I get the problems that come with including mothers; I really do. No self-respecting mother would allow her daughter to carry the ring back to Mordor, and no young woman—say Katsa in Graceling—would want her mother to come along on her missions. (When my sons were self-conscious middle-schoolers they would squirm with embarrassment if I even talked to anyone at the bus stop.)
If our stories trace journeys of self-discovery, our protagonists may need to be free of the fetters of family.
Lots of people have noticed the general lack of mothers in SFF. (See, for instance, Aliette de Bodard.) I’d like to add that if mothers appear at all, oddly, they seem to have borne only male children or primarily to have invested their energies in guarding a patrilineal line.
Something mysterious happened to make female babies rare, and it goes as far back as Penelope and Telemachus in the Odyssey. Think of Lady Jessica in Dune, Queen Kettricken in Robin Hobb’s Farseer series, or the royal mothers in Abercrombie’s The Shattered Sea and Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic. On the screen, we have Sarah Connor in Terminator II and Joyce Byers in Stranger Things protecting their precious sons. (I’m still angry with Catelyn Stark because she sits by Bran’s bedside and follows Rob’s army, but outsources the care of her daughters to a nursemaid and Lady Brienne.)
So, of the four possible relationships—father-son, father-daughter, mother-son, and mother-daughter—the last is the least common in SFF.
Moreover, if you do find a mother-daughter duo, chances are there’s something “off” about the pair. Something goes awry almost the moment it appears, no matter which of the pair is the more important character.
The Weak Mother: She creates a vacuum that the daughter is thus allowed to fill with her superior strength and independence. Katniss Everdeen’s mother has become incapacitated by her losses, leaving Katniss alone to try to save her sister and herself. Kaul Wan Ria in Jade City completely removes herself from the No Peak clan, forcing her daughter to navigate its treacheries without her help. In Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, Miryem’s mother can’t repair the family’s fortunes, nor protect her daughter from the Staryk (though she does provide a nurturing presence for Wanda, the abused village girl). In the del Toro version of Pan’s Labyrinth, Ophelia’s pregnant mother sickens and dies. (Exit mother, stage left.)
Unplanned Separations: In Butler’s Parable of the Talents, religious zealots kidnap Larkin as a baby, and Lauren and Larkin are kept apart throughout the book. The same happens to Essun and Nassun in The Broken Earth. Mrs. Murray, in A Wrinkle in Time, makes a great impression as a brilliant scientist who simultaneously cooks dinner over a Bunsen burner and intuitively knows the right thing to say to all her children. But she isn’t included in the expedition to save her husband. Kate Elliott’s Jessamy, who appears in Court of Fives, is taken away from her mother and sisters. (Act II: New location, sans mother.)
Abandonment for Higher Causes: Diana, in the movie Wonder Woman, leaves her mother and the Edenic island to fight evil in the world of men. Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand features a mother who deserts her daughters to help her clan, causing the protagonist deep pain. By contrast, in Outlander (TV version), Claire Randall, who is the lead character, temporarily renounces her grand passion with Jamie to stay in the 20th century, raising their child in safety and comfort. As soon as she grows up, Clare chooses Jamie and the 18th century. (Someone exits, stage right.)
The Alternative Mother/The Substitute Daughter: Older women often are allowed to be strong and have good relationships with a younger woman only if the female they care for isn’t actually their daughter. Fairy godmothers, foster mothers, grandmothers, or aunts serve as surrogates. See, for instance, The Mists of Avalon, Tehanu, or The Wizard of Oz. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the new maternal figure could turn out to be a wicked stepmother. (Enter understudy characters.)
Perhaps you know counter examples that I have yet to discover. But I can’t help wondering why these relationships are both doubly rare and then further attenuated. Why are writers who set out to portray mothers and daughters—I include myself here—somehow blocked from portraying richer or longer-lasting duos?
Habits of mind create an all-encompassing fog, creeping everywhere, clouding our vision. Especially since many fantasies are set in a pre-modern world, based on historical eras, canonical literary models, or Western mythology, it just feels “natural” to follow patriarchal patterns. Fathers and sons get to bond together against enemies, fathers get to bless their daughters and give them away to their suitors, and mothers get to stay home and support their sons or melt away.
Even our language betrays us: when I imagined a country where the throne passed down matrilineally, I kept having to remind everyone it was not a “kingdom.”
