Maternal Modernism: Narrating New Mothers

Description

Drawing on the figure and discourses of the Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman, this book examines women writers who struggled with conservative, patriarchal ideologies of motherhood in novels, periodicals and life writings of the long modernist period. It shows how these writers challenged, resisted, adapted and negotiated traditional ideas with their own versions of new motherhood, with needs for identities and experiences beyond maternity. Tracing the period from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth, this study explores how some of the numerous elements and forces we identify with modernism are manifested in equally diverse and often competing representations of mothers, mothering and motherhood. It investigates how historical personages and fictional protagonists used and were constructed within textual spaces where they engaged critically with the maternal as institution, identity and practice, from perspectives informed by gender, sexuality, nationhood, race and class. The matrifocal literatures examined in this book exemplify how feminist motherhoods feature as a prominent thematic of the long modernist era and how rebellious New Woman mothers provocatively wrote maternity into text and history. Acknowledgments Contents Chapter 1: The “Persistent Rebels” of Maternal Modernism Introduction: Framing Modernist Motherhood The New Woman and New Modernism Outline of Chapters Chapter 2: The New Woman, New Modernisms, and New Motherhoods Introduction: Modernist and Maternal Scholarship The True Woman, Republican Mother, and Race Mother The New Woman: Names and Narratives The Woman Movement, Feminism, and Maternalism Birth Control, Eugenics, and Imperial Motherhood Chapter 3: Mothers in New Woman Fiction: Mapping “the Terra Incognita of Herself” Introduction: Epochs of the Vanguard New Modernism and “New” Realism Mother-Problem Novels Wild Women The Daughters of Danaus Gallia The Awakening The Mother’s Recompense The Home-Maker Quicksand Conclusion: Bad Mothers of Modernism Chapter 4: “The ‘Momentousness’ of Motherhood”: Maternal Discourses and Debates in The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review and The Freewoman: A Weekly Humanist Review Introduction: Bondwomen Versus Freewomen Maternal Manifestoes New Women, New Periodical Studies, and New Modernism Talking the Talk: Modernist Salons Public and Counter-public Spheres, Discourses, and Intimacies The Freewoman: Feminism and the Endowment of Motherhood Endowment: Attacks and Counter-attacks Maternal Collaboration and Co-operatives Individualism and Motherhood Marriage, Motherhood, and Reproductive Agency Conclusion Chapter 5: “The Title Role of ‘Mother’”: Silent-Film Stardom and Celebrity Maternity in Photoplay Magazine Introduction: “The World’s Greatest Motion Picture Publication” The New Woman and New Journalism Popular Modernisms Between the High and the Low Fandom and Feminism Marketing Women’s Lives Role Mothers Alice Joyce Billie Burke Mae Marsh Florence Vidor Alice Brady and Catherine Calvert Belle Bennett Barbara La Marr Gloria Swanson Conclusion Chapter 6: “Freedom and Childbearing”: Prams, Politics, and Literary Life in New Woman Autobiographies of the Interwar Era Introduction: Mothers on the National Arena Auto/biographies of Relational Motherhood The Personal, the Political, and the Collective Women’s Autobiographical Traditions Interwar Work, Motherhood, and Modernism Charlotte Perkins Gilman Ida B. Wells Storm Jameson Naomi Mitchison Vera Brittain Conclusion Chapter 7: “A Mother, a Wife, a Worker and a Wonder-Woman”: Matroethnography, Black Feminism, and Postcolonial New Womanhood in Buchi Emecheta’s London Narratives Introduction: A Hybrid Trilogy Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Periodization Modernism and the Social Sciences Black Feminism and the Institution of Black Motherhood Traditions of African Women’s Writing The New Woman Künstlerroman Second Class Citizen In the Ditch Head Above Water: An Autobiography Conclusion Chapter 8: Coda: New Womanism in the Twenty-First Century Opposing Camps Leaning Out and Opting In Media, Myths, and Fantasies New Matrifocal Genres Childfree by Choice and Maternal Regret Continuing Crusades Bibliography Index