Abstract
This evolutionary reading of the Chinese writer Zhang Kangkang’s maternal stories explores the specificities and agency of mothers and of children. The dilemma confronted by physically absent and/or emotionally detached mothers, depicted in Zhang’s stories, entails women’s strategic intelligence to make tradeoffs between their reproductive efforts and their life stage and conditions. It sheds light on conditional maternal commitment, the necessity and feasibility of cooperative childrearing, and various mother–child conflicts.Zhang’s texts also describe insecurely attached infants and children who sink into a nonchalant and avoidant state after experiencing distress, terror, or resentment due to insensitive and unpredictable mothering. Absent and ambivalent mothers are generally harassed by the feeling of guilt, resulting from conditional maternal commitment, mother-child conflicts, and the high expectations of the motherhood myth. Children’s counterstrategies also regulate and enhance maternal or alloparental care.
Highlights
Samira Kawash (2011, 990, 996; see Ross 1995) points out that motherhood studies have been “fragmented and discontinuous”, and that, Sarah Hrdy’s work (1999b) is “a valuable corrective for anyone who would confuse the existence of a particular maternal behaviour with the natural essence of maternity,” it “has had approximately zero impact on feminist studies of motherhood.”
Limited or anecdotal as they can be in revealing human motherhood in reality, these literary texts by Zhang, in a certain representative way, depict the dilemma confronted by physically absent and/or emotionally ambivalent mothers, their strategies and tradeoffs, various mother-child conflicts, the ill consequences of insensitive and unpredictable mothering, maternal guilt, and young children’s counterstrategies to negotiate their survival and well-being
Xiao Xiao’s maternal story in The Invisible Companion, Zhong Cong’s bildungsroman in The Colourful Disk, and Zhang’s own life experiences illustrate that alloparental nurturing behaviours and attached emotions differ in quantity and quality, and that children may manage by embedding themselves in supportive kin and an alloparental network even if they fail to form any attachment to their mothers
Summary
Samira Kawash (2011, 990, 996; see Ross 1995) points out that motherhood studies have been “fragmented and discontinuous”, and that, Sarah Hrdy’s work (1999b) is “a valuable corrective for anyone who would confuse the existence of a particular maternal behaviour with the natural essence of maternity,” it “has had approximately zero impact on feminist studies of motherhood.” This paper is an attempt to fill this lacuna, employing the findings and arguments by evolutionarily oriented scholars, especially Sarah Hrdy, to analyze the maternal stories written by Zhang Kangkang (1950– ), a contemporary Chinese female writer. I will attempt to show how, instead of serving the mainstream views on how maternal responses are exclusively socially constructed, both Hrdy’s historical, ethnographic, and demographic case studies and Zhang’s literary stories provide insights into the innate mechanisms involved in women’s reproductive calculations that have evolved across a vast span of time and across cultures (Hrdy 2001, 66). Mothers respond to their offspring in variable circumstances with variable levels of maternal commitment. In the way that mothers optimize maternal care resources to combine and balance production and reproduction, maternal reactions remain generally consistent, even when maternity was ideologically disregarded during the Mao years in China
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