One of the saddest characters in Winesburg, Ohio is Elizabeth Willard, the mother of George Willard. We first met George in the story of “Hands”—he was the town newspaper reporter to whom Wing Biddlebaum took a liking. In actuality, George pops up in several of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio. In this fourth story, “Mother,” he makes another appearance. After all, the main character is his sad and defeated mother.
Mother: An Overview
In the opening two paragraphs of “Mother,” we get a glimpse of the characters of Elizabeth and Tom Willard, George’s parents. Elizabeth is described as tall and gaunt, with a face marked with smallpox scars. Even though she was only 45, the life had gone out of her. It turns out that she and her husband Tom run the local old hotel that her father had once owned. The hotel is old and run down…and Elizabeth hardly ever leaves it. Clearly, the old, rundown hotel symbolizes who she has become.
By contrast, Tom Willard was “a slender, graceful man with square shoulders, a quick military step, and a black mustache.” It is clear, though, that he resents having married Elizabeth. Every time he sees her, he gets angry and swears, “Damn such a life, damn it!” He resents having to run the hotel, for it was no longer profitable. Consequently, “he thought of the old house and the woman who lived there with him as things defeated and done for.”
Another thing we learn about Tom is that he was heavily into politics and dreamed of going to Congress and possibly becoming governor. In reality, though, he was hardly recognized and would get angry when some younger man in the local Democrat party started to get recognized. One thing is clear about Tom: he was full of self-importance and a big talker, but found himself stuck in a dead-end life, running a dead-end hotel and married to a lifeless and withered wife.
When it came to Elizabeth’s relationship with George, it was odd: “there was a deep unexpressed bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died.” Simply put, as we learn in a later story, Elizabeth had big dreams, but because of some bad decisions, ended up stuck in a loveless marriage. And she does not want the same thing to happen to George. She wants him to have a better life. Whenever George would go out, she would go into his room and half-pray to the skies that George wouldn’t become “a meaningless drab figure like myself.” She prayed that she would be willing to bear anything in order for George not to end up like her, but then added in her prayer, “And do not let him become smart and successful either.” What could that possibly mean? We’ll see later on.
One interesting little picture in the story that further illustrates the sad life of Elizabeth Willard is the scene that involves her looking out of her window into the alley behind the bakery and seeing Abner Goff the baker getting angry at a gray cat, swearing and chasing it away. Elizabeth wept upon seeing this because it “seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.” It is easy to realize that she saw herself like the unloved cat and her husband Tom as the angry baker.
In any case, the main thing that happens in the story is a particular “adventure” Elizabeth has one night. One night, she became extremely worried about George, so this sickly woman got out of bed and crept down the hall to his room. He was getting at the age where he would be going out in the evening with girls, and this evidently worried her. When she heard him in his room, her anxiety began to subside, and she started walking back to her own room. It was just then that she saw Tom come out of George’s room. Tom was ambitious for George and wanted him to be successful, like Tom thought he was. Of course, in reality, that wasn’t true. Tom was never successful and he was clearly trying to live out his aspirations through George.
It became clear to Elizabeth that Tom was pressuring George to “wake up” and make something of his life—basically, be like him. The thought of George becoming like Tom ignited something in Elizabeth and she decided she had to act to prevent that from happening. We are told that she had hated Tom for years, but it was always a generalized, impersonal hate. Now that she sensed he was going to harm her son, he became the personified object of her hate. And so, she grabbed some sowing scissors and resolved to stab him and kill him: “He has chosen to be the voice of evil and I will kill him. When I have killed him, something will snap within myself and I will die also. It will be a release for all of us.”
It is at this point in the story that we are given a little more backstory to Elizabeth Willard that sheds light on her present situation. When she was a young woman, she had a “shaky reputation” and was fascinated by the theater. We’re also told that she had a “great restlessness” within her that manifested itself in two ways. First, she wanted to travel the world with a theater company and get out of Winesburg. Even though travelling theater companies would tell her life on the road was mostly dull and uninteresting, she still wanted a change. And that leads to the second way her restlessness was manifested—basically, she slept around with men. As the story indicates, she was reaching out and searching for love and a way to express herself. There was always the initial passion and wild emotions, then a sense of peace, quickly followed by tears and regret. She always wondered why the man never cried as well. It should be obvious—the men were just using her for sex, while she was searching for something more.
More of Elizabeth’s backstory is found in a second story about her later on. But based on what we are told here, the implication was that she was full of dreams as a young woman, had made bad decisions, and had found herself sickly and in a loveless marriage. Clearly, she did not want George’s dreams to be shattered like her, and she was afraid that Tom would crush George’s dreams. That is why she decided she was going to stab and kill Tom.
