“I have let more time go by”: Maternal Anxieties and Queer Temporalities in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid

By Katie Bonevento

Katie Bonevento is a Ph.D. student in English at West Virginia University. Her current research focuses on representations of uncanny architectural spaces in postwar and contemporary Gothic and weird fiction. She is also interested in ecocriticism, sensory studies, and film studies.

As Eleanor Vance, the protagonist of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), embarks on her journey to Hill House, she is forced to reckon with her warped relationship to temporality. After thirty-two years of living under the control of her repressive mother, she is anxious about the prospect that she has “wasted […] her childhood” (Jackson 10). She reassures herself, “I am grown up now and know the values of things,” but is still “touched with the little cold thought: I have let more time go by” (Jackson 10). Eleanor’s anxiety about her failure to accomplish the temporal milestones associated with growing up is a defining element of her character and a constant presence in the novel.

A perhaps-unexpected character who shares Eleanor’s stalled temporality and maternal anxiety is Beau Wassermann (portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in Ari Aster’s 2023 film Beau is Afraid). Eleanor and Beau are defined by their failure to proceed through “the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family” (Halberstam 6). They exist not outside of “straight time,” but hidden inside the gaps between the expected benchmarks. Prevented from progressing forward by their overbearing mothers, they remain trapped in an anxious, liminal phase between childhood and adulthood. The tension that arises from their futile attempts to escape their fates is the force that propels both texts to their inevitable conclusions. Both Hill House and Beau culminate in the tragic deaths of protagonists whose ability to live and thrive independently has been subsumed by paralyzing anxiety, damaged beyond repair by their family circumstances. 

These texts diverge, though, in who/what they blame for the disintegration of their protagonists. In Hill House, Jackson indicts the heteropatriarchal system of the nuclear family that gives rise to Eleanor’s conditions, while in Beau, Aster depicts Beau’s calculating, depraved mother, Mona (Patti LuPone), as a singular monster at the helm of a massive conspiracy of control and manipulation. Put differently, Eleanor’s mother is only a symptom of the broader societal sickness of “the ‘absolute reality’ of nuclear families that kill where they are supposed to nurture” (Lootens 151), while Mona Wassermann is a caricature of the demonized, domineering single mother who has rebuilt society in her own image. Ultimately, reading these texts together illuminates how the postwar trope of the bad mother who threatens her children’s ability to live a heteronormative lifestyle has lingered into the present day, drawing a connection between these two ages of anxiety. Only Jackson’s novel, though, exposes this trope’s underlying misogyny and shows that it is indeed possible to escape straight temporality’s prison.

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Jack Halberstam’s theory of queer temporality examines how queer people and subcultures “use space and time in ways that challenge conventional logics of development, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility” (13). In opposition to straight temporality, which is invested in linear, orderly procession through a set of expected life milestones, queer temporality opens up possibilities for life outside this linearity. The biological timeline of reproduction and “the normative scheduling of daily [family] life” are discarded in favor of the radical, unlimited potentialities of “a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (Halberstam 5, 2).

Previous analyses of queer temporality in Jackson, including essays by Emily Banks and Joey Junsu Hong, apply Halberstam’s theories to argue that characters like Eleanor and the Blackwood sisters of We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) “[rework] traditional domesticity for the queer future” (Banks 170), building “defiant, deviant [refuges] from patriarchal order and time” (Hong). I build on these existing arguments by considering the limitations of the journey to represent queer experiences, an idea arising from the field of trans studies. Even though straight temporality valorizes the changes that come with linear progression through life stages, “aspects such as sexuality, gender, and embodied sex are assumed to be fixed” (Filipova 95). While trans narratives can complicate these presumed fixities, they often frame transition in a linear way—a story that begins with being born in a body that does not match one’s gender identity, “through ruptures and disparities, such as forms of suffering and transformation, to an end point (the realization of one’s true gender identity)” (Filipova 95). As Sandy Stone has noted, these binaristic ideas of transness are often professed by trans people to receive life-saving gender-affirming medical care and/or safely pass as cisgender, but they can erase “the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience” (25). The idea that transition must be a journey from one binary gender to another, Lenka Filipova argues, “reinforces the idea that trans identities are binary as well as static and fixed, rather than fluid and evolving” (96). Hill House and Beau do not depict literal gender transitions, but do focus on protagonists—queered by their failure to achieve the linear milestones of straight time—who undertake symbolically significant journeys. My readings of the novel and film illuminate how the pursuit of a single destination, rather than openness to transitivity and shifting plans, can reinscribe straight time’s limiting structures.

