The Brontes And Mothering Sunday

Here in the UK, we are today celebrating Mother’s Day. Mothering Sunday as it was once called was originally a day when domestic servants were given a day away from their duties to visit their mother parish and see their families. Today, of course, it is a day when we remember and celebrate the mothers in our lives.

As we’ve seen before in this blog, mothers are largely conspicuous by their absence in the Brontë novels, and in books including Jane Eyre, The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall and Villette it is aunts or godmothers who are raising the children. This is surely down to the reality the Brontës themselves had faced – with Charlotte aged five, Emily three and Anne Brontë just one year old when their mother Maria died.

Into the breach stepped Maria’s sister, Elizabeth ‘Aunt’ Branwell, and she became the mother figure throughout the Brontës childhood and beyond. There is one rather touching appearance of a mother in a Brontë novel, however, and we find it in Shirley. Caroline (the true heroine of the novel) is ill and seemingly dying, and is being nursed by Mrs Pryor – her friend Shirley’s former governess. It is now that a great secret is revealed to Caroline, who opens the dialogue in the extract below:

”I believe grief is, and always has been, my worst ailment. I sometimes think if an abundant gush of happiness came on me I could revive yet.”
“Do you wish to live?”
“I have no object in life.”
“You love me, Caroline?”
“Very much – very truly – inexpressibly sometimes. Just now I feel as if I could almost grow to your heart.
“I will return directly, dear,” remarked Mrs. Pryor, as she laid Caroline down.
Quitting her, she glided to the door, softly turned the key in the lock, ascertained that it was fast, and came back. She bent over her. She threw back the curtain to admit the moonlight more freely. She gazed intently on her face.
“Then, if you love me,” said she, speaking quickly, with an altered voice; “if you feel as if, to use your own words, you could ‘grow to my heart,’ it will be neither shock nor pain for you to know that that heart is the source whence yours was filled; that from my veins issued the tide which flows in yours; that you are mine – my daughter – my own child.”
“Mrs. Pryor – ”
“My own child!”
“That is – that means – you have adopted me?”
“It means that, if I have given you nothing else, I at least gave you life; that I bore you, nursed you; that I am your true mother. No other woman can claim the title; it is mine.”
“But Mrs. James Helstone – but my father’s wife, whom I do not remember ever to have seen, she is my mother?”
“She is your mother. James Helstone was my husband. I say you are mine. I have proved it. I thought perhaps you were all his, which would have been a cruel dispensation for me. I find it is not so. God permitted me to be the parent of my child’s mind. It belongs to me; it is my property – my right. These features are James’s own. He had a fine face when he was young, and not altered by error. Papa, my darling, gave you your blue eyes and soft brown hair; he gave you the oval of your face and the regularity of your lineaments – the outside he conferred; but the heart and the brain are mine. The germs are from me, and they are improved, they are developed to excellence. I esteem and approve my child as highly as I do most fondly love her.”
“Is what I hear true? Is it no dream?”
“I wish it were as true that the substance and colour of health were restored to your cheek.”
“My own mother! Is she one I can be so fond of as I can of you? People generally did not like her – so I have been given to understand.”
“They told you that? Well, your mother now tells you that, not having the gift to please people generally, for their approbation she does not care. Her thoughts are centred in her child. Does that child welcome or reject her?”
“But if you are my mother, the world is all changed to me. Surely I can live. I should like to recover -”
“You must recover. You drew life and strength from my breast when you were a tiny, fair infant, over whose blue eyes I used to weep, fearing I beheld in your very beauty the sign of qualities that had entered my heart like iron, and pierced through my soul like a sword. Daughter! we have been long parted; I return now to cherish you again.”
She held her to her bosom; she cradled her in her arms; she rocked her softly, as if lulling a young child to sleep.
“My mother – my own mother!”’

This passage becomes even more powerful and moving when we remember that Charlotte Brontë lost her brother Branwell and her sisters Emily and Anne Brontë whilst writing this novel. If you are a mother I hope you have a great Mother’s Day, and if, like me and too many others, you are remembering someone special today who is no longer there then I hope you find comfort. Join me here next week for another new Brontë blog post.