Unpayable Motherhood: Gothic Sacrifice, Bodily Debt and Gendered Disposability in Crossroads

Abstract

This article analyses Laurel Hightower’s Crossroads as a contemporary North American horror novella in which maternal grief is Gothicised into a debt, ritual payment and bodily sacrifice. Through a close reading of selected excerpts, coded according to the categories of Maternal Debt, Corporeal Payment, Gothic Transaction and Uncertain Presence, the study examines how Chris’s mourning for her dead son Trey becomes organised around ritualised bodily surrender in response to the patriarchal, unlimited abnegation of motherhood. The roadside cross, initially a memorial site, is progressively transformed into a threshold where blood, wounds and fragmented flesh function as offerings for an uncertain ghostly return. Gothic feminist criticism and theories of patriarchal motherhood allow exploring the violence embedded in ideals of maternal selflessness and how maternal selflessness becomes the site where maternal devotion is measured, disciplined and ultimately consumed, revealing motherhood as an impossible and unpayable debt, and the patriarchal conception of the mother as limited and ideal, yet monstrous, simultaneously.