Mothering Sunday

“I drove Iris and Ethel to the station.”

Paul makes this seemingly innocuous statement of fact to Jane while undressing her. In context, it suggests that he will now take on a more equal or even subservient role with respect to Jane. By chauffeuring his own servants, he suggests that, at least for that day, class barriers do not exist between him and Jane.

“All her life she would try to see it, to bring back this Mothering Sunday, even as it receded and even as its very reason for existing became a historical oddity, the custom of another age.”

Jane, later in life, reflects on how unique and special that Mothering Sunday with Paul in 1924 was. This is why she has always tried to remember and reimagine it. Its uniqueness lies partly in the fact that, like the tradition of Mothering Sunday itself, it has faded into the sands of time and can never occur again.

“And was she even a maid any more, stretched here on this bed? And was he even a ‘master.’”

Lying naked in bed with Paul after sex, Jane reflects on the temporary dissolution of the class identities that previously created a barrier between herself and Paul. Fully naked, they no longer bear the markers of their respective classes and roles. Instead, uninhibited and intimate sex has recast their relation as the deeper and more equal one between lovers. The play on the word “maid” (in the more archaic sense of “virgin”) underscores the connection.

“But it was these little trinkets, this boys’ jewellery that seemed now to claim him, confirm him.”

Jane watches Paul dress for his appointment with Emma. She notes (somewhat mockingly, as though his social status were simply playacting) how his clothes and personal possessions mark him as a member of his class. In contrast, it is the absence of such things that marks her social status and class position.

“It was in some way all for her—that she should watch him dress, watch his nakedness gradually disappear.”

As Paul slowly gets dressed in front of Jane, she wonders if he is doing it for her benefit. On one level this might be seen as a vulnerable and loving gesture, since he is allowing her to contemplate him undressed for as long as possible. On the other hand, it could be read as cruel, teasing, or sadistic, forcing her to see him transform into something—an upper-middle class man about to marry—that she cannot have.

“[S]he, Ethel, would make it vanish, like the good fairy she was.”

Jane reflects on what will happen to the mark left on Paul’s bed by their lovemaking—specifically, how Ethel, the maid at Upleigh, will deal with it. For once, Jane can see the privilege of Paul’s class position: He experiences the pleasure (of sex, food, etc.), and someone of a lower class has to deal with the resulting mess.

“In the ‘old days’, after all, a manservant might have ‘dressed’ him.”

Jane watches the elaborate ritual of Paul getting dressed. She thinks about how in the past a male servant would have done this for him, just as Jane must sometimes dress and undress Mrs. Niven. Although this practice is now dying out, it highlights yet another demeaning duty servants have to perform in the novel.

“She felt an actual sting of jealousy for the woman who would be the recipient of all this dawdling decking out.”

Jane sees Paul clothed in all his upper-middle class finery and imagines Emma seeing him like this. Despite realizing that it is these clothes that symbolically keep her and Paul apart, she feels jealous that Emma will be able to “have” him like this. This shows that Jane, like most in her society, is still enchanted by wealth and social status.

“All the scenes that never occur, but wait in the wings of possibility.”

Jane imagines the “scene” that will take place at the Swan Hotel when Paul arrives late for his meeting with Emma. This is one of a number of such scenes she imagines while walking around Paul’s house naked. It is this power to conjure the possible but not yet actual that, Swift suggests, makes Jane a writer.

“It was a strange thing, this need among their kind for pictures to adorn the walls, since she had never seen Mr or Mrs Niven actually stand before a picture and look at it.”

As Jane walks around Paul’s house, she notices the paintings in the hall. She reflects on how the middle-class people who own such works rarely appreciate them, seeing them largely as markers of status. Jane suggests that it is the servants, who have to dust the paintings they do not possess, who truly know and appreciate the works.

“[…] that essential art of the servant of being both invisible yet indispensably at hand.”

Looking at the vestibule in Paul’s house, with its coat and hat stands, Jane imagines Ethel waiting to take or dispense coats and umbrellas. She reflects on how this is another demeaning aspect of a servant’s existence. Servants are largely ignored and invisible as human beings, especially at social gatherings. However, they can never relax, as they must always be there to serve others when someone requires them.

“She tried to picture Emma Hobday’s naked body—how it might resemble or not resemble hers.”

As Jane looks at her own naked body in the mirror in Paul’s hall, she tries to picture Emma naked. However, she finds this task impossible. This is in part because Jane so strongly identifies Emma with the world of propriety and social convention that nakedness does not seem to fit her character. At the same time, this lacuna in her imagination may reflect sexual jealousy—an unwillingness on Jane’s part to acknowledge Emma’s sexuality and hence Paul being with Emma in the same intimate way that he is with Jane.

“Libraries themselves were like dry, sober rejections of adventure.”

