1. This fragmentation is noted by Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahler Kaplan, eds., Representations of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994): "The quest for the symbolic control of the term mother powerfully illustrates how language defines and constructs reality. Is she the egg that holds the genetic code, the womb that sustains and nurtures, or the person who practices maternal work?" (19).

2. I cite from The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "mother." For the historical introduction, see pp. viii-x.

3. Other, newer dictionaries add to the definition in ways that merit more discussion than is relevant here. The development of what the American Heritage Dictionary calls "vulgar slang," whereby mother refers to "something considered extraordinary, as in disagreeableness, size, or intensity" (e.g., the mother of all wars), is particularly worth further feminist exploration. Notably, the American Heritage and other dictionaries follow the OED 's lead in offering a second lexical entry, mother 2, to refer to "a stringy slime composed of yeast cells and bacteria that forms on the surface of fermenting liquids."

4. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), pp. 17, 22. It would be tedious to cite all the definitions that stress this relational identity, but it is widespread, not particular in any way to Ruddick's work. To note just one more example, see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, quoting Alison M. Jaggar: "As a working definition, I propose looking at mothering as a historically and culturally variable relationship 'in which one individual nurtures and cares for another.'" Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983 ), P. 256, quoted in Glenn, "Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), P. 3.

5. For overviews that are helpful see Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto, "The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother," in Rethinking the Family, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982), pp. 54-73; Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), chaps. 7-9; Margaret A. Simons, "Motherhood, Feminism, and Identity," in Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminism Philosophy, ed. Azizah Y. Al-Hibri and Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 156-74. Simons, among others, argues that the gap between feminist repudiation and recuperation of motherhood is less "absolute" than it is sometimes said to be, and she discusses the possibility of a more "integrative feminist resolution" of this opposition.

6. Deborah Babcox and Madeline Belkin, comps. Liberation Now! Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement (New York: Dell, 1971), p. 106.

7. This point is made in Deborah Rosenfelt and Judith Stacey's review essay, "Second Thoughts on the Second Wave": "The reaction to the fifties' cloying cult of motherhood freed millions of women like us to consider motherhood a choice rather than an unavoidable obligation, but it may also have encouraged many to deny, or to defer dangerously long, our own desires for domesticity and maternity. One of the ironic effects of this history is the current obsession with maternity and children that seems to pervade aging feminist circles, a romanticization that occasionally rivals that of the fifties." Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (summer 1987): 351.

8. Interesting critiques of various types of eighties recuperation are found in works such as Parveen Adams, "Mothering," in The Woman in Question, ed. Adams and Elizabeth Cowie (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), PP. 315-27; Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), especially chapter 1, "The Maternal and the Feminine," pp. 21-78; Patrice DiQuinzio, "Exclusion and Essentialism in Feminist Theory: The Problem of Mothering," Hypatia 8, no. 3 (summer 1993): 1-20; Janice Doane and Devon Hedges, From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the "Good Enough" Mother (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Ann Ferguson, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Male Dominance (London: Pandora Press, 1989); Jane Gallop, "Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism," Critical Inquiry 13 (winter 1987): 314-29; Sarah Hoagland, "Some Thoughts about 'Caring,'" in Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), pp. 245-61; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Domna Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 157-82.

9. Several feminist critics have made this observation. In the words of Terri Apter, with reference to new feminist arguments in the eighties about why women should mother: "Where do they leave us? There is no going back, no prodigal's return to the kitchen, no fond farewell to the outside world. Yet how can we go forward in a working world created for man, but with a mother's responsibility?" Apter, Why Women Don't Have Wives: Professional Success and Motherhood (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. xi. Or as Susan Rubin Suleiman says in "On Maternal Splitting: A Propos of Mary Gordon's Men and Angels ": "Can we choose or discard at will our most deep-seated fantasies and self-representations? Do we dare, in a time of increasing social conservatism and/or disintegrating family life, to give up our sense of an absolutely privileged relationship with our children?" Suleiman, Signs 14, no. 1 (autumn 1988): 25-41. These are also the questions asked by all of the novels that I look at here.

10. Ann Snitow, "Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading," Feminist Review 40 (spring 1992): 32-51. For a briefer version, see "Motherhood—Reclaiming the Demon Texts," Ms, May/June 1991, 34-7. See also Snitow's "A Gender Diary," in Conflicts in Feminism, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 9-43. The notion of "impasse" has been current in feminist thinking about motherhood since the late seventies; for example, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English argued that feminism had already reached a theoretical impasse in this regard as early as 1978, in For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Experts' Advice to Women (New York: Doubleday, 1978). But I speak here of the more recent articulation of this impasse, which responds specifically to the various modes of eighties recuperation of motherhood. I take Snitow as a particularly persuasive voice in this regard, but there are others making equally interesting cases for the failures of feminism to carry through on its original insights. Frequently these are also arguments that seek to justify childlessness as an ethical choice in the wake of eighties backlash. See, for example, Carolyn M. Morell, Unwomanly Conduct: The Challenges of Intentional Childlessness (New York: Routledge, 1994): "The strong public feminist voice of the early 1970s, arguing that women could have good lives without motherhood, is barely a whisper today. A maternal revivalism has occurred over the past two decades within feminism as well as in the dominant culture" (xvi).

11. Snitow, "Feminism and Motherhood," p. 34. In Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), Alice Adams implies agreement with Snitow when she argues that although the "essentialism" of early feminists may have been misguided, "the visions contained in the seventies-era utopias . . . still represent some of the most advanced thinking [about mothering] produced in second-wave feminism" (177).

12. "Preface," Feminist Studies 20, no. 1 (spring 1994): 3.

13. My focus here is only on the original prose contributions. The two poems included in this section, by Joan Cusack Handler and Susan Ticky, are easier to understand as belonging under the rubric of "maternal scenarios," and the same may be said of Cora Kaplan's "Fictions of Feminism: Figuring the Maternal," Feminist Studies 20, no. 1 (spring 1994): 153-67, a review essay. Kaplan takes on what she sees as "a dangerous overinvestment in idealized fictions of maternal and sororal relations" in two books published in 1989, but because of the five-year time lag, this well-thought-out critique doesn't seem particularly new and is not meant to explore alternative feminist ways of thinking about motherhood in any detail.

14. Judith Kegan Gardiner, "Empathic Ways of Reading: Narcissism, Cultural Politics, and Russ's Female Man, " Feminist Studies 20, no. 1 (spring 1994): 91, 104.

15. Stacy Alaimo, "Cyborg and Ecofeminist Interventions: Challenges for an Environmental Feminism," Feminist Studies 20, no. 1 (spring 1994): 133.

16. Ibid., 149.

17. Molly Hite, "Mother Underground (Fiction)," Feminist Studies 20, no. 1 (spring 1994): 66.

18. Patrice DiQuinzio, "Exclusion and Essentialism," Hypatia 8, no. 3 (summer 1993): 12.

19. Jane Price Knowles, Motherhood: A Feminist Perspective, ed. Jane Price Knowles and Ellen Cole (New York: The Haworth Press, 1990), pp. 6-7.

20. Doane and Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva, p. 28.

21. Snitow makes a brief reference to Sue Miller's The Good Mother .

22. Biddy Martin, "Lesbian Practice and Changing Lesbian Identities," in Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates , ed. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 103.

23. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Suversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 148-9.

24. In "Why Novels Make Bad Mothers," Jessamyn Jackson argues that whereas the novel in its earliest forms in English was associated with prominent female authors, the status of women writers and the redefinition of the novel as "a preserve of masculine authority" can be precisely located in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Jackson, Novel 27, no. 2 (winter 1994): 161-73.

25. See, for example, Deanna L. Davis, "Feminist Critics and Literary Mothers: Daughters Reading Elizabeth Gaskell," Signs 17, no. 3 (1992): 507-32.

26. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). For an interesting critique of Homans, see Davis, "Feminist Critics," pp. 18-20.

27. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 10. Hereafter, page numbers to this volume are cited parenthetically.

28. Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

29. Rachel DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 61.

30. Susan Winnett, "Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure," PMLA 105, no. 3 (May 1990): 505-18.

31. Ellen G. Friedman, "Where are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon," PMLA 108, no. 3 (1993): 240-52.

32. Claire Kahane, "Questioning the Maternal Voice," Genders 3 (1988): 82-91. For a brief discussion of how metaphor also serves to create a "transitional space" as an alternative to the play space that the mother fails to create in Beloved and Sula, see Laurie Vickroy, "The Force Outside/The Force Inside: Mother-Love and Regenerative Spaces in Sula and Beloved, " Obsidian II 8, no. 2 (fall-winter 1993): 28-45.

33. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 161.

34. Ibid., p. 165.

35. Magdalene Redekop, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 8-10.

36. Cited from Alice Munro, The Progress of Love (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), emphasis added.

37. For a good exploration of the mother's inability to play games and tell jokes, see Tillie Olsen's story, "Tell Me a Riddle."

38. Sara Ruddick, "Thinking about Mothering—and Putting Maternal Thinking to Use," Women's Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4 (winter 1983): 5.

39. Since my goal was depth and specificity of analysis rather than coverage, I have not included all of the fictional subcultures (such as Asian American or Latina) where I think the figure of the mother without child is also being explored, and I have chosen only one author to represent the postwar encounter of pronatalism and feminism outside North America, in England.

40. See, for example, Angus McClaren, Reproductive Rituals (New York: Methuen, 1984) for discussion of the loss of women's control over reproduction from the sixteenth century on.

41. A few examples of the many books and essays debating this concern include Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women's Biology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Linda M. Whiteford and Marilyn L. Poland, eds., New Approaches to Human Reproduction (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); Michelle Stanworth, ed., Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood, and Medicine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Science as Culture 3, part 4, no. 17 (1993); Hilary Homans, ed., The Sexual Politics of Reproduction (Aldershot: Gower Publishing, 1985); Judith Rodin and Aila Collins, eds., Women and New Reproductive Technologies: Medical, Psychosocial, Legal, and Ethical Dilemmas (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991).

42. Jean F. O'Barr, Deborah Pope, and Mary Wyer, eds., introduction to Ties That Bind: Essays on Mothering and Patriarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199), p. 14.

43. As I noted earlier, some, like Rosenfelt and Stacey in "Second Thoughts on the Second Wave," have argued that "the current obsession" with motherhood is an effect of the earlier repudiation, which caused women to deny maternal instincts. If this is so, then certainly stories about lost children could be explained as a manifestation of that denial, a projection of the sense of loss. Rosenfelt makes this point explicitly in another essay when she speaks of the "sense of terrible loss" she finds in what she identifies as the "post-feminist" novel: "Though often they grieve explicitly for the loss of a child, I am convinced that the less tangible loss they mourn is the certainty of the feminist dream, the myth of progress toward liberation surely attainable within the immediate future." Deborah Rosenfelt, "Feminism, 'Post-feminism,' and Contemporary Women's Fiction," in Traditions and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 287. Nancy Miller, in an interesting footnote, speaks of the "double truth of liberation and deferral" that marks the experience of motherhood for many feminists, including herself. Miller, "Decades," in Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 46. Compare my argument in the epilogue that the figure of the mother without child represents a "double strategy," expressing the need both to resist pronatalism and to revalue maternal experience.

