Goddesses a go-go

[steepholm]

This one's from a student of mine: "Where are the mother goddesses in children's fiction?" Not just goddesses, but mother goddesses, particularly those of a naturey, earthy kind, but at any rate really authoritative types. Minor godesses, chthonic or simply bloodthirsty goddesses, probably don't count - unless their bloodthirstiness is very firmly established as an element of a natural cycle. (Sulis in my Death of a Ghost might just scrape in under this definition, but on reflection she's too much a genius loci, and somehow not sufficiently "above the fray" to qualify. Must think more on this...)

Anyway, I discussed this with lady_schrapnell the other day, and we came up with a few ideas, which I carefully wrote down on one of my infamous scraps of paper, and then just as carefully mislaid. But from memory, our haul looked something like this...

Susan Cooper: Gaia (from Green Boy) indubitably, and maybe also the Lady from The Dark is Rising sequence.
Diana Wynne Jones: Libby Beer (from Drowned Ammet - a book that does gods and goddesses the way I really want them to be).
Frances Hodgson Burnett: Susan Sowerby (from The Secret Garden). A metaphor, maybe, but a pretty insistent one! But then again maybe she's more a priestess of Cybele?

We ummed and aahed over the maid-mother-crone combos represented by, for example, the Carlisle witches in Margaret Mahy's The Changeover - and not because the maid is a man-maid. Personally I don't think their magic is quite fecund enough for true Mother Goddess status, but since I'm not really sure what I mean by that statement (I have been proved 100% Intuitive - see last post - and should never be pressed on such matters) I'm not the least prepared to defend it.

I did wonder about Catherine Fisher's Ceridwen (in Darkhenge), but hit my shins on a similar kind of doubt. You couldn't say that a Gravesian muse is uncreative, exactly, but - well, I don't know. (I do not know much about goddesses - though I think that Hafren is a strong brown one.)

Well, there we kind of dried up. Surely there must be so much more to say about children's lit mother goddesses? Help me (and my student) out, please!

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

What I'm wondering is why one would expect to find many of them in children's books. The first thing an author generally seems to have to do, to emancipate a child protagonist and let them do interesting things, is remove the parent figures, hence the prevalence of literary orphans. If there are substitute-parent figures (and I'm assuming all gods, literary or otherwise, are basically that), they might well be more liable to be male, simply because more children are lacking a father than a mother - also perhaps because mother-figures are more liable to stifle a sense of adventure (I'd say the archetype there was Kanga). I'm sure, when I was a child, the last thing I wanted to read about was natury, earthy, really authoritative types. I do think the Queen, in The BFG, is used as a mother-figure in the same way that the BFG is used as a father-figure, but she's kept well in the background, which, IMO, is where adults, especially mother figures, belong in children's books. The last thing you want in the middle of an adventure is someone wittering at you not to get your socks wet.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The first thing an author generally seems to have to do, to emancipate a child protagonist and let them do interesting things, is remove the parent figures

This is one reason I love Noel Streatfeild's Gemma: not only are the adults there, but they sit and listen to their children's concerns, take them seriously, and reflect back good advice.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I can't really answer your first question, although my student's motivation for wanting to find goddesses has something to do with his research, which is on Philip Pullman.

But I know what you mean. And it's notable that several of these figures come in only at the end of the book, to say in effect: 'Well done, and here's your reward!' or possibly (and more dispiritingly for the independent-minded protagonist) 'I've actually been watching over you all this time, my pet. Didn't you guess that the Well of Wishes in chapter two was really my belly button, or that the Forest of Forgetting was in truth a lock of my naturally-curly hair?'

On the other hand, male gods can be pretty demanding when it comes to keeping your socks dry, washing your hands, etc. Cf Leviticus!