Motherhood, Gendered Death & Violence in Netflix series You

by: Eleanore Gardner & Alyson Miller , March 24, 2026

Introduction

While the female corpse is, as Peter Messent describes, crime fiction’s most ‘typically depicted site’ (2013: 75), its most troubling function in visual media is when it evokes a sense of relief, nonchalance, or even enjoyment in viewers. Figured as either the victim or femme fatale in crime fiction, women are inextricably linked to the abject via their femininity, their evocation of ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva 1982: 4) or their role as a corpse, that which is the ‘utmost of abjection’ (1982: 4). In literature and in life, ‘the stilled (and often mutilated) woman’s body is, most frequently, the end result of violent male criminality’ (Messent 2013: 87), and contemporary television series have monopolised this trope in order to expose the impacts of patriarchal violence.

Yet, popular television series such as Netflix’s You (Toland Krieger et al. 2018–present) complicate this notion by positioning serial killer Joe Goldberg as the archetypal antihero: charismatic, charming, and undeniably likeable in his disdain for modern society, whereas his murderous wife, Love Quinn, is made monstrous and villainised in her violence. This paper argues that in its positioning of Love as complicated, flawed, and even objectively unlikable, You perpetuates problematic ideas surrounding male violence and suggests that when female protagonists blur the line between femme fatale, victim, and damsel, they are able to be justifiably killed. Flourishing as an antiheroine capable of murder, Love must suffer her inevitable ‘downfall’ (Friedman 1987: xi) for transgressing gender boundaries, particularly those related to motherhood and expressions of sexuality.

Importantly, we argue that while the series is hesitant to show viewers the killings and corpses of Joe’s female victims, Love’s prey—all of whom are women—are violently displayed on-screen as spectacles of horror and violence, thus positioning her as an abject and unruly killer whose actions cannot be justified. Comparatively, the series rewards those who are ‘good mothers’ by allowing them to escape death at the hands of Joe and Love, as is the case with Marienne, Joe’s object of obsession and eventual lover in seasons three and four. As Caron Gentry and Laura Sjoberg suggest, ‘violent women … are often thought of as not only bad but as bad women … their violence makes them bad at being women’ (2015: 3), and as a failed mother, wife, and sister, Love epitomises the worst kind of woman—the ‘manic nutjob’ (S3, E2 ‘So I Married an Axe Murderer’)—in her transgressions.

Critically, while Joe and Love’s murders of women are rooted in (internalised) misogyny, despite their respective masquerades of feminism, their propensity for violence is attributed to the failings of the mother, thus signifying them as ‘bad seeds’ birthed from the monstrous wombs of alcoholic, manipulative, and abandoning mothers. Such misogyny manifests differently for Joe and Love, whose individual motivations differ based on what are essentially gendered assumptions. When Joe kills women, it is for one of two reasons: they are either insufferable ‘anti-women’ in their rejection of essentialist feminine traits who get in the way of his current obsession, or they no longer hold his attention as objects of desire and must be ‘taken care of’. Comparatively, Love kills women—who are always Joe’s current or previous lovers or obsessions—to protect the image of her ‘perfect’ life, marriage, and family, but pivotally, her status as a mother. As Gentry and Sjoberg observe, ‘we continue to make sense of women, even women who are violent, by binding them to the role of the mother’ (2015: 71), for ‘women’s political violence is not seen as driven by ideology and belief in a cause, but instead as a perversion of the private realm’ (2015: 72). While the series attempts to position Love as Joe’s violent equivalent, it nonetheless fails to denounce his killings as immoral when compared to the impulsive and jealousy-driven murders of its doomed antiheroine.

Further, You ultimately suggests that when women are good mothers—i.e., the antithesis of Joe’s own—they should not only survive but escape murder by his hand. As a self-righteous punisher of those who harm the vulnerable, Joe’s acts of faux-feminism and care for the innocent are positioned as complicated reasons for his murders, thus relegating the blame to the mother who abandoned him. Through an examination of Marienne, we argue that her faked death and eventual escape disrupt the expected formula of the series but also reposition motherhood as a denomination of a woman’s worth. You position mothers as either saints or sinners, victims or villains, with the treatment of women’s corpses as spectacles further relegating violent women to the category of monsters.

‘Our love language is violence’: Navigating Gender, Murder, and Antiheroism in You

