ABSTRACT
In medical and popular representations over the last half century, the mother of the autistic child has emerged as a contentious figure, a magnet for blame and admiration. At first blamed for her child’s condition, the unfeeling “refrigerator mother” appears today, in myriad counternarratives, as an exposed illusion that reveals fundamentally flawed, outmoded understandings of autism, as well as widespread patterns of mother-blame. Like a demonic transformation of the Angel in the House that haunts Virginia Woolf until the writer “kills” her, Bruno Bettelheim’s pathologized maternal specter keeps returning, and whether she materializes in women’s life stories, in documentaries like Refrigerator Mothers, or in histories of autism, she is roundly attacked as a harmful, though historically revealing, social construction (see, e.g., Nadesan 1, 97-99). Current cultural understandings of the mother in relation to her autistic child are also reflected in popular narratives such as Temple Grandin’s autobiographical story in Emergence: Labeled Autistic and Mark Haddon’s fictional autistic autobiography, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Commonly seen as portraying the perspective of an adolescent with Asperger’s syndrome, Haddon’s phenomenally popular novel constructs a boy’s coming-of-age narrative that hinges on his successful search for his mother; meanwhile, readers discern, as the adolescent narrator does not, the nearly muted story of the overwhelmed woman herself, almost defeated by her intensely emotional, traditional, but misguided approach to mothering. Oddly similar in effect to the loving but strong maternal figure who fosters Grandin’s story of triumph, Haddon’s realistic portrait may sound the death knell of the refrigerator mother, even if this cultural archetype is one of those phantasms that Woolf observes are “far harder to kill . . . than a reality” (286).
