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Sarah Vaughan on her Favourite Bad Mothers in Fiction
Sarah Vaughan's compelling thriller Little Disasters take a disturbing yet sensitive peak behind the facade of seemingly perfect motherhood. In this exclusive piece, Sarah highlights her favourite malicious, malevolent and muddle-headed mothers in literature.
Little Disasters, my new novel about the darkest reaches of motherhood, begins with a mother overwhelmed by her screaming baby and the sense that this is more than she can bear. The novel explores how the loneliness of early motherhood can fracture a woman’s identity and cause even experienced mothers to risk danger. Much of it is written from the point of view of Jess, an affluent mother-of-three, who is struggling. While I hope the reader is sympathetic, it’s clear her mothering is less than ideal…
It turns out I’m exploring fertile ground. Competent mothers don’t make for compelling literature, while flawed and morally ambiguous ones speak to our darkest fears. If they’re negligent or cruel, it seems we can’t stop reading about them, and if they dare to be sexually active or voracious, we’re even more intrigued and judgmental. Here, for Mother’s Day, are some of the worst mothers in literature.
Mrs Wormwood in Matilda by Roald Dahl
The role of mothers in children’s literature is largely to be dead or preoccupied (think Harry Potter, Danny the Champion of the World, Swallows & Amazons, Alex Rider, the Young James Bond) so that the main characters can get up to adventures undeterred. Alternatively, they can be so cruel our child protagonist has to break away. Nose-picking Mrs Wormwood views her intelligent daughter as a “scab” she can’t wait to throw away. Dahl reveals a strong strain of misogyny in his depiction of fat, bingo-playing, platinum blonde (with dark roots) Mrs Wormwood who “doesn’t encourage reading books” and resorts not just to TV dinners, but ones bought from the chip shop. When Miss Honey offers to bring up Matilda, she agrees with alacrity.
Mrs Bennet in Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
While Mr Bennet is equally weak in contracting out the pursuit of his daughters’ suitors to his wife, Jane Austen is most savage in her caricature of Mrs Bennet. “A woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper” obsessed with the financial necessity of getting her five daughters married without a care for their future happiness. (How exactly would Mr Collins and Lizzy work out?) Snobbish and vulgar, she ensures Jane becomes ill by sending her out in the rain to snare Bingley. But it’s her indulgence of headstrong Lydia that is seen as the most reprehensible since it threatens to bring shame on the family and means the youngest Bennet sister is stuck with caddish Wickham forever.
Mrs Winterson in Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
“My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle.” So begins Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. Zealous and hypocritical, Mrs Winterson beats the young Jeanette when her real mother comes to find her and locks her in the dark with no food for 36 hours when she discovers she’s gay. She then kicks her out with the words: “You’ll have to leave. I’m not having demons here.”
Adèle in Adèle by Leila Slimani
Leila Slimani’s eponymous heroine, like Anna in Jill Alexander Essbaum’s Hausfrau, has been seen as a modern Emma Bovary. But Adèle is far more narcissistic and her addiction to often dangerous sex with strangers – she ends up asking two drug addicts to smash her genitals – means she is all too ready to abandon three-year-old Lucien. “Lucien is a burden, a constraint that she struggles to get used to… Adele isn’t sure where her love for her son fits in among all her other jumbled feelings: panic when she has to leave him with someone else; annoyance at having to dress him; exhaustion from pushing his recalcitrant buggy up the hill.”
Eleanor Melrose in the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn
Drugged-up, distant, self-absorbed, and incapable of standing up to her sadistic husband, Patrick’s mother turns a blind eye to her five-year-old son being raped by him, despite having been raped by him, herself. That night, Patrick sits on the stairs waiting for her to come up, but she bows to her husband’s belief he shouldn’t be “mollycoddled”. Her “desperate affection” sounds “like a long-distance telephone call”, and when Patrick is cut by glass, she feels “impaled...while she considers the horror of her position.” In old age, Eleanor, whose favourite charity is Save the Children, disinherits him, giving estate to a New Age charlatan. As Patrick laments, in Mother’s Milk, “She was always a lousy mother, but I thought she might take a holiday at the end of her life, feel that she had achieved enough by way of betrayal and neglect.”
Lydia Fitzsimons in Lying in Wait by Liz Nugent
Reclusive, mercurial, obsessive, snobbish, and obsessed with appearances, Liz Nugent’s monstrous mother manipulates her son, Lawrence, to such an extent she even drugs him to control him. “Motherhood is not a game” she proclaims at one point, and, chillingly, “I gave birth to him, and therefore he is mine.”
Martina Lamb in The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
Martina Lamb in Lisa Jewell’s number one bestseller The Family Upstairs is “not the best mum, but not the worst”, and yet she is brainwashed into allowing the charismatic David to take over her Cheyne Walk mansion, siphon off her family’s assets, and inflict violence. As she explains to her incredulous son, Henry, when he questions how long the cultish leader will stay. “It’s, well, it’s about me I suppose. It’s about how I feel about myself and how I’ve felt so sad for so long and how all of this,” she gestured around her grand bedroom… “doesn’t make me happy, it really doesn’t. And then David came and he’s shown me another way.”
Mother in Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller
The mother in Claire Fuller’s Bitter Orange only appears in flashbacks and yet her waspish comments weigh heavily on her repressed daughter, Frances. Bedridden and controlling, Mother pinches her hard enough to leave a mark when she thinks she’s eating too much; and Frances wears her constricting underwear as a reproof. But it’s the blame cast for the failure of her marriage that’s most poisonous: “Mother used to say her stretch marks were my fault; that I had ruined her body, and if it hadn’t been for me she would have been unscarred and tight like her childless sister, and Father wouldn’t have strayed.”
Mariah in Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins
In Lucy Atkins' forthcoming literary thriller, Magpie Lane, Mariah, a Danish beauty with a “hard-won instinct for preservation”, is a reluctant stepmother to nine-year-old, mute and bereaved Felicity, who she makes little effort to understand. Dee, the narrator, is increasingly appalled by her self-absorption - it’s telling that Mariah’s career involves restoring old wallpaper; something superficial that papers over cracks. But pregnant Mariah might have her comeuppance. As Dee notes: “A colicky infant can turn even the most glamorous Scandinavian into a ragged lunatic.”
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An excellent, informative article. Good suggestions for future reading. Thank you. View more
Irene BroughtonNew reply
Please sign in to respond to comments.I enjoyed reading this and it gave me some good ideas about what to read next. View more
Alison SalesNew reply
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