As Rebecca Nicholson argues in her review of the series’ fourth season, ‘one of the trickier aspects of You (Netflix) is its inability to reconcile its contradictory sides’ (2023) as it consistently treads the fine line between black humour and genuine horror. A self-defined pacifist (S3, E5 ‘Into the Woods’), Joe Goldberg is a serial killer who hides behind his mysteriously alluring, literature-loving façade while he incessantly stalks and kills women, along with anyone who threatens to expose him. Akin to violent literary protagonists such as Patrick Bateman and Dexter, and with complex echoes of Villanelle from BBC’s Killing Eve (2018-2022), Joe is a typical antihero, a figure Rebecca Stewart defines as someone ‘whose moral compass is never firmly pointing north,’ and whose motivations derive from the ‘endless struggle with the society that would have them crushed, defeated or incarcerated’ (2016: 7). ‘I did a bad thing today but for a good reason’ (S1, E5 ‘Living with the Enemy’), Joe narrates in an exemplification of the antihero’s archetypal moral ambiguity. Further, such a warped sense of justification points to the protagonist’s ‘multiple identities, ones that do not always sit comfortably with each other’ (Stewart 2016: 9). Via voiceover narration that accompanies every episode, Joe repeatedly tries to persuade both the implied viewer and himself of his innate goodness: ‘I wouldn’t have done this … I have to know who killed Delilah … Even if it was me … I’ll rest when there’s not a murderer on the loose’ (S2, E9 ‘P.I. Joe’). Critically, viewers’ fascination with Joe Goldberg and his ‘perfect disguise’ of a baseball cap (Fraser 2020) has resulted in problematic idealisations of his stalking and obsessive behaviours, suggesting that the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ romantic (anti)hero continues to maintain not only relevance in contemporary Western society, but also popularity. In 2020, for example, a fan tweeted that Penn Badgley’s performance as Joe was ‘breaking [their] heart … what is it about him?’ suggesting the inconvenience or frustration of the protagonist as murderer—the only impediment to the appeal of an otherwise likeable and charming man. Such sentiments echo the problematic media representations of real-life male killers who are consistently described as ‘good men’ and ‘good fathers’ despite having murdered their domestic partner and, in some cases, their children—revealing the desire to overlook violence in favour of a presumed inherent goodness. Badgley responded to the fan tweet, stating, ‘A: He is a murderer’ (Grebenyuk 2021), a fact the actor frequently reminds viewers of:

Joe is not actually looking for true love … He’s not actually a person who just needs somebody to love him. He’s a murderer! He’s a sociopath. He’s abusive. He’s delusional. And he’s self-obsessed. (Highfill 2019)

These paratextual complications continue to deepen, with Netflix responding to the troubling reactions to Joe’s character via billboards with captions such as ‘Penn Badgley is hot. Joe Goldberg is not’ (Vargas 2021), and ‘It could be worse. Joe Goldberg could be your Valentine’ (Famous Campaigns 2023), despite occupying previously murky positions on serial killer romanticisation. Netflix’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (Franklin et al. 2022) and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (Berlinger 2019) about the serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, respectively, received mixed reviews from critics who raised questions about the ‘ethics of true crime’ (Silva 2022), the commercialisation of trauma, and glamorising murder. Indeed, and in a similar way to their denunciation of romanticising Joe, Netflix responded to fans’ idealisation of Ted Bundy in a 2019 tweet, telling viewers that they had ‘seen a lot of talk about Ted Bundy’s alleged hotness and would like to gently remind everyone that there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service – almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers’ (Foreman 2019). The response to Ted Bundy fans came only a few months after Badgley directly confronted viewers on Twitter about Joe’s criminality, timing which speaks to the rising prominence of a problematic zeitgeist of serial-killer vindication and obsession, whereby men who occupy the dual role of serial killer and sex symbol are seen as less responsible or accountable for their actions. As Sophie Thompson writes, since You’s first episode, the series has ‘taken social media by storm with many girls (as young as 15) begging Penn Badgley … to ‘kidnap them’ and expressing their love for a toxic, abusive character’ (2019), a trope Netflix continues to showcase via its wildly successful streaming of Polish erotic thriller film duology, 365 Days and 365 Days: This Day (Białowas and Mandes 2020–2022). Comparatively, and critically for this paper, the audience reaction to Love Quinn has been fundamentally different, with showrunner Sera Gamble remarking that the show ‘intentionally plays into the phenomenon of people choosing to quickly “forgive men like Joe”’ while women who wield masculine power in the series are quickly and harshly judged by viewers (Vargas 2021); as Vargas writes, ‘after a certain point, it seems as if the show wants the audience to feel for Joe’ after Love’s demise at the end of season three. Critically, this contradicts the streaming service’s overall messages warning against the romanticisation of Joe, thus suggesting an unexamined cultural bias which condemns such behaviour in men while simultaneously revelling in (and profiting from) it. While we argue that part of the differing reception to Love and Joe’s characters is in the actual positioning of Love’s crimes as worse than her husband’s—as observed through her victims becoming violent spectacles in death—it is worth noting that her characterisation as an antiheroine who disrupts gender, social and cultural boundaries immediately puts her at a narrative disadvantage when compared to the more socially acceptable and recognisable antihero figure.

