Troublesome Practices: Mothering, Literature and Ethics (original) (raw)

2002, Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research …

T o link mothering and writing, as I want to do here, might already be considered daring. Maternal muteness and marginahty, most often the rule, have traditionally been seen as prerequisites for the survival of culture: "We could locate in virtually all of the founding texts of our [western] culture a version of the myth (.. .) that the death or absence of the mother (.. .) makes possible the construction of language and of culture" (Homans, 1986: 2). This myth has by now been ably and amply challenged by feminists in various disciplines, whose work I wish to build on. I will argue not only that mothers can and should write literature, but that mothering and literary productionboth profoundly relational practices-can be linked and deployed as challenges to traditional western ideals of rationality and individuality, in subversive and ethically compelling ways. The idea of a maternal writing is troublesome because it unsettles many of the oppositions upon which motherhood in western culture has historically rested, such as that between maternity and creativity, or "the binary system that conceives woman and writer, motherhood and authorhood, babies and books, as mutually exclusive" (Friedman, 1987: 65-6). When this opposition is challenged, others, such as publidprivate and mind/body, are also upset. Maternal writing entails a publicizing of maternal experience, and it subverts the traditional notion of the mother as an instinctual, purely corporeal being. It is thus to be understood as a key tool in the redefinition of maternity in which feminists are engaged. Maternal writing-and maternal readingalso raise the question of relationahty, casting doubt on the self/other opposition, as we will see. This article is concerned firstly to offer a critical overview of how feminists have responded to the question of mothering and literature, and, secondly, to