Evil Matriarch - Television Tropes & Idioms

HEEEERE'S JOHN...oh, wait. wrong movie.

"She is a lady indeed, although my limited experience of her suggests that she is also a mixture of the warrior queen Boadicea without the chariot, Catherine de' Medici without the poisoned rings, and Attila the Hun without his wonderful sense of fun. Do not play cards with her, because she cheats like a Mississippi bustout dealer, keep sherry away from her, do everything she says, and we might all live."
— Terry Pratchett, Nation

“When Your Nemesis Is Your Mom: Fighting with your mom can be awkward. Will she know your weaknesses? If you win can you still go home for Thanksgiving? Just do your best in battle and remember that your mom will kill you if she gets the chance.”

— Does This Cape Make Me Look Fat? By Chelsea Cain and Marc Mohan

A mother is one of the most central figures that a character can have growing up, and her influence can have an impact on that character even as an adult. If the character is lucky, that mother will be a loving one, and if he or she is really lucky, she'll be an Action Mom who can kick ass and take names if the character is ever threatened. But if the character is really unlucky and isn't suffering from Parental Abandonment, the character's mother will be an Evil Matriarch and chances are, she will make that character's life a living hell.

The Evil Matriarch comes in two forms:

The first variety, usually used in the Dom Com, is usually the mother of one of the two parents on the show who comes to visit every so often, and someone on the cast dreads it. Usually (though not always) this variety of Evil Matriarch is a Meddling Parent, often to an irrational extreme. Classically, this is a Mother-In-Law situation, but from time to time, the kids themselves, or even the child of the mother is the one that dreads it. In some cases, everyone hates the Evil Matriarch, like in Malcolm In The Middle where everyone dreads Lois's mother coming to visit. In other cases, her visit is appreciated by everyone but the daughter or son of the Evil Matriarch, like in Family Ties, where the matriarch is evil because her daughter feels she can't live up to mom's perfection. Expect this variety of Evil Matriarch to have Power Hair and other Fashionable Evil.

The second variety of Evil Matriarch, which shows up in more dramatic media, is even worse: she is truly evil in a traditional sense, and is one of the worst villains one can face, especially if one of the Heroes or Love Interests is one of her children (or if she's married into his or her family as a stepmother). Many such Evil Matriarchs are completely convinced that they, and only they, know what's best for their children, and can be very controlling, manipulative, and perfectly willing to do anything they deem necessary for their children's sake, no matter how evil or destructive it may be. The most vicious examples of this variety of Evil Matriarch despise their children (or at least the one they've singled out as The Unfavorite) and are often physically or emotionally abusive towards them, and many of them are not above Offing The Offspring.

If she's not entirely human, then expect her to be a Hive Queen.

Examples

Anime

Sohma Ren, Akito's mother, from Fruits Basket. She's probably one of the worst fictional parents ever.
Precia Testarossa is the definitive Evil Matriarch. Look at what she does to and how she feels towards her daughter Fate.
Kageyama Hiroko (the Countess Werdenberg) from the anime Gilgamesh. Apparently she is intended as a tragic and sympathetic character, but this editor hated her from day one till the end.
Kagura's mother, Shinzen Tennozou, in Speed Grapher. Not only does she constantly belittle and starve her daughter, she even goes out of her way to show that thanks to her Screw The Rules I Have Money mentality, there is virtually nothing anybody can do to help, until Saiga shows up (and even then, he has it HARD).
Jane in a certain anime version of Tarzan, Jungle King Tar-chan. I vaguely remember her description and attitude: Jane is a former model who turned into a bloated cow after marrying Tarzan. She is lazy, gluttonous, and brutal. Fully willing to unleash hell on Tarzan's groin when he steps out of line. One unconfirmed rumor is where she kills and eats a woman who showed interest in Tarzan.
Kaede Domyoji from Hana Yori Dango puts the family corporate behemoth before everything, including her children's potential happiness ("There is no place for ridiculous emotions like [love] in the Domyoji Group.") She neglects her son for years (which is implied to be the source of his semi-sociopathic fits of violence) until he gets involved with the Plucky Girl heroine, after which she devotes herself wholeheartedly to sabotaging the relationship by using her massive wealth and connections to blackmail and destroy everyone the heroine holds dear, an exercise she already previously done with Tsukasa's older sister Tsubaki. When Tsukasa ends up in the hospital with amnesia, she doesn't even display any concern and merely exults in the fact that this will harm his relationship with his girlfriend.
Lelouch's mother, AKA Empress Marianne from Code Geass is heading towards this very quickly, especially after episodes 20-21 of R2.
- She's more of a Knight Templar Parent, because she truly believes that Charles's Instrumentality project *is* the best way for everyone to live and will ensure her children's happiness. Even if said kids end up traumatised. BIG case of Love Makes You Evil here, whether said love was skin-deep or not.
Tamaki's grandmother in Ouran High School Host Club looks down on him because he can't live up to her restrictively high standards for her family, and even forbids him from seeing his mother.
Duchess Martine Gabrielle de Polignac is written like this in Rose Of Versailles
In Soul Eater, Medusa is this to Crona.

