Motherhood and Freedom in Women's Writing After 1970 Kathleen Reeves a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Re

Motherhood and Freedom in Women’s Writing After 1970 Kathleen Reeves A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2021 Reading Committee: Thomas Foster, Chair Eva Cherniavsky, Chair Stephanie Clare Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2021 Kathleen Reeves Abstract Motherhood and Freedom in Women’s Writing After 1970 Kathleen Reeves Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Thomas Foster Eva Cherniavsky English Fifty years after a high point of feminist theories of reproductive work, motherhood remains fraught. Considering contemporary Anglophone writing about care alongside literature from the 1970s and 1980s, Motherhood and Freedom in Women’s Writing After 1970 claims that past feminist theories of reproductive work have yet to be fully reckoned with. I argue that Anglophone literature of motherhood elaborates an embodied, non-sovereign freedom which emerges socially and is based on interdependence rather than self-possession. This literature defamiliarizes care through formal innovation, encouraging and enacting a form of attention that generates a new, feminist reality. Chapter 1 considers care work, artistic work, illness, and embodiment in the writings of Bernadette Mayer and Anne Boyer, asking how literary form highlights or obscures the world-making properties of care. Chapter 2 discusses how 1970s and 1980s black feminist texts think about care outside the family after the Civil Rights movement, arguing that Meridian by Alice Walker (1976) and The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara (1980) articulate a notion of self-elaboration that is non-sovereign, anti-austerity, and intersubjective. In chapter 3, I consider how texts by Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti generate a feminist imaginary oriented around openness and possibility rather than choice. Chapter 4 argues that Octavia Butler’s novel, Wild Seed (1980), and Maggie Nelson’s memoir, The Argonauts (2015), offer visions of embodied transformation that lead to new concepts of pleasure in motherhood. Motherhood and Freedom in Women’s Writing After 1970 argues that literature of motherhood reimagines reality with care at its center. Contents Acknowledgments 2 Introduction 4 Chapter 1: The Aesthetics of Care 34 Chapter 2: Care Beyond the Family after the Civil Rights Movement 83 Chapter 3: Attention, Reality, and the Question of Reproduction 127 Chapter 4: Transformation, Pleasure, and Care 188 Works Cited 243 Reeves 2 Acknowledgements The Donna Gerstenberger Fellowship, the Elizabeth Kerr Macfarlane Endowed Scholarship, and the Modern Language Quarterly Dissertation Fellowship gave me time to write this dissertation. The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington also provided support in summer 2020. Thank you to my dissertation reading group, most of whom went through this process ahead of me and served as excellent role models: Lubna Alzaroo, Matthew Hitchman, Liz Janssen, Belle Kim, David Kumler, and Daniel Roberts. Their feedback on the drafts of these chapters was astute and generous. To new friends in Seattle who made my life here feel real: Claire Barwise, Lindsey Beach, Elizabeth Boyle, Greg Damico, Kaelie Giffel, Steph Hankinson, Liz Janssen, Mike Maguire, Alex McCauley, and Elizabeth Schoettle. To old friends who supported me from afar: Meaghan Burke, Abby Deutsch, Abigail Ellman, Ashley Gorski, Bernd Klug, Kimberly Lambright, Dani Neff, Kathleen Milnamow Stern, and Patton Quinn. Thank you to Kimberly Lambright for introducing me to a few of the writers in this dissertation, and especially for taking me to a day-long reading of Midwinter Day in Brooklyn in 2017. Thank you to Meaghan Burke for introducing me to Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Joe Concannon, Abigail Ellman, Dani Neff, and Peggy Reeves read and provided helpful comments on chapter 1. My Red May reading group, Lindsey Beach, Sam Karpp, Alex McCauley, and Sam Wooley, have challenged my thinking and nourished my spirit. Kaelie Giffel and I began talking about feminism and literature a couple years ago, and those conversations profoundly shaped this dissertation (especially chapter 3) and my identity as a feminist scholar. Thanks especially to the mothers and non-mothers named above who shared Reeves 3 their own thoughts and feelings about motherhood. My dissertation committee, Eva Cherniavsky, Stephanie Clare, and Tom Foster, made this project possible. I am especially grateful for the life- giving support of my chairs, Tom and Eva; our conversations about this dissertation and the articles I wrote during this time taught me how to be a scholar. Thanks to Mary Beth and BJ, whose care for me has been constant through the years. Finally, I thank my parents, Peggy and Bob, for raising me with uninterrupted love. Their presence, even across the country, has been steady and sure. I want to especially note the ongoing friendship and support of my mother. My interest in this subject is driven by a fascination with her own, as it seems to me, perfect expression of motherhood. Reeves 4 Introduction 1 Motherhood is both ordinary and hard to grasp. Today, in most countries, over three- quarters of women become mothers. 