Cows

The Hagbeast, Steven’s mother, is the novel’s primary antagonist and the embodiment of domestic tyranny and grotesque corruption. She is a monstrous, unchanging force of malevolence whose sole purpose is to inflict misery upon her son. Her physical description is a direct reflection of her inner state: She is a “gargantua,” an obese and filthy figure defined by the “caked, dead fish decay that came out between her legs” (4) and the rancid food she prepares. She is a perversion of the maternal archetype, a figure of anti-nurture who feeds Steven her “mealshit” to poison him physically and psychologically, ensuring he remains too weak and polluted to escape her control. Her power is absolute, maintained through a relentless campaign of physical violence, verbal abuse, and systematic degradation.

Her motivations appear to stem from a pure, unadulterated sadism and a desperate need to maintain dominion over Steven. She actively works to prevent his escape or development, seeing any sign of his independence as a direct threat to her authority. This is most evident in her reaction to Steven getting a job, which prompts her to escalate the foulness of his meals and threaten him with homelessness. The conflict between them becomes a battle of wills, a contest of endurance underscored by their consumption of excrement. The Hagbeast’s initial confidence that she can withstand anything Steven creates reveals her immense pride in her own corruption. Her eventual defeat and gruesome death at Steven’s hands represents the violent overthrow of one form of monstrosity by another, serving as the catalyst for Steven’s attempt to build his own world.

Lucy, Steven’s neighbor and eventual love interest, is the centerpiece of his fabricated dreamlife. Like Steven, she is a damaged and alienated individual, but her obsession is with internal purity rather than external normality. Convinced that her body harbors a physical manifestation of psychological trauma, a “hard and black” (16) poison, she engages in increasingly desperate acts of self-mutilation and examination to find and remove it. Her apartment, filled with surgical tools and medical videos, is a private laboratory dedicated to this hopeless quest. Lucy is a round but ultimately static character; while her circumstances change, her core obsession with her internal corruption remains tragically constant, driving her toward her inevitable self-destruction.

For Steven, Lucy represents the missing piece in his plan to construct a perfect life. He projects onto her the role of the loving wife and mother from his television fantasies, largely ignoring her deep psychological distress. Their relationship is based on a shared need to use each other as a shield against the world. Lucy briefly participates in Steven’s domestic project, helping to renovate the flat and playing the part of his partner, because it offers a temporary distraction from her own internal horror. Their opposing ideas of salvation make Lucy particularly important to the theme of The Illusion of the American Dream. Steven believes that happiness can be created from the outside inward: if he obtains the correct home, partner, child, and material security, internal happiness must follow. Lucy increasingly reaches the opposite conclusion. She recognizes that performing normality has not cured either of them, telling Steven, “There can’t be any happiness with poison inside, it doesn’t matter what you make around you” (161). In this way, her perspective exposes the central flaw in Steven’s dream: He treats the outward signs of fulfillment as though they can manufacture fulfillment itself.

Lucy’s death ultimately destroys both her own theory of salvation and Steven’s. Her attempt to physically remove what she believes to be the source of her corruption shows how completely she has literalized psychological suffering, just as Steven has literalized empowerment through violence. Both characters seek a single concrete act capable of curing damage that is far more complicated, as Steven tries to construct happiness around himself, while Lucy tries to cut unhappiness out of herself. Neither can address the underlying trauma that drives them, as Lucy’s character underscores how both have tried to pursue an inverse version of the same impossible goal.

Cripps is the foreman at the meat plant and Steven’s malevolent mentor. He believes that killing is “an act of self-realization” (34) that liberates men from societal constraints and unlocks their true potential. For Cripps, the slaughterhouse is a sanctum where men can confront their “dark core” and become more than human. He sees in the timid, abused Steven a potential convert and takes it upon himself to guide him through a brutal initiation into this worldview, overseeing his first kill and his participation in the slaughtermen’s depraved rituals.

Cripps’s interest in Steven is both ideological and predatory. He grooms Steven, using a mixture of philosophical encouragement and sexual assault to break down his resistance and remold him in his own image. His worldview is completely amoral; he is a self-proclaimed god within his domain, treating both animals and certain humans as mere instruments for his own and others’ violent epiphanies. More importantly, Cripps gives Steven an explanation for his lifelong powerlessness that is dangerously attractive because it also offers a solution. Steven has spent his life believing that other people possess some secret knowledge that allows them to control their lives. Cripps tells him that the secret is domination and that power comes from violence. In this way, Cripps becomes the novel’s ideological spokesman for the theme of Cruelty and Violence as Futile Attempts Toward Agency.

The ultimate irony of his character is that he dies as a martyr to his own twisted faith. When Steven turns on him, Cripps expresses not fear or betrayal but a kind of pride, believing Steven’s act of murder is the ultimate validation of his teachings. However, Cripps’s greatest influence becomes apparent only after his death. Steven repeatedly uses violence to restore his fading confidence, eventually teaching the heard essentially the same lesson Cripps taught him: that liberation, identity, and power can be achieved through killing. Steven may kill his mentor, but he never defeats his mentor’s ideology. Ultimately, Cripps is a model that Steven unconsciously reproduces, showing how systems of violence perpetuate themselves by teaching victims to understand domination as freedom.