Inadequate mothers in Ian McEwan's Atonement, Hilary Mantel's Experiment in love and Sebastian Faulks’ Week in December

An inadequate (or, in plain speaking, bad) mother seems to be one of the “wanted for the plot” figures of contemporary British literature. If we have the good look at the list of ORF seminar books and authors, we’ll find such image in quite a number of them. Inadequacy comes in different forms and shapes (neglect, aggression, misunderstanding, domineering). Its significance can vary from a mother’s temporary crisis (like in Taxi Driver’s Daughter or Magpie , where everything settles when mother recovers) to a sort of incurable genetic illness (like in Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before it Falls , where several generations of mothers of one family having suffered from their own parents grow up to torture their own children). So, from our point of view this subject is worth discussing.

Contemporary literature, although being not an inventor of the concept of inadequate mother (such images in English literature can

The novels I’m going to analyze are Atonement, Experiment in Love and A Week in December. As can be remembered, they depict Britain of three different historical periods (the 1930s, the 1960s and 2007), which makes our analysis even more interesting.

Reading Atonement , we are getting acquainted with Emily, the mother of the Tallises, in Part 1 Chapter 6. The chapter begins with: “once she was assured that her sister’s children and Briony had eaten sensibly…” [McEwan 2001: 63]. So, Emily seems to be attentive enough to the children’s primary needs, the “teatime-bathtimebedtime” triad. On the whole, she tries to act according to the Victorian ideal of the mistress of the house (being born somewhere close to the change of centuries Emily had definitely been brought up with this ideal in mind). She wants to have a ‘proper’ dinner for her family and visitors with cocktails, salad instead of the roast (for it is a very hot summer evening), polite small talk, toast prompted to her son as he is not a very experienced host yet, well behaved children and everything as it should be. But she fails. The change in the menu is ordered too late, after “not particularly refreshing cocktails” everybody feels “nauseated by the prospect of a roast dinner” especially if the water is only for the children and dinner is taking place in stuffy dining room with the portrait of “an aristocratic family… pale as ghosts” [Ibid.: 126]. And what is more, playing hostess, Emily remains blind to the fact that practically everybody around the table is preoccupied with their own concerns. All of these concerns are going to burst out before the evening is over and dramatically change the lives of all the characters of the book.

The point here is that not only the organization of meals, but everything is “not quite” about Emily as a mother. She is always behind with acting on behalf of her children, understands them only by halves (if not by quarters) etc. Emily has an excuse to offer: “Illness had stopped her giving her children all a mother should. Sensing this, they had always called her by her first name” [Ibid.: 66]. But what if this is really an excuse but not the reason of Emily’s inadequacy as a mother? Had she been a little bit more energetic, understanding, attentive could she be a better mother despite of her illness? For example, Emily thinks of Cecilia’s marriage as the only scenario for girl’s life, her only possible achievement [Ibid.: 64] while her daughter herself is planning work, travelling, an independent life but never marriage (and this, actually, opens her heart to Robbie). Or, for example, Emily sounds a bit displeased with Cecilia listening to the girl taking the flowers to the guest room (“at last…a simple errand she had been asked many times that day to perform”), as if the girl is useless around the house. But we know that ‘undomesticated’ Cecilia is the one who takes her mother’s place and performs her ‘chores’ when needed (like solving the twins’ problem with socks and trying to comfort them). Even Briony, the last-born, although somewhat of Emily’s favourite requires ‘mothering’ from Cecilia, not from Emily. Later, in London, Briony will never be homesick. Partly, this is because home is the place of her ‘crime’, the girl feels ill at ease to stay there, but another reason may be that nobody is quite at home at the Tallises. Emily, unlike the true Victorian Angel in the House, failed to make it really hospitable. The twins are unhappy there, Lola becomes dangerously distraught, Robbie is betrayed. Perhaps, when the war comes to the house (the war is a very important theme of the novel as we know (see [Brown 2010: 34]), Emily had her chance to make the presence of the evacuated family more peaceful. But the Tallisis’ home is always as a hotel (and it actually and symbolically becomes one at the end of the book) where there is comfort and friendliness, but you can never really feel at home.

