Mothering Desire: The Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's The Madness of a Seduced Woman

Abstract

This essay examines the strange tenacity of the traditional courtship or marriage plot in novels by women even when those women writers may satirize elements of the plots that they employ. Such plots may vicariously satisfy many women’s psychological need for mothering, but they also tend ambivalently to disassociate the daughter’s emerging subjectivity from the long shadow of her mother. As this essay argues, however, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s The Madness of a Seduced Woman (1983) exemplify sophisticated contemporary novels that move beyond the traditional romance not by minimizing or attacking the romance plot but by exploiting it directly. Most striking are the ways these two novels abruptly distance readers from the heroine’s narrative and turn the familiar love story into a story about, among other matters, women’s attachment to the fantasy itself. This essay speculates that some women writers like Atwood not only discover that escape from romance is impossible but also wonder whether such escape is entirely desirable