Mattie becomes the head of her household, in effect, after she and her mother are separated during the epidemic. Instead she got a backward, lazy girl child.” While there’s no evidence in the story that this perception is true, it shows how Mattie interprets her mother’s sometimes heavy-handed efforts to guide and protect her as a struggling single parent. She imagines that her mother sees her as an unwanted failure: “I disgusted Mother. Mattie also sees herself through the lens of her conflict with her mother. Mother may have grown up with carriages and gowns, but I had not.” Rather than appreciating her mother’s burden to provide for Mattie, Mattie just sees this unwanted courtship ritual in terms of conflict between herself and her mother-she and her mother are different in an unbridgeable way, she believes. Mattie is furious when her mother drags her to tea at the upper-class Ogilvie home, hoping for a possible match for Mattie with one of the wealthy sons: “We did not belong here. The captain I had to obey.” Though Mattie understands that her mother has faced “battles,” Mattie has never been “embattled” herself, so she can’t fully sympathize with her mother. Life was a battle, and Mother a tired and bitter captain. Mattie sees her mother as the person who runs her life-and not in the way that Mattie would prefer: “When Mother allowed herself a still moment by the fire on winter nights, I could sometimes see the face she wore when Father was alive. By framing the novel with Mattie’s relatively childish view of Lucille and, later, her more mature perceptions, Anderson demonstrates that mother-daughter relationships in any setting involve conflict, and she suggests that daughters come to empathize with their mothers through maturing and fighting their own battles.Īt the beginning of the story, Mattie’s relationship with her mother is conflicted. Though absent from the central part of the book, memories of Lucille’s strength inspire Mattie as she struggles to survive and gathers an improvised “family” of fellow survivors. When yellow fever hits, Lucille is stricken with the disease and disappears to an unknown location in the countryside the central mystery of the novel is whether Lucille has survived and will reunite with Mattie. She fails to appreciate her mother’s struggles to support her family and secure Mattie’s future. Mattie, 14, resents her mother, Lucille, as a scolding and meddlesome taskmaster.
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