32 pages • 1 hour read
Graham SwiftMothering Sunday
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaCharacter Analysis
Jane Fairchild
Jane is the novel’s protagonist and point-of-view character. At the time of the novel’s main action, she is a young woman working as a maid for the upper-middle class Nivens and engaging in a clandestine love affair with Paul Sheringham, the son of another well-to-do family. Later in life she moves to Oxford, marries a philosopher, and becomes a novelist.
After becoming a famous writer, Jane reflects on how she is often asked whether she “write[s] under [her] own name, [her] real name?” (98). Her response is that she writes under her “given name” but that “it might as well be a pen name” (98). This is because “Fairchild” was a name given to “foundlings”—children abandoned without names on the steps of orphanages. Meanwhile, as Jane says, her first name is just a generic name given to young girls. Jane was not just an orphan; she was one without any sort of “name” or connection to the past whatsoever.
This position contributes to her unique power of imagination. Without any clear identity of her own, Jane finds it easy both to imagine scenes involving others and to actively inhabit their roles. This is most vivid when Mr. Niven is driving Jane back to Upleigh. Prompted by the trauma of Paul’s death, Jane feels herself slipping into the roles of Emma Hobday, Mr Niven’s daughter, and Ethel. She becomes, in a sense, the characters Mr. Niven needs at that moment: the fiancée who requires consolation, the daughter who can console Mr. Niven, and the dutiful servant who will help him with the difficult tasks ahead. She later uses this chameleonic power in her writing and in her celebrity status as a writer. She becomes the image of the writer her fans and interviewers want while holding the truth about her real self back. This is why, despite her perspective dominating the novel, the character of Jane Fairchild remains elusive.
Paul Sheringham
Paul is Jane’s secret lover and the sole surviving male heir of the Sheringham family. Though he seems to harbor genuine affection for Jane, he is not so willing to defy convention as to end his engagement to Emma, his “social equal.” His death in a car crash en route to meet Emma symbolizes the increasing defunctness of his social class and the customs and traditions it clings to.
Jane says that one of the reasons she married Donald was that “Donald had reminded her of Paul Sheringham” (115). Consequently, Donald’s death was “the second grief of her life” (115), paralleling the one that she suffered when Paul died. Yet, Paul and Donald seem very different. Donald is an intellectual with whom Jane has deep conversations about language while in bed. Their relationship is partly cerebral. He is also her social equal, having met her when she was an aspiring writer at Oxford. Their 12 years of marriage also suggest a more pragmatic and conventional relationship than Jane and Paul’s.
In contrast, her relationship with Paul seems primarily physical and immediate. Paul, Jane remembers, scorns books and reading. As he asked her mockingly once, “[Y]ou read all that?” (80) This was to suggest that “their relationship was essentially bodily, physical and here-and-now, it wasn’t for droning on about books” (80). Instead, Jane knew, and loved, Paul through subtle behaviors revealed in significant moments. For example, Jane notices the unhurried way he gets dressed despite being severely late for his rendezvous with Emma. She also remarks on how he was happy to stand before her naked, noting, “[I]t was always Paul Sheringham’s great trick, to have such scorn for indignity that he never actually underwent it” (54). These are merely fleeting impressions of the kind of man Paul was, but Jane loved him precisely because of what was left unknown and unsaid.
Emma Hobday
Emma Hobday, the middle-class fiancée of Paul Sheringham, plays a central role in Mothering Sunday. She is the reason that Paul and Jane’s relationship must come to an end and therefore the reason for the significance of that “Mothering Sunday” for Paul and Jane. Metaphorically, she is the cause of Paul’s “death” to Jane, while also inadvertently becoming the literal cause of his death when he crashes his car going to meet her. However, Emma is never directly present in the novel. As Jane admits, “[S]he didn’t know Emma Hobday. Having only glimpsed her once or twice, how could she?” (19). She knows little to nothing about her life or character and, crucially, doesn’t “know how [Paul] behave[s] with Emma Hobday” (19). Someone so significant for Jane and for the novel remains perpetually in the shadows.
To fill this blank, Jane must use her imagination. When looking at the mirror in Paul’s house, “she trie[s] to put herself again in the shoes, the skin of Emma Hobday” (72). Yet this effort, more so than Jane’s “inhabiting” of any other character, runs up against fundamental blocks: “[S]he couldn’t even imagine Emma Hobday without clothes” (73). As a love rival, Jane struggles to accept Emma’s sexuality or that Paul may have an intimate physical relationship with her. Instead, she caricatures this woman as a middle-class prude whom Paul is merely marrying for money. Indeed, Jane suggests that their upcoming marriage is “arranged” and that “the arrangement might include that she must be a flawless, untouched virgin, as if he were marrying a vase” (41). This shows the resentment, linked to class, that Jane harbors towards Emma. It also shows the barriers and distortion that sexual jealousy, and the desire to remain unique in a lover’s eyes, creates for an imagination even as prodigious as Jane’s.