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One of the first things Jackson tells us about Eleanor is that she has spent “eleven years […] caring for her invalid mother, which had left her with some proficiency as a nurse and an inability to face strong sunlight without blinking. She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life” (3). Eleanor’s unhappiness and isolation derive from “[the] expectation that, not having started a family of her own, she must remain tethered to an inferior role within her birth-family” (Banks 171). Since she has devoted her young adulthood to caring for her mother, she has not been able to make her way through the expected milestones of straight time—leaving home, marriage, childbirth, and so on. Instead, she remains trapped in an anxious state of simultaneous childlike dependence on her mother and parentified care for her, “combining the worst aspects of a lonely adulthood and a socially awkward adolescence” (Wilson 225). Throughout “the whole underside of her life,” Eleanor hopes “that someday something would happen,” reflecting a desire to disrupt the endless monotony and routines of straight time that ruled her life with her mother (Jackson 4). This monotony persists even after her mother’s death. Sleeping on a cot “in the baby’s room” (Jackson 177) at her sister Carrie’s apartment and patronized and dismissed by Carrie and her husband when she attempts to assert her agency—“I am doing what Mother would have thought best,” Carrie tells her while forbidding her from using their shared car (Jackson 7)—Eleanor remains trapped in stasis. The normative structure of straight time consists of “following a linear path that coincides with aging,” but her aging has outpaced her progress down that path (Filipova 95). Her decision to steal the car and go to Hill House against Carrie’s wishes is an act of rebellion for which she is woefully unprepared due to the repression that has shaped her life.

Eleanor views her trip to Hill House as an opportunity to free herself from stasis: “Time is beginning this morning in June, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself […]” she thinks as she drives (Jackson 12). Rejecting linear measurements of time, she conceptualizes her progress toward Hill House not in “miles and hours,” but as “a passage of moments, each one new, carrying her along with them” (Jackson 11). As she pauses along the way to daydream about the sights she sees, time stretches out: imagining alternative lives for herself, she “[lives] a lifetime” in just a “few seconds” with each new fantasy (12). 

While Eleanor’s journey might be read as an escape from straight time, the spectral presence of her mother hangs over her dreams of freedom. From the house with the stone lions, where Eleanor imagines being waited on by a “little dainty old lady,” to her daydream of a secret kingdom inside a stand of oleander trees where “the queen waits, weeping, for the princess to return” (Jackson 12, 13), several of Eleanor’s fantasies suggest a deeper longing for maternal care (Hattenhauer 162). Furthermore, the fact that Eleanor’s journey remains governed by her destination of Hill House precludes it from providing her a way out of straight temporality. She flirts with the idea of “[stopping] just anywhere and never [leaving] again,” or driving on forever “until the wheels of her car were worn to nothing and she had come to the end of the world,” but these dreams of freedom pale in comparison to the looming presence of “Hill House always [waiting] for her at the end of her day” (Jackson 12, 14). The journey remains linear: from point A (Eleanor’s old life) to point B (her imagined new one in Hill House). The trajectory is “static and fixed, rather than fluid and evolving” (Filipova 96). 

Eleanor’s attempts to build relationships with her fellow guests at Hill House further reveal how she is out of joint with straight temporality. Her attachments to Theodora, Luke, and Dr. Montague are quick and intense. Socially stunted from her years with her mother, Eleanor is unfamiliar with the usual temporal rules that govern friendships. In the absence of these social schemas, she thinks of them in the only way she knows how: as family. For instance, it takes her “no more than half an hour” to consider Theodora “close and vital, someone whose anger would be frightening” (Jackson 35). Eleanor’s distorted perception of their closeness is unknowingly affirmed by “the false-family games” that the other guests play (Wilson 231). Theo is joking when she declares herself and Eleanor cousins, and Dr. Montague is joking when he characterizes Eleanor, Theo, and Luke as “three willful, spoiled children who are prepared to nag me for your bedtime story” (Jackson 39, 50). But to Eleanor, who was never able to separate from her family and mature on her own, these statements are profoundly meaningful. Theodora and Luke, who live independent lives and are thus secure in their identities as adults, can “shift readily from stage to stage,” from childhood to adulthood, but since Eleanor lacks that security, she struggles: “her life stages conflict rather than cohere within a stable adult self” (Wilson 232). The disconnect between Eleanor’s and the others’ perceptions of their closeness is especially evident when Theo, forced to move in with Eleanor after her room is defaced with a substance that might be red paint or blood, teases her: “‘Share a room and share our clothes,’ Theodora said. ‘We’re going to be practically twins.’ ‘Cousins,’ Eleanor said, but no one heard her” (Jackson 116). Importantly, Eleanor’s attempt to call back to their earlier moment of connection goes unheard, exemplifying how the developmental gap between her and the others prevents them from understanding the extent of her difficulties until it is too late. 

