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Radical Motherhood: Narcissism and Empathy in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2010

ALIKI VARVOGLI
ALIKI VARVOGLI
Affiliation:
Aliki Varvogli is Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee. Email: A.Varvogli@dundee.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This article discusses constructions and representations of motherhood in Russell Banks's The Darling and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document. It argues that the theme of motherhood has a long, if often overlooked, presence in American literature, and that the two novelists use the figure of the mother in order to engage with the themes of empathy and community. The novels participate in familiar postmodernist practices, such as multiple, fragmented viewpoints and narratives, unreliable narrators, non-chronological storytelling and the mingling of fact and fiction. However, they do not wholeheartedly embrace two key postmodern issues: irony and loss of affect. Instead, they seek to move away from some of the postmodern novel's more excessive decathecting tendencies, and they achieve that through their representations of mothers who, in not acquiescing to society's norms, challenge gender roles and cultural assumptions. The two fictional mothers under discussion share a past as Weather Underground activists, and in giving voice to them and refusing to demonize them as “bad” mothers, their creators also seek to expose other American narratives that reinforce dominant ideology and suppress the margins.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 657 - 673
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Barbara Christian, “An Angle of Seeing: Motherhood in Buchi Emecheta's Joys of Motherhood and Alice Walker's Meridian,” in Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994), 95–120, 95.

2 In Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), Stephanie A. Smith recalls the story of a senior colleague who could not think of a single mother in American literature. Smith suggests Hester Prynne, to which the colleague replies, “Oh, right,” “but that's not what's really important about her, is it?” (p. 2). As this anecdote so clearly illustrates, what is “important” in a text is a function of the culture that receives it, and not of the text itself.

3 Sugiyama, Naoko, “Postmodern Motherhood and Ethnicity: Maternal Discourse in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature” Japanese Journal of American Studies, 11 (2000), 71–90, 85Google Scholar.

4 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1992), 10.

5 Angela Meyer, “Dana Spiotta – Interview,” available at http://literaryminded.blogspot.com/2008/07/dana-spiotta-interview.html.

6 Timothy Egan, “After the Deluge,” New York Times, 16 Aug. 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/books/review/Egan-t.html.

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9 Adrienne Rich notes that this construction of motherhood is the product of a patriarchal society, and a patriarchal culture that “has created images of the archetypal mother which reinforce the conservatism of motherhood.” Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 45.

10 Russell Banks, The Darling (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

11 Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (New York and London: Scribner, 2006). Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

12 “I do believe that the history of race in America is a central history and that it's our master Story,” Banks told an interviewer in 2003. William Smith, “Transcript of Russell Banks Internet Talk Show,” 15 Oct. 2003, available at http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/cii_portfolio/talkshows/transcripts/Banks_transcript.pdf.

13 Liza Johnson, “Dana Spiotta,” available at http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_spiotta.

14 Banks, Russell, “Literature and Engagement: The Power of Words,” Salmagundi, 157 (Winter 2008), 3–6, 3–5Google Scholar.

15 Hutchison, Anthony, “Representative Man: John Brown and the Politics of Redemption in Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter,” Journal of American Studies, 41, 1 (2007), 67–82, 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Hannah's father is a child-rearing expert who closely resembles Dr. Spock, a man held by many responsible for the “permissiveness” and “lax morals” of the 1960s and beyond.

17 Hannah is here talking about her inability fully to imagine other people's otherness. However, her comments about narcissism can hardly be separated from her status as mother, since procreation itself can and has been seen as a form of narcissistic self-replication, a notion certainly familiar to Shakespeare when he urged the addressee of Sonnet 3 to have children lest his image die with him.

18 I am thinking here of the two most famous punishments meted out to transgressive mothers, in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening respectively.

19 E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 1992).