Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature

Mary Beth Rose

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319404530
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319404547
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Europäische Literaturkritik

This book explores the inconsistent literary representations of motherhood in diverse texts ranging from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Mary Beth Rose unearths plots startling in their frequency and redundancy that struggle to accommodate —or to obliterate—the complex assertions of maternal authority as it challenges traditional family and social structures. The analysis engages two mother plots: the dead mother plot, in which the mother is dying or dead; and the living mother plot, in which the mother is alive and through her very presence in the text, puts often unbearable pressure on the mechanics of the plot.  These plots reappear and are transformed by authors as diverse in chronology and use of literary form as Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, Oscar Wilde, and Tony Kushner. The book argues that, insofar as women become the second sex, it is not because they are females per se but because they are mothers; at the same time the analysis probes the transformativepolitical and social potential of motherhood as it appears in contemporary texts like Angels in America.

© The Author(s) 2017

M. B. RosePlotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern LiteratureEarly Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40454-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature

Mary Beth Rose¹

(1)

University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

End Abstract

In the famous story of incest and parricide, Oedipus the King, the hero’s courage reveals itself as a relentless search for knowledge of his identity, no matter how terrible his discoveries may be. His mother, Jocasta, occupies a particularly fraught position in the legendary plot. She is the first member of the family to realize that her husband is her son; that he murdered his own father; and that Oedipus, the father of her other children, is in fact their brother: in other words, Oedipus’ mother, Jocasta, already has the knowledge of his birth that the hero desperately seeks. A guarantor of his identity, she nevertheless attempts to forestall Oedipus’ recognition and fulfillment of his tragic destiny with absurd and improbable advice: “Best to live lightly, as one can, unthinkingly. / As to your mother’s marriage bed,—don’t fear it. / Before this in dreams too, as well as oracles, / many a man has lain with his own mother. / But he to whom such things are nothing bears / his life most easily.” ¹ With certain knowledge of his identity, Oedipus’ mother-wife now seeks to obstruct the discovery her son-husband passionately requires. An impossible task, given his heroic quest: she commits suicide, and he freely, if horribly, satisfies his quest for his origins through a prolonged process of logical deduction, rather than relying on his mother’s unquestioned biological authority.

Jocasta’s paradoxical position in the plot of Oedipus the King as both the source of knowledge and the impediment to it provides an early example—perhaps the early example—of a long western literary tradition in which maternal authority is unevenly and inconsistently represented. In a patriarchal culture, paternal authority, no matter how fragile, compromised, or defeated, presents the possibility of structural certainty: we know what plot positions the father’s authority must entail: progenitor, lawmaker, preserver of order, seeker of knowledge. But this structural clarity does not exist for the representation of maternal authority. As the example of Jocasta demonstrates, the mother’s singular authority is one of origins and knowledge: she knows the facts of her son’s birth and the identity of the father. But in the plot her position is never resolved. Her knowledge of her son’s identity functions as appalling and real, but not as a resolution for him. From the point of view of the hero, his mother’s knowledge of the truth is neither revelatory nor final. In addition she seeks to prevent Oedipus from finding out who he is, presenting obstacles to his desire for knowledge. As the creator of biological life, is she also essential to social life, or is it the fact of her death that allows that life to go on? It is only after his mother’s suicide that Oedipus is able to carry on with his tragic existence.

Freud and his successors famously reconstruct the Oedipus myth as a paradigm of male identity formation, requiring the successful subject to separate from his mother in order to occupy the father’s place. Implicitly the mother must be excluded from the unfolding process of the hero’s story, otherwise known as the plot. This study does not depart entirely from Freud’s discoveries, which uncover the structural logic of many western texts. But my analysis departs completely from Freud’s focus. What happens when we look at Oedipus the King not from the point of view of the hero, as Freud and his successors have, but from the positioning of his mother in the plot? Plotting Motherhood poses this question to a variety of texts from several periods of western history. I argue that focusing on the plotting of motherhood newly illuminates obscured forms of gendered meaning making. This exploration deconstructs and exposes the vulnerabilities of the very patriarchal cultural forms that Freud finds inevitable, but it also reveals meanings in texts that previously have been occluded, such as the transformative social and political potential of motherhood.

I consider plot in the Aristotelian sense as the arrangement of incidents in a text, which has a beginning, middle, and end. I ask how each arrangement creates meaning and explore the meanings that its representations yield. In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks develops these questions in a psychoanalytic direction: plot, he argues, is not simply about an arrangement of incidents. Rather the movements of plot reveal the “motor force in human desire, its peculiar relation to beginnings and ends … the underlying intentionality of event.” Although not particularly concerned with gender, Brooks adumbrates the nuances and complexities of desire, including how often it is deflected from its original aim. Those deflections become the plot, yet the hero’s original goal is proscribed both by its beginnings and its persistent, inevitable inscription in desire. ² As will be clear—particularly in my chapter on Augustine’s Confessions—I am indebted to Brooks’ profound analysis of plot. Yet my inquiry as a whole is less interested in individual desire and more interested in collective structures. My analysis brings together the problematics of maternal authority with the aesthetic requirements of plot in order to assess the changing social and political meanings that this conjunction yields.

