Introduction: Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature

Abstract

Plotting Motherhood explores inconsistent literary representations of motherhood in texts ranging from the fourth to the twentieth centuries. Mary Beth Rose unearths plots startling in their frequency and redundancy that struggle to accommodate—or to obliterate—the complex assertions of maternal authority as it challenges traditional family structures. The book examines the many plots in which mothers are dead, and those in which their living presences disrupt patriarchal authority. These plots reappear and are transformed by authors as diverse in chronology and literary form as Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, Oscar Wilde, and Tony Kushner. Writing in a culture enmeshed in changing gender values, Kushner revises existing mother plots to represent the transformative social and political potential of motherhood.