The Good-Mother·Evil-Mother Divide

The Good-Mother/Evil-Mother Divide organizes familiar stories and moral judgments around an apparently simple opposition: a mother is either tender and selfless or cruel and monstrous. The book examines how this split is maintained by making maternal goodness seem natural and unconditional, while displacing a mother’s cruelty onto an alien figure or explaining it away as madness. Against that tidy division, the Narrator sets the less orderly realities of care and the unresolved question of how to judge Alice Espanet after the deaths of her twins.

The stepmother as the mother’s dark double

In children’s stories, Cinderella is enslaved by a stepmother, and Snow White’s heart is sought by another. The biological mother, by contrast, is often simply absent: dead or forgotten. The young heroine’s task becomes escape from the stepmother, a plot that removes the mother from the scene rather than confronting the possibility that a mother herself might act cruelly.

The book’s account of psychoanalysis reads the stepmother as a division within the child’s understanding of the mother. The cruel mother becomes the other, no longer recognized as the mother at all; maternal honor is restored only when she returns to kindness and tenderness. This device preserves the ideal of the good mother by assigning evil to a separate figure. It is therefore more than a convenient fairy-tale villain: it shows how a culture can acknowledge maternal cruelty while refusing to incorporate it into its idea of motherhood.

The discussion broadens the pattern beyond children’s stories. The tradition of the virgin mother, too, makes maternal purity an ideal that can be detached from ordinary embodied experience. The book notes that the motif is not confined to Judeo-Christian tradition, describing it as a recurring element that appears across distinct cultures. The point is not that these figures tell the same story, but that the pure, exceptional mother is a durable cultural image against which actual mothers can be measured.

Maternal goodness and the work of care

The divide also obscures what motherhood consists of in daily life. The Narrator describes care as repetitive, exhausting labor: breastfeeding, changing nappies, trying to settle a crying baby, and checking whether he is still breathing after he falls asleep. These tasks occupy the hours while the rest of the world seems to continue at its ordinary pace. The work is round-the-clock and socially devalued, even as mothers are told that giving themselves to another person is among the most desirable and revolutionary things they can do.

The Narrator’s account refuses to turn exhaustion into evidence of deficient love. After becoming a mother, she sometimes feels that she must get away from her child; yet a solitary walk does not free her, because she continues to carry the baby in her consciousness. Three months without sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, repeated visits to a nurse to monitor the newborn’s weight, and close attention to his bodily symptoms culminate in her sense that motherhood has displaced her former identities. The writer, worker, wife, and daughter she remembers seem exiled by the all-consuming role of mother.

Love and ambivalence nevertheless coexist. At the daycare, Erik notices the Narrator’s arrival, abandons what he is doing, and crawls toward her with his arms outstretched. She experiences the embrace as an encounter with his vivid, particular physical life and wonders whether such intimacy might eventually become visible in her writing. But she is not sure that it does. The scene does not resolve her conflict between authorship and care; it shows why neither feeling can be reduced to a single verdict about whether she is a good mother.

The divide in Alice Espanet’s trial

At Alice Espanet’s trial, the opposition becomes a live dispute about responsibility, mental illness, and what kind of person could kill her children. Mélanie, the au pair, describes working in the home from the twins’ first month until the family’s life collapsed. Alice could supervise every detail of infant care, correcting how Mélanie held or changed the babies and applied cream; at other times she would leave Mélanie alone with them and retreat to her studio to paint. Her moods could turn from criticism to despondency over the twins’ weight, sleep, or health. The testimony presents instability through concrete patterns of conduct rather than a simple portrait of either an attentive mother or a remote one.

The Narrator sees the courtroom struggling to keep incompatible accounts in view. Carmela Basaguren’s defense turns the prosecution’s apparently straightforward case into a contest involving psychiatric language, biblical contradictions, psychosis, and hallucinations. At the same time, the Narrator cannot let the twins’ deaths disappear into argument: she dwells on their drowned bodies and on the fact that their mother’s hands continued when they could have stopped. The trial thus tests whether recognizing Alice’s suffering and illness can coexist with recognizing the children’s deaths and the choices involved in them.

The prosecutor resists the idea that maternal cruelty must be caused by madness. She names Angela and Alex as individual children who needed love and protection, and argues that treating a cruel mother as necessarily insane rests on an outdated prejudice about femininity. In her account, some mothers regard children as their own creations and claim the right to destroy them, as if creating life conferred divine authority. This argument breaks with the comforting assumption that a mother’s identity guarantees goodness, but it risks making evil an answer in itself rather than examining the particular circumstances of the case.

Carmela Basaguren’s closing appeal returns to Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code and asks the jury to consider the consequences of imprisoning a woman she describes as broken and confused. She recalls the evidence of depression, psychosis, hallucinations, paranoia, and sudden violent reactions, and argues that Alice had lacked control over her actions. The defense does not deny the horror of what happened to the twins; it disputes what punishment can accomplish in light of Alice’s condition and the lifelong burden of the children’s photographs, clothes, cribs, and remembered smells. The competing arguments expose how the good-mother/evil-mother binary can distort judgment in either direction: it can make maternal cruelty unthinkable, or make condemnation seem to settle questions that the trial has left unresolved.

The Narrator’s challenge to the binary

The Narrator’s own experience supplies no simple alternative ideal. Early in pregnancy, she briefly resents Niclas, who wants to become a father, before embracing the responsibility and beginning to desire the baby. Later, she is troubled by the time care consumes and by the possibility that her writing will be diminished or displaced. These changing feelings are not presented as proof of either maternal virtue or wickedness. They reveal the strain of a role that demands constant care while leaving little room for the self that performs it.

The Narrator also observes that public attention had once centered more readily on her pregnant body than on her identity as an author. After the birth, walking alone makes her feel incomplete and fraudulent, as if passersby cannot understand her unless the baby is present. The contrast shows how motherhood can become both the identity by which a woman is recognized and the identity that erases her other lives. Such pressures help explain why the ideal of the naturally fulfilled, self-sacrificing mother is so powerful—and why experiences that do not fit it can provoke shame.

The book’s central distinction is between emotional contradiction and a particular harmful act. A mother may love a child, resent the demands of care, long for solitude, and feel vulnerable without those experiences amounting to violence. Conversely, the ideal of maternal love cannot be used to deny that a mother may be cruel. By placing ordinary ambivalence beside Alice Espanet’s trial, the book refuses both the fairy-tale solution that assigns cruelty to a separate, inhuman figure and the assumption that every troubling feeling is a sign of danger. The divide matters because it shapes what people can imagine about mothers—and what they are prepared to see when a mother’s actions break the story they expected.