Both Flower and Flower Gatherer: Medbh McGuckian’s The Flower Master and H.D.’s Sea Garden

Abstract

The relationship between maternity and other kinds of work remains a difficult subject for twenty-first century feminism.' Women writers, concerned with the particular difficulties of creating literature while bearing and raising children, have contributed significantly to this conversation. In the twentieth century, most American women writers emphasize the desperate competition between writing and motherhood for time, resources, and creative energy. For example, Tillie Olsen in Silences, Adrienne Rich in When We Dead Awaken and Of Woman Born, and most of the women writers interviewed in Judith Pierce Rosenberg's A Question of Balance characterize motherhood as a condition of interruption. Its most debilitating result for these artists is the fragmentation of the caretaker's attention. These women stress the intense love and responsibility they feel toward the interrupters, but although these feelings increase motherhood's rewards, they also make it harder to give priority to any other kind of work. The recent notoriety of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Creating a Life, which decries pressures that make women choose between motherhood and high-altitude careers (6), shows the persistence (and, I think, the persistent validity) of this view, although Hewlett focuses on corporate rather than artistic work. However, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, some women begin to pair these acknowledgments of motherhood's costs with theories about its advantages for writers (Ostriker 130).2 In a 1983 book, Alicia Ostriker stresses maternity as a rich resource for women