MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19108, 28 June 1930, Page 21 (Supplement)

MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS.

In the great literature of the world, the mother, to use a slang expression, always “takes a back seat.”

She is certainly always, or nearly always, given a place of lesser importance than that of father and son, or father and daughter, and in many cases is “out of the picture” altogether. If she does appear, the mother, oftener than not, is made out' to be a hard or unpleasant personage, where she is not a real “bad lot.” In Shakespeare’s dramatic works, for instance, the mother seldom appears on the stage, or, if she does, she plays either a comparatively unimportant or somewhat unpleasant part; certainly not that of a tender mother, as in the case of Lady Capulet in “Romeo and Juliet,” where the role is usurped by the nurse. In several of Shakespeare’s other plays, too, the heroines are motherless, like Desdemona, whilst King Lear was a widower; and the characters of Goneril and Regan might perhaps have developed on kindlier lines had their mother lived. In “Hamlet’' Ophelia is motherless. In the first two dramas, by the way, the dead mother is never mentioned. The same curious attitude to motherhood is noted in the works of other masters of literature; for instance, in those of Schiller and Goethe, to name only two of world-wide fame. Where are the mothers of Ibsen’s Nora and Hedda Gabler, and what is the role of mother in most modern problem plays? George Berna»d Shaw is not much kinder. Fanny O’Dowd is motherless, and to that fact may, perhaps, be attributed her curious ideas on life as expressed in “Fanny’s First Play,” where the mothers and daughters have little or no love for each other. In Shaw’s other plays, too, these relationships are not shown in the happiest light.