The Haunted Housewife

The Shadow Aspect of the Veil Function

Today on Mother’s Day…I want to talk about a darker aspect of the archetype of the “mother” we all know too well…or at least one version of her…

She is the housewife who has a few too many glasses of wine and makes a scene at the family brunch.

Or maybe it’s the helicopter mother who throws herself into taking care of her children – making sure they are never hungry or inconvenienced as a way to avoid looking within at her own reflection.

Or perhaps in her most “villainous” aspect, she is the adulterer. The woman who uses her husband for money, security, status, or convenience while she harbors her affection for another man, like the infamous Mrs. Robinson in the 1967 film The Graduate, who seduces the much younger Benjamin Braddock.

Yet even before the movie The Graduate and our modern-day “Wine Mom” culture existed, this archetype has been referenced in the ways women in the 1950s and 1960s would pop valium as “Mommy’s little helper,” just to get through the day, or even the old stereotype of housewives “screwing the milkman” when he came to visit.

But why is it that these respectable women, who have husbands who supposedly love and adore them, seek out such destructive behavior?

Moreover, why is this such a ubiquitous concept, to the point where movies, TV shows, and even the artist Laufey’s music video for “Madwoman” reference this trope?

It is because the image of the “haunted housewife,” as I refer to her, reveals something very uncomfortable for us to look at in our modern society.

Specifically, that women, even those who are in supposedly “happy marriages,” are deeply unfulfilled and unhappy.

But how could this be?