“Despise me, before I was born”
Jemima recounts, “MY FATHER…seduced my mother, a pretty girl, with whom he lived fellow-servant; and she no sooner perceived the natural, the dreaded consequence, than the terrible conviction flashed on her—that she was ruined...Her incessant importunities to prevail upon my father to screen her from reproach by marrying her, as he had promised in the fervour of seduction, estranged him from her so completely, that her very person became distasteful to him; and he began to hate, as well as despise me, before I was born.” Jemima’s father’s abhorrence for her is ironic; he approved of her conception. Her father’s detestation indicates that he neither venerated Jemima’s mother nor esteemed her; otherwise, he would have enthusiastically wedded her after impregnating her. Fatherhood is not an unqualified elation for some menfolk. Accordingly, seducing a lady is not a validation of man’s unreserved regard.
“The office of a mother”
Jemima expounds, “Poverty, and the habit of seeing children die off her hands, had so hardened her (Jemima’s nurse) heart, that the office of a mother did not awaken the tenderness of a woman.” Suckling children should have logically roused the nurse’s motherly dispositions. Psychoanalytically, the nurse has Repressed her maternal feelings to buffer herself from the emotional discomfort which is ascribed to losing kids whom she is engaged to nurse. Moreover, the Repression empowers her to circumvent obsessive bonds with the children. Thus, ‘wet-nursing’ does not inevitably rouse maternal predispositions.
“The Pillars of the house”
Maria narrates, “But, to hasten to the more busy scenes of my life...The neglect of her darling, my brother Robert, had a violent effect on her weakened mind; for, though boys may be reckoned the pillars of the house without doors, girls are often the only comfort within... Great as was the fatigue I endured, and the affection my unceasing solicitude evinced, of which my mother seemed perfectly sensible, still, when my brother, whom I could hardly persuade to remain a quarter of an hour in her chamber, was with her alone, a short time before her death, she gave him a little hoard, which she had been some years accumulating.” Regarding males as pillars is satirical considering how they desert their parents in periods of infirmities leaving the daughters with the encumbrance of tending to their dying parents. Although Maria devotes herself to tending to her indisposed mother, her mother elects to bequeath Robert her hoard who hardly cares for her.
Maria’s mother is a typical patriarchal female who reasons that Robert is superior to his sisters notwithstanding his manifest negligence. Had Robert been an unqualified pillar, Maria would not beseech him to be in his mother’s presence. Ingrained patriarchy underestimates the worth of females, and overrates that of the males. Girls are the unqualified pillars in their households.
