It’s no secret that contemporary
television is gutsier than it once was.
It pushes limits, pushes boundaries, and pushes buttons all with the
hopes of increasing viewership. As a
result we have less predictable programming – shows that are more filmic in
nature and packed full of gratuitous sex and violence in ways that would have
shocked viewers even a decade ago. Despite
the reconfigured televisual landscape, in which not much is taboo, some plots
are still avoided for fear that they’ll be met with negative viewer reactions:
for example, the murder of children.
Set in a zombie apocalypse, AMC’s The Walking Dead gets away with killing
off almost everyone, including children.
But in 2014 the show featured a controversial episode that featured the
death of children not by hordes of zombies or villainous humans, but by one of its central characters:
Carol Peletier. One would expect
massive outcry against a female character who assassinated a child, but her
popularity actually increased in the following seasons (which found her again threatening
the well-being of a child). It left me
wondering what to make of fan’s celebration of Carol’s transformation into a
take-no-prisoners badass character.
Like many fans of The Walking Dead, I’ve been fascinated
by the character development of Carol for years and the ways in which the show
uses her to carry out its post-9/11 gender commentary. (For more on this see my previous post.) As she progresses from the role of the
emotional woman (an abused wife and mourning mother) to that of the hardened
female (an exiled group leader and child killer at various intervals), she eventually
pays the price for deviating from expected (gendered) behavior, and then –
surprisingly – transcends such punishment.
The reactions from fans and critics to the season four episode “The
Grove,” which debuted on March 17, 2014 – the episode wherein Carol, a
surrogate mother figure of sorts, decided to kill the child she was tasked with
caring for – is quite interesting. One
might assume that the emotional reactions viewers had to this plot twist would reveal
that various societal expectations for women are so ingrained in our culture
that even female characters in post-apocalyptic programs about hordes of
zombies are expected to conform to them.
However, the fan commentary concerning this character actually reveals
the opposite. For example, the vast
majority of the tweets about Carol that posted during and after this episode
have celebrates her deviance from traditional gender norms. This leaves me to believe that, despite its
hyperbolic plots and gratuitous gore, the violent landscape of the zombie
narrative might actually be an ideal space in which to interrogate conceptions
of femininity more broadly, and maternity more specifically.
Carol’s
transformation from a meek housewife to a rebellious leader, of course, makes
her later transgressions involving children all the more interesting. It's also interesting how the show shifts in terms of it treatment of Carol as her characterization becomes less and less feminine. For example, when Carol first acts
in way that evokes a sense of masculine power and autonomy, she is punished for
it (although later in the show such acts are applauded).
This is seen most clearly in season
three when Carol begins training the children of her community in survival tactics, causing some characters to question her position
as a role model. This season also finds Carol making the call to kill two
fellow survivors who were infected by a plague that threatened to wipe out the entire
group. Despite the fact that the group’s
leader, Rick, had made morally questionable, unilateral decisions on behalf of
the community, he casts Carol out as a punishment for her action. In this
example, Carol, who grows away from her status as “emotional woman” and into a
symbolic stand in for the “rational man,” making the cold and calculating - but
logical - call to protect the group, is punished for not behaving according to
social norms.
This sexist plot development was completely in line
with the show’s gender bias, as many have noted the program’s problem with patriarchy. For example, one
critic applied the comic book writer, Gail Simone’s notion of “fridging” to the
show. She coined the phrase “women in
refrigerators” to refer to the array of female characters who were “depowered,
raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator” in popular comics. Since, feminist comic book fans have adopted
the term “fridging” to note the pointless death of a female character in order
to fuel a male character’s pain and narrative action. This happens
repeatedly on The Walking Dead. Along these lines, Sara Century, a media
reviewer for Bitch Media, notes the
shows problematic portrayals of weak women, asking: “Does someone
want to do a tally of how many women in The
Walking Dead attempt suicide, go insane, or give up their authority by
deferring to men? Because every single female character does at least one of
those things. Just giving you a head's up.”