The antiheroine of contemporary television has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention since the beginning of TV’s ‘third golden age’ (Tally 2016), but while this morally ambiguous and unapologetic female figure is now familiar to viewers of Western television, the antiheroine continues to be defined by her mothering capabilities, objective unlikability, and position as a (non)sexual being (2016: 103, 106, 109). The antiheroine is an abject figure who ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ and who ‘does not respect borders, positions or rules’ (Kristeva 1982: 4) in her transgressions of gender expectations. Julia Kristeva figures the abject as a threatening and liminal force which threatens stability, particularly of the self, for ‘the abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I’ (1). For Kristeva, the abject is the ‘jettisoned object, [which] is radically excluded and [which] drags me toward the place where meaning collapses’ (1982: 2). The abject is ‘related to perversion’ (1982: 15) and is not just represented by ‘a piece of filth, waste, or dung’ (1982: 2) or even by the corpse, but also by the crossing of societal and cultural boundaries. Figured in these terms, the antiheroine is inherently abject and thus frightening, whereas antiheroes such as Joe Goldberg exist (un)comfortably within a familiar—and therefore more acceptable—history of male violence. In her exploration of gender and crime fiction, Maureen Reddy argues that female transgressors are conventionally portrayed as ‘dangerous, seductive villains … repeatedly position[ed] … as the dangerous Other that must be contained and controlled’ (2003: 193-194), and the antiheroine is no different, with her narratives often taking place within confined spaces such as prisons, the domestic space, or strictly controlled social situations (abusive relationships) from which she is often trying to break free. Like abjection itself, the antiheroine is ‘immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady’ (2003: 4), as opposed to the antihero who is so often granted narratives of redemption, justification, or empathy. Monstrous women in literature and visual media—whether they are villains, antiheroines, or femme fatales—continue to terrify because of their uncanniness and liminal existence, for, as Freud suggests, their wombs represent the ‘former heim [home] of all human beings’ (1981: 15), thus making them simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar—desirable and monstrous—to men. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen discuss death’s association with the ‘enigma’ that is the ‘multiply coded feminine body’ (1993: 13):

As the mother, ‘woman’ is the original prenatal dwelling place; as the beloved, she draws fantasies of desire and otherness; and as Mother Earth, she is the anticipated final resting place. (1993: 13)

The antiheroine, then, threatens the stability of the patriarchal order by blurring these already complex delineations of gender and by stepping outside of the ‘acceptable’ boundaries of femininity and female power. Likened to the ‘decaying body, the feminine is unstable, liminal, disturbing’ (14), which is only exacerbated when the feminine subject is simultaneously mother, nurturer, lover, and violent killer. As Goodwin and Bronfen further suggest, if woman ‘is the body, she is also the body’s caretaker … the layer-out of the corpse … if death is a kind of return to her care, then she is also contaminated by it’ (1993: 14), indicating a kind of inherent corruption of woman that is both cyclical and permeable. Critically, Love Quinn fulfils the role of the ‘antihero’s wife’ in slightly different ways to her predecessors: as Margrethe Bruun Vaage observes, in some antihero series, ‘there is a tendency to cast not just the domestic sphere, but everything feminine, in a negative light, and to give little access to its female characters. Increasingly, the antihero series has emphasised how the male can live a transgressive and exciting life if only he breaks free from the home’ (2015: 154, emphasis added). In You, Love is granted narrative power and agency as a temporary dual protagonist, yet her relegation to the domestic home in death, and her monstrous behaviour align her with the stereotypical antihero wife. She becomes so fundamentally unlikeable and domineering that the antihero’s eventual ‘immoral transgressions offer an enjoyable relief’ (2015: 155), both within his life and for the viewer. In an article for popular culture magazine, Punkee, Michelle Rennex writes that Love is the ‘real psychopath in You’ because she acts ‘purely off … emotion,’ ‘doesn’t worry about consequence,’ ‘is a hypocrite,’ and a ‘loud mouth’ who ‘wouldn’t let Joe change’ (2021). As the ‘messy, messy bitch who lives for drama,’ Love is defined here by stereotypically feminine traits related to emotional regulation (or lack thereof) and control, with Joe positioned as the ‘civil’ partner who is merely ‘trying to change.’ In her roles as mother, nurturer, lover, and killer, Love embodies the most abject form of woman in her liminality, in her ability to ‘elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space’ (2017: 95), with You perpetuating the denouncement of such antiheroine figures in its characterisation and treatment of her character as ‘monstrous.’

‘You made me kill her’: Love Quinn and her Spectacles of Violence

Love Quinn is introduced in season two as Joe’s new ‘light and fearless’ object of obsession, after he murders his girlfriend Beck in the season one finale. In line with previous infatuations, Love is characterised according to the trope of ‘not like other girls’; indeed, she is described as ‘the only woman in Los Angeles not showing off for strangers’ (S2, E1 ‘A Fresh Start’). More importantly, however, the link between nurturer and sexual deviant is made clear from the moment of her introduction to viewers: ‘Excuse me, does this peach look like a butt?’ (S2, E1), She asks Joe during their (anti-) meet-cute. Love is positioned as edgier and sexier than the ‘unspecial and mediocre’ (S2, E10 ‘Love, Actually’) Beck and ‘crazy’ Candace, with the series challenging audience expectations by revealing Love’s true nature: violent, impulsive, and murderous, thus aligned with Joe in a perverse form of romantic complementarity or even doubling. After a narrative twist where Love kills Joe’s ex-girlfriend Candace and neighbour Delilah at the end of season two, the couple moves to the suburbs for a ‘fresh start’ after marrying and having a son, Henry. Season three sees Love continue to kill and attack impulsively; her first victim is the beautiful neighbour—and Joe’s latest obsession—Natalie, while she also attempts to murder the anti-vaxxer, Gil, and her own lover, Theo. All three victims are bludgeoned over the head without warning and whilst defenceless, rendering her actions abject, ‘sinister … shady’ in nature (Kristeva 1982: 4). The season ends with Joe killing Love, the ‘spider’ (S3, E1 ‘And They Lived Happily Ever After’) he believes endangers his child, in the domestic space of their family kitchen when she is replaced as the object of Joe’s desire by Marienne, a local librarian and earnest mother. Unlike antiheroic Joe, who later becomes a distinguished university professor in London (S4), Love must be killed and her corpse—abject in its beauty—is burned within and alongside the Goldberg-Quinn family home, forever confining her body to the domestic spaces within which she failed to integrate in life. Having suffered her archetypal ‘downfall’ (Friedman 1987: xi) for challenging gender expectations, Love is ‘figuratively and then literally silenced’ (xiii), made monstrous in death, and relegated to the Bluebeard graveyard alongside those who came before her.