44. Davis, "Feminist Critics," p. 513.

45. Ruddick, "Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth," in Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, Representations of Motherhood, p. 30. Here Ruddick also insists, again, that "maternal concepts can be reflective of mothers, and a help to them, only if they are anchored in thinking about children."

46. For examples of such criticism, see Lisa C. Bower, "'Mother' in Law: Conceptions of Mother and the Maternal in Feminism and Feminist Legal Theory," differences 3, no. 1 (1991): 20-38, and the introduction to Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, Representations of Motherhood, pp. 1-25.

47. Elsa First, "Mothering, Hate, and Winnicott," in Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, Representations of Motherhood, pp. 147-61.

48. Mary Jacobus, "Dora and the Pregnant Madonna," in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Mary Jacobus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 147. See also Suleiman, "On Maternal Splitting," pp. 25-41. For yet another suggestive discussion of the unconscious and motherhood that takes a very different tack, see Mardy Ireland, Reconceiving Woman: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). Ireland's argument is too complex to summarize here, but notably she contends, as I would, that the current uncertainty about what motherhood means serves to open up what she calls "a psychic 'space' wherein additional signifiers of female identity may emerge into culture" (135). Childless women in particular, Ireland proposes, are "an apt metaphor of our postmodern times" and "the decentered or divided nature of the self" (142); as "other women," holding "a third position" in the gender system and representing the paradox of absence, they also call needed attention to "the undervalued presence of the unconscious" (145-6).

49. Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 234.

50. Knowles, introduction to Motherhood: A Feminist Perspective, pp. 6-7. This point has been made by many others. For one formulation, see Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, eds., preface to The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell 1985): "Psychoanalysis, whether it posits in the beginning maternal presence or absence, has yet to develop a story of the mother as other than the object of the infant's desire" (25). See also Suleiman's essay "Writing and Motherhood," in The (M) Other Tongue, p. 356, and Jane Gallop's "Reading the Mother Tongue."

51. In a chapter that includes a brief discussion of 1 Kings 3:16-28, Danna N. Fewell and David M. Gunn discuss the use of the metaphor of "whoring" for religious apostasy and point out an irony: "female prostitutes as a class constitute a serious challenge to the patriarchal control of women's bodies"; although prostitutes serve men's needs, they also represent "the possibility of a woman controlling her own sexuality, her own body." Fewell and Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible's First Story (Nashville: Abington, 1993), P. 170. This is an issue that Fay Weldon addresses extensively in Praxis, a novel I consider in the final chapter of this volume. For another discussion of the Hebrew term zona ("prostitute") and the movement from a characteristic associated specifically with women, "whoring," to a metaphor for the bad behavior of Israel, see Phyllis Bird, "'To Play the Harlot': An Inquiry into an Old Testament Metaphor," in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 75-94. For this and other references to the Solomon story in religious studies, I am indebted to Anne McGuire. For recent contributions to the discussion among legal feminists about the topic of motherhood, see Martha Fineman and Isabel Karpin, eds., Mother in Law: Feminist Theory and the Legal Regulation of Motherhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), and Martha Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (New York: Routledge, 1995).

52. One of the most fully developed treatments of the patriarchal mother is in Nicole Brossard's These Our Mothers (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984); see my discussion of this argument in the following chapter. For another brief discussion, see Suleiman, Subversive Intent, pp. 163 ff.

53. Not all feminist readings of the Solomon story would see it my way. This quotation is in fact taken from Phyllis Trible's pioneering feminist analysis of the Old Testament story, in which Trible more or less accepts the model of motherhood that I have critiqued here. Trible assumes that A was both the woman whose child was alive and the woman who brought the case to court and that the other woman, the bad mother B, is "the agent of both death and deceit" in this tale. The king is credited with exposing the fact that both women are locked in a power struggle as long as each claims possession of the fruits of her womb; only when compassion motivates the real mother to sacrifice justice for life does the possibility of "transcendent love which brings truth and life" appear. See Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), pp. 31-3.

54. For a brief overview of East Lynne and other novels that punish the mother who abandons her children, see Rosie Jackson's Mothers Who Leave (London: Pandora, 1994), pp. 50-7. It is difficult to find instances of more subtle literary treatments of the mother who abandons her child, but one interesting text that merits further feminist discussion is Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan .

55. As Ann Kaplan suggests, "liberatory discourses" about issues like single motherhood, female sexuality, and custody of children may exist "in complex relation" to something she calls "a renewed sentimentalizing of motherhood," and Sue Miller's The Good Mother (New York: Harper and Row, 1986) is a case in point of such sentimentality. As Kaplan also points out, "mothering is presented as a woman's only satisfying activity. Anna is destroyed when she loses primary custody of her child." Kaplan, "Sex, Work, and Motherhood: Maternal Subjectivity in Recent Visual Culture," in Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, Representations of Motherhood, p. 262. For a discussion of Hollywood treatments of mothers who give up their children, such as Kramer versus Kramer, see Jackson, Mothers Who Leave, pp. 65-76.

56. Thomas Laqueur, "The Facts of Fatherhood," in Hirsch and Fox, Conflicts in Feminism, 205-21. See also Ruddick's response to this essay in the same volume, pp. 222-33.

57. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 93.

58. Suleiman, Subversive Intent, p. 166.

59. For a usefully comparable argument that lesbians should practice an "elemental resistance to being either included or excluded" in the category of the family, with particular referencence to legal practice and theory, see Ruthann Robson, "Resisting the Family: Repositioning Lesbians in Legal Theory," Signs 19, no. 4 (summer 1994): 975-96.

1. For a recent critique of current social reform from a lesbian separatist point of view, see Jackie Anderson, "Separatism, Feminism, and the Betrayal of Reform," Signs 19 (1994): 437-48.

2. B. Drummond Ayres Jr., writing about the Sharon Bottoms case in "Judge's Decision in Custody Case Raises Concerns," The New York Times, September 9, 1993, P. A16. It is interesting to note that the child's name in this custody suit is rarely mentioned, whereas the most publicized custody case of the year goes by the child's name: the Baby Jessica case. This might be because we name a story after its perceived victim. Or it might be because the only really newsworthy mother is the "bad" mother, and while it's clear that as a lesbian Sharon Bottoms is "bad," it's harder to say which is the bad mother—or which is the real mother—in the Baby Jessica case (as in the even more famous case of Baby M). Naming the case after the baby deflects attention away from the more problematic question of who the mother is.

3. This point is confirmed from two different directions in Ellen Lewin's 1993 study, Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), and Harriet Edwards's 1989 study, How Could You? Mothers without Custody of Their Children (Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1989). Lewin looks at custodial mothers who try to stay out of court by concealing their lesbianism; Edwards surveys lesbians without custody and observes that " None of the lesbian women tried to gain custody in the courts, and most of them said the major, if not sole, reason for that decision was their sexual preferences and their awareness that such a preference has almost always precluded success in a custody contest" (54).

4. Audre Lorde, "Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting 1986," in Politics of the Heart: A Lesbian Parenting Anthology, ed. Sandra Pollack and Jeanne Vaughn (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1987), p. 310.

5. Bonnie Zimmerman, "Lesbians Like This and That: Some Notes on Lesbian Criticism for the Nineties," in New Lesbian Criticism, ed. Sally Munt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 3.

6. See Marilyn Frye, "Lesbian Community: Heterodox Congregation," in Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism, 1976-1992 (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1992), pp. 120-3.

7. Anderson, "Separatism, Feminism, and Reform," p. 446.

8. Jeffner Allen, Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations (Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1986), pp. 61-88.

9. Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, by Elly Bulkin, Minne Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Long Haul Press, 1984), p. 27

10. Ibid., p. 39. For another example of a woman writing from the position of a lesbian who gives up custody of her children, seemingly less reluctantly than Pratt, see Lucia Valeska, "If All Else Fails, I'm Still a Mother," in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984), pp. 70-8. Valeska describes herself as comparable to that contradiction in terms, the mother without child, that I explore in this study: "I am a mother and then again I am not" (70). She sees her position as both personal and political and argues that transferring custody is an option women should consider: "It is the surest, quickest, most personal survival. It is also a political statement" (75). She adds, however, that the "childfree" have a responsibility to take on child care.

11. Theresa de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 17-39.

12. For a classic description of this view, see Frank S. Caprio, Variations in Sexual Behavior (New York: Citadel, 1955). I am indebted to Kate Adams's work in "Making the World Safe for the Missionary Position: Images of the Lesbian in Post-World War II America," in Lesbian Texts and Contexts, ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 255-74, for calling my attention to this and other works that contextualize Rule's 1964 novel.

13. Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Faultline (Tallahassee: The Naiad Press, 1982), p. 8.

14. Meg Turner, "Two-Part Inventions: Knowing What We Know," in Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Refraining Resistance, ed. Carol Gilligan, Annie G. Rogers, and Deborah L. Toman (New York: Haworth Press, 1991), p. 163.

15. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," Signs 5 (1980): 183.

16. See Ann Ferguson's critique of "compulsory heterosexuality" arguments of Rich, Charlotte Bunch, Julia Penelope, and others. She sees these as guilty of "false universalism" and points out that if a girl's original love for her mother is based on social fact (women do the mothering in most cultures), then neither lesbian nor heterosexual preference can be seen as "natural." Ferguson, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Male Dominance (London: Pandora Press, 1989), PP. 189-93. Compare Mardy Ireland's more general critique of the emphasis on motherhood in the kind of feminist work associated with the Stone Center and an "ethics of care" model: "The feminist interpersonal-social learning perspective can appear to overemphasize and overidealize the mother-daughter bond to such a degree that it is unimaginable why or how a woman would ever chose not to become a mother herself, or how she could ever develop a positive sense of identity if childbearing is denied her for physical reasons." Ireland, Reconceiving Women: Separating Motherhood from Female Identity (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), P. 103. The bad mother is attended to in theoretical work like Melanie Klein's, assumed by a host of mother-blaming arguments, or critiqued as an effect of motherhood under patriarchy by feminists including Rich herself.

17. See Rosemary Curb, "Core of the Apple: Mother-Daughter Fusion/Separation in Three Recent Lesbian Plays," in Jay and Glasgow, Lesbian Texts and Contexts, pp. 355-76, for a discussion of three plays in which we see the common pattern—lesbian daughter, straight mother—and the further presumption that "coming out" is equivalent to separation from the mother, so that the lesbian daughter's fear is a type of every woman's fear. Curb concludes by emphasizing the importance and difficulty of separation in standard terms: "Mothers and daughters can never be entirely separated. The healthier the separation of mother and daughter, the more likely the lesbian daughter can form loving bonds with other women. Lovers can never replace the mother but always shadow her in some fashion. In healthy lesbian relationships both women mother the other out of the strength of their love rather than the weakness of mutually unfulfilled needs" (374).

18. In "Lesbians Choosing Children: The Personal is Political Revisited," in Pollack and Vaughn, Politics of the Heart, p. 50, Nancy Polikoff notes that lesbians who choose to mother rarely claim that lesbian childrearing is superior to traditional childrearing, or that raising children will enable the lesbian mother to put her politics into practice.