In a piece for Dame Magazine,
Laura Bogart analyzed the show’s lack of gender complexity, analyzing the ways
in which the show undoes even its strongest female characters. For example,
[The] formidable female warrior,
Michonne, is treated like a dreadlocked, katana-wielding Man With No Name—until
a rather bland, predictable attempt to humanize, or, rather, feminize her. Of
course, [viewers discover she lost] a young child in the apocalypse. Of course,
after the loss of her child, she ceases to feel like a person. Of course, the
only way for her to heal is to bond with the hero’s baby daughter.
Considering the show’s
general treatment of women, when Carol was punished for not towing the gender
line, it wasn’t a surprise. What was
surprising, though, was what happened when she returned from exile.
Carol’s
ejection from the group is not permanent and when she returns, I would argue the
patriarchal center of the show begins to shift.
In season four she reunites with part of the community after they have
all been forced (once again) on the run.
She ends up joining one other adult survivor (Tyreese) who has ended up
traveling with two sibling girls (Lizzie and Mika), and an infant (Judith, Rick’s
daughter). Despite, having progressed
far from her original matronly characterization, these episodes in which she
travels with this set forces her back into playing the role of maternal stand
in for the children she is protecting. Her
role as surrogate mother to this trio of girls is terminated in the season four
episode “The Grove,” which aired on March 16th, 2014.
An
oversimplified summary of the episode would be as follows: Carol and Tyreese find temporary shelter in
an idyllic cottage in the woods. Carol
works to continue developing survival skills in the two sisters: the gentle Mika is resistant to killing
anything (she refuses to shoot a deer, commenting that they could just eat peaches
instead) and the troubled Lizzie (who suffers from an unspecified emotional
disorder) refuses to believe that the walkers are not human (the opening scene
of the episode foreshadows a moment wherein she attempts to play tag with attacking
walker). Even after a group of zombies
attack them and they are all forced to defend themselves, Lizzie holds fast to
her belief that the walkers are not necessarily dangerous. So sure is she of her world view that she
decides to stab her younger sister to death in order to prove to the adults
that Mika could change and not be a threat.
Viewers are only privy to the aftermath of this violent act as they
discover this incident just as Carol and Tyreese do, returning to the property
to find Lizzie in front her sister’s dead body, still holding a knife with baby
Judith in reach and apparently next for the kill. They manage to lure Lizzie away from the
scene, Carol is forced to stab Mika in the head to prevent the change Lizzie so
desperately wanted to witness, and a decision is made. Carol tells Tyreese that Lizzie can’t be
around other people and then she takes the girl outside to the field, tells her
to “look at the flowers,” raises a gun to the back of her head and kills her.
Fan
reaction to the episode pretty consistent:
those live tweeting the episode noted how shocking, sad, and horrifying
the episode was but when Carol’s role in Lizzie’s death was specifically mentioned,
most voiced sympathy for the difficult situation she was placed in. For example, one twitter user wrote “Did not
see that coming but so good & love Carol even more.” Another
wrote: “those poor girls, but I’d do the
same as Carol.” And others
celebrated Carol’s survivalist instincts, seeming less phased by the death of
the children: “She plays no games. Carol
will take out any threat at any age.”
While
normally a scene involving a woman killing a child would evoke massive negative
reactions (likely directed at the female character), the fans of The Walking Dead – either because they
are already have an abnormally high tolerance for violence or because the
post-apocalyptic setting recalibrates moral compasses – did not produce an
onslaught of blaming tweets. In fact, the line “look at the flowers” instead
became a recurrent hashtag associated with Carol in the two seasons to follow,
used to not signify a horribly sad incident but instead to celebrate Carol’s
status as a badass.
The program continue to put Carol in situations that
showed her acting against so-called normal maternal impulses. In Season Five the reunited group finds
shelter within the previously mentioned gated community just outside of
Alexandria. Carol re-invents herself as
a domesticized, den mother, baking casseroles and cookies, and sporting knit
sweaters and floral shirts. The show
makes it quite clear that this feminine persona is an intelligent masquerade,
intended to make the residents underestimate her. As Century notes, Carol’s performance points
out “how gender is something we do – it’s a performative activity that we have
to continuously work at because it’s as socially constructed idea. Carol
performs this weak embodiment of women in order to be able to sneak around the
community and do as she wishes. At one
point Carol even remarks to Rick, ‘You know what’s great about this place? I
get to be invisible again.’ Carol challenges the innateness of gender by not
only being an extremely strong, capable survivor, but also by masquerading as
the opposite kind of woman she has become now.” And,
surprisingly, fans embrace her character evolution whole-heartedly, even when
she threatens to kill another child in a less justified encounter (while
dressed like “mommy knows best”).
