Courting Failure: Women and the Law in Twentieth-Century Literature

Chapter Three. “Mother Knows Best”: Women, Children, and the Law

Chapter Three “Mother Knows Best” Women, Children, and the Law To whatever degree the reality of or potentiality for motherhood defines ourselves, women’s lives are relational, not autonomous. As mothers we nurture the weak and we depend on the strong. As mothers we nurture and are nurtured by an interdependent and hierarchical natural web of others. —Robin West, Narrative, Authority, and Law1 Legal stories about contested motherhood stretch as far back as biblical narratives and offer rich sources for twentieth-century texts: in just two examples, Bertholt Brecht updates the King Solomon dispute in his 1944 play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Margaret Atwood rewrites the pact between Rachel and Bilhah (or, more accurately , Rachel and Jacob) in her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. That authors return frequently to the contested nature of motherhood speaks volumes about its place in the twentieth century: no other subject is more frequently explored in feminist texts. Nan Goodman argues that “whether complementary, subversive, or reflective of each other, taken together, legal and literary narratives can illuminate the way the culture constructs itself through narrative without privileging either the ostensibly real or the imaginary, the ostensibly true or the morally ambiguous.”2 Goodman’s recognition of the multiple components interacting in the construction of culture is particularly resonant for literary and legal texts that focus on motherhood . Motherhood, or more particularly, the position of mothers, is an integral and contested element of feminism and the law, subject to 104 “Mother Knows Best” 105 a variety of frames of reference moving from the “natural,” ever-loving “good mother” to the abusive woman who fails to keep her child from harm.3 Such visions of motherhood extend across a range of popular culture texts. For example, the slightly above-average psychological thriller The Forgotten (2005), starring Julianne Moore, argues that mother love is so strong, and the bond between mother and child so unbreakable, that it can metaphorically bring children back from the dead—or, in this case, government-condoned alien abduction . In Jackie Kay’s moving collection of poems, The Adoption Papers, the position of two (white) mothers—and implicitly their relationship to the law as well as to the mixed-race child that one mothers and the other gives up—is revealed through an interwoven series of voices. The competing voices of two white woman reveal that neither is wholly a “good mother” or a “bad mother,” and that both are at least partially imagined by their daughter, whose experiences of racism accord with neither adult’s own experiences.4 Most literature on motherhood and the law reflects not the success of the individual woman but her overt policing (a topic touched on in The Adoption Papers when the adoptive mother seeks to define herself as unexceptional to the social worker in order to receive her much-wanted child).5 This chapter explores how the law (and literature about the law) represents the woman-as-mother as somehow more closely monitored—and more often condemned—than other members of society. Here, it is vital to maintain a postegalitarian stance, given that the female defendant’s gender (through her very position as mother) is foregrounded rather than ignored, as it impinges on the reasons behind as well as the reception of any crime she may have committed. A postegalitarian feminist stance maintains that women constitute a “special case” under law, a viewpoint that potentially essentializes women’s position, concentrating on the similarity between individual women, but their difference from men (a stance which has been extensively critiqued within Anglo-American literary and social feminism). However, a number of incisive feminist essays argue that “[n]eutral treatment in a gendered world or within a gendered institution does not operate in a neutral manner.”6 Moreover , recognizing that all women are potentially subject to the law in 106 Courting Failure ways that men are not does not entail suggesting that all women are subject to the law in exactly the same way; as a number of feminist critics have pointed out, African American, Latina, or Chicana mothers , poor mothers, disabled mothers, and lesbian mothers (or any combination thereof) are often framed in particular ways in relation to the law, and their actions are read in ways that confirm the dominant culture’s suspicions about such women and set them in opposition to class-privileged, heterosexual, white women. Such...