I read about the "mother instinct," missing children, and menopausal women

Bunny Lake Is Missing
By Evelyn Piper

The Hours Before Dawn
By Celia Fremlin

I'm looking at these two novels together because they both deal, loosely, with the "mother instinct" and  missing children, and each is a tour de force of narrative style, albeit very different in tone and attitude.

In both novels a young mother beset with some adversity has a child who goes missing. In "Bunny Lake," the mother, Blanche, is struggling with managing a new job, a preschooler, as well as the social baggage of being an unwed mother in 1957. When she arrives to pick up her daughter, Bunny, from her new preschool, no one has seen the child. Blanche becomes distraught and, as her panic rises, the reader begins to suspect, along with the cops, that Bunny does not exist. In "The Hours Before Dawn" (1958) Louise is struggling with an inconsolable infant, Michael, a third child that her husband flat-out states he didn't want, and she is so exhausted that she actually falls asleep in a park and loses the baby for a time.

Blanche and Louise could not be more different mothers. Blanche's mother love is tigerish, she blasts every stereotype of the unwed mother that the 1950s might have thrown at her: She is well-organized, energetic, educated, self-sufficient, rather chaste, and utterly dedicated to her child. Louise is utterly overwhelmed by her duties as mother, homemaker, and wife. She is a woman who seems to be drowning in domesticity.

Both of these novels raise real questions about the "fitness" of mothers, and (especially as companion reads) both could be construed as criticisms of the "normal" nuclear family that was touted in the 1950s. Fremlin's novel is full of wonderful minor characters, among them Mrs. Hooper and her psychologist friend, Magda, who have theories about child-rearing. Mrs. Hooper's ideas about giving children independence (backed up by the childless Magda) are excuses to dump her kids on friends and acquaintances and go off to meetings. There are also Louises's other children, Harriet and Margery, who at first appear to be charmingly eccentric little girls, but whose demands and querulousness torment Louise almost relentlessly. There's also Mrs. Morgan, a kind of working class Mrs. Grundy. And there's Mark, Louise's husband, who manages to make things worse no matter what he does because he is utterly clueless. Grandmothers don't come off well in this book, either. Bunny's grandmother tries to persuade Blanche to give up Bunny--the shame of illegitimacy! Louise's mother-in-law is a chic middle-aged woman who has blossomed in the absence of children and death of husband, and wants nothing to do with Louise or her brats.

SPOILERS (and mind the confusion that might arise because both novels have a character named Louise): In both Fremlin's and Piper's novels, the person who takes the baby turns out to be an older woman on the cusp of menopause. Both women are posing as people they are not. Louise Benton, who kidnaps Bunny, is a former preschool employee who's been dismissed for odd behavior. She pretends to be a school employee who fakes Bunny's registration and then absconds with her when Blanche drops her off. Vera Brandon, who takes charge of little Michael, poses as a teacher who rents a room in Louise and Mark's home. Vera, an unwed mother, believes she was told that her child died at birth, and that he was switched with Louise and Mark's sickly baby by the hospital nurses.

Louise Benton, Bunny's kidnapper, doesn't even appear in the story; she is merely a device that winds up the action. In fact, Bunny herself appears only in Blanche's recollections and at the very end of the novel. The novel is really about Blanche and the increasingly weird collection of characters who try to assist, seduce, or thwart her. Piper's narrative becomes more herky-jerky as Blanche's panic rises. Episodes sometimes don't come clearly into focus until later passages clarify them. This narrative trick ratchets up the tensions as they pile up throughout the novel.

Vera Brandon, in "The Hours Before Dawn," is a force to be reckoned with. Vera is an amazon whose search for the baby she believes to be alive is relentless and intelligent. She is the direct opposite of Louise, Michael's putative mother. She is, in fact, a lot like Blanche Lake. Fremlin plots this novel so deftly that it is entirely unclear by the end of the novel whether Vera or Louise is Michael's mother, though there is no doubt whom he ends up with. The book is like one of those tessellated optical illusion pictures that, looked at one way, seems to be a school of fish, and looked at another way, shows a flock of birds (see the pic above left).

Something probably ought also to be said about both writers' very dim view of psychology in these books. The psychologist dispatched to help persuade Blanche that Bunny does not exist may be the nuttiest character in the novel. And Mrs. Hooper and Magda are certainly the most opportunistic of psychological theoreticians. The emerging science of the mind so touted in the 1950s (and which was responsible for so badly diagnosing women's problems) clears up nothing in either of these novels.