Another aspect of patriarchal culture is pitting women against one another. Perhaps SFF writers have been affected by the much-psychoanalyzed friction between mothers and daughters, those legendary battles over individuation vs. dependency, envy vs. loyalty, competition vs. devotion. Creating this particular parent-child relationship wanders into territory already made fraught by all the changing expectations and conflicting commands over how a “good” mother should behave or what a daughter “ought” to do with her life and her body. Mothers come with extra emotional baggage.
So, do these hexed relationships matter?
Buy the Book
A Queen in Hiding
The absence of richly drawn partnerships between mothers and daughters in SFF creates at least two major problems. First, our stories give the impression that the only way for a woman to be a hero is to leave her family; they present a model of independence and self-sufficiency that may be neither necessary nor desirable. Secondly, this absence deprives readers (young and old, of whatever gender) of models of female solidarity, just at a time when we need these models the most.
Although this problem is bigger than one corner of the bookstore, my impression is that in recent decades other genres have tried harder to remedy this lack. For instance, I happen to know that in romantic comedies, whereas the screwball heroines of the 1930s seemed mostly to have sprung from the head of Zeus, memorable mother figures support their grown daughters in Moonstruck (1987), As Good as It Gets (1997), Momma Mia! (2008), and Crazy Rich Asians (2018). And in so-called “women’s fiction”—I dislike the inference that the whole rest of the canon is for men—you can find mother-daughter relationships foregrounded in novels by, for instance, Amy Tan, Jodi Picoult, Anna Quinlan, or Elizabeth Strout.
“But,” someone might say, “rom-coms and women’s fiction deal with domestic, family matters and they presume a female audience, but SFF shows us adventures, quests, voyages, wars, or even societies with alternate forms of identity and reproduction. And SFF novels are pitched to all genders.”
That’s precisely why SFF should be more inclusive.
SFF authors can imagine so many wondrous things, is it really so hard to imagine mothers and daughters? With the freedom inherent in SFF, authors should be able to create worlds where daughters have as much independence as sons, mothers as much power and prestige as fathers—and where both of them can have each other’s backs, facing threats together.
Sarah Kozloff is a Vassar film professor turned novelist, author of the epic fantasy quartet, The Nine Realms. Book one, A Queen in Hiding, publishes January 21, 2020 with Tor Books.
Some thoughts:
1. While there is no reason for a narrative not to feature a close parental bond, much of what we talk about as writers and readers is focused around the journey of a protagonist – their narrative arc. Often, this journey is signposted by changes in relationships to a series of characters, with parents in the mix with all sorts of characters as journey markers. With respect to the examples above they seem indicative of mechanisms – the weak mother is there to be superseded, surpassed and even later understood/forgiven; separation emphasises the character’s own personal initiative and qualities; the higher calling allows the mother agency, but utlimately is a flavour of separation, and finally the surrogate is often there as the mentor/wizard to help the character realise their potential.
2. Fathers of sons in fiction don’t fare a whole lot better than mothers; often falling into seemingly identical bands as described above. Perhaps if there are more examples of these tropes being subverted it is less a function of a difference in types of relationship and more a case of the gender bias in the field: there may simply be more stories in the annals by men, about male relationships and so there is a greater number of interesting takes just on a statistical basis.
3. While writing is an imaginative art, there is little in fiction which is not patterned on reality. Perhaps male authors have, in trying to put themselves in the mind of a female protagonist, mapped their own parental experiences (or recollections of stories which have touched them) onto the relationship they are trying to portray. Perhaps female authors have read and patterned the structure of the relationship on materials which are in the genre, but weren’t in the original instance about a mother/daughter relationship. It’s obviously hard to say, even for the authors of these pieces, but it seems like it could be a credible line of inquiry.
4. Conversely, I am a male writer and there are some relationships that I don’t feel I could portray well, faithfully or in a way that would engage with women who have actually developed and live with those interpersonal dynamics. If I’m not alone, it could be that many writers – male and female – have decided to steer away from the subject matter. As an example, I see the way my female friends and family members relate to their mothers and feel like there is an ocean of subtlety, subtext and shades of interplay there that I don’t personally completely understand, let alone feel confident in portraying. I’m sure that there is more that I am missing than I am seeing too – this is even before considering particular events of shared personal history between the people involved. I therefore may not choose to foreground a mother/daughter relationship when planning my story and considering what topics I want to address in my story.
