Maternal Love Research Articles

New Lines: Mary Ann Yates, The Orphan of China, and the New She-tragedy

This essay demonstrates a significant break in eighteenth-century tragedy from tales of fallen women begging (the audience) for forgiveness and redemption to a different kind of she-tragedy, in which the heroine is neither fallen nor sexually desired, but rather transcends nation and politics with the “natural” moral force of maternal love. I argue that this shift was made possible/legible by Susannah Cibber’s ill-health, which forced Arthur Murphy to reconceive The Orphan of China’s heroine and allowed a rival actress, Mary Ann Yates, to step into this new role and to establish a tragic ‘line’ defined in opposition to that of her predecessor. The essay demonstrates this shift by tracing The Orphan of China’s convoluted path to the stage and by reading Murphy’s tragedy in dialogue with earlier translations of The Orphan of China and Douglas, the play Covent Garden mounted in opposition to The Orphan of China.

THE DISCURSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT “LOVE” IN TARAS SHEVCHENKO’S POETIC TEXTS

This article devotes to linguistic and cognitive analysis of the concept “love” in Taras Shevchenko’s poetry. The discursive development of the concept “love” in Shevchenko’s poetic texts is studied in the article. The contexts of use, epithets, comparative and metaphorical constructions are analyzed. The basic semantic features of the image of in Shevchenko’s poetry are highlighted. Linguistic and cognitive analysis of the concept “love” in poetry of T. Shevchenko showes that the dominant meaning of word “love” in poetry is love-compassion and mercy. Besides, the word functions in poetry in the meanings of sense of heartfelt affection for a person of another gender, family love, friendly love-affection, maternal love, love to Ukraine, love to God. The objects of in the poet's texts are also true, good, glory. This proves the truth of the conclusion of Y. Barabash, that the main factors of human existence for T. Shevchenko are for people, for God and for Ukraine.One of the key words in the poet's philosophy is the word “brotherly love”, which defines the ethical direction of the development of the Ukrainian people in the vision of T. Shevchenko, the way of liberation from the fate and the curse of Ukrainian history – brotherly hatred”. The poet preaches Christian as the basis of spiritual and social unity, as the basis of a nation-state organism.

Psycho-social impact of stillbirths on women and their families in Tamil Nadu, India \u2013 a qualitative study

BackgroundStillbirth has serious psycho-social consequences on the parents and on the family. The psychological impact of stillbirth is strongly influenced by the social and cultural context. There is very scarce information on this from the Indian context. This qualitative study was conducted to understand the psycho-social impact, aggravating factors, coping styles and health system response to stillbirths.MethodsA qualitative study was conducted using in-depth interviews with mothers who experienced stillbirth in the past 1 year and their families. A total of 8 women and two health care providers were interviewed by trained interviewers. The interviews were transcribed into the local language and thematic analysis was performed by the researchers retaining the transcripts in the local language. Themes were identified, and a conceptual framework was developed.ResultsWomen who experienced stillbirths suffered from serious forms of grief and guilt. These emotions were aggravated by the insensitive health system, health care providers, friends, and neighbours, as well as strained marital relationship and financial burdens. The women and their families were disturbed by the ‘suddenness’ of the stillbirth and frantically searched for the cause. They were frustrated when they couldn’t find the cause and blamed various people in their lives. The women and their families perceived poor quality of services provided in the health system and reported that the health care providers were inconsiderate and insensitive. On the other hand, the health care providers reported that they were over-worked, and the health facilities were under-staffed. The community health workers reported that they felt caught in the crossfire between the health facility staff and the family who suffered the stillbirth. The women reported several coping mechanisms including isolation, immersion in work, placing maternal love on other children, the anticipation of next pregnancy and religiosity.ConclusionStillbirth is a major cause of psycho-social morbidity. Health systems should be responsive to the psycho-social needs of women who suffer stillbirths and their families.

What Do Babies Need to Thrive? Changing Interpretations of 'Hospitalism' in an International Context, 1900-1945.

