Lucy Clifford, ‘The New Mother’ (1882)
Folk tales, fairy tales — contes de fée, Märchen — have been studied from various critical perspectives. Vladimir Propp derived a structuralist-formalist ‘grammar of story’ out of his large sample of Russian folk tales. Bruno Bettelheim argued, via Freud, that these sorts of stories provide means by which children can confront, process and work through the anxieties and trauma of growing up: intrafamilial rivalry and hostility, anxieties around sexual maturation and so on. Marina Warner historicizes these stories, taking them as a gendered, feminine idiom (passed-on by grandmothers, mothers, nurses and the like to daughters, an oral tradition) and relates them to female experience. ‘Where Bruno Bettelheim believes that the motif of the lost mother and wicked stepmother is an example of fairy tales’ timeless and therapeutic wisdom,’ says James Lasdun, ‘Marina Warner suggests that this motif might have more to do with the circumstances of an era when the frequency of death in childbirth led to a female life expectancy of around twenty-five years. Her point is that Bettelheim’s uncoupling of the tales from history causes them to diffuse “false consciousness” — it plays into received ideas about female behaviour.’ Not that Warner doesn’t also explore the way the elements in folk tales work symbolically, actualising fantasy desires and anxieties.
John Bayley distinguishes between traditional folk tales and stories written in the modern period in the mode.
An invisible barrier separates old from new fairy stories, like the glass wall round the princess in Andrew Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book. In the new ones, however accomplished and diverting they may be, the meaning is clear but coyly hidden, as in many modern fictions. In Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Tale’ (1982) it takes us a few pages to spot that the wife is a wolf, her husband a mere man. But the meaning is always there, urging us to spot it, whereas in the old tales it was neither proffered nor implied but intrinsic to the medium … The original Red Riding Hoods and Bluebeard’s wives were serenely unaware of meanings.
The best fairy tales, Bayley thinks, ‘are startling and mysterious but also commonplace’. He cites with approval Angela Carter’s laconic notation (she was jotting ideas down as she worked on an edited collection of fairy tales, just before she died): ‘the unperplexedness of the story. Fairy tales — cunning and high spirits.’ Bayley thinks ‘the unperplexedness of the story means that it knows what it is doing and where it is going, but neither knows nor cares what it means.’
Is Bayley right that a fatal knowingness, a studied perplexedness of meaning, has crept into the telling of such stories in the modern era? I’m not sure.
Take, for example, Lucy Clifford, who published as ‘Mrs. W. K. Clifford’, and her short, unsettling modern fairy story ‘The New Mother’ (first published in Anyhow Stories: Moral and Otherwise, 1882). Here’s the story: two young children and a baby live in a cottage in the countryside with their mother. The older girls are known as ‘Blue-Eyes’ and ‘Turkey’ — the former because she has inherited the bright blue eyes of her father, who is away at sea. ‘The younger one had once, while she was still almost a baby, cried bitterly because a turkey that lived near to the cottage, and sometimes wandered into the forest, suddenly vanished in the middle of the winter; and to console her she had been called by its name.’
The girls live a happy life in the cottage. Sometimes their mother sends them into town, to see if there’s a letter from father waiting at the post-office:
When they came back tired with the long walk, there would be the mother waiting and watching for them, and the tea would be ready, and the baby crowing with delight ; and if by any chance there was a letter from the sea, then they were happy indeed. The cottage room was so cosy : the walls were as white as snow inside as well as out, and against them hung the cake-tin and the baking dish, and the lid of a large saucepan that had been worn out long before the children could remember, and the fish-slice, all polished and shining as bright as silver. The baby’s high chair stood in one corner, and in another there was a cupboard hung up high against the wall, in which the mother kept all manner of little surprises. The children often wondered how the things that came out of that cupboard had got into it, for they seldom saw them put there.
On one trip out, though, the girls encounter ‘a strange wild-looking girl, who seemed very unhappy.’ This teenager shows the girls her ‘peardrum’:
“What is a peardrum ?” they asked.
