Monstrous mothers: containment, labor, and the Gothic feminine in modern film and television

Abstract

This thesis examines how recent Gothic media portray motherhood and emotional labor as forms of containment, turning the cultural ideal of the "good mother" into a source of horror. Drawing on Fred Botting's concept of the Gothic as "a writing of excess," Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and Barbara Creed's theory of the monstrous-feminine, the project explores how cultural pressures around beauty, care, and emotional stability shape women's roles in modern film and television. Feminist thinkers such as Adrienne Rich and Sharon Hays show how motherhood is treated as "natural," even though it demands impossible emotional and physical labor. I argue that Coralie Fargeat's film The Substance (2024), Mike Flanagan's Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Jac Shaeffer's Disney+ series WandaVision and Agatha All Along (2021, 2024), and Sam Raimi's film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) reveal how maternal containment, the expectation that women hold the body, home, and world together, creates the modern monstrous mother. Employing qualitative textual and contextual analysis, I integrate close reading, audience and critical reception, and auteur commentary to trace how Gothic narratives shift containment from the physical to the emotional and ideological. Each work reimagines monstrosity through maternal labor: The Substance ties it to the body, Hill House to domestic duty, and the Marvel works to emotional regulation and authorship. The findings confirm that the Gothic now locates horror in endurance itself—the quiet, relentless work of holding everything together. This shows that even feminist creators reproduce the same systems of control they seek to resist, revealing how motherhood remains a cultural mechanism of containment. Future studies might extend this framework to other depictions of maternal labor across media, exploring how empathy and care continue to disguise control.