Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature

Abigail L. Palko

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137602701
• eBook ISBN: 9781137600745
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Imagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean Literature undertakes a comparative transnational reading to develop more expansive literary models of good mothering. Abigail L. Palko argues that Irish and Caribbean literary representations of non-normative mothering practices do not reflect transgressive or dangerous mothering but are rather cultural negotiations of the definition of a good mother. This original book demonstrates the sustained commitment to countering the dominant ideologies of maternal self-sacrifice foundational to both Irish and Caribbean nationalist rhetoric, offering instead the possibility of integrating maternal agency into an effective model of female citizenship.

© The Author(s) 2016

A. L. PalkoImagining Motherhood in Contemporary Irish and Caribbean LiteratureNew Caribbean Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60074-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Embryonic Beginnings

Abigail L. Palko¹

(1)

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

End Abstract

In her 2006 “Papal Postscript,” Judith Butler argues for a feminist engagement with papal declarations of Catholic doctrine on the issue of gender. In response to then-cardinal Ratzinger’s 2004 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church in the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World,” Butler writes of the difficulty inherent in—and the importance of—engaging with a papal encyclical, “given its enormous authority throughout the world” (288). It is precisely this enormous authority that makes failure to engage with it dangerous: “[T]his quite forceful and reactionary machinery is left free to have its way in demeaning the sexual and gendered lives of those who already struggle against unjust restrictions and abjected sexualities within the social and political world” (289), Butler argues. Or, as Palena Neale suggests, “[w]oman in Catholicism is realized through the female body and is designated as a site for Catholic investment, where the dignity and vocation of woman are realized most fully through the use or disuse of the female body” (106). Throughout the twentieth century, a multitude of women writers from both Ireland and the Caribbean have taken up the challenge that Butler identifies to engage with a patriarchal, Western position vis-à-vis the gendered roles of modernity that are often posited as the proper woman’s sphere. Recent literary engagement with these normative notions of gendered roles through the use of subversive maternal motifs (a segment of a larger literary explosion of women’s writing) is, in this light, particularly noteworthy for the force with which authors as diverse as Jamaica Kincaid and Mary Morrissy (to name but two) have set out to deconstruct socially imposed maternal norms. As a careful perusal of late-twentieth-century women’s novels reveals, this cultural questioning and engagement most strikingly centers on representations of nontraditional, nonheteronormative mothering. In Imagining Motherhood, I engage with maternity both as the literal subject of study through critical readings of literary explorations of maternity and as the guiding theoretical concept, using the placenta as a controlling metaphor in theorizing the maternal imaginary. The (seemingly) incessant cultural wars over women’s reproductive power and bodily integrity—the very questioning of how each given society defines personhood, the question par excellence of nationhood—thus plays out on the pages of women’s novels in poignant explorations of the moral complexities which comprise these maternal issues.

In cultures where abortion and homosexuality are hotly contested issues or social taboos, such as Ireland or the Caribbean, the choice to explore the ramifications of rejecting maternity through procurement of an abortion or, alternately, of embracing motherhood as a lesbian mother signals a particular investment in the ways in which the acceptance and rejection of maternity are presented in literature, as well as an awareness of the impact of such images on a society’s view of motherhood and women. Although this study is not a theological treatise, any consideration of motherhood in societies where the Catholic Church exercises significant cultural power, as in the Caribbean and especially in Ireland, must take into account Catholic rhetoric on this issue. This study focuses on pairs of novels that demonstrate specific manifestations of these concerns in both Ireland and the Caribbean ¹ to argue that literary depictions of the acceptance and rejection of maternal impulses in a postcolonial world bear important ramifications for the development of women’s subjectivity and their position as citizens of modern nation-states. Feminist theorist Geetha Ramanathan asserts, “Women’s lived experiences of their bodies become powerful ways of expelling patriarchal and imperial transcriptions”; in advocating studied essentialism (which she defines as “an adversarial recognition that the strict confinement of women in society is because they are women”) over biological essentialism, Ramanathan is careful to clarify that this involves rejecting both a sense that the body is the sum of women’s lives and a purely cultural construct of the body (3). Following on global turns in the 1980s to more conservative stances in political arenas, the 1990s witnessed a reassertion of women’s right to bodily autonomy. This book, driven by Butler’s imperative and informed by Ramanathan’s insight, seeks to analyze the ways in which women’s writing in the 1990s honor women’s lived bodily experiences of rejecting a religiously, politically, and/or socioculturally imposed maternity. In their collective fictional worlds, they create a maternal imaginary ² : woman after woman empowered to mother specific, individual children by her assumption of maternal responsibility. As a result, a self-perpetuating reciprocity is initiated: the woman who mothers authentically (that is, according to her understanding of the situation’s demands) becomes mother to the potential nation, the nation that would recognize the full citizenship of women, which would in turn support women’s authentic mothering (as opposed to the institutionalized mothering that Adrienne Rich identifies). ³

