| A Twentieth-century American literature is filled with new images of motherhood. Long gone is the idealism of motherhood that flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in life and in writing. Long gone are the mother help books and guides on training mothers. The twentieth- century fiction writer ushers in new examples of motherhood described in novels that critique the bad mother and turn a critical eye towards the role of women and motherhood. This study examines the trauma surrounding twentieth-century motherhood and surrogacy1, in particular, how abandonment, rape, incest, and negation often results in surrogacy, and how selected authors create characters who as mothers fail to protect their children, particularly their daughters. This study explores whether the failure is a result of social-economic or physiological circumstances that make mothering and motherlove impossible or a rejection of the ideal mother seldom realized by contemporary women, or weather novelists have rewritten the notion of the mother's help books by their fragmented representations of motherhood? Has motherhood become a rejection of self-potential?;The study will critique mother-daughter relationships in four late twentieth-century American novels in their complex presentations of motherhood and surrogacy: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970), Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster (1990), Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Sapphire's Push (1997). Appropriated terminology from other disciples illustrates the prevalence of surrogacy and protection in the subject novels. {The use of surrogate will refer to those who come forward to provide the role of mothering and protection};INDEX WORDS: Motherhood, Surrogacy, Twentieth-century women's writing, Protection, Mother-daughter bonds, Abuse of female children, Trauma, Incest;1The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED) established the foundation of surrogate as "a person appointed by authority to act in place of another; a deputy" (1604) to later expand it to "a person or (usually) a thing that acts for or takes the place of another; a substitute (1644). This later definition is the first mention in the OED that accommodates mother-surrogacy but through the lens of the father-surrogate. The use of the term for this the study will be the later connotation to include the attribute/adjective of "taking the place of or standing for something else; representative. Now especially in contexts where the substitute is intended to fulfill the emotional needs of a person. |