A trained chef, Love expresses affection through food and, inadvertently, through mothering via food, aligning her with essentialist gender traits despite the series’ attempts at post-feminism: ‘You like strong flavours. Gimmicks don’t seduce you. What seduces you is the real thing. Therefore, roast chicken’ (S2, E1). The uneasy tension between nurturance and seduction epitomises the uncanny nature of women’s bodies as ‘horrifying … marked, impure and a part of the natural/animal world’ (Creed 1993: 49) via the womb, and phantastic in its symbolic potential as vagina dentata, the toothed vagina, or ‘the black hole which threatens to swallow them [men] up and cut them into pieces’ (106). The myth of the vagina dentata links primarily to ideas of woman as castrator, with the toothed vagina figured as ‘the mouth of hell – a terrifying symbol of woman as the “devil’s gateway”’ (106). Figured as characteristic of the femme fatale figure, the vagina dentata ‘points to the duplicitous nature of woman, who promises paradise in order to ensnare her victims’ (106), and Love’s image as a nurturer—figured in her love of cooking and maternal care of her brother, Forty—serves as the false image which “lures” Joe in. Love and Joe’s first sexual encounter occurs at an intersection of motherhood and sexual deviancy when, after consoling her alcoholic and ‘fragile’ twin brother, Forty, and putting him to bed, Love and Joe have sex in the adjacent room (S2, E3 ‘What Are Friends For’). The myth of the vagina dentata is further emphasised in the series by Love’s dominant sexual behaviour and autonomy—‘you’re a different kind of woman, Love’ (S2, E3)—and her propensity for sex immediately following acts of extreme violence. For example, after a failed Swingers night with Sherry and Cary Conrad, local influencers and members of the community’s social elite, Joe and Love attack the married couple after they overhear a discussion about Love murdering fellow neighbour, Natalie, and attempt to escape. After moving their unconscious bodies to the glass cell under Love’s bakery, Love seduces Joe on the basement floor:

Love: Holy fucking shit. I think that was the best sex we’ve ever had.

Joe: [internal monologue] Yes, it was. The spark our marriage needed doesn’t come from swinging. Our love language is violence. (S3, E8 ‘Swing and a Miss’)

As a disruptor to the familiar lines separating motherhood, sexuality, and violence, Love becomes ‘too significant of a threat to masculinity’ (Smith 2017: 39) and must be punished for her transgressions; she is unable to be ‘rehabilitated back to society by embracing the more traditional female characteristics of love or motherhood’ (39). Importantly, when Love does embrace these traditional ideals, she corrupts them, suggesting a maternal taint so often associated with the antiheroine figure.

Love’s troubled relationships with violence, sex, and motherhood are positioned as the result of her own mother’s failings, with Dottie Quinn epitomising everything Joe (ironically) despises: inauthenticity, wealth, and self-obsession. ‘If I did such a horrible job, how’d you turn out so well?’, Dottie asks Love after a failed mother-daughter dinner where they argue over Dottie’s nonchalance and bad mothering (S2, E8 ‘Fear and Loathing in Beverly Hills’). Dottie is overtly sexual and maintains a lavish lifestyle, with her first proper conversation with Joe revolving around her vagina being ‘drier than the Sahara. If it weren’t for this wonder lube we’ve developed, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s already so difficult to reach orgasm at this age’ (S2, E5 ‘Have a Good Wellkend, Joe!’). Joe refers to Dottie as ‘a demon, dragging [Love] to hell with her’ (S2, E8) and from which he must ‘rescue’ her in what is one of many repeated reminders of Joe’s distorted saviour complex. Dottie epitomises the archaic and all-devouring mother, terrifying in that she ‘is castrated … and castrates’ (Creed: 22) in her deadly mission to ‘tear apart and reincorporate all life’ (22). Indeed, Love blames her ‘absentee parents’ for failing to model ‘healthy caretaking,’ forcing her to ‘fantasize about a new [family]’ (S2, E10) with Joe, one where she is simultaneously mother, protector, lover, and killer. Love’s first episode clearly foreshadows the fraught role she goes on to play in Joe’s life as his faux-mother, wife, and mother of his child, with one of her early scenes transitioning from a flashback of child Joe and his mother to the present day:

Child Joe: I was afraid you left.

Joe’s mother: I went to get sunscreen. Come here. It’s nice here, right? We should come here every summer. It could be our home away from home.

Child Joe: You are home.

Joe’s mother: Sure, we’re home.

