Christa van Raalte

Enola Holmes and the Mystery of the Missing Mother

Enola Holmes is a piece of teen-neo-victoriana whose eponymous heroine, played by Millie Bobby Brown, directly addresses her young audience, emphasising the ‘double register’ which Imelda Whelehan describes as typical of the genre – and perhaps another kind of ‘double register’ in relation to its status as a feminist text (a status Brown has been keen to stress).  The film is adapted from the first in Nancy Springer’s series of Enola Holmes mysteries, entitled “The Case of the Missing Marquess”. The Marquess, however, is soon discovered – although the questions of who is trying to kill him and why take rather longer to solve. The missing person whose absence structures the narrative, and Enola’s developing relationship with her better-known older brothers, is her mother, played by Helena Bonham Carter, who remains mysteriously missing for most of the film. The ‘matrophor’, as Nadine Muller has termed it, is striking. It transpires that Enola’s mother is involved in a form of radical feminist politics that, with its organised direct action, consciousness raising and somewhat anachronistic self-defence classes above the tea shop, offers a distinct pre-echo of the second wave. Enola, meanwhile, like a late Victorian Katie Roiphe, rejects her mother’s politics, agreeing with her brothers that she is “dangerous” and choosing for herself a rather more neo-liberal path. Yet this cheerful romp, with its blithe disregard for historical accuracy or indeed narrative logic, is marked by nostalgia for the mother of childhood. It is also marked by a nostalgia for a simpler time when resistance to patriarchy could be signified by riding a bike, dressing in boy’s clothes or earning a living. In this paper I will explore the significance of the “matrophor” of the missing mother in this articulation of proto-post-feminism, along with the elements of nostalgia which stylistically and thematically underpin it.

Christa van Raalte is Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Media and Communications at Bournemouth University. She gained her BA in English from Oxford and her MA in Cultural and Textual Studies from Sunderland, where she also completed her PHD: Women and Guns in the Post-War Hollywood Western. Current research interests include constructions of gender in science fiction and action films, narrative strategies in complex TV, and workforce diversity in the media industries.

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