Zombies, Motherhood, and Social Commentary: More Thoughts on The Walking Dead’s Carol

I’ve previously written about Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) from AMC’s hit show The Walking Dead (2010-present).  As the show’s seventh season approaches, I find myself once again thinking about this character’s development and the surprising turn she took, once again, in season six. What makes The Walking Dead’s character growth of Carol fascinating is that it is not a tidy, straight trajectory wherein she seamlessly transforms into a stereotypical feminine character into a masculine one – from an emotional maternal figure to one (seemingly) unaffected by the deaths of children.  (See previous post).  Season six finds Carol struggling to come to terms with the woman she has become, specifically the amount of human lives that have been lost at her hands.  Despite having just saved Alexandria from an attack by the human invaders, she finds herself haunted by her actions, keeping a running list of how many people she has had to kill in order to protect herself and those close to her. 

In “Not Yet Tomorrow,” viewers find Carol sitting on her porch smoking a cigarette on the eve of another battle against a human threat (the Saviors).  Although she is reluctant to spill more blood, she is unwilling to risk her friends’ lives by not accompanying them to attack a group that poses a threat.  While Carol feels guilt both over the lives she’s taken, and the ones she predicts she will take the following day, her newly situated love interest, Tobin (Jason Douglas), reframes her skills in an interesting way.  When he admits that “[she] can do things that – that just terrify [him],” Carol responds by asking him how he thinks she is able to do those things (“Not Yet Tomorrow”).  His response can be read as a statement about motherhood more generally:

Tobin: You're a mom.
Carol:  I was.
Tobin:  You are.  It-- it-- it's not the cookies or the smiles.  It's-- it's the hard stuff.
The scary stuff. It's how you can do it.  It's strength. You're a mom to most of the people here.
Carol:  To you, too?

Tobin:  No. You're something else to me.

In a sometimes hyperbolic fashion, The Walking Dead often paints motherhood as being scary.  Consider for example the horrific scene early in the series wherein Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), Rick’s wife, dies during an emergency C-Section and her own son has to shoot her in the head so she will not turn into a zombie (“Killer Within”).  Or consider the more recent, but no less tragic, moment where mother of two, Jessie (Alexandra Breckenridge), watches her youngest son, Sam, get eaten by zombie and her screams doom her to the same fate (“No Way Out”).  (For more on the many tragedies that befall mothers on this show, see Audre Az’s piece in Mode: “Does ‘The Walking Dead’ Hate Mothers?”)  But Tobin’s aside about motherhood being “hard” and “scary” – a role that requires “strength” – seems to be a direct moment of commentary wherein the program makes a statement about motherhood outside the fictional landscape.  By specifically drawing attention to the fact that motherhood is not simply all about “the cookies or the smiles,” the work, challenges, and sacrifice of motherhood is alluded to quite plainly. 

If this moment of dialogue existed in isolation it might be able to be dismissed as not of much importance.  However, the surrounding episodes continue to focus on Carol’s conflicted emotions about not only herself, but about the role that her fellow long-time group survivor, Maggie (Lauren Cohan), should play in the group’s protection now that she herself is an expectant mother. Despite Carol specifically wanting to keep Maggie safely out of harm’s way in their battle against the Saviors, the two women get captured.  Carol reprises her role as the pathetic woman, performing weakness in order to be underestimated by their captors, and ultimately outsmarts them.  Not unimportantly, the two slaughter their imprisioners and fight their way free well before they could be rescued by the rest of their (predominantly male) group.  Tobin’s comment about the scary lengths that a mother will do to protect her own then serves as foreshadowing for the acts these two female characters are forced into in “The Same Boat.”  Still, Carol is unable to see this as a victory – or to be able to see her ability to kill as a strength – and by the season’s end she has exiled herself once again from the group hoping that if she is out on her own that she can avoid murdering any further humans. 

Since Carol-the-Badass became a fan favorite whereas the original Carol-the-housewife was rarely a passing through in viewers’ minds, it will be interesting to see whether her popularity will decline should she continue to survive and take on her new role as a quasi-pacifist.  But already there are critics pointing out the problematic ways in which her most recent characterization was plotted.  For example, in “Taking the Teeth out of Carol,” one blogger notes that focusing on Carol’s self-crisis as a result of PTSD rather than grounding it so heavily in her relationship to motherhood would have been more ideal.  For example, another character, Glen, is showcased as reluctant to slaughter the Saviors but his reluctance is not connected to his role as an expectant father.  But with so many contemporary anxieties surrounding women and motherhood, perhaps it’s unavoidable that many would creep into the narrative subtext of post-apocalyptic shows like this one.

While certain genres like dystopia, science fiction, and horror 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.  As a horror subgenre it stems from the gothic tradition that often associates motherhood with monstrosity.  Gothic narratives often focus on the displacement/death of the mother and/or the erasure of her physical body.  While male figures have often been the focus of horror narratives, there has been a notable spike in females taking center stage in horror storylines, particularly in recent Hollywood horror films.  What is worth noting, though, is that anxieties concerning motherhood play out differently in zombie narratives than they do in other horror narratives. The classic horrific mother tends to be depicted as one who harms or abandons her children; she represents a destructive and dysfunctional force in their lives.  This same motif is not present in zombie narratives as mothers are no more likely to be turned than any other character.  In The Walking Dead particularly, mothers are almost never shown as walkers posing a threat to the children they have left behind. If horror films represent external societal concerns about motherhood, the zombie narrative may actually represent internalized concerns that mothers have – concerns that may be the product of all of those external pressures.

Further, when zombies appear in contemporary media they are – for all intents and purposes – viewed as ungendered, sexless bodies.  Once they become “walkers” – a term that purposely dehumanizes them – they no longer are divided into socially constructed categories like man and woman.  (No one refers to them as female versus male walkers, for example.)  This is not the case in other horror or supernatural genres that depend on highly gendered others that thwart human communities (e.g. witches, vampires). Consider for a moment how often the plot of vampire narratives are tied to the gender and sexuality of the main vampires and/or to their romantic or sexual relationships with human characters.  Like other horror genres, in zombie narratives we get the classic human versus “other” conflict, but the other is not often gendered as female (even if in a particular scene the zombie threat happens to represent a body that may have originally been female).  While this may seem like a minor point of difference, it does change the potential underlying message.  Battles involving humans and zombies do not then prompt readings wherein we see female humans as in conflict with an other that is seen as a distorted mirror vision of herself (representing, as might be the case in vampire narratives, a fallen version of herself) or a metaphorical representation of her patriarchal other (i.e. man).  A zombie, in this way, is simply a zombie. 

That is not to say, however, that the zombie itself is not coded in a way that draws attention to important gender-specific critiques.  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.  These foci have led scholars to argue that zombie narratives are ideal sites in which to imagine and construct gender and sexual identities differently through their reconstituted social worlds.  Other academics have argued that continual focus of families in peril in zombie narratives like The Walking Dead allow provide commentary on issues such as the decay of the modern family.  And still others have read consumption in zombie narratives through a feminist lens, suggesting that it nods toward the time pressures and constraints of Western Culture – pressures felt even more forcibly by women and mothers. The program may make some missteps when it comes to presenting a world of gender equality, but it does reveal existing cultural anxieties impacting contemporary women women.