Child Joe: No, I mean my home is you. (S2, E1)

The transition from this memory to Love knocking on Joe’s door with medication to treat his ‘rookie’ sunburn reinforces the uneasy, liminal position Love occupies in the lives of all around her, from which she is unable to escape. In her desire to create a new ‘home,’ the safety of which she claims has been denied them (her and Joe) as children, Love kills anyone who gets in their way, who threatens their ‘little family in the making’ (S2, E10): ‘I dealt with Delilah the same way I dealt with the au pair. I’m protecting you because I want to, Joe. You didn’t break me. You opened your heart to me. We’re soulmates, Joe’ (S2, E10). As a typical antiheroine in her weaponization of motherhood (Gardner 2021; 2022), Love stops Joe from murdering her by revealing she is pregnant, once again highlighting the series’ troubling links to motherhood: when a woman is a good or promising mother, they are spared murder at Joe’s hand, a fact Love is very aware of: ‘He [their unborn baby] … is the only reason I am alive’ (S3, E2).

Critically, while Joe and Love kill their victims in similar ways, Love’s murders occur spontaneously, emphasising the impulsive and thus abject nature of her violence. Both protagonists kill above the torso, regardless of gender: Joe strangles, poisons, and shoots his victims in the head; and Love bludgeons, poisons, and slits throats. The intimate nature of these killings also suggests a twisted protection of the sexualised body, particularly that of women, but also emphasises the inextricable link between desire and violence in both protagonists’ crimes. Yet, abjection ‘kills in the name of life’ (Kristeva: 15), making Love’s murders—all of which occur to protect her family—inherently monstrous, as opposed to Joe’s, which are presented to the viewers as more justifiable via his focalised narration. When confronted with Delilah’s abject corpse lying face up in the glass box, throat slit, surrounded by a pool of blood, Joe is certain he could not have committed the crime: ‘I promised. I meant it. I wouldn’t have done this’ (S2, E9). Delilah’s body is shown on screen in graphic detail, with her white shirt stained with blood, lifted to reveal her stomach—an image of corrupted innocence—and a white rose beside her. Comparatively, Candace’s body is obscured from viewers, with her Lolita style glasses central to the frame, emphasising again ideas about youth and sexual deviancy, and thus justifying her death. Importantly, Delilah’s body is made an excessive spectacle in this episode, but only because Joe believes he did not kill her, a reminder of the power of his focalising gaze and role as unreliable narrator. As soon as Love is revealed as the true murderer, her body is not shown to viewers again. Whilst perhaps suggesting that the series is equalising the violence of the protagonists, this is overturned in season three with the graphic treatment of Natalie’s body, exposed in a horrific state of decomposition as Love and Joe exhume the cadaver to destroy evidence. The spectacularised corpses of Delilah, Candace, and Natalie each reflect and pass judgment on their roles as motherly, sexual, and corrupt women, respectively, suggesting that even in death, they are unable to break the cycles of patriarchy. As their abject killer, Love is representative of Hélène Cixous’ ‘anti-narcissism’ or ‘anti-love’ (1976: 878) in her internalisation of misogyny, and in patriarchy, leading her to ‘hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilise their strength against themselves’ (878). You unsuccessfully positions Joe as the central antagonist in the show, suggesting that corrupted men are a natural phenomenon, but that deviant women are naturally corrupting: ‘You act all pure and noble, like you have reasons for what you do when you do it. But when I do it, I’m crazy, right?’ (S3, E2).

No longer Joe’s object of desire or ‘good’ mother to his child, Love is murdered by Joe in the final episode of season three, her corpse beautiful and unspoiled in death as it is laid out as a spectacle in the quintessential domestic and feminised space: the kitchen. After attempting to poison Joe with wolfsbane, in what is a stereotypically ‘feminine’ mode of killing, Joe inverts the trope and injects Love with a lethal dose: ‘did you really think that I wouldn’t start to wonder what you were growing in the garden?’ (S3, E10 ‘What Is Love?’). In her final moments, Love reinstates her position as a (corrupted) maternal figure:

Joe: You did this to yourself. And the hardest part was making the dose because I couldn’t lie to myself. It had to be enough. I had to finally stop you.

Love: We’re perfect for each other. But bad … for Henry. He’ll know what you are. (S3, E10)

The parallels between Love and Joe’s mother are made explicit in a flashback which follows Love’s death, where Joe confronts his mother—who has moved on with her new family—months after she relinquished care of him: ‘I made too many mistakes. And even though I loved you, still love you … I was hurting you too’ (S3, E10). As the punisher of bad mothers, Joe projects his own abandonment onto Love—and all the women he kills—by staging her corpse within the confines of the domestic space, penance for her inability to assimilate to the appropriate roles of caregiver and nurturer. As Maggie O’Neill and Lizzie Seal suggest, ‘in order to be rescued from abjection, violent women must be recuperated into femininity … this often involves making the woman’s actions appear to be explainable, but also beyond her control’ (2012: 43); certainly, in Joe’s staging of a suicide, he attempts to control and contain Love’s monstrosity. Untainted in beauty, forever trapped in the typical Gothic prison of the home, Love occupies a liminal position as abject in death—for the ‘corpse … is the utmost of abjection’ (Kristeva: 4)—and simultaneously feminine, with her corruption remaining internal, genetic; she is literally and symbolically poisoned, a ‘bad seed’ who could not break the cycle of the maternal taint.

