Mothers in fiction

Journalist and academic Carrie Dunn‘s brilliant series on the mothers we know and love

 

5. Capulet’s wife
4. Marmee March
3. Pauline Mole
2. Sue Bridehead
1. Mrs Bennet

#5 Capulet’s wife, Juliet’s mother (Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare)

Ah, the famous romantic tragedy, beloved of star-cross’d teenage lovers the world over, who, like the protagonists, know that the passion in their young hearts will never die or fade or be overtaken. Older readers surely have a glimmer of sympathy with the parents of Romeo and Juliet, who are struggling with their recalcitrant children; and perhaps more so with the Capulets, who have no surviving children after Juliet’s death.

Although we’re always reminded how young Romeo and Juliet are, it’s easy to overlook just how young Capulet’s own wife is. She was fourteen when her daughter was born, making her only around 27 or 28 during the play – very young to be dealing with the grief of losing all her children – and married to a man who’s many, many years older than her. Her life cannot be a lot of fun, and when her teenage daughter starts being disobedient, it’s no wonder that she’s so angry. (16th-century parents would have expected unquestioning obedience from their offspring, and a good beating, such as the rage we see from Capulet, would have been seen by many as justified.)

Admittedly, she’s not a particularly involved mother – Juliet’s nurse has, as would be typical, done the bulk of the childcare and acted as the girl’s confidante – and her primary interest in her daughter seems to be to marry her off to an appropriately wealthy husband. Again, this isn’t exactly unusual for the time – daughters were useful bargaining chips and helpful to create alliances through marriage, but not a great deal else.

But perhaps it’s helpful to view Juliet’s mother’s rage in the light of her own experience and the societal norms. One can safely assume that as a teenager she wasn’t that keen on marrying a much older husband, but she did as she was told and fulfilled her duty to her family – surely Juliet should be flattered and excited that her suitor Count Paris is tall and handsome as well as eligible? Why should Juliet be an exception to the rule and get to pick and choose her own spouse?

And horrified though we may be as an audience to hear her disown her daughter and tell her, “Talk not to me, for I’ll not speak a word; do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee,” (and how many of us have heard our mothers in a fit of anger say something like, “Get out of my sight!” – or even said it ourselves?) Capulet’s wife receives a greater punishment than she deserves as Juliet dies and precipitates what can be seen now as a total psychological breakdown.

Yes, indeed, it’s a great tragic teenage love story – but ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is also a tragedy about loss, bereavement and parenting, and the fact that this element is so often overlooked is indicative of the way the parent-child relationship is neglected by critics, writers and readers.

#4 Marmee March (Little Women by Louisa May Alcott)

Marmee March is one of the most perfect mothers in fiction. Full of wisdom, always patient, and seemingly vaguely psychic, she cares for her four daughters and runs the household alone while her husband is with the army. (I say “alone”, she has Hannah the housekeeper, but I think we all know that in literature of a certain era, servants don’t
really count, right? Actually, the March family’s adoration of Hannah and her position as part of the family is quite unusual for 19th-century American fiction.)

She’s ahead of her time. A brood of troublesome daughters is, of course, the basis for lots of books of the same era, but Marmee doesn’t want her girls married off unless it’s a love match, even if it would mean financial advancement for the whole family. She disapproves of corporal punishment, withdrawing Amy from school after her teacher canes her for sharing out her pickled limes in class (not a euphemism). And although the March family aren’t exactly wealthy, she makes sure the girls know that they are much better off than others as she goes to help out the impoverished Hummels. (Admittedly this backfires after Beth goes to visit them and catches scarlet fever, but the intention was good.)

She manages her daughters differently according to their temperaments, ages and situations rather than instituting an entire system of rules – it may seem unfair to the girls at the time (such as Amy sulking because she doesn’t get to go to a dance when Jo, who doesn’t want to go, is forced to) but Marmee does know best. She deals with Jo’s fiery rage and calms her, copes with Beth’s recurrent ill-health with courage and grace, and although Amy is indulged by everyone around her, she does try to instil some discipline in the selfish little brat. Apart from her daughters, she also puts up with the irritatingly snobbish Aunt March – everyone has annoying in-laws, but not everyone bites their tongue as admirably as Marmee.

Marmee March could quite easily be perceived as an idealisation of the mother figure, but read closely and we learn about her faults: for example, she can manage Jo’s tantrums because she too has a temper, but she’s learnt to control it. And I suspect that, just as little girls read Little Women and are meant to identify with harum-scarum Jo, when they’re grown-up they should want to be the kind of mother - and head of the household – that Marmee is.

#3 Pauline Mole (the Adrian Mole series)

Read Adrian Mole’s earliest diaries as a teenager, and you’ll inevitably sympathise with our titular hero. Male or female, you cannot fail to identify with his woes about the state of his skin, school and sex, and his rage and frustration at the ineptitude and selfishness of his parents. His father George’s affair with Stick Insect Doreen Slater results in the birth of baby Brett; his mother Pauline’s affair with next-door neighbour Ratfink Lucas leads to confusion over the paternity of little Rosie.

It’s Pauline who bears the brunt of Adrian’s anger, though; she’s the one who he deems too old to have a baby, she’s the one who abandons him as she dashes off to her Sheffield lovenest, she’s the one he compares unfavourably to all the other mothers he knows. She doesn’t put the needs of her menfolk above her own; she doesn’t imitate the maternity-wear stylings of Princess Diana. For Adrian, she’s a failure as a mother.

Come back to the book as an adult, though, and your view will have changed markedly. Pauline’s undergoing a feminist awakening at a charged political time: a woman is prime minister but is destroying the working-classes, and the only challenger to her role as most prominent British female is a smiling, silenced princess, chosen to step into the spotlight because of her virginity and then her marriage to a royal man. After spending a miserable childhood in the potato fields of Norfolk with her fundamentalist Christian parents, and then her adult life running around after her husband and son, it’s no wonder that Pauline takes so readily to a new world of Germaine Greer, Greenham Common and assertiveness training.

