Motherhood Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham lands the line like a smile with a blade behind it: the kind of “misfortune” that looks, from the outside, like luck. Calling an affectionate mother a calamity isn’t just provocation; it’s a diagnosis of how love can become a soft form of possession. The wording matters. “Really affectionate” suggests not basic care but a saturating devotion, the sort that crowds out ambiguity and independence. “Boy” is doing work, too: this is about the making of men in a culture that prizes self-command, emotional restraint, and the myth that adulthood is earned by severing the cord cleanly.

As a playwright with a novelist’s cold eye, Maugham understood social roles as performances and family as the first stage. An affectionate mother can script the boy’s part too tightly: he learns to be admired, protected, excused. Later, the world demands competence and appetite; he arrives trained for approval, not risk. The “worse consequence” is not sentimentality but dependency disguised as virtue. Affection becomes a kind of insurance policy against discomfort, and discomfort is where personality gets forged.

There’s also a class-and-empire undertone common to Maugham’s era: boarding schools, colonial postings, and stiff-upper-lip masculinity all treat emotional closeness as something that must be rationed. Read that way, the line doubles as cultural commentary: a society so anxious about softness that it recasts maternal warmth as sabotage.

Maugham’s cynicism works because it refuses the comforting narrative. He isn’t scorning mothers so much as exposing the hidden bargain in “perfect” love: if it costs a child the freedom to become ordinary, fallible, and self-made, it’s not purely kindness.