It's Giving Mother

Absentee. Adulteree. Anti-Marmee. A roundup of some of literature’s most compelling moms.

“I do wish the girls had gone with something more youthful that Marmee.”

Once again, it’s time to celebrate Mom. Last year, inspired by that Dearest of Mommies, Joan Crawford, Tossing Shirts paid tribute to some of literature’s worst mothers. This year, I’m looking at some of fiction’s most otherwise interesting mothers and mother figures. For those lucky enough to have one, a kind, loving mom is a great gift. But while wonderful at home, adoring mater familias types are a bit drippy on the page. Ever wonder why directors of film adaptations of Little Women trot out fabulous ringers like Laura Dern and Susan Sarandon to play Mrs. March? It’s because as written, Marmee is an angelic bore. The women discussed here are flawed and complicated, their halos tarnished, sometimes badly. Most wouldn’t win Mother of the Year (or even merit a “World’s Greatest Mom” mug). Yet whether wacky, dastardly or even a bit slutty, they’ve all got that most important of (fictional) character traits – they’re deeply compelling.

“I suppose Berthe can be late to Gymboree.”

Emma Bovary (Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert)

Emma Bovary isn’t the textbook maternal sort. She’s less “stay at home and bake cookies” and more “pursue torrid affairs with my lovers while racking up debts against the family estate.” Then again, a loveless provincial marriage is no place for a tempestuous spirit with a penchant for silk dresses. This gal longs “for masked balls, for violent pleasures, with all of the wildness that she did not know.” Emma realizes from the get-go that the mommy act probably isn’t for her. “Would this misery last forever?” she wonders, almost immediately after announcing her pregnancy. And, for all her flaws, she’s at least self-aware enough to feel conflicted. True, her spells of dutiful motherliness never last longer than a few weeks or so, but have people considered that Berthe is kind of a drip? When faced with the choice between mundane domesticity with a dull doctor and a mewling toddler or a tumultuous love affair with a hedonistic bachelor, Emma hurls herself straight down the proverbial road to perdition. Iconic. 

“Use the Voice. But don’t you dare take that tone with me.”

Lady Jessica (Dune, Frank Herbert)

For a mom, relocating with the kids is often a nightmare. Relocating to a hostile planet amidst a nefarious imperial plot to assassinate your whole family while continuing to bolster the millennia-long breeding and propaganda campaign engineered by your mysterious, morally dubious religious order – impossible! As it turns out, though, some moms really can do it all. Yes, the powers of the Bene Gesserit are a big help – particularly the whole “controlling people with your voice” thing – but witchy superpowers can only get one so far. Everything else takes mettle. Lady Jessica might not be the best person, but she’s definitely a great mother. How else to explain her endless patience for her son Paul, who constantly muddles her efforts to ensure their survival on Arrakis with endless hemming and hawing over his (admittedly terrible) ultimate purpose? 

“You’re grounded.”

Orlando, (Orlando, Virginia Woolf)

Orlando’s story begins when he is a beautiful, arrogant lordling in the Elizabethan era and ends when she is a mother in 1928 London. Along the way, the immortal Orlando takes lovers, absconds to Constantinople, encounters the joy and the pain of being a writer, engages in literature’s longest redecorating project and discovers the wonders of skirts. Orlando packs dozens of existences into one life that’s bigger than big. Not many children can honestly say that their mother has ice-skated with a glam, androgynous tsarina, served as an ambassador, penned an epic poem of questionable quality and been married to a Spanish dancer named Rosina Pepita. All those centuries of adventures, and at novel’s end, Orlando “scarcely looked a day older” than thirty-six. Honestly, Ma Ingalls could never.

“I’m running for governor of South Dakota.”

Cruella de Vil (The Hundred and One Dalmatians, Dodie Smith)

Women who call their pets “fur babies” deserve to have their very own Medea. Enter Cruella de Vil. While her pooch-murdering proclivities won’t win her the popular vote, one might feel a perverse, closeted admiration for a woman who appears on the scene “wearing a tight-fitting emerald satin dress, several ropes of rubies, and an absolutely simple white mink cloak.” Ironically, Cruella is a devoted pet parent herself. (I told you, these gals are complicated.) She dotes on her spoiled white Persian, which begs the question, is she purely evil or just more of a cat person?

“Julie, move to London. We take jolly holidays in chalk paintings. We do not spar with hitmen.”

Julie Ballanger (The Mad and the Bad, Jean-Patrick Manchette)

For some women, motherhood is a lifelong dream. For others, it’s more of a post-mental institution nanny gig that turns into a life-or-death surrogate-parenthood scenario. So it goes for Julie Ballanger, the flinty, unstable antiheroine at the heart of this violent French noir. Fresh from a voluntary five-year stint in an asylum, Julie stumbles into a plum gig as chaperone for the orphaned nephew of a wealthy industrialist. Things get off to a rocky start with her new charge, Peter (one of literature’s uber-spoiled brats). In an early encounter, the two get into a slap fight. Nor is Julie’s relationship with Uncle Hartog any better. When he asks if she feels like she’s living in a fairy tale, she shoots back, “I don’t believe in fairy tales…You are a soap, oil and detergent magnate.” Turns out, he’s far from squeaky clean, as he has plotted to eliminate his wee nephew. Nothing bonds two souls together quite like being forced to go on the run from hitmen. A bloody chase through the French countryside ensues, with Julie risking life and limb (and sacrificing at least one pair of jeans) to protect one unbearable little boy. 

What must these permission slips look like?

The Mothers of Walkerville Elementary 4th Grade Class (The Magic School Bus Books, Joanna Cole)

Put aside, for a moment, the notion that most mothers might be curious as to why their children’s teacher is also the school-bus driver. (In this series, it’s unclear if Ms. Frizzle even has a Class A commercial driver’s license.) How full must even the busiest woman’s schedule be if her child’s near-constant mystical field trips to exotic locales such as the human circulatory system, the center of the Earth and the Jurassic Period don’t merit demanding an emergency PTA meeting? We never learn much about the Walkerville mothers. But given that they seem to be fine with their grammar schoolers traipsing off to the inside of a hurricane with a wacky PhD for a chaperone, their lives must be fascinating.