In 1945, the émigré psychoanalyst René Spitz published a landmark article in which he suggested that babies cared for in institutions commonly suffered from 'hospitalism' and failed to thrive. According to Spitz this was the case because such babies were deprived of 'maternal care, maternal stimulation, and maternal love.' Historical interest in separation research and the development of the concept of maternal deprivation has tended to focus on the 1940s and 50s. The term 'hospitalism', however, was coined at the end of the nineteenth century and by 1945 the question of whether or not babies could be cared for in institutions had already been debated for a number of decades by an international community of paediatricians and developmental psychologists, later joined by psychoanalysts. Criss-crossing national boundaries and exploring debates over the nature, causes, and prevention of 'hospitalism', this article elucidates the changing understandings of the impact on babies of living in institutions.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: Science, Fiction and Fairy Tales

The more I watch Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) in the context of the burgeoning industry of artificial intelligence and robotics, the more I appreciate the film’s insightful and nuanced comment on the field. Inspired by fiction, much like the mecha David who takes the story of Pinocchio literally, the roboticists Kubrick invited to consult on the film believe they can bring machines to life. The fairy–tale journey of the robot boy who is programmed to want to be ‘real’ enough to win maternal love that drives the plot clashes sharply with the wider framing of this film with its dystopic prologue and post-apocalyptic afterword that records the gradual disappearance of all human and non–human animal life. This clash is, I would argue, the point as it intimates our troublesome relationship to technology that has us dreaming of immortality even as it courts disaster.

Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity by Navid Kermani

Reviewed by: Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity by Navid Kermani Florian Hild (bio) Navid Kermani (trans. Tony Crawford), Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity (Polity, 2017), 272 pp. Errata Navid Kermani contains multitudes: born in Germany to Iranian parents, he is a practicing Muslim who is at home with Goethe and Hannah Arendt just as much as in reporting from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Cologne’s football stadium. Stephen Greenblatt called Kermani “one of the greatest Muslim writers and thinkers in the Western world.” He is a novelist, an orator, a thoughtful commentator on current events, and one of the rare voices that speaks with love and erudition about the Middle East and the West. Just as Goethe turned outward to write the West-Eastern Diwan from 1814–19 when all of Europe turned inward, Kermani seeks and lives the exchange between Orient and Occident at a time when Western authors give lip service to “intercultural dialogue” but often lack knowledge of the East and sometimes even of ourselves. “Shapeless fogs don’t encounter each other,” Hermann Hesse said, and Kermani gives shape and substance to both Islam and Christianity in his recently translated book, Wonder Beyond Belief. In this beautiful book (whose German title Ungläubiges Staunen literally means “wonder without belief and which Kermani originally wanted to call My Own Christianity), a fictionalized Kermani, assisted by an equally artful Catholic friend, makes his idiosyncratic way through Christianity by meditating on 40 works of Christian art. In these three- to 17-page essays, ranging from the first known depiction of the Madonna to a screenshot of Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, kidnapped and probably executed by ISIS in 2013, Kermani engages with the Christian faith in an irreverently pious and affectionately skeptical way. As it meandered leisurely past sculptures of an ugly Jesus, ancient mosaics, churches, Da Vinci, Gerhard Richter, Albrecht Dürer, and many more beautifully reproduced works of art, Wonder Beyond Belief taught me more about Christianity and Islam than seems possible in such a deceptively light and breezy read. The book invites [End Page 684] jumping around, re-reading, comparing, and meditating on the many literary and theological gems Kermani offers to readers. After I read Wonder Beyond Belief and took the liberty of asking Mr. Kermani which essays he’d like to see translated into English first, I suggested a striking one about a crucifix. His response was: “No, not ‘Cross,’ please.” This aversion to sensationalizing his work or himself seems typical: Kermani resists categorization, avoids talk shows, and prefers to give long radio interviews instead; a prostrated Muslim under a cross was not the first impression he wanted to give an American audience. He suggested “Love II” instead: a meditation on El Greco’s Christ Bids Farewell to His Mother. “I thought I saw two lovers, or, to be precise, two who love each other not like mother and son,” he writes. Mary as the archetypal mother is venerated in Kermani’s Islam, and many chapters in Wonder Beyond Belief deal with maternal love. In “Love II,” though, Mary looks too young to be a mother and Christ does not look like a son. “Only someone who knows she is entirely safe with her lover looks with such self-abandonment. And indeed he looks at her with eyes that simultaneously covet and protect. This is less a savior than someone who himself was saved by love.” Kermani then describes the contradictory nature of the painting’s title and its apparent content. At one point in “Love II” he writes that “as an outsider, that seems a bit strange to me,” referring to the inconsistency of the farewell motif and the biblical account of Jesus’s last days. It is precisely his outsider’s perspective, the incredulous awe he feels when contemplating Christianity through the lens of art, that gives Kermani’s book the refreshing and stimulating power which leaps off every page. The naïve and curious narrator of Wonder Beyond Belief can wonder where an insider can’t. He ends “Love II” by wondering about El Greco’s wonder regarding the mother and her divine son: “Is it not bewildering that the very two human...

Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt

Reviewed by: Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels by Jean Wyatt Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber LOVE AND NARRATIVE FORM IN TONI MORRISON'S LATER NOVELS, by Jean Wyatt. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. 248 pp. $74.95 cloth; $29.95 paper; $29.95 ebook. Jean Wyatt's new book, Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels, is that rare combination of nuanced textual analysis and cutting-edge critical theory. In her meticulous readings of Morrison's novels from Beloved (1987) to God Help the Child (2015), Wyatt weaves multiple areas of theory—psychoanalysis, rhetoric, and call-and-response—to tease out [End Page 225] the differences as well as the progressions in Morrison's conceptions of love. Starting with the research question, "What is the effect on narrative structure if it is love, not desire, that moves narrative forward—or, perhaps, imposes stasis and brings narrative momentum to a halt? Or pushes the parameters of narrative convention to reflect heretofore unrepresented kinds of love?" Wyatt creates a fascinating study of narrative structure and preconceived notions of love (p. 1). Morrison's readers, she argues, respond to concepts of love through her varying narrative forms. Reading Morrison's novels necessitates sometimes tentative, sometimes bold conclusions on the reader's part. According to Wyatt, Morrison's trademark technique of inviting the reader to participate in the creative act of story-telling coincides with her varying narrative strategies. Wyatt's study of a narrative's connection to a reader's notion of love explains how Morrison's texts force readers to call into question "customary values," "fixed beliefs about love," or preconceived ideas about "love, race, and gender" (p. 2). To illustrate how Morrison's structure mirrors content, Wyatt utilizes psychoanalytical concepts—including Freud's Nachträglichkeit (afterwardsness); Jacques Lacan's parable of the Fort! Da!; and Jean Laplanche's notion of the "enigmatic parental message"—to consider how narrative form works on readers (p. 3). She concludes that "delayed disclosures" in Morrison's texts cause the reader to go back and forth in time and in the text, "between the two scenes of her reading," and these delayed disclosures shift a reader's response to reassess motive and character (p. 3). Thus, Wyatt merges psychoanalytic theory with rhetorical narrative theory to suggest that various narrative components—"author, implied author, narrator, implied reader, and flesh-and-blood reader"—connect with African American call-and-response "oral art forms" to reinforce the reader's participation in discerning Morrison's messages (p. 4). For example, Wyatt claims that the complicated use of narrators reflects the complexity of moral questions necessary for "critiquing systems of oppression" (p. 5). If Morrison's early style is "mimetic realist discourse," the later writings use "expressive language and experimental form" to examine the effects of history on the shape of character and narration (pp. 7, 9). Wyatt asks, if Morrison's "call" in the text is unclear, how can there be an appropriate reader response? By challenging belief systems, Morrison forces readers to examine "entrenched convictions about gender, race, and love," and her later novels question conventional thinking about a reader's engagement with love (p. 13). Working through Morrison's novels in chronological order, Wyatt describes the different discussions of love and the effects of those renderings on the reader. She links Morrison's exploration of love to her inventions of "new narrative form[s] to express the new complexities of her subject" [End Page 226] (p. 18). In Beloved, Morrison examines maternal love in an uncanny way and, through the delayed telling of Sethe's killing, forces the reader to delay judgment. As a result, Morrison delivers the presence of the trauma of slavery. In Jazz (1992), Morrison begins with the "Western tradition of the love-death plot" only to end the novel with "freely chosen scenarios" of alternative versions of love that challenge the reader (pp. 16, 68). Looking at the problematic narrator of Jazz as the voice of the city, Wyatt illustrates how Morrison reveals collective African American trauma to be grounded in historical context. Having focused on the call-and-response framework of Jazz, Wyatt shifts to the...

Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence by Sarah LaChance Adams

Reviewed by: Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence by Sarah LaChance Adams Fiona Woollard Sarah LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a "Good" Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence, Columbia University Press, 2014 When a mother deliberately harms her child, it is tempting to assume that she must be either insane (a "mad mother") or lacking the "natural" love of a mother for her children (a "bad mother"). We want to believe that such mothers have almost nothing in common with "good" mothers. Drawing extensively on empirical research, Sarah LaChance Adams' Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What A "Good" Mother Would Do shows that maternal ambivalence, simultaneous desires to nurture and violently reject one's children, is both common and reasonable, the result of genuine conflicts between mothers' interests and those of their children. Both appropriate support and deliberative agency are necessary to avoid maternal ambivalence finding its expression in filicide. As LaChance Adams shows, it is because of not in spite of these tensions that motherhood is an instructive case for ethics. When we appropriately reflect the lived experience of mothers, rather than relying on long standing stereotypes, we find a new paradigm for ethical relationships. This new paradigm reveals that we require an ethical theory that recognises human needs to care for, to be cared for, and to maintain independence. The book begins with a notorious example of purposeful filicide: LaShanda Armstrong, who deliberately drove her minivan into the Hudson river with her four children inside. Armstrong and all but one of her children died. LaChance Adams argues that dismissing such cases of purposeful filicide as simply the actions of "mad mothers" or "bad mothers" oversimplifies both these tragedies and the character of maternal love in general. Most maternal filicides do not meet the legal requirements of insanity, but nor can they be simply categorised as bad mothers. Indeed, in many cases, mothers who kill their children see doing so as, in the circumstances, being a good mother (Meyer and Oberman 2001 89; LaChance Adams 2–4). In the first chapter of the book, LaChance Adams connects our inadequate understanding of maternal filicide to a widespread idealisation of the mother's relationship to her child, which [End Page E-1] takes a loving willingness to self-sacrifice as a given. She outlines the major flaws in philosophical treatment of motherhood and shows how her more nuanced account will build upon and improve the philosophies of care ethics, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Chapter Two explores the mother as ethical exemplar as portrayed in care ethics. Care ethics challenges individualistic ways of understanding ethics, which start from a conception of human beings as autonomous, independent beings whose main duty to others is non-interference. As LaChance Adams notes, simply thinking about human reproduction undermines the individualistic picture: "We do not pop out of the ground like mushrooms, as Thomas Hobbes would have us imagine, but out of the womb of a woman. Without a mother, or someone acting as a mother, no human infant would survive for a day." (18). Unsurprisingly, therefore the mother-child relationship is repeatedly used in care ethics as an ethical exemplar. However, LaChance Adams argues that care ethics focuses too much on the interdependence between mother and child and does not pay enough attention to ways in which the needs of mother and child might conflict. It ignores the mother's need for individual flourishing. LaChance Adams argues that motherhood is most useful as an ethical exemplar when we recognise both the interdependence of mother and child and the ways in which their needs can conflict. LaChance Adams argues that maternal experience reveals deep internal conflicts that are relevant to all human beings: "we have simultaneous needs to nurture, to be nurtured, and to maintain independence." We are pulled between two selves: the self as independent and the self as "entangled in indissoluble bonds with others" (LaChance Adams 24). Traditional rights-based ethics and care ethics each recognise one, but only one, aspect of the human condition. To bring the two together, LaChance Adams argues, we need a...

Migrant Mothering in Transition: A Qualitative Study of the Maternal Narratives and Practices of Two Generations of Rural-Urban Migrant Mothers in Southern China

In the last few decades, mothering in many societies has been affected by mass migration. Although migrant mothering is acknowledged to be dynamic, diverse, and continually reproduced in specific socio-cultural contexts, its transformation over generations has been ignored. Drawing on qualitative data obtained from 61 rural-urban migrant women in southern China, I compare the narratives of two generations of migrant mothers and their daily mothering of their left-behind children, revealing how the intersection of gender, class, and the rural-urban divide in China shapes their gendered ideology and performance of childcare over time. Whereas first-generation migrant mothers perceive good mothering as helping their children to start their own families and establish careers and therefore prioritize economic support for their children’s life endeavors as their main expression of maternal love and care, new-generation migrant mothers devote themselves to their children’s overall needs, focus more on the quality of the mother-child relationship, and adopt various strategies to meet their children’s emotional and educational needs. The present study gives a voice to migrant mothers, confronting the biased stereotype of migrant mothers as irresponsible parents and helping them to construct meanings for their maternal experiences during family separation. Documenting the transition in migrant mothering also underscores the importance of recognizing the changing needs of migrant mothers and their left-behind children over time.