No discussion of queerness in Hill House is complete without a fuller consideration of Theodora, who is framed from the moment we are introduced to her as “not at all like Eleanor” (Jackson 5). While Eleanor chafes against and ultimately fails to escape the prison of straight time over the course of the novel, Theo has already escaped it. She lives in an artistic, liberated world of “delight and soft colors” (Jackson 5); this, perhaps, is the “life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” made possible by queer temporality (Halberstam 2). By shortening her name to the androgynous nickname Theo and refusing a last name, she rejects the principles of “bourgeois reproduction and family […] and inheritance” that characterize straight time (Halberstam 6). Theodora lives with a so-called “friend” whose gender is never specified.¹ Her life with this friend is a secure and happy one that does not need to be legitimized by marriage. Even the “violent quarrel” between the two that prompts Theo to go to Hill House is not an existential threat to the relationship (Jackson 5). Jackson repeatedly emphasizes that the relationship’s temporality is built to outlast the disagreement: “only time could eradicate” their callous actions toward each other, the narration notes, and “before they could laugh over them together time would have to go by” (Jackson 5)². The novel’s concluding paragraph proves this notion right: when Theodora returns from Hill House, her friend is “mollified and contrite […] delighted to see Theodora back so soon” (182). The love that Theo and her friend have for each other is a rare glimmer of hope in a novel that depicts straight temporality with uncompromising horror. 

The guests at Hill House may be unwilling to indulge Eleanor’s longing for family, but the house itself is another story. As Luke describes, “It’s all so motherly […] Everything so soft. Everything so padded. Great embracing chairs and sofas which turn out to be hard and unwelcome when you sit down, and reject you at once—” (Jackson 154). Many critics, Roberta Rubinstein and Judie Newman among them, address the house’s maternal monstrosity; Tricia Lootens describes it as “a house that does not want you… but that does not want to let you go” (158). Equally important, though, is the architect of the monstrous “mother house”: the monstrous patriarch, Hugh Crain (Jackson 156). Perhaps the clearest example of the veiled presence of patriarchy in the house comes when Luke uncovers a book of moral precepts that Crain wrote for his daughter Sophia in the library. The book itself, assembled of images and text “hacked apart” from other books as well as original drawings and writing, is floridly descriptive of the damnation that Crain believed awaited sinners and signed in his own blood (Jackson 124). Repeatedly, the book compares the eternal suffering of hell with the eternal happiness of heaven. Crain urges his daughter to follow “the narrow path to everlasting bliss” to avoid “eternal damnation”; hell is a place of “everlasting flame,” a “wasteland burning always” where souls “burn forever”; in heaven, on the other hand, “angels praise [God] and one another unendingly” (Jackson 124-5, emphasis added). This is, perhaps, the ultimate manifestation of straight time’s fixed temporality, with the eternal joy of heaven a reward for correctly progressing through its stages and the eternal suffering of hell a punishment for those who cannot—or will not—do so. Michael T. Wilson suggests that the house’s manifestations are “filtered through Eleanor’s own disinterest in her long-dead father and the inescapable memories and influence of her mother,” and this history of maternal abuse causes “Hugh Crain’s patriarchally domineering presence in Hill House [to] ultimately [affect] Eleanor through a maternal persona” (243). The monstrous mother house may be the more apparent horror, but the animating force behind it is the patriarchal society that precludes self-determination for anyone who deviates from the expected reproductive timeline. 

