Beyond the Patriarchal Mother

Feminists and feminist literary critics have in general assumed that if and when mothers could speak and write, in contradistinction to their

earlier silence, they would tell us a new and different story. Some would add that only by telling new stories about their lives can women escape the traditional plots that confine them to the roles of wives and mothers. It is not yet obvious, however, that we have heard either a new or more accurate maternal narrative. In an important sense, many recent stories by or about mothers offer a mirror image of old stories: whereas for centuries the myths and literature of western culture assumed and arguably depended on the absence of the mother, many of our contemporary stories—and particularly the ones I am interested in here—assume and arguably depend on the absence of the child. My goal is to explore what this means. As Sara Ruddick has noted, "Some of the most reflective maternal thinkers have been moved to think deeply about motherhood precisely because mothering does not come easily to them."^[38] In this study, I consider a number of stories about women to whom motherhood does not come easily, or in easily recognizable ways, if indeed it comes at all. In all of these stories of the mother without child, the relational aspect of motherhood is disrupted or thwarted and thus thrown into relief.

This figure of the mother without child usefully derives from and elucidates a broad spectrum of experience, ranging from the literal circumstances of a woman who loses or relinquishes custody of a biological child to the psychological condition of a woman who miscarries or never becomes pregnant. One difficulty I faced early on in this project was deciding how to limit the field, how to decide which stories to consider. The more I looked, the more instances I found of what I was looking for. In what follows, I explain why I think the widespread appearance of the mother without child in fiction today is overdetermined and how we might begin to account for that overdetermination. But at the outset, it may be helpful to specify more precisely what kind of stories, what kind of female characters the rubric "mother without child" will comprise.

I have borrowed this rubric from Jane Rule's Desert of the Heart, a novel that is the principal subject of the next chapter and also the earliest of the works I include here (thereby constituting a terminus a quo for the relative notion of "contemporary fiction" in the present instance). In Rule's novel, "Mother without Child" is the title of a sketch in progress. With multiple ironies, it also describes the two main characters, who occupy one extreme of that broad spectrum: they are lesbians who, voluntarily in one case and involuntarily in the other, have

no biological children but are perceived to have a fraught relationship to motherhood and to behave in ways that sometimes resist and are at other times conventionally associated with maternal practice. In chapters 3, 4, and 5 of this study, I trace the figure of the mother without child through a series of biological mothers in novels by the betterknown American authors Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, and Margaret Atwood, whose plots entail the loss of a child or children. The fictional circumstances that disrupt or endanger the mother-child relationship are usually traumatic but highly various. The mothers in these narratives murder their own children, send them away temporarily or give them up for adoption, abandon them, or lose them to an oppressive state. The lines between voluntary and involuntary loss are often, but not always, blurred, as are perceptions about motives. In several of these stories, women arguably act out of fierce maternal love, although in some cases their intentions are misunderstood, and in others those intentions remain unknown, unclear, or unspoken. Finally, in the last chapter of this study, I turn to several novels by the British writer Fay Weldon in which the recurring figure of the mother without child includes not only women traumatically separated from the children they have borne but also instances elsewhere on the spectrum: a woman whose child is stillborn, a woman who murders another woman's infant with severe birth defects, a mother-to-be, a mother whose child is threatened by American presidential politics, and a childless woman who discovers, in her sixties, that she has four clones, thirty years younger but otherwise identical to herself.

These instances of the mother without child by no means exhaust the supply of contemporary stories that could qualify for inclusion under this rubric and that might confirm, extend, or possibly contradict the conclusions I draw. I suspect that most readers, like most colleagues and friends to whom I have described my work over the past few years, will immediately think of characters and stories that I could or should have added or chosen instead. This reaction testifies not only to the limits of any one study and the misjudgments I may have made in deciding what to use but also to the fact that the scope of my concern here is large and still growing and that much remains to be charted. The issues raised in these novels are prominent and pervasive, and the contemporary story of the mother without child, called to attention, demands future considerations.