‘Goodbye, you’: On Marienne, the ‘Good’ Mother, and Docile Bodies

While Love is unable to escape the misogynistic tradition of ‘maternal evil,’ redemption from such a taint is framed as possible through the figure of Marienne. A former drug addict who loses custody of her daughter, Juliette, Marienne is characterised almost entirely in relation to the maternal, particularly in terms of an obsessive desire to return to and protect her child, even in moments where her own life is endangered. In line with Joe’s assumption of ‘a paternalistic protective role’ (Petit-Thorne 2022: 64), Marienne is focalised through the male gaze as both a ‘hypersexualised object of desire’ and a victim of abuse—suffering the manipulations of a violent and gaslighting ex-husband—who requires, if not supervision, then strategic acts of intervention in order to ensure her wellbeing and happiness. Alexandria Petit-Thorne notes how You ‘has always been framed by racial paternalism, particularly in Goldberg’s recurring need to either save or pathologise—or save and pathologise—racialized characters,’ an expression of white supremacy emphasising how ‘particular racial groups require interference or intervention in order to be protected from their own inability to act or lack of self-discipline’ (2022: 72). As a Black woman, Marienne is not only stereotypically figured in relation to a history of addiction, violence, and a fractured family home that persists into adulthood, but also as fundamentally incapable of managing the complexities of her life, thus requiring—albeit unknowingly—the intercessions of Joe. It is worth noting, for example, how after the failed custody hearing, it is Joe who prevents Marienne from relapse (S3, E10 ‘Red Flag’), and who later murders her ex-husband, Ryan, so that mother and daughter might be reunited. In doing so, Joe appropriates the role of white saviour, working to disrupt the racial injustice inherent to the legal system and protect yet another woman from the brutality of predatory men in positions of wealth and power. In reality, however, the killer not only erases the voices of victims, but also reasserts the ‘privileged subjectivity of white, heterosexual masculinity’ (Rajiva & Patrick 2021: 283).

Despite her failures as a ‘fucking junkie’ whose behaviours once risked the safety of a child (S3, E6 ‘W.O.M.B’), Marienne is nonetheless redeemed as a ‘good mother’ due to her absolute and singular focus on Juliette, thereby ameliorating Joe’s anxieties about maternal abandonment, and repositioning motherhood as a denomination of a woman’s worth. It is the dedication Marienne demonstrates to her child which evokes Joe’s sexual obsession, reiterating once more the Freudian nature of his fixations; as he eventually observes, ‘it’s mother issues’ at the root of it all (S3, E6). Importantly, the maternal commitment exhibited by Marienne is admired even by Love, whose desire to murder the latest object of Joe’s desire dissipates on seeing the closeness between mother and child:

Love: You and your beautiful daughter, you need to run. Disappear. Ryan is just the beginning of what he’ll do.
Marienne: Then why aren’t you running too?
Love: It’s not that simple for me.
Marienne: No, okay listen to me, maybe it’s not my place. Maybe you think you owe it to your kid, or maybe you’re clinging to when things worked, but please, if there is ever even for a fleeting moment a tiny moment a tiny voice in your head, and that tiny voice is saying “I deserve better,” listen to her. That’s your partner. That’s you real true love, and if you betray her long enough, you will lose her. Trust me. I’m still trying to get mine back. (S3, E10 ‘What is Love?’)

While Marienne’s caution at first reads as an insistence on the self as primary, it is premised on the sanctity of the maternal, specifically on the mother’s role to guard against threat and as the source of individual power. Caught within an essentialised vision of femininity to which motherhood is central, Marienne is arguably most ‘real’ in those interactions concerning the fate of Juliette, a framing that echoes the characterisation of Joe in its violence and fierce sense of protectionism. When Marienne is kidnapped in season four, she repeatedly asserts that ‘all I want is to be with Juliette,’ and does not waver at the thought of murdering Joe so as to prevent the cycle of stalking and killing: ‘I will do it. My child is out there, I will not blink’ (S4, E9 ‘She’s Not There’). Critically, it is as mothers that women are granted their humanity in You, a lens which determines not only value, but also survival, regardless of how women are thus reduced to one-dimensional roles that border on caricature. As Love notes, it—understood to be patriarchal society—is ‘a game so rigged it could only exist in a world that hates women—especially mothers’ (S3, E10), observing the impossible tensions in performing a correct version of the maternal, and the misogyny inherent to regulatory social scripts. In the context of film and television, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn argues that ‘women have rarely existed as interesting characters once they are mothers … while occasionally sentimentalised and idealised, they are more often incompetent, monstrous or just not there’ (2011: 12). Indeed, while Love is made monstrous and therefore punished for failing to be properly consumed by motherhood, Marienne disappears into the maternal almost completely, a loss of self—even a symbolic death—that is positioned as natural and desirable, and more insidiously, as a pathway that enables women to enter a glorified space, one which reflects the most appropriate vision of the feminine: ‘You are a person, and a mum’ (S4, E9).

