Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors

A consistent theme in stories about the female super, or action, hero is that she is reared or mentored by a man rather than a woman. Some of the strongest, most complex, and independent superwomen in modern mythology are raised by a single father, while their mother is almost always physically absent, and at least emotionally unavailable—addicted, mentally ill, or outright clueless.

The morbid evidence: In her most recent incarnations, Lois Lane was trained in military combat by her father, General Sam Lane. Her mother is dead.³ In an episode of the television series Smallville, Lois (Erica Durance) notes that it was her father who raised her to be independent and self-sufficient. On that same series, Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) was also raised by her single father. Her mother is in a mental institution. Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) was molded into a spy without her knowledge or consent by her father, Jack—a man desperate to protect his little girl from a dangerous world. She was raised to believe that her mother, Laura, died in a car crash when she was six. Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) lives with her dad, Keith. Her alcoholic and adulterous mother abandoned the family. On Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the title character may live with her mother, Joyce, but it is her male mentor, Rupert Giles, who has the most influence over her development. The list goes on and on.

Marvelverse characters Araña Corazon and Elektra Natchios were raised by single fathers after the deaths of their mothers. Honey West, Ms. Tree, Nancy Drew, and Veronica Mars all followed in their fathers' footsteps to become private eyes; in the case of Joanna Dark, a bounty hunter. In The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Charly Baltimore's (Geena Davis) father was a Royal Irish Ranger. After his death she was adopted/recruited by his best friend, Mr. Perkins, to be an assassin for the US government. Her mother's whereabouts, and the reasons why she was adopted by a male government agent rather than a family, are never addressed. In the movie Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), the title character is guided throughout the film by the spirit of her deceased father. He asks her to complete his work, and dutifully she complies, but all she wants is to get back the time that was stolen from them when he died. This wish does not extend to her mother, who doesn't appear to have a memorial plaque next to her husband's and is only mentioned once—in a dream sequence that serves to reinforce Lara's relationship with her father. In the dream he shows her a picture of her mother and says he wishes she could remember her. Little Lara says, “I wish I could remember her too,” and then throws her arms around her father with an emphatic, “I still have you Daddy!”⁴ Her mother is altogether irrelevant.

There are also a number of daughters with single fathers in law enforcement. The aforementioned Keith Mars; but also Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. the crime-fighting vigilante Batgirl, and daughter of the more traditionally law-enforcing Commissioner Gordon; and also Zoe Carter (Jordan Hinson) who lives with her father, Jack, the sheriff of a scientific community in the Pacific Northwest known as Eureka—also the name of the show. The Sci Fi channel's webpage for this series describes Zoe as: “Jack Carter's defiant, delinquent, and also terribly intelligent daughter. Though Zoe tries to keep up her ‘riot grrrl' image, behind her attitude and piercings she's just another young woman who wants her absentee father to pay her some attention.”⁵ She loves her mother, but it's his attention she craves and his life she chooses to be a constant and meaningful part of. Max Guevara was created in a lab by a man named Sandeman, birthed by a surrogate mother she never knew, and reared and trained by Donald Lydecker. The Powerpuff Girls were born without the need for a mother at all: Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup were concocted in a lab by their single father, with sugar, spice, and everything nice, to be “the perfect little girls.”

While it's wonderful to see depictions of fathers who take an active role in their daughters' lives, when we don't see women teaching women, the message an audience receives is that these virtual Athenas, whether sprung from their fathers heads or mentored by sage men, can only be as independent as they are because they lack a mother's womanly—almost always implied as passive—influence.⁶

From biological fathers to adoptive dads, father figures to institutionalized patriarchy, even dead fathers and ancient prophets guiding from the ether, the favoring of the father–daughter relationship over the mother– daughter bond begs questions. Why are men presented as teachers, and women as students? Where are depictions of women mentoring women? Why are mothers almost always absent? And why the pervasive spotlight on fathers?

