Stranger Things & the Monstrous Feminine

by Akira Albar Kluck

Barbara Creed talks about the “archaic mother” in her essay “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine.” She discusses the mother as a negative force, and this can be in the sense of both morally negative and in the sense of negative space. This can be in things like Jaws and the shark’s mouth as something of a vagina dentata, or a vagina with teeth. She describes this as the “primeval black hole”, and the absence of a penis and terrifying empty space. Through this lens, one can view the Upside Down in the hit series Stranger Things as an archaic mother. This works especially well given the series’ overarching themes on motherhood and femininity. The Upside Down is the ultimate mysterious negative space. It is familiar, yet entirely unknown. Creed says that the focus is not on castration, but on “the gestating, all-devouring womb.” The main danger of Upside Down is not its existence, while the air is toxic it is essentially just a mirror universe of Hawkins, Indiana with bad weather. The real danger of the Upside Down is the creatures that come out of it, the Demogorgon, the Mind Flayer, Vecna. These are the things that pose a danger to the characters, the creatures the Upside Down gives birth to.

This connection has recently been in the cultural conversation, for admittedly less academic reasons. Netflix has recently created the “Stranger Things Experience” an interactive exhibition for fans all over the world, as well as several pop-up experiences to advertise for the newest season. In London, England they set up a pizza shop that people entered through what looked like a gate from the show. Many people online noted that this looked like a vagina. It is somewhat understandable to see how this could have been missed by an advertising team. This is just what the effects in the show look like, and they do have a certain Freudian tinge to them.

This is all underscored by themes of femininity and motherhood, particularly in the early seasons. The show’s initial draw in 2016 was Winona Ryder and her iconic performance as a mother looking for her son. The show frames her as a hardworking woman, trying her absolute best to be a good mother despite hardships. She is the epitome of a single mother, doing her best. We see how she does her best with Will, and how when he goes missing she refuses to give up on him despite seeming crazy. Netflix is extremely aware of this and attempts to play into it off-screen. Netflix’s companion site Tudum recently put out an article, Joyce Byers Is the Ultimate Single Mom. In it, the author Clint Edwards describes how Joyce and his mother share a lot of similarities, how important she is as a character, and how important his mother is to him. While every season she is seen as crazy but the rest of the characters, she is correct about every single connection or prediction she makes. She has the ultimate “mother’s intuition”, and time and time again it saves everyone. She is tough, and has gone to bat for her kids at every turn. She is also kind, warm, and loving, she provides nurture as much as protection. Where her ex-husband and father of Will and Jonathan were harsh, rude, and abusive, Joyce fostered the creativity and sensitivity of her children. She encouraged Will’s art and Jonathan’s photography. When reporting Will missing, she comments how Lonnie would say homophobic things. When Hopper asks if he is gay, she responds “He is missing is what he is.” She neither confirms nor denies whether Will is gay, and the audience understands she would not care, either way, she loves her child too much to take that into account, and that is a big statement for 1983. At that time HIV/AIDS was still regarded as a gay disease, and as such, it went almost entirely ignored by the Reagan administration and most institutions. Sick men were being thrown out of their homes, disowned by their families, and abandoned as they were dying. When Joyce tells Hopper that it does not matter if he is gay, he needs to be found is absolutely informed by the cultural context and understanding of the time period. She is the platonic ideal of a good mother.

This is directly contrasted against the experiences of Eleven, who has grown up isolated and neglected by the people in Hawkins National Laboratory. Where Will is protected and loved unconditionally, El must be the most powerful and the best of all of the child experiments to be properly taken care of. So much of season 1 is about her being in awe of Mike’s world, the things he has, the basic needs he has met. She is constantly confused for a boy, and we see that she desires to be feminine when he gives her a makeover so the Party can sneak her into the school. She is wearing real clothes, and not a hospital gown for one of the first times in her life. She gets to see how she would look in a haircut she gets to choose. In her view, this femininity would be how to attain the care and comfort she needs. She puts so much effort into her relationship with Mike, it is really all either of them knows.

In season 3, we see how tying so much of her agency after escaping the lab negatively affects El. After a fight with Mike, she calls Max and they hang out. This is the first female friend El has ever had, and Max encourages her to dump Mike and figure out who she is as her own person. They go to the mall, try on clothes, and El finds her own unique style. In season 2 she had a makeover by some punk bank robbers, but that was still something someone else picked out for her. Max encourages her femininity, independent of a man. They get to bond and experience the hallmarks of teenage girlhood and coming-of-age movies. Something both of them have been denied, with El’s childhood in the lab and Max’s abusive home life. Childhood and lack thereof has always been El’s central narrative. El’s mother is Terry Ives, who was experimented on while pregnant in an MK Ultra-style experiment. She has since been in an almost catatonic state, reciting the same few words in a rocking chair. She is reliving her past, and her trying to free El from the lab. She also has psychic powers. El goes looking for her after being let down by Hopper and finding some information and files he has saved about her. Her disappointment in her newfound father figure is what spurs her to look for her mother, another running theme throughout the show. There are not really any active dads in the show, with the exception of Hopper who adopts El. The rest of the kids’ dads are absent or emotionally unavailable, or in Lucas and Erica’s case just not in the narrative. It is the mothers that have active roles in the show.

This extends to how the monsters operate. While lots of horror antagonists are presented as phallic, particularly in the 80s slashers that inspire so much of the show, most of the horror is the archaic mother Creed discusses or its children. After sacrificing herself to save Mike, Lucas, and Dustin from the Demogorgon, El is trapped in the Upside Down. She needs to free herself in a scene so visually similar to birth. She escapes the expansive dark womb of the Upside Down and becomes her own mother, giving birth to herself in many ways. She has been her own mother for so much of her life, and her story has been her attempting to find that family she never had, as she deals with the dangerous monsters and father figure who wishes to do her harm, “Papa.” As much as Joyce is rescuing Will she is also rescuing and mothering El, and in later seasons literally adopts her and takes care of her as her own child.

Sources:

https://www.mylondon.news/whats-on/whats-on-news/netflix-stranger-things-pop-up-24097159

https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/joyce-byers-is-a-love-letter-to-single-mothers

https://www.glamour.com/story/the-moms-of-stranger-things

https://www.romper.com/entertainment/who-is-elevens-mom-on-stranger-things

https://www.academia.edu/47188889/Horror_and_the_Monstrous_Feminine_An_Imaginary_Abjection