Spectral motherhood and maternal grieving: language and sudden unexplained death in infancy in Australian juvenile fiction

ABSTRACT

Written by adults for children, children’s literature plays a significant role in shaping readers’ identities and worldviews, including those relating to gender and death. In two Australian children’s novels, The Shape (2000) by Diane Bates and The Naming of Tishkin Silk (2003) by Glenda Millard, the generic depiction of motherhood meets new representational agendas relating to sudden unexplained death in infancy and grieving at a politically charged price. Primarily drawing on an Irigarayian theory relating to motherhood, and patriarchal language and discourse, this paper argues that the depressed mothers in these two novels function as spectral figures, whose absent presence and present absence haunt both the child protagonists and the texts. Moreover, the fictional mothers’ healing is dependent on their relationship to their surviving children, which ensures that ideologies of motherhood are contained within patriarchal discourses in these texts for children.

KEYWORDS:

• Grief
• motherhood
• children’s literature
• depression
• infant death
• SUDI

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Perhaps the most well-known example of the sacrificial mother in recent children’s fiction is Harry Potter’s mother, Lily. In sacrificing herself for her son, Lily inadvertently places Harry under magical protection, causing Voldemort’s Killing Curse to backfire. Harry is unharmed, save for his lightning scar, while Voldemort is disembodied.

2. In 2008, Dianne Bates was awarded the Lady Helen Cutler Award for distinguished services to children’s literature in New South Wales, Australia. Several of her novels have also been shortlisted for Australian literary awards. In addition to being nominated and winning several Australian literary awards for children’s literature, Glenda Millard’s novels have been shortlisted for international awards, including the Carnegie Medal for The Stars at Oktober Bend (2016).

3. Bates’s The Shape was a Notable Book in the Young Reader category in the 2001 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Awards, while Millard’s The Naming of Tishkin Silk was named an Honour Book in the 2004 CBCA Awards and also a finalist in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

4. Prior to her sacrificial act, the depiction of Mrs Coulter in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy aligns more with that of monstrous mothers. Her eventual transition from monstrous to sacrificial is somewhat problematic as it, too, maintains the good/bad mother binary that is so prevalent in children’s literature. For further discussion of Mrs Coulter’s motherhood, see Moran (2016).

5. In her acknowledgements, Bates relates the writing of The Shape to her dealing with grief following the unexpected death of her infant daughter, Kathleen. Bates’s use of language and writing to facilitate her grieving is, in many ways, synonymous with the characters’ need to speak about death in the novel.

6. For further elaboration on the historical gendering of melancholia, see Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (1992). Schiesari argues that, during the Renaissance, male melancholia was celebrated as inspired genius while female mourning (or depression) was viewed as a deficit or lack.

7. According to Elizabeth Podnieks and Andrea O’Reilly, maternal texts are those that ‘engage in the process or act of textual mothering’ and, in doing so, ‘use textual spaces to accept, embrace, negotiate, reconcile, resist, and challenge traditional conceptions of mothering and maternal roles, and how they offer alternative practices and visions for mothers in the present and the future’ (2010, pp. 1–2).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Troy Potter

Troy Potter is a lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne. His research interests include the use of genre in children's and adolescent literature to construct, engage with and respond to contemporary concerns, particularly those relating to gender, sexuality and disability. He is the author of Books for Boys: Manipulating Genre in Contemporary Australian Young Adult Fiction (2018).