Moms, Memories, Materialities: Sons Write Their Mothers’ Bodies

Abstract

This essay investigates representations of working-class mothers—particularly aging, ill, and dying maternal bodies—in novels by middle-class sons (Mustafa Can, Peter Handberg, and Peter Sandström). Unlike patrifocal narratives, filial life writing about mothers is typically not written to recover a parent who has been absent, but to re(dis)cover one who has always been present. The novels offer a space for thinking through motherhood and sonhood as relational, embodied experience, and for reconsidering the interplay between gender and perspective in life writing as well as in cultural criticism.

Keywords:

• Mothers
• maternal bodies
• ageing
• filial narrative

Everything was fragile, everything was there. Always, my mother was by my side.

—Sandström 227

No body existed less for me: none existed more.

—Beauvoir 19

[E]ven within the community of feminist scholars, our imagination of maternality and its meanings apparently runs dry once our children begin to grow up, and once our own bodies are no longer potentially lactating and gestating. Those of us who are mothers know that our bodies will forever be maternal bodies, and that the profound ethical and phenomenological transformations that attend motherhood continue throughout the life cycle. Our bodies do not regain some mythical self-contained independence once our children leave our sides. When we die, we will die as mothers, and that will matter.¹

—Kukla xi

Introduction: Troubling Gendered Conventions of Maternal Narratives and Filial Life Writing

It has been a central aspect of women’s (at times feminist) literature to give voice to motherhood as experience, identity, and situation, and to criticize myths, ideals, and constraining conventions. Furthermore, it has been a central project in feminist criticism and theory to make motherhood as lived experience,² as well as representations of motherhood,³ visible and recognized as political. While some feminist critics have argued that focusing on motherhood may inadvertently support deterministic ideas about women as mothers, others have observed that motherhood is by necessity a feminist concern, since “feminist theory must consider the specificity of female embodiment, of women’s situations, experiences, and consciousness, and of women’s social relations and contexts.”⁴ This claim, like the epigraph from Rebecca Kukla, raises concerns around definitions of motherhood as embodied and relational experience—concerns which have been addressed in feminist literary and cultural studies. There, motherhood has typically been explored in woman-centered contexts, looking at female writers’ representations of mothers and mothering, or the relationships between mothers and daughters.⁵ Furthermore, as some critics have noted, feminist explorations of motherhood have predominantly focused on early stages of motherhood: conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and the mothering of young children.⁶

In the past dozen years or so, a number of Swedish literary texts have emerged that give a different spin to “maternal narratives” in terms of narrative perspective, authorship, and thematic focus. These are autobiographically based narratives by male authors, featuring male protagonists|narrators with (biological) mothers as central figures. Written by middle-aged, heterosexual Swedish men who are typically also fathers, they often proceed from the perspective of rather mainstream positions, if not exactly ones of cultural hegemony. At this particular point in time, then, a group of male authors choose to explore their mothers’ lives in memoirs and novels in filial, or “sonly,” narratives.⁷ The texts are rich in terms of their representations of emotions, memory, and embodied interpersonal relations, especially with the aging, ill, and dying mother.⁸ This study will investigate representations of mothers in a selection of such filial narratives.

According to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “[n]arratives of family and filiation are often memoirs—usually of a father, less often a mother—by a son or daughter whose parent was remote, unavailable, abusive, or absent … . Sometimes the narrative of filiation is a story of detection in which the son or daughter conducts a journey to discover the story of the lost or abandoning parent.”⁹ As noted by Smith and Watson, fathers have often been the focus of life writing by adult children, motivated in part by the remoteness or absence of the father—a point that is also raised by other critics.¹⁰ Certainly, this is true of Swedish twenty-first-century life writing about parents.¹¹ This focus is also typical in scholarship on filial life writing, for literary-critical exploration to date has largely focused on the father-son plot.¹² Richard Freadman has identified adult children’s narratives about their parents as “relational auto/biographies,” while highlighting above all sons’ narratives about (their relations with) their fathers,¹³ and father-son relations have also been a central interest of masculinity-studies-oriented scholarship in literary studies, as well as social research.¹⁴

Literary representations of mother-son relations, meanwhile, have not received much critical attention.¹⁵ In a previous study, I addressed the problematic notion of sons|protagonists “giving voice” to the mother,¹⁶ while Christine Cohen Park has discussed the “credibility” of mother figures in four filial memoirs.¹⁷ However, filial narratives about mothers and mother-son relations warrant further investigation, both because they have been neglected historically and because there currently seems to be a growing body of literature of this kind. The remarkable (gendered) difference between patrifocal and matrifocal filial life writing is that the matrifocal narrative typically centers on a parent who was always there. The investigation of the mother’s life does not proceed from the son’s experience of her absence, but from a strongly felt sense of her presence; it is written to retrieve or recover not a parent who has been (materially) missing, but one who has been within reach (materially speaking).

While some scholars have claimed that we live in the “Age of Memoir,”¹⁸ others note that it is increasingly difficult to make generic distinctions between memoir, auto|biography, and fictional life writing.¹⁹ One effect of these uncertain boundaries is the conflation, on the part of readers, critics, and authors themselves, of the family lives of authors with those of narrators|protagonists; in the Scandinavian context, the best-known case of this is perhaps Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle.²⁰ The books I investigate here are likewise messing with the borders between life and writing. Published as novels, they are marketed as autobiographical writing, and also spoken of as such by their authors, whose names are typically identical to the main character|narrator|son in the book.

In the following analysis, I discuss Tätt intill dagarna (Close to the Days, 2006), by Mustafa Can; Den vita fläcken (The White Spot, 2015), by Peter Handberg; and Transparente blanche (2014), by Peter Sandström. The novels will be introduced briefly as the analysis progresses, but have in common that they focus on loving—although far from unproblematic—relationships between middle-class sons and working-class mothers, and describe mother-son relations over the life course. Focusing on representations of (the son’s relationship to) the mother, and of the maternal body specifically, I wish to explore the materiality of the mother as it figures in these novels in terms of textuality and embodiment.

