From what we've read so far in this novel, Mother is one of the character that fascinates me the most. While everything about her character on the surface seems 'bland' and stereotypical, it's her development in the past few chapters that steers her away from the norms expected of her and brings her character to life.
Mother is described as being your typical early 20th century white upper-middle class woman - she takes care of her husband and other members of her family while managing her household and has an extremely sheltered view of what is going on the world outside their home in New Rochelle. Her character's name is literally just 'Mother', Doctorow's way of portraying her not as an individual character but someone who represents many women like her at the time. Doctorow makes the sheltered worldview of the family clear in the first few pages of the novel - "There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." (4) As we discussed in class, it's not that there were no African Americans and immigrants in the US in 1902 (or whenever this takes place). However, living the lifestyle in the society that the family exists in means that even if they interacted with African Americans or immigrants, they probably didn't fully register them as people, resulting in Father's especially bigoted worldview as seen on the Peary expedition.
However, when Father leaves for the expedition and leaves Mother and Younger Brother in charge of the family business, Mother starts to evolve into a multi-dimensional character for the first time. Younger Brother is off doing weird crap I'd rather not talk about, and Mother starts to have her own awakening and some longing for a purpose in life. She awakes to her internal discontent of living this almost subservient lifestyle and having to conform to what is expected of her by society and more importantly, Father. He notices this transformation when he comes back to New Rochelle - "He looked in Mother's eyes to detect there his justice. He found instead a woman curious and alerted to his new being ... She was in some way not as vigorously modest as she'd been. She took his gaze. She came to bed with her hair unbraided." (111) Father notices a change in Mother's behavior, namely that she's not nearly as modest as she had been before and as we see more clearly once Coalhouse Walker and Sarah enter into the family's lives, she starts voicing her opinions and is not afraid to shoot down what she sees as Father's stiff and 'backward' worldviews.
What prompts Mother's transformation? While it's hard to tell considering how much Doctorow moves around through the novel through the countless number of "fictional characters" and "historical figures", what really stood out to me is the fact that Mother basically has taken over Father's business. He leaves her and Younger Brother in charge but she becomes so adept at the affairs of running his enterprise that even he's "astounded" - "As for the business during Father's absence, it seemed to have got on well. Mother could now speak crisply of matters such as unit cost, inventory and advertising. She had assumed executive responsibilities ... Everything she had done stood up under his examination. He was astounded." (112) What comes after this made me dig even deeper - "On Mother's bedside table was a volume entitled The Ladies' Battle by Molly Elliot Seawell. He found also a pamphlet on the subject of family limitation and the author was Emma Goldman, the anarchist revolutionary." (112) Mother had started reading literature on the issue of women's rights - of course, The Ladies' Battle is an anti-suffragist text about how women are not informed enough to vote. However, one can see Mother becoming more aware about the world around her - before Father left, she probably would have subscribed to the worldview that he told her to without questioning the basis of those ideas. Mother's evolution is indicative of the broader story of first-wave feminism which was occurring at the same time.
Mother's character is a lens through which we can examine the broader story of women, especially well off white women in this part of the 20th century. She does not have a name, unlike Sarah or Emma Goldman, and Doctorow uses her to show us a different perspective through which views on race and gender evolve over time.
