4. [Lack of] Nurture in Dahl's Matilda

In working through my ideas for my essay for Monday, I was thinking back through the different levels of nurturing the mothers (or mother figures) we've read so far and the results the different levels of nurturing produced. In Frankenstein, for instance, a possible reason the creature becomes so out of control is the lack of nurture or companionship Victor is willing to give him. Similarly, one stance on why Ben in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child is the way he is comes from the way his parents reject him in many ways immediately following his birth. Even in Patricia Powell's Me Dying Trial, arguably many of the children struggle in part because of Gwennie's inability to be there for them throughout much of their childhood.

This got me thinking about examples of children who lack nurture growing up that we see in pop culture, which quickly led me to think about one of my favorite books/movies from my childhood: Matilda.


Matilda stands as a very definite example of a child who lacks any nurture or companionship from her parents. However, in Roald Dahl's story, Matilda is somehow able to find the nurture she needs first as a very small child in books and as a bit of an introvert, and eventually Miss Honey steps in as her mother figure.¹ I suppose I am just looking (or maybe stretching is a better word here) for examples of children who do not seem damaged from a lack of nurturing mother figures. Is Dahl's story too romanticized? Essentially, it is similar to Me Dying Trial, in which Peppy rises above a troubled childhood with a less than nurturing mother to become valedictorian of her high school class. To some degree, both of these young female characters seem to speak volumes for the nature side of the debate. Unfortunately, this just makes explaining the behaviors of Victor's creation and Ben all the more confusing.





¹Dahl, Roald. Matilda. Ed. Quentin Blake. New York: Puffin, 2004. Print.

3. The Fifth Child - Another Frankenstein?

I think this is a very interesting cover image for Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child,. It is not the cover I have, but this one, mine, and many of the covers I found images of display Ben or "the fifth child" as a relatively cute toddler rather than as the monster he is always described as in the book. I'm interested in why the editor of those versions chose not to go with a more... controversial? cover, like this one:


One of the reviews on the back of The Fifth Childcalls it "a moral fable of the genre that includes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein."¹ While I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to place this on the literary level of Frankenstein, I agree that it fits into the genre the earlier novel set. There are certainly very distinct similarities to Frankenstein's creation sprinkled throughout the work that makes me wonder how much Lessing took from Shelley. For instance, like Frankenstein, when Ben is born, he is described as "muscular, yellowish, long" (48). Much later, toward the end of the book, it almost seems as if Harriet is implying that Ben is some sort of descendant somehow from Shelley's creature himself. She questions: "How do we know what kinds of people--races, I mean--creatures different from us, have lived on this planet?" (106). Harriet explains that she thinks Ben is one of these nonhuman creatures, and somehow a descendent of these creatures. What I suppose was another standout connection to Shelley's novel for me was the trouble both Victor and Harriet had with admitting that they had had a part in bringing these creatures into the world, and the way they had both essentially abandoned a loving relationship with the "newborns" from the very start of their lives, even though they had been initially responsible for the birth. It seems to me a lot of blame lies with both Victor and Harriet, but that their situations also warrant an exploration of nature vs. nurture.




¹ Lessing, Doris May. The Fifth Child. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.

2. "The Online Mom"

I stumbled upon this blog in an...interesting way. LinkedIn emailed me and asked, "Have you Googled yourself?" and I thought to myself...not recently. So I did. My recent USA TODAY College Blog came up, and then a blog entry about it on The Online Mom. After reading through the entry about my blog, I decided to explore the rest of the site.

The site markets itself as "Tech Tools for Parents," so most of it is based around the internet, phone, video games, etc. and how to use those tools either as a parent or how to use incorporate them into your children's lives. They discuss the ways you can "protect your children" from problems that arise from this generations fascination with the internet and other technology and also debate issues of what is appropriate for children of which ages. One of the recent posts that I found really interesting was actually somewhat in opposition to my Facebook blog--it was a post about why you should let your children set up a Facebook profile. Essentially, they discussed the number of "teachable moments" available to parents for their children via Facebook, and I found that to be a really interesting perspective. Check out the whole post here.

Frankenstein's Monster

As I was browsing the internet on this snowy evening, I found this book review, for Frankenstein's Monster, a novel by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe, and I think the book sounds like it would offer a very interesting (and definitely relevant) take on what we're discussing/will be discussing more tomorrow in class about the way Mary Shelley's Frankenstein works with the conventions of motherhood. I'll be posting more on this book and on my thoughts on Frankenstein in general tomorrow or later this weekend when I'm not so GRE-crazed, but I wanted to make sure I remembered to post the link for my reference and for anyone else who might be interested.