As for food in the Experiment in Love, much has already been said about it, and on the pages of Footpath, too (for instance, see [Byrne 2010: 42‒44]). As we remember, Carmel’s mother (mind you, she doesn’t even have a name) cares very much about her daughter’s clothing or academic process, in fact, the things other people can see: “That I should look nice, that I should look different was my mother’s aim in life” [Mantel 2010: 29]. But we never see the family at table. In fact, the theme of food in the chapters depicting Carmel’s childhood is only mentioned as a reason of distress because of raising prices and as a mean of controversy (Carmel is not allowed to help her mother about the house much but at the same time she is snapped at because of her ‘helplessness’ – “everything done for you” [Ibid.: 53]). Mother controls the meals entirely, even the intimate sign of Carmel’s coming into womanhood is ridiculously taken for the strawberry jam (tasted without permission) [Ibid.: 139]. The control over the girl’s food comes hand in hand with the control over money the girl isn’t allowed to have. Food and money seem to be a matter of some personal choices and needs. Since Carmel’s soul does not interest her parents, her needs of food and money do not concern them as well. The final stage of her relationship with her mother Carmel calls “abortion at this late state” [Ibid.: 173]. Only she is a little mistaken. Her mother had aborted her not at the point when she ridiculously declined the girl the permission to spend Christmas with her boyfriend’s family (for what can be more decent than the invitation from boy’s parents to the family’s house?). It was done earlier, when Carmel had gone to London (for it is equally seems ridiculous when the parents do not care at all if the child living far away from home has enough money, food etc.).

The theme of parents and food does not touch Carmel alone. For example, lack of food served in the hostel correlates with the theme of the body. Taken away from their loving parents who used to feed them at home the students discover the necessity to feed themselves since the quantity of food in Tonbridge Hall is so poor. And it’s not only food. Carmel (and Hilary Mantel with her, no doubt) explains her fellow-students’ troubles (sex, pregnancies) by the fact that for years girls have been taught not to pay attention to their bodies and only being almost twenty they’ve discovered they have them: “When men decided women could be educated… they educated them on the male plan… Women were forced to imitate men…But we were released from collars and ties now…The little women inside were looking out” [Ibid.: 165].

Sebastian Faulks’ The Week in December depicts the major problems of the world of the beginning of the twenty-first century. The novel continues the traditions of Victorian Social Problem Novel set by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope (see, for example [Proskurnin, Filipieva 2017]). Inadequate mothers are also everlasting elements of such genre, for the family relationship is one of the most vulnerable and important questions of life. In Faulks’ novel this image is represented by Vanessa Veals. The interesting thing is that the Veals family is not only never seen by the reader at table, but Vanessa seems not to bother at all what, where and when her children eat or if they eat at all. This is really strange and upsetting, for even the family with grown children should share a meal from time to time, for instance, once a week or a month at least. That’s because such meals are not only about eating, but about communication, sharing problems, news. That is what the Veals never have. With Finn stuffing himself with pizza and coca-cola in his bedroom, Bella cooking for herself and Vanessa going out with friends in the evenings every member of the family goes his own way and there is the question if this way is right or wrong. Unlike Hilary Mantel, Sebastian Faulks gives his character a chance to speak for herself. Vanessa doesn’t wish to interfere with her children’s personalities, being helpless to change or understand them and also wishing them to be independent (“God knows what they did at these ‘sleepovers’…Bella seemed to have come from a different decade… Then Finbar… It was best to leave him to find his own way forwards in life, up there, on his own” [Faulks 2010: 267]. Meanwhile, the Veals children are not quite grown-up yet (neither is of age). That looks very much like ‘late abortion’. The emptiness of Vanessa’s own life makes her indifferent to others, even to her own children. Only the tragedy with Finn makes the mother think about habits, ways and relationships in the family. At the end of the novel Vanessa brings Bella home from a sleepover deciding that was the girl’s last one. The mother makes an attempt to create home at least for her daughter hoping that would help her not to lose the girl as she had lost her brother.

So, as we can see, in all three novels the theme of food, feeding the child as mother’s primary duty, tells the reader a lot. It helps to identify an inadequate mother, as well as the child’s lack of love and care he (or she) has to go through. At a slighter bigger scale, food at home seems to be the detail necessary to draw the reader’s attention to the major problems of the world, such as relationship among people, and loneliness.