May 11, 2008
Heroines as Mothers
Posted by Tracy Grant under Beneath a Silent Moon, Mélanie and Charles Fraser, Secrets of a Lady, The Mask of Night, Tracy GrantGetting ready to go to a friend’s house for a Mother’s Day dinner party, I started thinking about mothers in fiction. Specifically heroines are mothers. A number of my heroines have had children or have become stepmothers because in the course of the story. I knew being a mother would be an important part of who Mélanie was from my very first plotting the idea for the book that became Daughter of the Game and then Secrets of Lady. I hadn’t even come up with the idea of Mélanie and Charles’s son being abducted yet. I just had the idea of the two of them and the secrets in their marriage. But I knew I wanted them to have children, because that would be an extra tie between them, a tie that would add so much more weight to the choices they had made and the choices they would be compelled to make in the course of the novel. Once I had the idea of having their son kidnapped, I knew I wanted them to have another child, so I could show them interacting as parents even while trying desperately to get their son back.
Like my friends who are working parents, Mélanie and Charles struggle to balance their responsibilities to their children with the other responsibilities in their lives. In Beneath a Silent Moon, Jessica is a baby. Investigating a murder and coping with spies, smugglers, assassins, and the Elsinore League while taking care of an infant is a challenge for Mélanie. It was a challenge for me as a writer as well. I decided Mélanie would nurse Jessica herself, so I had to keep track of how long it had been since she’d fed Jessica, and I made unexpected research forays into questions such as “did they have breast pumps in the Regency?” (they did, called “breast exhausters”). But having the children in the book, particularly baby Jessica, was a great way to bring the tensions in Mélanie’s to the fore. At one point in the book, when Mélanie’s deliberately put herself in a dangerous situation, Charles tells her she should remember she has children. Mélanie shoots back that she never forgets she has children and says she’ll stop putting herself in danger whenever Charles stops running risks himself. Mélanie takes being a mother very seriously, but she isn’t completely defined by it, any more than Charles is completely defined by being a father.
In one of the excerpts I posted from The Mask of Night,, Charles and Mel try to balance the demands of an investigation with the demands of their children. The tension between having children and their lives as agents is a continuing thread throughout the series for both Mélanie and Charles, one I look forward to exploring.
Do you like heroines who have children? Any examples of books where being a mother shaped the heroine in interesting ways? How do you think Mélanie would be different as a character if she didn’t have children? How might her relationship with Charles and the choices she made be different?
This week’s addition to the Fraser Correspondence is a letter to Mélanie from her friend Isobel Lydgate (David’s sister and Honoria’s cousin) about the vicissitudes of being a mother.
Update 14 May: I’m guest blogging today on Writers as Play, taking off on my earlier blog on Focus Shifts in Historical Fiction.
May 14, 2008 at 4:34 am
Two (more) things I’ve noticed about your books:
1) Your aristocratic heroines don’t act like 21st century soccer moms, and
2) the children actually… affect their parents’ lives instead of being cute little props.
Of course, in your books, a child’s birth is often a catalyst - a lot of heirs who are not! In “A Sensible Arrangement”, the heroine must fight for her son’s birthright against her own husband, who (rather naively) accepts another child as his firstborn son. But then there is the mystery of his own birth.
May 14, 2008 at 5:15 am
Good points, JMM! Mélanie doesn’t act like a 21st century soccer mom, and yet a lot of the dilemmas she faces are similar to those faced by my friends who are working moms (and those my own mom faced).
I love including children in books, and I try to integrate them into the story. Birthright and inheritance are so important in Regency society. I love setting up plots that challenge the assumptions on which this society is based, as I also did with Charles and Colin and Charles’s father Kenneth. In Secrets of a Lady,” Charles thinks that by making Colin his son and heir he “struck a blow against everything his father stood for.”
May 15, 2008 at 2:56 am
There are many books with memorable mothers, good ones and bad ones, but I am having difficulties coming up with a title in which the heroine as a mother is not portrayed in stereotypes. (I suppose this should not be a surprise when children are treated as props.) The only credible one I can think of at the moment is Vianne in “Chocolat”, although she seems to be shaped as much by the fact of her being a mother as by her relationship with her own mother. I wonder whether anyone can be a parent without the shadows of his father or her mother following behind, either to be emulated or to be rebelled against. So we know Charles wants to be a father that his father is not. What about Mélanie? What is her mother like, Tracy?
May 15, 2008 at 8:14 am
Good question, Sharon! Mélanie’s mother came from a Spanish family who were the equivalent of English “country gentry.” in Mélanie’s words She fell in love with the stage and an actor and ran off with the man who became Mélanie’s father. She died when Mélanie was seven. I’ve always pictured her as being very warm and loving. I think a lot of Mélanie’s warmth comes from the positive years she had with ehr mother, as well as from her father. I’d love to do a book where Mélanie meets her mother’s family, who I think may not be precisely as she’s been told…
May 15, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Well, there is an awfully big irony in Charles making Colin his son and heir! He’s striking back at Kenneth in another way, without knowing it.
May 15, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Excellent point, JMM! And that’s actually an irony I hadn’t really considered myself. Amazing how you can find things in your own books you didn’t realize were there!