Analysis of Motherhood and Women's Expirences in Selected Novels

The perception of women’s experiences, that is experiences that are unique to women and the way they experience the world around them, have been challenged and altered in recent years. Rosalind Coward, in her article This Novel Changes Lives, draws attention to the issue of the writing of women’s experiences in one novel, often being perceived as a universal experience for all women. This is not the case. All women experience the world around them differently and are shaped by the experiences they live through. This is particularly with mothering and motherhood. There is no one shared experience for women when beginning the journey of motherhood. This is clear is clear through literature, such as novels, that have presented readers with alternate views of a mother, what it means to be a mother and what a mother looks like. While in contents very different novels, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, challenge the typical identity of a mother. Eva, in the way she does not fit the nurturing caring mother mould and Maggie in the way she is a part of a queer family. I will argue that through these novels the typical identity of the mother is challenged and therefore the category of women’s experience is problematised.

In Western society particularly, women are held to the cultural assumption that all women want to be mothers or are mothers and that procreating is proof of a permanent relationship with a man and of adulthood. A significant portion of social research has been dedicated to women and the role that children play in their lives, allowing the reproduction of societal assumptions about women gaining their identity from relationships in the domestic setting, particularly from motherhood within the family. Societal beliefs and institutions perpetuate the assumption that the ultimate role of a woman is to become a mother and be a “good mother” (Letherby, 525). That is, a mother who has become pregnant with her male husband who lives to care for and be nurturing towards her children and family. The novels, We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Argonauts, while significantly different stories and mothering experiences, challenge the traditional societal standards of being a mother. While Eva in We Need to Talk About Kevin and Maggie in The Argonauts, both have children, their experience of motherhood is drastically different to the what is the generally accepted mothering experience. In addition, their identities differ significantly from what is seen to be the traditional mother identity.

We Need to Talk About Kevin problematises the category of women’s experience, through the mothering experience of Eva. Unlike the typical motherhood mould, Eva does not find mothering to be a powerful experience but finds it to be a constrictive one that traps her and limits he identity as her own person. Kevin Katchourian, Eva’s son, brutally shoots and kills seven hand-picked victims, including his classmates, a cafeteria worker and a teacher, with a cross-bow. Before the massacre at the school, it is later uncovered, that Kevin has also killed his father and sister, only sparing the life of his mother. From Eva’s perspective, it seems that Kevin’s killing spree is a calculated act, performed just for her. However, this is something that is never quite uncovered. Readers are taken on a journey in We Need to Talk About Kevin through Eva’s, the self-reflexive narrator of the novel, telling of the woman’s experience, especially in motherhood, in 1980’s America. Through her series of letters to her dead husband, Franklin, written two years after the massacre, Eva retrospectively ponders the thought that her tense and frustrated relationship with her son might have contributed substantially to the way Kevin grows up and turns out. In writing about Kevin, Eva talks about herself and often experience of first-time mothering that speak to the frustrations faced by the contemporary middle-class mother, where the choice to have children is entangled with a more expansive expression of the self than socially dominant models of mothering allow (Muller, 38). Throughout the novel, Eva runs the risk of being an unlikeable narrator. Many reviewers have found her an example of “bad mothering” (Epstein, 259). The founding principle of “the good mother”, which the novel aggressively engages, predicates Eva’s self-blame for Kevin’s character. This concept of “the good mother” is one that sees the mother as the primary caregiver and giver of unconditional love and nurture. While Eva in the novel is the primary caregiver, she is not typically the most loving and nurturing mother. In the 1980’s where most of Eva’s mothering of Kevin occurs, the view of the good mother who subsequently produces the good child, hinders Eva’s understanding of self and others in the social sphere (Muller, 39). Likeable or unlikeable, Eva shows readers that mothering is never “good enough”. The sections of We Need to Talk About Kevin that refer to first-time mothering pursue the argument that the novel is in fact demonstrative of the persistence in Western culture of the exclusivity of the myth of the good mother, despite now the number of mothering discourses that now take into account the individual circumstances in which mothering occurs.

Eva’s letters to Franklin, detailing her relationships with work and her husband before children, show the social pressures felt by women around becoming a mother and the stigma around those who are or want to remain childless. Eva, however, entertains the idea of having a child and finally, in her late thirties, takes the journey into motherhood. The parts of the novel that document the early stages of motherhood are full of frankness, retrospective cynicism and self-deprecating humour, showing the failure of the one-size-fits-all view of motherhood (Muller, 41). For instance, Eva puts forward a list of reasons that outline her “downsides of parenthood”. This list includes, “dementing boredom”, “worthless social life” and “unnatural truism”. From what it includes and does not include, this list shows a narrow and intractable paradigm of what it means to be the good mother. This is, a mother who exists uncomplainingly and selflessly for her child (Letherby, 525). It is not surprising that Eva does not find mothering empowering in any way, using this narrow perspective of good mothering.

