She concludes with a call to action for all women to celebrate and embrace the monster within. The scope of her analysis is wide, stretching all the way from Shelley’s Frankenstein to Jurassic Park. Her research is impressive, as is her ability to synthesize the experiences of real-life women with fictional portrayals in movies and books depicting woman as monster. She lightens the tone by injecting humor and sarcasm where appropriate and is not averse to poking fun at herself. In spite of some of the deeply alarming content, Doyle avoids saturating her book with doom and gloom. Her analysis of The Exorcist analyzes scenes from the movie in terms of cultural revulsion at menstruation and a girl’s sexual awakening. She argues the male lens portrays young girls transitioning to womanhood as something other than human, as demonic, possessed by the devil, ineffable, and spewing all manner of filth from every orifice of their bodies.
Her analysis of horror movies depicting pubescent girls was particularly insightful. Some women suffered from mental illness some were driven to madness and some were murdered simply because they were strong, independent women who refused to cower down to their husbands. The real-life crimes Doyle describes are of women murdered, persecuted, tortured, dismembered, and flayed.
Labeling women as monsters represents the extreme and violent lengths patriarchy is willing to go to punish women for daring to disrupt or undermine patriarchal control. Doyle argues the patriarchal projection of women as monsters, deficient, and deviant ultimately stems from fear of the power of women and their capacity to reproduce. She traces the concept through the ages and includes Freud’s contribution that women are traumatized because they don’t have a penis. Doyle divides her feminist exploration into three parts: patriarchal strictures on daughters, wives, and mothers.ĭoyle provides a historical perspective going all the way back to Aristotle and his claim that women are deviant males. In Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, Sady Doyle examines the influence of patriarchy on culture and media describes how patriarchal norms fuel attitudes toward women and women’s roles and illustrates the way in which acts of violence against real women are intertwined with popular cultural depictions of women, with each feeding off one another and reinforcing one another.
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