Janet S. Zehr

May 14, 2006

Janet Zehr, a member of our Fellowship, is an Associate Professor of English at Salem College. She specializes in the works of Louisa May Alcott, 19th-century American literature and writings by women authors.

My topic, in celebration of Mother’s Day, is mothers in literature. I’ll be linking that theme with the UU principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. Mothering in real life AND in literature is like tightrope walking, requiring a tremendous sense of balance. Swaying too far to one side, one is an enabler. Swaying too far to the other, one is neglectful. And the balance point continually changes as both people in the relationship are constantly changing. Children grow and become capable of more. In different ways, mothers also grow and change. Trying to pin down clear rules for mothering is as futile as trying to pin down a drop of water as it heads through the rapids. The nearly impossible trick, as May Sarton wrote:

            Is knowing where to ask, where to yield

            Where to sow, where to plough the field,

            Where to kill the heart or let it live;

            To be Eve, the giver of knowledge, the lover;

            To be Mary, the shield, the healer and the mother.

            Balance is eternal whatever we may wish.

It’s hard to be a mother in real life and in literature, and it’s equally hard to be a child.

We tend to meet extreme mothers in literature. They are dreams—sainted beings like David Copperfield’s girl mother, Clara, pretty and dressed in white, doting on him, laughing with him, holding him – OR they are nightmares. Sylvia Plath has a poem called “Medusa” about her mother that rivals her more famous poem, “Daddy,” for dastardly daughterly discontent. I can only suppose that these archetypal extremes reflect the psychological constructs one finds in object relations theory, the idea that we hold in our minds two or more very extreme and dichotomous images of our parents, both inhuman and perhaps constructed in our imaginations when we are babies: one impossibly good and giving and gratifying, a mother endlessly supplying cooing and coddling and milk; the other demonic and denying one, constructed mentally when perhaps mom paused to run to the bathroom herself before attending to that wet cold diaper.

I’ll talk about the downside of being a mother in literature first, so I can end on a high note. First, for one thing, mothers have to contend with their functions in plots. One notices this often in fairy tales and in 19th-century American and British fiction, in which the mothers seem rather more frequently to have died than the dangers of childbirth in that era can account for. The mom has to die so that there can be a plot involving the child protagonist, who has to be free to go off and have adventures, meet villains, and overcome obstacles. Cinderella’s and Snow White’s mothers – dead, leaving them to the care of evil stepmothers. David Copperfield’s girl-mother Clara – dead so that he can become prey to machinations of the evil stepfather, Mr. Murdstone. Jane Eyre’s mother – dead, so that she can become prey to her cold aunt, Mrs. Reed, and the designing rake Mr. Rochester. Jane Austen’s Emma’s mother – dead, so she can go about making foolish errors, eventually mortifying herself enough to have a classic Austen moment of recognition. Well, you get the idea. Eventually all these characters triumph, having to make their own mistakes, having to call upon their own inner strengths and talents, and finally finding happiness in the form of riches and love. Of course, in these plots there is an assumption about mothers that is flattering: If the mother HAD been here, the child protagonist would have been happy and safe from the beginning. But then perhaps he or she would never have become so strong. And more to the point, there would have been no plot.

A second plot role played frequently by those few mothers who haven’t bitten the dust is probably much closer to a role mothers often play in real life. This one makes it hard on the children, makes it hard to be mothered in literature. This is the role of the giver of prohibitions and prescriptions, of don’ts and dos and dos and don’ts. A classic example is The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in which the mother sets up the plot by telling Peter, Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. And—as we all know—when someone lays down such prohibitions, the longing to break them is practically irresistible. And thus the plot begins and Peter is nearly killed by Mr. McGregor’s rake, must contend with evil cats, and has to hide miserably wet inside of a watering can. Besides being an excuse for delightful illustrations, the story and others like it are cautionary tales that might help kids think twice before disobeying, as Peter is sent to bed without any supper, while Flopsy and Mopsy and Cotton-tail get the enchanting-sounding meal of bread and milk and blackberries.

With a much darker tone, Jamaica Kincaid, the Antiguan writer, plays on this role in her short, short story “Girl,” which mixes Caribbean prescriptions and prohibitions in sometimes shocking ways:

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school? Always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming . . . This is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on.

Adrienne Rich comments intriguingly that this role of issuer of prohibitions is perhaps as hard on the mother, especially if she happens to be an artist, as it is on the children. A mother’s imagination is clamped down tight by her role as protector. “No, darling, it’s lovely to pretend, but actually you CAN’T fly.” Rich says, for a writer “there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is no way passive . . . Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to play with alternative . . . Now, to be maternally with small children in the old way . . . requires a holding-back, a putting-aside of that imaginative activity, and demands instead a kind of conservatism.”