A time “strangely new and of itself” began for Eleanor when she set out on her journey to Hill House, marking an opportunity for her to escape straight temporality (Jackson 12). Thus, once she surrenders herself to the house—the embodiment of both her mother’s abuse and the patriarchal, heteronormative culture that devalues anyone who exists outside of its linear temporality—she feels that “Time is ended now […] all that [the fantasies she had on her way to Hill House] is gone and left behind” (Jackson 172). Eleanor’s attempts to travel down straight time’s linear path have been unsuccessful, and she cannot conceptualize a temporality that is not ultimately governed by family and reproduction, so the only conceivable option is the end of time altogether. Her suicide is her attempt to take control: her biological age can no longer continue to outpace her mental and emotional development if she is dead. In Jackson’s notes for the novel, she wrote, “Leaving house = betrayal of mother. Eleanor does not belong anywhere. Betray mother by being born—taking away part of mother” (qtd. in Lootens 158, emphasis in original). Therefore, Eleanor’s choice to stay forever in the womblike mother house functions as a reversal of that betrayal: a kind of unbirth (Lootens 158). 

The inevitability of Eleanor’s fate is foreshadowed by Mrs. Montague’s claim that, with the help of Planchette, she has discovered the spirit of a nun walled up alive in Hill House. Outside of the obvious absurdity of this claimed apparition, the figure of the nun—existing within the patriarchal system of the Catholic church, yet barred from marriage and reproduction by vows of chastity—resonates with Eleanor’s experiences. Eleanor echoes this scene when the others make plans to send her back home: “‘Walled up alive.’ Eleanor began to laugh again at their stone faces. ‘Walled up alive,’ she said. ‘I want to stay here’” (177). She laughs because she knows that she is walled up alive either way: in Hill House or in Carrie’s apartment, there is no escape from her failure to proceed through straight time. Eleanor’s fate at the novel’s end is akin to the endless suffering of Hugh Crain’s hell: with her spirit trapped forever in Hill House, “[walking] alone” after her suicide (Jackson 182), she embodies “a form of security that is also a horror, with the mother as death to the self” (Newman 178). 

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Beau is Afraid is often characterized as “not another elevated horror³ [like Aster’s previous films, Hereditary (2018)and Midsommar (2019)] but a surreal dark comedy” (Luckhurst 37). While it is undoubtedly comedic, Beau also shares many features of the elevated horror genre with its predecessors. Vincent Jaunas identifies a focus on the monstrosity within normative societal structures as a key element of elevated horror. The family is often at the center of these critiques, and in films like Hereditary, The Witch (2015), and The Babadook (2014), “the monster emerges as an outgrowth of the tensions, the frustrations, and the traumas inherent to the family unit” (Jaunas 20). Furthermore, as David Church notes in his study of the genre, grief (particularly grief for a family member) is another common characteristic, to the extent that “post-horror’s reliance on grief is now an almost rote narrative setup” (68). Beau’s grappling with the (presumed) recent death of his mother is at the center of his emotional arc; grief traps him “in an emotional limbo that [he is] unable to get beyond” (Church 68). Like Hill House and many of Jackson’s other works, Beau might also be described as a work of family Gothic fiction, where horror derives from the repressed darkness at the heart of the family and home. While it doesn’t quite match the “vile […] diseased” nature of Hill House (Jackson 23), Mona Wassermann’s “terrifying Modernist house, where the sharp angles of the corridors and open-plan chasms brim with dread […] and something bad [is hidden] in the attic” is central to the film’s concluding act (Luckhurst 37). 

Roger Luckhurst, with particular reference to Hereditary and Aster’s 2011 short film The Strange Thing about the Johnsons, suggests that “Aster has been working on amplified, melodramatic versions of what Freud called the family romance from the very start [… entering] into this primal drama, adjusting the dynamics and replaying them in different combinations” (38). The first scene in Beau immediately establishes its continuation of this pattern, depicting Beau’s birth from his own point-of-view. In the background, his mother frantically screams, panicking about Beau’s well-being and accusing the nurse of dropping him. Mona embodies the psychoanalytic concept of the archaic mother: “the parthenogenetic mother, the mother as primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end” (Creed 17). Beau’s story begins as he separates from her, and the rest of the film concerns his doomed attempts to escape “the all-incorporating black hole that threatens to reabsorb what it once birthed” (Creed 27). 