The maternal imaginary as developed in women’s writing is both theoretical and embodied understandings and representations of maternal practice informed by women’s lived experiences of maternity in its wide variety of instantiations. It is women writing (a new form of literary) motherhood into being and in turn inspiring lived experiences through the fictional model. This process thus maps the reciprocal nature of the placenta’s biological function onto cultural practices of mothering. In her 1976 classic study of motherhood, Of Woman Born, Rich theorizes the detrimental effects of what she terms “institutionalized motherhood” (by which she refers to white, Western, middle-class motherhood). Rich argues that the masculinized focus/view of society has distorted our perception of motherhood with the result that maternal stories are still unwritten and still need to be told. She turns to the mother–daughter relationship, which she argues has been “minimized and trivialized in the annals of patriarchy” (226), as the key to women’s understanding of themselves as women. In particular, she delves into the tensions that exist between women and their mothers, noting of matrophobia that it “can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers’ bondage, to become individuated and free. The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr” (236). Rich honors this relationship, though, in asserting its centrality in women’s lives; their loss to each other, of each other, has been and continues to be “the essential female tragedy” (237).

Theorizing a Transatlantic Irish–Caribbean Connection

New attention to the nature and significance of cultural connections between Ireland and the Caribbean is one development of the recent critical turn to transnational studies in literary studies. The resulting studies have primarily engaged with political discourse (particularly around the issue of postcolonial independence) and canonical texts with clear genealogies of influence (such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Derek Walcott’s Omeros). As a result, critical readings have thus far focused on patriarchal and heteronormative understandings of nation and, more significantly, have upheld colonial-era normative conceptions of “woman” and the idealized image of the “Good Mother” who serves as mother to the nation. When we look through a different critical lens, however, more complex patterns of multidirectional influences and more nuanced understandings of the ways that maternity can impact women’s citizenship in the new nation both emerge.

At the same time, “transatlantic,” as it is frequently evoked, is an insufficient concept for considering the Irish–Caribbean connection. It all too often retains an aspect of the colonial conception of civilization as exclusively housed in the Western industrialized world, with overtones of appropriation/imitation, rather than the exchange that I posit happens. In this (the former) deployment of it, there is a hint that Irish writing, as closer to the center, occupies a superior position that inspires future texts. But the relationship is much more complex than that. As Walcott provocatively notes in a 1979 interview, “I’ve always felt some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realized that they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean. They were the niggers of Britain. Now, with all of that, to have those astounding achievements of genius, whether by Joyce or Yeats or Beckett, illustrated that one could come out of a depressed, deprived, oppressed situation and be defiant and creative at the same time” (Hirsch 288). Walcott does not just identify ways that twentieth-century Irish writers serve as an inspirational example to other colonized people, however. He highlights the similarities that bind them and their literary efforts; note his verb choice: “they were also.” He also discusses the fluid nature of their literary influence. Speaking of the role played by Synge’s Riders to the Sea in the writing of his own The Sea at Dauphin, Walcott says, “I guess I knew then that the more you imitate when you’re young, the more original you become. If you know very clearly that you are imitating such and such a work, it isn’t that you’re adopting another man’s genius; it is that he has done an experiment that has worked and will be useful to all writers afterwards” (288–9). As Walcott formulates it, the creation process is one of fluid circulation whereby a writer becomes original through an initial, momentary imitation—or as I theorize it, through a placental-like relationship, wherein the child’s becoming a unique person is dependent upon the mutually constructed placental relationship that defines pregnancy. Literary influence does not merely flow from center to near periphery to further periphery, but rather develops diffusely.

Walcott’s attitude in his Nobel Prize lecture “The Antilles” is instructive here: contemplating the Ramleela festival held in Trinidad, he asks, “Why should India be ‘lost’ when none of these villagers ever really knew it, and why not ‘continuing,’ why not the perpetuation of joy in Felicity and in all the other nouns of the Central Plain: Couva, Chaguanas, Charley Village?” (68–9). In this transnational space, those who have been shaped by migration (whether chosen or forced) need not consider their former ethnic identities to be “lost” because part of that heritage “continues” in their present, multiple influences melded together. To illustrate this web, we might consider a contemporary song like Macklemore’s “Irish Celebration.” ⁴ Macklemore, a white performer of Irish descent from Seattle, raps over background music that is markedly Celtic in sound, fiddles/violins, pipes, accordions, and drums included, blending rap musical influences with “traditional” Irish instrumentation. The resulting hybridity draws attention to the (cultural) similarities shared by the Irish and African diasporic people, particularly in political realms, which the official music video amplifies. The men depicted look either Irish, African, or Indian in heritage, giving visual support to the implicit argument of political affiliation that the song advances, but in the process, it endorses a masculinized view of history. For instance, very few women are shown, and none of them in a militarized stance. This overmasculinization is problematic in its representational character because it obscures the maternal, a crucial component of the formation of the new. Turning to the biological function of the placenta can help us understand cultural patterns of circulation. During a normal pregnancy, both placental material and fetal DNA cross into the mother’s blood stream; this “infusion” does not harm the mother, but it does alter her bodily composition (Taglauer, Wilkins-Haug, and Bianchi S65; Lo and Chiu 286). Similarly, the new artistic creation and identity that Walcott describes and Macklemore enacts depend upon the fusion of elements from multiple originary sources and result in a new kind of Irishness or Caribbeanness. It is through attention to the maternal, I argue, that we can parse out this process.