This study is primarily concerned with the plotting of motherhood as it represents the distribution of authority in the family and, by extension, the larger culture. Maternal authority is first and foremost an authority of origin. Second, maternity by definition constitutes an authority of knowledge, the mother’s knowledge of authentic fatherhood and the legitimacy of children. These conjoined authorities are not only singularly empowering but are of necessity acknowledged by all. “No uncertainty can exist about knowledge of maternity,” Carole Pateman explains: “A woman who gives birth is a mother and a woman cannot help but know that she has given birth; maternity is a natural and a social fact.” In contrast, “paternity has to be discovered or invented.” ³

Pateman’s assertions that “no uncertainty can exist” about motherhood and the knowledge of paternity it entails require qualification. What if the mother has had multiple sexual partners and does not in fact know (without the aid of DNA testing) who the father of her child is? What if the mother has been raped by a stranger she is unable to identify? Or committed adultery after marriage? What if a baby has been switched at birth, becoming, in more literary terms, a changeling? What is the status of maternal authority rooted in biology and based on origins and knowledge when confronted with adoption or the more contemporary issues of surrogacy and complex fertility procedures? Many of these situations are not infrequent in any period of history, while others are extremely contemporary and barely fall under the historical scope of this study. But all these scenarios disrupt the idea that maternal knowledge of origins and paternity can be regarded as certain, natural, or inevitable.

Despite the quality of universality with which Pateman seems to endow her arguments, her ideas have to do not with an all-encompassing view of maternal authority, but with historically normative conceptions of that authority as they have been formulated in western texts. Plotting Motherhood is concerned primarily with such normative representations and conceptions of the biological maternal body. While acknowledging the significance of the exceptions and distinctions catalogued above and also gesturing toward them, the arguments in this study focus on the tremendous power of the norm. The book presents a materialist analysis primarily concerned with the authority typically and traditionally assigned to the maternal body and the conflicted representations of that authority as it is encoded in western literary plots.

Oedipus brushes away his mother’s certain knowledge, giving her biological authority little credibility and favoring instead a deliberate, if panicky, process of logical deduction. His legacy in part persists. Despite the wide and deep recognition of maternal authority in the west and despite its grounding in biology, this authority and its impact do not find their corollary in most significant cultural formations of adult social and political life. The workplace and professions are impervious in their organization to the huge and omnipresent fact of maternal authority. Political structures do not embody it. Until very recently, legal systems do not encode it: in contrast, a good example of the historically systemic organization of paternal legal authority is primogeniture, an entire system of inheritance organized around fathers and sons. A problem seems to arise not from the recognition of maternal authority, but from the disposition of it in cultural life. We are left with two simultaneous though potentially contradictory truths: one about the necessity and immensity of maternal authority and another about the inability to connect that authority with public power or to create for it enlivened and sustained cultural forms. The plotting of motherhood, I argue, is designed to represent and struggle with (rather than to account for) this paradox.

What does account for it? The bodily authority of motherhood alone is traditionally assumed to be so basic and profound as to carry a forceful explanatory power. Plotting motherhood engages instincts and intimacies, our defining personal relations with our mothers, both body and mind, and the individual’s wish and need to escape what is often assumed to be the grounding inevitability of maternal authority; or, in a variation on that theme, the idealization of maternal sacrifice that enables the hero’s freedom, often through his union with the father: Freud’s Oedipal plot. Material in nature, my analysis focuses on the normative biological fact of motherhood, the maternal body (rather than maternal imagery, e.g., or mother–figures). Addressing issues of inequality, I argue that, insofar as women become the second sex, it is not because they are females per se, but because they are mothers. “It may be that all the details of the double standard are mere elaborations of the central fact that when a man and a woman have sexual relations the woman may conceive whereas the man will not,” Keith Thomas reflects. “The whole social and ethical structure may well follow from this in practice without following logically.” ⁴ The ways in which literary forms are created to interpret this material norm is a significant part of my subject.

I am interested in plotting motherhood in all its variations not as an inevitable expression of individual desire but as a political and social aesthetic structure: collectively created and recreated. Considered as a reiterated frame, the plotting of maternal authority can give form to an extraordinarily diverse range of meanings and events. What is the cultural work that it is doing and is seen to have done? What is the collective imaginative usefulness of the plotting of motherhood: what is it attempting to express, to transform, to emphasize or evade? In pursuit of these questions my analysis engages two kinds of mother plots: the dead mother plot, in which the mother is dying or dead; and the living mother plot, in which the mother is alive and, through her very presence in the text, puts—often unbearable—pressure on the mechanics of the plot.

