Mum’s The Word
K. Stoddard Hayes explores maternal instincts in Xena and Hercules, focusing in particular on the mother daughter/mother son relationships between the shows' main characters.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 10
“You are a strange woman, Lao Ma, soft and hard at the same time.”
“Like water. Nothing is softer than water, yet who can withstand the raging flood?”
- Ming Tzo and Lao Ma, The Debt
In the universe of Xena and Hercules, mothers appear in many aspects. Two of the most important are the mothers of the heroes themselves. Both Alcmene and Cyrene raised their children largely alone, and both have a great responsbility in bringing up a child with more than mortal abilities. They must give their children the strength, moral direction and compassion they will need to use their extraordinary gifts wisely, and to do battle with the gods themselves.
Alcmene is the ideal mother. She is always there to listen to Hercules and give him wise advice. Yet she allows him the freedom to make his own choices. Even though his life takes him far from her, often leaving her alone, she never reproaches him but instead encourages him to do all the good he can. She loves him and is there for him every step of the way, even when he turns into a pig!
That does not mean, however, that she is his doormat, sacrificing her own integrity to his needs. When Hercules shows displeasure at her relationships with Demetrius and Jason, Alcmene reminds him sharply that she has a right to make of her own life what she chooses. She has passed this independence on to her son - Jason observes that Alcmene, not Zeus, is the source of Hercules’ own strong will. Even on her death bed, Alcmene is a source of strength and direction for her son. By refusing to pretend nothing is wrong with her, she makes Hercules face up to her coming end, and by making the most of her last days, she gives him the courage to accept his loss.
Xena does not go home as often as Hercules, so we have seen less of her relationship with her mother. Yet Cyrene also demonstrates many strengths and values that she has passed on to her daughter. She is independent, running an inn by herself with a no-nonsense attitude that would discourage most people from crossing her. She is committed to her community and to her neighbours, and will stand up for them even against her warlord daughter. Most important, Cyrene is the source of Xena’s courage. It takes more than ordinary bravery to stand up to the gods, as Cyrene demonstrates when she defies Athena herself.
As a mother, Cyrene has an enduring love for her child, and welcomes Xena back into her arms the moment she sees that her daughter has truly changed. She can’t help meddling a little in Xena’s life by trying to find her a good husband to help raise her child. Perhaps this is because she herself saw very little ordinary domestic happiness with Atrius. But she can also accept Xena’s determination to live her own life without a husband if that is what she wants.
In some ways, Lao Ma is as much a mother to Xena as Cyrene. She sees beyond the killer to the potential good in Xena’s soul. She begins by saving Xena’s life then tries to teach her to give up hatred and violence and find peace with herself and the world. When Xena fails the test and resorts to violence again, Lao Ma has no hesitation in stopping her forcefully, like a mother disciplining a child. Xena does not accept Lao Ma’s lessons while she is with her, but the lessons are there when she needs them, and they help her soul to its renewal.
We usually think of the mother as a soft character, tender and nurturing. In the dangerous world of mythical Greece, we see mothers being fierce protectors of their children as often as we see their tenderness. Lao Ma stands by while Xena and Borias kill Ming Tzu, but the moment Xena turns on Ming T’ien, Lao Ma unleashes her spiritual powers to protect her child.
In The Furies, Cyrene reveals that she killed her own husband, Atrius, to prevent him from sacrificing Xena, his daughter, to the gods. The image of a mother killing her child’s father is disturbing yet knowing Cyrene, we can accept her action as a sign of her love for her daughter.
Sometimes a mother’s determination to protect her child becomes an obsession which blinds her to any other good. This is the path Gabrielle followed when Hope is born. It’s a mother's job to look for the best in her child and to try to nurture it, as Lao Ma does for Xena. Yet it's also the mother’s responsibility to recognize her child’s faults and weakness, and Gabrielle is so desperate to believe that Hope is good that she won’t hear a word against her. When Xena voices her suspicions, Gabrielle bristles with hostility and warns Xena not to come between her and her infant. From there it’s only a step to fleeing from Xena as if she were the worst enemy in the world, and even lying to her about Hope’s death. When Hope returns as a child, Gabrielle still keeps the secret in order to protect Hope from Xena. She needs to believe that her child is not evil, and she accepts everything Hope tells her, until it is too late.
In her defence of Hope, Gabrielle stops short of trying to harm her best friend. However, when Xena becomes the ruthless mother, she crosses that line without hesitation. Her first rage for the murder of Solan is directed not at Callisto or Hope, but at Gabrielle. Although it's too late to save her son, nothing will stop her from avenging his death on the one she holds most responsible, the best friend who betrayed her.
There is more to Xena’s hatred of Gabrielle than a mother’s grief and rage. Mothers are always quick to blame themselves when harm comes to their children. Xena may be as angry at herself as at Gabrielle for not seeing through Gabrielle’s deception, and for not killing Hope the first time she had a chance. Worst of all, some part of her must feel that she has failed as a mother because she didn’t love Solan enough to raise him herself, and now it is too late.
Sometimes the most loving thing a mother can do is give up her child. Lao Ma, Gabrielle and Xena all make this choice at different times but for much the same reasons. Lao Ma hides her twin daughters in obscure homes because she knows that their brother Ming T’ien will someday try to kill them if he can find them. Gabrielle, still believing in Hope's innocence, puts the baby in a basket and floats it away down a river while she decoys Xena, an image that recalls the story of Moses, whose mother gave him up the same way in order to protect him.
Xena gives up Solan for a far more poignant reason than protecting him from his enemies. When she sees the dying Borias’ love for his child, she is filled with a new fear and love for the baby she scarcely wanted before. She gives him to the Centaurs to protect him from herself.
