It doesn’t have to be Mother’s Day to review how mothers are presented in modern Catholic literature. At their best, these novels show how God works in the lives of ordinary people: Grace doesn’t make mothers perfect; it transforms their efforts despite, and even through, their imperfections.
Here are some profound and realistic examinations of motherhood in Catholic fiction.
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited: The righteous mother and the sainted memory.
Evelyn Waugh was a British novelist who converted to Catholicism. Brideshead Revisited (1945) is his masterpiece about an Oxford student who is transformed by his contact with a Catholic family.
Lady Marchmain, Teresa Flyte, is the overbearing matriarch of the Flyte family who live in the Brideshead mansion, which powerfully attracts the novel’s narrator, Charles Ryder. She is an example of a mother who is always right, but whose insistence pushes her children and husband away. On her deathbed, she expresses sorrow for being controlling — but it is beautiful to see how the faith she introduced to her family touches hearts despite her temperament.
Mrs. Ryder in the novel is the opposite of Lady Marchmain. She is the narrator’s absent mother, who died on a Red Cross mission in the war. Her self-sacrificial charity opens him to grace.
Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter: The blocked mother and the worn-down mother.
This powerful trilogy about 14th-century Norway features several mothers.
Ragnfrid Ivarsdatter, Kristin Lavrandatter's mother, is a good woman with an emotional blockage. She is dutiful to her family, even though her romantic history makes that difficult for her. She wants what is best for Kristin, but can’t give her much in the way of tenderness. She is an example of a mother who gives all she can, knowing it’s not enough.
Kristin Lavransdatter is also a mother — of seven boys. The book understands how being a mother pummels body and soul, saying at one point:
“They were her children, these big sons with their lean, bony, boys’ bodies, just as they had been when they were small and so plump that they barely hurt themselves when they tumbled down on their way between the bench and her knee. They were hers, just as they had been back when she lifted them out of the cradle to her milk-filled breast and had to support their heads, which wobbled on their frail necks the way a bluebell nods on its stalk. Wherever they ended up in the world, wherever they journeyed, forgetting their mother — she thought that for her, their lives would be like a current in her own life; they would be one with her, just as they had been when she alone on this earth knew about the new life hidden inside, drinking from her blood and making her cheeks pale.”
Flannery O’Connor: Maternal Common Sense Prevails.
Flannery O’Connor was an eccentric Catholic novelist who wrote sophisticated symbolic stories in plainspoken language. Her own mother never quite understood her, and that relationship is mirrored in her stories where flawed mothers persevere despite disrespectful children.
The Enduring Chill is a story about the pretentious Asbury Fox coming back from his sophisticated New York college to his Southern hometown because he is sick. His loathing for his mother drives the plot. She dotes on him, fussing over his health, as he scowls and tries, unsuccessfully, to offend her. He has written a long letter to her that will put her in his place when he dies. At the pivotal point in the story, grace descends in an unexpected way.
Temple of the Holy Ghost is also a story about a child who feels wiser than a mother, only now it’s a 12-year-old girl reminiscent of O’Connor herself. She is fascinated by the exoticness of Catholicism in the South, and prays (unsuccessfully) to stop sassing her mother. The climax of the story is a moving moment when kneeling by her mother in adoration, then driving home with her, gives the girl a profound understanding of the presence of God and the sacredness of every human life.
Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables: A mother’s sacrifice bears fruit.
Fantine in the novel Les Miserables is a single, unmarried mother who had to leave her daughter, Cossette, with innkeepers while she worked hard to send money. At one point Cossette’s savior, Jean Valjean, describes Fantine in words that sum up each of these literary mothers, and motherhood in general:
“Cosette, the time has come to tell of your mother. Her name was Fantine. Remember that name: Fantine. Fall on your knees whenever you pronounce it. She suffered much. And loved you much. Her measure of unhappiness was as full as yours of happiness. Such are the distributions of God. He is on high, he sees us all, and he knows what he does in the midst of his great stars.”
