"All Our Human Boundries were OverRun" Reconfiguring Motherhood in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller

Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Dimino, Andrea

Keywords

Mother, Rich, Adrienne, Abandonment, Abuse, Transgression, Subversion, White Trash, Intersectionality, O'Reilly, Andrea, Motherline, Loneliness, Adolescence, Unconventional, Lacan, Kristeva

Area of Concentration

British and American Literature

Abstract

My thesis focuses on how three contemporary novels reconceive of motherhood and reconfigure its definitions, ethics and ideology. Drawing on Adrienne Rich's examination, in Of Woman Born (1986), of motherhood as experience and institution in a patriarchal culture, I discuss Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Cavedweller (1998). Both authors depict characters who subvert and reject notions of an ideal or mythical Mother. In Housekeeping, the transient Sylvie and her adolescent niece Ruthie reconfigure motherhood with perceptions that disregard or move beyond delineations and boundaries, transgressing patriarchally imposed binaries such as "good" versus "bad" mothers. Bone's mother Anney in Bastard Out of Carolina challenges the definition of "mother" when she abandons her daughter in favor of Bone's physically and sexually abusive stepfather. In Cavedweller, Delia Byrd's three adolescent daughters struggle and eventually manage to conceive of their mother, who had abandoned two of them, as a multiplicitous individual. I employ Andrea O'Reilly's "Motherline" essay as a model for how Delia's daughters come to this understanding. Finally, I call for alternative, plural terms for "mother" and for more research into how other societies provide alternatives to mainstream American conventions of motherhood.

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