5. Finally, the last point may be that while those four categories above are not the whole of mother/daughter relationships, neither are they a diminishingly small section of them either. Plenty of people are putting relationships like this into their work because they resonate on some level – either personal or textual – and feel that there is merit in continuing to examine those tropes and ideas. Again, to relate back to your last set of points, these aren’t the totality of the experience, and new approaches would be a welcome change within the genre – it’s just a case of finding works of a quality and sensitivity that could start forging a new direction for these central relationships.
Anyway, I very much enjoyed the article; hope my thoughts aren’t too trite or incoherent!
Cheers, J
Excellent points generally! I see a big part of the root problem as not positioning grown women in roles worthy of respect. After all, many, many stories show children breaking away from their parents’ influence, and much of what you describe happens to boys/dads too. It’s just that the male-centered stories more often have a theme of earning dad’s respect, or learning to ask competent dad for help. So dad either comes back, or is otherwise positioned as someone to value.
And given this, I somewhat take issue with the example of Kate Elliott’s Court of Fives.
SPOILERS
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Yes, Jessamy is separated from her family in book 2 (bye, mom!), but mom comes back big time in book three & shows her strength, the relationship is rebuilt on different footing, and Jessamy learns to respect her mother as she is.
I would point out that troubled father/son and brother/brother relationships have been staples of literature from ancient times. Men seem to compete more than they bond fictionally.
I would point out that troubled father/son and brother/brother relationships have been staples of literature from ancient times. Men seem to compete more than they bond fictionally.
Two thoughts: History vs “herstory” and the tendency of histories and literature written by men to either completely ignore or gloss over the contributions of women. When a man’s mother is mentioned it’s because of her significance to his story, Mother/daughter relationships have no significance because in “his-story” women are insignificant. Mother/son and Father/daughter relationships are significant because of the men involved.
And secondly, up until say the last 100 years, being a mother was a very risky business. One of the leading causes of death among women was childbirth. The rarity of a healthy mother/daughter relationship as a story paradigm is reflective of real life, hence the more common paradigm of girls being raised by mother surrogates — grandmothers, aunts, stepmothers, paid servants, etc. Stories help us cope with the difficulties of life, and until very, very recently in human history, it was a harsh reality of life that one of its difficulties was growing up without a mother, and dealing with a mother substitute, who might be a stepmother, and favor her own children above her husband’s from a previous marriage, or an aunt who was never married, or a grandmother who’d already raised her own children, or someone paid (probably not very well) to look after you.
Some of my favorite portrayals of mother-daughter relationships are in Lois McMaster Bujold’s books. Tej’s mother in Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, and Fawn’s mother in the Sharing Knife.
Great article.
I will think more on this~
Not fantasy, but the 2018 film A Quiet Place ends with mother and daughter fighting the aliens together.
Melanie Rawn does families well.
This strikes me as a common idea among people afraid to write outside their own experience, whether it’s men writing women or women writing men. But it seems to me missing the forest for the trees.
Instead of focusing on the gender of the people involved in those relationships, consider instead that those “oceans of subtlety, subtext and shades of interplay” have more to do with a lifetime of people living together rather than entirely based on gender. While societal constructs of gender will play a part in their relationships (and varying levels of pressure to conform or not), it’s more about how parents and children, or siblings, interact with one another as people, than as mother/daughter or father/son–because the latter, from my perspective as a woman watching my brother and father, or male friends with their fathers and sons, have similar oceans. They may outwardly present differently, but a lifetime of interactions are going to create their own subtleties, their own subtexts, their own meanings that hinge more on the relationship between those individuals.
That’s where it seems to me so many men get hung up writing about women. Where with the heavy lean toward male protagonists, women have long been made to empathize with and understand the minds of men as people, there’s this common belief among many male writers that writing women is somehow different enough that it can’t be done right–so they don’t even try, even though they can write the same topics just fine with a character they identify as male.
As I understand it, most readers of most genres are women. The distinguishing characteristic of “women’s fiction” is not that many of its readers are women, but that almost none of them are men.
