The Good Mother – A Passive Life"We live in a world...where the decisive act can invite a holocaust." --John Updike An interesting question that comes up while reading The Good Mother is: why did Anna let this happen? Of course, this question must be included among many others, most of which elicit ambiguous answers: What really happened? Was there blame to be assigned? If so, whose fault was it? What is a good mother? Can a woman be a good lover and a good mother? Where should sexual lines be drawn between children and couples in a family? Regardless of what it is, the answer to the question Why Anna let this happen is that her gender, her class, and her social and family background made her almost powerless. do anything but let it happen. He spent his life letting things happen. Anna Dunlap, recently freed from a boring marriage and involved in a sexual awakening with an unconventional man, probably considered herself liberated in a very literal way before and during her relationship with Leo Cutter. “I had a feeling, a drunken, irresponsible feeling, that I was about to start my own life, to go beyond the claims of my own family, of Brian, in a passionate experiment, a claim on myself.” (p. 10) As events unfolded, however, it became obvious that Anna had not escaped her story and that her "liberation" was merely an illusion. Anna grew up in the shadow of her rich and domineering grandfather, her emotionally absent father and her cold, success-oriented mother. Her mother ran her life, pushing Anna to practice the piano in the hopes that she would one day become a professional musician. Anna was learning that she had no control over her life; she was forced to let life (due to her mother's ambitions towards her) happen to her. When she visited her grandparents' summer home in Maine, Anna witnessed her grandfather's overwhelming dominance and saw her grandmother, mother, and aunts engaged in interesting but meaningless (in Anna's view) "feminine" conversations. When Anna was fourteen, her mother, realizing that Anna was not a musical genius, loosened her grip on her daughter and, in fact, stopped praising her for anything. As Anna's body changed and she became attractive to boys, she sought to define herself through sex, which she found empty and unsatisfying. Once again Anna was not in control; she let it happen.