Gladys Hunt on Disappearing Mothers

Where are the Mothers?

Originally published on the Tumbln website, April 8, 2009

Sometime when you are with people who like children’s books, try out this game for fun. Try to name the titles of children’s books in which the mother is present as an important part of the story.

I got this idea from an article in Horn Book Magazine (by Catherine G Murdock) who also suggested that there aren’t many such books. As I thought about it, I remembered that author Roald Dahl kills off both mother and father in the first paragraph of James and the Giant Peach. Some favorites like the Madeline books have governesses or nannies. Harry Potter’s mother is gone, and the parents in The Narnia Chronicles are in London, having sent their children off to the country for protection from bombs, leaving the children alone to walk through wardrobes. Then there’s Because of Winn-Dixie or The Great Gilly Hopkins and even The Secret Garden. H-mm, what’s happened to all the mothers?

You will come up with a list of books that have mothers, of course, and be glad to find those who give the story its wisdom and security. Books like Little Women or Little House on the Prairie have wonderful mothers in them. Keep thinking. Others are out there.

Sometimes the mother is simply absent— gone to take care of a sick aunt or some other duty while the action of the story takes place. However, fictitious mothers have a habit of dying in childbirth or when children are two or three. Maybe this is a set-up to evoke sympathy or to make the protagonist braver, most courageous and noble.

Is it related to the seeming verity that children seem to love stories that scare them a bit?—like The Harry Potter series or all those books about dragons that little children love. (Why else would children keep reading the Lemony Snicket books? Or older children read Stephen King?)

Well-meaning, nurturing people have been trying to clean up Mother Goose and Grimm’s Fairy Tales for years to make them less scary and more refined. It hasn’t worked. Children like to live on the edge. They have a fascination for what is dangerous and even monstrous. Like dragons. In 1985 Saint George and the Dragon by Trina Schart Hyman won the Caldecott Medal and the Newbery went to Robin McKinley’s fantasy The Hero and the Crown. Dragons were in that year.

What’s this got to do with mothers? Maybe I am grasping at straws, but mothers do make the world safe. They do battle against elements that would pain their children—and maybe children need stories without the security of mothers to prove they can handle life. Fear, death, danger, evil, untamable forces of nature—these are realities. Maybe some kind of inner strength comes from stories where children meet characters who conquer against all odds…even without mothers.

Remember in Alice in Wonderland when Alice fell into the rabbit hole—down, down, down, thinking to herself, Well, after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down the stairs! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house! Maybe it’s something like that. A big experience in a book can help put the rest of life in perspective.

In her article, Murdock asks, “Could a fictional mother ever utter the words ‘Go whack that dragon, darling’ without adding at the very least ‘be careful’ or ‘wear your jacket’ or ‘don’t forget dinner is at six?’” Inconceivable, she concludes. In stories where moms abandon their children, this becomes the theme of the story and the characters struggle to understand the unfathomable. Such a mom would no longer be a mother.

What do you think?

© Gladys M. Hunt 2008-10, reissued in 2022 with minor adjustments with permission of the Executor of the Literary Estate of Gladys M. Hunt (4194 Hilton SE, Lowell, MI 49331). Used by permission. All rights reserved.