What makes a good mother? Does she hover, bring us chicken soup when we’re ill, bundle us up in our coats and mittens to go out into the cold world, make for when we return? Or does she let us step outside alone, live independently, find our selves and our passions and what makes us tick?
Of course a mother is not only absent or present. What seems to be consistent—even in it the face of these nuanced and textured versions of motherhood, even in the face of the way motherhood is moderated and sanctioned in our culture—is a mother, like any parent, wants what is best for her child. What does that look like? Depending on the mother—the woman—that can take on many forms.
A bad mother doesn’t seem much easier to define. Is she overbearing, never letting her kid out of her sight for one moment? Is she absent to the point of neglect? A bad mother is a woman. Her mothering is an afterthought.
The bad mothers of literature can be spectacularly awful. But still, at the bottom of it, these are women who are suffering. They are suffering from bad marriages; they are trapped by their time, unable to be themselves. Their suffering makes them cruel or it makes them clueless to their children’s needs. Present or absent, a bad mother is fodder for great fiction. And a bad mother never fails to get a reaction from all spectrum of readers. Because being a bad mother is the least acceptable character to be.
Here are ten bad mothers in literature. They are in no particular order but as I write, I realize the worst ones are the selfish ones, who live their lives as if their children are not there. Whatever the case, across the board, all bad mothers are punished.
No comments:
Post a Comment