The Present Mother in Absent Mother Literature

If you study literary criticism, you will quickly learn about the absent mother in literature. Feminist critics have pointed out that in many great works of literature, by men and by women, the mother is absent. She is mostly dead, sometimes missing, or unknown. But she is not there, not present, not often a character in the narrative.

Death of Kathy in Wuthering Heights

The critics suggest that this is because many authors fear a strong female character. Let’s face it. Mothers have a lot of power, a lot of influence. Mothers shape lives. They exert a powerful influence over their children. They are personalities to be reckoned with. In a society where patriarchy is the norm, where men are given the advantage at all times, such a figure threatens the dramatic mix. So it’s easiest to get rid of mothers. So mothers are dispensed with in written literature, television, and in film.

You could find many examples, but here are some familiar ones. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte kills mothers off almost instantly. It covers three generations, and all the mothers are dead soon after their children are born. In Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet has a mother, but the main female character, Ophelia, does not. We get no word on what happened to her. Ophelia has a brother and a father. Of course, if she is going to be dominated by her father, bossed around by her brother, and finally driven insane, she can’t have a strong, loving, powerful mother to go to for refuge. So get rid of the mother. On the paranormal side, the mother is gone in Carmilla. This early vampire novel has a father raising a daughter—like so many other novels. In TV, the venerated Andy Griffith Show followed suit on absent mothers. Andy was a widower. Opie had no mother. In their place was the fussy, virginal Aunt Bee. And so it goes.

Helen Bonham Carter as Opehia

I post this because Mother’s Day, a holiday celebrated in the US and many other nations, just passed by. Can writers of speculative fiction reverse the absent mother trend? I’d like to think so. Very often, the strong women we see in speculative fiction are not mothers. And very often the mother is absent. Hunger Games has a mother who turns out to be strong in the end. There are strong mother figures here and there, but we need many more of them.

I’ve tried to write some strong female characters and have included mothers in this category. In my full-length novel, The Sorceress of the Northern Seas, the main character, Lybecca, has a mother, Editha, who is gentle, kind, and who has turned her back on magic. Yet she has a profound influence on Lybecca’s life—an influence that keeps her daughter from being sucked into the evil sorcery that is so appealing and teaches her to use magic for goodness and justice. Editha’s mother, Devonna, is a powerful sorceress who shapes her daughter’s life in a way Devonna regrets. Eventually, she is highly influential on her granddaughter. I tried to create these powerful women, who do not die and are not absent.

Speculative fiction writers, women and men, have offered the world some strong female characters. I hope we can also oppose patriarchal trends and create mothers who are powerful, influential, and important. It will be a revolution if we are able to do this.

Check out The Sorceress of the Northern Seas and encounter some strong female characters, mothers and women who are not mothers—but all powerful and human.