Natural and unnatural.
A defining convention of satanic abuse narratives, in addition to their common basis in a chimerical legend, is the contrast of mothers and daughters in all the narratives. The mother is usually single and always an abusive, satanically evil life-destroyer; the daughter, as a child, is innocently angelic, and as an adult is usually married, loving, and a Christian nurturer of her family. Implicit in this comparison is an assumption that satanism is profoundly unnatural. Children brought up as Hare Krishnas or as Catholics regard their religious beliefs as perfectly natural, but somehow satanic victims "naturally" regard the religion they were supposedly raised in as profoundly wrong.
Therapist Noreen McCarrick noted to me that children brought up in even bizarrely abusive households can come to regard that abuse as normal: one of her patients grew up in a house where no one ever wore clothes upstairs; the father would bathe and blow dry his wife and daughters, and watch them while masturbating. The woman had not been traumatized by this abuse because for her it was normal to have no privacy whatsoever, although as an adult she naturally had difficulty interacting in a world that took privacy for granted (interview). The portraits satanic victims paint of themselves, however, are based on the assumption that even aside from physical and sexual abuse, the mothers' satanic beliefs are inherently unnatural and abusive.
Catholic Miracle Play.
The earliest narrative of satanic abuse I found is generally regarded by skeptics and believers as the first. Michelle Remembers, by patient Michelle Smith and therapist Lawrence Pazder (1980), is a crude amalgam of earlier genres. With superstitions about demonic possession clearly in mind (151-53), the devoutly Catholic authors combined religious antisatanist propaganda, in the tradition of Mike Warnke's The Satan Seller (1972), with a popularized case study of therapy for child abuse, in the tradition of Schreiber's Sybil (1973). Smith and Pazder placed the result in the form of a survival narrative reminiscent of Maria Monk's 19th century anti-Catholic novel--in both, a good and innocent child or woman is victimized by but somehow survives and escapes the depredations of an evil, alien society of negation and death. (8)
The book begins with a Papal quote that "the Devil" is a real and "living spiritual being" (ix); it ends with a string of miracles as Michelle gutturally recites the words of Satan, who appears in person and wraps his tail around her neck, until "Ma Mere," a French-speaking Virgin Mary, engages in a "cosmic battle" (249), thwarting Satan and rescuing Michelle. Sandwiched between pious quoting and outre miracle play is a merely implausible tale, in which an age regressed Michelle tells of being held captive and tortured at age five by satanists. Stories of satanism had been circulating (in a revival of the medieval legend) for years among fundamentalist Christians: only the context of child abuse and the psychiatric claim to validity were really original to Michelle Remembers.
Pazder claims he made tape recordings of his sessions with Smith, but the authors, writing in a novelistic third person style, admit they cut and pasted the transcripts, rearranging events to make a novelistic story (39 note). Putative transcripts aside, the authors appear to have distorted or invented facts to fit their preconceived beliefs (as discussed above in chapter three). However, as with all these satanic abuse narratives, I assume that the authors are true believers and not consciously dishonest.
Michelle Remembers was published before the term "satanic abuse" had been coined or the conventional motifs of satanic abuse had formed. Furthermore, the book's depictions of abuse lack the discourse since developed by the incest survivor movement. Michelle is not hypnotically age regressed--the current term--she is "descended into the depths of her memory" (photo page 5). Unlike later satanic victims, Michelle does not tell of being impregnated and forced to bear an infant for sacrifice. Instead, the satanists for the most part content themselves with cutting up cadavers of infants (127 note). Michelle's satanists supposedly practice "very sophisticated techniques of ego destruction" (35) and "mind control" (194), but Michelle does not have to struggle against cult programming to kill herself (a convention of many later narratives). Even in this early version of the genre, however, the narrative focuses on Michelle's relationship with her mother.
Michelle's father drinks and beats his wife, and he is often not there, effectively making her a single mother (11). We first see the mother as a willing participant in a satanic orgy (42-43). When Michelle is in the hospital, her mother tries to kill her by shutting off her oxygen tent (91). Later, the mother repudiates her daughter, saying "I don't want you" (103). The story is torn between a need to love the mother and the need to portray her as a vicious, evil satanic abuser. This conflict is resolved by the disappearance of the mother early in the narrative, leaving Michelle in the hands of two satanist surrogate mothers: a nurse at the hospital who Michelle confuses with her mother (103), and a "possessed" woman she also mistakes for her mother (169). Without dwelling on the gory details, the book describes two torture scenes that became obligatory in later narratives. The nurse/mother gives Michelle an enema (90), and later forces her to eat something nasty, in this case a "putrid" bowl of burnt human flesh (97).
