Steph Week Day Two: Mother | Child @stephweek
Stephanie Brown has experienced not one, but two separate dream sequences / visions of being a mother, once when she receives a c-section at the end of her teen pregnancy arc in Robin (1993), and later when, a pretty significant amount of time later, she undergoes the effects of Black Mercy and has a series of visions in the very last issue of Batgirl (2009).
The first vision is a nightmare, her birth dream sequence starts off mundane but almost immediately devolves into disaster, while the second is idealized: the intention of the Black Mercy dream is to trap the dreamer forever in a world so perfect they could never want to leave.
So effectively, we have two visions, one representative of Steph’s worst fears, a worst case scenario of her motherhood, and the other representative of her perfect, most ideal world where she is a mother.
If we take this premise seriously, if we assume even the small differences in these visions are representative of preference and not random chance, what are we being told about Steph? What might differences in the hair color of the hypothetical child, or the role vigilantism plays in either vision, or in Steph’s clothes and appearance represent? In what subtle ways do Steph's fears and hopes manifest in either?
Though the Black Mercy vision only takes up a single full-page panel and contains no dialogue, there is still a lot that I think can be gleaned from analyzing it in conversation with her first dream.
I want to take a look at three key differences in either of these visions and draw out what I think they say about Steph’s views on both motherhood and of herself.
(The panel in Batgirl #24 (2009) I will be referencing for the rest of this meta)
1. Steph as Child vs Steph as Mother
In the birth dream sequence, Steph and her baby are consistently compared.
For one, Steph’s vision of raising her baby reflects her own childhood. For instance, Crystal in the vision doesn’t act like the Crystal of the present day, who is more able to recognize Arthur as an asshole, but instead acts the way Crystal did for most of Steph’s childhood- as an enabler of Arthur unable to recognize his lies or the danger he posed.
Robin #59 / Batman Chronicles #22 / Robin #111
Steph’s own childhood then is layered over the imagined childhood of her baby in this vision, with Crystal acting as she did in Steph’s childhood.
This conflation between Steph and her baby is furthered through how dream Steph speaks: in short, simplistic sentences. Even Steph’s outfit - her pink shirt and the overalls - evokes her young age. She curls around her baby in fetal position herself at one point. The setting also strengthens this comparison, the same place where Steph was raised is the same place Steph in the dream raises her baby.
In so many ways Steph is textually compared to her baby, in this dream where she is literally the mother, Steph is still partially taking on the role of Child.
But how about her second dream?
Steph is no longer embodying her young age, or being compared to her baby. This can be seen in the setting alone. As mentioned before, her first dream has her raising her baby in her childhood home, the home she still lives in during Batgirl (2009). But in her second dream, the imagined version of Steph ostensibly lives and raises her child somewhere new, in what appears to be a modern high rise apartment.
In this vision, Steph's appearance too places her more firmly in the role of mother. Her clothes are more mature and professional than the pink shirt and overalls of the first dream. Additionally, in the second dream, she also emulates the hairstyle that modern Crystal has been rocking all through Batgirl (2009). Steph's dream of motherhood no longer has her emulating herself and her own childhood, but instead emulating what she associates with her mother and specifically her mother at her best and most supportive.
Steph’s subconscious is still drawing on symbols of her mother, but this time ascribing the present-Crystal to Steph, portrayed the good of motherhood Steph has experienced, instead of fixating on the past the worst of it. In this ideal, she is a mother to her child like Crystal is a mother to her now, in the present moment of Batgirl (2009).
In Steph’s worst fears of motherhood, her youth is emphasized, indicating her fears of subjecting her baby to anything like her own traumatic childhood as well as her fears of her own inadequacy and feelings of weakness - something which her Black Mercy dream starkly contrasts. In her ideal concept of motherhood she is not only more visually mature and independent than her 15-16 year old self, but even more so than her present in Batgirl (2009).
In comparing both children, quite a few obvious differences jump out. For one, age.
