May 28, 2018 The Nation. 43
and hate—hounded by fear and self-doubt.
Among the many horrors of mothering under the patriarchy is
that the image of the perfect mother—emotional, but not in excess;
accomplished, but never to the detriment of her children’s well-
being; stylish, but not too sexy—has made women into extremely ef-
fective agents of their own and each other’s oppression. Motherhood
is “thick with idealisations,” Rose notes, many of which converge on
a fantasy of maternal virtue predicated on total self-negation—the
essence of cruelty. A mother must be everything for her child, which
leaves very little room for her to be anything for herself.
A mother’s love is supposed to be unconditional, selfless, and
pure, cleansed of the affects that pollute love between adults: bore-
dom, jealousy, resentment, hatred. She is encouraged by pop culture
and parenting guides to cleave to what Rose calls a “template of
absolute singular devotion and blindness.” Her child is the most
miraculous child in the world; there is nothing she would not do for
him; he gives her life meaning—these are the lines she must utter
with absolute clarity and conviction if she wants to play the role of the
perfect mother; “the most wonderful person in the world,” as Wendy
sang to the Lost Boys and my entranced toddler. Mothers bear the
burdens of the world and the responsibility for setting things right.
Since the imaginary order of motherhood is essentially an
elaborate fiction, Rose routes her argument about the perver-
sions of maternal love through representations of abject or
homicidal mothers in fiction. The archive she draws from is rich
and varied, extending from the Greek tragedy of Medea to Edith
Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Toni
Morrison’s Beloved, and Sindiwe Magona’s Living, Loving, and
Lying Awake at Night. In each, we get stories featuring mothers
whose incomprehensible treatment of their children reveals the
corrupted ideals of motherhood: the possessiveness implicit in
treating one’s child as a miracle; the resentment that can arise
when one is expected to provide undiluted maternal affection
and attention; the hardening of the heart when, despite her best
efforts, a mother cannot protect her child from abuse, poverty,
enslavement—when, as in Morrison’s Beloved, she “cannot secure
the life of the child who is placed—sanctimoniously, thought-
lessly, mostly without material or practical support—in her total
care.” There is a wonderful, meandering chapter dedicated to the
novels of Ferrante, in which Rose argues that the books speak
“from the depths” of the maternal womb with an unparalleled
intensity, fear, and violence. Pregnancy, in them, is the “original
dissolution of form”—not just the literal stretching and tearing of
bodies, but the strange and sudden porousness of subjectivity one
experiences upon assuming responsibility for another’s life.
What is true for fictional mothers seems true for real ones as
well. “What woman has not dreamed of ‘going over the edge’?”
asks Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born—a book Rose returns to
time and again in Mothers to stress the ordinariness of mother-
hood’s ugly impulses. Most mothers do not abandon or murder
their children, but every single one has the potential to be impa-
tient, exasperated, unkind. This does not make mothers who act
on these feelings bad people. They are simply women subject to
impossible, unrelenting demands; women who often receive little
or no support or understanding from a society that believes it is in
their nature to love and care, to be fruitful and multiply.
Reading these sections of Mothers, I recalled the many experiences
I had forgotten (or repressed) just to perform the day-to-day work
of mothering. The awesomeness of creation, followed by the terror
of responsibility. The distress of feeding or swaddling or stimulat-
ing my children “the wrong way,” according to some arbitrary
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