A loneliness that can be rocked : maternal loss, language, and unconventional mothering in contemporary African American literature.

Abstract

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2016.Motherhood and loss are inseparable in the African American literary canon. This connection extends as far back as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs' early slave narratives, where both cite the deaths of their mothers as a moment of personal and social disorientation. 20th and 21st century African American fiction responds to these prevailing representations of maternal loss, articulating the pain and loneliness that surviving children feel after the death of their biological mothers and the way in which other mothers--typically female relatives or friends--step in and assume child-rearing responsibilities. However, in the novels of Jamaica Kincaid, Jesmyn Ward, Toni Morrison, and Ayana Mathis, the death of the biological mother results in the emergence of unconventional mother figures. My dissertation sees these alternative narratives of mothering in contemporary African American literature as a means to articulate agency. Specifically, these narratives articulate a shift from motherhood, the institution, to mothering, a practice or experience. While this move from the institution of motherhood to the practice of mothering is applicable and vital to understanding the relationship between mothers and children in all communities, African American literature most effectively illustrates this shift because it so prominently features maternal loss or absence, which resulted from slavery and its aftermath. In Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother, Ward's Salvage the Bones, Morrison's Home, and Mathis' The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, motherhood is premised around storytelling and cultural transmission (important facets of African American maternity), rather than biological reproduction. As such, the novels' nontraditional mothers challenge the systemic inequalities reflected in the prevailing, dominant discourse that surrounds black maternity, as these mothers reject the social and political hierarchies and ideology that have supported the institutionalized degradation of black motherhood. Moreover, the novels, themselves, perform a type of unconventional mothering — akin to the mothering through cultural transmission depicted within their pages--as they use storytelling as a means for passing on African American history, culture, and values. These unconventional mothers are not meant to replace the biological mother or be hierarchized; instead, they illustrate the necessity of the mother--whether biological or unconventional--in African American literature and communities