Hariraj and Haider: Popular Entertainment and the Nation in Two Indian Adaptations of Hamlet

AbstractMy essay will examine how two Indian adaptations of Hamlet, separated by more than a century, engage with the canonical text and also rehearse codes of indigenous identity. The adaptations in question are (i) Hariraj, a Bengali play first staged in 1897 and (ii) Haider, a Hindi film released in 2014. These two adaptations operate within popular media: Hariraj was commercially the most successful stage adaptation of Shakespeare in 19th‐century Bengal, while Haider has been the highest grosser among all of director Vishal Bhardwaj's films. Coincidentally, both of these base the action in Kashmir. For Hariraj, the locale implies a pseudo‐medieval past suggestive of Hindu political autonomy, which would therefore appeal to the contemporary taste for Hindu revivalism in Bengal. As against this, Haider brings the elements of Shakespearean appropriation to a dialogue with the setting for its action – the militancy‐stricken and militarized (Indian) Kashmir of 1995, characterized by gross violation of human rights. If Haider explores the ideological and aesthetic limits of representing the Indian nation as a political construct, Hariraj may be seen as an exercise in imagining an exclusionary Hindu past imbued with the glamour of Shakespearean tragedy. More importantly, both of the adaptations show the Gertrude‐equivalent to be strong‐willed and transgressive, and in both the texts, the Gertrude‐figure's climactic revelation of maternal love coincides with a self‐punitive/redemptive suicide. These two adaptations are thus invested in re‐formulating the sub‐plot of Hamlet's mother in an attempt at testing the representational limits of femininity. In both the cases, the Shakespearean original acts as a catalyst for dramatizing cultural expectations and assessing the imbrications between the personal and the political.

Four Principles of Political Correctness

This paper takes a psychoanalytic view of political correctness. PC is a consequence of a deep cultural transformation. Because of the necessity for the infant of maternal love, the mother is the most powerful force in the psyche. In traditional culture, the father is seen as having earned mother’s love, which makes him worthy of emulation. In the new culture, he Is seen as having stolen mother’s love, and is to be hated for his theft. Those from who he is seen as having stolen her love, called the marginalized, such as racial and sexual minorities, are to be loved in compensation. This whole project is based on the fiction that the father gained his love through theft, and therefore cannot be renewed by contact with reality. It must therefore be dramatized continuously. All this can be represented as four principles of political correctness: (1) Hate the father, (2) Love those from whom he has stolen love, (3) Keep the drama moving, and (4) Invoke the love and power of mother.

Előzetes eredmények egy magyar mintán kidolgozott Intrauterin Kapcsolati Kérdőív méréses tapasztalatairól – pilot study

Elméleti háttér Az 1980-as évektől kutatják az „anyai környezet” magzati fejlődésre gyakorolt hatását, ám az eredmények nem konzekvensek az anya–magzat kapcsolatot befolyásoló tényezőket illetően. Cél Magyar mintán kialakítani egy anya–magzat kapcsolatot mérő kérdőívet, valamint feltárni az intrauterin kötődésben meghatározó szerepet játszó jellegzetességeket. Módszerek 114, 15 és 38 gesztációs hét közötti várandós anya vett részt a kutatásban, kitöltve az Intrauterin Kapcsolati Kérdőívet, a Maternal Fetal Attachment Scale magyar változatát (MFAS-HU), az Intimitás és a Szülői Bánásmód Kérdőívet. Eredmények A kialakított 28 tételes Intrauterin Kapcsolati Kérdőív (IUKK) faktorstruktúrája illeszkedési mutatókban az elvárások alatt marad (RMSEA = 0,08; χ2/df = 1,645; NFI = 0,85; CFI = 0,87). A 8 alskála Cronbach-alfa értékei 0,56–0,93 közöttiek. Explorátoros faktorelemezéssel sikerült egy jó kommunalitási tulajdonságokkal rendelkező rövidebb modellt kialakítani (IUKK–R), amely 12 tételt és 3 alskálát tartalmaz (RMSEA = 0,08; χ2/df = 1,660; NFI = 0,95; CFI = 0,96). Az IUKK–R Cronbach-alfa értékei magasak: 0,81–0,93. Elemzéseinkhez az IUKK–R modellt használtuk. Kérdőívünk korrelál az MFAS–HU-val, ugyanakkor a megragadott magzati kötődés dimenzióik nem teljesen átfedőek. A nemzetközi tapasztalatokkal nagyjából összhangban, az anya–magzat kapcsolat erősségében szignifikánsan magasabb értéket ér el az anya, ha bármelyik tényező jellemzi: házasságban él; magasabb az anyagi hozzájárulása a családi kasszához; nem volt korábban spontán vetélése, ő maga beavatkozástól mentesen, természetes módon született; biztosan tudja, vagy nem tudja a magzat nemét. Nem befolyásol a várandósság ideje, az iskolai végzettség, a várandósság tervezettsége, a fogantatás módja, a meglévő gyermekek száma és a magzatmozgás észlelése. A magzati kötődés összefügg a párkapcsolati intimitással: az észlelt gondoskodás kedvezőbb, míg az észlelt kontroll kedvezőtlenebb anya–magzat kötődéssel jár együtt. Az anya saját szüleivel való kapcsolatának megélése, az anyai és apai szeretet, pozitívan korrelál a saját magzatához fűződő kapcsolattal. Következtetések A magyar mintára kidolgozott kérdőív megbízhatósága ígéretes, de szükségesek további validitásvizsgálatok, nagyobb, heterogén mintán. Tapasztalataink felhívják a figyelmet a szülői bánásmód és a párkapcsolati gondoskodás jelentőségére a várandósság időszakában és gyakorlati relevanciával bírnak a prevenciós munkában.

