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Emma Bovary and Scarlett O'Hara are two of the most hateful mothers ever depicted.  Here's Emma, responding to her toddler daughter's demand of attention:

But there, between the window and the work-table, was little Berthe, tottering along in her knitted boots, trying to reach her mother, to grab hold of the ends of her apron strings.
-- Leave me alone! said Emma, pushing her away.
The little girl soon came back again, even closer, up against her mother's knees; and, leaning to steady herself, she gazed up at her with big blue eyes, as a thread of clear saliva dribbled from her lips on to the silk of the apron.
-- Leave me alone! repeated the young woman sharply.
The look on her face frightened the child, who began to cry.
-- Can't you leave me alone! she said, elbowing her away.
Berthe fell over by the chest of drawers, against the brass fitting; she cut her cheek on it, blood trickled down.

(p. 107.)  Scarlett seems to have studied at the Emma Bovary mothering school.  Here's Scarlett, bemoaning her pregnancy with Ella:  "When she thought of the baby at all, it was with baffled rage at the untimeliness of it."  (p. 624.)

"Aren't you proud to be having a child?" [asked Rhett.]
"Oh, dear God, no!  I -- I hate babies!"
"You mean -- Frank's baby?"
"No -- anybody's baby."

(p. 638.)  As for Wade, Scarlett's oldest, his attempts at gaining his mother's attention are consistently met with "Don't bother me now.  I"m in a hurry" and "Run away, Wade.  I am busy."  (p. 823.)

In all societies, mothering is such a weighty measure of a woman's value and virtuousness that it's remarkable that these two enduring ladies of literature are such abominable mothers.  Bad mothers are unsympathetic.  Why would readers devote the time and energy to spending hundreds of pages with these two loathsome mothers? 

As readers obviously do spend the time and energy necessary to finish Gone with the Wind and Madame Bovary, repeatedly, they can apparently take bad mothering in stride when it's a character trait in their novels' heroines.  One reason may be that extraordinary adventures become possible for women who are not maternal.  In a sense, bad mothering is necessary for verisimilitude.  If Scarlett and Emma Bovary had accepted the roles that society had selected for them, then they'd have been normal mothers, and they wouldn't have gotten themselves into the messes that ruined their lives and make such great reading.

Scarlett's and Emma's bad mothering also contributes to the reader's sense of justice at the comeuppance both women receive at the end of the tales.  These ladies aren't merely victims of their authors' sadism; rather, they deserve their fates because, among other things, they've been appalling mothers.  Readers respond positively to this shape of righteousness in the narrative arc.

Finally, bad mothering shows a kinship between Scarlett and Emma and male protagonists of great novels.  By being lousy mothers, Scarlett and Emma signal their exceptionalism: they're not like other women; they're non-maternal.  They're like great men, who are driven by the imperative of realizing their potential in a non-domestic context, who'd rather live out their destinies directly than vicariously through their children. 

Privileging the self over others, including offspring, is a sharply double-edged trait.  It's both necessary for greatness, and the most ready mark of a narcissist -- or, in non-clinical terms, an asshole.  Truly great people rarely calibrate this trait with sufficient sensitivity: witness artist-monsters like Pablo Picasso and V.S. Naipaul.  As for the mere narcissists, the trait leaves their personalities an unmitigated disaster. 

In life, the misfortunes that rank above being the child of such a person are few.  On the page, there's enough distance to make it a captivating dymanic about which to read.    

"Ever since early adolescence, Flaubert had regarded bourgeois existence as an immense, indistinct, unmitigated state of mindlessness," pronounces Geoffrey Wall in the Introduction to the Penguin Classics 2003 edition of Madame Bovary.  (p. xxx.)

Emma exhibits symptoms of this mindlessness in her choice of reading: romance novels, treated in the book like a decidedly low-class, but highly addictive, drug.  Emma's first taste of romance novels comes from the old servant in her convent school, who lent "the big girls, clandestinely, one of the novels she always kept in the pocket of her apron" (p. 34) -- and so the good girl is corrupted by the help. 

Despite the interventions of her pious mother-in-law, on whose advice "it was decided to prevent Emma from reading novels" (p. 117), Emma's reading continues unabated, with disastrous effect on her correspondence: "in the letters that Emma sent to [Leon], there was a great deal about flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, naive devices of a depleted passion, attempting to rejuvenate itself from external sources."  (p. 263.)  "As a reader," Geoffrey Wall solemnly condemns her, Emma "only wants what she can incorporate easily into the stereotyped repertoire of her fantasies."  (p. xxv.)

Flaubert's ambition, then, was to attack the bourgeois mindset by undermining the complicity books had in perpetuating its existence: "Writing such as [Flaubert's] invites us, delectably, to reinvent our reading."  (p. xxxix.)

Flaubert's project seems, in later generations, to have been derailed by psychology, the advent of which postulated that bourgeois existence is not an "indistinct . . . state of mindlessness," but a variegated -- and extremely interesting -- assortment of neuroses.  Where Flaubert sought to inspire disgust in the bourgeois mindset, in order to provoke the will to change, psychology reinforced the bourgeois existence by infusing it with fascination.  Psychology drained the deadly boredom out of Flaubert's vision of bourgeois existence.

Flaubert himself foreshadows this development.  In a book conspicuously devoid of passages depicting self-reflection, or anything but the most perfunctory assertions of the mental states of the characters, the following passage caught my attention:

Love, [Emma] believed, had to come, suddenly, with a great clap of thunder and a lightning flash, a tempest from heaven that falls upon your life . . . . Little did she know know that up on the roof of the house, the rain will form a pool if the gutters are blocked, and there she would have stayed feeling safe inside, until one day she suddenly discovered the crack right down the wall.

(p. 93.)  The general trend of literature after Flaubert has been to examine closely those pools of rain, forming on the roof behind the blocked gutters, implacably cracking the edifice.  But because bourgeois mediocrity has such power that it can transform a potent agent of change, like psychology, into a neutered tool of commercialism, like self-improvement mania -- and because language is itself a poor match for such power ("like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing-bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars," (p. 177)) -- Flaubert's abiding mission has yet to see fruition.  Notwithstanding the ending Flaubert contrived for her, Madame Bovary lives on.