Possible answers are few and frustrating. For one, men have traditionally held authoritative positions in the public sphere, while women have worked as homemakers or in ancillary positions supporting men in power as secretaries, nurses, etc. But with the strides gained by the second wave of feminism, one would assume that perhaps when we see more female role models in popular culture, as a result of seeing them in the real world, this would include stories featuring healthy relationships between mothers and daughters. Maybe there is a lack of imagination on the part of male writers, who continue to dominate the mainstream film and comic book industries. (And perhaps they are working out their own “Daddy Issues” through the perspective of a female protagonist.) But this trope also extends back in time to fairy tales, which Marina Warner notes is a female storytelling tradition. In From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, she writes that “The raveled sleeve of these braided strands of male and female experience and wishes and fears can never wholly be combed out” and goes on to ask, “Above all, if and when women are narrating, why are the female characters so cruel and the mother so often dead at the start of the story?”⁷ She provides a reasonable answer: “The absent mother can be read literally as exactly that: a feature of the family before our modern era, when death in childbirth was the most common cause of female mortality, and surviving orphans would find themselves brought up by their mother's successor.”⁸

Yet what purpose does this serve today? What might it say about the needs of contemporary audiences? Is the narrative choice even a conscious one, or is it just that we are so used to not seeing the mother that we accept the situation as normal and without question? Maybe it's a result of the increase in the number of single fathers raising daughters after death or divorce? And at this point can we say anything about superwomen as motherless daughters other than they are almost always motherless?

As Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope note in their study The Female Hero in American and British Literature, in traditional stories of the hero “both men and women dissociate themselves from the mother at the beginning of the[ir] heroic quest.” They point out that “The traditional quest is a search for the father, who will initiate the hero into the world”⁹ and that “In works that make the patriarchal assumptions of traditional heroic theory, the mother–daughter bond is notable by its absence or by its subordinate position relative to the father–daughter relationship.”¹⁰

In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers also makes note of the father quest and asks Joseph Campbell, “But why no mother quest?”

Campbell answers, “the mother's right there. You're born from your mother, and she's the one who nurses you and instructs you and brings you up to the age when you must find your father.” But this presumes that the mother is always right there (which clearly, she isn't) and that the hero is, by default, male. Campbell goes on to say that:

[T]he finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There's a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it's your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny.¹¹

Notably, there are a handful of superwomen, who, though they follow the spirit of the journey, do so in a moderately progressive way— meaning that, for them, it is the quest for the mother that is the key to their identity. The foregrounding of the father–daughter relationship may reinforce narrative tropes, but the search for the mother is a reimagining of the journey of the hero.

Spy Daddy: Jack Bristow

You know, some people go miniature golfing with their parents. We go to India and look for nukes. (Alias)¹²

Sydney Bristow's dynamic, tempestuous, and often moving relationship with her father forms the basis of Alias (2001–6)—a spy-fi television show that combined elements of Mission Impossible,¹³ James Bond, and The Avengers with family drama. Sydney Bristow is a woman in her mid-20s attending grad school by day and fighting for the safety of her country by night. Sydney's mother, Laura, died when she was six years old, and she's estranged from her emotionally distant father, Jack (Victor Garber). Her friends Will (Bradley Cooper) and Francie (Merrie Dungey) and her finance, Danny (Edward Atterton), falsely believe Sydney works as a banker for Credit Dauphine. The company is merely a cover for SD-6, what Sydney and most of her co-workers believe is a secret subsection of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but is actually part of a global terrorist organization.

When Sydney betrays protocol by telling Danny she's not a banker but a spy, SD-6's leader Arvin Sloan (Ron Rifkin) finds out and has Danny brutally murdered. Sloan's punishment of Sydney's disobedience leads to a series of startling discoveries about her career, recruitment, and family. When Sydney refuses to return to work, Sloan puts a hit out on her as well. But while being pursued by the men sent to kill her, Sydney's life is saved by an unexpected agent—her father.¹⁴

In a riveting scene, Jack pulls up in a black vehicle and tells his daughter to get in. She does, and having believed her father was a salesman, remarks with shock, “Dad, you have a gun!” As he drives, backwards, shooting at the enemy, and reminding his daughter to buckle her seatbelt no less, he explains, with what will become a trademark combination of crypticism and to-the-pointness:

Jack: You're going to have to accept that there are many things you won't understand tonight. The one thing you must understand is that the agency doesn't trust you anymore. And they're going to kill you unless you do as I say. I work for SD-6, just like you. Undercover at Genis Aerospace. You leave tonight. I've arranged a flight to France with a connection to Switzerland. You'll be red flagged at customs. I've given you new papers.

Sydney: I thought you sold airplane parts!

Jack: I don't sell airplane parts. I never sold airplane parts.

(They stop in a parking lot. A nearby car is parked with its headlights on.)

Jack: That car is taking you to the airport. I have to get back so they're not going to know.

