The Good Mother by Sue Miller

First published: 1986

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Primarily Cambridge, Massachusetts, with scenes in New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Anna Dunlap, a musician and divorced mother
• Brian Dunlap, Anna’s former husband, a lawyer
• Molly Dunlap, the three-year-old daughter of Brian and Anna
• Leo Cutter, Anna’s lover, an artist
• Bunny, Anna’s mother
• Frank McCord, Anna’s maternal grandfather, the patriarch of her mother’s family
• Ursula, Anna’s piano student and best friend

The Novel

The Good Mother is a fictional study of Anna Dunlap, a woman who has lived most of her life under the domination of someone else—first her mother, then her husband, Brian. When Anna divorces her husband and tries to build a new, more satisfactory life with her daughter, she achieves a certain brief happiness, but the price she pays is almost more than she can bear.

Anna is the first-person narrator of The Good Mother, which begins while Anna is in the process of divorcing Brian. The first chapter, one of fourteen, foreshadows the events of the entire book. On a retreat from the strain of her dissolving marriage, Anna rents a cottage in a small town in New Hampshire. As Anna and Molly attend a film, enjoy a café dinner, and get ready for bed, Miller’s superb, realistic style evokes a close and loving relationship.

Anna receives legal papers from Brian’s attorney that she must notarize and return the following day. Anna leaves Molly asleep in the car when she visits the filthy home of a reclusive notary in order to have the papers stamped. When she returns after her nightmarish experience, she finds that Molly has opened the car door to look for her and has been attacked by one of the cats that roam the property; Molly has been screaming in fright for some time. Comforting the child, Anna feels that she is not strong enough, not good enough, to rear her alone. Again and again in the novel, Anna creates a private Eden that is shattered when the larger world intrudes.

Anna’s early life is told in flashbacks of her mother’s family, a handsome, high-strung group of five siblings dominated by Anna’s grandfather, Frank McCord. He held Bunny and his other children to an unspoken standard of achievement and bound them with his approval or disapproval.

Anna was expected to have a brilliant career as a concert pianist. After Anna attended a summer music camp for two years, however, her teacher advised Bunny not to send her again, for Anna was not “musically gifted.” After that summer, Anna felt that her life as a serious person was over.

Once resettled with Molly in Cambridge, Anna finds a friend, Ursula, among her piano students, and through her finds a part-time job testing memory retention in rats at a Boston University laboratory. Molly is happily enrolled at a day-care center, and the child fills Anna’s evenings with love and innocent prattle. Although she knows that her life is limited and uncertain, Anna is content until she meets Leo Cutter, a Cambridge artist whose life is as tenuous as hers. With Leo, Anna finds the sexual fulfillment that she never had with Brian; however, she carelessly permits Molly to share their bed when the child is upset. This happens several times, and once when Anna and Leo are united in intercourse.

The following summer, Molly goes to Washington, D.C., to stay with Brian and his new wife for a month. After a few weeks, Anna receives a phone call from him saying he will not return Molly and that the decision has something to do with Leo. Anna spends an agony of waiting until Leo returns from his art show in New York. She then finds out that with no prurient motives, Leo did let Molly touch his penis once, at her request, when he was emerging from the shower. Molly has told her version of the incident to Brian.

Anna is soon enmeshed in a net of lawyers, family-service officers, and psychiatrists as she fights to retain custody of Molly. Each step of the legal process heightens the tension. In his testimony in court, Leo lets himself be blamed for the sexual indiscretions, but he is inwardly furious. Anna grows wary of him, and he feels betrayed. Still, he loves Anna and tries to salvage the relationship. The conservative judge decides against Anna, and she loses custody of Molly. In her extreme grief, Anna loses all feeling for Leo, and she abruptly moves to Washington to live near her child. Anna and Molly take a long, bitter time to make peace with their losses.

After a year and a half, Molly is doing well, and she moves back to Boston with her father and his now-pregnant wife. Anna returns to Cambridge, again to be near Molly. She creates a life for herself that is a shadow of what she had wanted, but she is a survivor.

The Characters

Anna, the “good mother,” captures the sympathy of the reader from the start. As narrator, she shares her innermost thoughts with the reader, as well as her life and the characters who inhabit it. The story is told about four years after the events, and from Anna’s changing perceptions of the other characters, it is clear that she has grown wiser. Although she gains a deeper appreciation of the value of a real family, Anna is also proud of the way she has “made do” with her own circumstances. Yet the novel is ambiguous; although Anna never sinks into self-pity, conditions suggest that she is a victim.

Brian, Anna’s former husband, appears to be a thoroughly decent man, but he and Anna have a tepid relationship, and she is frigid throughout their marriage. When Brian’s law firm transfers him from Boston to Washington, Anna suggests that they separate. He has an affair with another woman who later becomes his wife while his marriage with Anna is dissolving. Later, when Anna discusses Brian with her psychiatrist in preparation for the custody battle, she wonders if he is not unconsciously punishing her for hurting him. Brian’s horror at the sexual indiscretions with Molly reflects the views of society at large, for he is a man who plays by the rules.

