The Gothic Mother—Dead, Deranged, Domineering, or Disgraced?

Writing gothic fiction can be challenging at times, especially when it comes to creating certain characters. Take my protagonist’s mother, for example. If I make her too relaxed or passive, this is how the conversation might go when my protagonist comes down the grand staircase in her flowing white nightgown.

“Mother,” she says, finding her by the drawing room fire, “who is locked in the forbidden wing?”

Her mother looks up from her embroidery with a serene smile. “Oh, that’s just your Aunt Lavinia.”

“What? I didn’t know I had an aunt. Is she your sister or Father’s?”

“Your father’s.”

“How long has she been up there?”

“Since she killed her husband by hitting him over the head with a candlestick thirty years ago.”

“Why did she do a thing like that?”

“He was about to run off with the maid.”

“Shouldn’t she be in prison?”

“No, the family doctor declared her insane before the trial.”

“An asylum, then?”

“Why? Does her sobbing bother you?”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“I sleep with a pillow over my head.”

“How can you put up with a situation like that?”

“It’s not as though we’d let any crazy old woman sob in the forbidden wing all night, dear. She’s family.”

It could be equally problematic if my protagonist’s mother were overprotective:

“Mother! There’s a governess position open in an isolated old mansion owned by a widower whose previous governess disappeared. Doesn’t it sound perfect for me?”

The concerned woman puts on her glasses and asks to see the advertisement. After a brief perusal, she looks up. “Don’t you find it suspicious that they specify applicants must be young, unmarried, and utterly alone in the world?”

“I didn’t really think about it.”

“Perhaps you could work downtown in a nice boutique.”

“But—”

How can I place my protagonist in great peril with common-sense maternal wisdom like that?

This is precisely why my protagonist's mother must be out of the picture by her sixteenth birthday at the latest. All I have to decide is whether she will be dead, deranged, or disgraced.

A dead mother is often my first choice. It gives the novel a dreary grave for my protagonist to visit, preferably in a drizzling fog—or, even better, when thick mist is swirling around the tombstones. In a gothic novel, that’s gold.

But she can’t pass peacefully in her sleep. Her manner of death must torture my protagonist until the novel ends and she’s magically healed from whatever wounds she’s carried since page one. And, let’s face it, no woman in a gothic novel ever dies peacefully. I must either have her waste away from a fever in a locked dungeon or fall from a cliff. And if she falls from a cliff, she should probably be pushed. And if she’s pushed, it should probably be by the person she trusted most in the world.

Her death also gives me the opportunity to have her leave behind something mysterious: a locket, a diary, or a half-finished piece of embroidery with the words HE’S TRYING TO KILL ME cross-stitched into the fabric and concealed among tiny pink rosebuds.

The important thing is that now she can’t object when my protagonist travels alone to a remote corner of Cornwall to serve as companion to a woman too weak to get out of bed because her husband’s mistress, posing as the maid, is poisoning her tea.

She cannot point out that the coachman looks as though he escaped from the local jail, has an evil glint in his eyes, and has deliberately taken the wrong road.

If she were alive, she might say, “Darling, if every person in the village goes silent when you mention the manor, perhaps you shouldn’t go there.”

“Mother, it’s too late. I’ve already quit my safe job and lost all my benefits.”

“Well, if needs must. But do bring money, sensible shoes, and the telephone number of someone to contact in an emergency.”

The deranged mother, on the other hand, is less convenient but considerably more atmospheric.

I can confine her to an attic room, a private asylum, or a cottage at the edge of the estate, where she’ll spend her days staring out the window and repeating the same cryptic phrase:

“The roses were white before he came.”

And—this is important—no one can ask what this means.

I can have the family doctor assure my protagonist that her poor mother must be plied with a toxic combination of morphine and chloral hydrate because it’s in her best interests.

Then I can allow her an occasional lucid moment, during which she might whisper something like, “You have Margaret’s eyes.”

“Who’s Margaret? Is she my birth mother? Is she the mysterious woman who walks the grounds at night? Is she the woman who leaves flowers on Father’s grave? Quickly, Mother. Tell me!”

Then her eyes glaze over, and she’s gone again.

The disgraced mother gives me even more possibilities. She’s absent from my protagonist’s life because she was involved in something scandalous. Perhaps she burned her grandfather’s will and forged another naming herself as sole beneficiary of his estate. Perhaps she stabbed her sister in the face with a shrimp fork for stealing her beau. Maybe she pushed her mother-in-law over the balcony after the woman took the maid’s side in an argument about the proper placement of linen napkins.

No one can tell my protagonist what her mother did, but everyone discusses it in hushed whispers the moment she leaves the drawing room—usually with the door ajar.

Her mother’s face should be cut out of the portrait hanging in the great hall so my protagonist remains unaware of their uncanny resemblance until she turns eighteen. Then elderly townspeople stare at her with mouths agape. Servants drop trays. Even her own father can’t bear the sight of her.

Naturally, I must have one servant who has been with the family since before my protagonist’s birth and knows more than anyone else about her disgraced mother.

My protagonist can repeatedly beseech her for information. “What do you know about her? Tell me!”

But the old woman has already turned away, overcome by an urgent need to polish a candlestick.

For the heroine’s mother-in-law, I often go for a domineering woman, one who presides over the household from a high-backed chair and wears enough black silk to upholster a hearse. Her son might technically own the estate, but everything is in her name, and she intends to outlive them both.

The domineering mother-in-law does not welcome my protagonist. She receives her.

There is a difference.

Welcoming involves a warm embrace, a gentle pat on the hand, or an assurance that she’ll always be happy in her new home. Receiving involves looking her slowly up and down with an arched brow and saying, “You are not quite what I expected.”

The domineering mother-in-law decided my protagonist was unsuitable long before her beloved son brought her home as his bride. Her family is nouveau riche—oh, the horror! Her manners are provincial. Her luggage is disappointing. She doesn’t know a salad fork from a dessert fork. But what truly prickles beneath her skin is that her son adores his new wife.

This mother has spent thirty years preserving the family name, even though the family has its share of adulterers, embezzlers, murderers, and people who dare to receive a gift without sending a thank-you card. Yet it’s the daughter-in-law with her insipid wardrobe and the utter audacity to smile and ask polite questions who poses the true threat to the bloodline.

Maternal roles are terribly important in a gothic novel, but the mothers I create must cooperate with the plot. I can’t give my protagonist a sensible mother or a welcoming mother-in-law because, well… what kind of gothic novel would that be?