‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ Examines the Unknowable Adeline Watkins [Fatal Femmes]
Warning: The following contains major spoilers for Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
The story of Ed Gein is forever linked to a woman. This convicted murderer’s mother Augusta was known to hate the so-called gentler sex and warned her sons about the dangers of fornication, forbidding them to ever “spill their seed.” Her hatred for “harlots” was so extreme that after witnessing a horrific act of animal cruelty, an all-consuming rage caused a stroke that would quickly end her life. Surprisingly her ire was not directed at the violent man, but the unmarried woman she saw at his house.
As a child growing up in Augusta’s oppressive home, Ed learned to idolize his saintly mother and view modern women as sinners and whores. For twelve years after Augusta’s death, Gein continued conversing with Mother in the isolated farmhouse, seemingly unaware that she had passed away. To cope with the effects of her prolonged abuse—and the symptoms of untreated schizophrenia—he began murdering women and stealing female corpses from the local cemetery. On November 21, 1957, Gein was discovered with preserved human body parts filling his home and a mutilated corpse hanging in his barn.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, based on the 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, attempts to dramatize this destructive relationship, presenting Mother as a dangerous persona deployed as a weapon by the outwardly harmless Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Mother emerges as the story’s real villain, her hapless son disappearing into the power of her hatred. The new season of Ryan Murphy’s Monster brings this vile woman back to life—thanks to a magnetic performance from Laurie Metcalf—while seeking to unpack the complicated legacy of Hitchcock’s film. But as Mother fades into the mid-season background, another female villain steps into her place.
Her Story
In the aftermath of Gein’s arrest, a woman named Adeline Watkins made national news. Claiming to have had a decades-long courtship with the “Butcher of Plainfield,” Adeline detailed a loving relationship and possible engagement. She would later walk back these statements, blaming the confusion on overzealous reporters. We’ll never know the actual extent of this doomed partnership, but Monster: The Ed Gein Story leans into her initial statements.
Co-creators Ian Brennan and Max Winkler introduce us to a character seemingly smitten with Ed (Charlie Hunnam). Though hesitant to commit to the man known as “strange” in their tiny town, they bond over a shared fascination with human atrocities and hold hands during a couple’s skate at the roller rink. But Adeline (Suzanna Son) balks when Ed invites her to meet Mother who sits motionless in her darkened bedroom. Sensing danger, she flees from the eerie home, but eventually crawls back into Ed’s good graces. She tentatively agrees to become the future Mrs. Gein then flees once again when she discovers Mother’s rotting corpse and a chair upholstered from human skin.
Yet moments after this supposed breakup, Adeline once again changes her mind and adopts a more seductive demeanor. She’s now curious about Gein’s macabre habits which align surprisingly with her own. In the same episode we will see her marvel over a butchered corpse, taking photographs of the gruesome carnage.
This heel turn is followed by an altogether different Adeline in the next episode. “Ice” begins in the middle of sex between Adeline and Randy (Christoph Sanders), a young man from town. But when he questions her crass words and haughty demeanor, she threatens to spread a rumor that he engages in bestiality with the pigs on his farm. This sadistic cruelty continues to spiral, causing us to question the sweet young woman we met in earlier episodes.
Her Weapons
Proficient in weaponizing her sexuality, we meet Adeline through her breasts. She’s trying on a bullet bra because fashion magazines say they’re what modern men want and Ed has snuck into her home to gawk at her body through a peep hole. Hearing someone out in the hall, Adeline betrays a secret smile, implying that she knows exactly who was just watching and at least partially enjoyed putting on a show.
In the afterglow of her interlude with Randy, Adeline mentions her “trick pussy” while smoking and casually insulting the town. Though this enlightened attitude toward sex is refreshing from a woman in the late 1950s, any empowerment is marred by unnecessary cruelty. We’re never sure exactly what she’s talking about when she threatens to spread rumors of bestiality, but given the way this scene plays out, it’s possible she’s completely made it up.
The formerly sympathetic character will spend the episode burning bridges and lashing out at everyone but Ed as she plans to leave town for New York City. Despite being engaged, she claims she’s not ready to walk down the aisle and rebuffs his insistence that they consummate the relationship. While again refreshing to see a woman set clear boundaries for sexual encounters, we’re meant to assume she’s withholding sex to manipulate Ed. When he continues to complain, she offers a horrifying alternative. Suggesting he should find a woman who “can’t say no,” Adeline leads her fiancé into the cemetery and hints that he should dig up a corpse to keep him company while she’s away.
With her relationships in Plainfield sufficiently razed, Adeline no doubt assumes she’ll take the Big Apple by storm. She’s lined up a job interview with her hero, a death photographer called Weegee (Elliott Gould) and prepares to show him her own grisly stack of photos. But things in the city are not what she’d anticipated.
Not only is Weegee clearly annoyed with her gushing obsession, he laughs off her meager portfolio and cruelly dashes her professional dreams. Sobbing later in her unheated room, a tear freezes to the devastated girl’s face. Adeline confronts the elderly landlady but is once again dismissed out of hand. She realizes that her well-honed powers of manipulation are not so effective in a larger pond. Furious, she attacks the equally cruel hotelier and steals enough money to get back home. Adeline returns to Plainfield, humiliated and ready to take her mother’s loathsome advice to abandon her dreams and settle down.
Her Victims
Though not nearly as dangerous as her unstable fiancé, Adeline also targets older women. In addition to attacking the freezing hotel’s proprietress, she has a combative relationship with her mother Enid (Robin Weigert). Early attempts to charm Augusta—before she realizes that Ed has been talking to a rotting corpse—are likely more manipulation intended to stay in a man’s good graces.
