Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart

Preface

Di Brandt begins the prologue to her book WildWoman Dancing (1993) discussing how the birth of her first child in 1976 called into question all that she had learned—or thought she had learned—in her Masters English literature program completed the same year. She writes: “It was like falling into a vacuum, narratively speaking. I realized suddenly, with a shock, that none of the texts I had read so carefully , none of the literary skills I had acquired so diligently as a student of literature, had anything remotely to do with the experience of becoming a mother” (3). Similarly , I first became a mother the same year I completed an Honors B.A. in English and Women’s Studies (1984). Two years later I began a Ph.D. in English and gave birth to my second child four months later in December 1986. Twenty-five years old with two children born in under three years and the only mother in my Ph.D. program, I hungered for stories by and about mothers and wondered, as did Brandt, “Where . . . were the mothers, symbolic or otherwise, whom I might have turned to in that moment of loneliness and desperation?” (4). My graduate specialization was in the field of Women’s Studies in English, and so I turned to women’s literature and feminist theory in search of the absent mother. However, in 1986 little had been published in feminist theory or feminist literary theory on the topic of mothering-motherhood, and what had been written tended to reenact the patriarchal marginalization of motherhood.1 It would seem that Di Brandt’s observation that “the mother has been so largely absent in Western narrative, not because she is unnarratable, but because her subjectivity has been violently, and repeatedly, suppressed” (7) held true for most early feminist thinking on motherhood as well. Fortunately, as a Canadian resident and scholar, the mother-centered works of Canadian women writers Margaret Laurence, Adele Wiseman, and Joy Obasan was known to me. But I longed for more. My quest led me to the “rediscovered” lateeighteenth -century women writers who engaged with the topic of motherhood, in both narrative and essay form, and whose writings gave rise to the ideology of moral motherhood that in turn became the maternal feminism of the suffragist movement of the late nineteenth century. I rationalized that though I did not research directly women’s narratives on mothering or feminist thought on motherhood , I did at least study, from a historical perspective, the emergence of the ideology and institution of motherhood. And so my fields of specialization became women’s studies in literature and eighteenth-century literature. ix Preface All of this changed one cold and snowy night in February 1988. That fall I had signed up for a course on the African American novel and in the second term we moved to black women’s fiction. I had tucked my one- and three-year-olds into bed with plans to begin the novel due for next week’s class; the novel was Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). I do not remember much from that night except that I finished the book at four in the morning when I should have been sleeping , given that my children would be up in two hours, and realized that I had found the maternal narrative for which I had been searching. In the three weeks that followed, I read all of Morrison’s novels and met with my professor of African American literature and asked if she would be my supervisor for a dissertation on mothering and Toni Morrison. She asked me if I was sure, given that such a switch would add time to a Ph.D. already delayed by the birth of my two and soon to be three children. Yes, I was sure. In the fifteen years that have passed since I first read Morrison, I have been asked on numerous occasions, “Why Morrison?” Or, more specifically, people wondered how I, a woman of English, Scottish, Irish ancestry who grew up in working-class Hamilton in southern Ontario, Canada, got so hooked on Morrison and motherhood. Every time I was asked this question, and even now as I finish this book on Morrison, I find myself at a loss for an explanation. I am a mother, and though my experiences of motherhood differ substantially from those narrated in Morrison, I nonetheless felt more at home in Morrison’s maternal world than that of...