Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures

1. Aberrant, Absent, Alienated: Reading the Maternal in Jane Urquhart’s First Two Novels, The Whirlpool and Changing Heaven

31 Reading Jane Urquhart’s early novels for their maternal representations reveals their critical commentary about the continuing impact of patriarchally determined views of motherhood and mothering on women’s lives. Western society’s concept of motherhood is still too much that of a “natural ” human condition, an immanent, cohesive continuum infused with a reified, normative immutability that gives it deified status seemingly above contemplation or examination. Urquhart’s novels reflect that continuum by presenting a decidedly pessimistic view of motherhood. Although written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Urquhart’s novels include no portrayals of “feminist mothering” or “mothering, freed from the institution of motherhood … [and] experienced as a site of empowerment, a location of social change” (O’Reilly, Introduction 2). In her first novel, The Whirlpool (1986), Urquhart features two female protagonists: Maud Grady, a widowed mother of a young autistic son, and Fleda McDougal, a married woman with no children who spends the summer of 1889 living in a tent pitched above a turbulent whirlpool in the Niagara River. Moving into the twentieth century while continuing her exploration of nineteenth-century ideals in her second novel, Changing Heaven (1990), Urquhart pairs the narrative of a dead balloonist, Arianna Ether, who encounters Emily Brontë’s ghost, with a contemporary story about an English literature scholar, Ann Frear, who is living and loving badly in Aberrant, Absent, Alienated: Reading the Maternal in Jane Urquhart’s First Two Novels, The Whirlpool and Changing Heaven | by myrl coulter 1 32 myrl coulter Toronto. With these two novels, Urquhart sets an almost relentlessly bleak pattern for her portrayals of traditional motherhood that continues throughout the four subsequent novels she has published at this point in her career. Her last published work, A Map of Glass (2005), features several contrasting mother portrayals, from the strikingly abject to the dutifully invisible,thuscontinuinganeloquent,yetgloomy,novelisticmeditationon maternal situations. With their consistent inclusion of various mother figures, Urquhart’s narratives highlight the impact of the traditional and the historical on the current state of Western motherhood. Adrienne Rich forcefully takes issue with Western notions of motherhood in her milestone work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, when she writes that “the patriarchal institution of motherhood is not the ‘human condition’ any more than rape, prostitution, and slavery are” (33). When it was first published in 1976,Rich’scontroversialworkdrewmuchattentiontotherigid,normative status of mothers by situating “mothering” as the way in which individual women approach their responsibilities as mothers, and “motherhood” as an ideological creation with specific social functions, a creation formed not by women but by Western civilization’s male-dominant society. More than a quarter of a century later, virtually all investigations into mothering and motherhood gesture to Of Woman Born because of its status as, in Andrea O’Reilly’s words, “the first and arguably still the best feminist book on mothering and motherhood” (From Motherhood to Mothering).1 This esteemed status not only points to the significance of Rich’s text, but also illustrates that motherhood, an ideal determined by patriarchal traditions and its inherited history, is automatically linked by gender issues to the twentieth-century waves of feminism and their mandates to challenge patriarchal structures that limit and exploit opportunities for women. An institutional cornerstone for the organization of patriarchal societies, motherhood is, by its very intimacy in everyone’s lives, often an uncomfortable target for feminists. Such foundational connections stipulate that feminism and motherhood continue to co-exist in a congenital relationship that is both intimate and conflicted. Just as with the wide-ranging debates about the state of feminism in the twenty-first century, current discussions about motherhood and mothering are urgent, intense, and at times confusing. The increase in options made possible by the women’s movements of the twentieth century has resulted in critical debates scrutinizing every aspect of maternal situations. In The Impossibility of Motherhood: Feminism, Individualism, and the Problem of Mothering, Patrice DiQuinzio recognizes that the tensions between femi- 33 aberrant, absent, alienated nism and mothering must be resolved: while “the issue of mothering often functions as a sort of lightning rod in feminist theory … neither feminism nor feminist theory can afford to ignore the issue of mothering” (xi). For DiQuinzio, both feminism and mothering are dynamic processes that could work together toward a focused future based on diversity and inclusiveness that will result in cultural reform. Feminist mothering is one...