Great with Child, A Review of Writers and Their Mothers, by Dale Salwak, Palgrave Macmillan (2018) (original) (raw)
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This thesis discusses the relationship between the experiences particular to the female body, namely pregnancy and childbirth, and the language employed to voice these experiences. This thesis is set up to reflect the physical cycle of pregnancy and birth. It is divided into three chapters. The first chapter discusses the desire for and the conception of a new use of language, a language equipped to carry the messages, creations, and voices of women. The conception of an expansion of language and the physical conception of a child are paralleled. In this chapter, poetry about wanting to write, wanting to become pregnant, and conception are used as examples of the emergence of the expanded language. In Chapter Two, the incubation of this new language is discussed, its many components and characteristics are described, and the discussion of the possible existence of a women's language is continued, by again analyzing a selection of poetry written by women. In this chapter, poetry about pregnancy and childbirth are used to exemplify the use of this language. The discussion of the gestation and birth of the expanded language with the physical gestation and birth of a child are paralleled. In Chapter Three, this notion of a women's language is further discussed, using poetry about new motherhood to demonstrate the effectiveness and existence of new ways to employ our given language. The discussion of what comes after the birth of a new, expanded language is paralleled with the experiences of a mother after the birth of her child. The ultimate conclusion of this thesis is that there is no one language that women do or should employ when writing, but a movement toward writing through the body when writing about the body, about experiences solely experienced by women.
We Have Deeper Selves to Write From": Motherhood and Writing
Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, 2002
Traditionally, motherhood has been considered an impediment to artistic creation, the two roles thought to be incompatible. Indeed, the artist hero, in nineteenthand twentieth-century European and American fiction, has typically been portrayed as an ivory tower type who avoids all responsibilities, including the domestic, in order to develop "his true self and his consecration as artist" (Beebe, 1964: 6)-making him the polar opposite of the mother, commonly viewed as a selfless, nurturing figure. A most eloquent spokesperson for the plight of the writing mother isTillie Olsen in her book Silences. Echoing Virginia Woolf, she observes that "until very recently almost all distinguished achievement has come from childless women" (1978: 31). While she acknowledges that the increasing number of women who combined writing and motherhood in the 1950s and 60s suggests new possibilities for women, she remains fearful, believing that the basic conflict between the two role...
Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women's Literature
Journal of the Motherhood Initiative For Research and Community Involvement, 2003
Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O'Reilly, eds. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010 387pp Reviewer: Jenni Ramone This far-reaching collection of essays is committed to revealing mothers' stories while establishing firm connections between the fields of Motherhood Studies and Literary
“What is to be a ‘Mother’?”—An Exposition of “Non-biological Mothers” in Literary Texts
English Language and Literature Studies, 2016
This paper investigates the identity formation of "non-biological mothers" in a sample of texts which include primarily "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" by Bertolt Brecht, "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë and "Eveline" by James Joyce. Three characters are selected from the works who perform the role of "mother" at different levels for children who are "biologically" not their own. In Brecht's play, Grusha cares for the child that is left by his own mother. In Bronte's novel, Nelly Dean looks after both Hareton and Junior Catherine, children who have lost their "biological" mother, as well as Heathcliff who is brought to the house as an orphan. In Joyce's short story, Eveline performs the role of mother and remains in Dublin defying her boyfriend's attempts to take her away to possible happiness in a faraway land. In the study, these three figures and their role as "mother" are the primary focus. However, characters such as the first wife of Okonkwo in "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achabe and Anna-Maria in "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen are also be examined to understand how women who have their own children, become committed towards children who are "biologically" not their own. The study elucidates the way this role of "non-biological mother" is constructed in various literary contexts and more specifically how these "non-biological mothers" are not recognized and their love regarded as subservient to the "love" of the "biological mother". A textual analysis of texts is used to interpret these characters in their specific literary settings. In this manner, the study promotes a re-reading of the role of "non-biological mothers" and re-interprets the socio-political implications of the role of "mother" as well as the concept of "motherhood".
<1>In the years since Angela Leighton's Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992) drew renewed critical attention to several non-canonical Victorian women poets, Augusta Webster (1837-94) has emerged as a key figure. Much of the first wave of the criticism on Webster that followed focused on the dramatic monologues she wrote relatively early in her career, collected in A Woman Sold and Other Poems (1867) and Portraits (1870). Poems such as "A Castaway," "Too Faithful," "Faded," "Circe," and "Medea in Athens" feature jilted, mistreated, and socially marginalized women from a range of historical periods and locations, who speak out against both patriarchal injustice writ large and the depredations wrought by specific men. It is not surprising that these works have drawn much of the early interest from scholars, given not just their frequent rhetorical brilliance but at least as significant, their remarkably direct feminist message. In the past few years, several scholars, including most notably Patricia Rigg, have begun to address Webster's previously underexplored and often less overtly feminist writings, including her closet dramas, her translations of Greek drama, and her career as a critic and essayist for the Examiner and the Athenaeum. Perhaps the most promising new area of exploration in Webster scholarship has been her final work, Mother and Daughter: An Uncompleted Sonnet Sequence (1895).(1) In the context of Webster's career, Mother and Daughter marks a masterful late turn from dramatic monologues, individual shorter lyrics, and closet dramas towards a capacious new form -the sonnet sequence; more broadly it represents an important turn against a common sub-genre for nineteenth-century women writers, sentimental poetry about motherhood.
Literature Compass, 2007
The process of literary influence is a battle between strong equals, father and sons.' So wrote Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence. But what of literary daughters? Can Bloom's work offer insights into the dynamics of literary influence for daughters as well as sons? Louisa May Alcott and Virginia Woolf were writerdaughters of writer-fathers who anxiously negotiated familial patriarchy and patriarchal literary history in their texts. In examinations of the power of fathers over the words of daughters, moreover, critics of Alcott and Woolf allude explicitly or otherwise to the theories of Bloom, the 'father' of influence studies. What happens when we apply Bloom's ideas to women's writing? Alcott's Little Women and the so-called 'Thrillers' that she published anonymously offer very different images of daughterhood. When read alongside Bloom, these contradictions suggest Alcott's anxious relation to the influence of her father Bronson, the education reformer and leading member of the Transcendentalist movement. Like Louisa Alcott, Virginia Woolf negotiated her father's personal and public legacy in complex ways. In her writing from 'A Sketch of the Past', to To the Lighthouse, Sir Leslie Stephen's characteristic academic and mountaineering tropes may be seen to surface repeatedly. Bloom's model of literary influence as an anxiety towards a father figure that is 'achieved' within the writing offers new insights into the works of both women: in their writing Alcott and Woolf confronted their fathers' legacies. That the personal and public battleground for these confrontations between father and daughter was writing suggests both the usefulness and limitations of Bloom's model for understanding the dynamics of literary influence upon women writers, and points to a new area of study for scholars of writing women.
“The Receiver No Longer Holds the Sound”: Parents, Poetry, and the Voices We Create in the World
In Education, 2014
In this article, we explore how poetic inquiry informed by duoethnography enables us to know our parents better and to reflect on our relationships with them after their deaths. We are interested in how this process of inquiry deepens our thinking about the nature of research and writing as well as about teaching and community work. Through the lens of poetry, we have been able to see beyond the received family histories of whom our parents were and to fashion a more layered and nuanced picture not only of them, but also of the social forces that shaped them, and in turn shaped us as researchers and social activists. Sources for our work include Heather's father's poetry and Gisela's poems, which draw from interviews with her mother and anecdotes her mother told her as she was growing up.