Grenouille's Mother

TL;DR: The unnamed Paris fishmonger who gives birth to Grenouille beneath her market stall on July 17, 1738, attempts to leave him in the offal heap to die — as she has done with four prior infants — and is hanged for serial infanticide before the day is out.

Spoilers through Chapter 1.

Snapshot

A young, exhausted Parisian working woman in her late twenties looking older. We see her for one chapter. Süskind grants her almost no interior life — she is the squalor that produces the prodigy.

Role in the story

She is the first character in the book and the first to reject Grenouille. The novel's opening pages render her with a clinical detachment that mirrors the narrator's stance toward all of Grenouille's adult handlers: she is part of the rotting Paris that the protagonist will spend his life trying to escape.

The narrator is careful to tell us she was not unique — she had given birth four times before under that same fish stall, and four times had let the infant die in the refuse. What undoes her this time is that the infant cries. Grenouille's first act in the world is to be heard, and the consequence is his mother's death by hanging.

Personality in plain English

The book gives us almost no interior. She is too tired for cruelty, too pragmatic for sentiment. She has a knife at her belt and the cold instincts of a woman trying to survive in 18th-century Paris. The horror of her presence in the book is not that she is monstrous — it's that she is ordinary. The Paris of Perfume makes mothers like her routinely.

What she wants

To get the birth over with and return to gutting fish. The narrator notes that she had calculated the childbed afternoon as a brief inconvenience.

What she fears (or hides)

The four previous infants she let die in the same offal pile. She admits to all of them under arrest, which is what gets her hanged.

Key relationships

She is not in the book long enough to have a relationship with anyone. The closest thing is her one-paragraph mother-son contact with Grenouille — and that contact is, by her intention, a refusal.

Visual identity

Worn beyond her years. Hollow cheeks, cold-roughened skin, hands raw and red and salt-cracked from gutting fish. Hair pinned roughly under a soiled linen cap. Coarse linen shift, dark wool kirtle, a heavy linen apron stiff with fish blood and adhering silver scales. A short gutting knife on a leather string at her belt. The image is meant to be archetypal rather than specific — Süskind wants you to see the Paris fishwife of 1738, not a particular face.

Aliases

The following names and references in the book all point to this character. Use any of these as link anchors back to this page.

• Grenouille's mother (canonical — the most common form)
• The fishwife
• The mother