@10
I understand what you are saying and, to an extent I agree – it was something I was conscious of even when writing that point: that the same argument could be used as an excuse to get out of trying to stretch oneself as a writer. Where I would disagree is that subtlety and subtext is actually what I consider to be the most interesting bit, but also the part of the relationship where I wouldn’t want to slip into a kind of literary uncanny valley. I don’t know – for me it’s certainly a space between my lack of confidence in the portrayals I’ve attempted, and the understanding that it is a challenge that I have no reason not to engage with.
Ultimately, I suspect this will be something I think about in my writing, include, experiment with and introduce (probably peripherally) slowly at first. It will be a while before I consider making a mother/daughter relationship the centrepiece of my work, but I hope it doesn’t mean I’ll never get there.
An example of a strong mother-daughter relationship in a fantasy for younger readers – The Night Garden by Polly Horvath. Sina is an eccentric artist and her daughter an aspiring writer. Both are memorable characters.
Fantastic, thought-provoking piece.
There has to be an example of a wise mother mentoring a powerful daughter, but I can’t think of any… Typically in Firestarter, there was no reason to have the mother fridged and the father taking care of their child, rather than the opposite.
Okay, I found one: Martha and Liz Macnamara in Tea with the Black Dragon.
April White’s Immortal Descendants series has a mother/daughter relationship that includes the weak mother and the abandonment of the mother, but it also reunites the two multiple times. Saira and her mother, Claire, have a good relationship, but Saira has to rescue her mother in the first book, and in later books leaves her mother on other quests. What I love, though, is that even though Saira is the main character and strikes out on her own, her mother is always there in between to listen, to share, and to confer with to make things right in their world. They both love each other dearly, and while they do have the occasional spat, they return to being supportive of each other. Not only that, but Claire goes from being the weak mother to having the strength to lead in her own right. While it does play somewhat into some of the mother/daughter tropes, this is a healthy relationship between two strong women that strengthens those around them.
I’ve been working on a fantasy book that features relationships exactly like this. Mother/daughter, sister/sister, and aunt/niece relationships are a major part of the character’s lives. Not to mention the rivalrous relationships, the friendships, and the loves, both heterosexual and homosexual.
Yes, there are men in the story, and one is even allowed to be in a position of benevolent authority as the male Dean of the national university and as a male professor. There’s also a male farmer and his male chef husband, and the male farmer’s father is a male innkeeper, while the main character’s father is a male merchant. I’m very progressive that way! After all, why shouldn’t men be allowed to have careers just like women? The head of state, however, is an elected Queen. Fantasy has enough monarchy, I should think, so let’s have a touch of democracy.
The main character’s parents in my story, along with the mother’s twin sister, were once part of an adventuring troupe, but who have settled in a major seaside trading city. The father is now a merchant, the mother is a respected and even renowned professor of History, the aunt a famed bard, and the main character’s elder sister is apprenticed to her father to take over the business, while the main character is a gifted student under her aunt’s tutelage. The two sisters’ best friends are a Queen’s courier who is frequently on the road and a Healer aiming to become the nation’s youngest Dottoressa at the national university in the capital city since the main character’s mother.
And then there is the final member of the parents’ adventuring troupe, the now-estranged rival/frenemy of the mother, an enigmatic witch who takes the main character under her wing, much to the chagrin and ire of the mother.
It probably didn’t help that when the four were all at university themselves, the witch carelessly/accidentally blew the historian right off a cliff and into the lake far below with a stray burst of magic. Fortunately for them both, a young lad from the nearby town happened to be on the lake in a boat, and rescued his future wife from the water. But, that’s a prequel in and of itself, isn’t it?
“Allaigna’s Song” by JM Landels is a brilliant fantasy novel centered around the relationship between three generations of women: grandmother, mother, and daughter. Check it out! It’s nice to see a high fantasy about a matrilineal line that depicts realistic, complex relationships between female family members for a change!
I think there is a lot of subtle misogyny hiding in the lack of mother/daughter duos, sure, but I also believe the general lack of positive mothers involved in adventures stems from the simple fact that no self-respecting mother EVER would let her child take those hardship unto themselves, no matter the stakes or the grand ideals involved. At best, she’d try to do it herself, and sideline the child (Molly Weasly), middle ground, she’d die failing (mother exits stage left). All that is left are the depressed/indolent, the uncaring or the malicious. Motherhood taken to an idealistic level implies the child comes first, and that has little to do with doing right and helping the child become a hero.
