Child’s Play and Women’s Work

Abstract

The third chapter examines children and women in the film. In particular, The Conjuring is a film filled with dangerous and diabolical toys and games: the doll Annabelle, the game Hide-and-Clap, Rory’s music box, the haunted toys in the Warrens’ Occult Museum. The film also displays children in peril and the parents who must struggle to protect them, even as the danger often comes (directly or indirectly) from the parents themselves. The five Perron daughters are linked with Judy Warren, Ed and Lorraine’s daughter, as all are threatened by supernatural evil and the threat of being harmed by the parents. In contrast the film also shows Rory, the dead boy killed by his mother, as a cautionary tale. Similarly, The Conjuring is a female-centric movie, concerned with wives and mothers, and yet is not particularly feminist. The second half of the chapter offers a feminist reading of the women of The Conjuring, considering how Lorraine, Carolyn and Bathsheba accept or reject roles as mothers and wives, and how they interact with the men in the story.