Mothers Love Best

[sistermagpie]

This came from an exchange in the comments on bookshop's post about women in HP that I'm sort of elaborating on. Rowling has said, looking at the series that it is "a litany of bad fathers" because that's where she thinks "evil" tends to "flourish"--where people didn't get "good fathering."

Comments

[teratologist]

If Rowling were American, I'd assume that this pattern basically reflected the messages about single mothers that Rowling would have absorbed during the Reaga era and then had to confront as a single mother herself in the immediate aftermath of Reaganism - mother love is default but the "male role model" makes or breaks a child, particularly a male child, and lack of same is what puts a kid into a gang, into jail, makes him a menace to society, etc. Ergo, the most vital thing a single mother can do for her kid is get a good man (for values of "good" that prioritizes a lot of other things over whether he treats her and the kid well) by hook or by crook, and not keeping a man is a failure, not just of basic womanhood, but of motherhood as well. And getting that man will magically lift her and her children off the welfare rolls, because only women without good men are poor.

I don't know if that message was as heavily promoted in Britain under Thatcher, though.

[merrymelody]

Take this with a pinch of salt, I don't remember Thatcher myself, but she had the same attitudes as Reagan towards 'family values' from the reading I've done on the subject. One of the more famous quotes is admittedly post-office (1998) on the subject of single mothers: "It is far better to put these children in the hands of a very good religious organisation, and the mother as well, so that they will be brought up with family values."

[sistermagpie]

Yipes!!!

[teratologist]

Wow. That says a bundle, right there.

[sistermagpie]

It also seems very Victorian to me, because there's a clear split between the mother love that is just there because that's what women do and represent, but the father needs to be the role model in how to act in the world. As I said in the last post, a lot of these women disappear, after all. Lily makes her sacrifice but then dies--she can't so far show Harry how to act as a man. Mrs. Crouch dies. Neville's mother can only love him. As the one who works outside the house it's Arthur who's the role model in the outside world etc.

[teratologist]

Yeah, it seems to be a pretty persistent notion. I suppose it relates to how feminine is seen as a state that women naturally lapse into, particularly when they fall in love or have a baby, and masculinity is something that men have to work at to distinguish themselves from women.

[teratologist]

Interestingly the credits for this kind of motherly love goes to all those philosophers who brought us the Enlightenment. In some essays about the education of man, women have to do exactly that: love their men or children and support them. Men act in the world to appear loveable to women. That is womens' value and their power. No wonder those times also brought a renewed worship for the Mater Dolorosa.
What I really would like to know is what women from before the Enlightenment would have thought of Rosseau's (and others) ideas. Probably said: Ah, yes. Now, take care of your siblings while I put the ox into the yoke. And don't forget to feed the livestock.;)

Chris-san

[seductivedark]

Reagan, Thatcher, and many parents and grandparents of people today grew up in the tail end of the Cult of Domesticity: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/truewoman.html... )