THE MOTHER IN MODERN LITERATURE

Through analysis of the work of six women writers, The Mother in Modern Literature explores the themes and images surrounding the mother and the intra-psychic conflicts stirred up by the complex tasks of childrearing. Kate Chopin, Tillie Olsen, Doris Lessing, Ann Sexton, Grace Paley and Sylvia Plath reveal in their fiction and poetry the emotional as well as socio-economic conditions which industrialization has imposed upon mothers and the ways in which caring for children transforms the caregiver.;The second chapter discusses four images or areas of concern in some of the fictional works of Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley and Doris Lessing: the difficulty one generation has in passing on meaningful or relevant information to the next; spatial images which reflect feelings of imprisonment (both socio-economic and spiritual); images of starvation, often in the midst of plenty, which become metaphors for feelings of severe emotional deprivation in a world which gives to some materially but in no other way; and the difficulty mothers have communicating with and understanding those from different backgrounds. I also examine, in short stories by Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, the uneasy relationship between white mothers and black mothers and the tendency to project needs and fantasies upon the "other.";The third chapter analyses the poems of Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton which are concerned with both the experience of being a child and the ways in which the relationship to one's own mother influences feelings and behaviour toward one's children.;The fourth chapter deals with the complex process of separation or detachment. The theories of psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler on the Separation/Individuation stage of infancy are elucidated and used to reveal the effect of the child's separation on the mother. Two mother-heroines from the fiction of Kate Chopin and Doris Lessing are used to explore this extraordinarily complex phenomenon: the weaning of mothers from their children.;The first chapter describes how and why modern industrial societies have used the mother as a scapegoat and persistently avoided, neglected, or denied this complex area of enquiry: the experience of caregiving.;The fifth chapter uses two short stories by Tillie Olsen to explore the intra-psychic conflicts and issues stirred up in adults by the vicissitudes of their children's adolescence. The dissertation concludes with a summary of how and why the literature and psychology of the mother has been avoided. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)...