Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Women’s lives are often defined by and limited to the roles assigned to them by the patriarchal capitalist society. The very act of contemplating motherhood is as much political as it is personal. As a result, motherhood tends to evoke strong feelings in women as well as a passionate rhetoric in our cultural discourses. This, in turn, is permeated by the particular socio-historical necessity of one’s time as well as the psychological make-up that goes into this act of conceiving. Embracing or rejecting motherhood transcends the mere bodily contours of the womb and becomes a collective decision waiting to engender the entire family or even the entire society. By tracing the various discourses of motherhood in Toni Morrison’s novels, I investigate how Toni Morrison re-writes the experiences of black mothers during and immediately after the days following the abolition of slavery in the United States. Morrison tends to show the complexity of a black woman’s experience as a mother, how she challenges the norms of motherhood and how she eventually emerges as a strong personality with a firm sense of justice. I propose that their attempt to (de)objectify their children speaks about their (m)otherhood. In other words, I attempt a psycho-cultural analysis that posits the black mother as non-normative and problematizes her actions both from the perspective of the “other” and that of a “mother.” This (m)othering strategy plays a dual role and doubly complicates the expectations that one might have from a “preserving and nurturing” mother.