The Didactic Carnivalesque in Lucy Lane Clifford's "The New Mother"

Lucy Lane Clifford's cautionary tale "The New Mother" has terrified readers since its publication in her 1882 collection of children's stories, Anyhow Stories Moral and Otherwise. ¹ Speaking for countless other readers, the children's literature critic Harvey Darton reveals that "Getting on for fifty years after I met her first, I still cannot rid my mind of that fearful creation." ² "The New Mother" narrates two young girls' rebellious behavior, their subsequent abandonment by their mother, and the final arrival of a monstrous new mother--Clifford's "fearful creation"--with a wooden tail and glass eyes. The few critics who have discussed the story usually interpret it as expressing primal, archetypal fears about the mother and the development of the self: Alison Lurie, for instance, calls "The New Mother" "a classic tale of separation anxiety" related to "the carved wooden images and superstitions of the voodoo cult," while Stephen Prickett writes that the story "clearly draws on something much more archetypal than normal Evangelical zeal." ³ I will argue, however, that Clifford's story goes beyond universal emotions and terrors by being deliberately set within a small village during the closing days of a fair. Clifford employs the fair as a symbol of corruption and disorder that destroys the home through the course of the story. ⁴ Like John Bunyan's Vanity Fair, carnival, according to Clifford, represents the worldly, the antidomestic, and the material. ⁵ Most importantly, carnival unleashes powerful forces of subversion, symbolized in the story by a strange, seductive young girl and the terrifying new mother, which are containable only by the story's didactic narrative frame. "The New Mother" demonstrates that the carnivalesque, which Bakhtinians praise as liberating, in fact has a sinister side. The story nicely illustrates the tradition that Mikhail Bakhtin calls the Romantic grotesque, which transforms the "joyful and triumphant hilarity" of medieval and Renaissance carnival into a vision of "an alien world" in which all is "meaningless, dubious and hostile." ⁶ Because Clifford clearly employs carnivalesque imagery for monitory purposes, "The New Mother" has much in common with other nineteenth-century children's literature, in which fantasy often serves as a vehicle for moral lessons. ⁷ Christina Rossetti's short story "Speaking Likenesses," for instance, shares with "The New Mother" its employment of grotesque imagery and didactic structure: both authors create frightening supernatural scenarios in which monsters teach disobedient little girls manners and morals.

Although fairs have been an important form of entertainment in England for centuries, an increasingly vocal chorus called for their suppression in the nineteenth century because of their association with idleness, drunkenness, prostitution, and the lower classes. Judith Walkowitz has argued that fairs were viewed as a site of working-class sexuality that had to be regulated and repressed: "A traditional form of working-class entertainment, the fair represented easy social intercourse between the sexes and defiance of work and time discipline. As such, it increasingly came under official attack in the late nineteenth century." ⁸ In 1871, an Act of Parliament permitted local and central government to suppress those fairs found "unnecessary . . . the cause of grievous immorality, and . . . very injurious to the inhabitants of the towns in which such fairs are held," and from 1871 to 1878 the Act was invoked to eliminate over 150 fairs. ⁹ An 1875 petition against fairs in Sawbridgeworth, for instance, labeled them "occasions of the most hideous forms of moral and social evil--drunkenness--whoredome--robbery--idleness--neglect of work." ¹⁰ Although some large fairs survived and even thrived because of the growth of the railroad, smaller fairs began to die out: in Southampton, for example, the Above-Bar Fair was suppressed on account of its "'moral delinquencies'" and "'customary orgies.'" ¹¹ By the time that Clifford penned "The New Mother," the movement to eliminate or regulate fairs had been well underway...