The choice to explore sons’ stories springs from an interest in how it matters who speaks. Just as the topos of motherhood is central to feminist studies, so too are questions about who speaks, who can speak about what|whom, and how the speaker influences the evaluation, listenability, and legitimacy of what is said. As a feminist literary scholar who has worked for a long time “in” masculinity studies, I am interested in thinking about what gender and re-genderings do to fictional narratives themselves—but also to criticism, to what it can perceive and theorize. How does it matter that it is the son who is writing the mother? How does the mother materialize in filial narratives? The following analysis proceeds from an understanding of sons and mothers as relationally constituted and socially situated locations. What I want to suggest is that the texts in focus offer a space not only for representing, critiquing, and thinking through these relational and social locations—motherhood and sonhood—as lived and embodied experience, but also for reconsidering the interplay between gender and perspective in life writing, as well as in criticism.

Filial Auto|biography: Representations of Memory and Embodied Mother-Son Relations

The promise of the filial “relational auto/biography” is to make the parent visible and graspable, for the son himself as well as a potential reader.²¹ Hence, in the case of these novels, “Who was she?” often functions as the most fundamental question that drives the narrative, and is often explicitly present in the narrative, as when Can’s narrator exclaims, “Who were you, mother?” and Sandström’s protagonist states, “I don’t know you, mother.”²² Because the son’s story typically takes shape at a point when the mother is already dead, or at least old and ailing, it is driven both by his wish to remember and by his middle-age realization about the finite nature of human life. The son’s understanding of life as finite is coupled with a discovery that the mother, the ever-present parent, is unknown to him; it is in spite of her having “been there” all through the son’s life that she appears as something of a mystery.²³ On the one hand, their time together has been plentiful (but perhaps ill-used); on the other, time is running out (or has already done so). Ultimately, the narrative that ostensibly is about finding out who the mother really was is also about coming to terms with the impossibility of ever really finding any complete answer to that question.

In order to uncover who the mother was, the son turns to his own memories of her, sometimes also others’ memories of her, and her own memories in the sense of a personal “archive,” which may consist of stories told by the mother, as well as photographs, diaries, old letters, and cuttings from newspapers. In the cases discussed here, the archives drawn on are mostly oral histories.²⁴ To convey how memories are woven together into a story, the authors use multiple narrative strands linked to different temporalities. First, there is a “now” when the mother is dead and the son remembers her; second, there is a recent past in the text, when the mother is old, ailing, or dying; and, third, there are retrospective sections describing a more distant past, based on memories of the son, the mother, and others, ordered into a linear narrative about her childhood, youth, pre-motherhood life, and life with young children. The basic premise is that the son—slightly too late, as it were—has caught sight of his mother as a human being, and wishes to explore her, get to know her, and grant her a certain kind of recognition that she did not get in her lifetime. On the level of narrative, the story often offers a kind of closure that the son-mother relation did not reach while the mother lived, and hence the narrative fills a need for the son|narrator|author. The book project as such becomes a project of remembering the mother, and a means for holding or capturing not only her, but also, to varying degrees, the trajectory of the narrator|protagonist, in reflections about his identity and how it has been shaped in relation to the mother.

In the “present” of Sandström’s Transparente blanche, a poet protagonist-narrator aged around fifty visits his eighty-five-year-old mother during one summer in Österbotten, Finland. While helping the mother out around the house, he recalls his childhood and teenage years in the family. The everydayness of the time the son spends with his old mother is balanced by his philosophizing about life, and about the loss of people along the way. His father, a farmer and war veteran, hanged himself when Peter was a child, and the mother, his only parent for several decades, has run their apple orchard on her own ever since, with the son helping out at harvests. The mother’s life has been one of hard physical work, but she is also a healer, ever since being struck by lightning as a child. The “now” of the narrative is interspersed with memories of the substantial past shared by mother and son. In Sandström’s novel, the narrator explicitly links remembrance to the body, in reflections about what and how the body remembers, as in the following passage: “I thought of the body’s memory after a boat ride in a storm, how it could feel wobbly walking the sidewalks of the town after coming back on land, a sensation that might last for days. Yes, the body would remember; electric shocks from old wires broken by the humidity of storage rooms, wooden crates full of winter apples, falling on toes and ankles. The body would remember the silence and the darkness that lay over the entire town after yet another power shortage; electrical wires hanging loose, poles that broke. Everything was fragile, everything was there. Always, my mother was by my side.”²⁵ Hence, the body stores and senses memory, and the protagonist perceives his mother “by [his] side,” “always,” in spite of having lived most of his adult life away from her. One evening, as he is boiling potatoes for their dinner while the mother naps on the couch, she wakes up and tells him, somewhat abruptly, that love is the only thing that matters: “I thought she was talking in her sleep, or at least in a state of confusion like that after a short and worried sleep, as in a fever … I did not know whether she expected some comment to that statement. I told her the potatoes were softening.”²⁶ Although his spoken statement does not respond to hers, as she gets up, swayingly, a bit unstable on her feet, he holds out his arms to catch her before she falls. The gesture demonstrates care and attention, and can be understood as an embodied version of love.

