32 pages • 1 hour read
Graham SwiftMothering Sunday
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Clothing and Nudity
After sex with Paul, Jane comments on how “the sunshine only applaud[s] their nakedness, dismissing all secrecy from what they were doing, although it was utterly secret” (11). Nakedness in Mothering Sunday symbolizes existential honesty. It represents the ability, as seen with Paul and Jane in Paul’s room, to cast off arbitrary markers of class or status and to properly be oneself in the eyes of the other. It especially signifies authentic and liberated sexuality, underpinning much of the joy Jane and Paul feel on that day. Conversely, clothing often signifies superficiality, sexual repression, and conventionality. Jane’s inability to picture Emma naked is a case in point. This impossibility is in part due to the fact that, for Jane, Emma represents conformity, propriety, and an unwillingness to be anything other than one’s preordained social role. Jane’s mocking reference to Emma’s “flowery dress over the chair, her silky underwear” shows this (40). Likewise, Paul’s return to stifling normality and the world of social expectation is suggested by his putting on of a ring and cufflinks: “[I]t was these little trinkets, this boys’ jewellery that seemed now to claim him, confirm him” (46).
At the same time, clothing also has an allure that Jane is not immune to. Watching Paul, she reflects on how “she has never seen a man get dressed before” (53). She is enchanted by the process of him dressing up despite knowing that it means the end of her intimacy with him: “[S]he felt an actual sting of jealousy for the woman who would be the recipient of all this dawdling decking-out” (58). Jane knows that Paul’s elaborate costume is the very thing that separates her from him. Yet, like almost everyone in that society, she cannot help being impressed by the status and power it conveys.
Books, Libraries, and Adventure
It seems at first that libraries in Mothering Sunday signify either intellectual pretension or escapism. As Jane notes when reflecting on Beechwood Library, it has “its wall’s worth of books, most of which (a maid knows) had hardly ever been touched” (75). Any books of genuine literary or intellectual substance are unread. Like so many things at Upleigh or Beechwood, they simply convey a sense of authority and status. The only books that people do read are trivial or juvenile, held in “a revolving bookcase” and recalling “childhood, boyhood or gathering manhood” (75). They are outdated adventure stories designed to provide a “male sanctuary” (75). That is, they offer temporary escape and respite from the real world of responsibility, work, family, and “tedious or terrible maturity” (78).
However, Jane subverts this staid reality. Her walking into Upleigh library naked mirrors her transgressive entry into the world of books and reading at Beechwood. It challenges the ossified boundaries of the traditional library, particularly when she “[takes] one of the books from the shelf in front of her and open[s] it, and then […] presse[s] it nursingly to her naked breasts” (80-81). Jane here explicitly challenges the distinction between the bodily and the intellectual. Books, rather than something cut off from the body, become instead an object of bodily desire and love, as well as a way of exploring and nurturing these; that she holds the book “nursingly” implies it holds the same significance that a child would. The novel likewise challenges the distinction between “serious literature” and the escapist or entertaining. As in Conrad, whom Jane discusses and adores, adventure stories can be profound and challenging. Such stories, rather than being an escape or distraction from life, can reflect and enhance the essential narratives and adventures that constitute our lives.
The Fading Traditions and World of the 1920s
As Jane says at the novel’s start, the Mothering Sunday ahead of her is “a ritual already fading” (14). Yet, as she adds, “[T]he Nivens—and the Sheringhams—still clung to it, as the world itself, or the world in dreamy Berkshire still clung to it” (14). Mothering Sunday in 1920s England, in contrast to “the nonsense they call Mother’s Day now” (99), was about servants returning to their family homes for the day. As such it has symbolic significance on several levels. First, it implies, and relies on, a world of live-in servants who maintain the status and living standards of the leisured class that employs them. Second, it depends on the paternalistic idea that the latter class “allows” their servants to return home.
As such, it is hardly surprising that families like the Nivens would want to maintain this tradition. It represents an older and more certain world of servants, power, and clear class hierarchies. These are precisely the things that “the modern age” has begun to question (44). The advance of technology makes having large numbers of servants unnecessary and undermines the economic power of the class of people who had them, typically small-scale property owners or rentiers. As importantly, the war has undermined this way of life. This is partly because “the male servants disappeared” as a result of fighting and dying (1). It is also because the war undermined the moral authority and certainty of the social order that was responsible for such carnage. For this reason, and to repress awareness of their sons’ deaths, the Nivens seek to maintain a tradition that is increasingly meaningless. They seek to arrest the march of time and to inhabit a simpler and idealized moment.