Primary among my principles of selection was the importance of considering texts that come from more than one of the subcultures comprising that loose collective we think of as first-world contemporary fiction in English. (Quite apparently, the inclusion of some of the "subcultures" I treat also calls into question any notion of a static, monolithic first world.) Although motherhood is often spoken of in terms of culturally homogenizing and universalizing ideals and standards, stories of the mother without child individually and collectively refuse to let us forget that experiences of motherhood depart from the theories that would inform them, and they also insist on embedding mothers in specific historical communities and groups. Looking at somewhat different communities and groups throws into relief the ways in which explicit norms and tacit assumptions about motherhood are compromised by varieties of material circumstances, especially in periods of rapid social and technological change and cultural clashes.^[39]

I should say at the outset what will soon be apparent and possibly frustrating to readers of this study: I propose no single meaning to these narratives of thwarted motherhood. These novels and stories raise a variety of questions and represent a variety of takes on that most complicated, confounding aspect of motherhood, its relational nature. Wherever we find examples of the mother without child, meaning has to be constructed locally, specifically, in particular contexts. At the same time, I aim to posit some vital common ground. The number and range of instances that can be aptly described by this rubric, despite their differences, argue for treating them as speaking together, although not always in one voice, to concerns that cut across divisions and differences.

Given both material circumstances and the rise of the feminist critique of motherhood, the appearance of so many fictional stories about women distanced in one way or another from their actual or potential children might appear overdetermined and predictable, and it might seem that we don't need to look very hard to understand the phenomenon: women are writing about loss because they are losing their children, literally and figuratively. I by no means wish to gloss over this concern. To paraphrase one of the characters in Rule's Desert of the Heart, the relational aspect of motherhood, so long taken for granted, may no longer be granted. Even the biological connection, once a solid starting place for thinking about motherhood, has recently been attenuated by the most scientifically advanced conceptive technologies. As

many feminist critiques of medicine and technology have argued, this is in fact not an entirely new development; mothers and midwives have been increasingly disconnected from childbirth over the course of the last hundred years (or more).^[40] Some of the latest, more dramatic medical advances have seemed to put new measures of control over procreation into many western women's hands. But what can be viewed as an unprecedented opportunity for women can also be perceived as a threat to born and unborn children. Anxiety over how best to use (or limit) the control women have or want manifests itself most visibly, perhaps, in the abortion wars. Others, meanwhile, have pointed out how uncertain and ephemeral the benefits of reproductive technology may be.^[41] For some women, anxiety verges on panic when the relentless progress of technology used for conceptive purposes threatens to reappropriate power for the medical profession and at the same time further fragments and controls the experience of motherhood. The ambiguities of medical and technological developments are reflected in the tension between the simultaneously emerging discourses of fetal rights and women's rights. Despite their opposing political stances, both movements tend to call into question the ideal of mother with child.

For increasingly greater numbers of women worries about either fetal rights or women's rights are a luxury; the urgent issues are how a mother can survive and take care of her living children's most basic needs. Poverty puts pressure on the middle-class norms of maternalchild relations, and unthinkable numbers of children and their increasingly isolated, unsupported mothers are visibly at risk in ways that are heartbreaking and resistant to solution. Apologists for "family values" often ignore the actualities of maternal work, and hence they too may stand between the (biological) mother and any means of meeting the needs of an actual child. As the editors of a special issue of Signs on "Mothering and Patriarchy" have observed, "Sentimentalized tropes of idealized mothering—endlessly loving, serenely healing, emotionally rewarding—have no counterpart in a political and social reality where the labor of caring is devalued, unsupported, and unseen, and where mothers are more likely to be endlessly burdened, anxious, and blamed. Biological motherhood, as a discrete and exemplary feminine event, is elevated, providing of course it occurs within the prescribed cultural scenario."^[42] Novels by and about lesbians, African Americans, and Native Americans show with particular clarity that the mother without child has historically been the brutal norm rather than the tragic ex-

ception. As previously underrepresented voices struggle to speak, and as we look more carefully for places in which they have already spoken, it should come as no surprise that we repeatedly hear sad stories about rupture and loss.