In Sandström’s narrative, the son is comfortable with being physically close to his mother. He describes using blankets and pillows to make a day bed for the two of them on the porch swing in the yard, where they can rest on a sunny afternoon. He notes that “mother had shrunk with the years, she looked warm and cozy lying there against the back cushions. She pulled the cap over her eyes, and I thought she would fall asleep. … I drew the blanket over her, so that only her head stuck out … It was actually nice to get away; that was what I felt lying next to mother, I had gotten away. Nobody really needed me then, except mother, and I didn’t mind.”²⁷ While the son welcomes this “escape” to his mother, away from his regular life, this is not a story about escaping into the mother,²⁸ nor does the son romanticize her situation; he is aware of her frailty and solitude. Rocking in the porch swing, she tells him about going out to fetch the mail some time before his arrival, in a passage that emphasizes her loneliness but also the intensity of living in one’s aging body: “One step at a time she took, and she thought that it was lucky she did not have a heart condition, that she had ‘been well’ as they said about elderly people. Just before the final step, mother halted. She could feel the tendons and veins and bones in her body, could feel the warmth and the pulsing power, and she sweated and she had not sweated in ages. It was a cold sweat, sweat that smelled, the most primitive of body fluids, and she had read in a glossy magazine, back when she was curious and eager, that the secretions that were the result of fear or desire or pure anger were the most animal signals that we humans could communicate to one another, subtle, unstoppable, and there she was now, on the steps to the street, sweating, and there was nobody there to catch the scent.”²⁹ The protagonist’s own reference to “the body” in the passage about body memory is countered by the insertion here of the mother’s own story where her body in its specificity claims space and is also clearly juxtaposed with the “nobody” there to perceive her. In that solitary moment, there is no relation between her and another body that could clarify whether her scent is one brought on by “fear or desire or pure anger.” At the moment of narrativizing the experience, however, the mother’s and son’s bodies are both rocking comfortably in the swing, and the acts of telling and listening while physically close serve to merge textuality, or narrative, with materiality. Although maternal bodies and motherhood as embodiment have been central to many feminist critical projects, these typically focus on the perinatal period of motherhood—that is, on pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.³⁰ The elderly maternal body is untheorized and, in the research literature, elderly bodies are not maternal bodies.³¹ Sandström’s novel, like the others in this investigation, asks us to recognize also elderly bodies as maternal bodies. Stressing longitudinal life-course perspectives on maternal bodies is rare and opens an interesting question: How is this focus on the mother as body over the life course charged? Is it a case of assigning embodiment to “woman”?³² The previously quoted passage, where the son reflects on “the body”—presumably his own—remembering, speaks against such categorical readings. It seems here that the maternal body, while still distinctively gendered, becomes a point of relational connection for the son.

Whereas, in Sandström’s novel, the mother is old but relatively well, it is more typical of filial auto|biographies that the well maternal body is not visible at all, and this is also true of the young maternal body. Often, the mother’s young, well body is notably “withheld” by various means—most obviously by omitting any actual descriptions of her.³³ An example of this is Can’s novel Tätt intill dagarna. Here, the mother, Güllü, is a migrant from Turkish Kurdistan, an illiterate Muslim housewife and mother of fifteen children, of whom eight survive to move with her and her husband to Sweden in the 1970s. From the perspective of his mid-thirties, the son, a journalist and secularized Swede, looks back on the mother’s life, his own experience of growing up, and the recent past of his mother’s illness with liver cirrhosis leading up to her violent death in hospital. In the sections where he looks back to his boyhood and youth, the maternal body is a clichéd figure, hidden from view in more ways than one: she is depicted only as a petite woman who wears foot-length dresses or coats and a headscarf,³⁴ and her looks bring out the author’s own feelings of otherness: “Mother strengthened my origins,” he states; “She made me feel like a stranger.”³⁵ He also thinks of her as contained in the family kitchen, where she constantly works hard to cook and maintain a household for ten.

However, from the point when she is hospitalized in her sixties, diagnosed with terminal liver cirrhosis, her body and its (mal)functions come into sharp focus. Instead of the previous clichéd figure that signals “difference,” Can deals concretely and directly with the material presence of the aging and ill maternal body, which becomes painfully, even brutally, present: “Mother is not herself anymore. With each passing day the colors of her face are pushed aside by the yellow of the liver cirrhosis. Here and there, her visage is tattooed with burst blood vessels, which make it resemble a landscape of tiny, dispersed red rivers. Her muscles are weakened, her body is so powerless that she cannot force out the thick phlegm that gathers in her throat and makes her gasp for air.”³⁶ We are told about the mother coughing blood, her voice now only a “hissing.”³⁷ Hers is an aged and worn-out body, “yellow and swollen,” which leaks, vomits, shits, and finally bleeds to death.³⁸ On the one hand, through the grotesqueness of its suffering and transformation, the maternal body is again “othered” in the son’s narrative, and Can’s descriptions remind us of crucial feminist work on leaky female bodies,³⁹ and the “indeterminate” borders of maternal bodies in particular.⁴⁰ Yet, on the other hand, here the maternal body is also brought into the center of the narrative, given|claiming space in new ways. Although the mother is still covered, now by the hospital bedsheets, Mustafa sees her swelling feet and legs, notices her bloated body taking on a bigger size. Her illness entails a different kind of exposure than she (or he) has experienced previously. This physical exposure is linked with the exposure of her past through narrative, for when the son demands that she tell him about her previous hardship, she complies, but soon states that she has told him “too much” and is interrupted by violent vomiting.⁴¹ In other words, the maternal body is represented as linking materiality and textuality.

Can’s novel illustrates a common feature in these filial narratives: the maternal body that is visible is an aging, typically also ill and dying, body.⁴² This captures the way that, in the words of G. Thomas Couser, to the able-bodied, the body is “taken for granted,” and it is only occurrences of “injury and illness (and aging) [that] remind us, in various unwelcome ways, that we have bodies, that we are bodies.”⁴³ Yet, beyond the dichotomy of ill and well bodies, the novels in focus here center on realizations about that “other,” gendered, maternal body, whereas they do not necessarily entail any reflections on the narrators’|sons’ own bodies or embodiedness.⁴⁴ This reminds us of conventions in male-authored life writing, where the male body has often been absent.⁴⁵ It would seem that embodiedness, as such, and especially vulnerable embodiedness, is yet again placed in the site of women or femininity, signaling a refusal to think men and masculinities in terms of (problematic, vulnerable) embodiment.⁴⁶ This is certainly true in Can’s case. The son’s close encounter with the mother’s illness, physical deterioration, and ultimate death makes him recognize the force and significance of the body, but her body remains other to him. There is no point at which he identifies with, or sees his own future in, the situation of the mother. However, the sections dealing with the mother’s illness and death present the son and mother sharing a certain closeness that they have not had since his childhood. In other words, closeness and recognition are simultaneous with disidentification with, and distance from, the mother.

