Maternal Asked

In traditional cultural context, mother means hope of life and continuance of the world; motherhood is regarded as the most selflessness and great devotion in the world and it is defined as instinct love and care to children. However, mother in the real world, sometimes present another face for some reasons and pressure. From the perspective of mothers' infanticide in western literatures and based on the theory of feminism criticism, This thesis used extant research findings of anthropology and sociology, and analyzed three novel,《Medea》,《Desire Under the Elms》and《Beloved》which are in three different era, distinguished cultural reasons hided in the phenomenon of mothers' infanticide. It also doubts the definition of motherhood and tries to propose some concrete conceives to motherhood.This thesis contains three parts, the first part reviewed the topic of mothers' infanticide and analyzed infanticide context and plot, it regard the Medea,Abbie,Seth both are courageous and resolute females. Their characters determined they would not compromise with the pressure of align society and would protect themselves using extreme measures; second, when infanticide taken place, the psychological characteristics of the women both are in desperate state of isolated and hopeless. They would take irrational measures to challenge unfairness of the society and protect their rights; last and what's most important, the women both pullulated in their society and experienced cultural value tropism which dominated in their society, and recognized their weak states and their groan, and experienced famine consciousness awareness and taken irrational extreme measures to revolt in their self-recognition progress.The second part discussed social and cultural meaning of the three mothers' motherhood, it indicated that meaning of traditional motherhood was the outcome of male chauvinist, and it did not consider female's unique life experience and emotional appetency. It also did not consider constraint and influence of concretely social environment and cultural system which the mothers lived in, while simply regulated nature of motherhood which consistent with their needs in theory. So, when the mother was oppressed in the real world and pushed by their self-appetency, when they exhibited another facet of motherhood, it collided with the essential regulation of male's society, and supplanted by the male's society. This part pointed out that true meaning of motherhood, should be harmoniousness of natural motherhood and cultural motherhood, male and female, female and maternityIn the third part, through identifying the status of mother, it proposed that reconstruction of maternity firstly needed to break the "myth of motherhood" in the male society, and regarded mother as an independence person, a facticity of being a women; second, reconstruction of maternity need a social and cultural environment of racial equality, national harmoniousness. This would make mothers no longer serve as generative tools and be the real meaning of the mother. Finally, reconstruction of maternity needed participation of males with female to build a harmonious motherhood embodied bisexual characteristics, and realize true consolidation of natural motherhood and cultural motherhood.