Ballads

In Child Ballad The Famous Flower of Serving Men, the heroine's mother had her husband and in some variants her baby killed.
In Child Ballad Willie's Lady, Willie's mother, a rank witch, casts spells on his wife so that she can not be delivered of her child but will die.
Of her young bairn she’ll neer be lighter,
Nor in her bower to shine the brighter.
But she shall die and turn to clay,
And you shall wed another may.

Comic Book

Jesse Custer's grandmother from Preacher is this trope taken to ludicrous and horrific extremes. She keeps her family imprisoned on a backwoods hellhole farm with the help of her degenerate and perverted henchmen, locks her grandson in a coffin underwater for weeks, and, of, course, tries to have her daughter killed. It is inexplicable that she hasn't been mentioned yet.
Mutant terrorist Mystique. She really does love her children, but {{X-men Nightcrawler's}} the only one she hasn't stabbed or shot. Though to be fair, one of her kids was a Complete Monster but another was just trying to get Mystique out of jail only for Mystique to breakout and stick a knife in her gut for taking to long. Yes, really does love her children.

Film

Disney loves these, and plays them straight. The Evil Queen, Baroness Tremaine (pictured above), Queen Narissa...and these are just the animated ones.
Eleanor Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate.
Hydia from My Little Pony the Movie
Norman Bates' mother from Psycho.
Marietta Fortune in Wild At Heart is a particularly deranged example.
Babylon A.D. The High Priestess of the Neolite sect destroys the convert where Aurora was brought up in with a missle strike, presumably to destroy evidence of her past that would obscure her status as a modern 'miracle'.

