Representing Mothers and Children

Laura Vivanco

I've just finished reading Kate Walker's Kept for Her Baby and one of the key issues is the heroine's status as a mother. In part this is because, as the title suggests, "If she had never become pregnant then he would never have married her at all. It was only because of his determination that his son would be legitimate that he had ever put a ring on her finger" (45) but it is also because of the questions raised by what happened after that son was born: "What loving mother, what good mother, would abandon her baby, walk out on him, leaving him alone with his father?" (17). The baby ended up in the care of

his father and the trained nanny [...]. The nanny that Ricardo had insisted on from the moment she had given birth, making her feel useless and inadequate, in a way that must have contributed to her breakdown. (36)

As the above quotation indicates, Lucy's abandonment of her child is ascribed to a temporary cause, and since "The doctors said that she was well again now" (18) there is no reason for the reader to believe it will affect her ability to be a "loving mother," a "good mother" in the future.

What does one have to do, though, in order to qualify as a "good mother"? Lucy seems to convince her husband that she's a good mother at least in part by how she picks up the baby and changes his nappy:

She almost laughed as she laid Marco on his back on the brightly coloured changing mat. This was something she knew how to do.
'Let's get you cleaned up ...'
Unfastening the sleep suit, removing the dirty nappy, cleaning, was the work of moments. And she enjoyed it - doing this simple task for her baby. Even when Marco waved his arms and legs wildly in the air, wriggling so that it was a struggle to get the nappy on and fastened, she couldn't hold back the soft chuckle of appreciation of his life and energy. Forgetting about the dark, watchful man behind her, she bent her head and blew a loud raspberry on his exposed stomach, revelling in its soft roundness, the uncontrollable giggles that burst from him in response. (115)

and how she feeds him:

She was looking down at Marco, laughing softly as the little boy squished his banana in his hand, obviously revelling in the mess he was making and the feel of it between his fingers. And Marco was watching her, his wide smile a beam of delight as he held up the sticky mess for her to see. (118)

Obviously one has to interpret Lucy's happiness in these scenes in the context of her previous separation from her baby. Having feared she might never see him again, it's entirely understandable that she should feel delighted to have the opportunity to spend time with him. It's also important to remember that the book is about a heroine who had "Post-natal psychosis" (171). Nonetheless, what is depicted for the reader are scenes which present motherhood as a source of joy.

The depiction of motherhood in Angela Thirkell's High Rising (1933) is rather different. In part this is because of the very different circumstances in which the two mothers find themselves, but I think it may also reflect different attitudes towards motherhood. It should also be noted that Thirkell's novel is more "romantic fiction" than "romance" since the central protagonist, Laura, is not involved in a romantic relationship (she does get involved in a bit of matchmaking for others). She's a forty-five year old author and widowed mother-of-four who, at the beginning of the novel, is collecting her youngest from boarding school. I wonder how many modern heroine-mothers would choose this option for their children? Clearly the many billionaire/sheik etc heroes could easily afford to educate their children this way, and some have been to boarding schools themselves. Maybe the ages of the children in romances play a part in how schooling choices are depicted in the genre, but I wonder if nowadays more people feel that children should stay with their parents. The heroine of Janet Evanovich's Smitten in fact broke up with her husband over this issue rather than over his infidelity:

"It turned out we had different expectations about marriage. Paul expected me to close my eyes to constant indiscretions, and I expected him to be faithful to me."
"I'm sorry."
Lizabeth waved it away. "Actually, I could have lived with that. What finally drove me out of the marriage was when he insisted that the boys go to boarding school. Paul had political ambitions. He wanted me to be a perfect hostess. He found the children to be a burden." (24)

For Laura, and other mothers of her class and era, sending children to boarding school would have seemed entirely normal, and although she may wonder, "as she had often wondered with the three older boys, why one's offspring are under some kind of compulsion to alienate one's affections at first sight by their conceit, egotism, and appalling self-satisfaction" (4) she does love her sons. It seems unlikely, however, that she would respond with joy to a sticky mess, no matter how much a child was "revelling" in it. This is a woman who admits to feeling rather "exhausted" after bringing up so many children:

When for about a quarter of a century you have been fighting strong young creatures with a natural bias towards dirt, untidiness, and carelessness, quite unmoved by noise, looking upon loud, unmeaning quarrels and abuse as the essence of polite conversation, oblivious of all convenience and comfort but their own, your resistance weakens. (21-22)

