If there is one person who personifies selflessness, un-wavering love
and caring the first to come to mind should be your mother. She cradled you for your fist nine months and
held your hand though all the challenges life could throw at you. Like with all true heroes books are littered with examples of hundreds of miracle moms from the classic Hester Prynne in the
Scarlet Letter, who taught her daughter it's not shameful to have pride in ones
self, to the more contemporary Mrs. Weasley the super poor super mom who took in
Harry Potter like he was her own son.
However not all the mother's in literature come out smelling like
roses. Abandonment, abuse, and adultery
are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the bottom of the barrel of fictional mothers. To help you forget that time
your mom forgot your birthday BookFinder.com has compiled a list of the 10
worst mothers in fiction.
The 10 worst mothers in Literature
10. Jeanettes Mother from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
The main character is a young girl named Jeanette, who is adopted into
a fundamentalist religious community. As
Jeanette grows up she discovers that she is a lesbian and finds love and
happiness with another local girl. When
her psychotic mother finds out she publicly condemns the girl in front of their
church/town and proceeds to tie the girl down and attempt two lengthy
exorcisms, one via a 14 hour beating and another 36 hours locked in a parlor
without food.
9. Sarah from Little Children by
Tom Perrotta
Sarah joins the ranks of the litany of literary mothers who neglect
their children to focus the self gratification of an affair. While defiantly not the only woman in
literature to commit this motherly sin she is getting singled out, I can only
have ten on the list.
8. Gertrude from Hamlet by
Shakespeare
The fact that she marries her brother in law, who killed her husband,
is proof that she's nuts but what really makes Gertrude a certifiable psycho is
that despite all the adultery and killing she tries a little too hard to show
compassion to Hamlet giving the kid a serious Oedipus complex.
7. Jocasta from Oedipus the King
by Sophocles
Speaking of Oedipus... Everyone in this story is too stupid and selfish
for words and Jocasta is no exception. Too
proud to kill her child to protect her kingdom, too stupid to not sleep with
someone who is half her age when the gods have proclaimed she will commit
incest, and soulless enough not to track down who killed her husband; she and
the rest of her family are the perfect pawns to entertain the Greek gods.
6. Sophie Portnoy from Portnoy`s
Complaint by Philip Roth
Alexander Portnoy is a deranged neurotic mess who, unable to enjoy sex,
continues to seek release with more bizarre and deviant acts. To Find the root of Alexander's issues one
doesn’t have to look to far beyond his smothering, flirting, fussing mother who
wouldn’t even let him use the bathroom without overseeing what he had
accomplished.
5. The mother/stepmother in
Hansel and Gretel by Brothers Grimm
She convinces her woodcutter husband to leave their kids out in the
forest to die. The children display
intelligence and cunning to make it back to the house when the woman gets her
husband to trudge them off even deeper into the forest. Child labor would even have been a more motherly option, and it was practically
fashionable in the 19th century.
Abandonment = bad mothering, at least she snuffs it in the end.
4. Norma Bates from Psycho by
Robert Bloch
While most of her emotional abuse and tirades
about the evils of women and sex go on behind the scenes in this novel, the
emotionally crippled murderous fruits of her labor take center stage. Norma Bates defines the role of the psychotic mother in fiction
3. Margaret White from Carrie by
Stephen King
Mother of Carrie White, Margaret was religious fanatic who believed
nearly everything was sin and became physically and emotionally abusive to her
daughter in an effort to get her to conform to her devout lifestyle, usually by
locking her in a closet until she prayed for forgiveness. That kind of mother would send anyone into a
telekinetic fury.
2. Petal from The Shipping News
by E. Annie Proulx
She leaves her husband shortly after his parents commit suicide and
runs off with her lover, but not before selling her daughters to a black market
adoption agency... her only redeeming quality is that she gets killed off in a
car crash so early in the book.
1. Corinne Dollanganger from
Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
After Marrying her father’s half-brother Corinne Dollanganger is
widowed, and forced to return to her family home with her four
children. Her mother agrees to let her
move back in on the condition that Corinne hides the (illegitimate) children
from Malcolm, her husband and Corinne’s father, until he dies. Instead of working it out on her own she
stuffs the children into an attic for years where they are generally ignored
and become malnourished, delusional, incestuous and develop every social
abnormality in the book. Oh yeah she
also tries to kill them off.
Honourable mention goes to Viviane Joan from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
Viviane (Vivi) really is a good mother but vanity gets the
best of her when she sees an interview with her daughter (Siddalee) in
Time magazine where Siddalee expresses her opinions of an unhappy childhood. Vivi proceeds to act like a four year old and
goes berserk and launching a war against her daughter, refusing to talk to her
and even taking down family photos.... way to suck it up and control the ol ego
for the family Vivi. Vivi would make
this list except that by the end of the story both her and her daughter once
again see eye to eye and really Vivi is just guilty of caring too much.
