Victorian writer Lucy Clifford’s short story “The New Mother” (1882) is as unsettling as it is hard to immediately classify. Is it a typical cautionary tale of the 19th century or a prime example of weird fiction avant la lettre? The protagonists of the story, the children Blue-Eyes and Turkeys, are tricked by an enigmatic girl into behaving so badly that their loving mother threatens to abandon them, sending a monstrous new mother in her stead, with glass-eyes, claws and a wooden tail. Convinced that this is a mere threat from their mothers’ side, the children persists in their disobedience, only to find out that it was all too true. She leaves them to their fate: and when night falls, the new mother arrives to the cottage. Terrified, the children flee into the surrounding forest where they live out the rest of their days, abandoned and afraid.
Long a largely forgotten story, “The New Mother” has been the subject of a critical and academic reappraisal during the last decades. In their readings of the work, interpreters such as Alison Lurie and Anita Moss highlights what they view as the subversive nature of the work. There is, however, a harmonizing tendency common to these modern readings that makes them problematic: by trying to fully explain or reduce the bizarre elements of the story, these interpretations are not able to account for the fundamental strangeness of the work. This paper, then, seeks to discuss an alternative ways of reading the story.