Creating a psychologically believable character: investigating the manifestation of the filicidal mother in And all the children cried (Jones and Campbell 2002)

Abstract

This article investigates the extent to which And all the children cried (Jones and Campbell 2002) adheres to research on maternal filicide. This would determine the degree to which an actor charged with playing the filicidal mother, Gail, would be able to create a psychologically coherent and believable character. A contextualization of Western realist acting approaches and its relationship to the written text serves as framework for this article. The three most dominant fields of research on maternal filicide – psychiatric, psychological and psychosocial – are reviewed to establish whether these fields have succeeded in establishing a discernible environmental and clinical profile for mothers who kill their children. This is used as a starting point for the text analysis. After analysis of the text, it was found that the character of Gail seems to be an amalgamation of different symptomology associated with maternal filicide and as such an actor would have difficulty in creating a psychologically coherent character adhering to the proven factors that could lead a mother to kill her children.