It might alternatively be argued that second-wave feminism itself is chiefly responsible, in one way or another, for the rise of stories about mothers who give up or lose their children.^[43] Most obviously, in its critique of motherhood as a site of female oppression, feminism, like birth control, seems to threaten to take women away from the children they bear, or ought to bear. More subtly, perhaps, these stories might be read as the work of the feminist-as-daughter, unable to forgive her own patriarchal mother—either for abandoning the daughter, or for failing to let her go—and barely able to imagine herself as a feminist mother or to represent anything but the anguish of motherhood that threatens from all sides. It has been suggested that feminists may devise distancing strategies to avoid confronting their ambivalence about mothering.^[44] In Ruddick's view, something like this may be going on, and the resultant distance between feminist mother and child explains the limits of feminist critique: "Partly because they wrote as daughters, feminist writing about mothers wrote very little about the children mothers think and speak about."^[45]

Given such ominous circumstances, it might seem inevitable and tragic that we find so many stories about the mother without child, all serving to reflect or critique the ways in which the mother-child bond is (and perhaps for some should be) currently loosened and endangered, if not severed. Why do the novels I consider need further analysis, then? Though I would not wish to deny that these stories express anxieties about a multifaceted, sometimes tragic reality, they offer more than reflection and critique. These narratives can be read in ways that do not forget or transcend but rather remember and look within the sense of loss and impasse. In doing so they insist that we reconsider our assumptions about what motherhood is "really" like, that we resist fundamental theories and practices that would oppress mothers and divide women, and even that we pause before assuming that "the" maternal voice or an autonomous maternal subject can or should be sought.

These stories address several general, often overlapping issues. Both conservative and radical definitions of mother oversimplify in assuming that the "mother's" position or identity depends on the presence of the child to whom the maternal figure gives birth, nurturance,

protection, and so on. Common experiences alone tell us that there is something left out if we fail to take account of the many moments at which a person might act as, feel like, or be considered a mother in the absence of a child. Before a baby is born, a woman is often thought of or thinks of herself as a mother; whether or not she ever gives birth, both traditional pronatalist and some feminist assumptions define every woman as a potential mother. When a child grows up and stops requiring maternal protection, takes responsibility for caring for himself or herself, or fails to offer affectionate reverence, that child still has a mother, and that mother may still identify herself (or himself) as such. When a mother loses or gives up custody of a child, or gives up hope that a child will live and so stops doing the work required to keep that child alive, or even acts to take back the life she has given in order to protect the child from suffering or to defend some other principle, that person may still be or wish to be considered a mother. In any of these instances where the child is absent, where the relation is, for good or for bad, temporarily or permanently, voluntarily or involuntarily broken off, what does motherhood consist of, what does a "mother" feel like? Does a woman without a child simply become (at last or again) a subject, an autonomous self, free from the claims and contradictions of motherhood? Or does she suffer a tragic, irreparable trauma? The story of the mother without child addresses these questions and thereby brings us closer to that frequently stated goal of feminist study: seeing maternal points of view more fully, hearing maternal voices more clearly and variously, understanding maternal subjectivity more deeply and complexly.

At another level of abstraction, the figure of the mother without child expresses the complexity of maternal consciousness by literalizing aspects of the unconscious. American feminism of the 1970s and early 1980s has been critiqued for ignoring the unconscious and positing a "one dimensional," unitary female self.^[46] Stories of the mother without child confront without flinching the often-ignored hate, the fantasies of aggression, the desire even to kill her child that is allegedly repressed by conventional accounts of maternity (including feminist accounts). This dimension of maternal experience is brought out in Elsa First's recent discussion of Winnicott's belief that "hate," for both mothers and psychoanalysts, is a necessary element of "self-respect." As First says, Winnicott argues that the mother must acknowledge her hatred if the child is to come to terms with its own aggression and that

"maternal resilience" depends on the mother's ability to "play" with her aggression, to recognize the "constructive energy" of anger.^[47] The fiction of the mother without child functions in some circumstances as a way of exorcising fear and guilt and even "playing" with aggression, although the stories may not look "playful" in any recognizably lighthearted sense.

