Where Are All the Mothers in Gothic Literature?
The halls of Gothic literature echo with haunted women—but rarely with mothers.
Look closely at the genre’s most iconic texts: Frankenstein, Dracula, The Monk, Wuthering Heights, The Turn of the Screw, and Jane Eyre. Mothers are strikingly absent, dead, or dangerously symbolic. Their absence is a shadow that shapes the Gothic world.
Mothers, after all, represent safety, origin, and continuity. They are (in theory) the keepers of warmth, the body that once shielded us. Gothic literature thrives on the opposite: disruption, dislocation, and fragmentation of identity and origin. The removal of the mother opens a vacuum where unnatural creation, sexual transgression, and hauntings take root.
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor’s mother dies when he is already in university and has a prideful perception of himself. In Mademoiselle Frankenstein, however, Océane’s mother dies in childbirth aboard a prison ship, exiled from Acadia—a death that fuses personal loss with political violence. Océane is born into sorrow, not privilege. Her yearning to create life comes from longing, not hubris. She doesn’t endeavor to defy death out of arrogance but to seek the remnants of her beloveds.
In Jane Eyre, Jane is an orphan. Her aunt is cruelly neglectful, which frames her longing for love and moral clarity. Bertha Mason—the madwoman in the attic—is a kind of monstrous mother figure: a woman with a past, a body, and a history too disruptive to fit the domestic ideal of the time. She must burn so Jane can rebuild.
Even when mothers appear in Gothic narratives, they are often ghastly. Consider the spectral mother in The Woman in Black, driven mad by loss. Or Lucy Westenra in Dracula, whose bloodlust transforms her from a maiden to a horrifying version of a mother: she tries to feed on children.
Gothic literature emerged during centuries when women’s reproductive roles were rigidly defined and idealized. To question the sanctity of the mother—or to show what happens in her absence—was inherently transgressive. The Gothic genre thrives on these taboos. What happens when birth goes wrong? When the family is a site of horror, not nurture? When love and death entwine?
In modern Gothic works, mothers are beginning to return—but not benevolently. From The Babadook, by Jennifer Kent to Hereditary, the screenplay by Ari Aster, motherhood is not a symbol of safety, but a source of terror and ambivalence. These stories acknowledge what early Gothic novels only hinted at: that motherhood can be just as uncanny, overwhelming, and monstrous as anything lurking in a crypt.
Mothers in Gothic literature don’t disappear—they become apparitions.