Another significant reason that Eva does not find the mothering experience to be that of a powerful one is through her emotional and physical experience of the maternal body. Socially approved texts, such as mothering books, encourage the dissociation of the body from the sexual in order to create a morally accountable sensuality. That is one that is purely in service of the child-to-be. Reflecting on this reinscription of her body, Eva writes:

I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young… the cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity… the twist of flesh in front took on a serious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a temper, a sweetener for doing the species’ heavy lifting, like lollipops I once got at the dentist. 

Others around her reinforce the idea of the renunciation of the sexualised female body. Eva’s gynaecologist gives Eva a list of things she cannot do and food and drink she cannot consume. Eva also reminds her husband of his behaviour changes towards her and her body since she became pregnant. “You were nervous about whether we were supposed to have sex, it would hurt the baby, and I grew a little exasperated. I was already victimized … by an organism the size of a pea. Me, I really wanted to have sex for the first time in weeks … You acquiesced. Bu you were depressingly tender”. An assertion from Luce Irigaray that states, “To become a mother is to unbecome a woman” is extremely relevant here in Eva’s situation. Eva details her experience of mother, particularly pregnancy, as an imposition on her life and body. Unlike the stereotypical mother in which society is aware, Eva remains selfish in her needs. Her writing of her pregnancy and of motherhood differs from the romanticised stories of joy that traditionally pair with the journey of pregnancy (Lethereby, 525). This is reinforced by Jeremiah when she states that We Need to Talk About Kevin challenges the traditional conflation of maternity and femininity and that women are not naturally or necessarily able parents, disrupting the assumption that all women want to be mothers.

We Need to Talk About Kevin consistently explores misfit between Eva’s individual motherhood experiences and the social discourses of motherhood which persistently seek to claim her and cause her to dissemble (Muller, 43). Eva writes of the experience of becoming a mother and unbecoming a subject by saying, “… crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park”. Eva also describes the different stages of pregnancy and motherhood as somewhat a false performance, in which the real woman and all of her subjectivity and agency disappears. This is shown in the day Eva found out she was pregnant when she took time before Franklin got home to “assemble herself into the glowing mother-to-be”. She constantly resists the role that is required of her, in which she has little control. “I felt expendable, throw-away, swallowed by a big biological project that I didn’t initiate or choose that produced me but would also chew me up and spit me out. I felt used”. In society it is a common belief that all women want to be mothers, are excited to be mothers and that the role of a mother will come naturally to all women (Letherby, 525). Eva is evidence that this is not the case. We Need to Talk About Kevin details the not so pretty details of motherhood and provides readers with an alternate view of what is accepted to be the norm – that motherhood is a wholesome experience for all women.

In Maggie Nelson’s novel, The Argonauts, a different side of pregnancy and motherhood is presented, however, one that also does not fit the traditional mould of the typical mothering experience. This is through Nelson’s experience of queer maternity. In the form of episodic fragments, Nelson tells her story of her relationship with gender-fluid, Harry Dodge and their lives and family they built together. Nelson details their sexual connection, their finding and keeping of love and their shared journey of building a family and home. Such a relationship and Nelson’s family setup challenges traditional societal expectations of a nuclear family and a “normative” pregnancy and motherhood (Letherby, 525). Such a sentiment is furthered by Nelson’s citation of Susan Fraiman who is also invested in disrupting “the tired binary that places ‘femininity, reproduction and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality and queer resistance on the other’”. Fraiman’s concept of the “sodomitical mother”, advocated for by Nelson, is outlined as the mother who has access “even as a mother” to “non-normative, non-procreative sexuality, in excess of the dutifully instrumental”.

