Dr Angelica De Vido is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, who specialises in women's writing and the history of feminist activism in the United States. I asked her about portrayals of motherhood, mother-daughter relationships and the role that literature plays in shaping our perceptions.
What recurring themes or misconceptions about motherhood have you observed in your studies?
My research explores how the representation of women in literature has been shaped by women’s shifting roles in society. Motherhood remains a key tenet of women’s representation in literature, and being a ‘good mother’ remains the role to which all women are encouraged to aspire – alongside finding a romantic (male) partner and becoming a wife. However, unlike the heroine of the romance narrative, on whose search for a husband fiction typically focuses, literary mothers have usually remained in the background of narratives – seen, but rarely heard.
This has led to the representation of mothers remaining one-dimensional; as stock figures who play a minor role in someone else’s narrative, rather than characters in their own right, and who put the happiness, needs, and desires of others above their own.
Resultantly, the reality of the range of experiences involved in being a mother have remained overlooked in fiction, until the rise in literature by feminist authors in the 1960s, who reclaimed the mother as a key figure for cultural and socio-political exploration.
How does literature play a role in shaping societal perceptions and expectations of motherhood, and what potential misunderstandings or myths can arise from these portrayals?
Literature remains one of the most dominant forces in culture, with almost 700 million physical books, and many more electronic books, being sold each year in the UK. While reading is fundamentally a leisure activity, the ideas and characterisations present in fiction play a key role in disseminating ideas of personal and social identity to readers. Literature has played a key role in the circulation of what has become known as the ‘Motherhood Mystique.’ This representation of mothers celebrates the self-sacrificing woman who joyfully devotes herself to her role, and places the needs of her children and husband above her own (think, Marmee March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women).
By contrast to this character type, women who express ambivalent or negative emotions towards being a mother, those who prioritise career ambitions over being present for all aspects of their child’s lives, or those who in fact choose not to be mothers at all, are often presented as ‘bad,’ ‘unlikeable’ characters whose behaviour is presented as unnatural and unfeminine.
Can literature help challenge traditional notions of motherhood? Are there examples where literature has contributed positively to this cause?
Literature can play a key role in challenging traditional notions of motherhood, through complicating the reductive ways in which being a mother has been represented in culture. Writers inspired by the feminist movements of the late-twentieth century have worked to dismantle traditional notions of motherhood being women’s primary source of fulfilment, joy, and sense of self. Writers ranging from Toni Morrison, to Margaret Atwood, and Angela Carter have moved mothers from the periphery to the centre of their novels – in roles ranging from being action heroes, to political activists – to attempt to give voice to the complexities and contradictions of motherhood, and to explore the ways in which ideas of gender, race, and class intersect in dominant cultural understandings of motherhood.
Contemporary writers have also worked to challenge one of the greatest taboos surrounding motherhood – women’s expressions of ambivalence, regret, and disappointment at being a parent.
Writers including Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti have used literature to attempt to dismantle the shame that women are taught to feel for expressing these emotions, and to challenge the dominant social idea that experiencing such emotions makes someone a ‘bad’ mother.
Instead, such writers used literature to humanise mothers as people with complicated emotions and lives, and to encourage transformation in social discourse and a lifting of taboos by bringing into mainstream culture discussions of the emotional and mental challenges involved in being a parent, as well as the joys and triumphs.
Have you noticed changes or shifts in how mother-daughter relationships are portrayed in literature over time? How do you think these changes reflect changing attitudes towards motherhood?
The mother-daughter relationship has undergone a range of transformations over recent decades. This relationship has traditionally been represented as adversarial and combative. Indeed, when girls reach adolescence, they are encouraged by social and cultural narratives to reject their mother in order to establish their own sense of identity. However, contemporary writers have focused on the liberating possibilities the mother-daughter relationships can provide both parties, as an intergenerational sharing of thoughts, feelings, ideas, and worries between daughters and their mothers can prove significant for women’s negotiation of their own sense of identity in relation to dominant ideas about gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Through encouraging conversation and knowledge exchange between mother and daughter, writers ranging from Adrienne Rich to Sara Taylor have emphasised the crucial role mothers can play in supporting daughters as they discover and experiment with their own identities as they approach adulthood. As Adrienne Rich writes of her own mother in her book, Of Woman Born, “hers was the first face I ever looked at, to know what women were, what I was to be” (p.219).
How can a deeper understanding of literary portrayals of motherhood and daughterhood support real-life experiences and challenges faced by mothers and daughters today?
The contemporary literary marketplace has witnessed a marked increase in mother-daughter narratives by women of colour. Such narratives are working to emphasise how parenthood, and experiences of being a girl and a woman, are deeply intertwined with narratives of race and class – narratives that continue to present challenges and forms of discrimination for women and girls of colour.
Writers ranging from Jean Kwok to Bernardine Evaristo are using literature to explore the experiences and challenges of the mother-daughter relationship, alongside examining the social narratives that continue to dominate ideas of gender, race, and class.
Literary portrayals of motherhood and daughterhood can also counter the contradictory, and often misogynistic, ideas of femininity and womanhood with which we are bombarded on a daily basis on social media. Contemporary literature’s detailed exploration of mothers’ and daughters’ thoughts, worries, ideas, desires, uncertainties, and aspirations can work to illuminate the challenges faced by women and girls, and to provide key counter-narratives that can support and reflect real-life experiences.
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