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.