In the first dream, Steph's baby is just that: a baby. Steph's nightmare melds the timeline of her present reality with her dream very smoothly. It's easy to imagine Steph receiving this C-section, awaking from this dream, and returning home with this baby to a situation not unlike her nightmare. It's immediately intertwined with her present moment, because this nightmare is based around her present fears. Her nightmare, this collection of things she fears would occur if she made the choice to keep her baby while concerned broadly with the future, is cemented in the present, in the immediate consequences of the choice to give up her baby or to keep it that Steph is grappling with through her nightmare.
The age of her child emphasizes its vulnerability, one of the things Steph obsesses over in her nightmare. Both the baby's mental vulnerability, how impressionable it might be as well as the baby's physical vulnerability, as it's launched into the air and Steph agonizes over her baby being injured as fighting breaks out. The baby is small, small enough to throw into the air, small enough to get easily crushed, small enough to be easily stolen away, young enough to literally REACH out to Arthur as it's stolen away, young enough not to know better at all, young enough for Arthur's influence to be potentially permanent.
Steph's nightmare has her imagining the immediate moment, the immediate consequence of bringing her baby home, of the disaster she fears would immediately follow. Her baby, so defenseless in this nightmare might not survive that one night, survive just one destructive moment.
And in contrast to Steph's Black Mercy dream, this frail moment of infancy has passed. Steph's child is still quite young, but not nearly as entirely helpless as her dreamt baby might have been. This child isn't able to be easily snatched as the baby in her nightmare was, and the child is also familiar with Steph and in possession of a greater cognition that means Steph's fears her child being corrupted somehow are less in play.
Another interesting difference between the two children is hair color.
One of the prevailing fears Steph fixates on up until her death is her fear over her connection to Arthur tainting her.
She repeatably assumes her friends and allies think less of her because of her (more times than I can easily portray), and she conceptualizes her relationship with both the Spoiler and Robin mantles with first her need to 'make up for' Arthur's evil and then secondly as proof of how different she is to Arthur.
Robin 80 Page Giant / Spoiler/Huntress: Blunt Trauma / Batgirl #53
This fear, as mentioned before, pervades her nightmare as this fear extends to her baby. Arthur steals her baby and threatens to "show him the ropes" and to have the baby "start a rap sheet". Steph's fear of being tainted by Arthur's villainy extends to her baby in this nightmare.
In the nightmare, Steph, her baby, and Arthur Brown all have identical yellow blond hair. While a small detail, it is a connection they all share in this dream, and there is also some precedence for Steph connecting her and Arthur's own hair color. If Steph inherited her hair color from Arthur, and her baby inherits this hair color from Steph (likely enough given Dean is portrayed as more of a ginger), then a connection between Arthur and her baby is visually apparent.
In her nightmare, as her fears over her connection to Arthur and her baby's subsequent connection to Arthur manifest, the connection is perceivable through hair color, strengthening and pointing out that connection.
Contrast this to the Black Mercy dream, where her child not only doesn't have blond hair, but has starkly black hair, totally disconnected from Arthur even tangentially. This also neutralizes the child's connection to Steph, which I suspect wouldn't register to Steph as an unfortunate side effect, but rather another boon. This child is a fresh start, untainted by Arthur's explicit evil and Steph's mistake riddled past, unlike the baby from the first dream who is completely embroiled in it's destructive connection to them both.
Steph’s nightmare illustrates a fear of her baby being corrupted by Arthur - a fear she clearly also experiences in reference to herself. Steph’s second dream therefore caters to her desire for a distance from Arthur by removing the association of blond hair. She also experiences a clear fear of her child’s physical vulnerability - that it could be injured or even killed, and a fear that Steph would be unable to stop it if it were to occur. Her fear of helplessness is similar to her fears of dependence and immaturity explored earlier. She’s assuages these fears in her second dream not only through the increased maturity and self support, but these fears are also assuaged by how she imagines her child’s age, no longer having the same physical fragility as a baby would have and creating the assumption that Steph is capable enough to have already succeeded keeping this child alive for multiple years.
