Feminism, motherhood, Jane Urquhart, Carol Shields, Margaret Laurence, and me
Abstract (summary)
Current debates about feminism and motherhood reveal the tensions between them. Mindful of Adrienne Rich's distinction between mothering as an individual experience and motherhood as a restrictive patriarchal institution, this dissertation takes up these debates as depicted in the novels written by Jane Urquhart, Carol Shields, and Margaret Laurence. As well, the project integrates autobiographical writings about my own life as both an investigative method and an integral subtext.
If paired together as narrative characters, feminism and motherhood would be intimate antagonists, their stories autoethnographic texts portraying particular cultural moments that shape individual lives and entire communities. Recognizing that the relationship an individual has with feminism and motherhood depends heavily on that individual's subjectivity, I take the position that, for a needed alliance between feminism and motherhood to flourish, women must re-direct their energies away from denouncing each other's situations and instead towards dismantling the ideological structures that still exist around gender.
My project's primary task is to interrogate representations of Canadian women and mothers in the fiction of Urquhart, Shields, and Laurence. Each one has created strong maternal narratives in her creative work and commented on both feminism and mothering experiences in either a memoir or published interviews; however, the subtextual commentary on women's lives and maternity these three writers illustrate is quite different: Urquhart's work portrays a pessimistic view of patriarchal motherhood's impact on women's lives, Shields' work focuses on the contained resistance of women in conventional domesticity, and Laurence's work, the earliest of the three, depicts increasingly feminist versions of mothering.
Following each chapter is a short personal afterword that provides further commentary about the connections that intrinsically link feminism, motherhood, and autobiography. My dissertation structure consists of two distinct voices: the academic voice that makes the intellectual argument and the personal voice that narrates my story. These two voices both alternate and blend. The shape of the dissertation works to keep them apart, but in the conclusion they come together in a blended commentary of mutual relevance.
Indexing (details)
Womens studies
0453: Womens studies