A Mother In Mannville

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1936

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Literary Devices

Setting

Rawlings uses the isolated setting of the orphanage to echo The Different Kinds of Isolation. The remote location, deep in nature, affords scenes of great beauty. Descriptions of blooming wildflowers and colorful sunsets evoke feelings of happiness and warmth, as in this quote: “He liked the late spring, he said. The rhododendron was in bloom, a carpet of color, across the mountainsides, soft as the May winds that stirred the hemlocks. He called it laurel” (241). Such passages illustrate why the narrator might find the solitude conducive to artistic creation. However, the mountain environment isn’t always so benign. In the winter, harsh snows and bitter winds cut off the inhabitants of the orphanage from the world—a bleak image that suggests loneliness.

Notably, the story takes place entirely in autumn: a season associated with change and, as it leads into winter, endings. This mirrors the fleeting and bittersweet quality of the narrator’s connection with Jerry, contributing to the story’s mood.

Syntax

Syntax involves the organization of a sentence—i.e., the order of words and phrases. Rawlings combines complex and compound sentences of descriptive prose with the short, declarative sentences of the narrator’s conversations with Jerry. This stylistic feature contrasts the worlds of the two characters. The narrator is highly educated and intellectual, as her description of the late spring illustrates: “The rhododendron was in bloom, a carpet of color, across the mountainsides, soft as the May winds that stirred the hemlocks” (241). The use of phrases and clauses in this sentence gives it a rolling quality, like the surrounding hills and mountains. Jerry, by contrast, is young, unpolished, and (apparently) guileless; he likely lacks much formal schooling, and his day-to-day concerns are more basic than the narrator’s. When the narrator quotes Jerry’s description of the same season, it highlights his simple, honest views: “It’s pretty when the laurel blooms” (242).

The narrator’s own dialogue is also simpler and less ornamented than her prose voice. The stylistic choice enhances the story’s realism—people generally speak differently than they write—but it also underscores the degree of distance that characterizes the narrator’s relationship with Jerry. Her remarks to him are candid but not effusive, as when she tells him, “You have been my good friend, Jerry. I shall often think of you and miss you” (254). She speaks plainly with him, treating him as a peer rather than as a surrogate child.

Mood

Rawlings creates a mood—the feeling or atmosphere that a work evokes—of nostalgia and reflection in this story. The story unfolds in retrospect, and the narrator’s tone is wistful even before the introduction of her friendship with Jerry. Explaining her presence in the area, she relates her homesickness for “the flaming of maples in October, and for corn shocks and pumpkins and black-walnut trees and the lift of hills” (242). Beginning the story in media res further develops the sense of nostalgia and reflection, as the narrative soon transports readers back in time to contextualize the opening conversation between the narrator and Jerry. Within this flashback, the narrator continues to reminisce, noting that Jerry’s integrity reminds her of her father. Such allusions to home and family—things neither the narrator nor Jerry currently has—contribute to the story’s bittersweet sense of missed connection.

Irony

Irony is a literary device involving a discrepancy between expectations and reality. The most obvious instance of irony in “A Mother in Mannville” occurs in the last line, which reveals that Jerry—a character the narrator praised for his “integrity”—fabricated the entire story about his mother. The disjunction heightens the moment’s emotional impact and invites readers to consider why an apparently honest boy would lie so elaborately about something so fundamental. If the lie reflects Jerry’s longing for a family or his shame regarding his situation, the irony underscores how lonely and unhappy his current situation must be. If the lie is Jerry’s attempt to protect the narrator, the irony further develops The Nature of Integrity by distinguishing it from strict honesty.

Rawlings’s depiction of the narrator is also subtly ironic in a way that underscores her Rationalization and Guilt. Despite her outrage at learning that Jerry’s mother has supposedly left him at the orphanage, the narrator becomes absorbed in her work and does not follow through on her interest in meeting Jerry’s mother. She even tries to discharge her own sense of responsibility for Jerry by offering to buy him presents, having earlier criticized his mother for the same: “Poverty or no, there was other food than bread, and the soul could starve as quickly as the body” (252). Because the narrator is not Jerry’s mother and because she does try to do right by him, readers are likely to find her preoccupation with her own affairs relatable and familiar rather than glaringly hypocritical. This underscores the rarity of Jerry’s selflessness; the narrator does not obviously lack the integrity that she so values, but Jerry possesses it to a unique degree.