A young boy, Sam, discovers Carol breaking into the gun
repository, revealing her façade. In a
moment of chilling dialogue, Carol threatens the boy, detailing what she will
do to him if he tells anyone what he’s seen:
If you [tell], one morning you will
wake up and you won’t be in your bed.
You will be the walls, far, far away tied to a tree. You will scream and scream because you will
be so afraid and no one will come to help because no one will hear you. Well, something will hear you. The monsters
will come… they will tear you apart and eat you all up while you are still
alive. All while you can still feel
it. Then afterwards your mom will never
know what happened to you. Or you can
promise not ever to tell anyone what you saw here and then nothing will happen
and you will get cookies, lots of cookies.
I know what I think you should do.
(“Forget” 5.13).
In many ways this scene
is more disturbing than the one wherein Carol is forced to kill Lizzie, but,
yet again, no fan outrage surfaced in the Twitterverse. In fact, fans jokingly posted tweets
like: “You’re not her first kid, Sam. Watch
yourself #Lookattheflowers.”
In the
end the Alexandria residents benefit from the faux housewife in their midst as
when their walls are breeched by violent infiltrators, it is Carol who saves
the day, trading in one costume for another (stripping off her matronly attire,
donning the clothing of a deceased assassin, smearing blood across her face (copying
their distasteful war paint), systematically killing the invaders off one by
one, shattering the illusion she has crafted for herself in order to save many
community members.
Perhaps
viewers embrace Carol because of her very divergence from the conventional
portrayals of television mothers. After
all, Carol’s character becomes “richer, more complex and formidable when she isliberated from parenting.” Bogart writes:
Carol’s transformation from
battered wife to one-woman assault squad is … radical: She is only able to
become her better, stronger self after her child is killed by zombies…
Nothing in her characterization now is expressly tied to her identity as a
mother.
Perhaps fans don’t balk
when Carol shoots a young girl or threatens to feed a young boy to the zombies
because women living in post-apocalyptic settings “are exempt from the
expectations of unfailing, uncomplaining maternal devotion, because in the
hells they inhabit, there are no PTA bake sales that demand slaved-over
cupcakes.” What this means is
that such narratives provide opportunities for critiques of motherhood that may
be resisted in other settings. Bogart
writes:
One of the primary appeals of
horror-based entertainment like The
Walking Dead… is that it offers us catharsis; the chance to see our most
brutal … impulses enacted onscreen. It makes sense, then, that [shows like
this] would feature characters that can embody and express attitudes towards
motherhood that most women could never feel truly safe admitting. After all,
motherhood is often referred to as the toughest job on the planet; but it may
be the only job where any random internet commenter or nosy-pants in the
grocery store thinks that she or he qualifies as a supervisor, full of
‘constructive criticism’ and ‘helpful feedback.’ And women who fall short of
the maternal ideal (or, worst of all, opt out of having children altogether)
are made into monsters. This makes women like Carol so essential: They can
blast those monsters back to oblivion.
The
decades following 9/11 have been ripe with hyperbolic rhetoric concerning the
supposed crisis facing masculinity in the 21st century and
conservative calls to put “family values” back at the center of the national
fiber. As media products always have a
reciprocal relationship to the cultural climates that spawn them, it is not
difficult to read The Walking Dead as
attempting to work through the cultural anxieties fixated on women on
mothers. While certain genres like
dystopia and science fiction are always ideal spaces for doing such work (and
providing cultural commentary on social issues more generally), perhaps the
zombie narrative is particularly primed to be a site where debates concerning
femininity and maternity are battled out.
After all, by nature such plots draw attention to the body, subtly
attending to debates concerning what qualifies as “life” and focusing
explicitly on the actual invasion and transformation of human bodies. If we
can look through the dramatized plots and aestheticized violence, programs like
The Walking Dead may actually reveal
important cultural sentiments – and potential correctives – concerning
expectations for contemporary women.
