The Didactic Carnivalesque in Lucy Lane Clifford's "The New Mother"

Abstract

Lucy Lane Clifford's cautionary tale "The New Mother" has terrified readers since its publication in her 1882 collection of children's stories, Anyhow Stories Moral and Otherwise. 1 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." 2 "The New Mother" narrates two young girls' rebellious behavior, their subsequent abandonment by their mother, and the final arrival of a monstrous new mother--Clifford's "fearful creation"--with a wooden tail and glass eyes. 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." 3 I will argue, however, that Clifford's story goes beyond universal emotions and terrors by being deliberately set within a small village during the closing days of a fair. Clifford employs the fair as a symbol of corruption and disorder that destroys the home through the course of the story. 4 Like John Bunyan's Vanity Fair, carnival, according to Clifford, represents the worldly, the antidomestic, and the material. 5 Most importantly, carnival unleashes powerful forces of subversion, symbolized in the story by a strange, seductive young girl and the terrifying new mother, which are containable only by the story's didactic narrative frame. "The New Mother" demonstrates that the carnivalesque, which Bakhtinians [End Page 727] praise as liberating, in fact has a sinister side. The story nicely illustrates the tradition that Mikhail Bakhtin calls the Romantic grotesque, which transforms the "joyful and triumphant hilarity" of medieval and Renaissance carnival into a vision of "an alien world" in which all is "meaningless, dubious and hostile." 6 Because Clifford clearly employs carnivalesque imagery for monitory purposes, "The New Mother" has much in common with other nineteenth-century children's literature, in which fantasy often serves as a vehicle for moral lessons. 7 Christina Rossetti's short story "Speaking Likenesses," for instance, shares with "The New Mother" its employment of grotesque imagery and didactic structure: both authors create frightening supernatural scenarios in which monsters teach disobedient little girls manners and morals.