Literary narratives and representations only partially reflect reality; they also reflect on it, and they creatively and imaginatively express, explore and shape experience and emotions. The new narratives of mothering offer insights into the complexity of mothers' subjectivities and intimate experiences. As such, they have the potential to supplement existing sociological and psychological studies of mothering by offering another dimension of expression - that of literary motifs, images and oth
Communities and Social Services/Policy
Creative Economy
Key Findings
1. The study documents a turn to mothers as narrative subjects (rather than objects of others' narratives) in women's writing in France of the 1990s and 2000s.
2. It reveals the prevalence of loss in new narratives of mothering.
3. Maternal guilt is found to be on-going, and contributes to the norms by which mothers are judged, and judge themselves.
4. Maternal ambivalence, arising from the tensions between mothering and the needs and desires of the woman, is commonly experienced and '