Such ambivalence is illustrated also in Handberg’s Den vita fläcken. Handberg’s novel tells the story of Gunhild, a working-class woman who has preferred the company of women friends and relatives to the seemingly always domineering ways of male partners, using “Men, thank you and goodbye!” as her personal motto. Refusing to be controlled or belittled by men, Gunhild divorces her husband and lives alone with her two boys in the 1960s and 1970s, a time when this was uncommon. In this novel, and somewhat similar to Sandström’s, the mother has been the son’s only parent for several decades; as with Sandström and Can, she has always been there for him. We are told that she dreamed about being a writer but, as a single mother, had to have “proper work” and a steady income. She was a waitress at Ormens pigor, a café in central Stockholm frequented by authors and artists, many of whom she befriended, while also working as a hairdresser. Gunhild is physically strong, even athletic, well read, culturally and politically interested, and active. “Even at eighty-plus her signum was a vibrant energy, wit, an engaging vitality. … Many men were provoked by her self-confidence, it made them ill at ease. ‘A learned female’ was one of the put-downs they used.”⁴⁷ An image of health, in her eighties Gunhild is nevertheless diagnosed with uterine cancer and deteriorates, to the horror and sorrow of her son and his children.

As with Can, the son in Handberg’s novel registers the changes the mother goes through: the loss of teeth, changes in skin texture, hair, and body shape, and her growing fatigue—a move from energy and movement to passivity and rest. Describing the mother at a late stage of her illness, he observes, “[h]er skin went limp. Her hair, wet, was plastered against her head. Some transparency entered that made her look like a bird flapping its wings to leave the nest,” and in the hospital he notes that she “lay huddled, in the fetal position, with eyes closed.”⁴⁸ These descriptions stress the ongoing disappearance of the mother and her helplessness, as well as the role reversal of parent and child. The son tries to make sense of what is happening, as in this passage, where he watches his mother on a screen outside her room as she undergoes treatment: “Paradoxically, her suffering became more tangible when I watched it on the screen. I became distanced from it, was no longer as if muted in her sorrow. Detached from herself and my relationship to her, she became objectified. The person I saw had shed a sequence of memories and feelings. Things became more naked than when I was actively present. It was a performance that was staged: a late act in her disappearance from earth.”⁴⁹ These reflections on distance as giving Gunhild’s suffering increased tangibility, on enhanced nakedness through physical remove, are indeed paradoxical. The protagonist suggests that the imaging, and hence objectification, of the mother oddly brings her closer to him than when he perceives her as a person with memories and feelings, relationally bound to himself. His idea that “the technology transformed her into an image of herself, an electronic reproduction,” suggests the idea of a controlling “male gaze” that couples masculinity with technology.⁵⁰ However, this comprehension of the mother’s situation on the part of the son proves to be illusory, for in the next passage ideas of separateness and disappearance are thrown out of orbit: “She came out from the room, definitely alive, if sleepy. ‘You’ll have time for a coffee in Blacken’, she said, while pulling the protective plastic socks off and throwing them in a bin. … those words about coffee sounded supernatural.”⁵¹ The son is represented as amazed and disturbed by the mother’s lively talk, by the realization that her personhood is still in place.

Handberg’s novel and the others I have discussed seem to negate psychoanalytic theories about male individuation, for while they do separate the son’s body from the mother’s, this does not entail an effacement of maternity, femininity, or women. The mother’s body is not “non-representable,” and the narratives represent mothers as subjects.⁵² Perhaps they also suggest that something is different in the here and now of Scandinavia in the twenty-first century than in the early 1990s, when US scholar Shirley Neuman observed that maternal bodies were seen only “in glimpses … in brief detours from the main direction of autobiographical narrative … they do not occupy the foreground of the scene.”⁵³ Well, now they do.⁵⁴

The trajectory described in these novels is thus often one that moves from the son’s bodily distance from the mother in youth and early adulthood—represented through negativity, by making the maternal body “invisible” in the text—to bringing the maternal body into focus when the son is middle-aged and the mother elderly, ailing, or dying. Clearly, this transformed maternal body negates ideas about motherliness understood as care for others. It makes impossible the mother-son relationship in its idealized version, and also signals the role reversal of carer and cared-for to which so many kin-carer children, especially women, have borne witness.⁵⁵

Re-genderings and Dis|identification

As many critics have observed, women have been thought to be “particularly, or peculiarly, embodied.”⁵⁶ Indeed, links between femininity and embodiment have been investigated by feminist critics for many decades.⁵⁷ Crucial and persuasive as these theorizations are, however, they are not focused on old age. Based in whole other experiences than those focused in the present study, these theories are not easily applicable. Similarly, a gendered perspective matters in literary narrations of the ill body. In a study of autopathography—life writing about illness—Couser observes that “[i]f women and ill people are both marginalized in different ways, then sick women are doubly marginalized. With recent developments in autopathography, then, we have a return of the doubly, or perhaps triply, repressed—an overt, unembarrassed, unapologetic representation of the ill, female body.”⁵⁸ Yet, the novels I have discussed here cannot be sorted under the genre of autopathography, although they do foreground “the ill, female body” in often “overt, unembarrassed, unapologetic” ways—that is, filial life writing about mothers foregrounds the ailing and aging maternal body in ways that literary criticism has not seen as part of “men’s writing.”