2 Moreover, motherhood shapes everyone’s life, to some extent; even people not raised by a mother or mothers are born from one. 3 At the same time, motherhood continues to be marginalized. Some people reacted with surprise when I said that I was writing my dissertation on literature of motherhood, as if I had located an eccentric, niche topic. One man, well-meaning, said he “had never realized” there was much of this literature; another said motherhood was a topic he knew nothing about. It is remarkable that the social institution and the biological process at the center of life can be so little thought about by so many people. As Sophie Lewis points out, “the everyday ‘miracle’ that transpires in pregnancy, the production of that number more than one and less than two, receives more idealizing lip-service than it does respect,” noting that “in 2017 a reader and thinker as compendious as Maggie Nelson can still state, semi incredulously but with a strong case behind her, that philosophical writing about actually doing gestation constitutes an absence in culture” (1). It may be true that “philosophical” writing about pregnancy and childbirth is rare, but there is no shortage of imaginative literature about both biological reproduction and the experience of mothering. But there is, still, a silence around motherhood: new mothers often report having been told little about the concrete details of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. 1 Sections from this introduction appeared in the article, “Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia as a Model for Care During Crisis,” published in Feminist Theory 23, vol. 2 (2022). 2 An exception is Japan, where between 25 and 30 percent of women were “childless” at the end of their reproductive years (“Childlessness”). “Childlessness” statistics generally include births only, not adoptions, so the percentage of women who become mothers is higher. 3 A possible exception is in the case of a surrogate who does not identify as a mother. Reeves 5 Among many non-mothers, there is a casualness about the experience, a sense that reproduction, as old as the human species, cannot be worth too much thought or trouble. 4 Finally, those who could advise women about reproduction, having done it themselves, are in the difficult position of being mothers. Mothers’ discussion of motherhood is sharply proscribed, limited to the expression of a narrow range of emotions, with the most commonly- accepted answer being “I love it” (Donath 40). Mothers who characterize motherhood as something less than wonderful are often pathologized; disliking motherhood is taken as a sign that something is seriously wrong with the mother, rather than an authentic response to an experience (Donath 42). 5 Beyond the silencing of women whose feelings about motherhood are primarily negative, women who enjoy motherhood for the most part often do not wish to hurt or shock their children, partner(s), or friends by articulating the difficulties of the experience. It is no wonder, then, that the more difficult, horrifying, and traumatic aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering are socially repressed. That is, some combination of love for one’s children, the desire to protect them, and the threat of social condemnation prevents women from speaking too openly about what they lose in becoming mothers. Notable exceptions to this are Alice Walker’s novel, Meridian , which frankly depicts a young mother’s complete disinclination to motherhood, and Orna Donath’s study, Regretting Motherhood , which presents the (anonymous) testimony of women who regret becoming mothers. When I taught Meridian to undergraduates last year, they interpreted Meridian’s hatred of motherhood—most unambiguously expressed in the line, “So this . is 4 Since, as I will argue, all women are constructed by motherhood, this attitude is more common among men. 5 Donath notes that though maternal ambivalence is more commonly expressed now than in the past, this emotion is still expected to be progressive , that is, moving toward the resolution of enjoying motherhood: “in a society where it is not acceptable for a mother to regret having children, focusing only on ambivalence—especially when paired with a progressive narrative of coming to terms with it—becomes more palatable” (45). Reeves 6 what slavery is like” (65)—and her decision to give up her

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