Sydney: Who are you?¹⁵

Sydney later applies to the real CIA with the intention of serving as a double agent to bring down SD-6. In doing so she receives one more shock—her father is also a double agent, working toward the same end. Finding out who Jack is will be important in finding out who she is, but so will revelations about her mother. As Abrams has stated, “Alias is a show about identity.”¹⁶

Abrams conceived of the show in jest during a writer's meeting for his series Felicity (1998–2002), thinking it would be “incredibly cool if Felicity were recruited by the CIA, because she could go on incredible missions and have kick-ass fights and stunts!” As he told Mark Cotta Vaz for the series companion guide Alias Declassified,

I wrote down these ideas about a grad school student who lived a double life and had trouble with Dad. I kept thinking about these characters and what their secrets and emotional lives would be. Any story about a family where there are secrets, and what happens when those truths emerge, was fascinating to me …It's a spy show, but at its core is the relationship between this young woman and her father. I got excited about what happens to her, what that person would be like.¹⁷

Once Sydney becomes aware of Jack's true allegiances, the revelations snowball. She discovers that her mother, Laura Bristow, was actually Irina Derevko—a KGB spy responsible for the gruesome murders of over a dozen CIA agents, including the father of Sydney's handler and love interest, Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan). Jack has kept this secret truth about Laura/Irina from his daughter to keep her from experiencing the pain of betrayal that emotionally crippled him. As a trained game theorist, this withholding of information, as well as his emotional distance, is a tactic intended to keep his daughter physically and emotionally safe. As Hope Edelman writes in her book, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, some fathers use a

relentless forward motion as a defense against [their] own emotional pain and a means of avoiding [their] children's grief. [This type of man] rarely speaks about his deceased wife out of a reluctance that may stem from his commitment to be the protector of his family, a job he believes involves shielding his children from emotional pain.¹⁸

And this is, of course, hyper-realized on Alias through secrets and espionage, the latter providing tools that aid Sydney on her quest.

But Irina (Lena Olin) is not dead, and when she resurfaces to turn herself into CIA custody, Jack goes into protective overdrive. Sydney has approached her mother, the prisoner, with trepidation, hoping to secure her cooperation in providing intel that will help the CIA dismantle the terrorist SD-6 organization. Jack, ever the tactician, visits the CIA's resident psychologist (Dr. Barnett) for assistance with “devising a strategy to persuade Sydney not to interact with her mother.”

Dr. Barnett: But have you considered that the more you'll keep her from her mother, the more you're going to spark her interest?

Jack: Of course I have! Which is why I'm hoping to devise a strategy with the necessary subtlety.

Dr. Barnett: Well, I'm sorry, but I am not in the habit of helping a father manipulate his daughter. No matter how good his intentions may be.¹⁹

Jack truly believes his manipulations will protect his daughter, though his actions will have the very effect that Dr. Barnett predicts. He'll tell Sydney that he trusts her judgment with Irina and that she's “doing just fine” in what he recognizes is a difficult situation for her. But as a spy, a game theorist, and mostly a daddy, he will also assume that he knows what's best for her and will justify morally questionable steps to ensure her safety by stating that “There's no one else to do this job”—willfully ignoring the fact that Sydney is an adult woman and a highly trained agent.²⁰ Jack will initially claim Sydney as his daughter, telling Irina that her “motherhood is a biological fact with no substantive value in Sydney's life”²¹ and “if Sydney in any way becomes victim to your endgame, I will kill you. She spent most of her life believing you were dead, she'll get used to it again. No matter what bond you try to forge with her.”²²

Sydney is initially cautious with her mother (in their first meeting in over 20 years, Irina shot her daughter in the shoulder). Understandably, she's both angry and curious. Irina is curious too, asking for personal information about Sydney's life, sharing stories with her daughter about her childhood, and offering to teach her meditative techniques. She's temporarily released from imprisonment to accompany Jack and Sydney on a mission to Kashmir, and when their daughter is injured, both parents rush to bandage her wound. Throughout the mission, Sydney will watch her parents' interaction closely for clues to her own identity and she'll later tell her friend Will:

When I found out my mother faked her death twenty years ago, after mourning her for most of my life, she was still alive. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to stand in a room with both of my parents again. It seemed impossible. That two people with so much … deceit between them could ever find a way to breathe the same air. And all of a sudden there we were. Just the three of us … walking down a dirt road in the middle of Kashmir. When we were out there, working as a team, it was comforting.²³

