...a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no getting off. (Sylvia Plath, 'Metaphors') I have read each page of my mother's voyage. I have read each page of her mother's voyage. I have learned their words as they learned Dickens'. I have swallowed these words like bullets. But I have forgotten the last guest--terror. (Anne Sexton, 'Crossing the Atlantic')

Anne Sexton, like Sylvia Plath more famously before her, was a poet and a mother. And a suicide. As mothers, academics and writers, it is not hard for us to understand the difficulties faced by these clever, passionate, creative poet mothers with respect to mid-late twentieth century Western patriarchal motherings and motherhoods, difficulties that arguably contributed to their suicides. However, we feminists seem to focus somewhat religiously on these female lives and deaths, as if motherhood and thinking, motherhood and writing, motherhood and creative production in general are, unequivocally, violently destructive dance partners. As such, our fascinations may often replicate and perpetuate (albeit unintentionally) the classic patriarchal distinction between masculine production (creative invention) and feminine (re)production (repetition). (1) When a woman lives both culturally gendered forms of production the result is, as this highly seductive biographical script tells us, female self-destruction. Motherhood, in nuptial embrace with a creative, intellectual life, will apparently be the death of you; indeed, your suicide: the modern, mythico-feminist-political (2) martyr who burns herself at the stake as her child (and her husband, or partner, or whatever we call them) watches on. And if you should kill or harm yourself (in real life or in creative representation), know that your work will take on an aura you could never have dreamed possible. You will become an icon, a role model; an ill divinity. Though, as Dorothy Porter's character Lou scathingly (and I think a little uncharitably) quips in The Monkey's Mask, most young women poets 'think they're Plath/without the loony bin.' (3)

Of course, I wonder if these uppity, self-obsessed, over-sexed, perhaps angst-ridden young women poets to whom Lou refers are also mothers. I doubt it (is it too cynical, or given what I've just said, too easy to suggest that they might then suffer as Plath did?) Still, I think Porter is right about the apotheosis of Plath as the young (masochistic) feminist's Madonna. Weren't many of us, secretly perhaps, in love with the domestic poesis of Plath's final act (above the poetry itself), and a little later by Sexton's repetition of that act (two poet mothers gassed themselves to death, Plath in her oven, Sexton in her garage). Do not Plath and Sexton each figure both the apotheosis and the pathos of maternal-cultural productivity, still? We need to ask why it is that these two social identities--'mother' and 'writer'--seem not only mutually exclusive but also antagonistic, even (self) destructive. To begin, we might remember Adrienne Rich's perspicacious statement: 'to be a female human being trying to fulfil traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination.' (4)

There is little doubt about the problematic relationship between mothering and writing. Mother (still) is generally understood to be selflessly devoted to the nurturing of family, especially her children. As naturally nurturing and unselfish, she stands in direct opposition to the image of the (male) artist, who is generally aloof, passionately devoted to his art, 'an ivory tower type who avoids all responsibilities, including the domestic, in order to develop "his true self and his consecration as artist."' (5) As Emily Jeremiah recently put it in her essay 'Troublesome Practices: Mothering, Literature and Ethics,' an essay that appears in an issue of the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering entirely dedicated to 'Mothering and Literature':

The idea of maternal writing is troublesome because it unsettles many of the oppositions upon which motherhood in western culture has historically rested, such as that between maternity and creativity, or "the binary system that conceives woman and writer, motherhood and authorhood, babies and books, as mutually exclusive." (6)

Susan Suleiman has shown how traditionally domestic duties were seen to be the main priorities of women who wished to write. (7) Such a woman, in the Victorian era, was expected to delay her writing life until after her children had matured. (8) Furthermore, those women who rejected motherhood to enable their writing lives have been valorized for their endeavours. To reject motherhood in favour of writing has been held up as bravely political. On this point, Suleiman cites Nina Auerbach, (9) who reveres Jane Austen and George Eliot for rejecting society's expectations of them as women to marry and become mothers, instead choosing the writer's life.

In other words, traditionally in our culture, mothers don't write. Not according to the dominant representations of this figure in the West. If we consider the figure of the mother in advertising and popular culture, mothers clean (using very good cleaning products that are nuclear in their efficiency to destroy germs that may threaten their innocent children) and nurture (because that is, naturally, who they are), and drive children to sporting events (in large, gas-guzzling SUVs). Occasionally they have sex with their husbands, but only because their car is so sexy it makes them quiver with excitement (according to Honda and Toyota). Or they even live promiscuously (the so-called post-feminist 'yummy mummy') in the clean and proper domiciles of facile, western suburbia (Neighbours, Desperate Housewives and so forth.) Most of all, the women-mothers reproduce the father and his name.

But write? They simply don't do that, according to the dominant paradigm. Again, we know the story. The writing mother is bound to self-destruct Or, her success often rests much less upon the bravery of her sortie into the world of (fiction, fantasy, poetry, painting, or whatever), than upon how far her work appears to be, or can be read as reasonably consistent with patriarchal social order. As a recent example in popular culture, we might think of Diane Keaton's character in Nancy Meyers' 2003 film Something's Gotta Give. As a writer, her function is to dictate the words of others to herself as she types her script, words that perfectly mimic the dialogues which we as spectators heard minutes before. (10) Again, and so recently, the creative woman merely reproduces, with great enthusiasm and accuracy, the world around her. Of course, this image of the female artist/writer hinges on the stereotypical image of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Hecate
The Waiting Years: Enchi Fumiko and the subjugated voice of the mother..., October 01, 2006
The evolution of the 'mother' in tarot., October 01, 2006
Song of the damned.(Poem), October 01, 2006
Terminal Poem: Soldier.(Poem), October 01, 2006
Gertrude Stein Lights the Lights.(Poem), October 01, 2006

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