In contrast to the evil of her mother (or surrogates), the child Michelle is good: she instinctively cherishes the crucifix and Bible that the satanists defile (112) and disrupts the satanists' rites at every opportunity. The book ends with Michelle learning from the Virgin Mary that her mother is coming for her (316). Mother and daughter are reunited, with all the unsettling questions raised by the mother's earlier murder attempt and rejection brushed aside.
If the child Michelle is a good foil to satanic evil, the adult Michelle is a nurturing foil to satanic murder. We are told offhand that Michelle entered therapy not out of her own unhappiness, but as a preemptive measure to keep her from abusing her own as yet unborn children as her parents did her (12). In more recent narratives, this claim has developed into a detailed depiction of the adult satanic victim as a selfless, nurturing, prefeminist housewife, a mirror reversal of her murderous, single working mother. Likewise, the mild contrast between the good child Michelle and her bad mother develops into a portrayal of the mother as irredeemable and the child as beyond reproach.
Oral tradition.
It was eight years after Michelle Remembers that the next book length satanic abuse narrative (that I know of) appeared. In the interim, the genre continued to develop in an oral and unpublished tradition among some therapists and patients. Debbie Nathan notes that Michelle Remembers became a bestseller (the paperback is now in its 9th printing), and that its publication inspired a copycat narrative that appeared in "a national tabloid" soon after (Women 158).
Meanwhile, the standard diagnostic guide for mental illness had been revised in 1980 to recognize "dissociative disorders," such as multiple personality. These disorders were thought to be caused by the forgetting of traumatic, usually childhood, memories. As a result, many therapists began encouraging their patients to remember, often using hypnosis. Michelle Remembers and its tabloid spinoff served to inspire many fundamentalist Christian patients to tell similar stories to their therapists (Hicks In Pursuit of Satan 147-48, Mulhern 146-151). The reasons patients were "remembering" fantasies about satanists rather than real traumatic events are complex and dealt with in chapter eight. Briefly, the psychosis of some people caused them to lie, while others were too hypnotizable, so that when entranced, they were unable to distinguish real memory from fantasy or books they had read.
Therapists were soon discussing satanic abuse, but afraid of satanic retaliation, they did so privately, marking their papers "not for distribution or reproduction," and even declining to have their conference presentations taped (Victor 95, Hicks In Pursuit of Satan 155). As they heard more stories of satanic abuse, some therapists began to expect to hear about satanism from their patients--and the number of satanic victims began to increase.
Career woman as evil mother.
Some of those victims were unafraid to go public with their claims, and in 1988 a Christian press published Lauren Stratford's Satan's Underground. The first edition sold 130,000 copies (Trott, "Lauren Stratford Update"), and the second is now in its third printing. (9) Stratford writes in the form of the popular Christian genre of "testimony" books, ostensibly factual autobiographies in the tradition of Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, in which the author tells the story of her sinful life, and how, by finding Jesus, she was able to renounce sin and achieve happiness. However, Stratford's is not a testimony of redeemed sin, but of divine rescue from victimization.
Stratford portrays Lauren as a perfectly innocent, immutably good child who, from a "very early age," asked "Jesus to become a father to me" (22), and who never abandoned her faith despite years of abuse and torture. But the satanic abuse genre had grown far more paranoid and irrational since Michelle Remembers, and Lauren cannot be like Michelle. Michelle's satanic tormenters are human beings stymied by a rebellious five year old whose active goodness disrupts their evil ceremonies. Lauren's captors are part of an inhumanly perfect and secret conspiracy, able to control her completely through intimidation and "brainwashing." When Lauren is forced to participate in satanism, Stratford goes to great lengths to absolve her of any wrongdoing. She has to be "brainwashed" and heavily sedated (107) for her to sacrifice an infant, but even so, is too horrified to pick up the sacrificial knife (109). She stabs an unidentifiable cloth wrapped "object" (the infant) with great difficulty, and faints immediately afterwards (110). Throughout, Lauren is a good but purely helpless and passive victim, completely dependent on her "father" Jesus to rescue her.
