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A review by barel63
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose
3.0
Oh boy, I had really high hopes of this, which might have been one of two reasons behind my disappointment. The other being the fact that I recently finished [b:Elena Ferrante: Parole chiave|38617571|Elena Ferrante Parole chiave|Tiziana de Rogatis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1519030887s/38617571.jpg|60232532] that though spoke about motherhood within the framework of Ferrante's work, it did so in a way that was both thorough and practical, moving beyond the confines of literature itself.
Maybe the problem here is me, but this book is at best a very spotty introduction to the discussion of motherhood and mothers from a feminist perspective. If you have read a lot of feminist and gender theory, this book is not for you. First because it discusses some very basic concepts, secondly because it does so in an uneven and unsatisfactory way.
Let me explain. "Mothers" starts with a strong and clear-cut argument, presented within the very first lines of the introduction: Mothers, Rose argues, are the recipients of all our hopes and desires, but also where we deposit all our disappointment and failures, making them the scapegoat for all the world's evils. I tend to agree with this assessment and thus expected Rose to discuss roots of the cult of motherhood and what it has done both to women and the experience of motherhood itself.
And to be fair, Rose does do that but to a very limited extent. There are some personal anecdotes and a few references to current political events. However, the vast majority of book is actually spent dissecting and discussing the plights of fictional mothers, from Euripides' Medea to Ferrante's female protagonists. Which is fine, but it's not what this book was marketed as. I understand that throughout history we do not have first-hand accounts of how mothers felt or were treated and thus we have to rely on literature as historical evidence, but at least make that clear from the beginning. And not only does the vast majority of the book focus on fiction, but there is little analysis beyond a rehashing of the plot of these novels interspersed with some basic analysis that anyone who has ever paid attention in a literature class could have come up with herself.
And it's not only literary analysis that suffers from this. Any analysis from a feminist perspective of modern-day pressures of motherhood (how, women are supposed to have it all, and often this portrayal of perfection is based on the exploitation of poor mothers of colour) is done sporadically and usually using block quotes from other feminist texts without Rose giving us anything original from her own perspective.
It just felt very shallow. Throughout the reading I kept expecting more, more examples to support her argument, more analysis of how patriarchal pressures have shaped our understanding of motherhood There were also some jabs at the right-wing polices that are disproportionally onerous to mothers and single mothers at that. But nothing on how even left-wing and "liberal" expectations can be just as detrimental (something that Tiziana de Rogatis does very well in her book). Nothing even on surrogacies, on how childbirth relates to motherhood.
I'm just disappointed. I guess read this text if you want to maybe have a sort of introduction to the topic and take from it a reading list to explore further these topics, because Jacqueline Rose does not do them justice.
Maybe the problem here is me, but this book is at best a very spotty introduction to the discussion of motherhood and mothers from a feminist perspective. If you have read a lot of feminist and gender theory, this book is not for you. First because it discusses some very basic concepts, secondly because it does so in an uneven and unsatisfactory way.
Let me explain. "Mothers" starts with a strong and clear-cut argument, presented within the very first lines of the introduction: Mothers, Rose argues, are the recipients of all our hopes and desires, but also where we deposit all our disappointment and failures, making them the scapegoat for all the world's evils. I tend to agree with this assessment and thus expected Rose to discuss roots of the cult of motherhood and what it has done both to women and the experience of motherhood itself.
And to be fair, Rose does do that but to a very limited extent. There are some personal anecdotes and a few references to current political events. However, the vast majority of book is actually spent dissecting and discussing the plights of fictional mothers, from Euripides' Medea to Ferrante's female protagonists. Which is fine, but it's not what this book was marketed as. I understand that throughout history we do not have first-hand accounts of how mothers felt or were treated and thus we have to rely on literature as historical evidence, but at least make that clear from the beginning. And not only does the vast majority of the book focus on fiction, but there is little analysis beyond a rehashing of the plot of these novels interspersed with some basic analysis that anyone who has ever paid attention in a literature class could have come up with herself.
And it's not only literary analysis that suffers from this. Any analysis from a feminist perspective of modern-day pressures of motherhood (how, women are supposed to have it all, and often this portrayal of perfection is based on the exploitation of poor mothers of colour) is done sporadically and usually using block quotes from other feminist texts without Rose giving us anything original from her own perspective.
It just felt very shallow. Throughout the reading I kept expecting more, more examples to support her argument, more analysis of how patriarchal pressures have shaped our understanding of motherhood There were also some jabs at the right-wing polices that are disproportionally onerous to mothers and single mothers at that. But nothing on how even left-wing and "liberal" expectations can be just as detrimental (something that Tiziana de Rogatis does very well in her book). Nothing even on surrogacies, on how childbirth relates to motherhood.
I'm just disappointed. I guess read this text if you want to maybe have a sort of introduction to the topic and take from it a reading list to explore further these topics, because Jacqueline Rose does not do them justice.