Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood

Edited by Catalina Florina Florescu

Publication date:

29 October 2013

Length of book:

264 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

237x161mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739183175

Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood presents the accounts of mothers who have suffered a major physical and/or psychically traumatic accident, and, as a consequence, their minds and bodies have been drastically changed. They live under the pressure of having discovered the alter ego of their traumatized personality, and now, distressed, cannot embrace their unconditional maternal love. Instead, they enter into a phase where they face the challenge of revealing who they are as persons before accepting or motivating themselves as mothers. The mothers presented in this volume also seem to have another thing in common: their transnational, fluid, female identity as they enter into an imaginary dialog that transcends geographical and temporal perspectives on womanhood and motherhood. This collection introduces and analyzes recurrent words that define a woman's body and mind today: fear, competition, motherhood and career rights, selfishness, ambition, destruction, distance, and identity. By using unprecedented comparative critical approaches such as phenomenological, medical, feminist, and re-enchantinent theories, and by analyzing works from literature, cinema, and visual arts, this collection attempts to reestablish and redefine a canonical concept with the intention to revitalize an otherwise taken-for-granted image and role.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 A Mother’s Loss of Her Daughter’s Face: Ethical Issues of Facial Disfigurement
in Natalie Kusz’s Memoir Road Song
Gudrun Grabher

2 From Child to Mother: The Disjoint Identity of Charles Robert
Maturin’s Immalee
Margarita Georgieva

3 Solving the “Crumbling” Mother in Nancy Drew
Michael Cornelius

4 Feminized and Maternal Bodies: Thresholds to Empowered Roles
in Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron
Sharon L. Decker

5 The Price We Pay: Motherhood, Marriage and the Struggle to
Class Jump in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina
Tarah Sweeting-Trotter

6Childless Motherhood: the Geopolitics of Maternal Bliss in
Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven
Oana M. Chivoiu

7 Dismatria: The Quest for a Mother-Land in
Igiaba Scego’s Writings
Tatjana Babic-Wiilliams

8 ‘I wanted to hear her called Mom’: The Grieving Mother and
Lost Pregnant Daughter in Sharon Rocha’s For Laci
Jennifer Musial

9 Unwanted Mother, Unwanted Motherhood:
Competing Maternities in Selby’s Requiem for a Dream
Zachary Snider

10 “She Who Dwells Alone …:” Mad Mothers, Old Spinsters and
Hysterical Women in William Wordsworth’s Poetry of 1798
Irina Strout

11 Writing, Mothering, and Traumatic Subjectivity in
Sapphire’s Push
Sherry Ziesenheim & Matthew J. Darling

12 Looking into the Mirror, Inscribing the Blank Slate:
18th Century Women Write about Mothering
Elizabeth Johnston

13 Wise Mother? Insane Mother? Sara Chapman Bull and the Disarticulated
Subjectivities of Turn-of-the Century Motherhood
Jacqueline Brady

14 Maternal Interruption: Reconceiving Political Spaces and Social Agency in Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood
Mary L. Cappelli

15 Mother-less: Joan Didion’s Blue Nights and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole
Catalina Florina Florescu

Afterword

Index

About the Authors

A wonderful compendium of interpretive scholarship about arguably our most important relationship: with our mothers, and with ourselves as mothers. By turns lyrical, intense, and always thoughtful, this is textual analysis at its best. Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood invites us into the dramatic worlds of mothering and trauma, broadly defined, from 18th century English Gothic to Emersonian America—from the Igbo mothers of Nigeria, to the contemporary genre of ‘nobody memoir.’ These are literary essays in both senses of a consistently high standard, offering a wealth of fresh insights into this under-explored yet often misunderstood or ‘disjointed’ figure at the heart of all our lives.