Mothers
An Essay on Love and Cruelty
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart.
Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice.
Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intellectually rigorous exploration of motherhood in Western culture, British essayist Rose (The Haunting of Sylvia Plath) urges readers to rethink what they expect from mothers. Drawing on feminist theory, the tenets of psychoanalysis, critical theory, and examples from literature, Rose asserts that motherhood "is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world." She notes that mothers, as subjects, are idealized as nurturing caregivers who provide humanity's entry point into the world, yet in the public and political sphere "mothers are either being exhorted to return to their instincts and stay at home or to make their stand in the boardroom." Rose's wide-ranging thought experiment probes contentious questions both political ("Why are mothers so often held accountable for... the breakdown in the social fabric?") and domestic ("What is being asked of mothers when they are expected to pour undiluted love and devotion into their child?"). The last section is a psychoanalytic interpretation of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels in which Rose argues that "the broken edges of Ferrante's mothers and her writing are mostly in tune with the world's grief." Readers of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts will be drawn to Rose's rumination.