And then there’s a third role in literature that we can call “the smothering mother.” This one is also complicated, since we’d assume that these mothers are often doing exactly what they think is right. We have, in this category, Flannery O’Connor’s controlling mothers who spout clichés—“I tell him Rome wasn’t built in a day”—and give so much that they weaken their sons. O’Connor describes these mothers with such clever, cutting detail that their talk seems like the equivalent of nails on a blackboard—only funny if YOU aren’t the one living with them. Yet, they’ve put themselves aside to be good mothers: One mother’s “teeth had gone unfilled so that [her son’s] could be straightened.” The adult sons often dream of becoming writers but, still at home in their late twenties in their childhood bedrooms, they stay frozen in a state of writer’s block, having taken jobs that are far from their ideal: “Well that’s nice,” a character comments in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” “Selling typewriters is close to writing.” In these realistic-seeming relationships, both mothers and sons suffer from the mothers’ well-meaning attempts to love in a self-denying way.

Similarly, in Sylvia Plath’s case, when her father died, her mother, at eight-year-old Sylvia’s request, promised she would never marry again, throwing herself into the role of self-sacrificial parent. However, by the time Sylvia was in her late twenties, married and a mother herself, the role had become monstrous. Her poem is hardly a hymn to the inherent worth and dignity of her mom. Plath plays off her mother’s name, Aurelia, which is the scientific name of a jellyfish, a jellyfish that is also called a medusa, because its tentacles resemble the snaky hair of the mythological creature.

Here are some of Plath’s affectionate lines: “Who do you think you are?/ A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?/ I shall take no bite of your body, Bottle in which I live . . . I am sick to death of hot salt. Green as eunuchs, your wishes/ Hiss at my sins./ Off, off, eeley tentacle! There is nothing between us.” There are some lines for a Hallmark Mother’s Day card! Mother and child are fused, as if Sylvia were still in the womb, drowning in amniotic fluid. Elsewhere, the transatlantic phone line—the married Sylvia lived in England while her mother was in the U.S.-- is compared to an uncut umbilical cord. “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

But now to a GOOD mother in literature, a character who may be the best mother ever in a novel—Marmee in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The original for Marmee, Abigail May Alcott, often called Abba, born in 1800, was the sister of a famous Unitarian minister, Samuel May. An ardent abolitionist, he become the first Unitarian minister in the state of Connecticut. In the small town of Brooklyn, he stirred things up by preaching against whiskey drinking, opposing capital punishment, and making his church “a center for international disarmament.” Abba’s daughter, Louisa herself, whose dates were 1832-1888, thought Theodore Parker, another of our eminent divines, to be one of the wisest men she knew.

So, supported by these strong Unitarians, Alcott eventually found fame and fortune in writing Little Women, the book in which Marmee, this exemplary mother, appears. The book opens with the four March sisters sitting by the fire talking about what they—in poverty—can do to make Christmas a bit merry with the small sums of money they have. The worth they see in their mother is reflected when, after thinking briefly about buying gifts for themselves, they change their minds and decide to buy gifts for their mother. Jo’s choice of gift – “army shoes, best to be hard” – reflects her own tomboy nature and her mother’s need for sturdy shoes in which to go about the city as a Civil War-era social worker. Marmee shortly returns from work and settles down with the girls.

In my childhood edition of Little Women, there was an illustration that, for me, presented Marmee as the apotheosis of motherhood. Illuminated by the cozy firelight, she sits in a chair with her daughters sitting and standing around her to make a perfect circle in which all seem connected, a part of one entity, safe and secure, warm and loved. Almost every edition of Little Women has such an illustration. For those poor souls who haven’t read the book, the feeling of the scene is something like that evoked by the pictures of the bear family on the Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Tea box.

Feminist psychologist Nancy Chodorow theorizes that, whereas boys need to separate from their mothers in order to resolve the Oedipus complex, this is not true for girls. They can bask in a kind of warm union, in which they don’t need to differentiate themselves from their mothers. Thus, though this may cause its own problems, there is no traumatic break. The Little Women illustration seems to exemplify this, as does Marmee’s character as the book continues.

The first trait that Marmee exemplifies is that she seems to know her daughters VERY well, to be intimately acquainted with their very souls. For example, her own Christmas gift to each daughter is a Testament covered in a particular color matching each girl’s personality. Meg’s is green, Jo’s crimson, Beth’s dove-colored, and Amy’s blue. You may remember that Alcott uses Pilgrim’s Progress as a structure for Little Women, as the girls travel on their way through life, stopping, as Bunyan’s “Christian” did, at places like the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair. On Christmas morning, the girls pledge to read their Testaments every day, as guidebooks on their life journey. It was my false childhood impression that the content of these books was different for each girl, perfectly tailored to her own strengths and weaknesses.

Next, Marmee’s close knowledge of her children’s characters is illustrated by the wise way she talks and listens, loving them and guiding them on their journeys in spite of their very real faults. After a dreadful incident in which little sister Amy falls through the ice while skating after an argument with Jo because an angry Jo doesn’t warn her that the ice is soft, Marmee – once Amy is rescued and resting in bed – speaks movingly to Jo about temper, a fault they both share:

            “Watch and pray, dear; never get tired of trying; and never think it is impossible to conquer your fault,” Marmee says, drawing the blowzy head to her shoulder, and kissing the wet cheek so tenderly that Jo crie[s] harder than ever.

