My Mother!

[Mijahu]

Did anything ever come of that mysterious person crying out "...my mother!" at the end of all of his/her sentences? I thought it might just be a joke at first, but you never know with Mr. Snicket.

[Dante]

Just a running joke, I think, but if anyone wants to get up to any wild speculation, a line in Chapter 13 reveals that the mother-crying person was a woman.

[notsoquiet]

Really? But I found it as a joke, maybe to put some humor in the book. Of course, there is a lot of humor in all thirteen books.

[cwm]

We know that this woman apparently has some link to the crimes the Baudelaires or Olaf have been blamed for, and also bears some resemblance to one of the Baudelaires.

Of course, since she's caught in the hotel fire, she is, as with everyone else in the fire at the time, irrelevant to the Baudelaires' fate.

[Dante]

I don't know, CWM. I got the impression her daughter was just caught up in the mob. And/or slightly crazy. This is a woman who put her mother on an evidence heap. ...I suddenly had a horrible idea: The mother is dead.

[cwm]

Do you mean already dead, or dead perished in the fire?

If the former, for all we know the Baudelaires were accused of her murder by the Punctilio!

[Mijahu]

Well I assumed she was alive before the hotel fire, because during the blind court session, the woman presented her mother as evidence. Unless she was presenting her absence as evidence...but I think her exact words were "I present my mother!"

[cwm]

I presume she would have protested as being used as evidence unless she, for whatever reason, was unable to protest, i.e. she was dead.

[falsespring]

It's likely just a running gag throughout the Baudelaire's horrible stay in that trecherous, if cleverly designed, hotel. I also find it unlikely that the woman's mother was dead; even in a hotel filled with villians and mob psychology, surely a noble person would have objections against someone's corpse being used as evidence. However, if this parent was in fact dead, perhaps she was being presented as evidence that the Baudelaires were involved in her death. What female, old enough to be a mother, has died in a way that could be connected to those poor, unfortunate siblings?

Also, for some reason, I thought there was another such joke in The End, but I think I was just mistaking the shouts of suggestions from the islanders to be similar to the mob psychology in the hotel that early morning. Mob outcries do seem to be another running joke in the chronicles of these orphans, as they are seen in TVV, TPP and TE. There may have been another instance during THH, during the operation...

[Mijahu]

I think there was another instance in THH of mob psychology, like you said. I find them funny

I just had a thought, though: she could be dead and no noble person would protest because nobody would know she is dead...they were all blindfolded.

[falsespring]

Very true, I forgot about justice being blind. But wouldn't people become suspicious when they didn't hear the mother protesting? Or perhaps they felt her cold, clammy flesh as they put down their own piece of evidence. Maybe she simply submitted a picture of her mother as evidence. Also, Justice Straus was not blindfolded at that point and was not yet 'hmm'ing, so she would have been able to protest the use of a corpse as evidence.

Edit: Oh, perhaps there was mob psychology in TSS too, when Olaf, the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard were tricking the Snow Scouts into being captured. It all depends on what sort of scale we're refering to. Were there any instances in TCC? I haven't read it in a long time.

[Dante]

The Baudelaires attempted to use mob psychology in TCC, but it backfired - the crowd ended up going wild, with the result that Madame Lulu and the bald man were shoved into the lion pit.

[falsespring]

I thought so, there seemed to be a running theme of mob psychology from TVV to TE. Would the arguement/schism taking place in Ish's tent count as mob psychology? They did seem to grow increasingly angrier with each suggestion, rage spreading through that tent like spores, a fire, or an angry idea.

[Dante]

It makes sense that Handler would continue the idea. The gullible, illiterate general public in aSoUE tend to be rather too dim for their own good - in some ways, they're the real villains, because if it weren't for them then the masterminds like Olaf and the sinister judges wouldn't get away with all their wicked plans.

[Mijahu]

I completely agree. The beginning books were more about gullible/illiterate/villainous guardians, and after that (namely TVV onward) it became gullible/illiterate/villainous crowds of people.