The novels by Sandström, Can, and Handberg are predominantly narratives about benevolent and loving relationships between sons and mothers. They represent the deteriorating body of the mother as an “other” in the sense that the sons see it as separate from themselves, but the maternal body is not one that the son avoids or abhors, nor does he employ a “fearful gaze on the ageing body,” to speak with Elizabeth Barry.⁵⁹ Instead, he is nearer to it than before, observing but also caring. As demonstrated in the analysis, these novels deal with the simultaneity of distance and closeness, of recognition and disidentification on the part of the son.⁶⁰ Although, as we have seen, there are narrative and thematic variations in the ways that closeness and distance are treated, by and large, the sons tend to disidentify with the mother’s embodied situation; they do not recognize themselves or their own futures in her.

However, another kind of recognition is given space in the novels. The maternal body becomes a strong presence in its old age, in its ailing condition, in ways that make impossible the son’s former disregard for the fact that the mother is—also—a living body with an embodied history. For Can, this creates anxiety and makes him want to “talk through” their relationship, as well as the mother’s life story, before it is too late; for Handberg, the mother’s deterioration causes deep distress. It both alienates him and brings him close to her.

While Sandström’s novel opens with the son thinking that he does not know his mother,⁶¹ at the end of the narrative he elaborates this thought, but also revises it slightly: “What did I actually know about her? I thought I knew the person she had been as my mother, but she had also been other people. She had been someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s beloved, someone’s enemy, comrade, perhaps someone’s mistress.”⁶² Unlike the other texts in my selection, Sandström’s ends with an insight that has a bearing on a continued mother-son relationship, and the mother is still alive by the book’s end. Her work as a healer has caused people in the local community to avoid her and spread rumors about her; even the son has, at times, been wary of the mother and her power. Now, he realizes that “[s]he was always an ordinary human being, one that went to the shop for bread, and got fed up when the TV didn’t work. I saw her as she was, as she had always been, and I felt the warmth in my breast, she was a woman, and she was not a witch, and she was my mother, and there was still time.”⁶³ This passage brings the mother “down to earth” and reaffirms her humanity as well as her gendered and individual specificity, and the son’s deeply felt connection with her is signaled by the “warmth” he feels, which has carried over from the early quotation where it is the mother who, in her solitude, experiences as bodily sensations “the warmth and the pulsing power.”⁶⁴ This suggests that closeness and embodied connection are possible, even if identification is not.

Conclusion: Rethinking Writing and Reading on Mothers, Embodiment, and Relationality

To return to the question initially posed: What does it mean for a son to write his mother in auto|biographical narrative, and how is such representation linked to embodiedness? The examples I have explored illustrate something of the breadth and variety of ways in which writing the mother, representing maternal bodies, and embodiment figure in filial life writing, while also pointing to some recurring motifs and narrative choices. Above all, these novels are brought together by their particular attention to the aging maternal body, to the old mother’s material (embodied, textual) presence, and to the ongoing relationality of sonhood and motherhood over the life course. Clearly, the texts offer a space for representing, critiquing, and thinking through motherhood and sonhood as embodied relational and social locations.

Is there, then, anything particularly new about sons telling stories about mothers’ lives and maternal bodies? This study has not claimed that sons have never written about mothers before—this is not part of the investigation—but rather that if there is such writing, it has not caught the attention of critics. From my feminist perspective, it is interesting that contemporary male authors choose to focus on mothers, embodiment, and mother-son relations, for several reasons. First, in that the mother is a central figure at all, placing the mother at the center of a male-authored text is still rare enough in fiction to be worthy of notice.⁶⁵ Second, because the maternal figure is not defined entirely by motherhood, but represented as a person with interests, qualities, and a life beyond it, the texts do not reinscribe motherhood as institution.⁶⁶ The mothers in these books have complexity; they are hard-working, independent, and caring, as well as self-centered, needy, and critical. Hence, they represent mothers as subjects while at the same time narrating mothers who are bodies, and insisting on the centrality of mother-son relations.

Crucially, then, these novels explore not just mother figures, but men’s relationships with mothers. Given the auto|biographical character of the books, this happens both on the plot level and on meta levels; the texts investigate the relational aspects of sonhood and motherhood, and function as sites where men’s relational identities are explored.⁶⁷ The emotional spectrum varies between the narratives, but the stories I have focused on are marked by filial mother love and|or ambivalence toward the mother. Although the “feminist potential” of men choosing to write about women should not be exaggerated, these filial narratives suggest other inroads to questions about men’s identification, and relational interdependencies, with the “other” parent than literary criticism has formerly recognized, and they urge a questioning of the strong focus of previous criticism and theorization on father-son plots and patrifocal narrative.⁶⁸ In a sense, they also offer a counternarrative to claims in social science research about men’s disregard for sonhood as defining their identities,⁶⁹ while supporting suggestions in critical masculinity studies and feminist studies regarding the real possibility of men developing relationally with their mothers.⁷⁰

In other words, while filial narratives about mothers may be seen as messing with conventions in life writing, they also ask us to mess with conventions in theory and criticism. Whereas maternal auto|biography, autopathography, and narrating the body have all been regarded as particularly linked to women’s writing,⁷¹ this study has explored auto|biographies by men who write motherhood, memory, aging, illness, and embodiedness.

