Maternal love and motherhood

Maternal love and motherhood are presented as both an intimate bond and a condition shaped by power: the ability to choose whether to bear a child, keep a child, and provide care is repeatedly taken from women or made precarious. The novel sets pregnancy under coercion and institutions that threaten separation against the daily work of feeding, sheltering, and protecting children. Its most hopeful maternal bond is also a belated one: Lady Lavinia Huntley discovers that Sunday Small, a foundling raised in the workhouse, is the daughter she had believed dead.

Motherhood Under Coercion

Cissie Burns first tells Sunday Small that she is pregnant in confidence. She imagines that the baby will be something of her own to love, and believes she is being sent to a country place where they will both be cared for. That hope collapses when an asylum carriage arrives instead. Cissie recognizes it, understands that she is to be confined, and pleads that she was promised the chance to care for her baby. She identifies Albert Pinnegar as the man who made her pregnant, but Miss Frost seizes and shakes her, dismisses the accusation, and shames her as an unmarried woman. The institution's power to classify and confine Cissie thus also threatens her claim to motherhood.

Years later, Sunday recounts Cissie's history to Lady Lavinia Huntley when asked whether Albert Pinnegar was a kind master. Remembering her friend, Sunday describes Pinnegar's coercion, Cissie's pregnancy, and the deception that sent her to Hatter's Hall. She has never heard from Cissie since. When Lady Lavinia investigates, Mr Crackett says that Cissie's baby died at birth; Lady Lavinia suspects instead that it may have been sold to a childless couple. The uncertainty matters: the institution offers an official answer without resolving what happened to the child, while Cissie's removal has already severed her from the possibility of caring for it.

Daisy Branning faces a related abuse of power. After Sunday notices her pregnancy, Daisy explains that Pinnegar summoned her to his office, hurt her, and threatened to send her brother Tommy Branning to Hatter's Hall if she told anyone. Sunday, remembering Cissie's fate, decides not to report the assault immediately; she fears Daisy could be subjected to the same treatment. Daisy later says that she hates the child growing inside her and wishes she could go to sleep and never wake. When Sunday calls the baby innocent, Daisy insists that she cannot separate it from its father's violence and asks whether it could be given away. Her anguish is not presented as a lack of feeling in the abstract: it grows from assault, fear, and an unwanted pregnancy for which she sees no escape. Sunday answers from her own experience of abandonment, but Daisy's shame and despair remain her own burden.

Care as Daily Work

The nursery scenes contrast formal responsibility for infants with the actual labor of keeping them alive. Sunday finds a woman responsible for the babies drinking sloe gin and giving them the liquor to silence them. The infants are soiled; many have bleeding sores, and their stillness is not evidence that they are content. Sunday changes them with clean binders, then asks for milk when she recognizes that they are hungry. She lights the stove rather than serving the milk cold, and feeds a baby from a banana-shaped glass bottle with a rubber teat. The child drinks so greedily that he nearly chokes. In this episode, motherhood is not confined to biological relation: attention to distress and responsive care become urgent moral actions where the assigned caregiver has failed.

Care also shapes Cissie's rescue. When Lady Lavinia finds her drugged and asleep, she recognizes that the girl has been sedated and takes her home. Mrs Roundtree immediately arranges a bath, clean nightgown, decent food, and rest, while Lady Lavinia expects Zillah and the housekeeper to take Cissie under their protection. The scene answers the cold machinery of confinement with concrete provision, though it cannot undo the separation Cissie has already endured.

The premature birth of Lady Lavinia's son makes care a shared effort. After the baby is delivered apparently lifeless, Zillah follows the doctor's instructions and slaps him until he cries; then she must turn her attention back to Lady Lavinia, who is bleeding heavily. Once mother and child are out of immediate danger, Zillah delays bringing the tiny infant to his mother until she has been washed and fed. Molly Worthington, the wet nurse, feeds him every hour, even through the night, and persists despite exhaustion. The baby's survival depends on this sustained labor as well as on Lady Lavinia's love for him.

Pregnancy, Expectation, and Attachment

Lady Lavinia's experience of pregnancy changes when she feels the baby quicken. Her earlier misgivings give way to anticipation; the nursery is uncovered, the tiny clothes she kept are washed and pressed, and she insists that, if all goes well, she will feed the baby herself rather than rely on a wet nurse. Her choice takes place within a marriage in which Ashley Huntley treats a son as an heir and imagines that his inheritance will free him to pursue his own pleasures. He finds the thought of his wife nursing a child disgusting, yet yields when she stands her ground. The hoped-for child is therefore both an object of maternal longing and the focus of a gendered demand for a male heir.

At Christmas, Lady Lavinia enters the prepared nursery and prays that it will be her last childless Christmas. The little rocking crib, lace-frilled canopy, and waiting blankets give visible form to a hope she has previously lost. When her son is born prematurely, his smallness first sharpens her fear of losing him. Zillah reassures her that Molly is nursing him effectively, and later places him in his mother's arm. Lady Lavinia kisses his head and feels a protective love she has not known before. She imagines him bringing her flowers at the Mothering Sunday service, a future that would end her painful envy of other mothers. Her joy is bound to the fact that this child is alive and that she can raise him herself.

Abandonment, Recognition, and Belonging

Sunday's understanding of motherhood is marked by the fact that she was left on the workhouse steps. When Daisy asks about giving her baby away, Sunday recalls pretending that her own mother must have had a good reason and would one day return. She now accepts that her mother may be dead or may simply have wanted to leave her. That history gives Sunday a powerful reason to defend the unborn child from being treated as if it were responsible for its father's actions, but it does not erase Daisy's suffering. The contrast makes the novel's treatment of motherhood more complicated than a simple claim that every mother will immediately love her child: care may be desired, obstructed, or impossible to feel under violence and despair.

The final revelation transforms Lady Lavinia's history of childlessness. Zillah tells her that Sunday is her daughter and explains that she kept the truth from her while Ashley was alive because of what he might have done. Lady Lavinia does not blame Zillah; she credits her with saving the child's life and resolves to tell Sunday who she is. She sets out for the baker's shop where Sunday is working, intending to bring her home to Treetops Manor. This discovery joins biological kinship to the novel's larger insistence on care: Sunday survived through Zillah's intervention and grew up without knowing her mother, while Lady Lavinia's newly recovered maternal bond begins with recognizing the person already living beyond her household. Motherhood here is not only birth or longing; it is also protection, truthful recognition, and the work of making a child belong.