it. Yoder uses the dog-mother as a rejection of conservative views. Giving birth is the closest many of us come to being an outright animal Feigel (2021). Though the mother doesn’t turn into a wolf, but a domesticated version, we can still see the correlation to that of the gothic werewolf and what makes this interesting is that in literary folklore, the focus of the werewolf is fixated on the males’ experience. Also, based on what literary sources that survives today, the have been produced almost entirely in societies that have posited property ownership and economic independence as predominantly a male privilege. This is because the wolf is a threat, not just to the primal male hunter, but also to the monetised male landowner, seeking to protect his ‘social and cultural worlds and his ‘investment’ from a destructive, external force (Priest 2018). Often the werewolf for the male threatens him with exclusion from a society in which he belongs first and foremost but for the female is often also the avenue into this society (Wilson 2018). Certainly, while by no means all explorations of the werewolf in fantasy are written by women or are explicitly feminist, nearly all fantasy narratives about lycanthropy explore themes that have been a consistent feature of feminist critical thought, and a high proportion trace a specifically female experience of lycanthropy (Chantal Bourgault du Coudray 2003). For Wilson (2018), the difference between the male and female werewolf is the male werewolf it may be argued that the man’s animalistic alter- ego represents a part of his self ordinarily repressed, thus creating a literal metaphor for the beast within all mankind that must be kept in check in order for society to function, a female’s journey into the mind of the wolf should, for want of a better phrase, come naturally to her. Furthermore, Creed (2022) notes that the female werewolf offers a perfect example of the symbol of the femme animale and her ability to explore new ways of being and knowing. We can see that clearly within Yoder’s novel as the more the mother gives into her inner dog, the more at peace she is within herself and her relationship with her son improves.
Additionally, the dog is a symbolic image of the mother giving into her monstrosity because she doesn’t feel satisfied to be a stay- at-home mother which is a conflicting opinion to have during a very conservative time in the US. Dittmer (2024) supports this by explain that monstrous women are not monsters but material-semiotic figurations of female repression and social influences and is a sign that communicates a meaning of female subjugation and a concomitant desire for free expression. She is only monstrous because she is ‘an evil of nature’ and goes against traditional values as the catholic church claimed (Kramer and Sprenger 1971, p. 74). Yoder’s mother is monstrous because she becomes more outspoken against her husband, as well demanding more intense and animalistic sex from him and demands to regain a part of her identity again by wanting to be creative again. Towards the end of the novel, the mother and her husband separate and with this freedom the mother is existing a free, independent individual for the first time since she became a mother. Therefore, ordinary woman can be seen to become monstrous when she behaves in what is seen to be an unnatural manner by abandoning her proper feminine role and ‘violating gender norms’ Creed (2022). A woman’s monstrousness depends upon their violation of gender norms as it is a violation to power relations within society. Yoder’s mother has rejected the institutions of family and normal society and thrives which then exposes the fragility of the patriarchal order within western societies. Though the mother referred to herself as Nightbitch because she was a ‘good sport’, She knew the horrible truth, that Nightbitch has always been there, not even that far below the surface (Yoder 2021, p.1-9). Like the idea presented by Wilson, like the inner wolf inside women, women light a fire early in your girlhood and you tend to it, and you don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl (Yoder 2021, p.7). By the end of the novel Yoder novel the mother has given into her inner dog, but she was also trying to ‘train’ her son, like a bitch training her cub, to explain that she was not all his (Yoder 2021, p.163). By doing this, Yoder as presenting that the gothic mother can be freed from her domestic prison if she gives into her inner beast.
The effects of postfeminism have had on ideas around femineity and the purpose of women within society is clearly seen in Heltzel’s novel ‘Just Like Mother’. Heltzel uses the gothic double in her novel to portray the confliction views on the perfect women which centres around motherhood. We can define the word ‘duality’ as meaning that there are two of something, and that it has also meant that some one thing or person is to be perceived as two and the two may compete, repel, or resemble one another (Miller 1987). We have our protagonist Maeve who is represents the side of classic feminism that focuses on freedom of choice, body autonomy and not conforming to traditional values if she doesn’t want to. In contrast to Maeve we have her cousin Andrea, who she looks uncannily similar too, representing the girl boss attitude of postfeminism as she is a successful businesswoman and desires nothing more than to be a mother. It is not uncommon for cousins to look like each other, but Maeve and Andrea are often described as being doppelgangers of each other-almost the same person but not. Maeve was predictable and average, whereas everything about Andrea was unpredictable (Heltzel 2022, p.54). Now, the doppelganger in folklore is traditionally regarded as harbinger of death but it become a more symbolic complex psychological function towards the nineteenth and twentieth century. The concept of the double in literature is wide as it includes such disparate varieties as the actual experiencing of a version of the physical self, separate and apart from the self (Oyebode 2025). In contemporary gothic fiction the doppelganger can be interpreted though the perspective of political individuality within the feminine. The concept of the female double is and remains a very under-examined representation because the doppelgänger is usually associated with 'texts labelled as "male"' or ones that examine the 'psychology of the villain rather than the heroine' and deal with 'male angst' rather than 'female imprisonment (Spooner 2004). These views have not changed completely even after the second-wave feminism movement and now, as we exist in the postfeminist period, women are expected to also be successful in their chosen careers. Hence, the conflict that arises between Maeve and Andrea. Furthermore, the female gothic is perhaps par excellence the mode within which women writers have been able to explore deep-rooted female fears about women’s powerlessness and imprisonment within patriarchy (Wallace 2004). The history of the women writers for the gothic genre is extremely important as they managed to find and use a voice that have be fraught with difficulties from unequal educational opportunities to not being allowed to appear publicly as the author. Therefore, women's Gothic in general speaks for women's feelings of vulnerability in a world where their only power was the power of ‘influence’ (DeLamotte 1990). This duality continues with Maeve at the end of the novel when she gives birth to twins- Julia and Esther. ‘Julia is sweet and guileless and though ‘Esther is also sweet’ she is ‘cunning’ as well (Heltzel 2022, p.312). it presents the idea that these conflicting views surrounding women- by women- will continue for generations to come. In post-millennial gothic, women in western cultures do not face those same barriers as female gothic writers of the past. However, they still use the gothic to demonstrate the issues that women face. Heltzel uses duality with her two main female characters highlight the opposing views on women within the US right now. The use of duality allows the presentation of opposing views and forces to engage readers with conflicting ideas and perspectives that reflects the confused state that postfeminism has left women in.
In all, the ordinary woman can experience monstrous things and be monstrous at the same time. The ordinary woman as monstrous-feminine is abject in that she undermines ‘identity’, ‘system’, ‘order’, hence violating the rules governing proper femininity and standards of decency, thus creating trouble for the patriarchy through her self-questioning (Creed 2022). However, we are in an era where women, including mothers, are called things far worse than monsters for just existing- especially in social media platforms. Postfeminism had created a focus for women to focus on themselves and their goals and not come together as a collective which has allowed space for more conservative views on women to seep back into the political sphere. It has also set up a space for mothers to sit alone and compare themselves to other women. However, social media platforms have allowed more and more stories being shared of motherhood’s enormous sacrifice- and that these instincts might not come quite as easily, or at all, to some women (Nguyen, G.A.-N. 2025). This has allowed the conversation to allow talk about how parenthood is much harder for women than men as the emotional and physical labour that mothers go through is often taken for granted. Novels like Yoder’s ‘Nightbitch’ and Heltzel’s ‘Just Like Mother’ have successful fought back on conservative views of women and mothers and created an insightful view on how postfeminism is harming mothers through the gothic.
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