Maternal bodies have been central to many feminist critical projects, but these typically focus on early stages of motherhood.⁷² While such studies are enormously important, they contribute to containing motherhood temporally to a time of mothering infants and very young children. The maternal body in reality—and, it turns out, in filial life writing—is not so contained.⁷³ Instead, since motherhood is not just a biological state (although for most mothers it is that, too) but also a social situation shaped in relation to others, it lingers, carries on, develops, ages, and manifests itself in varied ways over the life course. Toward the end of life, in the narratives investigated here, the mother becomes her body in the perception of the son|protagonist—a highly visible but (problematically) changed body, an embodied presence that the son must handle with distance but also with closeness and care. Hence, the representations of old, ill, and dying mothers in these narratives ask us to reopen questions about gendered conventions in literature as well as in (feminist and literary) criticism, even as they also ask us to continue thinking critically about mother-son relations and the lived experiences of maternal bodies over the long life course.

Uppsala University

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 In her introduction to a special issue of Hypatia on motherhood, Kukla writes that its “chronological organization … highlights an interesting and disappointing absence in this volume; it includes no papers about mothers or the mothering of adult children, nor about aging or elderly maternal bodies. … as scholars, we apparently still allow the socially recognized signposts of fertility, pregnancy, and the care of young children to dominate and constrain our imagination of maternality. I hope future work in this area will overcome this limitation” (“Kukla, Introduction,” vii–ix).

2 See Collins, Black Feminist Thought; O’Reilly, Mother Matters; Rich, Of Woman Born; Ruddick, Maternal Thinking.

3 See Hanson, “Maternal Bodies”; Kristeva and Goldhammer, “Stabat Mater”; Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation; Podnieks and O’Reilly, Textual Mothers, Maternal Texts.

4 DiQuinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood, 13.

5 See Addison, Goodwin-Kelly, and Roth, Motherhood Misconceived; Hirsch, The Mother-Daughter Plot.

6 Kukla, “Introduction,” xi.

7 Filial is understood here to mean “sonly,” as in the original meaning of the Latin filius (“son”), rather than broadly to denote any children. See Couser, “Memoir.”

8 Among these are novels like Mustafa Can’s Tätt intill dagarna (Close to the Days, 2006), Theodor Kallifatides’ Mödrar och söner (Mothers and Sons, 2007), Claes Britton’s Min mamma är död (My Mother Is Dead, 2010), Kristoffer Leandoer’s September (2013), Tomas Bodström’s Det man minns (What You Remember, 2014), Peter Sandström’s Transparente blanche (2014), Erik Wijk’s Bara de riktiga orden (Only the Right Words, 2015), Peter Handberg’s Den vita fläcken (The White Spot, 2015), Augustin Erba’s Blodsbunden (Bloodbound, 2015), and Alex Schulman’s Glöm mig (Forget Me, 2016), as well as essays by Fredrik Strage, Kristian Lundberg, Augustin Erba, and Jonas Brun in the collection Mor, mamma, morsan (Mother, Mommy, Mama, 2012). The texts center on the son’s investigation of his mother’s life from his (early or late) middle-age perspective and, in the process, on mother-son relations and their influence on his own development and identity formation. However, they differ widely in terms of setting, tone, and scope, as well as in terms of the mother figures they represent. They focus on married, divorced, and widowed mothers in circumstances of working-class lives (Handberg, Sandström, Kallifatides) and migratory experience (Can, Erba), or of middle-class Swedishness (Leandoer) and relative affluence (Brun, Strage). Some deal with depressed mothers (Lundberg, Erba), and quite a few focus on physically ill, aging, and dying mothers (Bodström, Britton, Can, Handberg, Leandoer, Sandström, Schulman, Wijk). The texts are often explicitly concerned with memory and acts of remembering|forgetting, and the titles and cover images often signal “history” and “memory,” as well as “nostalgia.”

9 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 155.

10 See, for example, Couser, “Memoir,” 228.

11 The contemporary wave of pappalitteratur in Sweden started with Åsa Linderborg’s tremendously successful novel Mig äger ingen (Nobody Owns Me, 2007), which has been followed by numerous others by male and female authors such as Johannes Anyuru, Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Hanna Hellquist, Mian Lodalen, Alex Shulman, and Kristian Petri.

12 For examples, see Couser, “In My Father’s Closet” and “Memoir”; Freadman, “Decent and Indecent”; Forslid, Varför män?; Mansfield, Australian Patriography.

13 Freadman, “Decent and Indecent.”

14 For an interesting discussion from literary studies, see Armegnol-Carrera, “Where?” For an insightful discussion from a social studies perspective, see Pease, Recreating Men.

15 See Addison, Goodwin-Kelly, and Roth, Motherhood Misconceived.

16 Wahlström Henriksson, “Sons Write Mothers.” See also Arenberg, “Memories and Nostalgia,” which discusses a son’s autofictional memoir of a mother and the notion of “giving voice” to her experience, but without focusing on the mother-son relationship.

17 Cohen Park, “Close Comfort?” The exception to this general rule of invisibility of representations of mother-son relations is film studies, where the overbearing or “horrific” mother, who hampers her son’s development, infantilizes, or feminizes is a recurring stereotype. See Addison, Goodwin-Kelly, and Roth, Motherhood Misconceived.

18 Chansky and Hipchen, Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, xxi; Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography.

19 Smith, “Impact of Critical Theory,” 85; Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 11–13.

20 Knausgård, Min kamp.

21 Freadman, “Decent and Indecent.”

22 Can, Tätt intill dagarna, 112; Sandström, Transparente blanche, 25. These are my translations, as are all the translations into English of the Swedish original texts; the novels have not been published in English.

23 The generally strong everyday presence of the mother in the narratives sets them apart from the “daddy literature” that has also been published in the twenty-first century, where fathers are typically represented as absent, unreliable, and|or irresponsible, and where the absence of the father contributes to making him unknowable to the (grown) child.

24 Physical archives are linked to ethnicity, functionality, education, and class; they are not available in the case of the mentally ill mother, as with Lundberg, or the migrated illiterate mother, as with Can. The novels by, for example, Shulman and Wijk seemingly draw on mixed sources (written and spoken), whereas Can’s narrative builds on oral histories. The notions of “archive,” history, and memory remind us that the family may be understood as a mnemonic community (Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering)—a community of memory|remembering—at the micro level. For further discussion of familial memory, see also Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” esp. 289.

