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The Haunted Mother​
A first encounter with Explorative Literature through Gothic narratives of motherhood, grief, and memory
Horror and Mother/hoods in a Global Cultural Imaginaries is an interdisciplinary collection published by Demeter Press, bringing together scholars, artists, and researchers to explore motherhood, monstrosity, grief, horror, and the maternal imagination across cultures, media, and symbolic forms.
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Rather than presenting motherhood as a fixed cultural ideal, the collection explores its complexities, contradictions, and emotional realities through the lens of horror, offering new
perspectives on maternal identity, fear, desire, resistance, and transformation.Bringing together established and emerging voices from motherhood studies, horror studies, gender studies, and cultural analysis, the volume examines how maternal figures continue to shape—and be shaped by—the stories we tell about family, loss, identity, and the human condition.
My Contribution
The Monstrous Mother: A Personal Journey Through Motherhood, Loss, and the Psychological Haunting Under the Gothic–Jungian Lens
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Motherhood is often described as the beginning of life and therefore, far less attention is given to the lives that remain suspended between presence and absence: the pregnancies that end too soon, the children who never arrive, the versions of ourselves that disappear alongside them...
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Drawing upon my own experience of pregnancy loss and motherhood, this essay explores how grief continues to inhabit memory, dreams, the body, and imagination long after the visible event has passed.
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Through Gothic symbolism, Jungian psychology, and literary reflection—including Toni Morrison's Beloved—the essay investigates motherhood as a psychologically haunted landscape where personal experience, cultural expectations, and symbolic life intersect.
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This is both an academic inquiry and a personal testimony.
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Not because lived experience replaces scholarship, but because it became the question that scholarship allowed me to explore.
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Why This Essay Matters
Some experiences remain difficult to speak about, because our culture often lacks the symbolic language to hold them.
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Reading cannot erase grief, but stories sometimes create the first space where grief becomes thinkable.
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This essay is an invitation to approach maternal loss not as something to solve, but as something that deserves careful attention, symbolic reflection, and human recognition.
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Reading as Encounter
This essay also reflects the principles behind Exploratory Literature, the interpretative framework developed through Alice in Gothic Land.
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Rather than separating literature from life, Explorative Literature understands stories as places where personal experience and symbolic meaning meet. So instead of asking only "What this text means", it also asks what happens when this a text begins to read us.
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It is at that moment that reading becomes a conversation, with memory, grief, identity and all the parts of ourselves that rarely find language elsewhere.​
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Included with Your Pre-order
Holding the Invisible
An Explorative Reading
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When you pre-order the collection, you will also receive an exclusive reflective reading designed to accompany my chapter.
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Rather than extending the academic discussion, it offers a contemplative space where reading becomes writing, observation, and symbolic dialogue.
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Through guided reflections you will explore:
• The relationship between motherhood and identity
• Invisible forms of grief
• Symbolic memory
• Gothic images as mirrors for personal reflection
• Writing as a way of listening to experience
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This is not an academic supplement, it is an invitation to remain with the questions a little longer.
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"An intriguing and intimate yet academically grounded personal account."
Anonymous Peer Reviewer
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An Invitation
Some stories explain.
Others accompany.
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If this essay speaks to something you have lived, questioned, or silently carried, I hope it offers a place where scholarship and experience can meet without asking either one to disappear.
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Pre-order your copy and begin your first Exploratory Reading.