“I am surprised at your not knowing,” the girl answered. “Most people in good society have one.” And then she pulled it out and showed it to them. It was a curious instrument, a good deal like a guitar in shape; it had three strings, but only two pegs by which to tune them. The third string was never tuned at all, and thus added to the singular effect produced by the village girl’s music.
She tells them that a little man and a little woman live inside the peardrum, and when the girls beg to be allowed to see these tiny people, the girl tells them she only shows them to naughty children. Blue-eyes and Turkey are good children, but they are driven to misbehaviour by their desire to see the little folk inside the peardrum: back home they break the crockery, turn baby on its head, and generally upset their mother. Maternal remonstrance does not dissuade them from their naughtiness, so the mother issues a threat:
‘I shall have to go away and leave you, and to send home a new mother, with glass eyes and a wooden tail.’
‘You couldn’t,’ they cried.
‘While she spoke her eyes filled with tears, and a sob almost choked her — ‘yes I could,’ she answered in a low voice, ‘but it would make me very unhappy.’
At this the girls promise to be good, but the temptation of the peardrum proves too great, and they again misbehave. And so the mother leaves. The story ends in the following terrifying manner. The children bolt the door against the coming of the new mother, but it does them no good:
Suddenly, while they were sitting by the fire, they heard a sound as of something heavy being dragged along the ground outside, and then there was a loud and terrible knocking at the door. The children felt their hearts stand still. … they heard through the thin wooden door the new mother move a little, and then say to herself “I must break open the door with my tail.”
For one terrible moment all was still, but in it the children could almost hear her lift up her tail, and then, with a fearful blow, the little painted door was cracked and splintered:
With a shriek the children darted from the spot and fled through the cottage, and out at the back door into the forest beyond. All night long they stayed in the darkness and the cold, and all the next day and the next, and all through the cold, dreary days and the long dark nights that followed.
The girls must make the best of their uncomfortable new life, alone in the woods ‘with only green rushes for their pillows and only the brown dead leaves to cover them, feeding on the wild strawberries in the summer, or on the nuts when they hang green’. The tale’s last paragraph:
And still the new mother stays in the little cottage, but the windows are closed and the doors are shut, and no one knows what the inside looks like. Now and then, when the darkness has fallen and the night is still, hand in hand Blue-Eyes and the Turkey creep up near to the home in which they once were so happy, and with beating hearts they watch and listen; sometimes a blinding flash comes through the window, and they know it is the light from the new mother’s glass eyes, or they hear a strange muffled noise, and they know it is the sound of her wooden tail as she drags it along the floor.
Oof!
Here is Anna Krugovoy Silver:
Speaking for countless other readers, the children’s literature critic Harvey Darton reveals that ‘Getting on for fifty years after I met her first, I still cannot rid my mind of that fearful creation’ …The few critics who have discussed the story usually interpret it as expressing primal, archetypal fears about the mother and the development of the self: Alison Lurie, for instance, calls ‘The New Mother’ ‘a classic tale of separation anxiety’ related to ‘the carved wooden images and superstitions of the voodoo cult,’ while Stephen Prickett writes that the story ‘clearly draws on something much more archetypal than normal Evangelical zeal.’ [Anna Krugovoy Silver, ‘The Didactic Carnivalesque in Lucy Lane Clifford’s “The New Mother”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 40:4 (2000), 727]
Here’s Bayley’s assessment:
Almost everything fearful in growing up is present in the story, though never explicit. Lucy Lane Clifford came to England from Barbados and married a professor of mathematics, who died, leaving her with two little girls and very badly off. She started to write — romantic novels, plays, verse, stories — and so successfully that she became the hostess of a London literary salon frequented by Kipling and Henry James. Hers was a success story, but one wonders whether her other productions are so riddled as this one with hidden fears and desires. The rare achievement is the identification with both sides: the mother’s urge to be free from the exasperating cares of a family, and the otherness and compulsive secret life of ‘good’ children … The story relates to The Turn of the Screw, and also to David Copperfield and Kipling’s ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. But its compression of helpless and piteous elements is in a sense even more shocking, and more raw, than in those famous cases. Angela Carter would naturally be knowing about the peardrum, and the horribly metamorphosed masculine intruder, with his eyeglass and ‘tail’, but hers is an art that depends on mutual knowingness: Lucy Lane Clifford’s in the last century genuinely reanimated the dark places of fairy tale while making them remain dark.
