Feminist Literary Criticism and Motherhood

Feminist literary critics, especially those who draw on psychoanalytic theories, have been taking part in the more generalized feminist critique of motherhood as institution and experience for many years. One early and enduring question, particularly for American literary scholars, has been the question of whether mothers can write, or whether writers can be mothers. The theoretical obstacles—especially the position of the mother in dominant theories of language, as highlighted by French feminist thought—as well as the practical constraints on a mother's time, energy, and creative powers have repeatedly been considered. Some have seen a movement across the historical terrain of novel writing in particular that anticipates the pattern of second-wave feminism: from repudiation of the mother, in various ways, by both nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers, towards efforts in the most recent fiction to recuperate her voice or write "as" a mother.^[24] A related subtheme of feminist criticism has been the position of the feminist critic as daughter, anxiously trying to sort out her relations to her (literary) fore-mothers and suffering, like most feminist daughters, from deeply unresolved feelings about mothers and motherhood.^[25] In both literary critical and metacritical studies, it is thus possible to note the same pervasive, multifaceted ambivalence about motherhood that we see in feminist studies at large.

An important book focusing attention on the literary ramifications of this ambivalence, with particular interest in nineteenth-century women writers, is Margaret Homans's Bearing the Word .^[26] Homaris at once presupposes and reevaluates a Lacanian theory of language, in which both the speaking and writing subject and the signifier are constituted as masculine, and she argues that this theory has been understandably debilitating for women writers. As many theorists agree, entering the symbolic order is especially difficult if not impossible for the feminine subject, who is associated with the literal or nonsymbolic. As Homans sees it, nineteenth-century women novelists were forced at one and the same time to see themselves as mothers, fulfilling or failing to fulfill the true destiny of the proper woman, and yet in writing to betray the mother, circumventing the maternal (as in Frankenstein ) or

representing the mother as a passive transmitter of the Father's seed or word (as in works by George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell). Women's very power as mother, given the possibilities for egotism and selfishness, had to be denied by norms of Victorian motherhood.

Marianne Hirsch's Mother/Daughter Plot presumes, with Homans, both the historical and strategic absence of the mother's perspective and the theoretical difficulty of representing this paradoxical perspective, or writing "as" a mother. Hirsch locates a major source of this problem in the conventional plots of western literature and the discursive myths of psychoanalysis (hence the missing or silent mother in Greek tragedy, upon which psychoanalytic theories often draw). Writing post-Bakhtin, Hirsch defines the novel as a genre open to dialogue between dominant and subversive voices, but she suggests that it has only recently become a genre in which the mother's voice could be heard. Nineteenth-century plots, on the contrary, are controlled by the family romance and depend on the heroine's "disidentification from the fate of other women, especially mothers"^[27] ; and so mothers are missing, voiceless, or devalued in novels by writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Sand, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Kate Chopin. Hirsch adds, "The conventions of realism, resting on structures of consent and containment, shut out various forms of indeterminacy, instability, and social fragmentation" (14). The situation changes to some extent in modernist plots, which are "supplemented," according to Hirsch, by the heroine's artistic ambitions and desire for affiliation with other women, so that "for women writers contradiction and oscillation, rather than repetition, bind the modernist plot" (15). Finally, in what Hirsch calls "postmodern" plots, "more multiple relational identities emerge," although the mother remains the one "who did succumb to convention," a negative model from which the daughter must detach herself (10). In texts Hirsch considers by Margaret Atwood, Marguerite Duras, and Christa Wolf, although the mothers are prominent, the perspective remains "daughterly." Only in the most recent fiction—especially, in Hirsch's view, in Toni Morrison's Beloved —do "mothers begin to appear as subjects" (11).

