There comes a point in every person's life, when they will leave the nest, but not everybody leaves for the right reasons. You see, generally people leave their home when they are financially and emotionally stable, but there is a generous number of people who are not able to care for themselves, but they decide to leave anyway; not because they are ready to, but simply because they are being driven away from the madness that has consumed them. Margaret Drabble’s famous novel The Peppered Moth follows the lives of the Bawtry-Barron family as one of the daughters from the last three generations, leaves home to discover who they are. With Drabble’s attention to detail and her ability to intertwine three different life stories together, it's no…show more content… As a pre-teen starts their transition into becoming a teenager, they start to reevaluate the things they cherished throughout their childhood and most find themselves embarrassed of what they used to treasure. People often feel shame towards the place they come from, whether it be because people in that town know of them as faulty or because the people in that town are faulty themselves. In The Peppered Moth Bessie, who is believed to be based on Drabble’s mother, is ashamed of her quaint little town. It says “Bessie had decided at an early age that Breaseborough was not real. It was a mistake” (Drabble 18). For Bessie to refer to her hometown as a mistake, shows that she is sheepish about where she comes from and that she had been ready to leave, since she was a little girl. So what does this say about Kathleen? Well Drabble displays Bessie as a sincerely unhappy girl because that’s the way she perceived her mother to be. Drabble even acknowledges this in her afterword, stating “I find myself being harsh, dismissive, censorious. As she was” (Drabble 367). The way Margaret addresses her word choice and admits to her harsh portrayal of her mother, shows that she holds some sort of respect…show more content… In Margaret Drabble's case, she thrived on that insanity and became an author to inspire young adults. She keeps up a lack of dialogue throughout her novel, The Peppered Moth and focus more on what the characters are thinking, which is truly all people really care about anyway, right? Nobody cares about what you say, they only want to know about what you are thinking, and Drabble figured that out and incorporated that into her book. The critic, Adam Mars-Jones noted about Drabble’s relationship with her mother by saying, “Setting out to understand the mystery of her mother's failure, she has mysteriously reproduced it” (Mars-Jones, Adam). He sees the tension that Drabble hold towards her mother and notices the way she, not so subtly, depicts her mother’s character. But there are people out there who miss the whole concept of this story. For Instance, Daphne Merkin, who works for the New York Times Book Review, stated that “Bad mothers, just as surely as absentee fathers or feuding siblings, can make for good fiction” (Merkin, Daphne). The purpose of this novel isn’t to make for “good fiction”, it’s to exemplify the challenge of how three women, all related, deal with the difficulties that come with having an unaffectionate family, even though they all deal with it by running away, Drabble wrote this book, so the new generations can learn from her