Back to the “present” in the story. Elizabeth was determined that when she confronted Tom to kill him, she was not going to look like the old, sickly, defeated woman she now was. And so, she got out an old makeup kit out from one of the theater companies she had kept all these years, and she fixed herself up so that she would once again look shockingly beautiful when she killed Tom. “The figure would be silent—it would be swift and terrible. As a tigress whose cub had been threatened would she appear, coming out of the shadows, stealing noiselessly along and holding the long, wicked scissors in her hand.”
But she couldn’t do it. Once the initial adrenaline wore off, she almost collapsed in her room, only to make it to her old chair she always sat in.
It was just then that George came in to tell her he was planning to leave Winesburg. “I don’t know where I shall go or what I shall do, but I am going away.” At that point, she asked him if he was going to “wake up” and go to the city to make money or something like that. Clearly, she wanted to know if George was going to take Tom’s advice or not. George replied, “I suppose I can’t make you understand, but oh, I wish I could. I can’t even talk to father about it. I don’t try. There isn’t any use. I don’t know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.” He then told her it wouldn’t be until a couple more years, but he knew he needed to go away because of something Tom had said.
That was enough to reassure Elizabeth that George was planning to one day leave Winesburg, not because he was obeying his father, but because he wanted to get away from him. And that brought her tremendous joy, and she knew that George would not end up defeated, like her, but he also wouldn’t end up becoming like his father. He was determined to become his own person. She then told him he should go out for walks more…and he turns to leave.
Mother: My Thoughts
In one way, “Mother” is a frustrating story, in that there really is no ultimate resolution. We don’t really know the full backstory of Elizabeth Willard, we don’t know much about her marriage to Tom, and her awkward yet sympathetic relationship with George isn’t completely spelled out. The reason for all this, though, is that there is “more to the story” regarding Elizabeth Willard. The reader simply has to wait for a later story (spoiler alert: it involves none other than Doctor Reefy!).
In any case, though, we cannot help but feel pity for Elizabeth. Although this story doesn’t tell us how she changed from that rebellious, adventure-minded young woman to the defeated and listless middle-aged woman she had become, her story no doubt reflects to a certain degree how many people probably feel about their lives. In our youth, we have dreams, many of them unrealistic and idealistic, and make naïve and foolish choices from time to time. We inevitably will get knocked around in life a bit, due to those naïve and foolish choices, but hopefully we recover and learn from them, and mature into better people. But there are always those who, rightly or wrongly, get completely derailed in life due to their youthful, foolish choices. We will see that in a clearer light regarding Elizabeth Willard in a later story.
In any case, it is clear that her character is one who has had the life crushed out of her…and yes, part of the reason has to do with her own bad choices—one of them having been getting married to Tom. Still, it is always sad to see it. How many people do you know who made a bad choice in marriage, and it ended up either completely destroying their life, or at least putting their life through hell for a number of years?
Another thing that struck me in this story is the way Elizabeth Willard prays to God about George. When she goes into George’s room to pray, it is clear that her conception of God is a vague notion, rather than any informed Christian understanding of God. The narrator describes what she did as “half a prayer, half a demand, addressed to the skies.” I think that is significant, in that it reflects the shallow understanding of God that most people probably have.
As for Elizabeth’s determination to kill Tom, although it might seem like a gross overreaction, once we know more of her backstory, we will begin to understand why. Without giving anything away, in the later story, we find out that she clearly hates (and blames) Tom for derailing her life. All the hopes she had as a young woman were crushed once she got involved with Tom. That is why she was so afraid that Tom would crush George’s hopes and dreams as well. And that is why Elizabeth prayed to God that George wouldn’t end up defeated like her, but also not an arrogant, obnoxious, self-important braggart like Tom.
As for her feeble attempt to kill Tom, it is significant that she took out the makeup kit from one of the travelling acting companies and tried to make herself beautiful again. She was trying to recapture the young woman she once was. It was as if she wanted to go back in time to when she was young and beautiful and get Tom out of her life before she became the sickly, lifeless middle-aged woman she had, in reality, become. Of course, you can never go back in time and change past mistakes. That is why her strength failed her.
Fortunately for her, George let her know he was planning to leave Winesburg at some point and figure his own life out. He wasn’t going to let Tom determine his life for him. Although that brought joy to Elizabeth, she was already so crushed and defeated in her own life, she couldn’t do anything more than encourage George to get outside more.
From George’s perspective, it must have been a stressful childhood. On one hand, his mother was this sickly and lifeless woman, and on the other hand, his father was a big-talker who, in reality, never had any success in anything—and that fact clearly gnawed at him. Therefore, one of the things the story tells me is the importance of good parents. In truth, even the best parents have flaws that affect their children, but the fact is that they serve as the primary role models for their children. Whether or not the children realize it, they end up becoming like their parents to a certain degree. So, what did George have? Neither role model was particularly good, and that would inevitably make it harder for George to figure out what he wanted for himself—neither role model was a good guide.
But such is life. Even with good parents, each one of us is faced with the challenge to “going outside” and figuring our own lives out for ourselves. We’ll see what becomes of Elizabeth, and Tom, and George later on.
