Mother or monster: A postcolonial study of two pathological women in postcolonial literature

Abstract

The loveliness and selflessness of the relation between a mother and a child do not need any explanation to be proved as it is universally known and established. Motherhood is a universal concept, but in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood and in Morrison’sBeloved this concept has been damaged. Both of these novels have shown motherhood with monstrosity. Monstrosity is a concept like beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and can therefore be interpreted differently. In these two novels mothers have been presented with excessive violence. Both of the novels dealt with an unnatural thing that the mother killed her own child which really does not sound usual and lacks credibility. But these two women did that impossible thing and this paper will try to find out the reasons why these mothers did that work. It will analyze these two women on one hand as child-killing ugly monsters and on the other hand, only as desperate but caring mothers. Key words: Double colonization, infanticide, monstrous feminine, neo-colonialism, violence.