Behavioral and neural responses to infant and adult tears: The impact of maternal love withdrawal.

The current study examined behavioral and neural responses to infant and adult tears, taking into account childhood experiences with parental love-withdrawal. With functional MRI (fMRI), we measured neural reactivity to pictures of infants and adults with and without tears on their faces in nulliparous women with varying childhood experiences of maternal use of love withdrawal. Behavioral responses to infant and adult tears were measured with an approach-avoidance task. We found that individuals with experiences of love withdrawal showed less amygdala and insula reactivity to adult tears, but love withdrawal did not affect amygdala and insula reactivity to infant tears. During the approach-avoidance task, individuals responded faster to adult tears in the approach condition compared with the avoidance condition, indicating that adult tears facilitate approach behavior. Individuals responded faster to infant tears than to adult tears, regardless of approach or avoidance condition. Our findings suggest that infant tears are highly salient and may, therefore, overrule the effects of contextual and personal characteristics that influence the perception of adult crying. (PsycINFO Database Record

Testosterone reactivity to infant crying and caregiving in women: The role of oral contraceptives and basal cortisol

Several studies have shown that mothers and fathers have significant lower levels of testosterone (T) than non-mothers and non-fathers, and that in men caregiving is related to a decrease in T. To date, only a few studies have examined T in women. We examined T reactivity to a crying infant simulator in 160 women. Use of oral contraceptives (OC), basal cortisol (CORT) levels and childhood experiences of maternal love withdrawal were taken into account. T levels were consistently significantly higher in women not using OC. In women not using OC, high basal CORT was related to higher initial T levels and larger decreases of T during caregiving. No effect of basal CORT was found in women with OC use. Childhood experiences of maternal love withdrawal did not affect T levels. This is the first study to show support for a decrease of T in women while taking care of a crying infant, supporting the Challenge hypothesis and the Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds.

幼児を持つ母親の「母性愛」信奉傾向と養育状況における感情制御不全

幼児を持つ母親の「母性愛」信奉傾向と養育状況における感情制御不全

The Idiom of Love and Sacrifice: Emotional Vocabularies of Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Greece

In this article, I draw on a rich body of family correspondence from the second half of the nineteenth century in Greece. I perceive letters in correspondences as textual and material in-between places, and therefore as key sites for the creation and negotiation of maternal feelings. Switching constantly between small-scale autobiographical accounts and contemporary cultural perceptions of good motherhood, I argue that maternal love, the most crucial term of the emotional vocabulary at the time, overlaps with feelings and practices of self-sacrifice and suffering. Paradoxically, the rhetoric of selflessness, as a strong indication of a life-long maternal offering to children, requires specific obligations as a way of repayment. In researching the genealogy of maternal love, sacrifice and selflessness, the article shows the clear proximity of these notions to the wordings of Christian indoctrination and moral teaching of the period.

Mother Love, Maternal Ambivalence, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering

Dominant cultural ideologies of motherhood define the nature of mother love. Recent developments in motherhood studies, and the work of a small number of feminist philosophers and scholars of motherhood, have challenged the tenets of these ideologies by daring to speak the “unspeakable”: that mother love is often and for all mothers, whether consciously or not, permeated by powerful negative and conflicting emotions termed maternal ambivalence. In this essay, relying on recorded personal narratives by Bosnian women who are raising children born of wartime rape, as well as recent studies on empowered motherhood, my aim is to show that maternal love, like love in any other close relationship, encompasses and assimilates healthy ambivalence, and can inform maternal care in a constructive and positive manner. I argue that the acknowledgment of healthy maternal ambivalence as an integral aspect of mother love involves honoring the mother's subjectivity and validates her personhood, and as such it opens up the possibility of redefining mother love in terms that are empowering to mothers.