19. Martha Gimenez, "Feminism, Pronatalism, and Motherhood," in Trebilcot, Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, p. 293.

20. Barbara Love and Elizabeth Shanklin, "The Answer Is Matriarchy," in Trebilcot, Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, p. 277.

21. Nicole Brossard, These Our Mothers, or: The Disintegrating Chapter (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984), P. 26.

22. The kind of symbolic mother Brossard imagines is also described in Penelope J. Engelbrecht's discussion of Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood's "Turning to Woman," in "'Lifting Belly Is a Language: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject," Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (1990): 85-113. Speaking of a line from Lotbiniere-Harwood's poetry, "the womb is our first context," Engelbrecht says that "womb" isn't an "essential element," but rather "symbolizes an abstract, rather than a physical thing . . . 'the womb' is but de Lotbiniere-Harwood's sign for language, knowledge, context, . . . process. Not an end, but a means to an end"(107-8).

23. Alice Parker, "Nicole Brossard: A Differential Equation of Lesbian Love," in Jay and Glasgow, Lesbian Texts and Contexts, p. 314.

24. This phenomenon is also reported by Sarah Bruckner, writing as a lesbian mother of two adopted children: "Oddly, the friends who have had the hardest time accepting our family are childless gays and lesbians who do not comprehend our loss of freedom and the new way we have gone public with our commitment to each other. Married friends with children have had fewer problems understanding." Bruckner, "Two Morns, Two Kids, and a Dog," in Mother Journeys: Feminists Write about Mothering, ed. Maureen T. Reddy, Martha Roth, and Amy Sheldon (Minneapolis: Spinsters Ink, 1994), p. 41. Writing in 1989, Marilyn Frye said that lesbians still do not agree "on whether the practice of friendship . . . requires active support of lesbians who have male babies." I can only assume that Frye believes that support of lesbian mothers of girls, at least, brooks no disagreement ( Willful Virgin, 121).

25. Ellen Lewin, Lesbian Mothers, pp. 186 and 192.

26. Ibid., p. 191.

27. In keeping with Brossard's theory, the lesbian who adopts would be the best example of a "symbolic" mother, but in Lewin's study, "fear that their sexual orientation might undermine the adoption" appeared in most cases to compromise the possibility of subversion (Lewin, Lesbian Mothers, pp. 71-2).

28. Harriet Edwards in How Could You? suggests that the answer to this question is yes. Edwards surveyed one hundred women who had "given up" custody of their children (in most cases, after several years of marriage) and notes that none of the lesbian mothers in her study even bothered to try to get court-ordered custody of their children; the advice they received and took was "don't try it." Edwards says these women went "outside the system altogether, and have met with a good measure of success"; their responses to living apart from their children were the only ones with "any real humor," and in her assessment lesbian mothers without custody seemed "the most joyful, the most settled, the most self-accepting, and the most thoughtful" (53). Lewin's worries about the complicity of custodial lesbian mothers are also noted by many contributors to Pollack and Vaughn's Politics of the Heart, including both women who have given up custody (such as Jeanne Vaughn) and women who haven't (such as Nancy Polikoff). But contrast in that same volume the view of Sue Overstreet in "No Apology Offered," pp. 38-9, who believes her strength to fight for and attain custody of her children came from both the anger and pride of her lesbianism, and the story of Rosalie Davies, in "Confronting the Courts," pp. 43-6, whose political action as founder of C.A.L.M. (Custody Action for Lesbian Mothers, founded in 1974) resulted from threatened loss of her children. See also Phyllis Burke, Family Values: Two Morns and Their Son (New York: Random House, 1993): Women's Review of Books says, "With neither a biological or a legal tie to Jesse, her [Burke's] issues were different from the start. Motherhood was transformative for Burke, as it was for the women Lewin interviewed; it did not move her toward the center, but in a radical, political direction" ( Women's Review of Books 11, no. 2 [November 1993]: 25).

29. Zimmerman, "Lesbians Like This and That," p. 13. She also notes, "Most theorists today are anti-essentialist, suspicious of 'experience' and 'truth' as categories, and enamored of disruption and fragmentation; most lesbians in everyday life believe they always have been lesbians, rely on their experience and sense of what's real to make literary judgments, and seek the condition of wholeness and normality."

30. Bonnie Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969-1989 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 144.

31. Ibid. Zimmerman points out that mothers may be characterized differently in novels by lesbians of color and ethnic lesbians: They are often "sources of personal and collective identity" (191). Her discussion of utopian versus realistic fiction recalls Catherine Stimpson's earlier division of lesbian novels into two "modes": "lesbian romanticism," in which "ruthlessness rejects a stifling dominant culture and asserts the value of psychological autonomy, women, art, and a European cultivation of the sensuous, sensual, and voluptuous," and "lesbian realism," in which there is "tension between the role of mother, which the lesbian may desire, and the traditional family structure, in which women are subordinate" ("Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 363-79). Stimpson does not mention Rule's fiction.

32. Judith Roof, "'This Is Not for You': The Sexuality of Mothering," in Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 167.

33. Ibid., p. 171.

34. Ibid., p. 172.

35. The alternatives presented by these two terms speak also to the division between women who voluntarily and women who involuntarily find themselves without children, a division that nonprocreative motherhood—and Rule's fiction—hopes to avoid.

36. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 462.

37. Ibid., pp. 464, 466.

38. I use the term "maternal representation" in the psychoanalytic sense to refer to the internal construct of the mother, in the child's mind; it is "a function of both objective events and subjective experiences," but not a persona and certainly not a person (see Adria E. Schwartz, "Thoughts on the Constructions of Maternal Representations," Psychoanalytic Psychology 10, no. 3, (1993): 331-44).

39. In de Beauvoir's Second Sex, for instance, we read: "It is only when her fingers trace the body of a woman whose fingers in turn trace her body that the miracle of the mirror is accomplished" (465). For arguments about lesbian writing as the space of sameness as opposed to difference, see Marilyn Farwell, "Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination," Signs 14, no. 1 (1988): 100-18.; see also Engelbrecht, "'Lifting Belly Is a Language.'"

40. Each character also suggests both essentialist and nonessentialist understandings of lesbianism. Ann, who is said to be bisexual, seems to view her desire for women, like her decision not to marry and bear children, as a matter of choice, although at the same time the narrative of her family romance suggests that there is something predetermined, if not essentialist, about her sexual orientation toward the mother she never had, away from a domineering father. Evelyn seems more socially constructed, in the sense that she is given little family heritage and clearly espouses a belief in will and intention. But then again, she is the one who speaks of her feelings for Ann as a matter of for once following "nature" and giving into "desire."

41. Compare Kate Adams's argument in "Making the World Safe for the Missionary Position," in Jay and Glasgow, Lesbian Texts and Contexts, that the truly radical book of the postwar period is The Price of Salt, where lesbians appear without the psychoanalytic stereotypes—but as Adams also argues, they are therefore "invisible" to the mainstream as lesbians. She warns of the dangers of "defensive posturings," but I think Desert of the Heart avoids these not just by announcing her lesbians as such but by showing both how they are constructed by the psychoanalytic confusion and how they dismantle it. Note here Jane Rule's comment in Lesbian Images (Trumanburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1975): "For anyone who would genuinely like to understand the nature of lesbian experience, the field of psychology should probably be off limits since just this brief, incomplete survey exposes the state of conflict and confusion which exists among the `experts.' But the myth that psychology has the answers about human experience is now deeply embedded in our culture, and people do turn there to increase their understanding or relieve their suffering" (45).

42. It might be worth exploring the idea of Ann as victim of abuse—not sexual abuse, but the emotional abuse of a father so controlling and despairing that he either instigates or actually helps Ann's suicide attempt. For a good description of the danger of fathers who "love" their children the way Mr. Childs seems to have loved Ann, see Sally Ruddick's piece on fathers in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox (New York: Routledge, 1990)..

43. The word "tenderness" is used repeatedly to describe what Ann and Evelyn feel for each other. A striking link that I cannot explore further at this point is the use of this word in The Bell Jar, published the year before Desert of the Heart . When Esther Greenwood, thinking about lesbians she has heard of in college and the mental asylum, asks the female psychiatrist who oversees her recovery what two women would see in each other, Dr. Nolan answers with one word: "tenderness."

44. Rule says she puts a piece of herself into every character, and this may be one of the authorial bits of Evelyn, for Rule herself really had an Aunt Ida. Ireland, in Reconceiving Women, says that about a third of the women without children whom she interviewed had an auntlike figure (a biological aunt or family friend), "a significant woman in her early life who did not have children and who left a positive mark on her development" (61).

45. Lucia Valeska, "If All Else Fails, I'm Still a Mother," in Trebilcot, Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, p. 72.

46. Although she does not mention this particular passage, this is Gillian Spraggs's reading of the problem of "nature" in Desert of the Heart . Spraggs sees the move in Evelyn's thinking—from "nature" as an explanation of her perversity, which can be "ransomed" only by will, to her decision that loving Ann is "natural"—as a step that evades moral responsibility, ignores the social construction of lesbianism, and fails to articulate a context within society for lesbianism, thereby leading to a "dead end" ("Hell and The Mirror: A Reading of Desert of the Heart," in Munt, New Lesbian Criticism, pp. 115-32). Spraggs's reading of the novel raises interesting questions, but I stress instead that Evelyn is finally able to stay with Ann, however temporarily, because she recognizes precisely the need to take responsibility.

47. Jane Rule, "The Question of Children," in A Hot-Eyed Moderate (Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1985), p. 95. The parenthetical reference is to Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), discussed at greater length in the preceding chapter.

48. The work Evelyn does as mentor-pedagogue should be understood as a positive alternative to rather than a compensation or displacement of her maternal desires, anticipating Adrienne Rich's comment that "poetry was where I lived as no-one's mother, where I existed as myself." Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, tenth anniversary edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 31.

49. See for example Marilyn Schuster's reading in "Strategies for Survival: The Subtle Subversion of Jane Rule," Feminist Studies 7, no. 3 (1981): 431-49. Spraggs also discusses intertextuality, and in several years of teaching this novel I have received a good number of student papers on the topic of various literary allusions and rewritings in Desert of the Heart .

50. To understand the subversiveness of Rule's pregnant women, it might be useful to compare the actual vulnerability of the unmarried pregnant woman as outlined in a study like Rickie Solinger's "Race and 'Value': Black and White Illegitimate Babies, 1945-1965," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 287-310.

51. The toast is raised by Ann's ex-boyfriend Bill, who uses the occasion to announce that he is marrying Joyce. The scene might also be read in light of Rule's hearty critique of compulsory heterosexuality and the oppression of women who marry. Alluding to Silver's pregnancy, Bill, a sympathetically portrayed and even "tender" man, tells Ann: "'That's what I should have done to you . . . I've solved my problem. I've got a girl who's already got a baby and I'm going to marry her'" ( Desert of the Heart, 191).