“If he stays with me, he’ll become a target for all those who hate me,” she says. “He’ll learn things that a child shouldn't know. He'll become like me.” (Orphan of War)
To give away a child is to trust someone else to shape that child's values and personality and its view of the world. The outcome is not always happy for the mother who meets her child much later. Solan fulfilled Xena’s hopes by growing into a plucky, kind and loving child, but no foster mother could have made any difference for Hope, who was Dahak’s child from the moment of her conception.
Lao Ma’s daughters, without their mother’s guidance, each learned a different lesson from their mother’s decision to hide them. K’ao Hsin believed her mother loved her so much that she gave her away to protect her, and so K’ao Hsin learned love. Pao Ssu believed her mother gave her away because she did not love her, and so Pao Ssu is determined to pay back the world for her mother's abandonment.
The most terrible mother is the mother who kills her own child. She is unnatural, a monster. Yet in Xena, the image of the mother turning on her own child is presented in a completely different way. In the very first episode of Xena, Cyrene draws a sword on her own daughter and warns her to leave: “This is not your town anymore. We are not your people. I am not your mother.” (Sins of the Past)
When the child has become a monster, the mother is willing to take responsibility for ending that child’s life rather than letting the child do more harm. Lao Ma also faces this choice, but she cannot bring herself to act it out. Although she knows that Ming T’ien is a bloodthirsty tyrant who will bring endless suffering to her beloved Chin; although she has the power to kill him even as she lies in shackles, she cannot raise her hand against him. She allows him to kill her rather than shed her child’s blood.
This theme reaches its fullest development in the Hope storyline. When Gabrielle is finally forced to accept Hope's evil nature, she poisons Hope, an act so painful that she considers poisoning herself as well. Hope’s resurrection a few months later brings mother and daughter together again. Hope’s attempt to persuade Gabrielle to join her sounds almost sincere enough to make us believe that she really does want her mother on her side. But Gabrielle can never again believe her. Like any mother, she feels her own responsibility for Hope’s crimes, not because of the usual mistakes in child rearing, but because she let Hope live when she should have killed her. Her own misguided love caused all this grief. She is determined to stop Hope from causing more suffering, and even more determined that Xena will not pay with her own life for killing Hope. She herself pulls Hope into the abyss, the mother prepared to die with the child, if that is the only way to stop the child.
With the birth of Eve, Xena has a second chance to be a mother, and all the themes of motherhood in this universe come to the foreground again. First we see Xena being the good and loving mother: nursing, comforting the baby when she cries, changing her diapers, talking to her, playing, even making a swing. Beyond mere physical care, Xena surrounds Eve with people like Gabrielle, Joxer and Cyrene, who she knows will also love her child and have a positive influence on her life. She even tries to ensure that Eve will always have a supportive family and community by making her an Amazon princess.
While Eve is still an infant, Xena is already concerned about what lessons her child will learn from her. When she finds a drop of blood splashed on Eve’s face after a battle, she wonders whether it is wrong to expose a child to so much violence, even for a good cause. She is looking forward to teaching her baby daughter all the wisdom she has learned in her turbulent life.
Xena must spend as much time enacting the role of protective mother as she does the nurturing, caring mother. When Alti steals the unborn baby's soul, Xena dares the spirit realm to save her. She travels to Chin to gain Lao Ma’s powers to protect her child. And to defend the newborn Eve from the gods, Xena is willing to bring about the destruction of the gods themselves and even to consider an alliance with Ares. Time and again, she finds ways to elude the implacable and omnipotent will of the gods, and finally tricks them into ending the hunt. Like Gabrielle hiding Hope in a basket, Xena entrusts Eve to Octavian, so that the child will be safely hidden while she stages their deaths.
In giving Eve to Octavian, Xena and Eve both suffer the consequences of the child separated from her mother. Xena never imagines that the separation will endure for 25 years or that Eve will grow up to become Livia, a Roman general. Octavian and Gabrielle try to console her that at least Eve is alive and no longer hunted by the gods, but it's not enough.
“I expected to raise her myself, to show her way beyond the blood and the violence,” Xena laments. (Livia)
It’s close to her worst nightmare to see that her child has become the embodiment of everything she hates about Rome. At first she considers making the same choice she made with Solan: to keep secret her relationship with Livia so that the gods will not begin to hunt her again. Only when she discovers that Livia has been corrupted by Ares, as she once was herself, does she tell her daughter the truth.
And now she must face the choices of the mother whose child has become a monster. Defeated by Xena in the arena before all of Rome, and deprived by her of the loyalty of both Ares and Octavian, Livia swears, “I’ll make you wish I’d never been born!”
Xena knows that rage all too well, and she knows that it will lead to violence like the slaughter of her own dark days. Yet she herself was once what Livia is. She knows how to walk the path that lead away from hatred and violence, and hopes that she can teach Livia, as Lao Ma taught her. When Livia has captured Gabrielle and killed Joxer, that hope seems to have failed. Xena has told Gabrielle that she could kill her own daughter if she had to, but when the moment comes, she makes the same choice as Lao Ma. She would rather die at Livia’s hands than kill her. At this moment, Xena’s love gives her a power even greater than the power to kill gods. It is the power to save a soul from hatred, as her love opens the way for the Light to touch Livia and transform her into Eve
The strength of a mother’s love and her power to shape her child make the mother a potent dramatic character. Xena and Hercules present many different mothers, whose interactions with their children range from loving to deadly.
By raising these themes, and especially by giving the choices of motherhood to central characters, the image of mother in this universe creates far more drama than we would see if there were only ideal mothers giving their children perfect love.