"All Those Years, I Kept Him Safe": Maternal Practice as Redemption and Resistance in Emma Donoghue's Room

Philosopher Sara Ruddick argues in Maternal Thinking that maternal practice is characterized by three demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptance. “To be a mother,” Ruddick argues, “is to be committed to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training” (17). The first duty of mothers is to protect and preserve their children: “to keep safe whatever is vulnerable and valuable in a child” (80). The second demand requires mothers to nurture the child’s emotional and intellectual growth. The third demand of training and social acceptability of children, Ruddick emphasizes, “is made not by children’s needs but by the social groups of which a mother is a member. Social groups require that mothers shape their children’s growth in ‘acceptable’ ways. What counts as acceptable varies enormously within and among groups and cultures” (21). The article examines how the mother in the novel Room performs the three demands of maternal practice in both captivity and freedom. It considers how her strategies of preservation and care—in particular keeping her son with her in Room, her close bond with her son, and her act of extended breastfeeding—are reconstructed as bad mothering upon freedom as the first strategy is read as maternal selfishness and the second two are read as violations of social acceptability, particularly for a male child. The article argues that only when the mother reclaims the maternal authenticity of her maternal practice in Room can she and her son reclaim their connection and achieve healing

In Search of the Goddess: Creating a Feminist Motherline for Mother-Daughter Connection and Empowerment

The term “motherline,” as Sharon Abby explains, “is a term that was first used by Jungian psychologist Naomi Lowinsky to describe the process of reclaiming aspects of the feminine self that have become lost, forgotten or repressed” (844). Current literature on motherlines conveys and confirms the potential of the motherline to empower women to achieve a reclaimed and renewed feminine identity. However, what is not specifically examined in the literature on motherlines is how a woman may reclaim aspects of the feminine self when she is disconnected from her familial and ancestral motherline. Drawing upon the insights of African American and feminist writings on the motherline, this article explores how women may resurrect a lost motherline through a psychic and embodied remembering of, and reconnection to, their ancestral lineage. The article begins with a discussion of the motherline as theorized in womanist and feminist literature, and then visits my own struggle to create a motherline for me and my daughters from a place of psychic and familial dislocation. The article concludes with narrative reflections written by me and my youngest daughter, Casey, about our 2015 journey to Ireland that explores how, in our search for the Goddesses of our Celtic lineage, we created a motherline for connection and empowerment

We Need to Talk about Patriarchal Motherhood: Essentialization, Naturalization and Idealization in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin

This chapter considers how <em>We Need to Talk about Kevin</em> disturbs and deconstructs the patriarchal mandates of essentialization, naturalization, and idealization. In patriarchal motherhood, it is assumed (and expected) that all women want to be mothers (essentialization), that maternal ability and motherlove are innate to all mothers (naturalization), and that all mothers find joy and purpose in motherhood (idealization). Although feminist criticism of the novel has examined various moth- erhood themes—including mother blame (Cusk), ideologies of good-bad mothering (Murphy; Muller; Robbins), maternal subjectivity and practice (Messer), and maternal ambivalence (Almond)—my reading of Kevin will seek to uncover “what lies beneath” the maternal angst discussed in the above criticism. I argue that the mother blame, “bad” mothering, and maternal ambivalence so evident in the novel and so central to discussions on the novel are the symptomatic manifestations of the essentialized, naturalized and idealized mandates and expectations of patriarchal motherhood. Eva is blamed and regarded as an ambivalent or bad mother precisely because she is seen as lacking the assumed innate desire and ability to mother as well as the happiness expected of women in and through motherhood. Kevin, thus, not only compellingly and convincingly conveys the discontents of patriarchal motherhood but, more importantly, it uncovers the cause of and reason for this maternal discontent: namely, the essentialization, naturalization and idealization of patriarchal mother- hood. In moving beyond the representation of the symptoms of women’s oppression in motherhood—ambivalence, blame, guilt, judgement—to an understanding of their cause, the novel opens up the possibility for change in the novel itself and, hopefully, in the lives of the mothers reading it