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Article Excerpt
Here's an interesting game: name one children's adventure story--just one--in which the mother is present.
A short list of things that wouldn't make the cut includes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Madeline, The Secret Garden, "Cinderella," Eragon, the Bartimaeus trilogy, My Father's Dragon, James and the Giant Peach, The Phantom Tollbooth, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, and Nightbirds on Nantucket. In Crispin: The Cross of Lead, the mother dies in the first sentence; in The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, on the third page. All we see of Eloise's mother are two size-three-and-a-half shoes. The parents in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe toil in London while their children travel to Namia. The single mother in Half Magic works full time, missing all the magic, while Percy Jackson in The Lightning Thief lives mostly motherless at summer camp. In virtually every adventure story you can name, the mother is decidedly absent from her children's lives.
Given the ubiquity of maternal mortality in children's literature, one marvels that the human race has managed to survive at all. Countless fictitious mothers...
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