In these terms, ideas about the ‘good’ mother are imbricated with patriarchal notions of the docile body, represented most clearly via the beauty of the female corpse. As noted, the victims of Joe and Love are positioned as spectacles for consumption, their horrific injuries often serving to emphasise an aesthetic in which dead women are idealised, pure in their innocence and corrupt in the violations suffered by their bodies. Joanne Clarke Dillman describes how the ‘image of the female corpse reduces woman to body and links her to a monstrous otherness’ (2014: 12), one which is ‘spectacularly visualised … eroticised and sexualised’ (13). While the bodies of characters such as Beck, Peach, and Candace are effectively disappeared from the screen, others remain in full and often lingering sight, highlighting how ‘the power to command the look is an aspect of larger systems,’ demonstrated in particular by the ‘one-way directionality of the gaze’ (Dillman, 10). Petit-Thorne contends it is also important to note the racialising tactics at play, specifically in relation to the abjectification of Delilah, a Latina woman whose ‘murdered, blood-covered, decomposing body lies in the edge of the frame for 21 minutes of the 50-minute finale as Goldberg and Quinn debate morality’ (74). According to Petit-Thorne, the ‘use of Delilah’s body as spectacle and as prop is a manifestation of the privileging of white male subjectivities in You; the images we choose or refuse to make visible are grounded in whiteness and its regimes of representation’ (74). Beyond acknowledging the atrocious smell of decomposition, Delilah is little more than a narrative puzzle working as a tool for the character development of serial killers; that her body is “vanished” by Love and fails to result in news alerts, community alarm, or even a footnote concerning the mysterious disappearance, exposes how racialized bodies are offered for ‘consumption as entertainment and spectacle,’ and denied personhood beyond a fetishized narrative of pain (Petit-Thorne, 74). As Marienne observes of the widespread search for Natalie: ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome is America’s favourite past-time, next to porn … white ladies deserve to be rescued; the rest of us can fend for ourselves’ (S3, E3, ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’). Parallel to what Marienne describes as a ‘specific phenomenon’ (S3, E3) is white feminism, which strategically re-codes the murder of Delilah so that Love is figured as the genuine victim of such violent trauma. Petit-Thorne notes:

In Delilah’s murder, Quinn centres her own experiences to garner Goldberg’s forgiveness, falling back on the familiar strategy of ‘white women tears’, which Moon and Holling (2020) describe as a discursive strategy that shifts the focus from people of colour to white women in need of care and attention, in order to deflect from difficult dialogues or accusations between women of colour and white women (73).

Spectacularising the racialised body is an act, Petit-Thorne argues, that is ‘deeply rooted in white supremacist formations and harkens to the historical use of the lynching’ (74), photographs of which were circulated as postcards in order to ‘proliferate and reinforce white settler colonial ideologies of inherent violability of the non-white body’ (75). Delilah’s bloodied and broken corpse remains a background feature of two episodes, a grotesque tableau relegated to the periphery of other concerns. The image repeats with the faked death of Marienne, whose slumped body on a park bench—suggesting a fatal relapse—is seductively posed as both tragic and titillating (Dillman, 13), abject yet eerily photogenic in the evening light (S4, E10). Waxen and waifish, even doll-like, Marienne is positioned—like a marionette—as a victim not to male violence but to the failures of discipline, proving unable to properly regulate an unruly self. Dillman notes how representations of dead women more broadly have both ‘a haunting quality and a disciplining function’ (1), acting as reminders of the governing controls imposed by patriarchy and its insistence upon the docile female body. While murder is, of course, the ultimate expression of enforced docility, the modes of killing are also significant; as discussed, both Joe and Love inflict violence above the torso, tending towards choking or puncturing the carotid artery, for example, acts which render the victim voiceless during the agonies of dying. Prior to their deaths, the women are frequently locked inside a cage—a glass box once used to store rare books—within a sound-proofed room, while Marienne is also starved, albeit accidentally, into weakened compliance. Indeed, the treatment of the female body both prior to and including the act of murder is focussed on literalising a cultural insistence on women’s silence. Natalie’s corpse exposes the force behind such brutality: the removal of her teeth, an attempt to reduce the possibility for identification, further diminishes the body to a passive state of infantile docility, emphasised via a lingering shot of her grey, puckered mouth. It is important to note that the women who are killed not only refuse to comply with the governing strictures of femininity, but also embrace identities which actively fight against attempts at containment: Beck is promiscuous, Candace is ravenously ambitious, Natalie is adulterous, and Delilah, per the intertext of Bluebeard, is an investigative journalist who slips across boundaries in pursuit of the truth, and is unafraid to speak: ‘Did you just mansplain and patronize me in the same sentence?’ (S2, E6 ‘Farewell, My Bunny’).

Whilst disciplined for their failure to conform to the gendered expectations of patriarchy, their haunting of Joe suggests resistance, a refusal, as it were, to lie still. According to Dillman, the dead women in visual media often ‘look back, talk back’ (1), embracing a transgressive agency, however limited, that seeks to subvert the borderlines of regulatory patriarchal cultural scripts. As the ghost of Beck taunts (in an example of the series’ gallows humour), ‘You’re pathetic. Oh, I’m sorry, did I hurt your feelings? Well, I’m fucking dead, Joe,’ while Love emphasises how women are surveilled into death, the final act of control: ‘I can’t be angry, Joe. You made sure of that’ (S4, E9). Yet their beauty in death exposes a more horrifying reality, extolling the virtues of passivity and compliance, and suggesting an idealised femininity; that is, the best woman is a corpse. In the context of such logic, the violence done to their bodies is a sign of their sin and corruption—resulting from subordination—rather than the result of male violence and internalised misogyny. Following the Bluebeard narrative that circulates throughout each season of You, the messaging is clear: had these women not looked into forbidden spaces and obeyed the rules, their safety may not have been in question.