The child Lauren's total passivity is part of her goodness, forming the epitome of traditional femininity. Lauren is thus a mirror reversal of her mother, whose evil is part of her epitome of traditional active masculinity. The mother's character, like the rest of the book, has little relation to Stratford's life, existing only in her mind (as discussed above in chapter three). A completely imaginary mother can be, and here is, a cardboard villain, unmitigatedly, willfully, and irredeemably evil. The symbolic ideology that requires the mother to be evil is equally simplistic. She is active outside her proper role of housewife, holding a "professional" job like the father (21). The mother also takes over all other aspects of the man's gender role, unmanning her husband--the ideology in Stratford's book seems to see gender roles as totally dichotomous and rigid. The unmanned father is "gentle, soft-spoken" and passive, while the masculine mother rules him through violence--she yells at him, kicks and hits him, stabs him, and puts him in the hospital "several times" from her beatings (22). The father never fights back or asserts himself, and finally leaves, "fearing for his life" (22). While I am dubious of the 'just-so' stories that make up psychoanalytic theory, Lacanian terms are useful here. The mother possesses the phallus, the power symbolized by the penis, while the unmanned father is dispossessed of it.
After the father leaves, the phallic mother acts like an abusive father, beating the adopted Lauren severely and forcing her to repeat to a mirror that she is a "bastard, a no-good, an unwanted, a bad-blood" (21). Three scenes of motherly abuse in Stratford reappear from Michelle Remembers. Michelle was given enemas; Lauren's mother decides on one occasion that Lauren is taking too long in the bathroom and gives her an enema with "steaming hot" water (44). Michelle was almost murdered and later forced to eat a horrifying concoction. Stratford combines the two incidents: the rampaging mother smashes everything in her kitchen, then scoops up a bowl of spilled cereal and broken glass from the floor and tells Lauren to eat it (23-24). Lauren concludes that her mother is trying to kill her (24).
However, the mother does not directly sexually abuse Lauren. Stratford appropriates feminist theories of rape and abuse to the extent that all the abusers in the book are men, all the victims women: women only sexually victimize when forced to do so by men. The phallic mother is only an honorary man, and instead of molesting Lauren herself, she prostitutes the seven year old Lauren to (literally) dirty old men in exchange for fix-it work (18, 20), and later to pornographer-satanists for money (34-36). Like enemas, murder attempts, and bowls of gruesome food, this minor detail of the pimping mother becomes an obligatory motif in later narratives.
Lauren does not get married in the book, but she does become a housewife. Teenage Lauren gets her father to take custody of her. Like the turn of the century daughters Linda Gordon studied, who took their absent mothers' place as "second wives" to their fathers (Gordon 254), Lauren does "all the things the woman of the house was supposed to do" for her father, but which her mother never did (Stratford 51). In Gordon's study, the fathers' rigid adherence to traditional gender roles caused them to link domesticity and sex--they demanded sex from their daughters as part of the daughters' housework duties. Stratford is an equally rigid traditionalist, and while she doesn't mention sex, Lauren otherwise becomes a "second," traditionally feminine wife, recreating the perfect home that her mother's untraditional feminism destroyed. Dismissing this passage as evidence of Stratford's "Electra complex" is to miss the ideology she is promoting. A victimization of daughters by their fathers becomes, in Stratford's book, an opportunity for Lauren to obey simultaneously her "father" Jesus's commands both to "honor thy father" (Ex 20.12) and to "submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord" (Eph 5.22).
Poor woman as evil mother.
It would be easy to dismiss Stratford's cartoonishly evil mother as unique to the author's own delusions, but virtually the same cardboard evil is attributed to "Gladys," the mother in Judith Spencer's Suffer the Child, a 1989 mass market book (no hardcover edition exists) put out by a mainstream publisher. Like the narratives discussed above, this book has sold quite well and is now in its sixth printing. Spencer's narrative is closely modeled after Schreiber's Sybil, in that it presents itself as a popular case study of multiple personality, with a scholarly apparatus of sorts, but is written as an omniscient third person novel, complete with the inner thoughts of people the author never met. "Jenny," the satanic victim and multiple personality patient, was in therapy for about six years before the book was published, which eliminates Stratford as a direct influence on Jenny's story and suggests that both were drawing on elements of the oral tradition of satanic abuse narratives for their portraits of their mothers.