25 Sandström, Transparente blanche, 226–227: “Jag tänkte på kroppens minne efter en skeppsfärd i stormen, hur det kunde kännas vingligt att promenera på trottoarerna i staden efter att man hade gått i land, en känsla som kunde bestå i dagar. Ja, kroppen skulle minnas; elektriska stötar från sladdar som murknat i fuktiga lager, trälådor fulla med vinteräpplen, fallande på tår och vrister. Kroppen skulle minnas tystnaden och mörkret som lade sig över hela staden efter ännu ett avbrott i distributionen av elektricitet; ledningar som hängde, stolpar som brast. Allt var bräckligt, allt var där. Ständigt var mor vid min sida.”

26 Sandström, Transparente blanche, 25: “När mor vaknade efter sin slummer på soffan sade hon att kärleken var det enda som betydde något. Jag tänkte att hon talade i sömnen, eller åtminstone i det förvirrade tillstånd som ett uppvaknande kan innebära när sömnen har varit kort och orolig, som i feber eller lätt berusning. Jag visste inte om hon väntade sig någon kommentar till sitt uttalande. Jag sade att potatisen snart var mjuk.”

27 Sandström, Transparente blanche, 8–9: “Mor hade krympt med åren, hon såg ut att ha det varmt och gott där hon låg längre in mot ryggstödet. Hon drog ned kepsen över ögonen, och jag tänkte att hon skulle somna. … Jag bredde pläden över hela mor, så att bara hennes huvud stack fram. … Egentligen var det skönt att slippa ifrån; det var så jag kände det när jag låg bredvid mor, att jag sluppit undan. Det fanns egentligen ingen som behövde mig längre, utom mor då, och det hade jag inget emot.”

28 See Morrison, Sula.

29 Sandström, Transparent blanche, 14: “Ett trappsteg i taget tog hon, och hon tänkte att det var tur att hon inte hade något åt hjärtat, att hon hade ‘fått vara frisk,’ som man brukade säga om de äldre. Just innan det sista trappsteget stannade mor upp. Hon kunde känna senorna och ådrorna och benen i sin kropp, kunde känna värmen och den pulserande kraften och hon svettades och det var länge sedan som hade svettats. Det var kallsvett, svett som luktade, den mest primitiva av kroppsutsöndringar, och det hade hon läst i något kolorerat veckomagasin förr, när hon var nyfiken och ivrig, att de sekret som avsöndras som ett resultat av skräck eller lust eller ren vrede var de mest djuriska signaler som vi människor förmådde förmedla till varandra, subtila, ohejdbara, och där stod hon nu, på trappan mot gatan, och svettades och det fanns ingen där som kunde förnimma lukten.”

30 For discussion, see “Maternal Bodies”; Hanson, “Maternal Bodies.”

31 See Barry, “The Ageing Body”; Hanson, “Maternal Bodies.” Feminist studies on “older women” often center on women in their forties and fifties, leaving quite a bit of old age by the wayside. See, for example, Whelehan and Gwynne, Ageing; King, Discourses of Ageing.

32 As explored and theorized in central feminist works such as Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Longhurst, Bodies.

33 This withholding also applies to the naked body of the mother, seemingly to signal that the taboo is observed: the maternal body is (must be) an asexual body in the eyes of the son.

34 For example, Can, Tätt intill dagarna, 80, 144.

35 Can, Tätt intill dagarna, 137, 123.

36 Can, Tätt intill dagarna, 24.

37 Can, Tätt intill dagarna, 55, 110: Mor är inte sig själv längre. För varje dag som går trängs färgerna i hennes ansikte tillbaka av levercirrosens gula färg. Här och var tatueras ansiktet med fler spruckna blodkärl, och får det att likna ett landskap med små röda utspridda floder. Hennes muskler är försvagade, hon är så kraftlös i kroppen att hon inte ens förmår tränga ut det tjocka slemmet som samlar sig i hennes hals och får henne att kippa efter luft.

38 Can, Tätt intill dagarna, 151.

39 Grosz, Volatile Bodies.

40 See Hanson, “Maternal Bodies,” 87; Longhurst, Bodies.

41 Can, Tätt intill dagarna, 48.

42 Similarly, in Leandoer’s novel September, the mother, throughout the story of her childhood, youth, work as a teacher, marriage, and life as a mother of three, appears curiously disembodied, until she falls ill with cancer, at which point her body claims center stage in the narrative and becomes starkly visible.

43 Couser “Autopathography,” 66.

44 I use embodiedness as well as the more accepted term embodiment for a reason. Embodiedness in my usage is similar to corporeality, but retains the core of “body”; it better captures the meaning of the Swedish word kroppslighet (approximately translated as “bodiness”), whereas “embodiment” translates as förkroppsligande.

45 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 51.

46 See Whitehead, Men and Masculinities; Thomas, “Reenfleshing the Bright Boys.”

47 Handberg, Den vita fläcken, 36–37; Också efter åttio var kännetecknet den pulserande energin, kvickheten, den medryckande vitaliteten … Många män retade sig på hennes självsäkerhet och kände obehag. “Ett lärt fruntimmer” var ett av skällsorden

48 Handberg, Den vita fläcken, 37, 255: “Hennes hud blev slapp. Håret pressades blött mot hjässan. Något genomskinligt tillkom som fick henne att likna en fågel som flaxar med vingarna för att lyfta ur boet. Förgäves”; “Hon låg ihopkrupen, i fosterställning, och blundade.”

