![]() Due to Catherine’s unequal treatment of her daughters both Alice and Karen have issues with behaviour: one is a bully and, perhaps, a murderer the other is too subservient. Neither Alice nor Karen have been correctly socially conditioned by Catherine: they are both defective in some way. Julian Petley, in his work on ‘The Monstrous Child’, agrees with Sarah Arnold’s argument in Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood, that a central feature of the 1970s horror film was the child as monster. “Children pay for the sins of their parents” They are one big happy family, but Alice is not included. As Catherine and Father Tom gush over Karen and her beauty, they ignore Alice. Father Tom gives Karen a crucifix, as Alice looks on sullenly. In an early scene in the film, Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich), Catherine, and Karen sit around the kitchen table while Alice is left standing. Is Catherine’s guilt the reason for her mistreatment of Alice? Alice’s illegitimacy might be read as a commentary on children raised out of wedlock by neglectful mothers who deviated from societal norms. Alice was one of these: she is ‘illegitimate’, and her mother upholds the religious belief that premarital sex is sinful. In the seventies, with growing reproductive agency for women, there was a surge of children born out of wedlock. In part, this preference for Karen seems to be tied to Alice’s status. ![]() It’s obvious that Catherine prefers Karen over Alice: perhaps one of the worst sins a mother can commit is not loving all her children unconditionally (even if Alice is a horrible child with murderous impulses). The film depicts Catherine Spages (Linda Miller) as a recently divorced mother of two girls, Karen and Alice (Brooke Shields and Paula Sheppard). Alice, Sweet Alice is particularly interesting in this regard. In Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction, Pamela Wojcik argues that the concept of the negligent mother became synonymous with the feminist mother in the 1970s. The theme of child neglect weighs heavy in Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) aka Communion.
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