Leo, Anna’s lover, represents not only the sexual fulfillment that Anna lacked in her marriage but also a passionate approach to life that nobody in Anna’s circle has ever held. He is a visual artist whom Anna describes as having “recklessness of the heart.” Yet he is essentially one-dimensional, a sensual, intense, gifted artist who stands outside conventional society. Although his work is overtly what matters most to him, Anna is never drawn into this important aspect of his life, nor is he interested in her music.

Molly Dunlap, Anna and Brian’s daughter, is one of the triumphs of the novel. She is the most important person in Anna’s life, and Anna describes her daughter’s physical presence and emotional states in exquisite detail. Molly’s dialogue is appropriate for a three-year-old and also a subtle indicator of what is going on in the child’s mind beneath her glib chatter. She is a bright, formerly happy child who is struggling to make sense of the torn world her parents have created.

Frank McCord, Anna’s grandfather and patriarch of the family, exhibits the repressive Calvinism under which Anna grew up. He is both contemptuous and manipulative. Although she struggles to retain control of her life by refusing his offer of money, she finally loses whatever pride she has when she is forced to ask him to pay for her lawyer. An arrogant, successful, self-made man, Frank McCord holds everyone to the same standards to which he holds himself.

Critical Context

The Good Mother was Sue Miller’s first novel and became a great success. It sold well, was praised in reviews, and was widely discussed. The book reflects the concerns that Miller explored further in Family Pictures (1990) and For Love (1993). Each of the novels focuses on a family in trouble and the nature of loving relationships. In her books, Miller refuses to follow the conventions of happy endings, allowing only ambiguous futures for her characters after they struggle with conflict and pain.

The popularity of The Good Mother perhaps stemmed from its relevance to social problems that dominated public consciousness in the 1980’s. The breakup of the American family, feminist concerns regarding the place of women in society, changing roles of mothers, sexual abuse of children, the personal in conflict with the public—all are themes that contribute to the complicated world of The Good Mother.

Far from suggesting answers to any of these problems, however, The Good Mother simply follows them to their logical conclusions within the context of the plot. Anna loses everything she holds dear by the end of the novel. The only constant is her love for Molly, which she never compromises or uses even for what may be the child’s own good. Some critics have suggested that the popularity of The Good Mother resulted because the novel played on women’s fear of being left alone, yet such a conclusion seems simplistic.

In The Good Mother, Sue Miller staked out her territory: the country of domestic conflict, where issues of love, control, and divided loyalties strip her characters bare. In subsequent works, she has continued to explore the extreme margins of this territory with sensitivity.

Bibliography

Drzal, Dawn Ann. “Casualties of the Feminine Mystique.” The Antioch Review 46 (Fall, 1988): 450-461. A detailed feminist analysis that compares Anna with other fictional heroines who are in the same predicament: They are uncertain about their place in society because they are unable to find satisfying work. Drzal discusses what the role of motherhood means to these women.

Humphreys, Josephine. “The Good Mother.” The Nation 242 (May 10, 1986): 648. Humphreys discusses the important contemporary issues that The Good Mother raises, and she finds that they overshadow the traditional character and plot underpinnings of the novel. She considers Sue Miller “brave” to raise such difficult questions in a first novel.

Johnson, B. D. “A Family Affair.” Maclean’s, November 14, 1988, pp. 58-59. This review of the film adaptation of Miller’s novel compares the film to the novel and discusses the issues of sexuality and motherhood. Includes comments by actress Diane Keaton, director Leonard Nimoy, and producer Arnold Glimcher.

Leber, Michael. “The Good Mother.” Library Journal 111 (May 15, 1986): 79. Provides a good overview of the novel for the general reader and considers some of the techniques Miller uses to create the drama and high tension of the plot. Calls Miller’s first novel “a stunner.”

MacLachlan, Suzanne L. “Conversations with Sue Miller.” Christian Science Monitor 87 (May 9, 1995): 114-126. Miller discusses how success as a novelist has influenced her life and her writing. Although she only briefly mentions The Good Mother, this interview provides insight into various themes that appear in her work.

McManus, Barbara F. “Anna and Demeter: The Myth of The Good Mother.” In The Anna Book, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. McManus discusses the novel as it parallels the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone and as it resembles Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s struggle between erotic and maternal love.

White, Roberta. “Anna’s Quotidian Love: Sue Miller’s The Good Mother.” In Mother Puzzles, edited by Mickey Pearlman. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. White examines the novel in terms of the different kinds of love (and absence of it) that influence Anna’s life and fortune. White concludes that Anna’s “capacity to sustain her love for her child through all the challenges to it constitutes a kind of heroism. . . .” This article should prove provocative to readers who find Anna more ordinary than heroic.

Zinman, Toby Silverman. “The Good Old Days in The Good Mother.” Modern Fiction Studies 34 (Autumn, 1988): 405-413. Presents a sophisticated reading of the novel that places it in the context of what Zinman calls “nihilistic nostalgia.” The term loosely means a style that loots the recent past for icons and then desecrates them. Anna’s longing for her grandparents’ primitive summer estate is the powerful nostalgia that rules Anna’s life.