Gladys is a poor, "white trash" single mother living in the rural southeast in the 1950's and, until she joins the local satanic cult, is a born-again Christian. Jenny and her older brother (who disappears for most of the book) are both illegitimate. Gladys is even more cartoonishly evil than the mother in Stratford's book: she supposedly never wanted to have another child, and hates Jenny as a result. Like Lauren's mother, she also administers sadistic enemas, except these are ice cold (33), also calls her child "Bastard--spawn of Satan" (36), and also prostitutes her eight year old daughter for money (67). But Stratford does not let the mother sexually abuse Lauren, while Gladys "found sexual release" in having sex with Jenny (76). Indeed, Gladys is so inhuman, so devoid of any sense of parental responsibility, that not only does she routinely lock Jenny in a potato crate in the basement so she is free to leave the house (34), but she sometimes deliberately locks a rat in the crate with Jenny (43).
American culture has a special abhorrence for rats; by having Gladys deliberately put vermin in with Jenny, the book establishes that she feels absolutely no parental love for her child. This unreal depth of evil is required by satanic abuse genre conventions. Occasionally the book contradicts itself, and we see a more realistic Gladys. For example, Jenny remembers almost drowning in a large puddle (56-57). Following genre conventions, either she or Spencer labeled Gladys as the murderous drowner. However, Jenny also remembers Gladys pulling her out of the puddle, crying "My God! What has happened to my baby?" (57), a blatant contradiction that Spencer simply ignores. Spencer says she checked Jenny's medical records in writing the book (xx), and so she is forced to reconcile the imaginary evil mother to Gladys's statements on record to Jenny's doctors. At age 12, Jenny swallowed an entire bottle of aspirin (86), and the next year she was checked into a psychiatric ward (99). On these occasions, Gladys explained to doctors that Jenny had been disturbed ever since her aunt kept her locked in a room (89), and that a cousin might have abused her (99), but that she has moved Jenny away from those people. Enthralled by the conventional requirement that Gladys be totally evil, however, Spencer dismisses Gladys as a liar.
Unlike Stratford, Spencer feels compelled to understand the mother's supposed evil, and explains Gladys's abuse by appealing to biased class stereotypes from Southern grotesque literature, demonstrating throughout a deep ignorance of working class realities. Reading between the lines, I saw a similarity between the real Gladys and the mother described by southern working class writer Dorothy Allison. Like Allison's mother, the real Gladys probably loved her daughter and wanted the best for her, but was trapped by poverty, illegitimacy, and a society that labeled her 'white trash' and treated her as only slightly less unhuman than Blacks. Allison's work eloquently describes the matter of fact attitude of resignation and the burning, sometimes violent anger that being so trapped creates, and also the taboos it builds up about discussing hurts. If the stories in hospital records are true, moving away was all the real Gladys could do; her daughter was supposed to tough it out, put it behind her, and never speak of it again. The adult Jenny, Spencer, and the therapists found it simpler, easier, and more satisfying to blame Jenny's problems on satanists and an evil, cardboard Gladys than to look at complicated and politically unsatisfying issues of deprivation and poverty or at the painful and ill-defined hurts of parental neglect and perceived betrayal that may contribute to Jenny's illness.
While the cardboard Gladys is straightforwardly evil, interpreting Jenny as good or evil is difficult because Spencer places an already complex story in the context of multiple personality. Jenny supposedly contains over 400 personalities (xxiii), some of which claim to be willing and eager satanists (including an alleged high priestess), while others are innocent victims or good housewives. To make sense of the host of personae Spencer describes, I had to remember that the idea of a single body being inhabited by a number of people is the result of Cartesian mind-body dualism. Since mind and body are not severable, none of the personalities are real people. There is only one Jenny, a person whose illness has caused her to invent a number of characters whose parts she role plays with total conviction.
From this perspective, Jenny's various characters fall into a number of standard literary stereotypes, especially the virgin-whore dichotomy. The young character that Spencer arbitrarily designates as the real, essential "birth personality" is "repressed, quiet, gentle, fearful" (xxiv)--like Stratford's Lauren, a passive feminine victim. Another, older character is "pretty and proper" (xxvi). Both are coded as virgins, the first a stereotypical "good girl," the other a traditional feminine woman. Other characters are coded as whores or "bad girls," either "strong, uppity, and untrusting" (xxiii), or else, tellingly, as "a prostitute into the drug scene" (xxvi). The "bad girl" characters are active satanists, while the supposedly more "natural" characters, the "good girls," are either good victims or traditional housewives. In day to day life, the "good" characters dominate, allowing Jenny to meet her "family's expectations" in being a "housewife and [nurturing] mother" (171).