In flashbacks woven throughout the film, we learn why Beau is so afraid. He believes what Mona has told him since he was young: that his father died the moment he conceived Beau because of a heart murmur that meant orgasm would kill him, and that Beau has inherited the same condition. As the film later reveals, this story is a fabrication, but Beau’s belief that sex would mean death for him shapes his personality and stunts his growth. As a teenager, he befriends a girl named Elaine (Julia Antonelli) while on a cruise with his mother; when Elaine’s mother takes her off the cruise ship and breaks up their burgeoning relationship, Elaine confesses her love and makes Beau promise to “wait for [her].” Since Beau already thinks sex would be fatal for him, it is easy for him to keep his promise. By the time the film’s main story begins, he is middle-aged, living alone in a dilapidated apartment in a comically crime-ridden neighborhood, and still has a Polaroid of Elaine stashed in his nightstand. Like Eleanor, his biological aging has continued while his social and emotional development remains static. 

The idea of conflicting temporalities—of Beau standing still while time goes by around him—is given visual representation in the scene when Beau is told over the phone that Mona has died. He drops the phone and stands frozen in shock. A jump cut then reveals he has been standing there, unmoving, for an extended period of time; the light in his apartment has changed, and the water from the bath he had started running before the call has overflowed onto the living room floor. Beau’s failures to proceed through straight time are also reflected in his constantly-interrupted journey to Mona’s house—his failed attempt at “progression from a starting point […] to an end point” (Filipova 95). Over the course of his journey, Beau is stabbed, hit by a car, forcibly adopted by the suburban couple who hit him, and taken in by a wandering theatre troupe: he tries to arrange transportation to the funeral, but his efforts are continually frustrated. When he finally does manage to make it back to Mona’s house, he arrives in the funeral’s aftermath, with event staff carrying chairs and half-eaten trays of food outside and a recording of the eulogy playing ominously over the house’s speaker system, shaming Beau for having “elected not to be present with us today.” The program displays the slogan “Gone Forever” prominently beneath Mona’s photo, echoing the punishing, eternal temporality of Hugh Crain’s book in Hill House and serving as a reminder that, despite his best efforts, he is too late to have redeemed himself. 

Two particular encounters that Beau has on the way to the funeral are especially important: mirror images of each other, the former encapsulating the prison of straight time and the latter offering a brief glimpse of life outside of it. After his car accident, Beau wakes up in the home of Grace (Amy Ryan), Roger (Nathan Lane), and their teen daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers). Their brightly lit suburban home is the antithesis of Beau’s dingy city apartment, and they seem to be the archetypal upper-middle-class nuclear family. They hold hands and pray before eating a family dinner, Roger and Grace both work white-collar jobs, and their treatment of Beau is exaggeratedly parental. The small ceramic statue of a mother holding a baby that Beau had planned to give to Mona and was shattered in the car accident is glued back together when he wakes up in Toni’s bedroom: a visual metaphor for the security of the family that Beau has apparently been welcomed into. 

However, cracks in the perfect façade soon emerge. Grace and Roger had a son, Nathan, who was in the army and died in combat, and his violent, disturbed army buddy Jeeves (Denis Ménochet) lives in a trailer in their backyard. Toni is resentful of Beau’s presence, and especially that Grace and Roger have set him up in her bedroom rather than Nathan’s “totally empty […] completely unused” bedroom, which has been left untouched since his death. Toni’s efforts to drive Beau out culminate when she attempts to involve him in vandalizing Nathan’s room and tries to goad him into drinking paint with her. Her plan also involves blackmail. “I have videos of you. I’ll post them. I’ll say what you did,” she tells him. Although it’s unclear what exactly Toni is referring to, the accusation’s subtext is clear: Beau is an interloper in the nuclear family, and his deviation from the norm casts him as a sexual threat. She also calls him a “pussy faggot” when he refuses to drink the paint, underscoring his status as a sexual Other in this world. When Toni consumes the paint and dies, Grace enters the room and is horrified by the scene. It seems to her as though Beau, the stunted outcast who has failed at progressing through straight time, has killed Toni, her only living child, and thus the embodiment of the family’s reproductive futurity⁴. Beau may have been tolerable to her as long as his presence did not disturb the familiar “schedule of repro-time” (Halberstam 5) that characterizes family life, but Toni’s death causes her to turn on him. Toni’s suicide illustrates that the structures of straight time, despite their insistence on futurity, are self-destructive and fragile. However, the destruction is not recognized as innate and instead displaced onto Beau. By scapegoating him, straight time can continue perpetuating itself.