52. Jane Rule, The Young in One Another's Arms (Tallahassee, Fla.: The Naiad Press: 1977).

53. Jane Rule, Memory Board (Tallahassee, Fla.: The Naiad Press, 1989), pp. 20-1.

54. Jane Rule, Against the Season (New York: McCall Publishing Co., 1971), p. 60.

55. According to Rickie Solinger in her comparative study, "Race and 'Value': Black and White Illegitimate Babies, 1945-65," it was in fact quite rare for a black woman to be able to give up her child for adoption, both because of official "white" policy and because of the attitudes of the black community toward maternal responsibility.

1. Cited as reprinted in Patricia Bell-Scott et al., eds., Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 203.

2. Joanne Braxton, "Ancestral Presence: The Outraged Mother Figure in Contemporary Afra-American Writing," in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 314.

3. Barbara Christian, "'Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something': African-American Women's Historical Novels," in Braxton and McLaughlin, Wild Women in the Whirlwind, p. 335.

4. Suzanne Carother, "Catching Sense: Learning from Our Mothers to be Black and Female," in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), pp. 232-47. Patricia Hill Collins also critiques the inapplicability of several "Eurocentric," white views of motherhood; Collins, "The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother-Daughter Relationships," in Bell-Scott et al., Double Stitch, pp. 41-60. Elsewhere, Collins points out that "work that separated women of color from their children also framed the mothering relationship"; Collins, "Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood," in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 63.

Several scholars have recently commended Morrison's Beloved for turning from white models and inscribing more Afrocentric perspectives. Karla Holloway compares Beloved to an African novel, Flora Nwapa's Efaru, in terms of their shared depiction of "contradictions between childbirth and wholeness" for women. Whereas for white women, Holloway observes, motherhood has been thought to block potential development as an artist, in both African and African American women's works, "childbirth is often framed as a threat to survival rather than the (comparatively) benign worry that pregnancy will 'sabotage' their creative drive"; Holloway, Moorings and Metaphors (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992.), p. 171. Barbara Hill Rigney addresses the connections between Beloved and an African rather than an American heritage: Sethe evokes the power of the African Great Mother, and the barely remembered language of Africa and Sethe's mother, carried too in the songs that Sethe and Paul D sing, is "subversive and unintelligible to white listeners"; Rigney "'A Story to Pass On': Ghosts and the Significance of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved, " in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, ed. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 234. A third example of this approach to Beloved is Maggie Sale's argument that Morrison, in her expressed intention to write "Black Art," structures the novel on the principle of "call and response" drawn from oral African culture; Sale, "Call and Response as Critical Method: AfricanAmerican Oral Traditions and Beloved, " African-American Review 26, no. 1 (1992): 41-50.

5. See both Mae Henderson's "Response" (pp. 155-63) and Houston A. Baker Jr.'s "There Is No More Beautiful Way," in Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr. and Patricia Redmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

6. Deborah McDowell, "Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin," in Baker and Redmond, Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, p. 58.

7. Hortense Spillers, "Response" to Deborah E. McDowell, in Baker and Redmond, Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, pp. 71-3.

8. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17 (summer 1987): 80.

9. Ibid. Other readings, however, view Sethe's destruction of Beloved as a type of universal or at least widespread maternal (mis)behavior, instancing "a mother's will to dominate" and the threat of the engulfing maternal bond to children's individuality. Laurie Vickroy, "The Force Outside/The Force Inside: Mother-Love and Regenerative Spaces in Sula and Beloved, " Obsidian II 8, no. 2 (fall-winter 1993): 28.

10. White feminist scholars have been at least as interested in this book as black critics, in large part perhaps because it allows them to exorcise some of their own ghosts. In the 1980s, (white) feminist (literary) theory was charged with exclusivity and bias not only for its failure to include nonwhite, nonmiddle class, nonwestern women's writings, but also for its prejudice toward or presumption of the daughter's point of view. Beloved affords critics the opportunity to redeem many past lapses in one gesture, as the interests of "mother theory" (most often, in writing about this novel, a psychoanalytically informed discourse) converge with the interests of taking the experience of African American (female) subjects more seriously.

11. Alice Walker, Meridian (1976; reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1986), pp. 90-1. Parenthetical references hereafter will be to the 1986 edition of the novel.

12. Rickie Solinger, "Race and 'Value': Black and White Illegitimate Babies, 1945-1965," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 287-310.

13. Judith Modell, "'How Do You Introduce Yourself as a Childless Mother?' Birthparent Interpretations of Parenthood," in Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding, ed. George C. Rosewald and Richard L. Ochberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 76-94. The editors' introduction critiques Modell's interpretation of the birth parents' narratives by observing that these stories "invite skepticism" in their professions of unambivalent love; as the editors see it, this is because "women who hope, against public policy, to reestablish connections with lost children cannot acknowledge that they were ever ambivalent" (10-1).

14. This, for instance, is Melissa Walker's formulation: "The core narrative is about a black man and the two women in his life—one black and one white"; M. Walker, Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women's Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966-89 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 173-4. Nancy Porter's brief summary of the plot also omits mention of the loss of Meridian's son; Porter, "Women's Interracial Friendships and Visions of Community in Meridian, The Salt Eaters, Civil Wars, and Dessa Rose, " in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 251-7.

15. Alan Nadel, "Reading the Body: Alice Walker's Meridian and the Archeology of Self," Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 1 (spring 1988): 55-68, says that "to become an activist," Meridian "has to relinquish her role as mother" (59, emphasis added); her body, which "reflects the conflict between her role as a mother and a self-fulfilling woman," must be overcome or renounced" (62), and she finally plays an "androgynous" role (66). Dianne F. Sadoff, "Black Matrilineage: Walker and Hurston," Signs 11, no. 1 (1985): 4-26, suggests that Alice Walker's "ambivalence" about the idealization of black motherhood emerges "even if dispersed, in the fictional texts" and that Meridian sacrifices her motherhood to pursue politics. Melissa Walker says the novel "dramatizes the power of public commitment to overwhelm the demands of private ties"; M. Walker, Down from the Mountaintop, p. 175. Lindsey Tucker, "Walking the Red Road: Mobility, Maternity, and Native American Myth in Alice Walker's Meridian, " Women's Studies 19 (1991): 1-17, sees Meridian struggling between maternity, which entails entrapment, and escape into the more spiritual, creative life associated with Native American symbols like the hoop, the sacred flowering tree, and Thought-Woman. Deborah McDowell argues that Meridian moves to an androgynous, fluid selfhood; McDowell, "The Self in Bloom: Alice Walker's Meridian, " CLA Journal 24, no. 3 (1981): 262-78. Karen Stein, " Meridian: Alice Walker's Critique of Revolution," BALF 20 (1986): 129-41, speaks of Meridian's female journey to "mature self-knowledge," wherein she can resist domination and gain authenticity.

16. However, as Margaret A. Simons points out, whereas early radical critiques like Shulamith Firestone's were better known, many feminists in fact tried from the beginning to offer more "integrative" solutions to the problem that motherhood can be both oppressive and empowering for women. See Simons, "Motherhood, Feminism, and Identity," in Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy, ed. Azizah Y. Al-Hibri and Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 156-74.

17. Barbara Christian, "An Angle of Seeing: Motherhood in Buchi Emcheta's Joys of Motherhood and Alice Walker's Meridian, " in Black Feminist Criticism (New York: Pergamon, 1985), pp. 211-52. Christian discusses the destruction of the Sojourner Tree (by Saxon students) as evidence that "it is sometimes black women who deny our own maternal history (often unintentionally)" (230). This essay provides the fullest reading to date of Meridian's complex treatment of motherhood and its contradictions for African American women.

18. Marjorie Agosin points out that a common way to "break" women activists in Latin American countries is to threaten their children, "making it clear to the woman that [by becoming an activist] she has lost the ability to protect them" (17). Agosin, introduction to Surviving beyond Fear: Women, Children, and Human Rights in Latin America (New York: White Pine Press, 1993). For further discussion of the Latin American motherist movements, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, "The Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal Action," in Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, Representations of Motherhood, pp. 75-91. See also Sara Ruddick's discussion of a maternal politics of peace, in Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), and Amy Swerdlow's Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). For an interesting discussion of both the political advantages and disadvantages of motherist organizing in one American city, see Mary Pardo, "Mexican American Women Grassroots Community Activists: Mothers of East Los Angeles," Frontiers 11, no. 1 (1990): 1-7.

19. See Collins, "Shifting the Center," for a relevant discussion of "motherwork" as a key to rethinking motherhood: "Whether it is on behalf of one's own children, children of one's racial ethnic community, or children who are yet unborn . . . the space that this motherwork occupies promises to shift our thinking about motherhood itself" (59). Susan Willis, in Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), notes this point: Meridian's refusal to mother shows us that "mothering . . . is the single most insurmountable obstacle to a black woman's self-affirmation," yet Meridian also seeks to define a "new social function, which includes a form of mothering, but in the larger sense of an individual's caring for her community" (123). The fate of Meridian's friend Anne-Marion, a young revolutionary, ironically suggests how seductive the white rather than the Afrocentric definition is. Far more certain of herself as an activist than Meridian ever is, Anne is nevertheless easily co-opted by success and motherhood; near the end of the novel, a parenthetical note observes that "AnneMarion . . . had become a well-known poet whose poems were about her two children, and the quality of the light that fell across a lake she owned" (201). It is interesting to note that this sentence serves as an epigraph to Adrienne Rich's recent discussion of the difficult necessity of combining writing and political activism. Rich argues that both seek "connection with unseen others" (1159), a particularly interesting formulation if we consider how motherhood too offers such connection; Rich, "The Hermit's Scream," PMLA 108, no. 5 (October 1993): 1157-64.

20. See Tucker, "Walking the Red Road."

21. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); the quotations are found, respectively, on pp. 140, 131, 132, 141, 142, and 124. The argument is similar to one made by Homans and Hirsch about earlier novelists; it ruerits fuller discussion with regard to claims by psychologists like Chodorow and Gilligan, made contemporaneously with the rise of the "feminist bildungsroman," that women have more fluid ego boundaries than men do.

22. So too her friend Anne-Marion calls her obsolete (124), and she is accused of "holding on" to the past (14).

23. Alice Walker, quoted in Claudia Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), p. 176.

24. See M. Walker, Down from the Mountaintop, pp. 171-2, for an interesting discussion of the formal structure of Meridian that comes to rather different conclusions than I do about its meaning. For discussion of the fragmented and cyclical structure of the novel, see Christine Hall, "Art, Action, and the Ancestors: Alice Walker's Meridian in its Context," in Black Women's Writing, ed. Gina Wisker (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), pp. 96-110.

25. Dianne Sadoff suggests that "in celebrating her literary foremothers . . . the contemporary black woman writer covers over more profoundly than does the white writer her ambivalence about matrilineage, her own misreadings of precursors"; Sadoff, "Black Matrilineage: The Case of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston," in Black Women in America, ed. Michelene R. Malson, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Jean O'Barr, and Mary Wyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 198. But my reading of Meridian suggests that here is the novel in which Walker uncovers and explores just this ambivalence.

26. Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); see especially chapter 1, "The Dialectics of Reproduction." It is particularly telling that both O'Brien and the narrator of Meridian identify a common historical turning point or dividing line in women's reproductive consciousness. O'Brien argues that the first significant historical change in the reproductive process was "the historical discovery of physiological paternity"; the second—far more recent, if anything more revolutionary, and still in the dialectal process of negotiation—is the technology that offers women the freedom to choose or not choose to be mothers (21-2). Speaking of Meridian's sense that she inherits an impossible legacy of endurance from her mother, the narrator observes: "It never occurred to her that her mother's and her grandmother's extreme purity of life was compelled by necessity. They had not lived in an age of choice" (124).

27. For one critical reading of O'Brien's alleged biologism and ahistoricism that is sympathetic, as I am, to her efforts to think about motherhood from a feminist perspective, see Reyes Lazaro, "Feminism and Motherhood: O'Brien vs Beauvoir," Hypatia 1, no. 2 (fall 1986): 87-102.

28. Susan Willis points out that Marilene is "the embodiment of the congealed labor that exemplifies the commodity form. In death, as was probably the case in her life, the white woman's labor power is the basis for her husband's livelihood"; Willis, "I Shop Therefore I Am: Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in Commodity Culture?" in Changing Our Own Words, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 180. In fact, however, Marilene didn't "labor," her husband insists, and what does it mean that as a commodity she is probably more valuable to her husband dead than alive?

29. For discussion of Othermothers ("women who assist blood mothers by sharing mothering responsibilities") as an Afrocentric concept, see Collins, "The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture," esp. pp. 46-50. See also Gloria Joseph in Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (New York: Anchor Books, 1981), pp. 75-126, and Rosalie Riegle Troester, "Turbulence and Tenderness: Mothers, Daughters, and 'Othermothers' in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones, " in Bell-Scott et al., Double Stitch, pp. 163-72.

30. Margaret Homans, "Her Very Own Howl," Signs 9, no. 2 (1983): 186-205, mentions Meridian together with Sula and Surfacing as novels that call into question the very possibility of representing women's voices in discourse; the Sojourner is a symbol of "both the persistence and the self-subversion of women's expression" (194-5).

31. I differ here from those who see the destruction of the Sojourner Tree as a tragic example of black-on-black violence, although I understand this reading. It seems to me, however, that the story of Louvinie is one of those ambiguous inheritances that does not serve its descendants altogether well, a story like Beloved's and Meridian's, as I argue in the conclusion of this chapter, "not to be passed on."

32. For one of many recent discussions of the psychological and material threats to black children, see Beverly Greene, "Sturdy Bridges: The Role of African-American Mothers in the Socialization of American Children," in Motherhood: A Feminist Perspective, ed. Jane Price Knowles and Ellen Cole (New York: The Haworth Press, 1990), pp. 205-25. Greene mentions, among other things, this grim list of statistics: "Black children are six times as likely as their white counterparts to show excess exposure to lead; six times as likely to contract tuberculosis; ten times as likely to die before the age of one year from nutritional deficiencies . . .. Black children are found in correctional facilities at 400 times the rate of their white counterparts and are placed in psychiatric, foster care and health care facilities at a rate 75 percent higher than that of their white counterparts" (214).

33. Although I do not develop this argument here, it is clear that Meridian's role as Othermother can be understood as a version of the argument that maternal functions, normally thought of as private, need to take the lead in reforming public policy. Here the analogy between Meridian and Latin American motherist movements is also clear: given the emphasis on mothering as a private responsibility, it is when mothers lose their children that they can or must enter into the public space. (In chapter 5, we see a similar pattern in the figure of Connie Ramos in Woman on the Edge of Time .) Several recent books also explore this notion that women need to become mothers of society as well as individual mothers: in addition to Ruddick's discussion of the basis of peace politics in maternal thinking, see for example Perdita Huston, Motherhood by Choice: Pioneers in Women's Health and Family Planning (New York: Feminist Press, 1992); Arnlaug Leira, Welfare States and Working Mothers: The Scandinavian Experience (New York: Guilford Press, 1992); and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

34. See for instance Gloria Joseph, "Black Mothers and Daughters: Their Roles and Functions in American Society," in Common Differences, for the suggestion that the "rituals" of respect and reverence celebrated on Mother's Day "can be traced to Africa and the slave quarters" (90).

35. The passage cited in the epigraph to this section is taken from the first flashback in the novel, in which Meridian faces what is often taken to be the philosophical core of the novel: the question of whether killing for the revolution is justified. What strikes me as interesting is that the initial presentation of this problem focuses attention less on the issue than on Meridian's experience of her hesitation as an involuntary disconnection between the parts of her body necessary for normal speech: she feels that her tongue refuses to move and hears instead an internal voice. Even when Meridian is finally able to move her tongue, at the end of this flashback, it is only to utter this characteristic language of self-doubt, marking the distance between the certainty she desires and the involuntary reluctance she feels. Nancy Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1990), has described Meridian as suffering from "periodic spells of disassociation" (126-7). Walker sees this as a "sickness" that Meridian must recover from, whereas I want to read it a little differently; but Walker too begins to link Meridian's out-of-the-body experiences and her subsequent connectedness, an issue I explore in the following discussion.

36. L. J. West, cited in Frank W. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorders (New York: The Guilford Press, 1989). The following overview of dissociation is taken mainly from chapter 1 of Putnam's book and from his chapter on "Dissociative Phenomena" in American Psychiatric Press Review of Psychiatry, vol. 10 (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1991), pp. 145-60.

37. As Ellen Rose pointed out to me, Meridian here can be compared to another fictional mother who gives up a child, Doris Lessing's Martha Quest, who has a similar moment of ecstatic dissociation on the veld.

38. This is compatible with feminist revisions of Freud. See Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), who argues that we can "avoid some of the problems in Freud's portrayal of the preoedipal mother," including the denial of the mother's desires, by seeing separation as primary, and "subjectivity . . . as an elegiac construct, the product of an internalized loss" of the mother's body (9). I suggest that "subjectivity" also take into account the loss of the child to the mother.

39. For a reading of Sula that suggests how Sula too disconnects herself in order to examine herself, see Vickroy, "The Force Outside/The Force Inside."

40. For a contrasting reading of this episode, see Elizabeth Schultz, "Out of the Woods and into the World: A Study of Interracial Friendships between Women in American Novels," in Conjuring, ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 67-85. The relationship is also discussed by Susan Danielson, "Alice Walker's Meridian, Feminism, and the 'Movement,'" Women's Studies 16 (1989): 317-30; Suzanne W. Jones, "Dismantling Stereotypes: Interracial Friendships in Meridian and A Mother and Two Daughters, " in The Female Tradition in Southern Literature, ed. Carol S. Manning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 140-57; and Nancy Porter, "Women's Interracial Friendships." Martha J. McGowan, "Atonement and Release in Alice Walker's Meridian, Critique 23, no. 1 (1981): 25-36, also discusses their friendship, although her emphasis is less on the interracial question than on Meridian's ability to sympathize with Lynne as a turning point in Meridian's life that leads away from her destructive feelings of guilt, because she is not able to blame herself for Camara's death.

41. Critics who see Meridian transformed by her moment of realization in the Black Church include Danielson, Hall, and Stein. Susan Danielson, "Alice Walker's Meridian, Feminism, and the 'Movement,'" Women's Studies 16 (1989): 317-30; Christine Hall, "Art, Action, and the Ancestors: Alice Walker's Meridian in Its Context," in Black Women's Writing, ed. Gina Wisker (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); Karen F. Stein, " Meridian: Alice Walker's Critique of Revolution," Black American Literature Forum 20, no. 1-2 (springsummer 1986): 129-41.

42. Spoken aloud, the two words might not seem quite so nearly identical, since the stress probably is meant to fall on the second syllable in the proper name as opposed to the first syllable in the common noun. However, as McDowell observes in "The Self in Bloom," the nearness of the two spellings may suggest an analogy between Meridian and a camera, "an image suggesting distance and detachment" (273).

43. Lorraine Liscio, " Beloved 's Narrative: Writing Mother's Milk," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 11, no. 1 (spring 1992): 44.

44. Jean Wyatt, "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved, " PMLA 108, no. 3 (May 1993): 484.

45. The first quotation is from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3d edition, 1987, as cited in David Spiegel, "Dissociation and Trauma," chapter 12 of American Psychiatric Press Review of Psychiatry, p. 264; the second quotation is Spiegel, p. 261.

46. Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 9.

47. Ibid., p. 33.

48. Cathy Caruth, "Introduction," American Imago 48, no. 4 (1991): 417.

49. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 38.

50. Spiegel, "Dissociation and Trauma," p. 261.

51. Caruth, "Introduction," p. 417.

52. Ibid., p. 420, emphasis added.

53. B. A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma," American Imago 48, no. 4 (1991): 450.

54. Caruth, "Introduction," pp. 422-3.

55. Compare Marianne Hirsch's claim that infanticide in Beloved "takes the text . . . to the point of antinarrative," in "Maternity and Rememory: Toni Morrison's Beloved, " in Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, Representations of Motherhood, p. 104.

56. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 40.

1. Rayna Green, "Native American Women," Signs 6, no. 2 (1980): 257 and 250, respectively. Green adds that the early colonizers "misunderstood Eastern tribes so profoundly that they sabotaged their own treaties in making them with men who did not have the right to make such decisions" (250).

2. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), pp. 28, 251.

3. Brooke Medicine Eagle, In Childlessness Transformed: Stories of Alternative Parenting, ed. Jane English (Mount Shasta: Earth Heart Books, 1989), p. 25.

4. Kate Stanley, "Thoughts on Indian Feminism," in A Gathering of Spirit, ed. Beth Brant (Ithaca, New York: Firebrand Books, 1988), p. 214.

5. Brant, A Gathering of Spirit, p. 11. See also Bea Medicine, who says "Indian women do not need liberation . . . they have always been liberated within their tribal structures," in Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands, American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. vii.

6. Furthermore, although I have stressed arguments like Allen's here about the matrifocal nature of many Native American cultures, it is important to remember that tribal and regional differences militate against sweeping generalizations about the power of "the" mother. Assumptions about "aboriginal matriarchy" were also mistakenly made by early western observers, as Cara E. Richards argues in "Matriarchy or Mistake: The Role of Iroquois Women Through Time," in Iroquois Women: An Anthology, ed. W. G. Spittal (Iroqrafts Indian Reprint Series), pp. 149-59.

7. Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), p. 5.

8. Patricia Hill Collins, "Shifting the Center," in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 65.

9. I pass over here the question of what "counts" as Native American literature, which, like questions of Indian identity and authenticity, is an ongoing problem. Recent examples of the voluminous discussion of this question include Michael Castro, Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Michael Dorris, "Native American Literature in an Ethno-Historical Context," College English 41, no. 2 (1979): 147-62; Susan Hegeman, "Native American 'Texts' and the Problem of Authenticity," American Quarterly 41, no. 2 (June 1989): 265-83; Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Simon Ortiz, "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism," MELUS 8, no. 2 (summer 1981): 7-12; Rodney Simard, "American Indian Literatures, Authenticity, and the Canon," World Literature Today (spring 1992): 243-8.

10. Judith Antell, "Momaday, Welch, and Silko: Expressing the Feminine Principle through Male Alienation," American Indian Quarterly (summer 1988): 213-4.