And now that I think about it, I’d loooove to read a story where the mother goes ubber mom on everyone’s ass to preserve her chosen one daughter, RGVeda style but with women… and maybe less tragedy? I’d read it as a tragedy, but I’d also like the version where we don’t make parental love the root of evil and yet another reason why women can’t, pretty please.
I do disagree with this your first point in the below paragraph because it also applies to male characters and any journey made by a hero:
It is literally the hero’s journey. Or the heroine’s. One must strike out on their own to find themselves and their calling/reason. You even had a great example with Diana. She had to leave in order to become Wonder Woman and know herself enough to be effective. Most children do need to leave the nest to see if they can fly.
Everything else? Yes. I’ve noticed that too. It’s like the fairy tale logic. Mothers are dead, weak, or wicked; especially to their girl children.
However to your other points?:
So true and it reeks of the institutionalized and hereditary sexism that we, as humans, have allowed.
As to your third sentence? I’ll just leave this here. Gilmore Girls in Space. I need that.
Thinking from a historical perspective, in Western society at least, it’s often been the case that young men stay in the family – they inherit the title, the land, the business, the family name. Women, on the other hand, went out of the family to marry. So their model for reaching full adulthood literally was leaving home forever.
Another area of literature that tends to get rid of parents wholesale is children or young adult adventure stories. In order for the kids to go off and have exciting adventures, the parents either need to be offstage and ignorant of what their children are up to, or need to be out of the picture completely. Mothers tend to get killed off with particular enthusiasm, as they could be expected to be paying attention to what their children are up to, and to object to unnecessary risk or rule breaking.
I remember the mother / daughter relationship in Updraft by Fran Wilde as being fairly key to the story.
As I understand it this problem is rooted in reality and has three major facets:
1. Larger society pulls any strong character away from family. It would take some exotic culture (like Amazons) to subvert it.
2. Motherhood is tied to pregnancy, which makes women vulnerable and affects the structure of society. But if such vulnerability was removed (by growing fetus outside the mother’s body) then the motherhood itself might be questioned.
3. Time creates a major physical limitation as well. If the mother invests enough time in her child, then she might be neglecting some other side of her life.
Overall, I see two good options for good mother-daughter story:
1. Family business, such as adventuring or mercenary work for a hero journey type of story. Something like mercenary barbarian mother takes her 12 y/o daughter along on her work-journey guarding a caravan or something like that. So the girl finally sees her mom’s work and her colleagues and new places and dangers of mercenary life.
2. Letters between mother and daughter living separately but still keeping a strong bond. Something like
“Dear mom, I’m sorry for not appreciating you enough. I miss you (and dad) a lot. Rodric is a good, virile (8 inch) man – he is everything I hoped for. Mother-in-law, Dorothea, is kind, sensible (and card sharper). And to be honest, I need a bit of help – those Asmodean zealots, supporting that tramp Beverly Jameson trying to steal my Rodric. I would have fed her to pigs already but she is Rodric’s childhood friend so my hands are tied …”
This form opens a lot of possibilities but demands a firm hand in execution.
How many supportive father/son relationships are there in fantasy? Usually dad is dead, otherwise absent, or the enemy.
In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan has a fantastic warrior mom with similarly bad ass daughter, both off to fight battles together. They aren’t the main characters, but I love them.
The Hidden Legacy series by Ilona Andrews features a tight-knit matriarchy, with sniper mom, tank mechanic grandma, and private investigator daughters. Super fun read, proving that great family dynamics don’t always detract from the adventure.
Two examples I can think of off the top of my head that allow some female relationships to be featured are Moana (although that’s more of a grandmother relationship) and…while this is all off screen, in Solo Enfys Nest is revealed to be a masked girl who’s spearheading a rebellion and mentions inheriting the mask from her mother. One really wonders what that story is…
In general parents of teen heroes don’t get a great shake since, usually, a part of the story is to give them some reason to be off on their own when it’s a coming of age story. But I agree in many ways women get the short end of the stick, narratively.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that even when fathers are absent/dead/evil in fantasy, there is usually no shortage of fatherly mentors or avuncular figures to fill in for them. Needless to say, female mentors in the genre are exceedingly rare. Sadly, this is the case even with the female protagonists and in the books written by female authors. Things are improving in this regard, but very slowly.