Alternatively, if we are trying to take into account the "unconscious" of mothering, the motif of the mother without child speaks to the perception of recent psychoanalytic approaches that stress the constitutive division of maternity, the mother as "site of an originary, constitutive splitting."^[48] Along similar lines, we might consider that the intersubjectivity of mother and child is, from the moment of birth, always and properly tentative and temporary as much as it is fiercely connected and interdependent. In her revisionary reading of Freud, Madelon Sprengnether has argued that the separation of mother and child, again considered at the level of the unconscious, should be seen as fundamental in human development in a positive way: "Mother's 'desire' leads her away from her infant, and her absence in turn elicits the child's creativity."^[49] This can be put in less abstract terms: an important part of being a good mother by today's popular standards, as experts and mothers will attest, is knowing when and how to let go. If the mother's work entails preparing the child, from the moment of birth, for independence from caretakers, and thus paradoxically engaging in a relationship whose ultimate goal is greater disengagement, distance, or even dissolution, the story of the mother without child may figure instead of repressing this paradox.

Yet another tightly connected concern involves the perception that the child has come first and overshadowed the mother in the most influential theories. As many have noted, Freud's is an infantile theory of human development; since Freud, it has been difficult if not impossible to express anything but the child's point of view of the maternal object, which later becomes the adult's. As Knowles puts it, it is hard to see the "reality" of mothers' feelings, including their ambivalence, their desire, or even their dislike of bearing and caring for children, in "a world full of adults whose inner children feel impoverished, who still yearn for the good mothering of their fantasies."^[50] Children really do need to come first, at many points, and it is hard in practice as in theory not to identify emotionally and rhetorically with their needs. If we do so, however, we may continue to ignore the other half of the

relationship. The story of the mother without child frees us, experimentally and provisionally, to focus on the mother, and in doing so to see her as a multifaceted and changeful subject. If narrative theories move away from the preoedipal mother-child bond as the source and site of literary activity, this move may find its narrative form in these stories.

Finally, in order to understand and attend to the emergence at this point in time of a new significance to the fictional figure of the mother without child, we need to set these narratives in relief against the old stories, the available plots and standing myths about mothers who lose their children or are threatened with such loss. My primary interest is stories about mothers without children, and stories need to be accounted for not only at the level of how they may represent, reflect, and resist current psychic and social realities or theories, but also in terms of how they engage available narrative patterns, in this case entering into and arguably revising a diachronic tradition of fictionally represented motherhood.

In western culture, stories about the mother without child are not new. Abandonment and separation are common themes, although the point of view from which these stories have been told has been the point of view of the child, broadly speaking, rather than the mother. Most of these stories, perhaps concomitantly, have not sought or served to scrutinize the implications of the relational status of maternal identity, to dislodge conventional, naturalizing assumptions, or to help us see or see with the mother. In fact, quite the opposite is true: the loss or threatened loss of the other member of the dyad, the child, has often been used to define and stabilize a particularly disabling meaning of mother rather than to open motherhood up to analysis, to acknowledge let alone express the perspective of a woman who mothers, or to tell the particulars of her experience.

A foundational example of this old story is the biblical tale of King Solomon and two women who both claim to be the mother of the same child. The women are identified as harlots or prostitutes who live alone together with their babies; the story begins when one of them brings the other to Solomon's court to claim that in the middle of the night the other woman accidentally smothered her own child and then switched the babies, taking the living child for her own. Relatively early in his kingship, Solomon uses this case to prove his sagacity, determining who the true mother is by putting (or pretending to put) in im-

