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

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Why is Mrs. Sowerby a priestess of Cybele? All I can think of regarding Cybele is the bit about castrating her priests, and that doesn't seem to have anything to do with Susan Sowerby at all.

I'd forgotten about the castration thing! (Funny how we never get to see Mr Sowerby...) I was only thinking that Susan Sowerby - particularly when taken in conjunction with her son Dickon, who with his pipe is admittedly more like Pan than Attis, seems to embody some kind of natural principle of growth, and in a generative as well as a social sense to be a Great Mother. Her appearance in the garden towards the end of the book (in a chapter telling entitled "It's Mother!" sets the seal on the garden as a place fully restored to life....

“Who is coming in here?" he said quickly. "Who is it?"
The door in the ivied wall had been pushed gently open and a woman had entered. She had come in with the last line of their song and she had stood still listening and looking at them. With the ivy behind her, the sunlight drifting through the trees and dappling her long blue cloak, and her nice fresh face smiling across the greenery she was rather like a softly colored illustration in one of Colin's books. She had wonderful affectionate eyes which seemed to take everything in -- all of them, even Ben Weatherstaff and the "creatures" and every flower that was in bloom. Unexpectedly as she had appeared, not one of them felt that she was an intruder at all. Dickon's eyes lighted like lamps.
"It's mother -- that's who it is!" he cried and went across the grass at a run.

I don't think Burnett is doing more than flirt with the possibility of Susan S as an earth-goddess (or representative of same), but I do think she is flirting.

Is there a goddess in Wise Child? I seem to remember a lot of tarot reading and herb steeping, and an intolerant male religion being opposed to nature-friendly female wisdom, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that there was a goddess involved too, but I just don't recall. But it's a while since I read it. It's a much bigger while since since I read the Prydain books - thanks, I'll check them out.

And of course you may friend me - as I am about to do to you!