First, the dead mother plot. Maternal authority and agency are represented with disturbing frequency not only as fierce challenges to the hero, but also as dangerous, threatening by their existences and self-assertion to the larger patriarchal organization of culture. So problematic can maternal authority become that in literary texts mothers are often dying or dead. The fact that there have been many critical discussions of the representation of motherhood has by no means obscured or explained the extreme strangeness and tireless reiteration of this plot. ⁵ Why are mothers in epics, plays, novels, and movies so frequently dying or dead? This fact unites texts as diverse in both historical period and literary form as the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Confessions of Augustine, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tom Jones, Emma, Persuasion, To the Lighthouse, Forrest Gump, The Descendants, the majority of Grimm’s fairy tales and Walt Disney movies, Pinocchio, Psycho, and Lolita. Clearly when the mother is not present, her authority, potentially conflicting with that of the father, presents no obstacle to the satisfactory workings of the plot. One striking example that can be culled from among the many I explore is the fact that in Shakespearean romantic comedy, the form that represents the wished-for society, there is not a single mother. The fact that Shakespeare represents and celebrates alternative sexualities in his comedies makes his avoidance of representing motherhood all the more interesting. To cite another example, often the mother, no matter how critical to the hero’s success, nevertheless presents an obstacle to the hero’s freedom and clarity of mind, as his beloved Monica does to Augustine, enabling his magnificent destiny precisely by her death.

The living mother plot exists in symbiotic relation to the dead mother plot in terms of concern with the structural positioning and potentially disruptive consequences of maternal authority and agency. How does the mother’s presence in the plot, including the exercise of her authority, transform the structure, and therefore the meaning, of the text? When mothers are alive, their authority is represented as excessive to the demands of the plot, refusing to be contained within the given logical structure and adding by its assertion to the violence, ferocity, and incoherence of the outcome, as Volumnia does in Coriolanus by acting as a public figure; or as Gertrude does in Hamlet, precisely because the dimensions of her maternal authority are attenuated, mysterious and vague. In the medieval Griselda tales the simple fact of the authoritative maternal knowledge entailed in giving birth becomes the specific target of the preoccupied husband’s brutal rage.

With some rare exceptions, disturbing representations of maternal authority as either destructive or unassimilable within given structures in the medieval and early modern centuries continue in modern and contemporary texts. However, changing social conditions and conceptions of gender make visible transforming versions of the dead and living mother plots in the modern centuries. I focus on texts by Oscar Wilde and Tony Kushner, in which enacted maternal authority begins to occupy a structural space that is legitimate and orderly, even benevolent. Wilde struggles to revise in his comic plots those conceptions of maternal authority that are idealized, deeply feared, or buried underground. Tony Kushner transforms maternal authority into a creative revolutionary force precisely by self-consciously revising both the dead and living mother plots.

Plotting Motherhood examines the ways in which plots make interpretive claims upon authoritative maternal knowledge in order to produce a great variety of material and political effects and outcomes. The study should be of interest to those who have focused on the struggles and contradictions that have long been embedded in the politics of gender. The analysis offers a suggestive genealogy of those struggles and politics. Including texts from many different historical periods, I pay particular attention to the ways that the historical moment in which each text is produced inflects the possibilities for innovations and constraints in literary forms. I want to underscore how noticeably dependent western cultural representations have been on the dead and living mother plots in order to tell certain stories for a long time; but also to emphasize a trajectory in which these plots are encountering political and social conditions in which they may be revised and transformed. Studying the historical permutations of conceptions of maternal authority and their changing embodiment in literary forms presents a compelling picture of a culture’s evaluation of itself. I hope to show that while biological motherhood is traditionally (although with decreasing frequency) construed as inevitable, mother plots as historically constructed are available to creative transformation.

The second chapter, “Time, Narrative, and Maternity in Augustine’s Confessions ” (c.397–401), centers on the hero’s education, as he moves through a perilous journey from doubt, heresy, and inner pain toward illuminated insight, a fully realized belief in Catholic Christianity made manifest in baptism. But the Confessions does not conclude with the hero’s baptism. In terms of literary form it becomes a bifurcated text. The first nine books narrate the story of the hero’s struggle within the demands of time; but after that struggle is successfully concluded, the final four books move out of the time-boundedness associated with narration, into the non-narratable, timeless world of meditation and contemplation. It is of course this second, new timeless life which for Augustine constitutes reality. The bifurcation paradoxica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature
• 2. Time, Narrative, and Maternity in Augustine’s Confessions
• 3. Maternal Abandonment, Maternal Deprivation: Tales of Griselda in Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Shakespeare
• 4. Maternal Authority and the Conflicts It Generates in Early Modern Dramatic Plots
• 5. Milton and Maternal Authority: Why Is the Virgin Mary in Paradise Regained?
• 6. The Emergence of the Mother in Oscar Wilde’s Comic Plots
• 7.  Angels in America: The Transformation of Maternal Plotting and the Transformation of the Family
• 8. Epilogue
• Back Matter