With Mother’s Day coming up on Sunday, we thought it would be fun to have a look at some of the iconic mothers in children’s literature.
But from looking through my own bookcase and the Book Village digital library, it would seem that any beautiful, sensible, patient and boundary-setting good mother would get in the way of a great children’s adventure story. In the best children’s stories, the mothers are dead or missing – or really awful!
From the list of great orphan characters there are quite a few princesses – Cinderella, Snow White, Elsa and Anna, animals like Bambi, Mowgli and Bagheera and Paddington Bear, boy adventurers like Harry Potter, Alex Rider, Tom Sawyer.
The list of motherless and orphaned girls includes Sophie from the BFG, Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden and Pippi Longstocking. Pippi is the envy of most children for her independence and superhuman strength, for her chest of gold coins and her generosity, for not having to go to school, and for sharing her house with a horse and her monkey without an adult in sight.
The worst mother in children’s literature is surely Mrs Wormwood, Matilda’s mother. She is so awful a small part of me almost likes her.
In the category of living mothers, most are absent like the mother in The Famous Five books, or kept out of the stories which happen in other worlds such as Narnia or in The Indian in the Cupboard.
So are there any good mothers in children’s stories?
I always loved the eccentric Mrs Durrell as portrayed in My Family and other Animals who allowed Gerald Durrell to pursue his interest in nature, but the mother I was most envious of as a child was mother in the Swallows and Amazons books. She’s definitely not part of the adventures, but she did sew tents and hay bags and get provisions for the voyage and made possible the wonderful sailing and camping adventures of John, Susan, Titty and Roger.
So to all mothers: You probably won’t be able to identify yourselves in any characters from great adventure stories, but you are the person who is most likely to take children on these amazing adventures through the pages of the books you lovingly read to your children.
Happy Mother’s Day!
<a href=’https://www.freepik.com/photos/baby’>Baby photo created by prostooleh – www.freepik.com</a>
