‘Fear, that’s what makes animals of us all. Before I met you, I was civilised.” So said Dr Yvonne Carmichael in the BBC’s Sunday night drama Apple Tree Yard, contemplating her vertiginous descent from ordinary middle-aged working mother to adulterer, then rape victim, and finally murder suspect. But what the series, adapted from a 2013 novel by Louise Doughty, was asking us to consider is whether civilisation is only ever a thin veneer; whether the animal inside could be unleashed more easily than we might imagine, given the right circumstances.
The idea of something primal, violent even, bubbling beneath maternal surfaces is hardly new, being a staple of everything from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare. Goading her husband into regicide, Lady Macbeth reaches for one of the few transgressions even more shocking to an Elizabethan audience, the idea of a mother murdering her own children:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
Yet the theme seems to hold particular appeal now, given television’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for darkly sexy crime dramas. There is so little new to say about women as glamorous victims, voyeuristically laid out on the slab, and the same is true of women as glamorous detectives. Which leaves only one obvious angle unexploited: women as glamorous suspects.
This month, HBO launches Big Little Lies, a tale of ferociously competitive California school gate moms starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, which revolves around a death at a PTA fundraiser. Clips from police interviews, full of bitchy playground gossip, alternate with long flashbacks to seemingly sunny domestic lives that turn out to be knotted with tension under-neath. It is based on a 2014 novel by Liane Moriarty, and there are echoes of The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas’s 2008 novel in which one simple domestic transgression – someone slapping another parent’s misbehaving child at a family party – opens a Pandora’s box of repressed emotions.
But the clever twist on a conventional whodunnit is that in Big Little Lies not only do you not know who did it, you don’t even know for a long time who died; there is so much seething emotion around that it could have been anybody. Women who kill are rare in reality, representing only one in 10 UK homicide suspects, but this storyline takes the flashes of rage most of us probably feel occasionally and stretches them to the point where almost every character is under suspicion. Would they? Could they?
The next juicy BBC1 offering, meanwhile, is The Replacement, the tale of a pregnant architect who suspects her maternity-leave stand-in of having malicious designs on more than her job. And in Netflix’s new gross-out comedy Santa Clarita Diet, Drew Barrymore plays a lovable suburban mom who is literally a man-eater. She has a guilty secret life as a zombie cannibal – albeit one who only eats bad people.
These are stories from the darkest side of motherhood, laced with sex, violence and obsession. But in a world full of idealised, Instagram-friendly images of family life, there is perhaps a hunger for something less saccharine.
Clover Stroud is the author of The Wild Other, an unsparing new memoir exploring her relationship with her own five children and with the mother she describes as both “alive and dead”, having been severely brain-damaged in a riding accident when Stroud was 16. After her third baby, Stroud developed postnatal depression, becoming troubled by wild imaginings about harming her baby.
“You’re led to expect motherhood is going to be a world of Bugaboos and babyccinos, that it’s going to be a soft and loving experience,” she says. “But from the moment you step into labour – which is never a moderate experience – I think that unleashes a sort of primal scream of maternity.
“The love you feel for your children is quite terrifying. I remember someone coming to see me when I had a baby, a mother who was older than me, and she said when her children were little, ‘I loved them so much I wanted to crush their bones,’ and I understood. There’s a physicality to it.”
Such intense love has a dark side, Stroud points out. “A kind of paranoia lies at the heart, because you are always worrying about your children’s health or safety or your responsibility for their happiness.”
And it’s this insecurity that creates fertile ground for drama. In more than one of these shows, an outwardly implausible plot is cleverly anchored in all too recognisable female anxieties: in particular, the fear of being replaced – in your child’s affections, your spouse’s, even your boss’s – by another woman. And that’s a theme with deep cultural roots.
The idea of the first wife, not merely as rival to the second, but almost as sinister alter ego, was powerful long before divorce became commonplace. Think of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, haunted by the ghost of the supposedly perfect first Mrs de Winter, or Charlotte Brontë’s mad Mrs Rochester in the attic, hanging like a terrible warning over Jane Eyre. Doubles and doppelgangers, too, are classic literary devices for representing repressed aspects of a character’s life – whether it’s Dorian Gray’s portrait, ageing hideously in secret while its human counterpart remains forever young, or the power struggle between Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and the monster inside, Mr Hyde. These are stories of duality and ambiguity, mirrors and shadows, secrets and lies; the double represents a path not chosen, a glimpse of what could have been.
That’s an idea with resonance for modern mothers, as the makers of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – the 1992 spine-chiller about a nanny who is certainly no Mary Poppins – recognised. Go back to work, and someone else must replace you, at least temporarily, in your baby’s life; take time out, and someone will slip into your professional shoes. Working motherhood can feel like a scramble for a footing in your own life, and the feelings aroused by continually defending territory on all fronts aren’t always rational.
Years later, I still remember the conflicting emotion of smelling the childminder’s perfume on my toddler; relief that she was clearly cuddling and comforting him, mixed with animal possessiveness. Many women feel equally conflicted about their substitute at work; wanting them to be good enough that nobody resents your absence, but not so good that nobody wants you back. The Replacement simply takes that worry and magnifies it a hundredfold.
Morven Christie plays Ellen, a successful young architect in a firm as close-knit as a family; Line of Duty’s Vicky McClure is Paula, hired to cover her maternity leave. At first, all seems cosy. After all, Paula is a mother herself and understands what Ellen is going through. But things soon turn sinister. Publicity photos for the series show the two actors’ faces emerging from a pool of inky darkness, like two sides of a coin.
There’s something faintly depressing about the idea of culture feeding on female anxiety, promoting the “Mean Girls” trope of women being forever at each other’s throats; bitchy, untrustworthy, neurotic. But while the pushy helicopter mothers of Big Little Lies might occasionally behave like monsters, they’re not unsympathetically drawn; the underlying anxieties that feed their behaviour – the working mother’s guilt over her absence, the stay-at-home mother’s worry about pouring too much professionally frustrated feeling into playground life – are carefully explored.
Gill Hornby is the author of The Hive, the 2013 bestseller about an insufferable queen bee of the school run, and mother of four now grown-up children. She felt the friction created by people with little in common but motherhood, rubbing up against each other daily, created perfect conditions for drama “because you’re trapped. You can’t just think, ‘Oh sod it, I’m out of here,’ because it’s not just about you, it’s your child.
“But I also think something else happens, because for five years you’ve had complete control of your child’s life and then there’s often an internal struggle [when they go to school]. You see people not wanting to let their child go, and everything is heightened by that. It’s an animal thing, your protective instincts can go awry.”
But as she points out, when it matters in her novel, the women come together. The same is true in Big Little Lies, whose storyline mixes female rivalry with solidarity, showing how intense experiences can bond women together. If nothing else, it has a fighting chance of passing the Bechdel test, the feminist rule that a film should contain scenes in which women talk to each other about something other than a man.
And that will be the final threatening act of replacement for some. For it is women’s lives and relationships that take centre stage in these dramas, and women who drive the plot, while the male characters tend to lag behind. “People can say anything. You really can’t tell the difference, can you?” as Yvonne Carmichael says to her lover Mark Costley, in the final astonishing scenes of Apple Tree Yard. Only at the end do we find out which one of them had the better grip on reality all along; and who has a chance of rebuilding that veneer of a civilised life.
• Big Little Lies starts in March on Sky Atlantic. The Replacement starts on BBC1 later this month.
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