Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature

"This book makes a strong, original, and often dazzling argument for the transhistorical significance of plots centering on the problematic authority vested in mothers-both dead and dying ones, and those whose living presence puts enormous pressure on the plots that seek to contain them. Through incisive analyses of texts ranging from Augustine's Confessions through Shakespearean and other early modern dramas to the 2011 Hollywood film The Descendants, Rose offers a fresh diagnosis of a seemingly intractable problem: social inequality based on gender." (Margaret Ferguson, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Davis, USA) "Where are the mothers in Shakespeare? Mary Beth Rose is known for asking basic questions and developing fresh answers. This book analyzes what Rose wittily calls the 'dead mother plot' and 'the living mother plot' from their early Western instantiations in St. Augustine's Confessions through Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton to conflicted attempts to revise these plots in the comedies of Oscar Wilde and their triumphal queering in the drama of Tony Kushner." (Leah S. Marcus, Edwin Mims Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, USA)

The analysis engages two mother plots: the dead mother plot, in which the mother is dying or dead; and the living mother plot, in which the mother is alive and through her very presence in the text, puts often unbearable pressure on the mechanics of the plot.

This book explores the inconsistent literary representations of motherhood in diverse texts ranging from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Mary Beth Rose unearths plots startling in their frequency and redundancy that struggle to accommodate —or to obliterate—the complex assertions of maternal authority as it challenges traditional family and social structures. The analysis engages two mother plots: the dead mother plot, in which the mother is dying or dead; and the living mother plot, in which the mother is alive and through her very presence in the text, puts often unbearable pressure on the mechanics of the plot.  These plots reappear and are transformed by authors as diverse in chronology and use of literary form as Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, Oscar Wilde, and Tony Kushner. The book argues that, insofar as women become the second sex, it is not because they are females per se but because they are mothers; at the same time the analysis probes the transformative political and social potential of motherhood as it appears in contemporary texts like Angels in America.