Representations Of Motherhood Research Articles

Diane Arbus

Abstract In the past, critics have tended to discuss Diane Arbus as an expressionist who voices her own existential angst through the suffering and alienation of her subjects. All her photographs can accordingly be decoded as self-portaits, designed to communicate the ambivalent mix of loathing and love she felt for herself and others. In this view she exists in a psychoanalytic twilight world, out of time, in which her pictures carry a charge of pain that is both highly subjective and transhistorical. Even the most sophisticated writing on Arbus generally ignores the place and period that were the cradle for her work.1 In fact, much of Arbus's oeuvre offers an incisive and profound commentary on the political realities of America c. 1960. Arbus's images of sexually ambiguous figures and transvestites, as well as her representations of motherhood, constitute a critique of the rigidity of gender roles in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a period in which sexuality was clearly prescribed by social and ideological conventions. Arbus's photographs also deplore the Cold War ideology that cleaved the world into tree and Communist halves, a dogma that mirrored the hard and fast distinctions between masculinity and femininity.

Representations of Motherhood

Representations of Motherhood

Representations of Motherhood.

Offering new perspectives on motherhood, distinguished contributors from a variety of fields look at the conflicting positions on motherhood within the feminist movement; draw on psychoanalysis to grapple with mothers' profoundly ambivalent feelings toward their children; discuss how advances in medicine influence the meaning of motherhood; and examine how representations of mothers in art, film, literature, the social and behavioral sciences, and historical writing have affected women. The significant contribution of this collection of essays is its repeated re-presentation of the mother as a fully bodied, real, complex person, a subject in her own right, both liberated and oppressed by the demands of birthing and rearing children.-Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Cross Currents

"Germany, Pale Mother": On the Mother Figures in New German Women's Film

This investigation is part of a comprehensive book project on the representation of motherhood in literature, painting, fairy tales, film and television, theater, and advertising. Edited by Renate Möhrmann, it will be published in the spring of 1996 by Metzler Verlag under the title Verklärt—Verkitscht—Vergessen: Die Mutter als ästhetische Figur . Since this project will be the first examination in German of the aesthetic representation of motherhood throughout various disciplines—and from the perspective of the mother rather than that of the daughter—the focus is less on the critical interpretations of individual works than on the treatment of motherhood within specific genres. (RM)

Where Did Mary's Mother Come From?