Oil by Ella Hickson

Reviewed by: Oil by Ella Hickson Kimberly Skye Richards Oil. By Ella Hickson. Directed by Carrie Cracknell. Almeida Theatre, London. October 21, 2016. From the Indigenous resistance at Standing Rock to artist-activist groups like Platform and Liberate Tate staging interventions in global arts institutions to protest sponsorship by oil corporations, dramatic conflicts over oil production and its transportation have saturated our media in recent years. Despite the theatricality of petro-politics, conflicts of resource extraction have seldom found their way to the stage. In her new play Oil, Ella Hickson transforms oil’s global history into a human story, one that asks audiences to suspend their disbelief across 200 years of action to follow a mother and daughter from the birth of the petroleum industry to the end of the age of oil. Directed by Carrie Cracknell at the Almeida Theatre in London, the play’s premiere production prompted serious reflection on fossil capitalism’s seductions and costs. Oil moves away from clichés about male oil executives as cutout villains of fossil capitalism to spotlight the journey of a single mother determined to better the situation of her child. Hickson sets the play in 1899 at a remote smallholding near Cornwall at the Singers’ family farm, the image of a premodern agrarian society focused on simple reproduction. When the family dismisses an American oil dealer’s offer to buy their property—despite the lifestyle that the sale would afford them—May, who is pregnant and wants a better future for her child, decides to leave during the night, traveling “through lands, through empires, through time” on a journey fueled by maternal love. Played brilliantly by Anne-Marie Duff, May embodied the pioneering spirit reinvigorated by the neoliberal order. Her journey saw her go from carrying out domestic duties, to working as a server at the British imperial headquarters in Persia in 1908, to making executive decisions for a multinational oil corporation in London in the 1970s, to serving as a Member of Parliament in the twenty-first century. As she gained more powerful positions in society and was better able to provide for her child, she became more deeply enmeshed in geopolitical petro-violence. Through May’s associations with the oil industry, the play illuminated how petro-imperialism operates through the decisions of individual people acting in their best interests. The fascinating trajectory of Oil is that it reminded those audience members aligned with the anti-fossil fuel movement of the cruelly optimistic passé of oil, energy, and capitalism. The performance also offered commentary on the limitations of women’s independence, as Hickson crafted the codependency of May and her daughter Amy’s relationship into a [End Page 582] metaphor for the codependency of the British Empire and its colonies. Three scenes dramatized the birth, peak, and imagined demise of Britain’s efforts to explore, discover, develop, and transport oil in Iran, Libya, and Iraq. They represented the transformation of “infantile” oil-producing countries into mature, rebellious, independent nations that resent supervision and insist that they be freed from its oppression. Increasingly desperate to maintain access, the parental figure was increasingly willing to make ethical compromises and unleash misfortune on less powerful others. Click for larger view View full resolution The dawn of the age of oil in Oil. (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith.) The end of Oil projected a bleak image of our prospective “tough oil” future, with May and Amy once again living on the Singer farm, struggling to stay warm, and arguing about whether they can afford to charge the car or take a hot bath. May yearns for intimacy and physical contact, but her relationship with Amy has deteriorated beyond repair, and men across time, even men who are caring and respectful, have never been able to satisfy her needs. The wreckage of Amy and May’s relationship, captured brilliantly through the nonnaturalistic time signature of the play, left us to contemplate if loneliness and disappointment are the excruciating costs of progress: in what ways must powerful women be willing to compromise? Would we be happier if we demanded less of ourselves? Oil is indicative of a new form of epic theatre that aims to...

