ABSTRACT
Western culture in our times, especially in America and Europe, has repeatedly conspired to silence the inner life of the mother by laying on her the weight of its own impossible and most punishing ideals'. Contemporary maternal fatigue is exacerbated by modern technology and the way working life is organized. For Rozsika Parker, ambivalence is 'a complex and contradictory state of mind in which loving and hating feelings for children exist side by side' that is determined by 'complex interactions of external and internal reality'. Heterosexuality and the discursive construction of mothering do not help. Night Waking shows how mothers are rendered exhausted, ambivalent, and silent, especially through the organization of heterosexuality and the discursive construction of maternity, but it also explores modes of resistance and recovery. Fiction, which dramatizes complex 'inner realities', can help combat such ghastly exhortations. Sarah Moss's novel arises at a moment when the professional maternal subject can perhaps, at last, survive and be articulated 'officially'.