But this is still early on in the progression of the popular feminist movement in the UK. Pauline starts to realise that she could have more than just her role as wife and mother: she proudly and excitedly (and inappropriately) declares to her son that her lover Lucas “fulfils my sexual needs. No more, no less”. Yet she realises soon enough that being treated like a ‘sex object’ by her boyfriend is no more satisfying that being treated as a skivvy by her husband and son; and more than that, this episode results in another pregnancy – and the only benefits she can identify to having another child are the increased family allowance and the possibility that she’ll have a little girl this time round. After all, what is attractive about motherhood when all it can offer to her is a variety of medical issues and further isolation from the outside world?

There are signs, though, that Pauline’s mindset has changed and she has no intention of ever again adopting her traditional homemaker role, no matter how much her husband and son may wish it. She informs them that if she wishes to go walking in the Hindu Kush, she will strap her imminent baby on her back and go; and once Rosie is born, we see George ironing baby clothes and being a hands-on dad. (We also see him threatening Adrian, “If you laugh, I’ll kill you” – George may well have adopted an ostensibly New Man approach within the home, but it seems that it’s just because he’s scared Pauline will leave him again if he doesn’t, rather than any change in his belief system. Still, it’s a start.)

Adrian is, of course, rather a staid teenager, and his ideas about appropriate gender behaviour seem largely to be modelled on his dad’s: he’s not that keen on women’s independence because of the impact it will have on his own life. For example, he tells his beloved girlfriend Pandora – brainy and beautiful – that he wants to marry her when they’re 16, after which he wouldn’t mind her having a job in a little cake shop because she will otherwise be occupied with looking after their children and baking bread in their kitchen, which is met with scorn. Still, the men in Adrian’s world all learn to keep their mouths shut, at least: George whispers that women should be at home cooking so he won’t be ‘karate-chopped to death’; the postman declares that runaway wives should be given a ‘thrashing’ and Adrian points out that if anyone tried to lay a finger on his mother, she would ‘beat them to pulp’.

This is significant because Pauline is by no means a physically imposing presence. We learn that she is quite a small person – ‘much smaller since you stopped wearing high heels,’ says her husband – and this idea that she would be able to defend herself in a fight is surely based on the fact that she is now prepared to defend herself verbally. She has developed a strong sense of self and she is not prepared to concede that to anyone, particularly not the men who claim to love her but really just want to control her.

Pandora may happily express her wish to have six children and be editor of The Times – such an idea had never previously occurred to Pauline or the women of her generation, and through Adrian’s diaries we see a microcosm of cataclysmic social change.

#2 Sue Bridehead (Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy)

It’s easy to dismiss Sue Bridehead as neurotic. And indeed she was; even her creator Thomas Hardy acknowledged that. Regardless of the reasons for her instability (too much education? too little education? repressed lesbianism? all of the above?) one thing can certainly be agreed upon – Sue should never, ever, ever have had children.

In fact, she probably should never have married Richard Phillotson, nor shacked up with Jude (neither of them, despite professing passionate love for her, seem to care very much about her feelings) – but having children made her even worse. If she hadn’t had her two children with Jude, it’s possible she wouldn’t have felt so keenly the social pressure to marry him and get that “licence to love” they endlessly witter about, the lack of which eventually forces her into a breakdown.

Not a particularly maternal individual from the start (the children are basically a plot device rather than characters), Sue’s career as a mother is complicated further by taking on her disturbed step-son ‘Little Father Time’. After learning of the social and economic difficulties the odd little family are facing because of the lack of a wedding certificate and the multiplicity of children, the boy kills his half-siblings, and then himself, apparently as an act of charity: ‘Done because we are too menny.’ The shock, unsurprisingly, causes Sue to have a miscarriage, leaving her with no children at all.

And poor grief-stricken Sue decides that her murderous step-son is an instrument of divine retribution, killing the children she should never have had with her cousin and out of wedlock. Bereaved, spirit crushed and seeking solace from the church that has condemned and ostracised her, she returns to her husband.

Hardy has some very depressing views on human nature and behaviour, admittedly; and Jude is one of the saddest books in English literature. Regardless, Sue’s failure to take to her socially defined role of motherhood in any real sense is an acknowledgement that not all women are by temperament meant to be mothers; and certainly even women who love their children dearly find their responsibilities a dreadful strain. For that, Hardy deserves praise for his honesty, rather than the horror and scorn that have been directed at him and his ‘unnatural’ views since the book’s publication.

#1 Mrs Bennet (Pride and Prejudice)

One of the most renowned meddling mothers in literary history, I always feel Mrs Bennet is a little hard done by. She’s always judged by modern standards, and her twin obsessions of money and marrying off daughters are sneered at as vulgar and superficial.

Yet with a posse of daughters and no eligible men for them to marry, she’s hardly unjustified in worrying about the cost of maintaining a gang of spinsters into their middle age – and leaving them enough of an inheritance to live on.

Yes, she’s silly and feather-headed, but her intentions are well-meaning, and she does want her girls to be happy and secure; not that Mr Bennet doesn’t, but he is apparently content to let his wife make all the major decisions and just carp from the sidelines and bitch about her with Lizzy on the quiet.

And for all the sneering levelled at her by her daughters, I suspect she’d have her revenge – after all, the beauteous, naive, slightly daft Lydia seems to be destined to end up just like her status-obsessed gossipy mother. Deal with that in 20 years’ time, Lizzy and your sense of superiority, when you’ve got your mama AND your sister telling you how you should be bringing up your own teenagers.