And when she has finally got her son into his bed after his first day home for the holidays, she

shut the door and reeled downstairs. [...] Oh, the exhaustingness of the healthy young! Laura had once offered to edit a book called Why I Hate my Children, but though Adrian Coates [her editor] had offered her every encouragement, and every mother of her acquaintance had offered to contribute, it had never taken shape. Perhaps, she thought, as she stood by Tony's bed an hour later, they wouldn't be so nice if they weren't so hateful.
There lay her demon son, in abandoned repose. His cheeks, so cool and firm in the day, had turned to softest rose-petal jelly, and looked as if they might melt upon the pillow. His mouth was fit for poets to sing. His hands - spotlessly clean for a brief space - still had dimples where later bony knuckles would be [...] she tucked the bedclothes in, kissed her adorable hateful child, who never stirred, and turning out the light left the room. (39-40)

The ways in which heroes respond to mothers also vary. Amanda Vickery describes one depiction of motherhood thus:

When Samuel Richardson singled out the breast-feeding mother in Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), one of the most popular novels of the century, he presented a traditional duty in a haze of beguiling limelight. Witness the scene when the once naughty Lady G. is surprised with her babe at the breast by her estranged husband:

Never was a man in greater rapture. For lady Gertrude had taught him to wish that a mother would be a mother: He Threw himself at my feet, clasping me and the little varlet together in his arms. Brute! said I, will you smother my Harriet - I was half-ashamed of my tenderness - Dear-est, dear-est, dear-est Lady G. - Shaking his head, between every dear and est, every muscle of his face working; how you transport me! - Never, never, never, saw I so delightful a sight! (Vickery 93-94)

Heroes in modern romances may not express themselves in quite these words, or feel "rapture" of exactly the same kind, but they too often react extremely strongly to motherhood:

Her body was preparing itself for the birth of their baby and the thought of that was a massive turn-on. (Williams 107)

'You're very sexy, pregnant,' he whispered.
'No, I'm not.'
'You are to me. [...] We men are simple creatures [...] Evidence of our virility can't help but prove satisfying. Call it a weird macho thing.' (Williams 108)

There are, of course, plenty of romances involving pregnant heroines who become involved with a new man, but occasionally I've come across characters who would rather not begin a relationship with a woman who's a mother. In Janet Evanovich's Smitten, for example, the hero hesitates before kissing the heroine:

He didn't want to come on too strong or too fast and frighten her away. And he didn't want to make working conditions awkward. And besides that, she was a mother. He'd never before been involved with a mother. In his eyes motherhood was in the same category as a PhD in physics. It was outside his sphere of knowledge. It was intimidating. And the thought of bedding someone's mother felt a smidgeon irreverent. Not enough to stop him, he thought ruefully. Just enough to slow him down. (17-18)

The heroine herself seems to have some preconceptions about what is, or isn't, suitable for a mother to do, but by the end of the novel she appears to have revised at least some of them:

She was in a suggestive position on the trunk when he returned. "Do you think this is undignified for a mother?"
He pulled her panties down. "I think this is perfect for a mother." (176)

So, is this novel grappling with the madonna/whore dichotomy? According to Caroline Myra Pascoe:

Images of motherhood in western society have most often ignored maternal sexuality, notwithstanding the sleight of hand that this entails. Anne Summers in Damned Whores and God's Police noted:

It is conveniently forgotten that married women must have sexual intercourse in order to reproduce: a general Australian puritanism has managed to convince itself that mothers are not sexual creatures and female sexuality is either denied or relegated entirely to the Damned Whore stereotype.

The modern romance genre, however, provides a reader with plenty of sexually active mothers and mothers-to-be. I suspect that the portrayal of mothers and children varies not just across time (and cultures, classes and many other social variables), but also across different genres. Jennifer Weiner, who writes women's fiction, thinks that

even though there are blogs and books and first-person essays about the everyday exhaustion and dreariness and frustration of motherhood, the prevailing cultural view is still that motherhood comes with this rose-tinged blissful glow.

