ABSTRACT
With the surge of first-wave feminism in the late 1800s, increasing demands for women’s autonomy and agency coincided with challenges to patriarchal motherhood. Such a charged climate generated a rise in matrifocal literatures. Matrifocal literatures are written and narrated by mothers in the first-person or limited third-person voice, rendering maternal identity and experience from subjective perspectives. Further, they (re)value the significance and meaning of maternal figures in cultural, social, and national arenas, and often contest or negotiate traditional ideologies of the “good” mother as self-sacrificing, nurturing, and sexless with her antithesis, the “bad” mother. These narratives perform what Susan Maushart calls the act of “unmasking” motherhood to reveal truths about maternity heretofore silenced or repressed. In this chapter, I survey maternal literatures in historical, critical, and theoretical terms, and then provide examples of matrifocal fiction, life writing, and poetry written in English from and within American, British, African, and Caribbean Canadian contexts. I conclude with references to the matrifocal genres of “mommy lit,” for its increasing cultural and commercial currency, and “nanny lit,” which is directing our attention towards the role of caretakers in the raising of children and expanding definitions of what we mean by “mother” and “mothering.”
