This Quiet Lady: Maternal Voices and the Picture Book

The silence of mothers' voices in contemporary picture books about mothers and daughters is a puzzling phenomenon little noticed in current discussions of children's literature. The cliché of a mother reading a picture book with her child remains as common as the fact that many picture books are written by women who may or may not be mothers. Yet when my interest as both a scholar and a mother in the treatment of mothers' voices in contemporary narrative led me to listen to mothers' voices in picture books, I discovered that the picture book was a place where mothers are to be seen, but rarely heard. Reading aloud, we who are mothers read our silence.

I wish to break this silence, to theorize why the patterns of silencing occur, and to argue that it is important to think about what happens to mothers' voices in these picture books. The moment I argue, I distance myself from the convention of the picture book mother who, when she speaks at all, is so careful about what she says. I also distance myself from the stereotypical feminist who supposedly is so appalled by the continuing definition of woman as mother in the picture book that she is interested only in showing children that women have other options. Since I am suspicious of reductionist generalizations, whether they concern the interests of feminists, the mothers who appear in picture books, or the daughters and mothers who read the picture books, I hesitate to assert that what I have found is true of most contemporary picture books. I do not think that there is an essential "mother's voice," nor an essential child reader. But I have two fears: that what my research has uncovered is generally applicable to the treatment of mothers' voices in picture books; and that the strategies of silencing which I discuss inevitably produce such an essential, carefully modulated mother's voice. As an older mother I do not care if the picture-book mother does not look like me; what disturbs me is what she sounds like.

Mothers' voices are not silenced simply because children's literature is the realm of the child, and so all adult voices are marginal to it. Mothers' voices are controlled in picture books in a way that other adult voices are not. Grandmothers, for example, often speak in a text where mothers remain silent. Feminists, eager to challenge stereotypes of the family, sometimes choose to include a father's voice in the picture book as if to demonstrate that fathers too can mother. All very commendable—how can I object—but meanwhile such choices mean that the narrative convention of the nurturing, silent mother continues to thrive. Seventeen years after the publication of Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, there is a massive critical bibliography on mothers and daughters. But Rich's protest in her first chapter still captures the response of the (m)other reader, the one whose voice is left out of the picture:

I was haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is "unconditional"; and by the visual and literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity. If I knew parts of myself existed that would never cohere to those images, weren't those parts then abnormal, monstrous?

(23)

Rich's book is a response to her reading of Western culture; I have a narrower focus—the picture book—where readers continue to learn those "visual and literary images of motherhood."

My conclusions are based on picture books that I have examined in the University of Calgary Libraries and the Calgary Public Library. Looking for picture books published since 1976, when Of Woman Born appeared, I first struggled with the problem of classification—when is a book about a mother and daughter? Who has the power to make that categorical decision and according to what assumptions? The premises that determine library of Congress classification affect first library journal reviews and ultimately reference works such as Juliette Yaakov's Children's Catalog, whose recommendations in turn influence both booksellers and librarians; it...