11. Quoting from James Welch, The Death of Jim Loney (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 34.

12. For a correspondent discussion of the figure of the absent mother in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, see Patricia Jones, "The Web of Meaning: Naming the Absent Mother in Storyteller, " in Silko, " Yellow Woman, " ed. Melody Graulich (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 213-32. Arguing for the importance of reading significance into the gaps in the characteristically fragmentary Native American text, Jones points out that "the most notable gaps and silences in Storyteller revolve around the absence of Silko's mother" (215); hence the mother is, as in Antell's view, both "absent" and "through her palpable absence, the very center of the text" (217). Jones relates the absent mother in Silko, especially in the Yellow Woman stories, to common myths of the mother who in one way or another fails an individual child, but with "good results" for the community and with an emphasis on the "ultimately creative act" of female sexuality.

13. I speak of Erdrich and Dorris as a team here because of their own frequent insistence that they work together. See Hertha D. Wong, "An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris," North Dakota Quarterly 55, no. 1 (winter 1987): 201. For ease of reading in discussions of particular texts, I subsequently use just the one author's name under which a novel has been published.

14. Robert Silberman, "Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman," in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), pp. 101-520.

15. Hertha D. Wong, "Adoptive Mothers and Thrown-Away Children in the Novels of Louise Erdrich," in Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, ed. Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 174-92. This point is also stressed in Owens, Other Destinies, in the chapter on Erdrich and Dorris.

16. Wong, "Adoptive Mothers," p. 186.

17. Karl Kroeber, editor of the first special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures devoted to Erdrich's work, is one of the first to point out that Love Medicine "poses a question about novelistic unity," and he argues for Erdrich's "sensitivity to the peculiarly poly-ethnic character of Americanness" as reflected in the novel's multiply voiced structure; Kroeber, Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 1 (1985), pp. 2-3. In her contribution to the same volume, Kathleen Sands describes the novel's narrative technique as "compellingly tribal in character," although she believes it moves toward the traditional end of presenting "a complete story in stable form." See also Sands' insightful discussion of the way in which the novel works as and through "the secular anecdotal narrative process of community gossip"; Sands, Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 1 (1985): 12-24.

18. Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), p. 5.

19. It is much simpler to make this claim for Yellow Raft on Blue Water than for Love Medicine, because it is clear who the central protagonists of the former are. Different readers have tended to see different persons in the collectively told Love Medicine as central. Robert Silberman and Thomas Matchie underscore June's importance; Matchie compares June to Moby Dick: "her presence pervades the entire story and gives it depth. She is not there and yet there" (483). Matchie, " Love Medicine: A Female Moby Dick," Midwest Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1989): 478-491. Deborah Rosenfelt says that the "warp and woof" of the fabric of Love Medicine are the "entwined" narratives of Nector (and his "attempt to reconcile his divided love for Marie Lazarre . . . and Lulu Lamartine") and Lipsha's quest for his parentage (wherein he needs to know who his mother is, indeed), but "this plot remains essentially a quest for identity and manhood—a quest predicated on the importance of knowing one's paternity" (281-2). Rosenfelt, "Feminism, 'Postfeminism,' and Contemporary Women's Fiction," in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 268-91.

20. A genogram is "a diagram that portrays the family tree of the individual for two or three generations"; for discussion, see Karen G. Howe, "Daughters Discover Their Mothers through Biographies and Genograms: Educational and Clinical Parallels," in Motherhood: A Feminist Perspective, ed. Jane Rice Knowles and Ellen Cole (New York: Haworth Press, 1990), pp. 31-40.

21. Quotations are taken from Michael Dorris, Yellow Raft on Blue Water (New York: Warner Books, 1987).

22. Sara Ruddick, "Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth," in Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, Representations of Motherhood, p. 38. As Patricia Hill Collins also points out, "For many women of color, choosing to become a mother challenges institutional policies that encourage white middle-class women to reproduce and discourages low-income racial ethnic women from doing so, even penalizing them" ("Shifting the Center," p. 65). See also Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), who repeatedly addresses the question of the voluntary or involuntary nature of human motherhood.

23. As Louis Owens implies in Other Destinies, the optimism may be problematic to some readers: "Resolution and closure come with a somewhat unpersuasive rapidity and ease in this novel" (223). Yellow Raft ought to be compared to The Crown of Columbus, which I omit from this study, because there the biracial daughter, Violet, is also a positive, hopeful mix of at least two cultures. For a reading of the novel that addresses this issue, see Ann Rayson, "Shifting Identity in the Work of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris," Studies in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (1991): 27-36.

24. This idea is echoed in several recent stories, poems, and autobiographical pieces by Native American women writers. For instance, see Beth Brant's introductory statement in A Gathering of Spirit: "As I unravel, I also weave. I am the storyteller and the story" (8).

25. Owens, Other Destinies, p. 223. For a comparable reading of the way in which "the mothers' reclaiming of storytelling is an act of self-creation, one by which they enact, with a full complement of ambivalence and doubt, their passage from loss and dispossession to hope and affirmation" (608) in another subculture, see Marina Hueng, "Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club," Feminist Studies 19, no. 3 (fall 1993): 597-616.

26. The dilemma is a familiar one: James Flavin points to a similar problem in Tracks when Nanapush says that since his name loses power every time it is written (speaking particularly of its inscription in "a government file"), he has only given it out once (32). This is "an awkward moment," as Flavin sees: "The character/narrator won't give it out, yet the novelist must use the name again and again throughout her story." See Flavin, "The Novel as Performance: Communication in Louise Erdrich's Tracks," Studies in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (1991): 1. In a somewhat contrasting argument about using "the languages of the colonialists" for indigenous purposes of resistance, Simon Ortiz points out that "it is entirely possible for a people to retain and maintain their lives through the use of any language" ("Towards a National Indian Literature," 10). The novel may run some risk in asking us to accept on faith that Ida's story is told "in my own language," although we read it in English; is nothing lost in translation?

27. Wong, "An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris," pp. 201-2.

28. Braiding is the final image of the novel, as Ida sits in the dark on the roof of her house with Father Hulbert. He asks her what she is doing, and in the last sentence of the novel she observes: "As a man with cut hair, he did not identify the rhythm of three strands, the whispers of coming and going, of twisting and tying and blending, of catching and letting go, of braiding" ( Yellow Raft, 372).

29. In Other Destinies, Owens says June is the "mythic catalyst" of the novel (196). Sands also uses the word "catalyst" in her commentary ( Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 1, p. 16). Claire Crabtree identifies the death of June and the revelation that she was Lipsha's mother as "a thread running through the novel," in "Salvific Oneness and the Fragmented Self in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, " in Contemporary Native American Cultural Issues, ed. Thomas E. Schirer (Sault Ste. Marie: Lake Superior State University Press, 1988), p. 50.

30. For a discussion of Lulu as Erdrich's "vision of a wholly transpersonal state of being," see Jeanne Smith, "Transpersonal Selfhood: The Boundaries of Identity in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine," Studies in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (1991): 13-26, esp. 18-9.

31. Deborah Rosenfelt calls this an image of "female reparenting," in "Feminism, 'Postfeminism,' and Contemporary Women's Fiction," p. 283.

32. Several recent discussions of "Native American" identity have made a similar point. See for example Gerald Vizenor, The People Named Chippewa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 107.

33. Erdrich and Dorris's fiction thus participates in the effort to revise the myth of the mother's "ultimate responsibility," an effort that feminist critics like Susan Suleiman have called for. Suleiman, "On Maternal Splitting: A Propos of Mary Gordon's Men and Angels," Signs 14, no. 1 (autumn 1988): 25-41

34. It has been pointed out, however, that Mary Adare, Adelaide's daughter, has "stringy black hair," which might indicate Indian blood and suggest a motive for Adelaide's flight. Leslie Marmon Silko, cited by Susan Perez Castillo, "Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy," Massachusetts Review 32, no. 2 (1991): 287.

35. Quotations are taken from Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen (New York: Bantam Books, 1986).

36. Quoting from Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).

37. Note that closure again comes with parental reunion and a child's possible forgiveness. Some indication of how difficult it was for parents to retrieve their children from Indian boarding schools is given in Brenda Child's discussion, with several examples of correspondence, in "Homesickness, Illness, and Death: Native American Girls in Government Boarding Schools," in Wings of Gauze: Women of Color and the Experience of Health and Illness, ed. Barbara Bair and Susan E. Cayleff (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), pp. 169-79.

38. For discussion of the trickster figure in the first three Erdrich novels, see Catherine M. Catt, "Ancient Myth in Modern American: The Trickster in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich," Platte Valley Review 19, no. 1 (1991): 71-81. One of the few discussions of the female trickster is Jay Cox, "Dangerous Definitions: Female Tricksters in Contemporary Native American Literature," Wicazo Sa Review 5, no. 2 (1989): 17-21.

39. Flavin discusses Nanapush's use of words to bring Lulu back to her native culture in "The Novel as Performance."

40. For just one of several discussions that make this assumption, see Annette Van Dyke, "Questions of the Spirit: Bloodlines in Louise Erdrich's Chippewa Landscape," Studies in American Indian Literatures 4, no. 1 (spring 1992): 15-27.

41. The quotations are taken, in order, from: Victoria Walker, "A Note on Narrative Perspective in Tracks," Studies in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (1991): 40; Jennifer Sergi, "Storytelling: Tradition and Preservation in Louise Erdrich's Tracks, " World Literature Today (spring 1992): 279; Van Dyke, "Questions of the Spirit," p. 22.

42. Nancy J. Peterson, "History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks, " PMLA 109 (October 1994): 989. Peterson's reading stresses the way in which Erdrich seeks to represent the problems of historical narratives about the precontact past; I stress the way in which this is figured in the search for the (preoedipal) maternal subject. As Peterson observes in a footnote, presumably written before the publication of The Bingo Palace, Fleur can be compared to both June and Adelaide, and these novels also "revolve around the disappearance of a key mother figure" (992).

43. Daniel Cornell, "Woman Looking: Revis(ion)ing Pauline's Subject Position in Louise Erdrich's Tracks, " Studies in American Indian Literatures 4, no. 1 (1992): 52. In "A Note on the Narrative Perspective," Walker also sees that Nanapush is slightly suspect, "a self-confessed, charming 'talker'" (40).

44. Compare Magdelene Redekop's identification of the "mock mother" in Alice Munro's stories, also discussed in chapter 1: "The mock mother is constructed as a result of the impossibility of picturing the 'real' mother. Often she performs as a kind of trickster who challenges our old ways of looking at the relation between the work of art and the human body" (4). Redekop, Mothers and Other Clowns (London: Routledge, 1992).

45. For a discussion that situates Tracks in women writers' tradition of using the ghost story to reflect an alternative epistemology, see Wendy K. Kolmar, "'Dialectics of Connectedness': Supernatural Elements in Novels by Bambara, Cisneros, Grahn, and Erdrich," in Haunting the House of Fiction, ed. Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 236-49. Written before the publication of The Bingo Palace, Kolmar's discussion notes that Erdrich's novels, like others she examines, are not classic ghost stories in that there is no encounter between the protagonist and a literal ghost; rather, "in each novel, the supernatural elements exist undifferentiated from the 'present,' 'the real,' 'the natural.' Characters and readers do not confront them as other, they are simply part of the experience of life and of the text" (238). In Erdrich's fourth novel, however, we see both the central "encounter" with a ghost and this blurring of natural and supernatural in the experience of text and characters.