Jenny marries at fifteen and moves into a house trailer with her sixteen year old husband (113-114); she then quit school and "kept up the trailer and cooked good meals" for him. She "tried to be the consummate housewife. . . . content to be at home, concerned only with pleasing" her husband (116). Stratford portrays her family as destroyed by the evil single mother's satanic feminism, Jenny by satanic poverty. When Stratford reconstitutes her own family with herself as the properly Christian feminine wife, she almost condones incest. Spencer and Jenny follow the less dangerous course of contrasting the evil satanic single mother to the daughter, a perfect victim and traditional nurturing housewife.
Oral Tradition.
The next book length satanic abuse narrative I have seen appeared four years later, in 1993, after a number of significant, again largely unrecorded changes in the genre. To backtrack somewhat, by 1986, the paranoia about satanic retaliation that characterized psychiatric conferences on dissociation began to ease, and satanic victims began appearing on TV talk shows (Victor 83). By 1988, satanic abuse was well enough known in tabloid circles for Geraldo Rivera to host a special "documentary" on it, drawing fifty million viewers (Victor 254). Stratford's and Spencer's narratives added to the publicity.
A fable that had previously been believed only among religious propagandists, a few therapists specializing in multiple personality disorder, and a few severely ill patients was now public knowledge. The fable began encountering serious skepticism, but it also met with wide acceptance among therapists at large, who began expecting to see it in their clients, and among self-help experts who began writing about it in their books. Before, victims tended to be like Jenny, who was in and out of psychiatric wards 27 times in twenty years, usually diagnosed (before she was reclassified as "dissociative") as schizophrenic, that is, suffering from a physical malfunction in the brain that can only be treated with antipsychotic drugs (Spencer 165). Newer victims tend to be more functional, in therapy but not in the hospital, with previous diagnoses of depression or stress, illnesses that can be treated with counseling. While the new victims are less vindictive toward their mothers, the stories they tell under hypnosis remain essentially the same.
Black woman as evil mother.
Gail Feldman's book, Lessons In Evil, Lessons From the Light, was published in 1993 in hardcover by a secular press, and has been successful enough to be republished in a mass market edition. As usual, it is fictionalized, with reconstructed dialogue and rearranged, selective quotes from what Feldman claims are transcripts of hypnotic interviews. Barbara is a prominent Black schoolteacher in New Mexico. She grew up in poverty, in what seems to be a small southeastern city, in a family of "religious fanatics" (46), who were, she comes to think under hypnosis, secretly satanists. It seems her grandfather, who prior to hypnosis she suspected had incested her, was a satanic high priest who subjected her to the usual list of tortures. Her grandmother, also a satanist, tempered his abuses so she would live to become the next high priestess. As in Stratford's book, the child Barbara is a passive victim, cowed into obedience by the intimidations and threats of her satanic grandparents, but always spiritually sustained by "the Light," literally, of Jesus's divine comfort (47). The book becomes interesting in its contrast of the evil satanic single mother to the good housewife and nurturer. In that contrast, Feldman, like Spencer, shows her incomprehension of class and race issues.
Barbara is doing everything she can to discard her class and race background: she has moved across the continent to New Mexico, dresses in expensive business suits (7), keeps her fingernails elegantly painted (34), and unkinks her hair (8). When unable to cope, she does not turn to a friend or minister in the Black community for support, but instead seeks out a white therapist. She is "determined to make it in the world of the 'haves'" (8), that is, the white world. Thus Feldman's observation that Barbara is the only Black satanic abuse victim she knows of is not cogent: Barbara's memories of satanic abuse are the product of therapy, and while most Black people are either unable to buy therapy or unwilling to trust mostly white therapists, Barbara seeks out and pays for therapy precisely because it is the white thing to do.