Grace and Roger’s suburban hell is juxtaposed with the almost utopian existence of the Orphans of the Forest, a traveling theater troupe that welcomes Beau in when they find him lost in the woods after fleeing Grace and Roger’s home. They live a communal lifestyle, free of conventional family structures. Beau is found by a pregnant woman, seemingly unattached to a husband, to whom he gives the statue originally intended for Mona. In the film’s final scene, he is attacked for this choice by Mona’s attorney, Dr. Cohen (Richard Kind), who calls the woman a “pregnant slut.” Characters who depart from the normative structures of straight time are, again, framed as sexually deviant. 

When Beau sits down to watch the play the Orphans are putting on, temporality shifts. The play begins, as Beau watches, with a young man mourning the deaths of his parents, but the scene quickly transitions into a fantasy in which Beau has become the hero. This sequence serves a similar narrative function to Eleanor’s fantasies on her drive to Hill House: time elongates, allowing Beau to imagine a different life for himself while the real world stands still. As the hero of the play, Beau settles into a home on his own, marries, and has three sons, living out the dream of successfully navigating the linear path of straight time. However, the bright, storybook aesthetic of the fantasy sequence indicates a childishness belying Beau’s idea of successful adult life. When a flood separates Beau from his imagined family, he searches for them until he ages into an old man. Eventually, the elderly Beau does find his sons, but the catharsis of their tearful reunion is shattered when one of the sons asks where their mother is. Beau, flashing back to Mona telling him about his supposed heart murmur, confesses, “That’s why I’ve never… with anyone,”⁵ and the son replies: “You’ve never been with anyone? Then… then how did you have us?” The reminder that reproduction and successful progression through straight time can only ever be a fantasy for Beau jolts him back into the real world. There, the Orphans are gunned down by Jeeves, who is tracking Beau via an ankle monitor installed by Grace and Roger (the figureheads of the nuclear family) on a mission to, as instructed by Grace, “rip [Beau] apart.” Beau has found that, for him, both successful movement through straight time and the escape from it via queer time are impossible dreams.

The film’s final act, after Beau returns to Mona’s house at last, is characterized by revelations for both Beau and the audience. Beau discovers that Mona faked her death and that almost everyone he has encountered throughout the film works for her massive pharmaceutical company. He also reunites with Elaine (Parker Posey), now Mona’s employee, and when they have sex, he learns that he is capable of orgasming without going into cardiac arrest. In a cruel twist of fate, though, Elaine dies upon orgasm instead: further reinforcing the idea that Beau’s attempts to progress through the stages of straight temporality are inherently doomed. Crucially, it is upon Elaine’s death that Mona re-emerges to confront Beau. Aborted though it is, the loss of his virginity marks one of his strongest attempts to propel himself out of his state of arrested development, which Mona—the architect of that arrested development—cannot abide. 

The most shocking revelation of all is the identity and fate of Beau’s father. Not dead after all, he is actually a giant phallic monster imprisoned in the attic along with Beau’s long-lost twin brother, punished for asking about their father when he and Beau were children. The ridiculously literal shape of Beau’s father indicates that, in Mona’s maternal-dominant world, the only function he serves is enabling reproduction. Mona, a business magnate with domestic servants to assist with housework and childcare, does not need or want a patriarchal husband to lead the family for her. But she is invested enough in accomplishing straight time’s milestones (or, at least, keeping up the appearance of doing so) that she wants, as she tells a young Beau during a flashback, “a normal life [… and] a child.” By keeping her monstrous husband locked in the attic, out of sight, she is able to have children as she is expected to, but can maintain total control over her family: a representation of the archaic mother “who conceives all by herself…outside morality and the law” (Creed 27). Beau’s father, like Hill House itself, is more apparently monstrous, but Mona, like Hugh Crain, provides the conditions for the monstrosity to exist. The film makes no gesture toward the societal factors that might have made Mona feel pressured to start a family. The closest we get to an explanation for her cruelty is a comment to Beau about her own childhood: “My own mother wouldn’t even touch me […] I wasn’t worthy of her love […] She blamed me for everything her mother did to her.” For generation after generation, the bad mother is the root of all evil.