46. See Sands in Studies in American Indian Literatures 9 , no. 1 (1985): 12-24.

47. In "June's Luck," Erdrich touches on the problem of domestic violence in Native American communities (as she does in the scene with King Jr. and Lynn near the beginning of Love Medicine ). For one interesting biographical/autobiographical essay about an Alutiiq woman and healer who escaped a violent marriage that suggests a more optimistic possibility than June's life, see Joanne B. Mulcahy with Mary Petersen, "Mary Petersen: A Life of Healing and Renewal," in Bair and Cayleff, Wings of Gauze, pp. 148-68. Retrospectively, June's alienation from her own body at the beginning of Love Medicine takes on added significance. For discussion of this and other moments when characters are split off or dissociated from their bodies, see Jeanne Smith, "Transpersonal Selfhood," p. 13-26.

48. Scott Sanders, Studies in American Indian Literatures 9 , no. 1 (1985):9.

49. Fleur's presence as Othermother is worth noting: We also learn in Tracks that before her own children are born, Fleur is a kind of surrogate mother to young Russell, and in a brief scene in Love Medicine she still seems to be taking care of him, after he is a wounded war veteran confined to his wheelchair. In The Beet Queen, where she seems to be living as an itinerant, she rescues and heals the broken bones of Karl Adare.

50. For a discussion of how this works in Tracks, see Peterson, "History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks ." This scene is evocative of Tayo's entry in Silko's Ceremony into the home of Betonie, the medicine man who lives with his combination of old and new ritual objects.

51. Compare Donna Haraway's frequently cited claim: "The Coyote or Trickster, as embodied in Southwestern Native American accounts, suggests the situation we are in when we give up mastery but keep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while that we will be hoodwinked . . .. I like to see feminist theory as a reinvented coyote discourse obligated to its sources in many heterogeneous accounts of the world." Haraway, "Situated Knowledge," Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 592, 593-4.

52. Both stories are anthologized in The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color, ed. D. Soyini Madison (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 200-6 and 256-63, respectively.

1. Quotations are taken from the Fawcett Crest edition of Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983).

2. Although in general it might be argued, as I suggest later, that Piercy valorizes the imaginative power of the mother's position in a way comparable to that of the French feminists, in this regard I take Piercy's view as antithetical to Julia Kristeva's position that the maternal is a site of constitutive splitting and radical otherness. For this view, see especially "Herethique de la'amour," Tel Quel 74 (winter 1977): 30-49; reprinted in Histoires d'amour (Paris: Denoel, 1983).

3. The fact that Connie is Chicana is interesting in light of my findings in chapters 2 and 3 about other racial and ethnic minority women, but I think the representation of the Chicana is not Piercy's main concern, so I do not discuss it extensively here.

4. Note that this is an act Connie has just imagined doing—when Geraldo breaks in, her hatred "gave her a flush in the nerves like speed coming on," and she imagines destroying his elegance in creative ways that foreshadow her visionary capacity: "She dreamed of peeling off a slickly polished antiqued lizard high-heeled boot and pounding it down his lying throat" (13).

5. Later, in utopian Mattapoisett at the end-of-mothering ritual, we learn tellingly that "aunts" (chosen, not biological) play an important role after naming, when the adolescent no longer goes to her mothers for advice, but to the aunts she selects as advisers for the next few years (116). Contrast Margaret Atwood's characterization of "the Aunts" in The Handmaid's Tale, an elite female gestapo who brutally train and police other women and serve the interests of the antifeminist state.

6. Not only does Dolly have the abortion, at Geraldo's insistence, but in the few brief visits Connie has with her niece we learn that Dolly, working harder than ever as a prostitute, is growing further and further estranged from her own daughter Nita, who is cared for by her grandmother.

7. Alice Adams, "Out of the Womb: The Future of the Uterine Metaphor," Feminist Studies 19, no. 2 (summer 1993): 275. See also Adams's discussion of Woman on the Edge of Time in Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

8. Piercy's vision in the novel is often taken to idealize androgyny, and she has sometimes been criticized for letting men into her utopia. See for example Peter Fitting, "For Men Only: A Guide to Reading Single-Sex Worlds," Women's Studies 14 (1987): 101-18.

9. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic Overview," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 7. For elaboration, see Sau-ling C. Wong, "Diverted Mothering: Representations of Caregivers of Color in the Age of 'Multiculturalism'" in Glenn, Chang, and Forcey, Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, pp. 67-91. See also Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Women's Work," Signs 18, no. 1 (fall 1992): 1-43.

10. Quotations are from the Fawcett Crest edition of Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987).

11. For discussion of this interpretation, see Amin Malak, "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition," Canadian Literature 112 (spring 1987): 9-16.

12. Helen Yglesias, "Odd Woman Out," calls this the "the Atwood woman," in The Women's Review of Books 6, no. 10-11 (July 1989): 3.

13. To cite just one more example: when she finally understands what has been obvious to the reader for some time, that there is an underground resistance and that her walking partner is a member, she is given a chance to join their efforts. Her partner urges her to use her nightly secret meetings to find out something about the Commander; "'Find out what?' I say" (289).

14. In this passage she criticizes her lack of sympathy for another Handmaid, who has gone mad: "I look after her. Easy out, is what I think. I don't even feel sorry for her, although I should. I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point" (361). This leaves her readers to ask: The point of what? What's the point?

15. For a discussion of Atwood's relation to "postfeminism" in the novel preceding The Handmaid's Tale that has implications I cannot explore here, see my earlier essay, "(Post)Feminism in Atwood's Bodily Harm," Novel 19 (1985): 5-21.

16. Aunt Lydia expresses just this reasoning when she explains why the promiscuity of the past was a mistake: "A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get. We want you to be valued, girls." The Handmaid's reflection, as the passage continues, highlights the tyranny and corruption of this ideology: "We sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally. We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives" (145).

17. It could even be argued that the Handmaid retrospectively highlights Connie's perhaps equally unsettling inability to give up the myth of individual and utter responsibility. Whereas the women of Mattapoisett have apparently relinquished the myth and share the work of mothering with a whole community (and do so only until the child reaches adolescence), Connie still embodies in her fairly standard brand of individual heroism another very ancient, long-lived, and romantic myth about good mothers: their willing and utter and lonely self-sacrifice.

18. Susan Rubin Suleiman, "On Maternal Splitting: A Propos of Mary Gordon's Men and Angels, " Signs 14, no. 1 (autumn 1988): 25-41.

19. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, tenth anniversary edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 240.

20. In "Balancing Acts," an interview of Kathi Aguero and Marea Gordett conducted by Ruth Perry, Women's Review of Books 5, no. 10-11 (July 1988), one contemporary mother and writer has publicly said that her fiction is useful in exorcising her fears about her children. Gordett observes, "Well, when I was pregnant I was somewhat obsessed with the fear of having a child who had some handicap, and I wrote a story about it and it helped me tremendously" (29).

21. Perry, "Balancing Acts," p. 30.

22. Domna C. Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 156-82, quotation on p. 174.

23. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), p. 37.

24. Tillie Olsen's "As I Stand Here Ironing" was first published in 1956; quotations are taken from Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle (New York: Dell, 1976).

1. Although most critics have approached Weldon as a feminist writer, some have disputed this designation; see, for example, Alan Wilde, "Bold, But Not Too Bold: Fay Weldon and the Limits of Poststructuralist Criticism," Contemporary Literature 39 (1988). For discussion of the subversive technique and effect of Weldon's satire, see Ann Marie Herbert, "Rewriting the Feminine Script: Fay Weldon's Wicked Laughter," Critical Matrix 7, no. 1 (1993): 21-40.

2. Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago, 1983), p. 96.

3. See Jessica Benjamin, "The First Bond," in The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 11-50.

4. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), pp. 228-9.

5. Ann Dally, Inventing Motherhood: The Consequences of an Ideal (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 90.

6. Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); see especially chapter I, "The Dialectics of Reproduction."

7. Fay Weldon, Female Friends (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), p. 116. Hereafter page references to Weldon's novels will appear in parentheses.

8. The phrase closes the first chapter and opens the last chapter. It also opens four of the first eight chapters of the novel (the first three of these chapters, 4, 6, and 7, focus respectively on brief comments about each friend in turn), and at less frequent, irregular intervals, it opens six subsequent chapters (24, 32, 36, 44, 52, 58). The refrain appears only once in the third person: "Marjorie, Grace, and Chloe" (the first words of chapter 24).

9. For the suggestion that Joanna May in The Cloning of Joanna May is also both first-person and third-person narrator, in a revision of the role of Eliot's Tiresias, see Betsy Ford, "Belladonna Speaks: Fay Weldoh's Wasteland," West Virginia University Philological Papers 38 (1992): 322-33.

10. In Drabble's recent trilogy, The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and The Gates of Ivory, friends Liz, Alix, and Esther take turns as the center of the narratives; the plots may focus on their individual experiences, but their friendship is of ongoing importance. Margaret Atwood's latest novel narrates the relations between three friends, Toni, Charis, and Roz, to a fourth character, Zenia, who has deceived and injured each of them. Rachel DuPlessis discusses a related phenomenon, what she calls the "group" protagonist or the "collective" or "communal" protagonist, in both the late novels of Virginia Woolf and in the more recent speculative fiction of Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and Doris Lessing, in Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), especially in chapter 11, pp. 178-97.

11. For a somewhat different reading that stresses the irony of the title, see Nancy Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in Contemporary Novels of Women (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990), esp. pp. 104-7.

12. In Weldon's Hearts and Lives of Men, it is difficult to know whether the story is about Helen or Nell, the mother or the daughter. The narrator alternately tells what happens to each of them during a fifteen-year period when Nell is lost and insists that the novel is about Nell. But readers know a lot more about Helen's feelings; Nell may be too lucky, indeed, to be penetrated by representation.

13. Fay Weldon, The Cloning of Joanna May (William Collins Sons, 1989; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1991, p.108. References are to the reprint edition.

14. The phrase is Donna Haraway's in "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575-99, an essay that speaks directly to many of the concerns raised in The Cloning of Joanna May .

15. Judith V. Jordan, "Empathy and Self Boundaries," in Women's Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center, ed. Jordan et al. (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), p. 79.

16. Praxis's self-division is particularly interesting in light of the fact that she is also the author of the novel and hence a figure of the woman writer. In "Me and My Shadows," Weldon approaches the task of writing an autobiographical essay by splitting herself into two parts, the Interviewer and the Answerer, and further discusses the multiple personalities she experiences in daily life. "The writing of fiction," Weldon claims, "for me, is the splitting of the self into myriad parts" (162); Weldon, "Me and My Shadows," in On Gender and Writing, ed. Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora Press, 1983).

17. Fay Weldon, Praxis (Hodder and Stoughton, 1978; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1990). References are to the reprint edition.

18. Other minor characters in Weldon's fiction who go mad in part at least because they know too much (about others or about sides of themselves that they fear) include Miss Martin in Puffball and Marion in Words of Advice . Such women protect the "self" that has been abused and disbelieved by retreating like Lucy into madness.