As Jane looks around the library at Upleigh she reflects on the staid and dull atmosphere of many libraries. Despite containing some “adventure” books, such places seem like the very antithesis of adventure; nothing exciting can or does happen in them. However, Swift suggests that this reflects the dull and unadventurous lives of the middle-class people who own such libraries rather than the true adventurous potential of books and reading.

“She took one of the books from the shelf in front of her and opened it, and then, for reasons she couldn’t have explained, pressed it nursingly to her naked breasts.”

This is Jane’s last gesture in the library at Upleigh. On one level this shows her love for books and for the world of imagination books have allowed her to develop and explore. On another level, it symbolizes Jane’s subversion of the dichotomies between the intellectual and the bodily, and the emotional and rational, which the novel suggests actually impede understanding of books and literature.

“[S]he might even have seen, when the time came, how her story had its failings. But much the greater likelihood was that Ethel, when attending to one or both messes, would not have much thought about either of them.”

Jane thinks about how Ethel might reconcile the existence of the mark on Paul’s bed with the half-eaten pie Jane leaves in the kitchen. Jane imagines the conservative Ethel telling herself a story about how Emma must have surprised Paul mid-eating and then made love to him upstairs. Jane acknowledges that Ethel would see problems with the plausibility of this story. However, because she has to deal with the pie and the mark, Ethel would not have the opportunity to dwell on this. Swift suggests that the working classes, because of the nature and quantity of their work, lack the opportunity to develop their imaginations (though the later implication that Ethel suspects Jane’s affair with Paul also challenges this idea).

“They were the most unadventurous souls on earth, weren’t they? Sitting all day at their desks.”

Jane highlights one of the odd tensions of writing and being a writer. Writers create stories and “adventures” of various kinds, yet they themselves lead entirely unadventurous lives. Indeed, the activity of writing is necessarily incompatible with literal action and adventure. However, in Jane’s view, writing is a form of mental adventure that involves wrestling with ideas and the imagination.

“How can you become a somebody without first being a nobody?”

When asked in interviews how she became a writer, Jane says that it was due to the circumstances of her birth. Being an orphan and having neither name nor family, she was obliged to invent an identity for herself. This helped her develop a capacity for imaginative creation, and especially for “creating” other characters. As the novel reveals, though, this story about her writing is only partially true.

“Since it made you an occupational observer of life, it put you on the outside looking in. Since those who served served, and those who were being served—lived.”

Jane again reflects on the circumstances leading her to be a writer. She suggests that being a maid was actually useful for her future career because maids occupy a liminal position in life. They are often part of a situation or scene, in the house or at a party, but are not full participants. As such, they are uniquely placed to watch scenes and characters unfold while not being absorbed into those scenes.

“And what if orphans really were called orchids? And if the sky was called the ground? And if a tree was called a daffodil. Would it make any difference to the actual nature of things? Or their mystery?”

Jane looks back on how the cook, Milly, asked whether Jane was an “orchid,” confusing the word with “orphan.” This leads Jane to reflect on the nature of language and the relationship between words and objects. She realizes that it is the non-literal and imaginative uses of words and expressions, like calling an orphan an orchid, that reawaken our interest in the world and in language, capturing deeper truths about both.

“She would never know how Emma Hobday herself might have written it […] she was now at the centre of a world that was betraying her, undoing her appointed future.”

Having heard news of Paul’s death, Jane wonders how Emma would deal with his absence from their meeting. Jane imagines Emma first feeling indignant at his lateness and then fearing that she has been jilted. However, Jane realizes that she can never know how Emma really experienced this, so her own narrative of the day’s events will forever remain in the domain of speculation and imagination.

“She would never know if her (and even Paul Sheringham’s) whole conception of Ethel had been mistaken from the beginning.”

When Jane and Mr. Niven return to Upleigh and Ethel answers the door, the latter behaves in an authoritative and controlled way in response to the news of Paul’s death. This response shakes Jane’s existing conception of Ethel as someone meek, subservient, and without character. On a deeper level this suggests the indeterminacy of Jane’s understanding of the various characters who help constitute her story of the day.

“But she said ‘yes, sir, in the way that maids simply mouth those words in general concurrence with everything.”

Driving back from Upleigh, Mr. Niven states that, with Paul’s death, all of his and the Sheringhams’ male offspring are dead. Jane responds in the manner befitting her role as his maid, which is to simply agree. This indicates the distance that their differing social stations creates, which harms both; Jane feels unwilling or unable to console Mr. Niven in a more meaningful way.

“[H]e suddenly leant across to her and, like a child, wept—blubbed—even pressed his head, his face to her breasts.”

Unable to express his grief for the loss of someone who had become a surrogate son, Mr. Niven breaks down in tears on Jane’s chest. On one level this shows the capacity of shared grief to overcome and dissolve boundaries of class, including those between servant and “master.” It also highlights another enduring concern of Jane’s: extremes of human experience resisting linguistic expression, being communicable instead only through the body.