Reflections on motherhood, without the apple pie

Writers and Their Mothers. Edited by Dale Salwak. Palgrave Macmillan; 257 pages; $34.99 and £19.50.

Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty. By Jacqueline Rose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 256 pages; $26. Faber & Faber; £12.99

A SHIVER of anxiety may strike female readers who pick up “Writers and Their Mothers”. On top of everything else, are mothers to be blamed for creativity skewed or thwarted in the cradle, at the breast or on the potty? Open this book of essays, and sure enough, there is William Golding’s mum apologising on her deathbed for having been a “bad mother”. “Too little cuddling” was what she meant, the author himself thought; “too much bottle…too little bosom”.

These details come in a wonderful piece by Golding’s daughter, Judy Carver. Mildred Golding was not a “bad” mother, but several others fit the description. John Ruskin’s made him interpret the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, again and again, as soon as he could read. Robert Lowell’s never allowed him onto her lap for fear of creasing her dress. True, Mrs Golding was physically remote, but her imagination was alive, and her son acknowledged his debt to her. “She was, as I am, a fantasist,” he wrote, with a “tumultuous…torrid, complex” inner life.

Predictably, some of the collection’s best essays are in its autobiographical section, in which the writers themselves cast their minds back, reinterpreting things seen or guessed at in childhood. Many remember noticing their mothers’ unspoken marital frustrations. Ian McEwan’s was silenced by her military husband’s “iron certainties”; Andrew Motion’s escaped into a world of books at odds with her spouse’s guns and fishing rods. Lyndall Gordon’s endured a “boredom that deadens the air around my father”.

As a child, Ms Gordon determined never to “settle for a blocked-off man like husbands of my mother’s generation”. This post-war generation features repeatedly, as it does in Jacqueline Rose’s “Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty”. These were the mothers, writes Ms Rose, “who found themselves, after a devastating war, under the harshest obligation to be happy and fulfilled in that role”—as though their function, as mothers, was to kiss the world better, wipe away its tears and smile.

“Mothers” is a passionate polemic, not just against that obligation—bound as it is to fail—but against its personal and political implications. “What are we doing to mothers,” Ms Rose asks, when they are expected to carry the burden “of everything that is hardest to contemplate about our society and ourselves?” It is a big question with many layers, and she pursues it through a huge variety of texts, settings and experiences, from the Sun newspaper to Euripides, North America to South Africa, feminist critique to psychoanalysis, poetry, fiction and personal history.

Ms Rose’s intellectual range is dazzling; perhaps, for some readers, exhausting. Yet woven through her analysis is a simple proposition. Motherhood is messy, physically and emotionally. Like nothing else, it acquaints women with extremes of feeling. It reaches parts most never thought they had. “There is nobody in the world I love as much as my child, nobody in the world who makes me as angry,” Ms Rose confesses. “Instead of maternal goodness welling up”, says another mother she quotes, “the situation seemed to open up new areas of badness in my character”.

The spectre of bad mothering, of Medea and her descendants, haunts this book, as do “blood, guts, misery and lust”. Ms Rose’s point is that pain is the qualification mothers bring to the world: the fact that “they are not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human.”