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A review by ygraines
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose
4.0
"the mother-daughter relationship, the pregnancy that contains the mother and all her forebears - 'and if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when i think i am safe?' - is where the world loses its bearings and all boundaries dissolve (giving the lie to the idea that any mother can hold everything in place). [...] allowing borders to open, recognising the radical fragility of the boundaries we create, can also be seen, in relation to mothers, as the foundation for a different ethics and, perhaps, a different world."
i'm not sure how much i have to say about this book, because jacqueline rose speaks so articulately, so sensitively, with such deliberation and such clear-eyed purpose for herself, and for mothers. this is, in some ways, a dense read, not because rose's writing is difficult to follow or because it is dependent on an impenetrable network of theory - it's neither - but because it is such a carefully constructed, critically rigorous project with such a vast scope.
rose is writing a political and social history, a response to psychoanalytical theory, a response to movements in current journalism and other media, an extended piece of literary and biographical criticism, a manifesto for the deconstruction of our cultural attitudes towards motherhood, a proposal to radically rethink motherhood on an individual, communal and global scale: each of these threads is conceptually huge in its own right, and together they form a piece of work that is constantly reaching beyond without ever losing itself.
it's deeply impressive as a piece of work, but i think, just as important, it's model of the kind of empathy i want to practice.
i'm not sure how much i have to say about this book, because jacqueline rose speaks so articulately, so sensitively, with such deliberation and such clear-eyed purpose for herself, and for mothers. this is, in some ways, a dense read, not because rose's writing is difficult to follow or because it is dependent on an impenetrable network of theory - it's neither - but because it is such a carefully constructed, critically rigorous project with such a vast scope.
rose is writing a political and social history, a response to psychoanalytical theory, a response to movements in current journalism and other media, an extended piece of literary and biographical criticism, a manifesto for the deconstruction of our cultural attitudes towards motherhood, a proposal to radically rethink motherhood on an individual, communal and global scale: each of these threads is conceptually huge in its own right, and together they form a piece of work that is constantly reaching beyond without ever losing itself.
it's deeply impressive as a piece of work, but i think, just as important, it's model of the kind of empathy i want to practice.