Literature

Olivia Foxworth, the terrifying grandmother from VC Andrews's Flowers in the Attic. She convinces her daughter to hide her four children in the attic of the family mansion in order to avoid being erased from the family line of inheritance. The children are starved, beaten and terrorized by the grandmother, and eventually neglected. It later emerges that Grandmother, in combination with her daughter schemed to kill the children by poisoning their food with arsenic. She is somewhat redeemed in one of the sequels, although this may be partial Dis Continuity because it was completed by the ghostwriter who succeeded Andrews after her death.
Eleanor Iselin in Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate.
Regan Hamleigh in The Pillars Of The Earth. A kind of Lady Macbeth type, she manipulates husband and son into doing her will.
Livia from Robert Graves' I Claudius is the Evil Matriarch ramped up to x1000. She poisons/murders no less than 6 family members (including her husband, Emperor Augustus) in her scheme to set up her son as the next Emperor of Rome. (And she doesn't even do it just for him, she also does it as part of a scheme to become deified after her death, and thus become an immortal goddess, to escape punishment in the afterlife for her crimes.)
In the prequels to the Dune series, Duke Leto Atreides' mother, Helena, is generally a thorn in the side of the Atreides household, and hatches a plot to kill her husband, the Old Duke Paulus. She is eventually exiled to the Sisters in Isolation to spend the rest of her life.
The Ancestress from Barry Hughart's Bridge Of Birds. A former imperial concubine, she plans to use her as-yet unconceived great grand-sons as pawns to overthrow the current dynasty and restore the one of which she had been the power behind the throne.
Queen Cersei Lannister from A Song Of Ice And Fire. Many of her villainous deeds stem from protecting her children, but mostly from her ruthlessness and ambition.
Gisella from S. M. Peters's Whitechapel Gods, who is little seen but for her effect upon Missy. Ran a brothel, taking in girls from the street that she personally mentally abused (to the point Missy hears Gisella's voice in her head denigrating her all the time), but subcontracted some more mental and physical abuse to John Scared, primary antagonist, nicknamed the "hobgoblin man" by the girls. Gisella would force the girls to drink something akin to a date-rape drug, so when Scared came by to properly "train" the girls, they experienced it as some kind of horrific nightmare from which they couldn't escape.
Discworld example: Nanny Ogg is not very evil (she, in fact, seems Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Good), but she rules over the entire Ogg clan (a massive family whose family tree is described as being closer to a mangrove thicket). She's quite benign and verges on My Beloved Smother for most of her family... except for her daughters-in-law, who cook for Nanny Ogg, clean for Nanny Ogg, and pray to the gods that Nanny Ogg doesn't come home from a vacation and find the slightest thing out of order. Famously, Nanny Ogg has never learned or has remembered the names of any of her daughters-in-law.
Also from Terry Pratchett is the person to whom the quote at the page's top refers to. Daphne's grandmother from Nation is exactly as described. Among her quirks are keeping track of just how many people have to die before Daphne's father becomes king of England. When Daphne learns that all those people did, in fact, die the first question out of her mouth is wondering if her grandmother did anything crazy.
In JK Rowling's Harry Potter, Walburga Black, Sirius Black's mother, is heavily implied to be an Evil Matriarch. (It is as close to a fact as gravity is, being that Sirius is known to exaggerate.)
Not quite a matriarch, but it's hard not to think of Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha, "who eats broken bottles and turns into a werewolf on the full moon".
- Nearly all Wodehouse aunts are like this, but a character who fits the trope more exactly is Lady Julia Fish in Heavy Weather, who despises (though she loves) her son Ronnie and tries to break his engagement to chorus-girl Sue Brown.
Grinny, in the children's book of the same name, who blends this and Nightmare Fuel. She's an aunt, not a grandmother, and comes across as a Cool Old Lady, but the children hate and fear her anyway because there's something frighteningly off about her. And how come they've never heard of her?
The grandmother in Jane of Lantern Hill manipulated her beloved daughter Robin into leaving her husband and taking her daughter, Jane, with her. She doesn't really like any of her other children, runs Robin's life, and does everything in her power to make Jane feel worthless.

