Full Description
Mediated Maternity: Contemporary American Portrayals of Bad Mothers in Literature and Popular Culture, by Linda Seidel, explores the cultural construction of the bad mother in books, movies, and TV shows, arguing that these portrayals typically have the effect of cementing dominant assumptions about motherhood in place—or, less often, of disrupting those assumptions, causing us to ask whether motherhood could be constructed differently. Portrayals of bad mothers not only help to establish what the good mother is by depicting her opposite, but also serve to illustrate what the culture fears about women in general and mothers in particular. From the ancient horror of female power symbolized by Medea (or, more recently, by Casey Anthony) to the current worry that drug-addicted pregnant women are harming their fetuses, we see a social desire to monitor the reproductive capabilities of women, resulting in more (formal and informal) surveillance than in material (or even moral) support.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mediated Motherhood
Part I: The Nancy Grace Effect
Chapter 1. Nancy Grace and the Motherhood Critics
Chapter 2. Neonaticide in Nancy Grace and Jodi Picoult
Part II: Working-Class Mothers in White and Black
Chapter 3. Gone Baby Gone: Reproducing the Bad Mother
Chapter 4. Stereotyping the Black Welfare Mother in Precious
Part III: Alienated Maternity in White Professional Women
Chapter 5. Creating the Reality of Postpartum Depression in Shields' Down Came the Rain and Morton's Breakable You
Chapter 6. Glenn Close and the Monstrous Maternal: Mothers and Daughters in Damages
Epilogue: Motherhood in Context
References
