Mothering Sunday

In one sense the day of Mothering Sunday (both in general and for the novel’s characters) is one of conventionality. Even though the servants have the day off, it is to return en masse to their parents, who themselves perform the usual traditions and rituals of Sunday lunch; Jane imagines “all the mothers getting out in readiness what passed for their best china. All the maids with their mothers to go to” (31). This is what Ethel and Milly, servants at Beechwood and Upleigh respectively, are doing. Meanwhile, the activities of their employers are no less conventional. Temporarily deprived of servants, the Nivens, Sheringhams, and Hobdays, meet for lunch to celebrate an upcoming wedding—an event epitomizing convention and the unquestioned continuation of tradition. The novel’s setting and basic narrative premise thus establish the theme of Servants, Maids, and Masters while underscoring the role of custom and convention in maintaining the British class system.

Despite Jane having no family to visit, and despite her affair with Paul, her day at first seems to be just as scripted. When Paul rings, she responds by saying, “Yes, madam…No, madam…That’s quite all right, madam” (12). While she chooses her words to conceal her affair from the Nivens, they nonetheless betray the conventions that bind her—namely, Paul alone is making plans to which she must meekly submit. This reflects her inferior social position, which her use of the word “madam” underscores. Likewise, the affair itself seems to follow a conventional pattern. Due to their respective class positions it must always be conducted in secret. It also must be subordinated to, and ultimately replaced by, Paul’s marriage to someone of equal social standing. However, all this changes when Paul says the words, “eleven o’ clock. Front door” (21). This apparently innocuous instruction alters the character of the day instantly. It not only changes the parameters of Jane and Paul’s relationship but sets in motion a series of events that subvert the conventional world they inhabit.

Most obviously, the front door symbolizes the open acknowledgement of Paul and Jane’s connection. Their relationship goes from being a secretive and casual meeting of bodies to something more meaningful as he properly invites her into his home and life: “[H]e’d opened the front door for her […] as if she were a real visitor and he a head footman” (12). As this comment suggests, this new openness goes hand in hand with a blurring of class distinctions that opens new possibilities in their relationship. The role reversal continues in the way Paul undresses her once in his room, “undress[ing] her as if he were her slave” in a way “he’d never done before” (30, 26). In part, this is a matter of circumstance. In their previous clandestine trysts, Paul did not have the time or opportunity to do this. At the same time, it recognizes Jane’s equal (or even superior) status. The act of undressing is one servants do for their masters or mistresses; Jane herself undresses Mrs. Niven in the novel. By undressing Jane in a full and reverential way, Paul shows that she is no longer somebody “beneath” him.

The same is true of their mutual nakedness in Paul’s room. As Jane says, “they had never been, in all their years […] as naked as this” (12). Their utter nakedness before each other symbolizes a casting aside of the superficial markers of class and status that previously defined them—what Jane describes as “the magic, the perfect politics of nakedness” (35). Stripped of these markers, they are free to fully see each other for the first time, rendering them emotionally “naked” with one another. This feeling transfers to their lovemaking, acquiring new meaning and intensity as Jane “command[s] him.” Without the lingering restraints of convention, they can enjoy and fulfil each other in a way that was not previously possible.

Unfortunately, this cannot last. Paul announces that he has a lunch appointment with Emma, which Jane says is “like the breaking of a spell” (37). Paul is returning, however reluctantly, to the world of conventional responsibilities and expectations. He is returning to a woman he does not love but who can provide him with money and social respectability. He is, as symbolized by his dressing again in his upper-middle class garb, “putting back on again the life that was his” (49). Conversely, Jane feels that, with his words and actions, she is “turning back into a maid” (37). She is transforming in both his eyes and her own from a cherished equal to the servant with whom one merely has casual sex. Further, Paul was aware that this transformation and return was going to take place; it was his realization that “it was their last day” that caused him to show his true feelings in this way for Jane (24). This fact, and Jane’s implicit awareness of it, lends the day both its pathos and its hallowed place in Jane’s later memories. As the novel progresses, the question of how and whether to preserve the day becomes increasingly important, reflecting the theme of Loss and Memory.