You might get rather a different view of children and childrearing from the horror genre, however. John Patterson at the Guardian suggests that

The most interesting evil-kid movies seem to rise up from the subconscious of their creators. Stephen King has said that he wrote The Shining when he was drinking a lot to numb his bleakest feelings about family life, and evil and/or seriously scary kids proliferate across his work in that period: Danny and the chopped-up Grady Twins in The Shining; Drew Barrymore in Firestarter; the dead child in Pet Sematary; Isaac in Children Of The Corn. David Cronenberg had a five-year-old daughter when he made his 1979 gyno-horror movie The Brood, with its murderous mutant children, and David Lynch memorialised his complicated feelings about fatherhood with the monstrously deformed baby in Eraserhead. Whereas most kid-slaying horrors play nakedly to the taboo, these films have a sense of anxiety, dread and profound ambiguity about parenthood that often makes them richer as works of art.

Those examples were all created by fathers, whereas romances are far more likely to be written by women. Is that just a coincidence? And does the romance genre, as a whole, represent motherhood and children in an idealised way or is it relatively realistic?

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• Evanovich, Janet. Smitten. 1990. London: Bantam, 1991.
• Pascoe, Caroline Myra. Screening Mothers: Representations of motherhood in Australian films from 1900 to 1988. PhD thesis. University of Sydney, 2006.
  
• Thirkell, Angela. High Rising. 1933. Osney Mead, Oxford: Isis, 2000.
• Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
• Walker, Kate. Kept for Her Baby. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.
  
• Williams, Cathy. The Italian's One-Night Love-Child. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.

With thanks to Kate Walker for sending me a copy of Kept for Her Baby, Tumperkin for giving me The Italian's One-Night Love-Child, AgTigress for providing me with a copy of Smitten and Sunita, who recommended Angela Thirkell's novels. The illustration came from Wikimedia Commons.

Links: Obituaries, Shakespeare, Ethics, and Psychology

Laura Vivanco

Both Harlequin Mills & Boon author Elizabeth Oldfield and romance cover artist Pino have recently died.

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Laurie E. Osborne has written a number of academic articles on Shakespeare and popular romance (they're listed at the Romance Wiki). There is some overlap between the information contained in them and the information which appears on her Romancing the Bard website, but they're not identical. The site explores the uses of Shakespeare and Shakespearean references in popular romance novels:

In my attention to the ways that romance novelists incorporate Shakespearean texts into their generic requirements, I am implicitly agreeing with recent arguments about the significance of romance novel. Critics like Janice Radway and Carol Thurston cite romance's predominantly female authorship and readership, as well as its economic clout in the book industry as some reasons that cultural critics should attend more closely to its generic features and constructed fantasies. Examining the incorporation of the "patriarchal bard" into these popular novels potentially contributes to the ongoing arguments about whether the romance constitutes a reincorporation of dangerous patriarchal ideologies (as most academic critics seems to argue) or feminine empowerment.

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Jessica, of Read, React, Review, has put up part 2 of her series of posts on ethical criticism of genre fiction: "This is a sketch of a project I am working on, and of a paper I gave at the Popular Culture Association conference in April."

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Marie-Joelle Estrada's recent PhD thesis seeks to evaluate "romantic actions." It's available online via Duke University Library. In it she mentions that

According to the Romantic Construal Model, people’s judgments of whether a particular act is romantic is determined by three factors: the degree to which the action is (a) personalized (personalization), (b) special (specialness), and (c) conveys that the actor values the relationship (conveyed value). Personalization refers to the extent to which an action is tailored specifically to the receiver’s idiosyncratic personality, interests, preferences, and dislikes. Specialness refers to how “out-of-the-ordinary” the act is, the degree to which the act positively deviates from everyday partner actions. Conveyed value is the degree to which receiver perceives that the act originated from or conveys the actor’s high esteem for the receiver and the relationship. According to the model, higher levels of personalization, specialness, and conveyed value increase the likelihood that a particular expression or behavior will be regarded as romantic. (10-11)

It seems to me that romance novels frequently contain romantic actions which are depicted as personalised and special and which convey "the actor’s high esteem for the receiver and the relationship." In a forthcoming essay, "One Ring to Bind Them: Ring Symbolism in the Modern Romance Genre," in New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction. Ed. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric M. Selinger, I've analysed some depictions of rings given to heroines by heroes, and one of the things I noticed about them was the frequent personalisation of these gifts. Furthermore, there were also a few contrasting instances of rings which lacked personalisation, and which were given to heroines by men who were not heroes. The correlation between hero status and personalisation of the ring, and between non-hero status and a lack of personalisation of the ring, accords with Estrada's suggestion that

