Where Did Mary's Mother Come From?

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...