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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.
List of contents
Introduction: Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature.- One: Time, Narrative, and Maternity in Augustine's Confessions.- Chapter Two: Maternal Abandonment, Maternal Deprivation: Tales of Griselda in Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Shakespeare.- Chapter Three: Maternal Authority and the Conflicts it Generates in Early Modern Dramatic Plots.- Chapter Four: Milton and Maternal Authority: Why is the Virgin Mary in Paradise Regained?.- Chapter Five: The Emergence of the Mother in Oscar Wilde's Comic Plots.- Chapter Six: Angels in America: The Transformation of Maternal Plotting and the Transformation of the Family.- Epilogue.- Bibliography.- Index.
About the author
Mary Beth Rose is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. Formerly editor of
Renaissance Drama,she is the author of
Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature;
The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama;
and co-editor of
Elizabeth I: Collected Works.
Summary
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.