Medeia escrava: sobre amada de Toni Morrison

The essay proposes a lecture of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, keeping the focus on the evident resemblance that exists between the story written by the contemporary author and the classical myth of Medea, and highlighting the distinctions of each one. The comparison between the two protagonists has already been drawn, more than once, and it is not the first time that a novel, whose protagonist is a woman who has killed her own offspring is compared to the mythical Greek personage. Women’s appeal to the horrible infanticide as a reaction to a tragic situation has been recurrent throughout history and throughout stories. And it is in the dialectic between reality and fiction that it is possible to notice the first big different among the two narratives. While Medea is a mythical character, Sethe – the character created by Toni Morrison – is a fiction based on a real person, on Margaret Garner, who has really killed her daughter, and because of this gesture became an important and almost mythical personage in the struggle of North American abolitionists. The second difference to be highlighted lies in the motivation of the act around which the story revolves: Self-love, in one case; maternal love in another. The third and last major outstanding distinction is directly linked to the first, that is, to the dialectic between fiction and reality. For coming from a story that really happened, the character of Toni Morrison has to face the reaction to her murderous act in the so-called real world, serve sentence in jail and suffer for it in her life. The deus ex-machina solution is reserved for mythical heroines. If there is a god able to save Sethe, it is a quite phenomenal one and goes by the name of Eros.

Breaking Historical Silence: Emotional Wealth in Joan Anim-Addo's "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and Andrea Levy' The Long Song

Breaking Historical SilenceEmotional Wealth in Joan Anim-Addo's "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and Andrea Levy' The Long Song Irene Pérez-Fernández (bio) "Epilogue"I have crossed an oceanI have lost my tonguefrom the root of the oldonea new one has sprung. —Grace Nichols, I Is a Long Memoried Woman "Echoes"Voiceless? Less?The spirits mocked.Youcannotaffordto be voiceless.Voice more or lessvoice more voiceamplifiedthroughterminal stumpsof seventy five millionmutilated tonguesforever everamplifiedincluding yours yours yours yours. —Joan Anim-Addo, Haunted by History [End Page 113] Fiction has often proved a fruitful means of bringing to life words persistently left unrecorded in official historical accounts. In the specific context of Black British literature, recovering lost stories has been a main thematic concern. As Paul Gilroy argues in his seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, the telling and retelling of stories of loss, exile, and migration have been central elements in the memory of black people that have served to "invent, maintain and renew identity" and, therefore, constitute a collective, shared cultural identity (198). Moreover, for Gilroy, returning to slavery through the imaginative possibilities of fiction has offered black authors "a means to restage confrontations between rational, scientific and enlightened Euro-American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook of prehistorical, cultureless and bestial African slaves" (220). This article examines Joan Anim-Addo's short story "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and Andrea Levy's novel The Long Song as nuanced representations of female experiences of slavery which highlight the above-mentioned confrontations. These two works by contemporary Black British women writers put an emphasis on emotional wealth and, therefore, question orthodox notions of wealth and riches, as well as political, philosophical, and anthropological accounts that justified slavery through a rhetoric of dehumanization and constructed slaves as mere objects of commercial exchange. Levy's The Long Song and Anim-Addo's "Daughter and His Housekeeper" present alternative portrayals of the social fabric of slavery by foregrounding the experiences of female slaves and highlighting the importance of emotional wealth. The characters' emotional wealth is directly connected to their abilities to open alternative emotional spaces in order to counter the devastating real spaces surrounding them. In this respect, I argue that the space opened up through maternal love becomes the driving force behind their heroic deeds of survival. These literary works reveal an alternative conception of wealth to the notion favored in capitalism and the discourse of Enlightenment through which "slavery, in its many guises, was the expectation, and racialized persons categorized as 'Indians' and 'Africans' or colonized 'others' were targeted for life-long experiences within it" (Beckles 779). Adam Smith's theories had a great impact on the economic discourses of the time and though he had published against the institution of slavery in Theory of Moral Sentiments, he did so "not on moral grounds, but as just one more artificial restraint on individual self-interest" (Gosh 3681). Therefore, "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and The Long Song appeal for a consideration of wealth in a light which does not pivot around the idea of individuals engaging in enterprises with the purpose of advancing their self-interest or around the validation of the mere accumulation of material possessions. By contrast, the short story and novel under analysis underline slavery as a dehumanizing experience and endorse an alternative conception of wealth, whereby wealth becomes paramount to what makes us human: emotions. This second consideration, much more fruitful, allows for the de/ construction—in the Derridean sense of making visible and extinguishing a power struggle by uprooting significations from a binary logic—of this double conception of wealth intrinsically present in discourses of slavery which constructed slaves as emotionless. Joan Anim-Addo, both a writer and an academic, has argued in her critical work Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women's Writing that "slaves were perceived as chattel property equated in law with 'removable personal property' such as domestic or dumb animals. In contrast to the European constructed as 'master,' the [End Page 114] status of the African of the period was enshrined in...