Motherhood in Literature

By Dale Salwak, author of Writers and Their Mothers

Mothers have been the focus of many fictional works throughout literary history.  Writers may revere or confront, respect or dissect, reject or accept them, but countless pages have been written in an attempt to understand them. Each woman responds differently to the travails of motherhood. Each had her fate connected with a particular man. Each reflects the social realities of the author’s time and place.

A famous example of the tie between mother and child is portrayed in the Old Testament book of I Kings (3:16-28), which relates the story of two prostitutes who give birth to sons. One infant dies, and his mother switches her dead baby for the other. Both claim ownership and the argument goes before Solomon, King of Israel, for resolution. With sword in hand he proclaims, “Cut the live child in two.”  One woman begs, “Please give her the live child only don't kill him.” The other remains stoic, “Cut it in two.” From their responses Solomon discerns the truth: “Give the child to the first woman. She is its mother.” The grateful mother goes forth with the infant in her arms. This archetypal tale, rich with the overtones of one mother’s cruelty and selfishness and another’s love and self-sacrifice, reveals two extremes of motherhood that authors have re-worked ever since.  The Polish heroine Sophie has to make a similar decision about which child to save in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. 

In Classical literature we find few good mothers, mostly because the gods, themselves immoral, punish tragic women who’ve been maltreated by men. Euripides’ Medea slays her two children because her husband, Jason, leaves her for a princess. Aeschylus portrays Clytemnestra who kills her husband, Agamemnon, when she learns that he has sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods. Shakespeare creates a few surrogate mothers who are supportive and protective, like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, but the literal mothers are absent, dominant, erratic, even spectacularly awful, like Gertrude in Hamlet or Lady Macbeth, lured by three witches to commit murder most foul.

Later on, mothers are often naive, incompetent, even silly. Mrs. Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is more concerned with social status and propriety than in her daughters’ struggles with the constraints of outdated conventions. Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’ Bleak House is so caught up in herself and her own philanthropic schemes that her ragtag children feel left out and cut off from maternal care.

In the Victorian and modern periods, mothers face the dark issues of an industrialized society where poverty, globalization, and war break down old assumptions about relationships and parenting. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina follows her lover and abandons her children. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary finds no joy in her daughter, and eventually swallows arsenic and leaves her daughter to work in a mill. Edith Wharton’s Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country marries and divorces so easily and so heartlessly, in her quest for upward mobility, that she ignores and abandons her children.

Gertrude Morel in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers is a devoted and sacrificial mother who also devours her son, Paul, with her emotionally crippling love.  The morally corrupt Mrs. Sheridan in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” bribes her young daughter with a new hat so she can have her planned celebration despite the recent death of a close neighbor.  In Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” when the possessive parent exclaims, “I’m your mother. I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby,” the hero “felt sick and vaguely nauseated.” Evelyn Waugh’s Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust blurts out, “Thank God,” upon hearing that her son has died and not, as she had believed, her lover with the same first name. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the mother, Sethe, murders her daughter to free her from slavery. Since we tend to idealize motherhood, we are shocked by women who deviate from that image.

At the opposite extreme there are mothers who are nurturing models. Understanding, selfless, spiritual, tender, protective, reassuring or self-assured, they display heroic qualities with which readers can identify. As an example of fierce love, patience and protectiveness that challenge the social structure of her time, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter views her daughter, Pearl, born out of wedlock, as “The infant model of great price” and her “only pleasure.” We see the devotion of Helen Graham to her son in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the change in Marilla Cuthbert from “narrow” and “rigid” to a loving, emotional, open person toward the orphan Anne in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Tireless and unfailingly kind, Mrs. March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is the quintessential mother as she glides sentimentally and “quietly from bed to bed, smoothing a coverlet here, setting a pillow there,” holding her family together while her husband serves as a chaplain during the Civil War. Even though Mrs. Bennet, as noted, is “a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper,” her concern that her five daughters marry wealthy men rather than face the humiliation of spinsterhood and penury is both self-serving and well intentioned.

Literary mothers, whether good or bad, are memorable characters. Bad ones become cautionary tales of the depths that humans can sink to; good ones become emblematic of the love we all yearn for.

About the editor

Dale Salwak is professor of English literature at Southern California’s Citrus College. His publications include Living with a Writer (Palgrave, 2004), Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature (2008) and studies of Kingsley Amis, John Braine, A.J. Cronin, Philip Larkin, Barbara Pym, Carl Sandburg, Anne Tyler and John Wain. He is a recipient of Purdue University's Distinguished Alumni Award as well as a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also a frequent contributor to the (London) Times Higher Education magazine and the Times Educational Supplement.