How to use this Page

By Kirsty Doole

As Mother’s Day approaches in the United States, we decided to reflect on some of the mothers to be found between the pages of some of our classic books.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Mrs Bennet is surely one of the best-known mothers in English literature. She has five girls to raise, and is determined to make sure they marry well.  So, in one memorable scene when Elizabeth turns down a proposal from the perfectly respectable Mr Collins, she is beside herself and goes straight to her husband to make sure he demands that their daughter change her mind. However, it doesn’t go quite to plan:

‘Come here, child,’ cried her father as she appeared. ‘I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?’ Elizabeth replied that it was. ‘Very well–and this offer of marriage you have refused?’

‘I have, sir.’

‘Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs Bennet?’

‘Yes, or I will never see her again.’

‘An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.’

Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning, but Mrs Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her husband regarded the affair as she wished, was excessively disappointed.

Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott

Mrs March – or Marmee, as she is affectionately known by her daughters – is basically the perfect mother. She works, she helps charity, she contributes to the war effort, all at the same time as being a loving mother to her girls, not to mention keeping the house looking beautiful. She is strongly principled, supported by her rock-steady faith, and despite at one point admitting that she used to have a bit of a temper, never appears to be angry. Most strikingly for the time at which it was written, though, she ensures that her daughters get an education, and encourages them to make decisions for herself, rather than marrying at the earliest opportunity.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Hamlet and his Mother by Eugene Delacroix

Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, causes deep resentment in her son when she swiftly married his uncle Claudius after the death of Hamlet’s father. However, despite the fact that Hamlet sees her as a living example of the weakness of women, she continues to watch over him with affection and concern. The relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude has been the subject of much academic debate. One famous reading of the relationship was by the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, who in the 1940s published a collection of essays on what he saw as Hamlet’s Oedipal impulses.

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In The Yellow Wall-Paper our narrator is a young mother suffering from depression. In a controversial course of treatment she is separated from her son and denied the opportunity to even read or write. She is forced to spend her time locked in a bedroom covered in yellow wallpaper, in which she starts to see a figure moving as her madness tragically develops.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Mrs Jellyby might be a relatively minor character in Dickens’ mammoth novel, but she is definitely memorable.  She has a husband and several children – most notably her daughter Caddy – but devotes her time to Africa’s needy. She spends all day writing letters and arguing for their cause, but all the time forgetting the saying “charity begins at home” and is blind to the fact that her own family is suffering badly from neglect.

Esther Waters by George Moore

Esther Waters is a young, working-class woman with strong religious beliefs who takes up a job as a kitchen-maid. She is seduced and abandoned, and forced to support herself and her illegitimate child in any way that she can. The novel depicts with extraordinary candour Esther’s struggles against prejudice and injustice, and the growth of her character as she determines to protect her son. James Joyce even called Esther Waters ‘the best novel of modern English life’.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Hamlet and his Mother by Eugene Delacrois. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The post A Mother’s Day reading list from Oxford World’s Classics appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• A religion reading list from Oxford World’s Classics
• How to write a classic
• Money matters

 

Tweet

Today on OUPblog we’re celebrating the 100th International Women’s Day. I’ve invited intern extraordinaire Hanna Oldsman to contribute her thoughts on “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A groundbreaking and important early piece of American feminist literature, it was first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine and has been subject to countless interpretations, as it powerfully illustrates 19th century attitudes about women’s physical and mental health.

By Hanna Oldsman (Publicity Intern)

For me, one of the most interesting lines of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” appears near the very beginning of the story. The words are an aside, a nervous excuse—and the only part of this rambling, uncomfortable tale to be cordoned off with parentheses: “John is a physician,” the narrator writes furtively, “and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind—) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”

“The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a story in which dead things come to life. The narrator, ill with what her husband calls a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency,” imagines that the wallpaper that covers her bedroom moves, that behind the “sprawling” pattern creeps a woman, trapped, who shakes the bars that confine her.  When I first read this story, I found it odd that the narrator believes the pages of her diary to be dead while the wallpaper sprouts heads like hydras and its curves “commit suicide—plung[ing] off at outrageous angles,” while its “pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare.” Odd, and also devastating: later in the story, she wishes that she had someone to whom she might divulge her thoughts—someone who might provide “any advice or companionship about [her] works.” There is some connection between the paper on which she writes and the papered walls on which her imagination paints a Gothic tale; it is as if her first imaginative impulses, suppressed, press themselves into the walls.

The irony of the words “but this is dead paper,” is, of course, that they don’t remain hidden: as we read this story, we are made party to the narrator’s madness and forced to take the place of her friends and family who refuse to listen. Her words make the nightmarish hallucinations seem real to us. Reading Gilman’s private writings is a similar experience. I recently had the chance to peruse two books from OUP on the work and life of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories, edited by Robert Shulman, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. Wild Unrest, in contrast to other books about this late 19th-century feminist and author, is less about Charlotte Perkins Gilman the public figure and activist than it is about Charlotte’s p