Live Action TV

Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development. She is implied to have both committed murder & had sexual intercourse with her overprotected to the point of infantilization son Buster on at least one occasion.
Stephanie Forrester from the Bold And The Beautiful is a clear example of this trope, having spent 22 years trying to drive Brooke Logan out of her family after Brooke married both her husband and later two of her sons. Her worst crimes include hiring a man to make Brooke look like an unfit parent who eventually ended up raping Brooke (though to be fair, Stephanie had no idea what the man was capable of) and attempting to poison another woman who was pregnant with her son's child, thus making her guilty of attempted murder of her own grandchild.
Once Lorelai Gilmore reluctantly re-opens relations with her mother, Emily Gilmore is quickly revealed not only as a near-definitional example of Type 1 (oh, how Lorelai and Rory dread those family dinners!) but as strong shadings of Type 2, as well.
- Vengeance is gained when Emily's Type 1 mother-in-law visits.
Shirl Hennessey in the Australian 1994-5 TV mini-series Janus (based on real-life criminal Kath Pettingill; known as Granny Evil, head of a notorious Melbourne criminal family).
Angela Petrelli from Heroes. All her actions have shady motivations and she's not above using her children if the end justified the means (even considering killing one son at one point).
Christine Jones from Home And Away certainly falls into Type 2. She has invaded her daughter's privacy, invaded the privacy of her daughter's teacher, attempted to use her daughter Melody as an example of Miles' apparent corruption of schoolkids (by way of Spring Awakening), Taken out an AVO against Geoff, ignored the fact that Melody was raped, institutionalized Melody after her rapist died, withdrew her daughter from the subsequent counseling (causing a nasty case of anorexia), attempted an exorcism, and then kidnapped Melody. Parent of the Year award right there.
An episode of Lois And Clark featured the mother of a deceased criminal known as "Bad Brain Johnson". To try and get her attention, her Un Favourite second son built a fully functional mind control machine, to offer her the whole world as a gift. Not only was he met with equal disdain as usual, but not even the machine at full power could force her to tell her son she loved him.
Erica Noughton, Julia's mother on Nip Tuck: witty, intelligent, and a hell of a great person to have a drink with — unless you happen to be her daughter. It's heavily implied that her criticism and emotional absence are responsible for Julia's extreme insecurity.
Rome's Atia of the Julii is another ancient Evil Matriarch. She uses sex to get what she wants, verbally abuses her children and everyone around her, arranges the murder of her daughter's ex-husband (whom her daughter still loved), and sabotages her uncle's romance. (Oddly enough, some of these actions might have been prompted by a sincere desire to help her family, but her motivations are, for the most part, selfish. )
- Servilia, from that same series, isn't exactly a paragon of virtue either.
Roseanne's mom from Roseanne started out as an Evil Matriarch, but eventually turned into The Ditz as she became a Recurring Character.
Barbara Eden (best known for I Dream Of Jeannie) played the Evil Matriarch of the Spellman Clan in Sabrina The Teenage Witch, whose appearances were usually preceeded by something unexpectedly (insofar as the word can be applied in this show) freezing in anticipation of her icy demeanor. Elizabeth Montgomery, had she still been alive, might have been a more natural choice, as her character's mother on Bewitched (played by Agnes Moorehead) is archetypical of the Evil Matriarch.
Sons Of Anarchy features Gemma Teller Morrow, who supplies her son's junkie ex-wife with heroin (in order to damage her health or kill her, keeping her away from the new baby), smashes a skateboard into the face of a girl she suspects is sleeping with her husband, and just generally manipulates people all over the place.
Livia Soprano from The Sopranos takes exclusive pleasure in tormenting people around her, especially her son Tony. She even tries to off him once.
- Nearly a case of Truth In Television except for the attempted killing part, presumably, as she's based on creator David Chase's own mother.
Charlie and Alan's mother in Two And A Half Men (as well as one of Charlie's girlfriends, much to everyone else's amusement and horror).
George Lopez's grandmother, both on the TV show and in real life.
Pops a lot in Hispanic Soap Operas as the typical castrating mother of the male lead, but the best and biggest one in malevolence is Catalina Creel de Larios in Cuna de Lobos. For her, "Family Name" comes before everything (including fortune and love), and because of that she is not shy in committing murder, lying barefaced and manipulating everything and everyone around her. She even has an Eyepatch Of Power who makes her look more sinister (and the patch is a plot point in itself)!

Theater

Bernarda Alba from García Lorca's play La Casa de Bernarda Alba ("The House of Bernarda Alba"). Even in the 1930, when all the values this woman embodied were still living in the deepest Spain, she still managed to come as too oppressive, gçcoldhearted, cruel, and smothering (and not only for her old maid).
In an earlier adaptation of this period in history, the titular character from G.F. Händel's 1709 opera Agrippina is similarly preoccupied with securing the throne for her son Nero. Expertly manipulating everyone around her, she manages to manoeuvre around a number of setbacks - such as her husband, the emperor Claudius, surviving the shipwreck that was supposed to have killed him - at the expense of the only morally upright character in the entire piece. In contrast to the other Roman examples listed here, the opera's happy ending allows for Agrippina's scheming to be played for (admittedly pretty nasty) comedy.