Personalization [...] symbolizes that the actor cares enough to pay attention to details about a partner’s likes and dislikes (thereby suggesting that he or she is important enough to warrant cataloguing the smallest preferences) and knows the partner well enough to make appropriate behavioral choices. Remembering specific preferences also ensures that the behavior is one that the receiver will like, suggesting that the actor ultimately aims to make the receiver happy. (11)

In Cathy Williams's The Italian's One-Night Love-Child the hero's gift-giving to the heroine is very special (it differs from his usual method of gift-giving) and personalised, both of which facts reveal to the reader (if not, at this point, to the hero) that he considers his relationship with her to be of high value:

Cristiano had never, personally, involved himself in the tedious pastime of buying presents for women. Firstly, he didn't have time to waste dithering in shops, peering at items of jewellery and asking sales assistants for help. Secondly, he could think of nothing more soul-destroying than trying to rack his brains and come up with a suitable present for any woman. No, this was where his faithful PA had always come into her own. A woman buying for another woman. Made sense.
For the past six weeks, however, he had ditched the PA in favour of the personal touch and had found the exercise a lot less arduous than he had expected. In fact ... he had discovered that there was a great deal of enjoyment to be had browsing in the shops for things that would put a smile on Bethany's face. [...] Having made the initial mistake of buying her jewellery, which all women presumably loved, incredibly expensive jewellery with super-watt diamonds, only to find his present politely accepted and then equally politely returned, he had revised his ideas. [...]
'I just bet this is the sort of stuff you're accustomed to giving your girlfriends,' she had shrewdly remarked [...].
Cristiano, who had never failed to rise to a challenge, had become imaginative. (136-37)

This passage also reveals another element often present in romantic gestures:

A potential moderator included in the Romantic Construal Model involves the degree to which the personalization or specialness of the action is seen as requiring effort on the actor’s part [...] even though effort is not essential to romantic construal, greater effort on the actor’s behalf serves to increase the intensity of the action’s impact on the receiver because it implies that the actor cared enough to sacrifice time, effort, or other resources for the receiver. (Estrada 14)

Estrada also mentions that

Social supportive behaviors convey affection indirectly through helpful and caring acts. They include behaviors such as giving compliments, offering financial assistance, doing favors, and accomplishing tasks to help the other person. Although supportive behaviors are indirect, if perceived by the receiver as communicating affection, they can “speak louder than words” and convey positive regard more powerfully than verbal or nonverbal expressions. Although socially supportive behaviors are an important way of communicating affection, recipients may construe supportive behaviors as practical rather than affectionate, or they might not even be noticed by the intended recipient. (3)

As regards such gestures in fictional relationships, Jennifer Crusie has offered the following piece of writing advice:

Cut those romantic declarations you’ve been slaving over, the ones that sound long-winded and dorky no matter how hard you try. Go for the action; the telling gesture is infinitely more effective than telling dialogue.

However, presumably this is only likely to be effective for readers if they recognise the actions as romantic. What happens if the readers "construe supportive behaviors as practical rather than affectionate"? And while it might be effective if the actions are not initially "noticed by the intended recipient" within the novel, it's not likely to be so effective if the readers also skim over the actions without really paying much attention to them. Getting back to real life,

Experts from the University of North Carolina in the US studied how couples behave when responding to nice gestures.

They found that simply doing something for somebody else does not automatically generate feelings of gratitude. Instead, people can feel indebted or not notice the exchange at all, especially if things have become routine.

Yet those who respond in a positive way and show gratitude can expect greater feelings of satisfaction about the relationship. Their partners also feel better, too. (Press Association)

An abstract of the article by Sara B. Algoe, Shelly L. Gable and Natalya C. Maisel can be found here and there's a longer description of its findings here.

Now I'm wondering what an analysis of the "supportive behaviors" in romance novels would show, and whether romances would provide support for the Romantic Construal Model.
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• Crusie, Jennifer. "The Five Things I’ve Learned About Writing Romance from TV."
• Estrada, Marie-Joelle. Testing the Romantic Construal Model: The Impact of Personalization, Specialness, and Value in Evaluating Romantic Actions. Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience in the Graduate School of Duke University, 2010.
• Williams, Cathy. The Italian's One-Night Love-Child. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2010.

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The image is of some rosemary, drawn by Francisco Manuel Blanco. It came from Wikimedia Commons. Shakespeare's Ophelia observed, "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember." My thanks to Tumperkin, who gave me a copy of The Italian's One-Night Love-Child.