Motherhood, Duty, and Care Theme Analysis

Throughout The Girl on the Train, the novel’s three main characters—Rachel, Megan, and Anna—all struggle with motherhood in different ways as they attempt to embody society’s idea of a good mother. Rachel feels like a failure as a woman because she cannot have a child. Megan, having botched motherhood once, now finds the idea of caring for a child repugnant and frightful. Anna, who uses motherhood as an outlet for her fears and anxieties about her marriage, smothers and over-parents her daughter, Evie, even as she ignores the dangers that her husband, Tom, poses to them. Through these women’s journeys, Hawkins suggests that there is no such thing as a perfect mother—and that to pursue perfection in motherhood actually pushes women toward dangerous behaviors.

Hawkins uses the character of Rachel to demonstrate how the pressure to perfectly embody maternal traits can inspire self-destructive behavior within women. Rachel longs terribly for a baby, and her inability to conceive a child has made her feel not only that motherhood is unattainable, but that a true experience of womanhood is incomplete without children. All she wanted while married to her now-ex-husband, Tom, was to become a mother. However, her struggles with infertility and the couple’s precarious finances meant that after only one round of in vitro fertilization (IVF), there were no options left for Rachel to become the mother she always dreamed of being. A lack of support from Tom both financially and emotionally left Rachel feeling responsible for her own infertility—a deep shame which led her to drink heavily in order to erase the pain of what she was going through. Buckling under the societal pressure to become a mother, Rachel began engaging in a destructive behavior that would certainly hamper any attempts at becoming pregnant or creating a healthy emotional environment for a potential child. Rachel’s self-destructive binge drinking, Hawking suggests, is a larger symptomatic response to the outsized expectations of maternal duty that society pushes upon women. In other words, the societal pressure to effortlessly become the perfect mother—not Rachel’s infertility—is what actually destroys her chances at becoming one.

Megan is the character with perhaps the most complicated relationship to motherhood and childcare in the entire novel. Throughout Megan’s arc, Hawkins explores how society shames and demonizes women who struggle with or fail at motherhood. Megan takes a job as a childminder, or nanny, to Anna and Tom’s daughter, Evie—yet she loathes childcare and resents the idea that she should, as a woman, have some natural predisposition toward maternal instinct. She dreads the idea of becoming pregnant herself and, seemingly without warning, quits her job with the Watsons when the pressures of caring for Evie become too great. Later on in the novel, as readers learn the truth about Megan’s past, her complex and painful relationship to childcare becomes more understandable. When Megan was just 19, she gave birth to a child whom she did not entirely want. The baby girl, named Libby, was born in a cabin in the woods. Megan hadn’t had any doctor’s appointments or taken any prenatal care throughout her pregnancy, hoping the baby might simply disappear—yet when the child arrived, Megan loved her fiercely. Tragically, however, when Megan took a bath with Libby sometime during Libby’s first year of life, Megan fell asleep—and Libby slipped into the water, where she drowned. By contextualizing Megan’s disdain for motherhood and childrearing through a backstory directly related to a profound, painful trauma in Megan’s past, Hawkins shows how difficult it is for women who have suffered the loss of a child to forgive themselves—largely due to society’s overemphasis of maternal dutifulness and perfect care. Megan failed her child, but because society demonizes women who make mistakes in motherhood, Megan feels that she is inadequate not just as a mother figure, but as a human being. Megan becomes pregnant again toward the end of her life and decides to keep the child—a radical act of reclaiming the idea that just because she is not perfect, she is still worthy of love, dignity, and the chance at experiencing motherhood once again.

Through the maternal, devoted Anna, Hawkins shows how even mothers whom society views as “perfect” can often fail their children in crucial moments. Anna’s life revolves around caring and expressing love for her infant daughter, Evie. Still, however hard she tries, Anna is not a perfect mother, or even one who does what’s right for her child. Anna is married to Tom, an abusive, manipulative, deceitful, and even violent man—but she overlooks his aggressions and lies in order to maintain the imagine of a perfect family. She is also inattentive to her daughter due to exhaustion at times. On one instance, a devastated Rachel sneaks into the house, picks up Evie, and brings her out into the yard without Anna noticing—a consequence of Rachel’s own unfulfilled longing for a child. Through Anna, Hawkins shows how even mothers whom society views as perfect examples of maternal duty, care, and responsibility can often fail their children in crucial moments. Anna is so locked into a prescribed idea of what maternal love looks like that she ignores the mistakes in her own parenting and caregiving, desperate to keep up an idealized front without taking the difficult, painful steps required of a truly good mother in the background.

In examining the judgment and pressures that three very different women experience as they wrestle with prescribed ideals of motherhood, Hawkins urges her readers to consider the painful—and even harmful—consequences of attempting to achieve perfection as a mother.