Confessions of the New Capitalist Mother: Twenty-first-century Writing on Motherhood as Trauma1

1. The phrase ‘New Capitalist Mother’ is taken from Pitt 2002.

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Notes

1. The phrase ‘New Capitalist Mother’ is taken from Pitt 2002.

2. This analysis tries to locate maternal embodiment in the consumer-capitalist context of the United States and the country that is perhaps its closest economic and cultural ally and imitator, the United Kingdom. I am grateful to the anonymous reader of a previous draft of this article for reminding me of the necessity to differentiate between national cultures of motherhood. The specific demands placed on a mother will vary according to the national culture in which she exists, though I am aiming to draw close parallels between American and British confessional writers and, by analogy, between the middle-class cultures of ‘productivity’ in which they mother. Lauren Berlant provides a helpful outline of the new meanings allocated to (re)productivity in post-Reaganite America (Berlant 1997:83–144), which emphasizes the replacement of maternal with foetal ‘citizens’ in the national reproductive imaginary, and situates the ‘contest between the mother and the fetus’ in a specific US context (Berlant 1997:86). Debates about maternal vs. foetal rights and the primary duty of a woman towards the family have generally been less aggressively conducted in Britain, though British media quite frequently echo the calls of the US Christian right to ensure maternal submission to foetal requirements, particularly when reporting medical research on correct maternal behaviour in pregnancy. See, for example, Mukherjee et al. 2005 on the unknown potential hazards of ingesting the ‘safe’ amount of two units of alcohol per week in pregnancy, and a report in the Daily Mail warning that ‘even a tiny tipple may harm your unborn baby’ (Chapman 2006).

3. See Luckhurst 2003:38 on confessional trauma literature as a possible result of the ‘sequestration’ of direct bodily experience in late capitalist western culture (in which death and, significantly, birth have been structured as absolutely private, barely communicable events).

4. Among those cited by Luckhurst (2003:37) are Moore 1996, Picardie 1998 and Diamond 1998. See also Brendan Stone's intriguing exploration of the recent memoir culture of depression and mental illness (Stone 2004).

5. See, for example, Enright 2004, Shaw 2001, Slater 2003, Abrams 2001, Hanauer and Gilchrist 2003, and Warner 2005.

6. For reflections of this dichotomy in legislation, see Thomson 1998:63–114 on British abortion laws.

7. ‘Cusk's book is a timely manifestation of all that is wretched about grotesquely self-obsessed modern parenting’ (Knight 2001); ‘if everyone were to read this, the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame. Because, believe it or not, quite a few people enjoy motherhood. But in order to do so, it is important to grow up first’ (Hornby 2001).

8. This pre-emptive apology may have been prompted by scathing responses to the serialization of the book in the Guardian before its publication, of which more below.

9. Knight 2001 offers a cursory criticism of P. J. O'Rourke's writing about fatherhood, before long and scathing attacks on Wolf and particularly Cusk, as quoted.

10. Williams 1991; see also Clover 1992 on horror as ‘body genre’ and the associations of abject embodiment with the ‘lowbrow’.

11. The rampaging debates about the desirability and effectiveness of ‘working mothers’ (full discussion of which is beyond my scope here) heighten the expectation of maternal perfection through selflessness: if a mother is doing a paid job, whether or not she actually has the choice to do so, she can be judged to be ‘failing’ in her primary childrearing duties. The consequences of such failure are regularly spelled out by well-publicized research on the inadequate educational and emotional skills of children entrusted to non-maternal care; see, for example, Belsky 1986 and Roberts 2005. For useful feminist analyses of controversies around mothering and work, see Hays 1998 and Hochschild 1992.

12. Simultaneously, the vulnerability of children (and foetuses) to risk is receiving tremendous attention: see, for example, Furedi 2001 and Warner 2005; on the foetus, see Thomson 1998:117–41.