You’ve heard the take before: Morticia Addams is a feminist icon.
- She’s sexually liberated ✅
- She’s body positive ✅
- She’s an engaged mother who also demands time for her own dark forces ✅
- She passes the Bechdel test ✅
- She models healthy BDSM ✅
- She’s the empowered woman we all need ✅
None of this is wrong, exactly. It’s just not the most interesting thing about her.
The feminist icon reading does what straight feminist readings always do: it takes a character who resonates far beyond the framework and flattens her into an empowerment narrative. Morticia is confident! Morticia communicates her desires! Morticia doesn’t care what you think!
And every time I read one of these pieces, I think: that’s not why she hit me like a freight train when I was twelve.
The Jessica Rabbit problem.
Here’s a useful comparison. Jessica Rabbit is the feminist reclamation story the discourse loves — a character designed as the ultimate male fantasy who turns out to be smarter, more loyal, and more self-aware than every man in the room.
Her creators literally described her as a male fantasy made flesh. Her feminist appeal is in how she navigates that: she knows she was drawn that way, she weaponises it, she survives inside the gaze that made her. The reclamation is real. Jessica takes the male gaze and turns it back on itself.
Morticia isn’t doing that.
Morticia isn’t navigating the male gaze. She isn’t subverting it. She isn’t weaponising her sexuality against a system that objectifies her. She’s not performing a strategic femininity that outsmarts the men who underestimate her.
She’s just — not registering it.
The normative gaze looks at Morticia and sees something monstrous, excessive, wrong. Too sexual. Too dark. Too much. And she doesn’t notice. Not in the way a confident woman chooses not to care — in the way someone whose desire and selfhood are structurally illegible to the culture around her simply has no use for its metrics.
That’s not subversion. That’s alterity. And it’s a fundamentally different thing.
The queer gaze sees the alt baddie.
The feminist reading says: Morticia models what empowered heterosexual femininity could look like.
The queer reading says: Morticia models what it looks like when your desire is so far outside the normative frame that there’s nothing to push back against — because the frame was never yours to begin with. (As an example, when the townspeople around them inevitably get mad at the Addams family and gather their pitchforks for an attack, the Addams family just thinks it’s good fun and embrace the chaos rather than run away screaming as the attackers want.)
Jessica Rabbit’s relationship with the gaze is adversarial. She’s inside the system and outmanoeuvring it. Morticia’s relationship with the gaze is — absent. She’s not inside the system. The system has no jurisdiction over her and she’s not interested in establishing diplomatic relations.
This is why the Addams household doesn’t read as rebellious. It reads as elsewhere. Gomez and Morticia aren’t inverting suburban norms for the shock value. They’ve built a life that operates on entirely different principles, and the comedy comes from the collision between their world and the normative one — a collision that the Addams family barely registers as a collision at all.
For queer women, for neurodivergent women, for anyone who grew up knowing their desire or their selfhood didn’t fit the available templates — that’s not an empowerment fantasy. That’s recognition.
The thing before the language.
As a teenager I went through an all-black phase (clothes, hair, the works) in part because of Morticia Addams. Eventually, I went back to blonde and Wranglers and developed an eating disorder to lose weight because that’s what you do. You conform. You translate yourself into something legible. You learn the scripts and you perform them and you tell yourself this is just what everyone does, this is just how it works, this is fine.
Eventually, I accepted that being that skinny and that focused on my physical appearance was making me miserable. So, I healed and went back to what felt comfortable, even if people told me it wasn’t “cool”.
The feminist reading of Morticia would call that self-acceptance. Empowerment. Confidence. And sure, it is those things. But that framing misses the critical part of the story, which is the years in the middle. The years of performing legibility for a gaze I didn’t even want to be seen by. The decade where I knew something was off about the script I was following but I didn’t have language for what, exactly, was wrong with it.
Morticia hit before the language arrived. Before queer. Before neurodivergent. Before any of the words that would eventually name the thing. She hit because she was the first fictional woman I’d seen whose desire and whose selfhood and whose entire way of moving through the world was not organised around being legible to the people around her — and she was fine.
More than fine. She was incandescent.
That’s not “be yourself and don’t care what people think”. That’s a much more specific and much more radical thing: what does it look like when you stop translating yourself for people who were never going to understand you anyway?
The house Morticia built.
Here’s the thing the neurodivergent conversation is missing entirely.
Since the Netflix series, Wednesday Addams has become the neurodivergent icon. The autistic-coded character who refuses to mask, who doesn’t perform neurotypical social scripts, whose bluntness and intensity and dark fixations are celebrated rather than pathologised. The discourse is extensive and it’s important and it’s entirely focused on Wednesday.
Nobody is talking about the woman who made that possible. Possibly in part because the Morticia (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones) on that show views the rift between herself and her daughter as a failure. My Morticia (Angelica Houston) would have celebrated the strife and the pain and relished the moodiness of her independence-seeking daughter.
So my point is that Morticia built the environment where Wednesday never had to mask. She didn’t do it by being a “good mother” in the way the feminist reading describes — hands-off yet engaged, loving yet direct. She did it by modelling, every single day, a life that doesn’t require explanation to anyone but yourself. A household where the weird is fundamental and acceptable, not decorative. Where desire looks however it looks and nobody asks you to translate it into something palatable.
Wednesday doesn’t mask because Wednesday (lucky girl) grew up in a house where masking was never required. That house exists because Morticia built it — not as a political project, not as an empowerment exercise, but because it’s genuinely how she lives, how the entire Addams family lives.
The feminist reading gives us Morticia as role model: be more like her. The queer reading gives us something more useful and more honest: she’s the first time you saw your own illegibility reflected back as something that could be lived in rather than fixed.
What Morticia is instead.
Morticia Addams isn’t a feminist icon merely because she’s confident. She’s a queer and neurodivergent touchstone because she models desire that is structurally illegible to the normative gaze, and she never performs legibility. The feminist reading isn’t wrong — it’s just looking through the one lens, and it keeps producing the same shallow-ish reading as a result.
Jessica Rabbit knows she was drawn that way and she’s magnificent for it. But she’s playing a game with a system that has power over her and making moves in her own favour costs her every time.
Morticia doesn’t know she was drawn any way at all. The system has no power over her because she never entered it. And for every queer, neurodivergent woman who watched her as a kid and felt something crack open without understanding why — that wasn’t empowerment. That was the first map of a place you didn’t yet know you were trying to get to.
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One snake bite. One moment of clarity she really didn’t ask for. Sasha Barrett has survived two years at the Praetorian Academy — turns out her captain was always going to be the most dangerous thing in the field.
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