Mother Without Child

Revealing the maternal as not a core identity but a site of profound psychic and social division, Hansen illuminates recent decades of feminist thought and explores novels by Jane Rule, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon. Unlike traditional stories of abandoned children and bad mothers, these narratives refuse to sentimentalize motherhood's losses and impasses. Hansen embraces the larger cultural story of what it means to be a mother and illuminates how motherhood is being reimagined today.

Elaine Tuttle Hansen is Provost and Professor of English at Haverford College and author of Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (California, 1991) and The Solomon Complex: Reading Wisdom in Old English Poetry (1988).