Maternal Plot the Working Mothers of Modernism

Adrienne Rich explains that the contemporary concept of the home and the domestic sphere is a cultural construct rather than an essential, inherent biological identity. She asserts that the “nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideal of the mother and children immured together in the home, the specialization of motherhood for women, the separation of the home from the ‘man’s world’ of wage-earning, struggle, ambition, aggression, power, of the ‘domestic’ from the ‘public’ or the ‘political’—all of this is a late-arrived development in human history” (46). The maternal identity has continued to trouble scholars and writers through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Modernist and feminist scholars have grappled with the function of the maternal identity within modern narratives and progressive endeavors. Much of the critical and mainstream conversations have situated the maternal identity as regressive character, the product of a reductive binary including good/bad, domestic/professional, woman/man, and so on. My research concentrates on modernist literary depictions of the mother to expand contemporary understanding of the construction of the maternal identity as a distinctly modernist project: the modernist mother. Modernist writers such as Henry James, Nella Larsen, and William Faulkner challenged Victorian values to depict the modernist mother as a complicated and nuanced figure. Later modernists like Kay Boyle, Storm Jameson, and Elizabeth Bowen highlighted the modernist mother as a self-sufficient woman who forges her own path within a changing world. Modernist writers depicted, questioned, and investigated different iterations of the Mother for the twentieth-century, eventually creating a model of modern motherhood which synthesized public and domestic life.