For Bayley, in other words, Clifford’s tale is a rare example of a modern writer somehow managing to reach back to the atavistic authenticity of the original folk tale. It’s certainly a striking, memorable work. Why does it shake us so?
Anna Krugovoy Silver takes a Bettelheimian approach to the story: she thinks the ‘peardrum’, about which the girls are so curious, is a sexual symbol — and their disobedience, therefore, about transgressive and dangerous sexual desire:
As the sisters approach the girl, they notice something hidden underneath her shawl: “At first they thought it was a baby, but when she carefully put it under her and sat upon it, they thought they must be mistaken.” The object turns out to be a peardrum, a musical instrument shaped like a guitar with a square box on one side. By moving the womb-shaped peardrum from the girl’s shawl, where it resembles a baby, to underneath her buttocks and genitals, Clifford changes its symbolism from maternal and reproductive to suggestively sexual.
I’m not so sure. Nor do I think Bayley’s regendering of the ‘New Mother’, into a ‘masculine intruder, with eyeglass and “tail”’ is quite right. A glass eye is not the same thing as an eyeglass, and the strangest thing about the new mother’s tail is not that she possesses such an appendage but that it is made of wood. The tail figures here not as something phallic but as something punitive, hard rather than the soft embrace of the old mother. And the eye is not a masculine-coded eye-glass but simply that: a panoptic organ of sight, inorganic to register its cold, pitiless searching power.
I think what’s going on here is that the mother isn’t really a new mother — which is to say: she isn’t a different mother to the one before. It is the same mother. That’s the point. The story articulates the fantasy, the fairy-tale bodying-forth, of a deep anxiety: that the mother, who loves us and nurtures us, who provides us a comfortable home, is also the mother who watches us, judges us, punishes us — who keeps us under her flashing glass eye, who sees everything we do no matter how we try and hide it, and who replaces love and comfort with hard rebukes and punishment when we transgress. It is a story, in other words, about the potency of guilt: a guilt which has nothing really to do with any acts we may perform out in the world, and everything to do with the fundamental relationship between the infant and the maternal.
How, the child wonders, can this be the same person? The same mother? So in fantasy, the mother is split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, to preserve the former, even if only as a possibility, a memory: even if the home now belongs to the terrifying ‘new’ mother. And the story is clear — and the children know it — that they have brought this on themselves, by their disobedience. The older of the two girls, ‘Blue Eye’, is reified into the shining glass eye of the new mother; and the younger’s anxiety about the disappearing turkey, whose caudal neck we presume had been severed on a wooden chopping block, becomes reified into the new mother’s wooden tail. But again, what’s really unsettling about this story is that it is not just specific malfeasance that banishes the soft, loving old mother and brings home the hard new one. If it were, we might say: but all the children have to do is behave, be nice, and the new mother will never come! But this is not the nature of things: growing up means, by degrees, leaving the comfort of the old mother. This is true for every child, for eventually every child must leave the maternal space and make a life for themselves out in the cold world. This process is a natural and necessary thing, although it is also — as this tale understand — a kind of disobedience.
The story is full of referential play and doubling. ‘Peardrum’ is a word Clifford has made up — there is no such instrument, in the real world — and it’s a fine word, punning of the pear-shape of the thing itself and the ‘pairing’ of the sisters, and of the two mothers after which the story is named. The -drum looks forward to the new mother’s wooden tail drumming on the door and floor of the cottage. And that ‘tail’ doubles as ‘tale’: the story itself, which we are hearing (it also, perhaps, echoes ‘telling tales’, that is tattling, revealing secret transgression by talking about it to authority). It’s a great story, and deserves to be better known.