49 Handberg, Den vita fläcken, 255: “Paradoxalt nog blev hennes lidande påtagligare när jag såg det i bildskärmen. Jag fick distans till det, var inte längre som förstummad i hennes sorg. Avsöndrad sig själv och mitt förhållande till henne blev hon objektifierad. Personen jag såg var avskalad en rad minnen och känslor. Det blev naknare än när jag själv deltog och var närvarande. Det var en föreställning som spelades upp: en sen akt i hennes försvinnande från jorden.”

50 Handberg, Den vita fläcken, 255: “tekniken förvandlade henne till en bild av sig själv, en elektronisk reproduktion.” For the classic theorization of the male gaze in cinema, see Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure.”

51 Handberg, Den vita fläcken, 255: “Efter ett tag kom hon ut ur rummet, livs levande om än sömndrucketn. ‘Du hinner väl med en kaffe i Blacken’, sa hon och drog av sig plastskydden och kastade dem i en korg. … de där orden om kaffe lät övernaturliga.”

52 Neuman, “Your Past … Your Future,” 54.

53 Neuman, “Your Past … Your Future,” 76.

54 Although I have not foregrounded the specificities of the Swedish national context in this article, the novels discussed can perhaps also be seen as engaging in a kind of dialogue with recent research about men and care, and men as carers for elderly kin, by, for example, Björk (“Doing, Re-doing or Undoing”), Ulmanen (Omsorgens pris i åtstramningstid), and Wallroth (Men Do Care!). As Björk observes, “caring masculinities” have not been made an ideal in relation to the care of aging parents, but rather in relation to the care of small children. Sweden is by no means unique in this—see, for example, Hanlon’s Masculinities, Care and Equality, a study of men and the care of small children in Ireland. But such contextual reading of filial life writing will have to be the focus of another study.

55 See, for example, Smith, Trading Places; Fant, Att bli mamma.

56 Couser, “Autopathography,” 75. Couser refers to Ortner’s “Is Female to Male?”

57 Ahmed, “Embodying Strangers”; Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe; Birke, Feminism; Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Gallop, Thinking through the Body; Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Longhurst, Bodies; Young, On Female Body Experience.

58 Couser, “Autopathography,” 75.

59 Barry, “The Ageing Body,” 135.

60 A project that would be interesting, but cannot be carried out within the scope of the present article, is a comparative reading of narratives by sons and daughters. An interesting point of reference is Beauvoir’s autobiographical narrative A Very Easy Death. Beauvoir’s elderly mother is hospitalized after an accident at home and diagnosed with terminal cancer, a fact her daughters keep from her until her death. Seeing the mother in her nakedness, being handled by the nurse, the daughter reflects: “No body existed less for me: none existed more. As a child I had loved it dearly; as an adolescent it had filled me with an uneasy repulsion: all this was perfectly in the ordinary course of things and it seemed reasonable to me that her body should retain its dual nature, that it should be both repugnant and holy—a taboo. But for all that, I was astonished at the violence of my distress. My mother’s indifferent acquiescence made it worse: she was abandoning the exigencies and prohibitions that had oppressed her all her life long and I approved of her doing so. Only this body, suddenly reduced by her capitulation to being a body and nothing more, hardly differed at all from a corpse—a poor defenseless carcass turned and manipulated by professional hands, one in which life seemed to carry on only because of its own stupid momentum. For me, my mother had always been there, and I had never seriously thought that some day, that soon I should see her go. Her death, like her birth, had its place in some legendary time.” During the mother’s time in hospital, the daughter also notes the condescension and contempt of male doctors for female patients and female staff alike. Beauvoir, far removed from her Christian bourgeois mother’s life choices, attitudes, values, and current situation, nevertheless recognizes their shared embodiedness as women in a culture where women and their bodies are exploited in their youth, and degraded and seen as worthless in their old age. The big difference between Beauvoir’s unflinching look at her mother’s body and the variously flinching or unflinching looks taken by filial narrators|authors in the novels I have discussed is the point of identification with the ailing, aging female body as one’s own future. For an initiated and sustained moral-philosophical discussion about meanings of intercorporeality in Beauvoir’s book, see Weiss, Body Images, 146–163.

61 Sandström, Transparente blanche, 25.

62 Sandström, Transparente blanche, 223: “Vad visste jag egentligen om henne? Jag trodde mig känna den människa hon hade varit som min mor, men hon hade varit också andra människor. Hon hade varit någons dotter, någons syster, någons käresta, någons fiende, kamrat, hustru, kanske någons älskarinna.”

63 Sandström, Transparente blanche, 223: “Hon var egentligen inte magisk, det var jag som hade sett henne så. Hon var alltid en vanlig människa, en sådan som gick till butiken och köpte bröd, en sådan som surade när teven inte fungerade. Jag såg henne sådan som hon var, som hon alltid hade varit, och jag kände värmen i mitt bröst, hon var en kvinna, och hon var ingen trollpacka, och hon var min mor, och det fanns fortfarande tid kvar.”

64 Sandström, Transparente blanche, 14.

65 See Cohen Park, “Close Comfort?”; Wahlström Henriksson, “Sons Write Mothers.”

66 See Rich, Of Woman Born.

67 For a discussion of masculinities and relationality in literary representations, see Wahlström Henriksson, “Fatherhood as Relational Construction.” See also Wahlström Henriksson and Häyrén, “Introduction.”

68 See Mansfield, Australian Patriography; Couser, “Memoir” and “In My Father’s Closet”; Freadman, “Decent and Indecent.”

69 See Doucet, “Can Boys Grow?”; Morman and Floyd, “The Good Son,” 39–40.

70 Dooley and Fedele, “Raising Relational Boys”; Pease, Recreating Men, 56, 67–68.

71 Couser, “Autopathography”; Podnieks and O’Reilly, Textual Mothers, Maternal Texts.

72 Hanson, “Maternal Bodies”; “Maternal Bodies.”

73 Kukla, “Introduction.”