Mother as a mirror for our failings...

In the opening of Jacqueline Rose’s book, Mothers: An Essay On Love And Cruelty, she writes, “Mother is, in the Western discourse, the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human. It is the ultimate scapegoat for our own personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task—unrealisable, of course—of mothers to repair.”

Rose’s long essay “raises the ante”, in her own words, about what we think the mother signifies. She explores the history of motherhood in literature, reading writers like Elena Ferrante, Euripedes’ Medea, Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison. If we read fiction as she does, we might turn to a few books that have reflected on the choice of motherhood, becoming a mother, tangled relationships with actual mothers who shape us and the loss of the mother. 

What does it mean to become a mother? Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey, explores this question through the eyes of Laura, the main narrator, and her friend Alina. For both women, their careers and ambitions are precious and they find that their easy stances about rejecting motherhood become more uneasy in their mid-thirties. Laura remains evangelical about her rejection of motherhood, while Alina changes course to become pregnant only to confront a difficult journey with motherhood. Laura watches pigeons on her windowsill with their eggs as she considers the many mothers she sees around her: her own, her neighbour, and Alina. The book gently and directly explores this life-altering choice with all its confusions, bringing up the ideas of agency, bodily sovereignty, precarity and social conditions that shape motherhood in an easy-to-read narrative.

The Long Form by Kate Briggs is a fictional deep dive into the life of Helen and her baby Rose, a literary motherhood that dips into the phenomenology of the everyday. How do two newly connected human beings go from day to day? Much like Bechdel, Briggs as a translator of Roland Barthes reflects on the theories of motherhood — listening to Winnicot’s radio programmes, reading Barthes, but going through the banal motions of the day without always grasping at meaning. The book seems to look at this role of mother and baby with fresh surprise and love. It ends with Helen, the new mother, and her newborn listening to a Winnicot lecture about how to take care of the infant, leaving us with an awareness of the ordinary devotion of this relationship.

In the mode of psychological exploration, Alison Bechdel thinks back to her troubled relationship with her mother in her second autobiographical graphic novel, Are You My Mother? Unlike Fun House which was about her closeted gay father, this book is more about Bechdel than the parent and explores through theory and literature the many ways she feels “composed” by her mother. She invokes Donald Winnicott, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and of course, the motherlode of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Bechdel tries to put her finger on the troubling and incomplete relationship she shares with her mother. There is nothing so glaringly imperfect and traumatic about it, but she explores it while tugging at the other relationships in her life with her lovers and her work.

In Naveen Kishore’s Mother Muse Quintet, we experience a grief-stricken exploration of losing his mother to a slow-bleeding Alzheimer’s, and then her passing. In poetry, the loss and the idea of the mother take on a deeper aesthetic richness, confounding, clarifying and metaphoric at once.

The author is a writer and editor based in Mysuru. She enjoys non-fiction about politics and society, and the punny brilliance of Anthea Bell.

Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.