“A Mother” is a modernist short story. Joyce was a member of the Modernist movement in literature, which emerged out of writers’ frustrations with traditional literary norms and conventions. Rather than telling romantic tales featuring heroic characters and happily-ever-after endings, modernist writers focused on capturing the alienation and dissatisfaction that they saw around them in the industrialized modern world, often writing stories with morally complex characters and bleak endings.
Many of these features of modernist writing are on display in “A Mother.” For example, the protagonist (Mrs. Kearney) is not exactly likable, nor are any of the characters in the Irish Nationalist movement with whom she has conflict. There is no obvious “side” for readers to be on in this story—Mrs. Kearney is not a very sympathetic character, given that she is a pushy and self-serving member of the upper-class who only joins the Nationalist movement to help her daughter become a famous musician. At the same time, however, she is a sympathetic character because—as Joyce intentionally highlights—she is a woman in a sexist society who is constantly belittled by the so-called progressive men in the Nationalist movement. It is also clear that she only cares so deeply about her daughter’s success because she was not given such an opportunity and was, therefore, forced to marry a wealthy man in order to find financial security.
This story is also a realist one in that Joyce intentionally captures the Nationalist movement in realistic ways. The movement did, in fact, organize fundraising events like the concerts in the story, it did have a newspaper called the Freeman’s Journal that covered such events, and it did have many years of waning support between Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell’s death in 1891 and its eventual success (with Irish independence) in 1922.
