Eighteenth 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 Beloved (1987) and Sula (1973), 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. Motherhood is about personal and political empowerment in her novels, an act of resistance, integral and important for the black people in their fight against racism and sexism. My paper focuses upon the parallels between narratives of slavery, femininity, and motherhood in these two Morrison novels. Eva, Helene, Hannah, Nel in Sula, and Baby Suggs and Sethe in Beloved, attest to the resisting mothers.