Videogames

Hilda from Fire Emblem 4. Tortures her sister in law Tiltyu AND her daughter Tinny for good measure, and while she keeps saying it's to punish traitors, deep down, she just enjoys torturing for the heck of it. The result becomes obvious. Tiltyu becomes extremely broken and cries everyday until she's dead due to sickness, and Tinny ends up as a Shrinking Violet. And then, Hilda keeps pressuring her blood daughter Ishtar to marry Julius, just so she can get more links and power from the Emperor. And in Fire Emblem 5, it's revealed that even her husband Blume does not support child hunts... but she supports it wholeheartedly.
- Succeeding Hilda would be Sonia from the 7th game. While just evil, manipulative and haughtily trying to appease Nergal that she is human (though it goes otherwise, You Cant Fight Fate), she just have to hammer it down by completely screwing Nino out, by raising her with full of hate, she would've killed her if it wasn't for Nergal's order. And then when Nino asks for truth, Sonia completely bemeaned her and reveals that she killed Nino's birth family. To hammer it down worse... Sonia plays a very big part in Nergal's plan on screwing up the Black Fangs, including the deaths of the Reed family, which is what Nino could consider the closest as blood family. If there's an Evil Matriarch in Fire Emblem, they'd surely target the cheeriest, genkiest victim, indeed.
Ironically, this is what becomes of Duminuss in Super Robot Wars OG Gaiden. Forcing her children that dedicate their lives to her to MERGE with her despite their own wishes, and later dismissed them as just mere pawns that she can throw away any time... the original Duminuss never had this, she was actually a loving mother despite coming off as cold. Thanks a lot, Character Derailment.
Morgan Fey in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All. Pearl's mother and Maya's Evil Aunt.
Queen Zeal of Chrono Trigger isn't evil just towards the world at large; she shows nothing but contempt for her children, using them as tools to acquire further power and disposing of them when they're no longer needed.
- She wasn't always like this; it's implied that a combination of her husband's death and the malevolent power of Lavos is what corrupted her.
Benezia in Mass Effect (though she is eventually revealed to be indoctrinated by Sovereign).

Webcomics

Hazel Green in College Roomies From Hell: her children refer to her as 'The Dragon', and she lives up to the name, having them followed by her private agents, using brainwashing, blackmail and intimidation to manipulate them, and having her daughter's would-be boyfriend (and roommate of her eldest biological son) kidnapped and implanting an explosive tracking device on him.
Every mother that appears, or is even mentioned, in the webcomic Ugly Hill, is one of these - often taken to ludicrous and downright scary extremes. One almost wonders if the author has some Freudian Excuse for this... or maybe it just comes down to the fact that every character in the comic is a literal monster.
Hannelore's mother in Questionable Content. Her visit is pretty much this trope non-stop.

Western Animation

Male example: Peter Griffin's step-father in Family Guy
In-law examples: Peggy's mother and Hank's father in King Of The Hill
Mom.

Real Life

Italian poet Giacomo Leapardi's mother seems to have been one. His accounts include her praying that her children die so that their souls would get into Heaven faster.
- The "mother wishes death on kids to send the souls towards God" is more of Values Dissonance. St. Rita of Cassia once did the same... but always was a loving mother towards her rebellious kids. Rita and her boys just happened to live in a time (the Dark Ages) where everyone believed that the Earth was a Crapsack World and that only in Heaven people would be happy with God, therefore a Christian death was pretty much the best option (And to Rita's credit, when her kids did fall mortally ill, she took care of them devotedly until they kicked the bucket.)
Date Masamune's mother, reportedly. She is pretty normal to other people, but towards Masamune, after plucking his eye out due to smallpox, she comes of as a complete bitch that tried to poison him when he was young, because he happened to be The Unfavorite. It's no wonder Masamune grew up to be that much of a wild, unpredictable, ruthless young warlord.
The Emperor Irene of the Byzantine Empire (that was "emperor" not "empress" - she insisted). She served as regent for her son. But when he grew up and tried to assert the power of emperor, she had his eyes gouged out. Among other very mean things.
This is part of the stereotype of the Jewish grandmother/mother-in-law. She dotes, spoils and fawns over her grandchildren, nags and overcontrols her son, and treats her daughter in law like garbage.
Princess Sophie of Bavaria, later Archduchess Sophie of Austria, is often portrayed this way in media, since she was the mother of Emperor Franz Joseph and the mother-in-law of Elisabeth of Bavaria aka "Sisi". The more pro-Sissi the media is, the more malevolent Sophie will be. It doesn't help that such media often derails Sissi as a Purity Sue, ignoring how complex her personality was in Real Life.