Even after he has seemingly vanquished his monstrous mother, Beau still cannot be truly free. After Mona apparently dies a second time, strangled by Beau in a fit of rage, Beau silently leaves the house and boards a small boat, which he rows down a dark, rocky tunnel and ultimately into a cavernous courtroom packed with people, where an alive-again Mona and Dr. Cohen put him on trial for a lifetime of transgressions. These so-called “crimes” are really no more than petty grievances, and every accusation is supported with video evidence. This is hinted at much earlier in the film, when, at Grace and Roger’s house, Grace surreptitiously drops a hint for Beau to turn to a certain channel on their TV, which shows Beau real-time surveillance footage of himself. He fast-forwards, showing scenes that happen later in the film (including a shot of him in the boat at the trial); the events of the film, it seems, were predestined. Beau’s journey is a warped mirror of the milestones of straight time: prevented from progressing normally by Mona, he must follow an alternative, equally inflexible path set out in advance for him. Mona has bent not only the nuclear family, but time itself, to her will. Therefore, it was only ever possible for the film to end in an inversion of its beginning. Beau and Eleanor both “[betray their] mothers by being born [, and] there is only one way to assuage [their] guilt: to be ‘unborn’” (Lootens 158). Beau’s path through the tunnel into the watery cavern of the trial room can easily be read as an unbirth; an encounter with “the gestating, all-powerful womb of the archaic mother” (Creed 27). His ultimate fate—drowning when his boat capsizes—concludes the inevitable cycle set into motion from the moment of his birth.

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The premise of Beau is Afraid—that the overbearing mother poisons her son’s development—speaks to postwar America’s cultural anxieties. In his 1948 book Generation of Vipers, Philip Wylie decried what he called “Momism”: “the destructive tendency among the overwhelming majority of American mothers to stifle, dominate, and manipulate their children—particularly sons—into submission and crippling weakness” (Terry 175). Particularly relevant to Beau is the idea that “mothers’ neurotic behavior toward their sons [… caused] the character weakness of male homosexuality” (Terry 171). Luckhurst questions whether Aster’s films, given their twinned, recurrent motifs of dominant mothers and “passive or absent fathers,” are misogynistic “or are interested in examining the structural roots of that misogyny in the power imbalances built into the family dynamic” (40), but Beau embraces Momism’s tropes too wholeheartedly to offer a real critique of them. Roel van den Oever argues that Momism was born out of “postwar anxiety over gender roles and Cold War paranoia,” and died in the 1970s, dispelled by the burgeoning movements of second-wave feminism and gay liberation (20). With these historical roots in mind, what are we to make of its resurfacing now? The notion of “both Mom and her queer son […] as threats to the nation’s well-being” (van den Oever 36) feels eerily relevant to an America increasingly driven by far-right politics, in which the rights of women, queer people, and trans people are under attack and Cold War paranoia is echoed in ramped-up aggression toward both foreign governments and immigrants within U.S. borders.

Just as Beau demonstrates the persistence of postwar anxiety about motherhood into the present day, Hill House shows us that “Momism was never a univocal discourse; it always contained the seeds of its own undoing” (van den Oever 182). Through Hill House, its history, and Eleanor’s fatal attraction to it, Jackson sheds light on how patriarchy conspires to create and blame the monstrous mother for its own faults. Furthermore, Theodora and her friend serve as crucial reminders that life outside the prison of straight temporality is not only possible but happier than life inside it, reminding us that alternative ways of life can exist despite patriarchy and heteronormativity. 

Works Cited

Aster, Ari, director. Beau Is Afraid. A24, 2023. 

Banks, Emily. “Insisting on the Moon: Shirley Jackson and the Queer Future.” Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House, edited by Jill E. Anderson and Melanie R. Anderson, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 169–188. 

Church, David. Post-Horror: Art, Genre, and Cultural Elevation, Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2007. 

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004, https://www.degruyterbrill.com/isbn/9780822385981. 

Filipova, Lenka. “Temporality and Trans Literature.” The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp, Routledge, 2024, pp. 93–103. 

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