In a similar way, Barbara is unwilling to understand how poverty has shaped her feelings for her mother. Because Feldman describes Barbara's memories both before and after hypnosis, we can see how the satanic abuse convention of an evil mother builds upon already existing resentments. The mother was fourteen years old and single when Barbara was born (9), probably in the early 1950's (Feldman phone interview). The employment opportunities for a teenage unwed Black mother in the South before the civil rights era were virtually nonexistent, and Barbara grew up wearing clothes from Goodwill and rarely having the luxuries of Christmas or birthday presents (9). She was shuttled between her mother and grandmother, presumably as her mother fell in and out of work, and from age six she was doing housework and taking care of her little brothers (9).
In short, Barbara grew up in a typical poor family; Dorothy Allison and numerous other working class authors describe similar childhoods. Barbara's prehypnotic interpretation of her childhood is, however, quite unusual. She was beaten by her mother (35), and she seems to have responded by attributing all her deprivations to the claim that "my mother hated me because I was Grandma's favorite" (9). The mother gives her housework and childcare tasks because "I was her slave," while gifts were lacking because the mother "enjoyed not giving me" presents (9).
A class conscious therapist would identify Barbara's rejection of her history as one source of her problems, along with a history of physical and sexual abuse, but Feldman is ignorant of class issues, instead uncritically accepting and reinforcing Barbara's skewed vision of her past, condemning the mother as a poor role model (13). Under hypnosis, Barbara's merely abusive mother becomes, as usual, evil. As required by convention, she gives Barbara an enema, temperature not specified (146). She tries to kill Barbara with a bowl of food laced with rat poison (266), and of course she pimps Barbara for money (134-136). While these motifs are by now very standard, Feldman's is the first satanic abuse narrative to end with an attempt to understand and forgive the mother. It does so not with a class analysis or a discussion of Barbara's need to deny her roots in blackness and poverty, but by making the mother a satanic victim as well. Barbara's mother supposedly moved away from her parents' house, leaving Barbara in care of her satanic grandparents, because she was raped by Barbara's satanic grandfather (283-85). Feeling "like a jealous older sister," the mother supposedly hurt Barbara in order to strike back at her father (288). Satanic abuse makes even the most complex motivations and emotions simple.
If Barbara's grandparents were trying to remake her into a satanic priestess, they would hardly have helped her escape their clutches by helping her through college. Even less so would her poor mother, who was unwilling to spend money on a doctor when Barbara was sick (35), have paid for her college. But she did get through college somehow and later got married. At the time of the narrative, she works full time as "one of the most well known teachers in Albuquerque" (7): a working woman, yes, but in a traditional woman's job. As if to compensate for her effrontery in holding a job at all, she is even more the good housewife and nurturer than usual. Despite her career, she routinely cooks and serves a family dinner, and to labor the point, Feldman writes that she does her therapy homework as well, listening to tapes of her hypnotic sessions while cooking in the kitchen. Amazingly, "once dinner was on the table," she is able to leave her distress at the contents of those tapes behind and "settle down to being a wife and mother" (161).
Like Michelle's precautionary therapy, Barbara initially comes to therapy not for herself (she remembers physical and sexual abuse and suspects incest as well), but for her marriage and her children. She is sexually dysfunctional with her husband, afraid her problems will cause him to leave her (8), and afraid her anger at her daughter will lead to physical abuse (11). Committed to fulfilling the traditional white woman's role as a mother, she feels "like a failure" because she is unwilling to have the third child her husband wanted (24). Not even the traditional feminine panacea of shopping helps her, since she can hardly bear to spend money on herself (34).
At the end of her therapy, Barbara cheerfully reports that she now has "had sex every day for five days now" with her husband and liked it (269), and now enjoys spending time with her daughter (279). When she meets her therapist again, socially, several months later, she suggests they "have lunch at the fanciest restaurant in town" and "go shopping" (280). Almost all of her supposed problems are fixed, creating a traditionally feminine, happily adjusted, selfless nurturer and wife. Now if only she will decide to have another child. . . .
Barbara's healing (or wounding) is paralleled by her therapist's own transformation. Feldman describes an estrangement between her fictionalized self, Gail, and her husband, Dan. Gail is unable to deal with the stories of satanic abuse she is hearing from Barbara, and begins to be "hard on Dan" (133). Upset by stories of violence against women in the news, she would "shout" at him to "join the men's movement," do something (133-34). "Poor Dan," Feldman writes, "arguing with a madwoman could get him nowhere" (134). Not only was Gail developing signs of feminism, she lost her passion and simply "went through the motions of sex" (133). Fortunately for traditional family values, Barbara's healing (or harming) had a profound effect on Gail, who realized "we [she and Dan] were placing our relationship and family at risk." The politically correct "we" is betrayed by Feldman's depiction of Gail as a "madwoman": the wife, not the husband, is the source of the marriage's troubles. Gail goes into marriage counseling with her husband, and was presumably saved from a divorce (291). Gail's reconciliation with Dan echoes both Barbara's new happiness with her own husband and her final decision to seek reconciliation with her mother (288), so the book safely achieves the rescue and rejuvenation of all three families, without the danger Stratford incurs of seeming to condone incest.