19. Atlantic, August 1980, p. 84. A version of the following discussion of Puffball appeared in the Alumni Magazine of Haverford College, Spring 1994 (pp. 24-31).

20. Anita Brookner, "The Return of the Earth Mother," Times Literary Supplement, February 22, 1980, p. 202.

21. Pauline Palmer, Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), p. 102.

22. Susan Bordo, "Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Subjectivity," in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 94.

23. Gayatri Spivak, "French Feminism in an International Frame," Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 183.

24. Iris Marion Young, "Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation," in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 160.

25. The novel also addresses a question posed by Barbara Johnson in "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," the final chapter of A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 190: "How might the plot of human subjectivity be reconceived (so to speak) if pregnancy rather than autonomy is what raises the question of deliberateness?"

26. The position is exemplified in statements such as: "Childbirth establishes the offspring's independent existence and simultaneously transforms the woman into a particular kind of social being, a mother"; Paula Treichler, "Feminism, Medicine, and the Meaning of Childbirth," in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 117. The fact that Liffey has a C-section adds another complication to the problem of including birthing labor in definitions of what makes a mother.

27. In Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), Tess Cosslett points out that the wording in these passages is very close to that of a popular manual, Gordon Breach's Pregnancy . Cosslett suggests that either Weldon used Breach or they had a common source (70).

28. Fay Weldon, Puffball (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1990). References are to the reprint edition.

29. As Emily Martin puts it, "In this view [postmodern anthropology] scientific discourse is not more privileged in its relation to reality than any other form of description." Martin, "Science and Women's Bodies: Forms of Anthropological Knowledge," in Jacobus, Keller, and Shuttleworth, Body/Politics, p. 71.

30. This perspective corrects the bias that Young points to in "Pregnant Embodiment":

The dominant model of health assumes that the normal, healthy body is unchanging. Health is associated with stability, equilibrium, a steady state. Only a minority of persons, however, namely adult men who are not yet old, experience their health as a state in which there is no regular or noticeable change in body condition . . .. Regular, noticeable, sometimes extreme change in body condition, on the other hand, is an aspect of the normal bodily functioning of adult women. Change is also a central aspect of the bodily existence of healthy children and healthy old people, as well as some of the so-called disabled. Yet medical conceptualization implicitly uses this unchanging adult male body as the standard of all health. (169)

31. In Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), which appeared after my discussion of Puffball was originally published, Alice Adams makes a similar point: "I think that the project of 'getting in touch with'—or 'writing through'—the body is more likely to confirm the inseparability of culture and biology than it is to help us rediscover an essential and constant woman's body" (7).

32. Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 261.

33. Tess Cosslett also stresses the "ambiguous" meaning, for a feminist critique, of the natural childbirth movement that Weldon so clearly articulates. See the introduction to Women Writing Childbirth, pp. 1-8.

34. See for example Janelle Sue Taylor, "The Public Foetus and the Family Car: From Abortion Politics to a Volvo Advertisement," in Science as Culture 3, part 4 (#17) (London: Free Association Books, 1993), pp. 601-18.

35. The literature critiquing visualization is too extensive to cite in full, but a few examples have particular relevance: Barbara Duden, "Visualizing Life," in Science as Culture, pp. 562-600, and The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Ann Kaplan, "Look Who's Talking, Indeed: Fetal Images in Recent North American Visual Culture," in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 121-37; Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition," Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): 1-40; Rosalind Petcheskey, "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction," Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 263-92; Susan Squier, "Conceiving Difference: Reproductive Technology and the Construction of Identity in Two Contemporary Fictions," in A Question of Identity: Women, Science, and Literature, ed. Marina Benjamin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 97-115; Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). For an interesting historical discussion of the link between eighteenth-century embryology and the fetal rights movement of the twentieth century, see Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 123-56.

36. The absence of any first-person narrator in Puffball may also reinforce the sense that we are trying to understand and discuss here experiences and feelings that are not readily available to verbal consciousness and linguistic representation. It recalls Daniel N. Stern's observation that "experience in the domains of emergent, core- and intersubjective relatedness, which continue irrespective of language, can be embraced only very partially in the domain of verbal relatedness"; Stern, "The Sense of a Verbal Self," in The Woman and Language Debate, ed. Camille Roman, Suzanne Juhasz, and Christanne Miller (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 199. Another effect of this technique is that readers remain somewhat distanced from all the characters, including Liffey and Mabs, and questions of sympathy and judgment are complicated. Perhaps this is why some readers find that the novel "valorizes" precisely where I find that it strongly critiques.

37. For one strong statement of this argument, see Maureen McNeil, "New Reproductive Technologies: Dreams and Broken Promises," in Science as Culture, pp. 483-506.

38. Liffey's meditation on her own new auditory perceptiveness also suggests that it is now difficult to sort out her self and her capacities and needs from those of the fetus:

Liffey wondered if she had always heard the other voice, the tone that lies behind the words and betrays them; and if she had heard, why had she not listened? Perhaps she listened now with the baby's budding ears? And certainly this disagreeable acuity of hearing diminished within a week or two: perhaps because Liffey could not for long endure her new sensitivity to the ifs and buts in Richard's voice when he assured her he loved her: perhaps because the matter of hearing was, once properly established, less in the air so far as the baby was concerned. (147)

39. In fact, she has borne her husband only one child; her second baby was fathered by another man, demonstrating that what she viewed for years as her own maternal incapacity was in fact an effect of "the male factor."

40. See for example Nancy Scheper-Hughes's discussion of the effect of culture and scarcity on "maternal thinking" in a Brazilian shantytown in Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

41. She commits this theft by treating other women's children with more indulgence than "any natural mother" could, adds the sententious narrator in this third-person section: "The natural mother is ambivalent towards the child. The unnatural one behaves much better" ( Female Friends, 273).

42. It is useful to compare another badly behaved woman in Weldon's fiction, Madeleine in Remember Me, who finds the will or energy to come back from the dead because she is worried about who will care for her adolescent daughter, Hilary.

43. In prison, moreover, the meager diet brings back memories of the past that are also almost tangible, and mind and body come closer to sharing a sense of coherence: "Her body as much as her mind she felt—was allowed for once to feel, in the boring tranquillity of prison routine—was the sum of its experience" ( Praxis, 244).

44. At one point, one of the voices of reason and insight in the story, a teacher named Mrs. Pelotti, reassures the distraught Isabel that her son isn't lost, as she has assumed when she comes to collect him from school and finds the classroom empty. The boy has been taken home by a neighbor, as in fact Isabel informed the school he would be. As Mrs. Pelotti comforts Isabel with a glass of medicinal sherry, she observes: "I'm quite sorry for mothers these days. They have lost their children to the nation's education system. I quite often find them roaming the school, looking for children they fancy they've lost who are perfectly safe somewhere else"; Weldon, The President's Child (Hodder and Stoughton, 1982; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 171. No doubt Mrs. Pelotti bespeaks a genuine problem, the psychological effect of social change in the way children are raised and educated and the way it gives a particular force to the Worm Anxiety. But just because women fancy their children are lost doesn't mean they aren't. The next time Isabel comes to school, Jason is indeed gone—kidnapped by Homer. Isabel thus represents the actual experience that so many female characters in Weldon's novels (not to mention the real world) imagine and fear, a woman's worst nightmare come true.

45. Useful representatives of the vast literature on this subject include the volume of Science as Culture noted earlier; Rita Arditti, Renate Duelli Klein, and Shelley Minden, eds., Test-Tube Women: What Future for Motherhood? (London: Pandora Press, 1984); Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women's Biology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Man-Made Women: How New Reproductive Technologies Affect Women, ed. Gena Corea et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Linda M. Whitford and Marilyn L. Poland, eds., New Approaches to Human Reproduction: Social and Ethical Dimensions (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); Michelle Stanworth, ed., Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood, and Medicine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Hilary Homans, ed., The Sexual Politics of Reproduction (Aldershot, England: Gower, 1985); Judith Rodin and Aila Collins, eds., Women and New Reproductive Technologies: Medical, Psychosocial, Legal, and Ethical Dilemmas (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991).

46. Given the actors in this plot, Ann Ferguson's concept of "husband patriarchy" seems particularly apt; see Ferguson, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Male Dominance (London: Pandora Press, 1989), pp. 102 ff.

1. In the third-person narrative, some connectedness can be glimpsed, and as the narrative unfolds, debilitating divisions between Praxis and several women are at least partially closed. Praxis expresses some insight into her own similarity to her mother; her sister Hypatia/Hilda is to an extent understood, forgiven and embraced; Irma, before her death, becomes a better friend and supporter; and Mary tells lies to save Praxis from a longer jail sentence. Praxis has at least temporary friendships with women to whom she is connected in more irregular, even socially disapproved ways, including Mary's mother, Miss Leonard, the schoolteacher who briefly becomes something of a surrogate mother to Praxis; and Elaine, the local chum with whom Praxis engages in a career of midday prostitution. The suggestion here as usual is that women who are sexually active outside the law, like Miss Leonard and Elaine (or like the lesbian character of the same name, Elaine, and her companion Olive in Female Friends ) have better relationships with other women. Mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives are divided in large part by their possessive, competitive relationships, especially to husbands or lovers, as Chloe with some accuracy understood.

2. Praxis comments on how women turn to motherhood as an easy form of connection, but suggests it is at best a "quick fix": "Women of child-bearing age have it easy: if all else fails they can always give birth to another human being, who will love them, at least for a time" (100). She addresses her "sisters" with an argument against "Nature," a force for procreation that "does not know best, or if it does, is on the man's side" (133), and commends them to struggle against the "natural": "When anyone says to you, this, that or other is natural, then fight" (133). She repudiates other conventional feelings and beliefs that constrain women, like possessiveness and jealousy. She replaces the notion that her prostitution was "shameful and disgraceful" with the understanding that it was "a way out, not a path down," and she wonders, "Why was I so easily made to feel it was distasteful, when my own experience indicated that it was not?" (148). In the same meditation, she decides that Hilda's madness needs to be revalued: it "at least enabled her . . . to function as a man might do . . .. If it was madness, it served her very well, as obsessional interests—company, religion, country, politics—serve men very well, to relieve them of the more exacting chores of family and domestic relationships" (148).

3. This makes sense too of Isabel's perceived connection with President Sukarno's mistress, who also bore her famous lover a son and eventually had to be gotten rid of. See pp. 160-1 for Isabel's recognition that "when male power and prestige is at stake the lives and happiness of women and children are immaterial."

4. Ann Ferguson, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Male Dominance (London: Pandora Press, 1989); Miriam Johnson, Strong Mothers, Weak Wives: The Search for Gender Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

5. Terri Apter, Why Women Don't Have Wives: Professional Success and Motherhood (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 26.

6. Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 149. Compare the notion that the mother without child serves as a "double strategy" to Alice E. Adams's discussion of "subjective flexibility"—the possibility of occupying the position of the "essential" self of individualism when it is useful, while taking advantage of a more contradictory sense of "self-in-process" at other points; Adams, Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory, and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), P. 68.