Other recent critics consider the impact of dominant myths of phallogocentrism on later women writers. In her study of H.D. and Jean Rhys, The Unspeakable Mother, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer supports the view that earlier in this century women writers tended to assume the role of daughters, not mothers.^[28] Modernist women writers have also

engaged the interest of feminist critics concerned with narratology, some of whom find more departure from the dominant psychoanalytic and discursive models than Homaris, Hirsch, or Kloepfer may. Rachel DuPlessis sees twentieth-century women writers as revising maternal myths in order to express "the peculiarities of the female quest,"^[29] although, still in keeping with views expressed by Homans and others, she finds that women writers like Virginia Woolf, H.D., and Alice Walker look back to the preoedipal. Susan Winnett suggests, however, that the traditional female experience of birth and breast-feeding has forced women "to think forward rather than backward"; we need to stop reading "in drag" in order to see that narratives for women work differently than theories based on male erotic experience have understood.^[30] Ellen G. Friedman also argues that the female modernists, like their male counterparts, yearn for the "unrepresentable." But whereas males see it buried in the past (hence the search for the father), women see it as "the not yet presented," so that their narratives look forward.^[31]

Another way in which motherhood has recently entered into literary studies from psychoanalysis is through the notion of the play space or potential space, taken primarily from object relations theory. Following key lines of French feminist thought, Claire Kahane has argued that this space is analogous to the discursive space the woman writer might occupy and that since "poetic discourse [is] dominated by the semiotic," it is the ideal vehicle for a maternal voice that questions "fixed structures of gender" in postmodernist discourse.^[32] In Subversive Intent, Susan Rubin Suleiman shares this view of the importance of the play space and wonders at the absence of figures of the playing or laughing mother in contemporary women's experimental writing. Instead, she finds that many recent women's texts are like those of the male surrealists, who "repudiate the mother" even as they appropriate her place in their battle with the father.^[33] As an instance of this, Suleiman cites Jeanette Wintersoh's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, where she reads the mother figure as "an instrument of patriarchy" whom the lesbian daughter-writer must abandon and deny.^[34] The positive figure of the mother in writers like Cixous and Irigaray could be seen as a reaction to this patriarchal mother, but she remains a myth and tends to lead to writing in the lyric mode, rather than in the humorous and narrative mode that Suleiman believes would be more subversive.

However, in a recent study of Alice Munro's Mothers and Other Clowns, Magdalene Redekop finds evidence of subversive "play and

parody" in stories about a certain kind of humorous mother figure. The source of comedy in Munro's magic realism, Redekop argues, is what she calls the "mock mother," a type that includes numerous surrogates: "stepmothers, foster mothers, adoptive mothers, child mothers, nurses, old maids mothering their parents, lovers mothering each other, husbands mothering wives, wives mothering husbands, sisters mothering each other, and numerous women and men behaving in ways that could be described as maternal." Finding in Munro's writing a female version of Freud's "fort-da" game, Redekop argues that the toy in this case is a doll, a mother in masquerade, and that the intent of the game is to subvert traditional definitions of motherhood: "Dancing in front of the erasure, the conspicuous mock-maternal figures do not affirm something inexpressible or sacred . . .. The entertainments of her [Munro's] mock mothers enable us to walk 'disrespectfully' around our idealized images of maternity."^[35]

The "mock mother" is clearly analogous to the figure of the mother without child; as Redekop notes, in Munro's stories as in the novels I have assembled here, "'Where are the children? ' is the question that triggers the collapse of the composition," a collapse that must precede revision and reconstitution.^[36] However, with rare exceptions (notably the work of Fay Weldon), the novels I consider are not comic, and the mothers in them often cannot play, laugh, or make other people laugh.^[37] This may be in part because theories that link "play" with "autonomous subjectivity" and "total freedom" (as Suleiman characterizes the theoretical insights of Freud and Winnicott) are often constructed from the infant's point of view, not that of the person who mothers. If "play" is a "non-purposive state," it might indeed be incompatible with maternal work and maternal thinking, which, as revalued by theories like Ruddick's, have to be understood as highly goaldirected behaviors. Moreover, as we shall see, these serious, often tragic stories may undercut the premise that (maternal) subjectivity itself can be so readily equated with autonomy and freedom. They also represent another way in which to imagine nonpatriarchal motherhood, a mother in a subversive, "culturally unintelligible and impossible" position.