Vigilantism and the effectiveness about vigilantism is another point of powerful contrast between these two dreams.
Steph is very familiar with idolizing heroes as a child. We're shown Steph identifying with Superman as a toddler, and her later idolization of Batman pervades her childhood.
Secret Origins 80 Page Giant
But this is not an attitude that follows her into her teens. Saddled with a distrust of adults at age 11 (and especially adult men) after almost being molested, Steph seems to cement what will continue to be a core component of her character: her self sufficiency and self reliance, and a deeply held belief others cannot be trusted to look out for her. By the time she actually meets Batman at 15, there is no trace of her young childhood idolization.
Secret Origins 80 Page Giant / Robin #69
Steph gave up on her faith in heroes, and as an almost direct consequence of that lost faith, she had to become her own. She becomes Spoiler because she couldn't rely on anyone else to protect her and Crystal, not Crystal, not the cops, and not Batman and Robin on their own. Steph has to do it herself.
In her nightmare, vigilantism falls uniformly into that view. Vigilante's can appear and fight, but when it comes to protecting what matters, they don't even come close. Her baby is in fatal danger, and as if a reaction to that fatal danger and the failure of the others to save it, Steph's Spoiler uniform suddenly appears on her body. But even her vigilantism is ultimately useless. She wakes before we see if she was able to catch the baby, but her expression, clear even through her mask, doesn't really bode well for her baby.
In this nightmare, vigilantes fail, mirroring how Steph viewed them in her disillusioned teen years, they can't be trusted to protect effectively. And worse - Steph can't rely on herself either. (This also connects somewhat to something I explored in another meta about Steph's pregnancy dream: how the purple tiles under her baby as it falls serve as a reminder of Steph's lost faith.)
But in her Black Mercy dream, the situation is solidly reversed. Behind Steph, totally ignored, is the light of the Bat Signal in the sky. She doesn't look to it and she doesn't seem to acknowledge it at all, her sole attention is fixed on her son as he plays. He looks back at her, not up to the sky. In his hand is a plushie donning the Batman cape and underwear. On the floor lay a scattering of other toys, dinosaurs and cars and robots.
While it's not conclusive, this scene seems to imply Steph may no longer be a vigilante, making it the only Black Mercy dream out of the seven total we see where she isn't a fighter of some kind, and it's definitely the only dream where Steph isn't actively fighting or seemingly about to engage in a fight. Even in the second most mundane dream, taking place at her college graduation, Steph still fights.
To me, the message is clear. To Steph, the ideal world where she is a mother is exactly the opposite of what she experienced as a child. It’s a world where a kid can rely on heroes, a world where Steph's child can rely on adults, and through the way vigilantism is represented as separate from Steph puts it in contrast to the world Steph grew up in, where she had to become her own hero. This is a world where her kid is absolutely safe, and a world where Steph doesn't have to be out at night fighting to make that true.
I want to be absolutely clear. One dream where Steph may no longer be a vigilante absolutely does NOT mean her secret dream is to give up fighting to be a mother.
Steph loves being a vigilante. While at times it proves to be akin to a redemptive quest for her (a way to make up for the sins of Cluemaster, or prove herself good enough for Batman, or to in some way try to make up for the harm she'd unintentionally caused to Gotham), Steph also just loves being a vigilante. It's not just the rush, it's the good she can do, the people in her community she can help, the victims she can save and relates to, and the agency and power she can grant herself. It's no wonder that 6/7 of these ideal worlds Black Mercy infects Steph's mind with contain at least some reference her being a crime fighter of some kind.
Steph (potentially) not being a vigilante in the motherhood Black Mercy dream isn’t really about Steph’s desire for herself, it’s about Steph wanting to raise her child in a world where heroes are so capable Steph doesn’t need to be one of them to ensure her child’s safety, a world where her child is never going to be so scared he has to sew together his own costume to protect himself, a world where maybe Steph never had to either.