Though initially horrified by Ed’s gruesome hobby, she marvels over the butchered corpse of local hardware store owner Bernice Worden (Lesley Manville), Ed’s latest fling turned murder victim. With a shocking lack of sympathy, she photographs the woman’s mutilated body and playfully asks Ed what comes next. While a fascination with death does not automatically make one a monster, Adeline turns her distaste for traditional femininity into an outright hatred for all womankind.
When her mother threatens to kick her out if she does not attend classes in Domestic Husbandry, Adeline bluntly insults host and teacher Eleanor Adams (Rebecca Tilney). When called out for her suggestive questions about wick size during a candlemaking session, Adeline responds with cruel barbs and vows to laugh over the matron’s grave. Not only does she insult the woman, but calls her son a rapist. We never learn the details of this accusation, but it’s likely she’s referring to Randy. Given the fact that this encounter appears consensual, we’re left to wonder if she’s referring to his speculative relationship with pigs or if she’s falsely accusing him of raping her. Worse, Eleanor has a heart attack and dies shortly after, we’re told because of Adeline’s accusations. Fulfilling her promise, Adeline—decked out in garish red—horrifies her mother by cackling throughout Eleanor’s somber funeral.
But this torment extends beyond the ceremony and Adeline will not let the woman rest in peace. Leading Ed into the cemetery, she points to Eleanor’s grave when suggesting he find a deceased girlfriend. Conveniently buried right next to Augusta, this suggestion is not an accident. She wants Ed to fully humiliate the woman and finds another way to symbolically dance on her grave. Enjoying necrophilia by proxy, she becomes complicit in Ed’s atrocious crimes, but pays a steep price for her shocking suggestion.
Sheepishly returning to Ed after her New York fiasco, Adeline finds that the man she once had wrapped around her finger has developed more sordid tastes and now prefers colder flesh. When Adeline finally initiates sex, Ed balks, claiming her body is “too warm.” This episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story ends with the demoralized young woman sitting in a bathtub filled with cold water as her fiancé dumps in a bucket of ice.
Her Motive
But before this chilling conclusion, Adeline suffers further humiliation. Confiding in Enid about her horrible trip, she confesses a fear that something is wrong with her. She has no desire for a traditional life and no interest in starting a family. We anticipate a tender response from the single mother, but Enid delivers a knockout blow. She tells Adeline what while pregnant, she repeatedly threw herself down the stairs, hoping to induce a miscarriage. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the reluctant mother cites one particularly brutal fall as the reason for her daughter’s progressive ideals. Enid ends this horrifying monologue by cruelly repeating her earlier instructions to stop playing around and find a husband.
This jarring speech sheds new light on Adeline’s spiraling contempt. Having grown up with a miserable mother who clearly resents her only child, it’s understandable that she would harbor deep animosity towards traditional women and fear being limited by the duties of motherhood. Like Ed’s troubling relationship with Augusta, a lifetime of emotional abuse has filled Adeline with internalized misogyny translated into destructive rage.
Her Legacy
After Ed’s arrest, Adeline makes a play for the spotlight. Downplaying their relationship and eventually identifying as one of his victims, she attempts to spin this bizarre turn of events into another way to escape the small town. No longer in contact, Ed—along with the show’s narrative lense—shifts to another villainous woman before returning to Augusta Gein. The real Ed likely would not have targeted Adeline, preferring women his mother’s age, and it’s surprising to see Brennan and Winkler give so much of the plot to a woman whose story is largely unprovable.
Hollywood adaptations of Gein’s violent life tend to age down his victims as well. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, Psycho), Sally Hardesty ( Marilyn Burns, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), and Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith, The Silence of the Lambs) are all much younger and more conventionally attractive than the women Gein confessed to killing and those whose corpses he mutilated. Is this another Hollywood glow-up or an element of Ed’s own legacy? After all, if the slasher genre was born in part from Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre then is Gein not also tied to the final girl?
More frustrating and ultimately revealing is the way Adeline shifts throughout Monster: The Ed Gein Story. We meet the young woman as an eager, if worldly, socialite desperate to win Augusta’s approval and determined to give the crumbling farmhouse a “woman’s touch.” As Ed’s own depravity grows, we watch Adeline become more villainous while documenting his grisly hobby.
But no matter who the real Adeline was, there’s no doubt she would have incurred Augusta’s wrath. After all, the vicious matron did not view women as human beings, but sinners out to corrupt innocent men. This fantastical version of the Ed Gein story seems at times to adopt Augusta’s cruel worldview, positioning Adeline as the show’s more prominent villain over the man dismembering women and raping their corpses. While arguably interrogating our tendency to vilify female figures, we never land on exactly who Adeline is and she ultimately becomes a cipher for larger themes.
The final episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story sees a much-older Adeline visit Ed in the mental institution as he slowly succumbs to cancer. Clearly suffering from a mental illness similar to Ed’s diagnosed schizophrenia, Adeline rages about those who’ve done her wrong, even producing a list of people she plans to kill. Ed ends the conversation by wishing her well and continuing on with this peaceful day. After all, he’s no longer the depraved man that mutilated all those female corpses and Adeline now serves as a vehicle to measure his own recovery. Once again she serves as a tool intended to reveal how Ed sees the world.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story pushes Adeline into a handful of female archetypes. She is at times an ingénue, a cruel seductress, a would-be bride, and finally a predator, but we never learn exactly who this version of Adeline Watkins truly is. Like the woman Ed has unearthed from their graves, she ultimately becomes a female body with no stable identity who exists to be repurposed for whatever the show needs her to be.
Categorized: Editorials
