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MOMMY DEAREST

As an antidote to May’s usual saccharine Mother’s Day fare, how about a gritty Top 10 list of dysfunctional moms in literature.

10. The Bible certainly has its share of dubious child-rearing. But the Greek mythological figure of Jocasta – the prophecy-pooh-poohing lover of Oedipus, her lost son who slays her husband – had to be the ancient world’s most careless parent.

9. Speaking of that select few who marry their husband’s murderers, Shakespeare’s Gertrude – Hamlet’s feckless mother (and aunt by marriage) – singlehandedly earned the misogynistic admonition “Frailty, thy name is woman.”

8. Hagar Shipley, the irascible heroine of Margaret Laurence’s 1964 novel The Stone Angel, reluctantly confronts the role she played in the loss of her favoured second son and strains to find closure with her plodding eldest.

7. In Kate Walbert’s novel A Short History of Women, Dorothy Townsend starves herself to death in the service of women’s suffrage. It’s a supremely selfless but equally selfish act, the shockwaves of which ripple through the lives of her descendants.

6. The neglect and abuse Astrid Magnussen suffers at the hands of her birth mother in Janet Fitch’s White Oleander isn’t horrific enough. She also gets to have a series of sensationally screwed up foster mothers.

5. Which brings us to the evil stepmother/witch in so many folk tales, an archetype brilliantly extended with the Medusa-haired, soul-stealing “other mother” in Neil Gaiman’s fable Coraline.

4. Deirdre, the sexually confused mother in Augusten Burroughs’s searing memoir, Running With Scissors, gives hysterical narcissism a bad name.

3. Wait. It already had a bad name after Vladimir Nabokov got through eviscerating Charlotte Haze through the eyes of Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Charlotte is oblivious to the narrator’s contempt for her and lust for her 12-year old daughter.

2. What could be classier than running off with your lover in the wake of the suicide of your husband’s parents? How about finding a black-market adoption agency where you can dump the kids, à la Petal in The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx?

1. The book-world mommas who most deserve to be thrown from the train are the sick, abusive ones in non-fiction memoirs like Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It or The Mistress’s Daughter by A.M. Homes. But the belle of the ball remains Joan Crawford, whose adoptive daughter, Christina, chronicled the horror of growing up in the movie star’s home, in 1978’s sensational Mommie Dearest.
To sum up, then, flowers and a card would be lovely on May 9.
But no ... wire ... hangers. Ever. 

Earl Fowler is a contributing editor to Movie Entertainment magazine.