Certainly, the refusals enacted by women in You are often futile, as Joe inevitably regains control. The haunting of Joe by Beck and Love experienced during a series of hallucinations or instances of disassociation suggests a Gothic sequence in which the spectre insists on the realities of the past. These are, however, little more than disturbing but brief phantasmic events, and easily silenced. It is arguably more significant that Joe is unravelled, if only provisionally, by a series of Black women and women of colour: as non-white characters, Peach (S1), Delilah (S2), Nadia (S4), and Marienne (S3, S4) are marked as ‘Other,’ functioning as (sexual) threats, helpless women, or background characters, all of whom, as Petit-Thorne contends, only exist ‘to forward Goldberg’s character development and/or the plot of the season’ (2022: 72). While it is critical that these women undermine and expose Joe, their punishments for daring to transgress their proper roles are violent and cruel: Peach and Delilah are brutally slaughtered, while Nadia is framed for murder and imprisoned. Marienne is returned to her greatest joy, Juliette, and in a final shot, portrayed as a kind of victor, having miraculously outwitted Joe and overcome death, restored to health and a vision of maternal happiness. Yet Marienne has also been contained and made docile; made doll-like once again, she is placed back inside the small Paris apartment, which now suggests another cage or prison, the terror and threat of Joe lingering beyond its walls. As noted, Marienne is redeemed and saved from death because she aligns with a vision of the “good mother,” first perceived by Love and Joe, and then by Nadia, a literature student who finds Marienne in the cage and manufactures her escape. To extend an earlier quote, Nadia exclaims: ‘You are a person, and a mum. It’s not right, we are getting you out’ (S4, E9). In these terms, Marienne fulfils a vision of womanhood that satisfies the patriarchal imaginary of You—an ideal that eludes Love, whose attention to its hypocrisies fuels the deep-seated rage for which she is ultimately murdered:

I barely recognise myself anymore. I was so excited to be a mother and your wife, and as soon as I became that, you punished me for it. I mean you gaslit me so fucking hard I started to question every single thing about myself. But that little voice in the back of my head that I’ve been suppressing this whole fucking time, it was right. I’m not the problem. My husband is the problem. (S3, E10, ‘What is Love’)

Patrice DiQuinzio contends that women ‘can be subjects of agency and entitlement only to the extent that they are not mothers, and … mothers cannot be subjects of individualist agency and entitlement’ (1999: 13). It is a scenario which demands the subjugation of the self to the role of motherhood, explaining why Marienne’s recovery from drug abuse entails a transformation into the singular: mother. But Rhys, the murderous alter-ego of Joe, offers a powerful reminder of the potential for relapse, noting that Marienne is ‘such a casual mother she left her child to go wander a foreign country. Of course, she got kidnapped!’ (S4, E9). While Joe refuses to kill Marienne, the reprieve seems temporary, as the moment makes clear how tenuous the distinction between a ‘good’ mother and one who has failed might be—and thus how the mother is always under surveillance, and how transgression from the maternal ideal might result in death.

‘It’s mother issues’: Conclusion

Despite the series’ popularity and the relative success of its four seasons (with a fifth due in late 2024), there is little critical scholarship on You, which is surprising given its timely release amid rising rates of violence against women globally. You’s somewhat fraught exploration of violence, sexuality, and motherhood mirrors the uneasy position of male perpetrator apologists who simultaneously fear and desire the murderous (but always attractive) man. Importantly, the murderous violence of You repeatedly turns on a question of mothers, who are persistently framed in binary terms: saints or sinners, victims or villains. Whilst Marienne suggests a complication of these divisions, as a recovered addict who redeems past errors by sacrificing individual selfhood to the role of the mother, the maternal remains central to ideas about monstrosity. Epitomised by the antiheroine, Love Quinn, the ‘bad seed’ of an archaic and all-devouring mother, the failings of motherhood are figured as the fraught space in which male brutality and (internalised) misogyny might thrive, and in which the female body is rendered docile. Certainly, the beautiful female corpses of You, whose aesthetic desirability is maintained even after the most horrific of deaths, reveal an impetus to reduce women to little more than static, silent objects for consumption, functioning as a caution against breaking the rules or failing to regulate the improper urges of an unruly body. By framing Love as complicated, resistant, and unlikeable, for example, You perpetuates problematic ideas about male violence by suggesting the justifiability of her murder, while the rescue of Marienne insists on redemption as located within the ‘proper’ expression of an acceptable femininity; namely, that of the ‘good’ mother. The cautionary nature of the murders portrayed in You are also profoundly racialised, with the bodies of Black or Latina women offered ‘as entertainment and spectacle’ and denied complex subjectivities beyond an eroticised vision of trauma (Petit-Thorne 2022: 74). Ultimately, the female corpses in You are fetishized, objectified, and returned to the feminine or domestic space in hopes of salvation, while the series’ antiheroic protagonist goes unpunished, and is even rewarded for his acts of violence. You suggests that Joe’s crimes, despite their similarity to Love’s own, are more palatable, justifiable, and understandable when compared to the transgressions of mothers, wives, and women: for unless a mother is a ‘saint’ (S2, E10, ‘Love, Actually’), she must be punished.