What This Theme Explores
Maternal instinct in The Inmate is presented as a primal, propulsive force that can nurture or destroy. The novel asks where protection ends and control begins, and whether love can excuse deceit or violence when a child’s safety is at stake. It also probes how a parent’s fear can spiral into obsession—and how children absorb and reproduce the very patterns meant to safeguard them. Ultimately, the story tests the moral line between guardian and aggressor, showing how good intentions can harden into justification for harm.
How It Develops
The theme begins in a recognizable register: a mother acts to shield her child. Brooke Sullivan returns to Raker and accepts a job inside a maximum-security prison to give Josh Sullivan a safer life after relentless bullying. Her protectiveness reads as selfless and restorative, an attempt to build a haven strong enough to keep the past from wounding her son.
In the middle of the novel, protection becomes complicated by proximity and deception. Pamela Nelson (Margie) enters as a comforting, grandmotherly presence, feeding and doting on Josh while posing as a harmless caretaker. At the same time, Brooke’s empathy unexpectedly extends to Shane Nelson when she witnesses him being bullied in prison—a mirror of her son’s suffering. Maternal feeling thus widens beyond the mother-child dyad and becomes ethically unstable: care shades into sympathy for a dangerous man, and kindness becomes a mask for control.
By the climax, the theme flips into its darkest form. Pamela’s “protection” is exposed as a lethal crusade to liberate Shane and reclaim her grandson, even at the cost of multiple murders. Brooke’s own instinct escalates into physical survival, forcing her to fight for Josh against both father and grandmother. In the Epilogue, the instinct passes to the next generation: Josh’s love for his mother—molded by adult fears—takes a deadly turn, proving how protective devotion can be taught, twisted, and weaponized.
Key Examples
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Brooke’s move to Raker: Brooke uproots her life to shield Josh from relentless taunts, especially the slur that targets his parentage. Her guilt over her past sharpens her protective resolve, turning motherhood into a mission to rewrite the environment that failed her.
It was a knife in my heart that the other kids were bullying him because of me. Because of my history and the fact that my son never had a father.
— Chapter 2 -
Pamela’s deception as “Margie”: Posing as a kindly babysitter, Pamela uses meals and maternal warmth to embed herself in Brooke’s household. What looks like care is control: by feeding, comforting, and “helping,” she claims access to Josh and authority over the family’s rhythms, weaponizing nurture as infiltration.
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Pamela’s confession: At the climax, Pamela admits to orchestrating and committing murders to free Shane and reconstitute a family with him and Josh. Protection mutates into possession: her love licenses brutality, and loyalty to her son becomes the rationale for terror.
“I told Shane what they did to me,” she says, “and we planned the whole thing together. It was all his idea. He is such a good son. He would do anything for his mother. Anything.”
— Chapter 52 -
Josh’s final act: Spurred by a warning from Tim Reese, Josh kills Shane with an icicle, believing violence is the only way to keep his mother safe. The child reproduces the adult logic of protection-at-all-costs, revealing how fear can prime even innocence for irrevocable choices.
I had to do it. Tim said he was dangerous and that he was going to hurt my mom... I had to do what I did. After all, I would do anything for my mom.
— Epilogue
Character Connections
Brooke Sullivan: Brooke channels the theme’s redemptive edge. Her decisions—returning home, facing the prison, confronting mortal danger—are anchored in her commitment to Josh’s safety. Yet her fleeting compassion for Shane hints at the theme’s gray zone: maternal empathy can blur boundaries, exposing how love risks misplacing trust in the name of protection.
Pamela Nelson (Margie): Pamela embodies protection’s descent into obsession. Her caretaking repertoire—food, warmth, praise—conceals a will to dominate, as she reframes murder and manipulation as maternal duty. In her worldview, “family” is something to be taken back by force, collapsing care into control until love becomes indistinguishable from coercion.
Josh Sullivan: Initially the protected child, Josh evolves into the theme’s most unsettling agent. He internalizes the adult script that danger must be eliminated to safeguard family, transforming devotion into action. His choice in the epilogue crystallizes the theme’s inheritance: children learn not only love, but the methods that love uses.
Symbolic Elements
The Raker House: Brooke’s childhood home doubles as a planned sanctuary for Josh—a concrete attempt to fortify the present against the wreckage of the past. Its walls promise safety, but the violence that enters them underscores how spaces cannot secure moral safety when obsession trespasses.
“Margie’s” home-cooked meals: Food typically signals comfort and trust; here it becomes camouflage. Pamela’s dishes soften defenses and create obligation, redefining maternal nurture as a means to insinuate control over an unsuspecting family.
The icicle: A fragile, seasonal object turns into a weapon, symbolizing innocence converted into harm. Its impermanence—melting away—also evokes the vanishing trace of wrongdoing, mirroring how protective violence seeks to justify and erase itself.
Contemporary Relevance
The novel interrogates a culture that valorizes the “mama bear” instinct without scrutinizing its costs. It speaks to modern anxieties about bullying, safety, and the urge to control variables that threaten children, even when such control breaches ethical lines. By charting protection’s slide from care into compulsion, the story cautions against equating love with domination and shows how fear, amplified and sustained, can conscript the next generation into repeating its logic.
Essential Quote
“He is such a good son. He would do anything for his mother. Anything.”
This line distills the theme’s peril: devotion framed as virtue becomes a mandate for violence. In Pamela’s voice, “anything” collapses moral boundaries, sanctifying harm under the banner of love—and foreshadowing Josh’s own catastrophic imitation of that creed.