Irina's ultimate intentions will be a question mark for the rest of the series, and though she was ordered by the KGB to have a child as a means to secure Jack's loyalty, what becomes clear is that she does care about her family—though her love for them is in constant conflict with her endgame. As she tells her husband, “I may have been under orders to fabricate a life with you, but there were times when the illusion of our marriage was as powerful to me as it was for you, especially when Sydney was born.”²⁴

Sydney's exploration of her relationship with her mother is also an exploration of herself, and she will continue to look to both her parents for hints of the past and clues to her identity. As Pope and Pearson note, “Unlike the classical, patriarchal hero, the [modern] female hero … often seeks reconciliation with both parents,” adding that:

In doing so, she integrates the best qualities associated with each sex role and rejects its life-denying aspects … she rejects those attributes of her parents that limit her growth, but she does not reject her parents … When she accepts their simple human frailty, she often learns that both their positive and negative examples help her to live a heroic life. She can love them and learn from them, without living her life in their shadow.²⁵

Sydney's parents will continue to do what most parents do, nurture and frustrate. She will ultimately combine their best qualities in order to become a more heroic spy, agent, partner, mentor, and mother.

Hero Daddy: Keith Mars

Keith Mars, the world's greatest dad. (Seriously. Greatest. There should be a mug.) (Joss Whedon²⁶)

Veronica Mars also focuses on the main female protagonist's search for identity, but here detective tropes, rather than spy-fi conventions (though similar), are used for the process of exposing, or maintaining, secrets. And though Veronica searches for her mother, this series does not offer as much of a progressive read as Alias, perhaps because it's slightly more grounded in reality.

Veronica (Kristen Bell) and her father, former sheriff Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni), have become outcasts in their town—the fictional Neptune, California (essentially San Diego). They had previously lived in middle-class comfort with Veronica's mother, Lianne, but when Veronica's best friend Lilly Kane is murdered and Keith mistakenly pins Lilly's billionaire father, Jake, as the killer, Keith loses his job as sheriff in a recall election. Keith begins work as a private eye, with Veronica often helping out at his agency, Mars Investigations. But the loss of a steady paycheck causes the Mars to lose their home and take up residence in a junky apartment complex. Lianne begins to drink heavily and is so ashamed by her family's ostracism that she begs Keith to move them out of town. When he refuses, Lianne abandons them and is seemingly nowhere to be found. As Hope Edelman notes:

The mother who abandons her daughter leaves a pile of questions behind: Who was she? Who is she? Where is she? Why did she leave? Like the child whose mother dies, the abandoned daughter lives with a loss, but she also struggles with the knowledge that her mother is alive yet inaccessible and out of touch. Death has a finality to it that abandonment simply does not.²⁷

For Veronica, who thrives on solving puzzles, these very questions plague her—though at first she's too devastated to think about them (“The best way to dull the pain of your best friend's murder is to have your mother abandon you as soon as possible. It's like hitting your thumb with a hammer, then when it's throbbing so badly you don't think you'll survive, you cut the damn thing off”²⁸). Her father says he doesn't want Veronica to see her mother as the villain in their current living situation.

Veronica: Isn't she?

Keith: No, it's not that simple.

Veronica: Yeah, it is. The hero is the one that stays and the villain is the one that splits.

Keith: I don't think that's a healthy perspective.

Veronica: It's healthier than me pining away everyday, praying she'll come home.²⁹

Veronica's defensiveness is to be expected. To quote Edelman again, “children often have trouble mourning a lost parent … because they have difficulty letting go of the image of an idealized mother they hope will one day return.”³⁰ In Veronica's flashbacks and dreams, Lianne is loving and attentive, talking about boys with her daughter while they make waffles for dessert. Veronica hopes her parents will reunite and is faced with the fact that they won't when Keith begins to date again. Wounds are reopened, and Veronica finally admits she needs her mother.

Veronica: Mom is still out there somewhere. Do you even care if she ever comes back?

Keith: You didn't care until I started dating. You've been hard on your mom for months.

Veronica: You can find anybody! If she were a criminal, you'd make a couple grand tracking her down and you'd have her back in a week.

