The Voice of Silent Toxic Mothers in Morrison’s A Mercy and Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers

This paper analytically compares Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) to Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers (2006) to explore the maternal position in Western and Middle Eastern literatures and give the silent mothers voice. These novels depict rudimentary social systems predicated on deep inequalities of class and gender; they highlight the commonality of mothers’ experiences regardless of their class, race, or nationality. In A Mercy, the black mother discards her daughter to protect her from a malevolent master, while in Hend and the Soldiers, the uneducated Arab mother arranges her daughter’s marriage to free her from the domination of the patriarchal society. The daughters consider their mothers as toxic parents and relate all evil in their lives to them. These novels are narrated mainly from a daughter point of view, and they share the themes of the disintegrated mother-daughter relationship and search for identity. This type of narration foregrounds the daughterly perspectives and subordinates the maternal voice (Hirsch, 1989, p. 163). Applying the elements presented in Marianne Hirsch’s Mother/Daughter Plot facilitates the deconstruction of the idea of silent toxic mothers and gives mothers the opportunity to speak for themselves. According to Hirsch, when daughters become mature enough to accept their problems and failures, they become not only real women but also part of their mothers’ stories by listening carefully. Thus, I argue that mothers’ voices are heard when their subjectivity is explored through their stories narrated in their daughters’ memories, in the mothers’ self-vindication, and by surrogate mothers.

Afrodiasporic Female Automobility and Motel-Dwelling in Lesley Nneka Arimah's "Windfalls"

This article explores Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “Windfalls” (2017) from a literary mobility studies perspective, applying notions of mobility studies such as the driving-event, friction, arrhythmia, and stickiness for an in-depth textual analysis. Given that its female migrant protagonists are constantly on the move, tropes of mobility recur throughout the story. Cars, filling stations, parking lots, truckers, motels and the figure of the sojourner play a pivotal role in defining its Afrodiasporic protagonists’ postmigratory mobilities in the United States. Arimah’s depiction of automobility and motel-dwelling underlines her theme of a flawed mother-daughter relationship and their impossibility of achieving the promised American Dream. A close reading of the fictional travellers’ displacements uncovers a critical analysis of automobility and motel-dwelling as forms of subversion of hegemonic mothering. Particular attention is drawn to how the female protagonists’ motilities are determined by their racialised gendered bodies. By analysing the literary representation of concrete and tangible mobilities performed by female Nigerian migrants, this study acknowleges the importance of exploring a key characteristic of third-generation Afrodiasporic fiction which has mostly gone unnoticed.

Reorienting Vulnerability: An Analysis of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk

This article seeks to challenge the traditionally negative connotations of the notion of vulnerability. I propose to approach the concept in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s idea of potentiality to demonstrate that both potential and vulnerability can be regarded as transforming and empowering characteristics for the subject. I analyse the protagonist of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk (2016) under this light to show how a subject can use vulnerability as the fulcrum of freedom and agency, particularly in the context of a problematic mother-daughter relationship. I suggest that understanding vulnerability as potentiality allows a reorientation of our conception of the victim or the vulnerable as subjects in potential power.

SATIRE IN EMMA HEALEY’S WHISTLE IN THE DARK: POSTMODERN STUDY

The aims of this study are to identify the social issues which are being satirized in Emma Healey’s Whistle in The Dark and and explicate Healey’s ways in satirizing the social issues in Whistle in The Dark. The writer applies the theory of satire in order to analyze social issues in the novel.This study applied qualitative research because the writer interpreted the novel in order to answer the research questions. The data are the narrator’s narration and characters’ utterances in the novel which are taken through scanning and skimming reading technique. The data analysis was done by classifying the narrations and utterances into the types of satire, discussing the findings, and concluding.The results of this study revealed that there are several social issues in the novel that are being satirized by Emma Healey, they are; environmental racism, mother-daughter relationship, queer issue, society’s fairytale, religious issue, technology in society, high-class society, society’s judgement, work and occupation, cyber pornography, sexual behaviour, people’s dissatisfaction, people’s anxiety, women’s insecurity, and teenager’s mental illness. The most used satire in the novel is Narrative.

The Power of Emotions: Negotiating Mother–Daughter Relationships in Seventeenth-century Hungary

This case study explores the epistolary strategies of negotiating the mother-daughter relationship through a reading of the correspondence between a widowed mother and her two married, half-sister daughters. Drawing on recent scholarship which investigates how emotional practices shaped relations of power, this study seeks to highlight how differences in age, social rank, and position in the family hierarchy between the half-sisters provoked distinctive strategies of bargaining their bonds to their mother. Furthermore, it contrasts rhetorical tactics adopted in everyday communication and in moments of crisis and interprets such epistolary strategies in the context of performing filial/maternal identities and doing authority.

THE MOTHERHOOD CONTINENT AS A WRITING SPACE IN THE WORKS OF JASMINA TEŠANOVIĆ

The phenomenon of motherhood is a challenging focus for research in the feminist literary theory/critique. The motherhood continent as a controversial point of contention in the society has become (or remains) a polemicized field between the traditionalism, critical, essentialist feminism and epistemology. Advocating for the deconstruction of social postulates of patriarchy starts with a revision of the positive connotations of motherhood, demonization of abortion/birth control, and the right to birth self-determination. In the struggle for power and control at the waning of matriarchy, the androcentric order established the purpose, model and objectives of motherhood. The examination in this work destabilizes elements of motherhood in A Women's Book, The Mermaids, Matrimonium, and Nefertiti Was Here. The objective of this work is to deconstruct the concept of motherhood that is present in our paternal/patriarchal traditions by denouncing the harmful and deeply rooted stereotypes. Simultaneously the work exposes and highlights the need for affirmation of authentic feminine legacy, elucidates aspects of the mother daughter relationship, and promotes the accomplishments of regional literature. In this scientific approach to the phenomenon of motherhood, the work makes use of such theoretical concepts as: ideology of intensive motherhood, creation of body language and women's writing, motherly instinct, maternal ideology, matriarchy and mythology, the black continent, identification with the mother, as well as the mother-daughter relationship, the child's belonging, motherhood and non-motherhood and abortion-birth sterility. The inclusion of these themes in the narratives is an indicative question of the subjective affirmative experience of motherhood, where we find transcendental impulses for generating women's language and creation, which juxtapose ideological norms, intensity of motherhood and achieve autonomy in literary creation.

‘Only mothers can be true revolutionaries’: The Politicization of Motherhood in 1980s West German Psychoanalysis

Analyzing conceptualizations of motherhood in 1980s West German psychoanalytic debates, this article argues that, in the wake of what can be termed as a ‘turn to motherhood,’ German psychoanalysis saw an unprecedented politicization of motherhood that followed from a conjunction of three distinct historical contexts: the integration of feminist theories of subjectivity into the psychoanalytic canon; the belated reception of the British object relations school; and the renewed attempt at grappling with the Nazi past. On the one hand, West German (female) psychoanalysts posited motherhood as a utopian space that allowed for uncorrupted forms of intersubjectivity in the form of an intimate and sexualized mother–child/mother–daughter relationship. On the other hand, and mirroring this ideal, motherhood, if not practiced correctly, could, according to psychoanalytically inspired thinkers in the late 1980s, also be a source of fascism.