Mothers, Daughters, and Familial Love Theme Analysis

Fever 1793 is a mother-daughter story. Mattie, 14, resents her mother, Lucille, as a scolding and meddlesome taskmaster. She fails to appreciate her mother’s struggles to support her family and secure Mattie’s future. When yellow fever hits, Lucille is stricken with the disease and disappears to an unknown location in the countryside; the central mystery of the novel is whether Lucille has survived and will reunite with Mattie. Though absent from the central part of the book, memories of Lucille’s strength inspire Mattie as she struggles to survive and gathers an improvised “family” of fellow survivors. By framing the novel with Mattie’s relatively childish view of Lucille and, later, her more mature perceptions, Anderson demonstrates that mother-daughter relationships in any setting involve conflict, and she suggests that daughters come to empathize with their mothers through maturing and fighting their own battles.

At the beginning of the story, Mattie’s relationship with her mother is conflicted. Mattie sees her mother as the person who runs her life—and not in the way that Mattie would prefer: “When Mother allowed herself a still moment by the fire on winter nights, I could sometimes see the face she wore when Father was alive. […] But no longer. Life was a battle, and Mother a tired and bitter captain. The captain I had to obey.” Though Mattie understands that her mother has faced “battles,” Mattie has never been “embattled” herself, so she can’t fully sympathize with her mother.

Mattie is furious when her mother drags her to tea at the upper-class Ogilvie home, hoping for a possible match for Mattie with one of the wealthy sons: “We did not belong here. I did not belong here. Mother may have grown up with carriages and gowns, but I had not.” Rather than appreciating her mother’s burden to provide for Mattie, Mattie just sees this unwanted courtship ritual in terms of conflict between herself and her mother—she and her mother are different in an unbridgeable way, she believes.

Mattie also sees herself through the lens of her conflict with her mother. She imagines that her mother sees her as an unwanted failure: “I disgusted Mother. She knew I was weak. I bet she wanted sons. Instead she got a backward, lazy girl child.” While there’s no evidence in the story that this perception is true, it shows how Mattie interprets her mother’s sometimes heavy-handed efforts to guide and protect her as a struggling single parent.

Mattie becomes the head of her household, in effect, after she and her mother are separated during the epidemic. The separation forces her to better appreciate her mother and, as she forms family bonds with other survivors, to realize some of the strains and sacrifices of holding a family together. As Lucille nears death (so Mattie thinks) from yellow fever, Mattie grieves her failures to fully appreciate and learn from her mother: “Tears threatened again. I sniffed and tried to control my face. No one could ever tell what Mother thought or felt by looking at her. […] There were so many things she had tried to teach me, but I didn’t listen.” Faced with the prospect of losing Lucille, Mattie is painfully aware of all she has failed to learn from her mother, and will now never have the opportunity to learn.

Mattie finds a lethal diagnosis to be incompatible with her perception of Lucille: “Mother […] had given birth to me in the morning and cooked supper for ten that night. She survived the British occupation while my father fought with Washington’s troops. Mother would beat back illness with a broom.” Mattie newly appreciates Lucille’s strengths when she sees her languishing with yellow fever. When her mother disappears to the countryside, this reminder of Lucille’s formidable presence sustains Mattie and lets her maintain hope that she’s still alive, even though they don’t know each other’s whereabouts for the duration of the epidemic.

Mattie fights for Nell, an abandoned orphan, and Robert and William, nephews of coffeehouse employee Eliza, even though it’s unclear how they’ll survive together in the aftermath of the fever. After Mattie successfully nurses them all back to health, collapsing in exhaustion before all is over, she offers Eliza a partnership in the coffeehouse and effectively starts a new household, folding Eliza’s whole family into her life there. Mattie’s battles on behalf of the children echo the strengths she’s internalized from her mother, though she doesn’t entirely recognize this in herself.

When Mattie and her mother are reunited, their roles are reversed in a way that’s sorrowful but ultimately reconciling for them. Though she’s recovered from the fever, Lucille is permanently weakened and newly reliant on Mattie for support, both physically and emotionally. Mattie tells her, “‘Please don’t cry. Everything is better now. I’m home, you’re home. You don’t have to worry anymore.’ I drew up a chair next to her, and she leaned against my shoulder. I cradled her head in my arms until her sobs quieted.” Mattie’s support of her mother is unprecedented, but she accepts the role unhesitatingly, made stronger and more empathetic from her own trials during their separation.

Mattie also takes over the coffeehouse and supports her mother financially. The end of the book finds Mattie waking early and letting her mother sleep late, in contrast to a combative scene between the two of them at the beginning, when Mattie complained about being scolded out of bed by Lucille. Though Mattie is upset by the change in her mother’s wellbeing, their long separation has both deepened Mattie’s love for her and strengthened her to care for Lucille as, she now realizes, Lucille has unfailingly done for her.

Mattie and Lucille have a great deal in common. A war survivor who was widowed when Mattie was only four, Lucille has worked hard to run a business and provide for Mattie; she is independent, determined, and brave. As Mattie struggles to survive the epidemic, her similarities to her mother are evident, and they are highlighted all the more strongly when Lucille comes to occupy a more daughter-like role in Mattie’s revitalized coffeehouse. Though it’s hinted that Lucille won’t survive for many more years, Anderson allows their relationship to come full circle in a deft and sensitive way, highlighting the notion that although mother-daughter relationships are inevitably conflicted, it is possible to find common ground through maturation and appreciation of each other’s efforts.