minent danger the life of a child that they both claim. His strategy, indeed, anticipates what I suggest is going on in today's fictional explorations of motherhood: to find out "the truth" about "mother," he creates the fiction that her worst fears for her child are about to be realized. The constitutional paradox or double bind for the "real" mother here is as clear, at least to a feminist reading, as the cleverness of the King's ploy: to claim a child and prove her identity as a lawful mother, to demonstrate the capacity to protect that child as a good mother naturally should, a woman must go so far as to give a child up—that is, to stop being a mother. This is a familiar plot. Women are pitted against each other in a competition for the scarce commodity that proves their fertility and, indirectly, their heterosexual activity and availability. The "good" mother is positioned so that she stands in opposition to a quintessentially "bad" mother, a woman so dangerous that she causes the death of her own child and is willing to see a child murdered rather than give up the irrational struggle for possession. The "good" woman and mother can speak only to erase her authority, to renounce possession, to disown her desire; a mother is someone who sacrifices something she has and wants, or is willing to do so, for the good of another. As we all might have learned from the case of Baby M and Mary Beth Whitehead, to want a child too much—so much that one breaks the law—is still to prove that one isn't really a fit mother, that one can't subordinate one's own needs for the child to the best interests of the child. The good mother understands the limits of her love and power and polices the dangers of maternal excess.

In thinking about Solomon's wisdom in this context and going back to the Old Testament to look again at how, exactly, the story was formulated, I noted something that struck me for the first time as peculiar: from the biblical narrative, it is impossible to tell which of the two nameless women—woman A, the one who brought the case to Solomon in the first place and accused her housemate of child stealing, or B, the one who was so accused—turned out to be the "real" mother, the one whose child was alive (or, in my reading, the one who was willing to sacrifice her own relationship to the child in order to save that child and identify herself). It would seem to be an odd omission of detail, but it is in fact consistent with the understanding that this story, like so many, obscures rather than represents anything about either woman's particular character or practical circumstances. The point is patriarchal wisdom in its starkest, purest form, founded on the construction of

self-sacrificial motherhood and control over women whose maternity could otherwise manifest independent sexual and reproductive activity. Tellingly, these are "harlots" living alone, outside the marital bond, on the borders of the law.^[51] The point is not to represent maternal subjectivity or maternal experience, and certainly not to explore female desire or agency.

If we focus on these latter-day concerns, we see what we already know about patriarchal wisdom: Solomon, its representative, is not interested in the truth or in the feelings and needs of the women in question. We might also wonder whether he is as wise as he seems, or whether he has been duped. Solomon misses or is unconcerned with the fact that both women are victims. One of them has already lost her infant, and if the mother of the dead child is in fact B, the woman who stands accused of child stealing, then her crime may be understood, if not excused, as a sign of her grief, perhaps even her denial and delusion. Or suppose that woman A is not telling the truth, that she is actually the one whose child died in the night, who then thinks up the clever idea of bringing woman B and B's still living baby to court, falsely claiming that B has stolen that baby. In this case, we might still want to see A as deranged with grief, but her stratagem would suggest that she has become canny, not irrational, in the face of loss. In either event, it seems altogether possible that Solomon (or the teller of the story, who equates the self-sacrificial woman with the mother of the living child) could be outsmarted in another way. How do we know that the mother who gets the child isn't just the better performer, the quicker witted one who understands what words to say in order to prove motherhood? Perhaps the "real" mother of the child is like Lear's truthful daughter, Cordelia, sure that her love is more ponderous than her tongue. Or perhaps she suffers from postpartum depression and, in a moment of great stress, standing before the King, almost welcomes the solution his sword pretends to offer.

We can, it seems, be sure of only one thing: the "patriarchal mother"—a term used by feminist critics to disparage a mother who is complicitous with the system that devalues motherhood and oppresses women—wins the case and gets to keep the child. This, again, is the point of the story.^[52] But how might feminist retellings of the Solomon story alter this point? In such revisions, maternal identity as formed in patriarchal contexts might still be tested by the loss or threatened loss of the child, but in that testing new definitions and alternative plots

might emerge. In the process, the woman who refuses to perform like a mother might well be the heroine, the one who resists patriarchal law and so ends up losing her child. Indeed, all of the stories of the mother without child that I consider here do just this. They call into question the implications, for women, of Solomon's long-standing wisdom, with its troubling presupposition that, as one Old Testament scholar puts it, "the presence of a love that knows not the demands of ego, of possessiveness, or even of justice reveals motherhood."^[53]