Keith: Well, maybe I don't care to find her. Have you ever considered that?³¹

When a mother deserts her child … family bitterness or shame may discourage a daughter from uncovering details of the past. If the marriage went sour … the loss may not be as severe for the father as it is for the daughter, and her fact-finding efforts that require his help may dead-end.³²

Keith is privy to information that his daughter hasn't—or doesn't have— access to, and like Jack Bristow, he wants to spare his child even more pain. But like Sydney, Veronica takes the situation into her own hands and begins to actively search for her mother. She sends out untraceable pre-paid cell phones to all of Lianne's friends and relatives in hopes that one will reach her mother, and through her investigations she discovers more about her mother than she bargained for. Edelman writes that “for an abandoned daughter the question ‘Why did she leave?' always includes the appendix ‘me,' ”³³ and for Veronica this will at least be partially true. She learns that her mother had been having an affair with her former high school sweetheart, Jake Kane. Celeste Kane, desperate to put her husband's infidelities to rest, hires her husband's head of security to take surveillance photos of Veronica. In the photos, sniper rifle targets circle Veronica's head, and these were sent to Lianne. Veronica finds them in a safety deposit box.

Keith hoped to protect his daughter from information that would hurt her—in this case, Lianne's infidelity (particularly because it raises an issue of paternity). Though Keith repeatedly tells her to “leave it alone,” Veronica is consumed by a desire to know, and his deflections fuel her curiosity. When Veronica finally finds her mother, their relationship only continues for a relatively short time (whereas Sydney's mother is more or less a consistent presence, if an ambiguous one, throughout the course of Alias).

After finding Lianne, Veronica, in a last ditch attempt to reunite her family, uses her college savings to send her mother to rehab. Lianne soon returns to Neptune pretending to be rehabilitated, but is actually drinking in secret. Veronica confronts her mother by saying,

I know, Mom. I know you're not through drinking, I know you didn't even finish rehab. You checked yourself out and that was my college money. I bet on you, and I lost. I've been doing that my whole life. And I'm through.³⁴

Just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer used the horror genre as a metaphor for adolescence, both Alias and Veronica Mars use the conventions of their respective genres to exaggerate their protagonist's search for identity—for Sydney and Veronica this comprises an exposure of family secrets, an understanding of personal history, and reconciling the parent–child relationships with both the father and the mother. As Roz Kaveney notes, these “tropes point out that the truth of who you are and how you got to be that person is at once a necessary discovery and a painful one.”³⁵ The novel thing about the journeys of these two superwomen is that though they keep with the trend of superdaughters raised by single fathers, they actually do interact with their mothers. And though their mothers are villainized, they still go in search of them to better understand their own identity.³⁶

Veronica Mars, and especially Sydney Bristow, offer a contrast to the stories of Lara Croft, Elektra Natchios, The Powerpuff Girls, and others, where the mother is deemed irrelevant. And perhaps, as we will see in the following chapter, the quest for the mother, and the female hero becoming a mother herself, is a promising sign of things to come.

The final superwoman that should be mentioned in this chapter does not take a mother quest, per se, but a revealed truth about the woman who carried her to term is a profound comfort to Max Guevara, the protagonist of Dark Angel.

Max finds Hannah, the woman responsible for rescuing her after her escape from Manticore³⁷ and a woman she saw only once, but who selflessly helped a scared child on a fateful night. She, like Sydney and Veronica, has questions about her mother—only a few of which Hannah is able to answer. Hannah tells Max that Manticore recruited young women who they then kept on the base. They were monitored and tended to throughout their pregnancies and subsequently paid for their labor. They were young girls, desperate for money, and once they delivered their genetically enhanced progeny, they were unceremoniously sent away. To Max's disappointment, Hannah claims she can't tell her anything about her mother specifically.

Max: I always wondered about her. My mother. Who she was, what she was like. Now I know. Just another girl looking to get paid. But it's all good. I turned out all right with my strange little life.³⁸

But later in the episode, as Hannah and Max are saying their goodbyes, Hannah confesses that she did in fact know the woman that gave birth to Max. She tells her that “She wasn't like the others. Seven months into her pregnancy, she tried to escape, because she didn't want to give you up. When she was full term, they had to strap her down when they induced. Finally, they had to put her under. She fought so hard.”

The episode ends with Max perched atop the Space Needle. Her voice-over narration speaks volumes to the motherless daughter and quester:

So, now I know. I had a mother who loved me and maybe she's still out there somewhere. Like that really changes anything in my life. Only, it changes everything.³⁹