Disjointed Perspectives on Motherhood presents the accounts of mothers who have suffered a major physical and/or psychically traumatic accident, and, as a consequence, their minds and bodies have been drastically changed. They live under the pressure of having discovered the alter ego of their traumatized personality, and now, distressed, cannot embrace their unconditional maternal love. Instead, they enter into a phase where they face the challenge of revealing who they are as persons before accepting or motivating themselves as mothers. The mothers presented in this volume also seem to have another thing in common: their transnational, fluid, female identity as they enter into an imaginary dialog that transcends geographical and temporal perspectives on womanhood and motherhood. This collection introduces and analyzes recurrent words that define a woman's body and mind today: fear, competition, motherhood and career rights, selfishness, ambition, destruction, distance, and identity. By using unprecedented comparative critical approaches such as phenomenological, medical, feminist, and re-enchantinent theories, and by analyzing works from literature, cinema, and visual arts, this collection attempts to reestablish and redefine a canonical concept with the intention to revitalize an otherwise taken-for-granted image and role.
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1 A Mother's Loss of Her Daughter's Face: Ethical Issues of Facial Disfigurement in Natalie Kusz's Memoir Road Song Gudrun Grabher 2 From Child to Mother: The Disjoint Identity of Charles Robert Maturin's Immalee Margarita Georgieva 3 Solving the "Crumbling" Mother in Nancy Drew Michael Cornelius 4 Feminized and Maternal Bodies: Thresholds to Empowered Roles in Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron Sharon L. Decker 5 The Price We Pay: Motherhood, Marriage and the Struggle to Class Jump in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina Tarah Sweeting-Trotter 6 Childless Motherhood: the Geopolitics of Maternal Bliss in Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven Oana M. Chivoiu 7 Dismatria: The Quest for a Mother-Land in Igiaba Scego's Writings Tatjana Babic-Wiilliams 8 'I wanted to hear her called Mom': The Grieving Mother and Lost Pregnant Daughter in Sharon Rocha's For Laci Jennifer Musial 9 Unwanted Mother, Unwanted Motherhood: Competing Maternities in Selby's Requiem for a Dream Zachary Snider 10 "She Who Dwells Alone ...:" Mad Mothers, Old Spinsters and Hysterical Women in William Wordsworth's Poetry of 1798 Irina Strout 11 Writing, Mothering, and Traumatic Subjectivity in Sapphire's Push Sherry Ziesenheim & Matthew J. Darling 12 Looking into the Mirror, Inscribing the Blank Slate: 18th Century Women Write about Mothering Elizabeth Johnston 13 Wise Mother? Insane Mother? Sara Chapman Bull and the Disarticulated Subjectivities of Turn-of-the Century Motherhood Jacqueline Brady 14 Maternal Interruption: Reconceiving Political Spaces and Social Agency in Buchi Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood Mary L. Cappelli 15 Mother-less: Joan Didion's Blue Nights and David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole Catalina Florina Florescu Afterword Index About the Authors