Attention to the maternal also demands (and then rewards) acknowledgment of motherhood as a transnational phenomenon. As Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels contend in their analysis of late-twentieth-century media images of motherhood (which they characterize as promulgating a “new momism”), “[w]e want to erase the amnesia about motherhood—we do have a common history, it does tie us together, and it has made us simultaneously guilt-ridden and ready for an uprising” (25). As numerous second-wave feminist literary theorists argued, including Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, and Annette Kolodny, the ties that connect a female tradition of writing are obscured when women’s texts are forced into the canonical literary ages constructed from a survey of men’s writing. Or as Gilbert and Gubar describe, “meanings [are] made by women’s texts […] when they were read not separately and not in the usual graduate-school context of, say, the ‘Victorian novel’ or ‘nineteenth-century American lit.’ but together, in the newly defined context of a female literary tradition” (xx–xxi). This tradition is generative and reciprocal in its potentiality: “[W]omen of letters […] had engaged in a complex, sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes convivial conversation that crossed national as well as temporal boundaries. And that conversation had been far more energetic, indeed far more rebellious, than we’d ever realized” (xxi). The same rich potential of “transformative” moments of literary analysis (xx) awaits the critic who reads a maternal literary tradition. Thus, I posit that when we undertake comparative readings of Irish and Caribbean women’s novels, we need to read horizontally, accounting for a multidirectional flow of influences.

A complex relationship to language, literary creation and imitation, and cultural influence characterizes the imbricated literary productions of Ireland and the Caribbean. E.A. Markham, a Montserratian poet, identifies the source of Ireland’s influence on Caribbean (and Montserratian in particular) culture and literature as “the special position of Ireland’s relationship to the English language” (137–8). In this observation, of course, is an echo of Stephen Dedalus’s lament: “The language we are speaking is his before it is mine. […] My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (Joyce, Portrait 205); Markham himself draws attention to this Joycean evocation. The power of this shared linguistic heritage is, according to Markham, incalculable:

It seems to me that these qualities, these perspectives—consciousness of an Irish presence at home—a population which, in some senses distanced itself from the English (though only in some senses) encouraged in the native population the feeling that outside forces, however irksome, were not necessarily monolithic, that it was possible to make alliances with those who were not necessarily on one’s side, when those alliances were useful, in the full knowledge that they might shift. (143)

Markham also cites St. Lucian poet Walcott in his effort to explain what engages the Caribbean writer in thinking about an Irish literary and cultural influence, suggesting that the fascination and influence both run much deeper than mere use of Irish texts as “leaping-off points” (137). It is Ireland’s own postcolonial situation—its “lack of political and economic empire” (139)—that enables the Caribbean writer to accept an Irish literary/cultural model as a viable, self-respecting option; the Irish example’s postcoloniality precludes the detrimental political self-consciousness that following either British or American models would impose.

Such a mutual literary indebtedness is the product of a century of imbricated postcolonial repressions. With the increasing attention paid in literary studies to the issues raised by a focus on transnationalism, scholars have begun to tease out important elements of the intersections of influence that characterize the relationship between Irish and Caribbean literature. Declan Kiberd, for example, in his reading of J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Mustapha Matura’s Playboy of the West Indies, illustrates the reciprocal nature of this influence, one that traveled eastward across the Atlantic Ocean as well as westward, punctuating Kiberd’s assertion of a bidirectional (both temporal and spatial) influence by calling Synge’s play the “Fanonite ‘seething pot’” (“The Empire” 135). By recognizing crucial similarities between them—their respective colonial histories, their island geographies (and the close relationships of reciprocity that they share with their near island neighbors), their peripheral locations, their language issues ⁵ —we open a space to consider significant ways that these connections have played out in similar, yet still locally specific, developments in the postcolonial era. Several critical texts lay out a trajectory of scholarship on Irish–Caribbean connections that my current study aims to further.

In a 2000 article entitled “Island Women: Comparing Irish and Caribbean Writers,” Beth A. Wightman draws on cultural studies’ theories of space to argue that current postcolonial studies are flawed to the extent that they conflate islands with subcontinents, eliding or ignoring differences between terrestrial borders and marine boundaries. Such geographical distinctions, she suggests, matter immensely in the development of national psychology, with particular significance in issues of gender when “woman” is so easily aligned with “home,” as in the postcolonial context. She describes the colonizing perception of the island: “A self-contained, seemingly inviolate space, its ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Embryonic Beginnings
• 2. “A Mother-of-Sufferer”: Subversive Mothering in the Caribbean and Irish Traditions
• Part I. Rejecting Motherhood
• Part II. Redefining Motherhood
• Back Matter