Full Description
Motherhood is one of those roles that assumes an almost-outsized cultural importance in the significance we force it to bear. It becomes both the source of and the repository for all kinds of cultural fears. Its ubiquity perhaps makes it this perfect foil. After all, while not everyone will become a mother, everyone has a mother. When we force motherhood to bear the terrors of what it means to be human, we inflict trauma upon those who mother. A long tradition of bad mothers thus shapes contemporary mothering practices (and the way we view them), including the murderous Medea of Greek mythology, the power-hungry Queen Gertrude of Hamlet, and the emasculating mother of Freud's theories. Certainly, there are mother who cause harm, inflict abuse, act monstrously. Mothers are human. But mothers are also a favourite and easy scapegoat. The contributors to this collection explore a multitude of interdisciplinary representations of mothers that, through their very depictions of bad mothering, challenge the tropes of monstrous mothering that we lean on, revealing in the process why we turn to them. Chapters in Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes explore literary, cinematic, and real-life monstrous mothers, seeking to uncover social sources and results of these monstrosities.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Abigail L. Palko
Part I: Precarious Mothering
Chapter 1: "Patchwork Girl - fractured maternal monsters" by Anitra Hunter
Chapter 2: "Laura's Story: Applying De-colonial Love to Indigenous Mothers of Missing
Children" by Josephine Savarese
Chapter 3: "'Science Put Babies in My Belly': Mothering and Monstrosity in Orphan Black" by
Susan Harper and Jessica Guillon
Chapter 4: "The Maternal Maleficent" by Abigail L. Palko
Part II: Maternal Violence
Chapter 5: "Central Intelligence and Maternal Mental Health: The Apparently Aberrant Bad
Mother in Homeland" by Aidan Moir
Chapter 6: "Karla Homolka, A Mom of Three" by Rebecca Bromwich
Chapter 7: "'A Victim Twice': Maternal Violence in the Poetry of Ai" by Jessica Turcat
Part III: Mothers Made Monstrous
Chapter 8: "The Monstrosity of Maternal Abandonment in the Literature of Women Writers from
the American South" by Jennifer Martin
Chapter 9: "'What is Incomprehensible': The Myth of Maternal Omniscience and the Judgment
of Maternal Culpability in Sue Klebold's A Mother's Reckoning and Monique Lépine's
Aftermath" by Andrea O'Reilly
Chapter 10: "'She laughed at anything': The Portrayal of the Monstrous Maternal in Anna
Burns' No Bones" by Shamira Ransirini
Chapter 11: "Monster Mothers and Mother Monsters from Dracula to Stranger Things" by
Melissa Dinsman
Coda: "A Trace of What It is Not: The Hauntings of the Monstrous Mother" by Andrea O'Reilly
Notes on the Contributors