Differing from Eva’s mothering experience in We Need to Talk About Kevin, much of Nelson’s experience is focused on her queer maternity. However, the concept of heteronormativity still is at the forefront. At the beginning of the novel, Nelson shares a story about the response of one of her friends to her pregnancy, in a familial setting. Having coffee with this friend in the kitchen, Nelson gets a mug gifted to her family by her mother. On it, a photo of Nelson, pregnant, Harry and her stepson, on their way to see a performance of The Nutcracker at Christmas time. The friend says, “Wow… I have never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life”. Nelson ponders this comment with a series of rhetorical questions that ultimately leads to her thinking about the queerness of pregnancy itself. “Is there something queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with - and radical alienation from - one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?”. In this extract of questions, Nelson uses her personal experience as a means of evidence for the allegorical exposition of queer maternity that she advances (Cooke, 20). By doing this, Nelson shows how everyday life, such as a passing comment, can be a driver for a cultural critique about the status of motherhood and maternity in queer politics. For example, Nelson interprets her friend’s comment as an accusation that maternity is overlooked within queer contexts because it cannot be detached from the normative. This is evidenced when Nelson draws attention to how her embodiment as a pregnant woman and her subsequent mothering experience stops her from accessing privileged status in radicality. Here, Nelson calls us to recognise that critiques of normativity can be sexist and consequently can replicate what they critique. In other words, Nelson wants us to question the anti-sexist commitments of radical queer politics when they coincide with acts of contempt for maternal embodiment as just another indication of normativity at work (Cooke, 20). The mug anecdote that Nelson writes of, does not stall the allegorical expression about queer maternity. This exposition extends that a preoccupation with fixing queer maternity to normativity can lead to its dismissal, which heavily relies upon the division between the normative and transgressive. Here, Nelson registers the contradictions of binary logic and the supposedly paradoxical subject positions they produce – most significantly, the queer mother. In addition, identity is also brought to attention here. Not only do readers become aware of identity struggles as a woman but also identity struggles within the queer community. Nelson’s outright rejection of the “normative” differs from most mothering experiences where, women are trying their hardest to fit into the “good mother” category.

Stories included in The Argonauts about maternity and motherhood delve into literary and academic spaces, extending beyond settings of domesticity. For example, when Nelson is at work and runs into a superior at the cafeteria, he pays for her lunch with a wink that her research interests will return after she has the baby. The text then takes us to a panel discussion for Nelson’s book The Art of Cruelty at which a “well-known playwright” asks Nelson, “I can’t help but notice that you’re with child, which leads me to the question – how did you handle working on all this dark material (sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence and so on) in your condition?”. These two interactions further emphasise the conflicting reception of maternal embodiment in which the cultural validation for having a baby intersects with sexist invalidation (Cooke, 22). Here, Nelson’s experience can be linked with that of Eva’s, in that Eva also experiences this conflicting reception. Neither of the women like the change in people’s behaviour towards them when they are pregnant.

Nelson makes the link extremely clear between kinship and citation by labelling the figures she cites throughout her novel, as her “many gendered-mothers”. This extends the text’s examination of queer maternity from the experiential to the figurative in two ways. Firstly, it shows the association to queer and feminist associated artists, theorists and writers. Secondly, the maternal is positioned as a recuperated source of knowledge. Instead of following the proverbial of “mother knows best”, this maternal knowledge detaches maternity from gender and bloodline. (Pidduck, 448). Nelson borrows the “many gendered-mothers” term from Dana Ward’s poem “A Kentucky of Mothers”, in which Nelson understands this poem as “defetishizing the maternal, even emptying the category out”. Unlike Ward, Nelson is not fully engaged with emptying the maternal category out, as many of the stories included in The Argonauts are based on the specificity of maternal relations. Included in this, is Nelson’s self-representation as a mother, her relationship with her own mother and accounts of Harry’s relationship with his birth and adaptive mothers (Cooke, 25). Nelson is vocal about how gender fluidity puts pressure on discourses of motherhood and fatherhood. Harry, she states, “does not see himself reflected in versions of in motherhood but also does not really see himself reflected in versions of fatherhood but still see himself very much to be a parent”. Nelson later describes The Argonauts as an attempt to discuss “biological maternity’ and “non-gendered points of care” without the one usurping the other.

Both We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Argonauts problematise the category of women’s experience. The novels present alternate views of the traditional mother and the traditional nuclear family. In We Need to Talk About Kevin, we are presented with Eva who is not the caring, nurturing mother that society expects. She feels as though she loses her own identity as a woman when she becomes a mother for the first time to Kevin. In The Argonauts, readers get an insight into queer mothering and parenting. While Nelson is excited to be a mother and shows more of a caring side than Eva, she dedicates parts of her novel to sexist incidents and issues of identity. Nelson focuses much of The Argonauts to making readers aware of alternate mothering experiences and alternate family units. Both of the novels clearly problematise the category of women’s experience, through Eva and Nelson’s significantly different mothering experiences.