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Tag: Rachel Cusk

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Billets Work in progress

Mapping the field of maternal studies: psychoanalytic approaches

Mary Cassatt, Mother Playing With Child, 1897

More conflict and guilt

Mothers are conflicted, we have seen plenty of evidence of that. They are conflicted because they have been told they could “have it all” and then realised that, sometimes, they couldn’t; because they feel that they should be mothers first, but that their love is stifling; or that they should prioritise their own wellbeing, but that they are abandoning their children in the process and probably turning them into sociopaths. No one, it seems, can win this game, and the constant tensions between conflicting cultural prescriptions is fueling the fire of mother guilt, which burns in all our hearts.

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Billets Work in progress

Representing childbirth in literature: from third to first person

Gustav Léonard de Jonghe, "The Young Mother"

What matters in representing childbirth in literature is making it visible. In a literary tradition in which the male experience has long been the main reference for any sort of human experience, childbirth as a life event has often been kept silent, relegated to the margins of discourse, like many typically female experiences such as puberty, pregnancy or menopause. In self-life writing written by men the main foundational event is often the first sexual experience, and if we go back earlier in time, participation in the war. Childbirth has only recently become an object of literary representation in its own right.

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Work in progress

Why so few babies in literature?

Why indeed?

This is one of the first questions Marie Darrieussecq asks in the memoir she wrote to recount the birth of her first child and her transition to motherhood. (Read the review of this book here)

What is a baby?

Why so few babies in literature?

What about the discourses around them? Why do we say “baby” and not “the baby”?

What is a mother? And why women rather than men?

Marie Darrieussecq, Le Bébé, 2013 (jacket blurb)
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