Other familiar stories about the voluntary or involuntary loss of a child reiterate the patriarchal definitions of motherhood fundamental to Solomon's wisdom. In Greek myth, mothers often have real power, but typically that power is horrifying and may be turned against a child or children by a vengeful mother such as Medea or Procne or Althea. Somewhat less frequently, a powerful mother is turned into a victim by the loss of a child, as in the story of Demeter. In several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, mothers who abandon their children are invariably portrayed as rogues (like Moll Flanders or Emma Bovary) or victims (perhaps the most pathetic of whom is Isabel Vane in East Lynne ); in both categories, they often suffer terrible punishments.^[54] Recent stories use the loss of a child to represent threatening social change and then reconsolidate a conventional definition of the good mother (as in Miller's The Good Mother ).^[55] Or the story of lost children is used to suggest different definitions of mother, but ones that bring us no closer to a particular woman's point of view. For example, in a recent discussion of maternal identity with an ostensibly far different notion of motherhood in mind, one that aims to de-essentialize the concept of the "mother" and lay claim to "parental" status for fathers, Thomas Laqueur demonstrates his wisdom in a way oddly analogous to Solomon's method. Laqueur suggests that since "facts" (such as whose body bore the child) can no longer prove parenthood, emotions can. To show that "mothering" today is or should be gender-neutral and that fathers do as much emotional work as mothers (or in some cases more), Laqueur cites two instances in which the loss or threatened loss of a child proves parental (or paternal) identity: Gladstone's moving account of sitting for days by the bedside of his dying daughter, and Laqueur's own sadness when his wife miscarried (and was less upset, according to him, than he as the prospective father was).^[56]

Such stories about mothers—or in this last instance, fathers—whose relational identity is at once disrupted and confirmed by loss of the

child, interesting and affecting as they may be, do not seriously challenge normative, categorical definitions of mother, although they may, read from the point of view of feminist critique, expose their faultlines and constructedness. Nor do these familiar stories help us to learn more about the possibilities or implications of a maternal subject somehow distinct from or independent of a relation to a child. They confirm that there is no concept of mother unless, as Ruddick says, there is a concept of child . The longevity of the Solomon plot also confirms how commanding stories may be, how much they may serve to mold and interpret experience in particular ways.

In the new stories that I consider, the loss or absence of a child may or may not still be presented as tragic or heartrending, and it may or may not literalize a fundamental aspect of human psychology, a "liberatory" political agenda, or a set of deplorable historical circumstances. The important difference, however, is this: these fictional women who are mothers (actual or, in some cases, potential) and their conventional maternal capacities, including their relational, nurturant, and protective abilities, are not utterly devalued or destroyed by the loss of the child, although they may be more or less damaged and are always changed in some way. And so the story, insofar as we know it, does not serve to confirm or disprove a fixed and fundamentally conventional or unconventional maternal (or parental) identity, be it one that is unified around bonding and self-sacrifice or divided between self and child, presymbolic and symbolic positions, and so on. On the contrary, it leads toward demystification, denaturalization, and reevaluation of the norms and needs of motherhood. It insists that the position of the mother without child is not only a traumatic present reality but also a logical impossibility, a taboo, and therefore a site of instability that facilitates thinking about motherhood and women beyond official logic and conventional possibility. It exemplifies precisely what Butler calls "subversion within the terms of the law,"^[57] representing the woman who, unlike the patriarchal mother, is "a mother and outside the father's law at the same time."^[58]

The law, in assuming that a mother bears, takes care of, and is revered by a child, at once presupposes and oversimplifies the meaning of the relational aspect of motherhood. Most (but not all) of the female characters in the stories I consider have hoped consciously or unconsciously at some point in their lives to follow this law, but for various reasons they are unable to do so or choose not to do so. In the old sto-

ries, a mother is known to the law only by her willingness to sacrifice everything, even her relation to the child; in them, the mother without child can only be either a criminal who breaks the law or a victim of circumstances or evil forces. In the new stories, as we shall see, she can subvert these categories of criminal or victim, bad or good mother, by not fitting comfortably into either or by occupying both at the same time.^[59] Emerging in the last three decades in conjunction with both the material crises of contemporary maternal practice and the feminist critique of motherhood, the fictional death, threatened death, or absence of a child thereby serves as the instigation to different ways of hearing, knowing, and being mothers.