Bad Mothers Analysis

The representations of mothers who act outside the pattern imposed by phallocentric society have been rare. This kind of narratives could be seen as highly threatening, since it implies both the acknowledgment of women’s subjectivity and of the limits of maternal love. However, as a result of the gains women have made in their struggle for social emancipation and psychological liberation, a true maternal discourse started emerging in the last decades of the last century. Towards the end of the twentieth century, maternal characters were given space to articulate their own stories and represent the different polarities they incarnate. They were portrayed as both powerful and powerless beings, authoritative and invisible, strong and vulnerable, capable of feeling never-ending love and ferocious anger. In this way, they could refer their own viewpoint and express their reaction to the rupture with the child, and all those feelings they felt that fall outside the maternal acceptable behaviour, threatening the …show more content…
What emerged is that maternal duties have greatly changed during the last three centuries, according to dominant discourse around motherhood and the different value given to the child. The representations of ‘bad mothers’ in myths and fairy tales have been reused in media discourse in order to associate these deviant women with images of madness and evilness. As regards contemporary literature, a new attention started to be given to bad mothers as literary characters in the last decades of the twentieth century, but the child’s point of view still prevails. The aim of the following chapters will be to investigate how abusive mothers have been represented in a sample of contemporary novels, what are the narrative strategies employed by the authors in their portrayals of these female characters, and the reasons given for violent acts towards children in their