            “You don’t know, you can’t guess how bad it is! . . . Oh, mother, help me, do help me!”

            “I will, my child, I will. Don’t cry so bitterly, but remember this day, and resolve, with all your soul, that you will never know another like it . . . You think your temper is the worst in the world; but mine used to be just like it.” (98) “My Jo,” she continues, “you may say anything to your mother, for it is my greatest happiness and pride to feel that my girls confide in me, and know how much I love them.”

In real life, Abba Alcott similarly earned her daughters’ confidence. They trusted her to read their journals, and she would often write them notes after she read. One such note to young Louisa reads: “I am sure your life has many fine passages well worth recording, and to me they are always precious . . . Do write a little each day, dear, if but a line, to show me how bravely you begin the battle, how patiently you wait for the rewards sure to come when the victory is nobly won.”

The real Abba Alcott had many difficulties to contend with, most notably a very impractical Transcendentalist husband, Bronson. During one period, when Louisa was about 10, Bronson and a friend set up a Utopian community. So idealistic were these Utopian dreamers, that they had difficulty choosing their clothing. Before the days of synthetic fabrics, they would not wear cotton because it exploited slaves, nor wool because it exploited sheep. Mrs. Alcott, to whom virtually all of the cooking, washing, and other household work fell, defied the rules and used a lamp at night to sew and read. The lamp was forbidden because it used an animal product, whale oil. One visitor asked, “Are there no beasts of burden on the place?” Abba replied, “No, only a lone woman.” She told Llewellyn Hovey Willis, a Unitarian minister who wrote recollections of a boyhood in which he knew the Alcotts, “I worked like a galley slave, Llewellyn, but mercifully the crash came in a few months or I should have died.”

She said of her husband, “If I should send my husband for a quart of milk, I should fully expect to have him drive home a cow” and “I do wish people who carry their heads in the clouds would take their bodies with them.”

Willis also wrote of her, “Through continued and dire poverty Mrs. Alcott was sunshine itself . . . No matter how weary she might be with the washing and ironing, the baking and cleaning it was all hidden from the group of girls with whom she was ready to enter into fun and frolic, as though she never had a care.” Though certainly in both real life and in fiction, Alcott’s Marmee has abundant worth and dignity, she doesn’t seem ever to have had much time for herself. Indeed, upon her death in 1877 at the age of 77, Louisa wrote that she had simply worn herself out.

Louisa’s real relationship with her mother shows once again the delicate balancing act. Eventually, Louisa came to mother her own mother. In the novel, Marmee shepherds her girls wisely into adulthood, encouraging independence. For example, Marmee encourages Jo to go off to New York to find work, knowing that it’s best for her to leave the next and try her own wings. Characters Jo and Amy live full lives, with vocations as writer and artist, as well as marriage and motherhood. In real life, such separation seemed more difficult for Louisa, as she devoted her life not so much to a dream of writing but to writing for a dream: to make money for the family that had been so ill-supported by the impractical Bronson. Never marrying or – as far as anyone knows – having an adult love relationship, Alcott also never established a home of her own. Often renting rooms for the winter to write in Boston, she would spend summers in Concord, keeping house for her parents or staying with her widowed sister Anna.

“My Sisters, O My Sisters,” the poem by May Sarton that I quoted at the beginning, has other lines about balance:

Hell is the loss of balance when woman is destroyer.

[There’s another Hallmark card Mother’s Day line.]

Each of us has been there.

Each of us knows what the floods can do.

How many women mother their husbands

Out of all strength and secret Virtu;

How many women love an only son

As a lover loves, binding the free hands.

For it is surely a lifetime work.

This learning to be a woman.

Until at the end what is clear

Is the marvelous skill to make

Life grow in all its forms.

I’ll leave you with the idea that perhaps the literature can inspire us to use this parent-child relationship as a kind of spiritual practice, a day-to-day tightrope walk that can help the individuals in a family know themselves. Don’t lean too far to the left (being too liberal a parent). Don’t lean too far to the right (being too fascistic and controlling a parent). Don’t hug too hard – somebody might be smothered. Don’t make the ties too loose – somebody might get lost. Which way do you TEND to lean? How hard do you TEND to hold? Resist the impulse for a moment and THINK. Try the opposite. Tiptoe slowly and carefully, keeping straight and true. Let go of hands sometimes, but keep the ability to give a hug so perfect that it recalls that blissful oneness you once felt in a rocking chair when that sleeping baby melted into your body. Develop dance steps to the music of each other’s developing lives. In UU language, that means: Mothers, respect the inherent worth and dignity of yourself and your children. Children, respect the inherent worth and dignity of yourselves and your mothers – at least for today. . . After all, it is Mother’s Day.