Educated impious woman as evil mother.
Laura Buchanan's Satan's Child is something of a letdown after Feldman's tour de force of traditional values. Buchanan is heavily handicapped in presenting herself as a good wife and nurturer: she is not only twice married, but also twice divorced, and currently raising her three children alone. She is equally hampered in demonizing the single mother, since she comes from an intact nuclear family. In presenting the child Laura as a perfect, femininely passive victim, however, she exceeds all previous authors. Buchanan sees satanism as an omnipotent conspiracy backed by the devil himself (2, 39); satanists supposedly know to torture children so as to always cause dissociative amnesia to the tortures (9, 31). All satanists, including Laura, are supposedly brainwashed from infancy to be helplessly obedient "robots" (9).
Buchanan's theory not only allows Laura to be the ultimate passive victim, it enables her to forgive her evil mother as well. Only the cult leaders are ever "consciously aware of their role in the cult" (31); ordinary members like Laura's mother are mere victims, no more able to resist their programming than the children they victimize. The mother, evidently a full-time housewife, compensates for being married by being unchurched (Buchanan interview) and by being educated--she took a degree in child psychology "from a prominent college for women in the south" (6). The mother tortures Laura in various ways, including the obligatory "painfully cold" enemas (8), and an exercise in near drowning that echoes Gladys's assault on Jenny in the mud puddle (8). But then we are asked to feel sorry for the mother as, presumably due to a failure in cult programming, she tries to run away from her husband (86), then to kill herself (87), and is finally institutionalized "against her will" by her husband and a satanist doctor and given electroshock treatments (87-88).
Laura's mother does not make a very good satanist, however, because Laura attributes most of the mother's conventional torture scenes, such as forcing Laura to eat a horrid bowl of food--human brains in this case (55-56)--to her father. Having a father lets Buchanan attribute all of Laura's memories of sexual abuse to her father, so the conventional prostituting of the daughter by the mother does not appear. Buchanan compensates for the lack of these standard motifs by writing the most violent satanic abuse narrative I have seen, with a body count to rival the most gratuitously violent of splatter films.
In defining Laura as a good housewife and nurturer, Buchanan uses a similarly heavy-handed, conscious symbolism. She identifies Laura's childbirths with the peak points of fulfillment in her life, carefully noting that Laura was nine months pregnant with her firstborn (not counting satanic pregnancies) when she graduated from nursing school (90), and, coincidence, was again nine months pregnant with her son when her second husband graduated from medical school (100). Even as her second marriage was falling apart, Laura was a devoted enough nurturer to stay home full time, "caring for two young children and tending to the many chores" that her husband, an intern, had no time for (100).
Feldman ends her book by restoring not just Barbara's family but Barbara's childhood family and her own as well. Laura Buchanan ends convinced that everyone is a satanist-- from Laura's therapists, through the police officers who investigate her claims, to the judge who hears her suit against her parents. Laura thinks that as late as 1990, satanists abducted, rebrainwashed, and retortured her and her children (158-59): she seems to see a satanist in everyone she meets. Compared to Feldman, Buchanan seems almost mean-spirited in her position that reconciliation is impossible. However they may define satanists or disagree over forgiving supposedly evil mothers, both authors valorize the passive, classically feminine victim and traditional 1950's male worker-female nurturer families. Like their predecessors, both devote their books to demonizing "satanists," who happen to include unmarried, educated, untraditional, dare we say feminist women.
The same combination of unforgiving mean-spiritedness and a desperate need to rejuvenate even the most hopelessly broken families, and the same antifeminist valorization of traditional women's roles compose the core of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation's agenda. The FMS Foundation is ideologically identical to the satanic abuse fable it is nominally and superficially opposed to. The FMS Foundation's history, ideology, and writings are much more brief, simple, and compact than the satanic abuse fable, and can be discussed with justice in one chapter.