“MOTHERS GET IN THE WAY IN FICTION.” Colm Toibin, novelist and critic, has published a book of essays with the dramatic title: NEW WAYS TO KILL YOUR MOTHER: WRITERS AND THEIR FAMILIES. The title is dramatic, but the essays are about tensions and not murders—in literary families. Toibin says in this interview with Kelly McMasters in Newsday that the idea for his first essay—about aunts—came when he was “trying to work out some theory of the 19th century novel connecting Jane Austen and Henry James. I saw that in their stories there were no real effective mothers at all, but both use aunts to do loads of things — they are a real civilizing presence.” In this article in the London Review of Books, Toibin says: “Mothers get in the way in fiction: they take up space that is better occupied by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and – as the novel itself develops – by the idea of solitude. It becomes important to the novel that its key scenes should occur when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no possibility of advice.”
It’s a novelist’s insight: reducing the number of characters makes it easier to tell certain stories.
It’s interesting that this comes from an Irish writer – it was my (purely subjective/non-scientific) observation that Irish literature seemed to emphasize the father-son relationship far more than any other.