Where Did Mary's Mother Come From? Mitzi Myers (bio) Once upon a time, I had fantasies of keeping up with all the current scholarship on mothers and daughters. I wanted to put that material in dialogue with what I knew about feminist literary criticism and historical children's literature. I thought the interplay might disclose an originary moment and a textual ur-form. Histories of families, childhood, and mothering; psychoanalytic studies from Freud to Klein to Chodorow and Gilligan; literary criticism from old-fashioned "images of" surveys to new-fangled postmodernisms; anthropologies and ethnographies from every culture—I bought, borrowed, or xeroxed them all. I tried to make sense of them in ever lengthening footnotes until an irate editor called up and demanded that I cut a couple which ran a page or so each. I still struggle womanfully, even though I know it is a losing battle. The maternity-juvenility dyad generates numberless progeny; it is as terrifyingly prolific as Mother Nature herself and sometimes as incomprehensible. Oddly, while every author claims originality, almost all concurrently depict mothering as the topic on which everything has "always already" been said. Even when the subject is something else, cultural critiques frequently invoke a discourse of mothering and familial analogy, perhaps because poststructuralist thinking stresses textuality as a space, the fecund generativity of words themselves, and the parasitic intertextuality of all literature. Of course, childbirth images have long been everywhere in literary history, shamelessly appropriated even by masculinist authors who claim they write with something besides a pen. Feminist literary criticism naturally takes to maternity as metaphor: witness Jane Gallop's final chapter, "History Is like Mother," in her recent overview, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory, just one example among dozens. Yet despite the huge volume of extant work on psychoanalytical feminism, Janice Doane and Devon Hodges are still in search of the "good enough" mother. Film critic E. Anne Kaplan regales us with popular culture's representations of motherhood from maternal melodramas to "phallic" mother paradigms. The tear-jerker Stella Dallas, whose author was Sylvia Plath's real life patron as well as The Bell Jar's pulp novelist Philomena Guinea, is a good example of the intertextual links seemingly inherent in mother-daughter relationships, lived or fictional.1 Gilliganized coauthors Elizabeth Debold, Marie Wilson, and Idelisse Malave garner major reviews in adult periodicals by reassuring readers that feminists mother best, that a Mother Daughter Revolution is moving us "from betrayal to power." William Holtz gets hate mail from irate Laura Ingalls Wilder fans for his revelations in The Ghost in The Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, even though Holtz's biography of the daughter half of American juvenile literature's most successful collaboration offers a moving portrayal of the thwarted daughter's talent and conflicted maternal ties.2 Students of children's literary studies will hardly be shocked to find the child birthing the mother's work, since articles along these lines have been appearing for a long time; indeed, readers of this journal may well wish for more than the brief, if telling, appendix of comparative passages which concludes Holtz's study. Nor will literary scholars debunking the rather recent Romantic notion of the author as solitary original genius find Holtz's investigation of dialogic creative endeavor unsettling. Most canonical male writers, as a thriving critical industry is revealing, have ghosts of one sort or another, too (see, for example, Stillinger). But somehow it is different when the prairie icon and reputed mother of so many juvenile dreams is shown to have been mentored by childwork. Post-Enlightenment culture seems to need to hang on to mutually contradictory mythologies of the mother's relation to cultural reproduction. On the one hand, we want to believe in progress, as do the late-eighteenth-century women writers who people their tales with rational dames, moral mothers, and mentoria figures and who recurrently align writing with mothering. On the other, nostalgia makes a compelling case for what the Scottish folklorist Robert Chambers calls "the simplicities of the uninstructed intellect"—the "light gabble and jocund song," the "tales of drollery and wonder which used to be told by...

Outcome evaluation in brief mother-infant psychotherapy: A preliminary report

The emerging field of mother-infant psychotherapy lends itself particularly well to objective measures of change. The improvements are often rapid, involving symptom relief or removal. These improvements can be related to subjective change in mothers and to modifications of various interactive variables. We examined changes due to brief therapy (maximum of 10 sessions) in cases of functional and behavioral disturbances in children less than 30 months old. Evaluations were done before treatment and at 1 week, 6 months, and 12 months after therapy. The outcome measures were changes in the infant's symptoms, the mother's representations, and the behavioral interactions between mother and infant. One group of mothers and infants was seen in a form of psychodynamic brief psychotherapy developed in our Center, and a control group was seen in a noninterpretive form of therapy called interactional guidance. This progress report includes the initial 38 mother-infant dyads who have completed the first three evaluations. Results indicate that the major changes are seen in symptom relief or removal; interactions change in the direction of becoming more “harmonious,” with mothers becoming less intrusive and infants being more cooperative. A better identification between mothers and infants is seen in the measures of the mothers' representations. No major differences between the two forms of therapy have yet appeared. To date, pretreatment predictions show little correlation with actual outcomes. Change proved to be durable, even showing some improvement in the 6-month follow-up evaluations. Results are discussed from the point of view of (1) the challenge of an objective, quantitative evaluation of subjective changes; (2) the issue of specificity of modes of treatment; (3) the difficulties of outcome predictions; (4) the remarkable opportunities for prevention of psychic disturbances in infancy; and (5) the relational nature of early disturbances.

Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau by Thomas Kavanagh

B ook R ev iew s identify motherhood with that idealized misconception and, because it rejects the image and its misuse, feminism circumvents the real experience that fantasy overshadows” (p. 234). It does? Which feminism? Similarly, Kristeva informs us categorically in In the Begin­ ning was Love: “ there is no secular discourse on the psychology of motherhood” (p. 43). These apparently disparate remarks are connected to the theory of the imaginary father through a chapter on the representation of motherhood and the Virgin Mary, “ Stabat M ater,” which both acts out and analyzes the author’s (and, according to her, Western women’s) hostility to women. She asks why the representation of the Virgin “ was able to attract women’s wishes for identification” (Tales, p. 256), and answers that it provided a way “ of dealing with feminine paranoia,” or “ the paranoid lust for power” (Tales, p. 257) at many levels, among which: “ The Virgin especially agrees with the repudiation of the other woman (which doubtless amounts basically to a repudiation of the woman’s mother) by suggesting the image of “ A woman as Unique” (Tales, p. 258). According to Kristeva, the women’s repudiation of “ an abject mother” (Tales, p. 375) is not only the norm, but the necessary norm that contemporary culture has lost and whose loss feminism has abortively attempted to mask: “ The image of the Virgin . . . had remark­ ably subsumed the maternal ‘abject’. . . . Lacking that safety lock, feminine abjection imposed itself upon social representation, causing an actual denigration of women; this in turn gave rise to increased antifeminism but even more so to a strong reaction on the part of women who were unwilling to bear, in narcissistic fashion, the representation of their own rejection of the maternal. . . . The first feminist generation . . . countered it [the image of ‘women-as-object’] with the image of the virile activist. . . ; the second generation advo­ cated a centripetal, mitigated, soothed feminine sexuality, before unearthing, quite recent­ ly, under the guise of romances among women, sadomasochistic havoc” (p. 374). In a chain of universalizations, beginning by generalizing her own repudiation of other women and of the mother to all women, Kristeva proceeds through a neglect of the vast majority of women never inside Catholic culture and its belief in the Virgin, through a preposterously counterfactual historical cause-and-effect narrative, to conclude by enclosing the whole of feminism into one of its most miniscule, most fleeting, and most insignificant sects, which could be tenuously connected to femininism only precisely because the movement is so diverse. If failure to reject the “ abject m other” leads to psychosis, then at least one variant of feminine psychosis “ might be analyzed . . . from the standpoint of the rejection of the other sex that it comprises” (Tales, p. 261). Universalizing the necessity to reject the preOedipal mother and love the imaginary father not only gives women a normalizing model, but one that relies on one of the tenets of Freudian orthodoxy most called into question today, by such theorists as Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Isaac Balbus, to name only a few. This framework gives Kristeva’s theory a mustily dated aura, difficult to recon­ cile with the description of her version of psychoanalysis as “ outrageous” (Tales, p. 276), “ revolutionary” (p. 375), and as “ the most radical approach to lucidity” (Beginning, p. 19). L e s l ie W. R a b in e University o f California, Irvine Thomas Kavanagh. W r it in g t h e T r u t h : A u t h o r it y a n d D e s ir e in R o u s s e a u . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Pp. xvi + 227. The essence of Thomas Kavanagh’s monograph is contained in his reading of Rous­ VOL. XXIX, N O . 1 101 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r seau’s Levite o f Ephraim, in which language, the individual, and society are integrated to the extent that the traditional opposition between Rousseau’s socio-political works and his literary works seems unjustifiable. Kavanagh attributes Rousseau’s rewriting of the biblical text to its gruesome central image: a...

Evaluation of changes in mother-infant brief psychotherapy: A single case study

Representation-oriented brief psychotherapy with mother-infant dyads is used to examine correspondences between maternal behaviors and maternal representations of her infant. A single case study is presented to illustrate how one can objectify interactional variables that may correspond behaviorally to underlying maternal mental representations. This paper presents the results of a collaboration that focuses on the process of enacting fantasy via the domain of behavior. Attention is drawn to interacted themes that are enacted versions of representational themes. Enacted themes are pathogenic in behavioral terms for the infant. Five themes are identified in the case material. Changes in the mother's representations affect both the mother-infant relationship and the infant's functioning.

Writing Um Said: Representation of Motherhood in Edward Said’s Out of Place

I chose to read Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place expecting to find an alternativehistory of Palestine from one of the most ferocious fighters for the Palestinian cause.I did not find much of Palestine, but I did read an intimate narrative of an Arab boy’s coming of age. Said’s focus on his family was a deliberate opening up of the structure of the Arab household, as he attests in the preface to the Arabic translation of the book. This gesture resonated deeply with my own feminist political position on existing family structures as oppressive units that attempt to control and undermine women’s roles in society.